Session 3

Orianna Cacchione’s curatorial practice is committed to expanding the canon of contemporary art to respond to the global circulations of art and ideas.

Anastasia Giannakidou studies linguistic meaning from formal semantic and philosophical perspectives. With background in ancient Greek philology and philosophy of language, she is interested in how meaning is represented in language, and what the relationship is between meaning and syntactic form.  While her main focus is the Greek language, Giannakidou has also worked on Dutch, French, Italian, Korean, Mandarin, and Basque.

Ahmed El Shamsy is an intellectual historian of Islam, researching forms of literacy, the history of the book, Islamic law, and theology.

Christopher Faraone focuses his research on ancient Greek poetry, religion and magic—topics about which he has spoken and published extensively.

Colin Shelton’s scholarly work applies insights from Second Language Acquisition to the teaching and learning of ancient languages. He has also published work about ancient Roman etymologizing and the semantics of Latin wordplay. His current projects focus on developing teaching materials to promote extensive reading in Latin and Ancient Greek, and to help ancient language teachers incorporate communicative approaches and multiliteracies teaching more easily into their repertoire.

Verónica Moraga designed and teaches the course Latinx and Spanish Language for Social Workers. Her current research and practice include curriculum for language for specific purposes, content-based strategies for language instruction, community-based learning, and interculturality. She is Assistant Instructional Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and has been teaching at the University of Chicago since 2008.

Darcy Lear has developed and taught courses, which include a survey course, Spanish for the Professions, and a course for the UChicago Law School. Her books include the pedagogical guide, Integrating Career Preparation into Language Courses (Georgetown University Press, 2019) and the introductory Spanish textbook, Conéctate with Grant Goodall (McGraw-Hill, 2022).

Ahmet Dursun’s work focuses on computer-assisted language teaching, testing research and practice, and test validation and has appeared in multiple peer-reviewed journals, edited volumes, and books. He is the Director of the Office of Language Assessment, where he is responsible for researching, developing, and managing the University of Chicago’s language assessment programs. He is co-founder of the “Language Pedagogy Innovation Initiative (LPII)” at the University of Chicago and “Transforming Language Instruction” program sponsored by the Andrew W.

Nicole G. Burgoyne develops and implements intermediate and advanced German language courses. She teaches topics ranging from fairy tales and folklore to contemporary politics and the culture of German-speaking countries from the Cold War to the present. The organizer of an exploratory teaching group on developing language courses based on domain analysis, Burgoyne is active in developing innovative language assessments for undergraduate and graduate students. She is Assistant Instructional Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago.

Since 2013, Catherine C. Baumann has directed the Chicago Language Center (CLC)  and has dramatically expanded its programs. She currently leads two grants, “Transforming Language Instruction,” from the Mellon Foundation, and the “Language Pedagogy Innovation Initiative,” from the Provost’s office. Both support innovation in language pedagogy through an assessment-driven reverse design approach.