Middlebury College Summer Language Schools Symposium

Featured Speakers:

Prof. Sinan Antoon, New York University
1:00–2:00 pm
The Effect of Globalization on Arab Cinema and Literature

Sinan Antoon's teaching and research interests lie in premodern Arabo-Islamic culture and contemporary Arab culture and politics. In 2002, he was awarded a Mellon grant to support his research in the Middle East. Professor Antoon's poems and essays (in Arabic and English) have appeared in the Nation, Middle East Report, Al-Ahram Weekly, Banipal, and the Journal of Palestine Studies, among others. He has published a collection of poems, Mawshur Muballal bil-Huroob (A Prism; Wet with Wars), and a novel, I`jam (Diacritics), both of which are forthcoming in English versions. In 2003, he returned to his native Baghdad as a member of InCounter Productions to film, coproduce and codirect a documentary, About Baghdad, which examines the lives of Iraqis in a post-Saddam-occupied Iraq. He is a senior editor for Arab Studies Journal, a member of PEN America, a contributing editor to Banipal, and a member of the editorial committee of Middle East Report.


Peter Lilienthal, Director
2:00–3:00 pm
Lucky to be Foreigner: Reflections of a Cosmopolitan Filmmaker

Peter Lilienthal, the German-Jewish director, has been making films for over four decades. In 1938, when he was nine years old, his family fled the Nazi regime to Uruguay. Since 1956, Lilienthal has been back in Germany, but the topics of his films remain international, frequently dealing with political struggles in Latin America and other parts of the world. His early films were important contributions to the New German Cinema of the 1970s.

Features such as Calm Prevails in the Country (1976), The Uprising (1980) and The Autograph (1984) won national and international awards. Lilienthal has also addressed the Holocaust and the Jewish Diaspora in films such as David (1979), which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin film festival, and The Poet’s Silence (1987).


Prof. Mario Domenichelli, University of Florence
3:00–4:00 pm
European Identity, European Identities and Cultural Memory at the Beginning of the Third Millennium

Mario Domenichelli teaches English and Comparative Literature. He is a past president of the Italian Association for the Study of Literary Theory and comparative history of Literatures. He has widely published books on various subjects, such as English Petrarchism; Conrad (1979), Golding (1979), Lowry, and James Joyce (1981); 16th- and 17th-century drama; and some 150 shorter essays. He has been the national coordinator of a research on Theatres at war (on the antitheatrical prejudice in Europe: 1500–1800). He has translated and edited The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, and the works of Galsworthy, Dickens, and Conrad. He has also published a long poem, Il cantare della Decima Classe (1991), and a novel, Lugemalé (2005), chosen among the three best “opera prima” for the Viareggio Prize; and the best “opera prima,” Alvaro Prize.


Prof. Romuald Fonkoua, Institute of French Literature, University Marc Bloch – Strasbourg 2
4:00–5:00 pm
The Quest for our own Identity: A Discourse on Postcolonial
African and Caribbean Cinema and Literature

Professor Fonkoua has published widely on 19th- and 20th-century French and Francophone literature, comparative literature, socio-linguistics, cultural anthropology, and francophone film. His publications include: Essai sur une mesure du monde au XXème siècle: Edouard Glissant; Littérature et savoir: Afrique Antilles Europe; Penser, dire, écrire la violence; Mémoire, mémoires; Albert Camus et les littératures du XXème siècle; Le philosophe nègre et le secret des Grecs. He has published numerous articles on Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Senghor, Césaire, and Ousmane Sembène.