News

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Théâtre de la Chandelle verte performance

We are pleased to welcome Le Théâtre de la Chandelle Verte for its performance of La farce de Maître Pathelin. The event is scheduled for Saturday, November 5, at 7pm, and it will take place in Baird Recital Hall (250 Baird). Scheduled during National French Week, the performance is free and ope to the public thanks to the generous support of the Melodia E. Jones Chair, the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, and the RLL GSA. A talk-back with the performers and the creators of the production will take place after the performance. Seating is by general admission, but reservations are required: write to ub-theatreinfrench@buffalo.edu for your confirmation.

 

Jane Tylus to lecture in Early Modern Masculinities Series

On Thursday September 22 at 3:00 pm in 904 Clemens, Professor Jane Tylus will present a lecture entitled "Gaspara Stampa, Louise Labé and the Return of Sappho." Jane Tylus is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature as well as Vice Provost for Academic Affairs and Faculty Director of The Humanities Initiative at NYU. The talk is based in part on her 2010 translation of Gaspara Stampa's poetry (The Complete Poems, The 1554 Edition of the "Rime," a bilingual edition, University of Chicago Press).

 

OuLiPo@50

The International Colloquium OuLiPo@50 organized by the University at Buffalo – SUNY and the international e-zine Arcade/Formules which will take place from October 5th to October 8th, 2011, marks the 50th anniversary of the official foundation of this French vanguard literary movement which expanded into many other artistic areas all over the world. This North-American Colloquium will encourage the dialogue between invited OuLiPo writers and their readers, both long followers of the group and new readers.

The colloquium will take place in the Hyatt-Regency downtown Buffalo at the same time as the MSA 13 Conference. In parallel, the world-renowned Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum in Buffalo is hosting an "OuLiPo" show, the first of this type in the world in which never-before exhibited documents related to the history of the group will be on display between September 1 and October 9. This includes documents and archives from the pre-Oulipo years to the latest contemporary pieces. There are pieces from the Paris BNF archives (which received them in a donation from Marcel Bénabou, the current Permanent Secretary of the OuLiPo Group) that have never been seen by anyone and this the first comprehensive exhibit devoted to OuLiPo in the US. The catalogue is available online. The colloquium will offer a historical prospective on OuLiPo and elaborate how the work of the group fits among the 20th-century literary and artistic movements. Since the event takes place in North America, it will also be the occasion to emphasize the interconnections between OuLiPo and the English-speaking world and the links that exist with past and current artistic and literary movements that mark North American modernity.

 

Jean-Jacques Thomas receives funds, distinction

Professor Jean-Jacques Thomas has received a $20,000 PIRQ (Programme d’initiative de recherche sur le Québec) grant from the Québec government. He has also been elected to the Executive Council of ACSUS, the Association of Canadian Studies in the United States.

 

Albertine: French-language theatre

We are happy to welcome again Le Théâtre de la Chandelle Verte with their performance of Albertine, en cinq temps by Québécois playwright, Michel Tremblay. The troupe's work is based on their adaptation of Tremblay's original text – with five actors who perform the five moments in Albertine’s life – to be performed by one actor. Francine Conley-Scott's exploration of the Albertines, from the clinically depressed to the sardonic to the happy-go-lucky, mesmerizes and delights as it explores the challenges of human existence (see reviews here). The performance takes place Wednesday, April 27, 7:30pm, 112 Norton (Woldman Theater), UB North Campus. The show is in French (with a detailed program in English), it runs one hour, and it is free and open to the public, thanks to the generosity of the Melodia E. Jones Chair.

 

Spain to and fro: Perspectives on Immigration

With the generous support of the Zengierski Family Lecture in Spanish Language and Culture Fund (Rev. Patrick J. Zengierski, founder) RLL is organizing a symposium on Tuesday March 22, 2011 from 2:00-5:00 pm in Clemens 120, followed by the screening of Montxo Armendáriz's film Las cartas de Alou (1990) in Professor Elizabeth Scarlett's class. The film will be in Spanish and does not have subtitles.

The participants and their titles are listed below:

• Larbi Touaf, Professor of English at the University of Mohamed I (Morocco), by videoconference, "Between a rock and a hard place: African emigrants in northern Morocco."
• Maria DiFrancesco, Associate Professor of Spanish at Ithaca College, "Migrant Bodies Float?: Unsettled Bodies and In-Between Subjects in Por la vía de Tarifa."
• Eva Juarros-Daussa, Assistant Professor of Spanish at UB, "Language Attitudes and Uses by Catalan and Galician Families in NYC"
• Tilman Lanz Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UB, "Cultural Ecstasy: Pakistani Immigrants in Barcelona"
• Carmen Moreno-Nuño, Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Kentucky, "Migraciones para la pantalla global: Vientos de agua de Juan Jose Campanella".

The symposium is free and open to the public.

 

Annual RLL Scrabble Fest

RLL will once again host a Scrabble tournament as a benefit for Literacy Volunteers. Players at all skill levels are invited to take out their boards and rack up tiles in support of this worthy cause. The RLL party will be held Sunday February 27th from 2-4pm in 904 Clemens Hall. The cost is $5.00 for students, $10.00 for others or $15.00 for a whole family. The winner will be invited to participate in the final championship event held on Sunday, March 13, 2011 at 1:00 p.m. in the Buffalo and Erie County Central Library. We encourage you to mark this on your calendar and plan to attend! What better way to beat the winter blues and help out a good cause at the same time? All proceeds raised during Scrabble Fest will directly benefit Literacy Volunteers of Buffalo and Erie County. If you have a scrabble board and can bring it, please do. See below for highlights of a past year's tournament!

 

Carrie Noland lecture

Noted literary scholar and professor, Carrie Noland, University of California at Irvine, will be visiting the UB campus next week. On Tuesday October 26th, 3:30 pm, Poetry Collection 420 Capen Hall she will present a talk entitled "Poetry and Performance" focusing on the special issues related to the poetics of the emerging Francophone territories in the Caribbean. Her aesthetic interrogation will be in line with the recent writings of the philosopher Jacques Rancière (Aesthetics and its Discontents) and his debate with Badiou and Lyotard on the question of the "sublime." In her talk she will explore more specifically the place of the Francophone poet Aimé Césaire and the place of aesthetics and politics in his Cahier d'un retour au pays natal ("Notebook of a Return to the Native Land"). It should be noted that the Poetry Collection here at UB has in its collection a rare copy of the original publication of this book edited in New York in 1945 by the constructivist French-German poet Yvan Goll in which appears the famous preface by André Breton entitled "A Great Black Poet." This North American edition of Césaire's book precedes the "official" edition published in Paris in 1947.

Carrie Noland is one of the foremost specialists in contemporary Poetics and her work has been exploring the ramifications between contemporary poetry and technology as well as manifestations of popular plasticity with texts. She is the author of Poetry at Stake: Lyric Aesthetics and the Challenge of Technology (Princeton, 1999) and Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture (Harvard, 2009). She is also co-editor with Sally Ann Ness of The Migration of Gesture (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), and co-editor with Barrett Watten of Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement (Palgrave, 2009). She has published two extremely important essays on literary plasticity : "Phonic Matters: Julia Kristeva, Bernard Heidsieck, and French Sound Poetry," PMLA, Special Issue on Poetry, v.120, n.1. January 2005 and "Graffiti and the Reinvention of Space," Word & Image (Fall 2005). She is currently writing a book supported by the American Council of Learned Societies entitled Not a Dancing Bear: Poetry and Performance in Franco-Caribbean Poetry and her lecture on Tuesday will take into consideration the problematics of this current work in progress.

 

Grant awarded to Eva Juarros-Daussà

Spain's Ministry of Science and Innovation has awarded a grant of €38,000 ($46,271.25) to the research team of RLL's Eva Juarros-Daussà, Raquel Casesnoves-Ferrer (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona), David Sankoff (Ottawa University, Canada), Josep Angel Mas Castells (Universitat Politecnica de Valencia) and Vicent Climent (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona) to complete a project entitled Future prevision of bilingual communities in multilingual contexts: the case of Catalan within and beyond our borders.

 

Grant awarded to Jean-Jacques Thomas

The Government of Quebec has awarded $5,000 to Professor Jean-Jacques Thomas to support program development in Canadian Studies. The funds will support the work of a graduate student who will coordinate Québec Studies offerings to be conducted under this grant by different faculty members in several departments of the College of Arts and Sciences. These funds may also make possible a "Summer Institute in Québec Studies", with courses partially located in the Department.

 

Bilingual reading by Pierre Alferi, September 21

On Tuesday, September 21, at 3:30 at the Poetry Collection, 420 Capen Hall the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, the Poetics Program and the Melodia E. Jones Chair sponsored a bilingual reading by Pierre Alferi, a leading figure of the new generation of French poets / writers / cinematographers born after 1960. His writings and films are concerned with plasticity of expression as they integrate graphic and sound components so as to produce a sort of textual and visual installation.

Pierre Alferi is Professor of visual studies at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Lyon (France). He nurtures collaboration with other artists and often performs with musicians, painters and other poets. With Suzanne Doppelt, a photographer and professor at the European Graduate School, he co-founded the literary review Détail, and with Olivier Cadio La Revue de Littérature Générale. His collaboration with the sculptor Jacques Julien led to the production of the DVD Ça commence à Séoul (2007). Alferi has also written lyrics for the actress and singer Jeanne Balibar. He wrote two of the songs for Balibar's 2003 album, Slalom Dame ("Cinéma" and "Ton Diable"), in collaboration with Rodolphe Burger, who composed the music. Alferi is well-known for his translations of works by John Donne, Giorgio Agamben and Meyer Schapiro into French. His creativity on film was edited and published as a DVD, Cinépoèmes & films parlants (2003). A special issue of the journal SubStance devoted to Alferi's work will appear in November 2010.

 

RLL Welcome Back picnic set for Saturday, September 11

Returning faculty and graduate students will gather at Chestnut Ridge Park to celebrate the beginning of the academic year.

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UB Authors Recognized at May 30 Reception

More than 150 University at Buffalo faculty and staff authors, including RLL professors David Castillo, Justin Read, and Jean-Jacques Thomas were recognized at a reception on May 30 in the Center for the Arts on the UB North Campus.

The reception was hosted by President John B. Simpson, Satish K. Tripathi(provost and executive vice president for academic affairs), and Jorge V. José (vice president for research). It honored UB authors who have published books between January 1, 2005, and May 1, 2010.

"Scholarship and creative activity at UB take many forms," said José. "Many UB faculty have published books; we want to recognize and honor them on this occasion," which he said he intends to make an annual event.

He called the response from faculty and staff to his request for publication information "truly overwhelming."

Sigma Delta Pi initiation

Top, left to right: Francisco (Paco) Martínez Ibarra, David Marello, Amanda Lubniewski, Lisa Kulka, George Efstratiou, Lauren Burdick

Bottom, left to right: Maureen Moynihan, Sarah Parylo, Susan (Susie) Hoy, Danielle VanMarter, Alanna Wellspeak

Not pictured: Andrea Perez Mukdsi, Meghan McGuire

On Friday, April 23rd, the Beta Nu Chapter of Sigma Delta Pi, the National Collegiate Hispanic Studies Honor Society, inducted thirteen new members from UB's graduate and undergraduate programs, all champions of Hispanic cultures and cross-cultural cooperation who have demonstrated high achievement in their Spanish coursework. 2009/2010 Officers Victoria Austin and Hannah Welch officiated at the Ceremony, with Katie Herdzick contributing to the Reception. Sigma Delta Pi was founded at Berkeley in 1917. For more information, contact Chapter Advisor Elizabeth Scarlett (scarlett@buffalo.edu). The new officers for 2010/2011 are Danielle VanMarter, George Efstratiou and Lisa Kulka.

Automatistes: a North-American Avant-Garde Literary and Artistic Twenty-Century Movement

In connection with the exhibit at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, UB will offer two events devoted to the presentation and public readings of representative "Automatistes" texts.

This avant-garde group of writers, artists and dancers under the leadership of Paul-Emile Borduas was flourishing in Montreal in the late 1940s. While Abstract Expressionism was revolutionizing visual art in New York and Letterism was introducing plasticity in art, film and letters in Paris, "Les Automatistes," true to the spirit of European vanguard movement published an important manifesto "Refus Global" that changed Québec art and politics. The group's experimentation in literature, art, theater and dance created a specific brand of lyrical abstraction that impacted all aspect of Québec intellectual life and paved the way for the so-called political "révolution tranquille."

Wednesday, March 17, 904 Clemens, UB North campus, 4:30 – 5:30  Lecture by Thierry Bissonnette (Laurentian University / University Laurentienne) and Christian Flaugh (UB) "Actualités et intempestivité de Refus global / Legacy and Untimely Actuality of the Automatistes' Manifesto.''

Friday, March 19, Auditorium,  5:00 – 6:00.  "Automatistes in (Con)text." A presentation by Ray Ellenwood (York University) with bi-lingual readings of texts by Thérèse Renaud, Paul-Emile Borduas, and Claude Gauvreau.  Steve McCaffery, Karen MacCormack, Valérie Hastings, and Jean-Jacques Thomas.

With the sponsorship of the Association Internationale des Etudes Québécoises, and, at UB, the Melodia E. Jones Chair, the Canadian-American Studies Committee, the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and the Poetics Program.

French Ambassador visits UB

On Wednesday April 8th, Ambassador Pierre Vimont visited the University at Buffalo.

According to the Washington Diplomat, Ambassador Vimont has served as ambassador of France to the United States since Augugust 2007. He was previously chief of staff to the French minister of foreign affairs (2002-07) and as ambassador and was, from 1999 to 2002, permanent representative of France to the European Union. After joining the Foreign Service in 1977, Ambassador Vimont was first posted to London as first secretary from 1978 to 1981 before returning to the Quai d'Orsay to serve with the Press and Information Office for four years. In his next assignment, he served as second counselor with the Permanent Representation of France to the European Communities in Brussels (1986-1990), and was subsequently chief of staff to the minister delegate for European affairs from 1990 to 1993. Ambassador Vimont then served as director for development and scientific, technical and educational cooperation, and then for cultural, scientific and technical relations. He was deputy director-general of the entire Cultural, Scientific and Technical Relations Department from 1996 to 1997 and then director of European Cooperation from 1997 to 1999. Ambassador Vimont holds a law degree and is a graduate of the Institute of Political Studies and the National School of Administration (ENA).

While in Buffalo, Ambassador Vimont toured Old Fort Niagara and visited two special library exhibits: one honoring the history of the Melodia Jones Chair in French and showcasing the French legacy in the Niagara Frontier region (on display in Special Collections), and the second, on exhibit in the foyer of the Lockwood Memorial Library, entitled "The Julian Park Collection: Rare Books Portray French History and Culture."

Ambassador Vimont presented a public lecture, "The United States and France and the Renewal of Transatlantic Relations," in which he discussed the changing nature of relations between the two nations over the past several years. The talk took place at 3:00 PM. in the Drama Theatre in the Center for the Arts, North Campus, and the video of the talk can be seen here.

French theatre performance

Tickets for the Saturday, April 10 "Femmes de lettres" performance by Le Théâtre de la Chandelle Verte are available; those interested should send e-mail to chandelleverte@yahoo.com. The event is free but reservations are strongly encouraged. The performance is at 1:00 pm and it lasts approximately one hour. The venue is Shea's Smith Theater (adjacent to Shea's mainstage theatre), 645 Main Street, in Buffalo. The performance consists of ten vignettes based on excerpts of writings by ten women: Marie de France, Christine de Pisan, Marguerite de Navarre, Madame de Lafayette, Madame de Sévigné, Olympe de Gouges, Camille Claudel, Colette, Marguerite Duras, and Fatou Diome. For more information on the performance, visit chandelleverte.org.

 

Commencement 2008

The annual RLL Commencement Celebration was held on May 9th, 2008, in the Center for Tomorrow. The ceremony began with recognition of the recipients of graduate degrees:

• Paola Margaret Kersch, PhD in Spanish
• Noemi Maldonado-Cardenales, PhD in Spanish
• Sergio Manuel Pedro, PhD in Spanish
• Adriana Primo-Vincent, PhD in Spanish
• Susana Ivonne Rodriguez, PhD in Spanish
• Keith Richard Christensen, MA in French
• Daniel Andrew Gattuso, MA in Spanish
• Laura Elizabeth Brooks Guglani, MA in Spanish
• Katie Marie Latour, MA in French
• Olga Maria Lepkyj, MA in French
• Diana Vela, MA in Spanish

The annual Alumni Address was given by Andrew Franklin. A native of Queens, NY, Andrew completed his Bachelor of Arts degree at UB, where he was in the Honors Program. He majored in Spanish with minors in Italian and Marketing. Following graduation in 2004, Andrew accepted a Fulbright Award to teach English in the Principality of Andorra. Since 2005, Andrew has been teaching Spanish and French at the Ross School in East Hampton, NY. Next year, he will be switching to a public school in Nassau County, NY. Andrew will also be beginning graduate work in Romance Languages at SUNY Stony Brook.

The awards portion of the program began with recognition of RLL seniors who had been inducted into Phi Beta Kappa: Rebecca Anderson, Kathryn Figliotti, Lauryn Ballesteros, Tracy Fort, Lynne Banks, Daniel Geyer, Juliet Barry, Lindsay Hall, Andrew Bernstein, Amy Hardy, Alana Bibergal, Christine Harvey, Amy Bouvin, Frances Karras, Kimberly Butts, Ghislaine Kersten, Devin Callan, Michael Kopalek, Julia Cole, Leila Manteghi, Brooke Dell'Oso, Lauren Mook, Jeremy Detwiler, Janelle Olmer, Kate Dunning, Ian Phillips, Chantal Englert, Holly Savage, Julia Eron, Brooke Shaughnessy, Dana Farber, and Emily Smith.

The faculty and assembled graduates then recognized the achievements of Dean's Medalist Katharine Facci, and the recipient of the Samuel P. Capen Award, Chantal Englert. Afterwards, with the help of Melodia E. Jones Professor of French Jean Jacques Thomas, Mary Ellen Gianturco recognized the winners of the annual Alliance française Prize for Excellence in French: First place to Jordan Pitts of City Honors, second place to Suzanna Friedman of Batavia High School, and third place to Chelsea Horne, of Williamsville East High School.

Led by Amanda Karl, the CAS Dean's Outstanding Senior for Romance Languages, RLL students received their diplomas at General Commencement on May 11th, 2008. The Alumni Speaker at RLL's Commencement Celebration was Andrew Franklin.

    

    

    

      

 

RLL picnic

RLL faculty and graduate students braved the rain to gather at Beaver Island State Park for the annual welcome picnic in September.