LARC

The Modern Language Association’s 2007 Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages, chaired by Mary Louise Pratt, looked at the language crisis that occurred after 9/11, and has come forth with specific recommendations that have turned some language and literature departments into armed camps. In particular, the committee’s findings that foreign language and literature departments need to become more client-centered and to adapt language curricula to the pragmatic use of language in a variety of globalized professional settings, are considered by some to be problematic. Need change be so unsettling for faculty? Are there ways in which implementation of the recommendations of “Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World” can benefit and reinvigorate the study of foreign languages in higher education? Looking backwards to technologies that have faded and to some that have flourished, we examine how the profession has evolved to a new mature state of interactivity and connectivity. We are at a place where technologies are converging to facilitate personal expression and trans-cultural mobility.

“Understanding The Arab Spring: The Case of Yemen” with Professor Stacey Philbrick Yadav from Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

And, read more at: http://merip.org/mero/mero102111

“Refashioning Barbary: American Discourse on North Africa” with Dr. Karim Bejjit, Associate Professor of English at Hassan II University in Casablanca and a Fulbright scholar.

America’s strained relations with North African states, particularly the regencies of Algiers and Tripoli during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, have been the object of numerous historical accounts, and have generated a continuing controversy among American historians about the failures and accomplishments of US policies towards this part of the Muslim world. Following the tragic incidents of 11 September 2001, several studies have again appeared on America’s encounter with the so-called Barbary States advocating analogies between terrorist attacks and corsair activity. This talk offers a critique of this established historiography and the politicized drifts which characterize its recent publications.