CMLLC students present research at conference

Stefania della Porta (Italian), Karyna Sitkowski (Russian), Ryan Woloshen (Near East), and Christen Zemecki (Classics) were among the presenters at last Friday's Undergraduate Research Conference, held in the newly refurbished Student Center. These four presenters from CMLLC were showcasing original research they completed with support from the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program.

Stefania della Porta, an Italian major who is also in the AGRADE program, presented a project titled "Language Learning While Studying Abroad: Perceptions, Participation, and Outcomes." In this study, she looks at the double-immersion method of language learning abroad used in the Wayne in Abruzzo program in Italy and how it aligns with current research in the field of foreign language learning. Della Porta observed American and Italian program participants to document who used what language when, why, and how. Over the course of the month-long program, Della Porta analyzed students' prospective language gains during the program, to consider how these results align with or contrast the results seen in other study abroad programs documented in current research.

Karyna Sitkowski, a double-major in Slavic (Russian Concentration) and Psychology, presented the results of her work under the auspices of an Undergraduate Research Grant, which she was awarded to study the serial killers of the Soviet Union and three of its successor states (Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan). She researched how their criminal justice systems have identified, captured, and meted out punishment to serial killers, as well as the ways that these societies and the media have responded to them. Her work reveals that law enforcement in this part of the world has been poorly equipped to deal with this type of criminal because of ideological assumptions about psychology and crime during the Soviet period and the breakdown of most public institutions following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. However, public perception of serial killers has been far more measured than in the US, where the media has at times created hysteria, and at others has gone as far as to turn serial killers into celebrities, putting into question the way in which such information is shared with the public. Ultimately, Sitkowski's work demonstrates that sharing practices and experience could benefit both the United States as well as the former Soviet nations.

Christen Zemecki, a double major in Classics and Philosophy, presented research on "The Genre of Plato's Republic." Zemecki argued that Plato's Republic possesses literary elements that one would find present in Greek tragedy, epic and comedy. His project is an attempt to discover whether Plato intended for readers to interpret the Republic as one of those genres in particular. The results of Zemecki's research shows that Plato uses more elements that belong to tragedy than epic or comedy, which may mean that Plato wrote the Republic as a tragedy.

Ryan Woloshen presented a project titled "An Analysis of Shifting Rhymes in Sura 52," which he will also deliver at the Annual Meeting

of the International Qur'anic Studies Association on November 21 in Atlanta, GA.

CMLLC is proud to recognize the research our students are undertaking, and we congratulate them on their accomplishments.