Professor Wood’s publications include articles in French Forum, Medium Aevum, and the Romanic Review, as well as a chapter on the Queste del Saint Graal in Murder Most Foul: Medieval and Early Modern Homicide (Larissa Tracy, ed., Boydell & Brewer press). He also has a wide range of teaching experience, including Sex, Gender & Identity in the Middle Ages & Renaissance at Durham, Paris: Anatomy of a City at Penn State, and French language courses. Here at IU, he is teaching F361 La France medieval (à 1500) and F300 Reading & Expression in French. This young scholar is indeed a welcome addition to our community!

Professor Eileen Julien and a team of faculty collaborators from three universities have received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant of nearly $200,000 for a summer institute in 2016 entitled "Arts of Survival: Recasting Lives in African Cities." Professor Oana Panaïté, also in our department, is a collaborator on this important enrichment opportunity for twenty-five college and university professors. The other team members are Professors James Ogude (Research Fellow, University of Pretoria, South Africa), Akin Adesokan (Department of Comparative Literature and the Media School, IUB), and Grace Musila (English, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa).

The project explores contemporary urban culture and arts in African and African diaspora cities--Accra, Lagos, Nairobi, New Orleans and Port-au-Prince. These cities share African "roots," but are distinctive because of the unique "routes" that subsequently shaped them: landscapes and histories; multiple languages; waves of immigrants who brought and continue to bring their labor, culture and creativity; and the sometimes tragic events, both “natural” (hurricanes and earthquakes) and man-made (political violence and legacies of colonialism and slavery), that these cities have undergone. Says Julien, “Our goal is to examine how art engages the political and social hierarchies embedded in these cities and often recasts marginal or precarious lives into lives that exceed their constraining structures.”

The Department congratulates Professor Julien and her team for this prestigious award! View a complete list of NEH grants awarded this summer.

Pi Delta Phi is the oldest academic honor society for a modern foreign language in the United States, founded at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1906. It is comprised of more than 370 chapters and is a member of the Association of College Honor Societies and endorsed by the American Association of Teachers of French. Its purpose is to recognize outstanding scholarship in the French language and its literatures, to increase the knowledge and appreciation of Americans for the cultural contributions of the French-speaking world, and to stimulate and to encourage French and francophone cultural activities. The current president of Pi Delta Phi is Professor Scott Fish (Augustana College).

Professor Musa received a Fulbright Fellowship to Italy (1956-58) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1971), as well as Indiana University's Distinguished Teaching and Mentoring Award in 1996. During his long and productive career, he became known as one of America's most skillful translators and critics of Italian literary classics, including not only the Vita Nuova but also Dante's Divine Comedy, Petrarch's Canzoniere, Boccaccio's The Decameron, Machiavelli's The Prince, The Italian Renaissance Reader, and Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, some of which were products of his collaboration with other Indiana University colleagues. His books were published by major university and commercial presses, including The Viking Press, Penguin, Norton, Oxford University Press, and Indiana University Press. For his fine work on Dante, he was awarded the "Fiorino d'oro" ("gold florin") by the city of Florence, Italy.

Thanks to Peter Bondanella, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, for the obituary.