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Apply Now for Critical Language Scholarships for Intensive Summer Institutes(CLS)

The United States Department of State is pleased to announce the upcoming scholarship competition for overseas intensive summer language institutes in thirteen critical need foreign languages for summer 2010. The on-line application for CLS Program awards will be available November 9, 2009, and the deadline to apply will be December 18, 2009. The selection process will be administered by the Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC) with awards approved by the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. The CLS Program will be administered by CAORC and the American Councils for International Education.

Click Here for more information or to apply.

NELC Celebrates Student Accomplishments

The NELC department would like to celebrate a number of accomplishments and awards obtained by its students over the previous year, as well as to highlight some of our students' exciting summer plans for work and study.

  • Shruti Krishnan received the NELC department Amel Amin Zaki Award at the 2009 spring reception.
  • Theresa Dazey received the NELC department Bibiyah Istrabadi Award at the 2009 spring reception.
  • Amy Stoller received the Fawzia al-Hirmizi Memorial Scholarship at the 2009 spring reception, as well as a Critical Language Scholarship from the U.S. State Department to study Arabic in Morocco for summer 2009.
  • Aymen El-Sheikh received the NELC department Best AI Award at the 2009 spring reception.
  • John Dechant received a FLAS fellowship for the 2009-10 academic year, towards intensive study of Persian.
  • Philip Dorroll received the NELC department M. Amin Zaki Award at the 2009 spring reception.
  • Walter Lorenz received the Rasoul Istrabadi Memorial Scholarship at the 2009 spring reception.
  • Aly Spartz received the Appreciation for Academic Excellence, Service to the Department, and to her Fellow Students award at the 2009 spring reception. She also presented a paper titled &quotThe Dark Side of Modernity: A Historiography of the Aswan High Dam and the Tabqa Dam&quot at the Landscape, Spaces, and Places Conference at Indiana Unversity in March 2009.
  • Eleanor Hartley received the Rajih Haddawi Scholarship at the 2009 spring reception.

Congratulations to Huda Fakhreddine!

Huda Fakhreddine has received a tenure-track position at Middlebury College.

Recently department activities

Language Technology for Arabic Language Teaching and Research
Led by: Emad Nawfal
Ph.D. Student in Computational Linguistics, Indiana University
Wednesday March 4, 2009

Workshop on Portfolio Assessment
Led by: Aymen El-Sheik
Monday April 27, 2009

Representatives from NELC participated inthe World Language Festival on March 7, 2009.  Dr. Istrabadi presented seminars on Arabic teaching and culture and the NELC Drama Club presented a short skit. There was also a NELC informational table at the department fair.

News from Professor Katz:

Professor Stephen Katz taught a course in Advanced Hebrew I and a survey of Modern Hebrew Literature in Hebrew (in translation as well as in the original for those able to read the selections) in the fall semester.  In the spring, he taught a course in Contemporary Israeli Culture and a course on Biblical Themes in Hebrew Literature.  The latter also included a section for graduate students.

Moreover, he served as a member of the JSTU Graduate Advisory Committee and was also the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, where he was also a member of the Undergraduate Advisory Committee, the Executive Committee and the Curriculum Committee.

Professor Katz's manuscript, "Red, Black, and Jew:  New Frontiers in Hebrew Literature" has been accepted for publication by the University of Texas Press and is forthcoming in July of 2009.   In addition, he published a number of articles pertaining to literary contributions of Hebrew writers (poetry and prose) in America:  "Child's Play:  Hillel Bavli's 'Mrs. Woods' and Indian
Representation in American Hebrew Literature," in Modern Judaism 27, no. 2 (2007):  193-218.  His translation of "The Doll," a short story by Yonah Bachur appeared in Zeek Magazine, February, 2008.  His annotated translation of E. E. Lisitzky's "So Miriam Spoke of Moses" was published in the CCAR Journal (fall 2008):  59-89.  Meanwhile his article "Ambivalent Embraces:  American Hebrew Literature's Accommodation with Eretz Israel" has been accepted for publication and is forthcoming in The Jewish Quarterly Review.  His "First Cry:  The Holocaust Poetry of Moshe Ben-Meir," is now under consideration by another journal.  His eulogy on the occasion of the passing away of Professor Henry Fischel, was also published:  “Hesped--Eulogy for Henry Fischel.”  Indiana Jewish Post and Opinion 74, no. 14 (April 2, 2008):  NAT 9.  He is currently completing an article on the Israeli writer Yoram Kaniuk and is also translating a short story by Avshalom Kaveh.

Last December, he delivered a paper entitled, "Hearts and Bodies East and West:  American Hebraists' Encounters with Eretz Israel," at the 40th Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies, Washington, DC, session 4.9, Sunday, December 21, 2008.

Recent Faculty News!

Professor Salman al-Ani was invited by Qatar University to give the keynote speech at the conference "Linguistics in Gulf II on March 11, 2009. The title of the speech is "The Historical and Acoustic Phonetic Investigation of the sound /daad/.

Consuelo Lopez-Morillas, retired professor of NELC and professor emerita of Spanish and Portuguese, gave two talks recently:

“The "Muwashshahāt,” Kuwaiti Students’ Association, University of Colorado, Boulder, October 2008

An invited conference paper: “El Corán de los mudéjares y moriscos: las traducciones al romance,”  Conference on “La lengua española y las tres religiones,” University of Oviedo, Spain, December 2008.

Presentation and publication news from Dr. Stetkevych

Prof. Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, NELC, adjunct CMLT, has just finished a book manuscript on The Mantle Odes: Praise Poems to the Prophet Muhammad in the Arabic Literary Tradition. In Spring 2008 she presented two papers: “Orality, Literacy, and the Semiotics of Rhetoric in Arabic Poetry”  at the Orality and Literacy VII Conference at Rice University, Houston, Texas, 12-14 April; and “Al-Ma‛arrī’s Mīmiyyah from Saqt al-Zand” at the Rutgers Workshop in Arabic Poetry and Translation, Rutgers University, New Jersey, 16-17 April. In the summer she presented (in Arabic) “The Badī`iyyah between the Art of the Qasidah and the Science of Rhetoric: A Study in Hybridity of Literary Form,” at the Yarmouk University Conference in Literary Criticism XII: Hybridity of Literary Forms, Irbid, Jordan, July 22-24. She organized a panel on Abbasid poetics to which she contributed the paper, “Genre and Hybridity in Abu al-`Alā’ al-Ma`arrī’s Saqt al-Zand” at the Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C., 22-24 Nov.

She is spending Dec., 2008-June 2009 in Cairo at the American Research Center in Egypt on a research fellowship funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. In Feb., she presented a paper, (in Arabic) “Ahmad Shawqi and the Reweaving of the Burdah” at the Cairo University Conference on Language & Literature in 20th Islamic Studies;” 21-23 Feb.; and (in Arabic) “From Representation to Abstract Expressionism: Interpreting Ma`arri’s Saqt al-Zand and Luzumiyyat,” at the Supreme Council for Culture 2d International Conference on Arabic Poetry,  15-18 Mar. The Arabic translation of her 1991 book Abu Tammam and the Poetics of the Abbasid Age appeared in Fall 2008 (Al-Shi`r wa al-Shi`riyyah fi al-‘Asr al-`Abbasi,trans. Dr. Hasan al-Banna `Izz al-Din, National Center for Translation, Cairo, Egypt).Her edited volume, Poetry and Poetics, in the Ashgate Formation of the Classical Islamic World series, will appear shortly

Professor Hasan El-Shamy conducts folklore workshop in Bahrain and publishes new book

At the invitation of the Ministry of Culture and Information, Division of Culture and National Heritage, Kingdom of Bahrain, Professor Hasan El-Shamy conducted a workshop/"training session" on the topics of "Fields of Folklore and Current Theories of Folklore" (Jan. 25-Feb. 5, 2009). The training involved sixty-one (61) professionals mainly at the National Museum of Bahrain at Manama; a number of participants from the university and neighboring countries joined the Session. Museum officials selected two of El-Shamy's published works as textbooks.

A certificate of graduation was granted by the Ministry under the auspices of her royal highness Shaikhah Mayy Aal Khaliifah, Minister of Culture and Information. Also El-Shamy published Religion Among the Folk in Egypt. 428 pp. (Westport, Connecticut, London: Praeger, 2008) Two works by El-Shamy (and M. El-Gohary) were reissued: Qâmûs mustalahât al-'ethnolojyâ wa al-folklore (Tr. of A. Hultkranz's General Ethnological Concepts) Cairo: El-Mariff,1972/2008. And Nazariyyât al-folklore al-mucâsirah. (Tr. of R.M. Dorson, Theories of Folklore and Folklife Studies, in Folklore and Folklife: an Introduction). Cairo, 1972/2008.

NELC Professor John Walbridge Receives Guggenheim Fellowship

We are extremely pleased to announce that NELC Professor John Walbridge recieved a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship. Professor Walbridge conductedresearch on Shirazi's synthesis of the philosophical foundations of Galenic medicine.

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