The CES offers an
annual competition for student and faculty travel grants. This past Spring, we
awarded multiple grants of up to $1,000 to assist those avidly pursuing their research, and/or presenting work at a scholarly conference or workshop.
Ana María Díaz Collazos, PhD in Hispanic Linguistics, was one of our
grantees, and wrote to us on her unique experience in America's Dairyland:
Travel Report
I attended a conference called 7th International Workshop on Spanish
Sociolinguistics, which took place in Madison, Wisconsin, on April 3-5. I
arrived one day before it started and left one day after. I stayed four nights
in the conference hotel. My presentation was scheduled for Saturday, april 5th,
at 11:00 a.m., which was entitled “Pronouns of Courtesy between Angels and
Demons in Colonial Hispanic America: Social or Spiritual Forces?” I also
chaired a panel entitled “Subject Expression,” Friday, April 4th, at
9:00 to 10:30. Beyond these fixed commitments, I participated actively during the
three days of schedule by attending to the panels and asking questions or
making comments. This allowed me to meet many potential employees.
Among the presentations I attended, I had the opportunity to learn about the
existence of many varieties of Spanish in contact with other languages. For
example, there are many English-based Creole languages in Central America, as I
learned from the presentation by Ashley LaBoda on the Limonese Creole in Costa
Rica (April 3rd). There is also a community of Mennonites who
migrated from Paraguay to Canada who blend Spanish, English and a Germanic
dialect already disappeared from Germany (April 4th). In the
session I chaired, there was an important professor whose name is Ana Maria
Carvalho, who shared her recent research on Spanish in contact with Portuguese
in the Uruguayan border with Brazil. I also attended a session on language
ideologies in Spain, where the speakers highlighted the increasing prestige of
traditionally marginalized languages such as Galician or Catalan (April 5th).
One of the keynote speakers, Sally Tagliamonte, spoke about the most recent
trends in quantitative methods for sociolinguistic research. Her presentation
was very interesting and useful to plan methodologically my future research.
I was able to
interact socially with Irene Moyna, who is editing a volume for which I will
contribute a chapter. She introduced me to some other professors and potential
employees. I presented a topic related to my contribution for the book, which
has to do with the usage of terms of address in authors of Spanish descent in
Hispanic America. They were three authors who wrote mystical poetry in 1561,
1650 and 1703. In their poetry, they take advantage of archaic meanings of
Spanish second person pronouns to represent the speech of supernatural entities
acting as characters of their books. In Spanish there three second person
pronouns in the singular. Each of them signals the intrinsic power in every
relationship. Thus, the attribution of certain pronouns to angels or demons
implies a perception of power as a fixed, unchangeable structure. I received
interesting feedback from the audience. For example, that it would be good to
explore the lives of these authors to discover the literary works they had access
to. In this way, I would enrich the analysis by showing the literary paths of
transmission for these archaic usages of pronouns.
My talk was part of a panel related to terms of address organized by
Irene Moyne. This panel took place in the morning of April 5th. I attended all other presentations of the panel and obtained an
invaluable amount of information on the newest trends in research on terms of
address. I had the possibility to network with these researchers, who are also
contributors to the volume to be edited by Irene Moyna. This was a unique
opportunity to increase my network in a sensitive period of my career as is
transition from a Ph.D. student to a professor in my last year of studies. The
travel grant from the Center for European Studies made it possible.
We currently have
students and faculty in Budapest, Moscow, Poland, Brussels (to name a few).
Keep your eyes peeled for their reports when they're writing on our
stomping grounds again.
