Teaching the History of the Spanish Language: New Challenges and Opportunities (Roundtable)
The “History of the Spanish Language” a pillar of Hispanic Philological Studies and an important ingredient in the graduate curriculum of Hispanic Studies in U.S. universities, has seen numerous challenges within the past two decades. The most pressing issue at the moment, and the intended focus of this roundtable, is the integration of materials -textbooks and primary sources alike- both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Much remains to be done in order to make the material both deliverable and palatable to undergraduate students, while maintaining rigor has been the challenge at the graduate level. How to incorporate Latin to an increasing number of students who lack the basic training in Classical languages, or how much emphasis there should be on medieval Castilian are two of the most difficult challenges. Although, traditionally, the course has been a pillar of Hispanic doctoral studies, with the advent of cultural studies and the shifting pressures within the Humanities, it has been under pressure to the point of being eliminated or watered down in an increasing number of U.S. universities. This session will also seek to address the need to keep the course content accessible and more hands-on with the use of new digital technologies. An additional dimension to this session is the discussion of how the study of a language in diachrony can help to reinvigorate the Humanities.
Please send abstract and Participant Information Form to Gabriel Rei-Doval (reidoval@uwm.edu) by Sept. 15, 2013. (available at http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html)
Call for papers for the International Congress on Medieval Studies, to be held in Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 8-11, 2014. Medieval Iberia appears as a multilingual space in which different languages co-existed, competed and even negotiated with one another for a long period of time. Language became the corner stone of different political, cultural, and religious identities. This session seeks to explore not only the process of identity creation by means of language, but also how these linguistic identities became naturalized and accepted. We welcome abstracts that deal with Arabic, Castilian, Catalan, Galician-Portuguese, Hebrew, Mossarabic and any other Iberian language that may help us understand how Medieval Iberia was divided according to linguistic differences. Please send abstract and Participant Information Form to Francisco Gago-Jover by Sept. 15, 2013 (available at [www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html] E-mail:(FGAGOJOV@holycross.edu)
