EFL Faculty Awarded Fulbright-Hays Grant

Dr. Faiza Shereen (English and Foreign Languages) and Dr. Mahmood Ibrahim (History) have been awarded a prestigious Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad (GPA) grant, sponsored by the Department of Education. This grant funds a five-week seminar this June-July for faculty, graduate students, and administrators from Cal Poly Pomona and iPoly High School at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco.

Before leaving the country, participants will learn basic Arabic and attend a series of lectures to learn about Morocco and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) more generally, a region that is often misunderstood and misrepresented in media. When they arrive in Morocco, participants will tour Rabat, the country’s capital, and then settle in at Al Akhawayn University in the Atlas Mountains. Once they arrive on campus, participants will work with local faculty and administrators to develop course content around Moroccan and Arabo-Islamic history, culture, and society; develop an international perspective in teaching and research; and establish research and scholarly collaborations with Moroccan partners. Weekends will be spent visiting relevant historical, religious, and cultural sites on trips to Casablanca, Fes, Marrakesh, Volubilis, and the Sahara.

Those interested in applying to join this seminar should contact Dr. Shereen (fwshereen@cpp.edu) and Dr. Ibrahim (mibrahim@cpp.edu) for additional information and application materials, which are due by December 19, 2016.

Dr. Shereen directed the CPP International Center for five years, is multilingual, and has been to Morocco 33 times since the mid-1990s, including several trips on a Fulbright serial grant. Her recent research has been on Francophone literature in North Africa and other literary cultures written in languages that aren’t native to those places, and her latest publication is an autobiographical essay, "Crossing Borders in the Shadow of Intellectual Giants,” in the collection Daughters of the Nile: Egyptian Women Changing Their World, published by Cambridge Scholars.