Stephen Valeri, '21 Receives DAAD Scholarship

DAAD - Germany's Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) scholarship program. The German Academic Exchange Service, supports programs and funding for American and Canadian students, faculty, researchers, and others in higher education to study in Germany, promoting international cooperation.

Through DAAD, Stephen Valeri will work with Joyce expert Elizabeth Bonapfel and Hans Walter Gabler, editor of the definitive corrected edition of Ulysses, at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, tracking Joyce's coinages of new words over the course of his novels.

"Finnegans Wake, Joyce's final work, is notorious for including approximately 50,000 invented words drawn from over 60 languages," Valeri says. "I'm interested in how he intervenes in the languages that he uses to produce, so prolifically, so many invented words."

Valeri says Dartmouth's comparative literature program has provided "strong professional preparation in the field that has been very useful" as he prepares to apply to PhD programs.

"It's a very supportive program, and there are a number of professors whose work is in line with mine," he says—including his adviser Lawrence Kritzman, the Pat and John Rosenwald Research Professor in the Arts and Sciences, who chairs the program. "He's one of the world's leading experts on French poststructuralism, which is something I incorporate heavily into my thesis," Valeri says.