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Department of Comparative Studies Graduate Handbook 2009-10

1. The Department of Comparative Studies
2. Graduate Programs in Comparative Studies
3. The Graduate Studies Committee
4. Criteria for Admission to the Graduate Program
5. Admission Procedures and Deadlines for the M.A. and Ph.D.
6. Requirements for the M.A. in Comparative Studies
7. Sample Programs for the M.A. in Comparative Studies
8. Requirements for the Ph.D. in Comparative Studies
9. Sample Programs for the Ph.D. in Comparative Studies
10. The Graduate Minor in Comparative Cultural Studies
11. Graduate Courses in the Department of Comparative Studies
12. Financial Aid
13. Graduation Procedures for M.A. and Ph.D. Students
14. Graduate Faculty of the Department of Comparative Studies
15. Associated Graduate Faculty of the Department of Comparative Studies
16. Staff of the Department of Comparative Studies

I. The Department of Comparative Studies

The Department of Comparative Studies promotes comparative, interdisciplinary, and cross-cultural research and teaching in the arts and sciences. The Department offers an interdisciplinary graduate and undergraduate curriculum that encourages comparative perspectives on a wide range of cultural and historical discourses and practices: literary, aesthetic, folkloric, technological, scientific, religious, political, material. Faculty and faculty associates work closely with other units at Ohio State, as well as with faculty at other colleges and universities. At the graduate level, the Department offers the Master of Arts in Comparative Studies, the Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Studies, and, for graduate students across the University, a Graduate Minor in Comparative Cultural Studies. For undergraduates, the Department offers the Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Studies with specializations in Comparative Cultural Studies, Comparative Ethnic and American Studies, Comparative Literature, Folklore, Religious Studies, and Science Studies. The Department also coordinates a new interdepartmental major in World Literatures. Several undergraduate interdisciplinary minors are also housed in Comparative Studies: American Studies, Folklore, and Religious Studies. Formerly a Center and, more recently, a Division, the Department of Comparative Studies has a more than fifty-year history at Ohio State of offering an interdisciplinary curriculum in the humanities, as well as interdisciplinary conferences, lecture and film series, and faculty/graduate student seminars.

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II. Graduate Programs in Comparative Studies

The Department of Comparative Studies offers interdisciplinary graduate degree programs in the study of culture at both the M.A. and the Ph.D. levels. For graduate students enrolled in other departments at Ohio State, the Department offers the Graduate Minor.

Graduate work in Comparative Studies is interdisciplinary and cross-cultural, addressing complex processes of cultural change, stability, and interaction, with particular attention to the construction of knowledge and the dynamics of power and authority. Questions of difference—racial, gender, sexual, class, ethnic, national—and the ways in which those categorizations inform and are informed by other discourses and practices are central to scholarship in comparative studies.

Such an interdisciplinary, comparative approach to the study of culture assumes both flexibility and rigor in terms of theory, methodology, and object of study. The M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Studies are designed for students whose scholarly interests require them to call upon the resources of several academic disciplines. Each graduate student, with the help of faculty advisers, designs an individualized academic program to meet specific research interests that cut across departmental and college boundaries. As a part of this process, students are encouraged to question the configuration of disciplinary boundaries and to place in historical context the development of disciplinary structures and their objects of study.

Students must develop a clear area of concentration and sound theoretical foundations for their individual programs in order to attain depth of knowledge, as well as breadth. Expertise of Comparative Studies faculty members is similarly focused in comparative ethnic and American studies; comparative literature; critical race theory; cultural anthropology; cultural studies; folklore; postcolonial studies; religious studies; science studies; social and cultural theory; urban studies; and visual culture, with specific attention to the interrelatedness among the cultural and historical domains these fields represent. Within their focus areas, students are encouraged to develop inquiries that attend to the cultural and historical contexts of the particular subject in question.

The element of comparison, both within and across cultures and borders, is important to faculty and student research. Comparisons may be drawn among the several discourses and practices of a single society, group of people, geographical region, or historical era. Research projects may also involve the comparison of specific genres and media—textual, performative, material—across cultures. Both approaches to comparative work are encouraged; most projects will involve elements of both, since contextualization is integral to all such studies. The function of comparison is not to discover differences and similarities, but to understand more comprehensively the political, social, economic, and aesthetic dimensions of the various discourses and practices that constitute social and individual life.

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III. The Graduate Studies Committee

The Comparative Studies Graduate Studies Committee oversees the graduate program. The Committee is composed of faculty members primarily from the Department of Comparative Studies, but may include faculty members from other departments as well. The Graduate Studies Committee is appointed by the Chair of the Department of Comparative Studies and is responsible for making admissions decisions, acting on students’ petitions, making fellowship and associateship nominations, determining procedures and guidelines, and acting as liaison between the graduate program and the Graduate School (http://gradsch.osu.edu/). The Graduate Studies Committee and its policies are subject to Graduate School rules, as described in the Graduate School Handbook (http://www.gradsch.ohio-state.edu/Depo/PDF/Handbook.pdf [PDF]).

The Comparative Studies Graduate Handbook
(Graduate Handbook [PDF]) is designed to provide information about its Master of Arts, Doctor of Philosophy, and Graduate Minor programs to prospective students, to students already enrolled, and to faculty advisers. Please send inquiries or requests for more information to the Graduate Studies Chair, Professor Ruby Tapia (tapia.14@osu.edu), or to the Graduate Program Coordinator, Dr. Margaret Lynd (lynd.1@osu.edu), at the following address:

Department of Comparative Studies
451 Hagerty Hall
1775 College Road
Columbus, OH 43210-1340

Phone: (614) 292-2559
Fax: (614) 292-6707

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IV. Criteria for Admission to the Graduate Program in Comparative Studies

Students may be admitted to the graduate program in Comparative Studies after completing a baccalaureate degree in a relevant field. Students who have completed a master’s degree in a relevant field ordinarily apply directly to the Ph.D. program. At the time of admission, the Graduate Studies Committee will decide the number of credits from the student’s M.A. program that may be applied to the doctoral program. In some cases, the student may be required to complete the M.A. in Comparative Studies before being admitted to the Ph.D. program.

Students with the B.A. degree only may apply either to the M.A. program or to the M.A./Ph.D. program. In either case, students must satisfactorily complete coursework, language, and thesis requirements for the M.A. in Comparative Studies. Students who wish to proceed to the doctoral program upon completion of the MA in Comparative Studies must follow the process described under requirements for the Ph.D. All students who satisfactorily complete M.A. requirements will be awarded the M.A. in Comparative Studies.

Criteria for admission to both the M.A. and the Ph.D. programs in Comparative Studies include the following:

1. A minimum of 3.0 cumulative point-hour ratio (on the 4.0 scale used at this University) in all previous undergraduate work. Students with an undergraduate cumulative ratio below 3.0 who wish to be considered for admission must petition the Comparative Studies Graduate Studies Committee for special consideration.
   
   
2. A minimum of 3.0 in all previous graduate work.
   
   
3. Graduate Record Examination scores for all applicants.
   
   
4. Minimum TOEFL score of 79 (internet-based), 213 (computer-based), or 550 (paper-based); or MELAB score of 82; or IELTS score of 7.0 for non-native speakers of English.
   
   
5. Applicants are advised to contact the Graduate Studies Chair, a Comparative Studies faculty member with whom they are interested in working, or the Academic Program Coordinator in the Department of Comparative Studies before applying. The purposes of this contact, whether by telephone, by e-mail, or in person, are to clarify the student’s research interests, needs, and goals; determine the suitability of the Comparative Studies program to the student’s intellectual and professional goals; and to advise the student in completing the statement of purpose required for admission to the graduate program in Comparative Studies. Students should make such contact well in advance of the application deadline.

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V. Admission Procedures and Deadlines for the M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Studies

Students apply to the graduate program in Comparative Studies by submitting: (a) a graduate school application and supporting documents to the Office of Admissions (http://gradadmissions.osu.edu) and (b) a statement of purpose, a writing sample, and an additional set of transcripts to the Department of Comparative Studies (http://comparativestudies.osu.edu). Recommendation forms and letters must also be sent directly to Comparative Studies. (Students who wish to proceed to the doctoral program upon completion of the MA in Comparative Studies must follow the process described under "requirements" for the Ph.D. http://comparativestudies.osu.edu/graduate/phd_requirements1.cfm . All students who satisfactorily complete M.A. requirements will be awarded the M.A. in Comparative Studies.)

1. Application procedures.
   
   
   1. The Graduate School admissions application form must be submitted online (http://gradadmissions.osu.edu/). The Graduate School admissions application includes:
      
      
      1. Completed OSU Graduate School application form (must be submitted online).
      2. Official transcripts for all previous undergraduate and graduate work. (A second set of transcripts should be sent directly to the department (see below).
      3. Official GRE and (when applicable) IELTS, TOEFL, or MELAB test scores.
         
         Transcripts for all previous undergraduate and graduate work and all test scores must be submitted to the Admissions Office. Please use the appropriate address from the following:
         
         
         Domestic Applicants:
         
         Regular U.S. postal mail:
         Graduate Admissions Office
         The Ohio State University
         P.O. Box 182004
         Columbus, OH 43218-2004
         
         Special delivery mail service (express mail):
         Graduate Admissions Office
         The Ohio State University
         3rd Floor Lincoln Tower
         1800 Cannon Drive
         Columbus, OH 43210-1270
         International Applicants:
         
         Regular U.S. postal mail:
         International Graduate Admissions Office
         The Ohio State University
         P.O. Box 182083
         Columbus, OH 43218-2083
         
         Special delivery mail service (express mail):
         Graduate Admissions Office
         The Ohio State University
         3rd Floor Lincoln Tower
         1800 Cannon Drive
         Columbus, OH 43210-1270
         
         
   2. Supplemental materials, a second set of transcripts from all previous institutions, and recommendation forms should be mailed to the following address:
      
      Graduate Studies Coordinator
      Department of Comparative Studies
      451 Hagerty Hall
      1775 College Road
      Columbus, OH 43210-1340
      
      The Comparative Studies supplemental admissions materials include:
      
      
      1. Statement of Purpose (see also section IV.5. above and sections VI.-IX. below). The principal element of the Department’s application is the Statement of Purpose essay of approximately five pages (double-spaced). This essay may substitute for the autobiographical statement required by the Graduate School and it should discuss in some detail the kinds of issues the student expects to explore in this graduate program, including their importance. The student should be as specific as possible in explaining how his or her intellectual project would benefit from the comparative, cross-cultural, and interdisciplinary perspectives offered by the Department and from the resources (faculty, courses, programs, collections) of The Ohio State University. Information about academic background, special experiences, and career goals may also be included. (The Course Offerings Bulletin can be viewed by individual department (http://www.osu.edu/academics/); more detailed information is posted on departmental Webpages (see University directory at http://www.osu.edu/alphaosu.php and the College of Humanities Web site at http://humanities.osu.edu). If admitted, students will design, with the help of faculty advisers, a program of coursework to fit their research needs. See sections VII., IX., and XI. below for sample programs and for a listing of courses in Comparative Studies.) Please note that the statement of purpose may be either mailed directly to the department or submitted electronically to Margaret Lynd at lynd.1@osu.edu.
         
         
      2. Writing sample. In addition to the Statement of Purpose, applicants should submit an academic paper, preferably of approximately 12-15 pages. Ordinarily, this will be a paper submitted previously for undergraduate or graduate credit—for example, a chapter of a senior or MA thesis or a substantial paper written for an advanced undergraduate class or graduate seminar. The writing sample should represent the student’s best work. Writing samples will not be returned. Please note that the writing sample may be either mailed directly to the department or submitted electronically to Margaret Lynd at lynd.1@osu.edu.
         
         
      3. Three letters of recommendation. An OSU Reference Form (http://admissions.osu.edu/apps/pdfs/refer.pdf [PDF]) must accompany each letter. Letters should address the applicant’s academic abilities and preparation for graduate work in the student’s chosen area. Students should request that letters, along with reference forms, be sent directly to the Department of Comparative Studies.
   
   
2. Deadlines. Admission to the graduate program is for Autumn Quarter only. The deadline for admission for Autumn 2010 is December 31, 2009 for domestic applicants and November 30, 2009 for international applicants. All required documents—the Graduate School application; official transcripts and test scores; letters of recommendation; and the Comparative Studies application, including the five-page statement of purpose and the writing sample—must be received in the Comparative Studies office by December 31. Because the Graduate School application, transcripts, and test scores must be processed first by the Admissions Office, all of these documents should be submitted well in advance of the December 31 deadline (November 30 for international applicants)
   
   
3. Students currently enrolled in a graduate degree program at The Ohio State University who wish to transfer to the graduate program in Comparative Studies or begin the Ph.D. program after completing the M.A. in another department should take the following steps:
   
   
   1. Arrange a meeting with the Graduate Studies Chair or the Academic Program Coordinator in the Department of Comparative Studies. If the student’s research needs and interests cannot be accommodated within the student’s department and if the M.A. or Ph.D. in Comparative Studies is an appropriate alternative, the student is directed to an appropriate faculty member for further advice. Transfer applicants are subject to the same admissions criteria and deadlines as external applicants.
      
      
   2. File with the Graduate School a Request for Transfer of Graduate Program form if the transfer is deemed appropriate.
      
      
   3. Submit a five-page statement of purpose and a writing sample. Applicants should specify which courses already taken they wish to apply toward the M.A. or Ph.D. in Comparative Studies. If the student is admitted, the Graduate Studies Committee will determine which courses already taken, if any, will count toward the M.A. or Ph.D. in Comparative Studies.
      
      
   4. Submit to the Comparative Studies office at least two new letters of recommendation from graduate faculty with whom they have studied.
      
      
   5. Students wishing to transfer to Comparative Studies from other departments are subject to the same deadlines as new domestic applicants. Both domestic and international Ohio State University graduate students must submit all application materials to the Department of Comparative Studies by January 1, 2010 for admission in Autumn 2010.
   
   The Comparative Studies Graduate Studies Committee acts on both the request for transfer and the request for specific courses to be counted toward the M.A. or Ph.D. in Comparative Studies. Approval of the transfer of graduate program does not ensure approval of credit for specific courses.
   
   
4. Graduate student status. Ordinarily, applicants are admitted to the graduate program as “regular” graduate students, and only those who are admitted with “regular” status may receive the M.A. or Ph.D. degree. In some cases, however, applicants may, for various reasons, be more appropriately assigned to other categories. Admission under any of the following categories does not ensure regular admission at a future date. Additional categories are as follows:
   
   
   1. Nondegree status: Students who do not intend to pursue a graduate degree may apply to the Graduate School for “nondegree” status provided they meet appropriate admission requirements.
      
      Domestic students (U.S. citizens or approved permanent residents of the United States, or those who have been granted asylee or refugee status in the United States) may apply for nondegree status by submitting an application (http://gradadmissions.osu.edu/nondegree.html) and supplying proof of completion of the baccalaureate degree.
      
      For international students (those who are not U.S. citizens, permanent residents, refugees, or political asylees and need to obtain a visa in order to study in the United States), eligibility for admission as a nondegree student is limited to those who are either participants in approved exchange programs or those who are enrolled in a graduate program in another U.S. university and wish to study for one quarter as a transient student and transfer the credit back to their home institution. See application instructions at http://gradadmissions.osu.edu/nondegree.html. Nondegree students may apply for admission to a Comparative Studies graduate program as “regular” students. If admitted, nondegree students may ask to apply a maximum of 10 hours of graduate nondegree coursework toward the degree. Admission as a nondegree student does not imply regular admission to any degree-granting program at a future date.
      
      
   2. Special status: Applicants who do not intend to pursue a degree may also apply for “special” status. “Special” status may be awarded by the Comparative Studies Graduate Studies Committee to applicants who have satisfied all Graduate School admission requirements, but who have not submitted the Application for Admission to the Comparative Studies Graduate Program (which outlines the student’s course of study in the graduate program). These students may later apply to the graduate program by submitting the additional materials required by the Comparative Studies Graduate Studies Committee. For students admitted to the M.A. or Ph.D. program, the Graduate Studies Committee will determine the number of graduate credit hours that may be counted toward the degree. Admission as a special student does not imply regular admission at a future date.
      
      
   3. Conditional admission status: Applicants who are accepted into the program on the condition that they correct certain deficiencies within a given period of time are granted “conditional” admission status. For example, some students may be required to maintain a certain grade-point average for several quarters of graduate study before being accepted into the graduate program; others may be required to complete some undergraduate coursework in preparation for the graduate program. Conditionally admitted students cannot be admitted as “regular” students until all conditions are satisfactorily completed. Failure to satisfy conditions of admission will result in dismissal from the program.
      
      
   4. Provisional status: Applicants for whom the verification of degree(s) or transcripts has not yet been completed, received, or evaluated may be granted “provisional” status if all other application material is acceptable to the Comparative Studies Graduate Studies Committee. If the material outstanding is judged satisfactory when submitted, the Committee may offer regular admission. Students are not permitted to enroll for a third quarter while listed as provisional. Admission as a provisional student does not ensure regular admission once the student’s file is complete.
   
   For further information on admissions, students should consult Section II of the Graduate School Handbook (http://www.gradsch.ohio-state.edu/Depo/PDF/Handbook.pdf [PDF]) and the Graduate and Professional Admissions Office Web site (http://gradadmissions.osu.edu/).

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VI. Requirements for the Master of Arts in Comparative Studies

All requirements for the degree must be completed within six years of the first quarter of enrollment in the program. Three sample programs are given in section VII below.

Requirements for the M.A. in Comparative Studies are as follows:

1. Coursework. All students are required to take a total of 50 coursework credits and must submit a completed design of the coursework program by the end of the first year. Courses are distributed as follows:
   
   
   1. All students must take the following courses during the first year of enrollment:
      Comp St 710, Approaches to Comparative Cultural Studies I (5 credits, offered AU)
      Comp St 711, Approaches to Comparative Cultural Studies II (5 credits, offered WI)
      
      
   2. All students must take a minimum of 30 credits in Comparative Studies. (Cross-listed courses may count in any department cross-listing the course, regardless of where the student is enrolled. Students may petition the Graduate Studies Committee if additional credits in other departments are required.)
      
      
   3. All students must include in their overall program at least one 700-level and one 800-level course (or two 800-level courses) in addition to Comp Studies 710 and 711.
      
      
   4. A maximum of 10 credits at the 500-level in the overall program may count toward the degree. All courses in Comparative Studies must be at or above the 600-level to be counted toward the degree.
   5. No more than 10 hours of non-graded (S/U or PA/NP) coursework (ordinarily taken as independent study) may count toward the degree.
   
   
2. Language. All students completing the M.A. in Comparative Studies must demonstrate competence in at least one foreign language. This requirement must be met in one of the following ways:
   
   
   1. by receiving a minimum grade of “B” in a 500-level course (572 in most depts) that certifies ability to read with the use of a dictionary);
      
      
   2. by passing a proficiency examination administered by the appropriate language department;
      
      
   3. by petitioning the Graduate Studies Committee to consider other evidence of competence, for example, an undergraduate major or minor in a foreign language.
   
   Courses taken to fulfill the language requirement cannot be counted toward the degree. However, foreign language courses taken at or above the 600-level may be counted toward the degree and may also serve to satisfy the language requirement.
   
   Thesis. All students are required to submit a Master's thesis and complete 50 coursework hours to be awarded the M.A. degree. Thesis hours are completed in addition to coursework hours. The thesis must address a substantial research question developed by the student in consultation with the thesis adviser, whom the student should make every effort to identify by the end of the first year of study. The thesis adviser serves as Chair of the student's Master's Examination Committee and must be chosen in compliance with the requirements stated in this document (see below) and the Graduate School Handbook. Students must take an oral examination in addition to completing the Master's thesis and must fulfill all graduation requirements as stated in Section VI of the Graduate School Handbook (http://www.gradsch.ohio-state.edu/Depo/PDF/Handbook.pdf [PDF]).
   
   
3. Advisers. The Graduate Studies Chair or a designated member of the Graduate Studies Committee will serve as adviser for incoming students, but each student must choose at least one academic adviser from the Graduate Faculty of the Department of Comparative Studies by the end of the first year. A second academic adviser (to serve on the Master’s Examination Committee) may be chosen at a later date from graduate faculty in Comparative Studies or in any other academic unit represented in the student’s curriculum. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of Comparative Studies, one additional member of the Graduate Faculty of the Department of Comparative Studies will serve as a third member of the Master’s Examination Committee.
   
   The Chair of the Master’s Examination Committee (the major adviser, who has primary responsibility for guiding students as they write the thesis) is ordinarily chosen from the regular Graduate Faculty or Associated Faculty of the Department of Comparative Studies. Faculty from other departments may serve as major advisers if they are first approved for graduate faculty status in Comparative Studies by the Graduate Studies Committee and the Graduate School. Other members of the Master’s Examination Committee need not be so approved.

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VII. Sample Programs for the M.A. in Comparative Studies

The following programs are chosen to illustrate the range of subjects students may choose to investigate for the M.A. degree.

1. Gender, Power, and Corporate Discourse. This program analyzes discourses of economic expansion and their relationship to changing governmental commitments to welfare programs. The project focuses particularly on the role of gender in political and economic processes. This student’s coursework is focused primarily in Comparative Studies and Women’s Studies. The coursework program is as follows:
   
   
   Comparative Studies:
   710 Approaches to Comparative Cultural Studies I
   711 Approaches to Comparative Cultural Studies II
   715 Theorizing America
   730 Theorizing Science and Technology
   830 Science and Difference
   Women’s Studies:
   710 Theorizing Difference
   720 Theorizing Gender, Power, and Change
   726 Gender and Public Policy
   796.20 Women and Law
   Public Policy and Management:
   801 Public Policy Formulation and Administration
   
   
2. Religion and Social Change. The second sample program included here illustrates through its very different content the range of possible subjects open to Comparative Studies students. This program is based on a study of Native American religious traditions and practices and their strategic use in power negotiations. It includes coursework in Comparative Studies, Anthropology, and English, as well as fieldwork among the Crow. The coursework program is as follows (five credits over requirements):
   
   
   Comparative Studies:
   620 Approaches to the Study of Religion
   651 American Indian Identity
   651 New Age Religions
   651 Contemporary Approaches to the Study of Religion
   710 Approaches to Comparative Cultural Studies I
   711 Approaches to Comparative Cultural Studies II
   792 Phenomenology and Religion
   English:
   870 Seminar in Folk Belief
   
   Anthropology:
   620.11 Anthropology of Religion
   693 Independent Studies: Ethnography
   810 Seminar in Cultural Anthropology
   
   
3. Literary, Religious, and Autobiographical Discourse. The third example is a study of the convergence of literary and religious discourse and self-representation, focusing on the late nineteenth-century Russian religious philosopher Solov’ev and his contemporaries, as viewed from a post-colonial perspective. The student’s coursework reflects an interest in literary and autobiography studies, Russian and European literature, and contemporary social theory, with coursework in Comparative Studies and literature departments. The coursework program is as follows:
   
   
   Comparative Studies:
   710 Approaches to Comparative Cultural Studies I
   711 Approaches to Comparative Cultural Studies II
   792 Translation Theory
   792 Decolonizing Culture
   792 Autoethnography
   890 Contemporary Theories of the Subject
   African American and African Studies:
   756 Theorizing Race
   German:
   850 Postmodernism and German Literature
   Russian:
   750 Pushkin and his Time
   852 Seminar in Russian Literature since 1917

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VIII. Requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Studies

Students who complete the M.A. in Comparative Studies may continue beyond the M.A. only upon the recommendation of the student’s Master’s Examination Committee and the Comparative Studies Graduate Studies Committee. Students who have completed the M.A. at other institutions or in other departments at OSU may in some cases be required to complete the M.A. in Comparative Studies before proceeding to the doctoral program. The number of credits earned in other M.A. programs that may be used to fulfill requirements for the Ph.D. in Comparative Studies will be determined by the Graduate Studies Committee at the time of admission. See the Graduate School Handbook (Section VII) (http://www.gradsch.ohio-state.edu/Depo/PDF/Handbook.pdf [PDF]) for University enrollment and residence requirements.

Students in the M.A. in Comparative Studies program may continue beyond the M.A. only upon the recommendation of the Graduate Studies Committee. At the end of each year, a special meeting of the faculty will be called to discuss the progress of the first-year students. At this meeting, each student's progress will be presented by her or his advisor of record. (Therefore, each student will need to have met with his or her advisor of record before this meeting.) During this meeting, input will be sought from all the faculty about the progress of each student. After the meeting, the results of this conversation will be communicated to each student by the advisor. The goal of these conversations is to provide timely and meaningful feedback to each first-year student about her or his work and potential for advancement in the program.

Since admission to the graduate program occurs once a year and all applications are due before the beginning of the Winter quarter, all students who plan to finish their MA during the school year and wish to be considered for continuing for a PhD the following year must announce those intentions by submitting the following materials by the same deadline that applies for new applicants: a statement of purpose (not to exceed five double-spaced pages) that describes a dissertation project; a writing sample (hopefully an extract from the MA thesis); and letters from any non-core faculty whose input the student would like to solicit. These letters are optional and should only be solicited when the student has had extensive intellectual interaction with a non-core faculty member. The new statement of purpose should represent the opportunity for the student to demonstrate their ability to build on their MA work and to sketch with some precision the next step in his or her intellectual progress. At the same time, it allows the faculty to assess the student's preparation for advanced graduate work and the fit between the student's needs and the faculty's expertise. Input regarding the advisability of any student's continuing for the PhD will be solicited from core faculty members during a faculty meeting in early January.

Requirements for the Ph.D. in Comparative Studies are as follows:

1. Coursework. All students are required to take a total of 145 credits (including credits earned in the Comparative Studies M.A. program or credits earned in another M.A. program and approved by the Comparative Studies Graduate Studies Committee): 95 coursework hours and 50 general examination and dissertation hours (or at least 95-100 total hours beyond the M.A.). Credits are distributed as follows:
   
   
   1. All students who have not completed the M.A. in Comparative Studies must take the following courses during the first year of enrollment:
      Comp St 710, Approaches to Comparative Cultural Studies I (5 credits)
      Comp St 711, Approaches to Comparative Cultural Studies II (5 credits)
      
      
   2. All students must take a minimum of 25 coursework credits in Comparative Studies beyond the M.A. degree (15 for students with the M.A. in Comparative Studies). (Cross-listed courses may count in any department cross-listing the course, regardless of where the student is enrolled.)
      
      
   3. No credits taken in other departments at the 500-level beyond the M.A. may count toward the Ph.D. degree. No courses taken at the 500-level in Comparative Studies may count toward either graduate degree.
      
      
   4. No more than 10 hours of non-graded (S/U or PA/NP) coursework (ordinarily taken as independent study) may be counted as coursework hours in the overall program. (This requirement is not related to non-graded 900-level hours taken as examination, thesis, or dissertation hours. Examination, thesis, or dissertation hours count toward the 145 credits required for the Ph.D., but cannot be substituted for coursework hours.)
      
      
   5. All students must include a minimum of 30 credits at the 700- and 800-level beyond the M.A. degree.
   
   See the Graduate School Handbook (http://www.gradsch.ohio-state.edu/Depo/PDF/Handbook.pdf [PDF]) Section VII. for additional Graduate School requirements.
   
   
2. Language. All students completing the Ph.D. in Comparative Studies must demonstrate competence in at least one foreign language, but some students’ research agendas will require competence in two. In particular, students working with forms of cultural expression produced in a language other than English must demonstrate competence in two foreign languages. The Graduate Studies Committee will determine whether a student’s language requirement may be fulfilled by showing competence in one or two foreign languages. This requirement (for each language) must be met in one of the following ways:
   
   
   1. by receiving a minimum grade of “B” in a 500-level course, the equivalent of 573 in some departments, that certifies ability to read with the use of a dictionary, but at a more advanced level than that required for the M.A. degree);
      
      
   2. be receiving a minimum grade of "B" in a 600-level course taught in a foreign language;
      
      
   3. by passing a proficiency examination administered by the appropriate language department;
      
      
   4. by petitioning the Graduate Studies Committee to consider other evidence of competence, for example, an undergraduate major or minor in a foreign language.
   
   Courses taken to fulfill the language requirement cannot be counted toward the degree. However, foreign language courses taken at or above the 600-level may be counted toward the degree and may also serve to satisfy the language requirement.
   
   
3. Candidacy Examinations.
   
   In order to begin work on the dissertation, a student will be required to complete a dissertation prospectus and three written examinations relevant to the student’s dissertation research and general preparedness for scholarly employment. Candidacy exams should be completed within three quarters of the completion of all coursework, normally by the end of the second year after the completion of the student’s M.A. More time for preparing can be obtained through petitioning the Comparative Studies Graduate Studies Committee. All qualifying examinations will comprise three examination fields and be structured to qualify students in two ways: 1) to pursue a specific dissertation research agenda; and 2) to situate the student as a researcher and teacher in at least two significant academic fields. In consultation with his or her advisory committee, the student will design the examinations in a way that best achieves these two objectives. The Comparative Studies exam format is highly individualized, guided by the needs of the student and the advice of the Advisory Committee.
   
   One of the examination areas must be Critical, Social, and Cultural Theory. The reading list for this exam will build on syllabi for CS 710 and 711, but may be modified by the Advisory Committee to meet the particular needs and interests of the individual student. The goal of this exam is to provide the student with the opportunity to demonstrate knowledge of current positions in Critical, Social and Cultural Theory and facility in conceptualizing research questions informed by these positions.
   
   The second and third exams should provide the student with the opportunity to articulate the specificity of his or her research interests and to situate those research interests and general preparedness for scholarly employment in the context of at least two significant academic fields. Before the exam, the student will be required to name the targeted fields of qualification. Advisory Committee members with expertise in those targeted areas will be responsible for ensuring that the examination process, including the definition of the examination fields, will qualify the student to use methods from those targeted areas in the dissertation research, to situate that research convincingly in debates in those areas, and to teach in those areas. The committee member responsible for overseeing the student’s preparation in a particular targeted area may, at his or her discretion, deem it necessary for an examination field to be devoted in its entirety to that area. For example, it could be possible to devote one exam to the specific area of dissertation research, saving the second exam to allow the student to demonstrate her or his ability to articulate that work to two fields. Another possible structure would ask students to articulate the relationships between their work and two different fields in two different exams.
   
   The actual examination process will be determined by each student’s Advisory Committee and approved by the Graduate Studies Committee. The goal of the process is to enable the student to demonstrate her or his capacity to perform interdisciplinary scholarly work at the highest level, but within a constrained framework. The length of time allowed for the writing of the exams and the conditions under which the exams are written should be set with that goal in mind. For example, the student could take three exams, one in each of the three areas, over a period of ten days and with a specified page limit. Alternatively, the student could write three formal papers over the course of a quarter, discussing the state of the field in each of the three areas. Or the student could take the exams in a very concentrated period of time, such as in three four-hour exams over the course of one week.
   
   At least two members of the Advisory Committee must be Comparative Studies Graduate Faculty, and the Graduate Studies Committee must approve any members of the Advisory Committee who are not members of the Comparative Studies Graduate Faculty or Associated Faculty. A two-hour Oral Examination is required by the Graduate School and must take place within one month of completion of the written portion of the examination. The Candidacy Examination Committee is made up of members of the Advisory Committee and the Graduate Faculty Representative, to be chosen by the Graduate School. The completed written portions of the examination must be received by the Graduate Faculty Representative no less than nine days prior to the Oral Examination.
   
   The outcome of the Candidacy Examination is reached in the absence of the student. The decision to judge the examination satisfactory or unsatisfactory must be unanimous and all examiners must sign the Candidacy Examination Report affirming that vote. Satisfactory completion of the Candidacy Examination indicates the student is deemed sufficiently prepared to undertake dissertation research, and the student then proceeds to candidacy for the Ph.D. If the Candidacy Examination Committee finds the student’s performance unsatisfactory, the examination may be retaken with the approval of the Graduate School. No substitutions may be made on the student’s Candidacy Examination Committee if a second examination is required and a second oral examination must be scheduled.
   
   See the Graduate School Handbook (http://www.gradsch.ohio-state.edu/Depo/PDF/Handbook.pdf [PDF]), Section VII. for additional details about the scheduling process and examination procedures.
   
   
4. Dissertation. Soon after the successful completion of the exams (normally within two quarters), the student must develop a dissertation committee (which might be the same as the Advisory Committee, but need not be) and submit a dissertation prospectus. This prospectus should outline a research problem, indicate the research problem’s theoretical significance, briefly review the most relevant past and current scholarship relating to the problem, and identify a relevant theoretical framework and research strategy. The dissertation committee will determine the proper length for each student’s prospectus, but it should typically consist of a minimum of fifteen and a maximum of thirty pages. The dissertation committee will determine the extent to which the prospectus represents a comprehensive and comprehensible plan for the completion of the dissertation.
   
   The dissertation is a scholarly document requiring independent research under the guidance of faculty advisors. It should demonstrate the student’s competence in interdisciplinary research and should demonstrate strong potential for future publication. The dissertation must be completed within five years of completing the Candidacy Examination. The dissertation advisor must be a member of the Graduate Faculty or Associated Faculty of Comparative Studies, or be approved by the Graduate Studies Committee and the Graduate School for Graduate Faculty status in Comparative Studies. The Dissertation Committee must include a minimum of three members, at least two from the Comparative Studies Graduate Faculty. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of the Comparative Studies Ph.D. program, most students will choose one or two additional committee members. All members of the Dissertation Committee must be approved by the Comparative Studies Graduate Studies Committee.
   
   All students are required to take a Final Oral Examination of approximately two hours. The Final Oral Examination Committee includes all members of the Dissertation Committee and a Graduate Faculty Representative appointed by the Graduate School. Before Friday of the second week of the quarter in which the Final Oral Examination is to be taken, the student must submit to the Graduate School a typed, properly formatted copy of the Dissertation, along with a signed Application to Graduate form and Doctoral Draft Approval/Notification of Final Oral Examination form.
   
   See the Graduate School Handbook (http://www.gradsch.ohio-state.edu/Depo/PDF/Handbook.pdf [PDF]), Section VII for additional details.
   
   
5. Advisers. The Graduate Studies Chair or a designated member of the Graduate Studies Committee will serve as adviser for incoming students, but each student must choose at least one academic adviser from the Graduate Faculty of the Department of Comparative Studies by the end of the first year of graduate study. Additional advisers to serve on the Advisory Committee for Candidacy Exams may be chosen from Comparative Studies regular and associated faculty. If a student wishes to choose an adviser from an academic unit represented in the student’s curriculum but who is not a member of the Comparative Studies associated faculty, that adviser must be approved by the Graduate Studies Committee and the Graduate School for graduate faculty status in Comparative Studies.
   
   In most cases, the dissertation adviser will be a member of the student’s Candidacy Examination Committee. Any change of the dissertation adviser requires the approval of the Graduate Studies Committee and the Graduate School.

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IX. Sample Programs for the Ph.D. in Comparative Studies

The Ph.D. in Comparative Studies is a relatively new program that accepted students for the first time beginning Autumn 2003. The two sample programs included here are fictional, but represent examples of the kind of interdisciplinary work that is possible. The first sample program combines work in religious studies and folklore, the second in comparative literature and science studies.

1. Women, Folklore, and Religious Practice in North Africa. Doctoral research would involve particular instances of the extra-institutional involvement of women in new forms of religious practice and the ways in which such creative manipulations of religious tradition may contribute to the empowerment of women. The project would compare the development of such practices in the varying cultural and political contexts of post-World War II North Africa, for example, in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. The program might include courses in Comparative Studies, folklore courses in English, and several courses in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, History, or Women’s Studies. Comparative Studies faculty and associated faculty whose work focuses on religious studies, folklore, history, Middle Eastern studies, or women’s studies would serve as advisers for such a project. Here is a tentative coursework outline for such a program for a student entering Comparative Studies with a baccalaureate degree.
   
   
   General Examination Areas:
   Critical, Social, and Cultural Theory
   Folklore
   Religious Studies
   
   Languages: French and Arabic
   
   Coursework:
   
   Comparative Studies:
   (Required) 710 Approaches to Comparative Cultural Studies I
   (Required) 711 Approaches to Comparative Cultural Studies II
   620 Approaches to the Study of Religion
   677.04 Comparative Folk Groups
   725 Theorizing Religion
   826 Religion and Sexuality
   862 Performance and Politics
   
   English/Comparative Studies
   770.01 Intro to Graduate Study in Folklore: Approaches & Research Methods
   770.02 Intro to Graduate Study in Folklore: Field Research
   
   English
   870 Seminar in Folklore
   
   Arabic
   626 Introduction to the Qur’an
   672 Arabic Folk Narrative in Translation
   722 Studies in Arabic Prose
   811 Seminar in Arabic Studies
   
   Near Eastern Languages and Cultures
   646 Colonial Cities in Postcolonial Memory: The Politics of Urban Development in the Near East
   
   Near Eastern Languages and Cultures/Comparative Studies
   672 Poetry and Politics in the 20th-Century Mediterranean
   
   History
   727 Studies in Islamic History
   
   Women’s Studies
   710 Theorizing Difference
   720 Theorizing Gender, Power, and Change
   860 Topics in Feminist Studies
   
   
2. Science, Capitalism, and Contemporary Fiction in the Americas. Much contemporary Latin American and North American fiction addresses both epistemological questions about science (which could be related here to the literary techniques of magical realism and of postmodernism) and political and economic consequences of technological development promoted through processes of economic globalization. Recent novels such as Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez’s One-Hundred Years of Solitude or Love in the Time of Cholera, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra or The Death of Artemio Cruz, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow or Mason and Dixon, for example, all address these issues in different ways using a wide range of innovative literary techniques. Comparative Studies faculty with expertise in narrative theory and comparative literature, ethnic and American studies, and science studies and associated faculty members from the departments of Spanish and Portuguese, English, and French would serve as advisors for such a project. In the sample program below, students would find most useful those courses in English, History, and Spanish that provide the cultural and historical contexts within which a number of 20th-century fiction writers in the Americas came to focus in their writing on a critique of the causes and effects of scientific and technological development.
   
   
   General Examination Areas:
   Critical, Social, and Cultural Theory
   Science Studies
   Contemporary North and Latin American Fiction
   
   Languages: Spanish and French
   
   Coursework:
   
   Comparative Studies
   (Required) 710 Approaches to Comparative Cultural Studies I
   (Required) 711 Approaches to Comparative Cultural Studies II
   715 Theorizing America
   716 Theorizing Culture
   730 Theorizing Science and Technology
   741 Theorizing Genre
   790 Foundations of Contemporary Critical Theory
   830 Science and Difference
   845 Literature in Global Contexts
   880 Culture and Capital
   
   English
   854 Seminar in 20th-century American Literature
   864 Postcolonial/Transnational Literatures
   890 Interdepartmental Studies in Critical Theory
   
   French
   657.01 Francophone Literature from Black Africa and the Caribbean
   
   History
   700 Studies in World History
   
   Spanish
   757 Studies in Contemporary Spanish American Literature
   760 Topics in Spanish American Culture and Civilization
   857 Seminar in Modern Spanish American Literature
   858 Seminar in Contemporary Spanish American Literature

The Ph.D. in Comparative Studies is a relatively new program that accepted students for the first time in Autumn 2003. As of Summer 2009, four students had completed the Ph.D. in Comparative Studies. Their doctoral research is centered, respectively, upon archival practices, prisoner literature in Africa, visual culture and terrorism, and African American women's narratives of addiction and recovery. Three of the four are employed in tenure-track positions (one in an academic library) and one has accepted a Post-Doctoral research position. The Department is pleased with the success of its first Ph.D. graduates.

Two of these four programs are described here and are representative of the kind of interdisciplinary work that is done in Comparative Studies.

1. The Shadow Rules of Engagement. This research project analyzes the effects, particularly on citizenship, of visual representations of the "Global War on Terror." [From the dissertation abstract:] "Like all wars, the Global War on Terror (GWOT) (2001-present) has resulted in upheavals of culture and politics. What makes the GWOT unique is the degree to which these disruptions coincide. This dissertation explores their convergence in visual culture, a key medium through which Americans confront terror in everyday life. The Shadow Rules of Engagement is an interdisciplinary project that integrates insights from cultural studies and political theory to provide a comprehensive account of the American visual culture of terror and how it shapes the experience of citizenship."
   
   This student's General Examination Areas are:
   
   Critical, Social, and Cultural Theory
   Visuality and Visual Culture
   Culture/Terror/Nation
   
   Language: French
   
   Coursework:
   
   Comparative Studies:
   (Required) 710 Approaches to Comparative Cultural Studies I
   (Required) 711 Approaches to Comparative Cultural Studies II
   651 The Sociopolitics of Language
   715 Theorizing America
   792 Trauma and Trans(per)formance: African American Cultural Production and Representational Struggle
   792 Citizenship, Politics, and Social Movements
   880 Culture and Capital
   890 Confronting the National Past
   890 Reading the Postcolonial
   
   English:
   762 Intro to Graduate Study in Drama and Performance
   776.02 Literary Criticism: From 1900 to the Contemporary Period
   
   Political Science:
   894.01 Contemporary Political Problems
   
   Sociology:
   608 Gender, Race, and Mass Communication
   
   Women's Studies:
   620 Topics in Women's Studies
   700 Intro to Graduate Study in Women's Studies
   710 Theorizing Difference
   720 Gender, Power, and Change
   740 Theorizing Gender Representation
   840 Topics in Representing Gender
   
   
2. The Incarcerated Self: Narratives of Political Confinement in Kenya. This research project explores narratives of incarceration in Kenya. From the dissertation abstract: "[T]his study concentrates mainly on the fiction and non-fiction writing of prisoners of conscience or political prisoners [in the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial periods.] . . . Focusing on memory, truth telling, the I-pronoun, and trauma, the study analyzes the relationship between self-exploration and narration of confinement. [The study shows] that oral narratives inaugurated the narrativization of incarceration in Kenya during the pre-colonial era and continued to serve as the oxygen ventilating written prison narratives in succeeding periods. . . . One of the major findings of this study is [that] prison literature [constitutes] an alternative and unauthorized national narrative that runs counter to the . . . official or authorized national narrative. Both these metanarratives claim legitimacy and fiercely vie for public space and attention, thereby perfoming what I term the paradox of patriotism."
   
   General Examination Areas:
   Critical, Social, and Cultural Theory
   African Literatures: Continental and Diasporic
   Prison Literatures
   
   Language: Swahili
   
   Coursework:
   
   Comparative Studies
   (Required) 710 Approaches to Comparative Cultural Studies I
   (Required) 711 Approaches to Comparative Cultural Studies II
   677.02 World Folklore: Travelers, Tourists, Tricksters
   741 Theorizing Genre
   845 Literature in Global Contexts: Modernization, Violence, Nation
   845 Literature in Global Contexts: Confronting the National/Transnational Past
   890 An Introduction to Affect
   
   African American and African Studies
   751 Intro to African Literature
   753 Graduate Survey
   756 Theorizing Race and Ethnicity
   758.01 Comparative History: African Diaspora I
   758.02 Comparative History: African Diaspora II
   775.03 Feminism and Black Politics
   860 Seminar in Comparative Black Literature
   
   English
   757.02 African American Literature: 1900 to the Present
   851 Seminar in Critical Black Literature
   876 Seminar in Critical Theory
   890 Problems in Critical Theory
   
   Theatre
   864 Theatre Criticism
   American Literature [Return to top]
   
   

   X. The Graduate Minor in Comparative Cultural Studies

   The Graduate Minor is designed for doctoral students in any department at Ohio State. It allows students to supplement their graduate studies with a broader understanding of the theoretical, historical, and methodological concerns related to interdisciplinary studies of cultural and cross-cultural issues. The Graduate Minor requires 20 credit hours of coursework to include Comparative Studies 710 and 711, Approaches to Comparative Cultural Studies I and II, which examine the history and theory of comparative and interdisciplinary studies of culture. Ten additional credits are to be chosen from the Department’s 600-800-level courses in Comparative Studies. The latter are chosen according to the specific interests of each student, upon consultation with the student’s own advisor and the Minor Program advisor. No more than one 600-level course may count toward the Graduate Minor, and no course counted for the Minor may be counted in the student’s own departmental degree program. Graduate students may enroll in the Graduate Minor in Comparative Cultural Studies by completing the Graduate Minor Program Form available in the Comparative Studies office, 451 Hagerty Hall. See also http://www.gradsch.ohio-state.edu/Content.aspx?Content=89&itemid=12
   
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   XI. Graduate Courses in the Department of Comparative Studies

   The courses listed below are offered for graduate credit in the Department of Comparative Studies. It should be noted that the content of topics courses varies widely from quarter to quarter, as does the content of many of the courses offered by other departments (see Web site for quarterly topics http://comparativestudies.osu.edu/courses/). Students should keep themselves apprised of quarterly offerings in relevant departments and should consult with faculty advisers on a regular basis to take best advantage of course offerings both in Comparative Studies and in other departments.
   
   As noted in Sections VII. and VIII. above, all Comparative Studies students take coursework outside the Department of Comparative Studies. Students are not limited to particular departments in order to fulfill this requirement, and are encouraged to take full advantage of the wide range of coursework available to them at this University. Associated Faculty also frequently offer courses in their home departments that are of interest to Comparative Studies students.
   
   Comparative Studies courses are described in the OSU Course Catalogue (http://www.osu.edu/academics/) as follows (all courses are five credits unless otherwise noted):
   
   620 Approaches to the Study of Religion Survey and comparison of concepts, categories, theories, and methods used by various disciplines in the study of religion.
   
   641 The Japanese Religious Tradition A survey of the Japanese tradition, including Shinto, Buddhism, Taoism, New-Confucianism, and folk religion from the 6th century B.C.E. to the present.
   
   645 Studies in Korean-American Literature (repeatable to 10 credits) Critical study of Korean-American literature and literary genres of the twentieth century, with particular attention to historical, social, and cultural contexts.
   
   648 Studies in Orality and Literacy Examination of major theories of writing and of oral omposition and transmission, in juxtaposition to case material deriving from a variety of Middle Eastern cultures.
   
   **651 Topics in Comparative Studies (repeatable to 15 credits) Critical study of selected themes and topics in a comparative and cross-cultural perspective; emphasis on issues of method, critical theory, representation, power, knowledge, and authority.
   
   660 Modernity: Key Issues and Concepts Introduces key issues and concepts defining modernity, focusing on how modernity has shaped recent and contemporary politics and culture, as well as discussions of globalization.
   
   665 Studies in Japanese American Literature (repeatable to 10 credits) Critical study of modern Japanese-American literature in historical and cultural context; topics vary: literature of the internment, gender and identity politics, genre studies, women’s writing.
   
   672 Poetry and Politics in the Twentieth-Century Mediterranean Exploration of several poets and poetic traditions around the Mediterranean in relation to modern political struggles; resistance to fascism; dilemmas of imperialism and underdevelopment.
   
   **677 Studies in World Folklore (each subdivision repeatable to 10 credits)
   
   677.01 Genres of Folk Literature Historical and cross-cultural study of genre theory. Comparative study of specific genres of folk literature: e.g., fairy tales, folktales, legends, epics, and jokes.
   
   677.02 Themes in World Folklore Cross-cultural, cross-genre study of folklore themes: e.g., folklore of sex, folklore of religion. Multidisciplinary perspective employs anthropological, psychological, and literary theory.
   
   677.03 Folk Custom, Art, and Material Culture Study of folk customs, arts, and material culture. Theoretical emphasis on structural affinities of these with other folk forms, including verbal art, ritual, festival, folk religion.
   
   677.04 Comparative Folk Groups Comparative study of ethnic, regional, religious, kin, occupational, age, or sex groups. Emphasis on range of historical and contemporary theoretical perspectives used to understand groups.
   
   678 Studies in Chinese-American Literature (repeatable to 10 credits) Critical study of modern Chinese-American literature in historical and cultural context. Topics vary: gender issues, genre studies, women’s writing.
   
   693 Individual Studies (1-10; repeatable to 15 credits) Designed to give able students an opportunity to pursue special studies not otherwise offered.
   
   **694 Group Studies (3-5; repeatable to 15 credits) Groups of students are given an opportunity to pursue special studies not otherwise offered.
   
   697 Study at a Foreign Institution (1-15) An opportunity for students to study at a foreign institution and receive Ohio State credit for that work.
   
   698 Study Tour (1-15) Specific content, location, quarter(s) of offering, and prerequisites vary; contact department office for details.
   
   706 Complex Ethography; Critical analysis of relationships among the researcher, object of research, framing knowledge, and political context of ethnographic work.
   
   *710 Approaches to Comparative Cultural Studies I Historical perspectives on modernity and difference: introduces the issues and methods involved in situating and comparing authoritative discourses (literary, religious, scientific) and other cultural processes. Required.
   
   *711 Approaches to Comparative Cultural Studies II Contemporary practices of contextualization and comparison: explores issues and methods involved in situating and comparing authoritative discourses (literary, religious, scientific) and other cultural processes. Required.
   
   715 Theorizing America Interdisciplinary study of culture, identity, and representation in the U.S.
   
   716 Theorizing Culture Examines the concept of culture as it has developed over time; emphasis on tension between descriptive and normative approaches.
   
   725 Theorizing Religion Examines relationships between religion and other domains in a cross-cultural, comparative framework with attention to theoretical models and particular texts and traditions.
   
   730 Theorizing Science and Technology Introduction to comparative and cultural studies of science and technology.
   
   739 Comparative constitutional Politics Compares consititutions and constitutionalism across cultures and through different disciplines with special attention to how people make claims to secure their rights and interests.
   
   741 Theorizing Genre (repeatable to 15 credits) Comparative studies of genre theory and specific genres, (e.g., epic, novel, autobiography, film genres) in cultural context.
   
   752 Race and Citizenship: Formations in Critical Race Theory Critical analysis of concepts of law, e.g., a value-free legal code, universality of legal concepts, equitable enforcement; emphasis on U.S.
   
   760 Theorizing Performance Advanced introduction to the field of performance studies; theory and practice of expressive social behaviors, including theatre, dance, ritual, sport, and embodied practices of everyday life.
   
   CS/English 770 Introduction to Graduate Study in Folklore A two-course sequence in current scholarship and methods necessary for advanced study in folklore.
   
   770.01 Approaches and Research Methods Bibliography, research, and critical approaches for the advanced study of folklore.
   
   770.02 Field Research Methods and theory of field research and field ethics necessary for advanced study in folklore.
   
   770.03 The Ethnography of Communication Ethnographic approaches to social interaction and performance; the speech community; the communicative economy.
   
   781 Studies in Women's History An intensive reading course designed to prepare graduate students in women's history in a comparative framework.
   
   790 Foundations of Comtemporary Critical Theory Interdisciplinary survey of the theoretical bases of major contemporary approaches to the study of literature; readings in Marx, Freud, Derrida, Cixous, and others.
   
   **792 Interdepartmental Studies in the Humanities (3-5; repeatable to 15 credits) Two or more departments present colloquia on subjects of mutual interest; topics to be announced.
   
   798 Thesis Seminar (3) Writing seminar for second-year students in the Comparative Studies graduate program. Open only to Comparative Studies graduate students.
   
   820 Comparative Sacred Architecture Explores the diversity of natural and built environments designed for various religious purposes in different cultural and historical contexts.
   
   825 Sacred Biography and the Cult of the Saint Explores issues and problems in the study of sacred biography and the cult of the saints; focus on both Christian and cross-cultural contexts.
   
   826 Religion and Sexuality Examines relationships between religion and sexuality in a cross-cultural, comparative framework with attention to theoretical models as well as particular texts and traditions.
   
   827 Religion and Politics (repeatable) Explores relationships across political and religious institutions and practices; topic varies.
   
   830 Science and Difference Explores scientific constructions of difference (racial, gender, sexual, cultural) and the consequences of difference for the making of science.
   
   841 Women's Autobiographical Writing Maps diverse modes and practices of women’s life writing by considering both theoretical works and autobiographical writing.
   
   845 Literature in Global Contexts (repeatable to 15 credits) Discussion of literary texts, cultural-political documents, and theoretical discourses in global contexts.
   
   850 Wexner Center Seminar (1-5; repeatable to 15 credits) Graduate seminar offered in conjunction with Wexner Center exhibitions, performance series, or symposia; may be taught by visiting artists, performers, or critics.
   
   862 Performance and Politics (repeatable to 15 credits) Analyzes role of performance in relation to political processes and cultural production.
   
   880 Culture and Capital (repeatable to 15 credits) Examines the concept of culture as it has developed over time; emphasis on tension between descriptive and normative approaches.
   
   **890 Interdepartmental Studies in Critical Theory (repeatable to 10 credits) Interdisciplinary study of a movement (phenomenology, deconstruction, etc.) or problem (intentionality, evaluation, etc.) in literary theory.
   
   996 Research in Comparative Studies: Candidacy Examination (Arr) Research in preparation for Ph.D. exams.
   
   998 Research in Comparative Studies: Thesis (Arr) Research for master’s thesis. [Not to be included in 50 required coursework credit hours.]
   
   999 Research in Comparative Studies: Disseration (Arr) Research for dissertation.
   
   *Required
   **Topics in these interdisciplinary courses vary widely from quarter to quarter.
   Graduate courses offered in 2004-05 include the following:
   
   An Introduction to Affect (Brian Rotman)
   Citizenship, Politics and Social Movements (Tanya Erzen)
   City Culture and Global Politics: Comparative Issues (Leo Coleman)
   Critical Pedagogy (Hugh Urban)
   Cultural Translation and Transmission (Margaret Mills, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures)
   Cultures of Waste and Recycling (Dorothy Noyes)
   Discourses of "Life" (Brian Rotman)
   D&oögen's Zen Philosophy (Thomas Kasulis)
   Folklore and the Disciplines (Sabra Webber)
   Folklore Genres and Interpretive Methods (Dorothy Noyes)
   Folklore, Memory, and History (Ray Cashman, English)
   Framing the Other: China and the West (Andrea Bachner)
   Gender and Traditional Cultural Practice (Amy Shuman, English)
   God/gods and Belief (Brian Rotman)
   Islam and Popular Practice in West and South Asia (Margaret Mills, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures)
   Japanese Aesthetics (Thomas Kasulis)
   Latino/a Fiction: Resistance, Revision, Transculturation (Theresa Delgadillo)
   Marx, Nietzsche, Freud (Paul Reitter, Germanic Languages and Literatures)
   Mesoamerican Religions—Before the Encounter with Europeans: Cosmovision and Ceremonial Centers and Since the Encounter with Europeans: Indigeneity and/or Hybridity (two-quarter sequence, Lindsay Jones)
   Modernization, Violence, Nation (Nina Berman)
   Politics of Culture in Latin America: Theory and Performance (Katey Borland)
   Post-Foundational Political Thought (Philip Armstrong)
   Primitive Passions, Intercultural Negotiations (Andrea Bachner)
   Prisons, Punishment, and American Culture (Tanya Erzen)
   Reading the Postcolonial (Kwaku Korang)
   Religion and Magic (Hugh Urban)
   Seminar on Foucault (David Horn)
   The Idea of Religion: Past and Future (Michael Swartz, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures)
   The Return of the Aesthetic (Gregory Jusdanis, Greek and Latin)
   Theories of Myth (Merrill Kaplan, English)
   Theorizing Science: Engineered Worlds and Machined Bodies (Leo Coleman)
   Theorizing the Public (Rick Livingston)
   Translation Studies (Dick Davis, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures)
   Travelers, Tourists, Tricksters (Sabra Webber)
   Visual Technologies of Race (Ruby Tapia)
   William James and the Construction of Experience (Thomas Kasulis)
   Women's Autobiographical Writing (Julia Watson) See also http://comparativestudies.osu.edu/courses/.
   
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   XII. Financial Aid

   The University makes financial aid available on a competitive basis to prospective graduate students in the form of fellowships and graduate associateships. All applicants who want to be considered for any kind of financial aid must check the appropriate box on the Graduate School admissions application.
   
   
   1. Fellowships. All fellowship consideration is conducted at University-wide levels. Students with exceptional academic records may be nominated by the Comparative Studies Graduate Studies Committee for consideration for the award of a University Fellowship or, for students who are members of underrepresented groups, a Graduate Enrichment Fellowship by the Graduate School. Special Graduate Enrichment Fellowships may also be considered for members of underrepresented groups who show evidence of high potential for graduate study, but whose previous education requires supplementary coursework.
      
      The stipend for University fellows runs for 12 months; resident and nonresident fees are waived. Graduate fellows must enroll for at least 15 hours of graduate credit each quarter they hold an appointment and must be in residence at The Ohio State University. The Comparative Studies Graduate Studies Committee does not permit graduate fellows in the M.A. program to hold any other type of employment with one exception: fellows may hold a concurrent Graduate Associateship at a maximum of 25% time. Students must continue to meet all fellowship requirements.
      
      Please consult the Graduate School Web site (http://www.gradsch.osu.edu/) and the Graduate School Handbook (http://www.gradsch.ohio-state.edu/Depo/PDF/Handbook.pdf [PDF]), Section X., for further information on graduate fellowships.
      
      
   2. Graduate Associateships. Graduate Teaching, Graduate Research, and Graduate Administrative Associateships (GTAs, GRAs, and GAAs) are available through University departments, centers, and other units. Duties and responsibilities of GAs appointed by units other than the Department of Comparative Studies are determined by the employing unit.
      
      
      1. Graduate Teaching Associateships. A small number of Graduate Teaching Associateships are available through the Department of Comparative Studies, and these positions are offered to especially qualified candidates. Students are also encouraged to inquire about Teaching Associateships in other departments. Applicants with backgrounds and skills of interest to a particular department (such as experience in teaching elementary foreign languages, mathematics, the sciences, or composition) should contact the appropriate graduate studies chair about the availability of GTA positions, eligibility requirements, and application procedures.
         
         Within the Department, GTAs sometimes have full responsibility for their own classes and sometimes assist faculty in teaching large lecture classes. GTAs employed as teachers will be expected to take full responsibility for all aspects of the class they are teaching. New GTAs will be observed and evaluated by Comparative Studies faculty at least once during the first quarter of teaching and at least once during the quarter in which a class is being taught for the first time. GTAs assisting faculty instructors will determine their specific duties in consultation with the instructor of the class. GTAs will be assigned office space, but in some instances may be required to share desk space with other GTAs.
         
         GTAs submit student evaluations of their performance each quarter to the Department Chair. Student and observer evaluations will be made available to GTAs, and GTAs will be expected to improve areas of weakness. If student or observer evaluations reveal serious problems with GTA performance, appropriate means of improvement will be determined in consultation with the Chair.
         
         
      2. Graduate Research Associateships. Duties and responsibilities of GRAs will be determined in consultation with the faculty or staff member to whom they are assigned. Means of evaluating GRA performance are the responsibility of the faculty or staff member with whom the GRA is working. GRAs generally will not be assigned office space of their own.
         
         
      3. Graduate Administrative Associateships. GAAs work as program assistants in offices throughout the University, and their duties and responsibilities are assigned by those offices. However, because there is no central listing of University-wide GAA positions, applicants themselves must often locate them. The Department brings such positions to the attention of students whenever possible. These positions are usually filled in March, April, and May, but GAA positions sometimes become available during the rest of the year, as well. Procedures for evaluation of job performance are established by the unit in which the student is employed.
      
      
   3. Criteria for Appointment and Minimum Enrollment Requirements. To hold any Graduate Associate appointment, a student must be pursuing a graduate degree at the University; must be registered in the Graduate School for at least nine credit hours during each quarter of appointment (except Summer Quarter, when students must be registered for seven credit hours); must be in good standing in the Graduate School when the appointment or reappointment becomes effective; must maintain reasonable progress toward a graduate degree; and must certify proficiency in spoken English before assuming GTA duties involving direct student contact.
      
      Reappointment Criteria. Reappointment as a Graduate Associate depends upon reasonable academic progress as determined by the Graduate Studies Committee, as well as satisfactory job performance. Comparative Studies students appointed by departments other than the Department of Comparative Studies are subject to the procedures and criteria of the employing unit for appointment and reappointment. Termination of employment will occur only after reasonable attempts have been made to resolve the specific problems leading to termination.
      
      Time Limitation. Students who enroll in the graduate program with a BA and who are in pursuit of an MA will be assured of two years of funding. Students who enter with a BA and progress on for a Ph.D. will be assured of five years of funding. Students who enter with an MA and are in pursuit of a Ph.D. will be assured of four years of funding. Each of these assurances presumes that the student remains in good standing and is making sufficient progress toward her or his degree. Students may also petition for additional years of funding which will be considered on a year-by-year and case-by-case basis. The Graduate Studies Committee will decide the merit of all such petitions.
      
      Grievances. When grievances of any kind cannot be resolved through discussion with an adviser, supervisor, the Chair of the Graduate Studies Committee, the Chair or Assistant to the Chair of the Department, or a dean of the College of Humanities, the Graduate Associate is advised to consult with Graduate School officials in order to undertake grievance procedures as established by the Council on Research and Graduate Studies.
      
      
   4. Travel Reimbursement. All students enrolled in the MA or Ph.D. program are encouraged to present papers at professional conferences and are encouraged to petition the Chair for reimbursement of travel expenses incurred for such presentations. The Department will, assuming the availability of funds, provide up to $500 for documented expenses. Students MUST submit to the office administrator, Wen Tsai, their estimated expenses BEFORE traveling. Reimbursements cannot be made if this request has not been recorded and assigned a University travel number. The Department cannot provide any financial assistance for attendance at a conference in which students are not formally participating as a presenter or discussant. All funding for travel is dependent upon the availability of funds.
      
      For further information about Graduate Associate appointments, fellowships, and financial aid in general, please consult the Graduate School Handbook (http://www.gradsch.ohio-state.edu/Depo/PDF/Handbook.pdf [PDF]), Section IX.
   
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   XIII. Graduation Procedures for M.A. and Ph.D. Students

   1. Students must submit an Application to Graduate form, which includes the date and time of the oral examination, to the Graduate School no later than the second Friday of the quarter in which graduation is expected. The form is valid only for that quarter. For M.A. students, the form must be signed by the student, the student’s thesis adviser, and the Chair of the Comparative Studies Graduate Studies Committee. For Ph.D. students, the Application to Graduate form, also signed by the student, the student’s dissertation adviser, and the Chair of the Comparative Studies Graduate Studies Committee, must be accompanied by the Doctoral Draft Approval/Notification of Final Oral Examination form and a completed, typed draft of the dissertation (see the Graduate School Web site http://gradsch.osu.edu/ under "Forms and Publications"). All members of the Dissertation Committee must sign the draft approval form indicating that the student is adequately prepared to defend the dissertation. All students must be registered for at least three credits during the expected quarter of graduation.
      
      
   2. M.A. students must successfully complete a thesis and oral examination and submit the Master’s Examination Report form to the Graduate School at least two weeks before commencement. Ph.D. students must successfully complete the dissertation and oral examination and submit the Final Oral Examination Report form to the Graduate School. Current Graduation Deadlines can be found at http://gradsch.osu.edu/ (under "Graduateion Deadlines").
      
      
   3. Students are responsible for arranging a time for the oral examination that is convenient for all members of the Master’s Examination Committee or the Final Oral Examination Committee.
      
      
   4. The final, approved copy of the master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation, with formatting approved by the Graduate School, must be submitted no later than Wednesday of the week before commencement (see current "Graduation Deadlines" at http://gradsch.osu.edu/). Detailed instructions for formatting and submitting these documents are found in the Graduate School Handbook (http://www.gradsch.ohio-state.edu/Depo/PDF/Handbook.pdf[PDF]). The publication "Guidelines for Preparing Theses, Dissertations, and D.M.A. Documents" is found on the Graduate School Web site under "Forms and Publications": http://www.gradsch.ohio-state.edu/Depo/PDF/Guidelines.pdf [PDF]. When submitting the final copy of the thesis to the Graduate School, students should be sure to give themselves time to correct any errors in formatting.
      
      
   5. In addition to the above procedures, all students are responsible for fulfilling the following requirements for graduation:
      
      
      1. Students must attain a cumulative point-hour ratio of at least 3.0 for all graduate credit hours taken at this university.
         
         
      2. Students must fulfill all requirements established by the Comparative Studies Graduate Studies Committee as stated in this document.
         
         
      3. Students must be sure that the Graduate School receives final grades by the deadline published in the Master Schedule of Classes.
         
         
      4. Students must fulfill all requirements by the deadlines established by the Graduate School.
      
      
   6. Doctoral students must also fulfill the following residence requirements:
      
      
      1. a minimum of 45 graduate credit hours beyond the master’s degree at this university.
         
         
      2. a minimum of three out of four consecutive quarters with an enrollment of at least ten graduate credit hours per quarter at this university.
      
      Please consult the Graduate School Handbook (http://www.gradsch.ohio-state.edu/Depo/PDF/Handbook.pdf [PDF]), Section VI. (M.A.) and Section VII. (Ph.D.), for further detailed information about graduation requirements.
   
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   XIV. Core Graduate Faculty of the Department of Comparative Studies

   Faculty in the Department of Comparative Studies are listed below, including particular areas of expertise within Comparative Studies. In parentheses are faculty members’ doctoral institutions and, when applicable, other formal departmental affiliations.
   
   Assistant Professor Philip Armstrong (Ph.D. in History of Art, University of California at Los Angeles) has published widely in the area of contemporary visual arts and culture, as well as essays on contemporary political philosophy (Hardt and Negri, Nancy, Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari). His present research is on the concept of networks, political discourse, and forms of political organization, and his book, Reticulations: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Networks of the Political, is forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press. He has recently co-edited volumes of La Part de L'oeil and Res, and is presently engaged in a number of research projects, including co-edited volumes on precarity and Deleuze and micro-politics. Further research and fieldwork include a collaborative project on disability and human rights in Kenya.
   
   Assistant Professor Andrea Bachner (PhD in Comparative Literature, Harvard University) joined Comparative Studies in 2008 after spending a year as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford. Her dissertation, "Paradoxical Corpographies: Towards an Ethics of Inscriptio," proposes a critique of inscription through readings of contemporary theoretical, literary and visual texts from different cultural and linguistic contexts. She has published articles on critical theory, interculturality, literature and cinema. Her current book project, "Alterity, Mediality, and the Sinograph: Chinese Writing Under Erasure," investigates how contemporary sinophone writers and artists reshape, decenter, and reflect upon the Chinese writing system and its cultural archive from positions of diaspora or interculturality, as well as regional, ethnic, and cultural difference, and how they engage with, translate, and contest Western theories of writing and mediality.
   
   Professor Nina Berman (Ph.D. in German, University of California, Berkeley) is interested in 20th-century culture and literature (modernity, postcolonial fiction, minority literature, drama); nationalism, colonialism, orientalism; Germany and the Middle East, Middle Ages to present; 19th and 20th century Germany and Africa. Her publications include Impossible Missions? German Economic, Military, and Humanitarian Efforts in Africa (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2004) and Orientalismus, Kolonialismus und Moderne: Zum Bild des Orients in der deutschsprachigen Kultur um 1900 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997).
   
   Associate Professor Katherine Borland (Newark Campus; Ph.D. in Folklore, Indiana University) is interested in the politics of culture, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean, and women's cultural expression. She has written widely on folklore revivals, festival enactments, oral narrative, literacy, and Latino/a folklore, and immigration narratives from Latin American and Caribbean-born poultry workers in rural Delaware. Her most recent book is Unmasking Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Nicaraguan Festival (U of Arizona P, 2006).
   
   Leo Coleman (Ph.D. in Anthropology, Princeton University) is an Assistant Professor in science and technology studies. He is a political anthropologist with research interests in India and South Asia, urban politics, and technological infrastructures. He has conducted historical and ethnographic research on electrification and the politics of public utilities in Delhi, India. Teaching interests include social studies of science and technology, urban politics, and history and theory of anthropology. The title of his dissertation is "Sovereign Gifts and Consumer Citizenship: The Politics of Electricity in Twentieth-Century Delhi."
   
   Assistant Professor Theresa Delgadillo (Ph.D. in English, University of California, Los Angeles) works in the areas of comparative ethnic literary and cultural studies, particularly Chicano/a and Latino/a studies, as well as gender studies. She is currently completing a manuscript on the interrelationships among religion, spirituality, gender, sexuality, race, and nation in contemporary Chicana narratives. She has published articles in American Quarterly, Revista de la Universidad de México, Modern Fiction Studies and Studies in American Indian Literature and has contributed chapters to several books in Chicana/o and Latino/a studies.
   
   Associate Professor Tanya Erzen (Ph.D. in American Studies, New York University) teaches courses in American religion and culture; gender and religion, the ethnography and sociology of religion; religion and the media; and gender and sexuality studies. Her research interests include conservative religious and political movements in the United States, the relationship between sexuality and religion, and the U.S. and global Christian Right. Her first book, Straight to Jesus: Sexual and Christian Conversions in the Ex-Gay Movement (University of California Press, 2006), is an ethnographic and historical study of the ex-gay movement and the sexual politics of the Christian Right. The book received the Ruth Benedict Prize from the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists and the Gustave O. Arlt Award from the Council of Graduate Schools. She is currently working on two research projects, one following the religious practices of men and women in state "faith and character" prisons and the other about the fans and fan cultures of the Twilight series.
   
   Professor of Comparative Studies and French and Chair of the Department of Comparative Studies, Eugene Holland (Ph.D. in French, University of California, San Diego) specializes in social theory and modern French literature, history, and culture. In addition to a number of articles on poststructuralist theory and particularly the work of Gilles Deleuze, he has published a book on Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis: The Sociopoetics of Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 1993) and an Introduction to Schizoanalysis (Routledge, 1999). He is currently working on a book on citizenship and perversions. Professor David Horn (Ph.D. in Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley) is past Chair of the Department of Comparative Studies. His research interests are in cultural and historical studies of science; social technologies; the body and deviance; cultural and social theory; Europe (Italy and France). His most recent book, The Criminal Body: Lombroso and the Anatomy of Deviance (New York: Routledge, 2003), is focused on nineteenth-century Italian human sciences. His first book, Social Bodies: Science, Reproduction, and Italian Modernity (Princeton University Press, 1994), explored social technologies of reproduction and welfare in interwar Italy. He is currently working on a study of anthropologies of writing.
   
   Professor Lindsay Jones (Ph.D. in History of Religions, University of Chicago) has a broad interest in most aspects of the cross-cultural study of religion, with special concerns for sacred architecture and for the cultures and religions of Mesoamerica. He is author of Twin City Tales: A Hermeneutical Reassessment of Tula and Chíchén Itzá (University Press of Colorado, 1995) and The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture: Experience, Interpretation, Comparison (Harvard University Press, 2000), two volumes; and co-editor with Davíd Carrasco and Scott Sessions of Mesoamerica's Classic Heritage: From Teotihuacan to the Aztecs (UP of Colorado, 1999). He is editor in chief of the second edition of Mircea Eliade's Encyclopedia of Religion (Macmillan, 2005).
   
   A scholar of both Western philosophy and comparative religion, Professor Thomas Kasulis (Ph.D. in Philosophy, Yale University) is past chair of Comparative Studies. He has written numerous books and scholarly articles on Japanese religious thought and Western philosophy, including Zen Action/Zen Person (University of Hawaii Press, 1989) and Intimacy or Integrity: Philosophy and Cultural Difference (University of Hawaii Press, 2002). He has co-edited for SUNY Press a three-volume series comparing Asian and Western ideas of self in different cultural arenas: Self as Body in Asian Theory and Practice (1993), Self as Person in Asian Theory and Practice (1994), and Self as Image in Asian Theory and Practice (1998), as well as The Recovery of Philosophy in America: Essays in Honor of John Edwin Smith (1997). He has recently published a book on Japanese Shinto, Shinto: The Way Home (University of Hawaii, 2004), and is currently working on a historical survey of Japanese philosophy and a companion sourcebook of readings in Japanese philosophy.
   
   Associate Professor of African American and African Studies and Comparative Studies, Kwaku Larbi Korang's (Ph.D. in English, University of Alberta) teaching and research interests are in postcolonial literatures, British and African literatures, postcolonial and critical theory, nationalism and modernity, and transatlantic Pan-Africanism. His first book is Writing Ghana, Imagining Africa: Nation and African Modernity (University of Rochester, 2003).
   
   Dorothy Noyes (Ph.D. in Folklore and Folklife, University of Pennsylvania) is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Studies, Director of the Center for Folklore Studies, and Research Associate at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies. She works on the history of folk voice as a dimension of the modern public sphere, concentrating on the Romance-speaking Mediterranean. She has written extensively on the tension between performance and heritage, the interaction of state and local actors in both collective performance and knowledge institutions, and, in her current work, the social organization of creativity. Her most recent book is Fire in the Plaça: Catalan Festival Politics After Franco (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and winner of the 2005 Book Prize of the Fellows of the American Folklore Society. Elected Fellow of the American Folklore Society in 2005, she has served on the AFS Executive Board and now serves on that of the Société Internationale d'Ethnologie et de Folklore. Course topics include folklore theory, performance, the cultural history of waste and recycling, American regional cultures, festival, and fairy tale.
   
   A recipient of numerous research grants and author of three books, Professor Franklin Proaño (Marion Campus; Ph.D. in Spanish, The Ohio State University, Doctor in Humanities, Catholic University of Quito, Ecuador) is interested in contemporary Latin American literature, women's studies, and Spanish creative writing. He has written many scholarly articles on Latin American literature, most recently a book on Latin American women's poetry, La Poesía Femenina Actual de Sudamérica (Scripta Humanistica, 1993).
   
   Professor Daniel Reff (Ph.D. in Anthropology, University of Oklahoma) is an anthropologist and ethnohistorian of colonial Latin America with a particular interest in European and Indian relations and Spanish missionary texts. His first book, Disease, Depopulation, and Culture Change in Northwestern New Spain, 1518-1764 (University of Utah Press, 1991), explores the dynamics of Jesuit and Indian relations in what is today northern Mexico and the American southwest. He is co-author of a critical edition of Andrés Perez de Ribas' History of the Triumphs of Our Holy Faith (1645) (University of Arizona Press, 1999). His most recent book is a comparative study of the rise of Christianity in the late Roman Empire and colonial Mexico, entitled Plagues, Priests & Demons: Sacred Narratives and the Rise of Christianity in the Old World and the New (Cambridge University Press, 2004). He is currently working on a book that explores the construction of Japanese identity in Jesuit missionary texts and through public performances by Japanese converts who "toured" Catholic Europe in 1584-85.
   
   Brian Rotman (Ph.D. in Mathematics, London University) is Professor of Comparative Studies and Distinguished Humanities Professor. He is interested in cultural studies of mathematics, particularly in how signs (linguistic, pictorial, symbolic, gestural) achieve their discursive effects and how mathematical inscriptional practices facilitate and alter human consciousness. He is author of several books, including Signifying Nothing: the Semiotics of Zero (UK: Macmillan, 1987; 1993), Ad Infinitum . . . the Ghost in Turing's Machine: Taking God out of Mathematics and Putting the Body Back in (Stanford University Press, 1993), Mathematics as Sign: Writing, Imagining, Counting (Stanford UP, 2000), and, most recently, Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being (Duke University Press, 2008).
   
   Professor Barry Shank's (Ph.D. in American Studies, University of Pennsylvania) research interests include U.S. ethnic and racial studies; U.S. cultural history; U.S. popular culture; popular music; race and popular music; capitalism and sentiment. Professor Shank pursues the interrogation of the American experiment through research in commercial popular culture and cultural history. His courses provide undergraduate students with the opportunity to investigate the economic and social determinants that shape everyday life and popular pleasure, while his graduate courses focus on the complex of theoretical and methodological tools that lie at the heart of interdisciplinary work. His books include A Token of My Affection: Greeting Cards and American Business Culture (Columbia University Press, 2004), and Dissonant Identities: The Rock'n'Roll Scene in Austin, Texas (Wesleyan University Press, 1994). He has co-edited (with Andy Bennett and Jason Toynbee) The Popular Music Studies Reader (Routledge, 2005) and (with Janice Radway, Kevin Gaines and Penny Von Eschen) American Studies: A New Anthology (Wiley/Blackwell, 2009). His current book project is "Silence, Noise, Beauty: The Political Agency of Music."
   
   Assistant Professor of Comparative Studies and French, Louisa Shea (Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Harvard University) is interested in the intersection between literature and philosophy, especially debates in and about the Enlightenment, skepticism, and tragedy. Her first book, The Cynic Enlightenment, or Diogenes in the Salon, is forthcoming in 2009 from Johns Hopkins University Press. Her next project is entitled, Collecting Ruins: From Hubert Robert to Walter Benjamin, a book-length study of ruins as source and metaphor for the building of museums and the role of the art collector and critic in society.
   
   Associate Professor Maurice E. Stevens (Ph.D. in History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz) works in the areas of American, ethnic, critical gender, and cultural studies. He is particularly interested in the formation of identities in and through visual culture and performance, and in historical memory in relation to trauma theory, critical race theory, psychoanalytic theory, and popular cultural performance. He has published a number of articles on these subjects, as well as a book entitled Troubling Beginnings: Trans(per)forming African American History and Culture (Routledge, 2003).
   
   Ruby C. Tapia (Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies, University of California at San Diego) is Associate Professor of Comparative Studies and Women's Studies. Her research and teaching focuses on women in/and visual culture, engaging in a sustained way the experiences, representations, and cultural production of women of color, as well as the theoretical formulations of critical race feminism and feminist media studies. She teaches courses such as "Race, Memory, and Motherhood in Visual Culture," "Death and Dying in Visual Culture," and "Women and Visual Culture," which examine how the discursive technologies of race, sexuality, gender, and class produce not only images but visualities: ways of seeing. She has published a monograph entitled Breeding Ghosts: Race, Death, and the Maternal in U.S. Visual Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), and co-edited an anthology, Interrupted Life: The Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the U.S. (University of California Press, 2008).
   
   Professor Hugh B. Urban (Ph.D. in History of Religions, University of Chicago) is interested in the study of secrecy in religion, particularly in relation to questions of knowledge and power. Focusing primarily on the traditions of South Asia, he has a strong secondary interest in contemporary new religious movements, and has published articles on Heaven's Gate, Scientology and modern Western magic. He is the author of five books: The Economics of Ecstasy: Secrecy and Symbolic Power in Colonial Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2001); Songs of Ecstasy: Tantric and Devotional Songs from Colonial Bengal (Oxford UP, 2001); Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics and Power in the Study of Religion (University of California Press, 2003); Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism (U California P, 2006); and The Secrets of the Kingdom: Religion and Secrecy in the Bush Administration (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007). The Power of Tantra: Religion, Sexuality and the Politics of South Asian Studies is forthcoming from I.B. Tauris in 2009.
   
   Associate Professor Julia Watson (Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine) specializes in life narrative and theory of autobiography and is currently serving as Associate Dean for Admissions & Undergraduate Affairs in the College of Arts and Humanities. Other research and teaching interests include feminist theory and women's writing, twentieth-century postcolonial and multicultural autobiography, visual autobiography and film. She has, with Sidonie Smith, co-written Reading Autobiography: A Guide to Interpreting Life Narrative (University of Minnesota Press, 2001) and co-edited five collections: De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women's Autobiography (University of Minnesota Press, 1992); Getting a Life: The Everyday Uses of Autobiography (University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2002), and Before They Could Vote: American Women's Autobiographical Writing, 1819-1919 (U Wisconsin P, 2006). Current projects include a book on autoethnographic writing and reading practices, a collaborative book on autobiographical hoaxes, and an essay on comix.
   
   Associate Professor Sabra Webber (Departments of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures and Comparative Studies; Ph.D. in Anthropology, Folklore, University of Texas) is past Chair of Comparative Studies. She is a specialist in folklore, ethnography, and the Arab world, especially Egypt and the Maghrib. Her book, the award-winning Romancing the Real: Folklore and Ethnographic Representation in North Africa (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), demonstrates the crucial role contemporary folklore theory plays in both historical and ethnographic studies, including studies in the third and postcolonial world. She has published articles on a range of issues, including canonicity, subaltern studies, and the position of women in the Middle East, and is the recipient of numerous national research awards, including Humanities Research Fellow, American Research Center in Egypt Fellow, and Rockefeller Research Fellow .
   
   Also teaching in the Department of Comparative Studies:
   
   Senior Lecturer Nancy Jesser (Ph.D. in English, University of North Carolina) is interested in the intersection of science, culture and power, especially as it informs technologies of everyday life. She has a book manuscript under review, "Troubling Worlds," which examines the role of sexual violence in women's fantasy works of the 1970s and 1980s, the US rape crisis center movement, and feminist theories of empowerment. She has published several articles on the science fiction and fantasy works of Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler and Sheri Tepper, among others. Her current research is on the North American "wild foods" and "slow foods" movements and foraging in the contemporary cultural, agricultural, and political setting. Her teaching focuses on the critical and cultural study of scientific, technological, and medical practices. She has also published poetry and fiction.
   
   The work of Rick Livingston (Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Yale University) focuses on twentieth-century literature, literary and cultural theory, and postcolonial literature, with a particular interest in South Asia, and he has published a number of articles in these areas. He is also serving as the Associate Director of Ohio State's Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities.
   
   Margaret Lynd's (Ph.D. in English, The Ohio State University) interests are in narrative, modern and postmodern literature, critical theory, and literatures of the Americas. She is also Assistant to the Chair, the Department's coordinator of academic programs, and student adviser.
   
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   XVI. Associated Faculty of the Department of Comparative Studies

   Associated Faculty of the Department of Comparative Studies represent different colleges and departments across the University. The faculty listed below share an interest in comparative studies of different cultural domains. All are affiliated with the Department by virtue of those interests and many frequently teach for the Department.
   
   

   Humanities Distinguished Professor Adélékè Adéèkó (Ph.D., University of Florida) in the Department of English specializes in Yoruba Literature, literary theory, African American literature, and Anglophone literatures of Africa, south Asia, and the Caribbean. He is the author of Proverbs, Textuality, and Nativism in African Literature (1998) and The Slave's Rebellion: Literature, History, Orature (Indiana University Press, 2005). His ongoing research projects include "animist" poetics in African American poetry and praise culture in Lagos, Nigeria.
   
   Professor of Spanish in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Maureen Ahern (Ph.D. Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Perú) works in several areas: indigenous and colonial cultures and literatures of Mexico and Perú; translation theory and literary translation; and Latin American women writers. Her current research projects are a book on mapping and narrating first contacts between indigenous and Hispanic peoples on Mexico’s northern frontiers and a study of the visual and verbal construction of frontier martyrdom in colonial Latin America. In addition to publishing widely in these fields, she has translated and edited a number of contemporary Mexican and Peruvian literary texts, including A Rosario Castellanos Reader (University of Texas Press, 1988) and Five Quechua Poets (The American Society/Latin American Literary Review Press, 1998). She is co-translator of Andrés de Ribas, S. J., History of the Triumphs of Our Holy Faith (1645) (University of Arizona Press, 1999), a history of the Jesuit missionary enterprise in northwestern Mexico, 1590-1645, and she is a contributing editor to the Handbook for Latin American Studies (Library of Congress).
   
   Professor in the Department of English Frederick Luis Aldama (Ph.D. Stanford) uses the tools of narrative theory and cognitive science in his teaching and scholarship on Latino and postcolonial literature, art, music, film, and comic books. He is the author and editor of seven books, including Postethnic Narrative Criticism, Brown on Brown, and the MLA-award winning Dancing With Ghosts: A Critical Biography of Arturo Islas. His latest book, Why the Humanities Matter: A Common Sense Approach (2008), brings a materialist approach to the study of translation, music, literature, and law. Your Brain on Latino Comics: From Gus Arriola to Los Bros Hernandez, as well as A User's Guide to Postcolonial and Latino Borderland Fiction, will be published in 2009. Along with Patrick Colm Hogan and Arturo Aldama, he is series editor of "Cognitive Approaches to Literature and Culture" with the University of Texas Press: http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/subjects/calc.html. He sits on the editorial boards of Narrative, Journal of Narrative Theory and Narrative and Image. He is currently also Director of Latino Studies: http://latino-astudies.osu.edu/ and co-coordinator with Jim Phelan of the “Narration and Cognition Working Group”: http://icrph.osu.edu/collaborativeResearch/workingGroups/groupDesc.cfm?WG=6.
   
   Associate Professor in the Department of History, Leslie M. Alexander (Ph.D. Cornell University) is a specialist in African American and American history. Her teaching and research interests focus on African Americans in the early national and antebellum eras. She is particularly interested in examining culture, nationalism, the creation of community, and the development of political organizations among African Americans. Her first book is African or American?: Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-1861 (U of Illinois P, 2008) and explores black culture, identity, and political activism during the early national and antebellum eras. She has also done work on the civil rights and black power eras, including a contribution to a book on Malcolm X. Professor Alexander's next project, tentatively titled "The Cradle of Hope: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth Century,” is an exploration of early African American foreign policy. In particular, it examines how African American activists became involved in international movements for racial and social justice in countries such as Haiti, Cuba, and Brazil.
   
   Chadwick Allen (Ph.D. University of Arizona) is Associate Professor in the Department of English. His areas of interest are comparative Indigenous literary studies; American Indian and New Zealand Maori literatures and cultures; postcolonial literatures and theory; and frontier studies and the popular western. He has published articles on postcolonial theory, the discourse of treaties, Indigenous aesthetics, and the popular western figure The Lone Ranger. His book is entitled, Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts (Duke UP, 2002).
   
   Assistant Professor in the Department of Greek and Latin, Georgios Anagnostu’s (Ph.D. The Ohio State University) research and teaching interests are in diaspora; immigration, ethnicity and race; and Greek and Greek American culture and society. Recent publications include, "The Politics of Metaethnography in the Age of 'Popular Folklore'" (Journal of American Folklore); “Forget the Past, Remember the Ancestors! Modernity, ‘Whiteness,’ American Hellenism, and the Politics of Memory in Early Greek America” (Journal of Modern Greek Studies); “Private Heirlooms, Public Memories: Tradition and Greek America as Translation,” (Gramma: A Journal of Theory and Criticism); “‘That Imagination Called Hellenism’: Connecting Greek Worlds, Past and Present, in Greek America.” (Classical Bulletin). His book is entitled Contours of White Ethnicity: Popular Ethnography and the Making of Usable Pasts in Greek America (Ohio UP, 2008).
   
   Associate Professor in the School of Music and the Department of African American and African Studies, Daniel Avorgbedor (Ph.D. Indiana University) is interested in patterns of African continuities in the African diaspora (music, dance, language use, religion, material culture, aesthetics); performance and creativity in contemporary African churches; urban ethnomusicology; and performance as a site for negotiating ethnic identities in African urban centers.
   
   James R. Bartholomew (Ph.D. Stanford University) is Professor of modern Japanese history in the Department of History. He is particularly interested in the history of science in Japan and in other countries historically less central to the scientific enterprise, and has taught senior seminars in which students are required to study the history of science only in areas outside the U.S. after 1900 and most of western Europe. He has published a number of articles on the development of science in Japan. His current book project is a study of Japan’s involvement with Nobel science prizes. His 1989 book, The Formation of Science in Japan: Building a Research Tradition (Yale University Press), received the 1992 Pfizer Award of the History of Science Society and was issued in paperback in February 1993. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for 2001-02 and a National Science Foundation Fellowship for 2003-2005 to support his research on Japan and the Nobel science prizes.
   
   William W. Batstone (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley) is Professor and past Chair of the Department of Greek and Latin. A specialist in literature of the late Roman republic, his broader interests include rhetoric and poetics, especially in the relationship of contemporary theories of reading to issues of aesthetics. Recent projects include “Catullus, Bakhtin and the problem of Dialogic Lyric” in Bakhtin and the Classics (Northwestern University Press, 2002)and “Plautine Freedoms: On the Value of Farce and Metatheatre” (in a Festscrhift for William S. Anderson, co-edited with G. Tissol). Both essays are part of a project that explores the performance of self in ancient lyric, comedy, oratory, and satire as they relate to Lacan and Bakhtin. He is a contributor to Companion to the Roman Republic (Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World, 2006) and co-author, with Cynthia Damon, of Caesar's Civil War (Oxford Approaches to Classical Literature, 2006). Other ongoing projects include a book on the Roman female poet Sulpicia.
   
   Alan Beyerchen (Ph.D. University of California, Santa Barbara) is Associate Professor in the Department of History specializing in 19th- and 20th-century German history. His publications have ranged from studies of the early 19th-century military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, through the cultural matrix of science and technology in the German Empire, to the complex political environment of scientists in the Third Reich, to the economic competitiveness of German industry at the end of the 20th century. His research centers on the Web of relationships among science, technology, and the values of modernity and his emphasis in teaching is on cultural history, broadly conceived. Professor Beyerchen’s current project is a series of essays on the implications of the nonlinear sciences (fractals, deterministic chaos, self-organization, complexity, etc.) for historical methodology and for the practice of German history.
   
   Vorman-Anderson Professor of Nordic Languages and Literatures in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Marilyn Johns Blackwell (Ph.D. University of Washington) specializes in Scandinavian studies and has published extensively on Scandinavian film and drama. Her most recent book is Gender and Representation in the Films of Ingmar Bergman (Camden House, 1997), and she is currently working on a study of spectatorship and spectacle in the dramas of August Strindberg.
   
   Associate Professor in the Department of English David A. Brewer (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley) works on 18th-century literary, theatrical, and visual culture, plus the history of authorship and reading more generally. He is also fascinated by the methodological challenges of writing literary history. He is the author of The Afterlife of Character, 1726-1825 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005, as part of their Material Texts series) and the recipient of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. His current book project, "The Work of Attribution in the Age of Anonymous Publication," investigates the uses to which authorial names were put in the 18th-century Anglophone world. His current teaching revolves around questions of how best to think about the changing resonance (and pleasures) of literary form across time and space.
   
   Brenda Brueggemann (Ph.D. University of Louisville) is Professor in the Department of English and an Associate Faculty member for Women’s Studies. She has particular interests in Deaf and Disability Studies, the rhetoric and writing of science and its contribution to the construction of differences, the ethical considerations of conducting research involving human subjects, and creative non-fiction. She has published articles on the ethics of qualitative research, issues of diversity, and disability studies in the humanities, as well as books entitled, Lend Me Your Ear: Rhetorical Constructions of Deafness (Gallaudet Press, 1999) and Deaf Subjects: Between Identities and Places (NYU Press, 2009). She is co-editor of Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities (MLA, 2002); editor of, and contributor to, Literacy and Deaf People: Cultural and Contextual Perspectives (Gallaudet UP, 2004); and series editor for Gallaudet University Press’ “Deaf Lives” series (autobiography and biography).
   
   Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s Studies, Cynthia Burack (Ph.D. University of Maryland) is the author of The Problem of the Passions: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Social Theory (New York University Press, 1994) and coeditor of Fundamental Differences: Feminists Reply to Social Conservatives, (with Jyl J. Josephson, Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). She has written essays on feminist political psychology, feminist critiques of social conservatism, ethnic studies, and sexuality studies and recently published Healing Identities: Black Feminist Thought and the Politics of Groups (Cornell UP, 2004). Her most recent book is Sin, Sex, Democracy: Anti-Gay Politics and the Christian Right (SUNY P, 2008).
   
   Mathew Coleman (Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Law and Policy Studies at OSU. He has research and teaching interests in political and economic geography, with a special emphasis on critical geopolitics and the politics of immigration at the Mexico-US border. His current research explores municipal immigration sanctuary laws in the US and their relationship to federal immigration legislation. He is also looking at how contemporary US immigration enforcement at home and abroad blends public and foreign policy issues and spaces into a single field of geopolitical practice and representation. He teaches a graduate seminar on empire and imperialism as well as undergraduate courses on political geography and geopolitics. He has published in journals such as Political Geography, Geopolitics, and Antipode.
   
   Alice L. Conklin (Ph.D. Princeton University) is Associate Professor in the Department of History. She is a recipient of the Berkshire Prize for A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford University Press, 1997). Her second book, In the Museum of Man: Ethnography, Race Science, and Empire, 1920-1950, is forthcoming from Cornell UP. It is a cultural, political and intellectual history of French anthropology as a colonial science, which questions whether a newer "culture concept" replaced the older biological concept of "race" in the era of the two World Wars. A second project is a survey of the history of France, 1870 to the present, co-authored with Sarah Fishman and Rob Zaretsky (Oxford) and scheduled for release in 2010, and she has plans for a future project on the history of anti-racism in France, and Modern Europe more broadly, from the 1930s to the present.
   
   Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Ignacio Corona (Ph.D. Stanford University) specializes in Mexican and Latino/a American Cultural Studies. His latest research focuses on the intersection of journalism, political discourse and literary discourse. He is author of Después de Tlatelolco: las narrativas políticas en México (1976-1990). Un estudio de sus estrategias retóricas y representacionales (Universidad de Guadalajara, 2001), and co-editor of The Contemporary Mexican Chronicle: Theoretical Perspectives on the Liminal Genre (SUNY Press, 2002).
   
   Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, John E. Davidson’s (Ph.D. Cornell University) research interests are in film (especially German film), contemporary critical theory, comparative literature (especially in the context of post-colonial independence), and popular culture. He has published widely in these areas, and is author of Deterritorializing the New German Cinema (U Minnesota Press, 1999). He is currently at work on a book on history and form in German cinema from the 1930s to the 1950s and is editing a volume on German film culture of the Adenauer era. He also serves on the editorial board of Studies in European Cinema.
   
   A scholar of Middle Eastern literature, a translator of Persian and Italian, and an award-winning poet, Professor Dick Davis (Near Eastern Languages and Cultures; Ph.D. University of Manchester, England) is interested in comparative literature and translation studies. His most recent publications include Panthea’s Children: Hellenistic Novels and Medieval Persian Romances (2002), Belonging (2002, a book of poems, chosen as a “Book of the Year” by The Economist), The Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings (2006), A Trick of Sunlight (2006), and three volumes of translations from the 11th-century Persian epic The Shahnameh (The Lion and the Throne, 1998; Fathers and Sons, 2000; and The Sunset of Empire, 2004).
   
   Kirk Denton (Ph.D. University of Toronto) is Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures. His research interests include modern Chinese literature, Chinese film, Chinese intellectual history, and critical theory. Among his important publications are an edited collection of writings on literature, entitled Modern Chinese Literary Thought (Stanford University Press, 1996), and a book entitled The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and Lu Ling (Stanford University Press, 1998). He is co-editor of The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature (Columbia University Press, 2003) and China: Adapting the Past, Confronting the Future (Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002). He is also editor of the journal Modern Chinese Literature and Culture and manager of MCLC Resource Center, a Web site devoted to the culture of modern China. He is presently writing a book on the politics of historical representation in museums and memorial sites in Greater China, tentatively entitled “Exhibiting the Past: Historical Memory and the Politics and Ideology of Museums in the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.”
   
   Currently involved in the emerging field of performance studies, Associate Professor of English Jon Erickson’s (Ph.D. University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee) first book is The Fate of the Object: From Modern Object to Postmodern Sign in Performance, Art, and Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 1995). He has also published a number of articles on modern literature, drama, art, and performance.
   
   Nancy Ettlinger (Ph.D. University of Oklahoma) is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography. Her research interests center on critical theory and cultural economy. She is particularly concerned with the relation between individuals and larger-scale phenomena (firms, institutions, societal projects), as well as an interconnected view of social, political, economic, and cultural processes. She is currently Co-Director of OSU’s Working Group on Cultural Difference and Democracy.
   
   Daniel M. Farrell (Ph.D. The Rockefeller University) is Professor in the Department of Philosophy specializing in ethics; applied ethics; social and political philosophy; and philosophy of law. He is also interested in the history of modern philosophy, from the 17th century to the present; moral psychology; and the philosophy of art. He has published widely in these areas.
   
   Assistant professor in the Department of History Lilia Fernandez’s (Ph.D. University of California, San Diego) research interests include Latino/a immigration history, race and ethnic identity formation, women’s history, and urban renewal and gentrification. Professor Fernandez teaches courses on Chicana/o and Latina/o history and Latina/o studies. She has published articles on Latino/a education, Latino/a youth culture, and community displacement of Mexican Americans in Chicago. Her current project is a study of Latino/a migration and community formation in Chicago from 1945-1980. She has been awarded various fellowships from such institutions as the Ford Foundation, the University of California, San Diego and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
   
   Professor in the Department of Theatre Lesley Ferris (Ph.D. University of Minnesota) has research interests in carnival and the use of masks, and in gender and performance. She has directed more than 50 dramatic productions in Britain and the U.S., including the award-winning “Portrait of Dora” (London and Memphis), “Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika” (Memphis and Columbus), “Wit” (Central Ohio premiere), and Bertolt Brecht's “Saint Joan of the Stockyards” (Columbus). Books include Acting Women: Images of Women in Theatre (Macmillan, 1990) and Crossing the Stage: Controversies on Cross Dressing (Routledge, 1993).
   
   Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Jill Galvan (Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles) works in the areas of Victorian literature and culture and twentieth-century British literature. She has written about the works of George Eliot, Marie Corelli, Rudyard Kipling, Henry James, Philip K. Dick, and others, and her current research project investigates Victorian technologies and women’s involvement in the rise of communications media. A book on Victorian women’s roles in communications media (seance mediums, telegraphers, telephone operators, etc.) is forthcoming from Cornell University Press.
   
   Associate Professor in the Department of English, Jared Gardner’s (Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University) primary research areas are in race, ethnicity, and the construction of identity, as well as in American literature, film, and popular culture. He is author of a number of publications, including Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature 1787-1845 (Johns Hopkins UP, 1998) and articles and reviews on identity, citizenship and media in American literature and culture. He is currently working on studies of early American magazines, myths of origin in popular culture of the 1920s and 30s, and the intersections between film and comics at the turn of the 20th century. Strands from these various ongoing projects are converging into a book tentatively entitled "Serial Citizenship."
   
   Kenneth W. Goings (Ph.D. Princeton University) is Professor in the Department of African American and African Studies. He specializes in 19th- and 20th-century African American history. His research interests include the history of historically black colleges and universities, the history of African Americans in the post-Emancipation South, African American popular culture, and African American urban history. Professor Goings is the author of The NAACP Comes of Age: The Defeat of Judge John J. Parker (1990) and Mammy and Uncle Mose: Black Collectibles and American Stereotyping (1994), which both received an Outstanding Book Award on the Subject of Human Rights, Gustavus Myers Center. He has co-edited with Raymond Mohl, The New African American Urban History (1996) and is the author of numerous articles, essays, book chapters and book reviews. In 2001 he was appointed a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians, and his current research project, with Eugene O’Connor, is “’They Dared to Call Their Souls Their Own’: The Classics as a Tool of Resistance and Social Uplift.”
   
   Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Richard Gordon’s (Ph.D. Brown University) work explores the complex interrelationships among expressive culture—film, music, cinema—and colonialism, slavery, anthropology, and globalization in Latin America. His first book, Cannibalizing the Colony: Cinematic Adaptations of Colonial Literature in Mexico and Brazil, is forthcoming from Purdue UP; the book investigates how filmmakers appropriate and transform colonial writing into a vehicle for intervening in conceptions of national identity. His current research project is entitled “Cinema, Slavery, and Identity in Cuba and Brazil.” Professor Gordon is also co-coordinator of an interdisciplinary working group, "LusoGlobe," funded by OSU's Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities, organized to discuss the global impact of the popular cultures of the Portuguese-speaking world.
   
   Fritz Graf (Ph.D. University of Zurich) is Professor in the Department of Greek and Latin. His research centers on Greek and Roman religion, epigraphy, and the classical tradition, and he has published widely in each of these areas. In addition to many articles, edited volumes, and other publications, recent books include Der Lauf des rollenden Jahres (Stuttgart and Leipzig: Teubner, 1997); La magie dans l’antiquité gréco-romaine (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1994), translated, revised, and augmented as Magic in the Ancient World (Harvard UP, 1997); and Griechische Mythologie. Eine Einführung (Munich and Zürich: Artemis, 1985; 4th ed. 1997), translated, revised, and augmented as Greek Mytholog: An Introduction (Johns Hopkins UP, 1993). Most recently, he has published Apollo (Routledge, 2008) and a volume co-authored with Sarah Iles Johnston, Ritual Texts for the Afterlife: Orpheus and the Bacchic Gold Tablets (Routledge, 2007). Currently, he is preparing a study on “Festivals in the Imperial East: The Transformation of Ritual Culture in Late Antiquity.”
   
   Harvey J. Graff (Ph.D. University of Toronto) is Ohio Eminent Scholar in Literacy Studies and Professor in the Departments of English and History. His recent research and writing center on projects of urban social and cultural history, literacy studies, and the social history of interdisciplinarity. He has published widely in many areas, among them modern North American and Western European social history; U.S. and Canadian history; history of the family; history of education; public and applied history; local and community history; theory and methods in the humanities and social sciences. Selected titles includeThe Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture and Society (1987; reprint Indiana University Press, 1991); The Labyrinths of Literacy: Reflections on Literacy Past and Present (1987; University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995); Conflicting Paths: Growing Up in America (Harvard University Press, 1995). A current book project, City at the Crossroads: Dallas, the Book, is nearly complete.
   
   Yana Hashamova (Ph.D. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) is Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures and an associated faculty member of the Department of Women’s Studies. She has published Pride and Panic: Russian Imagination of the West in Post-Soviet Film (Bristol, UK: Intellect Press, distributed in the US by University of Chicago Press, 2007) as well as numerous articles in the areas of Russian film, Russian and West European drama, comparative literature and the arts, critical theory and gender studies. Her co-edited volume (with Helena Goscilo) Cinepaternity: Fathers and Sons in Soviet and Post-Soviet Film is forthcoming at Indiana University Press (2010). She strives to establish links between political ideology, critical psychoanalysis, and cinema, while analyzing post-Soviet conditions. Her most recent work explores film representations of trafficking in women.
   
   Professor of History Jane Hathaway (Ph.D. Princeton University) is a specialist in Islamic and world history. She is particularly interested in the comparative study of households, factions, and marginal populations such as women, ethnic and religious minorities, slaves, and eunuchs in various societies. She has published a number of articles on these topics, as well as four books: The Arab Lands under Ottoman Rule, 1516-1800 (Pearson/Longman, 2008), winner of the Turkish Studies Association's 2008 M. Fuat Koprulu Book Prize; Beshir Agha, Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Imperial Harem (Oneworld, 2006); A Tale of Two Factions: Myth, Memory, and Identity in Ottoman Egypt and Yemen (State University of New York Press, 2003), winner of the 2005 Ohio Academy of History Publication Award; The Politics of Households in Ottoman Egypt: The Rise of the Qazdaglis (Cambridge, 1997) and two edited volumes, Rebellion, Repression, Reinvention: Mutiny in Comparative Perspective (Praeger, 2001) and Mutiny and Rebellion in the Ottoman Empire (U Wisconsin P, 2002).
   
   Wendy S. Hesford (Ph.D. New York University) is Associate Professor in the Department of English. She is the author of Framing Identities: Autobiography and the Politics of Pedagogy (University of Minnesota, 1999), winner of the 1999 Winterowd Book Award; co-editor with Wendy Kozol of Haunting Violations: Feminist Criticism and the Crisis of the "Real" (University of Illinois, 2001) and Just Advocacy? Women's Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and the Politics of Representation (Rutgers University Press, 2005). She has written a textbook with Brenda Brueggemann, Rhetorical Visions: Reading and Writing in a Visual Culture (Prentice Hall, 2006), and her next single-authored book, Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights, Feminisms, and the Transnational Imaginary, is forthcoming from Duke UP in 2009. Among her other current projects is a scholarly collection, "Realistic Wrongs: Questions of Evidence in Human Rights Work" (edited with Andrew Herscher).
   
   Pranav Jani (Ph.D., Brown University) is Assistant Professor in the Department of English. His teaching interests include postcolonial/world literature, history, and politics, especially South Asia, Africa, Ireland, and the Arab world and his research interests are in postcolonial theory: Marxism and postmodernism; imperialism, nationalism, and human rights; class/gender/ethnic relations in the postcolonial world. He is the author of articles and papers on South Asian literature, postcolonial theory, and the US media. His current project is a book on the Indian novel in English after 1947. It’s working title is "Decentering Rushdie: Cosmopolitanism and the Indian English Novel." Professor Jani argues that, in ignoring earlier writers, postcolonial studies often remains blind to the various aesthetic and ideological shifts that have influenced the genre over the last 50 years, especially a critique of the nation. His work is intended to reorient our understanding of Indian literary cosmopolitanism and postcoloniality.
   
   Sarah Iles Johnston (Ph.D. Cornell University) is Professor in the Department of Greek and Latin and is particularly interested in ancient Mediterranean religions. She has published a number of articles and books on religion and literature in the ancient world, and is the Editor-in-Chief of Religions of the Ancient World: A Guide (Harvard University Press, 2004). She is author of several books, including Restless Dead: Encounters between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece (University of California Press, 1999), Ancient Greek Divination (Blackwell, 2008), and, with Fritz Graf, Ritual Texts for the Afterlife: Orpheus and the Bacchic Gold Tablets (Routledge, 2007).
   
   An Associate Professor in the Department of History, Robin Judd (Ph.D. University of Michigan) is interested in Jewish and German history, gender history and theory, and the relations of these to citizenship and statehood. She has published Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and German-Jewish Political Life in Germany, 1843-1933 (Cornell UP, 2007). Her current project is Love at the Zero Hour: European War Brides, GI Husbands, and European Strategies for Reconstruction. She has published several articles concerning gender, Jewish history, Jewish ritual behavior, and German-Jewish life.
   
   Gregory Jusdanis (Ph.D. University of Birmingham, England) is Professor of Modern Greek in the Department of Greek and Latin. He is the author of The Poetics of Cavafy: Textuality, Eroticism, History (Princeton University Press, 1987), Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 1991), and The Necessary Nation (Princeton UP, 2001), and articles on romanticism, aesthetics, nationalism, multiculturalism, globalization, diaspora, and world literature.
   
   Assistant Professor in Germanic Languages and Literatures and English, Merrill Kaplan’s (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley) research interests are in Old Norse-Icelandic literature, nineteenth-century Norwegian literature and culture, and folklore. She has recently published articles on Henrik Ibsen and on the Icelandic sagas.
   
   Stephen Kern (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley) is a Distinguished Humanities Professor in the Department of History. His area of specialization is modern European cultural and intellectual history, with particular interests (chronologically ordered throughout his career) in childhood, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, the body, sexuality, time, space, love, vision (the gaze), causality, and crime, with an abiding general interest in the histories of philosophy, literature, and art. His major publications are Anatomy and Destiny: A Cultural History of the Human Body (1975), The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918 (1983, 2003), The Culture of Love: Victorians to Moderns (1992), Eyes of Love: The Gaze in English and French Paintings and Novels, (1996), A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought, (2004). He has been awarded ACLS, NEH, Rockefeller, and Guggenheim Fellowships and received the Ohio Academy of History Distinguished Historian Award for 2007. He is currently researching a book on modernism, modernity, and narrative.
   
   John N. King (Ph.D. University of Chicago) is Distinguished University Professor and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English and of Religious Studies. He is a scholar of early modern English literature, 1475-1660, with emphasis on the English Renaissance and Reformation, particularly sixteenth-century literature—Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton; Reformation literature, history, and art; the history of the book; printing history; and manuscript studies. The author of numerous scholarly articles, he has published seven books, among them Milton and Religious Controversy: Satire and Polemic in “Paradise Lost” (Cambridge UP, 2000) and three published by Princeton UP: Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition (1990), Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis (1989), and English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (1982; paperback 1986). The University of Pennsylvania Press recently published his Voices of the English Reformation: A Sourcebook. He is the recipient of fellowships from, among others, the American Council of Learned Societies, Folger Shakespeare Library, the Guggenheim Foundation, NEH and the Rockefeller Foundation.
   
   Professor in the School of Educational Policy and Leadership Patti Lather’s (Ph.D. Indiana University) research examines various (post)critical, feminist, and poststructural theories, most recently with a focus on the implications for qualitative inquiry of the call for scientifically-based research in education. She is the author of three books, Getting Smart: Feminist Research and Pedagogy With/in the Postmodern (1991 Critics Choice Award), Troubling the Angels: Women Living with HIV/AIDS, co-authored with Chris Smithies (1998 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title), and Getting Lost: Feminist Efforts Toward a Double(d) Science (2008 Critics Choice Award). Her in-process book, Engaging (Social) Science: Policy from the Side of the Messy, is under contract with Peter Lang.
   
   Valerie Lee (Ph.D. The Ohio State University) is Professor of English and Women’s Studies and Chair of the Department of English. She teaches and publishes in the areas of literary criticism, feminist theory, critical race feminisms, folklore, and African American literature. Professor Lee is author of The Prentice Hall Anthology of African American Women's Literature; Granny Midwives and Black Women Writers: Double-Dutched Readings, and Invisible Man's Literary Heritage: Benito Cereno and Moby Dick, as well as many articles and reviews on African American literature and theory, and multicultural pedagogy. She is a recipient of the OSU Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award and the OSU Distinguished Service Award.
   
   Associate Professor of Art Laura Lisbon (MFA Syracuse University) is a practicing visual artist who is working to engage practicing artists more closely with theoretical and critical debates about art and culture. Her paintings exhibit nationally and internationally including in New York City, England, and Holland. Professor Lisbon's essays about contemporary painting have been published in Dialogue and Beauty Is Nowhere: Ethical Issues in Art and Design. In 2001 Professor Lisbon co-curated an international contemporary painting exhibition, and is co-author, with Philip Armstrong and Stephen Melville, of As Painting: Division and Displacement (MIT Press/Wexner Center for the Arts, 2001).

   Assistant Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Morgan Y. Liu (Ph.D. Harvard University) is a cultural anthropologist studying social imaginaries and Islamic knowledge in central Eurasia. Theoretically, his interests include space, phenomenology, agency, emergence, and ethnographic complexity. He is currently working on a book on how ethnic Uzbeks in a Kyrgyzstani city conceive of the post-Soviet state and Islam, based on research using vernacular language interviews and ethnographic fieldwork of urban social life. His next project, set in the populous and pious Fergana Valley of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, will investigate the links between post-Soviet Islamic piety, economic prosperity & poverty, and structural problems in society. It will look at Central Asian Islam as a form of utopian thought and practice that aims for peaceful societal transformation in the Muslim postsocialist world.
   
   Associate Professor in the Department of English Manuel Martinez’s (Ph.D. Stanford University) publications include two novels, Drift: A Novel (Picador, 2003) and Crossing (Bilingual Review Press, 1998) as well as the scholarly work, Countering the Counterculture: Rereading Postwar American Dissent from Jack Kerouac to Tomás Rivera (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). A new novel, Day of the Dead, is forthcoming. His Web site is http://www.manuelmartinez.info/Site/Manuel_Luis_Martinez.html.
   
   >Professor in the Department of French and Italian, Danielle Marx-Scouras (Ph.D. Columbia University) works in contemporary French and francophone literature, theory, and cultural history. She has written on Camus, Sénac, Chraïbi, Zebda, Tel Quel, women writing on war, French popular music, Maghrebine francophone literature and theory, Vittorini and Il Politecnico. Her most recent book is La France de Zebda 1981-2004: Faire de la musique un acte politique (Editions Autrement in Paris, 2005). She is currently working on a new book project, "Rock the Hexagon: Popular Music and Identity Politics in France Today," supported by an OSU Arts and Humanities Seed Grant. Professor Marx-Scouras received the College of Humanities Rodica C. Botoman Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching and Mentoring in 2004.
   
   Brian G. McHale (D. Phil. Merton College, Oxford University) is Distinguished Humanities Professor of English. He has taught at Tel Aviv University, West Virginia University, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Freiburg (Germany), and the University of Canterbury (New Zealand), among other institutions. He was for many years associate editor, and later co-editor, of the journal Poetics Today. He is the author of Postmodernist Fiction (Methuen, 1987; reprint Routledge, 1989, 1991), Constructing Postmodernism (Routledge, 1992), and The Obligation Toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems (University of Alabama Press, 2004), as well as articles on free indirect discourse, mise en abyme, narrativity, modernist and postmodernist poetics, and science fiction. He is co-editor with Randall Stevenson of The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Literatures in English (2006).
   
   Stephen Melville (Ph.D. University of Chicago) is Professor in the History of Art Department, with an adjunct appointment in English. His principal interests are in contemporary art, critical theory and its relationship to aesthetic discourses. He has written extensively in the fields of art, literature, and philosophy, including Philosophy beside Itself: On Deconstruction and Modernism (University of Minnesota Press, 1986). He has co-edited with Bill Readings Vision and Textuality (Duke University Press, 1995); a collection of his essays, Seams: Art as a Philosophical Context (Gordon & Breach, 1997), is edited and introduced by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe. With Philip Armstrong and Laura Lisbon, he was co-curator in 2001 of “As Painting: Division and Displacement,” an exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts, accompanied by a catalogue from the MIT Press.
   
   Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Margaret Mills (Ph.D. Harvard University) researches and teaches about folklore and folklore theory, especially in the areas of orality and literacy; ethnography and qualitative research ethics; gender and performance; local culture and politics; material culture; and cultural studies of migration. Her regional interests are Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central and South Asia generally, and she is widely regarded as a leading specialist in the popular culture of the Persian and Farsi-speaking world. She is the author of Rhetoric and Politics in Afghan Traditional Storytelling (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991); Conversations with Davlat Khalav: Oral Narratives from Tajikistan, co-authored with Tajik folklorist Ravshan Rahmoni (Moscow: Humanitary Press, 2001); and the co-edited South Asian Folklore: An Encyclopedia (Routledge, December 2003). She is working on two monographs on oral history and oral narrative performance related to Afghanistan.
   
   Koritha Mitchell (Ph.D., University of Maryland, College Park), Assistant Professor of English, specializes in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American literature, racial violence throughout American literature and culture, and black drama and performance. Her current book project focuses on black-authored lynching drama written before 1930. Professor Mitchell is equally interested in examining the impact that racial violence has had on artists who work in forms other than drama. While examining a novel prompted by Emmett Till's murder, a recent essay in Callaloo builds on traditions of black feminist criticism to begin explicating what she calls “homebuilding anxiety,” a concept that will animate some of her future work. She has won fellowships from the David Driskell Center for the Study of the African Diaspora, the Ford Foundation, and the AAUW.
   
   Linda Mizejewski (Ph.D. University of Pittsburgh) is Professor in the Department of Women’s Studies, and her research interests are film and cultural studies. Her first two books, Divine Decadence: Fascism, Female Spectacle, and the Makings of Sally Bowles (Princeton, 1992) and Ziegfeld Girl: Image and Icon in Culture and Cinema (Duke, 1999), are about the historical, sexual, and racial meanings of high-profile showgirls in American culture. Her most recent book is Hardboiled and High Heeled: The Woman Detective in Popular Culture (Routledge, 2004). For Professor Mizejewski, the woman detective character is a symbol of the feminist scholar/investigator, showing up to ask tough questions and make the authorities squirm. Her current research project is women and comedy, and her book on the film widely regarded as the template for the romantic comedy genre, It Happened One Night, is forthcoming in a new series from Blackwell. She has won grants from NEH and ACLS, and has been awarded the Ohio State University Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award.
   
   Associate Professor of sociolinguistics in the Department of English, Gabriella Modan’s (Ph.D. Georgetown University) research and teaching interests include discourse analysis, language and social identity, ethnography, space and place theory, and Jewish studies, and she has published on these topics in such journals as the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology and the Journal of Sociolinguistics. She recently published Turf Wars: Discourse, Diversity, and the Politics of Place (Blackwell Press, 2007).
   
   Debra Moddelmog (Ph.D. The Pennsylvania State University) is Professor of English. Her areas of interest include twentieth-century American literature, feminist studies, and sexuality studies. She is the author of Readers and Mythic Signs: The Oedipus Myth in Twentieth-Century Fiction (Southern Illinois University Press, 1993) and Reading Desire: In Pursuit of Ernest Hemingway (Cornell University Press, 1999) and articles on Thomas Pynchon, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, romantic comedy and same-sex marriage, and coming-out pedagogy. She is Co-Coordinator of the Sexuality Studies Program and is the recipient of the 2004 College of Humanities Diversity Enhancement Award and the 2009 Ohio State Distinguished Diversity Enhancement Award.
   
   Laura Podalsky (Ph.D. Tulane University) is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Her research and teaching interests are in Latin American film, cultural studies, and critical theory. She has published a book on urban space and culture, Specular City: The Transformation of Culture, Consumption, and Space after Peron (Temple University Press, 2004), as well as numerous articles on a variety of topics including youth markets and contemporary Mexican cinema, telenovelas and globalization, and cosmopolitanism in tango films. She is currently working on a book manuscript on Latin American cinema, the politics of affect, and the contemporary public sphere.

   Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Martin Joseph Ponce (Ph.D., Rutgers University) has research interests in Asian American literature, African American literature, queer studies. He has published articles on Carlos Bulosan, Langston Hughes, and the Filipino diaspora. His book project traces the formation of diasporic Filipino literature as it emerges under the conditions of U.S. imperialism and migration. The study pays special attention to the complex formal strategies and (queer) sexual politics that render this discrepant tradition irreducible to national or ethnic models of literary history and representation.
   
   Associate Professor of Japanese in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, Charles Quinn’s (Ph.D., University of Michigan) research and teaching interests include the concept of performance in foreign language pedagogy and linguistic studies of the Nara and Heian periods. He is co-director of the Japanese language program at OSU and Associate Director of OSU’s National East Asian Language Resource Center. With Jane Bachnik, he authored and co-edited Situated Meaning: Inside and Outside in Japanese Self, Society, and Language (Princeton University Press, 1994; 2nd rev. printing 1996). He is currently working on a book entitled “Classical Japanese in context: a reader's rhetoric of grammar.”
   
   Shelley Quinn (Ph.D. Indiana University) is Associate Professor of Japanese in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures. Her field is premodern Japanese language and literature, and her special interests include literature and culture of medieval Japan, and Japanese performance traditions, in particular, arts of narrative recitation, and the Noh drama. She is author of Developing Zeami: The Noh Actor’s Attunement in Practice (2005), an interpretive study that traces the development of the medieval playwright/actor Zeami’s seminal theories of performance. Presently she is working on a monograph tracing the modern Noh actor Kanze Hisao’s efforts to broaden his base in the years after World War II. She is also interested in East Asian pedagogies, issues of modernity as they affect traditional arts, and literary translation, and teaches courses on Japanese literature and culture, theatre and performance, and classical Japanese language.
   
   Professor Karlis Racevskis (Ph.D. Columbia University) in the Department of French and Italian specializes in 18th -century French Literature and critical approaches to literature and culture. He is currently exploring connections between French critical theory and recent advances in neuroscience. His publications include books on Voltaire, Foucault, the Enlightenment, and Postmodernism.
   
   Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Paul Reitter’s (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, 1999) research interests are in German-Jewish literature and culture; German modernism; fin-de-siècle Vienna; and critical theory. He has published articles on Freud; Kraus; Kafka; Heine; the erotics of Viennese modernism; Thomas Mann; Erich Auerbach and Edward Said; Holocaust historiography; and Jewish self-hatred. His first book, The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siecle Europe (U Chicago P, 2008) is a study of the Viennese critic and satirist Karl Kraus and was one of the best books of 2008 by the Times Literary Supplement. Currently, Professor Reitter is working on a monograph-length reckoning with the topic of Jewish self-hatred—to be published by Princeton University Press—as well as a translation of Salomon Maimon's brilliant and scabrous autobiography.
   
   Ileana Rodriguez (Ph.D. University of California, San Diego) is Humanities Distinguished Professor of Latin American Literatures and Cultures in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She has published extensively on the literatures, cultures, and politics of Central America and the Caribbean and has authored several books including Women, Guerrillas, and Love: Understanding War in Central America (University of Minnesota Press, 1999); House, Garden, Nation: Space, Gender, and Ethnicity in Post-Colonial Latin American Literatures by Women (Duke University Press, 1994); and several others. Her current research is on the methods of constructing discourses and defining fields of knowledge. Her work seeks to map conceptual routes in the long journey from Mercantilism to Neo-Liberalism, and her main quest is to enter the dynamics of discourse intersection itself, focusing on nature and the representation of nature as it mutates from landscape into sugar fields, from forests into plantations, from cascades and lakes into transoceanic canals.
   
   Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Tamar Rudavsky (Ph.D. Brandeis University) has published a number of articles and books on Jewish philosophy, including Gender and Judaism: Tradition and Transformation (New York University Press, 1995) and recently co-edited, with S. Nadler, The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy: From Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2009). She is particularly interested in religion and science; gender and religion; and Jewish thought.
   
   Peter M. Shane (J.D. Yale Law School) is Professor of Law at the Moritz College of Law and Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Law and Policy Studies. His interests are in constitutional and administrative law (with special emphasis on the U.S. presidency), democratic theory, and cyberdemocracy theory and practice. He has published extensively in these areas. Professor Shane has received a National Science Foundation grant for interdisciplinary study related to cyberspace and democracy.
   
   Professor in the Department of English, Amy Shuman (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania) specializes in folklore and cultural, critical, and feminist theory and has published widely in those fields, including articles on conversational narrative, literacy, politics, food customs, feminist theory and critical theory. She has also published Storytelling Rights: The Uses of Oral and Written Texts by Urban Adolescents (Cambridge University Press, 1986); Other People’s Stories: Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy (University of Illinois Press, 2004); and, with Carol Bohmer, Rejecting Refugees: Political Asylum in the 21st Century (Routledge, 2007). She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a recent fellow at the Hebrew University Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, and recipient of the College of Humanities Exemplary Faculty Award.
   
   Mytheli Sreenivas (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania) is Assistant Professor in the Department of History and the Department of Women’s Studies. She has research interests in modern South Asia, women’s history, the history of sexuality and the family, and in colonialism and nationalism. Her work has been supported by several grants, including from the Fulbright Foundation. Professor Sreenivas has recently published Wives, Widows, and Concubines: The Conjugal Family Ideal in Colonial India (Indiana University Press, 2008), and is winner of the Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences from the American Institute of Indian Studies. She teaches courses in History and Women’s Studies on modern South Asia, comparative women’s history, history of the family, transnational feminisms, and world history.
   
   Michael D. Swartz (Ph.D. New York University) is Professor of Hebrew in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. He specializes in the cultural history of Judaism in late antiquity, rabbinic studies, early Jewish mysticism and magic, and ritual studies. He is the author of Scholastic Magic: Ritual and Revelation in Early Jewish Mysticism (Princeton UP, 1996) and Mystical Prayer in Ancient Judaism: An Analysis of Ma'aseh Merkavah (1992), and is co-author, with Joseph Yahalom, of Avodah: Ancient Poems for Yom Kippur (Penn State UP, 2005) and, with Lawrence H. Schiffman, of Hebrew and Aramaic Incantation Texts from the Cairo Genizah: Selected Texts from Taylor-Schechter Box K1 (1992). He also served as the Associate Editor for “Judaica” for the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Religion (2005). Professor Swartz is currently working on a history of ideas of sacrifice in post-biblical Judaism.
   
   Assistant Professor in Geography and Women’s Studies, Mary E. Thomas (Ph.D. University of Minnesota) is a feminist geographer interested in social and psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity, social difference, and identity. Her research focuses on the spatial processes of social difference in the United States; she explores how subjects learn and reproduce social difference through individual identities like gender, sexuality, race and class, and asks how sexuality, racism, and economic privilege structure identity formation. In her work she has specifically looked to the lives of teenage girls to approach the complexity of social identity and spatial subjectivity. A main theme underlying her published work is an interest in the spatial performativity of gender, race, and sexuality, how particular spaces like urban streets, high schools, and homes, impart normative lessons.
   
   Abril Trigo (Ph.D. University of Maryland) is Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and Distinguished Humanities Professor of Latin American Cultures. His research is in Latin American cultural studies, with particular interests in critical theory, national and post-national literatures, and popular cultures. His main publications include Caudillo, estado, nación. Litératura, historia, e ideologoía en el Uruguay (Gaithersburg, MD: Ediciones Hispamérica, 1990), ¿Cultura uruguaya o cultural linyeras? (Para una cartografía de la neomodernidad posuruguaya) (Montevideo: Vintén Editor, 1997), Memorias migrantes. Testimonios y ensayos de la diáspora uruguaya (Rosario/Montevideo: Beatriz Viterbo Editoras and EdicionesTrilce, 2003), and The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader, co-edited with Ana Del Sarto and Alicia Rios Durham (Duke University Press, 2004). He is currently working on an analysis of the main critical paradigms, as well as the most significant debates, that have shaped the field of Latin American cultural studies.

   Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and African American and African Studies, Rebecca Wanzo (Ph.D. Duke University) is interested in theories of race and ethnicity, African American literature and culture, critical race theory, popular culture—particularly the history of popular genre fiction in the U.S., comics, and representations of African Americans on television and film. Her current book project examines how sympathetic depictions of the oppressed in literature and other media have influenced politics.
   
   Assistant Professor in the Department of French and Italian Heather Webb (Ph.D. Stanford University) specializes in the literature and cultural history of medieval and Renaissance Italy. Research interests include Dante, early Italian lyric poetry, devotional poetry and prose, and history of the body. Her book, entitled The Medieval Heart, is forthcoming. She has published essays on Giovanni da San Gimignano's analysis of sensory function, Catherine of Siena's ideas about the heart, and Dante's "rime petrose." An essay on Paradiso 25 is forthcoming. Professor Webb also serves on the oversight committee for the Center for the Study of Religion.

   Alexander Wendt (Ph.D. University of Minnesota) is Professor in the Department of Political Science. His research and teaching interests are in international relations, political theory, social theory, and the philosophy of social science. His current research focuses on the inevitability of a world state, and on the idea of a quantum social science. He is the author of Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1999), and articles in International Organization, American Political Science Review, Review of International Studies, European Journal of International Relations, International Security, and Politics and Society. He has taught previously at Yale University, Dartmouth College, and the University of Chicago.
   
   Karen Winstead (Ph.D. Indiana University) is Professor in the Department of English. Her areas of interest are comparative literature and cultural studies, with a focus on late medieval England. She has written Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England (Cornell University Press, 1997), edited John Capgrave’s Life of Saint Katherine (Western Michigan University Press, 1999), and produced an anthology of saints’ lives in translation, Chaste Passions: Medieval English Virgin Martyr Legends (Cornell UP, 2000). Her most recent book is John Capgrave's Fifteenth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
   
   Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s Studies Shannon Winnubst (Ph.D. U of Notre Dame) specializes in queer theory, race theory, feminist theory, and psychoanalysis. Her research interests focus on the intersections of race and sexuality, focusing particularly on normative frameworks of space, time, and pleasure. Her recent book, Queering Freedom (Indiana UP, 2006), approaches these questions particularly through frameworks of excess, scarcity, pleasure, utility, and fear. Her current work excavates race and sexuality in the intersecting concepts of animality, fetishism, and nationalism. In addition to publishing in journals such as Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy and Philosophy and Social Criticism, she also edited a recent anthology, Reading Bataille Now (Indiana UP, 2006).
   
   Judy Tzu-Chun Wu (Ph.D. Stanford University) is Associate Professor in the Department of History. Her research and teaching interests focus on the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and nationality in American history. Her first book, entitled Doctor "Mom" Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Forgotten Wartime Celebrity (University of California Press, 2005), is a biography of Dr. Margaret Chung, the first known American-born Chinese female physician. Her current book project, tentatively titled "Radicals on the Road: Third World Internationalism and American Orientalism during the Viet Nam Era," is under contract with Cornell University Press for a series on U.S. and the World that is edited by Mark Bradley and Paul Kramer. This work focuses on the international travels of American antiwar activists during the U.S. War in Viet Nam. It specifically explores how these encounters with Asian culture, politics, and people shaped the radical imaginary of U.S. activists of varying racial, gender, and sexual identifications. Professor Wu received the OSU Distinguished Alumni Teaching Award in 2002 and co-coordinates the Asian American Studies program.

   Christian K. Zacher (Ph.D., University of California, Riverside) is Director of the Humanities Institute at Ohio State and Professor in the Department of English. His research interests are in Old and Middle English literature and in science fiction. He is the author of Curiosity and Pilgrimage: The Literature of Discovery in Fourteenth-Century England, a section on "Travel and Geographical Writings" in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, and of essays and reviews on medieval literature. He is co-editor of Critical Studies of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Idea of Medieval Literature, and he is co-general editor of Basic Readings in Chaucer and His Time.
   
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   Staff of the Department of Comparative Studies

   Dr. Margaret Lynd is assistant to the Chair, academic program coordinator, and student advisor.
   
   Wen Tsai, the office administrator, manages all personnel and budget issues.
   
   Lori Miller, the office assistant, provides support services for faculty and students.
   
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