MLCS Research Conference Series
The MLCS Research Conference Series brings together faculty members and researchers from the University of Alberta, invited professors from other Canadian universities, and distinguished scholars from around the world to share their latest research. Held throughout each academic year, these engaging talks are open to the public and free of charge with registration. Students, researchers, and members of the broader community are warmly welcome to attend.
2026-27 MLCS Research Conference Series
Next Conference
Join us on Wednesday, October 7 from 2-4 p.m. in the 2-20A Visualization Lab (Digital Scholarship Centre, Cameron Library) for "Writing Identity: Language Choice and Biscriptality in Belarus and Bosnia and Herzegovina: Digital Practices, Public Spaces, and the Symbolic Meaning of Script", the next lecture in our MLCS Research Conference Series which will be given by Dr. Maria Katarzyna Prenner, University of Graz (Austria).
Organized in partnership between the Department of MLCS and The Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies, the talk will examine how multilingualism and biscriptality interact with identity, medium, and communicative context in Belarus and Bosnia and Herzegovina. In Belarus, it focuses on the asymmetrical relationship between Belarusian and Russian, the coexistence of competing orthographic traditions, and the symbolic role of Latinica in digital discourse as a marker of cultural affiliation, differentiation, and opposition. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the analysis considers how Latinica and Kyrillica are distributed across institutional communication, public space, online discourse, and individual language use. The comparison shows that script choice is strongly shaped by communicative setting and by the distinction between institutional top-down practices and individual bottom-up usage. At the same time, language choice and script choice do not necessarily coincide, but may index different forms of belonging and social positioning. The talk therefore approaches multilingualism and biscriptality as dynamic semiotic resources through which identity is negotiated across different media and social spaces.
Light refreshments will follow.
Future Events
Join us on Monday, October 26 from 2-3:30 p.m. in the 2-20A Visualization Lab (Digital Scholarship Centre, Cameron Library) for "A Cannibal Writes Herself: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera", the next lecture in our MLCS Research Conference Series which will be given by Dr. Ana Carolina Mesquita.
Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s reflections on the violent gaps of the archive and on relational approaches to subjectivity, I explore Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) as a form of anarchival self-writing, in which individual and collective selves may emerge through encounters with different languages, histories, bodies, and epistemologies, against the logic of the colonial archive. Borderlands/La Frontera’s poetics of mestizaje may thus be understood as experimenting with models of relating to alterity in which incorporation does not require the erasure of difference and can therefore configure a creative resistance to dispossession. This possibility brings the text into productive conversation with the figure of cannibalism developed within Amerindian thought, while also foregrounding the literary and political stakes of Anzaldúa’s multilingual practice. It thus raises a question about anarchival practice as a writing of the self: whether writing against the archive might also involve unsettling the systems of division through which subjects and histories become archivable in the first place.
Dr. Ana Carolina Mesquita is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Campinas (Unicamp), supported by a FAPESP grant, and currently a visiting postdoctoral researcher at the University of Alberta, Canada. A translator and writer, she holds a PhD in Literary Theory from the University of São Paulo (USP) and conducted doctoral research at Columbia University in New York, where she worked with the manuscripts of Virginia Woolf’s diaries at the New York Public Library.
Join the Departments of East Asian Studies and Modern Languages and Cultural Studies on Tuesday, November 24 from 1:30-3 p.m. in Pembina 3-58 for "Principled AI: From AI Affordances to Purposeful Language Learning", a talk by Dr. Wei Cai.
While generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) offers affordances for language learning, the expanding range of possibilities can overwhelm teachers and learners without a clear sense of purpose and guiding principles. This talk connects second language acquisition theories and language teaching methodologies with GenAI affordances and presents principles for purposeful language learning with GenAI. Through concrete examples, it illustrates how these principles inform activity design, guide pedagogical decisions, and support learners in using GenAI purposefully. The talk offers a theoretically grounded, practical approach to integrating GenAI and invites participants to consider how its use can serve learning goals and engage learners in processes that facilitate language development.
Wei Cai is a Professor in the School of Languages, Linguistics, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Calgary, Canada. She previously served as the Director of the Graduate Program in Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Chair of the Division of Chinese Studies and Japanese Studies, Director of the Language Research Centre, and President of the Chinese Language Teaching and Research Association. Her main research interests include second language listening, second language acquisition, artificial intelligence in language learning and teaching, and teacher education. She received the Robert Roy Award from the Canadian Association of Second Language Teachers (CASLT) in 2023, and the Leadership and Mentorship Award from the Faculty of Arts in 2025. Her book Teaching and Researching Chinese Second Language Listening was published by Routledge (Taylor & Francis Group) in 2022. The edited volume Researching and Teaching the Chinese Language: Voices from Canada was published by Springer in 2024. Her book, Using Artificial Intelligence in Language Education: Principles and Prompting Activities, was published by Bloomsbury in 2026.
Light refreshments will be served.
Past Conferences
Join us on Monday, September 28 from 3-4:30 p.m. in the 2-20A Visualization Lab (Digital Scholarship Centre in Cameron Library) for "The Missing Translations: Beyond the ‘Absent Presence’ of Black Canadian Voices", a talk by Dr. Sylvia Ijeoma Madueke.
This presentation examines the relative absence of translation in scholarship on Black Canadian writing. While my focus is specifically on Black Canadian writers and translation, I situate this inquiry within the broader history of Black Canadian writing and the bibliographic and scholarly efforts that have documented its development, diversity, and significance. These efforts have challenged what Yvonne Brown describes as the “absent presence” of Blackness in Canada by documenting, recovering, and critically engaging with Black Canadian literary histories and contributions. Yet the question of translation remains largely absent from this discussion. Against this background, I ask what happens when translation is brought into the picture. This preliminary inquiry maps existing scholarship and bibliographic records to identify translations and gaps, and considers what these presences and absences reveal about the circulation and visibility of Black Canadian writing in translation. By bringing translation into conversations about representation and literary recognition, the presentation seeks to open a space for further scholarly inquiry into the historical, institutional, and publishing conditions that shape the circulation of Black Canadian writing across languages and cultural contexts.