Department Chair: Mary Christensen, Languages, Literatures & Cultures
First published in November 2012 edition of The Bullhorn. The original publication can be found here.
Professor Mary Christensen, Chair of Languages, Literatures & Cultures, starts off our new series of Department Chair profiles as a passionate lover of words, a compassionate advocate for unions and worker rights, and a positive energy on the SUNY New Paltz campus.
Her love of languages, and notably French, started with her mother. “She wanted me to be an educated person, so she pushed me to learn French and to be the kind of person she would have liked to be.” Eventually, she went to France through her high school and lived outside of Paris for a year and fell in love with languages and traveling. After finishing her high school and college degrees, she went back to France and taught English at the high school level for a year in Paris, a program sponsored by the French government that was “wonderful and really polished my French. I have encouraged my students to apply for this program ever since I started working at New Paltz, and I have eight students up there now.”
Between her master’s and her PhD at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and her current position at SUNY New Paltz, she expanded her language expertise beyond French and Spanish and studied linguistics, Latin, and Macedonian. After I confessed to my monolingualism and how impressed I am with even bi-lingual speakers, Mary Christensen addressed her concern about America’s linguistic isolationism: “When Huguenots settled this area, they were French speakers, but they lived in Germany before they came here, and then they were speaking Dutch, and then they had to learn Indian languages. Everybody thought that was normal. That’s just what you did; learn some languages so you can talk with people around you. The hegemony of monolingualism in the United States is something that’s a big obstacle for Americans; we see this as something so difficult. It’s really the norm to be multilingual throughout history and throughout time and space.”
Before her first trip to France, she considered pursuing her love for literature with an English degree. Today, as a philologist, or a lover of words, she still passionately studies literature and researches seventeenth-century women’s literature in France. In graduate school, she started as a medievalist, working closely with linguistics and language skills to interpret Old French, but she didn’t click with the expert in the field. Working her way up to seventeenth-century, her dissertation advisor, Dr. Domna Stanton, provided Christensen with the passion and love for the field she researches today. Specifically, she works on seventeenth-century memoirs, autobiographies, and the birth of the novel during that age. Her dissertation explored the birth of genealogy as a definition of class and its subsequent impact on the female memoir author. Today, she researches the “development of the novel and seventeenth-century ideas about truth.” She turns to autobiographies and novels of the time period, such as supposedly nonfictional works modern scholars discard as false and untrue, and asks, “Why do we want it to be so true?” Her work answering this question hopes to enlighten current perceptions of literary works.
As Department Chair of Languages, Literatures & Cultures, Mary Christensen stands in a unique position, negotiating between surprising trends of student interest in language, the different interests of language subsections, and the range of academic positions. Although funding continues to decline for languages at the state level, a growing number of students are majoring in languages, but “not in the areas you would expect.” Students are double-majoring in language and, not education as one would expect, but other traditional liberal arts fields that require graduate degrees, such as art history, English, history, and anthropology. A second language aids in their research. Similarly, students are also coupling languages with “International Relations, International Business, Finance, or even Women’s Studies, things that people will put together later as jobs.” Christensen encourages her students to continue their language studies in addition to their other majors because of the jobs that will perfectly suit that unique bachelor’s degree.
Even with the Spanish program’s approximately one hundred majors, the large elephant in the room toppling over the fifty French majors, fifty Asian Studies majors (split almost evenly between Chinese and Japanese), and other smaller language minors, Christensen works to diffuse the “power struggle” by investing in the growing majors that play a role in global affairs. “We’re bringing Arabic back. We’re opening up new sections of Chinese because that’s the biggest area of growth in the country right now. It would be poor foresight on the part of Americans to think that Spanish is the only language we should be studying.” Even with such sentiments, Christensen is interested in expanding the healthy Spanish program. By modifying language placement, unnecessary Spanish 101 sections were removed to allow greater investment in upper-division courses. Just as many of her French students paired up a language with a variety of liberal arts majors, she encourages a similar path for Spanish majors. A new study-abroad program for Economics majors, working with a Spanish bank and instructing in both English and Spanish, gave a scholarship to SUNY New Paltz, so interested students could go for a semester with little cost. Even in America, where the population is increasingly speaking Spanish, “you’re not going to be required to speak Spanish, but there are many jobs that if you do, you’ll be much better off. I’m better off in my job.”
Despite the “power struggle,” Christensen says working with her colleagues is a lot of fun. “We’re always learning a little bit of each other’s languages. I find there is less strain and more positive energy than anything else, and that makes me happy.” Despite starting her work at SUNY New Paltz in 1998, she will be the most senior member of the department by next semester; a younger faculty devoted to scholarship along with instruction bestows life to Languages, Literatures & Cultures.
With six tenure-track professors, eight lecturers, and eighteen adjuncts, Mary Christensen recognizes her responsibility to care for a large group of contingents. With organizing experience at University of Michigan, cousins in UAW (United Auto Workers), and her early efforts at New Paltz to build up the French program with only herself and eight adjuncts, the department chair’s pro-union sentiments and experience conflicts with continued department cuts and her inability to provide optimal full-time positions: “I’ve been trying to deal with the fact that there’s nothing I can do to create more full-time jobs or more tenure-track jobs. So, working with this reality, how can I make sure the people feel respected and taken care of? How do I give them the best schedule I can and make sure they actually have a computer?” Between working with administration needs and those of her colleagues, she works diligently to provide what is crucial. While she cannot provide phones to every adjunct, she tries to give two courses to adjuncts that need the health benefits guaranteed with the workload.
Despite cuts to the department, Christensen hopes to strengthen the educational value of the language courses. She confesses we are not in the most “ideal” situation as a language department, but between scheduling and funding, the department is trying its best to provide the most optimal experience. A smaller class-size would increase retention—student caps on courses is 27 when the Modern Language Association recommends 14—but stretching out faculty or hiring new faculty for more courses is not financially possible. Similarly, although more frequent weekly instruction would enhance learning, eighteen adjuncts would be at a disadvantage, spending more time and money for commuting. However, some improvements may be on the horizon. The Provost is in support of lowering the 20-person minimum class size, which would not only keep necessary major-track classes, but also greatly enhance active student courses such as Composition and Conversation.
As a member of the President’s Strategic Planning Committee, Mary Christensen knows that the administration is focused on globalizing education. The faculty is talking about increasing the language requirement, internationalizing the campus by expanding the Chinese Living Learning Community (in Crispell Hall) to other languages. Additionally, they hope to increase opportunities for students to “have contact with students of other nationalities and just celebrate that cultural diversity we already have on campus and that we can expand even more.” Lastly, they are exploring using computer technology to provide more courses more frequently. Christensen supports creating a freshmen seminar to cultivate in-depth learning early on, increasing and expanding the STEM disciplines across the departments, and moving campus-wide towards all four-credit classes. Regarding the latter, she notes it will increase four-year student graduation rates and ease faculty and student workload burdens.
True to her love of diversity and cultures, Mary Christensen enjoys cooking to escape from the stresses of work. She would have been a hobbyist reader if not for her intensive reading for her research, but her culinary passion well suits her love for languages. When first studying in France, one of her friends was living with her grandparents and invited Mary over on many occasions. Her friend’s grandfather, who was previously a chef, taught Mary how to cook and recognize and taste wine. Afterwards, she had a few small food-service jobs and her own catering company during college; now it is a culturally-diverse hobby. “I cook Thai food, I can roll sushi, I make my own bread and my own yogurt. I’m always looking to make something new and try something out.” Such a delightful outlook and go-getter attitude certainly shapes her passions to the benefit of her department and SUNY New Paltz as a whole.
Her love of languages, and notably French, started with her mother. “She wanted me to be an educated person, so she pushed me to learn French and to be the kind of person she would have liked to be.” Eventually, she went to France through her high school and lived outside of Paris for a year and fell in love with languages and traveling. After finishing her high school and college degrees, she went back to France and taught English at the high school level for a year in Paris, a program sponsored by the French government that was “wonderful and really polished my French. I have encouraged my students to apply for this program ever since I started working at New Paltz, and I have eight students up there now.”
Between her master’s and her PhD at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and her current position at SUNY New Paltz, she expanded her language expertise beyond French and Spanish and studied linguistics, Latin, and Macedonian. After I confessed to my monolingualism and how impressed I am with even bi-lingual speakers, Mary Christensen addressed her concern about America’s linguistic isolationism: “When Huguenots settled this area, they were French speakers, but they lived in Germany before they came here, and then they were speaking Dutch, and then they had to learn Indian languages. Everybody thought that was normal. That’s just what you did; learn some languages so you can talk with people around you. The hegemony of monolingualism in the United States is something that’s a big obstacle for Americans; we see this as something so difficult. It’s really the norm to be multilingual throughout history and throughout time and space.”
Before her first trip to France, she considered pursuing her love for literature with an English degree. Today, as a philologist, or a lover of words, she still passionately studies literature and researches seventeenth-century women’s literature in France. In graduate school, she started as a medievalist, working closely with linguistics and language skills to interpret Old French, but she didn’t click with the expert in the field. Working her way up to seventeenth-century, her dissertation advisor, Dr. Domna Stanton, provided Christensen with the passion and love for the field she researches today. Specifically, she works on seventeenth-century memoirs, autobiographies, and the birth of the novel during that age. Her dissertation explored the birth of genealogy as a definition of class and its subsequent impact on the female memoir author. Today, she researches the “development of the novel and seventeenth-century ideas about truth.” She turns to autobiographies and novels of the time period, such as supposedly nonfictional works modern scholars discard as false and untrue, and asks, “Why do we want it to be so true?” Her work answering this question hopes to enlighten current perceptions of literary works.
As Department Chair of Languages, Literatures & Cultures, Mary Christensen stands in a unique position, negotiating between surprising trends of student interest in language, the different interests of language subsections, and the range of academic positions. Although funding continues to decline for languages at the state level, a growing number of students are majoring in languages, but “not in the areas you would expect.” Students are double-majoring in language and, not education as one would expect, but other traditional liberal arts fields that require graduate degrees, such as art history, English, history, and anthropology. A second language aids in their research. Similarly, students are also coupling languages with “International Relations, International Business, Finance, or even Women’s Studies, things that people will put together later as jobs.” Christensen encourages her students to continue their language studies in addition to their other majors because of the jobs that will perfectly suit that unique bachelor’s degree.
Even with the Spanish program’s approximately one hundred majors, the large elephant in the room toppling over the fifty French majors, fifty Asian Studies majors (split almost evenly between Chinese and Japanese), and other smaller language minors, Christensen works to diffuse the “power struggle” by investing in the growing majors that play a role in global affairs. “We’re bringing Arabic back. We’re opening up new sections of Chinese because that’s the biggest area of growth in the country right now. It would be poor foresight on the part of Americans to think that Spanish is the only language we should be studying.” Even with such sentiments, Christensen is interested in expanding the healthy Spanish program. By modifying language placement, unnecessary Spanish 101 sections were removed to allow greater investment in upper-division courses. Just as many of her French students paired up a language with a variety of liberal arts majors, she encourages a similar path for Spanish majors. A new study-abroad program for Economics majors, working with a Spanish bank and instructing in both English and Spanish, gave a scholarship to SUNY New Paltz, so interested students could go for a semester with little cost. Even in America, where the population is increasingly speaking Spanish, “you’re not going to be required to speak Spanish, but there are many jobs that if you do, you’ll be much better off. I’m better off in my job.”
Despite the “power struggle,” Christensen says working with her colleagues is a lot of fun. “We’re always learning a little bit of each other’s languages. I find there is less strain and more positive energy than anything else, and that makes me happy.” Despite starting her work at SUNY New Paltz in 1998, she will be the most senior member of the department by next semester; a younger faculty devoted to scholarship along with instruction bestows life to Languages, Literatures & Cultures.
With six tenure-track professors, eight lecturers, and eighteen adjuncts, Mary Christensen recognizes her responsibility to care for a large group of contingents. With organizing experience at University of Michigan, cousins in UAW (United Auto Workers), and her early efforts at New Paltz to build up the French program with only herself and eight adjuncts, the department chair’s pro-union sentiments and experience conflicts with continued department cuts and her inability to provide optimal full-time positions: “I’ve been trying to deal with the fact that there’s nothing I can do to create more full-time jobs or more tenure-track jobs. So, working with this reality, how can I make sure the people feel respected and taken care of? How do I give them the best schedule I can and make sure they actually have a computer?” Between working with administration needs and those of her colleagues, she works diligently to provide what is crucial. While she cannot provide phones to every adjunct, she tries to give two courses to adjuncts that need the health benefits guaranteed with the workload.
Despite cuts to the department, Christensen hopes to strengthen the educational value of the language courses. She confesses we are not in the most “ideal” situation as a language department, but between scheduling and funding, the department is trying its best to provide the most optimal experience. A smaller class-size would increase retention—student caps on courses is 27 when the Modern Language Association recommends 14—but stretching out faculty or hiring new faculty for more courses is not financially possible. Similarly, although more frequent weekly instruction would enhance learning, eighteen adjuncts would be at a disadvantage, spending more time and money for commuting. However, some improvements may be on the horizon. The Provost is in support of lowering the 20-person minimum class size, which would not only keep necessary major-track classes, but also greatly enhance active student courses such as Composition and Conversation.
As a member of the President’s Strategic Planning Committee, Mary Christensen knows that the administration is focused on globalizing education. The faculty is talking about increasing the language requirement, internationalizing the campus by expanding the Chinese Living Learning Community (in Crispell Hall) to other languages. Additionally, they hope to increase opportunities for students to “have contact with students of other nationalities and just celebrate that cultural diversity we already have on campus and that we can expand even more.” Lastly, they are exploring using computer technology to provide more courses more frequently. Christensen supports creating a freshmen seminar to cultivate in-depth learning early on, increasing and expanding the STEM disciplines across the departments, and moving campus-wide towards all four-credit classes. Regarding the latter, she notes it will increase four-year student graduation rates and ease faculty and student workload burdens.
True to her love of diversity and cultures, Mary Christensen enjoys cooking to escape from the stresses of work. She would have been a hobbyist reader if not for her intensive reading for her research, but her culinary passion well suits her love for languages. When first studying in France, one of her friends was living with her grandparents and invited Mary over on many occasions. Her friend’s grandfather, who was previously a chef, taught Mary how to cook and recognize and taste wine. Afterwards, she had a few small food-service jobs and her own catering company during college; now it is a culturally-diverse hobby. “I cook Thai food, I can roll sushi, I make my own bread and my own yogurt. I’m always looking to make something new and try something out.” Such a delightful outlook and go-getter attitude certainly shapes her passions to the benefit of her department and SUNY New Paltz as a whole.
