What do Putin's regime, Arabic media, and contemporary anime have in common? They're all topics of the wide-ranging research published by faculty in the School of Modern Languages.
While the School has a well-deserved reputation for providing high-quality language instruction to Georgia Tech students and interdisciplinary degree programs spanning four of the six schools in Ivan Allen College, its faculty members are also busy producing top-tier research.
"Many people think the School of Modern Languages only teaches language classes, but it's so much more than that," said David Shook, associate professor of Spanish and Interim Chair of the School.
"We organize film festivals, lead study abroad programs, and analyze in our courses and research the pressing topics changing our world today, such as digital culture and the arts, medical practices and their societal impacts, technological and scientific developments over time, language development and language change, and so much more."
Check it out in our roundup of the latest research from the School of Modern Languages!
Paul Alonso
Paul Alonso, an associate professor of Spanish, published "Hybrid Alternative Digital-Native Media in Latin America During the Pandemic (Two Peruvian cases of Entrepreneurial Journalism hosted from Spain)" in the Journal of Latin American Communication Research.
"Through interviews with the creators/hosts of the shows and content analysis, this article examines how the context of national crises (in terms of public health, democracy, and information) demanded new voices to fill the gaps left by traditional media, while at the same time reconfiguring the relation with audiences in multiple platforms," Alonso writes. Read more.
Alonso also published a Spanish-language book, Thirty Years of Entertainment and Politics in Peru: From the Media Dictatorship to the Spectacle of Democracy (1992 – 2022). In it, he "traces the hybridizations between information and entertainment in Peru" into what he refers to as "infotainment."
"If we don't differentiate between spectacle and politics, we will be condemned to the endless spectacle of politics," Alonso writes. Read more.
Stéphanie Boulard
Associate Professor Stéphanie Boulard published a French-language book titled Hugographies: Reveries of Victor Hugo on the Letters of the Alphabet with co-author Pierre Georgel.
"The alphabetical letter is a constant object of reflection, speculation, even ramblings on the part of Victor Hugo," the authors write. Exploring it can open "the doors of the Hugolian mental landscape." Read more.
Lelia Glass
Assistant Professor Lelia Glass published "The Negatively Biased Mandarin Belief Verb Yĭwéi" in Studia Linguistica.
"This exploration engages the complex reasoning involved in deciding what to think about what other people think, and the linguistic resources used to guide it," Glass writes. Read more.
Stuart Goldberg
Associate Professor Stuart Goldberg published two Russian-language articles in the New Literary Observer, Moscow, titled:
- “From the History of Publication of the Russian Classics. Article One. A Forged Pushkin”
- “From the History of Publication of the Russian Classics. Article Two. The Simplification of Olenin (Drawings for an Ode by Derzhavin)”
Find them in the publications tab on his profile.
Andrea Jonsson
Assistant Professor Andrea Jonsson published a chapter titled "The Reach of Excess through the Prism of Voice-Affect-Gender" in The Routledge Companion to Gender and Affect.
"Voice and affect are already well-known interdisciplinary allies, but what does the triangular relationship between voice, affect, and gender do to the parameters of language?" she asks in the article. "How do these three fields of study support and enhance each other?" Read more.
Hyoun-A Joo
Hyoun-A Joo, an assistant professor of German, published "South Korean Immigrant Workers in Germany: L2 German Verb Placement and Sociolinguistic Factors" in the International Journal of Bilingualism.
"This research is significant as it aims to draw a comprehensive picture of L2 German acquisition and usage in the context of labor migration, highlighting a less-studied group of immigrants," Joo wrote. Read more.
Joo also published "'Tesla in Grünheide': Growing Intercultural Competence Through Role-Play Simulation" in Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German.
"This article discusses how a simulation exercise based on the contentious construction of the Tesla Gigafactory in Grünheide, Germany, facilitated the growth of students' ability to take perspectives other than their own – a crucial step toward [intercultural communicative competence]," Joo wrote. Read more.
Britta Kallin
Associate Professor Britta Kallin published a German-language chapter titled "Feminist perspectives and authorship in Marlene Streeruwitz' None of This Will Happen to Me... How Do I Remain a Feminist. (2010) and Ask Marlene. Feminist Manuals. (2018)." It appeared in Marlene Streeruwitz: Perspectives on the Author and Work.
"Marlene Streeruwitz's theoretical statements and feminist essays are intrinsically poetic and are closely intertwined with her stories, novels, video projects, and websites," Kallin writes. "For Streeruwitz, feminist critique is critique of hegemonic male truths that are described as universal." Read more.
Dina Khapaeva
Professor Dina Khapaeva published a new edition of her 2007 book on Russian President Vladimir Putin in French. Crimes Without Punishment: The Roots of Putinism is an updated translation of Gothic Society: A Morphology of Nightmare, which was first published in Russian. Khapaeva also wrote a new 20-page preface for the edition.
"Ten years ago, Dina Khapaeva published a Critical Portrait of Russia," the summary states. "Today, she fears that she has not been heard... and drives home the point: Putin's regime is an unpunished criminal regime." Read more.
Natalie Khazaal
Associate Professor Natalie Khazaal contributed a chapter on "Gender, Affect and Atheism on Arabic Media" to Global Sceptical Publics: From Non-religious Print Media to 'Digital Atheism.'
The book, set to publish in April, is "a collection of essays examining secular discourse in contemporary media spheres." Read more.
Yong-Taek Kim
Yong-Taek Kim, an associate professor of Korean, contributed a book chapter titled "The Kubo Project: Content-Language-Technology Integration through Literature" to How to Actively Engage Our Students in the Language Classes.
"This edited volume presents some inspiring research in second language acquisition, focusing on active learning, cooperative and collaborative approach, and other innovative strategies to engage the students and promote learning," the summary states. Read more.
Jin Liu
Associate Professor Jin Liu published "Fractality in Chinese Prose" in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities.
"We find that not only is it common to perceive meaningful patterns in randomness, but also that writers in varying degrees unknowingly actively create patterns," Liu and her co-authors wrote. Read more.
Liu also published "Deviant Writing and Youth Identity: Transcription of Shanghai Wu Dialect on the Internet" in Digital Orality: Vernacular Writing in Online Spaces.
"Deviating from the standard Chinese writing system, Internet-savvy youth transcribe their native dialects on an ad hoc basis, which celebrates multiplicity, creativity, and individuality and resists uniformity, standardization, and institutionalization," Liu writes. "The celebration of the sounds of Chinese dialects on the Internet echoes a global trend toward digital orality in many parts of the world." Read more.
Kyoko Masuda
Associate Professor Kyoko Masuda published the Japanese-language "Examining Gender Expressions in Manga and CEJC Corpora" in The 28th Proceedings of Princeton Japanese Pedagogy Forum.
Masuda also published "Learning Japanese Interactional Particles Through a Usage-Based and Concept-Based Language Instruction" in East Asian Pragmatics.
"For teaching interactional particles effectively in the classroom, understanding of the role of intersubjectivity in discourse is crucial," she writes. Read more.
Amanda Weiss
Assistant Professor Amanda Weiss published "Kawaii Kokutai: The Militarized Shōjo Body in Contemporary Anime" in Mechademia.
"The militarized shōjo, with her symbolic connection to possibility, purity, and pacifism, allows for the consumption of military imagery without addressing painful historical baggage," Weiss wrote with co-author Yezi Yeo. "This is part of a larger trend in Japanese media since 2000 that encompasses not only the militarized shōjo but also the 'feminization of war memory.'" Read more.
