The annual University of Alabama Languages Conference took place over the weekend, with this year’s theme being “Beyond Borders.”
“I think people have always debated about borders, and immigration has been a hot topic in not just the United States, but everywhere in world politics,” said Cheryl Toman, a French professor and the chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Classics. “We have a lot of international students, and of course American students as well, and they wanted to explore that topic together.”
This year’s conference invited students from multiple departments on campus, with a wide variety of topics being presented. Topics included the representation of Mexican immigrants to the U.S. in literature, the similarities between werewolves and skinwalkers in German and Navajo cultures and how they’re represented in media, and code-switching practices among Nigerians in French universities.
“Most of the panels we got this year are for literature, like psychoanalysis of a novel or migration and all that,” said Diweng Dafong, a third-year French Ph.D. student serving as the chair for this year’s conference. “For the linguistic part, we have people doing second-language teaching, some people doing AI.”
Joel Mensah Asmah, a graduate student at Mississippi State University, presented at the conference on the experiences of Algerians who fought for France during the Algerian War of Independence and how their post-war experiences made them effectively stateless.
“I was born in Ghana, and growing up I had many negative stereotypes about Africans who fought for colonial regimes like France,” Asmah said. “I focused on the question of belonging — is it geographic, is it spatial or can it be both together?”
The conference took place on Friday and Saturday and had 74 different speakers giving in-person and virtual presentations of their research. Speakers included UA students and faculty, along with students and faculty from as far as the University of Yaoundé I in Cameroon and the University of Strasbourg in France.
“We heard about [the UALC] from our supervisor, who’s had students from Kentucky present here before,” said Rosaline Adeleke, a Ph.D. student in French at the University of Kentucky who presented research on Gen Z’s second-language learning capabilities. “We’ve been doing our research in pedagogy, in second-language learning and acquisition, and we want to learn about the topic to be better teachers of it.”
Toman added that the University’s desirable graduate programs for language-based Ph.D.s have increased interest in the UALC.
“There are graduate programs that are really struggling to get students in the humanities, and here we’re having to reject applicants,” Toman said. “As the competitiveness of the program gets better, the more applicants we get, and the more motivated the students are to do this.”
Dafong and Toman both lauded the success of this year’s conference and how they believed it bolstered the University’s graduate and postgraduate humanities programs.
“I’m positive with the standard we’ve set for this year that next year is going to do even better,” Dafong said. “We’re very positive that we’re going to have more online presenters, more UA presenters, more outsiders coming to UA for this.”
