Department Blogger and Social Media Internship Opportunity

The English Department is seeking applications for a 3-credit internship for spring 2020 (8-10 hours of work per week).  The intern will create English Department blog posts (i.e. posts like these!), update the website and Twitter, post about the department to social media, keep an internship journal, create an ePortfolio of your work, write a reflection essay about the experience, and perform other duties to promote the department as needed, including possibly critiquing the department’s existing promotional efforts.  The intern will report to the English Department chair (Dr. Entzminger).

Requirements:

• Minimum 60 credits and 3.0 GPA by end of fall 2019
• English Major in Literature, Creative Writing, or Professional Writing and Digital Rhetoric
• Strong writing skills
• Experience creating blog posts or editing web pages
• No previous internship credits
• Good work ethic and initiative

Don't miss out on the opportunity to run this blog! To apply, send a resume and cover letter explaining why you are interested in the position and detailing your qualifications by December 1 to Dr. Entzminger at bentzmin@bloomu.edu.  In addition, ask one BU professor to email a letter of recommendation on your behalf to Dr. Entzminger.  

Meet Our Professors: Dr. Costanzo

Dr. Angelo Costanzo, Associate Professor of English

“My grandfather was a coal miner. He came to this country to work in the mines. He’s from Pittston. I grew up hearing about all these places, and to finally be here and doing research in them, it kind of feels like I’m meant to be here. Basically, I’m studying my grandfather. And that’s so cool.” 

Q. You studied linguistics during your undergraduate, what introduced you to this subject?
A. I’ve always been interested in languages. I got into linguistics through studying other languages; I studied Spanish for a really long time and a teacher suggested that I look into linguistics, as an undergraduate. When I started my undergraduate degree I was a major in Aerospace Engineering and I did not like that, so I went back to what I liked which was languages and linguistics.


Q. What has been your favorite course to teach so far?
A. I really like teaching History of English, because it’s the closest match up to what I’ve studied in the past. My background is mostly not in english, it’s in other languages, and I get to incorporate a lot of what I know of other languages in the History of English, because if you go back far enough a bunch of other languages used to all be one language. I also really enjoy teaching Structure of English, which I teach as kind of an introductory linguistics class.


Q. What brought you to BloomU?
A. What’s interesting is that when my family came to America they settled in this region. I was raised in Southern California, but I ended up coming back to where my family originally was from, which is kind of cool, it’s kind of come full circle. I like the area; I like Northeastern Pennsylvania. I feel like I belong here, even though I grew up some place very different from here.


Q. What projects are you currently working on? 
A. I’m working on a bunch of stuff right now, what I really want to be focusing on is a study of linguistic variation in the coal region. I have a personal connection the coal region; I like to do research wherever I am, I think it’s important to engage the community with the research. So I’m looking forward to in the future doing a lot of research in the coal region. I also have projects I’m working on based off my dissertation, which is based on Romania. So I do a lot of study of Romanian, the verb system, which is pretty boring, but I’m really excited to finally work on the coal region.


Q. What do you do in your spare time?
A. I have three children, so most of my spare time is spent with them. I enjoy cooking; I watch basketball a lot. Yeah, mostly try to spend time with my children. Every year I try to go to the Linguistic Society of America conference.


Q. If you were sponsored to travel anywhere to study linguistics for an extended period of time, where would you choose to go?
A. My favorite place, the place I’m most interested in, that I’ve spent some time in the past is the Balkans. I would love to go back to places like Macedonia and Albania, and study linguistics there. That area of the world interests me a lot. The culture is really, really interesting. It’s such a mixture...I found that was fascinating. I was lucky enough to spend some time there already; I fell in love with the area.


Q. What is your favorite thing about teaching at Bloom?
A. I think the students are great. The students are interested, they’re enthusiastic, they’re willing to mess around with language. A lot of learning linguistics is messing around, doing puzzles. I found the students here are willing to try.


Q. Do you have any visions for the linguistics program at Bloom?
A.  I want there to be more collaboration with other departments. The linguistics minor is already a collaboration between our department and Speech Pathology, I would love for there to be opportunities to make those connections stronger. I think co-teaching classes, these kinds of collaborations...We have so many interesting faculty doing so many interesting things.


Thank you to Dr. Costanzo for the interview!

Faculty News: The Chicago Accent

We are happy to announce that Dr. Durian was recently interviewed for a segment on NPR about his work (with Richard Cameron of the University of Illinois, Chicago) on the Chicago Accent. It appeared on NPR's Chicago affiliate, WBEZ 91.5, this past week.

In Dr. Durian's words: "In terms of what we are researching--we are looking at how the way Chicagoans pronounce vowel sounds has changed since the late 1800s. We are using a number of archival recordings that were made by the researcher Lee Pederson in the 1960s, and then we are comparing recordings we have made our selves in recent years with the older recordings. In doing so, we can actually explicitly trace how language change has been happening, since there's a roughly 50 year time period between when our recordings and Pederson's were made.

"In addition, we can look at how vowel pronunciations have changed across generational groups in Chicago. Since all of Pederson's subjects were born between 1875 and 1945, and all of our present day subjects were born between about 1920 and 1990, we can break up all the subjects into generational groups. So we are basically able to look at language change across 5 generations of speakers this way.

"To do the analysis, we use a computer program called PRAAT that lets us analyze digital sound files of all the subjects and take measurements of speaker vowels, called formant measurements. These basically allow us to use Hz measurements to see how people's tongues were aligned in their mouths as they produced the vowel sounds, and then we can compare those measurements across different subjects. Then we can also plot those measurements in graphs, and get an idea of what a subject's entire vowel system looks like, and again, make comparisons across speakers. We make comparisons by subject age and sex, as well as other social factors, like social class or ethnicity.

"I am completing this work as a part of a collaboration with a linguist at University of Illinois at Chicago named Richard Cameron. I grew up in Chicagoland, and had been working there at several schools before I came to Bloomsburg, which is how I got involved in the research. We are still in the process of completing our analysis, but we hope to be done sometime in the next few months."

You can check out the audio for this interview here!

News Event: S-Backing

Photo by meo from Pexels

What better payoff can there be then seeing your work cited in another article?  Today, we are happy to announce that our new linguistics professor, Dr. Durian, found his work cited in "Shtraight Talk on S-Backing," an article published on The Chronicle of Higher Education website this past August.  The article as a whole discusses the linguistic phenomenon where the pronunciation of [s] becomes "sh" in some dialects of American English.  If you pronounce grocery as groshery, you are s-backing - and quite a few Americans do this.  The author, Ben Yagoda, recalls several contemporary figures (including Michelle Obama) who do this and concludes (with citation from Dr. Durian's article) that it is a linguistic feature with strong correlation to urban identity.

Give the entire article a read here!