2024 RGSLL Newsletter
Message from the Chair
Faculty Spotlights
Department Kudos
Alumni Class Notes
Message From the Chair
Dear RGSLL community,
As the newly elected chair of the RGSLL Department, I am happy to update you on the accomplishments of our faculty and the exciting initiatives taking place within our department. It’s been another busy year!
Manuel Cuellar’s monograph, Choreographing Mexico: Festive Performances and Dancing Histories of a Nation, was awarded the 2023 de la Torre Bueno® First Book Award from the Dance Studies Association. Kathryn Kleppinger published a co-edited volume titled The Marseille Mosaic: A Mediterranean City at the Crossroads of Cultures. Abdourahman Waberi published his latest book, Notre France Noire, and his first book as a translator, Cette couleur-là, authored by Tracy K. Smith. Sergio Waisman issued a collaborative translation (with Yaki Setton) of Argentine poet’s Mirta Rosenberg’s El paisaje interior. Israel Rolón-Barada published Sara Montiel: La mujer y la estrella más allá del mito. And I published a co-edited volume titled Gendering the Renaissance: Text and Context in Early Modern Italy.
This fall, the department hosted a wildly successful food festival where hundreds of students mixed with faculty and enjoyed treats from our many countries. We’re hoping to make this event even bigger next year! In addition to book presentations, lectures and readings, we’ve organized an ongoing film series on immigration and are hosting a career readiness event for our majors and minors. We have a number of events planned for this semester. We would love to have you attend if you are in D.C.!
We are so grateful for your continued involvement in and support of our department. Thank you very much to all of you who donated, contributed your expertise and wisdom through workshops and guest lectures, reached out to update us on your accomplishments, provided advice and resources to current students and stayed involved in other myriad ways. Please stay in touch and share your news with the RGSLL community. Thank you for your continued support!
With all best wishes,
Lynn Westwater
Department Chair
Faculty Spotlights
Meet Victor Valdivia Ruiz
Professor Víctor Valdivia is an assistant professor of Spanish language and the director of the RGSLL Spanish Language Program. He received his PhD in linguistics from the University of New Mexico in 2016. His research focuses on the interplay between language use and grammar, particularly in contexts of language and dialect contact. Before coming to GW, he taught Spanish and Hispanic linguistics at the University of New Mexico and at the University of Guadalajara in Mexico.
His other research interests are Spanish as a heritage, language, language and dialect contact, Hispanic sociolinguistics, functional syntax and discourse analysis.
Meet D. Bradford Marshall
Professor Brad Marshall is a teaching professor of French language and the director of the RGSLL French Language Program. He has worked with French, Italian and English as a foreign language at the university and adult education level in Europe and the United States for over 35 years.
Since he arrived at GW, the program has grown from zero to four full-time colleagues who, along with devoted visiting and part-time faculty, have helped build a stable and innovative curriculum. Highlights have included a module on the Business and Culture of Wine (Jocelyne Brant), a new intermediate level in-house textbook (Sarah-Kay Hurst), new advanced grammar materials (Hadia Anaye), a greater focus on film and theater techniques in teaching (Noëlle Gires), as well as karaoke and presentations of artwork at a D.C. museum. Brad is currently working with GW’s Instructional Technology Lab on a web-based “Adaptive Feedback Project” to create online activities where individual targeted suggestions can be programmed for all possible errors.
When not in the classroom or at the computer, Brad spends his time listening to music from a collection of over 2,000 digital, vinyl and 78 rpm records; hiking the D.C. region’s many trails; playing chess (very slowly); and enjoying long dinners with family and friends.
Department Kudos
Hadia Anaye led a cooking class as part of a series of events celebrating Francophone culture for the French Embassy Centers of Excellence network.
Heather Bamford published an essay titled “Reading Magic in Early Modern Iberia” in the open-access, highly-illustrated Brill volume called Vernacular Books and Their Readers in the Early Age of Print (c. 1450–1600), edited by Andrea van Leerdam (Utrecht University), Anna Dlabačová (Leiden University) and John Thompson (Queen’s University, Belfast).
Masha Belenky moderated a roundtable on “Diversifying the Nineteenth Century” at the Modern Language Association Convention in San Francisco. She also presented a paper titled “The Magic of the Ephemera” as part of a research methods panel at the annual conference of the Society of Dix-Neuvièmistes, in Oxford, U.K., and a paper titled “Les passantes avant ‘A une passante’: Urban Encounters in Panoramic Literature” at the Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium in Baltimore, Md.
Charlee Bezilla published an essay, “Writers, Readers, Coders, Translators?” in Digital Studies/Le champ numérique as part of the special issue “Computer Modelling and Simulation for Literary-Historical Research: VESPACE and Social Physics/Modélisation et simulation informatiques pour la recherche en histoire littéraire: VESPACE et la physique sociale” (vol. 13, no. 2, DOI). Among other presentations, she gave a paper titled “Beyond the Plurality of Worlds: Epistolarity and Time in Rétif's Les Posthumes” at the Early Career Seminar of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in Rome, Italy, and another titled “Teaching Social Justice through the Bande dessinée” at the American Association of Teachers of French convention in Trois-Rivières, Québec. Her class FR 3600: Writing the Self participated in a virtual slam poetry writing workshop with the Québécois slam artist Élémo (Marc-Olivier Jean), sponsored by the Centre de la Francophonie des Amériques and the American Association of Teachers of French, in celebration of National French Week.
Yvonne Captain presented a paper on a panel of the International Studies Association in which she applied game theory to predict outcomes: “The Rise of Black Women Vice-Presidential Running Mates: A Political Reality or a Passing Trend?” She also traveled to Puerto Rico on research trip sponsored by the Institute for Humane Studies.
Manuel R. Cuellar published “Los mecos de Veracruz: Queer Gestures and the Performance of Nahua Indigeneity,” in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies and “Radical Imaginings of the World-Yet-to-Come: Centering the Latino Child in Oriel María Siu's Rebeldita the Fearless in Ogreland /Rebeldita la Alegre en el País de los Ogros" as part of the special issue of Letras Hispanas, “Arendt’s Children: Narrating Migration and Family Separation,” edited by B. Christine Arce and Lorella Di Gregorio. He also moderated the panel “The Afterlife of Deportation in Mexico” and presented a paper titled, “Centering the Latinx Child in Oriel María Siu’s Rebeldita the Fearless in Ogreland/Rebeldita la Alegre en el País de los Ogros'” at the Latin American Studies Association in Vancouver, Canada. He also taught a danzón class at the Library of Congress as part of the Latino Heritage Celebration in September. A feature on his research and dance work appeared in GW Today. He also published the online article "Black Imaginaries and Nahua Rhetoric in Colonial Mexico: Diario de Don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin" in Ethnohistory: The Journal of the American Society for Ethnohistory.
María-José de la Fuente presented a lecture titled “Education for sustainable development: Developing multicompetent language users in the foreign language classroom” at the Teaching Beyond the Curriculum: Transdisciplinary and Multilingual Perspectives at the Modern Language Association convention. She also gave an invited talk at the University of Virginia on “Sustainability Education as a Critical Area in the Advanced Foreign Language (FL) Curriculum: A Problem-Based Approach to Teaching and Learning.”
Margaret Gonglewski was elected vice-chair of the “Languages for Specific Purposes” Special Interest Group of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. She presented “The Language Learning Assistant Program: A Novel Approach for Connecting and Engaging Learners across Levels” with graduating senior Esha Mukherjee, at the Greater Washington Association of Teachers of Foreign Language conference. She also presented “Study of Stakeholder Perceptions of a Language Learning Assistant Program” at the Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in New York. Additionally, she co-led a faculty professional development program focused on “Green Business and CleanTech in Germany” in Frankfurt, Heidelberg and Stuttgart. Her Business German class also enjoyed a Q&A session with the ambassador of Liechtenstein at the embassy in Georgetown.
Sarah-Kay Hurst continued to organize exciting initiatives for French students, including excursions to the Renwick Gallery (often called “The American Louvre”) and to the Embassies of Haiti and Senegal. She attended a ceremony for French students Carla Dell’Angelica and Amy Ozinsky as they received 2023 Outstanding Academic Achievement awards.
Kathryn Kleppinger published a co-edited volume on the city of Marseille titled The Marseille Mosaic: A Mediterranean City at the Crossroads of Cultures. It explores the relationship between Marseille and the rest of France, Europe and the Mediterranean and proposes new models for the study of place by integrating approaches from the humanities and social sciences.
Laura Lazzari published “Narrations of Traumatic Childbirth in Contemporary Transnational Women’s Writing,” in Trauma Narratives in Italian and Transnational Women’s Writing, ed. by Tiziana De Rogatis and Katrin Wehling-Giorgi (Sapienza Università Editrice, 2022). The volume is available in Open Access.
Ludmila Michael and Galina Shatalina organized an event for students to share their experiences studying abroad in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Kyrgyzstan with other Russian students. They also took third-year Russian students to the Textile Museum as part of their study of arts from Russia and Central Asia.
Peter Rollberg published the article “Filming the Fighting Spirit: Martial Arts in the Cinema of Kazakhstan” in the online journal KinoKultura.
Israel Rolón-Barada published Sara Montiel: La mujer y la estrella más allá del mito. The book examines the life and cultural legacy of the great 20th century film star.
Mary Beth Stein participated in a panel discussion on “What Remains: The Dialectical Identities of East Germans” organized by Georgetown’s BMW Center for German and European Studies on October 3—the 30th anniversary of the Day of German Unity. She also participated in a poster session at the Oral History Association meetings in Baltimore. Her poster described the design, implementation and learning outcomes of oral history projects that students conduct in her The Lives of East Germans course.
Abdourahman Waberi published Notre France Noire, co-authored with Alain Mabanckou and Pascal Blanchard. He was also interviewed on France Inter. He also published his first book as a translator, Cette couleur-là, the most recent poetry book by Pulitzer Prize awardee and Poet Laureate Tracy K Smith.
Sergio Waisman published a collaborative translation (with Yaki Setton) of Argentine poet Mirta Rosenberg’s El paisaje interior [Interior Landscape] (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023). One of her poems was featured in the Paris Review.
Lynn Westwater published a volume of essays titled Gendering the Renaissance: Text and Context in Early Modern Italy (University of Delaware Press, 2023). Offering a complex picture of gender in early modern Italian literature and culture, the volume seeks to repopulate the literal and literary spaces of the Renaissance with the women who occupied them, but have often been elided in the historical record. She also published the article titled “Lo que Eva puso en peligro: la polémica bíblica en la trayectoria de Sara Copia Sullam, poetisa judía veneciana y ‘salonière’” in the journal La Querella de las mujeres, vol 13 of the series La Biblia y las mujeres.
Our student outreach committee, led by Hadia Anaye, Noëlle Levy-Gires, Sarah-Kay Hurst, Mary Beth Stein and Ludmila Michael, organized our first RGSLL International Food Festival! The event was a huge success with music, decorations and delicious food prepared by faculty and student groups.
Thank you to our Film Committee members Mary Beth Stein, Tessa Gurney and Manuel Cuellar for all their efforts to organize a year-long film series on immigration.
Sarah-Kay Hurst, Margaret Gonglewski, Charlee Bezilla and Víctor Valdivia collaborated on the “Future Features and Pedagogical Innovations” initiative—a series of workshops that bring faculty together to discuss and share best practices and new teaching techniques.
Alumni Class Notes
- Eduardo Ayala Fuentes, BA ’11, is a major gift officer for Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). He will also be graduating with an executive master’s in public administration this May.
- Jay Boyles, BA ’03, led the U.S. European Command’s Russia analysis group from 2019-2021, in the lead-up to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He has since served in several U.S. Navy leadership positions and will retire from active duty later this year.
- Elaine Cannarella, BA ’75, received her PhD in comparative literature \from Stony Brook University, New York, 48 years after graduation from GW.
- Dennis Carroll, BA ’78, retired in 2008 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and now divides his time between New York and Fort Lauderdale with his husband and traveling in, among other places, Southeast and South Asia and Europe while auditing courses at Columbia University.
- Kerry Ann Dobies, BA ’07, gave birth to her second child, a boy, in February 2023. She is a senior project manager at PATH, a global health NGO, and is based in Washington, D.C.
- Irina Karmanova, BA ’10, celebrated 15 years with the U.S. Department of State and started a new role as public diplomacy officer with the Office of Policy and Public Outreach in the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs.
- Katherine Prichard, BA ’05, lives in Austin, Texas, with her family and runs a boutique, academic consulting and test prep company, Bee Tutored.
- Joshua Rivers, BA ’13, is a senior user researcher and cultural broker at the nexus of the German and American video game industries.
- Stefanie Ulrey, BA ’91, teaches English language and composition in a local Bay Area Community College.
- Helen Yablonski, BA ’22, is pursuing her master’s degree in global communication at GW.