“The students in NOVA School of Law where I did my Fulbright teaching were bright, had good English, and were unfailingly polite and solicitous for my welfare. At the beginning of each criminology class, they gave me a brief tutorial on some of the issues I was having in speaking Portuguese. (We had an especially funny class where they tried to get me to be able to articulate the Portuguese words for cheese and chin that to my ear sounded exactly the same.)  I taught two courses, an undergraduate course for 60 EU Erasmus students in criminology and a graduate course for 15 in urban inequality and crime.  The educational system was different from what I was familiar with in the U.S. and took some getting used to, but overall, I loved my experience teaching in Portugal.

I developed relationships with many of my students that will definitely survive my return to the U.S.  The students were keenly interested in everything American and in my university in the snowy northeastern part of the country.  I had many conversations with students trying to figure out how to continue their educations at universities in the U.S. and will continue to make myself available to students who want to pursue this dream.

The intellectual environment at Nova was rich and stimulating, but again quite different from that at the University of Vermont, both because of its European focus and its focus on political and social issues at the level of the nation state, rather than at the level of the individual.  There were numerous seminars and open classroom discussions of issues of international as well as interational law to which all faculty and students were invited. These discussions were usually in English, included experts from around the world, and definitely got me thinking about the world in a different way.

I can’t express how important this unforgettable experience was for me as a scholar and world citizen.  Thanks to everyone at Fulbright-Portugal and to the wonderful faculty, staff, and students at Nova as well as to the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Vermont for making it possible.”

Professor Eleanor Miller, was a grantee in the Fulbright US Scholar Program category, in 2014/2015, to teach at Universidade Nova de Lisboa.

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