Portuguese Students and Instructors Receive Visibility Worldwide

Two FSU students pursuing minors in Portuguese have been awarded scholarships to attend the prestigious Middlebury College Portuguese School during Summer 2016.

Mackenzie Teek is a rising Junior majoring in Sociology with minors in Portuguese and Public Administration. Mackenzie was the recipient of a Rotary Scholarship to spend an academic year in João Pessoa, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil, when she was only fourteen years old. Determined to become a fluent Portuguese speaker and to one day pursue a Master's Degree in Sociology, her research interests target issues of race, identity, and demography as these subjects pertain to the African and Indigenous diaspora in Brazil.

Giovanna Da Silva is a rising senior majoring in History and International Affairs with a minor in Portuguese. She plans to write an Honor's thesis on the US involvement in the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964 - 1985) during the upcoming academic year and hopes to pursue the Master's in Brazilian history post-graduation.

The 7-week intensive-immersion course in Portuguese, held on the Middlebury, Vermont campus, allows students to develop reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills in the target language 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Experienced faculty from around the country instruct in the summer program. Over the past several years, the Portuguese faculty has included two Ph.D. candidates in Spanish Linguistics from FSU: Jamile Forcelini Alan Parma. Alan Parma will be returning to Middlebury again this summer and Jamile Forcelini will be in Brazil carrying out dissertation research.

In addition, Carolina Echeverri, a recent graduate of FSU who pursued a degree in International Affairs and Latin American and Caribbean studies, and a

minor in Portuguese, has received a Fulbright award to teach English in Brazil. Carolina started studying Portuguese during her junior year on campus and with the assistance of a Benjamin A. Gilman Scholarship she spent a semester in Lisbon, Portugal as an intern in the Public Affairs office at the U.S. Embassy. Following that experience she spent a summer as a sports camp counselor in the U.S. Naval base in Yokosuka, Japan, and then studied abroad in Oldenburg, Germany. Still awaiting the particulars of her assignment, Carolina will be departing for Brazil in February 2017.

Kudos to our Portuguese students and their instructors who have encouraged these students to continue their study of the language and culture of the Portuguese-speaking world!