Guillaume Ansart published two articles in the last academic year: “One injustice can never become a legitimate reason to commit another’: Condorcet, Women’s Political Rights, and Social Reform during the French Revolution (1789–1795)” (Intellectual History Review 33.2, June 2023) and “Condorcet, science et démocratie” (Lumières 42, 2023).

Margot Gray published an essay on Camus’s La peste in light of the COVID-19 pandemic in a volume in Oxford University Press’s series, “Oxford Studies in Philosophy and Literature.” The collection was edited by IU’s former philosophy professor and First Lady, Peg Brand Weiser.  As a member of the College’s Promotions Committee, Gray enjoyed glimpses into vastly different disciplines while teaching a new Honors course, “Gender/ Race/ Culture/ Narrative,” involving French novels in translation.

Thanks to the support of the IU Presidential Arts and Humanities Fellowship, Liz Hebbard was able to spend two months in summer 2023 working in archival collections in Italy for her book project. An article related to that book project appeared this spring in the conference proceedings for the Association Internationale d’Études Occitanes. Hebbard also published articles in Manuscript Studies and Digital Philology  this year, both related to her work as PI on the Peripheral Manuscripts Project, a collaborative effort to digitize and catalogue hundreds of medieval manuscripts in small collections across the Midwest. Hebbard and her Co-PIs also published a collaborative article about the project in the Journal for the Early Book Society. In January, Hebbard and her Book Lab collaborator Patty Ingham (IU English) were awarded an NEH Humanities Initiatives grant to develop a Book Studies undergraduate minor, and the exciting work on that three-year project began in March.

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada awarded a grant to Basile Roussel, Jeffrey Lamontagne and the Village historique acadien to work on historical variation in pronunciation and sentence structure in Acadian French. In addition to single-authored presentations and a publication on community patterns in borrowings (with Michael Friesner and Laura Kastronic), this year included collaborative presentations on borrowed words (Michael Dow), future temporal reference (Basile Roussel), question formation (Corentin Mazet), dialect attitudes (Kaitlyn Owens, Monica Nesbitt), and vowel pronunciations (Elliott Moreton, Monica Nesbitt, Stuart Davis). He also joined the Cognitive Science Program as an Associate Faculty Member.

In October 2023, Prof. Emerita Eileen Julien and Prof. Oana Panaïté attended the third annual Summer Institute supported through an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant as part of the project Entanglement, Mobility and Improvisation: Culture and the Arts in Contemporary African Urbanism and its Hinterlands. Alongside other senior academics, the two of them served as faculty mentors and plenary presenters for a group of over 20 junior scholars from African universities during an exceptionally rich and stimulating meeting held from September 29 to October 7, 2023 at the University of Ghana in Accra.

Oana Panaïté delivered several conference talks among which the one entitled “Confier la matière postcoloniale - risques et partages contemporains” at the international colloquium “Pratiques et modèles de la confiance en littérature” co-organized by Institut Universitaire de France in November 2023. She authored the chapter “Mondialité” in the volume Fragments d’un discours théorique. Nouveaux éléments de lexique littéraire (Codicille éditeur, Université Laval) and the article “Le Tapis magique immobile. Détail colonial et inattention narrative dans le roman de l’entre-deux-guerres” (with Étienne Achille) in the journal French Studies. Her monograph, Fictions of Race in Contemporary Literature: French Writers, White Writing (written in collaboration with É. Achille), was published by Oxford University Press in 2024.

This academic year Filippo Petricca has published an article entitled “Assaying Fiction. Dante’s Money as Literary Trust,” in the academic journal Dante Studies and completed his book proposal on "Dante's Divine Economy." He taught two new courses in the fall: a graduate seminar on medieval literature and economics and an undergraduate course on short stories about artists in Italian literary texts. He presented his research on literature and pawnbroking at seminars at Columbia University and University College London (online) and on neo-feudalism at the University of Chicago.  

His work focuses on grammaticalization and semantic change in adpositions, adverbs, conjunctions and discourse markers, mostly in Romance languages. He also works as an expert for the Dispositif d’enrichissement de la langue française (French Ministère de la Culture), on which he gave a talk (with two European colleagues) in the Student Faculty Forum in spring 2024. In ongoing work, Kevin and Benjamin are interested in the diachrony of reflexivity and are planning an eventual workshop on this topic in Paris.

Colleen Ryan published an interview with Italian American author Theresa Carilli in Diasporic Italy: The Journal of Italian American Studies. This year she has greatly enjoyed collaborations with students, such as the Carol J. Adams visit organized by Giorgio Losi, and the Big Ten Conference’s Academic Leadership Program in which she participated with five other IU faculty. Ryan thoroughly enjoyed working with Italian undergraduates in M450 Women in Italian Cinema in Fall 2023 and she’s deeply indebted to the vibrant interdisciplinary group of graduate students that came together in M600 “Classics and Contemporaries of Italian Cinema.” This course explored Italian cinema from WWII to current day through various thematic and theoretical lenses. The contributions of the Italian students, creative writers, film studies students, and budding journalists in this course marked a highlight in her 17 years in FRIT.

In 2023-24, Massimo Scalabrini continued to serve as DGS for Italian Studies. He gave talks at the annual meetings of the Sixteenth Century Society (in Baltimore) and the Renaissance Society of America (in Chicago), and he was invited to give a conference paper at a Franco-Italian conference titled “Gentilezza, grazia e incanto: buone maniere italiane e francesi a confronto (XVI-XVII secolo) / Gentillesse, grâce et charme: civilités italienne et française en miroir (XVIe-XVIIe siècle)” at the University of Genoa (Italy). His essay on the Muses and poetic inspiration was accepted by the journal Quaderni Folenghiani.

Karolina Serafin continued to serve as Director of Language Instruction of Italian and added a new administrative position: Director of Undergraduate Studies in Italian. Her work this past year focused on training the instructors and improving our undergraduate courses. Together with other Italian Faculty she worked on making our Major more attractive to larger student populations by introducing changes in our course offerings and requirements. In the Spring 2024 she received a Summer Instructional Development Fellowship from the IU Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning (CITL). Her project will focus on exploring new ways to increase students’ motivation in our basic language courses by following the principles of a combination of ungrading and specification grading and using new technologies as an instrument that allows students to measure and assess their progress. The course redesign would eliminate the fear of making mistakes and promote the acceptance of interlanguage as part of the learning process. This change would also promote equity in language courses since the students wouldn’t be graded based on the mistakes, but based on progress, effort, and consistency. The changes will be introduced in our M215 (Accelerated Intermediate Italian) in the Fall 2024.

Nicolas Valazza co-taught a master seminar, with Prof. Stéphane Lojkine, on illustrated books at Aix-Marseille University, and was invited to give a lecture on Baudelaire at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He also published two articles on Baudelaire in edited volumes. In the spring, he taught a course on Italian culture in Salerno, Italy. His new book, Le Livre enflammé. Fictions et poétique de l'autodafé, will be published by Hermann in September, 2024.