Kudos

Cristanne Miller, SUNY Distinguished Professor and Edward H. Butler Professor in the Department of English, has been awarded the Fulbright-Tocqueville Distinguished Chair in American Studies to teach for one semester at the University of Paris Diderot (Paris 7).

She also has received a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies to continue work on her readers’ edition of Emily Dickinson’s complete poems.

UB will be the new institutional home of the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA), a scholarly organization for professionals in the field of English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and all other modern languages in colleges and universities in New England, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Eastern Canada.

Carine Mardorossian, associate professor of English, was instrumental in bringing the organization to UB. A former president of NeMLA, she will serve as the association’s executive director from the academic year 2014-15 through the academic year 2017-18.

Walter Hakala, assistant professor of English and specialist in south Asian languages and literature, has received grants through the vice provost for university libraries and the Internationalization Fund of the vice provost for international education.

He will use the grants to travel to India in July and August to purchase materials in south Asian languages for the UB Libraries and to visit Banares Hindu University, the alma mater of President Satish Tripathi, and one of eight Indian institutions with which UB has partnership agreements.

Shayani Bhattacharya, a graduate student in the Department of English, researched and co-wrote “Adda: Calcutta, Kolkata,” a multiple award-winning documentary by Surjo Deb and Ranjan Palit that recently won the Golden Palm Award at the Mexico International Film Festival.

The film is a free-flowing, intimate portrait of a city and its people that employs the Bengali phenomenon of “adda,” a form of intellectual exchange that originally took place among members of the same socio-economic strata, although the process has democratized in modern times.

These informal conversations—a prominent leisure activity in India and Bangaladesh—go on for hours at a stretch on street corners, at markets, in homes and cafes, and are thought to have originated in ancient Greece, although some argue that its origins are in the ancient Kolkata.