Lingua Franca*

Dear Friends of RALL,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          Although the pandemic disrupted our departmental activities this past spring semester, we still have many achievements to celebrate in RALL for this 2019-20 academic year. In fact, the many challenges that came with this crisis have highlighted the resourcefulness, creativity, and innovative strengths that characterize our RALL faculty, staff, and students.

This year we were fortunate to welcome our new Educator and Coordinator of the French Basic Language Program Shureka Nyawalo. Next year Kara Moranski will come back as an Assistant Professor and we will be welcoming two new Educators in Spanish, Anne Lingwall Odio and Juan Godoy Peñas. At our virtual end-of -the-year Award Ceremony and a subsequent virtual Happy Hour we celebrated the retirements of Armando Romero, who was granted Emeritus status, Constance Lardas, and Patty Roper. We will miss them! We wish them the very best in their retirement and future endeavors.

This year again our faculty and graduate students have distinguished themselves through outstanding publications and awards. In particular, Jeff Loveland published his book The European Encyclopedia: From 1650 to the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and Andrés Pérez-Simón published Baroque Lorca: An Archaist Playwright for the New Stage (Routledge, 2019). The French translation of Armando Romero's novel, Cajambre, Suspens dans le Pacifique colombien was also published (Trans. Yves Moñino, L’Harmattan, 2019). Volume 47 (Fall 2019) of our Cincinnati Romance Review, edited by Maria Paz Moreno (Co-Editor, Spanish and Portuguese), Jeff Loveland (Co-Editor, French and Italian), and Julia Escobar (Assistant Editor) is now available online.  This volume is a monographic issue entitled Imágenes de la mujer y del erotismo en la poesía áurea. It was edited by Professors Patricia Marín Cepeda from the Universidad de Burgos and Javier Blasco from the Universidad de Valladolid (Spain).

Members of our RALL department received numerous awards and recognitions. The Spanish journal Don Galan published an homage to Pat O’Connor, “Más que un retrato: Patricia W. O ́Connor y su pasión por el teatro español.” 

Jen Vojtko Rubí received the Dean’s Innovative Teaching Award. In addition, Kara Moranski and Jen Vojtko Rubí received an A&S Innovation Grant for their project “Measurement to Support a Movement: Enacting Phase II of the Cincinnati Bilingual Center,” which focuses on the impact of the active learning initiative within gateway Spanish Basic Language courses at UC. Ibrahim Amidou received a Faculty Award for Most Outstanding Adjunct Faculty.

Olivia Barrera, who successfully defended her dissertation this past Spring, was awarded financial support by the Mexican Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA) for the production of her adaptation of Shakespeare’s Antonio and Cleopatra. Her proposal was selected among over 700 projects and this award is an exceptional recognition of her work.

New and ongoing events in RALL illustrate our faculty’s interdisciplinary expertise in literary, film, and cultural studies, Creative Writing, and Second Language Acquisition. We continued developing our long-term collaboration with English, focused on multi-lingual projects in Creative Writing and translation involving faculty and students, with a series of workshops in the Fall and a graduate seminar, “Literary Translation,” cross-listed with English and German and scheduled to be taught in Fall 2020 by Mauricio Espinoza. Nicasio Urbina organized a Poetry Reading and a Prose Reading including RALL faculty and graduate students. 

We held the second edition of our RALL Food Week.

Michael Gott organized various film screenings and symposia with Film and Media Studies, including a “Confinement Symposium” in March (unrelated to the subsequent confinement), co-sponsored by UC and the Contemporary Arts Center. Various films, followed by discussions, were paired with the group exhibition “Confinement. Politics of Space and Bodies.”                                                                                                                                             

In RALL we have a strong commitment not only to teaching and research but also to service and community engagement. This year we have continued to demonstrate our commitment to outreach and service learning through our Medical Spanish classes, our partnership with CANS-Clifton Area Neighborhood Schools, and the work of the Latino Faculty Association, which all align with UC’s own Urban Impact and CPS Strong initiatives. Ligia Gómez was featured in UC News because of her groundbreaking work with the Hispanic immigrant community in Cincinnati especially through the Certificate of Spanish for Service Learning in Social Work and Health Care Services, which she created and directs: 

For the second year the CANS initiative, led by Kara Moranski and supported by a GAship funded by the Provost's office as a Special Initiative, allowed two of our graduate students, Abbie Finnegan and Andie Anderson, to provide weekly Spanish lessons at the Clifton Area Neighborhood School (CANS), a Cincinnati public school serving students from pre-kindergarten to second grade. These CANS teaching interns participate in a year-long teaching internship program and learn to develop lessons that use Spanish meaningfully through song, games, and real-world communication. Once CPS went online, Abbie and Andie worked hard to shift to an all-digital curriculum for the students. Their work is featured in UC Magazine.

An article published in the Enquirer, “UC Latino faculty group: Reducing isolation, speaking up, fighting for human rights,” quoted Mauricio Espinoza, one of the co-founders of the Latino Faculty Association.

Nuria López-Ortega led various ongoing and new initiatives aimed at undergraduate student recruitment and retention such as our annual Spanish and Portuguese Day, an Ice Cream Social for RALL students, and a departmental Student Showcase. For the third year in a row Irene Ivantcheva-Merjanska also organized our annual French, Arabic, and Italian Day. 

Although our Spring study abroad program in Guatemala, organized by Siusan Sinclair, and our Summer Study Abroad programs—in Bordeaux (France) with Michèle Vialet, Rome and Naples (Italy) with Joyce Miller, Madrid (Spain) with Carlos Gutiérrez, Lomé (Togo) with Ibrahim Amidou, and Rabat (Morocco) with Mohamed Elayyadi—all had to be cancelled I want to acknowledge the immense and painstaking labor that goes into planning these programs. We are hopeful about conducting them again next year!

Although stressful in many ways, our transition to remote teaching this past Spring was also the opportunity to develop or hone our online teaching and remote communication skills. Faculty, staff, and students all worked very hard to maintain constant connections with each other and to make the best of this unexpected situation. Our RALL community has made it through this difficult time with flying colors, and I look forward to our next academic year together.

Thérèse Migraine-George

Ibrahim Amidou received a 2020 Outstanding Adjunct Faculty Member Award from the Office of the Provost. He also created and planned a new Maymester “discovery study tour of West Africa” including two weeks at the host institution CIREL-Village du Bénin in Lomé, Togo.

Heather Arden has a forthcoming scholarly article on Franz Schubert in the April issue of the Music Teachers National Association’s e-journal:  “What Would Schubert Do? Triplet Assimilation in the Works of Franz Schubert.”

An NBC News article quoted Mauricio Espinoza on immigration narratives and journalism, particularly in relation to the film Knives Out.

An Enquirer article about the Latino Faculty Association also quoted Mauricio Espinoza.

Ligia Gomez was featured in UC News in particular for her work related to the Certificate of Spanish for Service Learning in Social Work and Health Care Services that she created and directs.

Michael Gott was the invited respondent at the 2020 Modern Languages Association conference in Seattle for a panel on the topic of “Cinéma-monde francophone.”  He also contributed a chapter on “Borders” to our Alumnus Etienne Achille’s co-edited book Postcolonial Realms of Memory, published by Liverpool University Press and was an invited speaker for a roundtable panel on the topic of that volume at the 2019 Contemporary French Civilization conference at the University of Arizona. The collection he did with Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp on Rachid Bouchareb now also has a release date.

Carlos Gutiérrez was nominated for a Mrs. A.B. “Dolly” Cohen Award for Excellence in Teaching.  

Janine Hartman was nominated for the Darwin T. Turner Scholars 2020 Breakfast of Champions. Breakfast of Champions (BOC) is an annual event hosted by the Office of Ethnic Programs and Services, which honors the contributions of staff and faculty who impact student success. 

Sara Hutchinson, whose songs and videos have hundreds of thousands of plays across various platforms, created a music video for an original song called “Be Easy on Me.”  It deals with inviting peace into a space of heartbreak, and was filmed on an empty UC campus in the era of COVID-19.

One of Irene Ivantcheva-Merjanska’s poems, “My Father’s Eye,” was published in the Washington Square Review, Issue 44, Fall 2019, translated by the poet Holly Karapetkova, also an English Professor at Marymount University.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Kathy Lorenz was elected as a board member of the Emeritus Faculty association. 

Jeff Loveland’s new book The European Encyclopedia: From 1650 to the Twenty-First Century was published by Cambridge University Press (2019).                                                                                                                                                                                                            David McLaughlin’s book review on “Rio de Janeiro: A Food Biography by Marcia Zoladz,” was published in The Latin Americanist, Vol. 63, No. 3, 2019.  He also has an article forthcoming in May/June in Discurso: Meditations on Latin America (an online magazine by the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies) about the Venezuelan-American musician Devendra Banhardt, gender and word-play, and performance.

Thérèse Migraine-George published a book review on Oana Panaïté’s book The Colonial Fortune in Contemporary Fiction in French (Liverpool UP, 2017) in Contemporary French Civilization 44 and has three forthcoming book chapters: “French (in-the-World) Literary Translingualism” in The Routledge Handbook of Translingual Literature, ed. Steven G. Kellman and Natasha Lvovitch;  “Littérature-Monde, World Literature, and the Politics of Difference” in Francophone Literatures as World Literatures, ed. Christian Moraru, Nicole Simek, and Bertrand Westphal. London, U.K.: Bloomsbury; and “Performances of Power, Mimicry, and Subversion in Tess Onwueme’s Work” in Emerging Perspectives: Tess Onwueme, ed. Maureen Ngozi Eke. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

Joyce Miller created and planned a new Andiamo Italy tour. “UC Andiamo in Italia students are completing, with their student engineering partners of the University of Naples Federico II, six project proposals to reduce solid waste in Naples. Karen Manning, Assistant Marketing Professor – Annual Adjunct, led the collaborative discussions along with University of Naples teaching assistant Oriella Aimone. Project ideas ranged from the simple use of water dispensers on campus to recycling cigarette butts into surf boards via the US firm Terra Cycle. Fifty-three students of environmental engineer Professor Dr. Massimiliano Fabbricino collaborated with UC Andiamo students via WhatsApp and Microsoft Teams.  They used strategic and behavioral frameworks to develop programs that would be feasible within the university and the city of Naples. On April 29^th and 30^th the students participated in a series of virtual meetings presenting over 20 different waste management program ideas.  In May, the best concepts will be tested in a quantitative survey to evaluate the impact each idea has on influencing sustainable behavior among college students in Naples. A summary of survey results will be shared between the universities. Andiamo’s original motive was to involve the College of Business in an Italian language/culture project with a business component. And it worked! The program tripled in size and would have culminated in a five-week culture and language study abroad program in Rome and Naples in May and June.  The collaboration will continue. Already future projects are being discussed including how to implement winning concepts and new ideas like permaculture” (Joyce Miller).

Kara Moranski received a Research Priorities Award from ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) to conduct the study “The impact of metacognitive instruction for interactional feedback during text chat.” Her methodological review, “A case for multisite research in SLA: Challenges, risks, and rewards,” has been accepted for publication in Language Learning. She and Jen Vojtko Rubí are the recipients of one of the A&S Innovation Grants for their project “Measurement to Support a Movement: Enacting Phase II of the Cincinnati Bilingual Center,” which focuses in particular on the impact of the active learning initiative within gateway Spanish Basic Language courses at UC.

Maria Paz Moreno was quoted in the blog The Culture Trip on an article about the history of cocido madrileño and in the newspaper El País, one of the two main Spanish newspapers, in their culture section.  An article featuring her was published last December by COPE, one of the principal radio stations and news organization in Spain.                                                                                                                                                                                                                  She published the following two articles:                                                                                          - "Beyond the Recipes: Authorship, Text, and Context in Canonical Spanish Cookbooks.” Food, Texts, and Cultures in Latin America and Spain. Ana M. Gómez-Bravo and Rafael Climent-Espino, Eds. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2020: 201-219. 

- “Discurso ideológico e idea de España en El cocinero español de 1898 y 1938.” Lara Anderson and Rebecca Ingram, Eds. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies Special Issue, Food Cultural Studies in the Transhispanic World, Vol. XCVII, n. 7, 2020

Pat O’Connor’s article “Paradise and Love in Ana Diosdado’s Unpublished Final Play El cielo que me tienes prometido” will appear in the fall issue 2020 of the Revista de la Asociación Hispánica de Humanidade.

- Her introduction to Ana Diosdado’s final play will be published with the play in the fall (2020) or spring  (2021) issue of Estreno.  The title of her contribution is: “INTRODUCCIÓN A El CIELO QUE ME TIENES PROMETIDO (2015), ÚLTIMA OBRA DE ANA DIOSDADO”

- The Spanish journal Don Galan published an homage to Pat O’Connor, written by Lourdes Bueno at Austin College and titled:  “Más que un retrato: Patricia W. O ́Connor y su pasión por el teatro español.” 

Andrés Pérez-Simón published his book Baroque Lorca: An Archaist Playwright for the New Stage (New York: Routledge, 2020).

The French translation of Armando Romero's novel, Cajambre, Suspens dans le Pacifique colombien was published (Trans. Yves Moñino, L’Harmattan, 2019).

Grace Thome was highlighted in the latest edition of the Findings newsletter for having achieved sponsored research support for several consecutive years because of the STARTALK grants that she received for several years to fund a Summer Arabic language program for beginners.

Ken Totten was promoted to Adjunct Assistant Professor.

Nicasio Urbina published two articles: “Ernesto Cardenal en la cultura popular nicaragüense” in Revista Abril, 24, March 2020 and “La nueva música revolucionaria de la insurrección de abril en Nicaragua” in Carátula, 91, August 2019, one book review in Latin America Literature Today 13, 2020: “Tiempos recios” on Tiempos recios by Mario Vargas llosa, and 12 poems from his new book “Comenzó a llover en abril” in different magazines and journals.

Patricia Valladares-Ruiz published the following peer-reviewed articles:

- “Subjetividades en crisis y conflicto social en el cine contemporáneo venezolano: Desde allá (2015), La familia (2017) y La Soledad (2016)" in Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 54 (2020).

- “Música popular venezolana y resistencia política en el periodo revolucionario” in Studies on Latin American Popular Culture 38 (2020).

- “La inmigración asiática en El equipaje amarillo, de Marta Rojas” in Romance Quarterly 66.4 (2019).

Michèle Vialet was nominated for a 2020 Faculty Award for Exemplary Contributions in Service to the University of Cincinnati. She also created and planned a new “Bordeaux Summer Immersion Program” focusing on “Borders in Today’s Global World” with a French culture and language immersion component at the DEFLE (Department of French as a Foreign Language), Université de Bordeaux Montaigne.

Jen Vojtko Rubí received the 2019 Dean’s Innovative Teaching Award. 

She and Kara Moranski are the recipients of one of the A&S Innovation Grants for their project “Measurement to Support a Movement: Enacting Phase II of the Cincinnati Bilingual Center,” which focuses in particular on the impact of the active learning initiative within gateway Spanish Basic Language courses at UC.

In Spring 2020 three students graduated with an MA in French, five students with an MA in Spanish, and four students with a PhD in Romance Languages. The following students defended their dissertations:

- Olivia Barrera Gutiérrez, “Cleopatra y Antonio: A Critical Study and a Creative Writing Project based on Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra (1623).”

- Andrea Beaudoin, “La raíz de la luz” y “Escritura creativa en español: trayectoria, pedagogía y proyecciones en programas de posgrado en Estados Unidos.”

- Rodrigo Mariño, “Viene la ausencia” y “Escritura creativa: historia, teoría y agencia.”

- Aline Skrzeszewski, “Traversée des frontières littéraires: La littérature-monde face aux malaises de nos sociétés” / “A Walk Beyond Literary Boundaries: World Literature and Modern Malaise”.

Congratulations to all!

Raquel Barbero Ortiz published the book review “Risa y géneros menores” in Revista Orillas (Padova Universty Press, Italy). She gave the presentation “Is the Native Speaker Prototype Valid for Language Learners?” for the RALL Pedagogy Journal Club organized by Kara Moranski. Also, she was accepted to participate at the 5th Annual Chicago Graduate Conference with her research paper “Una mirada ecocrítica en el Inca Garcilaso y Gonzálo Fernández de Oviedo.”

Olivia Barrera was awarded financial support for the production of her adaptation of Shakespeare’s Antonio and Cleopatra. Her doctoral dissertation is a new translation of the famous tragedy into Spanish incorporating an inclusive point of view, offering a new reading of the play, and having all the roles played by women. The Mexican Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA) selected her proposal from over 700 projects. This award is an exceptional recognition of the quality of her work, and great international exposure for our department.

Luis Ángel Barreto published the book review “Martín López-Vega. Gótico Cantábrico” in Cincinnati Romance Review, Volume 46 (Spring 2019). He had his poem published in the book El puente es la palabra (The Word is a Bridge. Anthology of Venezuelan Poetry of the diaspora) by Caritas Venezuela and Lantana Poesía, 2019.The poem, “Arte poética” was a product of the poetry workshop Maria Paz Moreno taught last year. 

Tiffanie Clark published two articles this year. The first is titled “La evolución espiritual en tres obras de Amado Nervo.” This article is in press at the journal Reflexiones of La Universidad Libre de Colombia. The other is titled, “Ilka  Oliva Corado’s Poetry of the Diaspora.” It has been published in Cronicas de una Inquilina. 

Gabriela Falconi Piedra presented a research paper titled “Lo privado y las nociones de nación en Los rendidos: Sobre el don de perdonar (2015) de José Carlos Agüero” at the Conference: “State of the Nation: literary and visual nationalism, then and now” at the Stony Brook University on October 2019.

Jose Figueroa had one of his poems accepted for publication by the journal Label Me Latina/o. The poem, “Recuerdo de mi papá” was a product of the poetry workshop Maria Paz Moreno taught last year.

Abbie Finnegan was admitted into the Ph.D. program at Georgetown University’s prestigious School of Languages and Linguistics, with a very generous fellowship.

Kirsten Smith, who successfully defended her MA thesis entitled “Multilingualism and Transnationalism in 21st Century Québécois Film,” was accepted into the PhD program in French at the University of Minnesota.

Victor Vimos published his article titled “Ecuador: cuestionamiento a la literalidad del poder” in Contratiempo, a literary publication in Spanish from Chicago.  América Invertida, a literary magazine published by the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures at Stony Brook University, published a selection of his poems under the title “Paracas”. These texts were written in the poetry workshop that Professor Maria Paz Moreno led in the Spring last year.  Also, he was selected as a finalist for a selection of his poems, among about 600 participants, for the prize given by the Festival de Poesía de Medellín, Colombia. He attended the conference entitled “State of the nation. Literary and visual nationalism. Then and now”, at Stony Brook University, with the exhibition titled “Codigofagia en la identidad nacional: desplazamientos y anulaciones en la relación identidad-nación, a propósito del tríptico Pachacamac del pintor peruano Rafael Hastings.” He presented at the RALL Journal Club on the article entitled “The Nation in ruins: Archeology and the Rise of the Nation” by Professor Sara Castro-Klaren. He received the GSG Research Fellowship to develop a segment of my research in Mexico and the Taft Graduate Summer Fellowship for his project entitled “Ritual and Poetry”.

Twenty-two students graduated from our department with BAs in Spanish, French, or Arabic, including five students with Honors and ten with High Honors. Fifty-eight students received Minors in Spanish, French, or Arabic Language and Culture. Twenty-four students also received Certificates in Business French, Business Spanish, Spanish/English Translation, Spanish for Social Work and Health Care Services, and Italian Language and Culture.

Two Arabic majors, Gordon Goodwin and Julia James, received the prestigious national FLAS Fellowship to continue their Arabic studies in the summer at APTLI (Arabic, Persian, Turkish language Institute) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

Mia Turnbull (Major in Early Child Education, Minor in Spanish) has been granted a Fulbright scholarship to conduct educational research in the region of La Rioja, in Spain. Due to COVID-19, her starting date has been postponed to January 2021.

Farhan Ilyas, a Madrid summer program participant in 2019, is one of this year’s Presidential Medal award recipients. He is the 5th Madrid participant to receive this award.

Etienne Achille (PhD 2013) recently published the co-edited book Postcolonial Realms of Memory: Sites and Symbols in Modern France (Liverpool University Press, 2020). It was a massive project with more than thirty contributions from specialists in the interdisciplinary fields of French and Francophone Studies. The book is already being recognized as an essential update and correction to Pierre Nora’s famous Les Lieux de mémoire, which has been criticized for implying a narrow perception of national memory from which the legacy of colonialism was excluded. Etienne’s co-edited volume addresses in a collective and sustained manner this critical gap by postcolonializing the French Republic’s lieux de mémoire. The various chapters discern and explore an initial repertoire of realms and sites in France and the so-called Outremer that crystalize traces of colonial memory, while highlighting its inherent dialectical relationship with firmly instituted national memory. Etienne Achille was invited to present the book as a keynote speaker at the 2019 Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies conference in London.

Metycia Bengmo (MA in French 2018) was admitted at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in August 2018, where she is currently pursuing a Doctoral degree in French and Francophone literature and a graduate distributed minor in African Cultural Studies and Communication Arts. Her research interest includes migration in 20^th and 21^st century French and Francophone literature, Postcolonial Francophone literature, and Francophone Cinema. Her current work research that serves as an introduction to her thesis proposal addresses Migration of Young Adults from the sub-Sahara to Europe in 20^th /21^st Literature and Cinema, with a focus on space, memories, and women and children’s bodies.

Juan Camilo Galeano (PhD 2017) published “La masculinidad de Lorenzo: Disidencia personal y política en Estaba la pájara pinta sentada en el verde limón de Albalucía Angel.” Chasqui 48.2 (Nov. 2019) 238-252; and “Nanne Timmer (ed.): Cuerpos ilegales: sujeto, poder y escritura en América Latina.” Revista Iberoamericana—Book Review.

María del Mar Gámez (PhD 2018) was hired as tenure-track Assistant Professor of Spanish at Central State University. She recently published “La violencia contra la mujer en el teatro de Federico García Lorca,” Cuestiones de género: de la igualdad a la diferencia, 14 (2019).           Her play, La fauna del poder (The Political Jungle), which was written as part of a creative writing course that she took in our department in 2013, premiered in Cincinnati in Fall 2019. Then RALL PhD student Olivia Barrera was the director of this play and RALL PhD student Eugenia Mazur was the assistant director. All of the actors and actresses in the play, a total of ten, were local residents in Cincinnati of Latin American origin.  

Stephen George (BS Chemistry and BA French, Dec 2019) has been accepted in the Chemistry Ph.D. Program at McGill University.

Adriana Gordillo (MA in Spanish 2006) received his PhD from the U. of Minnesota in 2011 and has been promoted to full professor of Spanish at Minnesota State University, Mankato. Her most recent article is “Aura, “Constancia,” and “Sleeping Beauty”: Carlos Fuentes’ Little History on Photography.” In Sandra Vizcaíno and Inés Ordiz (Eds.), Latin American Gothic in Literature and Culture. Routledge, 2018.

Camille Meritan (MA in French 2014) recently published an article in FLANALS called Impact of self-reflection and awareness-raising on novice French learners pronunciation.  She will be starting a new job this summer as Assistant Professor of French at Bentley university in Waltham, MA, after successfully defending her PhD dissertation in French and Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Rozelle-Ann Polydore (MA in French 2012) was hired as teacher of French at Mays High School in Atlanta, GA in 2018.

Julio Quintero (PhD 2008) was recently hired as Associate Director for Inclusive Excellence in Education at University of Dayton. His latest article is “Defying Revolution in Venezuela: Biography as Utopic Discourse in Federico Vegas’s Falke.” Utopian Studies, vol. 28, no. 1, 2017. 

Manuel Ramos Montes (PhD 2016) was hired as tenure-track Assistant Professor of Spanish, Culture and Latin American literature at University of Toledo in Fall 2018. His book El hallazgo del escriba, based on his doctoral dissertation is forthcoming in Alción Editora, Buenos Aires, Argentina this year. He recently founded the literary journal Cohetes.                                                                                                                                                                         María Clemencia Sánchez (PhD 2011) recently published a new collection of poetry, La hermosa estación. She is a Professor of Literature at the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana in Medellín, Colombia, and has a weekly podcast about literature.

Since she graduated with a BA in Spanish with a French minor (UC 2012), Emily Sutthoff spent a year in Spain as a teaching assistant (2012-2013) and served in Ecuador as a Peace Corps volunteer in 2014-2016. Upon returning she completed her Master's degree in Speech-Language Pathology (U of Memphis, May 2020). 

Daniel Torres (PhD 1990) published a second edition of his book of poetry Debellaqueras. 10th Year Anniversary Edition.  San Juan: Editorial Isla Negra, 2019. He also published the short stories: “Somos novios” in Caribe: Revista de Cultura y Literatura/ Journal of Culture and Literature 21.1-2 (2018-2019): 187-189; and “La increíble historia de una gata que se creía perra” in  Revista Cruce, 12 de abril de 2020.  He published three articles: “Imágenes retrovirales de la lírica y la plástica boricuas del VIH y SIDA” in Escena: Revista de las Artes, vol. 78, núm. 2 (2019): 108-124, “Finezas barrocas entre Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz y don Carlos de  Sigüenza y Góngora” in Delaware Review of Latin American Studies, and “La construcción de una identidad criolla en Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez de Don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora (1645-1700)” in Revista Cruce (12 de diciembre de 2019): 13-22. He also published three book reviews and one conference presentation.

Alex Weil (MA in French 2015) is currently teaching French at the Villa Madonna Academy in Northern Kentucky. He heads the French Department as well as the international exchange trips with his students. Topics of interest in his teaching include Early Modern French history and literature, and bande dessinée.  He is also heavily involved with the Cincinnati-Nancy Sister Cities Association, where he serves as Chair of the Internship Committee and most recently served as translator and guide for the Sister Cities Jazz Ensemble that performed in Nancy's Jazz Pulsations 2019 festival.

Although many donors prefer to remain anonymous I would like to thank all those who have donated to the department for their tremendous generosity, which has had a powerful impact on our department, on both our undergraduate and graduate students, and on our faculty. Among other sources of funding I would like to acknowledge the Pat O’Connor Fund for Cultural Enrichment, the Betty Jane Hull Scholarship, the Emily Frank Adler Award for Study Abroad, the Edward Coughlin Scholarship, the Dr. Karen L. Gould Scholarship in Foreign Language Studies Endowment Fund, the French Culture and Francophone Studies fund, and the Susan Cogan Romance Language fund. Donations are allowing us to support our undergraduate students’ study abroad experiences and our graduate students’ research activities, to buy material and equipment for our department, and to support our many social, cultural, and scholarly events in RALL throughout the year. Donations allow us to grow and thrive and we are deeply grateful to all our donors for their generosity.

If you would like to give to our department please consult this webpage: https://www.artsci.uc.edu/departments/rall/giving.html

You can also email the head of the department, Thérèse Migraine-George, for more information on the various areas that you can support in our department.