Professor Alberta Gatti Receives Prestigious NEH Cares Grant for Language Education at CUNY

Professor Alberta Gatti (Linguistics), director of the Institute for Language Education in Transcultural Context (ILETC), was awarded an NEH Cares grant, one of four such grants awarded to CUNY and one of only 317 projects receiving awards nationwide, out of 2,300 applicants. 

This highly competitive grant of more than $42,000 will allow the institute to retain its assistant director, a position that was put at risk because of budget cuts related to the pandemic. The funds are critical to the institute’s mission to promote education in world languages and literatures across CUNY and in the context of New York City’s multilingual communities. The grant will allow the institute to conduct research; develop materials that are published as open educational resources; and offer professional development activities, including training 50 CUNY faculty in teaching languages online. 

Gatti’s own scholarship focuses on Spanish literature of the golden age and on language education. She said that receiving this highly competitive grant “is a testament to the kind of work we do at ILETC.”  

The institute is in the company of a wide range of cultural organizations receiving NEH Cares grants, which deliver emergency relief funds to preserve humanities jobs nationwide jeopardized by the financial devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic. Among the 317 organizations are the National Willa Cather Center in Nebraska, Lakota language e-resources in North and South Dakota, and the Apollo Theater Foundation in New York.