Research and Innovation

Congratulations to SLA students and faculty, Yazhuo Quan, Tetiana Tytko, and Bronson Hui, on publishing a methodological paper in Research Methods in Applied Linguistics. In this article, the authors introduce an AI application for researchers engaging in meta-research (research on research) in the field. The article is open access and available here (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rmal.2024.100101). Part of the training received by the students was sponsored by the Faculty-Student Research Grant from the Graduate School awarded to Bronson Hui.

Quan, Y., Tytko, T., & Hui, B. (2024). Utilizing ASReview in screening primary studise for meta-research in SLA: A step-by-step tutorial. Research Methods in Applied Linguistics, 3(1), 100101. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rmal.2024.100101

An interactive guide to accompany Carmen Benito-Vessels’ research about early modern Spain and the early modern United States.

Interview posted in Big10 Geoportal "Finding “The Missing Link”: An Interview with Carmen Benito-Vessels".

The award of an NEH Summer Stipend provides the time and resources to make significant progress on my forthcoming book project, tentatively titled ”Algiers as ‘Realm of Memory’ in Contemporary Algerian Literature of French Expression, which engages with postcolonial and decolonial theory (Mignolo, Walsh, Achille, Vergès, Apter) in order to respond to a question proposed by Algerian scholar Réda Bensmaia in his book Experimental Nations, or the Invention of the Maghreb: “Under what historical conditions is a city, and a postcolonial city at that, transformed into a ‘site of memory’?” 

This article examines how the apologetics of the abbé Noël-Antoine Pluche (1688–1761)
impacted his presentation of botanical knowledge in the ten dialogues published in the first
and second volumes of his natural history book Le Spectacle de la nature (1732–1750).
Pluche popularized a conception of the physical world where plants are reducible to inert
mechanisms, devoid of life and agency. First, I examine the various intertwinements
of science and theology in his depiction of plant anatomy, by investigating his use of
mechanical analogies, his adoption of the sap circulation hypothesis, and his application
of the pre-existence theory to account for both generation and vegetative multiplication.
I compare Pluche’s understanding of plant growth with those offered by
contemporaneous gardening treatises, demonstrating that part of Pluche’s project included
opposing the materialist and animist undertones found in these gardening treatises that
emphasized vegetal life, self-organization, and sap agency.

Publication Details:

Notes & Records. The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, The Royal Society, UK,  January 2024. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2023.0033

Since its inception in 2017 the series, a neo-noir thriller set in Berlin in the final years of the Weimar republic, has reached audiences throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas and has been met with both critical and popular acclaim. As a visual work rife with historical and contemporary citations Babylon Berlin offers its audience a panoramic view of politics, crime, culture, gender, and sexual relations in the German capital.

Focusing especially on the intermedial and transhistorical dimensions of the series, across four parts-Babylon Berlin, Global Media and Fan Culture; The Look and Sound of Babylon Berlin; Representing Weimar History; and Weimar Intertexts-the volume brings together an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars to critically examine various facets of the show, including its aesthetic form and citation style, its representation of the history and politics of the late Weimar Republic, and its exemplary status as a blockbuster production of neoliberal media culture.

Considering the series from the perspective of a variety of disciplines, Babylon Berlin, German Visual Spectacle, and Global Media Culture is essential reading for students of film, TV, media studies, and visual culture on German Studies, History, and European Studies programmes.

In Gianfranco Rosi’s 2016 film Fire at Sea, the haunting duality of Lampedusa—an idyllic island off the coast of Sicily—unfolds. By day, a slingshot-wielding local kid named Samuele explores woodlands, blissfully unaware of the migrant crisis that engulfs his home. By night, navy warships patrol dark waters, their radios echoing the desperate pleas of migrants lost at sea. Lampedusa, once serene, has become a primary transit hub for those fleeing Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Their perilous journey across the Mediterranean, often on overcrowded makeshift boats, is the deadliest migration route globally.

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.

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.

This “micro edition,” makes available—in translation and properly contextualized—an invaluable but overlooked  resource, comprising a selection of articles from the first issue of the Revue (July 1834) as well as the first issue of the second volume (July 1835), including a “Prospectus” and a “Declaration of Principles,"  an article criticizing the slave system and the exclusion of “free people of color” from political life of the colonies, as well as a bill for the complete and immediate abolition of slavery. In order to facilitate understanding and best restore the historical and material context of these articles, the digital edition offers several reading modes: articles transcribed in modernized or original spelling, English translation and simultaneous display aimed at facilitating comparative reading. 

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.