Language Matters IV
Reading and Teaching Toni Morrison in Translation

Participants

LM IV Agenda Handout

“Language Matters IV” End of Workshop Reflection

LANGUAGE MATTERS IV: In Translation:
Toni Morrison’s Works in Paris
By Marona Graham-Bailey

Giselle Anatol

Giselle Liza Anatol is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, KS. She has edited three popular culture collections: Reading Harry Potter: Critical Essays (Praeger 2003), Reading Harry Potter Again: New Critical Essays (Praeger 2009), and Bringing Light to Twilight: Essays on a Pop Culture Phenomenon (Palgrave, in press). Besides teaching and researching in the field of children's/young adult literature, Anatol also teaches Caribbean literature, African-American literature, and multicultural U.S. women's literature. She has published on the works of Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid, Nalo Hopkinson, and Langston Hughes, among others.

Elisabeth Bayley

Elisabeth Bayley is currently a doctoral student at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven where she is part of the research group 'Literary Studies: Literary Relations and Post/National Identities’. Her thesis is entitled "An Exploration of the Lie: Edith Wharton and Willa Cather’s Deconstruction of Social Contracts and an Entrance into the Spiritual" where she is using theorists René Girard and Jacques Lacan to explore the ways in which lying functions within the works of Wharton and Cather, in order to maintain notions of a 'norm' within a society.

Cheryl Ann Bolden

Cheryl Ann Bolden artist/curator , has a 15-year-old daughter, and has been a Paris resident since 1998. She was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1957. She is the creator “Precious Cargo”African Diaspora Artefacts, a traveling museum of original archives and objects, presenting artistic and educational programming in schools, libraries and museums internationally. She is an official speaker for Cultural Attaché American Embassy Paris. www.museumpreciouscargo.org

Shelia Bonner

Shelia Bonner teaches at Holmes Community College, Goodman, MS, as well as adjunct at Belhaven University, Jackson, MS. She recently published an article, "Lucas Beauchamp: Faulkner’s Attempt to Dishevel the South’s Customs and Racial Attitudes," in the literary journal Black Magnolias. She is presently writing a second paper for publication on Sandra Jackson-Opoku’s The River Where Blood is Born. Shelia is also an avid reader of Toni Morrison’s works; her favorite Morrison novel is: ALL of Them.

Lydia Diamond

Lydia Diamond’s plays include: Voyeurs de Venus, The Bluest Eye, The Gift Horse, Stage Black, Lizzie Stranton, and Harriet Jacobs. Producing Theatres include: Arena Stage, Huntington, New Vic, Goodman, Steppenwolf, Long Wharf, Hartford Stage, McCarter, Playmakers Rep, Kansas City Rep, Chicago Dramatists, Congo Square, TrueColors, The Matrix, and Company One. Commissions include: Steppenwolf, Humana/Victory Gardens, McCarter, Huntington, and The Roundabout. Stick Fly is published by Northwestern University Press. Diamond is a 2009 NEA/Arena Stage New Play Development Grant Finalist, a ‘06/07 Huntington Playwright Fellow, a current TCG Executive Board Member, and is on faculty at Boston University.

Odile Ferly

Odile Ferly is Assistant Professor of French at Clark University. Her research focuses on Caribbean literatures from a comparative perspective, especially the Francophone and Hispanic regions, with a particular interest in contemporary women’s writing. She teaches Caribbean texts both in translation and in the original.

Kit Frankenfield

Kit Frankenfield is a Ph.D. student in Composition and Rhetoric at the University of Kansas. She has taught English at Johnson County Community College as an adjunct professor for thirteen years and works full-time in the college's Career Development Center as a Career Information and Technology Specialist. Her love for being in the college classroom has led to her earning two master's degrees—one in English Education and the second in English, both completed at the University of Kansas. Kit's research interests include new media and infusing technology in the English classroom, material culture, visual rhetoric, the rhetoric of clothing, and strengths-based education. Her goals for the future, in addition to graduating from her doctoral program, are to publish both books and articles in her areas of interest, to become certified as a Gallup Strengths-Based Educator and to continue teaching English at Johnson County Community College. Kit considers herself a life-long learner.

Jacqueline Fulmer

Jackie Fulmer teaches Gender and American Cultures Studies at University of California, Berkeley. Her book, Folk Women and Indirection in Morrison, Ní Dhuibhne, Hurston, and Lavin (Ashgate 2007), received the 2008 Elli Köngäs-Maranda Prize from the American Folklore Society for feminist criticism in folklore studies. Her book-in-progress, Doll Culture in America (University Press of Mississippi), continues to examine indirect expression of gendered and ethnic identities. She really enjoys teaching Toni Morrison's writing and talking about teaching it with others!

Bela Gligorova

Bela Gligorova (1978) is a teacher and translator, residing in two cities, Belgrade and Skopje. In 2002, while on a Fulbright Scholarship Grant, she began her graduate studies, at the University of Kansas. Her focus, then, and later on at the University of Leeds (UK), has been fueled by two key questions plaguing the fields of performance theory and American Studies, respectively: the workings of memory in layered textuality and the incorporation of auto/ethno/biographical elements in critical pedagogy. A sample of this enquiry was published, in 2009, as part of the Life Writing: the Spirit of the Age and the State of Art, eds. Meg Jensen and June Jordan (Cambridge Scholars Publishing): Chapter V, ‘Baiting History, Baiting Memory: The ‘contact worlds’ of David Albahari’s Bo(a)rder Narratives’. Currently, she is working on staging her first play, A Family (of sorts).

Maryemma Graham

Maryemma Graham is a Professor of English at the University of Kansas. Her inspiration for Language Matters stems from her long-term professional and scholarly interest in African American writing and a desire to consistently integrate scholarly interests, teaching and community engagement (with a long family history in black education). Earlier that interest resulted in one of her books, Teaching African American Literature: Theory and Practice, based on a three year NEH project with Boston area teachers. During her tenure as President of the Toni Morrison Society (2004-2007), Graham created Language Matters, a national service initiative for the Society, with initial funding from NEH. The project has become one of the Society's signature programs, having enjoyed three successive rounds of funding, for years 2003, 2007, and 2010. It continues to bring teachers from throughout the US—and now the world—into dialogue about Morrison and other writers and about the challenges of teaching African American literature in pre-college classrooms. With 9 books to her credit, Graham's Cambridge History of African American Literature (with Jerry W. Ward, Jr.) was released in January 2010. The book on which she has worked the longest, The House Where My Soul Lives: The Life of Margaret Walker will be published by Oxford University Press in 2012. Graham is the recipient of many prestigious fellowships and awards and was inducted in the International Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent in 2010. Graham is best known, perhaps, as the founder and director of the Project on the History of Black Writing, founded in 1983, which has based at KU for the last twelve years.

Marona Graham-Bailey

With a BS in education and psychology from Vanderbilt University and an MA in journalism from the University of Georgia, Marona Graham-Bailey spends her time teaching and writing. She has taught writing at the middle and high school levels, and will be the instructor for the journalism workshop at Spelman College in Atlanta, Spring 2011. Graham-Bailey is passionate about using narrative to facilitate critical thinking and as a means of exposing ourselves to experiences beyond our own. Her work appears in a variety of publications including Rethinking Schools Magazine, Current Health II, the Athens Banner-Herald, and The Grady Journal, and focuses on such issues as race and mental illness. She will be assisting with the documentation of the Language Matters IV workshop through photography, videography, and writing.

Warren Heiser

Warren Heiser received an A. B. in History and Literature from Harvard University in 1968, concentrating on France and England in the modern period, and an M. A. in English from the University Colorado in 1973. Before attending college, he spent a year at the University of Grenoble in the program for foreign students. He has taught English at the Webb School of Knoxville, Tennessee for the past thirty-eight years.

Vanessa Hope

Vanessa Hope will be your official host for the Language Matters Workshop. She is from Ocala, Florida but has been An American in Paris for several years. Modeling originally brought Vanessa to the City of Lights, where she worked while studying until she achieved a Master's Degree in English. During her studies at the University of Charles V, which is affiliated with the University of Jussieu, she discovered Toni Morrison and wrote a memoire entitled "Song of Solomon: A Modern Bildungsroman." Vanessa is currently an English/French translator and has translated screenplays, websites, magazines and newspapers. She is anxious to welcome you to her city!

Joyce Hope Scott

Dr. Joyce Hope Scott is Associate Professor of American Studies and Humanities at Wheelock College, Boston where she teaches African American literature and Theatre, Race in America, American Popular Culture, and Literature and History of the Caribbean. She is a nationally and internationally-recognized educator, scholar, and researcher in the field of American, African-American, and Diaspora studies. Prof. Hope Scott is a Scholar of the Oxford Round Table (in England) and former Fulbright Senior Scholar/Professor to the countries of Burkina Faso and the Republic of Bénin in West Africa.

She has presented numerous, lectures, workshops, and scholarly papers at national and international conferences in Africa, Europe, Australia, India, Brazil and the Caribbean, and lectured extensively for U.S. Embassies and American Cultural Centres throughout West Africa. She created and directs an International Service-Learning and Travel Program for college & university students & professors to Ghana, Bénin and Senegal and is currently in the process of developing international summer teaching Internship opportunities in Ghana and the Republic of Bénin for undergraduate & graduate students.

Prof. Hope Scott is also the co-founder of an international nonprofit, NGO with consultative status with the United Nations’ Economic and Social Council (The NGO does development work in West Africa). She is the recipient of many awards and recognitions and author of numerous publications on African American writers and African and Diaspora literatures and culture&mdasn;among which are studies on Toni Morrison’s Novels  in The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison; “Alden Bland & the Chicago Renaissance,” in The Black Chicago Renaissance (Univ. of Illinois Press) and a ground-breaking critical volume entitled: Camel Tracks: Critical Perspectives on Literatures of the African Sahel (by Africa World Press). Her current research projects include a study of “African Spirituality in African Diaspora Novels”; translation of several volumes of sacred texts on the “Spiritual System and Ancestral Sciences of Sub Saharan Africa”; and “Travel as Subversion in Black Women’s Narratives.”

Mary Byrd Kelly

Mary Byrd Kelly is a lecturer in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Kansas. She teaches primarily upper-level language classes in French conversation, grammar and composition.  She also translates works by contemporary French intellectuals.  Her current project is a book translation about the history of film used as evidence at Nuremberg and in other war crimes trials.

Cicely Lewis

Cicely Lewis has always valued education. Teaching has been a huge part of her life and it continues to be an essential defining aspect. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in English Education from the University of Southern Mississippi, and a Master’s in English Education from Mississippi College. As her desire to learn more in order to better serve others increased, she went on to obtain her Specialist degree in Education Administration. Currently, she has been teaching for seven years.

Christina Lux

Christina Lux holds a Ph.D. in Romance Languages from the University of Oregon and teaches in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Kansas. Her primary research field is contemporary sub-Saharan literature, with additional interests in Caribbean literature, multilingual American literature, and literary translation. Her work has appeared in the International Journal of Francophone Studies, Metamorphoses: The Five College Faculty Seminar on Literary Translation, and Women's Studies Quarterly, as well as in literary magazines. She is currently translating a novel by Véronique Tadjo and writing an article on the politics of translating race and gender.

Frazier O'Leary

Dr. Frazier L. O’Leary, Jr. teaches AP Literature at Cardozo High School and is an Associate Professor of English at The University of the District of Columbia. He is a consultant for the College Board and a Charter Member of the Toni Morrison Society. He has been teaching the works of Morrison since 1978.

Portia Owusu

Portia Owusu graduated with an honours BA degree in English and American Literature from the University of Kent, Canterbury in 2008, and an MA degree from the University of York in Postcolonial Literature. Her thesis is entitled: The Politics of Going ‘Home’: Identity and Subjectivity in the African Diaspora. This examined the concept of Africa as a source of African-American identity in works by African/African-American writers including Toni Morrison. Currently, she is working in International Education and plan to undertake further study in future.

HÉlÉne Perriguey-Keene

Hélène Perriguey-Keene is an adjunct professor of French and Spanish at Johnson County Community College (JCCC). She teaches credit and continuing education classes there as well as mentors students. She also gives French classes at L'institut de la causerie française in Kansas City for retired professionals. She has been fascinated with languages ever since her family moved to Nigeria for a time and she attended an international boarding school in the south of France. She holds a bachelors in English with a minor in French for Foreigners from the Université de Besançon. While studying for the C.A.P.E.S. she became familiar with the works of Toni Morrison—whom she met for a book signing session of Beloved in Strasbourg. Hélène earned a masters degree in French with a minor in Spanish from the University of Nebraska, and worked towards a Ph.D in Spanish literature. She has also studied Arabic, German, and Italian. She loves teaching and was recently nominated for the Lieberman Adjunct Award at JCCC.

Adrienne Pierrot

Adrienne Pierrot is a French Teacher at Cardozo Senior High School where she serves as World Language Department Chairperson. Ms. Pierrot received her Bachelor's Degree at West Virginia State College in Institute, West Virginia. She spent a year in Paris, France under the auspices of Middlebury College where she received her Master's Degree. She has participated in summer programs with Georgetown University in Dijon, France, Michigan State University in Paris, France, Iowa State University in Angers, France and Université de Cocody, in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.

Ms. Pierrot has been the recipient of several awards including the Washington Post Agnes Meyer Outstanding Teacher Award, "American Teacher Awards" Disney Teacher Honoree, the NEH Foreign Language Fellowship, the Kiwanis Club Outstanding Teacher, and the Cafritz Teaching Fellowship. She was selected for the Fulbright Teacher Exchange Program and was sent to Dakar, Senegal where she taught English. Ms. Pierrot was awarded the Knight of the National Order of the Lion by decree issued by Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade under the recommendation of the Minister of Education.

Ms. Pierrot has chaperoned student groups to Paris and has organized teleconferences between her students and students in Switzerland and Senegal. Ms. Pierrot also served on the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.

Emily Robbins

Emily Robbins received a M.A. in Literature and Literary Theory with a focus on Caribbean literature/theory and auto/biography from the University of Kansas in 2007. She currently teaches British and American Literature and Composition at the Webb School of Knoxville. Her scholarly writing has appeared most recently in "Antipodas: Journal of Hispanic and Galacian Studies" and "The William Carlos Williams Review".

Julia Roth

Julia Roth is a doctoral candidate of the Ph.D. program "Gender as a Category of Knowledge" at Humboldt University, Berlin, and held a scholarship of the Potsdan Graduate School's program "Cultures in/of Mobility" (University of Potsdam). She wrote her M.A. thesis on Toni Morrison's essays as interventions in dominating literary critical discourses, taught several courses incuding Morrison's texts and has published several texts on Morrison, e.g. "Stumm, bedeutungslos, gefrorenes Weiß. Zum Umgang mit Toni Morrisons Essays im weißen deutschen Kontext." ('Mute, meaningless, empty Whiteness. On the reception of Toni Morrison's Essays in the white German context.')In: Mythen, Masken und Subjekte. Ed. by M. Eggers, G. Kilomba Ferreira, P. Piesche, S. Arndt, 2005, and recently with Carsten Junker the book Weiß sehen. Dekoloniale Blickwechsel mit Zora Neale Hurston und Toni Morrison (Seeing White. Decolonial Shifts of Persepctive with Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison) (2010).

Krista Slagle

Krista Slagle is currently working on her PhD in the Comparative Literature department at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, with a focus on Translation Studies in Post-Colonial Literature in the Caribbean. She earned her Master's degree in Literary Studies from the KU Leuven in 2007. Her Master's thesis analyzed the paratext along with a textual analysis in French Caribbean titles translated into English. Krista's interest within the framework of her PhD dissertation concerns the channeling process(es) a French-Caribbean text must undergo in order to be successfully translated into a North American context (with respective paratextual and textual analyses). She is currently looking at the works of Maryse Condé and Dany Laferrière. Krista attended the CETRA (Center for Translation Studies) doctoral translation research program in August 2008. She was a program scholarship recipient. Krista is currently teaching Translation Studies at the Institut Supérieur de Traducteurs et Interprètes through the Haute École de Bruxelles.

John Edgar Tidwell

John Edgar Tidwell is professor of English at the University of Kansas. Among his several courses, he teaches survey classes in American and African American literatures; major author courses in Gordon Parks, Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston; and an introduction to the study of fiction. Coinciding with his teaching, his areas of research are American and African American literatures. He has published six books and a considerable number of essays, book reviews, literary dictionary entries, interviews, and a bibliography. For the Kansas Humanities Council Speakers' Bureau, he has presented "Against the Odds: Writers Growing up Black in Kansas" and "Gordon Parks's Learning Tree Experience." Recently, he joined the KHC Talk About Literature in Kansas (TALK) program, conducting discussions thus far in the African American Experience series. In 2001-2002, he served as Project Director for "Reading and Remembering Langston Hughes," funded, in part, by the Kansas Humanities Council. Prior to that, he was a Resident Scholar for KHC's "Crossing Boundaries/Making Connections: African American and American Culture" program, in Spring 1996. He was born and reared in Independence.

Eliana VÃgÃlÃu

Eliana Vãgãlãu is a doctoral student in French and Italian at Northwestern University. Her current research interests include literary and cultural studies, with a focus on Francophone texts and Deleuzian theory. She has presented papers on Caribbean authors, as well as Salman Rushdie, Ousmane Sembène and Gilles Deleuze at various conferences. During the 2010-2011 academic year, she is continuing her research in Paris as part of Northwestern's Paris Program in Critical Theory, and completing her dissertation on the problematic of nomadism and the Francophone Caribbean novel.

Carmaletta M. Williams

Carmaletta M. Williams, Ph. D. has been the Executive Director for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Johnson County Community College since the Board of Trustees approved the establishment of the office in January 2008. Prior to accepting this administrative role, Dr. Williams was a Professor of English and African-American studies. She continues to teach African American Studies. She has been rewarded many times for her excellence in teaching, including the Burlington-Northern Sante-Fe Faculty Achievement Award; the 1997 Kansas Professor of the Year designation by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education; the JCCC Innovation of the Year award, and five Distinguished Service Awards. Recently, she was honored with the prestigious designation by The Kansas City Globe as one of the 100 Most Influential African-Americans in Greater Kansas City. Her publications include a guide for high school teachers, "Do Nothin’ Till You Hear from Me: Langston Hughes in the Classroom," published by NCTE in 2006, an e-book, "Of Two Spirits: American Indian and African American Oral Histories" edited with Mike Tosee, Lawrence, KS: U of Kansas, and "Mother to Son: The Letters of Langston and Carrie Hughes," co-written with Regennia Williams, as well as "Montage of a Dream: The Art and Life of Langston Hughes," edited by John Edgar Tidwell and Cheryl Ragar, University of Missouri Press 2007.