Glendon recognizes students with annual Engagement Awards

Glendon student engagement

Students of York University’s Glendon Campus were recognized recently for their leadership in academics and contributions to the community and to Glendon.

These outstanding achievements are highlighted through the Student Engagement Awards, where students are nominated by their peers.

This year’s awards and recipients include:

Margaret Wallace Leadership Award – awarded to a student who has demonstrated participation and leadership in campus life, with priority given to those involved in sport
Recipient: Kelsey Charette

Convocation Award of Excellence for Student Leadership – awarded to a graduating student who has been an exceptional leader, one who has made a consistent and valuable contribution to the community at Glendon.
Recipients: Delphine Guet-McCreight, Carli Gardner and Anais Dagrou

Emerging Leader Award – recognizing the contributions of a student who has recently become involved in student activities and demonstrates commitment and leadership potential.
Recipient: Ana Kraljevic and Kelly Akerman

Outstanding Contribution Awards – acknowledging the achievements of committed students who have had a positive impact on the student experience at Glendon by generously dedicating their time and talents.
Recipients: Dael Vasquez, Juliana Simoes-Dadgar, Bailey Campbell, Rebecca Kazdan, Megan Schwegel and Stephen Teong

Prix Molière – awarded to a student who has made important contributions to Theatre Glendon.
Recipient: Meghan Williams

Robert Wallace Award of Merit – given to a Glendon student demonstrating a strong record of involvement in, and positive contribution to, Theatre Glendon.
Recipients: Allison Holden and Vincenzo Sansone

John Proctor Award – awarded to a returning Glendon student for outstanding contributions to the Glendon Athletic & Recreation program in terms of organization, leadership and program promotion.
Recipient: Nathalie Sciberras

Ian Bingham Memorial Award – awarded to a Glendon student who promoted Glendon sports activities at the local and/or inter-college level.
Recipients: Catherina Blair and Tamara Donnelly

Education student wins Ontario Modern Language Teachers’ Association award

Image announcing Awards
Magdalena Kisielewska-Zaranek
Magdalena Kisielewska-Zaranek

Magdalena Kisielewska-Zaranek, a student in the Faculty of Education’s bachelor degree program at York University’s Glendon College has been awarded the Ontario Modern Language Teachers’ Association (OMLTA) Helen G. Mitchell Award.

The award is given annually to one graduating student from each education faculty in Ontario who is qualified to teach French as a Second Language (FSL) or as an international language in recognition of their dedication to, interest in and passion for second language teaching.

“I am very honoured that the Faculty chose me to receive the Helen G. Mitchell Award,” said Kisielewska-Zaranek. “My dedication to studies and to my students wouldn’t be possible without the support from my family.

“I am passionate about languages, in particular French, and I look forward to continuing to share this passion with my students, with the hope that they will become lifelong language learners,” she continued.

Kisielewska-Zaranek recently completed the final year of the consecutive bachelor of education, French as a Second Language program in the junior and intermediate division. She holds honours bachelor of arts and master’s degrees both in French Studies from York University.

Kisielewska-Zaranek has worked as a language instructor for the International Language and French Conversation Programs at the York Catholic District School Board, and as a tutor for French immersion students. She is currently providing her students with opportunities to continue learning French through distance learning.

“Magdalena is a conscientious student who works diligently to create creative, engaging and stimulating activities for her students,” said Cécile Robertson, Faculty of Education course director. “I had the pleasure of working with her and seeing her in the classroom context during practicum. At all times, she is respectful, kind and attentive towards student needs.

“She will be such an asset to the teaching community and in particular in the FSL context where her passion for French teaching and learning will inspire and motivate all who come in contact with her,” Robertson added.

Passings: Dorin Uritescu

passings

The following tribute was written in collaboration by Professor Sheila Embleton, Professor Philippe Bourdin, Professor Sylvie J. Rosienski-Pellerin and Adjunct Professor Eric Wheeler.

Glendon College’s Department of French Studies and Programme in Linguistics and Language Studies are mourning the passing of Professor Dorin Uritescu, who died on April 15.

Dorin Uritescu
Dorin Uritescu

Prof. Uritescu is remembered by colleagues as a wonderful linguist, a passionate teacher and, for many, a friend. And what a friend he was. He was admired by all those who knew him for his erudition, his sense of ethics and justice, his humility and his thoughtfulness.

Methodical and tireless in his work, Prof. Uritescu was a humanist in the truest sense of the term – a man of great culture and exceptional depth of thought and feeling, an educator whose brilliance and graciousness were such as to leave a lasting mark on colleagues and students alike. He changed them for the better, as he did universities generally, institutions whose vitality and centrality he always strove to uphold. While he had a special fondness for his Romanian fieldwork in the mountains of Transylvania and Crișana, he also knew how to engage in authentic collaboration with colleagues working within theoretical frameworks different than his own – a talent as precious as it is rare.

His contribution to the Glendon community and to York University mirrored his personality: generous, positive and wise. It was made in equal measure of rigour and determination. He was unwavering in his dedication to the Linguistics Programme, where he was coordinator, and the Department of French Studies, where he was Chair. Prof. Uritescu also co-founded the Centre for Research on Language and Culture Contact, and created the lectureship in Romanian Language and Culture, unique among Canadian universities, for whose creation we are all especially indebted to him.

Prof. Uritescu’s career began in 1977 at the University of Timișoara, where he taught until 1989, with an interruption between 1982 and 1984, when he was visiting professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago. Arriving in Toronto in 1991, he taught at Glendon and the Faculty of Arts, before accepting a tenure-track position at Glendon in 2000 and eventually being promoted to the rank of full professor in 2004. He held two doctoral degrees: one from the University of Timișoara, in 1978, and the other from the Sorbonne (Paris III/Sorbonne-Nouvelle), which he obtained in 1994, with the equivalent of summa cum laude. In 1998, he was awarded a prize from the Romanian Academy in recognition of the first volume of his New Romanian Linguistic Atlast: Crisana. Also, Aurel Vlaicu University, in Arad, awarded him the title of honorary professor in 2001.

His masterwork is undeniably the New Romanian Linguistic Atlas: Crișana, with the first four volumes published and the fifth  close to completion, a task now entrusted to his collaborators at the University of Cluj-Napoca. One need go no further than Glendon’s library to behold the monument that is the Atlas – the result of meticulous field research that he conducted primarily himself for the first 15 years before taking on a supervisory role. Drawn in Chinese ink, each map is a work of art. But the Atlas has also delineated new frontiers in technological innovation in dialectology: with the help of Professor Sheila Embleton and Adjunct Professor Eric Wheeler, Prof. Uritescu dedicated the last years of his life to digitizing it in its entirety, proving himself a true pioneer in his field once again.

Not content with the Atlas, which itself would unquestionably have secured his international stature as a scholar, Prof. Uritescu authored three books and co-authored two more. His list of printed publications includes more than 60 articles and 26 book chapters, authored and co-authored. He enjoyed such recognition as a linguist that it is an afterthought to mention that he received two Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Standard Research Grants (2003-08 and 2008-12) and two SSHRC Insight Grants (2012-16 and 2019-24).

Prof. Uritescu owed his ability to produce such a wealth of scientific work to his deep knowledge of Romanian and French and, more broadly, Romance languages, both from a synchronic and diachronic perspective. He owed it to the breadth and depth of his theoretical knowledge, which was profoundly rooted in the European structuralist tradition and spanned the fields of phonology and morphology, Romance linguistics, historical linguistics, language typology, dialectology and geolinguistic variation. He owed it to his steadfast respect for facts and to his distaste for approximation. Finally, he owed it to the exceptional fecundity of his mind, which was evident to all those who knew him and who worked alongside him over the course of his long, yet too soon interrupted, career.

Glendon College and York University have lost a great intellectual and an incomparable teacher.

Artists join Glendon author for virtual book launch

books literacy
A stack of books
Gabriel Levine
Gabriel Levine

Gabriel Levine, an assistant professor of drama at York University’s Glendon College, is celebrating his new book, Art and Tradition in a Time of Uprisings (MIT Press, 2020), with a virtual launch on May 21 at 3 p.m.

Levine will be joined on Zoom by interdisciplinary artist and singer/songwriter Cheryl L’Hirondelle and will be complemented with visuals by shadow artist Annie Katsura Rollins.

The event, open to the public, will be moderated by Glendon Assistant Professor Elaine Coburn. Those who wish to attend can RSVP to research@glendon.yorku.ca.

In Art and Tradition in a Time of Uprisings, Levine examines collective projects that reclaim and reinvent tradition in contemporary North America, both within and beyond the frames of art.

Levine shows how experimenting with practices that have been abandoned or suppressed can offer powerful resources for creation and struggle in the present. He describes the yearly Purim Extravaganza, which gathers queer, leftist and Yiddishist New Yorkers in a re-appropriation of the springtime Jewish festival; the Ottawa-based Indigenous DJ collective A Tribe Called Red, who integrate pow wow drumming and singing with electronic dance music; and the revival of home fermentation practices from microbiological, philosophical, aesthetic and political angles.

Art and Tradition in a Time of Uprisings
Art and Tradition in a Time of Uprisings

Levine is a co-editor of Practice in the Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press Documents of Contemporary Art book series, and has written for publications including the Journal of Curatorial Studies, Performance Research, PUBLIC: Art/Culture/Ideas, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies and Canadian Theatre Review. He has released recordings on Constellation Records and other labels, and his puppet and object-theatre projects have toured festivals in North America, Europe and the Middle East. He is currently program coordinator of Drama Studies at Glendon College and co-curator of the Concrete Cabaret performance series.

L’Hirondelle is an award-winning and community-engaged interdisciplinary artist, singer/songwriter and critical thinker whose work investigates and articulates the intersections of nêhiyawin (Cree worldview) and contemporary time-place incorporating sound, Indigenous languages, music and technology old and new.

Rollins is a researcher, theatre and puppetry artist and practitioner of Chinese shadow puppetry who recently completed a PhD at Concordia University on the precariousness of safeguarding traditional puppet forms.

Art and Tradition in a Time of Uprisings is available for purchase from MIT Press.

Glendon takes second place at annual Translation Games

Microphone

Glendon College’s translation team travelled to Quebec March 6 to 8 to compete in the 15th annual Translation Games, the largest inter-university translation competition in Canada, and came home with a second-place finish – Glendon’s best performance ever.

This year’s games were hosted by the Université de Sherbrooke and brought together teams from eight of the undergraduate translation programs in Canada.

Co-Interim Principal of Glendon Campus Ian Roberge
Interim Principal of Glendon Campus Ian Roberge

“Our School of Translation has been doing increasingly well at the games in the past few years,” said Glendon Interim Principal Ian Roberge. “We took third place in 2018 and our teams’ continuing success at the games speaks to Glendon’s ability to attract the best and brightest. We are very proud of this achievement and of the quality of our Translation program.”

The games feature individual and team events where students translate from English to French or from French to English. Faculty members from participating universities assess and rank the anonymized translations.

The Glendon team members were Rachael Buxton, Tess Foster, Dafna Godovich, Nicole Jung, Adam Kozak and Jean-François St-Arnault. In addition to taking two of the top prizes for individual literary translation into English (Rachael Buxton, first place, and Adam Kozak, third place) the Glendon team took first place for “creation of neologisms” in both English and French, first place for their translation of advertising into English, and second place for audiovisual translation into English.

“After helping our team prepare for the Games, it’s exciting to celebrate their success,” said Professor Lyse Hébert, Chair of Glendon’s School of Translation. “This friendly competition lets them demonstrate their skills as individuals, as well as their ability to work in teams. It’s experiential education at its best.”

Facing the future of technology at Translation Studies conference

Translation & Technology
Translation & Technology

Students in York University’s Master in Translation Studies program at Glendon College are hosting the 11th annual Graduate Student Conference in Translation Studies on March 14. The single-day multilingual event, titled “Facing the Future – Translation and Technology,” will take place from 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the Glendon Campus (2275 Bayview Ave., Toronto). Keynote speaker Sharon O’Brien will make a presentation via video conference. The event will also feature the work of students in the form of paper and poster presentations.

Into the second decade of the 21st century, technology continues to play an increasing role in translation processes and translator environments. What is translatable or not translatable through the mediation of machines is a central question heading into the era of neural translation and artificial intelligence. At the same time, questions emerge around whether the existing models of collaborative translation, crowd-sourcing, machine translated corpora and cloud-based Computer Aided Translation (CAT) tools are leading towards a new era of multi-modal plurality or to a fragmented dystopia where quality becomes a casualty. Conference attendees will be invited to consider whether the interaction of human and machine in present and future translation ecologies is a harbinger of an enlightened post-humanism or a problematic process that favours disembodied networks, algorithmic decision-making and unsustainable growth in a time of runaway climate change and environmental degradation.

Sharon O’Brien
Sharon O’Brien

Keynote speaker Sharon O’Brien is a professor of translation studies at the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies at Dublin City University. She obtained a PhD in 2006 on the topic of “Controlled Language and Post-Editing Effort” (Irish Research Council Scholarship). Prior to this, she was awarded a master of arts for research on “Language for Special Purposes, Text Linguistics and Machine Translation” (1993 – EU-funded) and a bachelor of arts (honours) in applied languages (translation, French and German). Between 1995 and 1999 she was a language technology consultant in the localization industry.  She has coordinated a Horizon 2020 EU-funded RISE project called “INTERACT” – The International Network in Crisis Translation. She has been a funded investigator (Science Foundation Ireland) in the ADAPT research centre for more than 10 years, where her focus has been on human factors and translation technology. Her teaching focuses on language technologies, research methods and translation.

Conference attendees will have the opportunity to enter a free CAT Tool Licence raffle.

Those wishing to attend the conference can register online. Additional information can be found on the conference website. A calendar of events hosted by Glendon can be found on the college’s website.

POSTPONED: Experts weigh in on lack of affordable housing in Toronto during March 16 event

Panorama of Toronto skyline at sunset in Ontario, Canada
Panorama of Toronto skyline at sunset in Ontario, Canada

This event has been postponed.

What are our representatives doing to address housing affordability? How are millennials and first-time home buyers being encouraged to purchase homes? Are the policies being put in place to assist us in attaining affordable housing effective? Are these policies counterproductive?

These are some of the questions a panel of experts will explore on March 16 when the Glendon Global Debates series presents “Plaguing Toronto: Affordable Housing.”

The event will investigate the housing market in Toronto, and how the demand for housing is increasing at a much faster than the supply of housing available, resulting in residents and newcomers to Toronto being priced out of the city.

Panorama of Toronto skyline

Toronto Regional Real Estate Board’s “Market Year in Review” report stated the average selling price of a home within in the city in 2020 will exceed $900,000, which is nearly a 10 per cent increase from the 2019 average sale price of $819,319 and nearly a 45 per cent increase from the average sale price in 2015.

Many Canadians, including millennials and new immigrants, are coming to see home ownership as less and less realistic. Toronto has the highest immigration rate per capita in the world, with 43 per cent of new immigrants settling in the GTA. The shortage of rentals available, the lack of affordable housing and the development of Toronto’s neighbourhoods by big-name developers all play a role.

Join the Glendon School of Public and International Affairs, the CITY Institute at York University, the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies and the Canadian International Council on March 16 from 7 to 9 p.m. in the Moot Court at Osgoode Hall, Keele Campus, to discuss the changing real-estate landscape of the city and what should be done moving forward.

Panel members for this event include: Nemoy Lewis from the University of Toronto, Scott Leon from the Wellesley Institute, Bria Hamilton from HOUSE and Michael Kenny from York University.

The event will be moderated by Jane Farrow, Canadian author, broadcaster and community organizer.

Faculty of Environmental Studies surges into second place in the race for the NSSE Cup

NSSE_SurveyRespRates_4
NSSE_SurveyRespRates_4

Results posted for the fourth week of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) Survey show a commanding lead for the Schulich School of Business in the race for the NSSE Champion Cup. The Faculty of Environmental Studies has jumped in front of the Faculty of Science and Glendon College, moving from fourth place to second place. The Faculty of Science is now in third place with a slim lead over Glendon.

Results for the fourth week of the NSSE Champion Cup Standings

From Feb. 10 to March 31, thousands of first- and fourth-year York University students are taking part in the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), or “Nessie”. Through NSSE, they’ll be able to contribute their insight and have input into York University’s future direction.

To add an element of fun to the survey and to encourage participation in the survey, NSSE organizers at York University challenged the individual Faculties (except the Faculty of Education and Osgoode Hall Law School) to compete for the NSSE Champion Cup.

The Faculty with the highest participation rate will win the NSSE Champion Cup and bragging rights until the next survey.

The online survey, which takes about 15 minutes to complete, allows students in their first and final years of a four-year degree to offer their insight into what York University does well and what it could improve. It will be used to determine how much time and effort students put into educationally rewarding activities and to what degree York University facilitates this involvement.

Updates on the progress of the survey and the NSSE Champion Cup will be published every week in YFile.

Brazil Globalization Seminar features work of three visiting researchers

seminar York University

Three visiting researchers will present talks on March 6 during the the HIST 4630 Brazil Globalization Seminar (Glendon Historian Gillian McGillivray’s Toronto Brazilian History Workshop V), with support from Glendon College and York’s Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC).

The event, titled “Struggles over Food, Fuel & Transportation in Brazil,” runs from 1 to 3 p.m. in A301 York Hall.

The event will include the following talks:

  • “Overpopulation or Overconsumption? A Brazilian Scientist’s Critique of Overpopulation Discourse during the Early Cold War, 1948-1973,” by Eve Buckley, University of Delaware author of Technocrats and the Politics of Drought and Development in Twentieth-Century Brazil (University of North Carolina Press, 2017)
  • “Food and Hunger During Brazil’s Ethanol Boom, 1975-1985,” by Thomas Rogers, Emory University, author of The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil (Univeristy of North Carolina Press, 2010)
  • “Bus Rapid Transit and Rights to the City: Comparing Rio de Janeiro and Curitiba,” by Bryan McCann, Georgetown University, author of several books including Hard Times in the Marvelous City: From Dictatorship to Democracy in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro (Duke University Press, 2013) and The Throes of Democracy: Brazil since 1989 (London: Zed Press, 2008)

For more, visit the Facebook event page.

 

Save the date: Glendon Campus Community Conversation planned for March 26

Glendon Campus in the winter
Glendon Campus

Join members of York’s senior leadership team and me on the morning of Thursday, March 26 for our Glendon Community Conversation to discuss our shared priorities and Glendon’s central role in York’s future.

Community Conversations provide all members of our community an opportunity to discuss our collective goals, so we invite all students, staff and faculty to join us:

Glendon Community Conversation
Thursday, March 26, from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m.
Sky Room (A300, York Hall)

This is a reminder that all York community members are also invited to the Community Conversation at the Keele Campus:

Keele Community Conversation
Wednesday, March 11, from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m.
Collaboratory, Scott Library (Second Floor)

For more information and to RSVP, go to the Community Conversations website. While you are there, please let us know what topics or questions you would like to see addressed during our discussion.

Sincerely,

Rhonda L. Lenton, PhD
President & Vice-Chancellor


Je vous invite à vous joindre à l’équipe de leadership de York et à moi le jeudi 26 mars au matin pour notre conversation communautaire à Glendon afin de discuter de nos priorités communes et du rôle central de Glendon dans l’avenir de l’Université York.

Les conversations communautaires donnent à tous les membres de notre communauté une occasion de discuter de nos objectifs communs. Nous invitons donc tous les étudiants, membres du personnel et du corps professoral à se joindre à nous :

Conversation communautaire au campus Glendon
Jeudi 26 mars 2020, de 10 h à 12 h
Sky Room (YH A300)

Nous rappelons également que tous les membres de la communauté de York sont invités à la conversation communautaire au campus Keele :

Conversation communautaire au campus Keele
Mercredi 11 mars 2020, de 10 h à 12 h
Collaboratory, bibliothèque Scott (Deuxième étage)

Pour obtenir de plus amples renseignements et répondre à cette invitation, rendez-vous sur le site Conversations communautaires. Profitez-en aussi pour nous indiquer les sujets ou les questions que vous aimeriez voir aborder lors de notre discussion.

Veuillez agréer mes sincères salutations,

Rhonda L. Lenton
Présidente et vice-chancelière