The Department of French and Italian is proud to recognize the following outstanding graduate students for their continued excellence in teaching and research in the academic year of 2021-2022. 

Aristides Theodoropoulos has been awarded the Department of French & Italian Junior Award for Excellence in Teaching Italian for his competence, passion, and enthusiasm for teaching. The quality of his teaching was truly remarkable for such a young instructor, and his commitment to his students and to the language program was also reflected in his leading role as an organizer of Italian cultural activities.

Soraya Cipolla has been awarded the Department of French & Italian Senior Award for Excellence in Teaching Italian for her consistently high-quality and inspiring teaching through the semesters. Her commitment to her students, excellent organization, leading role as an organizer of Italian cultural activities, and clear enjoyment of teaching was inspiring and a pleasure to observe in action.

Williams Asamoah has received this year’s K.A. Looney Junior Award for Excellence in Teaching French for his capacity to integrate his prior teaching experiences with the content and practices in the department, and outstanding commitment to serving his students and collaborating with colleagues. Having already taught three different courses and worked on the department's proficiency exam, he demonstrated great promise for the coming years.

Anne Mutidjo has received this year’s K.A. Looney Senior Award for Excellence in Teaching French in recognition of her excellence in teaching and coordination in the French Basic Language program and upper-level undergraduate courses. She masterfully performed research-informed pedagogical practices, such as designing inductive and literacy-focused lessons, and was also able to explain them clearly to her peers and the instructors she coordinated.

This year’s Department of French and Italian Graduate Essay Award in Italian goes to Cassie Pontone, Ph.D. student in Italian Studies, for her essay: “The voice between silence and semantics: A critical reading the Decameron in relation to Adriana Cavarero’s For More Than One Voice”. Cassie’s essay seeks to carve out a space for voice and non-verbal sounds in the soundscape of Boccaccio's Decameron. Adriana Cavarero’s For More than One Voice provides the theoretical framework that illuminates Boccaccio’s sensitivity to the uniqueness and power of the embodied voice. The essay engages extensively with the vast bibliography on silence and speech in the Decameron and provides complex and innovative readings of several novellas, developed with great finesse.

One of this year’s Humanities Research Institute Fellowships for Graduate Students, an important recognition for excellence in research at the graduate level on campus, went to Amanda Smith, Ph.D. Candidate in French Studies. The fellowship will support her work on her PhD dissertation, entitled “21st Century Black Beauty Resistance: Collectivism, Individuality, and In/Visibility in Black French Women’s Body and Hair Representations.” Amanda’s thesis fits in well with this year’s HRI theme “Un/Doing”, emphasizing that "at the intersections and overlaps of activism and scholarship are calls for un/doing the status quo that threatens us all—to abolish and defund, to decolonize, divest, decriminalize, dismantle, and de-center.”

All departmental award winners have been selected by faculty serving at the Committee on Fellowships and Awards based on nominations and evaluations by mentors and coordinators, the Directors of Basic Language, and input from ICES scores. We would like to thank faculty members who participated in the nomination process, and members of the Committee on Fellowships and Awards for their hard work selecting this year’s awardees.

Congratulations!