Faculty News In the Spring of 2020, Natalia Santamaria Laorden began supervising students’ work in a new internship with the Bergen Volunteer Medical Initiative (Hackensack, N.J.). A double major in Biology and Spanish, as well as a student in the Spanish for Health Care and Human Services Certificate, Risoneide Natalia Santamaria Zegarra Solano was praised by Laorden the institution for her work as an interpreter for Spanish-speaking patients.
Lopez’s anthology, Let’s Hear Their Voices: Cuban American Writers of the Second Generation (SUNY Press), co-edited with Eliana Rivero, was released in November 2019. Along with five of the ten authors featured in the anthology, including President Obama’s inaugural poet Richard Blanco, she presented Let’s Hear Their Voices at Books & Books in Coral Gables in January. Last, her article on affect in Cuban American narratives, “Privada de símbolos patrios: la memoria afectiva en textos cubanoamericanos posnacionales,” appeared in Identidad y postnacionalismo en la cultura cubana in Spain in 2019.
In order to share all the ways in which the UISFL federal grant contributed to the development of the certificate at Ramapo College, Prof. Santamaria participated in the 5th International Symposium on Languages for Specific Purposes (ISLSP) held in University of North Carolina (Charlotte) at the beginning of March. Her presentation was entitled “Teaching Spanish for Health Care and Human Services: Questioning Epistemologies and Power Dynamics.” Since late May, Santamaria Laorden is also the chair of the “Medical Humanities, Social Services and Intercultural Competency” in the Spanish Medical Taskforce, that brings together medical and language educators to assess best practices and to test pedagogical innovations in the teaching of Medical Spanish nationwide.
Ed Shannon has been awarded a 2020 Quarry Farm Fellowship by the Center for Mark Twain Studies in Elmira, N.Y. for summer 2020. The fellowship includes a grant and a two-week residency at the Center in Elmira. See: https://marktwainstudies.com/about/quarry-farm/ for more info. His recent publication: “Good grief, Comrade Brown! Woody Guthrie, Charles Schulz and the little cartoon book that was a big lie” Studies in Comics focuses on American folksinger Woody Guthrie’s unpublished and little-known response to anticommunist propaganda comic book Is This Tomorrow: America Under Communism (1947). Largely forgotten today, Is This Tomorrow was hugely successful, with millions of copies in circulation. Its tangled history reveals ideological conflicts with its publisher’s advocacy of comic book censorship. Is This Tomorrow also features early comics work by cartoonist Charles Schulz (years before beginning his comic strip Peanuts). By happenstance, Guthrie’s only substantial comment on comic books is also his only (albeit unknowing) comment on fellow iconic popular artist Schulz. Additionally, he presented “’I ain’t a-going to tell all’: Huck Finn’s (Missing) Sex Life” at the Clemens Conference, Mark Twain Circle/Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum. July 24-27, 2019. Hannibal, MO.
Iraida H. López spent four months in Chile on a Fulbright in fall 2019. She taught a postgraduate course on Caribbean literature offered jointly by the Catholic University and the University of Chile in Santiago, in addition to lecturing and Prof. Iraida López and colleagues in Chile conducting research for a new project. Written after her return from abroad, her piece, “Creativity at the Service of Social Mobilization in Chile,” came out in NACLA in December, https://nacla.org/news/2019/12/08/chileanti-rape-protest-Tijoux. The essay addresses the surge of creativity she witnessed after the onset of the street protests across the nation.
Yvette Kisor’s paper, “Romance and Sexuality in Tolkien’s Lost Chaucer,” was accepted for delivery at the 55th International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan in May 2020. After years of hard work, Lisa Williams’ novel, Forget Russia, was accepted for publication by Tailwinds Press. It is forthcoming in 2020. She also published the poems, “Tokyo,” “Kyoto,” and an elegy, “For Jacqueline,” in the fall issue of The Santa Barbara Literary Journal. You thought Goth was over? No way. Eric Daffron’s essay entitled “Transatlantic Terror: James Hammond’s Circulating Library and the Minerva Press Gothic Novel,” an article based on research on turn-of-the-nineteenthcentury British gothic novels archived at the New York 6
