Bryzys Wins GRS TF Award
Wiktoria Bryzys, a PhD student in our doctoral program in Hispanic Language & Literatures, has been honored with a 2023 Graduate School of Arts & Sciences Outstanding Teaching Fellow award. Congratulations, Wiktoria!
From the faculty who nominated Wiktoria:
“Wiktoria Bryzys is one of the most creative graduate students that the Spanish team has had the pleasure of working with. During her studies in language pedagogy classes, she exhibited remarkable talent in creating effective, objective-driven lesson plans, utilizing the principles of Backward Design. Her lessons were tailored to the needs of novice-level language classrooms and showcased her creativity in incorporating core teaching practices. Wiktoria was open to feedback and actively engaged in providing excellent feedback to her colleagues. Her dedication to teaching was demonstrated through her commitment to observing many language classes before she was assigned one. As an instructor, Wiktoria has developed a vast array of teaching materials, including a collection of poetry designed to enhance learners’ fluency at all stages of language acquisition. She skillfully adapted sophisticated cultural content to the level of each Spanish class she taught, generously sharing her expertise with her peers. Wiktoria’s organizational skills and understanding of how to design a class to make students use and produce the target language were praised by her LS 212 course coordinator, who visited her class this semester. She contributed interesting course content about the signer Rosalia for that class, further highlighting her commitment to enhancing the Spanish program. Wiktoria’s exceptional talent, dedication, and collegiality make her an excellent candidate for the GRS TF Award this year.
Wiktoria Bryzys’s intelligence, creativity, and dedication are all evident from her research and writing. She is preparing to defend her dissertation prospectus, which explores how the historical coexistence of Christians, Jews and Muslims shaped literary representations of space in medieval Iberian literature. Her dissertation will explore how the narrative genres of epic, romance, and historiography represent spaces according to paradigms of “local” and “foreign” that do not always correspond to political or religious boundaries. She is a lucid writer, and her research is informed by close attention to literary texts, voracious reading in critical theory (including coursework at Cornell’s School of Criticism and Theory in summer 2022), and a sensitivity to the historical context of cultural production. This May, she will present new research at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, in a paper that contrasts different models of cultural patronage in two translations sponsored by King Sancho IV of Castile. She also continues to develop her research interests in modern and contemporary drama, particularly the social theater of Alfonso Sastre. Finally, in 2022 she won first place for a verse translation in the Robert Fitzgerald Prize in Literary Translation, for the translation of selected poems by the Polish poet Halina Poswiatowska.”