Film Screening and Discussion
Gurumbé: Afro-Andalusian Memories
Commercial exploitation of the American colonies brought hundreds of Africans to Spain to be sold as slaves, forming a population which, over time, managed to gain space in a society wrought with racial prejudices. Music and dance were a fundamental part of their expression and the most important affirmation of their identity. Directed by M. Angel Rosale. Spanish with English subtitles.
Monday, October 22 at 12:45pm-3:00pm
Reel Cinema, Howard Gittis Student Center
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Film Screening
Hoje Eu Quero Voltar Sozinho (The Way He Looks)
Leonardo is a blind teenager dealing with an overprotective mother while trying to live a more independent life. When Gabriel, a new student in town, arrives at their classroom, new feelings blossom in Leonardo making him question his plans. ALL ARE WELCOME! The film will have English subtitles.
Wednesday, October 24 at 3:00pm
104 Anderson Hall
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Speaker: Ignacio M. Sanchez Prado, Washington University in St. Louis
Strategic Occidentalism. Mexican Fiction and the Question of National World Literatures
This presentation argues that world literature is actually a decentralized set of material practices of writing, editing, circulation and readership. Using the idea of a “national world literature” and the examples of Mexican fiction from the 1960s to 2000s, and the ideas set forward in Sánchez Prado’s recent book Strategic Occidentalism, the paper will argue for a study of world literature “from below” that uses sociologies of literature as base method and is attentive to the way in which the world is contingently constructed in the imaginaries of concrete literary fields.
Thursday, November 15 at 4:00pm
821 Anderson Hall
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Speaker: Angel Esteban, University of Delaware
La imagen de Martí en la novela histórica cubana moderna y posmoderna
The figure of José Martí has been used in different ways since his death in 1895 to the present, by individuals or groups that have wanted to assimilate it to certain political causes of opposite rank, social, religious, cultural and literary. This lecture will explore the process of reactualization of the Cuban identity associated with the charismatic leader.
Tuesday, November 27 at 4:00pm
821 Anderson Hall
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This past summer undergraduate Spanish major Mark Saucedo had the opportunity to intern with Mercado Global, a social enterprise organization that links indigenous artisans in rural Guatemalan communities to international sales opportunities, providing sustainable income-earning opportunities, access to business training and community-based education programs, and access to microloans for technology. Mark felt the experience was extremely rewarding because he was able to assist in providing more opportunities to the female indigenous workers while also learning their culture and customs.
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This past spring semester, undergraduate Spanish major/LAS minor Elizabeth Hollon studied at The Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán in Mérida, México, where she took Anthropology classes and learned more about the racial, class, and gender dynamics of modern México. While there, she taught English at a middle school and Nutrition in Spanish at a preschool. To better understand and appreciate the history and culture of the Yucatán, she traveled all over the region, to the archaeological zones, cities, and Maya pueblos. In Puebla and México City, she stayed with friends’ families and felt overwhelmed by their generosity and the diversity among the states of México.
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Undergraduate Anthropology major/Spanish and Global Studies minor Sam Nelson spent two months over the summer in La Merced, Peru with the Foundation for International Medical Relief of Children (FIMRC). Over two months, he shadowed doctors and nurses in the local hospital, but the most rewarding part of his fellowship was the work he did with the surrounding communities. Once a week for eight weeks, his group visited a small village at the top of a mountain called Shawan Rama.
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There he conducted workshops in Spanish on conservation, global warming, and healthy habits, and conducted fun activities with the children such as painting masks of endangered animals in the nearby selva, making soap dishes out of recycled plastic bottles, and putting on a skit about the importance of protecting the earth. The children were always full of excitement to learn and to show what they had already learned in school. Meeting and interacting with these kids made Sam rethink his entire career path. He now plans to pursue a career in Global Development instead of medicine so that he can surround myself with the same kindness, enthusiasm, and passion he felt at Shawan Rama.
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Undergraduate CST major/Spanish minor Ian Junker enjoyed an amazing summer semester abroad in Oviedo, Spain. Interacting with his host family, the people of Spain, and taking classes through la Universidad de Oviedo allowed him to finally attain basic fluency in Spanish, a feat he never thought he would have achieved. His host family’s kindness and hospitality made the entire experience that much better. Every day after class, he would arrive home, greeted by the smiling faces of his host mom and dad, who would patiently listen to and converse with him, despite his ineptitude with their native tongue. Ian feels that studying abroad in Oviedo, Spain was truly a life changing experience.
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On April 27, 2018, the Graduate Students Of Language at Temple (GSOLT) student organization, whose officers include graduate students Katie Clarkson, Raquel Mattson-Prieto, and Ashley Shaffer, hosted its fifth annual Language, Linguistics, and Life student research conference at the Howard Gittis Student Center. The theme of the conference was language and community, with a special emphasis on heritage language learning, bilingualism, immigration, and community literacy. Featured keynote speakers included Eli Goldblatt, of Temple’s Department of English, Silvina Montrul, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Kim Potowski, from the University of Illinois at Chicago. The 94 conference attendees were from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, DC, and Virginia. It was carried out with funding from CIBER, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the Shimada Fund, Associate Professor Augusto Lorenzino (personal donation), and Temple Student Organizations and Activities.
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Graduate student Raquel Mattson-Prieto presented part of her dissertation research, “Incorporating Spanish Heritage Learners’ Needs in the Mainstream Classroom,” at The American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP) Conference in Salamanca, Spain. This year’s conference celebrated the 100th anniversary of AATSP which was celebrated at the Universidad de Salamanca, the oldest university of the Spanish-speaking world. She also received a scholarship for a third consecutive year from Phi Sigma Iota, the International Foreign Language Honor Society.
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Graduate student Angel Díaz-Dávalos recently defended his dissertation, titled, "The Politics of Life and Death: Mexican Narconarratives at the Edge of the Twenty-first Century," and he will officially receive his PhD by the end of the current semester. In addition, his article, "Equis es igual a género, exilio y colonialidad: La nave de los locos de Cristina Peri Rossi" will appear in The Bulletin of Hispanic Studies by Liverpool University Press this Fall (volume 95, issue 9, 2018).
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During the summer, graduate student Megan DeVirgilis worked as a Research Assistant in Temple’s Writing Center, where she studied reading comprehension strategies and support for college-level students under the guidance of Lorraine Savage, Associate Director of the Student Success Center. Recent scholarship on writing centers has called attention to the “reading-writing connection” gaining ground in composition studies, and how writing centers could address reading comprehension more explicitly.
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Megan set out to explore ways that Temple’s Writing Center could achieve this by reviewing scholarship on the most appropriate cognitive and metacognitive reading strategies for print and non-print materials, for both native English speakers and English language learners, and conducting interviews with writing center administrators at select institutions across the country. At the end of the twelve weeks, she compiled a report that will help the Writing Center develop a center-wide approach to reading comprehension, parts of which she hopes to publish in the future.
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Graduate student William J. Ryan’s dissertation proposal, “Sovereignties Displaced: Avant-Garde Prose and Authoritarianism in Spain, Chile, and Argentina (1923-1939),” was approved in June of 2018. As part of his dissertation research, William visited Buenos Aires, where he consulted materials in the archives and special collections of the Biblioteca Nacional Mariano Moreno, the Biblioteca “Jorge Luis Borges” de la Academia Argentina de Letras, and the Instituto de Literatura Argentina “Ricardo Rojas.” While in Buenos Aires, William met with leading specialists Dr. Marcela Croce, Dr. Gabriela García Cedro, and Dr. Guillermo Korn to discuss their scholarly contributions and current debates in the field.
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Alumnus Daniel Seyler (CLA ’84, Spanish major and LASS-Mexico alumnus) is currently a Senior Director of Sales at Paychex. Paychex Retirement Plan Sales has the largest and most productive outside 401k record keeping salesforce in the country. At Paychex he was part of a Multi-Cultural Initiative to grow market share of Hispanic owned businesses Sales Leader for the company joint venture in Brazil (Sao Paulo). Before working at Paychex, he worked in DC as a Latin American Research Analyst at the US Library of Congress (Federal Research Division), and Program Associate at the Pan American Development Foundation inside the Organization of American States, among other positions. Early in October, Dan came to Temple and talked to our students about his life-changing experience studying in LASS-Mexico.
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It has been nearly a decade since alumnus Alejandro Aguilar earned his Master in Spanish at Temple University. He then moved to the Dominican Republic, where he began work as a professor at the Universidad Nacional Pedro Henríquez Ureña (UNPHU). A few months later, he was named Director of the Department of Foreign Languages and tasked with heading up Co-Curricular Activities. A few months ago, he was also named Editor in Chief of AULA, UNPHU's prestigious journal of Humanities and Social Sciences. He remembers his days as a graduate student at Temple with gratitude and nostalgia; the collegial atmosphere and academic demands were designed to make students first-class professionals. He hopes that he crosses paths with his classmates once again in the beautiful City of Brotherly Love, or in the Caribbean.
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Alumnus Alex Voisine (CLA '18), a Fulbright García-Robles Graduate Degree Grantee, has enrolled in a two-year Master’s in International Relations at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and is concomitantly doing a research project on LGBTI+ migration into Mexico. His research focuses on how the Mexican political asylum system treats asylum-seekers and refugees who identify as LGBTI+, as well as how immigration systems can function as instruments of soft power in the international arena. He is also volunteering on the
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legal team at Casa Refugiados, a local non-profit that assists migrants and refugees throughout the asylum application and resettlement process in Mexico. Drawing on the lessons he learned as an alumnus of the LASS-Ecuador program, and through conversations with classmates and new friends, class discussions and course content, he is becoming increasingly aware of the beauty that Mexico and Latin America have to offer, as well as the economic, social, and cultural challenges they face in a rapidly changing global landscape. Though he has only been in Mexico for three months, he has already fallen in love with its people, its culture, its academic life, and the “mexicanismos” that he is just now beginning to fully integrate into his vernacular.
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Spanish and Psychology alumna Ana Kearney (CLA '16) has been utilizing her Spanish skills as a social worker at Pathways to Housing PA. Helping people that were chronically homeless adjust to a calmer lifestyle, Ana blends her two majors into a job that she loves doing. When able, Ana returns to Puentes Hacia el Futuro, an educational organization under Puentes de Salud, where she interned in college. She plans on getting a graduate degree in Social Work to do more in-depth clinical work with the Latinx population. In the meantime, Ana continues to look for more ways to use her Spanish in a meaningful way.
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Alumnus Tom DiAgostino (CLA ‘16) is currently pursuing a Master's in Spanish Linguistics. He is also serving as a current Fulbright English Teaching Assistant (ETA) in Uruguay partnered with la Universidad Tecnológica de Uruguay (UTEC). UTEC is a five year old university and is the only public university in Uruguay that is not located in Montevideo. Working in the “interior” of Uruguay he has been able to meet beautiful and amazing people and share his US culture and English language with many people who have never met someone from the US before.
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An additional and amazing challenge that he has embraced during his Fulbright term is teaching English to students studying technology. He has instructed people on how to use 3-D printers, created workshops about genetic modification of food, and even assisted in innovation events for the university. If you would like to know more information about the Fulbright or any other scholarship/fellowships you may check with the Office of Scholarship Development and Fellowship Advising.
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Alumna Jamie Agins Lincow’s latest publication La distopía en las novelas de Ana María Shua was recently published. She continues to blog about the life of a working mom and has been featured by Working Mother magazine and the website Scary Mommy. You can follow her at http://thismultitaskingmom.com |
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Associate Professor Montserrat Piera recently had two books published:
- Remapping Travel Narratives (1000-1700): To the East and Back Again (Amsterdam University Press/ARC Humanities Press, 2018). Ed. Montserrat Piera
- Forging Communities: Food and Representation in Medieval and Early Modern Southwestern Europe (University of Arkansas Press, 2018). Ed. Montserrat Piera
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Associate Professor-Instructional Patricia Moore-Martínez also contributed to Forging Communities with her chapter "Eating for Success: Where, When, and What to Eat in Early Modern Spain", pp. 159-184.
Additionally, Montserrat's journal article “Wining and Dining at Celestina’s Table in Fernando de Rojas’ Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea” was published in ehumanista: Journal of Iberian Studies 39 (2018): pp 413-428. Lastly, her book chapter, entitled “Of Shipwrecks and Epiphanies: The Mediterranean Wanderlust of Iberian Knights,” was published in the book Chivalry, the Mediterranean, and the Crown of Aragon (Newark: DE, Juan de la Cuesta, 2018): pp. 61-83.
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This past April, Associate Professor Paul Toth was invited to Cleveland, OH as the keynote speaker for the annual conference of the Ohio Foreign Language Association, a statewide professional development and advocacy organization for language teachers. Conversations with conference attendees led to a follow-up written interview on the role of grammar teaching in second language development, which was published electronically on May 8 in the blog of Fluency Matters, a professional development organization for language teachers.
Over the summer, Paul gave invited keynote addresses on contextualizing grammar instruction at the annual conference of the Modern Language Teacher’s Association of Western Australia, at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, on July 21, and at the Ninth International Conference on TESOL at the Southeast Asia Ministries of Education Organization Regional Training Center (SAEMEO RETRAC) in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam on August 9. While “down under” between these events, Paul gave invited lectures at the University of South Australia in Adelaide on July 30, and at the University of Queensland (UQ) in Brisbane on August 1. His talk at UQ was made into a podcast by the School of Languages and Cultures, as was a subsequent recorded interview with UQ Prof. Noriko Iwashita on classroom second language research.
During the summer, Paul received a $10,000 grant from the journal Language Learning to support an invited colloquium that he has organized for the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) annual conference in Atlanta, in March 2019. At the colloquium, speakers representing five different social and cognitive perspectives on second language learning will discuss different features of classroom data that Paul has been publishing on with Temple Spanish graduate students over the past few years. The funds will be used to defray the cost of travel for the 11 colloquium participants, including graduate student Raquel Mattson-Prieto, who will analyze the data from the perspective of discursive positioning and identity theory.
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Adam's peer-reviewed article, “The Avant-Garde: From Creacionismo to Ultraísmo, Brazilian Modernismo, Antropofagia, and Surrealism” was published in April in The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2018), edited by Stephen M. Hart. Shortly after in May, he was elected by popular vote to be the Co-Chair of the LASA Brazil Section.
Summer found Adam researching at home and in São Paulo for his new book project. While in Brazil, he delivered two invited lectures on the work in progress: “Rever a revolução: A antiliteratura política de Augusto de Campos” (UNESP-Araraquara) and “Antiliteratura e Política em Augusto de Campos” (Casa das Rosas, Espaço Haroldo de Campos de Poesia e Literatura).
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At the May 2018 LASA conference in Barcelona, Assistant Professor-Instructional Hana Kahn gave a presentation entitled “A Trilingual Book By, About and For a Guatemalan Maya Kaqchikel Community.” Hana is preparing this collection of transcribed oral narratives in Maya Kaqchikel, Spanish and English, to promote trilingual literacy and awareness of the revitalization of Maya languages and cultures. The collection includes traditions and customs, personal histories, and memories of the Armed Conflict and will be published on paper and online in 2019. In July, Hana returned to Guatemala to participate in the Princeton Parramos Partnership program as a medical interpreter and continue work on the trilingual book.
Hana also recently hosted author Liliana Velasquez to share her experiences as an undocumented minor immigrant from Guatemala with her class. Liliana is author of the book Sueños y Pesadillas (Dreams and Nightmares). The event was extremely well attended by members of the Temple community and the college later released an article praising her lecture.
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Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea (ALEC) has just published its third and final issue for volume 43 (2018). Volume 43 runs for 824 pages. It contains 22 scholarly articles and 26 reviews of books. We must thank graduate student William J. Ryan for his hard work in the last couple of years as assistant to the General Editor. His accumulated experience will be put to good use as he will continue to support the journal’s activities on an advisory capacity. We have the pleasure to welcome graduate student Mariana Hernández y Rojas as the new assistant to the General Editor.
The journal’s related blog has surpassed 124,000 views in early September, and the Google+ page continues to bring attention to Spanish studies around the world. The audience remains international. Countries with most visits have been United States, Spain, Mexico, France, Russia, Brazil, Argentina, Germany, Ukraine, and Colombia. Both Mexico and Argentina have increased their number of visits and moved up the list. A visual rendering of the cities around the world who have visited the blog’s according to Google Analytics is inserted below.
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Study Abroad Opportunities
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2019 TEMPLE IN SPAIN: Oviedo Summer Session
Temple's summer session in Spain program is based at the University of Oviedo in the province of Asturias, one of the most culturally significant regions in Spain. The program is comprised of coursework in Spanish language, literature, cultural studies and eating cultures (Human Behavior GenEd) and students have an opportunity to enroll in 6 or 7 credits. Follow student bloggers as they chronicle their experience abroad.
Application Deadline: February 15
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WRITING CENTER SERVICES FOR STUDENTS OF SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE
Location: 201 Tuttleman Learning Center
Contact: 215-204-0702 or lcsavage@temple.edu
Hours: M–TH: 8:30am - 8:30pm
F 8:30am - 4:30pm
SA 10:00am - 4:00pm
Appointments are 50 minutes and walk-in sessions are 20-25 minutes. Times for Spanish & Portuguese services may vary based on staff availability. Find available times by visiting our online scheduler and selecting “Spanish” or “Portuguese.”
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Writing Tutoring in Spanish: Help with Writing
Writing tutoring provides assistance on college writing assignments for Spanish courses. Meet one-on-one with a tutor to review your drafts; to build vocabulary; and to improve clarity, sentence structure, and grammar in your draft.
Conversation Partners in Spanish and Portuguese: Help with Speaking and Listening
Open to students in 1000 and 2000-level courses only, Conversation Partners provides opportunities for Spanish and Portuguese language learners to practice speaking and listening. Meet one-on-one with a Conversation Partner to practice conversation, build vocabulary, review grammar, practice oral presentations, and more.
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SPANISH CLUB
The Spanish Club is a student organization and its principal goal is to promote the practice of speaking Spanish. One way we achieve this goal is to allow students to practice their conversation skills in a relaxed environment once a week. We also celebrate the Hispanic culture all year round with different activities. All levels welcome.
Mondays 4:00-5:00pm
422 Anderson Hall
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