A Mississippi School for Math and Science teacher will travel to Russia this summer after winning a Fulbright-Hays fellowship.
Margaret Mary Henry of Columbus is among 12 university and high school Russian teachers chosen nationwide to receive the prestigious grant, which will fund advanced studies in language, literature, pedagogy and culture at Moscow State University from June 18 to Aug. 4.
The Summer Russian Language Teachers Program is administered by the American Councils for International Education in Washington, D.C. Upon successful completion of the rigorous program, the fellows will receive 10 hours of graduate credit from Bryn Mawr College.
A Columbus native, Henry is the only high school teacher of Russian in Mississippi. She is a magna cum laude graduate of Georgetown University, where she majored in Russian and also studied Spanish. As an undergraduate, Henry spent a summer at Leningrad State University. She earned a master’s in journalism at Northwestern University and combined her skills in language and writing at The Moscow Times, the Dutch-owned English-language newspaper in the Russian capital, where Henry lived from 1992-1999.
At The Moscow Times she served as features editor and also wrote about the arts. Upon returning to the United States, she worked for more than four years at The Christian Science Monitor in Boston as Europe Editor on the newspaper’s international news desk. In 2004 she returned to Columbus and from 2004-2009 held the Harriet Stark Gibbons Distinguished Chair in journalism at MUW.
Henry joined the world language department at MSMS in fall 2010, initially teaching Spanish. She has lived in Seville, Spain, and spent a year in Buenos Aires after receiving a professional fellowship in journalism from Rotary International in 1990.
A devoted, classically trained singer, Henry is a former director of Georgetown University’s Russian choir and this year launched a companion folk group, “Matryoshka,” as part of MSMS’s program in Russian, which has grown from four students last year to a projected 22 next fall. MSMS Russian classes include not just lessons in language and culture, but also explorations of Russia’s history and politics.
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