It was May of 2017, and she had just graduated from Georgetown University with a degree in Spanish and justice and peace studies. Niebanck planned to spend the summer relaxing, traveling and enjoying her time with friends before moving to Boston for a job in technology sales. The post-college life she envisioned for herself was just beginning. 

But 10 days after she walked across Healy Lawn as part of the , Niebanck had a stroke during a scheduled brain surgery. She woke up paralyzed on the left side of her body and couldn’t speak or swallow. Suddenly, Niebanck’s full-time job became rehabilitation.

“I had to learn how to walk, how to sit up in a wheelchair, how to speak, how to swallow,” she said. “I had to do everything all over again.”

Niebanck watched her friends move to different cities, launch their careers and live what seemed like glamorous lives in her mind. The sense of being left behind grew. But conversations with her mentors, including a Georgetown professor, shifted her perspective and gave her a new mantra: Obstacles are opportunities.

In the years since Niebanck’s stroke, she has published two books — Fashion Fwd: How Today’s Culture Shapes Tomorrow’s Fashion and Fast Fwd: The Fully Recovered Mindset — and has become a public speaker and advocate for stroke survivors. In 2023, the World Health Organization invited Niebanck to speak about her rehab journey at its in Geneva, Switzerland. 

“We all experience obstacles in our lives,” she said. “It’s about how we respond to it and decide how to turn that into something positive for ourselves and for our communities.”

Finding a Place to Thrive

Niebanck grew up in Chatham, New Jersey, a suburb of New York City, as the oldest of three siblings. 

She knew from a young age that she wanted to study languages, and came to Georgetown because of its and location in Washington, DC. 

“It just seemed like a place where I could thrive,” Niebanck said. 

At Georgetown, she joined an investment club at Georgetown Collegiate Investors, where she rose to a leadership position. She volunteered as an English language tutor for low-income immigrant families in DC through the and participated in the and . Niebanck also worked as a front desk clerk for the .

In her sophomore year, she became an Entrepreneurship Fellow through the McDonough School of Business. 

“One of the things that I loved the most about Georgetown was that everyone was so driven and passionate about something,” Niebanck said. “I found it really refreshing that everyone was motivated and hard working and had diverse areas of interest, and we could all collaborate together.”

As a senior, she took the Launching the Venture course with , an adjunct professor in the McDonough School of Business who would become one of her closest and most influential mentors.

Niebanck looked forward to the path she thought lay ahead after graduation. She didn’t even stress or think about her upcoming brain surgery. 

Since childhood, Niebanck had dealt with migraines, culminating in a series of migraines that lasted more than 20 days during high school. Doctors her with a in the right occipital lobe of her brain. She elected to have brain surgery after college to remove the risk of a potential rupture.

“In my mind, it was just like, oh, this is just a thing that’s gonna have to happen, and then, you know, I’ll rest for a month, and I’ll be fine,” she said.

‘What Really Matters’

Before surgery, Niebanck had a pre-operative procedure. It caused a blood clot in her brain that burst, leading to a brain hemorrhage. She was rushed into emergency surgery. 

After her stroke, Niebanck spent 15 days in the intensive care unit, five weeks as an inpatient and two and half years as an outpatient.

Niebanck stayed in touch with Koester after graduation, and during one of their conversations while Niebanck was struggling with the constant physical and cognitive and speech therapy, Koester encouraged her to view the stroke as an opportunity to explore her interests and dive into her passions. 

“He was like, if you could do anything and work any job, what would you do?” Niebanck said.

For Koester, Niebanck embodies the idea of cura personalis, or care of the whole person, through her willingness and ability to inspire others with her story.

“Maddi is one of those people who never sought recognition, but her actions day in and day out brought people hope, joy and lessons for their own journeys,” Koester said. “I think what’s amazing about her is she never once let any limitations she faced as a stroke survivor slow her down. In fact, quite the opposite. She was the one who wouldn’t let others slow her down.”

Niebanck describes Fr. Matthew Carnes, S.J., as another influential figure in her recovery journey. Carnes, the vice president for mission and ministry who taught in Georgetown’s Department of Government and School of Foreign Service from 2009 to 2024, met Niebanck through her work for CLAS. Carnes said that Niebanck “points us to what really matters.”

“She kept her eyes on what was possible, and this has allowed her to make such amazing progress, and eventually to succeed in her career, and as an author, and in so many other ways,” he said. “But it’s not the success or the stroke that defines her. It’s the spirit that beats in her heart and has nourished her to this point, and the way she shares that spirit generously with others.”

Building a Supportive Community

When Koester challenged Niebanck to think of her dream job, she thought back to a self-published fashion magazine — Passion for Fashion — she designed in eighth grade. 

On the cover is her younger sister, Bridget, striking a model pose. Colorful headlines coat the page: “What’s in Style?”, “A Day in the Life of Model Bridget Niebanck”, “Fashion Advice: Just Be Yourself!”

Niebanck’s first job after her stroke was as a reinsurance underwriter for a Spanish company. But while she was rehabbing, Niebanck reached out to her network and cold emailed people for connections in the fashion industry. This time would eventually lead to her first book, Fashion Fwd, published in 2018, which explored fashion trends and how the fashion landscape was evolving.

“I interviewed everyone from small business owners to fashion executives to the [former] Washington Post fashion editor Robin Givhan,” Niebanck said.

She also worked for three years as the client relations coordinator for Hermès, a French luxury goods company, and is now a marketing manager for Cionic, a biotechnology startup that makes clothing to aid mobility. 

Today, Niebanck lives independently and works full-time in New York City, but still struggles with her vision. She lost half of her peripheral vision on the left side of both of her eyes. She does not drive.

“When I’m walking down the busy streets of New York City, I have to constantly scan and turn my head to make sure I’m not missing anything,” Niebanck said. “I get bumped into all the time.”

For a while, she said, the challenges of her recovery left her dejected and questioning, “What did I do to deserve this?”

But while writing her second book, Fast Fwd, published in 2020, Niebanck started to build a community of stroke survivors. She decided to share her journey with the public in hopes of meeting others with similar stories.

Since then, she has chronicling her experiences and co-hosted a live video every Sunday with another stroke survivor on . Niebanck has also given talks about her journey to college students. 

More recently started hosting , where stroke survivors and caregivers get together in person to “connect with others who share similar experiences and build a supportive community.” Niebanck has hosted four so far, with the first summit taking place in New York City in April 2024 and the most recent in Birmingham, Alabama, this October.

“Real life events are super impactful for people to be able to connect with the community and meet other people who are like them,” she said.

Embracing New Opportunities

There is a specific moment that Niebanck remembers as an inpatient.

She was walking up and down the hall in the hospital with her cane, trailed by her mother pushing her wheelchair. She passed the rooms of other patients and thought to herself, “I am so lucky and fortunate that I have this opportunity to work hard.”

Niebanck credits her family members, friends, New Jersey network, Georgetown community and the people she met in rehab for keeping her motivated. By working on her recovery, she wanted to show herself and her supporters that there is life after a stroke, Niebanck said.

“I don’t let my disability stop me or hold me back from achieving the things that I want to in my life,” she said. “Obviously I had a stroke, but I view it as a testament to my resilience and my ability to adapt and overcome and take a different step — literally and figuratively.”

Niebanck thinks back to when she was on the Hilltop and wants students to remain open minded to opportunities they might not have considered in school. If she hadn’t, Niebanck said, she would never have written one book, let alone two, or become a public speaker and disability advocate. The unexpected things that happen in life aren’t necessarily an ending, she said. They can also be a new beginning. 

“Your path can change,” Niebanck said. “It will change, actually, and that’s okay.”

That’s why, every week, she took time to work with Lutheran Social Services, a refugee resettlement agency in Northern Virginia. There, both in-person and online, she co-taught classes to an all-female club of Afghan refugees, covering topics from financial literacy to feminine health and English as a second language (ESL). 

“It felt natural to join initiatives dedicated to migration and ESL because I wasn’t a stranger,” said Ahmed. “As a daughter of immigrants, education holds a central role in my personal and professional aspirations. Since childhood, I’ve been raised to know that education is not simply a title one accomplishes through an institution, but, rather, an experience that requires academic, emotional, spiritual and physical toiling.”

In the spring, Ahmed was recognized alongside seven other graduating seniors in the ˝Ű×ÓĘÓĆľ & Sciences with the Lena Landegger Community Service Award, celebrating and honoring their commitments and contributions to service. The award, which has recognized Hoyas for exceptional service for more than 25 years, is given in honor of Lena Landegger (H’87), the mother of George F. (F’58) and Carl (C’53).

Listening to the Call to Serve

Recipients of the award, which is given each year to twenty students across the university in memory of its eponym, embody the call, articulated by Rev. Pedro Arrupe, S.J., for alumni of Jesuit universities to be “people for others,” engaged in the struggle for justice to protect the needs of the most vulnerable. 

For Ahmed, that call was deeply personal, and reflected the personal growth that is essential to a Georgetown education. 

“I didn’t seek out these opportunities because they were service-oriented projects, but rather because they resonated with my values, interests and own past,” said Ahmed. “Having these shared experiences, such as translating for my parents during medical appointments, college applications and day-to-day life, allowed me to better connect with the communities I worked alongside.”

In addition to her work with the Lutheran Social Services, Ahmed became involved with the , or DCSP, a program of the Center for Social Justice Research, Teaching & Service. There, she also taught ESL lessons to recently-arrived migrant children from the United States’ southern border. 

“My responsibilities included family outreach, leading information sessions on the Washington, DC, migration context and organizing local advocacy initiatives like distributing school supplies” said Ahmed. “Through this role, I honed my leadership and communication skills by advocating for migrant justice.” 

The through line connecting both programs was an attitude of service in collaboration and fellowship with others. 

“It can be tricky to traverse how to be in solidarity with a community, without disempowering them,” said Ahmed. “What I’ve learned is that service can not be done with the perspective that you are ‘helping’ or ‘giving a voice’ to the communities that you are working with, rather, service must be done from a place of solidarity, and by using your resources to amplify and uplift their narratives.” 

Combining the Personal and the Academic

Like Ahmed, Caroline Vail (C’24) found a second home in the DC Schools Project during her time on the Hilltop. 

“I worked with the DC Schools Project during all 4 of my years at Georgetown,” said Vail. “I was a tutor for 5 semesters, and in the spring of my junior year, I became a coordinator on our school-based team.” 

As a coordinator, Vail supported a small team of tutors as they worked with immigrant students in DC Public Schools on their English language skills. This role involved coordinating with the group’s on-site contacts at the school, communicating with parents and building community among the tutoring team. 

“The biggest lessons I learned from this work were from the relationships that I built with the tutees and their parents, which taught me the importance of working in collaboration with a community rather than simply providing a service or charity to or for a community,” said Vail. 

Vail’s interest in service-based education extended into her academic life. While double-majoring in both linguistics and Portuguese, Vail tacked on a minor in education, inquiry and justice. Her senior honors thesis in linguistics explored the language learning needs of the recently-arrived migrant population that she worked with through DCSP and sought to create a task-based curriculum for tutoring centered on those needs. 

For Vail, her passion for justice is inextricably tied to her faith. On the Hilltop, Vail was deeply involved in campus ministry, serving as a student leader with Chi Alpha, an inter-denominational Christian community. 

“Grounding my commitment to enter into the struggle of the migrant community through solidarity is a firm belief in fundamental human dignity, which encourages me to see each community member as an image-bearer of the Creator,” said Vail. “I see a faith that does justice as one way that I can honor that dignity.”

Today, Vail lives out her ethos of service working as a Student & Family Engagement Coordinator with Center for Supportive Schools, a nonprofit organization contracted by New York City Public Schools to provide support to under-resourced schools. Working at 3 high schools in the Bronx, Vail focuses on projects to increase attendance, improve school culture and climate and promote the wellbeing of the community as a whole.

“I think my faith, and specifically my commitment to honoring fundamental human dignity, was the through line between my academics, my work with DCSP and my leadership in Chi Alpha,” said Vail. “A lot of the information that I learned in the classroom about how we learn languages or about educational equity was directly applicable to my work with DCSP, and vice versa.” 

“I think that the reason that a lot of these things were intertwined was because my motivation was always to honor people and serve the community out of my belief that everyone is made in the image of God.”

Cover illustration by Bratislav Milenković.

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“The Faculty of Language and Linguistics is a national and preeminent leader in language education,” said Rosario Ceballo, dean of the ˝Ű×ÓĘÓĆľ & Sciences. “As we look at the world today, it’s important to reach out to others, to listen, to learn and to dialogue across our differences. Speaking and learning languages can help us to be people for others.”

In her remarks, Ceballo spoke to the unique power of interdisciplinary, humanistic learning to bridge cultural and linguistic barriers. 

“This learning might come in linguistics, where our faculty and students research and study the forms and contexts of language,” said Ceballo. “It might come in languages no longer spoken, like Ancient Greek and Latin, whose legacies surround us everywhere we turn or it might arise in the panoply of modern languages that our Faculty of Languages and Linguistics research and teach.” 

Distinguished Service Award

As part of the ceremony, each year a member of the faculty who has “made extraordinary contributions to the programs and mission of the FLL through his or her research, teaching and service to the community” is presented with the FLL Distinguished Service Award. 

This year, , a professor in the and faculty directory of graduate liberal studies in the , received the award. , the chair of the , presented McNelis with the honor. 

“Professor McNelis challenges students to confront the fundamental human questions raised by ancient texts, even as he develops students’ ability to identify the elements of diction, meter, and style that together make up a poem’s literary texture,” said Lee. “His trademark combination of sharp wit, modesty, and wisdom make him an ideal teacher and invaluable colleague.”

McNelis served as chair of the classics department for six years. He is one of the world’s foremost Latinists and his translations of difficult texts challenge contemporary notions of gender and sexuality in the ancient world. 

“Perhaps the most important lesson to be drawn from your studies is that there is not a single way of speaking, of conceiving of the world, of trying to communicate ideas to others, of capturing the excitement, beauty or even the disappointment of a given moment in life,” said McNelis to the assembled FLL graduates. 

The Regent’s Address

Each year, the FLL Awards Ceremony features The Regent’s Address, which is delivered by a senior in the FLL with an exceptional GPA who is chosen by the faculty. This year’s remarks were delivered by Chloe Olivia Morris (C’23). 

“The Faculty of Languages and Linguistics has opened my eyes to something paradoxical: we’re not just students of ‘languages’ and ‘linguistics.’ We are students of history, literature, art, political science and anthropology,” said Olivia Morris, a Spanish major. “The FLL has taught us to become global citizens of an ever-changing world with the goal of intercultural communication, understanding, and bridge-building.”

For Morris, studying a language is about far more than just proper syntax and pronunciation. 

“The Department of Spanish and Portuguese has taught me that languages are more than just phonetics,” said Morris. “Languages are vehicles that simultaneously unbuild and rebuild our worlds, and they change us just as much as we change them.”

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Incoming Initiative 

From Nashua, NH, Telerski became involved in the LGBTQ Resource Center soon after arriving on campus in the fall of his first year. After learning about the center, Telerski applied and was accepted to work as a program assistant where he planned events, developed community outreach and interacted with students that visited. 

“One of the things that I was really proud of were the coffee hours with different campus partners that we held each Friday,” says Telerski. “We would bring in members from the Office of Global Education to talk about studying abroad as a member of the LGBTQ community or we would host a partnered event with the Women’s Center. It really brought the community together in a shared space, which was very special to me.” 

Telerski says that he made the decision to be fully out once he came to Georgetown and that the LGBTQ Resource Center helped welcome him as he embraced his identity. 

“The very first weekend I was here was when I had my interview for the center and it was nerve wracking walking in there for the first time being fully out,” Telerski explains. “Coming out requires a lot of courage, so if a student doesn’t have access to that safe space it can be terrifying. This was a particular challenge we faced at the center after moving to a virtual environment.” 

Creating an Inclusive Center

Four months after starting in her role as assistant director of the LGBTQ Resource Center, Johnson had to pivot the center’s focus to accommodate and advocate for students online. Though each area on campus was faced with reformatting its programming, the LGBTQ Resource Center was one of the few units that were tasked with navigating the well-being of students as they returned home.

“Unfortunately, some of our students have home environments that are less than welcoming of their LGBTQ identity, which meant that they had to go back into the closet to some degree,” says Johnson. “Additionally, some students had started to come out or were beginning to do the work to understand their sexual orientation or gender identity and that process was cut off as we moved to a virtual environment.” 

At the start of the pandemic a few students needed housing assistance to avoid unsafe living situations, but as the pandemic stretched on, increasingly large numbers of LGBTQ students were dealing with hostile homes. Johnson worked with a team of Georgetown staff to situate students in at-risk home situations with safe housing options. 

As the campus plans to reopen in the fall, Johnson says that her biggest priority is to amplify the center as a resource to students.

“Since this is the first time that many first-year students and sophomores will be stepping foot on campus, I want to make sure that they are aware that we exist and are a resource for them and I want to make sure that students know who I am and that I am a resource as well,” says Johnson. “I also want to make sure that I engage with students and ask what they want and need from the center and develop our programming accordingly.”

A queer, Black, woman, Johnson plans to structure all of the center’s programming through an intersectional lens that will welcome LGBTQ students, their allies and those who want to become more involved with the community. 

“The joke I often tell is that I wish I could wake up in the morning and say ‘I’m just going to be a lesbian today, not a woman and not going to be Black,’ but I can’t do that because I hold all of those marginalized identities within me that has caused me to have my own unique experience,” Johnson says. “When our students come into our office they are not only LGBTQ, they have races and genders and they have other marginalized identities that are not LGBTQ identities. I want to make sure that our programs will speak to everybody in all parts of their identity.”

In order to achieve this goal, Johnson will invite speakers from diverse backgrounds and identities such as Black and brown folks, those who come from lower-class backgrounds, non-English speakers and immigrants. 

She also plans to continue to run the Queer Careers program that was started on Instagram during the pandemic. The center interviewed LGBTQ individuals from a range of careers such as artistry, HR and engineering to speak about their work and experiences.  

The LGBTQ Resource Center is planning to continue to host OUTober in fall semester as well as Lav Grad, but notes that she would like to add in another signature spring program other than the LGBTQ graduation. 

Johnson partners with the Women’s Center, Georgetown Scholars Program (GSP), Center for Multicultural Equity and Access (CMEA), and Office of Student Equity and Inclusion (OSEI) on campus, but hopes to develop further collaborations with other programs such as the Women’s and Gender Studies Program. She is currently working with the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS) to implement training for incoming faculty and staff about basic care for LGBTQ students. 

About to begin his junior year, Telerski is still involved with the center. He recently sat on a panel for the Summer Hilltop Immersion Program (SHIP) students to discuss the work being done and is helping to organize an event that will discuss the history of the LGBTQ community on campus. 

A government major with a Spanish minor, Telerski is also involved with Pride, Pep Band, New Student Orientation, and the Georgetown Admissions Ambassador Program (GAAP). This fall he will be a Title IX Ambassador, working with the Title IX office to educate the campus community on resources for those impacted by sexual misconduct.

Telerski says that his time with the center enabled him to come into his full identity in college. 

“For me, being involved in the center has meant having a safe space to be openly gay,” says Telerski. “Being able to put on events, interact with other students and be a leader as a first-semester student was a great way to become involved in the Georgetown community right away. Advocating and building a community on campus is important and I want to continue to work to build that space so the students who have not been able to have that support for a full year feel welcomed, loved and accepted when they return.”

The Evolution of Mentoring

When she first came to Georgetown, Keegan enrolled in the Foundations of Biology course taught by Manus Patten. After visiting his office hours, Keegan found that she and Patten shared similar interests in theoretical evolutionary biology.  

She stayed in touch with the professor throughout her first and second years on the Hilltop, eventually joining at the end of her sophomore year to study selfish genetic elements.

In their research paper that will be published this summer, Keegan and Patten discuss a hormone called hCG, the molecule that signifies pregnancy in pregnancy tests, as a selfish genetic element. 

Keegan says that though this research is theoretical, she enjoys that she and Patten are helping to develop our understanding of evolutionary processes and that “it pays tribute to all of the central advancements that Darwin and other evolutionary biologists made to describe these processes behind the progression of life.” 

“It also challenges previously accepted truths about evolution and gene development,” says Keegan. “Our work is expanding upon that knowledge to better understand that there’s more going on to these biological processes than we might have originally thought and that by improving our understanding of human evolution we can better understand health and medicine.”

In addition to working on her research publication with Patten, Keegan also serves as a teaching assistant for his Foundations of Biology class. She says that working with the professor during her time at Georgetown has shaped her experience as a student and researcher. 

“Dr. Patten has been so important to my time at Georgetown,” she explains. “Over four years, he has helped me identify and develop my interests and connected me with opportunities to explore a future in academia. I also appreciate that he has been invested in me as a person and has been incredibly understanding about stressors in my life outside of class and research.”

Patten, who teaches several biology and programming courses at the university, says Keegan’s talent and work ethic were apparent from when the senior first stepped on campus.

“Distinguishing oneself at Georgetown, particularly in the biology department is not easy, but I can say with confidence that I have not known anyone in that time as smart or as dedicated as Grace,” he says. “She has been my student, my advisee, my teaching assistant, and my research mentee across the last four years, and I feel fortunate that my job has brought me together with someone so impressive.” 

A Pair of Publications

Alongside her work with Patten, Keegan also serves as a teaching assistant to Anne Rosenwald, a professor in the biology department. Rosenwald has been a mentor to Keegan throughout her research on campus, including her second thesis with oncology professor Priscilla Furth on breast cancer which will be finished later this year and contribute to future publications by the Furth Lab on which Keegan will be listed as a co-author. 

Keegan began working in a breast cancer lab in her hometown of Chicago, later joining Furth’s lab in the Lombardi Cancer Center where she began studying genes related to breast cancer development in aging mice as a model for breast cancer in postmenopausal women. Specifically, they are driving breast cancer by upregulating two genes in order to identify other genes that might be indicative of cancer or could be used for gene therapy. 

Furth says that Keegan is “a natural researcher.”

“Grace tackles analytical challenges with curiosity, adaptability, logic and straightforward thinking that reduces complicated questions to more easily handled conceptual breakthroughs,” she explains. “Her work on breast cancer risk in my laboratory helps bridge the translational divide between genetically engineered mouse models and human disease.”

A Passion Past Research

Though she did not intend to focus on women’s health when she started at Georgetown, Keegan says that she realized that this was not only the focus of her research in her labs, but in her extracurricular activities as well. 

During her junior year, Keegan worked with Dr. Christopher King, chair of the Department of Health Systems Administration and a leader in health care disparities research in Washington, DC. This resulted in her co-authoring the article “Health Disparities in the Black Community: An Imperative for Racial Equity in DC,” which offers recommendations to healthcare organizations, medical services, and lawmakers in D.C. to help reduce these disparities.

She also played an important role in the founding of the Georgetown University Students for Health and Medical Equity (GUSHME) her freshman year and was elected president her sophomore year. As the current president, Keegan oversees the club’s mission to educate and advocate for the expansion of health equity while engaging in service projects that address the socioeconomic determinants of health in the DC community. 

The group has brought fresh produce to food deserts, provided legal counsel to patients at a free medical clinic, outfitted a mobile cancer screening van and delivered hygiene kits to high school students in Wards 7 and 8 of DC.  

Keegan has also worked as an exam room coordinator, medical interpreter and diabetes educator in the Arlington Free clinic since her first year, which she says give her “the opportunity to play an active role in helping vulnerable populations obtain the basic need of health care while motivating me to continue this work in my future.”

Rosenwald says that she knows Keegan will continue to go far in her work toward making health care more equitable.

“Grace is extremely talented, and succeeds in whatever she turns her hand to,” she says. “How she has time for all she does is incredible, yet she’s always calm and smiling. She has a deep desire and a specific plan to effect change for healthcare access and equity. It’s a big problem, but Grace has the drive and passion to carry out her plan.”

Advancing Justice 

Recently, as a result of changes to language requirements at Georgetown, Sanz, who directs the Spanish Intensive and Spanish for SFS programs,  took this opportunity to completely revamp the curriculum of the third-year advanced Spanish courses. 

From her work, four new and innovative courses emerged, with goals, content, tasks and assessment rubrics newly tailored to match the needs of the students and to reflect this moment in history. 

“The new curriculum explores historical, sociocultural and geopolitical topics from a transatlantic perspective, thus connecting the Americas and Spain through shared social justice challenges that are both local and global, such as gender and race discrimination,” says Sanz. “The transatlantic approach corrects an injustice built into the previous advanced language sequence, which gave the same curricular time to Spain as to the whole of Spanish-speaking America, a hand-me-down of Europe’s colonialist past that failed to prepare students for their future careers.”

Sanz also explains that the new courses continually promote awareness and concrete action against structures of political, social and economic power that marginalize historically oppressed communities. 

“For example, one weeks-long unit explores how different minoritized communities, such as Afro-Latinos or the LGTBQ+ community, suffer discrimination, both legal and social,” she elaborates. “During this unit, students critically analyze texts to learn how laws enacted in Latin America and Spain, at best, have made societies only slightly fairer or, at worst, have further marginalized these communities. Students then look for ways to somehow change the status quo.”

Looking Forward

In the future, the professor plans to continue to work to advance racial and social justice at the university through her teaching, service and research.

In her graduate course, Sanz has included speakers and a whole unit on critical language pedagogy that helps her doctoral students and future academics prepare to continually promote awareness and concrete action through their teaching against structures of political, social and economic power that marginalize historically oppressed communities.

She also plans to work with her colleagues to prioritize minorities in the graduate admissions process and to ensure that her research engages with other academics and practitioners to understand first and then to improve heritage language learners of Spanish’s experience while studying abroad.

“Through keynotes and publications, I drive the field’s attention to the pedagogical needs of minorities,” she says. “LatinX students differ greatly in terms of language proficiency, as some speak it, understand it, or simply view it as part of their family background. Their learning goals differ in important ways. They are also incredibly diverse in terms of social class, ethnic and racial backgrounds, national origins and connections with them and it is important to acknowledge this.” 

Sanz was assisted in her work by doctoral students Tim McCormick (GSAS’20) and Jorge Mendez Seijas (GSAS’19) with support from the School of Foreign Service. Mendez Seijas is now at Harvard redesigning their language curriculum, applying what he learned during his time at Georgetown.  

She said that she was particularly thrilled to receive this award after learning that the other awardee was her former student GermĂĄn ZĂĄrate-SĂĄndez (GSAS’15). Now an associate professor and language program director at Western Michigan University, Zarate is working to improve the experience of Black and African American students enrolled in Spanish courses.  

“It’s the gift that keeps on giving: we shape professionals that share their expertise beyond the university,” says Sanz.

A History of Ethnography

Rappaport was inspired to write this book after she conducted research with an indigenous organization in Colombia in the mid-1990s to early 2000s, which ultimately was published as Intercultural Utopias. She also worked to train activists while there.

Much of her work was influenced by Fals Borda who is considered one of the originators of participatory methodologies in the social sciences. Referred to as “participatory action research,” Fals Borda’s methods of ethnographic research require the involvement of the group being studied to carry out the research being conducted about them. 

Though the team Rappaport worked alongside made a great deal of progress, the researcher was interested in writing about the dynamics of collaborative research more in-depth after the conclusion of her work there, and so turned to Fals Borda’s personal archive as a resource. 

Originally, Rappaport had only planned to use his work in the beginning of her book, but due to the prominence of Fals Borda’s work, it became the focus of the finished publication. 

Rappaport explains that this is important because the purpose of this type of research is so that it can be used by the organizations representing groups being studied, so the involvement of locals is crucial. 

“It’s a very essential method used throughout the developing world, as well as among minority communities in the global North today,” says Rappaport. “Going back to Fals’ original framework and seeing how it worked out in the 1970s is important to activist researchers today, especially in Colombia, where the 2016 peace process has been derailed by armed actors on the right.”

More about Rappaport

In addition to her latest work, Rappaport has published four single-authored books on Latin America. She has also published in a variety of scholarly journals, including American Ethnologist, Collaborative Anthropologies, Colonial Latin American Review, Hispanic American Historical Review, History Workshop Journal, Journal of Anthropological Research, Journal of Latin American Anthropology, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Man, Revista Colombiana de AntropologĂ­a, Social Analysis, and Varia HistĂłria, as well as in numerous edited volumes.

Joanne Rappaport is an editor of the journal, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies and of the Narrating Native Histories series of Duke University Press. She served as president of the Latin American Studies Association during 2016-2017.

A Unique Time

Corcoran, who is studying Political Economy and Spanish, chose to travel to Spain to learn more about both of her majors in the hopes of eventually writing a thesis on the independence movement. She went to Spain through a program offered by Brown that began in January 2020.

While she was eager to visit her friends, who were also studying abroad in places like Berlin, Copenhagen and Lyon, Corcoran was most eager to get hands-on experience with Spanish politics.

“This is one of the places where democracy is actively being expressed and achieved,” Corcoran says. “In the United States, there is a general feeling of apathy towards politics, but in Barcelona, politics is personal, cultural and thought about every day and I was eager to immerse myself.”

Corcoran says that she is from an active political family, but knows that that is not as common in the United States. While in Spain, she witnessed small children wearing flags to represent different causes, and whole families would spend time together attending marches.

An Unexpected Journey

In the time before the announcement was made to return home, Corcoran explored Barcelona but also took a few short trips to Paris and Amsterdam. While in the Netherlands, the United States received its first positive COVID-19 case. One of Corcoran’s friends who was studying abroad in Bologna, Italy had already been sent home and told her and others to prepare for their own evacuations. At this point, Spain was still a Level One threat according to the CDC and students would not be evacuated until they reached Level Three.

“In Spain, many individuals including authority figures were not taking it as seriously, though personal space is almost non-existent and the population is very elderly,” says Corcoran. “The first time it felt like a real issue was when I was coming out of the metro and saw someone being transported into an ambulance by EMTs wearing hazmat suits two blocks from my apartment.”

Many schools remained open or simply suspended in-person meetings for two weeks. But on March 11, Corcoran and a group of her friends stayed awake to watch President Trump address the nation. Within the first two minutes, he announced that flights would be suspended from Europe in the next 48 hours. Corcoran now had less than two days to pack up her life from the past 10 weeks and return home.

“Though we found out later that this did not apply to Americans who were already abroad, we were told to return home by the university,” Corcoran says. “We received this order late Wednesday night and by Friday morning, I was on a flight headed back to U.S.”

Transitioning to Virtual Classrooms

Amidst this rapid-fire turnaround, Corcoran, like many other students, also had to determine how she would continue taking her classes from that semester, or if they would continue at all.

“As soon as I got an email from Georgetown about the , I met with my dean online and was able to begin two classes through the newly created semester for returning study abroad students, and continue to take two classes I was already enrolled in through my program in Barcelona,” Corcoran says. “I feel very lucky because friends from other universities that were part of my program could lose their credit for the semester since their schools were not offering courses to their students whose study abroad trips abruptly ended.”

Corcoran says that through GUGC she is able to take a major credit in addition to a common core credit, which was more than she was originally scheduled to earn.

However, the transition certainly has not been seamless. Corcoran said that on top of the stress of moving and the added exertion of jetlag, she found out that she had been in contact with four individuals who had COVID-19.

“I felt terrible because I found out after returning home to my parents,” says Corcoran. “But we took quarantine very seriously. I recently took the antibody test and came up negative, which means I never had it, but in these circumstances, it is so much better to be safe than sorry.”

Corcoran says that life is certainly different – she has yet to see her friends in person since returning to the United States. However, she says that her biggest takeaway from this experience has been the power of positivity.

“I think your mindset can really change how you view something, and you have to be able to frame things in a more positive way,” says Corcoran.” Though there is a space to be sad about what happened, there is a lot that I have to be grateful for, and focusing on the positives has been helpful.”

She also expressed how thankful she is to be a part of a college community that cares about each student individually.

“Georgetown has done a good job of listening to students and being so flexible with the different experiences and voices of each person,” says Corcoran. “My Georgetown professors have been so flexible and supportive. Everyone seems to have taken on a lot of empathy and I can tell that the faculty and staff are working hard to ensure that students are a having good experience despite us being apart.”

Click the links below to view parts two and three of our Returning Home from Abroad series

Returning from Abroad Part Two: Featuring Danielle Guida’s Journey Home from Italy

These awards commend faculty who were nominated by their students and faculty peers for outstanding service to our community and to the Academy as exemplary scholar-teachers, embodying Georgetown’s mission as a student-centered research University.

“Our awardees represent the very best of Georgetown: the blending of academic expertise, innovative research, and impactful pedagogy that draws out the ambitions and abilities of our students and faculty,” President John J. DeGioia stated.

All three professors have deep roots in the . Both Mackey and Sanz are linguists with expertise in bilingualism and how second languages are learned and taught, and McNeill has taught more than 3,000 students in his classes on world history, international relations history, grand strategy, African history, and environmental history.

The following recipients were honored at the Fall Faculty Convocation on Wednesday, October 23, 2019: