PULLMAN, Wash. — Alex Kuo and Joan Burbick, faculty members in the College of Liberal Arts at Washington State University, have submitted successful project proposals to the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Italy.
Kuo, chair of Comparative Ethnic Studies and Burbick, professor of English will attend the center in February, 2004.
Kuo’s project proposal focuses on a new novel in which the main character is involved in the removal of landmines globally. Burbick will continue her work on, “Men and Guns: The Cultural Politics of Guns in the United States.”
Burbick’s research focus is American nationalism. “Bellagio provides me the opportunity to read, think, and write about the USA outside its borders,” said Burbick, “and I gain the excitement of intellectual exchange with a group of writers, artists and scholars.”
Kuo received the American Book Award for his latest published work, “Lipstick and Other Stories.” Other recent works include “Chinese Opera” and “This Fierce Geography”. Kuo is WSU’s first writer in residence and a Senior Fulbright Scholar.
Burbick’s publications include “Rodeo Queens and the American Dream,” “Thoreau’s Alternative History: Changing Perspectives on Nature, Culture, and Language,” and
“Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America.” She was chosen as a Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center and received the Foerster Prize for best scholarly article in “American Literature.”
The center brings together top scholars with overlapping global interests in the sciences, social sciences, humanities and arts. Located in the small town of Bellagio, Italy, the center is on a peninsula in the middle of Lake Como in the foothills of the Italian Alps, two hours northeast of Milan near the Swiss border. Only 15 scholars attend the Center at any given time. The center prefers that not more than half the scholars be citizens of any one country and that half the scholars come from outside North America.
