The College of Arts & Letters is saddened by the loss of Chunhong Teng, Assistant Professor of Chinese, who passed away on Wednesday, November 13, 2019. She was 64 years old. Teng worked at Michigan State University in the Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asain, and African Languages for 18 years and taught many Chinese classes. She also was the faculty…
Barb Miller, Research Administrator for the College of Arts & Letters, has received the Fall 2019 Unit Research Administrator Spotlight Award in recognition of her professional contributions and quality of service. Recipients of the award play an integral role in advancing MSU’s research mission and lead by example. Miller has worked for MSU for 10 years, of which the past…
An art installation by three MSU faculty members is helping bring awareness to the issues surrounding environmentally harmful plastics and our societal dependence on them. The exhibition, Care. Not Convenience, which bridges art, design, science, and community engagement to foster dialogue on the role of plastic in our lives, will open at SCENE (Metrospace) November 8 from 6 to 8 p.m. and will…
The College of Arts & Letters is saddened to learn of the sudden passing of Dr. Kimi Nakatsukasa, who earned her Ph.D. from the Second Language Studies Program in 2013. In her dissertation she investigated the effectiveness of teachers' gestures when used during oral corrections in ESL classrooms. Her other research interests included interactions in language classrooms, teachers' and students' gestures, learners'…
MSU Department of Theatre Assistant Professor Deric McNish and his students have been hard at work on a new project with Shakespeare as their muse and The Winter’s Tale at its center.Their goal was to create an accessible and informative audio resource for students, actors, and other Shakespeare lovers involving elements of live performance, audio performance, digital dissemination of the performance, and podcasts with experts. “I see this as…
Two Professors from the College of Arts & Letters are recipients of the 2019 Mid-Michigan Spartans Quality in Teaching Award, which recognizes excellence in classroom instruction through the incorporation of research and innovative learning opportunities. Christopher Frilingos, Professor in the Department of Religious Studies, and Jonathan Choti, Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian & African Languages, will…
Aline Godfroid, Associate Professor of Second Language Studies and TESOL, is being recognized for her outstanding research in the area of second language acquisition and recently was elected to the Executive Committee of the European Second Language Association (EuroSLA) and will serve as Secretary of that committee. A leading scholar in the use of eye-tracking, Godfroid was named the 2019 recipient of the TESOL Award for Distinguished Research for her study, “Incidental vocabulary learning…
The College of Arts & Letters has a new endowed faculty position thanks to the generosity of MSU alumna and former Ohio State Senator Karen Gillmor, who has been giving back to Michigan State University for the past decade. The Karen L. Gillmor, Ph.D. Endowed Professorship in Professional and Public Writing, created in Gillmor’s name, will help recruit and retain…
Professor Justus Nieland has been named Chair of the Department of English, effective October 1, 2019. Dr. Nieland joined the Department of English as an Assistant Professor in 2002. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2008 and to full Professor in 2014. During his 17 years with the department, Nieland has been actively involved in its research, teaching, service,…
For 70 years, Arabic was an official language of Israel. That changed last year with the passing of the Nation-State Bill, which became law on July 19, 2018, designating Hebrew as Israel’s only official language. How and why this decision came to be is the focus of a current study by Camelia Suleiman, Associate Professor of Arabic Studies, who was…