Jonathan Arac is immersing himself in a place most other professors dare not tread: an undergraduate classroom.

Arac, a professor of English, is taking first-year Italian to prepare for daily life in Italy, where he will start teaching in March. He compared attending the course to visiting a foreign culture.

“Being in a class with Pitt undergraduates who are my fellow students, though not the ones I’m teaching, is of course a cultural dislocation, also, and it’s a great one,” Arac said.

Arac is one of four Pitt faculty members who have won grants to travel, teach and research abroad through the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program this year. The program, which is funded by the U.S. Department of State, pays for academics and professionals in fields that include the humanities, science, technology, engineering and math disciplines to study, research and teach outside the United States. The grants include the costs of living abroad, transportation to and from the country to which the Fulbright scholar will travel and health benefits, according to the program’s website. In some countries, grants also cover the costs of tuition, books and other expenses.

Two of Pitt’s faculty who have received the award this year teach English literature.

Along with Arac, Susan Andrade, an associate professor of English literature, was awarded a Fulbright grant to teach in Karnataka, India.

Pitt faculty members also received grants to research information and health sciences abroad.

Valerian Kagan, a professor of environmental and occupational health, received a Fulbright Visiting Research Chair grant to research environmental studies in Ontario, Canada.

Peter Brusilovsky, the chair of Pitt’s information science program, was awarded a Fulbright-Nokia Distinguished Chair grant to research information and communications technologies in Helsinki, Finland.

Brusilovsky said one must be careful to choose the right country if one wants to do research.

“Some countries [where] the sun is warm might be very attractive for sabbatical, but it might not add very much value,” Brusilovsky said. 

Brusilovsky has already completed his first trip to Finland, during which he met and worked with other researchers. He plans to return again in April to strengthen relations between Pitt and what he considers to be one of the leading countries in technology education.

But some professors will head for warmer climates.

Andrade plans to leave for India in January and remain immersed in the culture until the end of the spring semester.

She will research realism in modern African and Indian literature, and she said that there is no better way to get a feel for a culture than to dive into it.

“These is nothing like being there, especially living there, to know something deeply,” she said.

Kagan said in an email he was not available for an interview because he is currently teaching in Canada. Except for a brief visit to Pittsburgh in December, Kagan plans to remain there until the end of the school year.

Kagan said in a statement released by Pitt that he is working with biochemical researchers at McMaster University, which is located in Hamilton, Ontario. He and the other researchers are trying to develop “substances that would assist the human body in mitigating the effects of harmful levels of radiation.”

Andrade, Kagan and Brusilovsky agreed that exposure to foreign culture is essential for a well-rounded education.

“I think the greatest value is just to see the bigger picture when you’re outside [one’s own country],” Brusilovsky said.

Andrade studied in France between her undergraduate and graduate studies. She said the experience “did much to enrich my thinking and my own sense of self.”

She added that being a student in a foreign country improved her perspective on American culture.

Arac is a proponent of foreign-language acquisition. He said the University of Naples, where he will teach comparative literature, shares the same philosophy.

There, Arac said, students are required to learn a second Western language and to study an Eastern language, such as Arabic, Hindi or Mandarin Chinese, to increase their cultural awareness.

”The capacity to discover who you are in another language and culture is a very great enrichment of the kind of self-understanding that university life, in general, is meant to give you,” he said.