Cristiano Mazzei—director of online education and program development for the College of Humanities and Fine Arts and senior lecturer in comparative literature where he is director of online translator and interpreter training—has published The Routledge Guide to Teaching Translation and Interpreting Online with co-author Laurence Jay-Rayon Ibrahim Aibo of New York University.

The Center for Teaching and Learning has announced four faculty winners of the 2021-22 winners of the Distinguished Teaching Award (DTA), including Jennifer Fronc, professor of history, and Mazen Naous, associate professor of English. Since 1961, the University of Massachusetts has presented the Distinguished Teaching Award to instructors who demonstrate exemplary teaching at the highest institutional level. This highly competitive and prestigious campus-wide honor is the only student-initiated award on campus. This year’s review committees, comprised of former DTA winners, noted particularly how difficult their task was given the excellence of the nominees and how exceptional these award winners are.

Joe Pater, professor and chair of the linguistics department (ranked No. 2 among linguistics departments worldwide), and Gaja Jarosz, associate professor of linguistics, have been awarded National Science Foundation (NSF) research grant on “Representing and learning stress: Grammatical constraints and neural networks” in the amount of $386,226. This three-year research grant will study the learnability of a wide range of word stress patterns, using two general approaches. The goal of the project will be to develop grammar and learning systems that can cope with a broader range of typological data than current models, and that can handle more details of individual languages. 

Milton Cantor, who taught American history to two generations of students at the University of Massachusetts, died Saturday, March 26, 2022, after a short illness. He was 96. ...