Research and Innovation

This edited volume adopts a new angle on the study of Spanish in the United States, one that transcends the use of Spanish as an ethnic language and explores it as a language spreading across new domains: education, public spaces, and social media. It aims to position Spanish in the United States in the wider frame of global multilingualism and in line with new perspectives of analysis such as superdiversity, translanguaging, indexicality, and multimodality. All the 15 chapters analyze Spanish use as an instance of social change in the sense that monolingual cultural reproduction changes and produces cultural transformation. Furthermore, these chapters represent five macro-regions of the United States: the Southwest, the West, the Midwest, the Northeast, and the Southeast.(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Co-authored with Manel Lacorte and Eliza Gironzetti. In F. Salgado-Robles and E.M. Lamboy (Eds). Spanish across Domains in the United States: Education, Public Spaces, and Social Media

This article describes the creation of the Comité du Film Ethnographique (CFE) in 1953 at the Musée de l'Homme, Paris, France, as an answer to the need to produce documentaries that would meet both the requirement for scientific rigor and the general public's interest in ethnography and diverse cultures. The CFE aimed to legitimize the use of cinema in a relatively new discipline in the scientific world and to highlight the enthusiasm, professionalization, and autonomy of ethno-cinematographers since the beginning of cinema, while having to address the issues and ambiguities linked to this field of research and its place in society.

One site of Hebrew study has been virtually ignored by stakeholders in the enterprise: Hebrew language programs at American public schools. Despite the fact that these programs exist – and in many cases are expanding and thriving – they remain a virtual black box in Jewish educational research, and are often disconnected from broader Jewish communal and institutional structures. We contend, on the other hand, that Hebrew language instruction, even in public schools, has implications for Jewish education.

OpenITI AOCP is a multi-institutional initiative led by a highly interdisciplinary team of humanities, computer science, and digital humanities principal investigators from Roshan Institute for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland (Roshan-UMD); Northeastern University’s (NU) NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks; the Aga Khan University, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations (London) (AKU-ISMC); the Department of History, University of Vienna; and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, UMD (MITH-UMD). OpenITI AOCP proposes to address the technical and organizational barriers currently stymying the development of Arabic-script OCR and digital text production in a three-stream work plan. OpenITI AOCP’s technical work (workstream #1) will focus on integrating standards-compliant text export functionality (e.g., TEI XML) and the latest advancements in machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing with eScriptorium (an open-source and user-friendly OCR pipeline). This work will result in a robust digital text production pipeline for Arabic-script languages that will enable researchers, students, and citizen scientists to produce high-quality, open-access, and standards-compliant digital texts in a user-friendly environment for the first time. OpenITI AOCP team will also build digital capacity in the field of Islamicate Studies and cultivate networks of OCR researchers and interested users through a combination of experts workshops, biannual teleconferences, and pedagogical materials—efforts that will both improve the quality of AOCP’s final deliverables and expand their community of users.

The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Language Teaching: metodologías, contextos y recursos para la enseñanza del español L2 provides a comprehensive, state-of-the-art account of the main methodologies, contexts and resources in Spanish Language Teaching (SLT), a field that has experienced significant growth world-wide in recent decades and has consolidated as an autonomous discipline within Applied Linguistics. Written entirely in Spanish, the volume is the first handbook on Spanish Language Teaching to connect theories on language teaching with methodological and practical aspects from an international perspective. It brings together the most recent research and offers a broad, multifaceted view of the discipline.

The Spanish Enlightenment writer Gaspar de Nava Álvarez interrogated eighteenth-century notions of masculinities and sexualities in 'Poesías asiáticas' (Asian Poems 1833), a reworking of original Arabic and Persian verses. I argue that the homoeroticism expressed in 'Poesías asiáticas' forges an Enlightenment-inspired masculine identity of Muslim men that deconstructs stereotypical images of lascivious and violent Islamic predators. The deployment of positive imagery of desire between Muslim men redirects Spanish Enlightenment poetry away from French influences and invokes Islamicate discursive images as a sort of new Arcadia in the Spanish collective imaginary and as a source of poetic inspiration.

Focusing on recently translated cookbooks from medieval Arabic and early modern Persian culinary traditions, this essay suggests that recipes and other culinary texts in translation can do more than simply diversify the contours of food studies: they can invite food scholars to question the categories and assumptions of our "gastronomic epistemologies," to borrow Jon Holtzman's phrase.

Gastronomica (2019) 19 (2): 87–95.

In a time when literature is accused of being self-centered and overly narcissistic, women’s autofiction in France since the turn of the millennium has been received with controversy because it disrupts readily accepted ideas about personal and national identities, gender and race, and fiction versus autobiography. Through the study of polemical writers Christine Angot, Chloé Delaume, and Nelly Arcan, I contend that, by recounting personal stories of trauma and sexuality, and thus opposing themselves in opposition to social convention, and by refusing to dispel doubts regarding the fictional or factual nature of their texts, autofiction resists and helps redefine categories of literary genre and gender identity. This book analyzes concurrently the textual and sociopolitical implications that underlie the (de)construction of the autofictional subject, and particularly how these writers constantly redefine themselves through performance and self-fashioning made possible by media and technology. Moreover, this work raises important questions relating to the media’s complicated relationship with women writers, especially those who discuss themes of trauma, sexuality, and violence, and who also question the distinction between fact and fiction. Proposing a new understanding of autofiction as a form of littérature engagée, this work contributes to a broader understanding of the French publishing establishment and, of the literary field as a cultural institution, as well as new insight on shifting notions of identity, the Self and nationalism in today’s ever-changing and multicultural French context.

I analyze this volume departing from the privileged position that my wide experience as a glocal emcee grants me. Departing from this insider position, the following recurrent issues were identified in this volume: 1) a failure to offer a critical reflection of what the authors consider by Hip-Hop; 2) a lack of positionality towards Hip-Hop; 3) an over focus on, and legitimation of, mainstream music industry ideologies and practices; 4) erasure (Irvine & Gal, 2000) of Latinxs in the US context. To avoid repetition, I will analyze the first three of these recurrent issues that intersect many of the chapters after I offer a qualitative review of the strengths and weaknesses observed in every chapter. The recurrent issue of erasure of Latinxs in Hip-Hop, since is an issue limited to the US context, will be analyzed in its corresponding chapters within the next section.

In the past decade, there has been a resurgence in the study of Hebrew in traditional andcharterpublicschools. However, the types of schools teaching Hebrew and the demographics of students studying Hebrew do not resemble those of earlier iterations of public school Hebrew programs that trace back to the early 20th century. Although the majority of Hebrew programs still disproportionately serve Jewish students, many schools in urban and suburban districts across the country are teaching Hebrew to students from diverse racial, religious, linguistic, and ethnic backgrounds. This project set out to take measure of these programs and provide some baseline information about Hebrew teaching in public schools in 2018 by investigating their demographics, instructional approaches, and language learning objectives.