Culture Archive

For my project, I have created and trialed cultural materials for use in second-year French classes that look at non-hexagonal (or Francophone) cultures on their own terms. By putting together cultural units that focus on specific geographical places and topics, I expand the idea of engaging with French culture beyond traditional ideas of Paris-centric themes…

Television advertising provides versatile authentic materials for learning Italian language and culture, as it constitutes a privileged point of entrance for analyses of Italian society through its rich network of cultural references – feature films, TV shows, songs, newspapers, magazines, as well as other advertisements. Further, the cross-cultural dimension of TV advertising prompts critical examination…

Languages such as Czech, with complex grammatical marking and a vocabulary very different from English, are challenging to teach at the elementary level. My project starts from the premise that using a broad range of authentic cultural material, including excerpts from articles, ads, menus, film clips, and songs as the basis for grammatical exposition, drills,…

Culture has been commonly understood as something we “have”, acquired through membership in a community rather than something socio-ideologically situated that we “do” bodily in and through language. Through videotaped interviews with hearing mothers of deaf children discussing their language experiences in the visual world of their deaf child, I attempt to shape an emergent…

Immigrant homes often display artifacts of cultural, historic, and ethnic importance. I have looked into the meaningful objects that Bay Area Finns of different generations and age groups hold dear to their hearts. The owners find nostalgic connections with these objects as they keep negotiating and recreating their Finnishness. This talk discusses the many fragilities…

This year, I attended the 2012 Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention in Seattle, WA. My presence at the convention was motivated by my interest in both literary studies and pedagogy. As a panelist on a special session on nineteenth-century flânerie in Paris, I presented a paper titled “Elevated Flâneries: Bourgeois Women, Spectatorship, and the Façades…

In spring 2009, a 25-minute documentary, Il corpo delle donne (The Body of Women), composed of images selected from 400 hours of television programs, exerted an unexpected impact on an Italian public which over the years had become uncomplainingly accustomed to seeing women made objects of the most explicit forms of degradation, humiliation, and misogyny.…

A website curriculum for teaching Russian phonetics and avant-garde literary culture. Website address: https://sites.google.com/a/fulbrightmail.org/russian-phonetics-through-avant-garde-poetry/ The idea for this project emerged from of my experience teaching Russian at Berkeley and my own budding dissertation work on Russian avant-garde poetry. As a graduate student instructor of Russian—and a student in the throes of research—I became increasingly convinced…

**** Videos now available - please use Safari or Firefox ***** Saturday, Sept.10, 2011 9-5:30 pm 370 Dwinelle INTRODUCTION The MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages (2007) has advocated teaching, together with functional language abilities, ‘critical language awareness’ and ‘historical and political consciousness’. Indeed, the many commemorative events in the cultures we teach as…

Bringing conceptual blending into foreign language classroom discussions of cultural narratives can lead to critical language awareness and a deeper and broader understanding of cultural narratives, which the MLA promotes in its (2007) conceptualization of transcultural and translingual awareness. Using ...