Discover What’s New With Literatures, Cultures and Language Studies
The Faculty of Literatures, Cultures, and Language Studies (LCL) within the College of Arts & Sciences is stepping into the new academic year with a lineup of events that showcase the richness of human expression across languages, cultures and disciplines.
From translation workshops to an international lecture series, the LCL, which offers an expansive range of major and minor programs in languages and literary and cultural studies, is committed to bringing together students and scholars in dialogue about the role of language in shaping our understanding of the world.
Marden Nichols, the new convener of the program and chair of the Department of Classics, emphasized adaptability as central to the LCL’s mission.
“I feel that the LCL is very well placed to create tailored education that gives students a fuller sense of human culture and its potentialities,” Nichols said.
Translation Seminar Series
The “Between Differences, Across Divides: A Translation Seminar Series” debuted this semester with “Creative Crossovers: Translators as Fiction Writers.”
The event, organized by the Georgetown Humanities Initiative with the support of a Global Humanities Faculty Seminar Grant awarded by Georgetown University’s Office of the Vice President for Global Engagement, featured two distinguished literary translators and authors, Jennifer Croft and Lily Meyer.
It helped draw attention to the artistry and complexity of translation, asking what happens when translators, who are so often behind the scenes, step into the spotlight as authors. The “Translation Seminar Series” highlights how the LCL reaches far beyond grammar drills or vocabulary lists.
“It is not just about the act of learning vocabulary and syntax,” Nichols said when asked about the meaning of language learning. “It is fundamentally interdisciplinary. Films, novels, culture through food, business practices and norms across the world all become part of how we engage.”
The series will give students further opportunities to learn directly from practitioners shaping the field, with one upcoming session in the fall – “Domesticating/Foreignizing” on November 4 – and additional workshops and panels planned for the spring.
Islamic Studies Lectures and Theology in Arabic
The “Islamic Studies Lecture Series” remains a cornerstone of the LCL’s engagement with religious and intellectual currents. The series – launched in 2010 by Felicitas Opwis, chair of the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies – reflects her commitment to bringing leading scholarship to the Georgetown community.
In September, the series featured Rushain Abbasi, an assistant professor of religious studies at Stanford, on “The Kingdom of Heaven and Earth: On the Life of Islam.” It will continue this month with Walid Saleh from University of Toronto on “The Late Meccan Suras of the Qur’an: A New Reading” on October 29.
More lectures are planned in the spring, keeping with the tradition of five to seven per year.
“The Islamic Studies Lecture Series is a way to expose the audience to the state of topics and questions in the field and various methodologies used,” Opwis said. “It aims at providing a fertile ground for discussion and scholarly exchange.”
In tandem, the “Theology in Arabic Series”, organized by assistant professor Rodrigo Adem, continues as an online forum where scholars gather monthly to explore Christian, Jewish and Muslim Arabic theological traditions.
The wonderful thing about pedagogy in the LCL is that we are bringing together internationally recognized experts across a large number of fields, all of whom are tasked with using their individual specialized knowledge and expertise to create unique pedagogy that is their domain.
Marden Nichols, LCL convener and chair of the Department of Classics
A Humanities Conference
Another highlight this fall is the conference, “What’s Work? Humanistic Approaches to Understanding Work” on October 30–31. Organized by Georgetown’s German and English departments, together with the Fritz-Hüser-Institut in Dortmund and the Georgetown Humanities Initiative, the event asks how the humanities offer distinctive insights into work’s human dimensions.
“This symposium is an inspiring example of collaboration across departments for an event that will bring together faculty, students and non-Georgetown scholars from the U.S. and Europe,” said Nicoletta Pireddu, director of the Georgetown Humanities Initiative. “It embodies the intercultural dialogue to which Georgetown is committed and explores a quintessential human experience – work – that is central to the definition and dignity of the person, in line with Georgetown’s values.”
While the social sciences often emphasize structural aspects of labor, the humanities delve into narratives, meaning and representation — through novels, films, poetry and performance — to explore work as lived experience.
Featured speakers include Sonali Perera, author of No Country: Working-Class Writing in the Age of Globalization, Sarah Ann Wells, author of Media Laboratories: Late Modernist Authorship in South America and Jasper Bernes, author of The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization. They will discuss working-class writing, labor in cultural forms and the aesthetics of work under deindustrialization.
The conference comes at a moment when questions of meaning, labor, automation and human flourishing are increasingly urgent.
“The humanities play a vital and intellectually generative role across disciplines,” Pireddu said, “because they foster critical inquiry, ethical reflection and a nuanced understanding of human culture, history and expression.”
Looking Ahead
For students looking to expand their horizons, the LCL is not only a place to learn languages but also a community where conversations across cultures come alive.
There will be no shortage of opportunities for student engagement.
LCL departments are marking the calendar with a range of special events, including a conference on the 10th anniversary of the 2015 Paris terror attacks, an Andrea Camilleri celebration and Persian Poetry and Cinema weeks.
Nichols expressed confidence in the LCL’s future.
“We are standing on the precipice of enormous change in academia,” she said. “But I believe we are well placed to continue posing the deepest questions — What does it mean to be human? How do we relate to one another across boundaries? — and to answer them through our teaching, research and events.”