Gabriela Stoicea, assistant professor of German, received the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. The annual dean’s awards are peer-reviewed by the college faculty awards committee. Each award comes with a plaque of recognition, placement on the list of awardees in the dean’s office and a cash award.
As one nominator commented, “[Her] classes rank among the very best that the university has to offer. … I found them to be incredibly intellectually stimulating, and other students and I often mulled over ideas from class discussions long after class had ended.”
Another wrote, “She always upheld a certain atmosphere in her classroom that encouraged productive and thought-provoking conversation. She led us as we powerfully worked through seemingly difficult topics, such as societal oppression on the individual or the complexities of moral standards.”
And, from her own teaching statement, Professor Stoicea reminds us all of this very important message: “Contributing to my students’ intellectual formation is a privilege I never take for granted, but one that I work hard to earn every single day.”
Stephen Fitzmaurice, assistant professor of American Sign Language, was awarded $1,011,547 from the South Carolina Department of Education to establish the first South Carolina Educational Interpreting Center at the University Center in Greenville. Clemson will partner with the South Carolina State Department of Education and the South Carolina School for the Deaf and the Blind to open the new center.
The center aims to improve the quality of educational interpreters in South Carolina by providing national skills and knowledge assessments, in-service professional development sessions, mentoring and technical assistance to educational interpreters and local school districts.
“As a nationwide leader in preparing educational interpreters,” Fitzmaurice said, “we are excited to receive this award which will go a long way not only to improving the skills of working educational interpreters in South Carolina but towards improving educational access for children who are deaf and hard of hearing across the state.”
Other faculty news:
Luca Barattoni, associate professor of Italian, gave a lecture at the Department of Cinema and Television Studies at Kadir Has University in Istanbul in December 2016. His topic was “The Relevance of the Neorealist Debate to Contemporary World Cinema.”
Jeff Love, professor of German and Russian, co-edited a new collection, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky: Philosophy, Morality, Tragedy, published by Northwestern University Press in November 2016.
Joseph Mai, associate professor of French, published an article on how a contemporary French novelist uses literary experimentation to explore ways in which humans and animals are defined in relation to one another: ‘“Un tissu de mots”: Writing Human and Animal Life in Olivia Rosenthal’s Que font les rennes après Noël ?’ appeared in Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal: 49, 3. He also participated in the scientific committee and was an invited speaker at the World Cinema and Television in French Conference, held in September 2016 at the University of Cincinnati.
Tiffany Creegan Miller, assistant professor of Spanish, published a book chapter entitled, “Una sociedad fragmentada: la heterogeneidad maya durante el conflicto armado guatemalteco y la violencia de la ‘posguerra’ en ‘Insensatez’” in the edited volume Horacio Castellanos Moya: El diablo en el espejo, published by Ediciones Eón in Mexico and edited by María del Carmen Caña Jiménez and Vinodh Venkatesh. In other news, Miller also presented work on appropriations of Japanese cultural forms in K’iche’ Maya poetry at the Symposium on Indigenous Languages and Cultures of Latin America (ILCLA) at Ohio State University. She also was invited to be a guest lecturer for a medical Spanish class at Brown University to discuss health care initiatives in Guatemalan Maya communities.
Kim Misener Dunn, lecturer of American Sign Languages, co-authored the peer-reviewed article “Early Reading for Young Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children: Alternative Frameworks,” which was published in April 2016 in the online journal Psychology.
Salvador Oropesa, department chair and professor of Spanish, published the book chapter “Lonely Souls in ‘Solo Dios Sabe’ by Carlos Bolado: Pastoralism and Syncretic Spirituality in Times of Crisis” in The Latin American Road Movie, edited by Jorge Pérez and Verónica Garibotto. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 121-36.
Johannes Schmidt, associate professor of German, was lead editor for a co-edited volume Herder and Religion. Contributions from the 2010 Conference of the International Herder Society at the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana (Synchron 2016). The volume includes his own contribution “Light of Nature/Light of Reason. Herder’s and Kant’s Religion Essays.” He is also included in another Herder publication with an article entitled “Johann Gottfried Herder’s Adrastea: History in Relation” (Beate Allert (ed.): Herder: From Cognition to Cultural Science (Synchron 2016).
Graciela Tissera, associate professor of Spanish, presented her research on the supernatural in Hispanic films, “Spirits Trapped between Worlds: The Devil’s Backbone by Guillermo del Toro,” and chaired a panel on film and paranormal phenomena at the Film and History Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in October 2016. Tissera’s students, Jodie Holodak and Rebecca McConnell, participated in the panel to discuss their Creative Inquiry projects related to health and business topics in film and media. Tissera also attended the Film and Literature Conference organized by the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina in November 2016 to present her research paper entitled “Theories of Knowledge in the Fiction of Borges and Cortázar.”
Eric Touya, associate professor of French, published The Case for the Humanities: Pedagogy, Polity, Interdisciplinarity. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, December 2016. Countering the perception that the humanities are unessential, this volume contends that their well-being has not only academic but also cultural, political, and existential ramifications.
