French and Italian - FRIT at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

10/05/2022

Caffettino is back! Our Italian Conversation Table starts today at 5 pm, Espresso Royal on the corner of Oregon & Goodwin!

09/28/2022

FRIT events are back! Our first Pause Café is on tomorrow at 4 pm in good old Espresso Royal! Venez nombreux!

08/21/2022

French and Italian is back! We welcome this year's incoming graduate students who are:

Aisha (Sacha) Craig (Ph.D., French Studies), a native of France and a trilingual speaker of French, Arabic, and English. She comes to learn more about collegiate language learning and the various centuries and genres we cover in our programs at Illinois;

Alix Jean Charles (M.A., French Studies), born and raised in Haiti and a veteran of the United States Army. He will focus on our diverse course offerings in literatures and cultures and the theories and practices of collegiate language teaching.

Jesse Keruskin (Ph.D., French Studies), a native of Appalachia who is returning a few years after her M.A. @ Illinois. She is looking for more to study on literatures and cultures through a wealth of perspectives and interdisciplinary collaboration that we offer;

and

Costanza Vallicelli (M.A., Italian Studies) who is coming directly from Italy. As a former exchange student at the U of I and the University of Bamberg (Germany), she is joining our program to explore multidisciplinary approaches to Italian Studies, linguistics, SLA, and language and minorities in Europe.

Welcome, Sacha, Alix, Jesse, and Costanza!

05/06/2022

Undergraduate students in our French and Italian programs have again demonstrated excellence in their studies this year. Congratulations to the following students who received national and departmental awards for their achievements!

Ella Dennis, student of French and Foreign Policy Research Fellow in the College of ACE received one a highly competitive Boren Scholarship to study abroad in Dakar, Senegal this summer 2022. She'll be studying in French, learning Wolof, and participating in a community outreach project.

Boren Scholars and Fellows come from diverse fields of study immerse themselves in the cultures in world regions underrepresented in study abroad, including Africa, Asia, Eurasia, Latin America, and the Middle East.

Ella’s goal is to use the time she spends there as preparation for her post-graduation goal of working for USAID.

Departmental Awards
French

This year’s Charlotte Kambarian McMillian Award for French Excellence goes to Natalie Metsch. This award recognizes one outstanding student who has achieved a minimum GPA in French of 3.9.

The K.A. Looney Awards for French Merit have been awarded to Ivie Osagiede (Minors) and Grace Duggan (Majors). These awards recognize junior majors who have earned a minimum GPA of 3.5 in a rigorous academic program in French. The senior award recognizes senior majors who have earned a minimum GPA of 3.5 in a rigorous academic program in French.

The following undergraduate students have been awarded the 2021-2022 French Undergraduate Basic Language Book Awards that come with the paperback edition of a major literary work in French.

Becky Arden

Hetansh Trivedi

Ziyin Wang

Ainslee Wong

Italian

This year’s Department of French and Italian Merit Awards in Italian went to Ivette Ibarra (Minors) and Eleonora Benedetti (Majors)

These awards recognize excellence in teaching on the part of graduate teaching assistants who can teach both introductory and advanced courses at the highest level of competence, as measured by the evaluations of their faculty mentors, the Director of Basic Language, and attested by ICES scores and statements of nomination.

The following undergraduate students have been awarded the 2021-2022 Italian Undergraduate Basic Language Book Awards that come with the paperback edition of a major literary work in Italian.

Elizabeth Atmore

Natalia Palafox-Burbano

Blake Soderholm

Miranda Stillwell

Please join us in congratulating the following undergraduate students, their instructors, and members of the faculty Committee on Fellowships and Awards for soliciting nominations and selecting the awardees in our two programs!

04/26/2022

Graduate Student Awards 2021-2022

The Department of French and Italian is proud to recognize the following outstanding graduate students for their continued excellence in teaching and research in the academic year of 2021-2022.

Aristides Theodoropoulos has been awarded the Department of French & Italian Junior Award for Excellence in Teaching Italian for his competence, passion, and enthusiasm for teaching. The quality of his teaching was truly remarkable for such a young instructor, and his commitment to his students and to the language program was also reflected in his leading role as an organizer of Italian cultural activities.

Soraya Cipolla has been awarded the Department of French & Italian Senior Award for Excellence in Teaching Italian for her consistently high-quality and inspiring teaching through the semesters. Her commitment to her students, excellent organization, leading role as an organizer of Italian cultural activities, and clear enjoyment of teaching was inspiring and a pleasure to observe in action.

Williams Asamoah has received this year’s K.A. Looney Junior Award for Excellence in Teaching French for his capacity to integrate his prior teaching experiences with the content and practices in the department, and outstanding commitment to serving his students and collaborating with colleagues. Having already taught three different courses and worked on the department's proficiency exam, he demonstrated great promise for the coming years.

Anne Mutidjo has received this year’s K.A. Looney Senior Award for Excellence in Teaching French in recognition of her excellence in teaching and coordination in the French Basic Language program and upper-level undergraduate courses. She masterfully performed research-informed pedagogical practices, such as designing inductive and literacy-focused lessons, and was also able to explain them clearly to her peers and the instructors she coordinated.

This year’s Department of French and Italian Graduate Essay Award in Italian goes to Cassie Pontone, Ph.D. student in Italian Studies, for her essay: “The voice between silence and semantics: A critical reading the Decameron in relation to Adriana Cavarero’s For More Than One Voice”. Cassie’s essay seeks to carve out a space for voice and non-verbal sounds in the soundscape of Boccaccio's Decameron. Adriana Cavarero’s For More than One Voice provides the theoretical framework that illuminates Boccaccio’s sensitivity to the uniqueness and power of the embodied voice. The essay engages extensively with the vast bibliography on silence and speech in the Decameron and provides complex and innovative readings of several novellas, developed with great finesse.

One of this year’s Humanities Research Institute Fellowships for Graduate Students, an important recognition for excellence in research at the graduate level on campus, went to Amanda Smith, Ph.D. Candidate in French Studies. The fellowship will support her work on her PhD dissertation, entitled “21st Century Black Beauty Resistance: Collectivism, Individuality, and In/Visibility in Black French Women’s Body and Hair Representations.” Amanda’s thesis fits in well with this year’s HRI theme “Un/Doing”, emphasizing that "at the intersections and overlaps of activism and scholarship are calls for un/doing the status quo that threatens us all—to abolish and defund, to decolonize, divest, decriminalize, dismantle, and de-center.”

All departmental award winners have been selected by faculty serving at the Committee on Fellowships and Awards based on nominations and evaluations by mentors and coordinators, the Directors of Basic Language, and input from ICES scores. We would like to thank faculty members who participated in the nomination process, and members of the Committee on Fellowships and Awards for their hard work selecting this year’s awardees.

Congratulations!

03/29/2022

On the job with Alum and Assistant Professor Gyula Zsombok (PhD 2020)

Gyula Zsombok (PhD 2020) was hired as a French instructor at Middlebury College just prior to the first lockdowns in Spring 2020. Despite setbacks due to the pandemic, however, he has found a vibrant and close-knit academic community at his new institution. At first, everything was limited to Zoom, and his courses were hybrid, but the circumstances imposed by the pandemic ended up motivating Gyula to explore new pedagogical and collaborative methodologies to make synchronous online sessions more dynamic and engaging.



Gyula believes that the most important asset he learned at Illinois were the rich inter-disciplinary curricular and workshop offerings for academic and professional development that he was able to put to good use in his current position. His doctoral dissertation, entitled "Dynamics of Prescriptivism and Lexical Borrowings in Contemporary France", directed by UIUC Research Associate Dr. Joe Roy and Associate Professor Zsuzsanna Fagyal, is a prime example of such inter-disciplinary collaboration: it is a corpus-based study that necessitated learning how to use data-mining tools and new statistical techniques to investigate cutting-edge research questions on language and society in France and Quebec. Thanks to training at the U of I, he was also able to create an interdisciplinary approach to French, Linguistics, and Data Science with his colleagues and students at his current institution. Additionally, teaching and coordinating classes at UIUC made him feel more comfortable and ready to teach his own classes at Middlebury College. In Gyula’s opinion, many graduate programs do not offer a comparable teaching experience for their graduate students, and if done well, such a varied teaching portfolio becomes a quintessential asset that speaks for itself on the market.



Thank you for sharing your tips and experience with us, Gyula, and all the best with your promising career!

03/22/2022

Please join us on Wednesday, March 30th from 5:00-6:30pm (CST) for Dr. Stéphanie Gaillard's presentation on "The essential roles of a language coordinator in Higher Education".

Please email [email protected] for zoom link information.

03/21/2022

On the job with Alum and Lecturer in French Dr. Péter Tarjányi (PhD 2020)

Alum Péter Tarjányi (PhD 2020), Lecturer in French and Gender and Women’s Studies at the U of I and Middlebury College (VT), does not hide his satisfaction when it comes to some positive changes in his teaching in the last two years. In his experience, having more tools and methods online and more opportunities for online and hybrid teaching in language and culture courses in general has been a positive development. In the same time, he also recognizes many obvious drawbacks of the pandemic, two of which has been the scarcity of jobs and frequent institutional budget cuts that makes applying and hiring difficult and unpredictable.


Péter believes that the most important asset he learned at UIUC was the interdisciplinary nature of graduate education in FRIT. In his case, it was the faculty’s encouragement to expand his research horizons and their encouragement to pursue a Graduate Minor in Gender and Q***r studies that put him on the right track for dissertation research and, ultimately, a Lecturer position. His doctoral dissertation advisor, Emerita Professor Nancy Blake held a joint appointment in French and Comparative Literature and members his thesis committee came from multiple programs and units on campus. The department also provided him with many advanced teaching opportunities throughout the years, which weighed heavily in his favor compared to other candidates on the job market. He taught bridge courses in literature and culture, intermediate grammar, and every level of the basic language sequence multiple times. His doctoral dissertation entitled "Sexpeditions: Mapping Mobility and Sexuality in Postcolonial France and the Maghreb" is directly relevant to the courses that he teaches today, among them ‘Sex, Power & Politics’, ‘Q***r Theory’, ‘Film, TV & Gender’, and more.

Thank you for sharing your experience with us, Péter, and all the best with your promising career!

03/15/2022

On the Job with Alum Dr. Pierpaolo Spagnolo

To the many accomplishments of our most recent Alum, Dr. Pierpaolo Spagnolo’s (PhD 2021), Instructor of Italian at Duke University, we should add the not-so-small feat of graduating, finding a job, and teaching full time in a demanding academic program during the pandemic.

A native of Italy, Pierpaolo is no stranger to change and hard work. Prior to graduating with a PhD in Italian and Medieval Studies from the University of Illinois, he obtained a bachelor’s degree in Italian, English, and French Languages and Literatures at the University of Salento (Italy), a master’s degree in Research in Language and Literature Teaching at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain) and another master’s in Romance Languages (Italian and Spanish) at the University of Oregon. In Oregon, he also added a SLAT (Second Language Acquisition) certificate to his degrees.

Pierpaolo believes that one of the most important assets he acquired at Illinois has been the extraordinary set of teaching tools that made him particularly competitive on the job market. Like everyone else, he was deeply affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, but a positive approach to life and focus on opportunities helped him move forward.

While finishing and applying for jobs, he continuously improved his doctoral dissertation, entitled “Relics and Artifacts: The Materiality of Holy Bodies in Italian Culture from 14th-Century Novella until Modern Film” under the expert guidance of his advisor, Associate Professor Eleonora Stoppino. He also honed his skills in teaching methods and tools that made him a better job applicant, teacher, and person. He credits the department to having hired him as a Tech Expert Support (Zoom, Compass, Proctorio, etc.) and an Instructional Video Developer for the online ITAL 103 and 104 courses that he could help implement under the guidance of his Coordinator and Director of Italian Basic Language program: Professor Laura Hill. Coordinating the elementary level Italian language instruction (ITAL 101 & 104) has also added valuable teaching and supervisory experience to his profile.

Thank you for sharing your experience with us, Pierpaolo, and all the best with your promising career!

03/01/2022

On the job with Alumna Assistant Professor Camille Méritan
Having graduated in the early months of the pandemic, Camille Méritan (PhD 2020), now Assistant Professor Tenure-Track at Bentley College (MA), believes that COVID did not necessarily have a significant impact on her job search. She was able to travel to three campus interviews and select his favorite place a few weeks prior to the March 2020 lockdown. COVID-19 did, however, have an impact on her defense that had to be done remotely.

As for her current position, Bentley college has provided her with an extra year to conduct research and write articles since the pandemic has negatively affected the field of academic publishing causing slow turnaround for reviews and, therefore, journal papers and books to appear. Although the whole process of “publish or perish” remains as stressful as ever before, Camille has already been able to put out several papers based on her doctoral dissertation entitled "The Impact of Self-Reflection and Integrated Pronunciation Instruction on the Intelligibility of Generation Z Learners of French: A Mixed Methods Study’, thanks to the thorough guidance of Assistant Professor Aurore Mroz.

Camille shares that her teaching has not been affected much by the pandemic, as Bentley functioned following a blended synchronous model (BSM) for the AY 2020-2021, which means that half of the students were remote and half of them were on campus, simultaneously. Being familiar with online teaching and having read new research about BSMs, it was not too difficult for Camille to adapt to this teaching scheme.

Camille credits the U of I with a few important assets that she could put to good use on the job market. One of them was professionalization: in addition to learning to talk about her research in both English and French, she learned to tailor her “dissertation elevator speech” and her job talks to her audience, be it a small business-oriented university, an R2 university, or Ivy league school. One aspect of graduate student training that Camille recommends emphasizing more is service. Service, she says, can put people in the Humanities on the campus map. In addition to helping to coordinate basic language courses, acquiring experience in advising/mentoring undergraduates, sitting on independent studies with Professors, for instance, service and outreach to organizations on and off campus can add valuable experience to students' portfolio and make a difference on the job market.

Thank you for sharing your advice and experience with us, Camille, and all the best with your promising career!

02/19/2022

https://slcl.illinois.edu/news/2022-02-18/french-and-engineering-professors-awarded-fairness-artificial-intelligence-grant

French & Italian professor Zsuzsanna Fagyal and electrical & computer engineering professor Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, affiliate faculty in the Department of Linguistics, have been awarded an $800,000 grant to help make automatic speech recognition systems more inclusive.