November 5, 2019

YERUN RMA 2019 – Meet Carolina Spiegel

As a PhD Candidate and Research/Teaching Assistant at the Department of Romance Linguistics at the Faculty of Languages and Literary Studies of the University of Bremen, I work in the research area of Romance Linguistics. On the 14th of March 2019, I gave a lecture on my PhD project to master students in the seminar “Cultura, multiculturalidad e interculturalidad en el ámbito del español” at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.

I presented examples of linguistic variation in spoken 21st century Judeo-Spanish and thus connected my presentation to one of the main topics of the master seminar: linguistic variation in different contact situations. I was able to experience and enjoy the (linguistic) diversity of the master students from different parts of Spain, Latin America, the United States and China. On the 20th of March 2019, I gave a lecture at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), the Centre for Human and Social Sciences (CCHS), and the Institute of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. I enjoyed and profited from the discussion with experts in Sephardic Studies after my lecture.

A few months later, I had the possibility to return to the UAM: between the 28th and 30th October 2019 I participated in the conference “Dinámicas lingüísticas de las situaciones de contacto” organized by the research group “Español en contacto con otras lenguas” under the chairmanship of Prof. Dr. Azucena Palacios Alcaine. In my lecture I presented various aspects of aspects of contact-induced linguistic variation of my doctoral dissertation. My participation in the international conference strengthened the collaboration between the UAM and the University of Bremen. Furthermore, I felt at home again in the Department of Spanish at the Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities of the UAM and it was such a pleasure to meet all of my UAM colleagues again.

Carolina Spiegel in the CSIC-CCHS in front of the poster announcing her lecture about Sephardic community clubs in Istanbul and Izmir

Carolina Spiegel has been a PhD Student and Research/Teaching Assistant at the Department of Romance Linguistics in the Faculty of Languages and Literary Studies at the University of Bremen since October 2015. Her doctoral dissertation aims to visualise the tendencies toward an ongoing contact-induced language change in Judeo-Spanish by Castilian (Modern Spanish), and contributes to the documentation of spoken Judeo-Spanish in Turkey as a minority language. She studied Romance Languages and Literature (Spanish, French), as well as German Linguistics at the LMU Munich. She studied abroad for two semesters at the University of Salamanca and at the Bordeaux Montaigne University. In 2012 and 2015 she conducted in-depth research at the Ottoman-Turkish Sephardic Culture Research Center in Istanbul. In 2017 she visited the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for two months to work on her research project. During her 6 months of field research in Istanbul and Izmir in 2015 and 2016, she conducted 73 biographical narrative interviews entirely in Judeo-Spanish and created a corpus of spoken 21st century Judeo-Spanish in Turkey. In 2018 she has contributed to several international conferences and summer schools. In 2018 she was invited to present her project – at the Instituto Cervantes in Bremen – at the Centro Sefarad-Israel in Madrid – as part of the program SCIENCE GOES PUBLIC! in Bremen. In 2018 she has published two papers on: – “Kualo ay de nuevo? Aproximación a la (re-)castellanización del judeoespañol vernáculo en Turquía.” In: Migración y contacto de lenguas en el siglo XXI/Migration et contact de langues au XXIe siècle, Carolin Patzelt/Carolina Spiegel/Katrin Mutz (eds.). Peter Lang: Frankfurt am Main (in press). – “El contacto lingüístico entre el castellano y el judeoespañol vernáculo (judezmo) en Turquía en el siglo XXI: El ejemplo de dos mujeres sefardíes esmirniotas.” In: Caminos de leche y miel. Jubilee Volume in Honor of Michael Studemund-Halévy. Language and Literature, David M. Bunis/Ivana Vučina Simović/Corinna Deppner (eds.). Barcelona: Tirocinio, vol. 2, 169-184. She is a speaker at the International Day of Judeo-Spanish/Ladino in Istanbul and writes newspaper articles for the Judeo-Spanish newspaper Şalom/El Amaneser.

Click here to access Carolina’s ORCID.

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