In the media

  • GSL garnered some publicity about its decision to add Korean to its roster of taught languagues beginning this fall, including from the online The Korea Times and MIT’s student newspaper, The Tech, and the SHASS newsletter, Said and Done. Said and Done also published a story on the winners of GSL’s de Courtivron Writing Prize.
  • Jeff Ravel is one of the main organizers of an international conference hosted at MIT and Harvard of the Comédie-Française Registers Project May 19-21, which was covered in this MIT News article.
  • Elizabeth Wood participated in a panel discussion on “Russia Expertise in American Foreign Policy” May 12 and the event was captured on VIDEO.
  • Margarita Ribas Groeger and Dagmar Jaeger gave a live webinar on “Interactive Media: How New Technologies Enhance Language Learning Environments” on May 16, invited by the International Association for Language Learning Technology (IALLT) .

GSL Open House

GSL hosted a successful open house in the “Global Tent” at the MIT Centennial Celebrations on April 23. Thank you to all our volunteers!

Publications

  • Emma Teng co-authored an article with Prof Wen-hui Anna Tang (National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan), “Looking Again at Taiwan’s Lü Hsiu-lien: A Female Vice President or a Feminist Vice President?” in the Women’s Studies International Forum (2016), pp. 92-102
  • Ian Condry’s book, The Soul of Anime,  was recently published in Chinese translation in by the National Chiao Tung University Press, and so is now available in English, Japanese and Chinese. Ian will be on leave in the fall of 2016 to work on a new book manuscript about music and inequality.
  • Marie-Hélène Huet has a new book, Jules Verne’s Le Testament d’un excentrique, critical edition (Paris, Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2016). READ A REVIEW. She also published two articles: “Editorial Paternity” in Collectionner l’extraordinaire, sonder l’ailleurs, Festschrift in honor of Jean-Michel Margot, (Encrage 2016); and “Editorial,” Verniana, February 2016.
  • Leanna Rezvani published a book review in Renaissance Quarterly this spring. The review is of Jacob Vance’s Secrets: Humanism, Mysticism, and Evangelism in Erasmus of Rotterdam, Bishop Guillaume Briçonnet, and Marguerite de Navarre. She also had a book review of Domna C. Stanton’s The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France: Women Writ, Women Writing in European History Quarterly.

Conferences

  • Bettina Stoetzer organized a multi-day day workshop on “Feral Technologies and Multispecies Dumps” at the Anthropocene Campus in Berlin, organized by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science April 15-22. Two graduate students from HASTS at MIT participated in the conference. Clapperton Mavhunga from STS at MIT will also hosted one of the other workshops.
  • GSL was well represented at the recent Association for Asian Studies (AAS) conference in Seattle, March 28-April 1. Ian Condry, Heather Lee, Paul Roquet and Emma Teng presented papers.
  • Takako Aikawa co-organized the Annual Spring Conference of the American Association of Teachers of Japanese, held in conjunction with the AAS, where Yoshimi Nagaya presented a paper “Expand Your World by Reading – Reading Project for Mid-Advanced Learners,” which was well-received. Two hundred thirty people attended the AATJ conference, with presentations on topics in language pedagogy, linguistics, second language acquisition, and literature by more than 100 presenters.

Teaching English as a Second Language

  • Jane Dunphy reports that the entire English Language Studies group presented at their major international conference, TESOL, in Baltimore April 5-8.  Jane presented a 90-minute workshop grounded in business communication research on job search communications. The workshop provided an interactive framework for writing powerful cover letters. Activities included interpreting job ads, recognizing and highlighting relevant strengths and demonstrating a good fit between the advertised position and applicant’s profile.
  • A.C. Kemp presented  “Flipping the ITA Classroom: Practical Strategies for Success” on April 6 at the TESOL conference. This presentation outlined ways that her video series “The User-friendly Classroom”  could be used to create a flipped classroom for International Teaching Assistants. The video series was made with the support of the Gilberte Furstenberg & Douglas Morgenstern Fund for Innovation in Language Instruction.
  • Eric Grunwald presented a poster session on “The Writing Process in L2 Composition: A Website for Instruction” at the TESOL conference April 6.

Business Chinese and CLTA

  • Haohsiang Liao, Tong Chen, Min-Min Liang, and Kang Zhou attended the 5th Business Chinese Workshop held at the University of Pennsylvania on April 29-30. This came in anticipation of the Chinese Group launching a new Business Chinese course in the Fall, 2016.
  • The section was also well-represented at the Second Chinese Language Teachers Association (CTLA) International Symposium on Chinese Language Teaching and Learning, College Park, University of Maryland, Maryland, April 1-3.
  • Min-Min Liang made two presentations at workshops. One was a teaching activity, “Word Association for Vocabulary Learning.” The other presentation was “Responsive Classroom: Classroom Interaction for Active Learning.”
  • Tong Chen chaired a panel and presented his paper entitled “Analysis of Errors in Intermediate Level Students’ Reading and Writing and Pedagogical Strategies.”

More Conferences and Talks

  •  Jing Wang gave two talks in April: “Maker as Entrepreneur, Maker as Change-Maker,” at the University of Manchester ; and “The Maker Movement in China and NGO2.0,” for the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University.
  • Emma Teng presented the keynote at the “Negotiating Identities: Multi-Racial Individuals in China, Japan and Korea” symposium, held at the Center for Asia Pacific Studies, University of San Francisco on April 13. She also delivered the Taiwan Studies Lecture at the UCLA Asia Institute on May 10. Emma and Heather Lee presented together at a roundtable on “Teaching Asian American Studies with Digital Tools” at the Association for Asian American Studies Annual Meeting in Miami, Florida on April 28.
  • Paloma Duong was invited by the Department of Spanish at Wellesley College to give a talk April 1, “Dos revoluciones mundiales” [Two World Revolutions] . On April 14 she gave a talk, “Digital Cuba: Contemporary Screen Cultures.” for the Department of Romance Studies at Brandeis University. On May 5 and 6 she gave a talk at a Writing Workshop and Alumni Roundtable for the Department of Latin American and Iberian Studies at Columbia University.
  • Haohsiang Liao was invited by the Chinese Association of Western Massachusetts to give opening remarks at the Asian Culture Festival in Chicopee on May 14.  The event was a cultural gala with festive performances, such as Asian music instruments, Tai Chi demonstration, martial arts, and Chinese calligraphy.
  • Spanish lecturers Margarita Ribas Groeger, Lissette Soto, Ana Yáñez Rodriguez, Mariana San Martin, and Roberto Rey Agudo, participated in an international symposium “Reshaping Hispanic Cultures: Symposium on Recent Scholarship” at the Observatorio Cervantes at Harvard University May 12-14. Their presentation was: “La enseñanza de la cultura en la clase de ELE.”
  • Leanna Rezvani organized a panel on Questions of Love, Religion, and Devotion in the Writings of Marguerite de Navarre for the Renaissance Society of America Conference in Boston on April 1.  She also presented a paper entitled, “Saint Sebastian and the Mule-driver’s Wife: Marguerite de Navarre’s Renaissance Martyr” on the panel.
  • Nilma Dominique gave a talk entitled “100 Shades of Black: the perception of race in Brazil” at Wellesley College on April 7 as part of the open course Unity and Diversity in the Hispanic World. Nilma also reports that she organized a conversation between the Portuguese language students and Noam Chomsky about East Timor in April.
  • Maria Khotimsky gave a guest lecture, “Maxim Gorky’s World Literature Project,” at the Translation Lunch Lecture Series for the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication at Princeton University on  March 28.
  • Roberto Rey Agudo was a speaker and panel organizer at the conference of the Northeast Modern Language Association in Hartford on March 18th. He presented “From Annotation to Essay: Developing Writing Proficiency through Digital Annotations” at a panel, Digital Humanities in the Modern Language Curriculum: Beyond the Language vs. Content Divide.

And also…

  • Dagmar Jaeger’s “Visual Art, Media, Creative Expression” students visited the Willy Römer photography exhibition: Life in the City of Berlin 1919-1933 at the Goethe Institut, Boston, with a tour through the exhibit by the institute’s director on April 25.  On May 8, the group also watched the German silent movie “Asphalt” from 1928 with live music at the Goethe Institut.  GSL sponsored the tickets for the film event. Dagmar also organized an exchange with local high school students who are studying German so they could meet MIT students and learn more about German on the university level.
  • Maria Khotimsky supervised a cultural event at MIT that hosted Russian speakers from MIT and the local Russian community. The event  “Total’nyj Diktant” is a competition in literacy and writing skills, which is hosted  annually across the world on the same day. This year, it took place in 549 cities across 58 countries. 30 people came to write a dictation to check their literacy and attended a poetry reading afterward.
  • Roberto Rey Agudo participated in a MISTI-Spain orientation session April 14 with a presentation, “Ten Things You Should Know about Spain.”
  • Nilma Dominique presented to a group of students who will be spending the summer in Brazil through the MISTI Program to discuss practical and cultural aspects of living in the country. The meeting took place at the April 29 Solta a Língua (picture below). Solta a Língua is a monthly Portuguese-language lunch table hosted by GSL, MISTI-Brazil, and MISTI-Portugal.
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