The Carolina Asia Center is excited to introduce Sunny Vo and Aadil Zeffer Sofi, 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 2022-2023 to teach Vietnamese and Hindi-Urdu.
Dzung Vo (Sunny) is serving as a visiting Vietnamese instructor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, with sponsorship from the Fulbright FLTA program. She is from Vietnam, which she describes as a beautiful Asian country. Before coming to the US, she had been a lecturer teaching linguistics and academic skills at many universities and educational institutions in three regions of Vietnam. Besides teaching, her second passion is music which boosts her creativity and reinforces her teaching methods. As a Vietnamese Instructor and an ambassador for her native culture, one of her biggest goals while in the U.S. is to successfully introduce Vietnam, especially through Vietnamese culture and music and to connect and expand the Vietnamese community at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill and more broadly across the state. As an educator at UNC, she wishes to enhance her understanding of the multicultural and educational environment. She strongly believes in the idea that everyone has an equal educational chance to learn and grow, and wishes to contribute to educational development in the future.
Dr. Aadil Zeffer Sofi is serving as a visiting Hindi-Urdu instructor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, with sponsorship from the Fulbright FLTA program. He is from Kashmir, India. He is an internationally experienced English instructor, having more than three years of teaching experience, including experience teaching in the United Kingdom, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and India before coming to the USA. Aadil has his education in seven countries ranging from the University of Cambridge to taking courses in Russia. His research interests include postmodernism, postcolonial studies, psychoanalysis, poetry, science fiction, and gothic fiction, among others. Besides academic life, he is very fond of traveling and has visited as many as eleven countries. As a cultural ambassador to the USA and a language faculty at the University of North Carolina, he plans to use this Fulbright language and cultural exchange experience in his future academic and teaching assignments.