Dr. LeConté Dill is a scholar, educator, creative writer, and artist guided by Black Feminist ways of being and knowing. With a commitment toward transdisciplinary, community-accountable scholarship, her work focuses on the safety, resilience, and wellness strategies of urban Black girls and other youth of color. Dill’s scholarship is critically informed by years of working in partnership with youth and community…
Ayodele Uhuru, a first-year undergraduate student from Detroit, is among the first cohort of students at Michigan State University to major in African American and African Studies (AAAS). The B.A. in AAAS just launched this year through MSU’s Department of African American and African Studies in the College of Arts & Letters. “Choosing to major in AAAS was a no-brainer for me,”…
Most people can recognize what words are real and which ones aren’t in the languages they know. However, sometimes a nonsense word might sneak through, especially when the word sounds and looks a lot like a legitimate one. Karthik Durvasula, Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures at Michigan State University, is delving further into “wordlikeness judgments”…
A new scholarship is being offered to College of Arts & Letters majors who are participating in independent internships. Funded by the Excel Network, the College of Arts & Letters Independent Internship Scholarship is designed to help students who are doing unpaid or low-paying internships. The scholarship aims to alleviate the financial burden that low-paying or unpaid internships can bring…
Michigan State University College of Arts & Letters student Mary Claire Zauel is graduating with a perfect 4.0 grade point average and is a recipient of the Board of Trustees’ Award. Each semester, the MSU Board of Trustees recognizes graduating students for earning the highest scholastic average. This fall semester, 52 students received the award, including Zauel. Each of the award…
Writing has always been something I was innately interested in. Throughout all the stages of my life, I would always find ways to engage in it when all other forms of communication fell short. This feeling has remained very much present since the early days of surpassing the single composition page required for writing prompts in elementary school, writing articles for my high school’s newspaper, and composing poems and short stories in my room on the weekends...
Marta Tienda grew up poor in the inner ring suburbs of Detroit. Her mother died when she was 6, but her father assured her life would be better if she worked hard and finished high school. She listened to her father, an immigrant from Mexico who raised five children in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Alternating between jobs as a factory…
As a 2022 CREATE! Micro-Grant recipient, Ryan Freund, a junior majoring in Studio Art, produced a sculpture featuring a single, manipulated Balisong knife. Titled Intersection, Freund utilized the knife's four handle scales to complete the piece. "I find flipping Balisong knives to be very beautiful and have been doing it since I was 13 years old," Freund said. "Their handles are used…
Evamelo (Eva) Oleita came to Michigan State University wanting to pursue a degree in Human Biology, but after re-evaluating her priorities and thinking about the communities she wanted to serve, she is now among the inaugural class of students majoring in African American and African Studies (AAAS) at MSU. Oleita, who is in her second year of her undergraduate education,…
A collaborative project focusing on “Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Africa: the History and Current Status of LGBTQ+ in Kenya,” led by College of Arts & Letters faculty Jonathan Choti and Danny Mendez, will bring two guest speakers from Kenya to Michigan State University this spring to share their knowledge, experiences, approaches, and ideas in implementing intersectionality and inclusion in curriculum design and pedagogical practices. The two…