Research and Innovation

Samuel Blank is working on his doctoral thesis. Still in its fundamental stage, it is an interdisciplinary research project at the crossroads of French and Judaic cultures. It is projected to be a comparative study among the works of various Franco-Judaic authors, including Romain Gary and Albert Cohen. More specifically, Samuel is interested in researching the roles of marginalized sexualities within this literary corpus. He analyzes how trends of twentieth century francophone literature coincide with those of the European Jewish experience, all of which serve as a framework to depict LGBT characters. It is his suspicion that these characters showcase a certain hidden spirituality within the Abrahamic tradition towards alternative sexualities. There is a morsel of Jewish wisdom that states that all learning is discovery of the self. Samuel believes that his research reveals greater understanding of not only literature and the world, but of himself and his calling. Similar to his masters thesis, themes of identity, religiosity, trauma, and marginalization are key pillars of this study. As this is an entirely theoretical research project. Samuel uses primary sources from these authors along with literary theory.

Co-edited with Karine Bertrand (Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada), this special issue focuses on the tensions between local, national and transnational as they are expressed, and shape Québec cinema and (new) media since 2000. Re-examining the role of nationalism within Québec evolving culture, exploring increasingly diverse and inclusive representations of Québec, and constantly redefining what it means to be "Québécois," Québec cinema and (new) media are evolving under the influence of new global tendencies while remaining deeply preoccupied with defining and redefining itself.

This essay focuses on the representation of the worker in one of the major examples of Italian political cinema—The Working Class Goes to Heaven (Elio Petri, 1971)—by proposing an approach that looks at the worker as a figure. The essay argues that a figure should be understood as the point of dialectical articulation between figuration and its opposite, namely, disfiguration. A figure comes into existence as the intersection between a form and its undoing, and is best described as a process in which figuration and disfiguration are not in a reciprocal position of inoperative externality, but one participates in and presupposes the other and vice versa. By way of this dialectic, the image doesn’t just aim to represent reality, but thinks the possibility of the emergence of a political subject. In Petri’s film, this political subject—the worker—is at the same time the protagonist of radical political struggle and the victim of an irreversible crisis due to the capitalist restructuring of production. In this quasi-schizophrenic split the essay locates the snapshot of the decline of a once-hegemonic figure that is slowly losing its centrality with the advent of a new form of capitalist organization.

This book explores modern political and intellectual movements to protect local languages and cultures in the Sinophone world. The first half of the twentieth century saw East Asia-wide pressure to suppress and erase local languages in favor of enforcing national and colonial languages. This book analyzes language activism in Japan-occupied Taiwan, British Hong Kong, and Northwestern China by situating it in a pan-regional anti-colonial consciousness that sought to protect indigeneity from nationalism and imperialism.

Written entirely in Spanish, the volume is the first handbook on Spanish Language Teaching to connect theories on language teaching with methodological and practical aspects from an international perspective. It brings together the most recent research and offers a broad, multifaceted view of the discipline.

This volume is the first to focus on teaching about Haiti’s complex history and culture from a multidisciplinary perspective. Making broad connections between Haiti and the rest of the Caribbean, contributors provide pedagogical guidance on how to approach the country from different lenses in course curricula. They offer practical suggestions, theories on a wide variety of texts, examples of syllabi, and classroom experiences. Teaching Haiti dispels stereotypes associating Haiti with disaster, poverty, and negative ideas of Vodou, going beyond the simplistic neocolonial, imperialist, and racist descriptions often found in literary and historical accounts. Instructors in diverse subject areas discuss ways of reshaping old narratives through women’s and gender studies, poetry, theater, art, religion, language, politics, history, and popular culture, and they advocate for including Haiti in American and Latin American studies courses.

Together with my colleagues from the University of Leipzig, Germany led by Denisa Bordag we have developed Ontogenesis Model of the L2 Lexical Representation. We introduce the blueprint of the Ontogenesis Model of the L2 Lexical Representation (OM) that focuses on the development of lexical representations. The OM has three dimensions: linguistic domains (phonological, orthographic, and semantic), mappings between domains, and networks of lexical representations. The model assumes that fuzziness is a pervasive property of the L2 lexicon: most L2 lexical representations are low resolution and the ontogenetic curve of their development does not reach the optimum (i.e., the ultimate stage of their attainment with optimal encoding) in one or more dimensions. We review the findings on lexical processing and vocabulary training to show that the OM has a potential to provide an interpretation for the results that have been treated separately and to move us forward in building a comprehensive model of L2 lexical acquisition and processing.

Nominated by faculty and students of the Latin American Studies Center (LASC), the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (SLLC), and the Departments of English and American Studies

The book provides a useful and comprehensive overview of all the important issues in L2 education of the last 50-60 years, and second, introduce the pedagogy of multiliteracies as a multifaceted approach that moves past the linguocentric perspective that has historically characterized L2 teaching by (a) leaving behind the divide between language and content courses, and (b) favoring a multimodal and socioculturally situated approach to L2 teaching that places oral, written, visual, and digital texts – understood broadly as the key meaning-making units – at its core.

Headlines on re-education camps in Xinjiang and a forced switch to Mandarin as the language of instruction in Inner Mongolian primary schools have brought concern in the international community about the wellbeing of China’s ethnic minorities. To address this concern, the current article examines China's minority police changes under Xi Jinping in the last few years.