Graduating Senior Earns Fulbright Scholarship to Argentina
Lewis & Clark has been a top 10 producer of Fulbright scholars in recent years. Peter Bradley BA ’19 has received an English Teaching Fellowship to Argentina and adds to the long list of Lewis & Clark recipients aiming to improve intercultural relations.
Open gallery
by Franchesca Schrambling BA ’22 and Dawn Mist Movich-Fields BA ’20
Peter Bradley BA ’19, a sociology and anthropology major from Madison, Wisconsin, has received a Fulbright English Teaching Fellowship to Argentina. Bradley will be an assistant teacher in a university classroom for students studying to become English teachers. He joins generations of Lewis & Clark Fulbright alumni in improving intercultural relations.
Fulbright promotes the exchange of scholars, teachers, and other professionals to study, research, teach, or use their talents abroad; the program also provides scholarships or grants for citizens of other countries to do the same in the United States. Lewis & Clark has been named a top 10 producer of Fulbrights in the past, and last semester hosted Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence Professor Rasha Soliman, who taught courses in ancient Egypt.
Bradley started studying Spanish in his first year at Lewis & Clark. He became fascinated with the language, and made it a goal to live and study in a Spanish-speaking country after taking Spanish 201 with instructor Cecilia Benenati. Bradley studied overseas in the fall of 2017 in the Dominican Republic, living in the city of Santiago and studying at Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra (PUCMM). It was there that he took a course on teaching English as a second language and found himself enjoying the classroom setting.
Bradley, who worked for the College Outdoors program as a trip leader and warehouse staff, aspires to work in outdoor and experiential education after his Fulbright experience. He hopes his travels in Argentina and his Spanish fluency will aid him in leading trips in Latin America.
“I love the challenge of navigating a world in my second language. I’m still at the point where I am excited just to be able to speak Spanish, so it adds a new element to my daily interactions,” says Bradley. “I found studying abroad put me in a growth mindset where I was more open to new experiences and meeting new people, which is a big part of the reason I applied for the Fulbright.”
Before studying abroad in Argentina, Bradley encountered another opportunity to embed himself in the global community, separate from his Spanish studies. In June of 2017, he spent time in Cambodia as a part of the microcredit research project Assistant Professor of Sociology Maryann Bylander started. With two other students, Lacey Jacoby BA ’17 and Andrea Blobel Pérez BA ’19, Bradley conducted fieldwork and helped tackle microcredit—the practice of providing small loans at low-interest rates to new businesses, predominantly in developing countries.
Of his experiences on campus these last four years, Bradley says: “Lewis & Clark has contributed to seeing myself as a citizen in a global community. I have taken a lot of internationally focused classes, and my experiences abroad have started to take me out of a U.S.-centric mindset.”
