Yvan Rose
© ENS LSH

Ian Maddieson

Ioana Chitoran

Wendy
Leeds-Hurwitz

Isabelle Marinone
© ENS LSH

The Collegium de Lyon's ambition is to link its scientific programme to the objective of producing and disseminating knowledge in support of public policy. Enjoying access to all the resources of a major European city, the Institute is positioned as a sounding board for public initiatives and seeks to involve the research community in the political, cultural, technological and environmental dimensions of societal issues. A number of priority topics have been designated: language, health-related behaviour and practices, and the UNESCO Chair in Memory, Cultures and Interculturality, supported by the Catholic University of Lyon.

Based on a permanent call for applications, the scholars (both junior and senior) hosted each year at the Collegium de Lyon are selected in April and November by the 18 members of its international scientific committee. Ten scholars, representing a wide range of disciplines, were invited by the Collegium de Lyon in 2009: eight of them are non-French from five different countries; six are junior academics; and four of the five currently in residence are working in the fields of language and linguistics:

- Yvan Rose, linguist and specialist in children's acquisition of phonology, is in residence in Lyon from September 2008 to July 2009. After taking a PhD in linguistics from McGill University in Canada, he continued his work in the United States (University of California, Berkeley, and Brown University). Since 2002, he has been a professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland (Canada).
An interview with Yvan Rose appears in this newsletter.

- Ian Maddieson holds a doctorate in linguistics from the University of California and teaches at the University of New Mexico. His five-month fellowship at the Collegium de Lyon ended in June 2009. His main research topics relate to the diversity of sounds used in the world's languages; the aim of his current project is to demonstrate the existence of common patterns.

- Ioana Chitoran is a linguist specialising in phonetics, in residence for five months in Lyon. She teaches linguistics at Dartmouth College (United States), and her research interests lie on the interface between phonetics and phonology. Her research project at the Collegium de Lyon deals with the consonant sequences specific to two Caucasian languages, Lezgi and Georgian.

- Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, a specialist in communication and linguistics, has a resident fellowship from February to July 2009. She holds a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania and teaches communication at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside (United States). Her research in Lyon, at the crossroads of anthropology, linguistics and communication, focuses on the social construction of interdisciplinarity.

- Isabelle Marinone, cinema historian, specialising in French silent and documentary film, will complete her ten-month residency in July 2009. She holds a doctorate in film history and aesthetics, and is currently in a teaching/research position at the University of Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle. Her research project at the Collegium de Lyon is entitled "Exotic reels from the early years of French cinema: looking for a fantasy world".

Brief review of the year's main scientific events:

On 8 and 9 April, Ioana Chitoran organised a workshop for young linguists specialising in the languages of the Caucasus. The workshop provided the opportunity for doctoral students from various European and US universities to meet and exchange ideas on various aspects of these languages.

On 27 and 28 May, Ian Maddieson and Yvan Rose organised a workshop entitled "Complexity, Typology and Acquisition" that brought together participants from European and North American universities. The workshop addressed the following questions: How can complexity be measured? Do languages maintain a form of distributional balance between their more and less complex components? Is there a relationship between linguistic units' frequency of occurrence and their complexity? How does a child acquiring a language learn the complex units of that language? These questions were addressed on the basis of data derived from adult languages and children's linguistic production, obtained through experimentation, typological research, computational models and statistical studies.

On 11 and 12 June, Isabelle Marinone organised an international colloquium in Lyon on the topic "Images, Memories and Movement". The meeting explored the concept of movement in both the literal and metaphorical senses. For example, the participants examined, through the lens of the cinema, the questions of memory-related conflicts and of individual and collective processes of change, where such change is affected by deterritorialisation (occupation, exile, diaspora, etc.). Also considered were works that are noteworthy as encounters with "the memory of the other". In this context combining consideration of political and aesthetic questions, Israeli filmmaker Avi Mograbi presented his latest film Z32 (Venice Film Festival, 2008).