STUDENT NEWS

Torrey Goad (MA student, Languages & Cultures of Asia) served as the U.S. Embassy Public Affairs Representative in Georgia during an internship in the summer of 2006.  His duties include giving lectures on U.S. government and related topics to Georgian audiences and serving as an embassy representative to Georgian NGOs across the country.  Torrey had previously served in the Peace Corps in Georgia from 2002 to 2004

 

Chris Haskett (PhD Candidate, Languages & Cultures of Asia) completed his doctoral coursework and preliminary examinations in the Spring 2006.  Chris will now begin work on a dissertation dealing with the role of confession and expiation in early Buddhism.  During the Fall 2006, Chris will also teach First Semester Sanskrit at UW-Madison.

Jeremy Holiday (MA student, Languages & Cultures of Asia) received a HEX (Humanities Exposed) award for his Civil Rights Movie Project. Jeremy works with fifth-grade students at Thoreau Elementary School to write and film a bi-lingual English-Spanish documentary on the Civil Rights Movement. In the film, students share insights they have gained about the history of civil rights in the U.S. and about racial discrimination in their lives. [text taken from www.humanities.wisc.edu/programs/HEXprograms.html

STUDENT AWARDS

Achala Vajira Rockwell was nominated for The Chancellor's List, the highest academic honor to which graduate students can aspire. Achala also translated several Telugu short stories to Sinhala and currently in the press.

Undergraduate student Forrest Leslie received a Pritzker Pucker scholarship award to study abroad in Varanasi, India in the 2006-07 Academic Year.  The Pritzker Pucker Awards were made possible by the Vince Club Family Foundation, led by Gigi Pritzker Pucker, an alumna of the UW-Madison’s Nepal study-abroad program, specifically for year-long study in one of the UW’s programs.

CONFERENCES, MEETINGS, PAPERS

Chris Haskett (PhD Candidate, Languages & Cultures of Asia) presented a paper on "The Reception of Nagarjuna in Tibet: Sakya Chogden and the Great Madhyamaka," at the 216th Meeting of the American Oriental Society in Seattle in March 2006.  Chris also completed a revision and new edition of Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand, by Pabongka Rinpoche, original translation by Michael Richards; and editing of notes and Sanskrit and Tibetan portions of the new translation and critical edition of the Divyavadana, by Andy Rotman, both forthcoming by Wisdom Publications, Somerville, MA.