Joseph Suszczynski, a second-year Ohio Northern University law student in the concurrent JD/LLM program, has been selected for a Boren Fellowship to Kosovo. Boren Fellowships are an initiative of the National Security Education Program; they provide unique funding opportunities for U.S. graduate students to study less commonly taught languages in world regions that are critical to U.S. interests.

From the end of May to mid-July, Suszczynski will do an intensive Albanian language study at Arizona State University’s Critical Language Institute. He then will travel to Tirana, Albania, for intensive immersion language study. He will be in Tirana from mid-July to mid-August, and he has received separate, secondary funding through the State Department’s Title VIII Program for this aspect of the trip.

In August, Suszczynski will travel to Kosovo, where he will continue his language studies and complete an internship, during which he will meet with local scholars and human-rights workers in Kosovo, Macedonia, Bosnia and other Balkan states to conduct in-depth research into the border security of Kosovo and the Balkans.

Suszczynski will remain in Kosovo until July 2017 before returning to ONU in August 2017 to finish his third year of law school, earning his JD and LLM in Democratic Governance and Rule of Law.