Message from the Director, Juan Uriagereka

2021 News and Awards

The following are the remarks I had prepared for the end-of-year event, before we all heard Yomaira Figueroa’s talk. Since it would have been anti-climactic to go anyhere after such an inspirational presentation, I have decided to post them on the website instead, for a while anyway.   - Juan Uriagereka

If I may paraphrase a writer I don’t particularly like: It was the worst of times, it was the best of times; the age of wisdom and foolishness, the epoch of belief in... incredulity, as we moved to the season of darkness... hoping for a new light. You get the drill, since all of this, it has been! But there’s no point in dwelling on the worst—since vaccination, common sense, and discipline... have allowed us to come ahead of that, by and large—so let me concentrate on the reason for hope, which is always one another. At the risk of sounding like an MC for the Oscars, and not a funny one at that, let me organize accolades into groups, asking for your applause after I complete a set. We have so many to celebrate, even since our last occasion in May, that applauses after each instance would take us to the verge of tedium... 

I’ll start with our students, the energy behind what we do. We have a dozen graduating seniors, who we will celebrate next week (so hang in there, only a few more finals!). I will, however, recognize two Dean Senior Scholars: Molly Shreier (Arab) and Erin Namovicz (SPAP). You make us proud! In addition, our former student Eric Nichols (EAS) was awarded the Best Entertainment & Amusement Paper Prize at the IEEE Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. Who ever said the humanities aren’t just what our societies need at this point, to fill in the blanks with analysis, perspective, and sheer fun? Moving on to our graduate student colleagues, we have two new doctors: Nick Pandza (SLA)—working on neurostimulation in linguistic learning—and Chris Lewis (SPAP), on the works of Eduardo Lalo and Rita Indiana Hernández. Kudos to you both!

In addition, we have been successful in various university awards: from SPAP, Juan Díaz got a Summer Research Fellowship and Sofía Maurette, the ACHA Presidential Travel Award, while Nélida Devesa received the Snouffer Fellowship. From SLA, Takehiro Iizuka and Adonis de Carvalho Borges obtained Outstanding Graduate Assistant awards, while Mireia Toda Cosi was a Language Fellow at the LSC and a finalist in the TINET narrative contest in Catalonia. And two Wylie fellowships were given to Mariana Reyes (SPAP) and Léandra Cormier (FRIT) respectively. Nothing compares to your continued success, which we should find a way to correlate with more decent graduate student funding, by the way—one windmill at a time. Let’s have your applause for our young colleagues!
 
Let me move, next, to honors from our faculty, starting with school-internal awards. Ana Acedo, Evelyn Canabal, Ginette Eldredge, Chris Lewis, Chila Hidalgo, and José Magro, El Meswi, were recognized with the Zenobia Camprubí Professional Faculty Award. Elisa Gironzetti and Laura Demaría, with the Jorge Aguilar Mora Faculty Research Award. Turning to college awards, Masha Solomon received an ARHU Innovation Grant, Mercédès Baillargeon, an Advancement Grant for her project, Caroline Eades a subvention for the publishing of her monograph, and Mauro Resmini, the TOME@UMD award, to support the open access publication of his forthcoming book. In addition, Ana Patricia Rodríguez received the college Faculty Service Award. Mercédès was also awarded the 2021-2022 Auerbach Cinema & Media Studies Research Award for her book project. Beyond the college, Masha Solomon also received a FSRA award from the graduate school. Mercédès Baillargeon, Jyana Browne, and Matt Miller have received ISRCA awards for 2022 (Valerie Anishchenkova was a recipient in 2021). Finally, Andy Schonebaum was awarded a Geiss Foundation grant to complete editing his book project. I return to other forms of recognition, but let’s applaud these awards first.

Two main grants have come our way this semester. Elisa Gironzetti was awarded an NEH Digital Humanities Advancement, and Matt Miller, a Level III bridge grant from the Mellon Foundation. There’s more. Andrea Frisch is Senior Fellow at the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study, while Ana Patricia has joined the Prince George’s County Executive’s Latino Advisory Board, and Nahal Akbari will be Project Global Officer in Persian and Arabic for a three-year cycle. And our bread and butter: seven books from our colleagues have just come out: Hester Baer, German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism (Amsterdam University Press); Laura Demaría, Prosa chica (Borde Perdido Editora); Caroline Eades, Cinéma et Mythologie: Varda, Resnais, Honoré, Annaud (L'Harmattan); Anny Gaul, with colleagues Auman & Valosik (eds.), Making Levantine Cuisine: Modern Foodways of the Eastern Mediterranean (UT Press); Manel Lacorte with colleague Reyes-Torres, Didáctica del español como 2/L en el siglo XXI (Arco Libros); Thayse Lima, Latino Americanizando o Brasil: A crítica Literária e o Diálogo Transnacional (UFPR); Juan Carlos Quintero, De la queda(era). Imagen, tiempo y detención en Puerto Rico (El Cangrejo-La Criba); Saúl Sosnowski, El país que ahora llamaban suyo (Paradiso Ediciones). Just as Hester initiates her co-editorship of The German Quarterly, Saúl is putting together his 150th issue of Hispamérica—half a century after his initial steps! And while Fatemeh returns to her publishing on Rumi, as if she’d never been an administrator, Kira Gor, Nan Jiang, and Steve Ross published a combined nine articles in Second Language Research, The Journal of Second Language Studies, Frontiers in Psychology, Bilingualism: Language & Cognition, Language Learning, and the ECNU Review of Education. There are several other books and articles in the making: we will report on them next semester. These results speak for themselves, so I will leave it at asking for your applause.

I also want to honor those who left us. This was sadly true this year in the passing of our colleagues Madeleine Cottenet Hage and Mike Long, during the Spring semester. The SLA graduate students already planted a tree in honor of Mike in front of Jiménez, where we hope to see it blossom next Spring, and I also hope to celebrate Madeleine’s legacy in ways that start with recognition in a new obituary section in the Faculty Affairs website. 

Hopefully with good health for years to come—also during that semester but much less ominously—we experienced the retirements of Stefanía Amodeo, Etsuko Yamakita, and Regina Igel. This semester too, there is a retirement we are still trying to process, given its magnitude: Bob Ramsey has just become emeritus, soon after we nominated him for a Board of Regents award for Public Service. We won’t know until 2022 whether the regents will have enough sense to recognize that our community would treasure this even more than Bob needs to, after his most illustrious career, but we certainly do already: Here’s to you, Bob! We will keep relying on your good advice and common sense! The ship sails on with inspiration from your legacy.

To conclude, I want to celebrate the school itself, which I have become more familiar with in the last five months. I have been impressed by the energy of our students, including their participation in our constitutional task forces—an ask they put on the table on an event at my place, in which the only thing bad was my barbecue. I commend my colleagues for grassroots efforts that I contemplate with admiration and anticipation: in applied linguistics, in this moment of change, and for diversity/inclusion/community-engagement, as the university itself explores a way to get there. I was also going to speak of how Marylin Matar was able to turn a flood in the Language House, mold included, into an opportunity for a revamped space, but this weekend we learned of yet another flood after a burst pipe; so the rebuilding efforts will have to involve Residence Life and beyond. 

Efforts are also under way in the flagships to expand their mission in ways that are meaningful to the community at large, while the LSC has just informed me that SLLC will have a membership deal cut in half (and of our half, I will pay another half from transition funds)—because they want to be our partners. All of it while we are going into exciting new searches, with literally hundreds of candidates seeking to join our ranks; imagine what we could do if retirement lines could be planned for internally... 

Above all, I want to recognize the teaching and mentoring of one another in these difficult times, as our dedicated staff went beyond the call of duty, 24/7. My special shout out is for our COVID Tzar, Nicco Cooper. Even if he was already everywhere prior to his brave new mission, he is now anywhere that makes a difference: if nothing else to remind us that, when it’s embarrassingly cold, we can fix that by getting to the bottom of it all. That’s the spirit that will take us out of this pandemic and wherever we may be heading. We can go there together. 

So that’s all folks! Have a great break and stay healthy my friends!