Najia Alameddin received recognition for Impactful Teaching through the Undergraduate Exit Survey. She was a guest speaker and presented a lecture on “Corneille and the Comedy of Illusion.” She was nominated for The Provost Award for Excellence in Teaching and The William S. Ward Endowment Award (COLA finalist). Recently, she received the nationally recognized ACUE Certificate in Effective College Instruction from The Association of College and The American Council on Education.
Amy Austin was inducted into UT Arlington’s inaugural Academy of Distinguished Service Leaders in Fall 2022. She served as a Faculty Fellow for the Maverick Advantage Faculty Engagement Program and her project “Reimagining Iberian Cultures through Digital Fabrication” was featured at the Center for Research on Teaching and Learning Excellence Faculty Showcase. At the Spring 2023 Cultural Constructions conference, she presented on a roundtable titled “Iberian Iterations and Digital Fabrication: Re-envisioning Cultures.” Finally, she presented a paper titled “Imagining, Sensing, and Understanding through Art in Ramon Llull’s Arbor scientiae (1295-96)” at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference.
Barbara Berthold’s Scholarship of Teaching and Learning was recognized threefold. (1) She received a SPARK! grant by the Goethe-Institut and the American Association of Teachers of German to create after-school language programs in Arlington (8/22). (2) Dr. Berthold was selected for the UTA-sponsored ACUE program Fostering a Culture of Belonging aimed at equipping administrators, faculty, and staff with actionable practices for whole-campus reform so that all students and colleagues feel seen, heard, and valued (micro-credential, 4/23). (3) Dr. Berthold received the William S. Ward Endowment Award, a university-wide award that recognizes student-centeredness and enhancement of University goals, and moderated a roundtable at the German Studies Association conference in Houston on September 18, 2022. The topic was German-American Studies Today.
Jinny Choi has the book chapter “La variación fonológica del español paraguayo” accepted to be part of Enciclopedia Concisa de los Dialectos del Español (ENCODES) (Manuel Díaz-Campos and Juan M. Hernández Campoy, Eds.), New York: Wiley-Blackwell.
In the summer of 2023, she will be traveling to Argentina for the last part of data collection for her book on “Language and Identity of Koreans in Argentina.” She will also be presenting a chapter of the same book “Power of English among Korean-Argentines” at the Asia TEFL International Conference on August 17-20, 2023.
Christopher Conway published an article in the Mark Twain Annual as well as a book chapter for the book La expansión y revisión de un mito: el Oeste norteamericano en la literatura española. Two of his coedited books appeared in print: The Comic Book Western: New Perspectives on a Global Genre (coedited with Antoinette Sol) and The Western in the Global Literary Imagination (Coedited with Marek Paryz and David Rio). Both volumes contain chapters authored by Conway and critical introductions that he cowrote. The Comic Book Western won the 2023 Ray and Pat Browne Award for Best Edited Collection in American and Popular Culture.
In October 2024, Dr. Lisalee Egbert will be one of the keynote speakers for the American Society for Deaf Children’s (ASDC) Literacy Conference in South Carolina, which she also will cochair. Dr. Egbert was also invited to lecture at the University of Rochester and California State University Sacramento. Locally, Dr. Egbert was voted President of the Deaf Catholic Advisor Board of the Diocese of Fort Worth and awarded a seat as a board member on the Deaf Action Center in DFW. Dr. Egbert was also selected to receive the Diversity Academy for Interpreter (DAI) scholarship as a BIPOC Mentor Interpreter for the Educational Interpreting Proficiency Assessment (EIPA) which is a national certification for educational interpreters for the Deaf.
Mónica de la Fuente Iglesias published two book chapters in collaboration with other linguists, one on the contribution of other languages to dialectal differentiation in Spanish-speaking countries as part of The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Dialectology, and another on intervocalic /s/ voicing in the Andean Spanish of Peru as part of the volume Mutual Influence in Situations of Spanish Language Contact in the Americas. She was the keynote speaker at the UTA Student Conference in Linguistics & TESOL (UTASCILT). She also presented two papers at the 28th Conference on Spanish in the US and 12th Spanish in Contact with Other Languages. She received the COLA Outstanding Teaching Award for Tenure-Track Faculty.
Lonny Harrison won a UTA Research Enhancement Program grant for research travel to the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University. He will be investigating sources for his book on Russian revolutionary terrorism, under contract by Academic Studies Press. Prior to this, he received a research associate award for the Open Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois. He presented a conference paper, “The Making of a Terrorist: Evolution of the Revolutionary Persona in Late Imperial Russia,” at the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages in February and will present further research at the International Association of Biographical Writing in Warsaw, Poland, this July.
David Hervás presented in the Bridging the Gap Spring 23 Development Conference, at Collin College in January 2023. His presentation was “Student Engagement through Time Management and Organizational Skills.” He also presented in March of 2023 at our own departmental Cultural Constructions Conference, with the presentation “Cinderella Becomes Cenicienta, An Academic Translation.” He is also to present at the 2023 AATSP Annual Conference in Salamanca, Spain this coming June, on Pop Culture in the Spanish Classroom: “Society and History Through Spanish Cinema.”
Sonia Kania was a faculty fellow in the Maverick Advantage Faculty Engagement program. She presented her poster, “Global Engagement and Research in SPAN 3316: Exploring the Spanish Language,” at the 2023 CRTLE Faculty Showcase on April 20, 2023. Her co-authored paper, “Digital Editions of Old Spanish Texts: Incorporating Experiential Learning in the History of the Spanish Language Classroom,” was presented at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference in Lexington, Kentucky, on April 21, 2023. She also received funding to participate in the ACUE Certificate in Effective College Instruction and is now ACUE certified. Dr. Kania was awarded the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching (Tenured) in Spring 2023.
Neal Liang collaborated with Fu Jen University in Taipei, Taiwan to apply for the Taiwan Huayu Best Grant from the Ministry of Education in Taiwan in the fall of 2022. The grant has been approved in April 2023. The grant enables FJU to recruit and send an instructor to teach Chinese courses at UTA and to provide scholarships for UTA students to pay for the tuition and living costs to study Chinese courses at FJU. Dr. Liang has also been awarded the UTA Faculty-led Study Abroad Program Development Grant with which he plans to visit Xi’an, China to survey the areas in preparation for the study abroad in China program to be held in the summer of 2024. Lastly, Dr. Liang attended the “National Chinese Language Conference” on 4/25-26/2023.
In the fall 2022, Iya Price received a UT System-level 2022 Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award and completed an Association of College and University Educators (ACUE) Certificate Program. Furthermore, Iya Price and Lonny Harrison received a Rebuilding a Russian-American Conversation (RARAC) grant from the US Department of State ($9,774) that allowed for a semester of online collaboration between UTA students learning Russian and students from Russia.
Alicia Rueda-Acedo has published “The Voices of Migrant Families: Testimonio, Service-Learning, and Community Translation” in Community Translation Research and Practice (Routledge, 2023). She has presented this work at the CRTLE Seed Grants Presentation Seminar and at Cultural Constructions. She has also published “Versión, subversión y parodia: propuestas posfeministas en ‘Malena una vida hervida’ de Almudena Grandes” in Revista Valenciana. Estudios de Filosofía y Letras, a peer-reviewed journal published by the University of Guanajuato, Mexico. Dr. Rueda-Acedo was an invited lecturer by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to present about community translation and service-learning, and she was also invited to participate in the International Migration Summit celebrated in El Salvador.
Ignacio Ruiz-Pérez published the translation of his book Isles of Firm Ground (Deep Vellum, 2022). He also published his award-winning book El deseo es una lámpara que no alumbra (UAS, 20220). Ruiz-Pérez was also guest speaker at the Hispanic Heritage Month at Collin College (October 2022) and at UTA Cultural Constructions Conference (March 2023).
Reem Shishakly attended UCLA’s EPIC-Lang Conference (Excellence in Pedagogy & Innovative Classroom), “Reimagined Critical Pedagogy: Resistance and Solidarity in Language Classrooms” on April 28-29, 2023. Reem Shishakly also participated in the UTA MODL “Lunch and Learn” program, speaking on “ACUE goes to the Language Classroom.” (November 9, 2022) and “Teaching toward Proficiency: Assessing Student Achievement” (March 29, 2023).
This past year, Pete Smith finished two international certifications in culture with Hofstede Insights, based in Helsinki, certification in: Organizational Culture; and Intercultural Management. He chaired a day-long workshop on the latest developments in NLP and large language models at the LAK23 international conference in learning analytics, in addition to serving as one of the conference organizers. And he served as an organizer and presenter in a day-long professional workshop at the annual/national NASPA conference in Baltimore, Maryland, training on NLP for student affairs professionals in higher education.
Alicia Soueid was promoted to Distinguished Senior Lecturer of French.
Natalia Trigo presented at two international conferences: The 2022 Texas Library Association Conference and the XXVII Mexican Literature Congress in El Paso. She also had three short stories accepted for publication: “Habitación 12” and “El cómplice,” forthcoming in edited volumes; as well as “La cuidadora/The Caregiver,” due to be published in August 2023 by Harper Collins, in a volume entitled “Machetes Under Our Beds: An International Anthology of Words and Writings by Daughters of Latin America”; Dr. Trigo was also a recipient of the Art Omi Foundation Writing Fellowship in New York (May 3-June 2, 2022) and the Santa Maddalena Foundation Fellowship in Italy (June-July 2023).
