Language faculty recognized with awards, honors 2017

The Department of Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures is proud to celebrate our outstanding faculty and their numerous accomplishments over the course of the last academic year. The following are a few highlights from the 2016-17 academic year.

Mohamed El-Sharkawi

Professor Mohamed El-Sharkawi (Near East studies) was awarded tenure and promoted to associate professor.

Guy Stern

In January of this year, the French Consul General bestowed the prestigious Knight of the Legion d'Honneur medal, the highest French order for military and civil merits, on Distinguished Professor Guy Stern.

Professor Stern was one of the Ritchie Boys of WWII, a group of young men who fled Nazi Germany and returned to Europe as soldiers in US uniforms. In Camp Ritchie, Maryland, they were trained in intelligence and psychological warfare.

Francisco Higuero

Professor Francisco Higuero (Spanish) won a Board of Governors Award, a prestigious recognition created in 1974 to recognize a particular accomplishment or achievement during the previous academic year.

Victor Figueroa and Haiyong Liu

Professors Victor Figueroa (Spanish) and Haiyong Liu (Chinese) were awarded prestigious grants as part of the Research Enhancement Program in the Arts and Humanities, a competition sponsored by the Office of the Vice President for Research.

Professor Figueroa's project is a book tentatively titled "Decolonial Topophilia: An Ecocritical Approach to the Poetry of Luis Palés Matos, Juan Antonio Corretjer, and Julia de Burgos." It explores the representation of nature, as it relates to ecological and environmental concerns, in Puerto Rican poetry. The book will examine the work of three major Puerto Rican poets whose literary output addresses the intersection of colonial domination on the island during the first half of the twentieth century and its impact on the island's natural spaces and non-human living beings.

Professor Liu's research examines a phenomenon known as "Object Drop" in Chinese and in English. He explains his innovative project in this way: "Basically I study why when English cannot allow object drop in general (e.g. I don't like (it)), it allows the omission of a generic object (e.g. I am eating (it/food)). And Chinese does the opposite. I hypothesize that each language can only allow one type of object drop, depending on the specificity and definiteness of the object."

Michele Valerie Ronnick

Professor Michele Valerie Ronnick (Classics) won a 2018 Humanities Center Faculty Fellowship for a project titled "Putting the World on Wheels: Classical Elements in the Creation of Michelin's Bibendum and the Marketing of the Pneumatic Tire," one of the winning projects for the competition on the topic "Revolutions." The spring 2017 Humanities Center symposium, "Mobilities," featured numerous CMLLC faculty members who won grants last year: Professors Alina Cherry, Nicole Coleman, and Hernan Garcia all presented papers. And Professors Anne Duggan and Alina Klin presented papers at the Humanities Center's Fall Symposium, which considered the topic "Ideology."

Nicole Coleman and Mohamed El-Sharkawi

Professors Nicole Coleman (German) and Mohamed El-Sharkawi won University Research Grants. Coleman's project, "Violence against Aliens," draws on her work in intercultural literature, and will be the first chapter of a book in progress. El Sharkawi's project, titled "Historical Short Vowel Data Bank," proposes using a data bank to produce a series of three articles about the vowel behavior of pre-Islamic Arabic.

Laura Kline

Dr. Laura Kline (Global Studies, Russian) was appointed director of global studies.

Nicole Coleman, Laura Kline and Leonidas Pittos

Professors Nicole Coleman, Dr. Laura Kline and Dr. Leonidas Pittos (Modern Greek), were awarded funds to start a "Crisis and Revolution in Detroit and Beyond" Learning Community, a collaborative project that will connect and support students in Global Studies, Russian and Greek over two semesters.