Projects
African Studies Lecture Series
Lead Faculty: Brigitte Stepanov, Chris Ippolito
An annual speaker series has been established which centers on the African Studies Minor and focuses on inclusive pedagogy while elaborating on global issues pertaining to a diversity of peoples, languages, and cultures. The series fosters partnerships with the diverse community surrounding Georgia Tech and examines a broad set of questions concerning identity, gender, human rights, literary and cultural production through various media, health, social justice, immigration, and sustainability. Additional resources help to build a library collection of more diverse and inclusive materials.
French Environmental Humanities and/in the Arts
Lead Faculty: Stéphanie Boulard and Andrea Jonsson
This interdisciplinary initiative integrates French language, art, literature, and ecology studies. One of its first undertakings has been the use of a Haikubox installed on campus to monitor and identify bird songs. This innovative work explores the connections between ecology, biodiversity, and the French and Francophone environmental humanities. The project is partially funded by AGSC and the French Embassy, among others, offering unique educational opportunities.
Please check out the video here.
French Speakers Series
Lead Faculty: Stéphanie Boulard
Upcoming events:
Location: Price Gilbert Scholars Event Theater
Dates/Times:
September 3, 2:00 pm : Cinematic Perspectives: Agnès Varda and the Female Gaze, A conversation between Anne Pauly and Stéphanie Boulard
October 4, 9:00 am-12:30 pm: French Friday - Education and pedagogy
October 4: French in Higher Education: A Regional Seminar for Growth and Sustainability
November 22, 4:30 pm - 6:30 pm : Spaces of the Soul: Felwine Sarr on Literature, Music, and Dreams in conversation with Stephanie Boulard
Click here for more information
Global Health Humanities and Well-Being
Lead Faculty: Narin Hassan
This initiative at Georgia Tech highlights existing strengths and creates opportunities for research, curricular, and program development in this area. The four key areas of focus are:
- global medicine/health cultures and histories
- wellness, embodiment, and social justice
- arts, culture and well-being
- sustainability and global health
Global Media Festival
Lead Faculty: Paul Alonso
An annual documentary film festival focused on sustainability across languages and cultures through film screenings, roundtables, class visits and curriculum design. This series is produced by the faculty from the School of Modern Language and various collaborators. The goals of this festival are to promote awareness of diverse viewpoints, needs, and strategies related to sustainability; create new connections with sustainability-focused community and organizations worldwide; develop K-12 and college-level educational modules; promote Georgia Tech’s strategic plan to educate “good global citizens”; promote understanding and pursuit of the UN Sustainable Development Goals; and inspire attendees to critically engage with sustainability issues both globally and locally in order to better effect meaningful change.
The 2023 festival explores the theme “reduced inequalities within and among countries” (#10 of the UN sustainable development goals). It includes screenings of international films from Peru, France, China, Germany, Japan, and Brazil and Q&A with directors and discussants.
2024 Festival Highlights:
- “Bigger Than Us” (France, 2021) — Director Flore Vasseur
- “Rolling Strong (Rodar Contra Todo)” (Peru, 2016) — Director Marianela Vega
- “Alice Júnior” (Brazil, 2019) — Screenwriter Luiz Bertazzo, Director Gil Baroni
- “Hidden Letters” (China, 2022) — Director-Producer Violet Du Feng
- “Untold (War of Memories)” (South Korea, 2018) — Director Lee-Kil Bora
- “We Were Kids Back Then” (Peru + USA, 2022) — Director Rafael Alvarado
- “We Will Have Everything” (China, 2020) — Director Jiang Nengjie
- “Mr. Bachmann And His Class” (Germany, 2021) — Director Maria Speth
2023 Festival Highlights:
- “The Revolution and the Land” (Peru, 2019) — Director Gonzalo Benavente Secco
- “Making Pandemics” (France, 2021) — Director Marie-Monique Robin
- “Above the Drowning Sea” (China + Austria, 2017) — Director-Producer Rene Balcer & Producer Nicola Zavaglia
- “Ascension” (China, 2021) — Director Jessica Kingdon
- “One Day We Arrived in Japan” (Japan, 2017) — Directors Ana Paula Kojima Hirano and Aaron Litvin
- “Beyond This Backyard” (Brazil, 2021) — Director Alfredo Suppia
- “Tropic Ice” (Germany, 2010-2019) — Director Barbara Dombrowski
HIVEMIND
Lead Faculty: Amanda Weiss
A student and faculty-run digital magazine of global speculative fiction, featuring science fiction and fantasy on the themes of language, culture, and communication. Each issue centers on one unifying concept or theme of critical interest to writers of the speculative, whether it is a critique of science and technology or of culture and society. The content includes original short fiction, reprints, translations, interviews, and articles.
Current Issue: Tolkien in Asia [Nov 2023]
Past Issues: The Anthropocene, Japan x Future, The Future of Translation
Japanese Language & Culture through Manga
Lead Faculty: Kyoko Masuda
Manga is one of Japan’s best known cultural exports. Because it is a top 5 reason for learning Japanese and it shapes how the world sees Japan, it can be a good resource to learn Japanese culture and language. This initiative aims to focus on the genres aimed at girls and women to shed light on female protagonists and their language use in relation to ‘role language’. By creating manga corpora and distributing resources, frequently-used word lists can be developed so students of Japanese can learn about Japanese culture and language while enjoying reading Manga.
Latin American Environmental Humanities Lab
Lead Faculty: Germán Vergara & Miguel Rosas Buendia
A bilingual (English-Spanish) multimedia lab that combines humanistic inquiries and digital resources to explore relevant environmental issues and raise underrepresented voices from Latin America. The lab develops multimedia pieces (including podcasts, videos, stories, and visual collections in English and Spanish) that display and examine environmental-related issues, such as extractivism, urban change, race and indigeneity, Human Rights and environmental activisms, etc. For the academic year 2022-2023, two critical topics have been identified: energy and toxicity.
Linguistics for High School Students
Lead Faculty: Hongchen Wu & Kyoko Masuda
Linguistics is a scientific study of language, combining elements of natural science, social science, and humanities. In studying linguistics, students can exercise their analytical skills and improve their knowledge of core scientific principles while learning about the diversity of language and culture. This initiative includes hosting the annual North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad, offering linguistics workshops and professional development opportunities, and developing introductory online linguistics teaching/learning toolkits.
Rwanda Study Abroad
Lead Faculty: Valerie Thomas
Launching a study abroad program in Rwanda that is a partnership between Georgia Tech and the Africa Center of Excellence in Energy for Sustainable Development (ACE-ESD) at the University of Rwanda. Within a network of reciprocal activities, a foundation can be built for meaningful engagement, interaction, and understanding between students at both institutions. By leveraging the potential of distance technologies, Georgia Tech can make use of its substantial technological and pedagogical capabilities to engage with Rwandan students, faculty, and institutions.
Speech Learning Toolkits
Lead Faculty: Hongchen Wu
This initiative applies technology, such as speech analysis software Praat, to develop accessible materials for language instructors and learners. Speech learning toolkits are developed so second language learners can pronounce words properly to have intelligible and comprehensible speech. Toolkits may include components such as tone, rhythm, intonation, prosody, accent and emotion. A website and user manual of the toolkits will be developed and tutorial sessions on how to use the toolkits will be offered.
Voice+
Lead Faculty: Andrea Jonsson, Jan Uelzmann, and Stuart Goldberg
In today's digital age, the role of technology in shaping the music industry cannot be overstated. From the advent of digital recording techniques to the rise of streaming platforms, technology has revolutionized how music is created, consumed, and distributed. It has had both positive and negative implications and exploring these effects can provide valuable insights into the evolving landscape of the industry.
The Voice+ Project will host an interdisciplinary conference on these topics and implement an initiative to grow a new research cluster on the human voice internationally at different intersections with language, media, science, humanities, medicine, engineering and other fields in our technology-driven world. The initial conference is planned to take place November 14 - 15, 2023.