Department of Foreign Languages

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Dear friends,

 

We invite your participation in the activities of our department, whether as attendees of department-sponsored events, creators of the events themselves (presentations by alumni and other friends of Foreign Languages), visitors to campus, or financial donors.

Please contact me or individual faculty members if you are interested in visiting the department.  We are extremely happy to welcome you and would enjoy having you meet students and faculty and tour our newly-renovated classroom building, Brown Hall.

If you are interested in helping to fund some of the projects and activities of the Department of Foreign languages, you may make donations through the WMU Foundation.  Please go to https://www.wmich.edu/foundation/gift/index.html and click on any of the three options: Credit Card, Annual Pledge, or E-funds Transfer.  This site also includes the name, address and phone number of the Director of Development Accounting, whom you may contact by letter, e-mail, or phone.

Below are the major initiatives for which we are seeking support:

1. Student Scholarships for language majors and minors.  Specifically, we
   are working to fund seven $3,000 grants, one for each of our language areas, and five $2,000 scholarships for participants in our Summer Translation Institute.  
2. Student Emergency Fund.  This fund will provide immediate help
   to worthy students who find themselves unable to completely cover the cost of books and other academic materials.
3. Academic and Community Activities, including the following:
   • The Summer Translation Institute, a four-week intensive program on the practice, theory, and business of translation.
   • The annual Francophone Film Festival held every March.  This four-day competitive event brings to Kalamazoo recent movies from French-speaking countries around the world, with the movie subtitles in English.
   • Conferences at WMU.  Next year, we will host two conferences oriented toward the philosophy and practice of teaching: a conference on Arabic linguistics co-sponsored by WMU and the American University of Cairo, and a symposium on Gender Studies Across Languages and Disciplines.
   • A speaker series in which we invite experts in our fields of language, linguistics, translation, teaching, literature and culture to talk with students, faculty, and members of the community.Foreign Language Days, when we invite area high school students visit our department.Southwest Michigan Roundtable on French and Francophone Studies for high school and university teachers in the region.
4. A Visiting Professorship, a position that would rotate among the disciplines and languages in the department. Perhaps the greatest need of our department is to have a larger number of full-time teachers, in order to make our programs more stable and assure their continued excellence.  Because the popularity of individual languages can change within a single decade, a rotating professorship would enable us to respond to changing student interests and needs in the area of foreign languages and connected disciplines.
5. Faculty Research Travel Fund.  Our faculty members need to travel in order to remain well informed for their students: we must pursue our research and stay current in the languages and cultures that are our specialties, often through travel abroad.

Thank you for considering the possibility of partnering with us, and we hope to see you soon on campus.

Sincerely,

Cynthia Running-Johnson
Chair, Department of Foreign Languages
411 Sprau
Western Michigan University
Kalamazoo, MI  49008-5338
269-387-3021
c.running-johnson@wmich.edu

P.S.:  Here are more specific directions for using the WMU Foundation donation site.  The Credit Card option will ask you to choose the appropriate college--College of Arts and Sciences—and then the Foreign Languages Department.  Or, if you would like to designate a particular language area or project, you can scroll down to “Other” in the list of departments and type “Foreign Languages” and the particular area. 

For the Annual Pledge and E-funds Transfer options, choose "Other” in the “Gift Designation” section.  In the next space, type in "Foreign Languages."  Then, in the same space, type the specific language area or project you want to benefit or simply "Unrestricted" if you want the department chair to use your contribution for the area of greatest need. 

Thank you for your thoughtfulness.