Tuesday, November 16, 2021
by Editorial Team
Dr. Margaret McLaren
Rollins College philosophy professor and George D. and Harriet W. Cornell Chair Margaret McLaren has been awarded the Fulbright-Nehru Professional and Academic Excellence Award for the 2021-22 academic year. In spring 2022, she will be pursuing her research project, “Tagore’s Cosmopolitanism: Educating for Global Citizenship” at Visva Bharati University in Santiniketan, India.
The Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowships aim to provide Indian faculty, researchers, and professionals the opportunity to teach, conduct research, or carry out a combination of teaching and research at a U.S. institution. McLaren’s Fulbright-Nehru project explores Indian thinker Rabindranath Tagore’s contributions to global citizenship (cosmopolitanism). According to Tagore, global citizens should embrace humanitarianism, internationalism, and sustainability as goals, believing that educating for global citizenship involves respect for differences, empathy, and open dialogue. McLaren will develop Tagore’s notion of cosmopolitanism as educating for global citizenship and demonstrate the significance and contemporary relevance of Tagore’s idea of cosmopolitanism by illustrating the ways in which his idea of a “relational cosmopolitanism,” which promotes global unity while respecting differences, can help us face the myriad challenges of the 21st century.