Associate Professor Keith Dede receives two prestigious fellowships

Associate Professor of Chinese Keith Dede has received two research fellowships in support of his upcoming sabbatical leave. One is an award from the Fulbright Traditional Scholar program, which is supported by the U.S. Department of State and administered by the Council for International Exchange of Scholars (CIES). The other is an award from the Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad (FRA) program. This program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education and provides fellowships for faculty members to conduct research overseas in the fields of modern language and area studies.

Dr. Dede's research project is "Contact and Change in the Chinese Dialects of Qinghai". Four months in China will allow Dr. Dede to gather naturalistic speech samples from native speakers of Qinghai Chinese dialects, train local researchers in language-gathering and documentation techniques, and work with local scholars on the social history of northeastern Qinghai. Generally, this research approach will allow for the testing of theories of language evolution.