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Adrián Pérez Melgosa Stories for Our Time
Internship Program

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Renamed in honor of the visionary director of the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook University, this program offers between 20 and 60 yearly internships in which students apply public humanities to bridge the gap between campus and community through intergenerational online writing circles around such themes as “Testify: Memoir as a Tool for Action,” “From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter,” “Re-Imagining Mental Health

Care,” and “Shaping Spaces: Disability Stories to Build a Movement.” Since its inauguration during the pandemic years, around Pérez Melgosa’s theme of “Healing, Resilience and Survival,” this program has changed the lives of scores of young people every year, allowing them to integrate their academic studies into the larger search for meaning in community, as the themes and offering morph and shift every year.  Here students have a chance to write side by side with Civil Rights leaders in their 80’s, with the son of a sharecropper from Arkansas, with people who were locked in mental institutions during that same era, with people whose disabilities would not have allowed in person contact, as together they forge new paths for equity, inclusion, and grace.  Numerous graduates from this program continue to work with Herstory, in the schools, in the courts, and in blazing new theories and connections.

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