June 8th, 2006 | Brooklyn College
Brooklyn, NY — Brooklyn College graduate student and Edward R. Murrow High School history teacher Matthew MacLean has been awarded a 2006 Fulbright Fellowship to conduct an oral history in the United Arab Emirates among longtime residents. In the past forty years these older residents have seen the nation transform from a sleepy collection of British colonies to a fabulously wealthy nation that controls 8 percent of the world’s oil reserves.
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Matthew MacLean
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“The target group for my work will be UAE nationals who are sixty years old or older. Because oil-related development in their country began in 1966, they would have memory of what life was like before the oil boom,” says MacLean, who is working toward earning his master’s degree in history at Brooklyn College. “The simplest explanation has been ‘First we were poor, then we were rich,’ but I think the reality is probably a bit more complicated.” The Fulbright grant will fund ten months of research in the United Arab Emirates, a collection of seven small Islamic city-states along the Persian Gulf, the most famous being Dubai, a city with a population of more than one million — 80 percent of whom are foreign-born noncitizens. While English is widely used in the UAE, MacLean will take a crash course in Arabic in order to interview the country’s older residents.
MacLean has previously made two visits to the United Arab Emirates, most recently in February. “During the summer it is absurdly hot, 115 degrees in the shade, but in the fall and winter it can be quite pleasant,” he says. Another challenge is the culture. “Everything is done through personal introductions and there is a completely different sense of time there — things happen when they happen. So there are many adjustments for Westerners to make.” A San Diego native, MacLean has taught history at Murrow High School for the past six years and lives in Kensington.
Fulbright grants are funded by the U.S. State Department and administered by the Institute of International Education, with additional support from participating countries and educational institutions. The program awarded approximately 1,200 student fellowships last year.
The program was established sixty years ago to increase mutual understanding between the United States and other countries. Fellowships are awarded to outstanding college graduates, graduate students, young scholars, and higher education faculty.
For more information about scholarship opportunities, graduate programs, and the Brooklyn College Department of History, visit the Brooklyn College Web site at www.brooklyn.cuny.edu.