Barbara Berthold successfully completed the Microcredentials within the University Ecosystem – A Primer course offered to select faculty this summer. The course is part of UT Systems’ Texas Credentials for the Future program and aimed to develop an understanding of the use of microcredentials in higher education and to provide tools for the integration and development of microcredentials. Participants were able to earn a microcredential themselves. To earn it, Barbara Berthold completed four asynchronous-online modules, attended four live sessions, and designed a comprehensive plan setting out how microcredentials could add value to the Department of Modern Languages career readiness initiatives.
In July of 2023, Jinny Choi traveled to Argentina to collect the last part of the data for her book project on “Language and Identity of Koreans in Argentina.” She presented a paper at the Asia TEFL International Conference on August 17-20, 2023. She also submitted her paper to be published in Asia TEFL Proceedings 2023. Dr. Choi received the COLA Endowment for Faculty Research in the Spring of 2023. Along with Drs. Sonia Kania and A. Raymond Elliott, she coauthored an Open Educational Resources Textbook for SPAN 3316 titled Español práctico: introducción al estudio de la lengua española.
In July, Christopher Conway presented research on the Holocaust in Mexican comics at the International Autobiography Association meeting in Warsaw, Poland, as well as at the Comics Studies Society 2023 conference at the University of North Texas.
Lonny Harrison was a research associate at the Open Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois, where he investigated sources for his work on Russian revolutionary terrorism. He has a forthcoming monograph under contract by Academic Studies Press. He also won a UTA Research Enhancement Program grant for travel to the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University, where he did archival research during the summer. He presented some of his findings at the International AutoBiography Association (Europe Conference) in Warsaw, Poland, in July. Dr. Harrison was appointed to acting chair of the Department of English for the Fall 2023 semester.
Sonia Kania’s co-authored article “¿Diez o décima?: The Variable Use of Cardinal and Ordinal Numbers in Notarial Texts of the Colonial Period” was published in the homage volume, Despertar palabras, renacer historias: Estudios lingüísticos en homenaje a M.ª Nieves Sánchez González de Herrero (Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2023). Her chapter on the history of Spanish in the United States appears in the The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Historical Linguistics (Routledge, 2024). Dr. Kania served as editor of the Open Educational Resource textbook that she is co-authoring with Drs. Jinny Choi and Ray Elliott, Español práctico: introducción al estudio de la lengua española. The textbook is provided to student free of charge in the newly redesigned course SPAN 3316 Exploring the Spanish Language, which is a Maverick Advantage course at UTA.
Alicia Rueda-Acedo was invited as keynote speaker at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in April 2023 to present about community outreach and service-learning in language courses. In the summer, she presented “Stories to Our Children: Storytelling on Migration, Service-Learning, and Community Translation” at the 3rd International Conference on Community Translation in Warsaw, Poland. Alicia was invited to participate at the European Summit on Service-Learning, Democracy, and Civic Engagement that took place in Majorca, Spain in June 2023.
On September 21, 2023, Ignacio Ruiz-Pérez received the prestigious 2023 Óscar Oliva Poetry Prize for his book Ensayo de la sombra [Essay on Shadow]. In the summer, Dr. Ruiz-Pérez was also invited to present his most recent book of poetry, El deseo es una lámpara que no alumbra [Desire is a lamp that does not shine] at the University of Veracruz, and at the Autonomous University of Tabasco. This book was the winner of the Autonomous University of Sinaloa National Poetry Prize.
In March 2023, Pete Smith led the UTA team hosting the LAK23 international conference on learning analytics, which brought 300 scholars to campus following a year of meeting planning. He also led a daylong workshop for these conference researchers in natural language processing, natural language processing, and large language models.
Rosa Téllez and Barbara Berthold were selected for the AY 23-24 Maverick Advantage Faculty Engagement (MAFE) fellows program. Over the course of one academic year, MAFE faculty fellows collaborate to develop and integrate the Maverick Advantage’s high impact practices into their academic courses. High impact practices, for example, diversity/global learning, community engagement or undergraduate research, bring together new learnings, application of knowledge and skills with reflection for changed beliefs or behaviors. They help students make connections between their academic studies and the world(s) they interact in off campus. They are crucial for skills building and support our students’ career readiness.
Natalia Trigo traveled to Italy as part of her writing fellowship with the Santa Maddalena Foundation. She also presented the book Daughters of Latin America: and International anthology of Writing by Latine Women (2023) at Trinity University, which features the works of 140 Latine writers, activists, and academics worldwide. She participated in an NPR interview, where she discussed her chapter titled “La cuidadora/The caregiver”, which delves into the analysis of intersectional discrimination and disparities in the conceptions of womanhood and embodied experiences among Latin American women. Additionally, she presented the bilingual anthology El Crimen/The Crime (2023), in which she contributed a short story titled “El cómplice/The accomplice”, where she explores the intersections between Mexican immigration, internal colonialism, and the experiences of linguistic and cultural displacement.
