The top producer nationally in Oswego’s category of master’s universities was Towson University, with four recipients.

In addition to Oswego’s two faculty recipients — Dr. Geraldine Forbes of the history department and Dr. Faith Maina of the curriculum and instruction department — Dr. Joshua McKeown, Oswego’s director of international education and programs, was selected to participate in a Fulbright-Nehru International Education Administrators Seminar in India.

Geraldine Forbes, distinguished teaching professor of history

Distinguished Teaching Professor of History Geraldine Forbes is sharing her knowledge, and collecting more, through a Fulbright-Nehru Visiting Lecturer Fellowship to India. Faith Maina, a SUNY Oswego faculty member and a new Fulbright Scholar, returned this school year to her native Kenya as she seeks to build the research and writing skill sets of young Kenyan scholars.

Forbes is teaching courses on gender and history, gender and visual history and other topics at the Calcutta University Women’s Studies Research Centre.

Forbes, who first visited India as a graduate student researching Indian Positivists in 1969, had a previous six-month Fulbright Research Grant to India in 2003-04 to work on a monograph, Photographic Imagery in the History of Indian Women. She said she plans to return to that project while she is in India.

The Fulbright proposal Maina produced grew from her experience with universities such as Moi in Eldoret, Kenya, working with young researchers as an editor of the JINSIA-Moi University Journal of Gender and Women Studies.

“They weren’t getting promoted because their journal submissions were not being accepted due to poor writing,” Maina said. “No articles, no promotions, no gender equity. I feel this (Fulbright) would be an opportunity to break some of this cycle.”

Faith Maina, associate professor, department of Curriculum and Instruction

Maina attended primary and secondary school in Kenya, and did her undergraduate work at Kenyatta University in Nairobi. She learned to speak Swahili and English, in addition to her native Kikuyu, and wants the same educational opportunities for other girls and women in extraordinarily diverse Kenya, which has 42 distinct ethnic groups. l

— Tim Nekritz M ’05 and Jeff Rea ’71