Language Programs
A WPI education isn’t all about STEM; the arts, music, and languages are also crucial—in fact, the humanities are a huge part of what makes WPI students the engineers, scientists, and individuals who go on to change the world. As a student, you can complete a minor in your choice of four languages—Arabic, Chinese, German, and Spanish—during your time on campus through immersion programs, project work, independent studies, and capstone projects where you’ll focus not only on fluency, but learning about the culture and history of the areas where your language of choice is prevalent. Learn from professors who are experts in their fields and prepare for a postgraduation life that’s just as unique as you are.
Projects at the Morocco Project Center
Don’t just stop at a minor—follow your passion for Arabic language and Arab culture through your entire time at WPI with the opportunity to complete both your HUA Requirement and IQP at the Morocco Project Center. Examples of recent student work include projects focused on psychiatric healthcare in Morocco, navigating public spaces as a woman in Morocco, and ethnographic studies of Zellige craftsmen.
Projects at Chinese Project Centers
Each year, dozens of WPI undergraduates travel to China to complete their IQPs and MQPs at project centers in Hong Kong, Hangzhou, Beijing, and Taiwan. Students have the chance to immerse themselves in new cultures, make connections with local students, and take on real-world challenges through project work that ranges from working with NGOs to develop a mental health app to identifying ways to preserve the Chinese White Dolphin by controlling marine traffic.
Use a Language Minor During IQP and MQP
WPI students complete project work at one of 50+ project centers around the world. For many of them, it’s not only a chance to make an impact on a global scale, but to immerse themselves in another culture through language. Several project centers are immersive, meaning that students have the opportunity to perfect their fluency in languages while completing their project work.
Coming from a family with a long teaching tradition going back at least to her great-grandfather, teaching has always been fundamental to Professor Brisson’s well-being. Being a German professor at WPI in particular has been a great privilege because the students are motivated, hardworking, and eager to learn. She feels that teaching German language and culture is particularly important at an engineering school with a strong focus on environmental technology and sustainability for a number of reasons.
Mohammed El Hamzaoui teaches academic writing to native and non-native speakers of English, Arabic as a foreign language to non-native speakers and ISE (Integrated Skills of English) courses to international students. Mohammed adopts an eclectic approach to teaching languages; he uses a communicative and interactive methodology to help students overcome persistent fears related to learning, speaking and writing in foreign languages.
My research centers around religion in North Africa and the Middle East with a focus on Islam; I approach the study of Islam through its representation in visual culture. My first book project, an outgrowth of my dissertation, focuses on recent fiction film by Moroccan women filmmakers as oblique forms of resistance to dominant narratives about Muslim women. My research tends to be very interdisciplinary: I draw on religion, cultural studies, feminist theory, film theory and affect theory.
Professor Rivera has been conducting research on 19th- and 20th-century Spanish Caribbean literature and theories related to the exploration of limits or borders (i.e., the edges or places where multiple cultures touch or come into contact). He has been exploring how Caribbean traditional modes of representation have been restructured to significant changes in cultural, literary, and historical contexts.
By training, I am a political historian of China and Japan. Coming to WPI has expanded how I view my own research and teaching and what can be done with them. I’ve led WPI’s efforts to build China-related programs for STEM students on campus and off. With like-minded colleagues I helped establish and now direct WPI’s East Asia Hub (formally China Hub), established and co-direct WPI’s Hangzhou and Taiwan Project Centers, and advise the Chinese Studies minor.