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

The Department of Literatures, Cultures and Languages welcomes a mix of Masters and Ph.D. students in German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Comparative Literature (which includes a Chinese Studies Program). Graduate students in programs in the humanities are well aware that the employment landscape has shifted decisively in the past twenty to thirty years. This said, MA and PhD students have very different goals and needs. MA students tend to come to the program to explore an interest in advanced studies and to take time to chart a career path while studying, working, and upgrading their credentials. As a result, they tend to be fairly comfortable using their degrees as steppingstones for a broad array of non-academic careers. Although some still come with the intention of using their degrees as springboards for language teaching careers (a well-compensated sector which has recently seen an upsurge in demand) our MAs graduate and work in fields as diverse as politics, university administration, translation, publishing, artifact conservation, and business.

 

The level of specialization that is the hallmark of the Ph.D. poses more challenges, but also potentially more rewards, when entering the job market. Most students enter doctoral programs with the idea of pursuing a career in education, academia, government, or in a wide range of fields that require an advanced understanding of the intersections between culture, language, media, and the arts. To this end, LCL offers doctoral students hands-on preparation for teaching, doing research, and also for identifying and communicating with researchers who are the lifeblood of any field and which, in many cases, form a global community. The good news is that the proficiencies students will need for the academic market involves an impressive range of skills. The practical flexibility and the excellent communication skills that PhDs must hone for their teaching and writing make them extremely valuable contributors in a wide array of professional environments.

 

In 2016 LCL developed a specialized course to prepare doctoral students for the different arenas that PhD candidates have to navigate—conferences, grant writing, publishing, teaching—if they plan to prepare for academic jobs. This course, Scholarship and the Profession, was taught for a second time last fall. It was designed by LCL’s Director of Graduate Studies, Professor Jacqueline Loss. The course is recommended for all starting PhD candidates. Students are given the full picture of the steps students must take to build an academic career. One of the strategies Professor Loss uses to help students manage this challenge is to ask them to develop a five-year plan for their graduate studies, charting the benchmarks they would like to hit for each year.

 

The first step for incoming Ph.D.’s is to develop a compelling topic for their project. In a structured series of collaborative workshops, Professor Loss teaches students how to recognize good research topics, how to perform in-depth literature reviews, and how to devise methods for conducting research that are appropriate to the topic. The rest of the course is devoted to preparing students with the hands-on experience that is necessary for actually getting that research done, i.e. by writing abstracts and grant applications, learning how to identify venues (and thus by extensions audiences) for publishing their work, and, towards the end of the course, gaining some hands-on practice in the unwritten rules for the preparation of academic CVs, job letters, interviews, and job talks.

 

Loss also adopts a practical approach to prepare students for the job market. For instance, she shows that writing job documents (whether a cover letters or a teaching statement) requires a familiarity with the conventions of technical writing: ideas need to be articulated with precision and clarity. By working through multiple drafts, doing peer-review sessions, and getting constructive feedback at each step, students learn how to create their own job documents. This exercise is also lesson in genre writing since the conventions of professional writing are distinct from other genres of academic writing in which there is more space to develop ideas. The course also helps students in a number of other practical ways, training them to navigate standard academic job databases, use reliable online sources for academic job support like ChronicleVitae and Higheredjobs, and provides them with a first-hand taste of what it means to interview for academic jobs.

 

Senior graduate students in different phrases of their projects are frequent guests in Loss’s course. They coach younger Ph.D. students on how to present their work in conferences, to write prospectuses and to share their strategies to manage time and the pressures of graduate school as productively as possible. International students in the program help provide perspective on the nuances of the style and structure of the American academic system. While this process can appear daunting for new PhD candidates, it is helpful to gain a realistic picture of the pressures on the horizon. Gaining confidence in the various skills that will eventually make for a well-rounded professional help PhD students feel that they equipped to apply for talks, grants, and jobs.

 

Overall, graduate students see this course as a much-needed opportunity to not just think about how to make the most of their degrees, but also how to strengthen their overall academic profiles. Michael Pfremmer, a second year Ph.D. student in German confessed that taking the class was an eye-opening experience. While he will only be entering the job market in a few years, he found the course invaluable in making him think about the next steps in preparing his profile. Xiaoqiao Xu, a second year PhD student in CLCS found it useful in making her aware of the many opportunities that graduate students have in strengthening their academic portfolios. “Before the class, I was not aware of the importance of conferences for graduate students.” Taking the course helped her polish practical skills like writing an abstract or identifying conferences for which she should apply and reinforced the importance of such extra-curricular activities at the graduate level. She has now applied for two major conferences. Although it brings up certain fears students have in confronting the job market, it also prepares them to address them systematically in productive and fruitful ways.

The Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages is very proud to announce that Daniel Hershenzon has been awarded a fellowship at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies for the academic year 2019-2020. This is one of the most prestigious fellowships in North America.

 

Professor Hershenzon joined UConn in 2012 after having received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan. He has won many fellowships over his young career, most recently at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute and the Bard Graduate Center. Before coming to UConn, and among many other prizes, he earned a Max Weber Post Doctoral Fellowship at the European University Institute and a Bernadotte Schmitt Research Grant from the American Historical Association. His work has appeared in Past and Present, the Journal of Early Modern History and Philological Encounters.

 

His new project builds on the work of his first book The Captive Sea: Slavery, Commerce and Communication in Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean (University of Pennsylvania Press), but shifts emphasis to the unstable status of religious objects often looted, sold, or held for ransom side-by-side with people.

 

In his abstract for Institute for Advanced Studies, Captive Objects: Religious Artifacts and Piracy in the Early Modern Mediterranean, Hershenzon describes

how religious artifacts trapped in the maritime plunder economy became the contentious subject of conflicting claims by a host of actors. Religious artifacts—Korans and Bibles, prayer shawls, crosses, images of Christ and the Virgin Mary, and relics—circulated in their thousands in the early modern western Mediterranean, crisscrossing the boundaries between Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. This mobility was largely a byproduct of piracy to which 2 to 3 million persons from all sides fell fate between 1500 and 1800 and which intertwined Spain, Italy, Morocco, and Ottoman Algiers. Reconstructing objects’ trajectories and their involvement in human trafficking sheds new light on the experience of captivity and the practice of redemption, of both people and objects. More importantly, the project argues, the captivity of religious artifacts turned objects previously isolated in their respective realms into contentious objects that formed a distinct category and acted as religious boundary markers within and among confessions.

 

The Department warmly congratulates him for this notable distinction.

Dr. Jacqueline Loss, professor of Latin American Literary and Culture Students and the Director of Graduate Studies at LCL, is an internationally published researcher and educator. She is the author of two books, numerous articles and book chapters and is the coeditor of one collection of essays and another anthology of short stories. Her primary research interests include Cuban literature, history, and culture, and she has translated into English the works of many prominent Cuban writers and artists such as Víctor Fowler Calzada, Ernesto René Rodríguez, Jorge Miralles, Jorge Mañach, and Anna Lidia Vega Serova.

 

Born in Connecticut, Loss developed a love for literature in translation from Latin America at a very early age. While Spanish is not her native language, she gained a familiarity with it early through her extended family. Her great-aunt, originally from Austria, had emigrated to Mexico, and her maternal grandfather, also an Austrian refugee, spoke Spanish fluently, attending to his many Spanish-speaking patients as a doctor in Bridgeport, Connecticut. “From the moment I learned to read,” Loss confessed, “I poured over books and started using literature as a means to escape.” She went on to do her undergraduate studies in Hispanic and Continental European Literatures at Boston University, where, through the guidance of some wonderful mentors, professors of Spanish themselves, she started speculating about a career as a professor. She carried out her graduate studies in comparative literature at the University of Texas at Austin.

 

In her research, Loss threads a delicate balance between her work in cultural studies, theory, and as a translator. Rather than having theory imposed on translation or having translations being wholly disconnected from theory, she believes in finding a middle path where both act as organic foils to each other allowing for the exploration of interesting questions of identity, politics, and history. Her second book, Dreaming in Russian: The Cuban Soviet Imaginary weaves this balance in exploring how Cubans remember the approximately three decades of diplomatic, political, economic, and cultural relations between the Soviet Union and Cuba and how they shaped the histories, identities, cultures, and linguistic orientations of Cubans both on the island and in diaspora. Drawing on interviews with Cuban artists and scholars along with resources from cinema and archival collections, Loss paints a rich tapestry of Cuban cultural heritage that shows how many in the island (and abroad) still retain aspects of the Soviet era in negotiating their lives, identities, and social relationships. Similarly, her translations highlight a range of complex psychological states, historical heritages, and personal testimonies that capture the diverse postcolonial and post-Soviet experiences of Cubans and Cuban Americans. They particularly show how such experiences can provide valuable interventions in thinking about theoretical questions related to local and global discourses of identity politics.

 

Loss’s interest in translation studies has also made its way into her classroom. She believes that effective teaching involves collaborative thinking and maintaining a dialogue with students that sometimes takes everyone out of their comfort zones. In her classes, students not only read and engage Latin American literatures and histories both in Spanish and in translation, they are also encouraged to be translators themselves, to gain a first-hand experience about challenges and rewards of working with multiple languages and cultural contexts. She recalls that a few years ago in a writing seminar, filled largely with seniors and Spanish majors, students collaborated with one another and with her in carrying out a rough initial translation of a canonical essay by Jorge Mañach. From this act of translating,” she notes, “students learned not just about history, literature, and translation theory, but also about how to transplant early twentieth century registers of Cuban writing into US English.” Students also made use of various digital tools, and were fortunate enough to hear first-hand from several expert guests, including our very own librarian Marisol Ramos. Praising the guest lecturers that influenced her strongly throughout her undergraduate and graduate studies, Loss tries to regularly invite scholars and artists to our department. Since the class, Loss has been steadily revising this translation. In fact, it has recently been published by Linkgua in Barcelona, Spain, with acknowledgements to the contributions of all of her students. In the near future, she hopes to offer a translation studies class at the graduate level where she envisions doing similar collaborative work with students.

 

Arnab Dutta Roy

The Italian Studies and the Medieval Studies programs welcomed the return of Valerio Cappozzo to present his just release book, Dizionario dei sogni nel medoevo: Il Somniale Danielis in manoscritti letterari (Dream Dictionary of the Middle Ages: the Somniale Danielis in literary manuscripts). Dr Cappozzo directs the Italian Language program at The University of Mississippi. He had presented the early results of his work during a visit to UConn in 2007. Although passionate about how dream symbolism relates to literature, he joked that his project had been such a long time coming that it had “become a real nightmare” for him.

Cappozzo discussed the significance of dreams and how the interpretation of symbols found in dreams can be applied to literature to make sense of an author’s intentions. We know people have been interpreting dreams since at least the beginning of representation and in that history, there is a remarkable coherence between dream interpretations and dreamed symbol archetypes. He used “tooth” as an example for a dream symbol: between 1220 BC Egypt and today, losing a tooth has been consistently viewed as a bad omen, most often as a premonition of death. He notes that the desire to find meanings in dreams was as manifest in the Middle Ages as it is now, though the frameworks for exploring this has changed profoundly due to vast transformation in culture, science, and religion since then. That dreams retain a certain symbolic consistency over time despite that change is one reason we keep returning to them.

In his talk Dr Cappozzo focused on the dream symbols found in the Somniale Danielis, “the Dreams of Daniel”, a book of symbols used by Daniel in the Book of Daniel to interpret dreams he believed to be prophetic. He then went on to an analysis of the dream symbols in the Divina Commedia a work in which dreams are used systematically to foreshadow events later in the cycle.

Prof Cappozzo said that there is a disconnect between dreams and reality that makes it difficult to establish simple equations between them the link between the one and the other. While dreams can recall fragments of reality, they do so following an unconscious logic of their own. In the original manuscript of Somniale Danielis, the complexity of dreams is reduced to a series of symbolic structures in order to make their potential meanings more available. Dr Cappozzo concluded with a quote from Cinderella to encapsulate one of the reasons he believes we keep searching for their meaning: “A dream is a wish your heart makes.”

by Olivia Merchen

On September 12^th, the award-winning translators, Anna Kushner and Kristin Dykstra, spoke about the challenges of translating Cuban works for an English-speaking audience in the US in an event titled “Translating Cuban Letters” hosted by LCL. Kushner is the translator of prominent Cuban works such as The Autobiography of Fidel Castro by Norberto Fuentes, and The Halfway House by Guillermo Rosales. Dykstra is a writer, literary translator, and scholar who has translated authors including Reina María Rodríguez, Juan Carlos Flores, and Angel Escobar among others. Both the speakers emphasized that the work of a translator does not only involve an attention to differences in language, but also to the contexts in which language makes meaning.

The translators discussed translation as a mode of understanding and making visible the immense diversity in the diasporic experiences of Cubans and Cuban Americans both within and beyond the United States. Kushner used the example of her translation of The Halfway House to emphasize how Guillermo Rosales captures many of these experiences in stories that include meditations on complex psychological states, crisscrossing cultural narratives, and interweaving histories involving the US, Cuba, Spain, and Russia. Dykstra, on the other hand, foregrounded the way her work helped to break stereotypical perceptions of Cuban culture, replacing the images of “mojitos and old cars” with new narratives that capture the diverse lived experiences of the people of Cuba. Translating figures like Rodrigues, Flores, and Escobar, each from different regions of Cuba, has allowed her to offer a more complex image of the island’s many cultures and peoples.

The event garnered an active participation from an audience that included LCL faculty and graduate students. Professors including Jacqueline Loss, Odette Casamayor-Cisneros, and Peter Constantine enriched the conversation by sharing their views on issues ranging from the challenges and rewards of translating across linguistic and cultural barriers, the institutional and identity politics of translation to the future of translation studies within the broader fields of the humanities and the social sciences in the US.

by Arnab Roy

On February 21^st, Professor Valérie Saugera described her current research on “Louchébem,” a secret language spoken by Parisian butchers. Saugera has expertise in lexical borrowing and has published widely on Anglicisms in the French language. 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 butchers in Paris.

Saugera first heard about Louchébem over ten years ago in a sociolinguistics class, while doing her Ph.D. She describes Louchébem as a “means of disguising words from the common language so as not to be understood by customers.” It relies on a code: speakers replace the first consonant in a French word with the letter “L”, move the original consonant to the end, and attach one of ten suffixes to it. Thus, when you apply this rule to the word boucher (‘butcher’), it produces the form Louchébem.  In her lecture, Saugera focused primarily on the linguistic mechanics of Louchébem and the reasons for using it in butcher shops today.

We know that Louchébem emerged in the second part of the nineteenth century in one of the oldest guilds in France; the butchers organized themselves into a guild as early as the eleventh century. Studying what is essentially an oral practice, “means accepting gaps in the data and unanswered questions,” Saugera says. The “literature is sparse… There is a plethora of myths and tales,” she adds. Only a few articles are available on the topic, but via a wide corpus of interviews, Saugera has been able to uncover many details about this supposedly dead argot.

Saugera has interviewed 153 Louchébem speakers in their traditional butcher shops. What is most fascinating is that some of the butchers she interviewed do not know how Louchébem is formed, they have simply acquired memorized words – a finding that she describes as the “most surprising” thus far. She has also learned from the interviews that, because butchers in France are traditionally male, female family members usually have only a passive knowledge of it; that is, they can often understand it, but do not speak it.

Butchery is a declining industry due to the rise of vegetarianism/veganism, competition of halal butcher shops, scandals with slaughterhouses, among many reasons. Therefore, another question Saugera will pose in her ongoing research concerns the consequences of losing a trade argot like Louchébem and why it is crucial to save these “micro-languages”. According to one of her interviewees, “… in some ways the practice of Louchébem is a miracle of its own”.

by Clare Boers