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French and Italian
Spring 1996, Vol. X
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Newsletter of the
Department of French and Italian |
Supported in part by dues-paying
members of the I.U. Alumni Association |
It's a short commute from your
computer to Bloomington. Visit the
French and
Italian Home Page and while you're at it, why not
send
us a class note.
Table of Contents:
Diana Guiragossian Carr
was born on July 11, 1930, in Cyprus, where her
father was on an academic mission. Shortly
thereafter, the family returned to France. Except for
a three-year interlude, both magical and frightening,
in the Dauphiné region during World War II, she
spent a happy childhood and youth in the midst of her
family in Bourg-la-Reine, just southwest of Paris.
Upon graduation with the Baccalauréat from
the Lycée Marie Curie, where she discovered her love
for Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Enlightenment, she
pursued studies in French literature at the Sorbonne
and earned the Licence-ès-lettres. When her
father was transferred to New York, she accompanied
her family and continued her graduate studies at
Columbia University, where she received an MA and PhD
in French literature.
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Diana Guiragossian Carr
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After teaching for four years as an assistant
professor at Columbia, she joined the Indiana
University faculty in fall 1966 as an associate
professor of French. She was promoted to the rank of
professor in 1970.
Her love of literature was fostered and guided by her
father, a man of great culture and learning, who
loved to discuss with her the books she had read. It
was only natural that she should choose the reading
and teaching of literature as a profession. In
addition, she had the good fortune to be a student of
two eminent scholars of the Enlightenment, Daniel
Mornet at the Sorbonne and Norman Torrey at Columbia.
A competent editor has read everything in the field,
everything in adjacent fields, and even much in a few
remote fields. And has forgotten nothing. Norman
Torrey had found that Carr met these requirements
when, in 1966, he suggested that his colleague Otis
Fellows invite her to co-edit Diderot Studies
with him. Seven volumes of this journal, certainly
the most reputable one on this continent devoted to
18th-century French literature, had appeared by that
year. Carr accepted and, since it was also the year
she moved to Bloomington, she brought a valuable
piece of luggage with her.
Editing a journal involves vast scholarship, endless
evaluation, correction, correspondence, and, above
all, ensuring survival in hard times. The burden of
such responsibilities has gradually shifted to Carr
over the years; even before the loss of Otis Fellows,
it had begun to weigh ever more heavily on her
shoulders. Volume XXVI was published this year, and
retirement will by no means keep her from continuing
to edit the journal.
As its title indicates, the journal emphasizes the
study of Diderot, but it also offers essays on other
18th-century writers and the Enlightenment in
general. In this respect, it resembles Studies on
Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, published
by the Voltaire Foundation in Oxford, England. This
foundation is likewise publishing The Complete
Works of Voltaire, an enormous project that
began some 30 years ago and involves scores of
scholars in many different countries. The editors
invited Carr to contribute critical editions of
Voltaire's 32 facéties, or satirical
sketches, which she had investigated in her book Voltaire's
Facéties (1963). This study demonstrated for
the first time that these compact works had
considerable literary merit and therefore deserved
the attention of Voltaire critics, who had been
neglecting them. She has finished editing 10 facéties,
which are awaiting publication in The Complete
Works, and she is working on more.
In the meantime, articles by Carr on 12 facéties
have appeared in the Dictionnnaire de Voltaire,
published in 1994. She has also published articles on
subjects as diverse as Voltaire, Diderot, the novel,
Delacroix, and Port-Royal-des-Champs. She is
presently working on a book titled Diderot in
England 1750-1878, a study of the
philosophe's audience and influence. In recognition
of her scholarship, grants have been awarded by
Columbia University, the American Council of Learned
Societies, and Indiana University. She received a
major grant from the National Endowment for the
Humanities and a fellowship from the ACLS. She has
served on the Modern Language Association's Scholars'
Library Selection Committee and the Gottschalk Prize
Committee of the American Society for
Eighteenth-Century Studies. She continues to serve as
reviewer and evaluator for the NEH.
Because of her high academic standards, she has
awakened an enduring loyalty in her students,
including those she taught years ago at Columbia,
where she directed 17 MA theses. At Indiana she has
directed nine PhD dissertations, three of which have
been published, and she is directing two more. The
authors of these dissertations are: Alan J.
Singerman (1970), full professor and chair
at Davidson College; Philippe de Gain
(1973), assistant professor at Widener University; Annie-Christiane
Bertand-Guy (1974); Margaret Moses
Young (1974), who subsequently graduated
from Columbia law school and currently is a lawyer in
New York City; Shawncy Jay Webb
(1977), assistant professor at Ball State University;
William Edmiston (1977), full
professor and chair at the University of South
Carolina; Suellen Diaconoff (1978),
associate professor and chair at Colby College; Camille
Garnier (1978), associate professor at IU
Southeast; and Thomas Vessely
(1979). Carr is currently directing the PhD
dissertations of Wendy Carson Yoder
and Mihaela Ionescu, who teaches at
the University of Oklahoma.
With Carr's retirement, the department of French and
Italian will lose a brilliant and versatile teacher,
a highly dedicated graduate examiner and graduate
adviser, and a hard-working member of many
committees. The university will lose a conscientious
and learned member of tenure, promotion, selection,
and curriculum committees, as well as a widely
respected representative of the humanities.
Fortunately, however, neither will lose the
distinguished scholar and editor, for she will stay
in Bloomington, where her husband is still teaching.
It was in Bloomington that she met and married Richard
Carr, her colleague in the French
department, whose specialty, Renaissance humanism and
literature, complements hers. They both love
classical music, art, and gardening. Having now to
contend with only one very crowded academic schedule,
they hope it will be easier to travel, particularly
to England and France, to see friends and family. It
is for the latter that Carr is writing her memoirs of
World War II.
Her many friends congratulate her and wish her well.
From September 28 to October
1, film directors, critics, students, and the public
met at Indiana University's "European Cinemas,
European Societies, 1895-1995"
conference, organized by Distinguished Professor
Peter Bondanella, chair of the department of West
European Studies and member of the faculty of the
French and Italian department. Among those present at
the conference were three internationally renowned
film directors, who introduced their films and
answered questions after the screenings. American
directors John Landis (Blues Brothers, Animal
House) and Peter Bogdanovich (The Last
Picture Show, Paper Moon) were joined by the
Italian director Ettore Scola (Passione d'amore,
Une Giornata Particolare). Some of the most
respected figures in film theory and criticism
delivered papers, including French sociologist Pierre
Sorlin, who gave the conference's keynote address.
Altogether, nearly 70 papers were presented and five
films screened to large crowds. The purpose of the
conference was to discuss and to celebrate 100 years
of European film.
Directors Ettoer Schola, Peter Bogdanovich
and John Landis, with critic Lino Miccciche and Peter Bondanella at last
fall's conference on European cinema.
Former chair Emanuel
Mickel and present chair Rosemary
Lloyd were recently asked to
address the readers of this issue of the French and
Italian Alumni Newsletter.
Professor Mickel wrote:
In the months since leaving the chairmanship I have
rediscovered the pleasures of uninterrupted time for
pursuing questions of intellectual interest and of
the almost unlimited time one can devote to class
preparation. This continues to be a joy for me.
As for the chairmanship, I enjoyed a number of
challenges in the eleven years I spent as chairman:
watching the growth of our graduate program from 44
graduate students to 65; doubling the number of 300,
400, 500, and 600 level courses that we offer
annually; more than doubling AI stipends; and
increasing needed faculty positions in a period of
general retrenchment. Among the personal aspects, I
enjoyed trying to solve problems in a fair and
equitable manner. It was an opportunity to serve
faculty, students, and staff in a way that supported
their efforts as teachers, scholars, and
professionals.
Professor Lloyd wrote: With
the new millennium fast approaching and with the
astonishingly rapid increase in technological aids to
teaching and research, being asked to chair the
department of French and Italian is both exciting and
challenging. We need to respond to new interests and
new possibilities while retaining our high standards.
We also need to counter the growing trend to see
Spanish as the second language of this country. Our
majors are going into different kinds of careers, and
we must adapt to prepare them for a wider variety of
options and a greater range of demands.
Indiana University's French and Italian department is
lucky in having faculty with such a variety of skills
and subject areas, which allows us greater
flexibility than smaller departments facing the same
problems and prospects. Many of our faculty come from
quite different backgrounds, have experienced, and
are the products of, other concepts of education, and
this, too, is to our advantage. When I came to
Bloomington five years ago, from a mixed Australian
and British educational background, I was both
pleased and surprised by certain practices at Indiana
University. Like many of my colleagues I have been
enriched by perceptions here, and in turn I can
enrich the department.
As we adapt to, indeed exploit, all these changes,
we're sure that you, as alumni, will be as excited as
we are, and we hope that you will share your ideas,
insights, and experience with us. Let us know what
careers you have gone into, what use you have made of
your education, and how your languages have benefited
you. In the meanwhile, let's all adopt and adapt the
recent AATF slogan: "Languages open up the world
for me."
A native of the town of Angers,
capital of Anjou, Laurent Dekydtspotter
received his doctorate in linguistics from Cornell
University in 1995. In addition to terroir French, he
is interested in Creole and the languages of West
Africa. His research area is the relationship between
syntactic structure and the interpretive component of
the mind. His dissertation, Null Operator
Variable Structures, Predication and the Interpretive
Interface, proposes a restrictive theory of the
syntax and interpretation of predicate formation in
Natural Language, and investigates consequences of
this theory for the theory of grammar.
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Laurent Dekydtspotter
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Dekydtspotter's interests go beyond predication; he
has developed a theory of the interpretation of ne
que, exploring how it gets to mean seulement.
He is currently working on a dialectal progressive
form involving the preposition après as in:
Jean est après tirer les vaches, "Jean
is milking the cows," found in western France
and Canada. He is interested in how après
induces the progressive, and what this form tells us
about the nature of the progressive in human
cognition more generally.
Since his arrival in Bloomington, he has started a
project on the relative clauses of child French,
which differ substantially from the relative clauses
of standard French. He is currently teaching an
undergraduate and a graduate class in French
linguistics; the latter class explores what the
theory of grammar tells us about the nature of French
and how French is learned by the child and the adult.
In his spare time, he enjoys cooking, music, and his
two pet cockatiels, and works on improving his
horsemanship.
In April 1995, the department gave
three awards for outstanding teaching by associate
instructors. The winners were Daria Roche,
Kelly Sax, and Paolo Villa,
all of Bloomington.
Awards also went to undergraduate and graduate
students on the basis of outstanding scholarship. The
Cannings Prize, given annually to the outstanding
student majoring in French linguistics, honors the
late Professor Peter Cannings. This year, the award
went to Dan Golembeski (Aubern
Hills, Mich.).
Michael Belsley (Bluffton) received
the Lander MacClintock Award, which is given to an
outstanding student, graduate or undergraduate,
majoring in either French or Italian, alternating
annually. MacClintock, who taught here for more than
40 years in both languages, essentially established
Italian studies at IU.
Kira Moore (Bloomington) received
the Grace P. Young Graduate Award, given for overall
excellence in literary studies on the graduate level.
Catherine Walden (Columbus, Ind.)
and Megan Wesling (Cincinnati) were
named winners of the Grace P. Young Undergraduate
Award.
Named for the late professor of French literature and
civilization, the John K. Hyde Award is given to an
outstanding undergraduate majoring in French. This
year's recipient was Marcia Maniak
(Bloomington).
The Albert and Agnes Kuersteiner Memorial Prize,
established in memory of Agnes Duncan Kuersteiner,
Class of 1907, and her husband, Albert Kuersteiner,
professor of French from 1897 until his death in
1917, is given to a sophomore or junior for
excellence in both the spoken and written language.
This year's winner was Sarah Bridges
(Montgomery, Ala.).
Five undergraduates majoring or minoring in Italian-Salina
Bussien (Bloomington), Aaron
Greenberg (Columbia), Alison Trainer
(Dallas), Alison Gilmartin
(Hopatcong, N.J.), and Hugh Aprile
(West Lafayette)-were inducted into Gamma Kappa
Alpha, the national honor society for college
students of Italian.
Also honored were two graduate students of Italian, Colleen
Ryan (Hawthorne, N.Y.) and Lara
Polignano (Lenexa, Kan.), recipients of the
1995 Captain Mario G. Vangeli Award for scholarly
excellence.
At the same ceremony, Alexander M. Galt (Green Bay,
Wis.) was awarded the first Carol Ann Brush Hofstadter Memorial Scholarship
for Bologna-bound IU students. The mother of two small children and
the holder of a bachelor's degree in Italian and art history, as well
as a master's in library science from IU, Carol Ann Brush Hofstadter
died on December 12, 1993, at age 42 in Verona, Italy, where
her husband, IU Professor Douglas Hofstadter, was conducting research
on artificial intelligences at the IRST Institute near Trento. As Professor
Edoardo Lèbano stated during the presentation, "Carol
loved learning, she loved IU, and particularly she loved the IU Italian
department and the Bologna program. It is thus most fitting that in
her memory there be an annual award to support an outstanding IU student
in Bologna." The Carol Ann Brush Hofstadter Memorial Scholarship
was funded by donations from her family and many friends across the
nation and around the globe.
The gift of a beautiful crystal bowl was presented to
Professor Emanual Mickel at the
annual award ceremonies, and his accomplishments as
department chair were praised by Professor Albert
Valdman.
Undergraduate students recently elected to Phi Beta
Kappa include Rachel Franklin (Bloomington),
Susan Mattler (Indianapolis), Elise
Millett (Ho Ho Kus, N.J.), Bambi
Semroc (Cortland, Ohio), Rachel
Shaevel (Roswell, Ga.), Marcia
Maniak (Bloomington), Elizabeth
Stanciu (Wheaton, Ill.), Catherine
Walden (Columbus, Ind.), Megan
Wesling (Cincinnati, Ohio), Michael
Belsley (Bluffton), Jelani Eddington
(Muncie), Bryan Fahrbach (Indianapolis),
and Marcet Townsend (Los Angeles).
On April 3, 1995, a play-reading of La
Répétition ou l'Amour puni, by Jean Anouilh,
was presented in Ballantine Hall by a group of French
graduate students. Excellent performances were given
by Elizabeth Scheiber as La
Comtesse, Charles Pooser as M.
Damiens, Matthew Zimmerman as Le
Comte, Rebecca Stevenson as
Hortensia, Dan Golembeski as Héro, Robert
Seaman as Villebosse, and Daria
Roche as Lucile. The presentation was
directed by Charlotte Gerrard.
Professor Gerrard also directed an extremely amusing
play-reading of Ionesco's La Cantatrice chauve
on November 14, 1995. The talented undergraduate cast
consisted of Tanya Yeoman as Mme.
Smith, Court Singrey as M. Smith, Darius
Torchinsky as M. Martin, Sukanya
Subramanian as Mme. Martin, Amanda
Baker as Mary the maid, and Derrick
Korn as the Fire Chief.
Rosemary Lloyd was on leave first
semester last year, and spent the time from Christmas to mid-February
back home in Australia. While there, she gave two papers at the Australasian
languages and literatures meeting. One of these was the talk about the
fan featured in last year's alumni newsletter. The other was a plenary
talk on narrative strategies associated with jealousy, the topic of
her new book, which came out in November with Cornell University Press.
In May, she and her husband, Paul, drove off to explore the Southwest
and had a wonderful time among superb scenery in New Mexico, Arizona,
Colorado, and Utah. Highlights were their close-up sighting of a cougar,
the drive through the seguarro forest, and the snowstorm that forced
them to go over their highest mountain pass (12,000 feet) behind a snowplow.
Most of her energy since then has gone into learning about her tasks
as chair, and running the department's first retreat, which gave the
faculty a day to discuss courses and strategies.
During the 1993-94 academic year, Gilbert Chaitin was
resident director of the Indiana/Purdue University Study Abroad Program
in Strasbourg. His book Rhetoric and Culture in Lacan has been
accepted for publication by Cambridge University Press and is scheduled
to appear in spring 1996. Dealing with the question of individual and
cultural identities, it examines the role of rhetoric and poetry in
the thought of the French psychoanalyst. For the past five years, Chaitin
has been general editor of the Yearbook of Comparative and General
Literature. Volume 41 came out in spring 1995, and the next number,
a special issue on the French 19th-century poet Mallarmé, titled "Mallarmé,
Theory and the Arts," will appear this winter. In October 1994,
Chaitin presented a paper on the "Politics of Contingency"
at the 19th-Century French Colloquium at the University of California
at Santa Barbara. It dealt with the topic of his current research, the
relationship of literature, philosophy, and politics in 19th-century
France. In September 1994, he chaired the first plenary session of the
IU conference on Mallarmé: Music, Art, and Letters, organized by Rosemary
Lloyd, and he wrote a description of the concurrent exhibit
at the Lilly Library for the Newsletter of the Friends of the Lilly
Library.
As he has done for several years, in spring 1995, Edoardo Lèbano
served as chair of the national AATI summer study Siena committee, which
awards 20 grants to teachers and graduate students of Italian. These
grants fund attendance at a Corso di Aggiornamento Linguistico-Culturale
at the Università Italiana per Stranieri, Siena. Debra Karr,
an IU associate instructor of Italian, was among the scholarship winners
who spent last July studying in Italy. During summer 1995, Lèbano's
last as director of the Middlebury College Italian School, he directed
two DML dissertations and also taught a graduate seminar on Ariosto
and Tasso. To honor him, the students and faculty who have attended
or taught at Middlebury during his tenure have established a scholarship
in his name. From Nov. 31 to Dec. 2, he was in Washington, D.C., as
an invited speaker at a national convention, "Preserving and Promoting
the Italian Language and Culture in the United States." At the
annual AATI national convention on December 11-13, which for the first
time in the history of the association was held in Italy, he delivered
a paper entitled "From Italy to Indiana: One Hundred Years of Italian
Emigration to Vermillion County, Indiana: 1856-1952."
In April 1996, Penguin will release the audio book version of Mark
Musa's Divine Comedy, read by British actors Paul
Scofield and Derek Jacobi. Penguin is also negotiating with actor Richard
Harris, who plans to do Musa's translation of Pirandello's Henry
IV on Broadway in the near future. In 1995, Musa's translation
of Six Characters in Search of an Author and Other Plays and
his Portable Dante were published by Penguin. Also published
was the Inferno: the Indiana Critical Edition. The IU Press
will publish his Petrarch (850 pages) on April 9, 1996. In
addition, he received the 1996 Distinguished Teaching and Mentoring
Award. The award will be made at a special ceremony in the fall. His
second grandchild, Evan Michael Musa, was born on Oct.
28, 1995.
Samuel Rosenberg's thousand-page Chansons des trouvères
(including Old French texts, facing modern French translations, music,
and critical notes) has just been published by Livre de Poche in the
series "Lettres gothiques." Meanwhile, he is preparing an
anthology of troubadour and trouvère songs meant for American students
and musicians. Texts and music will be complemented by English versions,
and the book will be accompanied by a recording of about a dozen of
the songs on a CD. Together with Mona Houston, he is
organizing the November 1996 annual meeting of the American Literary
Translators Association, which will take place on the IU campus, a very
fitting venue for the meeting since there is much active interest at
IU in literary translation. The theme of the meeting will be "Translating
from East to West, from old to new." One of the founding members
of the IU Arts Coordinating Council, Rosenberg is still, after 11 years,
actively involved in the council's work, which is essentially to mount
the annual IU festival Arts Week. In these years, this event has grown
from a single weekend of arts activities to a 10-day span. It includes
performances, exhibitions, lectures, demonstrations, panels, and attempts
to foster creative collaboration across disciplinary lines.
Michael Berkvam, who was on leave last year, is working
on a book-length study of the literary treatment of World War II in
France in novels and short stories written between 1940 and 1960 by
such authors as Sartre, Aymé, Dutourd, Curtis, Saint-Exupéry, Vercors,
and Triolet.
Last year, Julia Bondanella gave a series of lectures
concerning the problematic absence of foreign language and culture study
in the current debate about the multicultural curriculum. Each of the
lectures recommended a greater focus upon the study of foreign languages
and cultures within our global society as the only way in which cultural
barriers can truly be bridged. Each reemphasized the importance of language
study in the development of what are now called "lifelong"
learning skills. ("We used to call them the skills of liberal learning,"
observes Bondanella.)
Margaret Gray's son, Joseph, made
his debut as an academic at age six weeks, when he accompanied her to
a conference in Lexington, Ky., where she gave a paper on Cocteau. In
addition, she has an article on the Belgian writer Toussaint forthcoming
in Symposium. She also began her duties this year as the department's
graduate adviser.
This past summer, Mona Houston visited Myriam Champigny
in Switzerland and also saw friends in England and Venice going back
to her own graduate school and Fulbright days. She finished translating
a new American play by Richard Kalinosky, The Beast on the Moon,
into French (La Bête sur la lune), for a reading on November
9 at the Odéon (in the Petit Odéon). The play was in the Humana Festival
in Louisville last spring and has been taken up by at least seven theaters
in the U.S. The director/producer of the French version, Irina Brook,
is hopeful that there will eventually be a full-scale production in
French. Houston went to Paris on November 3 to be able to work with
Brook and the actors and see the public reading. In May 1996, her translations
of Le Médecin volant and Le Sicilien will be produced
at the Waldron Arts Center in Bloomington as An Evening of Molière
One-acts. Le Sicilien is a particularly interesting event:
it is a one-act comédie-ballet, with music by Lully, almost never performed:
This may well be a U.S. premiere of the work. The music will be performed
by the Ensemble Seicento, specialists in 17th-century music, whose leader,
David Wilson, specializes in Lully. In 1996­p97, Houston will
be the resident director for our IU/Purdue program in Strasbourg. Her
daughter, Natalie, gave a talk at this year's MLA in
a special session on British working-class poetry: 1800-1900, titled
"Coughing Slightly with Sharp Pain: Consumption and the Poetic
Image of David Gray."
Guillaume Ansart defended his dissertation in Princeton
last May and was promoted to assistant professor in August. He is reviving
the popular, oft-requested French business-language course (F317) this
spring.
Last spring, Andrea Ciccarelli was invited to give
a lecture at the University of Virginia, where he spoke on Manzoni's
dialogical style. He was also invited to participate in a special session
on anthropology and Italian literature, organized by the AAIS, held
at Arizona State University. More recently, he was invited to lecture
at the University of Pennsylvania on "Foscolo, Manzoni and the
Culture of Exile." Also in past months, his articles on Pirandello
and the Italian tradition, on Manzoni's lyrical style, and on Corazzini
and Ariosto have appeared. Other articles, on language instruction,
on Foscolo, on Futurism, and on exile in modern Italian literature,
have been accepted for publication. He is finishing a book on Manzoni's
aesthetics and is also editing a book on The Concept of Exile in
Italian Culture from the Risorgimento to Our Days, to which 15
major scholars from Europe and the United States plan to contribute.
John Isbell has recently published two books, The
Birth of European Romanticism: Truth and Propaganda in Staël's "De
l'Allemagne" and Madame de Staël: Ecrits retrouvés.
Among his forthcoming works are two critical editions of Staël. Current
projects include a book titled A Very Public Woman: Staël's Lost
Seat at the Birth of Modern Liberalism. He also has several articles
awaiting publication, including "The Painful Birth of the Romantic
Heroine: Staël as Political Animal, 1788-1818," in Romanic
Review (1995) and "Le Contrat social selon Benjamin Constant
et Mme de Staël, ou la liberté a-t-elle un sexe?" in Cahiers
de l'Association internationale d'Etudes françaises, (1996). He
has been hard at work preparing for a conference that he will co-host
with Andrea Ciccarelli at IU in September, titled "The
People's Voice: A Romantic Civilization, 1776-1848." His departmental
service activities include directing the Maison française and the Table
française.
Patrick Meadows went to the Foreign Language Conference
in Lexington, Ky., last spring, where he read an invited paper on the
poet Blaise Cendrars. While in France last summer, he visited Michel
Viegnes, who is now a professor at the University of Grenoble.
In 1995, Albert Valdman
assumed the role of president of the American
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Antonine Maillet, Albert Valdmand, and
Rosemary Lloyd
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Association of Teachers of French and organized the
1995 annual meeting of that organization in San
Antonio. Plenary speaker at the meeting was Antonine
Maillet, who was introduced by Rosemary Lloyd.
Valdman is currently organizing the 1996 annual
meeting of the AATF, to be held in Lyon, France. In
March, he traveled to New Orleans, where he attended
a workshop and met with colleagues working on the
NEH-funded project collecting lexicographic data on
Louisiana Creole. Collaborating on the project are Tom
Klingler, PhD'93, and Kevin Rottet,
PhD'95. During the summer, he directed the 1995 AATF
Summer Institute for Teachers of French, guiding 24
high school and college instructors through intense
language immersion in Bloomington and France. The
three-week program, funded by the French Cultural
Services, NEH, AATF, and IU departments such as WEST
and International Programs, has received funding for
1996. Valdman was also elected honorary member of the
International Association of Applied Linguistics
(AILA). He had served this organization as president
for six years. In October 1995, he was invited to two
conferences sponsored by the AUPELF-UREF (Université
des Réseaux d'expression française-Association des
Universités Entièrement ou Partiellement
Francophone) held in Paris and Lyon, respectively. He
is serving on the steering committee on AUPELF-UREF
networks undertaking research on French as spoken in
Africa and the Caribbean. These two conferences,
dealing with linguistics and computer applications,
were preparatory to the next summit meeting of heads
of state of Francophone countries. Last but not
least, Valdman has been honored by the Indiana
Association of Teachers of French as its University
Teacher of the Year.
Martha E. Schaaf,
BA'33, of Boca Raton, Fla., is retired as a librarian
and teacher. She has written several books, including
a children's biography, Lew Wallace: Boy Writer.
She is listed in the 1995-96 Who's Who in
the South and Southwest and in the
50th-anniversary edition of Who's Who in America.
Adrienne Hall Bodie, MA'64, and her
husband, Charles, live outside of Lexington, Ky., on
a lovely piece of property where they are currently
raising angora sheep. Adrienne is a member of the
Cercle français de Lexington-Rockbridge.
Bonnie Gammon, BA'65, is a licensed
broker with ReMax Realty Professionals, Bloomington.
Judith Yancey Gibson, BA'65, MAT'66,
MS'73, is an assistant vice president for the
University of Delaware, Newark.
In July, Marianne Plzak Inman,
MA'67, became president of Central Methodist College,
Fayette, Mo. She had previously been vice president
and dean of Northland College, Ashland, Wis.
Joanne Altschuler, BA'71, teaches at
the University of Southern California's school of
social work and practices as a psychotherapist. She
recently earned a PhD in social work at USC. She and
her husband and son live in Los Angeles.
Anne Lutkus, PhD'73, language
coordinator in the department of modern languages and
cultures at the University of Rochester, N.Y., has
been selected to receive a Distinguished Teacher
Award from the New York State Association of Foreign
Language Teachers. The Ruth E. Wasley Distinguished
Teacher Award honors an educator who has demonstrated
excellence in the classroom and has contributed
greatly to the foreign language profession. Lutkus
has taught at the University of Rochester since 1978.
Michael Harris, PhD'76, is still the head of the department
of modern languages at VMI, where he is in his twenty-third year of
teaching. He spent the 1992-93 academic year as a visiting professor
at the Ecole polytechnique in Palaiseau, with whom VMI maintains a cordial
institutional relationship. He is also the present treasurer of the
Virginia State Conference of the AAUP. He writes: "I would welcome
communications from any of the old gang from IU French and Italian."
Nancy A. Jones, BA'77, is doing
research on voices of lament in the major literary
genres of 12th-century France. She has taught at
Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Baruch College,
and Harvard University and co-edited Embodied
Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western
Culture for Cambridge University Press. She
lives in Cambridge, Mass.
Geoff Hyatt, BA'83, MBA'93, and his
wife recently visited Strasbourg, where they met
during a study-abroad year. He now works near Milan,
Italy, for Whirlpool.
From March 1993 to April 1995, Colleen
McNenny, BA'83, MA'85, served as utility
consumer counselor for the State of Indiana. Before
being appointed to the post by Gov. Evan Bayh, BS'78,
McNenny had been general counsel to the Indiana
Utility Regulatory Commission. She recently moved
with her husband and two sons to Columbus, Ohio.
Laura Ziemer, BA'86, BS'86, is an
attorney for the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund,
Seattle. She is also a mountain climber and was a
member of the support team for an expedition to the
top of Mt. Everest last spring.
Danielle LaFountaine, BA'88, is a
graphic designer for the Haughey Group, Boston, an
advertising and design firm.
Leslee Poulton, PhD'88, has been
tenured and promoted to the rank of associate
professor at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse,
where she teaches both French and Russian. This past
summer she attended the Summer Workshop of East
European and Slavic Languages in Bloomington and, in
her rare spare moments, had a chance to visit with
old friends. In winter 1996, she will be doing
research in Paris and will spend much of the
following summer in Russia.
Susan Jordan Myers, MA'89, PhD'94,
began teaching last fall in the French department at
William Jewell College, Liberty, Mo.
Michèle Anderson, PhD'90, is on the
modern languages faculty at Franklin College.
Mylène Catel, MA'90, is teaching at
Kalamazoo College, Mich., where she read her own
poetry on November 15, 1995. She had earlier been
invited to read her verse in Toronto, and she has
published two books of French poetry. She also
addressed the Alliance Française of Kalamazoo in a
lecture in January.
Sarah Froning, BA'90, graduated with
honors from the École Nationale du Patrimoine,
Paris, the French Ministry of Culture's school for
training art curators. She is finishing a master's
degree in art history at the Sorbonne, and plans to
return to the U.S. to look for a job as a museum
curator.
In 1993, Christopher Clark, BA'91,
graduated from Thunderbird, the American Graduate
School of International Management, Glendale, Ariz.
He now works teaching Windows'95 for Pennzoil Co.,
Houston.
In May 1995, John Duffy, PhD'95,
defended his doctoral dissertation on the
nineteenth-century novelist Emile Zola, which he
wrote under the direction of Professor Gilbert
Chaitin. He is currently teaching at the
University of South Carolina.
On December 1, 1995, Anthony Everman defended
his doctoral dissertation on Proust, "Lilies and
Sesame: The Orient, Inversion, and Artistic Creation
in A la Recherche du temps perdu,"
which he completed under the direction of Professor Margaret
Gray.
Laura Salsini, PhD'95, and Francesca
Parmeggiani, ABD, were among the faculty who
taught at Middlebury last summer. Salsini is
currently teaching at Kenyon College, Ohio.
Juliana Starr, PhD'95, has been
appointed to the faculty of the school of liberal
arts at the University of Southern Indiana as a
visiting assistant professor in French.
Denis Augier, ABD, is the recipient
of this year's Weathers Dissertation Fellowship, a
spring semester fellowship created by the department
to support a graduate student in French in his/her
work on the PhD dissertation.
Once again Max Creech, ABD, served
at Middlebury as the Italian School's bilingual
secretary last summer. During fall 1995, he was a
lecturer in Italian at the University of the South in
Sewanee, Tenn.
Ruth Johns Heath, ABD, is interim
assistant professor in the modern languages
department at Houghton (N.Y.) College. When not
working on her dissertation, she is teaching two
sections of beginning Spanish and two sections of
intermediate French.
Sayeeda Mamoon, ABD, is teaching
French at the University of South Dakota.
In fall 1994, a group of graduate
students and faculty from the department of French
and Italian decided to pursue some creative writing
outside their academic studies and research, and
formed a poetry group. The group was named the
"True Vers" after the title of a poem by
one of its founders, Isabelle Cadieu.
The True Vers group has met regularly since October,
to exchange poems and ideas, and to decide on a theme
for the next meeting. After each meeting, a few
members assemble the poetry into a booklet, also
called the True Vers, which is copied and
eventually distributed in the FRIT office for a
minimal donation. Five such volumes have been
printed. Original drawings by various contributors
are also published in the booklets. Multilingualism
has been a strong point for the group; to date, poems
have appeared in French, Italian, English, and
Spanish. The "True Vers" has also featured
French poems written by undergraduate students
enrolled in classes from F200 and up.
Thanks to the brainstorm and organization of
Professor Charlotte Gerrard, a
poetry reading was held in Ballantine Hall on Mardi
Gras, 1995. Several True Vers poets shared their
original works with an audience of around 30. Because
of the success of the public reading, it might become
an annual event for the group.
Standing behind Charlotte Gerrard, center,
are, from left to right, Daria Roche, Kira Moore, Francesca
Parmeggiani, Mylene Catel, John Isbell, Judith Ware, Isabelle Cadieu
and Randy Johnson
The department was saddened to
learn that Patricia Dougherty died
in Paris on Aug. 26, 1995. Her friends and former
teachers fondly remember her passionate love of
Voltaire and Diderot, her probing intelligence, her
kindness and interest in people, and her wonderful
sense of humor.
On Sept. 23, 1995, members of the French and Italian faculty gathered at
a one-day retreat, organized by the new department chair, Professor
Rosemary Lloyd, at Camp Shawnee Bluffs on Lake Monroe. The meeting
was called in order to discuss and exchange ideas about courses and other
departmental matters. Among the issues raised were the diversification of
departmental course offerings, possible modification of exam options at
the PhD level, and the use of new technologies in teaching and research.
Late in the afternoon, following the formal part of the proceedings, a
barbecue was held for faculty members and their spouses.
This newsletter is published by the
Indiana University Alumni Association, in cooperation with the Department
of French and Italian and the College of Arts and Sciences Alumni Association,
to encourage alumni interest in and support for Indiana University.
Take note: The IUAA now has its own e-mail address.
Correspondents should use the Internet address iualumni @indiana.edu to send
questions or comments via electronic mail.
Department of French and Italian
Chair, Rosemary Lloyd
News Editor, Russell Pfohl
College of Arts and Sciences
Dean, Morton Lowengrub
Director of Development, Susan Green
IU Alumni Association
University Director of Alumni Affairs, Jerry F. Tardy
Assistant Alumni Director, Jodi Hollowitz
Editor for Constituent Publications, Carol Edge
Editorial Assistant, Leora Baude
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1997
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