A series of events focused on “Striking Languages: Language in Research, Expression and the Professional World,” will kick off on the Wartburg College campus Tuesday, Feb. 3.

The program begins at 11:30 a.m., with the Michaelson, Briner and Kildahl Literary Symposium in the McCaskey Lyceum of Saemann Student Center. Elise Dubord, assistant professor of Spanish linguistics at the University of Northern Iowa; Patrick Malloy, associate professor in humanities at Hawkeye Community College; and Thomas Farmer, assistant professor in the psychology department and director of the Language Processing in Context Lab at the University of Iowa, will be the featured speakers.

“Flow: A Multilingual and Musical Exploration of Sound and Meaning” will begin at 7:30 p.m., in the Wartburg Chapel. The performance features Eric Wachmann, Department of Music chair, and his students on the Japanese bamboo flute as well as several Wartburg faculty and students reading texts in Swahili, French, Spanish, Belarusian, Portuguese and Japanese.

A round table discussion, “Language Matters: Language, Professional Advantage, and Empowerment for Global Engagement,” will be Thursday, Feb. 5, at 11:30 a.m., in Luther Hall 330. Featuring many of Wartburg’s multilingual faculty and students, the event will explore the advantages of developing high-level language abilities in life choices, professional contexts and global citizenship, including the potential for service.

Dubord, who served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Guatemalan highlands, will present research from her book, “Language, Immigration, and Labor: Negotiating Work in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands.”  

Malloy, who served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya, has done research on the intersections of medical and local histories in colonial Tanzania. He will speak on “Calamities of Uncertain Guests and Second-hand Clothes: Images of the Early AIDS Epidemic from Swahili Newspaper Poetry.”

Farmer’s research is in cognitive science, with specific interest in understanding the nature of the relationships that exist among perception, cognition and action. He will speak on “We Never Stop Learning Language: Adaptation to Novel or Atypical Linguistic Events.”