Dickens Project Comes to LA!

More pictures for the NAI-Dickens Partnership here.

Los Angeles, California – September

This fall, on each student desk of a South Los Angeles classroom, will sit a 562-page novel and a 283-page memoir—Charles Dickens’s  Martin Chuzzlewit (1843) and American Notes (1842), this year’s Dickens Universe book selections. For many students, this will be the closest they have ever come to a novel of this length and genre. The books are part of a grant from a new partnership between the Dickens Project and the USC Neighborhood Academic Initiative (NAI)—a program that prepares students in neighboring South Los Angeles communities around USC who would be first in their families to attend college. The full grant will award annual scholarships to students and teachers from the NAI program, securing their participation at the Dickens Universe at UC Santa Cruz, a week long conference centered on Dickens’s work and his times. 

The new partnership between the Dickens Project and NAI will cultivate the next generation of readers of Charles Dickens, and of readership in general, in keeping with the spirit of Dickens himself, whose innovations in serial publication helped popularize reading in unprecedented ways. Jacqueline Barrios, an AP English teacher with the program, said that “students from our community need complex and challenging books to prepare them for complex, challenging lives. The dizzying world of change in the 19^th century is a perfect mirror for their own times. Martin Chuzzlewit, the only Dickens novel that includes a transatlantic journey to America, makes a great parallel for the experience of crossing into new worlds, that first generation college students face . . . that first-time readers of Dickens face.”

Jon Varese, Director of Digital Initiatives for the Dickens Project, said that “the partnership with the USC Neighborhood Academic Initiative is going to allow us to take the high school outreach work we've been doing for nearly a decade, and focus on urban and Title 1 school outreach specifically, which, frankly, is one of the few areas of focus where the Dickens Project lacked strength.”

The partnership will launch with a $10,000 scholarship grant -- $5000 of which Varese raised through private sources, and the other $5000 coming in the form of a matching grants from the Adobe Corporation, the Salesforce.com Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. (The Philadelphia Dickens Fellowship, the oldest Dickens Fellowship in the United States, also provided a substantial donation.) The $10,000 grant, and the launch of the partnership in general, is part of a larger fund-raising campaign to grow the Friends of the Dickens Project endowment, and ensure the longevity of the Dickens Project, far into the future.  “This partnership will not only have a huge impact on the lives of NAI scholarship recipients, but it will also transform the nature of the Dickens Universe itself. Our attendees -- many of them faithful to the Universe for over 30 years now -- are too thrilled to embrace this new generation of Dickens scholars and enthusiasts," Varese said. 

The Dickens Project is a research consortium of faculty and graduate students from major American and international universities. Founded in 1981 and headquartered at UC Santa Cruz, member institutions include the University of Southern California, all the UC campuses, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, and NYU, among others. For more, please go to http://dickens.ucsc.edu

USC’s Neighborhood Academic Initiative (NAI) is a rigorous, seven-year pre-college enrichment program designed to prepare low-income neighborhood students for admission to a college or university. Those who complete the program, meet USC’s competitive admission requirements, and choose to attend USC are rewarded with a full 4.5-year financial package, minus loans. For more, please go to https://communities.usc.edu/college-access/nai/

  

Contact:

Jacqueline Jean Barrios

jacquelinebarrios@me.com

Foshay Learning Center/LAUSD Faculty

University of Southern California

Neighborhood Academic Initiative

661 W. Jefferson Blvd.

Los Angeles, CA 90007

Phone: 213-743-1591