Outstanding Faculty Service - Patricia Black
Patricia E. Black was raised in Oberlin, OH (population about 10,000), located in northeastern Ohio and part of an original utopian community founded on the principles of Jean Frédéric Oberlin who ministered and brought education to isolated communities in Alsace in France. The founders of the community also created a collegiate institute that became Oberlin College and Conservatory.
She began by studying French, music theory, and piano because she planned to make a career in music. Cornell took her to New York where she first received an MA and then a Ph.D. in French literature and a specialization in the Middle Ages. However, in the middle of these studies, which represented a final decision not to go into music professionally, she spent three years in Poitiers (FRANCE) at the Centre d’Etudes Médiévales and received a Diplôme d’Etudes Avancées. During these years Black began studying Spanish and taught English at the Chamber of Commerce. At Cornell she received a Cornell Fellowship, the Corson French Prize, and served as a teaching assistant in intermediate French for three years.
New York continued to be home for a further two years while Black taught at the State University of New York at Potsdam, only two hours from Montréal and a place that required heat even in the summer! This position required teaching all levels of French, including to students in a consortium of Clarkson and Lawrence Universities. The transition from New York to California took her from a very cool, wet summer in upstate New York to late summer weather in the 100s in the Central Valley. She joined what was then the Department of Modern Languages at CSU Chico and which taught only French, German, Italian, and Spanish. During that first year she heard the Chico Symphony and later auditioned for Al Loeffler. Her association with what then became the North State Symphony lasted twenty-five years.
Currently Black is a professor of French and serves as the department chairperson. This department is much more diverse than it was when she joined it. There are now courses in ten different languages, minors in Italian and Japanese, and majors in French, German, and Spanish. Depending on the semester, she currently teaches both semesters of introductory French, advanced French composition and conversation, French for business, French linguistics, and the first semester of German. She advises students in all the programs of the department, offers weekly conversation time for interested students and community members, and participates in as many of the events offered by the department as possible.
Her professional interests are wide-ranging. Black received a J.D. from the Cal Northern School of Law in 2010. She also renewed her study of Spanish with a faculty fellowship from the University Study Abroad Consortium in 2004. She eventually acquired graduate units in Spanish and has conducted research into transformations of medieval legends in the Spanish peninsula as well as South America. Her most recent publication for the Handbook of Medieval Literature (de Gruyter) involved examining medieval didactic poetry in Latin, middle English, the major languages of France, and middle High German. Her current project will examine the connections between Rumi and thirteenth century medieval French religious poetry.
Black also provided service to her profession by serving as secretary-treasurer of the Société Rencesvals for seven years. This scholarly group is devoted to the study of the medieval epic and its transformations wherever they occur. As part of her office, she organized yearly sessions for the group at the Modern Language Association and did so longer than anyone in the history of the SR.
As she told members of the department, she is humbled and honored by being chosen for this award of Outstanding Faculty Service for 2011-12. Members of the FRAS committee, Dr. Zingg, and Dr. Flake, the Department of Foreign Languages faculty members and students, thank you, merci.