Foreign Language and Area Fellowships

The Center has a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) grant from the US Department of Education, International Programs. Annually, six to eight fellowships are awarded to UW students studying/researching Canadian topics and acquiring language skills. The Center is extremely proud to be the first Title VI program in the nation to award three FLAS fellowships in least-commonly taught languages – Inuktitut, Dane-zaa and Musqueam Salish.

2009-2010 Application Form
Summer/Fall 2008 Fellow Reports
Former FLAS Fellows

2009-10 FLAS Fellows

	Barbara Bennett Marine Affairs, French (Summer 2009)
	Sylvia DeTar Music, French (Summer 2009)
	Rachel Feller Law, French (Academic Year 2009-2010)
	Joyce LeCompte-Mastenbrook Anthropology, Salish (Academic Year 2009-10)
	Jennifer Leider Evans School of Public Affairs, French (Summer and Academic Year 2009-10)
	Erin Maloney Ethnomusicology, French (Summer and Academic Year 2009-10)
	Julia Miller Linguistics, Dane-zaa (Academic Year 2009-10)

Barbara Bennett

Marine Affairs, French (Summer 2009)

My area of interest is the human dimension of endangered species recovery in heavily used coastal areas, with special attention to stakeholder engagement and public education. My current research is on policy strategies to reduce vessel interactions with southern resident killer whales in the Salish Sea, a trans-boundary body of water that includes Canadian and US waters. I will be interviewing representatives of commercial whale watching and private boating communities based out of Vancouver and Victoria in Canada, and Friday Harbor, Anacortes, Port Townsend, and Bellingham in the US.

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Sylvia DeTar

Music, French (Summer 2009)

My research explores relationships between bagpipe music in Brittany, Québec, and British Columbia. I play highland bagpipes in the Simon Fraser University (SFU) Pipe Band located in British Columbia, which plays music from Scotland, England, Ireland, Wales, Australia, New Zealand, the US, and parts of Canada, representing a fair amount of Celtic expression. The SFU Pipe Band's current and five-time World Pipe Band Championship status has influenced the styles and repertoires of pipe bands around the world. My research examines the separation of repertoires between Brittany and Québec despite sharing French as a language.

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Rachel Feller

Law, French (Academic Year 2009-2010)

I am focusing on the relationship between labor rights and international trade. As part of my FLAS studies, I will research the North American Free Trade Agreement and its accompanying labor side agreement, the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation, in order to examine its effectiveness in improving compliance with and respect for core international labor standards, especially the comparative labor rights of immigrant workers in Canada and the US. By improving my French, this fellowship will allow me to pursue a legal career advocating for workers’ rights both at the national and international levels.

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Joyce LeCompte-Mastenbrook
Anthropology, Salish (Academic Year 2009-10)

My research focuses on the connections between environmental perception, land management practices, and landscape change over time. This past year, with the support of a FLAS Fellowship and the generosity of the Musqueam Indian Band, I spent the academic year studying introductory h?n’q’?min’?m’ language, culture, and history on the Musqueam Reserve in Vancouver, British Columbia. Studying with the Musqueam people was a great privilege that enabled me to begin to understand the indigenous geography of the Fraser River watershed and the Salish Sea, and to see beyond the political boundaries imposed by American and Canadian colonial governments.

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Jennifer Leider
Evans School of Public Affairs, French (Summer and Academic Year 2009-10)

My research focuses on comparative policy studies, and I have looked at citizen political engagement through public deliberation. More specifically, I have begun to comparatively look at the influences of language and identity upon civic engagement within immigrant populations in Québec and France. I am also interested in relationships between citizen trust in government, the role of civil society, and citizen political engagement.

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Erin Maloney
Ethnomusicology, French (Summer and Academic Year 2009-10)

Erin behind her home in upstate New York where she is playing an instrument that she built and named the "Manderin.”

My research is focused primarily on the role of music in national, ethnic, and individual identity in eastern Canada. I have spent the past year studying the concept of Canadian-Celtic identity and nationalism with musical style, and will be expanding my work this coming year to examine social organization and community aspects of music and dance in Québec. My research will include an investigation into how the fiddle and dance tunes of Québec have moved into New England community dance forms, and in turn have spread across North America.

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Julia Colleen Miller
Linguistics, Dane-zaa (Academic Year 2009-10)

Thanks to the Canadian Studies Center FLAS fellowship, I have been continuing my study of the First Nation language, Dane-zaa, spoken in northern British Columbia and Alberta, Canada. This year’s focus is on collecting and translating personal histories and conversations in Dane-zaa. With the help of Dane-zaa speakers, I am learning about the grammatical nuances of natural speech, as well as increasing my vocabulary. When the transcriptions are completed, these stories will form a corpus of data, allowing me to investigate linguistic tone in different speech styles of Dane-zaa, as well as to create language materials, such as subtitled DVD movies to leave for community language projects.

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