Faculty News

David Castillo was named a UB Exceptional Scholar and received a Sustained Achievement Award at the Fall 2018 Celebration of Faculty and Staff Excellence. The award “…honor[s] outstanding professional achievement that has been focused on a particular body of work over a number of years”, and recognizes “an unprecedented accomplishment in a senior scholar’s career, distinguishing a body of work of enduring importance that has gone beyond the norm in a particular field of study.“

Colleen Culleton received a 2018-2019 President Emeritus and Mrs. Meyerson Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching and Mentoring. As Dean of Undergraduate Studies Ann Bisantz noted, “...the Meyerson Award recognizes the impact quality mentoring has on the student experience and academic achievement. As UB strives to deepen and enrich student involvement across the campus we look to our faculty to cultivate rich opportunities that will give students an advantage in their chosen fields.”

Congratulations to Christian Flaugh who, with the help of former RLL graduate student Lena Taub Robles, just published Marie-Vieux Chauvet’s Theatres: Thought, Form, and Performance of Revolt (Leiden/ Boston: Brill) in the “Caribbean Series” of this international publisher. Lena is Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages French Program, California State University, Bakersfield.

Christian is also the recipient of a 2019- 2020 Humanities Institute Faculty Fellowship for his book project entitled “Revolting Subjects: Tastes, Tactics, and Techne of Global Black Performance.” Revolting Subjects attends to how and why artists, entrepreneurs, and scholars have intertwined visceralized aesthetics of revulsion and vitalized ethics of revolt—or “revolting subjects”—in transatlantic African and Afro-descent performance work since the mid-twentieth century. Through case studies of theatre, dance, and festivals in print, live, and digital format, the project sheds light on performance practices across French, Creole, indigenous, and English lingui-cultural contexts, that tactically retool perilous, pleasing, polluting, and profitable tastes woven to “black” experience throughout global histories.

UB’s Gender Institute awarded Clinical Sharonah Fredrick $3500 in faculty research funding for her project, “Female Mirrors of Piracy in the Americas: The Threat of the Virago, Real and Imagined, in Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean.” Sharonah will travel to Peru during summer 2019 to gather research for the project, which “… probes the imperial linkage of subaltern identities, the “illegal” and “witch-like” female refugee in the New World, with supposed criminal activity, in the colonial Caribbean of the late 16th century, later extending to Peru’s Pacific port of Callao in the early 17th century. “

Amy Graves Monroe has accepted a one-year appointment as RLL Interim Chair effective August 15, 2019! Additionally, she has received a $5000 grant from the 2019 OVPRED/HI Research Funding in the Arts and Humanities for her project: “From the Printer’s Press to the Touchscreen: Experiential Learning with Early Modern Political Pamphlets.” The project aims to digitize a collection of historically significant French pamphlets held by the University at Buffalo Libraries and to utilize them as the basis for a new undergraduate course in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. Project implementation will not only provide training for graduate students in French and Library Sciences, but will also result in a platform for researchers to utilize the collection worldwide.

Maureen Jameson was named a 2018-2019 Experiential Learning Network Faculty Fellow and recipient of $5000 in financial resources to support the development of RLL 496, “Tutoring Language and Narrative in Immigrant Communities”. The course serves as the basis for a new RLL micro-credential program, “Career Building with Languages.”

Fernanda Negrete received an Honors Faculty Fellowship from Fall 2018 through Spring 2020. In Fall 2018 she became Executive Director at the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture. She also gave a paper entitled “Is Love Revolutionary? Duras and Lacan after ’68” at the October 2018 Buffalo: Crossroads of a Transatlantic Insurrection conference, on whose organizing committee she participated. She gave a lecture at the Gender Institute: “Symptom & Sensation: Toward an Aesthetic Clinic in Women’s Experimental Art & Literature,” sharing an overview of her book manuscript (under preliminary contract at SUNY Press) and of the research she conducted with her Spring 2018 Gender Institute Faculty Award. She gave a paper entitled, “Marguerite Duras’ Music: An Aesthetic Space for the Return of the Real” at the Sounds: Avant-Garde, Modernism, and Fascism symposium, organized by the Modernisms Research Workshop.

Emanuela Pecchioli chaired a session at the 50th Anniversary NeMLA Conference, March 21-24, 2019, Washington, DC, entitled “Intersections of Love, Friendship, and Family ties in Italian Cinema.” She also presented a paper “Interconnections of Love, Friendship, and Family in Muccino Genovese, and Other Directors” at the conference.

Justin Read was named one of 14 SUNY Hispanic Leadership Fellows for 2019. The Hispanic Leadership Institute offers fellowships to SUNY Hispanic/LatinX faculty and staff in leadership positions. The fellowship program included a series of retreats and monthly videoconferences, as well as opportunities for individualized mentoring and meetings with established Latino leaders.

As of August 15, 2019 Justin accepted the position of Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education and Experiential Learning. In this role, Justin will be responsible for undergraduate education and for leading the development of experiential learning initiatives across the College. We wish him every success in this new undertaking!

The Modern Language Association recently announced the election Elizabeth Scarlett to a five-year term on the executive committee of the forum Transdisciplinary Connections--Religion and Literature. We wish Professor Scarlett congratulations and best wishes on her new leadership role. The Spanish Honor Society Sigma Delta Phi, for which Elizabeth is the faculty advisor, was the recipient of a $5000 donation from the estate of UB alumn Walter R. Smith.

In Fall 2018 Stephanie Schmidt led a Nahuatl language workshop for a group of graduate students from RLL and History. In the spring, Stephanie published an article entitled “World Time and Imperial Allegory in a Nahuatl Manuscript on the Final Judgment” in Writing in the End Times: Apocalyptic Imagination in the Hispanic World, a special issue of Hispanic Issues Online, edited by David Castillo and Bradley Nelson. She also co-organized and chaired a panel on “Indigenous Cultural Innovation in New Spain” at the annual conference of LASA (Latin American Studies Association), and presented a paper on “The Nativity of Christ, as rendered in the ‘Cozcacuicatl.’

In addition to organizing the Buffalo: Transatlantic Crossings of a Critical Insurrection international ymposium and the Big Buffalo Quebec Film Festival, Jean-Jacques Thomas also reports the publication of two new books this year, Perec en Amérique and Oulipo: Chronique des années héroïques (1978-2018).

Paola Ugolini recently received two publication grants for her book “The Court and Its Critics”-- one from the Julian Park Publication Fund (University at Buffalo), and the other from Lila Wallace – Reader’s Digest Publication Subsidy. She also received a Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Special Projects Grant for her project The Comic in Renaissance Italy, a conference co-organized with Jessica Goethals at the University of Alabama.

Margarita Vargas hosted Mexican playwright Bárbara Colio for several days of performances, meetings and discussions with Raices and Torn Theatre, two local theatrical companies. A selection from one of her plays, Julieta tiene la culpa, was a featured dramatic reading during the RLL Graduate Student Association Conference. She also presented two papers: “El arte de improvisar” at the Congreso de Literatura Mexicana Contemporánea held at the University of Texas at El Paso in March 2019 and “Estrategias dramáticas en la búsqueda de la justicia en Colio y Hernández” at the Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City held in November 2018. Furthermore, she has been named Interim Chair of UB’s Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies for Fall 2019.