A look at individual and group research in the college.
Palabras and Palavras
Linguistics professor Mark Davies (above) recently received a $200,000 National Endowment of the Humanities grant to develop two very large corpora of Spanish and Portuguese. Davies will expand his online Corpus of Spanish to 2 billion words from 21 Spanish-speaking countries and the Corpus of Portuguese to 1 billion words from four Portuguese-speaking countries. These two corpora will join the other corpora from corpus. byu.edu, which are used by more than 170,000 researchers and teachers each month.
The Value of Experiential Language Learning
Although some argue low language enrollments are a result of students pursuing preprofessional goals, Sam Eisen, director of the Language Flagship at the U.S. Department of Education, asserts in a new article published by the Russian Language Journal that the language flagship model used at universities across the United States—including BYU—is helping bridge the chasm between the humanities and professional training. In his article, “The Language Flagship Model and the Humanities,” written in conjunction with BYU’s Humanities+ Symposium, he mentions the need for more professional-level language study and shows how intern- ships and experiential learning through language flagship programs give students moments of epiphany and presence that take them well beyond the traditional classroom and study abroad experiences.
Fulbright Senior Scholar
From January through June 2015, English professor Brian Roberts was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in American literature and American studies at Sebelas Maret University in Indonesia. For several years, Roberts has worked with Keith Foulcher from the University of Sydney to research the American writer Richard Wright’s 1955 trip to Indonesia to attend the Asian-African Conference, a landmark meeting of representatives from 29 postcolonial Asian and African countries. Together they will publish a book titled Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright, Modern Indonesia, and the Bandung Conference (Duke University Press, spring 2016).