Workshop with David Gramling 

"Post-Election Workshop: What, How, and Why Will We Be Teaching Additional Languages in 2025? How about in 2125?"

We’re in an era when it’s so much easier than it was 40 years ago to rely on monolingualism to solve all our problems technologically, and for university administrators to do so too. In the face of new technologies, media cultures, political economies, authoritarian nationalisms, and complex social worlds, we need courageous horizons that vividly communicate with learners the why-and-how around additional language-learning in the 21st and 22nd centuries. Why should we keep learning to speak and translate on our own, when a phone can do it pretty well for us? What about embodied language proficiency must truly value in this moment? What unforeseen features might characterize the socio-political world of the 2030s/2040s, which will require multilingually trained adults who were educated in these 2020s? What is now the political value of advanced proficiency in multiple languages today, a value which might differ profoundly from previous eras?

Bio: David Gramling is author, editor, or translator of eight books in print: Literature in Late Monolingualism (Bloomsbury 2024); The Invention of Multilingualism (Cambridge University Press, 2021); The Invention of Monolingualism (Bloomsbury 2016, American Association for Applied Linguistics Book Award, 2018); co-author of Palliative Care Conversations: Clinical and Applied Linguistic Perspectives (De Gruyter 2019, with David’s big brother Robert Gramling); Linguistic Disobedience: Restoring Power to Civic Language (Palgrave 2019, with Yuliya Komska and Michelle Moyd); Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration 1955–2005 (University of California Press 2007 with Deniz Göktürk and Anton Kaes); and Transit Deutschland: Debatten zu Nation und Migration (Konstanz University Press / Wallstein Verlag, with Deniz Göktüurk, Anton Kaes, and Andreas Langenohl). David’s book-length co-translation (with Aron Aji) of Murathan Mungan’s Turkish-language Shahmeran story cycle Valor: Stories (Cenk Hikâyeleri) was published in Fall 2023 with Northwestern University Press, and made possible by a 2021 Global Humanities Translation Prize from Northwestern University. Future books include Translating Transgender (with Aniruddha Dutta, Routledge 2026), and Aloof: On Seeing Less than you Should, which details David’s lifelong adventure with ocular albinism, a rare congenital visual Disability.