Modern and Classical Languages and Literature Research

Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literature

Alce su Voz (Rachel Showstack) is a community-based initiative whose mission is to improve health equity for Spanish speakers and speakers of Indigenous languages in the United States, with a focus on Kansas and the Midwest. A three-pronged approach to improving health equity for speakers of minoritized languages in Kansas includes 1) Community engagement and education, 2) Workforce development, and 3) Policy research.

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GRANTS:

2024-2025: National Endowment for the Humanities, $150,000 >Project: Stories of Language, Communication, and the COVID-19 Pandemic in Kansas Latinx Communities.

2024-2026: Kansas Health Foundation $300,000 >Project: Improving Health Equity for Latinx and Indigenous Kansans through Access to Mental Health Services, Civic Engagement, and Multilingual Education.

2023-2025: Office Assistant Secretary for Health/Office of Minority Health, $375,000 per year >Project: Improving Healthcare Language Access for Spanish Speakers in Kansas.

2022-2023: Wichita State University Community Engagement Institute/Kansas Department of Health and the Environment, Increase the Reach, $250,000 >Project: COVID-19 Vaccine Equity for Guatemalan Indigenous Communities in Kansas.

2022-2023: Kansas Health Foundation $75,000 >Project: Building Capacity to Increase Civic Engagement Among Spanish-speaking Kansans to Improve Health Equity.

2021-2023: Kansas Health Foundation >Project: Empowering Spanish-speaking Kansans

Become More Inclusive & Become More Global

Our department embraces these ideas by the very nature of its programs and faculty.

In 1895, Fairmount College offered Classical Greek, Latin, French, & German.

MCLL was created in 1984 through a merger of Romance Languages, German, and Classics.

In 2023, American Sign Language (ASL) was added to the majors offered in MCLL.

MCLL offers 11 languages: Spanish, French, ASL (our majors), German, Japanese, Latin, Chinese, Italian, Arabic, and Russian.

Basic research in the humanities is necessarily interdisciplinary: scholarship through MCLL prepares learners for advanced degrees in areas of applied language, literature, linguistics, civilization, or pedagogy.

Articles

Navarro, Enrique. ”Migrant Children and the Carceral State in the Comic Book Home” Resistance and Abolition in the Borderlands. A. Aldama and J Ordaz. Tucson: U of Arizona P (2024): 286-305.
Roussel, Brigitte. “Femmes, bagues et anneaux dans l’Heptaméron: le labyrinth rhétorique du parcours amoreux” Subject/Object and Beyond: Women in Early Modern France. N. Frelick and E. Benkov. Iter Press. Volume 1 of Réflections sur la Première Modernité (2024): 131-54.
Fonfria-Perera, Daniel. “Identidad maldita: la construcción de la masculinidad del romaní en Mar de plástico (2015-2016) y La novia gitana (2018)”. Estudios sobre género negro, Eds. À. Martín Escribà and J. Sánchez Zapatero. Editorial Dykinson (2023): 477-483.
Veliz, Marivi. ”Feeling Presences: Regina Galindo’s Acts of Becoming Someone Else, Something Else” (2023) Diaphanes. U of Chicago P.
Veliz, Marivi. “Women to Power. Art, Politics and Migration in Regina José Galindo and Tania Bruguera” Never-Ending Journey: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Central American Migration in 21st. Century. (2023) U of Arizona P.
Baldridge, Wilson. (2022) “The Language of Difference in Derrida’s ‘How To Name’: Effects of the Like/As Dyad.” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 53:1.
Showstack, Rachel. (2022). Audiovisual Assignments as Service-Learning for Social Justice in Latinx Communities. Spanish as a Heritage Language, 2:1.

Books

Showstack, R., Pascual y Cabo, D., and Wilson, D. (2024). Language Ideologies and Linguistic Identity in Heritage Language Learning. Routledge Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics.
Santos, M., Showstack, R., Martínez, G., Colcher, D., and Magaña, D. (2023). Health Disparities and the Applied Linguist. Routledge Studies in Applied Linguistics.
Czerwionka, L., Showstack, R., and Liskin-Gasparro, J., eds. (2022). Contexts of Constructed Discourse: Interaction, Pragmatics, and Second Language Applications. Routledge Studies in Applied Linguistics.
Navarro, E., Mendoza, A. and Price, J., eds. (2022) Mexican Americans of Wichita’s North End. Arcadia Publishing.
Del Aguila, R., and Miseres, V., eds. (2021). Food Studies in Latin American Literatures. Perspectives on the Gastronarratives. of Arkansas Press.