Faculty notebook

As Americans’ attention was focused in 2020-21 on voting, Guillaume Ansart published an article entitled “Rousseau and Condorcet: Will, Reason and the Mathematics of Voting” in the British journal History of Political Thought. The work considers how Rousseau and Condorcet defined the social conditions and voting procedures necessary to make voting a mechanism of rational collective decision-making.

Alison Calhoun traveled virtually to Vancouver, Dublin, and London to present her research on Descartes and on early modern opera. As Director of Graduate Studies in French and Francophone Studies, she was particularly uplifted by the courage of the incoming cohort of graduate students, especially those who battled pandemic restrictions to join the program from abroad.

Along with his research team, Laurent Dekydtspotter recently published in the Journal of Neurolinguistics on the topic of nonnative French addressing the neurocognitive bases of nonnative language processing in the language network. In ongoing work, Dekydtspotter and colleagues, including Charlène Gilbert (MA ’16, French Linguistics) and Kate Miller (PhD ’11, French Linguistics), argue that this network of the brain modifies its activity during nonnative language processing to counteract the weaker activation of the stored information for the words and grammar of the nonnative language. This action of the language network is argued to be automatic and to reveal fundamental aspects of the language system.

Margot Gray hopes to have put teaching via Zoom behind her, after various mishaps - including an effort to help a student get into a breakout room that resulted in putting herself in the room instead, then not being able to get out, despite helpful coaching from the breakout group. (She did enjoy her unplanned discussion of the breakout topic, though.) Her book Stolen Limelight: Gender, Display and Displacement in Modern Fiction in French has been accepted for publication. She was glad to return to Proust with another forthcoming piece, and is contributing a chapter on political and corporeal suffocation in a collection with Oxford UP on Albert Camus’s The Plague and COVID-19.

Elizabeth Hebbard, along with colleague Patricia Ingham (IU English), created the IU Book Lab in Fall 2020, which focuses on the book as a physical, historical, technical, artistic, and cultural object (see LINK in this newsletter). She also continued work on her CLIR grant-funded project, The Peripheral Manuscripts Project: Digitizing Medieval Manuscripts in the Midwest ( https://peripheralmss.org/), with Michelle Dalmau (IU Libraries) and colleagues at nearly two dozen collections in the Midwest, to digitize and catalog hundreds of medieval manuscripts.

It was a year full of Dante events to commemorate the 7th centenary of the poet’s death. For Akash Kumar, the most interesting activity was appearing on the BBC 4 radio program “Beyond Belief” ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000vh5t) to discuss the continued relevance of Dante’s Inferno in the here and now.

In March, Jeffrey Lamontagne was invited to the University of Texas at Austin to present collaborative work with Gretchen McCulloch on dialectal differences in French tweets. During this virtual visit, he showed that we can learn about subtle properties of a dialect’s pronunciation from which letters tweeters repeat for stylistic effect (e.g. “aiiime” vs. “aimeeee” for “aime”).

As president of the Conseil International d’Études Francophones, Oana Panaïté was in charge of the first virtual congress of this international association dedicated to interdisciplinary studies, research, publications, and artistic expression from all countries and regions of French expression. The 2021 CIÉF Laureate was the writer Marie Darrieussecq whose lecture and interaction with the audience was characterized by her usual cheerfulness, wit, and passion for literature and the connections it makes possible. FRIT was well represented both by alumni and current students: Cristina Robu (MA’17 and current PhD candidate, French/Francophone Studies) and Amanda Vredenburgh (PhD ’20, French/Francophone Studies) moderated panels and delivered papers while Renata Uzzell (PhD ’21, French Linguistics) and Victoria Lagrange (PhD candidate, French/Francophone Studies) provided invaluable assistance before and during the event.

Colleen Ryan received the university-level Distinguished Service Award from the American Association of Teachers of Italian this summer in recognition of her leadership in Italian pedagogy. Ryan reports that teaching “Women in the Mafia and Antimafia” and “Masterpieces of Italian Literature” in Spring 2021 was a great experience despite the online learning imposed by the pandemic. Students had a good sense of how to engage and learn remotely, she says, and they contributed with great energy all the way through. In addition, she recently took film director Fred Kuwornu’s “Teaching Black Italy” course for faculty, which was extremely informative, encouraging and energizing!

During the 2020-21 academic year, Massimo Scalabrini completed a book manuscript titled Commedia e civiltà: Dinamiche anticonflittuali nella letteratura italiana del primo Cinquecento, and he is currently in the process of finding a publisher. He also became a member of “Cinquecento plurale,” an international network of scholars working on the Italian Renaissance.

Appropriately for Dante’s 7th centenary, the first 2021 issue of Romanic Review was published in May under the guest editorship of Wayne Storey with the title: The Pleasure of Dante’s text/Il piacere del testo dantesco. The eleven essays, in English and Italian, included Storey’s introduction to the volume and his own “Painting (and Writing) over Dante.” His study “Michele Barbi curatore di testi danteschi” appeared in the commemorative issue for the 100-year anniversary of Michele Barbi’s founding of Studi Danteschi 85 (2020), and his “Legacy of Petrarch’s Chartae” was published in Petrarch and His Legacies, edited by Ernesto Livorni and Jelena Todorović (MA ’06, PhD ’09, Italian).