At the annual meeting of the American Historical Association to be held in New York January 2-5, 2009, a round-table session will be devoted to the importance of languages for the study and teaching of history

It may be hoped that this AHA session will stimulate further professional activity leading to more extensive cooperation between language teachers and historians, drawing on the experience of the round-table participants and members of the audience.

Session Title: Languages: Since Qua Non for Globalizing Historiographies

Time: 9:30-11:30 A.M. Saturday, January 3, 2009.

Place: Sheraton New York, Carnegie Room West

Co-Sponsors: German Historical Institute, Conference Group for Central European History, World History Association

Moderator: Thomas M. Adams, Independent Scholar (History)

Panelists:

Volker Berghahn is a historian of Germany (Columbia University) who specializes in German-American relations. His numerous publications on German and European history include a survey that appeared in 2006 on Europe in the Era of Two World Wars. His teaching experience includes work with American undergraduate students at the Free University of Berlin, in a program conducted entirely in German.

Carol Klee--is Professor of Hispanic Linguistics at the University of Minnesota. She is an expert on Quechua and on the contact of Spanish with other languages. She has also published extensively and served as a national consultant on curriculum and pedagogy. In charge of Spanish language instruction at the University for many years, Klee has played a leading role in the LAC program there, and she currently directs the National Resource Center on Western European Studies at the University of Minnesota.

Alida Metcalf teaches the history of Brazil at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, and has co-directed a thriving LAC program there with her colleague Nanette Le Coat in the French Department. Metcalf has won prizes for her writings on Brazil, writings that include a recent study on Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500-1600, and an earlier study entitled Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil.

Nanette Le Coat teaches French language and literature at Trinity University, and has co-directed the LAC program there with historian Alida Metcalf. Her research interests relate to the intersection of history and literature from the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. She has written about nineteenth-century perspectives on Mme du Châtelet and about the institutionalization of history at the French teacher training institution, the École Normale.

Jonathan Spence is the Sterling Professor of History at Yale, where he has taught since 1965. His writings on Chinese history, known to a large audience, include The Death of Woman Wang; The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds, and a biography of Mao Zedong. His contributions to the field have won him wide recognition, including a MacArthur fellowship. He has lectured and conducted research at Chinese universities, and served as President of the American Historical Association for the year ending in January 2005.

For the MLA statement, “Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World, see http://www.mla.org/flreport. For further information, please contact Thomas M. Adams at adamspt@earthlink.net