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Department News : Modern Languages and Literatures Fall, 2010

Returning Faculty:

Dr. Kirsty Bell Dr. Kirsty Bell spent her 6 month sabbatical, from January to July 2010, working on analyses for her project on literary representations of painters in Québécois literature. She also co-edited, with Drs. Monika Boehringer and Hans R. Runte, a volume of essays entitled Entre textes et images : Constructions identitaires en Acadie et au Québec. This collection of essays will be published this October (2010) by l’Institut d’études acadiennes in Moncton. At a French Studies Conference in Toronto, Dr. Bell also delivered a conference paper on artist workshops and museum exhibits in essays by Québécois author Louise Warren. Finally, she has recently returned from a conference on word-image relations, held in Brazil, where she presented a paper on some of the phenomena that characterize fictional painters in contemporary Québécois literature.

Dr. Monika Boehringer, Dr. Monika Boehringer has had a productive half-sabbatical in the fall of 2009. With Drs. Kirsty Bell and Hans R. Runte she co-edited a volume of 19 essays, one of which she authored herself. The volume, Entre textes et images: Constructions identitaires en Acadie et au Québec (Moncton, Institut d’études acadiennes, 2010), will be published shortly. She presented papers at two conferences and contributed three annotated entries to Les écrits de Marguerite Duras: Bibliographie des œuvres et de la critique – 1940-2006 by B. Alazet, R. Harvey and H. Volat, dir., (Paris, IMEC, 2009). She also published two book reviews, one on Hélène Harbec’s latest works and one on a book about the French artist Claude Cahun. Her critical edition of France Daigle’s first novel, Sans jamais parler du vent: Roman de crainte et d’espoir que la mort arrive à temps, has also been submitted. During the winter semester 2010, she was one of the external reviewers of a department of Modern Languages in the Maritimes and an adjudicator of a SSHRC committee; she also serves on the editorial boards of three journals. After having recently conquered her computer problems with the help of Computing Services (un grand merci!), she can now update her website on Acadian Women Writers: www.mta.ca/research/awlw

Dr. Mark Lee Mark Lee’s book Les Identités d’Amélie Nothomb : de l’invention médiatique aux fantasmes originaires was published in May 2010 with Editions Rodopi (New York/ Amsterdam). This work starts with how Amélie Nothomb - a Japanese born francophone Belgian and now international best-seller - was initially accused of being an impostor, suspected of being an aged male writer hiding behind what was considered an unlikely name. More than other authors, she has had to invent herself both in the media and in her writing. After confronting multiple media constructions of her person since 1992 with those found in her writing, I then examine the question of identity through the optic of the Family Romance. Juxtaposing interviews with recurring narratives of misnaming, I identify a fundamental ‘onomastic disaster’ at the heart of this author’s notion of self and explore its uncanny return in the representation of gender, nationality and the very scene of writing itself.

Since the last update, Dr. Lee also published two other articles on Amélie Nothomb and a number of book and film reviews. He served as an external reader for a MA thesis at the Université de Moncton and with a colleague in France he is putting together an extended study of intertextual connections between Marguérite Duras and Amélie Nothomb. Dr. Lee was promoted to Full Professor of French in July 2010.

Dr. Lauren Beck is an Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies. She completed her doctorate in July 2008 at the University of Western Ontario in Hispanic Studies by defending her dissertation: "16th Century Religious Signs and Symbols throughout the Lands of Spain." Soon after arriving to take up her position at Mount Allison, she generously indulged her interest in the art of communication with other "signs and symbols" by creating a new Hispanic Studies website for the Department: to see it, go to http://www.mta.ca/faculty/arts-letters/mll/spanish/index.html
Before completing her PhD, she co-organized, in late 2007, a conference: "Technologies of Writing" for which she presented a paper entitled "Reading map signs: a comparative study of the UK and Spain." She has addressed The Upper Canada Map Society at the University of Toronto on "Early maps of the Americas." Her publication, "The mezquita-garaje, mezquita-sótano, and Islam in Spain since 11-M," in a volume of Historia Actual was dedicated to the intersection of contemporary dictatorship and religion During the Summer of 2009 Dr. Beck was awarded the 2009-2011 Marjorie Young Bell Faculty Fellowship for The Hidden Mosque Project, which examines the representation of Muslims in Spain, from the early modern period until today. She also completed a book about religious map signs in 16th- century cartographic texts of Hispanic territory.

Miyako Oe, who has been teaching and directing the Japanese courses at Mount Allison since 1993, was re-elected as President of the Canadian Association for Japanese Language Education ( CAJLE) for another two-year mandate in August, 2008 .CAJLE provides a forum for faculty members of universities and teachers of various levels of schools across Canada to discuss research and professional activities in Japanese linguistics and language education. ( http://cajle.info/home) (English/Japanese) The CALJE holds an annual conference each summer and publishes the annual Journal CALJE, for which Miyako Oe works as an editorial member as well. The recently published Journal CALJE Vol.10 is available in the MLL Department.

In July 2009, Miyako Oe was invited to speak as a panelist at the JSAA-ICJLE 2009 ( http://jsaa-icjile2009.arts.unsw.edu.au/en/index.html) ( English/Japanese),an international conference held in Sydney, Australia. This conference was hosted jointly by the Japanese Studies Association of Australia and the International Conference on Japanese Language Education which presently consists of the member organizations of ten countries/regions, ( Japan, US, Australia, China, Taiwan, Korea, Europe, Canada, Vietnam and Hong Kong). She presented a paper entitled "The medium of instruction in teaching of Japanese Studies in Canada", discussing the liason between language and content of Japanese Studies such as literature, lingusitics, history, geography, etc. Her paper is available on the website, (http://jsaa-icjle2009.arts.unsw.edu.auéassetséfilesépapersécanada.pdf)

In the academic year of 2009-2010, Miyako Oe will continue with her efforts in further developing an advanced japanese course at Mount Allison via distance education in collaboration with York University.

Dr. Renata Schellenberg, is an Associate Professor of German. In April 2009 Dr. Schellenberg presented a paper at the IGRS ( Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies) in London, UK. The conference theme was Breaking Boundaries: The 1790s in Germany, France and Britain.

Dr. Schellenberg spent the summer conducting research at the British Library. She was looking at eighteenth-century museum catalogues and auction inventories. This is research for her monograph on commodity culture in post-Enlightenment Germany. She published a chapter in the book series Étudés Internationales sur le dix-huitième Sìècle(Éditions Honore Champion, Paris). The title of the chapter is" The Fantasy of America in Eighteenth-Century Germany". She also had an article entitled "The Incommensurability of Nature: Goethe's Scientific Method" accepted by Science and Society Journal.

She has two additional articles in press with Walter de Gruyter and Anthem Press and continues to act as associate editor for the The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum.