Hélène Blondeau
Presented two co-authored papers on lexical and morphosyntactic variation in French spoken in Montreal and Welland, Canada, at the New Ways of Analyzing Variation conference (NWAV 52) in Miami.
As part of the French for All Initiative (French in Higher Education program), and in collaboration with partners at Washington University Johns Hopkins University, the University of Virginia, Hélène Blondeau helped the French program secure a grant from the French Embassy in the United States to enhance connections between global health and the study of French. The grant will help fund an upcoming U.S. lecture tour with professionals from Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières, providing students with firsthand insights into humanitarian medicine, particularly as it is practiced in French-speaking regions. In addition, the grant will fund the creation of a shared pedagogical platform for universities to develop and exchange resources on French for Health Professionals. By blending the acquisition of language skills and cultural knowledge with real- world medical experience from the field, this interdisciplinary initiative will prepare students for tomorrow’s careers in global health.
For more information, visit https://franceflorida.clas.ufl.edu/promoting-global-health-and-french- studies-2024-2026/
James Essegbey and Fiona McLaughlin
Pushing the boundaries: Selected papers from the 51-52 Annual Conference of African Linguistics, edited by James Essegbey, Brent Henderson, Fiona McLaughlin and Michael Diercks.
“This volume contains some of the papers there were presented at ACAL 51-52, which was organized virtually at the University of Florida. A couple were accepted for presentation at ACAL 51, which was canceled because of COVID- 19. The theme of ACAL 51-52 was African linguistics: pushing the boundaries. There are 18 papers and an introduction: two phonetics papers, five phonology papers, nine syntax papers, one sociolinguistics paper and one typology paper. “
Matthieu Felt
Columbia University, “Meanings of Antiquity: Myth Interpretation in Premodern Japan, ” November 21, 2025
January 10, 2025 MLA Annual Conference, Myths, “Notes, Paratext, and the Quest for Hidden Meaning in Japanese Myths,” January 10, 2025
Florida State University, “Myths in Motion: Creation Narratives in Premodern Japan, ” February 6, 2025
AAS Annual Conference, “Centripetal Verse: The Nativizing Power of Poetry in Japanese Myths, ” March 16, 2025
Fiona McLaughlin
Published two chapters in The Oxford Guide to the Atlantic Languages of West Africa, edited by Friederike Lüpke (2024): “Atlantic consonant mutation” and “Ajami writing practices in Atlantic- speaking Africa. ” She also published a chapter co-authored with Karim Ouaras (University of Oran 2) entitled “Extreme landscapes (with an example from the Algerian hirak)” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Linguistic Landscapes, edited by Robert Blackwood, Stefania Tufi, and Will Amos (2024). In collaboration with Adib Bencherif (U of Sherbrooke) she has organized a roundtable on “(Post)nomads in global Africa” at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association in Chicago.
Barbara Mennel
Barbara Mennel published Su Friedrich in 2023 and Mädchen in Uniform in 2024. She gave invited talks at Texas A&M and Utah State University, discussed her work in the virtual series Conversations Across Screen Cultures, and presented at Visible Evidence in Udine, Italy. In November 2024, she served as a facilitator for the Humanities Center Leadership Boot Camp at the National Humanities Center.
For her current book project The New Tiny: Reinventing Miniatures in the Digital Age, Mennel received the Humanities Scholarship Enhancement Fund and the CLAS Research Spark Grant, which enable her to travel to museums, exhibitions, model villages, and interview artists and modelmakers during her current sabbatical. For her discussion of the return of handcrafted models in cinema, she has visited the studios of Wes Anderson’s modelmaker Simon Weisse in Berlin and puppet maker Andy Gent in London. She is currently tracing the influence of Frances Glessner Lee who created “Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death” in the mid-twentieth century to train detectives in forensic science. The gruesome dioramas are held by the Office of the Medical Examiner of the State of Maryland, where they are used in the annual Frances Glessner Lee Homicide Investigation Seminar. Mennel participated in fall 2024 as part of her research on the reappearance of murder miniatures in twenty-first-century television shows from the English Midsumer Murders to the American CSI and American Rust.
Kensaku Ogata
“Self-Study Project for Enhancing Learners’ Motivation, Innovation, and Language Skills” , October 2024, Foreign Language Association of Virginia (FLAVA) 2024 Annual Conference: Navigating a Changing World with Languages, Norfolk, Virginia, USA.
Christopher Smith
Christopher Smith What is going on when a graphic novel has a twelfth-century samurai pick up a telephone to make a call, or a play has an ancient aristocrat teaching in a present-day schoolroom? Rather than regarding such anachronisms as errors, Samurai with Telephones develops a theory of how texts can use different types of anachronisms to challenge or rewrite history, play with history, or open history up to new possibilities.
By applying this theoretical framework of anachronism to several Japanese literary and cultural works, author Christopher Smith demonstrates how different texts can use anachronism to open up history for a wide variety of different textual projects. From the modern period, this volume examines literature by Mori Ōgai and Ōe Kenzaburō, manga by Tezuka Osamu, art by Murakami Takashi, and a variety of other pop cultural works. Turning to the Early Modern period (Edo period, 1600–1868), which produced a literature rich with playful anachronism, he also examines several Kabuki and Bunraku plays, kibyōshi comic books, and gōkan illustrated novels. In analyzing these works, he draws a distinction between anachronisms that attempt to hide their work on history and convincingly rewrite it and those conspicuous anachronisms that highlight and disrupt the construction of historical narratives.
Richard Wang
“The Rise of Quanzhen Daoism at Maoshan. ” Invited paper presented at the “Future Prospects and Proposals for the Study of Daoism & Daoism in Cliffs, Caves, and Inscriptions” conference. Arizona State University, December 7, 2024.
“Local Daofa in the Ming Daoist Ordination. ” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR). San Diego, November 24, 2024.
The panel “Song, Jin, Yuan Inscriptions, ” at the “Future Prospects and Proposals for the Study of Daoism & Daoism in Cliffs, Caves, and Inscriptions” conference. Arizona State University, December 7, 2024, as discussant.