Margarita Jara (World Languages & Cultures), along with professor Pilar Valenzuela (Chapman University), presented their research paper, "Construcciones Posesivas en Español Peruano Amazónico," at the Latin American Association of Linguistics and Philology conference (ALFAL 2026) held at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú in…

Susan Byrne (World Languages & Cultures) has published a chapter titled "Cervantine Allusions" in Cervantine Futures: Reading Cervantes after the Critical Turn, a volume edited by Nicholas R. Jones and Paul Michael Johnson, and issued by Vanderbilt University Press. Byrne studies how Spanish creative author Miguel de…

Mayumi Ajioka (World Languages and Cultures) received a Laura Bassi Foundation Editorial Grant (Summer 2026) in support of her research on heritage language speakers’ motivation to learn and maintain their heritage language. The grant provides partial support for the preparation of a journal article manuscript for publication.

Associate Professor in French, François-Nicolas Vozel (World Languages and Cultures), published an essay titled "A Woman Impersonally: Hélène Cixous, Gilles Deleuze, Clarice Lispector, and the Poetics of Immanence" in French Forum (University of Pennsylvania Press), 50.2 (2026), pp. 99-114.

Matthew Childs (World Languages and Cultures), Ph.D., received the Metzler-Mews Conference Travel Grant from the American Association of Teachers of German. This competitive award provides funding for scholars to present their work at national and international conferences. This grant will support Childs's attendance at the German Studies…

Arpine Mkrtchyan (World Languages and Cultures) was invited to participate at the biennial conference of Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition, held at the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, UK, from April 16 to April 18, 2026. Her presentation, titled “Feature Reassembly and Syntactic Constraints in L2 French and English…

Susan Byrne (World Languages & Cultures) chaired a panel of scholars presenting papers on Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes during the Renaissance Society of America's annual conference, held this year in San Francisco, CA. The panel's speakers came from the USA, Canada, France and Ireland to critically analyze numerous aspects of the works…

Margaret Harp (World Languages and Culture) presented a paper, "Blindness as Motif in Montaigne's Librairie," at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America on February 20, 2026 in San Francisco, CA.

Mayumi Ajioka, Ph.D., (World Languages and Cultures), co-presenting with Yumiko Kawanishi, Ph.D., (UCLA), presented a practice-oriented paper titled, “A Path to Confident Conversation Participants Using PBI Class Activities,” at the 2025 ACTFL Convention in New Orleans on Nov. 21, 2025. The presentation introduced practical classroom activities…

Margarita Jara Yupanqui (World Languages and Cultures) served as the lead editor of the Letras volume published by the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (Lima, Peru), titled "Amazonian Spanish: Studies on the Diversity of Contacts in the Amazon, Toward a Regional Contextualization and the Delimitation of Monolingual Dialects."  This…

Arpine Mkrtchyan (World Languages and Cultures) has been selected and invited to present her article at the 51st Annual Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium, organized by University of Nevada, Reno, from October 30 to November 1, 2025. Mkrtchyan has presented her article titled “Altérité et perception poétique chez Victor Hugo: Analyse en…

For the second consecutive year, Kathy Callahan and Kirsten Barnstorf-DeBord (World Languages and Cultures) received a grant from the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Washington, D.C., for its “Germany on Campus” initiative. This year's program explores the theme “Boost Your Career with German,” Sept. 29-Oct. 3. Events include a…