About us

It all started with a dream.

What if, Professor Rafael Montano asked, we were able to create a dynamic, hip and fresh site for the students in our department intended to showcase their creative artifacts in all of the languages that are taught in our Department of Languages and Literatures? That is, a virtual space where our students could showcase their poetry, prose, videos, podcasts (etc etc), in Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, Arabic, Chinese, Persian, Punjabi etc.

Well, it took a minute, but we finally did it! Our students responded resoundingly to the call, and we now have our first exciting collection of cultural artifacts for all to see and admire. Indeed, the first number of Footprints: Multimedia Multilingual Arts Journal is now here in all its glory.

A warm note of gratitude to all of you who have helped us to make this a reality: to the wonderful undergraduate students who formed the initial journal committee, and who together plotted to get this project off the ground, Aidan Matthew Takeda Curran, Micaela Belen Andreano Alba, Nayla Janelle Hamid, Jeremy Alexander Burbano, Emily Graham, Sammy Chu, Wilson Ho; to all of you who have entrusted us with your creations; to the Language Coordinator, Dr. Ana García Allen and to the graduate language instructors Maria Flores Barba, Luis Miguel Herrera Bejines, Martha Black, Tatiana Fernández, Victoria Jara, María Rodríguez Medina, Diana Fernández Acosta, and Juan Pablo Aguilera Torralbas, for their incredible job motivating their students to create; to our department administrator Ingrid Timusk, and to Professors Alena Robin, Constanza Burucúa, Juan-Luis Suárez, Victoria Wolff, Yasaman Rafat, Mitsume Fukui, Luca Pocci, Yahya Kharrat, Cristina Caracchini and James Miller for their constant support.

And thank you, dear visitor, and happy reading!

Vidit Desai

Hala Mousa

Profe Felipe Quetzal

Profe Rafael Montano

On Finding our Name

Footprints, the proud name and symbol of our journal, is an apt ambassador for our ambitions; for it invites us to imagine a sense of journey across cultures, languages, peoples and time. To find our name, Professors Rafael Montano and Felipe Quetzalcoatl Quintanilla made an open call to the department’s undergraduate students to join the naming committee for the Multilingual Multimedia Project Untitled.

We were you very please with all the wonderful you suggested, but following a vigorous voting contest, we finally had a name for our publication: Footprints. Multilingual Multimedia Arts Journal, as suggested by student Nayla Janelle Hamid.

Our project aims to highlight the importance of studying languages, the unity and interconnections across different cultures at Western, as well as to share literary/artistic content that will be accessible and legible to all. Footprints, the name we have collectively chosen, is an apt ambassador for our ambitions, the proud name and symbol of our journal; for it reflects, most poetically, a sense of a journey across cultures, languages, peoples and time. 

Second prize went to Marianna Marangi for the following suggestion: MULTI (Multicultural United Literary Translated Initiative) Magazine. 

Finally, there was a tie for third place which went out to Sidia Clarke for LUMMID (Language, Unity, Multilingual-Multimedia, Interconnections, Diversity) Magazine, and to Francesca DeNoble for Babel at Western. 

Our Mission

Our mission is to highlight the importance of studying languages, the unity and interconnections across different cultures, as well as to showcase the literary/artistic drive of our students at the Department of Languages and Cultures, in the University of Western Ontario.