Eda Derhemi is a Teaching Associate Professor in the Department of French and Italian.
What is the focus of your current work and/or subject of your current research?
The beauty of teaching in a language department is that linguistics naturally fuses with literature, culture, ideology, law and politics, not just in meetings between colleagues of different fields sharing the same space and students, but also in everybody’s individual teaching and research. I have always been keen to conduct research that is interdisciplinary, but also involves fieldwork and has a relatively direct impact on the world. My main focus in recent years has been on linguistic endangerment. I study how languages all over the world live the last part of their lives, with an eye to how they might be saved. The geographical focus of my work zooms in from Europe to the Mediterranean area between Italy and the Balkans-from Croatia to Greece and Turkey-and the use dynamics of the languages related to Albanian. I have two concrete directions of research that particularly interest me at the moment: one is the continuous flow of language, culture and people in the triangle Albania, Greece, and Italy; the other is the study and recording of the linguistic production of two sisters, both over 90, that speak Arvanitika, an old Albanian dialect that used to be spoken in many areas of Greece but is now severely endangered. The language is close to death, no longer used for communication, maintained only by a few elderly individuals. These two sisters are extraordinary in many senses: they show high maintenance of their grammatical and lexical Arvanitika knowledge, which is very rare today. They are an even rarer micro-world where natural communication in Arvanitika is real, not just staged by the researcher for recording purposes. I hope I receive some sort of support to study the language of these two women, in their tiny, isolated village in the mountains. I have been there more than once privately, but never more than for a few days. I hope this village can become my home for a few months before it is too late.
For the last decade I have been an active member of the executive committee of the Foundation for Endangered Languages (FEL) and for the fall '23-spring '24 I am involved in two publishing projects: one is an FEL volume "Endangered Languages and Diaspora", to come out in 2024 contracted with with BRILL; and another is a monography on Arvanitika and Arvanites in Greece, for the conclusive part of which I need to conduct some more research in situ.
What classes do you teach? What are some of the topics of those classes?
I teach Italian language classes, at various levels of grammar and speaking, as well as classes on sociolinguistics and issues of language in society. The latter includes linguistic minorities in Europe and beyond, language rights, interconnections of languages and cultures in the Mediterranean area, the invisible ties between the vitality of language varieties and political institutions, and linguistic regimes in various geographical areas and in international institutions.
One of the courses I teach this semester which deals with some of the above topics, is “Language and minorities in Europe” (ITAL 418), which is open to both undergraduate and graduate students. It is an exciting course about historical minorities and more recent immigrants, the state of their languages and communities and the complex ways they represent a diverse Europe. This course appeals to students not just because of its wide range of fascinating linguistic and sociological topics and areas, but also because it integrates very recent events and changes in the European political and ideological landscape, with their important linguistic consequences.
Every Fall-Spring I also teach a sequence of two levels of Italian grammar for students that already have mastered basic Italian. In these courses I teach grammar through original print, audio and visual texts that are selected with grammatical goals in mind, but also engage the students with Italian literature, history, and culture, increasing their general comprehension, their precision of written and spoken expression, and their cultural and pragmatic skills.
Do you have any recent awards, honors, or publications that you would like to highlight?
In March 2023, the volume Endangered Languages in the 21st Century which I co-edited together with Chris Moseley, was published by Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Endangered-Languages-in-the-21st-Century/Derhemi-Moseley/p/book/9781032196749
The volume brings forefront research about endangered languages around the world and underlines the resilience of languages even when very small and threatened. I have given a thorough interview about this book to EUC's Sydney Lazarus, which will be published in September 2023. My own chapter in this volume regards theoretical issues about language change in the case of endangerment.
I have a long EUC has published an interview about a translated Albanian novel (Miele sul coltello) published in Italy a few months ago, which I translated in collaboration with Francesco Ferrari, a graduate student in our Italian program. The book has been very successful in Italy and Albania. It attracted me because of the complicated jumps from a language to another and also from an Albanian dialect to another. Recently I have been workingon a major translation from English to Albanian of the novel "A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess, a classic that has not yet been published in Albania. Given the intricate linguistic complexities of the English original, and my keenness for text with entangled multiple codes (in this case, including Russian), I have not yet given up, although I am extremely busy.
I have two conferences coming this fall, in which I will present my research. In one of them (Tirana, Sept. 4-6, 2023) I am the plenary speaker. Part of this summer was reserved for the work towards them.
My last award was as a Fulbright Scholar for research and teaching, which I conducted in Albania between 2014 and 2015. I strongly continue to support Fulbright’s mission, as a member of the UIUC Fulbright - National and International Scholarship Office, and of the National Fulbright Committees, and by helping students to understand and take advantage of the great opportunities Fulbright offers to them.
What is a book (academic or non-academic, in or outside your field) that you think should be more widely read?
I always find it hard to answer when I am asked to give ONE name, whether book, film, event, or person. I live through many people and many works, and I am many people and many works. But I will answer with what comes to mind right now, with the caveat that tomorrow I might choose other books. I will answer as if I were going to suggest books for my two daughters.
I love "The Giving Tree" of Shel Silverstein. I love anything by him, but especially this. It is a book that parents should read to their children as they grow up, and again right before they become teens, and then right after that. They will never forget its poetry, and they will have with them forever the empathy embodied in the book and will appreciate forever the act of giving rather than taking. I wish all my students would read it, either alone or with somebody they love and trust.
I love "Pygmalion" by George Bernard Shaw. I love its humor, word games and linguistic dynamics that feed the plot much more than the cultural frame of the story. This is a genius play so much beloved by linguists.
I love Strindberg’s “Creditors”, even more than Ibsen’s plays. Ibsen has a better control of the ideological planning of his works. Strindberg does not; he is much more instinctive, but what he amazingly controls is the language and the art itself; and it this is how he overcomes his own problematical ideology.
I love Nikolai Gogol, Emil Zola and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. And, of course, I love Leonardo Sciascia! Read anything from Sciascia! Among poets I stand with T.S. Eliot, in particular “The wasteland” and “The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. I have translated Prufrock into Albanian. This summer I would like to translate the Wasteland… if I have any time left. If not, next summer.
I love Nicholas Ostler’s “AD infinitum: a biography of Latin and the world it created”, and his “Empires of the word: a language history of the world” for showing the power of the written and spoken word in further globalizing the forever globalized world and in shaping culture and politics. “Ad infinitum” tells the history of the Mediterranean, and the history of the world “Empires of the word”, primarily as linguistic history rich in linguistic detail, in a very clear, intelligent, eloquent narration that speaks to any category of readers, specialists or not. It is hard today to find scholars that are masters of the methods of both philology and modern linguistics, who deeply know many dead and living languages, all necessary for producing such excellent books.
I will end this list (containing strangely only men) on a high note by suggesting a recent book by a woman author I deeply respect, a scholar from our own university: Maria Todorova’s “The Lost World of Socialists at Europe's Margins: Imagining Utopia, 1870s-1920s” (please, particularly check the chapter on women and the socialist movement). Todorova is a rigorous scholar who not only has been working for decades to balance academic thought (and, together with it, the real world) in ways that criticize and change the dominant gaze on the marginalized, but she is also a historian that comfortably situates herself inside “the margins” as she analyzes the world’s history.
Is there any additional information or advice you'd like to share?
I grew up in Tirana, Albania, in Enver Hoxha’s crushingly authoritarian political culture and society. So, I feel an almost instinctive urge to be critical instead of being on the side of institutions and persons of power. I have not yet overcome this formative “problem”. But in recent times, I say everywhere I can how proud I am of the way my university, the University of Illinois, has dealt with the extraordinary situation caused by the Covid pandemic, its promptness of testing and creating all the necessary structures to cope with the pandemic, and particularly the many measures to assist the students. The care for the students was extraordinary, and it came from every level of administration and faculty like from a functional and loving family. A person close to me had an issue related to the harsh situation the pandemic forced on us, and the care she received from the LAS administrators of all levels was incredible. As I saw and heard news from the rest of the US and from around the world, with many people living in total chaos, panic and fear, I knew that we were literally living in a separate world, safe and peaceful. I will forever be grateful for this to my university.