Research and Innovation

The Routledge Handbook of Multiliteracies for Spanish Language Teaching: multimodalidad e interdisciplinariedad, co-edited by Elisa Gironzetti and Manel Lacorte, provides a comprehensive account of the main theoretical, curricular and pedagogical foundations for implementing and researching a pedagogy for multiliteracies in Spanish Language Teaching.

Written entirely in Spanish, the volume is the first handbook to connect the multiple disciplinary perspectives that contribute to a pedagogy for multiliteracies and to bring together renowned and young scholars from around the world to offer the most recent research and a multifaceted view of this field.

As a dauntless practitioner of exulansis, Marjan Moosavi writes this Note from the Field in an attempt to unlearn my practice of keeping silent about the challenges of moving across borders. It is based on a survey she did about the challenges and issues (e.g., securing visas and funds) that Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) scholars/researchers sadly encounter when they decide to participate in US conferences. While offering specific action items to the ATHE organizing committee, she reminds her fellow MENA colleagues who have experienced disconnect that their sadness should prompt a vivid upsurge of collective attention to the countless possibilities we organizers and participants still have for cosmopolitan friendship while taking joy and grief all in, at once, from afar.

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’?” 

The assemblage of different languages—Spanish, English and Indigenous, as well as in-between inflections—shows the complexity of linguistic and cultural connections between and within the two nations. The University of Maryland, College Park, along with Georgetown University, the Mexican Cultural Institute, and the Library of Congress came together to organize the original symposium, held in November 2021 in Washington, D.C. and College Park, Maryland. As co- organizers Eyda M. Merediz and Gwen Kirkpatrick put it in the introduction to this volume, “To work in poetry is to navigate manifold meanings, unanticipated relationships between joy and sorrow, play and lamentation, the everyday and the sacred, high and low, the oral and the written.”

Here, fourteen scholars and poets from Mexico and the United States attest to the power of contemporary poetry through essays on topics ranging from “Poetic Breadth in the 21st Century” to “Translation in a Global World,” from “Representing and Defying Affect through the Body Poetic” to the “Linguistic and Geographic Remappings of Indigenous Poetics.” These invigorating texts are complemented by an anthology of verse published in the original languages, as well as in English or Spanish translation. The volume’s intellectual and linguistic diversity offers a vibrant picture of the power of poetry today and for all time.

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.

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.