Penn Nursing’s Julie Fairman, Nightingale Professor in Honor of Nursing Veterans, professor of nursing, and director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Future of Nursing Scholars Program, has been selected for the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency Program, a month-long residency in Bellagio, Italy. Her residency will take place in 2022.

The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency Program offers academics, artists, policymakers, and practitioners a setting for focused, goal-oriented work, and the unparalleled opportunity to establish new connections with residents from a wide array of backgrounds, disciplines, and geographies. The program has a track record of supporting important new knowledge addressing some of the most complex challenges facing our world and innovative works of art that enhance our understanding of pressing global and social issues and encourage positive action.

Dr. Fairman was selected for the Academic Writing residency program for an interdisciplinary history project that explores health as a civil right through its engagement with citizenship, human rights, and social justice. The research will include the development of a book proposal and revision of two existing manuscripts, about nurses as civil rights activists from 1960 to 1970 and as participants in liberation strategy in the Caribbean from 1920 to 1940. Her collaborating partner in this project is Karen Flynn from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 

The Academic Writing residency is for university and think tank-based academics, researchers, professors, and scientists working in any discipline. Those selected for this program have demonstrated decades of significant professional contributions to their field or show evidence of being on a strong upward trajectory if earlier in their careers. The Bellagio Center has a strong interest in proposals that align with the Rockefeller Foundation’s efforts to promote the well-being of humanity, particularly through issues that have a direct impact on the lives of poor and vulnerable populations around the world. These issues include but are not limited to health, economic opportunity, urban resilience, food and agriculture.