News About International Activities in the School
2008
Japanese Studies
Benjamin Robinson, who completed Japanese 9 in Semester One, has been awarded a one-year Japanese government scholarship (approximately A$15,000 in total + airfare) to study at Saitama University. He and six other students will leave for Japan for one year/one semester at one of LCL’s partner universities.
In addition to these new exchange students, 10 students are currently in Japan on exchange.
Classical Studies
International Conference
Refashioning the Classics: modern fabrications of the ancient world
Caulfield Campus, September 20th-21st. First Classical Studies International Conference.
International Visitor
Simon Goldhill is internationally renowned as one of the most innovative and prolific contemporary commentators on Classical literature and culture. His work has been groundbreaking, developing new fields of interdisciplinary research within Classics. Author of over ten monographs, his books include the highly influential Language, Sexuality, Narrative: ‘The Oresteia’, (Cambridge, C.U.P 1984), Reading Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, C.U.P. 1986), and Who Needs Greek? (CUP 2002), as well as two recent works on Jerusalem, and the popular Love, Sex and Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes Our Lives (John Murray 2004). Simon Goldhill is Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of King’s College.
Simon is the keynote speaker for the Classical Studies Program's first conference, Refashioning the Classics: modern fabrications of the ancient world at Caulfield, September 20th-21st. He will also be giving talks for CCLCS and the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation.
Linguistics
Linguistics is hosting three international visitors in the second part of this year:
- Britta Uriana Súmico Püttmann is visiting from 1/8/08 until 30/9/08. Britta is a student from the University of Hamburg who is undertaking a Research Internship in association with the Language and Society Centre. She is assisting in several of the Centre's current projects during her visit.
- Professor Claudia Riehl will be visiting Melbourne between late October 2008 and the end of March 2009. Professor Riehl is Head of the Department of German Language and Literature at the University of Cologne, and her research interests include language contact and multilingualism, discourse analysis and pragmatics, intercultural communication, minority languages, regional languages and language attitudes. During her visit, Professor Riehl will carry out research comparing multilingualism in urban contexts in Australia and Europe. She will be spending time at both Monash and the University of Melbourne, and she will give a number of lectures and seminars during her visit (details to follow).
- From 2-9 October Prof Ulrike Mosel of Kiel University, Germany, will be visiting Monash to work with Anna Margetts as part of the Saliba-Logea Documentation project. She is a specialist in Oceanic languages and has worked extensively on language documentation, description and typology.
She will present a Seminar on 7th October with the title "Putting oral narratives into writing – experiences from a language documentation project in Papua New Guinea" (abstract below)
Abstract
Transforming oral narratives into written texts certainly creates a new genre that is foreign to an endangered language and culture without any former literary tradition. But it does not necessarily do any damage to the language as some linguists warned. When members of the Teop speech community in Papua New Guinea edited the transcriptions of forty recorded oral narratives, they did not only eliminate speech errors and lexical borrowings from the dominant languages English and Tok Pisin, but also made syntactic changes by replacing parenthetical sequences of simple clauses by complex sentence constructions. As these constructions are – though less frequently – also found in the recordings, they are not considered as innovations, but are attributed to probably universal differences between spoken and written language. For the grammatical analysis of the language, the edited versions reveal natural transformational equivalents of constructions that genuinely reflect the native speaker's metalinguistic knowledge. Furthermore, they enlarge the corpus with data which often show lexically and syntactically more elaborate structures than their oral equivalents.
In conclusion, the enterprise of editing spoken narratives is not only justified from the speech community's point of view, but is also fruitful from a purely linguistic perspective.
Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
Kate Rigby was keynote speaker at two international conferences:
- Fourth Tamkang International Conference on Ecological Discourse (Taipei, May 23-24). Entitled “Criss-crossing Word and World: Ecocriticism, Crisis, and Representation,” this event continued the Tamkang tradition of bringing different kinds of ecocritics into conversation with one another and with scholars in other areas of the ecological humanities. My keynote was entitled, Discoursing on Disaster: The Hermeneutics of Environmental Catastrophe
- The biennial ASLE-UK conference on “Activism, Apocalypse, and the Avant-Garde” (July 10-13), entitled "Negative Ecopoetics and the Prophetic Imagination" (Edinburgh)
German Studies
The program will have two guests from overseas:
- Prof. Dr. Horst Dippel (University of Kassel, Germany) (September 2008)
- Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Stefan Neuhaus (University of Innsbruck, Austria) (April/May 2009)
2007
International Committee
Associate Professor Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover attended the XIII International Dostoevsky Symposium, Budapest University, July 3-8 2007. She delivered a paper on "Freud's Dostoevsky Essay versus a Freudian Reading of The Brothers Karamazov." She was confirmed as coordinator of the Australian Chapter of the IDS.
Membership to the IDS (Australian Chapter) is $25 for professionals and $15 for students. Membership is open to anyone with an interest in F M Dostoevsky's life and works. Members of the IDS receive an annual issue of the journal "Dostoevsky Studies" and are eligible to attend the IDS Symposiums which are every three years. The next one is in Naples in 2010.
Please send requests for membership to Millicent.Vladivglover@arts.monash.edu.au
International Dostoevsky Society (Australian Chapter)
Associate Professor Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover attended the XIII International Dostoevsky Symposium, Budapest University, July 3-8 2007. She delivered a paper on "Freud's Dostoevsky Essay versus a Freudian Reading of The Brothers Karamazov." She was confirmed as coordinator of the Australian Chapter of the IDS.
Membership to the IDS (Australian Chapter) is $25 for professionals and $15 for students. Membership is open to anyone with an interest in F M Dostoevsky's life and works. Members of the IDS receive an annual issue of the journal "Dostoevsky Studies" and are eligible to attend the IDS Symposiums which are every three years. The next one is in Naples in 2010.
Please send requests for membership to Millicent.Vladivglover@arts.monash.edu.au
International Research Links
In first semester 2007, Dr Natalie Doyle (French Studies and Monash European and EU Centre) was a research fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Within the department of History and Civilization, she worked on a book manuscript Modernity in Contemporary French Social Theory: Autonomy and Political Sovereignty
Dr Doyle established collaborative research links with Professor Bo Strath, Finnish Academy Distinguished Chair in Nordic, European and World History at the University of Helsinki and Professor Alain Supiot, director of France’s first Institute of Advanced Studies, which opens in January 2009. This collaboration involves a project on the history of the process of European integration and the social and political deficits of the EU.
Recent Overseas Appointments
Dr. Franz-Josef Deiters
Senior Lecturer in German Studies