Author: Michael Williams

Huércanos Esparza Chairs NeMLA Panel

At the Northeast Modern Language Association conference held in March of this year, PhD student Íñigo Huércanos Esparza chaired a panel on nineteenth-century Spanish culture and national identity. Panelists covered a wide range of media (newspapers, novels, opera) and touched on topics such as the image of Spain abroad, the construction of a national canon, […]

Jennifer Cazenave Receives Fellowship

Jennifer Cazenave has been awarded a 2025-2026 fellowship from the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut. She will be spending the 2025-26 academic year at the Institute where she will write the remaining two chapters of her second book, Lessons in Seeing: Disability in the Media Archive (under contract with Columbia University Press).

French PhD Students & Alumni Present at Conference

Two of our current PhD students in French (Kara Saar and Fargol Khosravanifard) as well as two of our recent alumni from that program (Tiffany Bailey and Brittany Bernard) recently presented at the 20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium held at UNC Greensboro. This colloquium centered around the theme of “Justice”, […]

Carrie O’Connor Memorial Travel Fund 2025

Dear RS colleagues, BU Giving Day will soon be here on Wednesday April 9! Each year, BU holds Giving Day as a way for programs, departments, and organizations to maximize their fundraising efforts through friendly competition and matched university funds. If you are able, please consider donating to the Carrie O’Connor Memorial Travel Fund.  The […]

Rutgers French Graduate Student Association Symposium

French Graduate Student Association Symposium on Ghost: Haunting Presence and Absence in Works of Art 10 April 2025 Rutgers University French Graduate Student Organization invites scholars, and theorists from all disciplines to discuss how ghosts manifest across different art forms and serve as metaphors for personal and collective histories, resisting historical amnesia, trauma, and cultural forgetting. […]

Sembe Defends Dissertation

Congratulations to Karina Sembe, who successfully defended her dissertation on March 25! Karina will graduate this May with a PhD in Hispanic Language & Literature. From Karina’s abstract: “This dissertation explores the socio-racial image that contributed to Black upward mobility in the 16th-19th centuries. I analyze three case studies from South America whose archival presence […]

Bianconi Publishes Article

Celia Bianconi, Master Lecturer in Portuguese, has published a piece in the journal, Portuguese Language Journal. Her work appears in a special edition of the journal titled, Voices of Leadership:  Women in Portuguese Language Programs in U.S. Higher Education. Bianconi’s article is called, “The Journey of a Lifelong Transformation,” and describes her path to becoming […]

Sembe Presents at African American Intellectual History Society Conference

The African American Intellectual History Society’s (AAIHS) Tenth Anniversary Conference was held March 14-15, in Providence, Rhode Island, in partnership with Brown University. Centered around the theme “Slavery and Its Afterlives”, the conference examined the multifaceted legacies of slavery across geographies locations and time periods, such as memory and community, cultural expressions, global diasporic perspectives, […]

MLA Panel – Of Monsters & Mothers

This panel, “Of Monsters and Mothers: Challenging Representations and Theories of Maternity in Literature,” seeks to explore how literature complicates, subverts, and redefines conventional understandings of motherhood. From monstrous maternal figures to radical reimaginings of care, the maternal body has long been a contested site of power, anxiety, and transformation in literary texts. We invite interdisciplinary […]