University at Albany
State University of New York
Department Languages, Literatures and Cultures

What's Inside

UHS Italian Program Workshops

UAlbany Italian Majors

Baran Receives Excellence Award

LLC Faculty Attend Hispanic Poetry Congress

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LLC hosted the First Annual University in the High School Italian Program Seminar this spring for New York State high school teachers who participate in the UHS program by offering university-level Italian courses to their students for college credit. Twenty teachers from across the state attended the May 3rd workshop, conceived and organized by Maria Keyes of LLC’s Hispanic and Italian Studies Program and held on UAlbany’s uptown campus. 

Dr. Gregory Stevens, founder and Director of the UHS Program and Assistant Dean of UAlbany’s College of Arts and Sciences, was on hand to welcome the teachers to the day’s events. Presentations by UHS teachers included “Material Used for Intermediate Italian: What Works and What Does Not” by Ferdinand Iucci of Monroe-Woodbury High School, “Teaching Italian Through Story-Telling” by Anna Barletta of Hudson High School, “L’Inferno de Dante con il Power Point” by Aldo Belardo of Yorktown High School, “Food and Culture” by Cynthia Ferraro of Lakeland High School, “How to Learn Italian with 3,000 Words” by Domenic Tebano of the Newburgh Free Academy, and “Effective Strategy for Teaching Italian at the College Level” by Leslie Crill of Clarkstown High School North. UHS Associate Director Grace Kelly updated teachers on administrative protocols for the program, such as student registration, grading, and working with UAlbany’s liaison Maria Keyes. In addition to the administrative and collegial perspectives, teachers heard from Justin Longobardi, now a junior at UAlbany majoring in Italian, who presented “A Student Experience.” Justin began studying Italian in the 7th grade. At Yorktown High School in Westchester County, New York, Justin enrolled in the UHS Italian program, taking classes with Aldo Belardo and Dominic Passarrelli. He earned six credits towards his college degree and his good grades in Italian helped to boost his GPA at UAlbany. 

Justin ultimately decided to major in Italian. “The classes are challenging and the program’s been good to me,” Justin explains, “It’s a lot smaller, there’s more individual attention from the professors.” Justin encourages fellow students to consider a major, double major or minor in a foreign language: “The language background is nice to have; it’s useful.” Justin has plans to study abroad in Italy during the spring 2003 semester, and he hopes to land a job in international business after graduation. 

By all accounts, the May workshop was a great success and very well received by the teacher participants, who especially enjoyed discussing the program from the different points of view presented: administrative, peer and student. Those in attendance expressed a high level of enthusiasm about the prospect of attending next year’s seminar, which is already being planned.
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Three-time Fulbright Award winner Henryk Baran of LLC’s Slavic and Eurasian Studies Program was one of four university faculty members to be awarded a 2002 Excellence in Research Award. The award recognizes outstanding research and scholarship by members of the faculty that is sustained over a number of years. 

A versatile teacher and researcher with expertise in Russian and Slavic literary studies, Dr. Baran has taught more than 60 courses in his long and distinguished career. He was also recognized for his research contributions last July with an honorary doctorate from the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow. 

Dr. Baran received his graduate training in the Slavic Department of Harvard University, where he studied with Roman Jakobson, an expert on Russian poetry and one of the leading scholars of language, literature and linguistics in the 20th century. Dr. Baran’s dissertation was a study of Russian futurist poet Velmir Khelbnikov, and his subsequent research has been included in 70 articles and book chapters, as well as four edited books. A founding editor of Elementa: Journal of Slavic Studies and Comparative Cultural Semiotics, Dr. Baran was also associate editor of the Slavic and East European Journal. 

His administrative experience at UAlbany includes seven years as department chair and service as graduate advisor and coordinator for the Slavic studies program. LLC faculty and staff join the entire university community in congratulating Dr. Baran on this well-deserved recognition. (Back to What's Inside)