Abby Dings, assistant professor of Spanish, and Ted Jobe, assistant director of the Language Learning Center, presented two papers at the joint conference of the South Central Association for Language Learning Technology and the Texas Foreign Language Education Conference in Austin April 15-16. The first paper, “We’ve got video. Now what?” examined best practices for the incorporation of authentic materials in the second language classroom. The second paper, “Students watching authentic video materials together: Learner identity and the co-construction of meaning,” examined how students collaborate to co-construct meaning and their shifting orientation to their identities as experts and novices in the target language.

Laura Senio Blair, associate professor and chair of Spanish, presented a paper titled “Forking Paths: Roadside Scenery and Emergent Identities in the Hispanic Road Movie” at the Popular Culture Association Conference in San Antonio April 21-23.

Abby Dings, assistant professor of Spanish, presented a paper titled “Getting Help: A Longitudinal Analysis of Patterns of Repair in NS/NNS Interactions” at the 2011 American Association for Applied Linguistics Conference in Chicago March 26-29.

Laura Senio Blair, an associate professor of Spanish at Southwestern, has received a Fulbright award to study and teach in Chile during the spring 2012 semester. Senio Blair will teach a course on Hispanic film at the Universidad Católica Santísima Concepción in Concepción, Chile. Concepción is located southwest of Santiago in the central part of Chile. The area was the epicenter of the devastating 8.8 magnitude earthquake that struck Chile in February 2010.

Senio Blair has been interested in Chile ever since she went there in 1994 on a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship. She also went to Concepción for that program, and took master’s level classes in Hispanic literature at the University of Concepción. Senio Blair says she established relationships on that trip that continue to this day. The trip also led to the topic for her dissertation, which she continues to explore: how sentiments of dislocation born from exile experiences and the return from exile are expressed in narrative, drama and film. Senio Blair says the Fulbright scholarship will enable her to continue her current research on Chilean films. She hopes to complete a book manuscript that centers on the contributions female directors have made since the 1970s to the increasingly growing field of Chilean cinema, both in documentaries and fictional feature-length films. Read more here.

Carlos D’Oro, assistant professor of Spanish, participated in a panel about Latin American film at the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association Convention held at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque Oct. 14-16. D’Oro presented a paper titled “Film, Nation, and Gender Representation in the Colombian Caribbean.”

Laura Senio Blair, associate professor of Spanish, and Katy Ross, assistant professor of Spanish, are presenting papers next week at the 20th Asociación Internacional de Literatura y Cultura Femenina Hispánica being held in Austin. Senio Blair is presenting a paper on Chilean film director Angelina Vazquez at a panel on Latin American Women in Transnational Cinema. Ross is presenting a paper titled “Being Bad is Good: The Ethics of Mothering according to El club de las malas madres by Lucia Etxebarria” at a panel on Ethics and Otherness.

Abby Dings, assistant professor of Spanish, presented a paper titled “The Role of Alignment Activity in Interactional Competence” at the Texas Foreign Language Education Conference in Austin April 24th.  She and Ted Jobe, assistant professor of Spanish, also presented a paper titled “What’s on the Tele?:  The Use of Target-language Television Series for Teaching Reading, Listening Comprehension, and Cultural Literacy.”

Maria de los Angeles Rodriguez Cadena, assistant professor of Spanish, presented a paper titled “El pasado nacional como narrativa de ficcion, o la historia es una telenovela” at the Interdisciplinary Conference on History and Fiction at the University of West Georgia Nov. 12-14. She also had an article titled “Relajo and melodrama in the fictional portrayal of the Mexican Independence of 1810” published as a chapter in a new book titled (Re) Collecting the Past.

Laura Senio Blair, assistant professor of Spanish, presented a paper titled “Driving Class Conflict: Taxis and Taxistas in Contemporary Chilean Cinema” at the Geographical Imaginaries and Hispanic Film conference in New Orleans Nov. 4-6.

Laura Senio Blair, assistant professor of Spanish, wrote the program notes for “Chilean Cinema of the Post-Dictatorship Era: A Retrospective in Film (1994-2004),” which is part of the Cine las Americas Latin American Film Festival being held in Austin this week. To read her notes, go here. Senio Blair and student Francisca Lopez are interviewing Chilean directors who are in town for the festival this week as a collaborative student-faculty project. They plan to use the interviews to write an article about trends in Chilean cinema. For more information on the festival, visit www.cinelasamericas.org. Chile is the invited country for this year’s festival.

Laura Senio-Blair, assistant professor of Spanish, has received a $4,000 grant from the American Scandinavian Foundation for research on Chilean film director Angelina Vazquez, who lived in Finland during Augusto Pinochet’s regime. The grant will enable her to access to Vazquez’s films, interview other Chilean exiles who still live in Scandinavia, and digitize related material for her research and for the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, which does not have copies of materials filmed in Scandinavia during the Pinochet years.

Southwestern has awarded $139,000 to fund 11 faculty-student research projects in the coming year. The projects will enable nearly 30 Southwestern students to conduct research with faculty members, particularly during the summer. Laura Senio-Blair, assistant professor of Spanish, received $1,932 to study how Hispanic film can provide linguistic, cultural and professional opportunities for liberal arts students.

Laura Senio Blair, assistant professor of Spanish, published an article titled “Bridges between the divide: The female body in Y tu Mama tambien and Machuca” in Studies in Hispanic Cinemas Volume 4 Number 1 (2008): 47-62. The article was co-authored with former Communication Studies professor Hector Amaya.

Katy Ross, assistant professor of Spanish, had an article titled “Trauma, Violence and Pornography: Un mal ano para Miki by Jose Ovejero” published in Letras hispanas 5.1 (Spring 2008). The article is available here