Announcements
FRIT Congratulates its Graduating Seniors
Graduating Italian majors Abigail Silbert, Greg Attra, and Sam Park. Next to Sam is his girlfriend Rosella, whom he met while studying abroad in Bologna last year.
The Department of French and Italian once again partnered with the Department of Spanish and Portuguese to celebrate our graduating seniors at a reception the day before the spring commencement ceremonies. On May 3, 2013, State Room East of the Indiana Memorial Union was adorned with vases of roses and lilacs, and also with the smiles of students finishing their BA degrees. Among the attendees were our Directors of Undergraduate Studies, Professor Eric MacPhail and Associate Professor Massimo Scalabrini, who wished the students well in a brief program during the event.
Abigail Silbert, Sam Park, and Greg Attra sat together and reminisced about the Bologna overseas study program, which all three participated in during 2011-12. Abby will be teaching high school English in the Lombardy region of Italy next year, while Sam has applied to an MA program at the University of Gastronomical Sciences in the town of Bra, in the Piedmont region of northern Italy. Greg has a job lined up with Senator Angus King in his home state of Maine this summer, and he plans to pursue a degree in public service and social policy analysis at the Muskie School of Public Service of the University of Southern Maine.
French graduates Eleanor “Ellie” Berry and Bailey Hacker will both be teaching English at secondary schools in France next year through the French government teaching assistant program, while Jessica Johnson is looking forward to returning to francophone Africa, specifically Senegal, where she studied on IU’s Dakar program in Summer 2011. She has been admitted to a dual MA program in African Studies and Public Affairs at IUB for next fall.
In all, 30 French majors and 9 Italian majors are set to graduate this month. Congratulations to all our graduates. May your knowledge of French and Italian enrich your lives for years to come!
Assistant Professor of French publishes book
Assistant Professor of French Nicolas Valazza has published his first book Crise de plume et souveraineté du pinceau - Écrire la peinture de Diderot à Proust with the distinguished French press Classiques Garnier. The work explores the development of French art criticism as a literary genre, in light of the emerging paradigm of sovereignty of painting. The thesis at the core of the book is that the fall of the ut pictura poesis regime, which was governing the classical relationship between painting and literature until the second half of the 18th century, represents a critical moment in the discourse on art—corresponding to the birth of art criticism with Diderot—while causing a proliferation of new literary forms in the 19th century.
Annual Awards Ceremony Celebrates Achievements
Undergraduate student awards winners Naama Levy, Ellie Berry, Maria Walker, Jacob Ladyga, Katy Vaughn, Abigail Silbert, Susan Swanson, and Blake Steiner
French and Italian faculty and students gathered at the Herman B. Wells House on a sunny afternoon April 5 for the annual departmental awards ceremony. 17 students received awards for academic merit named after distinguished former faculty members and friends of the Department, one student was inducted into the Gamma Kappa Alpha Italian honorary society, and two Associate Instructors received special recognition for teaching excellence. The Department’s seven undergraduate majors selected for Phi Beta Kappa this semester were also recognized for their achievement, and the annual Trustees Teaching Award was given to Associate Professor of French linguistics Kevin Rottet. For a full list of award recipients, please see our awards page for undergraduates and graduate students.
After the awards were presented, family and friends joined in for coffee and sweet treats. The faculty members present agreed that there were many talented nominees this year, and it was difficult to choose even though 17 awards were available. We are indeed proud of our students who have excelled in their classes in the Department, as they are both a pleasure to teach and an inspiration to their peers.
Graduate Students Awarded Fellowships
Dissertation fellowship recipients
Mary Migliozzi and Kathryn Bastin
The College of Arts and Sciences has awarded two of our advanced doctoral students dissertation fellowships for 2013-14 in the amount of $20,000. Mary Migliozzi, a student in Italian, received the Dissertation Completion Fellowship with the expectation that she will finish and defend her dissertation before the end of the summer 2014. She is working on a dissertation entitled “The Politics of Regional Language: Dialect Literature in Italian Periodicals During Fascism” under the direction of Professor Andrea Ciccarelli. Kathryn Bastin, a student in French literature, received the Dissertation Year Fellowship for her work on a thesis titled “Le singe est-il toujours singe?: Monkeys and Apes in the Grande Siècle and the Age of the Enlightenment.” She is working with two co-directors, Professors Hall Bjørnstad and Guillaume Ansart. We are proud that this is the second year in a row that two of our students have received College dissertation fellowships. Carla Bicoff (Italian) and Jennifer Betters (French linguistics) received the awards last year.
The Department of French and Italian has also rewarded a promising PhD student with a departmental fellowship. Georgy Khabarovskiy has received a Grace P. Young Fellowship to attend the Dartmouth Summer Institute in French Cultural Studies in June-July 2013. The Institute, now in its 11th year, aims to revitalize and enrich the teaching of French language, literature, and culture, and its theme this year is “Culture and Gastronomy.” Khabarovskiy, who plans a dissertation on the topic of travel narratives, looks forward to a summer experience that is beneficial both to his teaching and his research, as he makes connections with scholars from the US and France.
