Faculty Accomplishments

The following excerpts come from the 2008 Annual Reports submitted by our faculty. It has been a pleasure for me to read about the wonderful work in research, teaching, curricular development, service to the profession, and so much more. It is really impressive!

I asked every faculty member to select one item: "please feel free to choose what YOU would like to share: maybe the mention of a new course you taught, a special initiative involving students, a grant or prize you were awarded, the citation for a publication, a conference presentation, etc., etc." I am delighted and proud to share these accomplishments.. — Susan G. Polansky Spring 2009

Mariana Achugar published a monograph about the discursive manifestations of the conflict over how to remember and interpret the actions of the military during the last dictatorship in Uruguay (1973-1985): What we remember: The construction of memory in military discourse. Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture Series (John Benjamins Publishing Company).

Stephen Brockmann was elected Vice President of the German Studies Association.

Charlene Castellano's article, "Remembering Bely Remembering," was accepted for publication in the Canadian-American Slavic Studies special issue on Andrey Bely, forthcoming in 2010. As a result of the submission, she was invited to co-edit the volume.

Kenya Dworkin presented "Gazing into the Broken Mirror: Mexican Sephardic Women Negotiate Identity and Politics in Print and Film Versions of Rosa Nissan's Work" at the Association for Jewish Studies 40th Annual Conference and "'Spanish' Jews, Boricua Neighbors: Another View of New York's Immigrant Origins" to the members of the 'Hispanic New York Project' at Columbia University.

Gabriele Eichmanns became a member of the local Western Pennsylvania Chapter of the American Association of Teachers of German in Fall 2008 and attended a workshop during which German high school teachers and university professors took a tour through Pittsburgh and learned about Pittsburgh's rich cultural German heritage.

Barbara Freed was named an Officier de l'ordre des Palmes académiques by the French Government in recognition of her contributions to French language and culture.

Felipe Gómez took advantage of a Berkman grant and a Falk fellowship to conduct research on countercultural conceptualizations of death and dying at the interface between literature and popular music in Mexico and Argentina.

Christian Hallstein participated in a symposium on Benjamin Britten's "War Requiem" at the Princeton Theological Seminary in May. His presentation focused on Britten's setting of a poem by Wilfred Owen about the biblical story of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac and how this was subsequently given a striking filmic representation by British director Derek Jarman.

Yasufumi Iwasaki collaborated with Masahiro Okamoto in adapting the Elementary Japanese curriculum to the summer courses and creating course schedules and lesson plans for them.

Christopher Jones was the first American recipient of a Research Fellowship under the Program of Support to Foreign Scholars of the National Library and Archives of Quebec. Jones used this support to do research in the public and patrimonial collections of recorded music on the evolution of country music in Quebec.

Xiaofei Kang worked on finishing the collaborative book, Contesting the Yellow Dragon: Religion, Ethnicity and Tourism in China's Borderlands.

Keiko Koda co-edited a 12-chapter volume, Learning to Read across Languages, published by Routledge.

Susan Polansky published an edition with introduction, notes, and glossary of Miguel de Unamuno's novel Abel Sánchez (European Masterpieces. Cervantes and Company Spanish Classics).

Carrie Ruiz was invited to contribute an article on Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares for an edited book published by Juan de la Cuesta. In alignment with her current research, her article offers an analysis on exemplarity, the gaze, and the construction of desire.

Beryl Schlossman published essays on literature and film and fiction in several new books that appeared in Germany, the U.K., Portugal, and on line at H-France Review.

Naoko Taguchi explored a variety of SLA research issues, including pragmatics, oral fluency, and Japanese grammar. Her work appeared in Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Language Learning, Modern Language Journal, and Foreign Language Annals, among others.

Therese Tardio accompanied a group of first-year students from the Global Studies House on an alternative spring break trip to Managua and Estelí, Nicaragua.

Dick Tucker was selected to serve as the university's Interim Dean of Student Affairs for academic year 2008—2009.

Jing Wang attended the Chinese Language Association of Michigan 2008 Annual Conference and gave a presentation entitled "Adjust Teaching Strategy to Classroom Environment."

Michael West developed a new freshman seminar in English on Haiti which was piloted during the Spring 2008 semester. During the summer and Fall of 2008, he modified the seminar to offer it as an upper-level French and Francophone Studies course for piloting in the Spring 2009 semester.

Sue-mei Wu traveled to China to present her paper "The Nominalizer Zhe: Its Syntactic Function in Classical Chinese" at the International Association of Chinese Linguistics Conference (IACL-16) at Peking University, Beijing, China.

Bonnie Youngs taught Elementary French I online via teleconference to CMU-Q as well as a section in Pittsburgh during the fall 2008 semester. The Qatar students communicated via written synchronous chat with the Pittsburgh students to practice their language skills, and via Skype with the instructor.

Yueming Yu coordinated the Chinese summer program in Shanghai, China for 34 Carnegie Mellon students for the eighth year and compiled a Chinese textbook series for high school students.