Session 1

Grammatical gender—a system of classifying nouns as masculine, feminine, or neuter—has long been the bane of language learners. That in German “a young lady has no sex, but a turnip has” led Mark Twain to lament “the awful German language.” But for 19th-century German linguists, grammatical gender was not capricious or irrational, but rather a deeply meaningful structure that provided insight into cultural norms and primitive forefathers.

This session addresses a single poem, Wordsworth's famous “Intimations of Immortality Ode,” a text that has supplied lines and phrases that reverberate in modern literary culture: "trailing clouds of glory," "Shades of the prison-house," "splendor in the grass," "The Child is father of the Man," and "Thoughts that ... lie too deep for tears." Taken in its entirety, the Immortality Ode is a particularly challenging lyric with complex twists and turns, a work that amply rewards the kind of critical patience and close attention we will be bringing to it.

Franz Kafka is known for his great modernist prose, his penetrating vision of the human condition, and his absurdist sense of humor. But did you know he was also an avid language learner? Over the course of his adult life, Kafka studied both Yiddish and Hebrew. Focusing on the latter, the presenter shares one of Kafka's Hebrew notebooks, which has only recently become available to researchers at the Israeli National Library in Jerusalem. The reasons for its long years of disappearance are interesting in themselves, and the speaker explains them.

Spanish has become one of the most useful languages in the U.S. While undergraduate students often search for study-abroad opportunities to practice and improve their Spanish, the interaction with local Spanish-speaking communities in the U.S. has not been explored for this same purpose. In this session, the presenter discusses exploring iconic Spanish-speaking neighborhoods such as Pilsen, La Villita, and Humboldt Park in Chicago and talks about many topics related to their history and status.

How would you describe how you look to a complete stranger? Today, we would use the familiar metrics of height, weight, and eye color. But in 4th century BC Egypt, these metrics were quite different, defining physical appearance through face shape, hair texture, location of scars on the body, among other characteristics.

Most Haitians are monolingual in Kreyòl, their native language. However, Kreyòl is not the primary language of education and administration in Haiti. Instead, French remains the main language used in those contexts, which has led to many negative consequences in Haitians’ lives from persistent low literacy levels to stratification in the society. Drawing on empirical data, the presenter will explain the discrepancy between the current language policy and language attitudes and language identity among Haitians.

This session addresses a single poem, Wordsworth's famous “Intimations of Immortality Ode,” a text that has supplied lines and phrases that reverberate in modern literary culture: "trailing clouds of glory," "Shades of the prison-house," "splendor in the grass," "The Child is father of the Man," and "Thoughts that ... lie too deep for tears." Taken in its entirety, the Immortality Ode is a particularly challenging lyric with complex twists and turns, a work that amply rewards the kind of critical patience and close attention we will be bringing to it.

At a time before the advent of a rationalized system of numbered addresses, people in cities understood the places in which they lived as a network of integrated spatial and social relationships between streets, people, institutions, and activities. This was true in 1427 in the case of the first “modern” tax census carried out in Florence. Known as the catasto, this massive experiment in developing a demographic portrait of the city required each household to declare where they stood, literally, in relation to the state and their immediate neighbor.