Research and Innovation

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.

Rutas is an integrated intermediate Spanish textbook and online platform utilizing current research in language teaching and learning. It is specifically designed for hybrid or flipped learning environments, but works well for total online learning and traditional classroom environments. The materials are completely integrated so that students are constantly working with recycled grammar and vocabulary. In addition, culture is intertwined throughout the text, while dedicated Cultura sections explore themes related to the country or region and chapter theme. Authors: Danielle C. Velardi, Roberta Z. Lavine, Paula V. Croci Date: 2019

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.

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.

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.

As a five-member international team including my former PhD students, we have developed the fuzzy lexical representations (FLRs) hypothesis. We are co-editing a Research Topic Fuzzy Lexical Representations in the Nonnative Mental Lexicon for Frontiers in Psychology and Frontiers in Communication. We propose the fuzzy lexical representations (FLRs) hypothesis that regards fuzziness as a core property of nonnative (L2) lexical representations (LRs). Fuzziness refers to imprecise encoding at different levels of LRs and interacts with input frequency during lexical processing and learning in adult L2 speakers. The FLR hypothesis primarily focuses on the encoding of spoken L2 words. We discuss the causes of fuzzy encoding of phonological form and meaning as well as fuzzy form-meaning mappings and the consequences of fuzzy encoding for word storage and retrieval. A central factor contributing to the fuzziness of L2 LRs is the fact that the L2 lexicon is acquired when the L1 lexicon is already in place. There are two immediate consequences of such sequential learning. First, L2 phonological categorization difficulties lead to fuzzy phonological form encoding. Second, the acquisition of L2 word forms subsequently to their meanings, which had already been acquired together with the L1 word forms, leads to weak L2 form-meaning mappings. The FLR hypothesis accounts for a range of phenomena observed in L2 lexical processing, including lexical confusions, slow lexical access, retrieval of incorrect lexical entries, weak lexical competition, reliance on sublexical rather than lexical heuristics in word recognition, the precedence of word form over meaning, and the prominence of detailed, even if imprecisely encoded, information about LRs in episodic memory. The main claim of the FLR hypothesis—that the quality of lexical encoding is a product of a complex interplay between fuzziness and input frequency—can contribute to increasing the efficiency of the existing models of LRs and lexical access.

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.

Browne’s analysis of the film Opera Aoi, which premiered at Hyper Japan in London in 2014, reveals the artistic possibilities and limitations of the combination of bunraku puppetry and Vocaloid music within the film. She argues that Opera Aoi suggests that these technologies, whether the centuries old bunraku or the 21st century Vocaloid, requires a human element to reach its expressive potential.

This invited conference at the Université de Bretagne in May 2021 examined the transnational experience of Raoul de Roussy de Sales, who covered events in the United States for the French press at the beginning of World War II. A bi-national French/American writer and intellectual, Roussy became an influential figure in France-United States cultural and diplomatic relations. As the author of articles published in The Atlantic Monthly and other north American outlets, he provided a bi-cultural view on the American experience. A version of this conference will be published in proceedings in 2022.

More specifically, this article examines the thematic and aesthetics implications of ennui in Stéphane Lafleur’s Tu Dors Nicole (2014) and Rafael Ouellet’s Gurov & Anna (2014) to better understand this new trend in the post-referendum Quebec context of the new millennium, which is simultaneously marked by weariness in the face of the question of national sovereignty, and an acceleration of cultural and economic globalization. To do so, I will first look at how ennui shapes films from the Quebec New Wave; I will then see how the films Tu Dors Nicole and Gurov & Anna both approach the question of ennui differently by questioning concepts of realism, reality, fantasy, and fiction; and finally I will explore the centrality of ennui in the Quebec New Wave in connection with the current socio-political conjuncture of Quebec. Full reference: “Cinéma indé et esthétique de l’ennui dans le renouveau du cinéma québécois,” Contemporary French Civilization, vol. 44, nos. 2-3, 2019, pp. 201-219.