Author: Terni, Jennifer

Nada Elshabrawy Wins Harriott Fellowship

Nada Elshabrawy has been awarded UConn’s Harriott Fellowship for outstanding young scholars who have been admitted to doctoral programs at the University of Connecticut.  Recipients of these fellowship represent the very best applicants to graduate programs at the University. Applicants must also demonstrate a commitment to enhancing diversity in higher education and/or a commitment to enhancing diversity in their field of study.  Nada will be taking up the PhD fellowship in the fall of 2024.

In the spring of 2024, Nada will be completing her master’s degree in French and Francophone studies. Her academic journey has been marked by a profound exploration of identity politics within the realms of French and Arabic literature. Nada’s research delves into the intricate intersections of cultural and linguistic identities, weaving together the diverse narratives in the French-speaking world.

Born in Egypt in 1995, Nada received her B.A in Law from Mansoura University, and has garnered significant recognition for her creative endeavors. Her YouTube channel, boasting 150k subscribers, serves as a platform where she influences Arabic readers with her insightful content. In 2019, she expanded her reach by launching a literary podcast, further establishing herself as a voice in the literary community.

Nada’s literary prowess has been celebrated through numerous accolades. In 2020, her poetry collection “An Almost Fallen Heart” clinched a renowned poetry award, setting the stage for her subsequent success. In 2021, she followed this triumph with her second collection, “Curses,” which reinforced her poetic excellence and secured the same prestigious prize in 2022.

Beyond the realm of literature, Nada has extended her artistic contributions to the Arab music scene, collaborating as a lyricist. Her impact on the entertainment industry increased in 2022 when she created the children’s TV show “Almaktaba.” Currently gearing up for the third season, scheduled to commence filming in June 2024, Nada continues to demonstrate her versatility and commitment to inspiring audiences of all ages.

In addition to her accomplishments, Nada has an extensive background in the publishing and bookstore sectors in the Arab world. Between 2017 and 2022, she actively contributed to these sectors, participating in fellowships and programs in France, Turkey, the United States, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. This rich period of experience has undoubtedly enriched her understanding of the literary landscape and added depth to her contributions.

Rahul Koonathara Win Prestigious Doctoral Fellowship

Rahul Koonathara has been awarded UConn’s Harriott Fellowship for outstanding young scholars who have been admitted to doctoral programs at the University of Connecticut.  Recipients of these fellowship represent the very best applicants to graduate programs at the University. Applicants must also demonstrate a commitment to enhancing diversity in higher education and/or a commitment to enhancing diversity in their field of study.  Rahul will be taking up the PhD fellowship in the fall of 2024.

Rahul Koonathara is completing his MA in Comparative Literature which is focused on tradition and transformation in  shadow puppetry. He is himself an accomplished shadow puppeteer, a tradition in his family. This past summer he toured extensively through the US with his father, Padmashri Ramachandra Pulavar, also a master and keeper of this form. They  performed across the country.

He has produced several puppetry shows here at the Ballard Institute celebrating South Indian shadow puppet traditions of Tolu Bommalatta and Tholpavakoothu, as well as recent innovations reflecting the changing nature of the form, in a show he has curated called Tradition and Revolution in Indian Shadow Puppetry.  The show last summer led to a longer-term exhibition at the Ballard Institute.

 

Image portrays traditional puppet manipulation onto screen lit by candles. Rahul Koonathara is manipulating the shadow puppet.
Rahul Koonathara manipulates puppets.

The exhibition’s opening took place on August 4th. It featured a tour of the Ballard Institute, a gathering to celebrate the opening, followed by a 45-minute-long performance of Tholpava Koothu: The Shadow Puppet Play of Kerala by Padmashri Ramachandra Pulavar and Rahul Koonathara. This ancient, ritual-based performance was based on selected verses from the epic Kamba Ramayana. On August 5th Rahul  and Ramachandra Pulavar hosted an Indian Shadow Puppetry Workshop. The day-long event featured shadow puppet design, carving, and manipulation.

For over thirteen generations Indian puppeteers have performed myths, customs, and rituals based on two Hindu epics, The Ramayana and The Mahābhārata. In recent years new variations in design, construction, and content have re-shaped traditional performances, which in many cases have shifted from temple performances to secular locales and included new subjects such as the lives of Mahatma Gandhi, Jesus, and the animal characters of the Panchatantra, as well as contemporary social and political themes.

Image portrays shadow puppetry in action. Four figures, one a child, are grouped together beside a stylized tree.
Shadow puppetry in action.

Tradition and Revolution in Indian Shadow Puppetry will remain on exhibit at the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry through December 17, 2023

Please note this exhibit contains some nudity.

LCL Professor Valérie Saugera Wins NEH Fellowship

Valérie Saugera, Associate Professor of French and Director of the Language Program in French, has been awarded a National Endowment of for the Humanities (NEH) grant for her project, “Chronicling Louchébem, the Resilient Secret Language of the Butchers of Paris.”  This Fellowship, one of the most prestigious in the humanities, will allow Professor Saugera time to complete her current book project on Louchébem, a secret, endangered language (argot) spoken by Paris butchers since the nineteenth century.

Saugera has expertise in lexical borrowing and has published widely on Anglicisms in the French language. She is the author of Remade In France: Anglicisms in the Lexicon and Morphology of French published with Oxford University Press in 2017.  In this new project, she marries linguistic and ethnographic research to explore a trade argot that many considered dead. Saugera’s research shows that it is still alive and used by a significant number of traditional butchers in Paris.

Although Louchébem is often classified as extinct, Saugera’s recent fieldwork reveals that the secret language of Parisian butchers survives, although in decline.  An argot borrowed from thieves’ slang that emerged in the nineteenth-century, in a slaughterhouse located in Villette. Louchébem is still spoken in butcher shops. The pressures on the butchers’ profession since the late 1980s lend urgency to the task of documenting Louchébem, especially given that scholarly research has overlooked this singular argot. Based on ethno-linguistic fieldwork, including data collected from 227 Parisian butchers, Sugéra’s book project chronicles Louchébem by tracing it to its origin, recording its history, and evaluating its current status. This project investigates an endangered cultural and linguistic phenomenon while shedding light on wider issues of modernity, including the role of tradition, the relationship between language and consumption, and the value of linguistic diversity in a world where languages are rapidly dying off.

We are providing a link to an overview of a talk about Louchébem that Professor Saugéra delivered in 2018 in the context of an annual LCL colloquia series.  It provides a helpful overview of what the NEH committee obviously recognized as a fascinating, urgent, and highly innovative project.

LCL Lecture: Valérie Saugera and the Secret Language of Butchers

In memoriam: Professor Laurietz Seda Ramirez

Many have heard about the sad news that our dear colleague, Laurietz Seda Ramirez, passed away on December 7, 2021.

Her trajectory as a researcher was, and will continue to be, a source of pride for our Spanish section and the department of Literatures, Cultures & Languages. Those of you who have read her books, such as Teatro contra el olvido (U Científica del Sur 2012), La nueva dramaturgia puertorriqueña (Ateneo Puertorriqueño 2003, 2007), Travesías trifrontes: Teatro de vanguardia en el Perú, Trans/Acting: Latin American and Latino Performing Arts (Bucknell UP 2009) and Teatro de frontera 11/12 (U de San Marcos 2008) understand this statement perfectly. She was internationally renowned, as one of the most prominent figures in the field of Spanish American theater.

Her work as editor, critic, and scholar of dramaturgical theater leaves a significant mark. She always interpreted textual theater together with dramatic practice, ritual, and human presence. Pre-pandemic, this perspective forged an itinerary of remarkable travels and residencies. She had an adventurous spirit and this led her to seek fearlessly out theatrical life in unexpected places: in abandoned factories, in urban ruins, in squares and streets, in destitute neighborhoods, in mountain ranges and tropical jungles. Her journeys informed her academic writing; she was able to understand the intimate relationship between globalization and theater, particularly in late capitalism and liquid modernity. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she studied synchronously performed virtual theater and managed to teach her last graduate seminar while facing a grueling illness. Despite this, her conversations with colleagues and students stemmed from a need to understand how these forces were reshaping the lines of an art form she knew intimately.

Above all, she taught us in the classroom and through her publications.  We celebrate the traces she has left in the history of our section and in our department. The study of Spanish American theater was of great importance in our curriculum.  Her graduate students found themselves acting and directing as a way of investigating theater as a bodily practice, a social event, a live act. The importance of her contribution to Latin American theater and its presence in the United States can be gauged by the LATT (Latin American Theatre Today) conference in 2005, in which Storrs turned into the epicenter of Latin American theater for a few days. The hemisphere’s main voices in criticism and dramaturgy, as well as renowned actors and theatrical collectives, collected for the gathering. It was one of the most successful Latin American theater conferences and festivals held in the northeastern United States. Laurietz seized on the occasion of this intellectual and artistic meeting to create the prestigious George Woodyard Latin American Theater Award in an effort to celebrate the achievements of Latin American playwrights.

In addition to her academic work, she was a great mentor, colleague and friend. We will remember her humanity: her professionalism, her camaraderie, her ability to work in a group, and to listen and understand students and colleagues. Laurietz was kind and creative, elegant.  She was a reserved and loyal friend, with an endearing and cordial manner. She made her home in several countries and continents from her beloved island, Puerto Rico to Peru, from Connecticut to Granada (Spain).

We have lost not only a member of our Spanish section,  but someone who has marked our lives in countless ways over the last twenty-four years. One way to honor her memory is not only to continue reading the works she bequeathed to us, but also to keep her in mind as an example of the best that our profession has to offer.

 

Upcoming Events in the Decolonizing Area Studies Language Teaching Project

Last summer, LCL’s Professors Anke Finger, Professor and Manuela Wagner along with Graduate Student Isabell Sluka won a grant in an initiative sponsored by CLAS in order to develop anti-racist courses, to enable insights into racism on college campuses, and to facilitate direct interaction with anti-racist activists.

The focus of the grant, called Decolonizing Area Studies: Towards Intercultural Citizenship and Social Justice was to de-center whiteness in language education and help uncover the oppression that minoritized students often suffer and that dominant groups perpetuate. This project involves different complementary activities and was designed to solicit participation by active language teachers, including graduate students through a series of lectures, a symposium, and a graduate student working group. The participant-driven project aimed to develop a plan for implementing theories, approaches, practices, and assessments that would help decolonize language curricula by taking a hands-on approach.  The organizers hoped that students and faculty could work towards actually implementing new curricula and developing learning materials and teaching methods that truly reflect the diversity and cultural variety of modern-day societies.

Upcoming Events

March 16, 2021, 4:00 pm-5:30 pm.

Double Lecture with Q&A

    • Nicole Coleman, Assistant Professor of German, Wayne State University

“‘We are all more alike than not’: Moving Beyond Universalism for Anti-Racist Pedagogies in the Literature Classroom”

    • José Aldemar Álvarez Valencia, Professor, School of Language Sciences Universidad del Valle, Cali (Colombia)

“‘Doing Research with University Indigenous Students: From ‘rationalizing the decolonial to feeling the decolonial’”

(You can register for this event by following this link:)

 

 

COMING In May 2021.  Two-Day symposium

More information about this even coming soon!

 

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For more information about the Decolonizing Area Studies initiatives, please visit https://sites.google.com/view/decolonizeareasstudies/home?authuser=0.

Read the whole article on the CLAS Anti-Racism pedagogy grant project in UConn Today at https://today.uconn.edu/2020/09/new-clas-programs-support-anti-racist-teaching-research-community-engagement/#.

Upcoming Symposium: The Translation of Letters and Ideas in Cuba’s Republic

This symposium brings together important scholars in the area of Cuban studies to analyze the Cuban period between 1902 and 1959. The presentations will investigate translations and the exercise of translation in relation to the formation of various humanistic or scientific disciplines on the island, such as anthropology, medicine, political science, literature, and psychoanalysis. The symposium will allow, on the one hand, to expand critical studies on translation in Cuba, and on the other, to implement the concept of translation as a vehicle to investigate the racial, gender, or post-colonial constructions put into practice in the Republican period.

Organized by Jacqueline Loss, Professor, Literatures, Cultures & Languages and Reynaldo Lastre, PhD Student and Jorgensen Fellowship Recipient

March 2-March 5, 2021

Co-sponsored by:
Department of Literatures, Cultures & Languages
Humanities Institute
El Instituto Seed Grant
John N. Plank Lecture Series
Global Affairs

Registration is obligatory. To obtain program information and conference links please visit us at: https://s.uconn.edu/ogx7qvfhpj.

 

 

Corona Virus Leads to Transatlantic Course Initiative

When the pandemic struck, few of Ana Maria Diaz-Marcos’ 50 students in her Span 3232: Literature of Crisis in Modern Spain course imagined that the spread of a worldwide virus would lead to a meeting with a living Spanish playwright over Zoom. Yet when the crisis hit, Professor Diaz-Marcos, an expert in contemporary Spanish theater, saw an opportunity for learning on many levels.  She contacted Gracia Morales, author of the play NN12 that deals with historical memory and the drama of the “desaparecidos” (missing people) to invite her to create a special event for her class. Gracia Morales also happens to be a professor at the University of Granada (Spain).  On April 15th both professors joined online to lead a virtual discussion on the importance of historical memory during and in the aftermath of any crisis.  Graduate students and faculty along with other students in LCL, many majoring and minoring in Spanish, joined Diaz-Marcos’s class for the virtual meeting.  Students were given the opportunity to ask Prof. Morales questions about her dedication to theater, her academic life, and her thoughts on the current crisis. The event turned the challenge of the pandemic into an occasion of transnational teaching, learning, collaboration, and hope. Gracia Morales concluded on a positive note when she commented that “art is deeply human (…) This pandemic is going to change society as we know it. Hopefully it will bring about a more lucid society.”

Fulbright Contributes to Dynamic Irish Program at UConn

UConn is lucky to host Sinéad Murray as this year’s Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant in Irish (Gaelic). Sinéad is a passionate advocate for the Irish language and for Irish Studies both at home, in Ireland, and among those here abroad who are interested in the history, language and culture of Ireland.

There is a political and cultural battle to keep traditional Irish culture alive within Ireland but the omnipresence of English makes the effort of integrating Irish more difficult. Sinéad explained that an Ghaeilge (Irish) is an official language of Ireland along with English and that all students learn it and over 70,000 use it in their daily lives, but these live mostly in rural areas. She also points to the traditional class politics surrounding the Irish language, which has complicated the status of an Ghaeilge even more, since it has historically been associated with the rural poor. This being said, at the primary-school level, many children in Ireland today are educated in Gaelscoileanna (Irish-language Schools) schools. This was also Sinéad’s experience; her family was committed to transmitting her Irish cultural heritage to her, and her dad especially considers Irish culture indissociable from the spoken language. The development of Gaelscoileanna has helped spread a working knowledge of the language beyond rural counties into urban areas like Dublin, where it has become more fashionable among the highly-educated middle class. Despite these efforts, there has been a slight decrease in the number of people who use Irish in their daily lives over the last few decades, but this trend has been variable since with every generation of parents, teachers, and students new cultural investments become apparent which have turned the tide in other Celtic-language communities in Europe, for instance in Wales or Brittany. Sinéad who is a primary school teacher, plans to return to teaching Irish language to elementary school children in Dublin and it was this commitment to Irish education that prompted her to pursue her MA and venture to the US to fine-tune her experience by teaching Irish at the college level thanks to the Fulbright Program.  She just completed masters in ‘Scríobh agus Cumarsáid na Gaeilge’ at University College Dublin in December.

 

The Irish program is helmed by two very distinguished Irish specialists, Professors Brendan Kane from the departments of History and Litetatures, Cultures, and Languages and Mary Burke of the Department of English. The prominence and reach of the Irish language within the Irish Studies Program at UConn is something that sets it apart, since it is one of the rare places in the US where students can study Old, Early Modern and Modern Irish language and culture. In fact, thanks to the initiatives of Brendan Kane, UConn is now leading an international, multi-institutional effort to recover and codify the Irish language as it evolved in the mediaeval to early modern period. Irish has the distinction of being one of Europe’s oldest, extant written vernaculars and there is an abundant written record of Old (and Middle) Irish documents dating from the sixth to the thirteenth centuries. This distinction earned the attention of nineteenth and early twentieth philologists who longed to trace the origins of Indo-European languages and cultures in Europe. For this reason, Old Irish has been available to scholars in a way that the texts from the period that follow it, the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries, have not been. After the tenth century many European vernaculars began to crystalize and in the geopolitical story that Europeans began to tell themselves, the new languages—English, Italian, French, Spanish, Dutch, Polish, and German—began to take center stage, although this period continued to be a remarkably rich one in terms of Irish cultural production. Scholarly attention moved on, leaving Irish without the supports that help reproduce any language: dictionaries, guides and grammars. Professor Kane has mobilized an international effort partnering with many key institutions in the US including the Universities of Notre Dame and Harvard University as well as many of the major universities in Ireland including Trinity College Dublin and University College Cork, to create a web-based platform, Léamh.org, to develop an online dictionary, grammar and reading guide using texts from the period. Undergraduates, graduate students and Irish specialists have spent thousands of hours scanning and categorizing period manuscripts with software designed to help specialists sort through the data. Thanks to these efforts to introduce people to the language, this year the first Early Modern Irish grammar game will be beta-launched through Greenhouse Studios. This project has had the corollary benefit of creating many links for our graduate and undergraduate programs: a new exchange program with the National University of Ireland, in Galway, coming online that has a strong emphasis on Irish language learning, and Emmet de Barra, an Irish national who did his undergraduate degree at Trinity College, Dublin, is here pursuing an MA degree and working on the Léamh.org platform.  Besides teaching introductory Irish here at UConn for a couple of years to help shore up the program, Professor Kane will be co-teaching a course on Irish language and its historical contexts at Harvard University next fall.

 

Professor Burke, how specializes in Modern and contemporary Irish literature and drama, Irish identities and Irish material history and culture, anchors the literary side of the Irish Studies program.  English majors may pursue a concentration in Irish Literature by taking four courses focusing on Irish Literature, Language or History. Every semester, courses in Contemporary and Modern Irish Literature are offered, alongside more specialized courses that touch on subjects like the theater, poetry, and the history of Ireland across three campuses and two departments. The Fulbright Program at UConn has been instrumental in ensuring that Irish language courses are also available every semester (Mary Burke actually sits on the Fulbright National Screening Committee).

 

The graduate program is prestigious and fairly large for such a specialized program. It is typically home to as many as seven students at a time preparing dissertations in Irish literature or history from the medieval era to the eighteenth-century to the contemporary period. Recent alumni of the program include a current Director of Irish Studies at Villanova, and Heads of the English Departments at Miami University, William Paterson University, and University of New Haven in Connecticut.  Most recently Matthew Shelton, a Ph.D. candidate in Irish poetry, was awarded the Krause Research Fellowship for his translations of contemporary Irish-language poet Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh at the American Conference for Irish Studies. The Irish Studies Alliance, a graduate organization sponsors a Working Paper Series and works with faculty to coordinate conference participation at regional and national Irish conferences.  An average of three to six public talks or readings related to Irish literature occur every semester at UConn, usually through the English and History Departments.  The Gerson Reading, organized by Professor Burke, is a premier event in Irish Studies at UConn. The Gerson Reading has hosted most of the best-known Irish writers of recent years including Colm Toibin, Edna O’Brien, Colum McCann, Paul Muldoon. This year’s reader will be Emilie Pine on March 31 at Alumni House. Emilie Pine is the author of bestseller Notes to Self which is considered the most important Irish memoir in decades.

 

A variety of extra-curricular societies contribute to keeping the Irish community at UConn vibrant. There is An Cumann Gaelach (Irish Language Society) that serves both undergrads and graduate students; the UConn Irish Club, just for undergraduates; UConn Gaelic Football; UConn Irish Dance and Husky Hurling also for undergraduates. Meanwhile, Sinéad Murray and Dr. Kane run a UNIV course on Irish Culture and there are plans in the works to establish Irish Studies as a minor.

For information for classes next fall, please follow this link

Liansu Meng’s Ecofeminist Illumnination of Poet Chen Jingrong

As part of the LCL Faculty Colloquium Series, Liansu Meng, Associate Professor of Chinese, presented “Ecofeminism Avant La Lettre: Chen Jingrong and Her Creative Translation of Baudelaire.” The presentation was excerpted from her essay in Chinese Poetry and Translations: Rights and Wrongs (Amsterdam University Press, 2019) edited by Maghiel van Crevel and Lucas Klein, a book that brings new thinking to the interrelations between translation, poetry and China.  It is also part of a chapter in her forthcoming book Man/Woman, Machine/Nature: Modern Chinese Poetry at the Intersection of Industrialism and Feminism (1915-1980) with the University of Michigan Press. Chen Jingrong belonged to a poetic lineage that performed translations of Western works into Chinese in order to stimulate innovation in Chinese poetry.  Chen was the only woman translator of Baudelaire and one of the very few women poets of her generation.  Blending translation and reception studies, Professor Meng explored Chen’s original interpretation of Baudelaire’s poetry in her critical essays, her translations and her own poetry, drawing a contrast between Chen’s approach to Baudelaire and those of his male translators to argue that the differences between theirapproaches can be mapped onto an early form of ecofeminism.

Chen moved to Shanghai in 1946 shortly after the end of the Japanese occupation of the city when the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) drew to a close with the defeat of Japan in WWII. China resumed the unresolved civil war between the Nationalist Party (GMD) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). (The CCP would finally prevail against the GMD in 1949).  Although Shanghai was controlled by the GMD in 1946, when Chen published her first essay on Baudelaire,  “Baudelaire and the Cat” (波德莱尔与猫), the CCP’s influence dominated the intellectual underground and championed a political realist-inspired poetics dubbed the “People’s Poetry” that was supposed to appeal to the masses. Baudelaire’s bourgeois poetry was not considered appropriate and Chen faced grave criticism from an all-male community of literary critics for translating a decadent Western poet.

In her essay, Chen characterizes Baudelaire as a poet who feels equal empathy for all things,  especially “minor and small things,” which “he painted . . . with a layer of miraculous radiance.” Intellectuals in China had been drawn to Social Darwinism from early twentieth century. Chen pointed to the savagery of the war to refute the theory, arguing shocking cruelty towards their own kind and other creatures proved that humans had not evolved as a species. In Baudelaire’s deceptively simple invocations of everyday things, Chen argued that he created images infused with the unpretentious feeling of lived experience and empathy for the poor and the marginalized, precisely because he had written from the point of view of his own experiences of suffering.

In response to her critics, Chen published another essay in 1947, “On My Poetry and Poetry Translation” (我的诗和译诗) in which she foregrounded her identity as a woman, associating her individual suffering with the universal oppression of women and other injustices. This was a bold stand to take considering many male intellectuals’ confident assertions that women’s equality in China had been achieved or was included in the discourses of class, revolution and national survival. In the essay Chen sketched out what Liansu Meng described as eco-feminism avant la lettre, a poetics that emphasizes the interconnection and co-existence of all living things and advocates for a wide spectrum of empathy that spans across such categories as class, gender, age, physical ability, and extends to animals and the natural environment.  Chen addressed the issue of gender relations head-on, arguing that again and again women demonstrated their strength, resourcefulness, and empathy in the face of unspeakable challenges, their resilience and compassion offering its own testimony about the range of women’s agency.  In her talk, Meng characterized Chen’s interpretations of Baudelaire as eco-feminist also because Baudelaire’s symbolically-saturated landscapes, their startling juxtapositions of life, death, suffering and decay, pointed towards a new poetics that she drew on in her own poetry to describe landscapes that had been desecrated by war. Meng argued that “the endless oppression of Chinese women enabled them to urgently and sensitively critique this and other injustices in the world—a view which echoes Chen’s reading of Baudelaire’s poetics.”  In this way, Professor Meng concluded, Chen made the case for women’s agency and their empathy that was born from their gendered experience of suffering.

Spotlight: Verena Aschbacher

Verena Aschbacher, a new Ph.D. student in German Studies, grew up in South Tyrol (Südtirol in German), Italy. Verena’s small hometown lies at the border of Austria and Switzerland and people from the area speak regional dialects of German and Italian. This borderland zone combines Mediterranean and Germanic languages and cultures in the midst of dazzling mountains.

She attributes her love of books to her parents’ habit of bedtime reading when she was young. When she looks back on her childhood it seems that if she was not reading, she was swimming. When she was seventeen, she was asked to give swimming lessons. Coaching kids about how to swim was how she discovered that teaching was something she found extremely fulfilling.

This experience stayed with her and she eventually decided on a teaching career. Once she had completed her master program in teaching, she moved to Switzerland to teach German to migrants and refugee children and adults. Her classes were made up of students from around the world, all of whom spoke different languages. Many were traumatized and she was often confronted by students who had never been to school. The parallel between teaching language and teaching swimming helped her to stay focused on what is satisfying about the learning process for both student and teacher. Aschbacher observed that “teaching a language and teaching how to swim have quite big similarities. At first, the kid would not be able to swim a meter. Then, by practice and graded exercises, the kid is able to swim ten meters, and a hundred then. Learning a language is quite similar.” This perspective gave her the tools to encourage her students through the process and rewards of moving forward despite the challenge each of us encounters while learning something new.

After teaching refugees and migrants for two years, Verena became a secondary school teacher, still in Switzerland. While working at the secondary school, she took an extra class intitled “Giftedness, Creativity, and Talent Development” which provided teachers with methods to help students identify and develop talents about which they might not have been aware. That is where she understood the importance of creativity to students. Creative investment had to become a regular part of students’ re-engagement with a subject in order for the learning process to be effective. The program she took happened to be designed by the Swiss professors of Education Salomé Müller-Oppliger and Victor Mūller-Oppliger, who designed the program after learning about it at UConn. This was how Verena learned about UConn.

After three years as a secondary school teacher, Verena decided she was ready for a new challenge. While she was exploring graduate programs online, she discovered that UConn—a University she had already heard so much about—was recruiting graduate students for its the German Studies Program. A crucial motivation was that she would continue to develop her work in teaching German literature, language, and culture.

Her current interests are for writers such as Juli Zeh and Ferdinand Von Schirach. Verena also enjoys graphic novels including Nick Sousanis’s Unflattened (2015), a work she is hoping to translate into German. She is in her first year of PhD at UConn and is still thinking about a dissertation project.

—Lodi Maresescu