The Center for Latin American Studies, Center for Slavic and East European Studies, and East Asian Studies Center have awarded Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship grants to 52 Ohio State students to support intensive language study during the 2019-2020 academic year. More than $860,000 in awards will support 31 graduate and professional students and 21 undergraduate students to develop language fluency in Chinese, Japanese, Kichwa, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Quechua, Russian and Uzbek. Funding for FLAS Fellowships comes from the U.S. Department of Education under Title VI of the Higher Education Act.
The Center for Slavic and East European Studies awarded eight graduate students and 10 undergraduate students funding to support elementary, intermediate and advanced studies of Polish, Russian and Uzbek. The East Asian Studies Center awarded 13 graduate students and two undergraduate students funding to support advanced studies of Chinese, Japanese and Korean. The Center for Latin American Studies awarded 10 graduate students and nine undergraduate students funding to support intermediate and advanced studies of Portuguese and Quechua.
Academic year FLAS Fellowships are awarded to undergraduate, graduate, or professional student who are enrolled in a course of study at Ohio State that requires both language and area studies expertise. Students are required to take one language and one area studies course in both autumn and spring semesters, completing one academic year language sequence. Typically, students are enrolled at Ohio State during the academic year, but in some instances, students can use the funding to study overseas.
The fellowship provides a stipend of $15,000 and tuition support up to $18,000 for graduate and professional students. For undergraduate students, it provides a stipend of $5,000 and tuition and fees up to $10,000.
The Graduate School provides the Area Studies Centers with up to 30 tuition and fee awards to cover graduate student tuition costs at Ohio State for the academic year. The Graduate School funding totaled $630,000 for 2019-2020. The tuition funding support from the Graduate School in turn allows the centers to award more FLAS Fellowships.
FLAS Fellowships often provide graduate students with funding so that they can focus on language acquisition during the course of the fellowship while not needing to hold a graduate associate position to fund their studies that year.