Marilyn Bierling

Professor Bierling presented a paper entitled "The Immigrant in Our Midst" at the conference on Spirituality, Justice, and Pedagogy in September 2005 and, along with Dianne Zandstra, organized and presented in a panel on curriculum revision at NACFLA in the spring. During the summer she will be teaching Spanish in Merida with IDEA Ministries.

Sandra Clevenger

Professor Clevenger presented a paper at the NACFLA conference titled: "Teaching Renaissance Literature from a Christian Perspective."

Edna Greenway (emerita)

Professor Greenway will return to Calvin to teach a CALL (Calvin Academy of Lifelong Learning) class for adults in beginning Spanish this fall called "Practical Spanish for Hosts and Guests." It will meet for six weeks from end of September until the first of November.

Olga Leder

Professor Leder will be completing her three-year term as director of the Study in Honduras program this fall.

Edward Miller, Jr.

Professor Edward Miller is preparing to take over as the director of the Study in Honduras program next fall (2007) and will be in Denia in January for interim. He presented a paper at the Michigan Academy titled: “Los Afroargentinos y los periódicos del Siglo XIX.” Professor Miller has also been working with Kori VanderKoi on a translation of José Luis García Suarez's poetry De Azul y Blanco . They are finishing the last corrections now. Additionally, he hopes to have the last draft of Argentina Diaz Lozano's short stories ready by October to show to possible publishers.

Karen Miller

Professor Karen Miller has been carrying out research on first language acquisition in Chilean and Mexican Spanish-speaking children, investigating how syllable final /s/ lenition in Chilean Spanish, but not in Mexican (City) Spanish, affects child development of plural morphology. For more information see http://www.calvin.edu/~klm26/

Marcie Pyper

Professor Pyper successfully defended her doctoral dissertation in December 2005. The title of the dissertation is, "Music and Motivation in the Second Language College Classroom." Along with Cynthia Slagter she presented a paper at the International Conference on Civic Education entitled “ Teaching Moral and Spiritual Values in the Foreign Language Classroom Through Biographical Narrative.” Professors Pyper and Slagter also jointly presented the paper “A Cuban Refugee Story” at the NACFLA conference at Baylor University.

Lourdes Rodríguez

Professor L. Rodríguez earned her Master's degree from Grand Valley State University. Because most information on Hispanics in the USA concentrates on Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, her master's project looked at current information about other Hispanic groups. Professor Rodríguez is expecting her second child in November.

María Rodríguez

Professor M. Rodríguez is working on her doctoral dissertation on Literacy and the Bilingual Child.

Cynthia Slagter

Professor Slagter presented papers at four conferences this year. For the conference on Spirituality, Pedagogy and Justice her paper was titled “Approaching Interpretive Justice through Reading Aloud.” At the Michigan Academy she presented “Narrative Transvestism in Luis Goytisolo's La cólera de Aquiles .” The other two papers were presented jointly with Professor Pyper: “ Teaching Moral and Spiritual Values in the Foreign Language Classroom Through Biographical Narrative” and “A Cuban Refugee Story.” On a personal note, Professor Slagter hiked the Camino de Santiago from Ponferrada to Santiago de Compostela, thereby earning her Compostela.

Dwight TenHuisen

Professor TenHuisen is on sabbatical during the spring and fall Semesters 2006. He received a Fullbright Award and will be going with his family to Germany to do research at Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel for a monograph project “The Sixteenth-Century European Travel Narrative: A Comparative Transatlantic Approach.” He presented the following conference papers:

“German in Early Modern Transatlantic Studies.” 9 th Annual International Congress of the Mediterranean Studies Association. May 24, 2006. Genoa, Italy.

“Stinking Corpses in Mendes Pinto's Peregrinação .” April 21, 2006. 59 th Annual Kentucky Foreign Language Conference. Lexington, KY.

“A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: A Comparative Look at the Woodcuts and Engravings in Staden's Wahrhaftige Historia. ” Modern Languages Association. December 30, 2005. Washington, D.C.

On a personal note, the TenHuisen family was blessed by the birth of their fourth child, Susannah Faith Raak TenHuisen, born on January 30, 2006. She weighed 11# 13 oz. and is a pure joy. Everyone says she is a carbon copy of her siblings. Older sisters and brothers adore her and fight over her.

Alisa Tigchelaar

Professor Tigchelaar presented a paper at a conference in Lancaster University, UK titled "Reading Spiritualities: Constructing and Representing Spiritualities through the Medium of Text: Literary, Sacred and Visual. Her paper was titled "A Tale of Two Sisters: The Dramatic Recasting of Female Identity in the 17th-Century Spanish Convent."

She is currently working on an article on Carmelite nun María de san Alberto for publication (untitled) and on a conference paper on the presentational angle of convent drama.

Dianne Zandstra

Professor Zandstra presented a paper at the Michigan Academy in March on “Women and Memory in Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo” and co-chaired a session on curriculum review (with Marilyn Bierling) at the NACFLA conference in Waco, Texas. She hopes to take a group of students to Argentina in May and June of 2007. She also has a book in the process of being published, which will hopefully appear next spring, on the grotesque as a means for social criticism in six novels by Argentine author Griselda Gambaro.

Jan Evans (Calvin College Spanish Department 1994-2002)

Professor Evans is now teaching at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. In 2005 her book Unamuno and Kierkegaard: Paths to Selfhood in Fiction was published by Lexington Books. You can read a review of it in the most recent issue of Hispania.