Allegheny News and Events

Reeck participates in BBC Radio story

Associate Professor of Modern and Classical Languages Laura Reeck Participated in a BBC Radio story on soccer in the French Banlieues. She discussed attitudes toward the Euro 2016 soccer championship in the French banlieues, specifically in the banlieue of Bondy. Here is the link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03yptx9
“This has a backstory shared with my students from last semester who took a course on the French banlieues with me. I reached out to Fouad Ben Ahmed after reading articles by George Packer featuring him in the New Yorker Magazine. My students and I entered into a relationship with him over the course of the semester though email exchanges and a video conference. On a short trip to France in June, I had the privilege of meeting Fouad Ben Ahmed — recently called “Ambassador of the Banlieues” in a LeMonde newspaper article — in person and interpreting for him in this BBC piece. I also worked with the journalists to identify and interview residents of Bondy,” said Reeck.

Source: Academics, Publications & Research

Reeck participates in BBC Radio story

Associate Professor of Modern and Classical Languages Laura Reeck Participated in a BBC Radio story on soccer in the French Banlieues. She discussed attitudes toward the Euro 2016 soccer championship in the French banlieues, specifically in the banlieue of Bondy. Here is the link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03yptx9
“This has a backstory shared with my students from last semester who took a course on the French banlieues with me. I reached out to Fouad Ben Ahmed after reading articles by George Packer featuring him in the New Yorker Magazine. My students and I entered into a relationship with him over the course of the semester though email exchanges and a video conference. On a short trip to France in June, I had the privilege of meeting Fouad Ben Ahmed — recently called “Ambassador of the Banlieues” in a LeMonde newspaper article — in person and interpreting for him in this BBC piece. I also worked with the journalists to identify and interview residents of Bondy,” said Reeck.

Source: Academics, Publications & Research

Hernández Presents Paper on Racism and Homophobia in Film “Bad Hair”

Associate Professor of Spanish Wilfredo Hernández attended the XVII International Congress of Hispanic Literature held in Mérida, Mexico, March 9-11. He presented “Racism and Homophobia in Mariana Rondón’s Bad Hair.” Bad Hair is a Venezuelan film that received the main prize at the 2013 San Sebastian International Film Festival. Professor Hernández was also the moderator of the panel where his paper was included, which dealt with recent Latin American films.

Source: Academics, Publications & Research

Hernández Presents Paper on Racism and Homophobia in Film “Bad Hair”

Associate Professor of Spanish Wilfredo Hernández attended the XVII International Congress of Hispanic Literature held in Mérida, Mexico, March 9-11. He presented “Racism and Homophobia in Mariana Rondón’s Bad Hair.” Bad Hair is a Venezuelan film that received the main prize at the 2013 San Sebastian International Film Festival. Professor Hernández was also the moderator of the panel where his paper was included, which dealt with recent Latin American films.

Source: Academics, Publications & Research

Herrman Awarded Visiting Fellowship at University College, Oxford

Judson Herrman, associate professor of classical studies and Frank T. McClure Chair of Greek and Latin, has been awarded a visiting fellowship at University College, Oxford, for the Hilary Term (January-March) 2017. These fellowships recognize “distinguished external scholars” who can contribute to the academic community in Oxford and benefit from its resources. While in residence at Oxford, Professor Herrman plans to complete a book manuscript, “Selected Political Speeches of Demosthenes,” in which he edits the Greek text and provides English introduction and extensive commentary. He will make a public presentation of his work to the Faculty of Classics at the University of Oxford and will mentor students and post-graduates.

Source: Academics, Publications & Research

Herrman Awarded Visiting Fellowship at University College, Oxford

Judson Herrman, associate professor of classical studies and Frank T. McClure Chair of Greek and Latin, has been awarded a visiting fellowship at University College, Oxford, for the Hilary Term (January-March) 2017. These fellowships recognize “distinguished external scholars” who can contribute to the academic community in Oxford and benefit from its resources. While in residence at Oxford, Professor Herrman plans to complete a book manuscript, “Selected Political Speeches of Demosthenes,” in which he edits the Greek text and provides English introduction and extensive commentary. He will make a public presentation of his work to the Faculty of Classics at the University of Oxford and will mentor students and post-graduates.

Source: Academics, Publications & Research

Experiential Learning Opens a World of Opportunity

Cammarata

“Allegheny College gave me the opportunity not only to have my first experience outside of the United States, but outside of my comfort zone, too,” says Kelsey McNary ’13.

As an Allegheny student, McNary joined an Experiential Learning seminar that toured Germany, Denmark, Switzerland and Sweden during the summer of 2011, following her sophomore year.

Experiential Learning seminars (known as ‘ELs’) are led by Allegheny faculty and administrators and take place each year, just after the spring semester. The trips are coordinated by the International Education Office, part of the Allegheny Gateway. The seminars provide students with the opportunity for international education in a more contained and condensed environment than semester- or year-long study abroad opportunities. The programs typically last two to three weeks and are worth two to four “experiential learning credits” that count toward the number of required credits for graduation. Several unique programs are offered each year and involve travel to places such as Kenya, Austria, England, Sri Lanka and Peru.

On the trip McNary attended, the students traveled through the four featured countries studying public transportation. McNary, an environmental studies major and geology minor from Albany, N.Y., had neither studied nor even used any form of public transportation before this seminar, so the material her group was studying was completely foreign to her.

“I didn’t really expect the material to translate directly back to my Allegheny experience, but it wasn’t necessarily about what I was learning anyways,” she says. “What mattered was where I was learning it – being out of the country was the most important part. It doesn’t even matter where you go, just that you go.”

“The trip made me more aware, and more conscious of the world around me. In a sense, it really grounded me,” says Lexi Cammarata ’17, biochemistry major and Spanish minor from Greensburg, Pa., who traveled to Nicaragua in Central America in 2014, after her freshmen year.

“Being in the second poorest country in the Northern Hemisphere, I witnessed a kind of poverty in Nicaragua that I had never seen in the United States. The people there didn’t have a lot – but what they did have, was a huge sense of community that really affected the way I’d view the values of family and community when I returned home.”

This trip that Cammarata attended is a service-based trip where the team from Allegheny completes roughly 80 hours of service each in the few weeks they are there. Cammarata was on a trip that focused on predominantly homeless families who were living in a refuse facility. The community relied on the garbage in the dump for food and other basic necessities. The program helped to move these families out of the dump, construct homes, teach adults a trade, and establish a school for their children.

“While I come from a wealthier community then these people, I could still share those values of community and family, but it was just so different to experience and see these values in a place where that’s most of what they have,” Cammarata says. “It was very eye-opening, and in coming home, I found that those values became more important to me, too. Family has always been important to me; don’t get me wrong – but my experience on this EL made me so much more appreciative of my family and my community when I came home.”

While the Experiential Learning Program offered by Allegheny is one that continuously makes an impact on students due to the nature of a foreign environment becoming a place of learning, there are still some challenges.

McNary says that her struggles included more than just being outside the country: “I didn’t know anyone else in the program, so it wasn’t even just that I was going to a new country, but that I also felt alone going into it. On top of having to adjust to the new cultures around me, I needed to make new friends. So, coming home after having done that – having been by myself and having found that I could adapt to my surroundings – I experienced a huge confidence boost.

“My experience on the EL trip strengthened my application to jobs,” she says. “While abroad, I conducted a journal that would assist in my writing the overall project paper after our return. I was then able to include these documents in my portfolio, and to talk about my travel experience on my resume,” says McNary. “What I didn’t know before the EL was just how much experience with traveling would strengthen my application.”

Immediately following graduation, McNary was offered a job in environmental consulting as a GIS Analyst for the city of Columbia, Sc.

As Cammarata finishes her Allegheny education, she, too, is thankful for her EL experience.

“As a pre-med student, I was particularly interested in the health of the people in Nicaragua, and when I was there I was able to see the quality of their health care, firsthand. After a day of work, our bus pulled to the side of the road after seeing a motorcycle accident. Since I’m an EMT, I assisted the resident doctor in responding to the scene and calling for assistance. While we stabilized the woman’s broken leg, we then waited 30-minutes for the ambulance to arrive even though we were right outside the center of the town. The people there aren’t getting the access they deserve – and that’s when I realized then that there are places all over the world like that.”

This experience helped to confirm Cammarata’s passion for emergency medicine. “There’s no question that I’d love to take my future in medicine abroad once again to help in communities like this one. The idea had crossed my mind before going to Nicaragua, but this trip really solidified those goals.”

Experiential Learning trips cost from $3,000 to $7,000 per student, and while the College can make some funding available, students are asked to pay the cost in full.  For information about how you can help to make this opportunity more affordable for students, please contact the Office of Development and Alumni Affairs at (814) 332-2843.

Photo Caption: Lexi Cammarata ’17 of Greensburg, Pa., traveled to Nicaragua after her freshman year.

Source: Academics, Publications & Research

Reeck Contributes Three Translations to Anthology

Associate Professor of French Laura Reeck contributed three translations to Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics (eds. Harrison and Villa-Ignacio, Stanford UP). Souffles was a leading anticolonialist Marxist journal whose publication spanned 1966-72. Professor Reeck translated “Interview with Ousmane Sembène”; “The World Festival of Negro Arts, or the Nostalgics of Negritude” (Abdullah Stouky); and “The Winding Course of Negritude” (René Depestre).

Source: Academics, Publications & Research

Reeck Contributes Three Translations to Anthology

Associate Professor of French Laura Reeck contributed three translations to Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics (eds. Harrison and Villa-Ignacio, Stanford UP). Souffles was a leading anticolonialist Marxist journal whose publication spanned 1966-72. Professor Reeck translated “Interview with Ousmane Sembène”; “The World Festival of Negro Arts, or the Nostalgics of Negritude” (Abdullah Stouky); and “The Winding Course of Negritude” (René Depestre).

Source: Academics, Publications & Research

Humanities Research Opens Students’ – and Professor’s – Eyes

Catherine LeBlanc and Leah Thirkill spent last summer reading Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame).

Although you may picture them sitting by the beach leisurely paging through the novel, the scene and purpose for their reading was much different. Instead, the students were on campus conducting humanities research alongside Briana Lewis, assistant professor of the Department of Modern and Classical Languages.

LeBlanc and Thirkill, both freshmen at the time, conducted this research as part of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant for Collaborative Undergraduate Research in the Humanities, a grant the College received in 2013. Each six- to 10-week grant supports student-faculty collaborative research in the humanities.

“Being on the Steering Committee and seeing the variety of projects encouraged me to think about how it could apply to my work,” Lewis explains. “In the foreign languages, we have an extra hurdle when involving students in research, because the students need to have the necessary language skills. I was motivated to create our own model of how this could work, and it ended up going very well.”

For their research project, Lewis tasked the students with reading Notre-Dame de Paris – in French – and looking for certain themes. The ultimate goal was to connect their findings with Lewis’ past research.

“The first week, we did a really intensive study on background information about author Victor Hugo and my past research,” Lewis says. “Then we spent four weeks reading and taking notes chapter by chapter. We studied themes such as women, vision, who’s seeing whom when and how that is gendered. It took other directions too, such as the ambiguity between the living and the dead. It was all interconnected.”

When LeBlanc, a French major and history minor, first learned about this research opportunity, she admits that she didn’t know how she would conduct humanities research.

“When you think about research, you usually think about microscopes and test tubes. Humanities is different, so I wondered what I really would be doing,” she says. “But I quickly learned valuable research skills. I had some previous experience analyzing text, but I had never done it with so large of a text with so much depth.”

“Research isn’t typically thought about in the languages. But this experience – as a freshman – allowed me to see what I can do with language in a master’s program or beyond,” adds Thirkill, who is double majoring in French and psychology.

Although the students are taking a break from their research this summer, they will be digging back into it this fall as they work with Lewis to prepare for a conference at Princeton University in November. According to Lewis, the conference, “the Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium,” is the top conference for 19th century French studies in the country.

“I probably wouldn’t be presenting on Notre-Dame de Paris if it weren’t for the work Catherine and Leah did last summer,” Lewis says. “This was my first time doing summer research with students, and it pushed me in a different direction as a scholar. Their work definitely advanced my research.

“Working with Catherine and Leah also helped me as a teacher,” she adds. “In the fall, I am teaching a new research methods course for the modern languages department, and this experience has very much informed the way I will teach research at a much more student-focused level. I have a clearer sense of what I need to articulate in the form of a course.”

Learn more about student-faculty humanities research at Allegheny.

Source: Academics, Publications & Research