NEWS
NORMAN, OKLA. – Two University of Oklahoma professors have been selected to receive Fulbright U.S. Scholar fellowships for the 2023-2024 academic year. The fellowships are awarded by the U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board in recognition of the recipients’ academic merit and leadership potential.
OU anthropology professor Racquel-María Sapién, Ph.D., joins geosciences professor Gerilyn Soreghan, Ph.D., who was previously announced as a 2023-2024 Fulbright Scholar recipient.
Fulbright Scholar Awards are prestigious and competitive fellowships that provide opportunities for scholars to teach and conduct research abroad. Fulbright scholars also play a critical role in U.S. public diplomacy, establishing long-term relationships between people and nations.
“The Fulbright Scholar program recognizes academic and research excellence,” said OU President Joseph Harroz Jr. “Having two faculty chosen for these fellowships is exciting and validates what we already know: that OU attracts some of the nation’s best and brightest scholars. Our professors’ research abroad is sure to produce exciting results, and we are thrilled to see their discoveries come to fruition.”
Sapién will travel to Suriname, where she will work with Dr. Renata de Bies, who chairs the National Language Council of Suriname. A goal of the project will be to support the use of minority languages as a medium of instruction at the primary level in Suriname. Sapién will also develop and deliver two series of workshops aimed at increasing resources and visibility for minority languages of Suriname, as well as advancing research into language ideologies in the country.
An associate professor in the Department of Anthropology, Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences, Sapién works primarily with speakers and heritage learners of languages that have fallen out of regular use. Her research focuses on developing methodologies that are inclusive of community members who have a vested interest in work with their languages.
Along with mentoring OU students working with their own heritage languages, Sapién has taught at institutes such as the Northwest Indian Language Institute at the University of Oregon, the Institute on Collaborative Language Research and the Oklahoma Breath of Life, all with a goal of supporting language work.
Sapién earned a Bachelor of Arts in Applied Linguistics from Queens College in New York, a Master of Arts in Education from Chapman University in Orange, California, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics from the University of Oregon, Eugene.
Soreghan, who is the director of the School of Geosciences at the Mewbourne College of Earth and Energy, will conduct her research in Serbia. Her research focuses on the use of sediments and sedimentary rocks to interpret paleoenvironments and understand the history and behavior of Earth’s climate.
The two OU Fulbright Scholars join alumni of the program, which includes 62 Nobel Laureates, 89 Pulitzer Prize winners, 78 MacArthur Fellows, and thousands of leaders and world-renowned experts in academia and many other fields across the private, public and non-profit sectors.
For more information about the Fulbright Program, visit eca.state.gov/fulbright.
About the University of Oklahoma
Founded in 1890, the University of Oklahoma is a public research university located in Norman, Oklahoma. OU serves the educational, cultural, economic and health care needs of the state, region and nation. For more information visit ou.edu.
