UA Professor Wins Fulbright Awards

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – Dr. Andrew Raffo Dewar, professor of interdisciplinary arts with The University of Alabama’s New College and School of Music, was recently selected for two grants from the prestigious Fulbright program to teach and research abroad.

Dewar received a Fulbright Specialist Award and was named the Fulbright Canada Research Chair at York University in Toronto.

“I’m very thankful to have been awarded these two Fulbrights and for the support they signify for my current research,” said Dewar. “Receiving both awards within a one-week period was incredibly surprising and overwhelming, in the best way.”

Through the Fulbright Specialist Program, Dewar received support to visit the Antonio Nariño University in Bogotá, Colombia in June. He gave two public seminars on experimental music and intermedia arts, discussing both the history of those art forms and his own creative research in those fields.

Dewar was also asked to help develop a template for an undergraduate curriculum in the field of ethnomusicology, the study of music and culture, and in collaboration with his counterpart at UAN, Professor Rodrigo Diaz, made audio field recordings and began work on a new research project that will result in a new piece of sound art.

As the Fulbright Canada Research Chair in spring 2022, Dewar will share his research and work with students at York University in Toronto. He will also work in York’s DisPerSion Lab, directed by York Associate Professor Dr. Doug Van Nort, on a new intermedia creative work of sound and light entitled “Volver” (“Return”).

“Volver” combines oral history recordings, archival imagery, spatial audio and generative video to relate the complex stories of the 1930s repatriation of hundreds of thousands of Mexican-Americans to Mexico during the Great Depression. The foundation for the piece is oral histories recorded by Dr. Christine Valenciana in the 1970s that are housed at the Lawrence de Graaf Center for Oral and Public History at Cal State Fullerton.

“To receive this kind of support at this moment in my career simultaneously feels like an acknowledgement of the decades of work I have already completed, and an invitation to stretch my research into new directions with my future work,” said Dewar.