Michael Avanzato
I am a Legal Studies and History major at Umass Amherst, with a minor in Middle Eastern Studies. I studied Arabic, and political science at the American University go Beirut in Lebanon during the Spring of 2015. Afterwords, during that summer, I taught English in the Rashidieh Palestinian refugee camp in South Lebanon, just outside of the Lebanese city of Sur. I hope to return to Lebanon, and (pending my acceptance/rejection on April 7th) hope to return to Lebanon to pursue a Masters Degree in Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, and, of course, continue my study of Arabic.
Joshua Castillo
I graduated from UMass Amherst in 2015, majoring in history. I studied Swahili through the Five College World Language Center. I have continued to study it on my own and will be studying it again in September during my PhD candidacy in African History with a focus on the DRC at Boston University.
Melanie Fisher
Melanie Fisher is a Latin American Studies and Portuguese major at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst (Class of 2016). During her junior year, she studied abroad in São Paulo, Brazil at the Federal University of ABC (UFABC). After spending years teaching herself about Brazilian music, she hosted her own radio show called Café Brazil, on the UMass community radio station, WMUA. In her free time, Melanie enjoys playing music, cooking, and studying telenovelas from different countries.
Isabella Galdone
Isabella Galdone grew up in Vermont, and attends Smith College where she is pursuing a double major in French Studies and Art History, specializing in 18th and 19th century British and French Art, as well as medieval European material culture. She spent her junior year studying with Smith Junior Year Abroad in Paris, and spent the following summer in France on the Anita Volz Wien Global Scholars Fund program. She enjoys acting, hiking and oil painting and is planning to pursue a career in the curatorial field after graduation.
Jacob Greenwald
Jacob is a student at Amherst College in the class of 2016. He majored in Religion, with a focus in Islamic theology. He has taken four years of Arabic, in addition to courses in Levantine Arabic through the Five College Center of World Languages. Jacob studied abroad his junior year, both at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the AMIDEAST program in Amman, Jordan. To his joy, he realized that the Five College Center courses in conversational Arabic had prepared him for buying his own groceries, asking for directions, and making conversation with cab drivers, all integral parts of a study abroad experience. While he is still uncertain of his long-term plans, Jacob hopes that the introduction to Arabic that he received in the past four years was merely the beginning of a life-long engagement with both the Arabic language, and the Arab world.
Brendon Mackeen
My name is Brendon MacKeen, and I am a senior at UMass, currently soaking up my last semester of college. I am a Spanish major, but have minors in Portuguese, Linguistics, Anthropology, and Comparative Literature. I’m fortunate enough to say that I have traveled to Peru (2 weeks), Mexico (2 months), and most recently to Spain, where I walked 850 kilometers on the Camino de Santiago. I have studied numerous languages in my time at UMass – Italian, Catalán, Portuguese, Quechua, Swedish, and Chatino – and each one of these classes has only intensified my passion for learning the sounds of the world. I definitely would not be here today if it weren’t for the tremendous opportunities afforded to me through my relationship with language.
Emma Martin
Emma Martin is a Smith senior and will be graduating with a major in Education and Child Study and a minor in Chemistry. She has always had a passion for languages and studied Spanish and Italian before beginning French during her first year at Smith. During her junior year, Emma studied in Geneva for a semester where she researched “zones of priority education” in the French school system. Next year she will be attending Mount Holyoke to get her Masters of Arts in Teaching for grades 1-6.
Rachel Murgo
Rachel is a sophomore at Mount Holyoke College majoring in Russian Language and Literature. She will be studying abroad in Saint Petersburg, Russia next year after spending the summer at the Middlebury Russian Summer Language School. She enjoys drinking kvas and being humbled by Russian grammar.
Sydney Ramirez
Sydney Ramirez is a senior at Smith College majoring in German Studies and minoring in Middle East Studies. Originally from New Hampshire, she began studying German in high school. Since coming to Smith she has studied German, Spanish and Turkish. She spent the summer before her junior year at Bogazici University in Istanbul and her junior year abroad with Smith in Hamburg. During her junior year she was awarded the Blumberg Traveling Fellowship to study multicultural theater and migration museums in Germany. In September 2016 she’ll be returning to Hamburg on a research Fulbright titled “How the Transforming History Workshop Movement Shapes Recent Public Memory Discourse.”
Cassidy Rappaport
Cassidy is a senior at Hampshire College, studying Anthropology, Human Rights, and Refugee Studies. She has traveled to Burma eight times and has been studying the language since her first time in the country at 16 years old. She studied Burmese under a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship at the Southeast Asian Summer Studies Institute (SEASSI) and has continued to study through the Five College World Language Center. Cassidy is currently working on her senior thesis, an ethnography of the Burmese refugee teenagers in Fort Wayne, Indiana. After graduation, she plans to move to Thailand to continue her Burmese studies and work for an NGO assisting refugee and migrant populations.
Sara Redeghieri
I’m an Anthropology and Romance Languages (Spanish and Italian) double major from Mount Holyoke College. I speak Italian, English and Spanish. I am from Italy and studied abroad in the U.S. for a year during high school, then studied abroad in Mexico in the spring of 2015
Katy Reinhardt
I am a senior Accounting and Italian Studies major at UMass Amherst. From February- June 2015 I studied at the University of Bologna’s Forlì campus, in the northeast region of Emilia- Romagna, Italy. During my semester abroad I visited the UK, France, and Portugal, and many cities within Italy (Venice, Siena, and Sorrento are some favorites). After graduating in spring 2016, I will begin work in PricewaterhouseCooper’s Boston Risk Assurance practice.
Tenzin Thargay
Tenzin Dawa Thargay is a rising Junior at UMass Amherst double majoring in Political Science and Chinese. During the summer of 2015, Tenzin received the prestigious Kathryn David Fellowship for Peace fully funding his studies at the Middlebury Chinese Language School.
Miriam Tinberg
I graduated from UMass Amherst in 2014 with a BA in Middle Eastern Studies and an Arabic minor. Upon graduating, I completed a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship grant in Rabat, Morocco, where I taught Information Communication Technology to Moroccan university students. Before Morocco, in 2012 I had studied for six months in Amman, Jordan.