Fulbright Scholars

Visiting scholars are a key aspect to any postgraduate course, bringing different voices and expertise to the academic programme. We are delighted to host two Fulbright scholars each year, with distinguished writers and critics joining us for the second semester.

Fulbright Scholars 2022

Professor Rus Bradburd is the author of four books, including the recent All the Dreams We've Dreamed: a Story of Hoops and Handguns on Chicago's West Side and Paddy on the Hardwood: a Journey in Irish Hoops. His latest book project focuses on the assimilation of refugees into Northern Irish culture through sport.

After coaching basketball for fourteen seasons at University of Texas, El Paso (UTEP) and New Mexico State University, he left the game to pursue a life in writing. A professor in NMSU’s MFA program, his books focus on the intersections of sport, social justice, and race. He still directs his acclaimed Basketball in the Barrio summer program in El Paso, Texas. A Chicago native, he is an accomplished fiddle player who plans to pursue this hobby in the pubs of Belfast.

Professor Laura Ferri is a theatre artist from Seattle who specializes in the creation of performances derived from oral histories. Recent works include writing and directing Friends Across the Wires, concerning the American incarceration of the Japanese and The Ruins of Memory: Women’s Voices of the Holocaust. Her play Crates of Thunder explored WWII through the lens of the B-17, touring internationally to critical acclaim. A strong advocate for accessibility, Laura has created productions with the blind community.

While at Queen’s she will work on a play looking at the impact of the American military on the Northern Irish community during WWII. An expert bread baker, she is excited to see how her sourdough starter will react to life in Northern Ireland.

Too Late to Stop Now, by Professor Jenny Browne (Fulbright Scholar 2020)

An essay describing something of her time as a Fulbright Scholar with us in early 2020, published in The American Poetry Review (Sep/Oct 2021).

A Unique Silence

After an early return to Texas due to the Coronavirus pandemic, Jenny Browne continued to collaborate with us on a series of online seminars with Heaney Centre students and those from Trinity University in San Antonio. Find out more...

Fulbright Scholars 2020

Professor Jenny Browne and Professor Greg Winston

Professor Jenny Browne, from Trinity University, Texas and Professor Greg Winston, Husson University, Maine have taken up post for the semester.

Jenny is the author of three collections of poems, At Once, The Second Reason and Dear Stranger and two chapbooks, Welcome to Freetown and Texas, Being. A former James Michener Fellow at the University of Texas, she has received the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and two creative writing fellowships from the Texas Writers League. She was the 2018 Poet Laureate of the State of Texas.

Greg's scholarship takes historical and environmental approaches to Irish and British modernist writers. He is author of the book Joyce and Militarism (University Press of Florida, 2012). He has previously worked as a journalist in New York and rural Alaska. As part of his research, which takes an ecocritical approach to twentieth-century Irish literature, Professor Winston will be focusing on Seamus Heaney and John McGahern during his time at Queen’s.

Hear from them here.

The Seamus Heaney Centre

Fulbright Scholars