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Fearless Fulbrights: Dr. Valerie Orlando

Dr. Valerie Orlando is a decorated three-time Fulbright scholar. Her travels haven't just taken her around the world, they've also led to the publication of her six books as a distinguished literary scholar!

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Access2Alumni Virtual Career Mentoring Event

ARHU students can virtually explore career options and network with alumni on April 10.

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UMD screens restored surrealist film during international festival tour

University of Maryland students, staff and faculty explored and celebrated Spanish and Mexican filmmaker Luis Buñuel’s work at the Il Cinema Ritrovato on Tour film festival Thursday.

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NEH Grant Supports Work to Curate Data From Premodern Islamic Geographical Manuscripts

The innovative digital humanities project will enable historians to better identify geographic locations and place names from medieval documents.

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2024 Maya Brin Artist-in-Residence Mikhail Durnenkov

The Maya Brin Residency Program is proud to announce Artist-in-Residence, Mikhail Durnenkov, who will be a visiting faculty member in the SLLC and the TDPS for the Spring 2024 semester.

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Welcome to the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures in the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Maryland, College Park.

The School is a transdisciplinary teaching and research unit. Our students, faculty, and staff investigate and engage with the linguistic, cultural, cinematic, and literary worlds of speakers of ArabicChinese, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, JapaneseKorean, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish, as well as questions surrounding Second Language Acquisition and Cinema and Media Studies.

We invite you to learn more about our undergraduate and graduate degrees, our fields of study, and special programs like the Language House Living and Learning Program, the Language Partner Program, the Persian Flagship and Arabic Flagship Programs, Project GO, and the Summer Language Institutes.

Explore Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at UMD

Degrees

Undergraduate and Graduate Degrees

The School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures offers numerous undergraduate and graduate degrees in 12 languages and 16 different fields.


Fields

Fields of Study

Faculty, students and staff investigate and engage with numerous languages and fields, often through interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research and study.


Special Programs

Special Programs

SLLC offers several special language-learning programs, including the Arabic and Persian Language Flagships, the Summer Institute and the Language House Living and Learning Program.


Centers

Centers

The school is home to two centers, Roshan Center for Persian Studies, a landmark institution for the promotion of Persian language and culture, and the Center for East Asian Studies, which promotes the study and appreciation of East Asian cultures by offering a wide range of scholarly, artistic and community programs.


People

Faculty, Staff and Graduate Students

Search our directory to learn about our faculty, staff, and graduate students.

FACULTY, STAFF AND GRAD STUDENTS

Constructions critiques d’un « Balzac 1830 »

Critical constructions of an "1830s Balzac"

School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

Dates:

La présence fantomatique, chez Paul Bénichou, d’un Balzac théoricien du désenchantement invite à étudier la place qu’occupe la crise historique et politique de 1830 dans la critique balzacienne. C’est ce que cet article entreprend en proposant une rétrospective de quelques avatars mémorables de ce Balzac marqué de la « griffe de 1830 »: de l’idéologue déçu décelé par Pierre Barbéris entre les lignes d’un Balzac commentateur social, au prolifique homme de presse analysé par Roland Chollet, en passant par le conteur fantastique étudié par Pierre-Georges Castex, et enfin au Balzac, génial inventeur de lui-même, que révèlent les travaux de José-Luis Diaz. Au vu de ce panorama, c’est autant de perspectives distinctes mais complémentaires sur Balzac 1830 que la critique balzacienne invite à découvrir.

The ghostly presence of a Balzac, theoretician of disenchantment, in the work of Paul Bénichou invites us to examine the legacies of the historical and political crisis of 1830 in Balzac criticism. This article undertakes such an examination through a review of a number of Balzacs marked by the “stamp of 1830”: from the disillusioned ideologue lurking between the lines of his social commentaries, recognized by Pierre Barbéris, to the hyperproductive journalist analysed by Roland Chollet, to the narrator of the fantastic studied by Pierre-Georges Castex, and finally to Balzac, self-mythologizer, as revealed by the works of José-Luis Diaz. This overview invites wider critical consideration of the distinct yet complementary perspectives through which we can understand Balzac as a figure of 1830. 

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Georges, "roman mulâtre", au prisme de la presse abolitionniste

Dumas, Georges, roman, mulâtre, couleur, esclavage, abolitionnisme

School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

Dates:

Cet article envisage Georges, le seul roman dumasien à s’intéresser au statut contesté des personnes de couleur en situation coloniale esclavagiste, à la lumière des discours émancipateurs circulant à l’époque de sa rédaction, notamment dans la presse antiesclavagiste française. Il se propose d’interroger, ce faisant, les enjeux du roman de Dumas et le rapport de celui-ci à la pensée et à l’écriture abolitionniste. 

This article considers Georges, the only novel by Dumas to address the contested status of people of color in the context of colonial slavery, in light of the emancipatory discourses circulating at the time of its writing, especially in the French antislavery press. In doing so, it aims to examine the stakes of Dumas's novel and its relationship to abolitionist thought and writing.

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La Jeune-France au miroir : stratégies de légitimation d’une jeunesse romantique

The "Jeune-France" Reflected : Legitimation Strategies of a Romantic Youth

School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

Dates:

This article considers the literary self-representations produced by the so-called Jeunes-Frances around 1830, interrogating the simultaneous presence of two contradictory imaginaries: that of a Romantic youth and that of a century prematurely aged by commercialism. Several critics have noted the place of youth in the articulation of a generational self-consciousness, but the motif of youth, as taken up in the works of writers such as Borel, Gautier, Nerval, or O’Neddy also offers a means of questioning their marginalization within the literary marketplace and revealing the latter's corruption. The self-portraits these writers produce for their contemporaries thus not only underscore their collective identity, but constitute a novel discourse about youth itself.

Cet article se propose de revenir sur les portraits que les dénommés Jeunes-France donnent d’eux-mêmes autour de 1830 afin d’y étudier la coexistence de deux imaginaires contradictoires : celui d’une jeunesse romantique et d’un jeune siècle, prématurément vieilli par l’avènement des logiques marchandes. Au-delà de l’élaboration, déjà abondamment commentée, d’une conscience générationnelle, l’adhésion au motif de la jeunesse dans la production d’écrivains tels que Borel, Gautier, Nerval ou O’Neddy constitue un moyen inédit de remettre en question leur marginalisation dans les systèmes de légitimation en vigueur afin de mieux en exposer les failles. Les représentations qu’ils renvoient à leurs contemporains contribuent ainsi à façonner, par-delà l’identité collective, un nouveau discours sur la jeunesse.

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Choose the SLLC

Land Acknowledgement

Every community owes its existence and strength to the generations before them, around the world, who contributed their hopes, dreams, and energy into making the history that led to this moment.

Truth and acknowledgement are critical in building mutual respect and connections across all barriers of heritage and difference.

So, we acknowledge the truth that is often buried: We are on the ancestral lands of the Piscataway People, who are the ancestral stewards of this sacred land. It is their historical responsibility to advocate for the four-legged, the winged, those that crawl and those that swim. They remind us that clean air and pristine waterways are essential to all life.

This Land Acknowledgement is a vocal reminder for each of us as two-leggeds to ensure our physical environment is in better condition than what we inherited, for the health and prosperity of future generations.

Office of Diversity and Inclusion