Welcome to the Modern Languages Department

The following excerpts come from the 2007 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 February 2008

Mariana Achugar was awarded a Small Research Grant from the Spencer Foundation to investigate "Teaching and Learning History in the Multilingual Classroom."

Stephen Brockmann received the German Academic Exchange Service's DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German Studies / Humanities on November 15 at the annual Global Leadership Award Dinner of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, which took place at Cipriani on Wall Street.

Charlene Castellano taught "The Faust Legend at Home and Abroad" for freshmen in the Humanities Scholars Program. The centerpiece of the course was an overnight trip to Toronto to see a new production of Gounod's opera, "Faust". It was an exciting theatrical event and for most of the students, their first experience of live opera.

Kenya Dworkin collaborated with other ML colleagues to design and implement the Círculo Juvenil de Cultura program, a Hispanic Heritage, Spanish-language and culture program for immigrant children in the greater Pittsburgh area, which is an ongoing project.

Barbara Freed’s new film focuses, once again, on a relatively unexplored aspect of Henri Matisse's life. This second documentary concerns the little known story of Matisse and America / Matisse and Americans: the interactions, the friendships, the influences and the accomplishments.

Felipe Gómez participated in the ACTFL 2007 conference in San Antonio (TX), where he co-presented with Therese Tardio a panel session co-authored by faculty in the Spanish group: "Refocusing Third Year Spanish: An Integrated Content Approach."

Christian Hallstein participated in a panel discussion of Melanie Dreyer’s production of a new bilingual play by German author Andreas Jungwirt entitled Outside Inn. The play premiered in Pittsburgh (in English and in German) in September and was subsequently produced in Stuttgart at the theatre rampe.

Sono Takano Hayes enjoyed collaborating with Naoko Taguchi and Yumiko Kono to build a new curriculum framework for Advanced Japanese.

Yasufumi Iwasaki reworked the course, Structure of the Japanese Language, in order to better assist our students in understanding the basic cultural way of thinking underlying Japanese in comparison with that of English.

Christopher Jones directed the multi-year French Online project which won the CALICO/Esperantic Association Access to Language Education Award in the Spring of 2007 for best publicly available web-delivered language instruction.

Xiaofei Kang continued to work on religion and tourism at China's ethnic borderland on an ACLS fellowship and an NEH collaborative research award.  Two collaborative papers are in press with Carnegie Mellon/Penn State Press and Palgrave Macmillan.

Keiko Koda edited a special issue of Language Learning featuring second-language reading and biliteracy development.

Susan Polansky supervised via weekly videoconferencing between the Carnegie Mellon Pittsburgh and Qatar campuses two undergraduate students in Hispanic Studies working on novels by Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno and collaborating on the development of a student edition of Unamuno’s novel Abel Sánchez.

Beryl Schlossman gave a reading at a literature festival in southern France, Le Printemps du Livre, in Cassis, France.

Naoko Taguchi continued to investigate pragmatic development and use among second language learners. Her papers appeared in TESOL Quarterly and Applied Linguistics.

Therese Tardio gave an invited lecture at Syracuse University on Chicana feminist literature.

Dick Tucker was selected as the Recipient of the University's Robert Doherty Award for Sustained Contributions to Excellence in Education.

Michael West participated in a week-long Summer Institute at Sonoma State University (California) in July, sponsored by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), which was devoted to the increased globalization of the undergraduate general education curriculum and included teams from 15 other academic institutions.

Sue-mei Wu continued to serve as the leader of PSLC’s Chinese LearnLab (funded by NSF). She created a new course, 82-134 Elementary Chinese (II) Online, and successfully organized a national PSLC Chinese LearnLab symposium. 

In Bonnie Youngs’ new course, "Révolutions romantiques", a non-H&SS student wrote an independent thesis on the three views of death described by three Romantic poets. Never before had he understood, or wanted to understand, poetry.

Yueming Yu attended the 6th International Conference on Chinese Language Pedagogy in Nanjing, China, and presented a paper on the new characteristics of our students in the 21st century and the new challenges we are facing in Chinese education.