Two students from the University of Pennsylvania, Daniel Blackey and William Dossett, have been awarded Critical Language Scholarships. They are among approximately 560 U.S. undergraduate and graduate student CLS scholarship recipients this year.

Daniel Blackey, a rising sophomore from Charlotte, became interested in the language and culture of China while in high school. An alumnus of the National Security Language Initiative for Youth, Blackey spent the summer after his senior year of high school studying Chinese with the Confucius Institute at the University of Minnesota in Shanghai, China. He recently attended the 2016 National Chinese Language Conference in Chicago as an intensive language study abroad presenter. This summer he will study Mandarin at Shaanxi Normal University in Xi’an, China.

William Dossett from Nashville, earned his bachelor of arts degree in international relations from Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences on May 16.  His senior thesis analyzed the impact of Jewish immigration on the development of agriculture in Palestine between 1880 and 1948. He has written articles for the Foreign Policy Research Institute and the SIR Journal. At Penn, Dossett was a member of Alpha Sigma Phi fraternity, Men Against Rape and Sexual Assault and the Penn Climbing Team. He will spend the summer in Tangier, Morocco, studying Arabic.

The Critical Language Scholarship Program is part of a U.S. government effort to expand the number of Americans studying and mastering critical foreign languages. Each CLS scholar will spend eight to ten weeks in one of 24 locations studying Arabic, Azerbaijani, Bangla, Chinese, Hindi, Korean, Indonesian, Japanese, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Swahili, Turkish or Urdu.