Where Business Meets Art Fulbright award takes Tobie Stein to Taiwan to share her expertise on performance arts management.
I
n October 2014, Professor Tobie Stein, director of
the graduate program in performing arts management in the Brooklyn College Department of Theater, traveled to Taiwan on a Fulbright award to spend the month giving seven lectures at National Taiwan Normal University, Tainan National University of the Arts, and Aletheia University. The lectures, delivered in English, were based on her forthcoming book, Leadership in the Performing Arts. And the classes were attended by anywhere from 30 to 60 undergraduate and graduate students, from different educational backgrounds but all interested in arts management and marketing. The Fulbright was supported by Professor Kang Kuo Ho ’92 M.Mus., who invited Stein to lecture in Taiwan. Today, Ho runs the graduate institute for the arts at the National Taiwan Normal University.
“Because performing arts are central to the Taiwanese culture, the
students were very eager to learn, participate, and interact with me,” says Stein, who co-taught with a Taiwanese professor who helped give cultural context to her remarks.
While in Taiwan, Stein was invited to speak at the Cloud Gate
Dance Theatre of Taiwan by its executive director, Wenwen Yeh ’89 M.F.A., and there she also met with another alumna, Yuling Chang ’01 M.F.A., the theater’s public relations and development coordinator. Cloud Gate Dance Theatre is scheduled to open the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the fall. —Ernesto Mora
Martha Nadell Teaches Post-9/11 Fiction in Venice Martha Nadell’s recent Fulbright teaching and research fellowship has taken her to Venice, where she is teaching graduate students at Ca’Foscari University and conducting research about post-9/11 literature.
“I like to teach my projects before I write about them because it helps
me sort out my ideas and get new perspectives,” says Nadell, who has taught a course titled Post-9/11 Literature during the past three summers.
An associate professor in the Department of English who
specializes in African-American literature and investigates the role of her native Brooklyn in the American imagination, Nadell sought to more fully look into questions at the forefront of her research interests.
“How does American literature engage with events such as 9/11,
Katrina, and the events in Ferguson after the shooting of Michael Brown?” she asks. In Nadell’s view, those happenings are connected and raise issues regarding race and ethnicity as well as the role of the United States in the world.
Her students at Ca’Foscari are reading American novels from this
period, including works by Jonathan Lethem and Michael Cunningham, both of whom have written fiction related to 9/11. “Like other Americans, authors must wrestle with understanding and interpreting catastrophic events of that magnitude,” Nadell says. “And Venice, like New York, is a city rich in art and literary history.”
For Nadell, teaching post-9/11 American literature to a foreign
audience is a beneficial exercise because the students react to it
Brooklyn College is once again among the top producers of Fulbright winners, allowing our students to study abroad. The Fulbright Program is the U.S. government’s flagship international education exchange program.
differently than American readers, challenging her perceptions and offering fresh viewpoints on her research. —Ernesto Mora
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