Posted on Friday, April 16, 2010
Dr. Bethany Hicok, Westminster College associate professor of English, was selected from a national pool to participate in a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) summer seminar July 5-30 in São Paulo, Brazil.
The seminar will bring together 15 faculty from across the United States to study Brazilian urban fiction with Dr. David William Foster, distinguished professor at Arizona State University.
Hicok will also study the Portuguese language and work on a research project that considers the relationship between American poet Elizabeth Bishop, who lived in Brazil for many years, and Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. According to Hicok, the research will eventually lead to a book on Bishop and Brazil.
"It's pretty exciting," said Hicok, who lived in Venezuela for more than a year in the mid-1980s. "I can't quite believe I'm actually going."
Hicok, who joined the Westminster faculty in 2001, earned an undergraduate degree from Russell Sage College and two masters and Ph.D. from the University of Rochester. She is the author of Degrees of Freedom: American Women Poets and the Women's College, 1905-1955. She has published articles on Bishop, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens, contributed chapters to two books, and delivered papers on American poetry at professional conferences.
The NEH is a federal agency that supports summer seminars and institutes at colleges and universities to enable university faculty to study with experts in humanities disciplines. The seminar in Brazil is one of 30 offered across a range of disciplines that includes Spanish literature, music, archaeology of the Americas, and the works of Shakespeare and Chaucer.
Contact Hicok at (724) 946-6349 or e-mail hicokbf@westminster.edu for additional information.
