Faculty Awards, Grants & Publications
2007-2008
- Congratulations to the recently announced recipients of semester-long General Research Board awards: Jorge Aguilar-Mora "The Other Sun: A Cultural History of Latin America in the 19th century", Regina Harrison "Visions in the Convent", Eric Zakim "Learning to See: Israeli Cinema and the History of Zionist Vision", Andrea Frisch "Classical Amnesia: Forgetting Differences in Early Modern France", and Alene Moyer "Accent and the Second Language Learner. Theoretical Problems, Practical Applications".
- Joseph Brami, Chair of French & Italian and Professor of French Literature edited Marguerite Yourcenar's 3rd volumne of letters (1957-1960): Une Volonté sans fléchissement. Paris: Gallimard 2007.
- Jianmei Liu of the Department of Asian and East European Languages and Cultures has just published her book (co-edited with Ann Huss) entitled The Jin Yong Phenomenon: Chinese Martial Arts Fiction and Modern Chinese Literary History by Cambria Press in 2007. She was also invited by Cambria Press to be the Editor of Chinese Studies Series. Her most recent article "Joining the Commune or Withdrawing from the Commune?--A Reading of Yan Lianke's Shouhuo" will be published by Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (Vol.19, No.2) in Fall, 2007.
- Robert M. DeKeyser, Professor of Second Language Acquisition edited Practice in a Second Language. Perspectives from applied linguistics and cognitive psychology. Professor DeKeyser is in the third year of a five year term as Editor of Language Learning, one of the two leading international peer reviewed journals in SLA.
- Laura Demaria, Associate Professor of Latin-American literature: a revised version of Cruces de Carlota [Crossing Carlota], a collection of short stories, the first version of which won the 1997 Latin American Literary Award from the University of California, Los Angeles, has just been republished in Argentina by Alcion Editora, 2007.
- Elke Frederiksen, Professor of German literature and culture, edited Within Global Contexts: Literature and Culture of German Speaking Europe. Oxford, New York: Berghahn, 2008.
2006-2007
- Two recent publications by Ali Abasi in the Persian Flagship program: Abasi, A. R., and Taylor, M. C. (2007). Tackling the issues and challenges of using video data in adult literacy research. Australian Journal of Adult Learning, 47(2), 289-307 and Taylor, M., Abasi, A. R., Pinsent-Johnson, C., and Evans, K. (2007). Collaborative learning in communities of literacy practice. Adult Basic Education and Literacy Journal, 1(1), 4-11.
- An article by Persian Flagship professors, Ali Abasi and Nahal Akbari, "Discourse appropriation, construction of identities, and the complex issue of plagiarism: ESL students writing in graduate school," has been chosen by the members of the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Second Language Writing as the best JSLW article published in 2006.
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Carmen Benito-Vessels of the Department of Spanish & Portuguese has published her most recent book entitled "La palabra en el tiempo de las letras" (The Word in the Time of Letters). La palabra en el tiempo de las letras studies language as “being” in an Orteguian sense, and in its ontological manifestation, through Spanish literature from the Middle Ages until our present time. From a solid philological base, Carmen Benito-Vessels sees discourse as a way of life and, at the same time, she understands life as a textual discourse, or palimpsest, in which the speaker’s being is inserted.
In this work a bridge is forged between classical philosophy, Judeo-Christian tradition and contemporary philosophy. The author shows that in every epoch there has been a veneration for the word that allows the identification of the being of language and the being of man. The objective reading of Libro de Buen Amor, Celestina, Novelas ejemplares, Ensayos de Unamuno and many other works confirm that there is no circumstance foreign to this “becoming” that is the “being of language”. Offered to us here is a heterodox history of Spanish, in which God and scholars find themselves on the same page, and Jewishness (judeidad) –different from Judaism- is revealed as an essential element of Spanish language and culture. - David Branner, Associate Professor of Chinese linguistics edited The Chinese Rime Tables, Linguistic philosophy and historical-comparative phonology. Amsterdamn/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2006. Dr. Branner was elected to the Associate of Chinese Phonology and joined the Board of Directors of the American Oriental Society.
- Congratulations to Andrea Frisch, Caroline Eades (French & Italian) and Laura DeMaria (Spanish & Portuguese) who have been awarded tenure and promoted to the rank of Associate Professor.
- Hernan Sánchez de Pinillos has been awarded a fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science. He will be working at the "Center for Cervantine Studies" at the University of Alcalá in Madrid, Spain. His project is entitled, "Don Quixote in American Fiction", which will culminate in a monograph.
- Manel Lacorte has edited a volume on Spanish Applied Linguistics
(Madrid: Arco/Libros. 2007). Based on a multidisciplinary perspective on the field, this book examines the most relevant areas of interest within applied linguistics in Spain, Latin America, and the US: teaching and learning Spanish as a second language; historical, social, and political issues; and language in the professions.
- Alaa Elgibali has been unanimously elected to serve a three-year term on the Governing Council of the Center for Arabic Study Abroad, the national consortium for the advanced study of Arabic Abroad. He also serves on the boards of the other two important organizations in the field: American Association of Teachers of Arabic (executive board) and Near Middle East Language Resource Center (executive board).
- The National Association of Self Instructional Language Programs (NASILP) elected Dr. Naime Yaramanoglu, Coordinator of the SILP at SLLC, UMD (The FOLA Program) as Vice-President of NASILP. Naime will serve a two-year term as VP, and then she will automatically become President of NASILP for a two-year term. Naime has been on the Board of Directors of NASLIP for the past two years.
- Liu Jianmei has been awarded a GRB (General Research Board) Summer 2006 research grant. She will be working on her book "Politics of Hermit Literature in Modern China." She is currently co-editing a volume of essays on The Jin Yong Phenomenon: Chinese Martial Arts Fiction and Modern Chinese Literary History, which will be published by Cambria Press in 2007.
- Robert DeKeyser has a forthcoming pubication: (ed.) Practice in Second Language Learning. Perspectives from Applied Linguistics and Cognitive Psychology. New York: Cambridge University Press.
- Caroline Eades has recently published "Le Cinéma post-colonial français" (Paris: Editions du Cerf/7ème Art, 2006). This book brings a new perspective to post-colonial studies by demonstrating how, since 1962, French films have contributed to illustrate the shift in France towards a critical re-assessment and reappropriation of the colonial past from the point of view of the colonizer.
- Federica Brunori Deigan has been awarded the 2005 "Prize for the Translation of an important work of Italian literature" by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
- Valerie Orlando has published one article and two book chapters:
"The Afrocentric Paradigm and Womanist Agendas in Ousmane Sembène's Faat Kiné (2001)" CSAAME (Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East), (Vol. 26(2) Fall 2006)
"Writing in/on the Front Lines of Exile: Political Dissidence, Memory and Cultural (Dis)location in Francophone Literature of the Maghreb ," in Representing Minorities : Studies in Literature and Criticism (Eds. Larbi Touaf and Soumia Boutkhil, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, October 2006).
"Knowledge, Power and Fear: Edward Said and the Mainstreaming of Postcolonial Thought," in Paradoxical Citizenship: Edward Said (Ed. Silvia Nagy-Zekmi, Lexington Books, 2006). - Lauretta Clough has been chosen by a 2006-2007 Philip Merrill Presidential Scholar as one of two K-16 faculty mentors that have most influenced her academic career. This is Lauretta's second Merrill mentor award.
- Michael Long has recently published two books: Second Language Needs Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Problems in SLA (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2006).
- Laura Demaría is one of six faculty chosen from 21 applications to participate in the Undergraduate Technology Apprenticeship Program (UTAP). The UTAP program pairs an undergraduate student with a faculty mentor and provides discipline-knowledgeable students with the technical skills and pedagogical basics needed to support faculty uses of technology in the classroom. Dr. DeMaria's proposal is to organize an archive of visual (paintings, maps, sculptures) as well as musical materials to complement the course readings at the 300/400 levels.
- Lindsay Yotsukura will serve on the Editorial Advisory Board for The Handbook of Business Discourse.
- Rose-Marie Oster has been selected as one of two faculty members on campus to receive the 2006 Award of Excellence in the Preservation of Scandinavian Culture by the American Scandinavian Association.
- Peter Beicken, was awarded a 2006-2007 CTE-Lilly Fellowship by the Center for Teaching Excellence and the Office for Undergraduate Studies.
- The Maryland Higher Education Commission has granted a project award to Profs. Manel Lacorte (ARHU/SPAN), Ana Patricia Rodríguez (ARHU/SPAN), and Millicent Kushner (EDCI). The title of the successful proposal is "The New Majority: Highly Qualified Teachers Maximizing the Success of English Language Learners." The proposal addresses two articulated needs within the Prince George's County Public School system: (a) helping conditional teachers meet the qualifications for becoming "highly qualified", and (b) providing specific teacher development activities related to reading and language skills for Hispanic students, the fastest growing segment of the school-age population in the state and the nation. The amount awarded is $100,613 ---mainly for participating teachers to receive UMD or MSDE credits, and for faculty salaries. As far as Spanish and Portuguese/SLLC is concerned, in addition to Profs. Ana Patricia Rodríguez and Manel Lacorte (project leaders), Prof. Carmen Román, Coordinator of Community Outreach, will also be actively involved in the activities scheduled for the next two years (2006-2008).
2005-2006
- Ph.D candidates Cerue Diggs (Germanic Studies), and Esteban Ponce (Spanish), have each been awared a one-semester Dean's Dissertation Fellowship for the 2006-2007 academic year. Cerue's dissertation project focuses on "National Fantasies and Triangular Thinking: Representations of Brazil after Alexander von Humboldt in 19th Century German Travel Narratives." Esteban is working on his dissertation on the theme of evil in Latin American literature, under the direction of Jorge Agular Mora.
- Professor José Emlio Pacheco was elected by unanimous acclaim to the Mexican Academy (Academia Mexicana de la Lengua)
on March 28, 2006. Acknowledgement by this honorary society is reserved for a very select group of writers.
This is a great honor and recognizes his many accomplishments as poet, narrator, essayist, and cultural icon.
Below is the Spanish text from the newspapers:
" José Emilio Pacheco (1939) es un hombre de letras completo, un alto poeta, excelente historiador y crítico de literatura que tiene todo el perfil para ser parte de la Academia Mexicana de la Lengua, advirtió su director, José G. Moreno de Alba."
" Con él coincidió el pleno de la academia, que el 23 de marzo designó, por aclamación, al Premio Alfonso Reyes 2004 y Federico García Lorca 2005, como académico honorario de la institución centenaria. "
"Poeta entre los mayores de nuestra lengua, prosista destacado, traductor eximio y una de las figuras que más ha sobresalido en la vida intelectual de México", así considera la academia al autor de novelas como Morirás Lejos y Las batallas en el desierto (con traducciones al inglés, francés italiano, griego, ruso, japonés y portugués)."
- Professor Gabriele Strauch, Germanic Studies, has been awarded a GRB (General
Research Board) Summer 2006 research grant. She will be working on her
book "Representation and Cultural Construction of 'old age' in German
Medieval Literature."
- Regina Harrison, Spanish & Portuguese has been awarded the Latin American Studies Association (LASA)
2006 “Award of Merit in Film," which is given for "excellence in the visual presentation of educational and
artistic materials on Latin America." The award will be presented at the LASA meeting in Puerto Rico
(March 16-18, 2006). Prof. Harrison produced, scripted, and filmed a 40 minute documentary in English:
"Mined to Death" (with subtitles), which also exists in a Spanish version titled "Mina adentro"
(with subtitles). The documentary depicts miners in Potosi, Bolivia, who extract silver, zinc, and lead
from the mountain in the same precarious conditions as their ancestors did five centuries ago.
Tourist agencies and transnational mining companies promise to bring in additional revenue for the miners,
but it is apparent that the 'rich' mountain is dying.Campus funding from CAPA, MITH, and ARHU DRI funds,
as well as maintenance funds from Fulbright-Hays, helped defray the costs of several years of travel,
filming, and editing.
- Professor Tsung Chin was presented with the Chinese Language Teachers Association (CLTA) Walton Award.
The award was made to Dr. Chin in November during the annual CLTA conference held in Baltimore.
It is given for overall contributions to the field of Chinese language pedagogy.
The CLTA Walton Award has been presented annually since 1998 in honor of Dr. A. Ronald Walton,
a faculty member at the University of Maryland from 1984 to 1996, and one of the founding directors
of the University's Language Center in 1991. Dr. Walton was also an internationally recognized expert in
the areas of language pedagogy, policy and planning for the less commonly taught languages in general and
Chinese in particular. Dr. Walton helped found the National Foreign Language Center (NFLC) in 1987, and served
as its Deputy Director until his death. Dr. Walton played a critical advisory role in the development of both the Generic
and Chinese ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines.
- Professors Maria Lekic and Richard Brecht were recently honored for their contributions to the field by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages at thenational conference of AATSEEL, at the President's Reception held in the Russian Embassy in Washington, DC on December 29. The reception was co-sponsored by AATSEEL and the American Councils for Education/ACTR. In addition to the many distinguished members of the Slavic profession who work in the US, also in attendance were Ambassador Ushakov, Dr. James Billington (Librarian of Congress), Dr. Liudmila Verbitskaya (Rector of St. Petersburg University), Dr. Kostomarov, and many other foreign guests. Dr. Lekic was presented with the "Award for Outstanding
Contributions to the Profession" and Richard Brecht was presented with the "Distinguished Service Award for Contributions
to the Russian Profession".
- Professor Jorge Aguilar-Mora has been selected as one of six faculty as a 2006-07
University of Maryland Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award. Sponsored by the Office of Faculty Affairs, this award honors
tenured members of the faculty who, as men and women of outstanding scholarly accomplishment, combined with excellence in teaching,
personify our image of the professoriate. The purpose of this program is to recognize successful scholar-teachers and to enable them
to share their achievements and expertise with the university at large.
- Juan
Carlos Quintero Herencia, Associate Professor of Latin
American and Caribbean Literatures, has been selected
by the Graduate School’s Creative and Performing Arts Board
for a CAPA Summer Award for summer 2006.
Professor Quintero Herencia was recognized is his
latest book of poems, "Libro del sigiloso" (roughly
translated as “Book of Stealth”) a collection of about 36
poems written in Spanish that is “a meditation on the
multiple conditions of an escape or, if you like, a
consideration on the images associated with breaking away
from a familiar place,” in his words.
- Elke Frederiksen, Professor and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher has been awarded a GRB (General Research Board) semester research grant for Fall 2006. She will be working on her book "Travel - Colonialism - Cultural Conflicts: German Visions of Africa in the Early and Late Twentieth Century."
- David Prager Branner was elected to the Executive Committee of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics, and has designed an on-line tool for the prosodic analysis of Medieval Chinese poetry, together with a database of Chinese historical and dialect phonology (now available for beta-testing at http://dev.umd.edu/cpd ; please write to Branner if you have trouble signing up for an account). His newest book, The
Chinese Rime Tables, appears in December.
- Distinguished University Professor, José Emilio Pacheco, was named the recipient of the 2005 Premio Internacional de Poesia Cuidad de Granada, Federico Garcia Lorca after receiving a phone call from the Mayor of Granada, José Torres Hurtado. Over thirty poets from Spain and Latin America were in contention and José Emilio is the second recipient of this fairly new and prestigious literary award.
2004-2005
- Peter Beicken, was awarded a 2005-2006 CTE-Lilly Fellowship by the Center for Teaching Excellence and the Office for Undergraduate Studies.
- Alessandro Manzoni's "The Count of Carmagnola and Adelchis, " introduced and translated by Federica Brunori Deigan, was published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in July 2004, and was awarded (ex aequo with two other books) the 2005 Flaiano Prize for Italian Studies.
- Alaa Elgibali has been elected to a three-year term on the executive board of the American Association for Teachers of Arabic.
- Regina Harrison, awarded a Fulbright grant for Fall 04-Sping 05, has spent the year in Ecuador and Bolivia gathering materials for another video project and lecturing at several universities in the Andean region.
- Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak has recently published two works: Essays on Nima Yushij: Animating Modernism in Persian Poetry , Ed. Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak and Kamran Talattof, Leiden: Brill , 2004 and Strange Times, My Dear: The PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature , Ed. Nahid Mozaffari and Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, New York: Arcade Publishing, 2005.
- Manel Lacorte has published: Contactos y contextos linguísticos: El español en los Estados Unidos y en contacto con otras lenguas Manel Lacorte and Luis A. Ortiz López, co-editors. Madrid / Frankfurt :Iberoamericana / Vervuert, 2005.
- Roberta Z. Lavine was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship for the Fall 2005 semester. Her project, "A Prototype for Faculty Development: Instruction of English as a Foreign Language at the University of Concepción" was supported by the University of Concepción and the Chilean Education Ministry.
- The paperback edition of Catherine J. Doughty & Michael H. Long (eds.)'s, Handbook of Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Blackwell was published, June, 2005. In addition, his edited collection, Second Language Needs Analysis, will be published by Cambridge University Press, 2005.
- Refracted Images: The Canary Islands Through a New World Lens, Transatlantic Readings by Eyda Merediz was published by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance, January 2004.
- Alene Moyer was promoted to Associate Professor in the department of Germanic Studies and was also awarded a GRB award for her project titled "Intelligibility, Comprehensibility and Non-native Englishes".
- Distinguished University Professor José Emilio Pacheco was selected by a popular poll in Mexico as today's NUMBER ONE Mexican Poet. Jose Emilio was also honored for all his accomplishments and major awards by the SLLC and ARHU, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Mexican Cultural Institute with a special Symposium at which such distingished poets and critics attended: Dana Gioia, President of the NEA, and also Alistair Reed. In addition, Professors Maria Rosa Oliveira of Notre Dame University, Rebecca Biron of the University of Miami, and Hernán Sanchez, Professor Emerita Graciela Nemes, graduate students of the department and the organizers, Sandra Cypess and Roberta Lavine also presented on aspects of Pacheco's varied artistic production.
- La máquina de la salsa : Tránsitos del sabor, by Juan Carlos Quintero Herencia, was published in 2005 by Ediciones Vértigo of San Juan, Puerto Rico.
- Robert Ramsey was elected to the Editorial Advisory Board of the journal Korean Studies and also edited a volume of the journal Japanese Language and Literature that was issued as a "Special Issue in Honor of Samuel E. Martin".
- Mary Ellen Scullen and Joseph Brami were honored with the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques, Knight of the Education Order. This is one of the few French Republic Orders honoring outstanding professionals.
- The third edition of the textbook, Chez nous, branché sur le monde francophone, by the author team, Albert Valdman, Cathy Pons and Mary Ellen Scullen was published by Prentice-Hall in February 2005. This edition features a new video shot on location in Paris, Nice, Seillans and College Park with many SLLC friends and alums such as Bienvenu Akpakla, Hervé-Thomas Campangne, Christian Giaume, Marie-Julie Kerharo, Marie Louis, Françoise Rosso, P. Reychman, and Françoise Vandenplas. For this edition, Virginie Cassidy wrote the lab manual and Sandhya Mohan developed a section of the Companion Website. Lisa Witmer was also involved in proofreading the answer key for the Student Activities Manual.
- Lindsay Yotsukura was elected to the Executive Board of the Association of Teachers of Japanese (ATJ) for 2004-2007.
- Eric Zakim's book, To Build and Be Built: Landscape, Literature, and the Construction of Zionist Identity , was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005; he is currently co-editing a volume of essays on culture in the Mediterranean, 'Mediterranean Studies: Rethinking the Boundaries of Culture", which will be published by the MLA Press.
