Bixby Knolls resident, Cal State Dominguez Hills professor and globally recognized multicultural mediator Nancy Erbe will be spending next school year teaching in Brazil as the only distinguished Fulbright chair to be awarded this year in American Studies. 

A professor of negotiation, conflict resolution and peacebuilding at CSUDH, Erbe will travel to Pontifícia Universidade Católica in Rio di Janero for the 2014-2015 school year, where she will teach courses in international mediation and international conflict resolution to graduate students at PUC-Rio’s International Mediation Center, which was established by Norway’s embassy in Rio de Janeiro.

Officials at PUC-Rio describe her expertise in multicultural mediation as being “vital to the Mediation Center that we are creating.”

“Receiving this award means so many different things,” Erbe said. “That the committee selected by President Obama and Brazilian academics who have never met me are recognizing [a] lifetime [of] work inspiring a rich global multicultural community…and finding ways to catalyze justice against all odds where it most matters, means that at prestigious academic levels…this work still matters.”

Fulbright scholars act as representatives of the United States Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs in their attempts to increase mutual understanding and foster international relations in the countries to which they are assigned. Brazil, for Erbe, is an important battleground for multicultural mediation as it is one of the emerging BRIC countries. 

Though she began her own alternative dispute resolution practice in 1995, Erbe has spent most of her career traveling the world working on dispute resolutions and facilitating cross-ethnic dialogues with youth, women, those in war-torn societies, the incarcerated as well as indigenous people. In 2000, she taught students from war-torn countries at the Peace Research Institute in Norway, a precursor for her Fulbright work in Brazil. 

Other clients of hers include the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Office of the Interior, Colorado State Commission on Indian Affairs, Colorado State Department of Corrections, Bay Area Rapid Transit and the County of Los Angeles.

She is one of only 38 distinguished chairs to be awarded by the Fulbright Scholar Program this year and the first distinguished chair to come from CSUDH. 

“I believe we are born with divine gifts and with encouragement, we can discover great vision, purpose, potential,” Erbe said. “That’s a big part of what I try to do for the students at CSU Dominguez Hills and around the world.”

For more information on Erbe’s work at CSUDH, visit csudhnews.com