Isabel Owen ’19 is the first Geneseo alum to win multiple Fulbright awards (photo provided).
Isabel E. Owen ’19, a history and English double major from Great Neck, NY, has won a 2022â23 English Teaching Assistant Award to Brazil. Owen is presently enrolled in a graduate program at Tulane University in Latin American studies and serves as a Foreign Language and Areas Studies (FLAS) Fellow for Portuguese. She becomes the 45th Geneseo US Student Fulbright awardee and the fourth to Brazil.Â
The US Student Fulbright award is Owenâs second, and she is the first alum in Geneseo history to earn multiple grants. Her first Fulbright year to Brazil in 2020 was incomplete due to the pandemic.
âMarch 15 was an incredibly difficult day for me and my fellow ETAs, as we found out that we would need to evacuate Brazil,â Owen remembers. âWhen I arrived home in New York days later, I had a strong instinct that my work in Brazil was not over.â In response, she rededicated herself to practicing Portuguese, kept current with her UberlĂąndia friends, and applied to the Tulane program.
Geneseoâs lessons in history encouraged Owenâs sense of global citizenship. A freshman year Latin American Visual Cultures course sparked her interest in both history and Latin American studies, âallowing me to embrace interdisciplinarity with my other majors and with other languages, which eventually informed a history thesis project on United States immigration control at the turn of the twentieth century.â
Owen is inspired by the Portuguese phrase tudo vai dar certo. Loosely translated, it means âeverything will be okay,â prompting her to be resilient and look for solutions even when things are dark and uncertain. âIt reminds me of the importance of community,â she says, âwhether that community is at home with family, or in Brazil on the other side of the hemisphere.â
Gillian Paku, associate professor of English, notes that Owen has an authentic desire to understand the world beyond the US, and with âa capacious understanding and appreciation of its complexity,â presents her own countryâs potential to be âcollaborative, respectful, and deeply invested in the greater good.â Owenâs pursuit of a graduate degree in Latin American studies indicates âhow profoundly she thinks that cultural interactions should be central to being an American.â
After her Fulbright year, Owen plans to enroll in a comparative literature PhD program and continue her work on literary translation and Lusophone studies. Her career goal is to become a university professor and translator of Portuguese creative works into English.
Fulbrights at Geneseo
In four of the past five years, Geneseo has been named a Fulbright Top Producing Institution by the State Departmentâs Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs in its annual article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. For the 2017â18 Fulbright cycle, Geneseo was the first dedicated SUNY institution to be named a Top Producer of US Student awards in any categoryâbachelorâs, masterâs, research, or special-focus four-year institutions.
The Fulbright US Student Program provides grants for individually designed graduate study, research programs, or English teaching assistant programs in many foreign countries. Sarah Fadlaoui â22, Michael Hughes â20, and Kallie Swyer â17 have also won 2022â23 Fulbright awards. Gail Cabahug â22 was named an alternate to Spain. Geneseo had nine semifinalists in this yearâs competition and reporting on other finalists will continue through May.
The US Student Fulbright competition is open to students and alumni. It is administered at Geneseo by Director of National Fellowships and Scholarships Michael Mills, who can be reached at millsm@geneseo.edu and 585-245-6002. For more information about the Fulbright and other nationally and internationally competitive scholarship and fellowship programs, visit Fellowships and Scholarships.
âMichael Mills