Three students in the McNeese English and Foreign Languages Department will be studying abroad this summer in French-speaking European countries: Hayley Aguillard of Hathaway, who graduated from McNeese in May with a bachelor's degree in English and a minor in French, has been awarded a French government assistantship and assigned to the region of Rouen, where she will be teaching conversational English for seven months in a French high school or middle school; Gabrielle Myers of Longville, who is pursuing bachelor's degrees in French and in English, was awarded a CODOFIL, or Council for the Development of French in Louisiana, scholarship to study at the University of Liège, Belgium, for the month of July; and Saphire Wolven of Lake Charles, a French major, was awarded the MICEFA, or Mission Interuniversitaire de Coordination des Échanges Franco-Américains, scholarship through CODOFIL to study at a university in Paris for the 2010-2011 academic year.

Dr. Nancy María Blain, McNeese assistant professor of modern languages, co-authored a study on online teaching of Spanish titled "Teaching Spanish Online” ("Reinventing the Language Lab”), which will be published in the CALICO Education Journal. The study was presented at this summer's annual conference of the Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium in Amherst, Mass., in a session on "Comparing Distance Language Programs.” Blain also has had an article titled "The Picaresque and the Grotesque: Two Beauties and Their Beasts” accepted for publication by Romance Notes.

Amy Fleury, associate professor of English and poetry director in the Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing Program at McNeese, presented "Demystifying the Hiring Process: Inside the Search Committee” at the recent Association for Writers & Writing Programs Conference in Denver, Colo.

Chris Lowe, English instructor at McNeese, has had a story, "Oxygen,” accepted for publication by Bananafish, an online fiction journal.

Various faculty and graduate students in the McNeese Creative Writing Program were involved in the second installation of the poetry and art exhibition "Vision/Verse,” which opened its doors in June at the Art Associates Gallery at the Central School Arts and Humanities Center. Featured in the exhibition were graduate students Lou Amyx, William Lusk Coppage, Brendan Egan, Angelina Oberdan, Michael G. Rather Jr. and Michael Shewmaker and faculty members Dr. Jacob Blevins, Dr. Rita D. Costello and Hillary Joubert.