Department of French and Italian

In April, Alison Calhoun co-organized and participated in a Newberry Library symposium called “Medieval and Early Modern Dance in the Book,” where she ran into Isabella Magni (Ph.D. ‘17), who was at the Newberry completing her Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship. In May, Calhoun took twenty students to Paris for a Hutton International Experience Program course titled Reading the City: Parisian Spaces. Students spent two weeks studying in Paris after 8 weeks of course work on campus.

Andrea Ciccarelli once again served as director of the overseas study program in Florence this summer, but due to a sports injury and subsequent surgery, he was not actually able to be in Florence with the 35 enrolled students. However, thanks to his vast experience with the program and the study sites in Florence, the help of Associate Instructors Francesco Samarini and Carlotta Vacchelli, and the convenience of technology, Ciccarelli was still able to direct the program and teach the core course on Renaissance Florence online. Site visits are integral to this course, so he is extremely grateful to the AIs for taking on the extra work of leading the visits after each online session he taught. They were also invaluable in coordinating the program on the ground.

Margot Gray completed her book manuscript, Stolen Limelight: Gender, Display and Displacement in Modern Fiction in French. She also greatly enjoyed organizing a symposium honoring the centennial anniversary of the publication of Proust’s In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, second volume of In Search of Lost Time; William C. Carter (Ph.D. ‘71), University Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, was the keynote speaker. The celebration included a recital of songs of Proust’s era performed by musicians trained by the IU Jacobs School of Music.

A culmination of research begun in the 1980s, the book Life in God’s Country, by Professor Emeritus Edoardo Lèbano was published by The Daily Clintonian in 2018. The work consists of interviews with Italian immigrants who settled in Clinton, Indiana, in Vermillion County, from the mid-19^th to the mid-20^th century, as well as immigration records of these families. Around the turn of that century, Clinton had a population of approximately 15,000 people, about one-third of whom were Italian.

Eric MacPhail had a short term fellowship in July 2018 at the Newberry Library in Chicago, where he worked on his book No Word for God. Along with history professor Daniella Kostroun, he will organize a seminar on Religious Persecution and Religious Pluralism in the Early Modern World for 2019-20, funded by a grant from the Consortium for the Study of Religion, Ethics and Society.

The book-length study Comparative Stylistics of Welsh and English (Cardiff: University of Wales Press), by Kevin Rottet and Steve Morris, was published in Fall 2018. Rottet, who is on the executive committee of the North American Association for Celtic Language Teachers, is a specialist of both Welsh and Breton. In their study, Rottet and Morris (Swansea University, Wales) compare and contrast the linguistic structure of Welsh and English through the window of a parallel corpus of over 30 novels and autobiographies from the late 19th century to the present.

This summer, Kelly Sax and IU professor of geology Michael Hamburger spent a month in southern France conducting site visits in preparation for their 3-week summer 2020 IU Bicentennial course entitled “Provence From the Ground Up: Geology, Culture, History, and Traditions.” Lesson number one: what holds Provence, which extends from the Mediterranean to the Alps, together? Sheep! The tradition of the transhumance, the practice of moving livestock from one grazing ground to another in a seasonal cycle, typically to lowlands in winter and highlands in summer, ensured regular cultural exchanges between low- and highlanders across time.

Colleen Ryan has enjoyed presenting at various conferences on Italian film and Italian American studies this year, from the MLA in Chicago to the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies meeting in Rome. Her professional highlights, though, were her two spring courses, Italian American Women Artists in the Hutton Honors College and the Italian Theater Workshop, featuring a student-scripted and produced rendition of “Pinocchio.”

Nicolas Valazza recently published a book entitled La Poésie délivrée. Le livre en question du Parnasse à Mallarmé (Droz, 2018). In collaboration with Professor Emeritus Samuel N. Rosenberg, he edited a volume entitled Paul Verlaine: A Bilingual Selection of His Verse (Penn State University Press, 2019). In April, he also curated an exhibition of “Banned Books and Prints in Europe and the United States, 17th-20th Centuries” at the Lilly Library and organized an interdisciplinary workshop on “Literary Censorship and Obscenity Law.”