Jody H. Cripps, assistant professor of ASL, served as editor-in-chief of the Society for American Sign Language Journal, which released its second volume. He presented his article from the journal “Stuttering-Like Behaviors in American Sign Language” at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association convention in Boston. Cripps published another article, “Exploring Signed Language Pathology: A Case Study of Professionals Working With Deaf Students Who Have Delay/Disorders in Signed Language Development,” in conjunction with his undergraduate student who was doing a research study at a residential school for the deaf on the topic of signed language pathology.
Stephen Fitzmaurice, assistant professor of Interpreting: ASL, published the chapter “Teaching to Self-Assess: Developing Critical Thinking Skills for Student Interpreters” in “The Next Generation of Research in Interpreter Education,” edited by Cynthia Roy and Elizabeth Winston (Gallaudet University Press). The South Carolina Educational Interpreting Center grant he received in 2016 was renewed and its funder has published the 2018 Annual Report. Fitzmaurice also presented “Reducing Your Grading Time: Student Self-Assessment Practices That Work” at the international Conference of Interpreter Trainers in Salt Lake City. He was elected to a four-year term as secretary on the board of directors for the Conference of Interpreter Trainers. He was also an invited presenter at the Southeastern Regional Symposium for College Educators of Teachers of the Deaf, and Educational Interpreters, in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he presented new empirical evidence regarding “Predicting Interpreter Performance.”
Joseph Mai, associate professor of French, published an extensive review of the Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh’s most recent film, “Graves Without a Name,” in The Mekong Review. This poetic documentary is an autobiographical exploration of mourning and reconciliation, 40 years after genocide during the Pol Pot regime.
Tiffany Creegan Miller, assistant professor of Spanish, gave the presentation “Uk’u’x kaj, uk’u’x ulew: Ecocritical and Ecofeminist Kaqchikel Maya Epistemologies in the Film ‘Ixcanul’ (2015)” at the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP/10) held Oct. 17-20 in New Orleans. Miller also gave a guest lecture by videoconference on Oct. 22 to a medical Spanish class at Brown University about her work with underserved Kaqchikel Maya patients in Guatemala.
Salvador Oropesa, professor of Spanish and Department Chair, participated in the roundtable discussion by language department chairs on October 15 at the Mountain Interstate Foreign Languages Conference at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Roberto Risso, assistant professor of Italian, published a book, “La penna è chiacchierona: Edmondo De Amicis e l’arte del narrare,” about Edmondo De Amicis (1846-1908), an Italian novelist, journalist, poet and writer of short stories. Risso’s book is the first to explore the entirety of De Amicis’s vast body of work.
Kumiko Saito, assistant professor of Japanese, appeared on “Writing Dystopia Now,” a radio program in The Cultural Frontline series on BBC World Service. On the Decemeber 9 broadcast, she spoke about cyberpunk and Japanese popular culture. The program is available on demand.
Daniel Smith, associate professor of Spanish, has been listed as an advisory board member on a European Research Council Advanced Grant application, “Cross-Community Bilingual Usage Patterns and Their Acquisition by Children.” His research on Spanish-English bilingualism in northeast Georgia is cited in the proposal for a potential project at the University of Cambridge. This will be the first major study of its kind to conduct a cross-community investigation of geographically separated groups of people who are nevertheless speakers of the same pair of languages, Spanish and English, in various locations in Europe and the Americas. He also presented “The Order of Morpheme Acquisition: Spanish and English in Contact” at the Mountain Interstate Foreign Language Conference at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Jae Takeuchi, assistant professor of Japanese, was invited to give a lecture at the University of Washington in Seattle as part of their Japan Studies Program Lecture Series. The title of the talk was “Who Knew? How Japanese Language Learners Negotiate the Challenges of Dialect in Small-Town Japan.”
Graciela Tissera, associate professor of Spanish, published “‘The Appeared’ (2007) by Paco Cabezas: Redefining the Book of Hidden Memories and Cyclical Time” in “Terrifying Texts. Essays on Good and Evil in Horror Cinema,” edited by Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper (McFarland & Company). She presented the research paper “Los castillos en la ficción cinematográfica: sobre los enigmas del espacio laberíntico” at the III Congreso Xàtiva: Historia, cultura e identidad. The conference on the theme of castles in history and fiction was held October 17-19 in Xàtiva, Spain, and was organized by the Universitat de València, Institució Alfons el Magnànim and city of Xàtiva. She also explored the historical memory of the civic-military dictatorship of Argentina (1976-1983) in her paper “Argentina ante la memoria de la última dictadura: percepciones fílmicas de la intrahistoria.” She presented her research at the conference “III Congreso Internacional Art-Kiné: estéticas de la memoria. Prácticas sociales del recuerdo: el cine, los medios de comunicación y la cultura,” which was held November 6-9 at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Eric Touya, professor of French, read a paper titled “Claudel dans/pour l’avenir: diplomatie, économie, éco-critique” at the Colloque International Paul Claudel Résolument Contemporain, sponsored by Sorbonne University, the National Library and the Comédie Française at the Université de Paris IV Sorbonne in Paris. He gave the presentation “Bonnefoy, Badiou, et l’avenir de la poésie: divergences et rapprochements” at the 2018 Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association Conference in Cheyenne, Wyoming. He also presented “Teaching Hélé Béji, Post-Colonialism, and the Arab Spring: Perspectives From Baudrillard, McClintock, Giroux” at the conference’s Teaching Women in French Roundtable. Touya published an article, “Le poète et le philosophe: Bonnefoy, Badiou, et l’avenir de la poésie,” in Revue européenne de recherches sur la poésie, No. 4. Paris: Classiques Garnier, and a book chapter titled “Teaching Hélé Béji, Post-Colonialism, and the Arab Spring: Perspectives From Baudrillard, McClintock, Giroux” in “Rethinking the French Classroom: New Approaches to Teaching Contemporary French and Francophone Women,” edited by E. Nicole Meyer and Joyce Johnston (Routledge, New York).
