Wisconsin in the World

Peer Advisors Share Experiences, Insights

Studying in another country transforms lives, changes perspectives on the world, and contributes to the development of well-rounded global citizens. Those who understand this best are those who have lived through the More »

Payne Finds New Perspectives in Hong Kong Internship

Matt Payne, a UW–Madison senior from Rochester, Minnesota, who is majoring in Chinese and economics, spent the summer of 2011 writing editorials and op-ed articles for The Wall Street Journal Asia editorial More »

Kellner Discovers Indonesia Through Luce Fellowship

UW–Madison alum Paul Kellner (M.S. ‘07, Life Sciences Communication) recently completed a year working in Jakarta, Indonesia, as a 2010-11 Luce Scholar. The Henry Luce Foundation created the year-long Luce Scholars Program More »

Steven Olikara meets with Matt Beyer (left)

Olikara Finding Badger Connections In China

Steven Olikara, a political science and environmental studies major from Brookfield, Wisconsin, has been traveling in China this summer, exploring Wisconsin connections and interests. Olikara, UW–Madison’s incoming senior class president, wants to More »

Internship in Malaysia is About ‘More than Just Working’

Dan Lawler, a senior majoring in mechanical engineering, is currently working for Plexus Corp., based in Neenah, Wisconsin, as an international mechanical engineering intern in Penang, Malaysia. Lawler, who plans to graduate More »

Fulbright spotlight: Skloot sharing Holocaust theatre expertise in UK

June 13, 2013 admin

Robert Skloot describes himself as “a believer that the arts must play a role in the discussions of issues of serious social importance.”

Skloot, who has taught and directed plays at the University of Wisconsin–Madison since 1968, is among the few scholars who specialize in theatre and the Holocaust.

Robert Skloot

“The arts create different ways of knowing and feeling, often emotion-filled and directed at the heart as well as the head,” he says. “The worlds created by theatre artists, and by choreographers, poets and filmmakers, report back to audiences the historical experience of victims, perpetrators and bystanders through the emotions as well as rationally. When they do that, their impact of their work is likely to be greater and more lasting.”

Skloot retired in 2008, but the professor emeritus of Theatre and Drama and Jewish Studies continues to share his unique expertise, near and far.

This summer, supported by the Fulbright Specialist Program, Skloot will be contributing to a pair of academic conferences in the United Kingdom – Trauma & Memory: the Holocaust in Contemporary Culture (University of Portsmouth, July 11-13) and The Future of Holocaust Studies (University of Southampton, July 29-31). Participants will include established and up-and-coming scholars from around the world, as well as teachers and students.

Internship spotlight: Hovel gets hands-on experience in public health

June 05, 2013 admin

After graduating from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in December 2012 with bachelor’s degrees in biology and Spanish, plus a certificate in global health, Elizabeth Hovel embarked on a new learning adventure earlier this year—an internship in northern Spain, with the health department of Asturias, one of 17 Spanish autonomous communities.

The Asturias Consejería de Sanidad—comparable to a state health department—has been collaborating with UW–Madison’s Population Health Institute to implement the Health Observatory of Asturias—the first application outside of the United States of the County Health Rankings methodology pioneered by the PHI.

Dr. Rafael Cofiño, chief of population health in Asturias, has been a visiting scholar at UW–Madison, working with Dr. Patrick Remington, Dr. Javier Nieto, and Marion Ceraso.

Dr. Cofiño and Lori DiPrete Brown, associate director for education and engagement of UW–Madison’s Global Health Institute, assisted Hovel in planning her internship. To help with funding, Hovel received an internship grant from the Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies (LACIS) Program.

During her internship, Hovel:

Participated in a community health rotation with family medicine residents, which consisted of learning about public health programs and spending time with various associations working to improve social determinants of health;
Took courses in community health, qualitative investigation, and web 2.0 strategies;
Spent a week at a clinic with a primary care pediatrician;
Helped to review and organize the Health Observatory’s online health asset database to make it more searchable for citizens;
Translated some materials from Spanish to English to increase the Health Observatory’s potential for outreach.

UW alum visits campus, promotes linking professional skills, language

May 30, 2013 admin

Jason Shin, who combined his studies of engineering and Japanese as a student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, returned to campus this spring to offer encouragement to current UW–Madison students.

Today, Shin runs his own company, Takamoto Electric, based in Tokyo, Japan, which designs and produces LED lamp modules for many Japanese car models. The 45-year-old CEO wants to help students advance on their own professional paths.

Through the International Internship Program (IIP), he set up two internships – one focused on engineering and the other on office management and finance – with Takamoto Electric. In addition to professional and technical skills, Shin required his interns to have at least four semesters of Japanese language instruction.

During his recent visit, Shin sat down for a interview.

Interview with Jason Shin from UW-Madison International Studies on Vimeo.

Shin also sat in for a Japanese language class, taught by Professor Junko Mori.

Read more about Shin here

Fulbright spotlight: Hilmes bound for Nottingham for US-UK broadcast research

May 28, 2013 admin

Like millions of Americans, Michele Hilmes watches Downton Abbey. But please don’t bother her when the show is on, because she is working.

Hilmes, a professor of Media and Cultural Studies and chair of the Department of Communications Arts at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, is doing research for her next book, a follow-up to Network Nations: A Transnational History of British and American Broadcasting (Routledge, 2011).

“My book, which came out in 2011, took this British-U.S. history up to the 1970s, so my next book takes it from there and goes forward,” she says. “There was a huge change that happened around then which was satellite broadcasting, something we take for granted now.”

Satellite broadcasting created a shift in how television was produced and sent all over the world. In her next book, she intends to analyze that shift and its effect on the relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom.

This time, Hilmes will be taking her investigation overseas, to Nottingham, England, on a Fulbright Scholar Fellowship from the Fulbright Commission. She seized upon this opportunity when a contact from the University of Nottingham reached out to see if she was interested in the position. By chance, the seven-month program coincided with her already-planned sabbatical.

Fulbright spotlight: Studying Buddhism through architecture

May 22, 2013 admin

Just three weeks after Anthony Irwin arrived in Bangkok, Thailand, the Thai Army staged a coup to overthrow the elected government under Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Irwin recalls seeing soldiers and tanks beginning to crowd the streets.

He had just graduated from State University of New York (SUNY) at New Paltz and decided to take time off. He had come to Bangkok, where his brother had recently moved, with the intention of living there for a year.

Soon after landing in Bangkok, Irwin traveled to Chiang Rai, a town in northern Thailand.

“I was just planning on going on vacation; I had bought a round-trip plane ticket,” he says. “But I really didn’t like Bangkok, and not just because of the coup, that wasn’t the only reason why. I ended up staying in Chiang Rai and finding a job there.”

In Chiang Rai, Irwin began to recognize Buddhism as more than a religion—but as a way of life.

After a year of living in Thailand, Irwin returned to the United States to pursue his master’s degree in southeast Asian studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In August, he will return to Chiang Rai on a Fulbright scholarship to work on his PhD dissertation.

New study tour to introduce UW–Madison students to Japan

May 16, 2013 admin

Many of them are studying Japanese language. Others had simply taken a Japan-related course to fulfill a requirement. Most have never been to Japan, and several have never traveled outside of the United States.

Together, 23 undergraduates from the University of Wisconsin–Madison — accompanied by a professor and a graduate student — are venturing across the Pacific Ocean for a newly created 10-day Japanese study tour, called the “Kakehashi Project – The Bridge for Tomorrow.”

The program was launched by the Japan Foundation with support from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan “to encourage greater understanding between the youth of Japan and the United States and to foster long-term and ongoing interest in one another by providing firsthand experiences with the culture of the other.”

Charo D’Etcheverry, associate professor of Japanese literature, pursued this serendipitous opportunity as soon as she caught wind of it. As a result, UW–Madison is among eight U.S. universities initially chosen to participate in this fully funded program.

“Travel to Japan is so expensive,” D’Etcheverry says. “I thought it would be wonderful to be able to take a group of UW students there, especially those who weren’t planning on study abroad to begin with.”

Living in this dorm offers world of experiences, connections

May 14, 2013 admin

Signs and posters in several languages converge in a first-floor collage representing a multitude of places around the globe. Brightly colored flags adorn the walls at every turn.

Conversations in such languages as Arabic, Spanish and Japanese spill out from the bedrooms. From the kitchen downstairs drift smells of pizza accented by snippets of Italian.

Outside, students toss around wooden blocks in an intense game of Kubb, a Nordic sport.

What might sound like scenes from an Olympic village are everyday occurrences from the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s International Learning Community (ILC), in Adams Hall, by the shore of Lake Mendota.

UW-Madison’s International Learning Community from UW-Madison International Studies on Vimeo.

Rosenthal talks about combating antisemitism

May 08, 2013 admin

If you aren’t depressed by the time you leave here tonight, I haven’t done my job, Hannah Rosenthal tells her audience.

Rosenthal, who led the U.S. State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism from November 2009 to October 2012, came to the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus on Monday, May 6, to talk about her efforts to document and fight what she describes as the oldest hatred on Earth – against the Jewish people.

Despite providing the impetus for founding the United Nations more than half a century ago, that “longest hatred” still has an insidious grip in countries around the world, she says.

Rosenthal finds expressions of antisemitism that range from denials of the Holocaust – the systematic mass murder of approximately 6 million Jews by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany – to proponents of the idea that the Holocaust was good, but unfinished. She also comes across those who believe that accounts of the Holocaust are simply exaggerated – due, in part, to the lingering stereotypical view that Jews control the media.

The talk by Rosenthal, who has long-standing connections with the Madison community and UW–Madison, was sponsored by the Wisconsin Alumni Association, the Madison Committee on Foreign Relations and the UW–Madison Division of International Studies.

Fulbright spotlight: Discovering European cities through printmaking

April 30, 2013 admin

Traveling around Novi Sad, Serbia, Galen Gibson-Cornell noticed a certain poster plastered on walls. The poster features a man—stoic with gray hair and large glasses covering his face. The man, Vojislav Šešelj, is a member of Serbia’s Radical Party and currently on trial for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Around the city, Gibson-Cornell noted the politician’s image 36 times—each distorted in some way, by elements of nature and by human hand.

“Any time you put a face up, no matter who it is, people will draw devil horns or people will mess with it. In some ways, it is natural, but in every one of these (posters) there is some sort of tear around his face. There is a lot of emotion in that,” says Gibson-Cornell, a third-year MFA student specializing in printmaking and lithography at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

He uses his printmaking to show the history represented by the stories and art he finds tagged to the walls of cities.

Undergraduate Symposium highlights international work

April 23, 2013 admin

Among the research projects showcased at this year’s University of Wisconsin–Madison Undergraduate Symposium, several focused on international topics.

Seniors Jordan Wackett (left) and Beau Trapp (right) were among the presenters. The pair met while on a medical service trip to Nicaragua, and went on to develop a project — with a Wisconsin Idea Fellowship grant through the Morgridge Center for Public Service — that focused on teaching CPR to hospitals in San Salvador, El Salvador.

“When we got back from (Nicaragua) we wanted to do something more sustainable than medical tourism. So we started working with some of the physicians we met down there just to try and brainstorm what we could do,” Wackett says.

In January, they went to three hospitals in San Salvador and set up training sessions to teach the staff about CPR.

“The biggest thing for me is that it is sort of ubiquitous with anything health-related or working as a babysitter when you are a young teenager, you get CPR training. When we were down there, we saw hospitals that didn’t even have defibrillators to help people if their heart stopped beating. So we saw (CPR training) as something that is really powerful to us here, let’s take the knowledge that we have and translocate that to Central America,” Wackett explains.

– Text and photo by Jeff Cartwright

INT'L@UW