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.
2016 News Archive
Petrarchive project receives collaborative research award
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).
Faculty research grants show breadth of francophone interests
We are proud to announce several grants obtained by IU faculty during 2015-16. In the fall, Assistant Professor Vincent Bouchard received a Mellon Short-Term Faculty Fellowship to pursue his project “The Film Commentator in West Africa: From Colonial Screenings to Video Animation.” He will use the funds for a 10-week research stay in France and Belgium to access the various archives of educational films in French made in former French colonies soon after independence, as well as reports of film screenings and how the films were received. Bouchard’s book project aims to show how certain film reception practices, particularly during “educational” screenings, were established through the intersection of vernacular cultures and colonial practices in Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso and other West African countries, as well as the former Belgian Congo.
We are also pleased to announce that two faculty members have received research grants from the IU Institute for Advanced Study (IAS): Julie Auger and Brett Bowles. While on sabbatical in 2015-16, Associate Professor Julie Auger conducted fieldwork in Picardie, France, on two occasions. The IAS award she received will allow her to hire three graduate students who will help her with the transcription of the interviews and plays she recorded, as well as with the digitization of some of her extensive collection of written Picard. These data will complement those from previous fieldwork and provide important information for the monograph on the structure of Picard that she is currently writing.
Associate Professor Brett Bowles received an IAS Research Consultation Award to bring Belgian film historian Roel Vande Winkel (University of Leuven) to Bloomington for four weeks during the spring 2017 semester. Their project, titled "Beyond Goebbels: Alfred Greven, Nazi Film Politics and Policy in Occupied Europe, 1940-1945" uses previously untapped archival sources to reconstruct German film production and distribution in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands during the Second World War.
Finally, we congratulate Associate Professors Oana Panaïté and (again) Brett Bowles for grants received from the College Arts & Humanities Institute. Professor Panaïté, in collaboration with professors Margaret Gray, Vincent Bouchard, Brett Bowles and Eileen Julien, is organizing the meeting of the 20th & 21st Century French/Francophone Studies association to take place at IU-Bloomington in April 2017. Her CAHI conference grant will help fund a session on “Sense and the Senses/Le Sens et les sens: A Roundtable on Aesthetics, Sociology and Literature” at this conference. Professor Bowles has received a CAHI research travel grant for a trip to Paris for the project “Forms and Functions of Poster Art in France during the First World War.” We are grateful for these awards that make our faculty research possible!
The College of Arts