Jillian

Nikolina

Lan

Shannon

Lilian

Peter

Corinne

Meriem

Craig

Jillian Brady has been tracing the history of translations of the Quixote for Maria Tymoczko. Her avenues of inquiry include: "which translators copied each other, who knew Spanish, who didn't, how they cheated, who read it and who owned it."  Jillian is also working with an online publication that can be found at www.zwiebook.com.  She publishes translations and has made a star of Chris Michalski with his translation of "Half Sleep April Judas" by Georg Heym.

Nikolina Dobreva, was kind enough to respond to prompts about the FBI on campus and who's your best friend.  She writes that: "After participating in a weird decision-making experiment in the econ department, I walked home richer and more undecided than ever. I don't know who my best friend is any more, and I love the FBI (maybe they've brainwashed me in that experiment too). Hoewever, my academia-related decision-making abilities have improved dramatically, so I was finally able to put together not only a committee for my comps, but also four tentative topics. That means that if the world in general and UMass in particular don't collapse next semester, I might end up having completed my course work AND passed my exams. Isn't life wonderful?"

Lan Dong took courses from the English and German departments, taught in Complit, and was writing her rationales in Fall 2002. Fall semester she also presented at Campus Communities: Promises and Prospects of Asian and Pacific Americans in Higher Education: Annual Conference of Asian and Pacific Americans in Higher Education (APAHE) at Columbia University in the City of New York, November 1-3, 2002, and at Imaginary, Image, Word/Imaginaire, Image, Texte: Perspectives on the Relation of Words and Images in Painting, Poem, Book, Cinema, and Cyberspace: An International Conference at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, October 24-26, 2002.  In addition, Lan is the recipient of the First Prize OGSCL Winter 2003 Newsletter Editor's Award.

Shannon Farley writes: "Eagle Hill School (www.ehs1.org) has just finished the process of being accredited by the NEASC. I have been asked to develop a foreign language department this year, which is taking up a lot of my time, as is the planning of my wedding in June. In November, I took five of my students to Classics Day in Williamstown, where they were exposed to both a catapult contest and Paula Saffire singing Sappho in Greek."

Peter Kahn is a student in the master's program in translation.  He invites us all to read his translation of "Antieros" by Tununa Mercado, in the Summer 2002, Volume 2, Number 3 edition of Gastronomica magazine. He warns that it is "spicy reading!"

Chris Michalski has been published in an online journal called Zwieback. 

Corinne Oster is currently completing her dissertation on the new representations of marginality in contemporary French women's cinema, which she hopes to defend by the end of the academic year.  She is presently teaching a French Film class with Professors Schwartzwald and Portuges, and will be teaching Cinema and Psyche for the Comparative Literature department with Professor Portuges next semester. Along with Dale Hudson and Géraldine Vatan (French department), she presented a paper last June at the 12th Annual Screen International Conference for Film Studies in Glasgow (UK), entitled "De(con)structing/ Re-constructing the National Space: The De-localisation of French Cinema in the Films of Claire Denis," and she will be publishing an article on Claire Denis' film J'ai pas sommeil for online film journal Kinoeye (www.kinoeye.org) early next year.

Meriem Pages writes: "This year, my second at UMass, has been very busy. In May, I presented a paper on a medieval pilgrimage account, the "Tractatus de locis et statu sancte terre Ierosolimitane" at the Conference for Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I presented another paper entitled "The Assassins: An Image Problem" at the Conference on Texte, Image, Imaginaire this fall. In this later paper, I focused on the representation of the Shi'ite sect of the Assassins in thirteenth-century French vernacular chronicles and pilgrimage accounts. This semester, I also taught a section of "Good and Evil: East and West" for the first time. After nearly a semester of teaching in the Department of Comparative Literature, I am just as excited and eager as the first day (although a little less nervous) and am already looking forward to being a TA in Professor Moebius' "Myth, Folk, and Children's Literature" next semester."

Craig Sinclair, Craig@complit.umass.edu, has been attending to some journalism and art projects this semester-- writing short fiction and doing fancy photo things. After honing his paper to mere degrees away from passable perfection, the Velvet Light Trap will soon be printing "Audition: Making Sense in/of the Cinema," in their forthcoming special issue on "Sound in the Cinema" (#51). Craig has also been nominated for the University’s Distinguished Teaching Award and moved back from the woods, which were "frankly scary."