Dr. Fagyal is Professor of French and Head of the French & Italian Department. 

What is the focus of your current work and/or subject of your current research?

To sum it up briefly: socially meaningful variation and change in ethnic and racial minority contexts in French and multilingual communities. My most recent project, co-funded by NSF and Amazon, is in collaboration with a team of speech and computer scientists at UIUC and Johns Hopkins University on ethnic and racial self-identifications in connection with inclusive automatic speech recognition.

What classes do you teach? What are some of the topics of those classes?

I regularly teach an intermediate-level writing class in French that I enjoy and recommend to anyone who wants to brush up on their written French while writing about contemporary topics of interest in Francophone countries and regions. Otherwise, I teach undergraduate and graduate courses on language variation, policy, and planning in French and regional minority languages in Europe. Next year, I will offer a graduate and undergraduate seminar on French in US minority contexts, in which we will follow and discover connections between French and the local languages and cultural traditions of native and African American businessmen, community leaders, missionaries, colons, and musicians in the early modern and modern eras from Chicago to New Orleans. Look for more advertisement coming soon!

Do you have any recent awards, honors, or publications that you would like to highlight?

If you search Illinois Experts, you will find up-to-date information on my past and current work, but I guess I would like to highlight the amazing collaboration we have between linguists and computer scientists on the detection and analysis of speaker-specific social information in very large speech corpora as part of our NSF-Amazon grant (Prof. Hasegawa-Johnson as PI) 6. What is a book (academic or non-academic, in or outside your field) that you think should be more widely read? I sincerely recommend "Breaking Through: My Life in Science" (2023) by Nobel-prize winning biochemist Katalin Karikó, the Hungarian-born inventor of the mRNA technology that helped produce the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccines. Karikó’s book is not only an inspiring story of extraordinary focus and resilience in the face of countless obstacles and closed-minded thinking by some members of the scientific establishment, but also a testament to hard work, curiosity, and commitment to one’s personal and professional goals.

Is there any additional information or advice you'd like to share?

Check out our research and course offerings in French & Italian next Fall and the following semesters, and thank you for your attention!