Research and Innovation

Focusing on recently translated cookbooks from medieval Arabic and early modern Persian culinary traditions, this essay suggests that recipes and other culinary texts in translation can do more than simply diversify the contours of food studies: they can invite food scholars to question the categories and assumptions of our "gastronomic epistemologies," to borrow Jon Holtzman's phrase.

Gastronomica (2019) 19 (2): 87–95.

In a time when literature is accused of being self-centered and overly narcissistic, women’s autofiction in France since the turn of the millennium has been received with controversy because it disrupts readily accepted ideas about personal and national identities, gender and race, and fiction versus autobiography. Through the study of polemical writers Christine Angot, Chloé Delaume, and Nelly Arcan, I contend that, by recounting personal stories of trauma and sexuality, and thus opposing themselves in opposition to social convention, and by refusing to dispel doubts regarding the fictional or factual nature of their texts, autofiction resists and helps redefine categories of literary genre and gender identity. This book analyzes concurrently the textual and sociopolitical implications that underlie the (de)construction of the autofictional subject, and particularly how these writers constantly redefine themselves through performance and self-fashioning made possible by media and technology. Moreover, this work raises important questions relating to the media’s complicated relationship with women writers, especially those who discuss themes of trauma, sexuality, and violence, and who also question the distinction between fact and fiction. Proposing a new understanding of autofiction as a form of littérature engagée, this work contributes to a broader understanding of the French publishing establishment and, of the literary field as a cultural institution, as well as new insight on shifting notions of identity, the Self and nationalism in today’s ever-changing and multicultural French context.

I analyze this volume departing from the privileged position that my wide experience as a glocal emcee grants me. Departing from this insider position, the following recurrent issues were identified in this volume: 1) a failure to offer a critical reflection of what the authors consider by Hip-Hop; 2) a lack of positionality towards Hip-Hop; 3) an over focus on, and legitimation of, mainstream music industry ideologies and practices; 4) erasure (Irvine & Gal, 2000) of Latinxs in the US context. To avoid repetition, I will analyze the first three of these recurrent issues that intersect many of the chapters after I offer a qualitative review of the strengths and weaknesses observed in every chapter. The recurrent issue of erasure of Latinxs in Hip-Hop, since is an issue limited to the US context, will be analyzed in its corresponding chapters within the next section.

In the past decade, there has been a resurgence in the study of Hebrew in traditional andcharterpublicschools. However, the types of schools teaching Hebrew and the demographics of students studying Hebrew do not resemble those of earlier iterations of public school Hebrew programs that trace back to the early 20th century. Although the majority of Hebrew programs still disproportionately serve Jewish students, many schools in urban and suburban districts across the country are teaching Hebrew to students from diverse racial, religious, linguistic, and ethnic backgrounds. This project set out to take measure of these programs and provide some baseline information about Hebrew teaching in public schools in 2018 by investigating their demographics, instructional approaches, and language learning objectives.

This text considers contemporary China’s language ideology and how it supports China as a rising global power player. It examines the materialization of this ideology as China’s language order unfolds on two front, promoting Putonghua domestically and globally, alongside its economic growth and military expansion. Within the conceptual framework of language ideology and language order and using PRC policy documents, education annals, and fieldwork, this book explores how China’s language ideology is related to its growing global power as well as its domestic and global outreaches. It also addresses how this ideology has been materialized as a language order in terms of institutional development and support, and what impact these choices are having on China and the world. Focusing on the relationship between language ideology and language order, the book highlights a closer and coherent linguistic association between China’s domestic drive and global outreach since the turn of the century.

Juan Carlos Quintero-Herencia, professor Spanish and Portuguese in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, received a grant from the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) to host an symposium at the University of Maryland in Spring 2019 on Spanish Caribbean literature and culture.

This proposal describes the design and organization of an experimental symposium focused on the critical reconsideration of periods, situations and texts that have been polemics in the modern and contemporaneous Spanish Caribbean. It is, in addition, an intriguing proposal for its promise to combine esthetics and policy, literary critique and analysis of the current political, economic and environmental uncertainties that confront the societies of the Caribbean.

In Latin America, the Caribbean occupies a secondary or inferior position, and is often overlooked.  This project makes a significant effort to increase the academic visibility of this region, therefore it obtained a high score in the evaluation of the potential of its impact criteria.

The organizers and participants in the symposium, who come from different countries in the Hispanic Caribbean and other countries, show an excellent transnational and hemispheric commitment that includes the United States, Canada, Europe and Latin America, and seek to be involved in the proposed discussion and to supply texts to established and emerging academics, from a great variety of institutions. In summary, it is an original project, it is very well developed and is clear in its proposals, objectives and use of the budget.

 Selection Committee:

The project selection committee in this cycle was presided over by Mara Viveros-Vigoya, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Vice President of LASA and President-elect, and included the participation of María Victoria Murillo de Columbia University; Emiliana Cruz, from Ciesas, México DF, Vivian Andrea Martínez-Díaz, Universidad de los Andes and Jaime A. Alves of CSI/CUNY and Universidad ICESI/Colombia, former winner of the FORD-LASA grant in 2015.

Louis Malle's collaboration with oceanographer and environmental activist Jacques Cousteau on "The Silent World" was a training ground and foundational work for the budding French director in 1956. The specific treatment of three elements -the presence of recording technology, the observation of marine life, the use of sound- pervading the film as a documentary feature had a significant influence on Malle's narrative and aesthetic choices as soon as he turned to fiction two years later, with "Elevator to the Gallows" and "The Lovers" (and on to his early 1960s films -"Zazie dans le métro", "A Very Private Affair", "The Fire Within"). Malle's interest in the mediatisation of vision, his 'mechanistic" conception of cinema, his acute perception of the representational and narrational inadequacy of verbal language, his ethnographic concern (shared with Jean Rouch) for "an ethic of looking and listening", his disenchanted gaze on the man-machine, his shift between nature (animals) and mankind (in particular children) -all speak to a constant engagement with issues of realism, truth and objectivity, and, ultimately, to a more assertive political thrust than is ordinarily perceived in his early work.

Laura Demaría, professor of Spanish, has published her first novel. 

“A diferencia de Utopía, la isla prodigiosa que se desea y es un sueño, St. Louis y todos los lugares de este blues siempre han estado presentes sencilla y abrumadoramente. Aquí no se inventa nada, ni se desea lo inencontrable. "St. Louis Blues" afirma la inmanencia de la vida, describiendo, con palabras discretas y casi dolorosas, esos secretos con que esta va construyendo su evidencia: nuestros encuentros, nuestras pasiones, nuestras soledades, todo aparente, pero inasible; todo resonante pero incomprensible. Esta inmanencia nos rodea y también nos invade; pero ¿qué sentido tiene? Laura Demaría nos ofrece una narración de permanente suspenso: no duda que lo existente tenga sentido; pero ¿dónde está?, ¿qué cara tiene?, ¿es el lugar donde estoy y el ostro que veo en el espejo?, ¿o son también los lugares de los otros y sus pasiones? ¿Hay una respuesta? Con una sabiduría gozosa, esta narración recorre estas supremas preguntas.” - Jorge Aguilar Mora, professor emeritus of Spanish.

A phonological priming experiment reports inhibition for Russian prime-target pairs with onset overlap in native speakers. When preceded by the phonological prime /kabɨla/, the target /kabak/ (кобыла – КАБАК, mare – PUB) takes longer to respond than the same target preceded by a phonologically unrelated word. English-speaking late learners of Russian also show inhibition, but only for high-frequency prime-target pairs. Conversely, they show facilitation for low-frequency pairs. In semantic priming (e.g. carnation – DAISY), facilitation is observed for the same two lexical frequency ranges both in native speakers and learners of Russian, suggesting that the primes and targets in the low-frequency range are familiar to the nonnative participants. We interpret nonnative phonological facilitation for low-frequency words as evidence for sublexical processing of less familiar words that is accompanied by reduced lexical competition in nonnative lexical access. We posit that low lexical competition is due to unfaithful, or fuzzy phonolexical representations: nonnative speakers are unsure about the exact phonological form of low-frequency words. Such unfaithful representations are not strongly engaged in lexical competition and selection. High reliance on sublexical rather than lexical processing may be a general property of nonnative word recognition in case when the words are less familiar and have a low level of entrenchment.

Central America has long been pivotal to U.S. economic and geopolitical interests and the U.S. political and cultural imaginary because of the isthmus’s geographical location. Combined, U.S. interventions, local armed conflicts, and the migration flow from Central America produce the conditions that make possible the production of a U.S. Central American literature. In their works, U.S. Central American writers such as Tanya Maria Barrientos, Francisco Goldman, Héctor Tobar, Marcos McPeek Villatoro, and poets like Maya Chinchilla, Lorena Duarte, Leticia Hernández-Linares, and William Archila, among others, not only give visibility and voice to an array of U.S. Central American subjectivities but also contribute to an expansion of Latina/o literary history, now forced to reckon with Central America. This chapter examines the production of U.S. Central American literature before and beyond the age of neoliberalism.