Professor awarded Fulbright for study in Austria

By Erika L. Mantz, Media Relations

Willem deVries, professor of philosophy, has been awarded the Fulbright-University of Vienna Distinguished Chair in Humanities and Cultural Studies for the 2004-2005 academic year.

deVries will spend the spring 2005 semester teaching three courses at the University of Vienna. This is deVries’ third Fulbright award. He received a doctoral dissertation fellowship and a senior research fellowship for study in Germany earlier in his career. deVries has been at UNH since 1988.

In Vienna, deVries will teach a course on consciousness, a course on the philosophical implications of the computer revolution and a graduate level course on Wilfrid Sellars, a great American philosopher and the subject of a book deVries is finishing.

“Going to another country is an eye-opening experience,” deVries says. “Not only is it a chance to learn about that country, but an opportunity to learn a lot about one’s own country. You quickly realize that things that seem a matter of course are not the same for everyone, from the way light switches work to an entirely different political system. It makes you much more aware of both yourself and the world around you, and I think ideally every student should go abroad.”

The Fulbright Program was established by Congress in 1946 to “increase mutual understanding between people of the U.S. and people of other countries.”

Named for its sponsor, the late Sen. J. William Fulbright, the program is the U.S. government’s premier international educational exchange program. Since the program’s inception, more than 36,000 U.S. Fulbright Scholars have taught or conducted research in 140 countries.

More than 25 UNH faculty members have been Fulbright Scholars in the last 10 years.