Welcome!
Welcome to the Faculty Seminars: Understanding and Including Forced Migrants and Refugees: Responses from the Humanities. This is a seminar series sponsored by Georgetown University.
Our speakers presented multiple perspectives from within the humanities: literature, the arts, and linguistics. They showcased the social, moral, aesthetic, and linguistic experiences of refugees and migrants.
Our goal was to foster mutual learning by the host communities and newcomers. We thrived to advance inclusive and humane discussions of the transnational, transcultural, and translingual consequences of forced displacements for both newcomers and hosts.
We welcomed active participation of Georgetown audience in the seminar events through critical reflection and commentary in interaction with our invited speakers, some of whom had lived experiences with displacement and others who had devoted themselves to the service of displaced communities.
Our Team
Co-organizers
Anna De Fina
Anna De Fina is a professor of Italian Language and Linguistics in the Italian Department and affiliated professor with the Linguistics Department. Dr. De Fina specializes in the study of narrative, discourse and identity, immigrant and transnational communities, Italian American studies and superdiversity.
Lourdes Ortega
Lourdes Ortega is a professor in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University, where she mentors undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral students conducting research on applied linguistics and multilingualism. Dr. Ortega is also Faculty Director of GU’s Initiative for Multilingual Studies.
Nicoletta Pireddu
Nicoletta Pireddu is the Inaugural Director of the Georgetown Humanities Initiative and the Director of the Global and Comparative Literature Program. Dr. Pireddu’s research revolves around European comparative literature as well as questions of national and transnational identities, in connection with issues of borders and migration.
Research Assistants
Negar Siyari
Negar Siyari is a PhD candidate in Applied Linguistics. With the help of her mother tongue in Farsi as well as her second language teaching experience, she specializes in language education for Afghan newcomers in the United States. Her doctoral dissertation focuses on the evaluation of a task-based curriculum of English for Afghan migrants.