Diouf led a playwriting workshop, taught an undergraduate class, performed a reading of her monologue play Tracks, introduced the reading of her play The Great She-Bear (directed by Analise Cain and produced by Babel Theater Project), and engaged in a livestreamed conversation around her work. In the spring semester, Alison once again took twenty students to Paris for two weeks as part of the Hutton Honors College International Experience Program. She took advantage of being in Europe to say “yes” to an invitation to speak at a theater conference on “Stage Operations” in Munich, Germany, where she shared her research on networks of knowledge behind the scenes of musical theater and opera at Louis XIV’s Versailles.

 

At the end of December, Andrea Ciccarelli will retire from IU. He arrived in 1990, fresh from graduate school, and he considers himself lucky for having had many great colleagues and wonderful students. Throughout these decades, he has seen the department evolving, pedagogically and scholarly, towards a broader interdisciplinary offer in Francophone, French and Italian Studies that allowed us to strengthen our first-rate literary, pedagogical, philological, linguistic and historical background, embracing other fields such as visual culture, social media, and popular culture. Our cultural diversity makes us stronger and reaches out to the entire campus. In these years, Andrea has had the pleasure to serve the department (DLI, DGS, chair) as well as the campus (director of CAHI, IU Florence Program, dean of Hutton Honors) in various capacities that offered him the opportunity to learn constantly. He will now focus his attention on continuing his research endeavors on modern and contemporary Italian culture, as well as leading the Ragusa Foundation for the Humanities in New York City. This last task, well underway, would not have been possible without the experience matured through his interactions with FRIT undergraduate and graduate students, as well as his colleagues.

 

In the past academic year, Laurent Dekydtspotter started new laboratory work on basic aperiodic neuronal activity detectable by electroencephalography. Most L2 neurocognitive research focuses on periodic activity, also known as oscillations. Aperiodic activity reflects the basic activity of the brain's excitatory and inhibitory circuits, enabling a completely new view of the nature of the L2 vs. L1 in the brain. This comes in addition to his contributions to emerging research on the role of the fast gamma rhythm oscillations (>30 Hz) in basic language operations. He also published an article in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. This paper addresses how gamma oscillations implementing a workspace for basic operations that interacts with cell assemblies for basic lexico-grammatical elements can play a significant role in enabling parsing-based L2 acquisition. He also published a chapter entitled Input Processing in Generative Second Language Acquisition in Wynne Wong and Joe Barcroft (eds.), (pp. 59-72) in The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Input Processing (Taylor and Francis). This chapter discusses the degree to which advances in L2 acquisition research support a processing-based instruction model. 

 

Cristina D’Errico joined our Department as a Visiting Lecturer in Italian in the Fall of 2024 and will be staying for the 2025/2026 academic year. Her time at IU has been both rewarding and full of opportunities for growth as a teacher, researcher, and active member of this academic community. At IU, she has had the pleasure of teaching Italian at various levels, both in person and remotely. This range of formats has allowed her to develop flexible and inclusive approaches to language instruction and to connect with students across different learning contexts. While teaching, she has remained actively engaged in research and professional development. She recently presented at a conference in Boston on Teofilo Folengo and his representation of doubt as a monstrous figure—an exploration of how literary form can embody epistemological instability in early modern texts. Currently, she is working on an article focused on Giovanni Leone Semproni’s Erminia Duellata, a fascinating seventeenth-century dialogue in which two noblewomen debate artistic portrayals of Tasso’s Erminia in a country house setting. The article argues that Erminia represents a unique case of unresolved alterity in Gerusalemme Liberata, a theme that persists into the Seicento.  She looks forward to continuing to contribute to our teaching and research mission in the year ahead.

 

This year, Elizabeth Hebbard published a chapter, “Napoleon’s Troubadours,” in Troubadour Texts and Contexts (Boydell) that examines two medieval Occitan songbooks that were confiscated from Rome by Napoleon’s commissioners. In spring 2025, Hebbard began a new project, The Bayeux Tapestry from Scratch, which has been generously supported by a Medieval Academy of America Centennial Project Grant and an IU Public Arts & Humanities Project Grant. The project focuses on the techniques and materials used to produce this 11th-century embroidered history of the Battle of Hastings, and the first project events included a roundtable, Textiles in Context, featuring presentations by FRIT colleague Kevin Rottet and EALC colleague Nick Vogt, and a guest lecture, “The Uses and Economy of Medieval French Linen,” by Sarah-Grace Heller (Ohio State University). Several events and workshops are planned for 2025-2026 and will be open to the public. In May 2025, Hebbard was awarded an NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant to continue the Peripheral Manuscripts Project, a collaborative effort to digitize and catalogue hundreds of medieval manuscripts held in small collections across the Midwest, and for which she serves as PI. She gave invited lectures on the project at Purdue University, the University of Leeds, and the Lawrence J. Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as the keynote for the 2024 joint meeting of the Mid-America Medieval Association and the Medieval Association of the Midwest. Finally, Hebbard has been appointed managing editor of Tenso, the journal of the Société Guilhem IX, and looks forward very much to the privilege of working closely with Occitan studies colleagues across the world and to the exciting work of helping to disseminate their research.

 

Eric MacPhail participated in the International Colloquium of FISIER at the Sorbonne from June 10 to 14 on behalf of the Erasmus of Rotterdam Society. On June 26, he was in Rome at the Sapienza for an event organized by the Laboratorio Erasmo. From July 15 to 19, he was in Aix-en-Provence for the International Association for Neo-Latin Studies. Then it was on to Copenhagen from July 22-26 for the International Society for the History of Rhetoric.

 

Oana Panaïté published the monograph Fictions of Race in Contemporary Literature: French Writers, White Writing (co-authored with Étienne Achille; issued with Oxford University Press in 2024) and co-edited two journal issues on the themes of “Decolonizing Literature in French and the Question of the White Writer” for Contemporary French Civilization (CFC Intersections, September 2024) and “Thinking with Édouard Glissant” for the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy (JFFP, November 2024). In addition to co-authoring (with FRIT graduate student Nicolas Noé) a journal article on poetry and informatics in Édouard Glissant, she also signed a journal article on translingualism in Jacques Derrida and Glissant, as well as a chapter in the first scholarly volume dedicated to the work of 2021 Goncourt Prize-winner Mohamed Mbougar Sarr. She presented talks at a special conference entitled “Reenvisioning Francophonies” organized at Penn State University in September 2024 and in a Presidential Theme Session dedicated to the topic of literary authority in the French-speaking world at the Modern Language Convention held in New Orleans in January 2025. At the annual convention of the American Comparative Literature Association (held virtually on May 29-June 1st), she participated in a two-day seminar on “necrofiction” (a concept she developed and illustrated in a 2022 book), in which ten scholars from institutions around the world examined the resonances and potential applications of this concept to understand the role of literary works in creating sites and symbols for remembering as well as coping with individual and collective loss.

 

Filippo Petricca will be publishing a new article on the reception of the Old Testament story of Joseph in medieval France in light of medieval debates on usury and financial speculation. This article is forthcoming in the academic journal Speculum and it is entitled “The Patriarch and the Moneychangers. Usury, Speculation, and the Old Testament Story of Joseph in Medieval France.” He submitted a book chapter article on divine money, currency manipulation, and debasement in the fourteenth-century Roman de Fauvel. This article, “Divine Money. Currency Manipulation and the Economy of Justice in the Roman de Fauvel,” is part of a collective volume: Cultures of Exchange, ed. by Susanna Barsella, Germano Maifreda, and William Caferro for the University of Toronto Press.

In the Spring, Filippo organized a panel at the Renaissance Society of America annual meeting in Boston: “Medieval and Early Modern Economies: Literary Works and Historical Sources.” At this panel, he presented a talk entitled “Unlike a Rolling Stone," exploring Dante's conceptualization of punishments as debts in Purgatory and how ​it refashions medieval legal punishments for debtors. He has also presented his research at Boston College, the University of Kansas, Notre Dame, and at the annual meeting of the Dante Society of America (theme: Dante and Money), with a talk entitled “Dante’s Money: Faith, Debt, Trust.”  

He taught four newly-designed courses, an undergraduate course that offers a complete reading of Dante’s Hell, the first cantica of the Divine Comedy; a graduate seminar on Dante’s Hell and Its Rewritings, a Gen-Ed Critical Approaches, Monetary Fictions, which focused on literature and economics, and an undergraduate course in Italian, Fortuna della luna, which examines the history of Italian literature through the lens of the moon.  

 

Kevin Rottet was on sabbatical in fall 2024 and put the time to good use to make a lot of progress on the forthcoming Dictionnaire étymologique, historique et comparé du français de Louisiane, to be published in 2026 by De Gruyter Brill. In September, Kevin gave a keynote address related to the dictionary work at the annual convention of the Association of French Language Studies (AFLS) in New Orleans entitled: “La place du français de Louisiane dans la francophonie nord-américaine: Perspectives lexicographiques.” He also participated in a workshop held in Besançon, France, in October on the topic L’adverbe en variation en francophonie. In March 2025, he participated in a workshop organized by his colleague Liz Hebbard entitled Textiles in Context: A Roundtable. Kevin’s intervention was on the topic “The place of cotton in Louisiana French Culture and Language.” He has continued to lead a weekly Breton language Reading Group, which went hybrid in January 2025 in order to incorporate several people in far-flung places as well as local folks.

 

In the past academic year, Massimo Scalabrini completed three articles: one on the symbolic meaning of the Macaronic Muses, another on the concept of civility in early modern Italy, and a third on the impact of North American criticism on the eminent italianista Ezio Raimondi. He presented at several symposia and conferences, including the Renaissance Society of America. He is currently working on a new monograph titled Parody, Satire, and the Human Condition in the Italian Renaissance, for which he received a College Arts and Humanities Institute fellowship.

 

Karolina Serafin has continued to serve as Director of Undergraduate Studies (DUS) and Director of Language Instruction (DLI) for the Italian Program. She also completed the Intercultural Competency Certificate and implemented her “ungrading” approach in the M215 Intensive Intermediate Italian course and presented this innovative assessment method during the Student-Faculty Forum, attended by members of our department and the broader Indiana University community. Elements of this approach have since been adopted across all our language courses. Additionally, we have begun exploring the integration of AI tools in both instruction and student assessment.

 

Nicolas Valazza published his third monograph, Le Livre enflammé. Fictions et poétiques de l’autodafé, in the collection “Fictions pensantes” of Hermann in the fall of 2024. In his graduate seminar on “The Haitian Revolution in French Literature,” he co-hosted a lecture by the Haitian poet John Wesley Delva with Websder Corneille and the Haitian Creole Program of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. More recently, he organized a conversation with Franco-American novelist Benjamin Hofmann about his most recent novels. Starting in the fall of 2025, he will serve as interim Director of Undergraduate Studies for French. He looks forward to presenting students with the many cultural, professional, and social opportunities that a French major can offer them.

 

In addition to serving as Director of Undergraduate Studies in French, Barbara Vance has continued to co-lead the weekly Old Occitan Reading Group with colleague Elizabeth Hebbard, and she facilitated a two-week collaborative research visit to Bloomington by Prof. Pierre Larrivée, a scholar of French and Occitan syntax and semantics from the University of Caen, France.