Department News

This category captures all the news related to the department.

LCL Welcomes Ambar Sengupta As Interim Department Head

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The Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages is pleased to announce that Ambar Sengupta, professor of mathematics, will serve as interim head of the department for the 2026–2027 academic year.

Professor Sengupta brings extensive academic and administrative leadership experience to the role. He recently completed his term as head of the Department of Mathematics, a position he held since 2016. During his tenure, he led the department with openness, thoughtfulness, and a strong commitment to supporting faculty, staff, and students.

Ofer Harel, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, affirms his gratitude to Professor Sengupta for his “willingness to step into this role and provide leadership during this period of transition. His extensive experience as a department head will bring valuable perspective, continuity, and stability to the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.”

As interim head, Professor Sengupta will provide leadership for the department throughout the 2026–2027 academic year.

We warmly welcome Ambar Sengupta as the Interim Head of LCL, and we look forward to his leadership during this academic year.

Professor of German Studies Receives International Recognitions

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Image of Professor Anke FingerAnke Finger Receives International Grant for Humanities Diplomacy Workshop

Anke Finger, Professor of Digital Humanities in the German department in LCL, has been awarded a €20,000 grant as one of four Co-Principal Investigators for the international workshop, Humanities as Science Diplomacy: Building Global Networks and a Pedagogical Toolkit for Intercultural Dialogue. The project is sponsored by the University of Bayreuth’s Centre of International Excellence “Alexander von Humboldt” and is being developed in collaboration with the European Masters in Intercultural Communication (EMICC) network.

The two-day workshop will bring together diplomats, scholars, and university administrators from seven countries to explore the intersections of humanities diplomacy and humanities communication. Participants will work toward strengthening global networks and developing pedagogical resources that foster intercultural dialogue and international collaboration.

Elected to the Board of the Association for Intercultural German Studies

In addition, Professor Finger was elected to the Board of the Association for Intercultural German Studies (Gesellschaft für Interkulturelle Germanistik, GiG) at the organization’s annual meeting this summer. GiG is an international scholarly association with members and activities spanning six continents. As part of the five-member global board, Professor Finger serves as the sole representative from North America, contributing to the organization’s mission of advancing intercultural perspectives in German studies worldwide.

More information about GiG can be found on the organization’s website.

Ph.D. candidate wins Lounsbery/ENCCRE Fellowship

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LCL is delighted to announce that our PhD candidate, Fadi Elsaid, has been named a recipient of the prestigious Richard Lounsbery Foundation / ENCCRE Fellowship. This award supports international collaboration within the ENCCRE Project (Édition Numérique Collaborative et CRitique de l’Encyclopédie). Sponsored by the French Academy of Sciences, ENCCRE is a major scholarly initiative dedicated to producing a new critical and digital edition of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s Encyclopedia, a foundational work of the French Enlightenment. In addition to this digital edition, ENCCRE brings together leading scholars to investigate the intellectual, material, and cultural dimensions of the Encyclopédie.

Supported by the Richard Lounsbery Foundation, the fellowship is awarded to outstanding doctoral candidates and early-career researchers based in or trained in the United States whose work engages with eighteenth-century French intellectual culture. Relevant areas of research include the editorial and material history of the Encyclopédie, the work of Diderot and his collaborators, early modern visual culture, the history of technology and crafts, Enlightenment knowledge systems, and the circulation of print culture.

Fadi Elsaid’s research explores the intersections of French and Arabic intellectual histories between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His dissertation devotes particular attention to the afterlife of the Encyclopédie’s empiricism in the imperial representation of Egyptian arts and crafts in the Description de l’Égypte, the monumental publication produced following the French expedition to Egypt (1798–1801). His selection for this highly competitive fellowship reflects both the originality of his work and its significance for current scholarship in Enlightenment studies.

As part of the fellowship, Fadi will spend up to three months in France collaborating with the ENCCRE research team. The Department warmly congratulates him on this significant achievement and looks forward to the continued impact of his work.

LCL Ph.D. Student Wins International Fellowship

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Doctoral student Joscha Valentin Jelitzki was awarded the Franz Werfel Fellowship by the Austrian Agency for Education and Internationalisation (OeAD) in the spring of 2024.  He is currently in Vienna conducting the research that the Fellowship was awarded to support.
 
Joscha joined the department in 2019 as a PhD student in German and Judaic Studies. In his dissertation he describes the aesthetics of desire in modernist literature from Jewish writers in fin-de-siècle Vienna. In contrast to our contemporary notion of desire as forming an identity, his project rediscovers desire as something that constitutively splits the subject. The project further demonstrates how Jewish-Christian differences were conceived as sexual differences in Central Europe around 1900.
 
Before coming to UConn Joscha studied in Berlin, Frankfurt/Oder, and Jerusalem, and worked as a research assistant for the critical edition of the works of Hannah Arendt. At UConn he teaches courses on German language, literature, and cinema. He has published an article on the poetics of Martin Buber’s life writing (Martin-Buber-Studien 2022, co-authored with Sarah Ambrosi). His article on the biblical figure of Job and its modern reception, co-authored with Dr. Sebastian Wogenstein, is accepted for publication. Currently, Joscha is writing an article on the recent emergence of German Jewish gangster rap.
 
The Franz Werfel Fellowship is allowing Joscha to further a specific dimension of his doctoral research. In 2022, he presented a chapter draft at the Viennese Jewish Studies Colloquium, which offered a comparative reading of the notion of ‘drive’ in Freud and in the Talmud. As a visiting researcher he will have access to the numerous literary archives of the city of Arthur Schnitzler and Bertha Pappenheimer, and connect the literary material to the authentic urban streets and neighborhoods of today. Dr. Wilhelm Hemecker (Vienna) and Dr. Brigitte Spreitzer (Graz) will offer their expertise from decades of scholarship in the field to support Joscha in his research and act as his local advisors.

German Studies Student Wins Prestigious Fellowship

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Guerlina Philogene, a senior in German Studies’ dual-degree EUROBIZ program, has been named a graduate fellow in the Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Graduate Program, funded by the United States Department of State and administered by Howard University. The program, which welcomes applications from members of underserved minority communities, prepares students for foreign service careers in the State Department.

Guerlina says she became aware of her strong interest in a diplomatic career thanks to her experiences in LCL, in particular with her advisers in the German Section, professors Anke Finger and Sebastian Wogenstein. “Before enrolling into UConn or EUROBIZ,” Guerlina says, “I met with Anke Finger and spoke to her about my deep interest in German and international relations.” Later, Sebastian “hinted to me, during my exchange year, that it appeared that I am more interested in foreign relations.” Guerlina concludes, “They both seemed to have known where my mind was headed before I discovered my passion while in Brussels.”

According to the announcement in UConn’s campus publication Today, 

Following her graduation from UConn, Philogene will attend graduate school and take part in Pickering activities during her summer break between years in Washington, D.C. She will also take part in a two-week program in Washington this summer as an orientation to the program. Upon completion of graduate school, Philogene will have a 10-week overseas internship at a United States embassy or consulate. Philogene will then have a five-year commitment to State Department employment in foreign service.

Guerlina generously credits her time in LCL with helping her form the broad perspective necessary for a diplomatic career. She says, “The topics we talk about during my German courses also resonate deeply with my goals representing the United States. We discussed topics that are not often talked about when you think about Germany such as for example, Turkish, Black, and Vietnamese minority groups and their experiences.”

LCL, Guerlina relates, “became a place of refuge for me to study.” Moreover, her time in the department represented an important part of her development as a future global leader. “Whenever I go abroad,” she continues, “I always try my best to represent groups that are often looked over when speaking about the US. The German department although small, exemplifies diversity and pushing boundaries.”

Congratulations, Guerlina!

Ana María Díaz-Marcos will be an UCHI fellow

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LCL is thrilled to announce that Ana María Díaz-Marcos has been awarded a fellowship for the 2023-24 academic year at the UConn Humanities Institute!

Ana María, a Professor of Spanish Studies, will continue work in the vein of her exciting digital humanities exhibitions and collections, which she completed as part of the international program Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage. Those open-access digital works published in the last two years include an exhibition about the history of the antifascist newspaper La voz published in Spanish in New York between 1937-1939, coincident with the Spanish Civil War, a collection of articles from the newspaper focused on the topic of antifascism and feminism, and a collection of political cartoons published in La voz by Puerto Rican artist José Valdés Cadilla. The project that she will complete during my fellowship at the UCHI will focus on Spanish antifascist activist Ernestina González Fleischman, whom I discovered while reading La voz. Ana María writes that “this book will provide the first in-depth study of her leadership in New York´s arena of civil rights and protest, and the first edition of her collaborations in the leftist press.”

“Ernestina González Fleischman,” Ana María continues, “led an awe-inspiring life marked by political activism, international visibility, and intellectual relevance. She tirelessly engaged in public activities, published in several New York-based Spanish newspapers, run a radio program in Spanish (also based in New York city), and delivered speeches on topics of human rights, antifascism, feminism, and anti-imperialism. She accomplished all that during her two decades living in New York and, later on, in Mexico. It is hard to believe that such a prominent figure in the arena of the anti-fascist Hispanic hubs in the United States, Mexico, and Spain could have vanished from historical accounts. My monograph will recover the life and intellectual work of one of the most significant Hispanic women to oppose fascism in the thirties and forties. Her life and writings will expand our knowledge of US Hispanic antifascism in that period, addressing materials from archives and leftist periodicals that have not been studied before.”

Xu Peng receives Richard Brown Fellowship

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Congratulations to Xu Peng, a graduate student in Chinese Studies, who has been named the Richard Brown Dissertation Fellow at the UConn Humanities Institute! Xu will continue work on his Ph.D. thesis “From History to the Future: Chineseness in Contemporary Cuban, Puerto Rican and Dominican Literatures and Cultures.” The dissertation studies the literary and cultural representation of Sino-Caribbean experiences. By analyzing contemporary articulations of Chineseness in Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Dominican literatures and cultures, Xu hopes to demonstrate how these articulations recode Chineseness within the mestizo nation and how such recodings provoke reconsiderations of national identity and cultural politics in the Spanish Caribbean.

Departing from the prevailing tendency to (re)discover the Chinese presence in Caribbean histories, Xu takes a future-oriented approach to Sino-Caribbean experiences that, instead of pivoting on a marginalized positionality, is more attuned to each nation’s political, economic, racialized, gendered, and sexualized realties in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Xu hopes that this project will serve as a critical point of entry into the globalized processes of (re)creating Asian subjects and into the continuing interrogation of Chinese futurity in the Caribbean and beyond.

LCL’s Glorimarie Peña Alicea wins Aetna Translation Award

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Glorimarie Peña Alicea has won the Aetna Translation Award from UConn’s English department for her translation of Claudia Hernandez’s short story “El hijo muerto” as “Dead Child’s Manual.” Glorimarie’s translation will appear in the 2023 edition of the Long River Review. Congratulations, Glorimarie, on this signal achievement.

Glorimarie writes that Hernandez’s story, “published in the book titled De fronteras changed my perspective on undocumented migration. After reading Hernandez’s work, I decided to include the cultural production of the Salvadoran undocumented migration in my research, jumping into an unknown world for me.” Glorimarie worked on her award-winning piece during the first course she took to complete the Literary Translation Certificate under the guidance of professor Peter Constantine and with the help of colleagues Sandra Ruiz Lopez (a former LCL Graduate Student) and Angela Pitassi. Receiving this award, she writes, “reiterates the importance of collaboration in the literary translation practice.”

Professor Peter Constantine, head of LCL’s Translation Studies Program, writes of Glorimarie’s work, “In her brilliant and sensitive translation… Glorimarie shows a particular awareness of Hernández idiosyncratic use of the page, where image and word complement one another in very significant ways. It is a tour de force of translation.”

Glorimarie is currently working on her doctoral dissertation, focused on the literary and cultural production of the undocumented Dominican and Salvadorian migrations in the late 20th and 21st century. She is also currently translating the poetry volume Lo arrugado del eco by Yomarilly Meléndez Meléndez, a young Puerto Rican writer. Last year Glorimarie also won the National Dominican Day Parade Scholarship, and she has recently collaborated with the podcast La Brega in an episode about the tension between salsa and merengue music, undocumented migration, and racism in Puerto Rico.

Spotlight: Annia Bu

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Annia Bu is a second-year master’s candidate in the Spanish Studies section of the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. Annia was a professional actress in film and theater before she came to UConn.  In fact, she was acting professionally even before her undergraduate degree and has received acting awards at the Ceara Film Festival in Brazil, the Gasparilla International Film Festival in Tampa, Florida, and has worked under renowned directors such as Juan Carlos Tabio. She is a native of Santiago de Cuba.

She completed her undergraduate studies at the Art Institute of Cuba. There, she studied drama, acting and theater arts.  She also took courses in literature, history, philosophy, psychology alongside drama – subjects which she describes as “crucial” to doing well in the field of acting.  She loves studying and performing.

In 2011, Annia moved from Cuba to Miami, and then from there to New Haven one year later where she worked as assistant director of a film festival hosted by Yale University featuring films from Spain and Latin America. She then moved to New York City where she spent three years working for the Spanish Repertory Theater – one of the most prominent and longest-running Spanish-speaking theaters in the city.

Annia knew that she wanted to pursue graduate studies in the United States with a focus on literary and cultural studies.  In 2016, she began her master’s degree at UConn. Annia says she was excited to begin her M.A. because of the encouragement of Professor Laurietz Seda, a specialist in Latin American theater. In her first year of the program, Annia took courses in Latin American and Hispanic Theater taught by Professor Seda as well as in Spanish Theater taught by Professor Ana María Díaz-Marcos. Advanced study has supplemented her practical theatrical experience with new insights. “When I analyze literature or philosophy here in school, I’m glad I can apply the practice of looking for subtexts, things that are not told in the text completely… I’m so happy that I can see these, but now in a different way,” she says.

Annia speaks fondly of her fellow graduate students. She says that analyzing works of theater while working with her classmates’ individual interpretations has been instrumental in deepening her appreciation of theater and for writing more broadly. Teaching, however, is the best part of her day. “My goal is not that my students are perfect speakers,” she says, “my goal is that they communicate, engage with the culture, and now know more about the Hispanic world.” Annia has drawn upon theatrical practice to help teach her native language. Her students always form a circle at the beginning of class, a ritual that is important in theater. During class, Annia implements group activities during which she encourages students to play out their lessons, voice their new vocabulary, and to translate the abstract into physical gestures. She says that theater helped her learn how to go further in communicating even when words aren’t spoken perfectly.

In May of 2018, Annia will be graduating with a M.A. in Spanish Studies and a teaching certificate. She will be staying in the United States to teach Spanish and continue her work in theater. In the future, she would like to pursue a PhD with a focus on history through the lens of theater. “I am happy I decided to come to UConn,” she says in reflecting on her time in the master’s program. “It is great, in our department, to have people from all around the world… I am lucky for having this opportunity to learn and teach but also to have this environment.”

 

This feature was written by Claire Boers.

New UConn Major Aims for Cultural Connections

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The new Arabic and Islamic Civilizations program at the University of Connecticut hopes to bring context and conversation to an increasingly connected world by offering courses ranging from the classical to the contemporary.

The program, which will include a major and minor track, will launch during the 2018-19 academic year, Dr. Nicola Carpentieri, Assistant Professor and Chair of Arabic and Islamic studies at UConn, said.

“One of the great assets of this program is that students have a choice to focus on contemporary issues like modern Arabic literature, Arabic cinema or the press,” Carpentieri said. “Or they can focus on the classical heritage.”

Courses under the major will provide for a variety of interests with topics including classical Arabic literature, folk tales, Arabic media and more, Carpentieri said.

“I had to create about 14 new courses to cover the kinds of things that I think students would be interested in,” Carpentieri said. “We also have quirky things like a course on folk tales and advice literature for princes…These kinds of things are part of Islamicate culture.”

Among the program’s many goals is to provide a distinction between Arabic and Islamic culture and to study their interaction, Carpentieri said.

“We aim here to give a plural and inclusive view of Arabic and Islamic civilizations in many linguistic traditions but also different religious traditions,” Carpentieri said.  “Arabic is always associated with Islam but that’s a very simplistic association.”

Morgan Boudreau, a senior graduating this May with an individualized major in Arabic and Islamic Studies, said she is elated to see her interests reflected in the new courses.

“It’s really nice to see that once I graduate people will be able to pursue that degree path,” Boudreau said. “I think UConn is a great place for this program because they have such a unique student body.”

Janae McMillan, a sixth-semester political science major, said that for some students such as herself, UConn provided the first opportunity to explore the Arab world and spurred interest in pursuing further studies about this topic in the future.

“I think it’s important that students have the opportunity to learn about other cultures, especially those that are as fascinating as Arabic and Islam,” McMillan said. “I started at the college level and now that I know how amazing it is, I wish other students could have that same possibility.”

Carpentieri said he is enthusiastic about the program’s future.

“There’s a lot to be learned I think,” Carpentieri said. “If students are interested in the Arab world and Islam, we hope to offer this to open the eyes of people on the positive values of every culture.”

 

This article first appeared on the Daily Campus on 2/8/2018 and was written by Colin Sitz. The photo is from Dunia: Kiss Me Not on the Eyes directed by Jocelyne Saab (2015).