BRASA BIS (BRAZIL INITIATION SCHOLARSHIP)

Description

The Brazil Initiation Scholarship (BIS) is a key component of BRASA’s agenda to expand Brazilian Studies in the United States. BRASA invites applications from graduate and undergraduate students for a one-time $1,500 travel scholarship to do exploratory research or language study in Brazil. This scholarship targets aspiring Brazilianists with relatively little or no experience in Brazil. It seeks to contribute to the student’s initial trip (for a period from six weeks to three months), to heighten the student’s interest in Brazil, and deepen his/her commitment to Brazilian studies in the United States. Students are encouraged to combine this scholarship with other grants or awards. Recipients will be recognized on the BRASA web page in January 2011. Funding will be disbursed prior to travel. BRASA will award four fellowships in this competition.

Eligibility

Proposals for the BRASA BIS will be reviewed according to the following criteria:

Highest priority will be given to applicants who are outstanding college seniors, recent college graduates applying to graduate programs in Brazilian studies or in Latin American studies with the intent of focusing on Brazil, or new graduate students already focusing on Brazil;

Students from all disciplines in the humanities and social sciences are eligible. In exceptional cases, applications from the natural sciences will be given consideration (for example, someone in environmental sciences who is writing a dissertation on the Amazon or pollution in São Paulo and who plans to continue research on Brazil);

Preference will be given to those applicants who have little or no in-country experience in Brazil;

A student requesting funding to undertake an exploratory research trip should present evidence at the time of the application that he/she has achieved at least an intermediate level of competence in the Portuguese language sufficient to carry out the proposed research;

An applicant seeking support to undertake language studies should present evidence that after returning to the US he/she intends to continue studying Portuguese and plans to engage in research on Brazil;

Successful applicants may combine BIS with other grants, scholarships, or awards, as long as he/she specifies clearly how the funds are going to be spent (for example, the BRASA scholarship might be used to cover travel costs, while a grant from another source could be used for living expenses, etc.).

Application Process

A complete application (partial applications will not be considered) will include the following documents:

The application cover page (download form);
(1) A two-page prospectus (double spaced, 12-point font);
(2) A two-page résumé or CV;
(3) A budget specifying how the $1500 will be spent;
(4) In the case of undergraduates or recent college graduates,
a letter of intent to study Brazil in graduate school;
(5) If applying for exploratory research, include a two-page
bibliography on the subject of study, and present evidence that
the applicant has achieved at least an intermediate level of
competence in Portuguese (competence can be demonstrated by a
transcript or a letter from a university instructor of
Portuguese);
(6) If applying for Portuguese language study, the name of the
school should be specified;
(7) Proof of membership in BRASA
(8) Two letters of recommendation from professors; and
(9) Copies of undergraduate and graduate transcripts.

(The letters of recommendation and transcripts may be mailed directly to BRASA at the address below. All other materials should be submitted together either as PDF or MSWord files in a single email to brasa@vanderbilt.edu.)

Evaluation Criteria and Selection Process

In order to be considered for the scholarship, the two-page prospectus should:
(1) Clearly and coherently outline the project’s engagement with Brazil;
(2) Demonstrate as precisely as possible the feasibility of the proposed project (exploratory research or language study) and how it will contribute to the student’s academic development;
(3) Briefly discuss the role the work undertaken in Brazil will play in shaping the applicant’s future course of academic study (for instance, it could be the seed project for a larger grant
application, provide the basis of a paper prepared for presentation at a BRASA conference, or serve as the foundation for future research on Brazil).

Report

Upon completion of the research experience in Brazil, recipients are required to file a two-page, double-spaced report with the BRASA Executive Director summarizing their activities and identifying relevant academic outcomes. In addition, a statement accounting for the expenditure of funds must be sent to the BRASA Executive Director. If the scholarship was used to study Portuguese, recipients should attach a certificate from the school where language studies were conducted. Following completion of studies in Brazil, BRASA strongly encourages recipients to participate in a subsequent BRASA congress in order to report on their activities.

Deadline for application: October 15, 2010

Awards will be announced by January 31, 2010

To submit a proposal and for all other correspondence regarding this award, contact:

BRASA
VU Station B 350031
2301 Vanderbilt Place
Vanderbilt University
Nashville, Tennessee 37235-0031
U.S.A.
615-343-1764 (tel)
615-343-6002 (fax)
email: brasa@vanderbilt.edu

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GRADUATE STUDENT WORKSHOP

SIPGO encourages all SIP graduate students to attend the Teaching Portfolio Graduate Workshop, organized with our academic and professional needs in mind.

“Dear Graduate Students:


Teaching portfolios have become an integral part of job applications for faculty positions in US institutions including research institutions. These portfolios include among other things material that reflect on your teaching practices as related to student learning and development in the classroom.

To learn more about the components of the teaching portfolio, the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese has organized an interactive workshop under the direction of Professor Ann Abbott. The workshop will take place on Friday, October 29 in 319 Gregory Hall from 3:00 pm-4:30 pm.

All graduate students are encourage to attend.

Best regards,

Mariselle”

Geographies of Risk Conference

UIUC Geographies of Risk

September 23-24, 2010


Conference's website

Organized by:


Ericka Beckman

L. Elena Delgado

Javier Irigoyen-García

Mariselle Meléndez

Emanuel Rota

Eleonora Stoppino


Sponsonsored by:


Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese

School of Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain's Ministry of Culture and United States Universities

Center for Advanced Studies

Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Program in Social Dimensions of Environmental Policy, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology

Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory

The Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities

University Library

The Center for Translation Studies

Department of Geography

Department of Comparative and World Literature

School of Art and Design - Art History

Department of French

The Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security

Department of Sociology

Spanish Italian and Portuguese Graduate Organization

"The Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese is pleased to announce the upcoming “Geographies of Risk,” an interdisciplinary conference dedicated to examining the manifold ways in which the Humanities engage with the notion of risk. The conference will invite reflection on the systems of knowledge that have emerged to assess, distribute, and manage risk in different geographical, cultural and historical contexts.

Migrants settling in foreign countries and border patrols, pirates and insurance companies, biologists and ethicists, scientists and environmentalists, merchants and poets, terrorists and governments share a common activity: the assessment and management of risk. Perceptions of risk and risk-taking permeate everyday life, from the public sphere to the most intimate realms of interpersonal contact. Discussions of risk, however, have generally been limited to scientific disciplines, such as probability, game theory and actuarial science. The experts who decide when a risk is worth taking are very seldom the products of departments of literature and culture. The Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese at the University of Illinois proposes a conference dedicated to examining the manifold ways in which the humanities engage with the notion of risk. “Geographies of Risk” will invite reflection on the systems of knowledge that emerged to assess, distribute, and manage risk in different places and historical moments.

The operation of defining generic hazards as risks is fundamentally a struggle over representation, a field of inquiry that the humanities are in a unique position to study. As Ulrich Beck has written, since a given risk may not actually ever occur, risks have a high component of “unreality.” Therefore, risks are constructions and social definitions based on relations of definitions, the result of competing acts of representation. Thus, there are owners of the “means of definition,” mostly scientists and jurists, and citizens who lack “the means of definition” and who depend on the first group to determine when something is or is not a risk. Working at the intersections between power and representation, humanistic inquiry has a stake in asking what constitutes or does not constitute a risk and a risk worth taking.

The focus on geography in this context is related to an understanding of the term as a practical inquiry deeply rooted in the notion of space. Indeed, space is already a representation of risk insofar as it represents (or at least speaks to) border and border crossings, containment and mobility, the limits and conceptualizations of the body, and the location of collective and individual memory. For scholars in the field of colonial Latin American studies, for example, space has represented a useful tool to examine the diverse representations that distinguished the risky encounter between European and native indigenous societies. The global implications of the so-called Discovery of the Americas represented one of the many examples in which geography (as previously described) came to play a critical role in the perception of risk and risk taking. Transoceanic and transnational encounters contributed to the traveling nature of risk and its discursive components, including mapping, picturing, and representation, to name a few.

There is another element that justifies the link between “risk” and “geographies.” Until the present, genealogies of risk have generally taken the societies of the North Atlantic as their starting point, tracing how risk was “tamed” through the invention of discourses such as political economy and science, and practices such as bureaucratic rationalization, statistical analysis and insurance. As the yardstick for modernity, the Protestant, capitalist North has been imagined as a territory in which rational and calculating subjects were able to gauge and dominate risk. As Roberto Dainotto and others have shown, the eighteenth century witnessed the invention of Southern Europe as the irrational, disorderly and often dangerous counterpart to the countries of the North. Elements of this discourse have also operated in the Americas, where Spanish and Portuguese imperial legacies have served as explanation for the region’s lack of properly rationalized societies. Today, investment climates, tourist advisories, and immigration restrictions depend upon the racialization of risk in the global South.

Geographies of Risk” will bring together scholars from across the disciplines for a two day state of the art conference to be held on September 23-24, 2010. The Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese will organize complementary activities that will take place in the semester before and during the conference, including a set of colloquia, graduate seminars centered on the notion of “risk,” a faculty and graduate student reading group, and a library exhibit."

WELCOME!

SIPGO wants to welcome Professor Montrul as our new Head of the Department. We look forward to working with you and wish you the best in this new endeavor. We also want to thank Professor Diane Musumeci for all her good work and for the time dedicated to us, and congratulate you in your new position as Interim Associate Dean of Humanities and Interdisciplinary Programs at LAS.

We truly appreciate as well Professor Mariselle Meléndez’s acceptance to serve as Associate Head this year, and Professor José Ignacio Hualde’s as Director of Graduate Studies next year (2011-12).

Welcome Jonathan McDonald, Assistant Professor of Spanish and Linguistics; Nola Senna, Director of the Portuguese Language Program; and Claudia Quesito, Instructor of Italian.


And last, but not less important, welcome to our new graduate students and TAs: Cornelio Chaidez, Gaston Philipps, Sarah West, Giovanni Fiore, and Alessia Zulato.

To those returning graduate students… congratulations, you are still successfully on the run to finish your degree, and that in itself constitutes an accomplishment.


To all of you, remember that SIPGO is always at your service. We wish you all great success in this new academic year.

SIPGO welcomes all of you!

SIPGO's FIRST MEETING FALL 2010

TO: ALL SIP grad students.

Dear SIP graduate students,

Welcome back! Hope you are all having a great beginning of the semester.

We need to elect a new president, treasurer, secretary, student representative (mainly to be present at all departmental meetings) and other students for different faculty committees such as: Study Abroad Committee, Lectures & Arrangements Committee, Capricious Grading Committee, Policy & Development, Website and newsletter committee, and Scheduling committees (in charge of TA assignments).

SIPGO’s first meeting

When: Thursday September 2, 2010

6:00pm-7:30pm PM 4080 FLB

We know that as students you all want OUR SIP department to be its at its best. Make your voice be heard, and the faculty wants to hear you, so...be part of it; become involved. We need you! All of you.

Hope to see you there!

Let's all show how much we care.