Maria Sachiko Cecire

Maria Sachiko Cecire is a program officer for Higher Learning.

Previously, Maria was the founding director of the academic concentration and the Center for Experimental Humanities at Bard College, which focuses on how technologies mediate the human experience. This interdisciplinary initiative brings together diverse collaborators from across the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences, including in the local community, and supports justice-minded projects. She is on extended leave from Bard as associate professor of literature. Maria’s research addresses children’s literature and youth culture, media and digital studies, medieval literature and its afterlives, and the role of the humanities in contemporary society. She is a national project scholar for the American Library Association’s Great Stories Club, a program that supports reading and discussion groups for underserved US teens, primarily in juvenile justice, alternative school, and youth outreach settings.

She holds an AB in English language and literature from the University of Chicago and an MSt in English medieval studies and a DPhil in English from the University of Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.