Last year at this time, we spoke of beginnings and routine, of resolve and the quotidian habits required to weave them into a meaningful life. We set our intention to focus on five priorities through which we in the College of Arts & Letters will chart a path to national and international leadership in Arts and Humanities education and scholarship.
When the Chicago Public Art Group asked Renee Robbins to paint a public mural in a Lincoln Park neighborhood, it offered an exciting challenge for the 2005 Studio Art MFA alumna, who typically paints smaller works in her studio.Robbins spent more than 16 weeks designing and painting the mural, which now appears on both sides of a pedestrian underpass at Fullerton and Lake Shore…
Senior Japanese major Lily McCormick has traveled more than 6,300 miles to participate in the Kakehashi Project, a short-term exchange program to Tokyo, Japan, that, for this particular trip, is focusing on pop culture and animation. Through the Kakehashi Project, McCormick and 24 other students were selected to travel from the United States to Japan January 8-16 to deepen their understanding of animation…
Michigan State University Associate Professor of English Sheila Contreras, in partnership with Capital Area District Libraries, was awarded a $14,000 grant to host the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Big Read in the Greater Lansing/Mid-Michigan area. An initiative of the NEA in partnership with Arts Midwest, the NEA Big Read broadens our understanding of our world, our communities, and ourselves through the…
Sometimes to understand our current worldview, it is necessary to examine and understand the events of our past, at least according to Assistant Professor of French Valentina Denzel, whose area of research focuses on how the Age of Enlightenment, an intellectual and philosophical European movement during the 18th century, continues to shape our everyday life. Denzel first became interested in…
Having taught more than a dozen different classes at Michigan State University — from Introduction to Film and Film Technologies to Film History and even a capstone seminar on the Digital Documentary — Associate Professor Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai’s ability to combine the scholarly with the creative has propelled his success in the classroom.
During her most recent linguistics internship, senior Karen Lovelace pushed herself far out of her comfort zone...about 3,965 miles to be exact. A Linguistics major with a minor in Communicative Sciences and Disorders, Lovelace spent 10 weeks over the summer in Utrecht, a city in the central Netherlands, at ReadSpeaker, a company that creates audio voices (comparable to Siri) for…
During their first semester at Michigan State University, students in the Citizen Scholars program were exposed to unfamiliar forms of artistic and cultural expression and asked to reflect on those experiences as part of a requirement toward earning their Citizen Scholars Badge.“Our students are invited to participate in many forms of experiential learning during their first year as Citizen Scholars — this is…
After spending a year in Germany on the Academic Year in Freiburg Program, alumna Caroline Murawski knew she was meant to live abroad. Graduating from Michigan State University in 2009 with a double major in Hospitality Business and German, Murawski has lived and worked in Germany for the past 7 years. Currently, Murawski and her fiancé own and run Big…
Professor Jacqueline Rhodes and Assistant Professor Dawn Shoultz Opel, both faculty members in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures, received a three-year, $140,000 grant from Humanities Without Walls (HWW) to create and sustain humanities-centered health service research collaboratives.Their project, “Building Collectives in a Changing Healthcare Climate,” is an interdisciplinary collaboration between the MSU College of Arts & Letters’ Critical Diversity in a Digital…