Maria Claudia André of the Hope College Spanish faculty has received a fellowship from the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE) to attend a week-long seminar in Mexico this summer.
André, who is a professor of Spanish and chairperson of the department of modern and classical languages at Hope, is the only 2010 recipient of a full $1,500 Ping Faculty Development Fellowship from CIEE for this year's International Faculty Development Seminars (IFDS) program.
The award will help underwrite her attendance at the seminar "Contemporary Creative Mexico," which will be held in the city of Guanajuato, Mexico, and will include multiple presentations and site visits related to Mexican literature and arts of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The program is designed to provide those attending with a strong sense of who's who, what new tendencies and themes are emerging, and how Mexican creative work dialogues with the nation's larger intellectual, political and social issues.
A member of the Hope faculty since 1994, André specializes in Hispanic American literature and Latin American studies in her teaching at the college. She has presented papers at national and international conferences and published articles in several literary journals, and is the author or editor of several books, including "Latin American Women Writers: An Encyclopedia," published in 2008. She holds her undergraduate degree from the Universidad del Salvador in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and her doctorate from the State University of New York at Albany.
CIEE is the leading U.S. non-governmental international education organization. Established in 1947 when it began offering student programs, CIEE added the IFDS program in 1990 with the goal of encouraging U.S. colleges and universities to internationalize curricula. Since 1990, CIEE has run more than 220 seminars worldwide in more than 40 countries, with enrollment including 3,550 faculty and administrators from 800 U.S. and foreign institutions of higher education. This year, IFDS will include 20 topics in 23 countries.