The 9th Lawrence R. Schehr Memorial Award Winning Essay

In the nineteenth century, France was no nation of modern language learners. This was not by any means because France was isolated from other nations: on the contrary, its increasing desire to expand its colonies, its international links through diplomacy, trade, and culture, and significant levels of immigration into France, all positioned it at the heart of a multicultural, multilingual global network. However, for much of the century, modern languages were widely considered to be a rather decorative accomplishment; it was only with France’s devastating defeat by Prussia in 1871 that the dearth of language skills among the French population began to cause widespread concern and to be seen as a worrying national weakness. Although lengthy texts and speeches mediated and scrutinized this dramatic shift for the upper classes, for the popular audiences of workers, artisans, and lower-middle class clerks and shopkeepers it was often café-concert song that confronted its novelty and its strangeness. Dozens of songs were written between 1870 and 1914 about teachers, pupils, dubious accents, and mediocre exam results. This article explores these songs - about Spanish, German, and English - to question how they reflect upon attitudes to language learning, upon popular perceptions of France’s neighboring nations, and upon the audience’s own sense of identity as Parisians and as French citizens.

2020 Max Jacob Memorial Award (P. C. Wayner, Jr.) Review: Change-of-Phase in an Extended Meniscus

The extended meniscus and the intermolecular and capillary forces that govern its behavior and connection to change of phase heat transfer have been the subject of an increasing body of research over the past 50 years. We have been fortunate to be at the forefront of this effort starting from the development of a capillary feeder, in Earth's gravity, to stabilize film boiling to running a series of transparent heat pipe experiments aboard the International Space Station hoping to better understand the role of intermolecular forces in microgravity. The use of ellipsometry and interferometry to highlight the location and state of the vapor-liquid interface have been key to these studies and have helped to uncover many new, interesting, and sometimes unexpected, phenomena associated with fluid flow and change-of-phase heat transfer.

Genetic Templates and Coded Worlds: David Hontiveros’ Seroks Iteration 1: Mirror Man as World-Driven Dystopia

In 2012, David Hontiveros revisited and expanded the world of his Carlos Palanca Memorial Award-winning short story, “Kaming Mga Seroks”, in Seroks Iteration 1: Mirror Man, which is set in a dystopic future where cloning is a booming industry, and genetic templates are pirated to create seroks or clones of clones. Mirror Man employs a fragmented style of storytelling that crafts a long-form narrative that is neither plot nor character-driven but world-driven. Through a mix of interviews, messages, recordings, and more, Mirror Man delves deeper into the world’s history and current events than it does into the lives of its recurring characters. In this way, the world of Seroks is not so much a backdrop against which the story takes place but the story’s main draw as it utilizes its dystopic setting to critique Philippine society, thus prompting the reader to reconsider the trajectory of the Philippines and reimagine its future.