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School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

Tawes Hall, University of Maryland, College Park
Friday, October 24, 2014 - 8:30 AM to Saturday, October 25, 2014 - 6:00 PM

The Graduate School Field Committee in Medieval & Early Modern Studies hosts Knowing Nature in the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds, Friday and Saturday, October 24-25, 2014. The conference is free and open to the public.

SQH room 1120
Tuesday, November 04, 2014 - 7:30 PM to 10:00 PM

November 4th : " The Wind Carpet"
"فرش باد"

Rasmuson Theater, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, 4th Street & Independence Avenue, S.W. Washington, D.C.
Saturday, May 03, 2014 - 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM

Students in Foxworth course, SPAN408I, present their work on the Salvadoran transmigration at the Smithsonian.

PULSAR, or the Program for Undergraduate Language Science Ambassadors in Research, represents a new interdisciplinary training opportunity geared towards undergraduate students. The University of Maryland has the largest and most integrated team of language scientists in North America, and the PULSAR program allows undergraduates to tap into this unique resource, providing them with opportunities beyond those found in their primary major.

 

To be a successful PULSAR scholar, students should:

• Commit to PULSAR for 4 semesters.

• Take a total of 15 credits of language science related coursework (generally, 1 prerequisite course and 12 additional credits); With the exception of the prerequisite course, these credits must be outside of the primary major, but can be part of a minor or second major; this expectation is intended to provide interdisciplinary breadth in language science education.

• Serve as a research assistant or language-science-related intern for a minimum of 2 semesters (generally 6-10 hours/week), or pursue an honors project; these activities can be either within the student’s major or outside of it.

• Participate in at least one outreach activity per year.

• Attend a 1-credit weekly seminar series, and speak at that series to peers about their research.

GO to http://languagescience.umd.edu/education/undergraduate-pulsar/application for more information and to apply now!

Library of Congress, Room 220, the AMED Reading Room, on the second level of the Thomas Jefferson Building
Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM

WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 17, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
The World of Persian Literary Humanism: Spreading Culture through Books”Hamid Dabashi, Columbia University 
 

Stamp Student Union, UMD
Friday, May 02, 2014 - 4:15 PM to Sunday, May 04, 2014 - 5:45 PM

The 3-day forum will feature guest speakers, roundtable discussions and symposiums on Chinese languages and their relationships to the globalized world.

The University of Maryland College of Arts and Humanities (ARHU) would like to congratulate the inaugural recipients of the Foxworth Creative Enterprise Initiative (Foxworth Initiative), including Psyche Williams-Forson, associate professor in the Department of American Studies; Ana Patricia Rodriguez, associate professor in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures; and Leigh Wilson Smiley, associate professor of theatre and director of the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies.

“We are excited and proud to announce our first cohort of Foxworth Creative Enterprise Initiative recipients and courses,” said Bonnie Thornton Dill, dean for the College of Arts and Humanities. "Funding from the Foxworths will enable faculty to further engage students in the lived experiences of people from diverse heritages, traditions and histories, and facilitate their reflections upon the role of the humanities in promoting civic values within the contemporary United States.”

This year’s Foxworth Initiative funds the development of three arts and humanities courses to support advanced teaching and engaged research by scholars whose interests examine community defined issues and whose products and documentation appropriately assess student learning and community engagement.

Courses include a variety of topics like Food, Trauma, and Sustainability; Latina/o Transmigration and Transnationalism; and Community Partnership for the Performing Arts. The Foxworth Initiative also partners each course or “Creative Enterprise Team” with community partners like Prince George’s County Food Equity Council and Casa De Maryland to encourage the inclusion of the arts and humanities disciplines in the application of solutions to pressing issues like food insecurity, climate change, immigration, poverty and racism.

This initiative is made possible by the generosity of two college alumni, Domonique and Ashley Foxworth; Domonique ’04 is a graduate of American Studies, and Ashley ’06 is a proud English alumna. Ultimately the Foxworth Initiative is intended to enrich arts and humanities education and scholarship, and support projects that address enduring or emerging themes central to the arts and humanities or questions arising from other disciplines to which the arts and humanities might speak. For more information, visit www.arhu.umd.edu/foxworth.

INAGURAL FOXWORTH FACULTY COHORT:
 

Faculty Lead: Psyche Williams-Forson, Department of American Studies

Course: AMST 418G: Food, Trauma, and Sustainability

Social Issue: Food insecurity

Approach: Students will work with community partners like the Prince George’s County Food Equity Council to help reduce food vulnerabilities in the county.

Interdisciplinary in focus, students will draw from the fields of American Studies, anthropology, cultural studies and women’s studies to explore issues of food insecurity and urban food deserts. The project will engage these issues in the context of Prince George’s County (e.g. Sheridan Community Garden, Prince George’s County Food Equity Council), and in addition to their hands-on engagement students will learn about issues of food economies, acquisition and distribution circuits.

Community benefit: Communities made up of elderly and migrant populations, identified by partnering organizations like Casa De Maryland, will benefit from food delivery, work in community gardens and will be able to share their life stories with students.

 

Faculty Lead: Ana Patricia Rodriguez, Department of Spanish and Portuguese 

Course: SPAN 408i: Latina/o Transmigration and Transnationalism

Social Issue: Invisibility of Salvadorian migrant communities

Approach: The Salvadorian diaspora makes up the third largest Latino migrant community in the United States, many of whom reside in the Washington, D.C. metro area. SPAN 408i will bring students into conversation with this community to build and archive a digital storytelling project.  The course will explore the complex migration factors that lead to the Salvadorian diaspora.  Students will interact with non-English speakers to understand Latin American migration patterns with the members of the community, drawing on the powerful narrative tradition of testimonio, will have an opportunity to challenge their social and political invisibility through these documentation practices. At the end of the course, students and community members will present aspects of this digital storytelling project at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

Community benefit: UMD students in SPAN 408i will work with alongside the Latino Resource and Justice Center (CARECEN) in their community outreach to members of the Salvadorian diaspora. Together they will build a digital archive of Salvadorian migration, experiences of civil war and unrest, to form part of a larger archive in San Francisco, Washington, D.C. and El Salvador.

 

Faculty Lead: Leigh Wilson Smiley, School of Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies

Course: TDPS358P Community Partnership for the Performing Arts

Social Issue: Racism, immigration and adolescent identity

Approach: Students from UMD and the Latin American Youth Center will work together to learn and apply performance skills of listening, voice and working in front of an audience. They will apply these techniques as they collaboratively build a performance piece, which they will use to explore and express a range of social issues that affect them as adolescents and young adults.  Inspired by the work of Jerzy Grotowski, Augusto Boal and James Gilligan, among others, they will develop storytelling skills as a means of expression, empowerment and imagination. 

Community benefit: Students explore and develop community partnership skills to become trained cultural field workers who will do transformative community based work. Latin American Youth Center.

 

Wednesday, December 04, 2013 - 5:00 PM to 7:30 PM

Wednesday December 4, 2013 5:00 - 7:30 p.m. Reception, Art Gallery, Art-Sociology Building, UMD. 6:15 p.m.

By Natalie Kornicks

The School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures has appointed Zhanna Gerus-Vernola the Maya Brin Distinguished Lecturer in Russian starting fall 2013. In addition to teaching, she will organize all events and activities related to the new Maya Brin Residency Program, established through a generous $600,000 gift from University of Maryland Professor Emeritus of Mathematics Michael Brin. The residency program, named in memory of Brin’s mother, Maya, who taught Russian in the Russian program for nearly 10 years, is designed to bring leading Russian scholars, artists and cultural figures to campus for short-term stays between one week and one semester.

A lecturer in Russian at Maryland since 2006, Gerus-Vernola has been the primary beyond-the-classroom organizer for the Russian program and has been active in providing program enrichment through contacts in the community.

“Ms. Gerus-Vernola unites excellence in teaching and a range of administrative skills with a strong attachment to student engagement and a serious commitment both to the new Maya Brin Residency Program and to the Maryland Russian program,” said Elizabeth Papazian, an associate professor of Russian and film studies in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures.

Gerus-Vernola holds a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in psychology from Moscow State University and a master’s degree in Russian language and linguistics from the University of Maryland. She has completed her Ph.D. coursework in second language acquisition and Russian at Bryn Mawr College.

Gerus-Vernola is active in the area of technology and learning, with a three-year stint as a consultant on Internet-based language modules for American Councils. This past year she received a New(er) Technology Grant from the University of Maryland Center for Teaching Excellence for intensive training during the summer, followed by monthly seminars throughout the academic year

Additional professional experience includes a three-year position as a program officer for the Future Leader Exchange Program (FLEX) at the American Councils for International Education; four years as a co-organizer of an annual international sports festival for handicapped athletes in Russia; and a year as a practicing psychologist in Moscow working with women from war-conflict zones.

Thanks to a grant from the university’s College of Arts and Humanities that recognizes innovative projects, a faculty team will digitize rare historical French pamphlets, exposing valuable information about the French Revolution to a broad audience.

Funded in part by a $5,000 New Directions Innovation Seed Grant, three co-leaders will oversee a project to digitize 300 French pamphlets published in the late 18th century. Another 700 will be cataloged to increase their accessibility among researchers.

The UMD French Pamphlets Project is led by Assistant Professor Sarah Benharrech and Professor Valerie K. Orlando of the Department of French and Italian and Kelsey Corlett-Rivera, librarian for the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures from the University Libraries.

The pamphlets reveal valuable information about French society during the upheaval of the Revolution (June 1788-December 1804) and provide cultural historians, linguists and political scientists with important source material to study history, language, politics, government  and social issues.

The University Libraries hold approximately 12,000 historic French pamphlets, more than 7,000 of which are from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras.

“We hope this pilot project jumpstarts an even greater effort,” says Corlett-Rivera. “I’m honored to be part of a team that builds on the expertise and relationships across campus.” Corlett-Rivera and her co-leaders conceived the project at the Digital Humanities Incubator series sponsored by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

The project leaders are working closely with colleagues who curate special collections within the University Libraries as well as those from the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. 

For more information: http://www.lib.umd.edu/special/guides/frenchpamphlets

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