Tuesday, November 24, 2015

Dr. Priya Wadhera/ French Program



Let's congratulate Dr. Wadhera,  her paper "“Manger chez Perec: Food on the Threshold between Metaphor and Matter” was just accepted to the Contemporary French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium taking place in St. Louis, MI in mid-March.
Dr. Wadhera keep up the good work! You make us proud!

Saturday, November 21, 2015

Dinner and Dialogue November 19, featuring, Dr. Raysa Amador

The Center for Student Involvement (CSI) organized the Dinner and Dialogue event on November 19, featuring, Dr. Raysa Amador



Saturday, November 14, 2015

Hoy la Sociedad Nacional Honoraria Hispánica cumple 96 años./Today the Spanish National Honor Society celebrates its 96th birthday!








                                                                                 Ruth Barnes de la UC-Berkeley;
                                                                                     Fundadora de la Sociedad.




                         Feliz cumpleaños Sigma Delta Pi! /
                           Happy Birthday Sigma Delt Pi!


           Hoy la Sociedad Nacional Honoraria Hispánica cumple             96 años.
/
         Today the Spanish National Honor Society celebrates its 96th    birthday!


                 
La historia/ the history: http://www.sigmadeltapi.org/About.Us.html

Alumna Dr. Gladys Nussenbaum shares memories with us


Gladys Nussenbuam graduated from Adelphi in 1950, studying Spanish with Professor Ruth Richardson.
A good friend of Robert G. Hartmann (see pages 2 and 3) who went on to study Spanish in Middlebury’s illustrious program, Dr. Nussenbaum has graciously shared a few images from over half a century ago.
Enjoy!





With Joaquín Casalduero, critic of Spanish Literature, Federico Garcia Lorca’s brother, Francisco. August 1948.

  




 With Américo Castro, prominent Spanish literature critic 1949.   


  



In Middlebury, VT., July 1949.






 With Spanish scholar Luis Baralt 1949  

The history of the Italian Language at Adelphi!/ The Curious Case of Professor Bruno Rosselli.


The Curious Case of Professor Bruno Rosselli



A strange tale of a Florentine immigrant who came to the U.S. in 1907 and taught Italian at the original Adelphi College in Brooklyn has come to our attention. Professor Bruno Rosselli taught Italian at Adelphi from 1911 until returning to his native country to fight in the First World War, after which he ultimately taught at Vassar from 1919-1933. His colorful story, told in the 0n-line Vassar Encyclopedia (linked bellow), stands as a testament to the importance of Italian studies on Adelphi’s campus from its beginning as an institution of higher learning.


http://vcencyclopedia.vassar.edu/faculty/prominent-faculty/bruno-roselli.html

The Myth of the Unemployed Humanities Major



The Myth of the Unemployed Humanities Major
Nov 11, 2015
Wilson Peden
For the last time: No, earning a degree in English, philosophy, art history, name-your-humanities-discipline will not condemn you to a lifetime of unemployment and poverty.
Actually, this is probably not the last time I will write some version of those words. It’s certainly not the first time I have written them. (See, for instance, the lede from another blog post I wrote almost exactly a year ago: “Good news for recent graduates who majored in the arts or humanities: you are not doomed to a lifetime of poverty and unemployment.”) But I feel compelled to keep writing these words because, in the face of all evidence, the myth of the unemployed humanities major persists. It may be more prevalent than ever: Florida Senator Marco Rubio has made snarky remarks about the job market for philosophy majors a trademark of his campaign speeches for the Republican presidential nomination.
But persistent or not, the myth of the unemployed humanities major is just that: a myth, and an easily disproven one at that. Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce has been tracking differences in the employment of graduates from various disciplines for years, demonstrating that all graduates see spikes and troughs in their employment prospects with the changing economy. And AAC&U’s employer surveys confirm, year after year, that the skills employers value most in the new graduates they hire are not technical, job-specific skills, but written and oral communication, problem solving, and critical thinking—exactly the sort of “soft skills” humanities majors tend to excel in.
Perhaps the most comprehensive data source in this vein is the aptly named Humanities Indicators project. Researched and curated by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Humanities Indicators aim to “provide a nonpartisan, objective picture of how the humanities are faring in the United States today.” The collected data span everything from salary distributions to teacher credentials to museum attendance, but for now, let’s just look at the employment numbers—which, as it happens, have just been updated based on the latest available information.
In 2013, the unemployment rate for Americans whose terminal degree was a bachelor’s degree in a humanities discipline was 5.4 percent. That is slightly higher than the 4.6 percent unemployment rate for bachelor’s degree holders across all disciplines that year.  But it’s significantly lower than the 9 percent unemployment rate for those with only a high school diploma or equivalent. Humanities graduates may have a slightly harder time finding jobs than their colleagues in the health sciences, but they are still much more likely to find work than those with no college degree.
Salary distributions tell a similar story. The median salary for those with a terminal bachelor’s degree in the humanities was $50,000 in 2013—a little lower than the median salary for all bachelor’s degree holders ($57,000), but still much higher than the median salary for those with just a high school diploma ($35,000). These findings echo those detailed in How Liberal Arts and Sciences Majors Fare in Employment: A Report on Earnings and Long-Term Career Paths, published last year by AAC&U and the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems. The report shows that humanities and social science graduates earn only slightly less than their peers with degrees in professional fields upon graduation from college, and by mid-career the earnings of humanities and social science graduates surpass those of graduates with professional degrees. Humanities majors are also more likely to go on to earn graduate degrees, a move which takes their median annual salary up to $71,000. All told, it’s hard to see a degree in the humanities as a bad investment.
It’s also worth pointing out that humanities graduates experience more equitable employment outcomes along gender lines than graduates from other fields, especially engineering, and especially at the graduate level. Women with graduate degrees in the humanities do experience slightly higher unemployment than their male colleagues—3.5 percent versus 3.4 percent. But those women still fare better than women with graduate degrees in engineering, who experience 3.6 percent unemployment, compared with 2.5 percent for men.
I should stress that my point is not that prospective students should major in humanities fields rather than, say, engineering—I have no wish to erase the real differences that exist among all of these disciplines or pit them against each other in any way. When you read the news and see the vast array of scientific, political, and cultural challenges facing the United States today, it becomes pretty clear that we need more and better-educated college graduates in every discipline, and we need all those graduates to be equipped with a broad base of knowledge and intellectual skills that cut across disciplines. We need policymakers who understand both the science of climate change and the history of the Middle East; we need medical practitioners who can communicate clearly and sensitively with a general public that is ethnically, economically, and religiously diverse. Such breadth of knowledge and ability will be crucial for the continued functioning of the US economy and, just as important, for a healthy civil society and peaceful relations with the rest of the world.
All of which is to say, we need people studying the humanities, just like we need people studying every other discipline. It’s up to individual students to choose their own educational pathways and majors according to their interests, abilities, and yes, their employment prospects. But they should do so based on accurate information, not myths.

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Dr. Priya Wadhera and MLA Conference in Germany 2016

Let's congratulate Priya in the acceptance of her proposal, “Memory / Starved: Food and Forgetting in W ou le souvenir d’enfance by Georges Perec,” for inclusion in the program for the MLA, Modern Language
Association’s
2016 International Symposium, Other Europes: Migrations,Translations, Transformations, to be held in Düsseldorf, Germany.

This is the first-ever MLA international symposium to take place in Germany next June. The program committee stated that they received roughly three times as many proposals as they could accomodate, so we are very proud that her proposal was accepted.

Congratulations Priya!