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Explaining our methodologies, our purpose, and our impact as teachers and researchers in colleges and universities has never been more necessary. Students, parents, government agencies, and political leaders are asking us to articulate the value of our research, especially our research in the humanities, and to justify what we teach and why it is right and good to teach it. Focusing on research and teaching in global languages and cultures, and on some artworks concerned with languages, this lecture calls for making a more pragmatic, and more assertive, case for knowing and learning world languages. Knowing and learning world languages are crucial to our students’ lives, to solving urgent social and technological problems, and to understanding the global dimensions of our local communities. As U.S. residents, it is not enough to know English. We must open ourselves to the languages we don’t know, to the languages many of our students know, and to the new multilingualism of our campuses and our cultures.
Rebecca L. Walkowitz is Provost and Dean of the Faculty at Barnard College, where she is also Claire Tow Professor of English. Over the past 25 years, her research and teaching have focused on aspects of cosmopolitanism, multilateralism, and multilingualism in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature. She is the author or editor of 10 books, including Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature, Bad Modernisms, A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism, and Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation. In her dual role as academic leader and literary scholar, she is writing The New Multilingualism: Knowing and Not Knowing Languages in Literature, Culture, and the Classroom, which will be published by Columbia University Press. In this book, she calls for new ways of counting, organizing, and valuing world languages inside and outside the university and traces the emergence of historically new examples of multilingual art and entertainment. Her essay on the value and social impact of research in world languages, “Gutting Language Departments Would Be a Disaster,” was published by The Chronicle of Higher Education in September 2023.