After graduating in December 2020 with dual degrees in Spanish and Arts and Humanities, alumna Emily Van Dyke-Mathews has accepted a Fulbright English Language Teaching Assistantship in Asturias, Spain, that will begin in fall 2021. During the 9-month assistantship, Van Dyke-Mathews will teach English to primary and secondary students in Spain. She also will serve as a cultural ambassador for the…
Tom Shanahan was looking for something to devote his attention to during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic took away the 1978 MSU graduate and former State News sports editor’s opportunities to write as a freelance journalist — his career for the last 12 years — so he decided to retire. Shanahan was not done writing, however. His first task in…
Andrew Murray has been selected as the Director of Advising, a new position within the College of Arts & Letters. He begins his new position, which is part of Undergraduate Studies, on Monday, June 14. Murray currently serves as the Academic Advisor for the Department of English, a position he has held since July 2018. Prior to that, he was…
Isaiah Johns, recent graduate with a B.A. in Film Studies and a minor in Fiction Filmmaking, received a first-place Michigan Student Broadcast Award from the Michigan Association of Broadcasters (MAB), along with partner George Pham, a Media and Information major, for their Holiday Comma Concert. This 2021 statewide award was in the Use of Multimedia category. The MAB is a…
Ayanna De’Vante Spencer, who earned her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Michigan State University this spring, has accepted a tenure-track assistant professorship at the University of Connecticut with joint appointments in Philosophy and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Dr. Spencer is changing the status quo in the field of philosophy by combining activism with her research. Her dissertation, “Epistemologies of Criminalization:…
Alumna Suban Nur Cooley, who received her Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Writing from the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures (WRAC), won the highly competitive 2021 James Berlin Memorial Outstanding Dissertation Award for her dissertation, titled Carrying Culture: Temporal and Spatial Constructions of Somalia Among Women in the Diaspora. This national award is presented each year by the Conference…
The Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program (CADFP) Advisory Council selected to fund a project that will allow MSU researcher and College of Arts & Letters alumnus Ike Iyioke to travel to South Africa for collaborative research efforts and graduate student teaching and mentoring. Iyioke is a Research Specialist working in the Analytics Unit of MSU’s Office of Research & Innovation.…
Armed with a passion for Spanish and an undeniable drive to learn, Margaret “Peggy” Kennedy successfully earned her M.A. in Hispanic Literature from Michigan State University last week at the age of 72. But what led her to pursue a second graduate degree at a time when most people are looking to retire, was born out of the love for…
MSU College of Arts & Letters student Darby Grachek graduated this spring with a Master’s of Arts in Linguistics and says it was her MSU education and experiences here that propelled her to pursue a Ph.D. Darby Grachek “If it weren’t for the different research labs and professors at MSU giving me opportunities to do different kinds of research, I…
Four College of Arts & Letters students graduated with perfect 4.0 GPAs and received Board of Trustees Awards for having achieved the highest scholastic average at the end of their undergraduate careers at Michigan State University. They are among the 130 MSU students recognized this spring by the MSU Board of Trustees for having graduated with a 4.0 GPA. The…