This national award, AATG’s highest honor, recognizes innovation in teaching, extraordinary talent, and exceptional leadership in German language education. Dr. LaFountain’s nominators—from Harvard University, Georgetown University, local high schools, and the Goethe-Institut—praised her dedication to the SPARK for German community-engaged teaching program, her advocacy for language learning through pedagogy publications, and her creative, student-centered methods.

Student nominees also highlighted the impact of her teaching. “Dr. LaFountain is committed to creating an environment where students from all walks of life can engage with German language learning,” wrote one student. Another shared that Dr. LaFountain “shows students that education is more than time in the classroom; it is immersive, international, inclusive, and empowering.”

Pascale LaFountain joins German Club on a full-day outing to the Neue Galerie and German Döner Haus in Spring 2025

Avelisse Guzman ’25, currently on a Fulbright in Germany, describes Dr. LaFountain as “one of the most encouraging and inspiring professors I have had during my undergraduate studies,” noting her “boundless creativity” and that she “genuinely wants every student to succeed.”

Bailey Dunn ’25, currently working with the , appreciated the experience of being mentored by LaFountain in the SPARK for German program, saying it “helped me to apply my language skills in a practical environment, allowed me to take on teaching and leadership roles as a student, and was a fulfilling way to connect with the community beyond the university.”

Dr. LaFountain, who also received Montclair’s inaugural Presidential Award for Teaching Excellence in May 2025, said, “I am so excited about this award, most of all because it reflects how much our students can achieve and how playful applied learning can also be highly effective, opening doors for students to pursue multi-lingual and intercultural opportunities of all kinds.”

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On being recognized by the University, LaFountain shares, “It is the greatest honor to be recognized for my teaching, which I could not do without the deep diversity and cultural curiosity our students bring to class every day. Alongside this Presidential Excellence Award, the greatest recognition is seeing my students regularly experience exceptional success on a national and international level. I am particularly proud to see our students show how ready they are to present their research at national conferences, win international scholarships, and thrive in fully funded graduate programs.”

On May 19, the University will honor its employees on the inaugural Red Hawk Recognition Day. The goal of this day is to thank and recognize each other for our commitment to our students and our mission. Read about the other employees who will be celebrated on Red Hawk Recognition Day.

Funded by the and housed under the MLA’s new initiative, the grants provide up to $10,000 to support faculty members with the development of new structures, programs and resources that bolster the recruitment, retention and career readiness of undergraduate students, especially students of color, first-generation college students and Pell Grant recipients.

Led by Professor of World Languages and Cultures Elizabeth Emery, the Montclair team – which also includes faculty members Kathleen Loysen, Wing Shan Ho, Thomas Herold, Enza Antenos and Pascale LaFountain – will use the funds to develop a cocurricular career resources hub, which will offer tools for defining career pathways for students in modern languages.

The recipients of Pathways Step Grants will present their projects at the 2025 MLA Annual Convention, to be held in January of 2025.

“We are honored and delighted to have been selected for a MLA Pathways grant,” says Emery. “The funding will support the construction of new resources, like a language careers calculator to help students understand how best to hone and leverage their language skills in the workplace, and improve communication with partners on campus and in local communities. We are particularly excited to improve the career prospects of multilingual students in New Jersey, a state in which more than 200 languages and dialects are spoken.”

Montclair offers a diverse range of programs spanning 13 languages – Arabic, ASL, Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. In addition to language study, students focus on the business practices, journalism, technology, health care, literature, cinema, music, art, cuisine and other cultural aspects of the countries in which these languages are spoken. They can major, minor or even double-major in individual languages, in translation studies or in Montclair’s bachelor’s in Language, Business and Culture program.

“Our World Languages and Cultures faculty are a dynamic and talented group who care deeply about the well-being and future success of our students,” says College of Humanities and Social Sciences Dean Peter Kingstone. “This project is a critical part of our effort to help students choose to study languages and see its value in the workplace.”

For more information on World Languages and Cultures at ����vlog, visit .

Discourses of Heimat and of migration both negotiate questions of identity, belonging, and integration; moreover, despite the reemergence of right-wing, racist, and exclusionary uses of the term Heimat, there are in fact more recent German-language cultural texts that problematize and challenge a view of Heimat as a community that excludes the Other than there are promulgating it. This volume addresses the parallel proliferation of discourses of Heimat and of migration in contemporary German-language culture and demonstrates that the entanglement of migration and Heimat can be productive: it can help us to reframe what it means to have a home, to lose one, find one, or belong to one.

The president of the Italian Republic grants the distinction “to Italians abroad or foreigners who have acquired special merit in the promotion of friendly relations and cooperation between Italy and other countries.” Fiore was honored during a special ceremony on February 24, 2021, at the Italian Consulate in New York.

“I am truly honored to receive this recognition which highlights the impact of the humanities in international relationships and of the academic profession in world languages, which is effectively the work of cultural ambassadors,” says Fiore. “I am lucky that what is a passion for me is also a professional mission: work that creates a dialogue across languages and cultures between two countries, Italy and the U.S., that have given meaning to my life in very different and complementary ways.

“I am grateful to all the scholars, artists, entrepreneurs and organizations, as well as the Consular offices, that have accepted to share their work as part of a decade of Inserra programs, and within a transnational vision that embraces and goes beyond the U.S. and Italy.”

During the ceremony, the Consul, Francesco Genuardi, highlighted Fiore’s commitment to the promotion of Italian culture in the tri-state area and beyond through the activities, research, and   public/private partnerships she develops as part of the Inserra cultural programs at ����vlog.

The Inserra Chair is an endowed position devoted to the promotion of Italian culture, with particular emphasis to its meaning and relevance in the international scene – especially in the U.S. and in New Jersey. Since its inception in 2011, the Inserra Endowment has made possible , from the regular presentation of cultural events with notable artists and scholars to the development of innovative educational initiatives, pedagogical approaches, and pre-professional opportunities with paid internships.

Fiore’s interdisciplinary work as Inserra Chair – on topics ranging from migration to translation and Made in Italy – has received several recognitions, most recently a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for a project that links Italy to Spain and Latin America linguistically and culturally. She is also the author of “Preoccupied Spaces: Remapping Italy’s Transnational Migrations and Colonial Legacies,” which will be released in Italy later this spring.

“I am grateful to ����vlog and our donors, in particular the Inserra family, for constantly creating the conditions that allow for all this work to be of regular benefit to students, the University at large, the surrounding community, and now also the online community following us from all over the world,” says Fiore. “This recognition adds an official stamp that can only inspire me to continue this work further, with a particular eye toward international experiences for our students; from study abroad programs to internships with a transnational component, so that world languages become more central to the U.S. university experience.”

For more information on the Inserra Chair in Italian and Italian American Studies, visit montclair.edu/inserra-chair.

Rosano’s questions about Fiore’s teaching and her research bring attention to her MSU courses on migrations from and to Italy, as well as and the Spanish legacy in Italy and Latin America.

The piece is also an opportunity to briefly reflect on the current situation in the U.S. and the NY metropolitan area in relation to the political climate and public health issues, as well as to invite Italian students to consider the U.S. as a destination for their studies once the pandemic is over.

See the .

The lecture will be followed by the presentation of an in-progress research project about food practices in Sicily at the time of the Allied Landing (Food, Hunger, Migration and the American Myth), supported by MSU donors (the Cali and the Inserra families) and involving Italian majors. Despite the fact that it preceded D-Day, the 1943 landing in Sicily is often overlooked, and this project is aimed at bringing attention to this historical moment for its interconnection with past migrations and with the transnational circulation of food. See excerpts from video-interviews with direct witnesses of the landing in Sicily.

The result of a collaboration with several departments on campus and an Italian association, this online event – free and open to the public – will be in English with simultaneous interpretation into Italian. For more details and the , see the flyer below or the webpage.

The event will be held on December 3, 2020, 2:00-3:30 p.m. Hosted by Sandi Toksvig of Great British Baking Show and QI fame, the event will feature three, fifteen-minute talks by the speakers followed by a panel discussion. Presentations will include the following:

Meaghan Clarke, Senior Lecturer in Art History, University of Sussex

Shona Kallestrup, Associate Lecturer, School of Art History, University of St Andrews

Elizabeth Emery, Professor of French, Dept of World Languages and Cultures, ����vlog

The panel discussion will be moderated by Thomas Stammers, Associate Professor (Modern European Cultural History) in the Department of History, Durham University.

For more information, or to reserve your free ticket to this event, please visit the .

The significance of the achievement isn’t lost on Professor Lois Oppenheim, chair of the Department of World Languages and Cultures. She hired the two, who are married, based, in part, on the strong recommendation of a dean at Harvard, where LaFountain and Herold earned doctoral degrees in Germanic languages and literatures. Paraphrasing the conversation, Oppenheim was assured the academic couple would create a German program “the likes of which we could not imagine.”

In just nine years, they have done just that, reintroducing the major in fall 2015 and growing the program with innovative instruction and a commitment to their students, says Michael Shaughnessy, executive director of the association. ����vlog received the 2020 designation during a virtual ceremony on November 21 with the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

“Along with a recent FACE Foundation grant offered via the French Cultural Services of the French Embassy for a virtual teaching exchange with the Université Bordeaux Montaigne, and the culture and curricular programming grant from the Korean Ministry of Education also just awarded us, the Department of World Languages and Cultures is feeling very proud,” Oppenheim says.

The German program has benefited since LaFountain and Herold joined the faculty. Despite the program’s long history at Montclair State and the esteemed international sister-city exchange of scientists, engineers, musicians, and other scholars with Austria’s University of Graz, the German major had been discontinued due to faculty retirements and falling enrollment.

It was a pivotal moment in the couple’s careers. “Building it all up from scratch, just the two of us, made it so that we know the program, we know every single student, and that makes it such a tight circle,” Herold says.

“Our courses are about the students and about the students having this genuine cultural dialogue,” LaFountain adds. “You can’t get through our classes without getting to know us. We’re talking about our families, we’re talking about social justice, we’re talking about our hopes and dreams. We’re talking about what we care about most in life.”

The major has grown more than 80% in just five years and the University’s designation as a German Center of Excellence is expected to continue that growth.

The program’s success “makes people want to teach with us, makes people want to study with us,” LaFountain says. “It makes our students confident to want to apply to grad school, to have the courage to apply for a Fulbright or other international scholarships upon graduation.” Five alumni last year, for instance, won stipends to teach in Austria with the U.S. Teaching Assistantship program administered by Fulbright.

“The study of German has certainly given me a wider international perspective and cultural experiences abroad,” says Thomas McNulty ’19, who earned degrees in German, and International Business and Marketing. “Learning a new language is no easy task, but the rewards and experiences unlocked along the way are truly invaluable.”

One major goal has been to provide an affirming learning environment for LGBTQ+ students. The program introduced a preferred pronoun element, created an advanced course called Queer Germany, and integrated a unit on the public service photography initiative Trans at Work. In June 2019, the German program was invited to a celebration by the campus Office of Social Justice and Diversity, at which its efforts for inclusion were publicly recognized.

The ability to adapt and offer courses that speak to the lives of their students is among “the advantages of us having created the program,” Herold says.

Music Performance and Musical Theatre partner with the German program, and have helped double majors from the artistic fields bridge their study in music performance, art history, studio art, and animation with German.

“We’ve been able to see what our students love, what really animates them and then design our whole curriculum around that,” LaFountain says.

Student engagement is high, with a film and lecture series, coffee hours, and German club and honor society among the events students regularly attend.

“My favorite thing about the German program is that all of the students are like one big family,” says Casey Masterson, a senior German major who heads both the German club and honor society. “I never expected this type of community to come from my German program, but you often find the best things in the most unexpected places.”

Story by Staff Writer Marilyn Joyce Lehren