Texas Tech University

Issue 20

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Message from the Chair

Pereira

Dr. Carmen Pereira
Department Chair and Professor of Spanish

As my first academic year as CMLL chair is winding down and I get to reflect on what we have achieved, I am proud and impressed by all the accomplishments in our department. As you can see under Academic Excellence in this Newsletter, our excellence in teaching and research keeps been recognized through awards, grants and placement of our graduates. I would like to especially mention Dr. Andrea Jonsson's 2019 Hemphill-Wells New Professor of Excellence in Teaching Award, and Dr. Chris Witmore, Professor of Classics, who was awarded a President's Excellence in Research Professorship for 2019-2022. Many of our faculty members and graduate students have received external and internal grants to help them develop their research or fund initiatives that benefit the whole academic community. Kudos to our four Graduate Students who received the Helen DeVitt Jones Excellence in Graduate Teaching Award. CMLL consistently has one of the highest averages in teaching evaluations in the College of Arts and Sciences, and this year has not been an exception. Thank you all for your incredible work as teachers!

It has been a busy and exciting year, packed with job searches, conferences, symposiums, and cultural activities. We successfully completed four tenure track searches, and we will have the pleasure of welcoming into the department Drs. Alicia Luque (Spanish Linguistics), Linda Gosner (Roman Archeology), Britta Anderson (Border and Latinx Studies), and James Lee (Qualia Professor of Applied Linguistics). Thank you to the committees who spent so much time and effort in these searches. Well done!

Céfiro, the annual Spanish graduate students conference, had a special celebration this year, marking its 20th anniversary. It was great to see again many of our alumni, who are now professors at other institutions. Our own Dr. Iñaki Prádanos, associate professor at Miami University of Ohio, was one of the keynote speakers. It felt like a family reunion. Happy anniversary to Céfiro!

The Identity and Resistance in Global Contexts undergraduate symposium and exhibition was a success, a testimony to our faculty's commitment to undergraduate research. As part of the Identity and Resistance multidisciplinary project we enjoyed world-class concerts by Ute Lemper and Ruthie Foster, and we had the privilege of hosting the artists in our building for a Q&A session. Caliche, the 8th Annual Applied Linguistics and Second Language Conference on Learning and Teaching, and the interdisciplinary conference on Animal Studies added to the vibrancy of our intellectual life and contribute to place CMLL in the national and international map of innovative research. Internationalization being one of our trademarks, for the second year CMLL hosted a Study Abroad Fair that showcased the unique study abroad opportunities that our department offers. Our Language Clubs and their outstanding outreach activities are windows to the countries and cultures that we hope our students will get to know firsthand in a study abroad setting.

Community outreach, service learning and engaged scholarship are on the rise in CMLL. The Language Laboratory and Research Center hosted what would be the first in a series of workshops for regional teachers to train them in new language-learning technologies. The English as a Second Language program created "English in the Evening" classes for the local international community. The Spanish Heritage program developed multiple service-learning activities, establishing connections with local schools and staging bilingual readings at the Lubbock Hispanic flea market. It was very sweet to hear in our building the noise and laughter of all the little kids who came from Lubbock's elementary schools to enjoy El Día de los Niños at CMLL and listen to bilingual story telling by our graduate students.

We are proud of the new "babies" in our academic offerings: Starting next fall, CMLL will offer a BA concentration in Chinese and in American Sign Language, and we are adding Korean to our language offerings. We will have new and exciting classes like "Developing Cultural Intelligence in a Global Society" and "Social Change in the Hispanic World through Cultural Expressions". Many of our faculty and instructors will be involved next year in the project "Global Readiness through Language and Culture". This project has recently been awarded a substantial grant from the Center of Global Communication, which will help to further increase the teaching caliber of our department.
A heartful thank you for their many years of service to Drs. Steve Corbett and Connie Scarborough. We will have a chance to celebrate them at the end of August and wish them the best in their well-deserved retirement.

Thank you to everybody for an outstanding year, and happy summer to all!

Carmen

Classical & Modern Languages & Literatures

  • Address

    CMLL Building, 2906 18th St, Lubbock, TX 79409
  • Phone

    806.742.3145