Spring 2019 RGSLL Department Newsletter

Welcome to the George Washington University Department of Romance, German, and Slavic Languages and Literatures. Our department is home to a remarkable group of teachers and scholars of Russian, German, Spanish, Italian and French languages and literatures. The department’s faculty has been busy all year with scholarship in a variety of areas, from the analysis of literary and cultural works to the teaching of language and linguistics. Their specific achievements are highlighted in our newsletter.

In our classrooms, we excel in the study of languages and in the close, historical and contextualized study of literature and culture. Our majors take specialized courses that dig deep into a particular topic, and we also offer courses of broad interest to students everywhere in the university, from those who wish to learn a language in depth to others who are looking to study the writing, film and music of a particular nation or linguistic region.

Our faculty is innovative in the classroom and in their research. They are generous with their time and expertise. We are excited to bring to the university the best of our research and teaching.

Antonio López
Interim Chair

Professor Ariadna Pichs had a dilemma. Her Advanced Spanish Writing course had a limited capacity to allow students time for discussion, but it was also in high demand because it satisfied a writing requirement. How could she preserve the quality of the course while making it available to more students? Pichs decided to offer her course online, leading her to the innovative teaching and learning team of GW Libraries and Academic Innovation (GWLAI).

Instructional designers, teaching and learning specialists, instructional technologists, graphic designers, videographers and librarians partner with faculty to transform a traditional course into an effective and engaging online course. “Faculty know their courses inside and out. We help them to envision new ways for their students to achieve course goals and learning objectives in an online environment,” said Maddy Kadish, leader of GWLAI’s team of instructional designers.

In his book Imperial Idiocy: A Reflection on Forced Displacement in the Americas, Associate Professor of Spanish Christopher Britt Arredondo  aims to pierce through the layers of comfort, security, and prosperity that numb “imperial idiots “in the United States of America to the suffering of the displaced in Colombia and Mexico.

In her review of the book, Margarita Serje from the Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia, wrote:
"From the first to last paragraph, this book Christopher Britt Arredondo unsettles us with a shocking force similar to that of the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century. We are shocked to discover the cruelty and suffering that accompany the more than 65 million people in the world today who have been violently displaced from their homes. We are also shocked to learn that all this cruel suffering is tied to the displacement of intellectuals from the public sphere and their resettlement in the privatized realms of moral, intellectual, and political idiocy. Recalling that for the ancient Greeks idiocy was an abject condition suffered by individuals who had abandoned their social bonds and responsibilities, to say nothing of their creative potential, in order to selfishly pursue their private interests, Britt Arredondo leads us through a variety of ethnographic experiences that unfold in overlapping contexts of physical, emotional, cultural, political, and economic displacement. While focused on the forced displacement of ordinary families in Colombia and Mexico, Britt Arredondo proposes a suggestive reflection on the displaced position of contemporary intellectuals in his own country: the United States of America. This discussion is crucial for Latin America, where intellectuals and academics have traditionally sought to speak from a place that lies somewhere between science and politics. Although intellectuals in Latin America have played an active role in the construction of nations and states—contributing with the creation of utopias and counter-utopias and even proposing “research in action” as a political project of knowledge production—, this tradition is now subject to the same destructive processes of privatization that Christopher Britt Arredondo analyzes in Imperial Idiocy."

The majority of medieval and sixteenth-century Iberian manuscripts, whether in Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, Spanish, or Aljamiado (Spanish written in Arabic script), contain fragments or are fragments. The term fragment is used to describe not only isolated bits of manuscript material with a damaged appearance, but also any piece of a larger text that was intended to be a fragment. Investigating the vital role these fragments played in medieval and early modern Iberian manuscript culture, Assistant Professor of Spanish Literature Heather Bamford’s Cultures of the Fragment is focused on fragments from five major Iberian literary traditions, including Hispano-Arabic and Hispano-Hebrew poetry, Latin and Castilian epics, chivalric romances and the literature of early modern crypto-Muslims.

Bamford argues that while some manuscript fragments came about by accident, many were actually created on purpose and used in a number of ways, from binding materials, to anthology excerpts, and some fragments were even incorporated into sacred objects as messages of good luck. Examining four main motifs of fragmentation, including intention, physical appearance, metonymy, and performance, this work reveals the centrality of the fragment to manuscript studies, highlighting the significance of the fragment to Iberia’s multicultural and multilingual manuscript culture.

Abdourahman A. Waberi, assistant professor of French and Francophone literature, authored a volume of poetry titled Naming the Dawn which is introspective and inquisitive, reflecting a deep spiritual bond—with words, with the history of Islam and its great poets and with the landscapes in which those poets and Waberi himself have walked.

The poems in Waberi’s volume are introspective and inquisitive, reflecting a deep spiritual bond—with words, with the history of Islam and its great poets, with the landscapes those poets walked, among which Waberi grew up. The sage yearns here for the simplicity of each individual moment to somehow become eternal, for the histories and people that are part of him—his mother, his wife, his unborn child, the sacred texts that ground his being—to come together harmoniously within him, and to emerge through his words. Lyrical and personal, but with powerful historical and cultural resonances, these poems are the work of a master at the height of his powers.