Faculty in the Division of World Languages, Literatures and Cultures are active in their areas of specialization. Departments in our Division are committed to fostering an environment where research and creative activity thrive; research takes our students and faculty across the globe in the pursuit of scholarly engagement. Here you will find a sampling of our faculty's recent publications, exemplifying our commitment to active engagement.

Recent Books by Faculty

Spanish Grammar Companion for Teachers (2022)

Philip Klein

This textbook boosts the confidence of persons teaching Spanish as a second language, who may lack confidence in their understanding of certain tricky areas of expression. Their previous training has not enabled them to control (much less explain to others) the several “danger zones” which challenge many in-service teachers, graduate students serving as teaching assistants and others who use Spanish professionally. It offers original and insightful analyses, abundant examples and helpful English comparisons. It disarticulates the machinery of grammar into manageable parts.

It is not intended for those beginning to learn Spanish (since it skips the basics to focus on the “rough spots”), but for those who know Spanish well, yet need to overcome their nagging limitations in obtuse areas, e.g. subjunctive, reflexives, pronouns (neuter, relative, personal), adjective placement, ser/estar, preterite/imperfect, commands, gender, passive and impersonal expressions. There are sections devoted to words easily confused with each other, use of the accent mark, irregular verbs, and sentence structure.

This work is optimal for self-study and to supplement course texts in composition, culture and linguistics. It benefits native-speaker teachers unfamiliar with the “why” of their language. It benefits native-speaker teachers unfamiliar with the “why” of their language, as well as buttressing  anglophone instructors of scant linguistic background. The result is a better prepared teacher and a more promising learning experience for the students.

Hacia una sociolingüística crítica: Desarrollos y Debates (2020)
Co-Edited by Mercedes Niño-Murcia, Virginia Zavala, and Susana de los Heros

Currently, new and exciting developments are shaking research on language. In the 1960s and the 1970s a new paradigm substantially changed the focus on language research from a mental perspective (generativism) to take language as social and cultural interactions. Those were the times when sociolinguistics appeared as a subfield of linguistics, led by scholars like William Labov, Dell Hymes, Joshua Fishman, and Erving Goffman. 50 years later we are witnessing new developments that have been named by the scholar Mary Bucholtz as Sociocultural linguistics. In order to disseminate decisive work, we present translations into Spanish of pieces by Mary Bucholtz, Kira Hall, Monica Heller, Gunther Kress, Jonathan Rosa and Nelson Flores who are spearheading a change. The theoretical work of these researchers will have consequences for other disciplines and will put language research into a different light. In addition, we have included new Latin American and USA researches whose work illustrate the new paradigm of sociocultural linguistics (Virginia Unamuno, Ana Cristina Ostermann and Anne Marie Guerrettaz).

Despertarse de Europa: Arte, literatura, euroescepticismo (2019)
Luis Martín-Estudillo

Europa y el proyecto de su integración han sido el motor de transformaciones políticas y sociales beneficiosas al mismo tiempo que resultaban la coartada perfecta para otras fuertemente cuestionadas. Desde hace más de un siglo, ese ideal y sus realizaciones han generado sueños y pesadillas, respuestas racionales y afectivas tanto a favor como en contra. Su ambigüedad sigue provocando controversias también en ámbitos ajenos a la esfera institucional. Mediante el estudio riguroso de un variado corpus cultural (ensayo, televisión, fotografía, poesía, novela, "performance", teatro) este libro presenta una historia de las resistencias españolas a una idea que ha emocionado, frustrado, alarmado e inspirado a intelectuales y artistas tan distintos como María Zambrano o Santiago Sierra.

Watch the professional video recording of the book launch in Madrid.

History of the Chichimeca Nation (2019)
Edited and translated by Amber Brian

Composed in the first half of the seventeenth century, a hundred years after the arrival of the Spanish conquerors in Mexico, the History of the Chichimeca Nation is based on native accounts but written in the medieval chronicle style. It is a gripping tale of adventure, romance, seduction, betrayal, war, heroism, misfortune, and tragedy. Written at a time when colonization and depopulation were devastating indigenous communities, its vivid descriptions of the cultural sophistication, courtly politics, and imperial grandeur of the Nahua world explicitly challenged European portrayals of native Mexico as a place of savagery and ignorance. Unpublished for centuries, it nonetheless became an important source for many of our most beloved and iconic memories of the Nahuas, widely consulted by scholars of Spanish American history, politics, literature, anthropology, and art.

The manuscript of the History, lost in the 1820s, was only rediscovered in the 1980s. This volume is not only the first-ever English translation, but also the first edition in any language derived entirely from the original manuscript. Expertly rendered, with introduction and notes outlining the author’s historiographical legacy, this translation at long last affords readers the opportunity to absorb the history of one of the Americas’ greatest indigenous civilizations as told by one of its descendants. Amber Brian (Spanish and Portuguese)

Space in Modern Egyptian Fiction (2019)
Yasmine Ramadan

A critical analysis of the intersection between nationalism, literature and space in modern Egyptian fiction, by Yasmine Ramadan, November 2019. Space in Modern Egyptian Fiction explores how a literary generation from the 1960s shifted the representation of rural, urban and exilic space, reflecting a disappointment with the project of the postcolonial nation-state in Egypt.

The Rise of Euroskepticism (2018)
Luis Martín-Estudillo

Covering from 1915 to the present, this book deals with the role that artists and intellectuals have played regarding projects of European integration. Consciously or not, they partake of a tradition of Euroskepticism. Because Euroskepticism is often associated with the discourse of political elites, its literary and artistic expressions have gone largely unnoticed. This book addresses that gap.

Recent Articles by Faculty

"Das geistliche Spiel als Ablassmedium. Überlegungen am Beispiel des Alsfelder Passionsspiels (Religious Theater as an Indulgence Medium),” in Religiöses Wissen im mittelalterlichen und frühneuzeitlichen Schauspiel, ed. Klaus Ridder, Beatrice von Lüpke, and Michael Neumaier (Tübingen 2021), 259-297. Glenn Ehrstine.

"Illustrations for the Divan in Editions of Goethe’s Works during his Lifetime". Publications of the English Goethe Society (Special issue: Goethe's West-östlicher Divan and its Uses), Volume 89, Issue 2-3 (2020), 137-156. Waltraud Maierhofer.

Evidence for sk in German as a Complex Segment. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 32.1 (2020): 84-96. Sarah Fagan.

"Johann Heinrich Ramberg als interkultureller Buchillustrator der Goethezeit: Ein digitaler, vernetzter Werkkatalog." Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik 2020.LII - 1 (2020): 99-114. Waltraud Maierhofer.

[it] shakes my whole breathing being: Rethinking Gender with Translation in Anne Carson’s “A Fragment of Ibykos Translated Six WaysKonturen, Volume 10: Re-thinking Gender in Reading, (2019): 126-151. Adrienne K H Rose.

Apostrophe's Double, Konturen, Volume 10: Re-thinking Gender in Reading, (2019): 22-53. Sabine I. Gölz.

Unshackling the Ocean: Screening Affect and Memory in Guy Deslauriers’s Passage du Milieu~The Middle PassageCelluloid Chains: Slavery in the Americas through Film, edited by Rudyard J. Alcocer, Kristen Block, & Dawn Duke, University of Tennessee Press, 2018, pp. 121-146. Anny Curtis.

Narrativizing foreclosed history in ‘postmemorial’ fiction of the Algerian war in France: October 17, 1961, a case in point. Reimagining North African immigration. Identities in flux in French literature, television, and film, (Edited by Véronique Machelidon & Patrick Saveau, Manchester UP, 2018), 134-152, Michel Laronde.

On the interpretation and processing of exhaustivity: Evidence of variation in English and French clefts, Journal of Pragmatics, Volume 138, December 2018, Pages 1-16, Emilie Destruel Johnson, Joseph DeVeaugh-Geiss.

État présent du XVIIe siècle, French Review 91.2 (December 2017): 13-34, Roland Racevskis with co-authors Russell Ganim, Nicholas Paige, Volker Schröder, Eric Turcat, and Ellen Welch.

Digital Humanities Projects

Glenn Ehrstine: Digital Archive, German Iowa and the Global Midwest - Content Provider Glenn Ehrstine; site maintenance. In collaboration with Elizabeth Heineman (content provider), H. Glenn Penny (content provider). Further details can be found at https://germansiniowa.lib.uiowa.edu/.

Waltraud Maierhofer: Johann Heinrich Ramberg als Almanach- und Buchillustrator / J. H. Ramberg as Illustrator of Books and Almanacs. Interactive catalogue of works. [Ongoing Public Humanities database 2019-2020: https://rambergillustrations.lib.uiowa.edu.]

Kristine Muñoz: Medellín After Escobar, a public digital space intended to re-envision Medellin (Colombia), collecting images, oral histories and collaborative projects that show the city’s identity of innovation and industry, in contrast to memories of its violent history of narcotrafficking. https://medellin.lib.uiowa.edu/.