Two of our undergradaute concentrators, Baird Campbell and Charlotte Peterson, have been awarded English Teaching fellowship from the Fullbright Program.

Congratulations Baird and Charlotte!

Diane Larsen-Freeman will accept an honorary doctorate on Oct 17, 2009 from Hellenic-American University in Athens.  She received this honor in recognition of her “ground-breaking work in second-language acquisition and seminal contribution to teacher education.”

Congratulations, Diane!

Anne Curzan has won a Faculty Recognition Award from the College of Literature, Science and the Arts.

From the University Record

In her seven years at U-M, Ann Curzan, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, associate professor of English language and literature, Department of English Language and Literature; associate professor of linguistics, Department of Linguistics, LSA; and associate professor of education, SoE, has built a remarkable record of achievement in all areas of academic activity — research, teaching and service. Accolades for her “stellar intellectual and professional accomplishments” in multiple areas are numerous. In 2007 she won both the Henry Russel Award and a Thurnau professorship.

Curzan’s central scholarly work is in English diachronic syntax and semantics, the study of how the English language has changed and developed over time. More particularly, because of her 2003 book “Gender Shifts in the History of English,” she has been called “the leading authority on issues of grammatical gender in the history of English.” This book, which is a synthesis of historical linguistics, corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics, has commanded a large and diverse audience of students, linguists, cultural and literary historians, and general readers.

With a background in both linguistics and English language and literature, Curzan has wide-ranging interests and capacities, all of which she pursues with the same passion and competence that she brings to her central work in diachronic syntax and linguistic gender. She is a serious student of semantics and lexicography and an expert on North American English. And she has an intellectual passion for all issues that involve teaching, teacher training, the politics of pedagogy and classroom dynamics. She has co-authored both a book on teaching, “First Day to Final Grade,” and a textbook in her field of study, “How Language Works,” among her many other publications. She currently is working on two more books on the history of the language.

Her teaching of both undergraduate and graduate students is called “transformative” — for colleagues and other teachers as well as for students. She also has been invited to speak about teaching on campuses around the country and internationally.

In Curzan’s service to the Department of English, she successfully fashioned and instituted a radical revision of the undergraduate curriculum, and has taken on the task of directing the first-year writing program.

Diane Larsen-Freeman has been awarded a Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the University of Innsbruck for the coming year.  She will be teaching courses in second language acquisition, multilingualism and English Grammar.

Congratulations, Diane.

Alan Mishler (Linguistics ‘09) received a highly competitive Baggett Fellowship to serve as a research assistant at the University of Maryland during the 09-10 academic year.  Alan works primarily on phonetics and speech perception with an emphasis on Japanese tonal and prosodic phenomena.  Alan was also the recipient of the Marshall Salins Social Science Award last spring.

Robin Queen has received an Excellence in Education award from the College of LSA.  This award recognizes efforts in the areas of classroom teaching, curricular innovation, and the supervision of student research, as well as other significant contributions to the quality of the College’s teaching-learning environment.

Ezra Keshet has received a grant from the LSAIT committee to create the Online Semantic Calculator, which will help students learn semantic analysis techniques.

Alan Mishler has received the highly competitive Marshall Sahlins Social Science award from the Honors College. The Marshall Sahlins award is part of the Goldstein Honors prizes, a set of prizes estalished to recognize scholarly excellence and outstanding achievement.

Alan received the prize based on his many academic strengths as well as his service and leadership on campus.

Alan’s thesis, Voice Onset Time in Japanese Voiceless Stops: Domain-initial Strengthening and Perceptual Salience,  is an acoustic and perceptual investigation of domain-initial strengthening in Japanese. The goal of the acoustic study was to determine whether a set of Japanese consonants exhibited domain-initial—in particular, word-initial—strengthening. It did, which led to the perceptual study, whose goal was to assess whether native Japanese speaking listeners could use the acoustic consequences of strengthening to identify word onset. The perceptual study addresses whether strengthening is perceptually useful.

Congratulations, Alan!

Rosalie Edmunds has been awarded a Virgina Voss award for Excellence in Writing by Senior Honors Women from the Honors College for her honors theses, “They’ll be doing away with those buffalo”: Language, Culture, and History in a Salish-Pend d’Oreille Narrative.

The thesis combines linguistic and anthropological analysis with historical research in order to elucidate the background and structure of a traditional narrative set in the late 19th century and early 20th century on the Flathead Reservation of northwestern Montana.

Congratulations, Rosalie!

Marlyse Baptista received an award from the Center for World Performance Studies for bringing to campus the Cape Verdean sculptor, painter and sketch artist Ida Abreu.  Baptista nominated Abreu for a four-week residency at the University of Michigan during April 2010.   Abreu will offer exhibits of his art, as well as three campus lectures.  In addition, he and Baptista will visit several public schools in Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti and Detroit where they’ll discuss with students the connections between art, language and identity.