A UCSB visiting ethnomusicologist has been named a Fulbright Scholar for 2007-08, and will lecture and undertake research at the University of Sonora in Hermosillo, Mexico. During the same period, Bren research professor Paul Berkman will use his Fulbright support to help lay the groundwork for a conference in Washington, D.C., to distill lessons learned from the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, one of the planet’s most successful multi-national agreements.

Peter Garcia, assistant professor of Chicana and Chicano studies, plans to investigate the annual fiestas of San Francisco in Magadalena as “a transnational pilgrimage within the … contexts of popular and traditional musical culture…”

He comes from Arizona State University, Tempe, and will be teaching classes at UCSB through the winter quarter.

Bren School’s Berkman, a researcher with the Program on Governance for Sustainable Development, plans to organize a scholarly analysis of the Antarctic Treaty for 2009. It will be titled, “Antarctic Treaty Summit: Science-Policy Interactions in International Governance.”

With his Fulbright, Berkman will spend seven months at Cambridge University in Britain, an international nucleus for polar activities, gathering support for the summit. Already private foundations and public agencies, like the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission, have pledged funds.

For 50 years the treaty has secured Antarctica as a “shared domain reserved for the pursuit of peaceful scientific research and study.” Berkman hopes to convene scientists, economists, nonprofit officials, government administrators, and others to extract lessons about international cooperation from this history.

He and Garcia are part of the approximately 800 U.S. faculty and professionals who will travel aboard in the coming academic year through the Fulbright Scholar Program, according to the U.S. State Department, which administers the program.