Announcements
DEPARTMENT WELCOMES NEW FACULTY FOR FALL 2009
August 2009. The Department is pleased to welcome seven new faculty members for Fall Semester 2009-10.
Hall Bjornstad comes to IU as Assistant Professor of French in the Department of French and Italian after a serving as a visiting postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University. He received his PhD from the University of Oslo, Norway, in 2006, where he defended his dissertation entitled Créature sans créateur: Pour une anthropologie baroque dans les “Pensées” de Pascal, which he is currently developing into a book for the Presses de l’Université Laval (Quebec). In 2010 he will complete the third year of a postdoctoral fellowship from the University of Norway on the topic “The Mirror of the Sun King: Literature, Politics and the Seventeenth-Century Crisis of Exemplarity.”
Assistant Professor Nicolas Valazza joins the Department after completing his PhD in French literature at Johns Hopkins University this summer. His dissertation, entitled Crise de plume et souveraineté du pinceau, analyzes the development of French art criticism from the second half of the 18th century through the 19th century, and the concept of the painter as a narrative character. A native of Switzerland, Valazza also spent one year of his doctoral studies abroad, at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, for which he received a fellowship from Hopkins.
We also welcome Juliette Dade and Peter Vantine to the department, who each begin two-year visiting assistant professorships in French. Dade comes to us from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she recently completed her dissertation entitled Exploring Sapphic Discourse in the Belle Epoque: Colette, Renée Vivien, and Liane de Pougy. Her research is focused on literary and cultural life in Paris at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Vantine, who holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, served as Visiting Assistant Professor at Macalester College in 2008-09. His field is 19th century French literature and culture, particularly print and visual culture, exemplified by his PhD dissertation entitled Entre fantaisie et réalisme: texte, contexte et métatexte dans les premiers romans des frères Goncourt.
Finally, we have several additions to the teaching staff of our French and Italian language programs. Tania Convertini joins our Italian language program as Visiting Lecturer to teach elementary and intermediate Italian. Like Vantine, Convertini comes from the University of Wisonsin-Madison, where she is completing her PhD in Italian Studies with an emphasis on cinema, contemporary culture, and pedagogy. In French, Rebecca Petrush and Anne-José Villeneuve, both PhD candidates in French linguistics at IU-Bloomington, begin positions as Visiting Lecturers this fall. They will coordinate the F100 and F150 classes, respectively, and teach elementary French as well. Petrush is still developing her dissertation topic in the field of second language acquisition, while Villeneuve is actively working on her thesis, tentatively titled A variationist study of Vimeu French.
Symposium on Contemporary Italian Cinema Set for April 2010
June 2009. We are pleased to announce a Symposium on Contemporary Italian Cinema to take place April 7-10, 2010 at IU-Bloomington. Submissions are being accepted for original research on the importance of new directors and trends in Italian cinema. Topics may include: recent research on directors, regulation and funding with regard to film production in Italy, individual film analysis, the influence of international cinema on contemporary Italian cinema, the influence of Italian cinema on international cinema, the importance of photography or music in contemporary Italian cinema, the representation of family and gender, the issue and experience of otherness, the search for cultural and spiritual identity, and cinema as a pedagogical tool in the foreign language classroom.
Proposals on Italophone cinema are also encouraged: namely, the cinema of North and South America, Australia, the Mediterranean world and Africa that deals with the Italian experience outside of Italy.
A major contemporary Italian filmmaker will be present as keynote speaker.
Papers should be written in the language with which the reader feels most comfortable (Italian or English) and should be limited to no more than 18 minutes (8-9 doubled-spaced pages). One-page abstracts should be sent electronically (Word attachment only) by Dec. 31, 2009 to Antonio Vitti (ancvitti @indiana.edu), to Colleen Ryan-Scheutz (ryancm @indiana.edu), and to Andrea Ciccarelli (aciccare @indiana.edu).
Albert Valdman Fund Created
August 2008. The Department is pleased to announce the creation of the Albert Valdman Graduate Student Research and Travel Fund in honor of Rudy Professor Emeritus Albert Valdman, to foster graduate student development as Professor Valdman has throughout his career. The fund will be used to pay research and travel expenses for graduate students in the French linguistics MA and PhD programs. “As his colleagues and former students,” says Associate Professor Julie Auger, “we feel strongly that we would not be where we are in our lives today, both personally and professionally, without the benefit of Professor Valdman’s teaching and mentoring.” Valdman, still very active in research on Haitian Creole and Louisiana French, retired from the faculty of the Department of French and Italian and the Department of Linguistics in 2004, but still serves as Director of the Creole Institute. If you would like to support this fund in his name, please click the GIVE NOW button.
