Laila Hussein Moustafa, distinguished assistant professor at the University Library has been selected as a Fulbright Specialist by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and World Learning. She was recommended by the Peer Review Panel for placement on the Fulbright Specialist Roster for a tenure of three years starting this winter.

The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and is designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. It offers grants to study, teach, and conduct research for U.S. citizens to go abroad and for non-U.S. citizens to come to the United States. The Fulbright Program operates in more than 160 countries worldwide and has provided approximately 370,000 participants with the opportunity to study, teach, or conduct research in each other’s’ countries and exchange ideas. Approximately 8,000 competitive, merit-based grants are awarded annually in most academic disciplines and fields of study.

Professor Hussein Moustafa’s first project will be at Khartoum University and Omdurman Islamic University in Sudan in research titled “Digital Literacy Skills and Historic Preservation Capacity.” She will be joined by erudite and esteemed librarians and faculty from all across Sudan. “ Her role in this project will be to train librarians, faculty, and students in advance methods of conducting research methodology, learn about basic preservation and reference service, and also to work on her own research of preserving cultural heritage.

She believes that her experience in Sudan will diversify her knowledge in the field of digital literacy and preservation, which will add lots of value when she comes back and teaches at the University of Illinois.

Laila is an assistant professor of Library Administration and the Middle East and North Africa subject specialist in the International Area Studies Library. Her previous achievements and extraordinary work of training librarians at Qatar University in 2016 was lauded by the State Department Review Panel and helped her receive the competitive Fulbright scholarship among six finalists.

Laila was most recently featured on the Illinois International News blog for her research on
“Exploring and preserving history: Illinois’ Mauritanian manuscripts.”