Stephen Fitzmaurice, assistant professor of ASL, published “Best Practices for Educational Interpreters in South Carolina,” a technical assistance resource for the South Carolina Department of Education Office of Special Education Services. He was also featured in the Member Spotlight of the national Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf.
Alma García-Rodríguez, lecturer of Spanish, received her Ph.D. in Spanish literature from the University of Florida. Her dissertation focused on the representation of the city in six novels from the Hispanic Caribbean: Santo Domingo, La Habana and San Juan. She took a Neo-Baroque perspective to study these cities as elements that stand against an established order and authority in order to create a new identity that governs itself. She plans to continue researching Caribbean literature.
Daniel Holcombe, lecturer of Spanish, published the essay “Salvador Dali’s Everyman: Renaissance and Baroque Classicism in ‘Don Quixote and the Windmills (1946)’” in Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America. Here he traced Dali’s classical trajectory through art historical analyses of the third watercolor illustration from the artist’s first illustrated edition of “Don Quixote.” He also published “Salvador Dalí’s “Don Quixote: High Art or Kitsch?” in Laberinto Journal. He was recently named an editor of this online peer-reviewed journal published by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. His article in Laberinto defines Dalí’s role as an illustrator of the 1946 text. It also reveals how Dalí achieved what critics have deemed impossible: the rendering of both fantasy and reality in the same pictorial composition. Holcombe presented related research at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association conference in Atlanta in November 2017. He also published a book chapter, “Marco Berger: Homoaffective Edging and Cinematic Queered Continuums,” in Intimate Relationships in Cinema, Literature, and Visual Culture, edited by Gilad Padva and Nurit Buchweitz for Palgrave Macmillan. In the chapter, Holcombe combines queer theory with Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytical theory l’objet petit a to analyze the spectator gaze and cinematic techniques in two films by Argentinian director Marco Berger.
Jason Hurdich, lecturer of ASL, was named the Marie Griffin Interpreter of the Year. The award, given by the Southeast Regional Institute on Deafness, recognizes his outstanding service to the deaf, hard of hearing and deaf-blind communities of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee and the Carolinas. Read more about his award here.
Salvador Oropesa, professor of Spanish and Department Chair, published the article “‘El Quijote’ en la trilogía de la frontera de Cormac McCarthy: Neobarroco del Southwest” in the Colombia-based journal Lingüística y Literatura 72 (2017): pp. 135-55. In his abstract, Oropesa said: “We read Cormac McCarthy as a novelist of the Baroque of the Southwest paying special attention to syntax, vocabulary, and intertextuality. The bulk of the critical attention on McCarthy is anglocentric. We cover the influence of Spanish literature, mainly Cervantes, in the Border Trilogy.” He also presented the paper “La Trilogía del Baztán de Dolores Redondo como guía de liderazgo en el contexto de la novela policiaca contemporánea española” at the XXVII annual congress of the International Association of Female Hispanic Literature and Culture November 8 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
Kelly Peebles, associate professor of French, published the article “The Head, the Heart, and Hysteria in Jeanne Flore’s ‘Tales and Trials of Love’ (c. 1542)” in the Journal of Medical Humanities. She presented the paper “Mothering in the Shadow of the Crown: Royal cousins, religious refugees, and the nurturing influence of Renée de France” at the Royal Studies Network’s Kings & Queens 6 conference, which was held in Madrid, Spain, September 12-15.
Graciela Tissera, associate professor of Spanish, presented her research on armed conflicts and historical memory in film, “Paco Cabezas y Gilles Paquet-Brenner: intersecciones de la memoria histórica en el cine,” at the IX Congreso de Análisis Textual Trama y Fondo (University of Valladolid, Spain) in October. Tissera also attended the II Congreso Internacional Figuraciones de lo Insólito en las Literaturas Española e Hispanoamericana organized by the University of León, Spain in October to present her research paper “Jorge Luis Borges y David Roas: percepciones de múltiples universos y seres soñados.” The research focused on the perception of time, space, and personal identity related to supernatural dreams and idealist philosophy in the fiction of Borges and Roas.
Eric Touya, associate professor of French, gave the lecture “Make Civil Rights and the Humanities Happen at Your Library” on October 12 at the 2017 South Carolina Library Association Conference in Columbia. He also read the paper “Humanizing Economics: Pedagogical Approaches to Transforming the Homo Economicus” at the 32nd Annual Interdisciplinary Conference in the Humanities held October 27 at the University of West Georgia in Carrollton.
