2016 News Archive

Petrarchive project receives collaborative research award

Professor H. Wayne Storey (Italian) and Associate Professor John Walsh (Informatics) have been selected to receive the 2016 Outstanding Faculty Collaborative Research Award. This award, jointly supported by the Office of the Provost & Executive Vice President and the Office of the Vice Provost for Research, was established to recognize and honor the achievements of a collaborative team of IU Bloomington faculty whose research, scholarship, or creative activity is making important scholarly contributions. In addition to research funding, the award entails a presentation to the IU scholarly community of the team’s Petrarchive project and collaborative process during the Fall 2016 semester. The Petrarchive project, to digitalize Petrarch’s poetic masterpiece Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, was started in 2013 with an IU New Frontiers Start-Up Grant, and was awarded a 3-year NEH grant in 2014. Ph.D. candidate Isabella Magni has also been instrumental in helping with this cutting-edge textual coding project involving one of the most important works in western literature. The research team is applying 21st-century analytical methods to a classic text written over a 40-year period in the 14th century.

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Bologna Consortial Studies Program celebrates 50 years

IU President Michael McRobbie will join dignitaries from the University of Bologna and IU faculty, staff, and alumni to celebrate the 50th anniversary of IU’s study abroad program in Bologna May 26-28, 2016. Founded by the late Professor Mark Musa, the bilateral exchange between the two universities evolved into the Bologna Consortial Studies Program which now includes 15 U.S. colleges and universities. More than 1,600 IU alumni having participated, and over 300 University of Bologna students have come to IU through individual scholar exchanges. McRobbie will present the University of Bologna Rector Francesco Ubertini with the Thomas Hart Benton Medallion during the ceremonies, in recognition of his public service. The BCSP resident director since 2003 is Dr. Andrea Ricci (Ph.D. IU ’02). 

NEH Grant awarded for Louisiana French dictionary project

We are pleased to announce that four French linguistics scholars with ties to IU have received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the development of a specialized dictionary of Louisiana French. Rudy Professor Emeritus Albert Valdman, Associate Professor Kevin Rottet (Ph.D. IU, 1995), Research Associate Marvin Moody (Ph.D. IU, 1972), and Professor Thomas Klingler (Ph.D. IU, 1992) from Tulane University will work together on the Differential, Historical, and Etymological Dictionary of Louisiana French. The work will provide rich, in-depth information on the lexicon of Louisiana French and will reveal to users what elements are shared with other French-speaking regions of the world and what elements are unique to Louisiana French. It will thus contribute to our understanding of the place of this language variety within the broader francophone world. This project, funded by a $240,000 grant from the Preservation and Access Division of the NEH, will constitute the culmination of the lexicological and lexicographic research on Louisiana Creole and Louisiana (Cajun) French undertaken under three previous NEH grants that led to the dissemination of three fundamental resources for French-related varieties in Louisiana: the Dictionary of Louisiana Creole (1998), the CD-ROM, Discovering French Through the Spoken Word (2003), and the Dictionary of Louisiana French: As Spoken by Cajun, Creole, and American Indian Communities (2010), as well as the Louisiana component of the panfrancophone lexicographic database (Base de données lexicographique panfrancophone).