Academic Excellence

Degrees Awarded

Doctoral Spanish

Maria Luz Bateman

Dissertation title: “'Yo quisiera ser feliz como las otras ¿A quién no le gustaría ser feliz?' Ficciones de felicidad femenina en la novela realista peninsular”
Dissertation chair: Carmen Pereira-Muro
Dissertation committee: Susan Larson, Antonio Ladeira
Dean's Representative: Kent Wilkinson

Gustavo Costa

Dissertation title: Reflexo e Imagem: Uma leitura comparativa de “A alma encantadora das ruas” de João do Rio e “Aguafuertes cariocas” de Roberto Arlt á luz da imagem recíproca Brasil-Argentina
Dissertation chair: António Ladeira
Dissertation committee: Genaro Pérez, Steven Sloan
Dean's representative: Jeffrey Mosher

Vicente Jose Iranzo Banuls

Dissertation title: The Processing of Grammatical Gender in Spanish in Heritage and Late Bilinguals: The Effects of Syntactic Distance, Task Modality, and Working Memory
Dissertation chair: James Lee
Dissertation committee: Idoia Elola, Alicia Luque
Dean's representative: Jeffrey Lee

Ana Rodriguez Padial

Dissertation title: Spanish heritage learners' cognitive approaches to multimodal writing: a multiple case study with digital storytelling.
Dissertation chair: Idoia Elola
Dissertation committee: Kristen Michelson, Ariana Mikulski
Dean's representative: Curtis Bauer

Master of Art Languages & Cultures

Jessica Mellenthin Classics (August)
Sarah Maria Schiffecker – German (August)
Claudia Schumann – German (August)

Bachelor of Art

Languages & Cultures

Crystal Green, American Sign Language/English Interpretation (December)
Nicholas Norton, Russian Language & Area Studies (December)

Spanish

August
Arrington, LaurelA.Black
ForrestS.Cora-Casllo
Veronica Duarte
Aiime Goodnight
Caroline G. Leyva
Alderete, Fernando
December
Alvarez, Daysi M.
Burrow, LaurenT.
Campos, Jose
Diaz Ramirez, Jeannette
Dominguez, Osvaldo C.
Higdon, Grace C.
Karkabi, Tayla M.
Larriva, Michelle F.
Portocarrero, AbigailS.
Robinson, Christy L.

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Faculty Awards & Recognitions

2020-2021 Institute for Inclusive Excellence CMLL Cohort

The Institute for Inclusive Excellence is a partnership between the the Teaching, Learning, and Professional Development Center, and the Center for Global Communication. Since its inception in 2009, The Institute for Inclusive Excellence provides faculty with an opportunity to promote a greater understanding of the academic value of diversity. Participants consider inclusive pedagogies and best practices in the classroom and in the university. Participants gain a richer understanding of the academic success that can be achieved through an institutional model of inclusive excellence. Learned strategies and insights will aid them to prepare Texas Tech students to be multiculturally competent and globally competitive.
Website

A virtual book launch for John Beusterien's new book, Transoceanic Animals as Spectacle in Early Modern Spain, took place on December 11, 2020 hosted by Susan Larson, Charles B. Qualia Endowed Professor of Romance Languages. Book discussion participants included Erika Gaffney, Amsterdam University Press and Abel A. Alves, Ball State University.

Carole Edwards, Associate Professor of French, was awarded a Fulbright grant for Spring 2021. She will be teaching at Ibn Zohr University (Agadir, Morocco) in the Postcolonial Studies Ph.D. program entitled Race, Ethnicity and Otherness in Literature and Culture.

Linda Gosner, Assistant Professor of Classical Archaeology – Awarded Loeb Classical Library Foundation (2020-2021) for $35,000 for her fieldwork in Sardinia.

Sarah Guengerich, the First Vice-President of the Grupo de Estudios sobre la Mujer en España y Latinoamérica, pre-1800(GEMELA), co-organized with her board a virtual symposium that gathered scholars from Europe, Latin America and theU.S. to advance our knowledge of women's cultural and textual production. The event took place in October 3-4, 2020. Virtual Symposium

Susan Larson, Charles B. Qualia Endowed Professor of Romance Languages - The work she did with her colleague Eva Woods Peiró of Vassar College 15 years ago on the volume Visualizing Spanish Modernity has been given a second, digital life by Routledge. They published the following e-book edition last month providing continuation to work their way into discussions of Spain's modern visual culture.
E-book

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Student Awards & Recognitions

Aleksei Proskurin received two scholarships for 2020-2021: Texas Tech Study Abroad Competitive Scholarship for $300, and an ACTFL Stipend for $100 toward registration for the American Council on the Teaching Foreign Languages 2020 Virtual Convention. This is one of only three awards given through ACTFL's Teaching and Learning of Culture Special Interest Group (TLC SIG).

Julien Léveque received a Texas Tech Study Abroad Competitive Scholarship for $600 for spring 2021.

Presentations

Dr. Britta Anderson launched three online initiatives this fall to help create community through the department despite the physical distance.

First, the CMLL Junior Faculty and Instructor Research Showcase was a whirlwind event on Zoom to highlight colleagues' work, in the hopes of sparking further conversations and collaborations. Participation was so enthusiastic that the event was divided into two days, Oct 2 and Nov 6. Presenters and audience members enjoyed identifying common themes across our interests and research.

CMLL Presenters in Part I of the Showcase, October 2

Raychel Vasseur, Assistant Professor, Spanish
Linda Gosner, Assistant Professor, Classics
Bruno Penteado, Vising Assistant Professor, French
Yanlin Wang, Assistant Professor of Practice, Chinese
Christopher Vasquez-Wright, Director, Language Lab and Research Center
Sarah Cantor, Instructor, Italian
Meixiu Zhang, Assistant Professor, Applied Linguists
Alec Cattell, Assistant Professor of Practice, Humanities and Applied Linguistics

CMLL Presenters in Part II of the Showcase, Nov 6

Alicia Miklos, Assistant Professor, Spanish
Ashley Voeks, Assistant Professor, French
William Tortorelli, Assistant Professor of Practice, Classics
Brandon Rogers, Assistant Professor, Spanish Linguistics and Translation
Britta Anderson, Assistant Professor, Spanish
Pamela Zinn, Assistant Professor, Classics
Lucas Wood, Assistant Professor, French
Brendan Regan, Assistant Professor, Spanish
Kristen Michelson, Assistant Professor, French & Applied Linguistics

Second, the Work-in-Progress workshops unite an interdisciplinary group of scholars who read and provide in-depth feedback to one-another. The faculty wring community this semester focused on the work of Alec Catell, Linda Gosner, and Yanlin Wang.

Finally, the Chicana/ Lanx Literature reading group brought together a group of dedicated graduate students interested increasing conversations around and amplifying the profile of Chicana and Lanx literature and culture in our department.

Virtual Discussion of Victoria Surliuga's Latest Book on artist Ezio Gribaudo

On November 21, 2020, the Texas Tech University Libraries and the Department of Classical & Modern Languages & Literatures co-hosted the virtual book presentation of the e-book by Associate Professor of Italian and World Cinema coordinator Victoria Surliuga, published by ytali.com (Venice, Italy) and the Texas Tech Libraries.  She has published extensively about Gribaudo and his works. In addition to "Homage to Ezio Gribaudo," her former writings include five other books, among them, "Ezio Gribaudo's Seashells" (2019, in Italian and English); "Ezio Gribaudo's Landscapes" (2018, in Italian and English); "Ezio Gribaudo: My Pinocchio" (2017, in English; "Ezio Gribaudo: Il mio Pinocchio" in Italian); and "Ezio Gribaudo: The Man in the Middle of Modernism" (2016, and Texas Tech University First Place President's Faculty Book Award for 2017-2018).

“Omaggio a Ezio Gribaudo / Homage to Ezio Gribaudo” is a bilingual e-book that brings together six years' worth of Surliuga's published writings in Italian and English about Italian artist Ezio Gribaudo in various venues such as “L'Osservatore Romano” and others. The e-book was published at the end of September as an open access e-book in the Texas Tech University Libraries Open Repository.

Gribaudo is a painter, sculptor, graphic artist, art publisher, and art collector who lives and works in Turin, Italy, where he was born in 1929. His award-winning production has been recognized with several international prizes, such as the XXXIII Venice Biennale Prize in 1966, and his work is part of many permanent collections around the world, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy.

A virtual discussion of the book via Zoom on November 19, 2020, featured artist Ezio Gribaudo himself, as well as his daughter Paola Gribaudo, art publisher and president of the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti di Torino, and Victoria Surliuga. Other participants included Texas Tech associate professor of Art History Janis Elliott, Texas Tech associate librarian Ian Barba, and journalist, publisher, and editor of the online journal ytali.com Guido Moltedo. Texas Tech President Lawrence Schovanec introduced the event.

Announcements: Link 1, Link 2, Link 3, Link 4

E-book:, Link 1, Link 2

• Direct Download of the E-book

Reviews/Mentions:, Link 1, Link 2

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Arts & Sciences Research Ready

The College of Arts & Sciences designed Research Ready, a collection of three prolific panels featuring research leaders from across Arts & Sciences and the TTU Health Sciences Center for faculty on December 2-4, 2020. Focus this year was centered on Navigating the Early Years, Approaching Federal Agencies and Partnering with Texas Tech Health Sciences Center.

The one-hour panels spanned across three days and were tailored to equip faculty across the college with insights and best practices to be successful across a variety of fields. CMLL German faculty Dr. Anita McChesney was among the five panelists for panel one, Navigating the Early Years.

Kristen Michelson (Assistant Professor in French and Applied Linguistics) and Applied Linguistics MA and graduate students Irina Lavrova, Mirai Nagasawa, and Aleksei Proskurin collaborated on a presentation for the ACTFL Virtual 2020 Convention, held online in November, entitled: How to enhance textbook cultural topics through multi-literacies pedagogies. They met every Friday afternoon for six weeks in September and October to develop lesson sequences for Russian, Japanese, German, and French. Their materials and presentation demonstrate ways to expand upon common foreign language textbook topics such as clothing, travel and accommodations, getting around town, and food, through sample instructional sequences using authentic multimodal texts, guided by multi-literacies pedagogies, with extension activities that foster community and civic engagement. Full citation: Michelson, K., Lavrova, I., Nagasawa, M., & Proskurin, A. (2020, November). How to enhance textbook cultural topics through multi-literacies pedagogies. [On Demand Session]. American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Virtual Conference.

Brendan Regan, Assistant Professor of Spanish, gave a virtual presentation titled "The role of proficiency in the acquisition of language-specific and dialectal-specific allophonic /d/ variation by L2 &Heritage Spanish speakers studying abroad in Sevilla" to graduate students and faculty on November 12.

Ashley Voeks, Assistant Professor of French, gave a virtual guest lecture as part of the Mahindra Humanities Center's Renaissance Seminar at Harvard University on November 17. Her lecture, “Beyond Violence: Writing Religious Toleration in Early Modern France,” examined the role of literature in shaping the idea and practice of religious toleration from the time of the French Wars of Religion through the 17th century. She focused in particular on French neoclassical tragedian Pierre Corneille's Polyeucte martyr (1643), demonstrating its potential to compel early modern readers and spectators to confront ideas, experiences, and emotions that in turn gave rise to tolerant thinking.

Yanlin Wang, Director of Chinese Studies at Texas Tech and Professor of Practice of Chinese, was one of nine guest speakers at the roundtable discussion, Language program development during Covid-19: Challenges and strategies, for the American Association of University Supervisors, Coordinators, and Directors of Language Programs (AAUSC-Asian Section) on November 19, 2020.

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Interculturality Across the Curriculum

Part of our mission at TTU, to “[prepare] learners to be ethical leaders for a diverse and globally competitive workforce” and on October 28, the most recent Quality Enhancement Plan focused on Communicating in a Global Society took place. These are clearly important goals for the education of all students at TTU, regardless of major. But what are strategies and resources for faculty to include the building and assessment of interculturality regardless of field of study? In this session, Dr. Raychel Vasseur, Assistant Professor of Spanish in Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures, began with an overview of key skills of interculturality, moved to how to incorporate developing such skills in your students and where to find additional resources, regardless of discipline, and finally, how you might assess student progress.

2021 SEDLL International Congress, Texas Tech University Presentation, “Identity Construction through Digital Storytelling: A Study Abroad Case Study”

Maya Edwards, Dr. Raychel Vasseur, Yerko Sepúlveda

Dr. Raychel Vasseur, Maya Edwards, and Yerko Sepúlveda presented “Perceived changes of identity construction through digital storytelling: A study abroad case study” on November 7, 2020.

Yerko García Sepúlveda was sponsored by the Humanities Center at Texas Tech to participate in the National Humanities Center's Summer Seminar. The title of his participation was "Passionate Teaching in a Research Environment: How to Create Meaningful Online Learning Experiences." Yerko's work will also be featured in the TTU Humanities Center Humanities Now podcast, coming out this spring.

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