Overseas Scholars Teach and Give Public Talks at Puget Sound

TACOMA, Wash. – Visiting scholars from China, Germany, Canada, and Malaysia are bringing a spectrum of global viewpoints to challenge and inspire the University of Puget Sound students this fall. Two of the foreign scholars are giving free public talks.

The four academics share first-hand accounts of their home countries and their expertise in areas ranging from business communication to archaeology to the Indonesian language to American culture and media. Their visits are part of Puget Sound’s ongoing focus on teaching students to be effective global citizens. The visitors include:

·   From China, the visitor is Liling “Lily” Lin, Puget Sound’s first exchange scholar from Fujian Normal University (FNU) in China, supported by the Trimble Foundation. Professor Pierre Ly, from Puget Sound’s international political economy program, visited FNU in fall 2015.

·   From Germany comes Sarah Makeschin, who is here as part of a near 30-year-old faculty exchange program with the University of Passau in Lower Bavaria.

·   Megan Daniels, a Canadian graduate of Stanford University, is this year’s Lora Bryning Redford Post-doctoral Fellow in Archaeology.

·   Farizah Ahmad, a secondary school teacher from Malaysia, is here teaching and auditing classes on a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant award.

 

“This is my first time visiting the United States,” said Lily Lin. “It is a great chance for me to understand this country, which is different from the textbook version, and I hope my visit will help to promote better communication between China and the United States.”

Lin teaches English in the College of Foreign Languages at Fujian Normal University in Fuzhou, a large modern city on China’s southeastern coast. Her research in business English and intercultural business communication benefits from her visits to Puget Sound classes on marketing communication, South Asian business, China’s political economy, and Chinese. During her visit, Lin taught students in a Chinese class about the sister cities, Tacoma and Fuzhou, and Fuzhou's history, intriguing them and demonstrating how to make a Chinese knot.

Lin’s visit to campus coincides with Tina Yu's stay, a visiting scholar from China’s Confucius Institute, who is in her second year of assistant teaching in Puget Sound’s Chinese language classes.

 

Sarah Makeschin, chair of American Culture and Media Studies at the University of Passau in Germany has met local scholars and participates in classes. She will be giving a free public talk titled “‘European Century?’—Barack Obama, Transatlantic Relations, and the Imagination of a European Self in the German Media” on Wednesday, Sept. 28, at 4 p.m. in Murray Board Room, Wheelock Student Center.

Her current research focuses on information and media literacy, including education in the digital age, citizenship, and innovative higher education. The faculty exchange program with Passau was founded by Klaus Hansen, professor emeritus of American Studies in Passau, and David Tinsley, professor emeritus of German Studies at Puget Sound.

 

Archaeology postdoctoral fellow Megan Daniels also has arranged a free public event: a half-day symposium organized to mark International Archaeology Day and Indigenous Peoples’ Day, which occur in the same month.

“Bigger Histories: Indigenous Archaeology and Decolonizing Perspectives in Education” on Thursday, Oct. 13, will explore how archaeology has engaged, and can better engage, with indigenous values and practices through projects in the community and teaching in the classroom. The event will run 1–4 p.m. in the Tahoma Room of Thomas Hall. Daniels’ research examines long-term social change in the Bronze and Iron Ages of the Mediterranean region through religion and its intersections with political ideologies and commercial exchanges.

 

Farizah Ahmad, an English teacher from Malaysia, is a teaching assistant in one of the newer classes at Puget Sound: learning Bahasa Indonesian, a form of Malay. The class prepares students for an international career and Puget Sound’s Southeast Asian field schools, supported by the Henry Luce Foundation’s Luce Initiative on Asian Studies and the Environment (LIASE). The next field school, focusing on culture and sustainability, will be in Indonesia in May 2017.

Ahmad, who earned a Master of Education degree from Macquarie University in Australia, is one of nearly 400 young educators from 50 countries awarded the Fulbright grant for teaching overseas. She also will assist with cultural programming on campus.

It is the generous support of the Trimble Foundation, Henry Luce Foundation, Lora Bryning Redford endowment, and the Fulbright Program, as well as the cooperation of the University of Passau and Fujian Normal University, that make possible these global interconnections and experiences that go far to enrich teaching and learning at Puget Sound.

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Press photos of the four visiting scholars are available upon request.

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