2024 Conference

In/Between 2024: Translation

Unless otherwise indicated, all panels take place in 1501 University Hall

Thursday, April 4

8:30–9:00 am

Coffee and breakfast

9–9:15 am

Welcome

Prof. Ellen McClure (French and Francophone Studies and History)

Director, UIC Institute for the Humanities

9:15–10:45 am

Paper panel #1

Moderator: Phill Cabeen (Germanic Studies)

Tatjana Gajic (Hispanic and Italian Studies)

Visuality and Thought: Materiality of Earth in Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman’s  Video Art

Luis López (Hispanic and Italian Studies)

Misleading is and is not lying

Andrew Modaff (Germanic Studies)

Ambiguity and Contradiction in Grillparzer’s Ahnfrau

Folorunso Odidiomo (Germanic Studies)

Adoption, Affect, and Accumulation in Kleist’s Der Findling

11:00 am–12:00 pm

Undergraduate student panel:

Translating linguistic discrimination into activism

(Faculty mentors: Jill Hallett, Liliana Sanchez )

Moderator: Jill Hallett (Linguistics)

Joshua Amyx

Perceived Language Hiararchy Among Heritage Speakers and its Impact on Acquisition

Mythreyi Namuduri

Multilingualism as an Asset for Language Revitalization

Kat Pope-Keegan

The case for offering ASL as a language requirement-fulfilling course at UIC

Elise Hotchkiss

Love in the Age of STEMinism: Crip Linguistics Perspectives of Contemporary Romance

Aditi Dhandapani

Discriminatory Behaviors in AI Chatbots

12:00–1:00 pm

Lunch

1750 University Hall

1:00–2:30 pm

Paper panel #2

Moderator: Heidi Schlipphacke (Germanic Studies)

Karina Duncker-Hoffmann (Germanic Studies)

Die Gartenlaube (arbor) – liminal space on the threshold between nature and culture: How a 19th century trope regained relevance after 2020

Young Richard Kim (Classics and Mediterranean Studies)

Thoughts on Translation, A View from Classical Studies

Ipsita Mukherjee (Hispanic and Italian Studies)

Translating Rabindranath Tagore’s poem “60” from Bengali into Spanish Through English

Brian Zdancewicz (Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian Studies)

Time, Genre, and Transmission in Yuri Rytkheu’s The Last Shaman

2:45–3:45 pm

Strategic Planning

Open discussion on curriculum

Moderator: José Camacho (Hispanic and Italian Studies)

4:00–5:00 pm

Lecture

Nicole Wicha (University of Texas, San Antonio)

Electrophysiological signatures of cognitive development and bilingualism in processing simple arithmetic

Sponsored by the Laboratory of Integrative Neuroscience

This event takes place in SELE 4289.

Friday, April 5

8:45–9:15 am

Coffee and breakfast

9:15–10:45 am

Undergraduate research forum #1

Moderator: José Camacho (Hispanic and Italian Studies)

Lisset Rodriguez

Role understanding of Spanish medical interpreters within the healthcare team and its effects on interprofessional collaborative practice

(Advisor: Diana Gonzalez-Cameron)

Chloe Swerdlick

Additive multilingualism: The role of proficiency in multiple languages in learning an additional language

(Advisor: Kara Morgan-Short)

Eliza Apavaloaiei

Musical Legacies: Children in the Reformation and its Contemporary Counterpart

(Advisor: Ellen McClure)

Bernadette Pitt-Payne

The Face of an Empire: Material Culture and the Image of Queen Victoria in the British Raj, 1857-1901

(Junaid Quadri)

Ivan Tedrowe

“Opulent Textures”: Tolstoy, Wagner, and the Aesthetics of Expansiveness

(Advisor Michal Markowski)

11:00 am–12:15 pm

Paper panel #2

Moderator: Ipsita Mukherjee

Jill Hallett (Linguistics)

Translating the transnational: Migrants’ situated meaning-making of the plurilingual landscape

Jessica Hoselton (French and Francophone Studies)

Crafting Practical Magic: Navigating Humanities Education in a Post-AI Era

Jeff Imbaquingo, Daniel Perez, Keyra Colón, Liliana Sanchez, Helen Koulidobrova

(Hispanic and Italian Studies)

COVID knowledge in indigenous communities

12:15–1:00pm

Lunch

1750 University Hall

1:00–2:30 pm

Undergraduate research forum #2

Moderator: Luis Lopez (Hispanic and Italian Studies)

Yael Lenga

Learning Languages with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity

Disorder: The Role of Feedback

(Advisor: Kara Morgan-Short)

John Parisi

Propaganda and Rhetoric without Logic: From the Weimar Republic to Today

(Advisor: Heidi Schlipphacke)

Hazal Su Ceylan

Self-Confidence and Language Skills of Language Learning Assistants at UIC

(Advisor: Elizabeth Weber)

Hazal Su Ceylan and Daisy Munoz

The relationship between second language proficiency and neurocognitive processing

(Advisor: Kara Morgan-Short)

Jimmy Del Re

The Language of Music Pedagogy: A Comparative Study of the Language of Academic and non-Academic Music Instruction

(Advisor: Xuehua Xiang)

2:45–3:45 pm

Roundtable: Translation in/as Research and Teaching

Moderator: Elizabeth Loentz (Germanic Studies)

Keith Budner (Hispanic and Italian Studies)

John Ireland (French and Francophone Studies)

Young Kim (Classics and Mediterranean Studies)

Dianna Niebylski (Hispanic and Italian Studies)

Konstantin Mitroshenkov (Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian Studies)

4:00 pm

Alumni Keynote

Bradley Hoot (Depaul University)

Information structure in bilingual Spanish: Translating three decades of research

Abstract:

While bilingual grammars differ systematically from those of monolingual peers, not all areas are affected equally. One linguistic feature that has been claimed to be especially vulnerable to divergence in bilinguals (including L2 and heritage language acquisition) is information structure. Information structure includes constructions in which speakers adapt sentences to the discourse context by manipulating syntax or prosody to mark certain constituents as more (or less) salient, for example by moving a constituent expressing new information to a prominent position like the edge of the sentence (e.g., ¿Quién tosió? Tosió [Juan]F. ‘Who coughed? [Juan]F coughed.’)

Research on information structure in bilingual grammars has expanded substantially in the past three decades, with data from Spanish playing a key role. As the evidence accumulates, it may now be fruitful for the field to pause and take stock of our progress. The goal of this talk is thus to review the current state of research on information structure in bilingual Spanish. I synthesize this growing body of scholarship, with emphasis on quantitative studies of the realization of the information-structural category of focus.

I conclude that the bulk of the evidence suggests focus in Spanish does not in fact present special difficulty for bilinguals, regardless of speaker background, focus type, or methods, although quantitative differences remain and there are limits to the data we have. Where differences are found, prosody may be the area most vulnerable to cross-linguistic influence. I then suggest how to fruitfully translate these research findings into future scholarship and teaching.

Bradley Hoot is associate professor of Spanish in the Department of Modern Languages at DePaul University, where he is the director of the Spanish Program and the Linguistics Program. He received his Ph.D. from UIC in 2012. His research focuses on the intersection of bilingualism, linguistic theory, and quantitative methods, using experimental tasks to elucidate properties of the language faculty as instantiated in bilingual speakers. One major line of that research has concerned bilingual acquisition of information structure—especially information focus—and the nature of cross-linguistic influence.