Bettina Brandt and Carrie Jackson Receive Awards from the President’s Funds for Undergraduate Research

Congratulations to Dr. Bettina Brandt and Dr. Carrie Jackson, both of whom received awards from the President’s Funds for Undergraduate Research!

Dr. Brandt’s award is for the Holocaust translation project “With Love from Vienna to Pasadena: Transcribing and Translating a Jewish Family Correspondence from the early 1940s.”  Dr. Brandt is working with sophomore Anna Bahnfleth on the project in cooperation with the library’s Sandy Stelts and with Trudie Engel, a faculty member in the College of Education. They are translating the correspondence of Trudie Engel’s grandmother. Her letters describe the difficulties of daily life of a Jewish woman waiting in Vienna for a visa to the US that never arrives. Eventually, she was killed in Theresienstadt.   

Anna Bahnfleth is a premajor student in the College of the Liberal Arts and plans to major in German. She is also the president of the German Club.

Dr. Jackson has received the award for a project that investigates whether one can manipulate the impact that certain production biases have on word order variation in L2 production among intermediate and advanced L2 learners of German (English L1), in an effort to encourage more native-like word order patterns in L2 production. The results of the study will address current debates in the psycholinguistic literature regarding the impact of cross-linguistic interaction during L2 production, and they also have important implications for foreign language learning. 

Dr. Jackson will work with Jack DiMidio and Bradley Morabito on the project. Jack and Bradley are premajor students in the College of the Liberal Arts and plan to major in German.