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Newsletter Staff Chair and Advisor: Mike Long | Editor and Advisor: Lauretta Clough

Editor: Mike Fekula | Layout: Jeffrey MaurerProduction: Bob Masiulis, UM Dept. of Business Services

SLLC Welcomes

New Faculty

Features

Julie KoserAssistant Professor of German

Julie Koser holds a B.A. in International Studies and Ger-man from Trinity University and a Ph.D. in German from the University of California, Berkeley (2007). Her dissertation, “Representations of Armed Women in Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century German Literature,” explores the intersection between literary representations of gender roles and political participation in Germany. Her work anal-yses the means by which the German literary community appropriated images of armed women during a period of more than two decades encompassing the French Revolu-tion, the French Revolutionary Wars, and the Napoleonic in-vasion of German-speaking territories in order to reinforce or to contest the gendered divisions between the public and the domestic spheres. Her research and teaching interests include the con-struction and dissolution of gender myths; the interplay between gender, national identity, and citizenship; gender and warfare; literary and visual depictions of women and violence; and the body as site of social and political rebel-lion in literature. She employs an interdisciplinary approach that considers literary works in their historical, political, and social frameworks. In her spare time she enjoys running.

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4 Faculty Profile: Professor Joseph Brami

6 staff profile: Mike Fekula

8 Language house: 20 Years of Immersion

11 News and events

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Ali R. AbasiAssistant Professor of Persian

Ali holds a PhD in Second Language Education from the University of Ottawa, Canada (2008). His doctoral research was an examination of the socio-historically specific notion of plagiarism and a cri-tique of the exclusionary functions of institutional plagiarism policies in relation to international ESL student writers in North American academia. He joined the University of Maryland in 2006 as a lecturer in the Persian Flagship Program and ac-tively contributed to its development. His research interests include language for specific purposes, writing across cultures, and socio-cultural theories of learning. He has two studies in progress. One investigates the influence of culture-specific rhe-torical development on summary writing tasks by Persian language learners, and the other explores distributed cognition in dyads and small-groups as language learners jointly accomplish a task. Some of his recent publications have appeared in the Journal of Second Language Writing (2006), Australian Journal of Adult Learning (2007), English for Specific Purposes (2008), and Journal of English for Academic Purposes (2008).

Nan JiangAssociate Professor of Second Language Acquisition

Nan Jiang received his Ph.D. in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching from the University of Ari-zona in 1998. He taught at Auburn University and Georgia State University before joining the School. His main research interest involves the study of cog-nitive/psycholinguistic processes and mechanisms involved in adult second language acquisition. Spe-cific topics include lexical representation and devel-opment in L2, language transfer, the integration of linguistic knowledge in adult L2 learning, and the relationship between language and thought. His re-search is mostly lab-based and has appeared in jour-nals such as Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Language Learning, Applied Linguistics, Modern Lan-guage Journal, Applied Psycholinguistics, Journal of Memory and Language, and Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.

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Would you like to start with a word about your current research?

For some years now, the main subjects of my research have been the French writers Marcel Proust (1871-1922) and Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987). My work on Proust covers both his fiction and his correspondence. One project concerns the treatment of social identity in In Search of Lost Time. A common misconception about Proust is that he was a fashionable dandy who sought the company of French high society – dukes, duchesses and the like – a milieu he is purported to have been fascinated by and with which he is said to have shared values and perceptions. But Proust was keenly aware of his own dual social and ethnic origins – his father was a secular Christian of provincial petty bourgeois background who became a success-ful and influential doctor and his mother was an assimilated Jew whose family had amassed a fortune since its arrival from Germany some two generations back. Proust’s work reflects the complex and trying experience of those whose social and ethnic origins create situations of alienation. His Jewish characters are particularly marked, as anti-Semitism was a recurrent phenomenon in French society during the latter part of the 19th century and at the turn of the 20th. The main purpose of my work is to show how Proust developed what is in fact a radical criticism of France’s dominant ideology, through which the elite saw itself as homogenous and defended a hierarchically organized society. With his latent “minority” sensitivity, if you will, Proust made of In Search of Lost Time one of the first major French literary works to “deconstruct” the notion of French grandeur. The work on Yourcenar is quite different. Marguerite Yourcenar was a 20th century novelist and essayist who spent nearly half her life in the US living and writing in relative isolation with her companion and American translator Grace Frick on Mt. Desert Island (Maine). Her novels, among them the famous Memoirs of Hadrian, were very well received, and in 1980 she became the first woman to be elected to the French Academy, shattering a theretofore impenetrable glass ceiling. Yourcenar was also a prolific letter-writer, and I am co-editing her correspondence. The three volumes already published will be followed by a fourth in 2010, covering the years 1961-1964.

Faculty Profile: Professor Joseph BramiPhD, NYU, Chair of the Department of French and Italian, teaches courses on French literature and criticism. He spoke recently about his life as an academic, how he came to this life, and his scholarship and teaching.

You’ve picked two greats, two big names. Why these writers?

For fundamental reasons, really. Dur-ing my MA years in France, I had an advisor who understood that I would never really be interested in the domi-nant literary school of the day, the so-called New Novel. It was the “in” MA thesis or doctoral dissertation topic. But those novels didn’t hold any se-crets for me. I found them too formal-istic and I simply could not relate to their conception of literature, society, or politics. My advisor, whom I have not stopped thanking ever since, sug-gested that I work on Yourcenar, who at the time most people didn’t know very well, especially in academia. I wrote my MA on one of Yourcenar’s most important novels, The Abyss, a work set in the Renaissance. In it, Yourcenar tries to capture the com-plexity of what it means to think about mankind and society in a time

5of violent religious wars and revolutionary change in ways of thinking, believing, and doing. Yourcenar was writing about the Renaissance with her mind turned towards her own time, which of course could be ours as well. My advisor was right -- the litera-ture that I am most taken by is one that confronts problems not in an abstract and formal way, but in a way that raises concrete human questions, the old-est human questions.As for my choice of Proust, it is because along with a few others, such as Montaigne, Diderot, Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, he is one of the French writers who help me to see the world, to apprehend it, if I may, to apprehend myself, society, and art, to ap-prehend my own relations with people.

So for you, literature is a kind of touchstone for life, through which you exist… more fully?

Absolutely! I don’t mean to sound overly enthusiastic, because in fact literature shows us how pessimistic we should be about our human condition. But by “absolutely,” I mean that literature for me is what allows us to pose and understand the basic questions, who we are, where we come from, where we are going. Whether in the form of novels, poetry, or essays, whether by authors with whom I agree or disagree, literature helps me to filter problems, to opt for one idea over another, for one philosophical, aesthetical, political, or ideological position over another, if only to change with time and turn to something different that, without literature, I would not have heard of before.

How does this relationship to literature make its way into the classroom? What literature do you bring to your students here at the University?

Most of the texts I choose do correspond to this idea of literature. I treat literature as a source of knowledge – of the works, the self, the world-- and, for the most advanced, especially graduate students, I introduce them to methodical and critical approaches that will help them in turn become teachers and researchers. I try to play the role of an inter-locutor, really. I introduce my students to writers and works so that they can discover their own interest in literature, develop their own methods of research, and I often learn from their ideas and approaches. People forget how much learning teachers get to do. It is one of the most engaging aspects of our lives.

You mentioned doing your MA in France. We know English is not your native language. Would you like to talk about your own sense of identity -- the subject you talked about developing on Proust -- your own sense of rootedness and perhaps non-rootedness in this country and in others?

The country of my birth and early upbringing -- Tunisia, in North Africa -- was a colonized country. We received a French education, and French was our mother tongue. My relationship to France as a country and to French culture is one of love and admiration, but experienced as a colonized person, an outsider. This has shaped my identity, as well as my rela-tion to what I learned with time to be mythical France.A few years after the decolonization of 1956, my family left for Israel, where as a teenager I had to learn another basic part of my identity, the Jewish one, along with the Hebrew language. Later, since what I really wanted to study was French literature, and because my symbiotic relationship to the French language had only strengthened over the years, I went to France to do an MA. I later came to the US, for personal reasons, and I of course had to learn another language, another culture. Recently, I have turned toward a 4th country, Italy, where again I have learned a language and a culture. So here I am at this point in my life, a multicultural man. I understand now looking back that the fact that I am able to experience my particular ensemble of identities in a posi-tive way, rather than as a multiple source of alienation, as I in fact did when I was much younger, is because I live in this particular country. The US has become in the last 30 years or so a true multicultural society, and this has helped me to understand my own experience, one that, I believe, gives me more to explore both as a student and as a teacher of literature.

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You like gray, rainy days, Mike?

It reminds me of home! Gives me nostalgia for Connecticut. Up until the age of 18, when I came down to Maryland to go to college, I lived in the tiny, little town of Weston, Connecticut, surrounded by woods.

What do you recall of your student years at UM, those 30+ years ago?

I was a Family Studies major (now Family Sciences), but didn’t have a clear career path. I was always more into extra-curricular activities. I spent five years vol-unteering at the campus crisis hotline, the Help Cen-ter. I was dealing with some of these issues for the first time -- suicide, sexual assault, drug overdoses -- and it was really an eye-opener.

Staff Profile: Mike FekulaFacility Coordinator

We are here to talk to Mike Fekula on a gray, rainy day, which, it turns out, is to his taste.

How did you manage to stay with it for 5 years?

I actually thought I was doing some good. In that regard I, always felt like I was a bit lucky, because crisis hotlines are no-torious for burning out their volunteers. I guess I just felt like I had helped enough people get through their crises that it seemed worthwhile. I also really like the kind of people who volunteer for a place like that. Very caring, very supportive, very sensitive, obviously, very thoughtful people, and from that standpoint, it was tremendously rewarding.

Has some of what you learned from that experience stuck with you, learning to talk to people in times of stress?

It’s perfect experience for the SLLC! Perfect training for what we do here. Seriously, first of all, you can never have enough in terms of communication skills. Not only being an active listener, but understanding what people are going through in their lives, both in and out of the office, especially when you’ve got cultural differences in the mix. This aspect was really new for me coming down here from little Weston, which was almost all white and middle class. Down here I was dealing with people from every background.

What does your job at the School consist of?

It’s basically all the nuts and bolts of building management and running an office. Part of the communication piece is being liaison both within the building and with other offices on campus. I have to hear people’s admin support prob-lems and try to find the solution. The School is a busy place. We have a lot of different programs going on at once, a lot of things can come up at the last minute, and you have to react, and when you have many different cultures, there are many different ways people will approach you, and you just have to adjust to that.

Are there parts of this job that bring you distinct pleasure, or a feeling of the good kind of pride? Any: I’m glad I did that, or, I liked doing that? Or do we all just drive you crazy?

Well, I probably take silly pride in doing all the various and sundry things without going crazy! It’s really knowing that I’m supporting people who are awfully good at what they do. And it’s knowing that they need to have somebody like me there who’s going to take care of x, y, and z. It is nice to be able to have this work experience after all my years on this campus. UM has been a big part of my life. I’ve been at SLLC five years. In addition to my five years volunteering at

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the Help Center, I volunteered for WMUC radio for nearly twenty years. I was an FM DJ, and also worked in the sports department; and I did a public affairs show called Campus Focus. It was an interview show where I talked to a different student organization each week. It was a chance to highlight all the interesting things student groups were doing that people usually don’t hear about.

I see a thread in the three things you’ve talked about so far. You’ve always been someone who is talking to people. And being a relay point.

Pretty much. Networking, literally, in radio, but in any kind of work that you do, is something I find a lot of fun. I don’t know why. But I think there’s something about putting people together that I enjoy.

Is that part of the inspiration for your involvement in politics?

I think there’s a lot to that, because certainly the progressive movements that I’ve been involved with live or die on networking. That was a big part of my work at the Rainbow PUSH Coalition. Activists are generally already very busy do-ing other things, and they have limited time to be involved in any other projects, so the success or failure of any kind of movement pretty much depends on people being able to network to manage their time.

Are you still interested in political activities, with your own limited time?

I’m interested, but it’s really only the occasional conference now. I’ve got this full-time job here, and I’m still a part-time sports writer over at the Terrapin Times, which I’ve been doing for 10 years, so I don’t sit around much. And yes, I’m a sports junkie. I just covered the Maryland Field Hockey Team which won a national title again.

It makes sense that you should be our editor, since you’ve been in radio and print journalism. One of the things people may not know about is your attachment to another kind of writing -- poetry. I’ve heard you recite poetry standing here in my office, I’ve seen you market Ter oets,p how did you get involved in poetry?

My original involvement goes back about 15 years. We used to have in College Park a wonderful little coffee house restaurant called The Planet X. The Planet X had open mic readings every Wednesday night, and I remember the first couple of times I went to it, I was impressed by some of the people that were reading. And then there were some others that frankly were so bad I said to myself, if that guy’s got the wherewithal to stand up and read that crap, I know I can do better. So I just started reading my own stuff, which, well, I’m sure Allen Ginsberg was never looking over his shoulder seeing me coming, but I really had a tremendous amount of fun with it. I especially like the open mic format, where you have a lot of people that are new to it, and it’s a lot of people who are in a real sense trying to find their own voice. And you see that especially with the young writers coming up for whom this is something new. And a lot of times the process involves addressing emotions that they have for the first time. And it becomes even a bit therapeutic; kind of dovetails with my Help Center experience. In a way it’s the same thing, where you sometimes have people who are wrestling with their thoughts and feelings, and the thing to do is just get it out there on paper, and read it, and see how it feels, and how you think and feel about your own words. And so I’ve found that exploration process to be really fascinating. I prefer the open mic format to slam poetry which, is about competition and not expression. Everything you’ve said today has a base in communication through talk. And I wonder if you’ve had more pleasure from poetry in the speaking of it than in the writing stage itself. Or in sitting in a chair when it’s gray and rainy and reading poetry.

I do appreciate the performance aspect to it, but one thing that I was told early on is the old axiom that you can’t write if you don’t read. I had to broaden my knowledge of poetry by just reading. And I now have a collection of anthologies that would probably fill a bookcase. Anthologies were the easiest way for me to get a sampling. And it’s really curious to see what gets anthologized sometimes. You kind of wonder, what were they thinking?

I won’t use that as a last line.

Feel free to put that in! Because I really wonder sometimes, you know. But reading new material has been an incredible part of the growth process. That’s how you learn. With poetry, you can take any other area of interest that you have, and there is going to be a genre of poetry that addresses it.

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The Language House Immersion Program is having a birthday! Established in 1989 in St. Mary’s Hall as the first UM living-learning program, the top-billed program provides students with round-the-clock language and cultural immersion. Under the guidance of a director, live-in native-speaker mentors, and faculty liaisons from SLLC, student residents – now numbering close to 100 -- live in distinct apartments where they com-municate in the language they are studying. Ten languages can be heard in its halls: Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Persian, Russian and Spanish. And with ten languages come ten arrays of cultural heritage, ten hubs of activity. While academia can seem like a highly competitive arena, a living-learning program like the Language House places a premium on fostering a cooperative spirit among its residents. LH students organize and participate in a number of target language-based programs, including weekly apartment meetings, Coffee Conversations, Faculty and Guest Lecture Series, the Around the World Dinner, the rousing Language House Showcase, and hands-on Maryland Day projects. In addition to these language-focused activities, the House sponsors inter-cluster clubs, such as the culture-based Film, Cooking or Tai-Chi Club, or the general interest Running or Gardening Club. All of which makes St. Mary’s Hall an easy place to create lasting relationships with other students and with faculty. Language House Alumni are typically its ablest and strongest advocates. To quote one: “Language House students ultimately are some of the most sensitive and pro-active “global ambassadors” for the University of Mary-land, both during and after their studies. They say that you can really only learn a culture by learning its language. I think that the beauty of the Language House is that “diversity” is never treated as an agenda action item in itself, but rather,an outcome. I think it comes out truly stronger this way and really trains students to be more worldly, while also representing UM students only in the best light.”

Language House 20 Years of Immersion

“Learning about the Language House and visiting it on Maryland Day and watching the Show-case when I was still a high school student helped me make my decision between the University of

Maryland and other colleges.” 2007 UM graduate

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Dean Harris Donates Piano

Jim Harris, Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities, has generously do-nated the family baby grand to the Language House. The 1928 Schulz & Co. piano had its public unveiling dur-ing the Around the World Dinner, with Dean Harris in attendance. On behalf of the House, Jeremy Feldblyum, a music major and member of the Russian Clus-ter, performed two pieces by Alexander Scriabin in gratitude to Dean Harris.

Language House News & Events

New Short-term Study Abroad Program to China

The Language House organized a study abroad course in Tianjin, China in Summer, 2008. Nine students from five colleges participated in the four-week program. Students took four hours of intensive language classes every morning and two hours of culture courses three afternoons per week. On weekends, students made excursions to Tianjin, Beijing, Xi’An and Shanghai. In addition to touring scenic and historical sites, students visited a local school and factory. The course will be repeated in Summer, 09.

Professional Pastry Chef makes Coffee Conversations even more popular

Brook Jefferson, the first LH Graduate Assistant, has been baking pastry for the weekly multilingual Coffee Conversations. An MA student in French Language and Literature, Brook is a graduate of L’Académie de Cui-sine’s professional Pastry Arts program. His pastries have attracted more Coffee Conversation-goers this se-mester than ever! Between 90-130 people now stop by on Monday afternoons at 4pm to converse in 14 languages…

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Student Awards

Graduate:

Margaret Braswell (French) and Laura Maccioni (Spanish): co-winners of the 2008-2009 Luc Secretan Dissertation Fel-lowship.

Sunyoung Lee and Gisela Granena(SLA): Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training Grant (IGERT), National Science Foundation

Sylvia Naylor and Christina Wall (Germanic Studies) and Mary Cobb Wittrock (French): Graduate Summer Research Awards.

Undergraduate:

Ashley Buckland (Germanic Studies): Elizabeth Cannon Scholarship for incoming freshmen.

Marianne Burgett (Japanese): ARHU Catherine P. Mackin Memorial Scholarship. Anika Cartas (Japanese): John Gannon Portal Scholarship from Computer Science; and the James A. Yorke Young Scien-tists Award. Allison Chang (German): Philip Merrill Presidential Scholar, 2008-2009; the Presidential Commission on Ethnic Minority Issues (PCEMI) award; ARHU Dean’s Senior Scholar Award; the German Society of Maryland Merit Award.

Andrea Donohoe (French): Elizabeth Cannon Scholarship Sarah Goldberg (Spanish): Maryland Distinguished Scholars Award from the State of Maryland. Kenneth Lull (Germanic Studies): Hugh F. and Glen Hannah Cole Financial Aid Scholarship. Krystle Norman (Spanish): 2008 Pickering Fellowship. Kyle Pfeiffer (Spanish): Elizabeth Cannon Scholarship for incoming freshmen.

Charissa Powell (French): Elizabeth Cannon Scholarship for incoming freshmen.

Sara Rothman (Romance Languages): Heyward G. Hill Memorial Scholarship Vineeta Singh and Dennis Stinchcomb (Spanish): Dean’s Senior Scholar Award Christopher Tabisz (Germanic Studies): The German Society of Maryland Merit Award.

John Van Trieste (Japanese): Dean’s Freshman Scholarship. Alisa Williams (Germanic Studies): Senior Summer Research Scholarship. Alisa will present her work at Undergraduate Research Day, 2009. Kirah Yen (Germanic Studies): The German Society of Maryland Merit Award.

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Caroline Eades’ (French) From Myth to Film is due to be published by Editions du Cerf, Paris, in 2009. The book includes a survey of films from various cultural origins that illustrate three major types of treatment of myth in cinema: adap-tation, reference to contemporary theory, and continuing oral tradition.

Alvaro Enrígue (ABD, Spanish) has published a fourth work of fiction: Vidas Perpendiculares [Perpendicular Lives] (Editorial Anagrama, S.A. 2008). His first novel, La muerte de un instalador [The Death of a Plumber], won the Joaquín Mortíz First Novel Prize in 1996, and his second novel, El cementerio de sillas [The Cemetery of Chairs ], was recognized as the best work of Mexican fiction in 2002 by the arts journal La Tempestad.

Eyda Merediz’s (Spanish) co-edited volume, Approaches to Teaching the Writ-ings of Bartolomé de las Casas (NY: Modern Language Association, 2008), ex-plores the relevance of a sixteenth-century Dominican missionary in the twen-ty-first-century classroom across disciplines and languages.

Hongen Yao (Chinese) will publish Memorizing English Words for College Eng-lish Tests through Association (Shanghai: World Books Publishing Co.) in Spring, 2009. The author provides an associative “bridge” for Chinese speakers to mas-ter English vocabulary with greater efficiency.

Elena Lozinsky (French) successfully defended her PhD thesis on Marcel Proust, “Les Carafes dans la Vivonne: L’Emploi intertextuel des genres litté-raires �n-de-siècle dans A la Recher-che du temps perdu.” [The Glass Jars in the Vivonne; The Intertextual Use of Fin-de-siècle Literary Genres in In Search of Lost Time] Directed by Dr. Joseph Brami. Elena is well-known as a translator of French literature in her native Russia. She has recently published a Russian translation of “Combray,” the opening chapter of Proust’s novel.

Publications: Doctoral Defense

News and

Events

SLLC Faculty Research Forum

Writing with a Vengeance: The Countess de Chabrillan’s Rise from Prostitution

The first Faculty Research Forum of 2008-2009 featured Carol Mossman (French), who presented her work on a notorious 19th-century French courtesan who, after teaching herself to write, proceeded to scandalize her contemporaries by pen-ning a set of memoirs, ten novels, and nu-merous plays. Following a sketch of the Countess de Chabrillan’s startling biogra-phy, Professor Mossman examined some of the overarching themes in Chabrillan’s novelistic oeuvre with an eye to explor-ing the power of the writing process to avenge, to heal, to assuage, and to con-struct identity.

The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and its Aftermath: Exile and Memory

A second fall presentation was given by José María Naharro-Calderón (Spanish) on: “The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and its Aftermath: Exile and Memory.” Professor Naharro-Calderón’s passionate exploration of the collective work of memory and forgetting, with special focus on the writer Max Aub (1903-1973), was attended by students, many from Pro-fessor Naharro-Calderón’s course on the subject, colleagues, and guests, including a witness of the war.

GuernicaPablo PIcasso

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SLLC Faculty Teaching ForumTalking Outside the Box

This inaugural Faculty Teaching Forum, organized by Manel Lacorte and Janel Brennan, presented a range of models for the use of online discussion tools in literature and language courses from the intermediate through the graduate level. The three panelists were Eyda Mere-diz (Spanish), Alene Moyer (Germanic Studies), and Verónica Muñoz (Spanish). Two forums are planned for Spring, 2009 on interdisciplinary approaches to teach-ing literature.

Guest Lectures:

Implicit learning and SLA: The What and the How

In the first SLA lecture of the semester, Dr. John N. Williams, from the Uni-versity of Cambridge, reviewed what is currently known about what can be learned implicitly, and what cannot, and what this might tell us about the nature of the underlying implicit learning mechanism. With regard to the learnable, he focused on experiments showing rapid and inciden-tal acquisition of abstract word order patterns and implicit learning of form-meaning connections. With regard to the unlearnable, he focused on experiments that fail to find evidence of learning noun classes and abstract syntactic rules.

Gendering Japanese Robots

Jennifer Robertson, Professor of Anthropology/History and Women’s Studies, delivered a public talk entitled “Gendering Japanese Robots,” sharing her most recent research on cutting-edge robotics in Japan. Robertson addressed “the development of humanoid robots designed and marketed specifically to enhance and augment human society,” paying special attention to the telling ways that gender is imagined and manifested in the latest generation of robots.

The Truth About Spain: Politics, Scholarship, and the Spanish Civil War

Sebastiaan Faber, Oberlin College, gave a presentation on his most recent book, Angloamerican His-panists and the Spanish Civil War (2008), which traces the history of Spanish and Latin American stud-ies in the 20th century as it was re-lated to the Spanish Civil War.

Age of Acquisition and Nativelikeness in a Second Language

Professor Kenneth Hyltenstam, of the Center for Research on Bilingual-ism at Stolkholm University, presented his research on the incidence of nativelikeness in adult second language acquisition, a controversial is-sue in SLA research. While some researchers claim that any learner, re-gardless of age of acquisition, can attain nativelike levels of second lan-guage proficiency, others hold that attainment of nativelike proficiency by late starters is, in principle, impossible. The work presented in this talk focused on studies that have provided apparent counter-examples to the critical period hypothesis.

The Role of Arab Women in the Modernization of the Middle East

Former Ohio Congresswoman Ma-rie Rose Oakar, current president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrim-ination League and well-known champion of peace efforts in the Middle East, gave a talk on women in the Arab world, courtesy of the Undergraduate Arabic Flagship Program.

Marie Rose Oakar

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Korean Alphabet Day: Hangul-Nal Celebration

The Korean program celebrated the 562nd anniver-sary of Hangul-Nal, Korean Alphabet Day, October 9. Professor Robert Ramsey, Chair of the Department of Asian and East European Languages and Cultures, gave a talk on why we celebrate the day, followed by Hangul calligraphy and a Korean drumming demon-stration, along with other Korean traditional perfor-mances. The standing-room-only crowd was then invited to sample traditional Korean food.

Viking Navigation

The Germanic Studies Department sponsored a lecture by Danish author and former marine super-intendent Soren Thirslund on “Vi-king Navigation.” Mr. Thirslund has published extensively on naviga-tion and the history of navigation, including the 1997 Viking Naviga-tion: The Sun Compass. Mr Thirslund is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Navigation Society.

The Holocaust in Italian Literature and Cinema

Two November talks organized by the Italian Program centered on the theme of the Holocaust in Italian literature and cinema, in con-junction with a new course being offered to undergraduates this semester. The first was the presentation of a new book by Dr. Toni-no Tosto, Director of Gruppo Teatro Essere, Rome, entitled 1938: L’Invenzione del Nemico [1938: The Invention of the Enemy], written on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the promulgation of Ra-cial Laws by the Fascist Regime in Italy. The presentation of the book was accompanied by music and images of manifestos, proclamations and newspaper cartoons of the period. The second was a lecture by Dr. Stefania Lucamante, Catholic University of America, entitled “Tips Against `Numbness’: Helena Janeczek Discusses Her Difficult Lega-cy.” For Janeczek, the memory of the genocide of the European Jews must remain alive and ignite a widespread desire for justice and tol-erance.

Paul Robeson Archives in Berlin

The Germanic Studies program hosted a lecture by Christine Naumann, an independent scholar with a research focus on Afro-German studies who is teaching German and English at Arch-enbold High School in Berlin. In her talk entitled “The African-American Collection in Berlin: The Paul Robeson Archives, Stiftung Archiv at the Acad-emy of Arts,” Ms. Naumann discussed transatlantic relationships in the 20th century between African Americans and Germany, with a special focus on Paul Robeson. The talk included digital images from the Paul Robeson archival collection.

Imaginarios femeninos en el populismo. Género y Nación en La razón de mi vida, de Eva Perón

The Department of Spanish and Portuguese and The Latin American Studies Center sponsored a talk in Span-ish by Dr. Susana Rosano, journalist and professor of Latin American Literature at the Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Argentina. A prize-winning specialist on populism and Eva Perón, Dr. Rosano spoke on genre and nation in the context of Perón’s autobiography.

Christine Naumann

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Conference:Iranian Jewry: From Past to Present

The Roshan Cultural Heritage Insti-tute Center for Persian Studies, in cooperation with the Meyerhoff Cen-ter for Jewish Studies, held an inter-national conference entitled “Iranian Jewry: From Past to Present” from November 1-3. Persian and Jewish cultures have interacted for over 27 centuries, ever since Cyrus the Great, the first of the ancient Persian em-perors, conquered Babylonia and set the Babylonian Jews free to practice their religion and to stay or leave his empire as they wished; almost every-one in the exiled Jewish community of Babylon stayed and an eventful history of intercultural give-and-take was inaugurated.

This history has been overshadowed in recent times by a new focus on the Jews of Europe and the Ameri-cas. The University of Maryland’s Iranian Jewry Conference was the first gathering of its kind to address this imbalance. In his opening remarks, Provost Nariman Farvardin alluded to the mix of nationalities, ethnicities and religions present in the hall by extending his welcome, in his words, “first to non-Iranians and non-Jews among you, followed by welcomes to non-Iranian Jews and non-Jewish Iranians, before welcoming those of you who can claim both identities.”

In addition to a panel on ancient Iran, most noteworthy were panels on Jews in Medieval Persian Culture, Jewish-Persian Relations in the Nineteenth Century, and Iran and Israel in the World Today. Along with these historical surveys, investigations into Resources for the Study of Iranian Jewry, Jewish Material Culture and Folk Arts, and portrayals of Jews in Persian literature provided glimpses into questions of interpretations, marginality and centrality, and a tremendous mix of intermarriage and hybridity of all sorts, literal and meta-phorical.

The organizers had arranged for the Library of Congress to be involved as a co-host through its relevant units, the Hebraic and Near East Section of the Library’s Middle East Division. Held at the Library’s Mumford Room, the second day of the Conference also featured an exhibition of the Library’s holdings in maps, manuscripts, and all sorts of documents in Persian and Hebrew and related to Judao-Iranica as a field of scholarly inquiry. A concert by Izra Malakov’s Bukharian Jewish Folklore Ensemble was held at the Clarice Smith Center for the Performing Arts in celebration of the conference. The publication of the Conference’s proceedings and the establishment of a web-based forum will seek to further worldwide research in this important, yet understudied field of linguistic, literary, and cultural interac-tion.

For more information, visit www.languages.umd.edu/persian/Jewry/Main.php.

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Film at SLLC:The International Film Series Marks The Semester on War and the Representation of War

Co-sponsored by the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, the College of Arts and Humanities, the Office of International Programs, and the Hoff Theater, the series dedicates its 7th year to 10 films on the subject of war. The fall screenings were:

11.09.01-September 11Youssef Chahine, Amos Gitai, Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu, Shohei Imamura, Claude Lelouch, Ken Loach, Sami-ra Makhmalbaf, Mira Nair, Idrissa Ouedraogo, Sean Penn, Danis Tanovic (2002)Hosted by Myron Lounsbury(American Studies)

All Quiet on the Western FrontLewis Milestone (1930)Hosted by Peter Beicken (Germanic Studies)

Land and FreedomKen Loach (1995). Hosted by José Mar a Naharro-Calderón (Spanish)

Barefoot Gen (HADASHI NO GEN)Mori Masaki (1983) Hosted by Michele Mason (Japanese)

Duck, You Sucker! (GIÙ LA TESTA)!Sergio Leone (1971)Hosted by Saverio Giovacchini (History)

Witness to Hiroshima (US Premiere)Kathy Sloane and Michele Mason (Japanese) (2008)Hosted by the producers

In this 16-minute film, Japanese citizen Keiji Tsuchiya uses watercolors to tell the story of his experiences in Hiroshima as a 17-year-old soldier immediately following the dropping of the atomic bomb. While the film addresses a horrific moment in history, it emphasizes how Mr. Tsuchiya has directed his life toward purpose and healing through his lifelong commitments to advocating for atomic survivors, opposing nuclear weap-ons, and preserving the horseshoe crab. The screening was followed by a Q&A period with Kathy Sloane and Michele Mason, during which they spoke about their two-year collaboration and recent acceptance in the Human Rights Watch Film Festival organized by UC Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archives.

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Poets at SLLC:Esmail Khoi: A Retrospective

The distinguished Iranian poet Esmail Khoi was guest of honor at a panel discussion organized by the Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute Center for Persian Studies. One of the most articulate voices of the Ira-nian Diaspora, Esmail Khoi was born in 1938, educated in Iran and England, and began his career in Iran as a lecturer in philosophy. As a founding member of the Writers Association of Iran, he opposed the restric-tions placed on intellectual freedoms in monarchical Iran, gradually advocating revolutionary change. In order to circumvent censorship, Khoi developed his own symbolism as a lyric poet. He was dismissed from his post as University lecturer by the Shah’s regime. Af-ter the Iranian Revolution of 1979, he was faced with an even more oppressive system of government. In the early 1980s, as a leading member of the intellec-tual opposition to clerical rule, he was forced to spend close to two years in hiding before fleeing his home-land in 1983.

The Arabic Flagship Program presentsNazrah A Muslim Woman’s Perspective

Directed and produced by Farah Nousheen in 2003, Nazrah: A Mus-lim Woman’s Perspective presents a discussion among a group of Mus-lim women living in the United States, revealing their views on Is-lam, politics, and the relationship between seeming and being as a Muslim in the West.Hosted by Inas Hassan (Arabic).

Rana’s Wedding

Directed by Hany Abu-Assad, this 2002 production was shot on loca-tion in East Jerusalem, Ramallah, and at checkpoints in-between. Hany Abu-Assad, a Palestinian who also produced and directed Paradise Now, sees the Palestinian-Israeli conflict through the eyes of a young wom-an who, with only ten hours to marry, must negotiate her way around roadblocks, soldiers, stone-throwers, overworked officials ... and into the heart of an elusive lover.

Wings of Defeat

Director/Producer Risa Morimoto and Producer/Writer Linda Hoaglund hosted a viewing of their award-win-ning documentary film on the Kamikaze, Wings of Defeat (2007). The film takes viewers behind the scenes of World War II’s Pacific theater to reveal truth about the Kamikaze – the “suicide bombers” of their day. Interviews with surviving Kamikaze, rare battle footage, and Japanese propaganda reveal a side of WWII never before shown on film. American vets from the greatest generation tell harrowing tales of how they survived attacks. Wings of Defeat shatters the myths of the fanatical kamikaze to reveal a generation of men forced to pay for an empire’s pride with their lives. This was the second 2008 visit to UM of Linda Hoaglund, best known for her translations of Japanese films.

The Japan ARHU Speaker Series presents

Esmail Khoi

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Reading: Pura López Colomé

The Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Latin-American Studies Center, in collaboration with the Cultural Institute of Mexico, presented a reading by the Mexican poet, Pura López Colomé. She was awarded the Alfonso Reyes National Prize for Young Writers in 1977 and the yearly Fellowship granted by the Mexican Center of Writers for critical writing in 1982. She has published nine volumes of poetry, including The Hunt-er’s Dream (1985) and No Shelter (2002). Her latest poetry collection is Password (2007), for which she shared the prestigious Xavier Villaurrutia prize with fellow poet Elsa Cross, for Latin-American writers publishing in Mexico.

F ort hc o m ing Events:Celebration in Honor of Professor Emerita Graciela Nemes

The Department of Spanish and Portuguese will present A Celebration of Graciela Palau de Nemes: Critic and Edu-cator, in collaboration with The Embassy of Spain and oth-ers, on April 3, 2009, in the Juan Ramón Jiménez Room of the Stamp Student Union.

University Professor Emerita Graciela Palau de Nemes, a long-time faculty member in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, is recognized as one of the most promi-nent critics of the works of the Nobel laureate poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, as well as of Spanish and Latin-American literature in general. Her academic contributions to the criticism of poetry and poetics, modernismo, memoirs, and the epistolary genre have been recognized both na-tionally and internationally. She belongs to a visionary generation that promoted, advanced, and embodied the transformation of our fields of study.

The program will consist of panels of scholarly presenta-tions and personal reflections about Nemes’ influence on the field, as well as comments by Nemes herself. There will also be opportunities for interaction between Nemes and the audience. In preparation for the celebration, faculty members from the department will produce a documen-tary about Dr. Nemes, her academic life, and the history of the teaching of language and literature at UM.

Music at SLLC:Modernism in Russian Music: ScriabinAle ander x

On November 17, SLLC’s Russian program and the Lan-guage House sponsored a bilingual Russian/English stu-dent presentation and concert on the Russian composer Scriabin. Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) was one of the

fathersfounding of Modernism in music. In his piano compositions, including nine sonatas and such pieces as “Satanic Poem, he introduced chords built in fourths instead of the conventional major and minor triads, pro-ducing an exotic, mystical effect. He aspired toward a fu-sion of the arts, and his “Divine Poem” (1904; the third of three symphonies), a programmatic orchestral work, at-tempted to unite music and philosophy.

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Giving to the School of Languages, Literatures, and CulturesYou can contribute to the School or your favorite program within the School

A message from Mike Long, Director, SLLC

The faculty, staff and students of the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (SLLC) are going from strength to strength. The quality of our undergraduate and graduate programs, of our faculty members’ and students’ research and scholarly publications, and of the services our faculty and staff provide for the campus and surrounding communities is truly exceptional.

But we need your help. As State funding declines, generous gifts from alumni, friends, embassies, cultural organizations, and businesses become ever more important. Private support is needed to increase funding for undergraduate scholarships, graduate fellowships, lectureships, and professorships. If you can support the School’s work in any way, please contact either of the following individuals:

Claire Goebeler, Associate Director for Administrative Affairs, SLLC, 301-405-4927 email: cgoebele@umd.edu

Laura Brown, ARHU Director of Development, 301-405-6339 email: lwbrown@umd.edu

Chose the Giving Method that’s Right for YouOnline Giving Make a donation to the department online at https://advancement.usmd.edu/OnlineGiving/umd.htmlPlease designate “SLLC” on the form.

Gifts By CheckGifts may be made by check to “University of Maryland College Park Foundation (UMCPF).” Please designate “SLLC” in the memo line. Checks can be mailed to: Claire Goebeler Associate Director for Administrative Affairs 3215D Jiménez Hall University of Maryland College Park, MD 20742

Other Gift Options You can also donate to the School or to specific SLLC programs through matching gifts, appreciated securities, real estate, annuities, estate planning, and more.

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