The Carolina Asia Center is excited to introduce Vy Ton and Kanika Bhalla, our new Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistants (FLTA) for this upcoming year! They will be joining the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at UNC for 2021-2022 to teach Vietnamese and Hindi-Urdu.
Vy Ton will serve as the visiting lecturer for Vietnamese as part of the language program’s resurgence at UNC. Before going to the USA, she was a teaching assistant at Fulbright University Vietnam in the core course of Modern Vietnamese Culture and Society. Vy finished her MA in Education and International Development (2017-2018) at the Institute of Education, University College London with the UK government’s Chevening scholarship. Traveling through 36 countries with field trips, including several border and conflict areas, Vy is interested in learning how education about cultures and history shapes learners’ identities.
Kanika Bhalla will serve as a visiting lecturer teaching intermediate Hindi-Urdu. Her research interests include postcolonial studies, conflict zones, identity politics, and Islamic theology. As a Fulbright FLTA, Kanika plans to utilize her time in the US by interacting with people from around the world and observing how people live in perfect unison despite their racial, ideological, gender, and cultural differences. Apart from employing the skills acquired in the US to bring quality education to Kashmir, she hopes that her Fulbright experience would be beneficial to her efforts to bring peace into the conflict-ridden Valley