While most Texas A&M University faculty, students and staff were gearing up in early August for another fall semester in Aggieland, Dr. Evan Haefeli, a professor in the Department of History, was busy making final preparations to head to Japan as the recipient of a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program award in American history for the 2024-25 academic year.
As a Fulbright lecturer in Japan, Haefeli is spending the fall and spring semesters teaching undergraduate and graduate American history courses at three different universities in Tokyo: Tokyo University, Ochanomizu University and Kyoritsu Women’s University.
“The Department of History is delighted that Dr. Evan Haefeli was selected to participate in the prestigious Fulbright program,” said Dr. Angela Pulley Hudson, professor and head of Texas A&M History. “That he was chosen for this competitive fellowship demonstrates his prominence within the discipline as well as his expertise in the field of American history. Dr. Haefeli’s engagement abroad will not only benefit the students he teaches at the University of Tokyo, Ochanomizu University and Kyoritsu Women’s University, but also promises to build research and exchange relationships to last many years.”
For his part, Haefeli said he is especially looking forward to teaching early American religious history — a staple of his teaching at Texas A&M — to an international audience. At the University of Tokyo, he is associated with the Center for Pacific and American Studies, where he is working with fellow professors, graduate students and undergraduate students to enhance their coverage and engagement with American history and culture. In addition, he will be presenting his research and connecting with colleagues in American and early modern European history in Tokyo and around the country. Beyond reconnecting with his Texas A&M teaching roots, he is also looking forward to improving his Spanish.
“Representing my country to Japan as a Fulbright Fellow is a great honor and an exciting opportunity to develop contacts with a part of the world that people in my field normally do not have much contact with,” Haefeli said. “The chance to engage in these sorts of cultural and intellectual exchanges is one of the reasons I became a professor in the first place. I look forward to strengthening the ties between my colleagues in America and Japan. And the food: Japanese cuisine is fantastic!”
Haefeli, who joined the Texas A&M faculty in 2014 after previous faculty stints at Princeton University, Tufts University and Columbia University, is one of the more than 800 U.S. citizens selected each year to conduct research or teach abroad through the prestigious program. Since 1946, the Fulbright Program has provided in excess of 400,000 accomplished students, scholars, teachers, artists and professionals of all backgrounds with such horizon-broadening opportunities to exchange ideas and build connections as they work to address complex global challenges.
Representing my country to Japan as a Fulbright Fellow is a great honor and an exciting opportunity to develop contacts with a part of the world that people in my field normally do not have much contact with. The chance to engage in these sorts of cultural and intellectual exchanges is one of the reasons I became a professor in the first place.
Akleman, an instructional professor and director of the master’s of science program in the Department of Statistics, spent December 2023 through April 2024 as a Fulbright Senior Researcher in Izmir at Ege University, one of the oldest universities in Turkey. As a visiting member of the Faculty of Medicine and Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics, Akleman’s goal was to better understand the graduate education and training in statistics and biostatistics, then analyze the causality and causal relations in recruitment, mentoring and retention in Turkey. In addition to giving departmental seminars and mentoring Ph.D. students, she had weekly meetings with medical doctors and presented on causality and medical case studies at national and international conferences. She also began her current service on the scientific advisory board for the Ege Journal of Medicine.
“I was honored to receive this award,” Akleman said. “It was a rewarding experience, and I developed social and professional friendships while I was there. I am grateful for this opportunity and the invaluable support from my department, college and university.”
O’Reilly, a professor in the Department of Geography and a 2018 Texas A&M Presidential Impact Fellow, was awarded a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Flex Award to begin a six-month research program spanning two years at St. John’s Medical College in Bangalore, India. Her project investigates the workloads of young women who are unmarried, living matrilocally and married, living patrilocally in rural India in order to analyze the gendered geographies of domestic labor and leisure and how such dynamics reproduce gender inequality, thereby adding to global knowledge of unpaid labor’s gendered impact. Her goal is to better understand the extent of young women’s workloads and free time, thereby adding to global knowledge of unpaid labor’s gendered impact and filling a large gap on women’s leisure time activities in rural India.
“I consider the Fulbright-Nehru Award the greatest honor of my career,” O’Reilly said. “It recognizes my 25-year commitment to research on gender, water and sanitation in India and allows me to continue that research in a slightly different area — young women’s domestic work and leisure time activities — using audio diaries as a novel methodology.
“Audio diaries have seldom been used with populations of low literacy, but they can provide tremendous insight into how young women reflect on how they spend their time and how they feel about it. The Fulbright-Nehru Award will also allow me to collaborate with doctors and public health researchers on young women’s physical and mental well-being by bringing new data to bear on questions of women’s work and welfare.”
Learn more about applying for the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program or other opportunities available through Texas A&M Global Enhancement and about faculty excellence in the College of Arts and Sciences.
About The Fulbright Program
The Fulbright Program is the U.S. government’s flagship international educational exchange program and is supported by the people of the United States and partner countries around the world. It is funded through an annual appropriation made by the U.S. Congress to the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Participating governments and host institutions, corporations and foundations around the world also provide direct and indirect support to the program.