As Brown/Wheaton Faculty Fellows, these doctoral students will have the opportunity to hone teaching skills gained at Brown, while being introduced to faculty life at a small liberal arts college. 

“This experience will be a tremendous opportunity for me to further develop my teaching skills and to make my scholarship accessible to a wide body of students with different interests and backgrounds,” says Zangani, who is a PhD student in Egyptology and Assyriology.

He will be teaching a course in Wheaton's History department titled, Worlds in Contact: Imperialism, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Ancient Near East. The topic of this course is the broad spectrum of political, economic, and cultural interconnections between the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Syria-Palestine, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Persia, and the Mediterranean.

He looks forward to teaching Wheaton students about how the large-scale, long-term phenomena that developed in ancient times can inform our understanding of broader historical and political issues cross-culturally, as well as provide valuable insight into the current challenges of the Middle East and the Mediterranean.

Garbes, a PhD student in Sociology, is also eager to engage students on topics salient to their daily lives. Her course is on Race and Racism in the U.S., taught through the Sociology department.

Karina Santamaria, a PhD student in Behavioral and Social Health Sciences, is most looking forward to her time with the students at Wheaton and “engaging with them in ways that I hope inspire their ideas and broaden their horizons to what they can do with a career in public health.”

She will teach a course on best practices for designing and implementing behavioral interventions that promote social justice. Her students will have the opportunity to identify and conceptualize an addressable public health problem as they further their knowledge of the opportunities and constraints of implementing interventions with various populations and settings.

The fourth Brown/Wheaton fellow for the 2019-2020 academic year is Kirun Sankaran, a doctoral student in Philosophy. Sankaran will teach a course in either political philosophy or philosophy of law next academic year.

Through the program, advanced doctoral candidates teach a one-semester course and participate in the intellectual life of the college. The experience provides a better understanding of the responsibilities and challenges of academic life at a four-year, liberal arts college.