By Zaynah Almasri ’27, Leila Bensrhir ’28 and Julia Fedoruk ’26 Wesleyan hosted its 50th annual Navaratri Festival from October 8th through 11th 2026. The oldest continually running festival of its kind in the United States, it celebrates new beginnings through music, dance and conversation. This year, the festival featured guest artists T. M. Krishna…
Foreign Language Teaching Assistants (FLTAs) visit Wesleyan for one year to study as visiting graduate students and enhance students’ language learning instruction. They work under the supervision of Wesleyan’s language learning departments and bring valuable cultural exchange to Wesleyan’s language community! This year, we welcomed 9 new FLTAs and 2 returning FLTAs. Hailing from France,…
by Oleksandra Volakova Every year, Wesleyan welcomes new FLTAs (Foreign Language Teaching Assistants) from all over the world – foreign students interested in teaching others their native language and immersing themselves into foreign culture. 11 people, coming from different backgrounds, help Wesleyan students to understand the culture and language better, becoming an irreplaceable support to…
by Tasmiah Akter Wesleyan faculty’s collective expertise spans the globe, and the Office for Intercultural Learning at the Fries Center for Global Studies is pleased to celebrate their international and often multilingual work with great pride here in the Wes and the World newsletter. Last week’s theme was the Arts and this week it’s Social…
by Oleksandra Volakova The very first event of International Education Week – a week celebrating cultures and languages all around the globe – was organized by representatives from various cultures worldwide. Wesleyan’s Foreign Language Teaching Assistants (FLTAs) collaborated with Fries Center for Global Studies to organize a FLTA Carnival – a festival featuring specific games,…
This past year (2023-24), the Wesleyan community was enriched by the presence of our first-ever Fulbright Scholar-In-Residence (S-I-R), Dr. Pawan Sharma from Kurukshetra University in India. The S-I-R program aims to promote campus internationalization by bringing scholar-teachers to campus for either a semester or a whole academic year; as Fulbright explains on its website, “S-I-Rs…
by Oleksandra Volakova Traveling to ten different countries in four continents in less than two hours sounds impossible, but not for those who visited Russell Library on Saturday, April 27. At the “Adventures Around the World” event, children got a chance to get acquainted with different cultures, listen to other languages, and taste various international…
by Tasmiah Akter For two months this summer, Maryam Badr ‘25 traveled to the Shiv Nadar University in Greater Noida, India to do computational neuroscience research on hippocampal place cells with Dr. Sachin Deshmukh in the Department of Life Sciences. Maryam chose to take on this endeavor due to her passion for science, medicine, and…
South Asia encompasses a large region of the world and includes more than a quarter of the world’s population. Wesleyan’s new major, Global South Asian Studies, explores the cultures of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, the Maldives, and the Tibetan cultural world in a worldwide context. GSAS offers insights into these cultures through…
Priyanka Chakraborty, our Fulbright Foreign language Teaching Assistant for Hindi-Urdu 2022-2023 participated in the Spring Semester Concert of ‘World of Dance’. She performed Swarajathi, an 18th century piece and a popular form of Carnatic music. This 21st century rendition was choreographed by Professor Hari Krishnan of the Wesleyan Dance Department and performed with live music by students of the Music department. Coming…
