IUB professor receives France’s highest academic honor

Albert Valdman, the Rudy Professor of French and Italian, and of linguistics, received the Commandeur dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques from Francois Bujon de l’Estang at a ceremony in the Moot Court Room of the IU School of Law-Bloomington.

The Palmes Académiques was established in 1808 by Napoleon Bonaparte as an award for devotion and accomplishment in the areas of teaching, scholarship and research.

A native of Paris, Valdman is a world authority on pidgin and Creole languages, especially Haitian and Louisiana Creole. He founded IU’s Creole Institute and is the senior author of several dictionaries on French Creoles, including the recently published Dictionary of Louisiana Creole. He also is the founding and continuing editor of Studies in Second Language Acquisition, the leading international journal in the field.

Valdman has been the recipient of several other prestigious international awards, including other honors from the French government, the U.S. Embassy in Haiti, the International Association of Applied Linguistics and the American Association of Teachers o f French. He also has been awarded an honorary degree from the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland.

To hear the ambassador’s remarks regarding the European Union, go to:

http://broadcast.iu.edu/frambassador/index.html