.

. undergraduate

. Comparative Studies

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Undergraduate Courses in Comparative Studies

CS201 LITERATURE AND SOCIETY Study of relationships among politics, society, and literature; analysis of social and political elements of literature and film from diverse cultures and historical periods. (GEC, H)

CS202.01 LITERATURE AND RELIGION Study of relationships between religion and secular literature; analysis of religious and spiritual elements of literature and film of diverse cultures and historical periods. (GEC, H)

CS202.02 COMPARATIVE SACRED TEXTS Introduction to religious views of the universe, the supernatural, the human condition, ethics, social organization, etc., through primary sacred texts (oral and written) of diverse cultures and historical periods. (GEC)

CS203 LITERATURE AND THE SELF Study of relationships between psychology and literature; analysis of psychological concepts and processes as represented in literature and film of diverse cultures and historical periods. (GEC, H)

CS204 LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND TECHNOLOGY Study of relationships among literature, science, and technology; analysis of representations of science and technology in literature and film of diverse cultures and historical periods. (GEC, H)

CS205 LITERATURE AND ETHNICITY Study of relationships between literature and ethnicity; analysis of concepts of ethnicity as represented in literature and film of diverse cultures and historical periods. (GEC)

CS214 INTRODUCTION TO SEXUALITY STUDIES This course will provide an introduction to sexuality studies through an interdisciplinary approach. To apply the knowledge learned, this course requires a fieldwork component.

CS234 AMERICAN ICONS Interdisciplinary methods in American studies; emphasis on the plurality of identities in American culture. (GEC)

CS239 CITY AND COUNTRY IN AMERICA (under revision) Interdisciplinary perspectives on the development, accuracy, and influence of popular images and stereotypes of city and country.

CSH240 THE NATURE OF MODERNITY: KEY IDEAS AND ENDURING PROBLEMS Examination of some of the defining ideas of modern thought and how those ideas have problematically affected modern life in both developed and developing countries. (Honors only; GEC)

CS241 INTRODUCTION TO ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES Introduction to Asian American studies; history, experiences, and cultural production of Americans of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, South Asian, Filipino, and Southeast Asian ancestry. (GEC)

CS242 INTRODUCTION TO LATINO/A STUDIES Introduction to Latino/a studies; history, politics, and cultural production of Latino/a communities in the U.S. and its borderlands. (GEC)

CS 243 INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES TO RACE AND ETHNICITY IN THE AMERICAS Introduction to race and ethnicity in the U.S.: how race and ethnicity have shaped American culture social thought, social institutions and inter-group relations. (GEC)

CS 264 READING POPULAR CULTUREIntroduction to the analysis of popular culture texts, with special emphasis on the relationship between popular culture studies and literary studies.

CS 270 INTRODUCTION TO COMPARATIVE RELIGION Introduction to the academic study of religion through comparison among major traditions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc.) and smaller communities. (GEC, H)

CS272 SCIENCE AND SOCIETY Critical analysis of the multiple relations of science to society, with emphasis on knowledge, power, authority, values, and ethics. (GEC)

CS273 INTRODUCTION TO WORLD LITERATURE Analysis of oral and written literatures of diverse cultures and historical periods; their relation to such issues as cultural difference, national identity, and textual authority. (GEC)

CS274 INTRODUCTION TO COMPARATIVE CULTURAL STUDIES Introduction to interdisciplinary field of cultural studies; emphasis on relation of cultural production to power, knowledge, and authority, globally and locally. (GEC)

CS 275 INTRODUCTION TO VISUAL REPRESENTATION Analysis of the use of visual representation to generate and transmit ideas, information, and knowledge in contemporary culture. (GEC)

CS293 INDIVIDUAL STUDIES Designed to give students an opportunity for personal study with a member of the faculty.

CS294 GROUP STUDIES Designed to give groups of students an opportunity for pursue special studies not otherwise offered.

CS301 LOVE IN WORLD LITERATURE Representations of love in world literature; emphasis on mythological, psychological, and ideological aspects of selected representations in different cultures and time periods. (GEC, H)

CS305 MEDICINE AND THE HUMANITIES Humanistic, scientific, and clinical perspectives on medical issues; literary uses of medical themes, medicine as art and science. (GEC)

CS306 THE QUEST IN WORLD LITERATURE Motif of the quest in world literature; physical and mental journeys as metaphors of personal transformation and salvation. (GEC)

CS308 REPRESENTATIONS OF THE EXPERIENCE OF WAR Representations of war in works of literature, religious texts, and film from diverse cultures and time periods. (GEC)

CS314 WOMEN IN EAST-ASIAN AND ASIAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE Critical analysis of East Asian and Asian-American women's experience, examining the gender and sexual differences in the distribution of political power and in discourse. (GEC)

CS315 WOMEN AND RELIGION Modern women writers' search for feminist alternatives to traditional and patriarchal religious beliefs.

CS321 THE RELIGIONS OF INDIA History and structure of South Asian religions with attention to myth, ritual, art, philosophy, and social stratification.

CS322 NATIVE AMERICAN RELIGIONS Comparative survey of indigenous religions of North, Central, and South America; and patterns and diversity in religious experience, cosmologies, myths, rituals, beliefs, and local regional variations.

CS323 THE BUDDHIST TRADITION History and structure of Buddhism from founding to present in South, Southeast, and East Asia; emphasis on rituals, beliefs, and local and regional variations.

CS324 AFRICAN RELIGIONS Survey of African traditional religions and their interaction with Islam and Christianity in Africa and the diaspora; emphasis on cosmologies, myth, ritual, ethics, and witchcraft.

CS336 CULTURAL STUDIES OF AMERICAN MUSICS Investigation of the social, political, and cultural contexts of the development of popular musics in the U.S. (GEC)

CS339 TRANSNATIONALISM AND CULTURE IN THE AMERICAS Transnationalism as a central feature of cultural and artistic production in the Americas, focusing on the politics of language, race, citizenship, migration, and national belonging. (GEC)

CS345 SOUTH ASIAN AMERICAN RELIGION AND CULTURE Historical overview and critical discussion of South Asian American identity; focus on religious identity, ethnicity, nationalism, globalism, gender. (GEC)

CS358 FILM AND LITERATURE AS NARRATIVE ART Relationships between film and literature; emergence of cinematic art as a form of representation with emphasis on diverse cultural traditions. (GEC)

CS367 SECOND WRITING COURSE (GEC)

CS373 TRANSLATING LITERATURES AND CULTURES Introduction to issues and problems inherent to translating literatures and cultures.

CS376 THE JEWISH MYSTICAL TRADITION The history of Jewish mysticism from antiquity to the present, with emphasis on its implications for the comparative study of religious experience.

CS377 CONTEMPORARY FOLKLORE IN THE ARAB WORLD Study of contemporary folklore of the Arab world, including verbal art, material culture, visual self-representation, and performance. (GEC)

CS398 APPROACHES TO COMPARATIVE STUDIES Introduces comparative studies majors to theoretical tools, methods of investigation, and key concepts in comparative studies research and scholarship.

CS470 FOLKLORE OF THE AMERICAS Comparative study of folklore and folk groups of the Americas; topic varies: folk narratives, beliefs, customs, practices of Latino/a, Asian, African, Native, and Anglo cultures.

CS475 STUDIES IN ETHNOGRAPHY Explores the history, theory, and methods of ethnographic study in different contexts (e.g., religious, ethnic, occupational groups).

CS489 RESEARCH INTERNSTHIP IN COMPARATIVE STUDIES (1-5; repeatable to 10 credits)Intensive research experience in Comparative Studies; individualized research training; students collaborate closely with faculty member on research project; projects either student-initiated or faculty research.

CS498 STUDY TOUR Specific content, location, quarter(s) of offering and prerequisites vary; contact department office for details.

CS508 UTOPIA AND ANTI-UTOPIA Exploration and critique of utopian thinking in different historical and cultural contexts.

CS510 THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY NOVEL: TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS Analysis of twentieth-century fiction from western and nonwestern traditions: issues include colonialism, post-colonialism, nationalism, revolution, migration.

CS515 GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND RELIGION Explores intersections of gender, sexuality, and religion in comparative and cross-cultural contexts.

CS525 CONTEMPORARY RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS IN GLOBAL CONTEXT Examination of contemporary religious movements within the context of larger political, cultural, and economic processes, including post-colonialism, modernization, and globalization.

CS526 NEW AGE AND NEW RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS Study of new age and new religious movements in contemporary America.

CS531 THE CITY AND CULTURE Introduction to the comparative and cross-cultural study of cities, urban culture, and urbanism.

CS535 GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND SCIENCE Examination of relations between gender and science; topics include the gendering of "science" and "nature," biological theories of sexual inequality, feminist critiques of science and technology.

CS541 MYTH AND RITUAL Ritual, myth, and literature: structural and thematic relationships.

CS542 NATIVE AMERICAN IDENTITY Historical and contemporary issues of American Indian identity, primarily in U.S.; focus on American Indian authors, artists, and scholars.

CS543 STUDIES IN ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE Focused study of a topic in Asian American literary and cultural studies.

CS544 STUDIES IN LATINO/A LITERATURE AND CULTURE Focused study of a topic in Latino/a literary and cultural studies.

CS545 INTERSECTIONS: APPROACHES TO RACE, GENDER, CLASS, AND SEXUALITYExamines intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality in various sites within American culture ( e.g., legal system, civil rights discourse, social justice movements).

CS550 WEXNER CENTER SEMINAR Seminar offered in conjunction with Wexner Center exhibitions, performance series, media series, or symposia; may be taught by visiting artists, performers, or critics.

CS573 WORLD LITERATURE: THEORY AND PRACTICE Discussion of world literatures in theoretical, historical, and cultural contexts, with particular attention to translation, language, nationalism, globalization, and internationalism.

CS585 STUDIES IN LITERACY

CS597 ISSUES OF THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD (GEC)

CS598 SENIOR SEMINAR Writing seminar based on students' independent research.

CS620 APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF RELIGION Survey and comparison of concepts, categories, theories, and methods used by various disciplines in the study of religion.

CS641 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.

CS645 STUDIES IN KOREAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE Critical study of Korean-American literature and literary genres of the twentieth century, with particular attention to historical, social, and cultural contexts.

CS648 STUDIES IN ORALITY AND LITERACYExamination of major theories of writing and of oral composition and transmission, in juxtaposition to case material deriving from a variety of Middle Eastern cultures.

CS651 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.

CS660 MODERNISM: ITS ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CULTURE AND POLITICS Origins and development of the modernist sensibility in 20th-Century art, literature, social theory, and politics.

CS665 STUDIES IN JAPANESE AMERICAN LITERATURE Critical study of modern Japanese-American literature in historical and cultural context; topics vary: literature of the inernment, gender and identity politics, genre studies, women’s writing.

CS672 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.

CS677 STUDIES IN WORLD FOLKLORE (each subdivision repeatable to 10 credits)

CS678 STUDIES IN CHINESE-AMERICAN LITERATURE Critical study of modern Chinese-American literature in historical and cultural context. Topics vary: gender issues, genre studies, women's writing.

CS693 INDIVIDUAL STUDIES (1-10; repeatable to 15 credits) Designed to give able students an opportunity to pursue special studies not otherwise offered.

CS694 GROUP STUDIES (3-5; repeatable to 15 credits) Special topics.

CS697 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.

CS698 STUDY TOUR (1-15) Specific content, location, quarter(s) of offering, and prerequisites vary; contact department office for details.

CS699 UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH IN COMPARATIVE STUDIES (1-15; repeatable to 15 credits) Undergraduate research in variable topics.

(Most 700-level courses require the instructor’s permission for undergraduates.)

CS706 COMPLEX ETHNOGRAPHY Critical analysis of relationships among the researcher, object of research, framing knowledge, and political context of ethnographic work.

CS716 THEORIZING CULTURE The concept of culture as it has developed over time; emphasis on tension between descriptive and normative approaches.

CS725 THEORIZING RELIGION Relationships between religion and other domains in a cross-cultural, comparative framework with attention to theoretical models and particular texts and traditions.

CS730 THEORIZING SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY Introduction to comparative and cultural studies of science and technology.

CS741 THEORIZING GENRE Comparative studies of genre theory and specific genres, (e.g., epic, novel, autobiography, film genres) in cultural context.

CS752 RACE AND CITIZENSHIP: FORMATIONS IN CRITICAL RACE THEORYCritical analysis of concepts of law, e.g., a value-free legal code, universality of legal concepts, equitable enforcement; emphasis on U.S.

CS 760 THEORIZING PERFORMANCE Advanced introduction to field of performance studies; theory and practice of expressive social behaviors, including theatre, dance, ritual, sports, and embodied practices of everyday life.

CS781 STUDIES IN WOMEN’S HISTORY (repeatable to 20 credits including credits for History 781) An intensive reading course designed to prepare graduate students in women’s history in a comparative framework.

CS H783 HONORS RESEARCH Senior honors course leading to graduation with distinction; independent study for the student with special aptitude.

CS790 FOUNDATIONS OF CONTEMPORARY 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.

CS792 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.

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Comparative Studies Undergraduate Student Group

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Study Abroad

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The Honors Program

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The Marilyn R. Waldman Award

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College of Humanities Undergraduate Scholarships

After Graduation

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Comparative Studies students will graduate well-prepared for a diverse and changing job market, as well as further education in professional or graduate schools. For students who wish to go directly into the job market, the Comparative Studies major is excellent preparation for a career in business, government, or social service agencies and institutions. Like other majors in the humanities, the Comparative Studies major emphasizes analytical, critical, and communication skills, but more than most, it emphasizes interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives that are increasingly relevant for the job market. Students are encouraged to take advantage of the Career Services Office in the Colleges of Arts and Sciences (http://asccareerservices.osu.edu/ ) for help in locating internships and employment after graduation.

For those students who want to go on to graduate or professional studies, the Comparative Studies B.A. will also prove useful. Areas of concentration will be noted on student transcripts, and the design of the curriculum, which is both focused and interdisciplinary, will ensure that students are highly competitive for admission to traditional disciplinary graduate programs and to professional schools, as well as to graduate programs that emphasize interdisciplinary studies.

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Core Faculty of the Department of Comparative Studies

Associate 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.

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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Associated Faculty of the Department of Comparative Studies

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. He sits on the editorial boards of Narrative, Journal of Narrative Theory and Narrative and Image. He is currently also Director of Latino Studies and co-coordinator with Jim Phelan of the "Narration and Cognition Working Group".

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 include The 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. Visit Manuel Martinez' Web site

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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