Five College of Arts & Letters students and alumni were awarded 2024-2025 Fulbright U.S. Student Program grants. They are among the 10 Michigan State University students and alumni who were offered Fulbright grants this year, nine of whom accepted the awards and are traveling to seven different countries to conduct research or teach English during the 2024-2025 academic year.
Since graduating from Michigan State University in 2006 with a B.A. in Spanish, Lauyren Haight has earned a Juris Doctor degree and has led federal and global corporate investigations at the U.S. Department of Justice, the FBI, and Google. Much of her work has focused on civil rights and sexual harassment investigations. Currently, she works for Microsoft in Washington, D.C., as a Corporate Counsel and Employee Relations Investigator.
Fluent in both Russian and English, Zhanna Yakubova, who was born and raised in Moscow, Russia, decided to learn Spanish too and began taking classes in high school when she moved to the United States six years ago. Now a senior at Michigan State University, Yakubova is double majoring in Linguistics and Acting. She has always had a love for learning languages and, during her first year at MSU, she added a Spanish minor to her undergraduate education.
Growing up in Honduras, Oscar Rodriguez Quiroz didn’t have much access to the theatre and it wasn’t until he was 17 that his love for acting began when he saw a performance at the Escuela Nacional de Arte Dramático (National School of Drama) in Honduras. He is now a seasoned actor who has performed in many plays and an MFA in Acting Candidate at Michigan State University who is preparing to graduate this spring.
Hannah Diggs-King is graduating from Michigan State University this month with a double major in Spanish and Marketing. She also is an Honors College student. As Diggs wraps up the final days of her undergraduate education, she reflected on her personal journey at MSU in this following Student View.
The College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University is mourning the passing of Virginia Ruifernández-Conde, an Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance and Classical Studies. Ruifernández-Conde also was a graduate of MSU having earned her Ph.D. in Hispanic Cultural Studies from Michigan State University in 2013. She died on Feb. 19, 2024, after a fierce…
The MSU Latinx Film Festival (LxFF) is returning this year after a four-year pandemic-induced hiatus. Scheduled for Feb. 15-18 at several different venues across the Michigan State University campus and in the Lansing and East Lansing communities, the 2024 festival will continue its tradition of screening ground-breaking independent cinema from Latin America, Spain, and the United States while shining a cinematic light on various social issues.
Since she was a kid, Ana Patricia Ponce Castañeda has loved horror films and fondly remembers watching scary movies with her mom as she was growing up in Mexico. Now, a second-year Ph.D. student in the Hispanic Cultural Studies program at Michigan State University, Castañeda has found a way to merge her childhood love of horror with her adult interests…
With knowledge gained from her MSU education and experiences, Hannah Diggs-King, a senior who is double majoring in Marketing and Spanish, won an internship competition for which she was flown to New Jersey to meet with the company CEO and co-presented with him at a national meeting. This past summer, Diggs-King worked as a Corporate Marketing Intern for Stryker, a medical technology company headquartered in Kalamazoo, Michigan, with locations around the…
Silvina Bongiovanni, Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance and Classical Studies at Michigan State University — along with her colleagues from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, New York University, Illinois-Wesleyan University, and Towson University in Maryland — have received a $50,000 grant from the Spencer Foundation to incorporate perception training into second language pronunciation teaching. The grant…