Italian Program, Dr. Jonathan Hiller

Sharing more good news with you, this time from our Italian Program, Dr. Hiller was at a conference at Georgetown University last Saturday (October 26), entitled “Italian Language and Culture Conference: Challenges in the 21st Century Italian Classroom”. His talk was entitled “Brutti ma buoni: How to use less-than-masterpieces of Italian cinema to engage students”. The conference was supported by the Italian foreign ministry as part of the international “Week of the Italian language” initiative.

Congratulations, Jonathan for your continuous research work!

French Program, Dr. Priya Wadhera

Absence  in Georges Perec

Priya Wadhera, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures

The celebrated 20th-century French author Georges Perec was a member of the influential OuLiPo group of writers who believe constraints are liberating. Perec made an indelible mark on the history of French literature with his varied and virtuosic œuvre. Case in point is Perec’s La Disparition (1969), a 300-page novel that entirely lacks the letter “e.” This gesture of literary bravado also has a deeper meaning. The lack of “e” evokes a lack of “eux” or them, those who died in the Holocaust, including Perec’s mother. In this paper, Dr. Wadhera studies another stark absence that pervades his works:  the lack of food. Perec’s protagonists rarely eat and the little food one sees are mere scraps, crumbs, morsels. She aims to understand this gesture in an era inaugurated by Marcel Proust, an author whom Perec greatly admired, and his “madeleine episode” which offers a position of privilege to food.        

Priya Wadhera is Associate Professor of French at Adelphi University in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures.  She earned her doctorate at Columbia University where she stayed on for three years as a lecturer in the department and Director of the Maison française before joining Adelphi in 2007. She has been the most senior member of the French program for over a decade at Adelphi where she savors her time in the classroom.

  

Over the years, Dr. Wadhera has established herself as a specialist of Georges Perec.  Her first book, entitled “Original Copies in Georges Perec and Andy Warhol,” came out in 2017 with Brill | Rodopi.  She has given papers throughout the US and France on his works, including by invitation at the Association Georges Perec in Paris, and later this semester in Australia at a conference drawing scholars from around the world who will be speaking on the OuLiPo.  Her published articles on Perec include one recently accepted to the authoritative Cahier Georges Perec, which gathers scholarship from the world’s foremost perecquiens.  In fact, this article was one of four she placed in peer-reviewed journals while on a recent yearlong sabbatical.  “Absence in Georges Perec” is based on another one of those articles.

Foreign Languages Film Festival, 2019

Manuela Sáenz: South American Revolutionary Heroine

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csyp5c

French replacement position

Melba Martinez, Assistant Director for ENL, Dual and World Languages for Bay Shore Schools has a French leave replacement position that will be opening in December and she is hoping to get some candidates in for an interview, please  contact her.  The leave replacement is for approx. 8-10 weeks and is a split assignment between the high school and middle school. 


Melba Martinez

Assistant Director for ENL, Dual and World Language

Bay Shore Union Free School District

P: 631-968-1177

E: mmartinez@bayshore.k12.ny.us

Feeling blue? Come to Finland!
Ranked the happiest country in the world in 2018 and
2019 by the World Happiness Report, Finland has
attracted global attention for its innovations and success
in governance, business, education and social welfare. It
is also ranked the safest country in the world. Come find out how they do it!
Professors Laatikainen and Gupta are offering a spring term 1 credit faculty-led study abroad course to Finland May 16-25, 2020. The course, 0187-396-001 Finnish Innovations in Politics and Business (cross-listed with 0210-396-001) runs during the period after commencement until just before the summer session. We will travel to Tampere and Helsinki in Finland and spend one day in Tallinn, Estonia which is renowned for its e- governance. This is a 1 credit spring semester course that could easily fit into your spring and not incur additional tuition costs.
We have planned interesting site visits, including famous Finnish firms like Nokia and the start-up Happy or Not. We will visit Sitra, the government funded innovation fund. We will explore the experiment in universal basic income at the University of Tampere. In Helsinki, we will visit the Finnish Institute of International Affairs and the famous Suomenlinna fortress island. There are planned visits to the Lenin museum and of course we will have a sauna on one of Finland’s 10,000 lakes. We have also worked to ensure that students will meet Finnish students socially throughout the study tour.
Interested students should apply through CIE. The link to the Finland course can be found at: https://adelphi- sa.terradotta.com/index.cfm?FuseAction=Programs.ViewProgramAngular&id=40257
Scholarships are available and info can be found at: https://study-abroad.adelphi.edu/students/scholarships/
The application and deposit deadline is November 19th.
Professors Gupta and Laatikainen would be happy to answer any questions you might have about this program. Please feel free to contact us. Professor Gupta can be reached via email (copied on this email) and his office hours this term are M, W, Th 3pm to 4pm in HHE 333. We are happy to talk about this exciting program, and put you in touch with students who took the course last year!
We thought we might leave you with a chuckle and some food for thought. Brag for Finland is a short, comical video that was prepared for Finland's celebration of its 100th anniversary last year in which citizens of more well-known countries try to teach the famously humble Finns how to brag about their many
accomplishments. Might as Well be Finnish is a half-hour pod-cast produced by the BBC and Sundance to explore how Finland has not only grown but prospered in a challenging geographic neighborhood.

Tervetuloa—Welcome to Finland!

Dr. Keiko Miyajima, Japanese program

Thank you very much for helping us to make the rakugo event happen, the event turned out to be a huge success. Master rakugo-ka Yanagiya Tozaburo's hilarious performance both in English and Japanese and four students from Prof. Miyajima's Japanese classes performed versions of rakugo in Japanese. Each of them did a great job making the audience laugh (in Japanese!). The room was full of laughter from the beginning to the end. Thank you so much again!

Thanks to Prof. Miyajima, coordinator of the Japanese program, for masking this happen.