UT College of Liberal Arts:

Sarah Le Pichon Graduate Student Photo Sarah Le Pichon, one of our French Studies Doctoral Students, recently presented a Trauma-Informed Teaching: A Workshop and was part of a round table discussion on Safe Spaces: Investigating Trauma and Trauma-informed Practices in and out of the Classroom, which were both hosted at Clemson University. Bien fait!

Dr. Paola Bonifazio is the recepitent of a Big XII Faculty Fellowship for the 2019-20 academic year! This program offers faculty the opportunity to travel to member institutions to exchange ideas and pursue research. Dr. Bonifazio has been invited to visit the University of Oklahoma to deliver a lecture this fall. Brava!

Congratulations to a recent graduate from our French Studies Doctoral Program, Ashley Voeks who has accepted a position as Visiting Assistant Professor of French at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan for this Fall 2019! Bravo!

Congratulations to our French Linguistics Doctoral Student Joshua Griffiths for receiving the Best Student Paper Award at the 49th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages for his paper titled "Data cleaning methods to improve the accuracy of coding in the Project Phonologie du Français Contemporain Corpus: A Case Study of Schwa Realization." Félicitations!

Congratulations are again in order for Italian Doctoral Student Elisa Valentini, who has accepted a Visiting International Scholar teaching position with the Italian Department at Dickinson College this Fall 2019. Brava!

Guy Raffa's course, Dante's Hell and its Afterlife, was featured during Eyes on teaching 2019, a two-day event allowing UT faculty to observe selected classes and discuss teaching with instructors and one another. Provost Maurie McInnis joined the group that attended Raffa’s class. His lesson took students and visitors on an illustrated tour of the circles of gluttony, greed, and wrath in Dante’s Inferno, and included modern adaptations of the medieval poem. Read more here. Bravo!

barbara Congratulations to Dr. Barbara Bullock who has won an Experiential Learning Initiative Course Developer grant. This Provost's Office initiative aims to spread the culture of "learning by doing" in UT Austin courses and degree plans. With these funds, Dr. Bullock will design a new French Civilization (F C) course for the department. Dr. Bullock's proposal was one of 12 selected to be funded from the College. Félicitations!

lsa logo Please join us in congratulating Dr. David Birdsong whose article "Ultimate attainment in second language acquistion" has been included in the Linguistics Society of America's Best of Language: Volume III. This volume is made up of the 20 best articles of 500 written btween 1986-2016. Four of the selected articles were written by UT Austin Liberal Arts faculty.

Congratulations are in order for Italian Doctoral Student Elisa Valentini, who has been awarded the 2019 Graduate School Dissertation Writing Fellowship. The excellence she demonstrated in coursework and comprehensive examinations has given rise to an original and innovative dissertation project, "The Art of Science: Early Twentieth-Century Italian Futurism in the Context of Pre-Einsteinian (Meta)Physics." Engaging various disciplines and media, her dissertation explores the intersecting roles of science and occultism in shaping Italian Futurist visual and literary works before World War I and the popularization of Einstein's Special theory of Relativity. Brava!

Congratulations to Professor Douglas Biow on his most recent publication "Vasari's Words: The 'Lives of Artists' as a History of Ideas in the Italian Renaissance."In this book, Douglas Biow analyzes Vasari's Lives of the Artists —often considered the first great work of art history in the modern era— from a new perspective. He focuses on key words and shows how they address a variety of compelling, culturally determined ideas circulating in late Renaissance Italy. Ben fatto!