Associated Faculty of the Department of Comparative Studies represent different colleges and departments across the University. The faculty listed below share an interest in comparative studies of different cultural domains. All are affiliated with Comparative Studies by virtue of those interests and many frequently teach for the Department.
Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́ (PhD University of Florida) Humanities Distinguished Professor in the Department of English. Dr. Adéẹ̀kọ́'s teaching and research interests are in Yorùbá 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 (2005). He guest edited a special issue of Research in African Literatures 40:4 (Winter 2009) on writing about slavery in the African diaspora. Areas of expertise include 20th-Century British and American literature; African American literature, postcolonial literature and criticism, diasporic black literatures, literary theory (deconstruction); Anglophone African literature; Yorùbá literature and orature.
Frederick Luis Aldama (PhD Stanford University) Arts & Humanities Distinguished Professor in the Department of English. Professor Aldama 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 eleven books, including Postethnic Narrative Criticism; Brown on Brown;the MLA-award winning Dancing With Ghosts: A Critical Biography of Arturo Islas; Why the Humanities Matter: A Common Sense Approach; Your Brain on Latino Comics: From Gus Arriola to Los Bros Hernandez; and A User's Guide to Postcolonial and Latino Borderland Fiction. 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 as well as Texas Tech UP's “The Americas” book series. He is currently also Founder and Director of LASER—the Latino and Latin American Studies space for Enrichment and Research and of Latino Studies. Areas of Expertise include narrative theory, film studies, critical theory, 20th-Century British and American literature. Visit: www.frederickluisaldama.com
Leslie Alexander (PhD Cornell University), Associate Professor in the Department of History. Professor Alexander specializes in African American and American history; her teaching and research interests focus on Black culture, nationalism, the creation of community, and political movements. Her first monograph, entitled African or American?: Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-1861, explores Black culture, identity, and political activism during the early national and antebellum eras. She is also the co-editor of 'We Shall Independent Be’: African American Place-Making and the Struggle to Claim Space in the United States and the Encyclopedia of African American History. She has also won several university awards, including the University Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching, the University Distinguished Diversity Enhancement Award, and the College of Humanities Diversity Enhancement Award. Professor Alexander's current research 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. She is also the recipient of several prestigious fellowships, including the Ford Foundation Post Doctoral Fellowship and the Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship.
Chadwick Allen (PhD University of Arizona), Professor in the Department of English and Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences. Professor Allen's 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. He is author of the books Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts (Duke University Press, 2002) and Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2012). He is also the submissions editor for the journal SAIL: Studies in American Indian Literatures. Areas of expertise include Native American and US Ethnic literatures; global indigenous literatures; postcolonial literatures and theory; frontier literature and the popular Western.
Georgios Anagnostou (PhD The Ohio State University), Associate Professor in the Department of Classics. Professor Anagnostu’s areas of teaching and research interest are in Greek diaspora, American ethnicities, and modern Greek culture and identity. He has published Contours of “White Ethnicity”: Popular Ethnography and the Making of Usable Pasts in Greek America (Ohio University Press, 2009). Recent articles include “When ‘Second Generation’ Narratives and Hollywood Meet: Making Ethnicity in My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” MELUS (2012); “Reading the Hyphen in Poetry,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies (2011); “Where does ‘Diaspora’ Belong? The Point of View from Greek American Studies,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies (2010); and "A Critique of Symbolic Ethnicity: The Ideology of Choice?" Ethnicities (2009).
Franco Barchiesi (PhD University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa), Associate Professor in the Department of African American and African Studies. Professor Barchiesi's latest book is Precarious Liberation: Workers, the State, and Contested Social Citizenship in Postapartheid South Africa" (SUNY Press and University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2011). The book is the winner of the 2012 CLR James Award of the Working Class Studies Association. Barchiesi has also edited (with Tom Bramble) the book Rethinking the Labour Movement in the 'New South Africa' (2003). He is a recipient of the 2010 Distinguished Undergraduate Research Mentor Award at The Ohio State University and in 2008 he received the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship (Article) Award from the American Sociological Association, Labor and Labor Movements Section. His current research interests are in comparing modalities and discourses of employment in relation to processes of state formation and subaltern resistance in Southern Africa, the mid-Atlantic United States, and the Caribbean between the 19th and 20th centuries. These issues are addressed in his current research project, provisionally titled "Liberal Whiteness and Its Other: Work, State Formation, and Conflict in Colonial and Settler Societies, 1870s-1920s,” for which he is also a Visiting Research Associate in the Faculty of Humanities (School of Social Sciences) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (South Africa). Other recent publications include: “Precarious Liberation: A Rejoinder,” South African Review of Sociology (2012); “Migrant Labor,” in Encyclopedia of South Africa, eds. Sean Jacobs and Krista Johnson (2011); “Informality and Casualization as Challenges for South Africa’s Industrial Unionism: The Case of the East Rand/Ekurhuleni Region in the 1990s,” African Studies Quarterly (2010).
See: http://works.bepress.com/franco_barchiesi/
James R. Bartholomew (PhD Stanford University), Professor in the Department of History. Professor Bartholomew is a specialist in modern Japanese history, chiefly interested in the history of science, medicine, higher education, and business in Japan, and he has published widely in these areas. 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. Fields of study include East Asian history; constellations of study include Environment, Technology, and Science; and Religion in History.
William W. Batstone (PhD University of California, Berkeley), Professor and past Chair in the Department of Classics. Professor Batstone is editor (with Diane J. Raynor) of Latin lyric and elegiac poetry: an anthology of new translations (New York, 1995); editor (with Garth Tissol) of Defining Gender and Genre in Latin Literature (Peter Lang, 2005); and (with Cynthia Damon) Caesar's Civil War: A literary Introduction (Oxford). His research and teaching interests are in Roman literature, rhetoric and literary criticism, and lyric.
David A. Brewer (PhD University of California, Berkeley), Associate Professor in the Department of English. Professor Brewer works on 18th- and early 19th-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 Inhumanity of Authors (and why it's a good thing),” investigates the uses to which authorial names were put in the 18th-century Anglophone world. His edition of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals and George Colman the Elder's Polly Honeycombe is forthcoming from Broadview Press. He recently co-organized a conference in Berkeley: "Somebody's Story: Twenty-Eight Ways of Being Taught by Cathy Gallagher.” Areas of expertise include Restoration/18th-Century British literature; film.
Cynthia Burack (Ph.D. University of Maryland), Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Professor Burack works in the areas of feminist political theory and political psychology. Her research focuses on identity groups and their ideologies and cultures. She has published The Problem of the Passions: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Social Theory (New York University Press, 1994); Fundamental Differences: Feminists Talk Back to Social Conservatives, edited with Jyl J. Josephson (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); Healing Identities: Black Feminist Thought and the Politics of Groups (Cornell University Press, 2004). The most recent is Sin, Sex, and Democracy: Antigay Politics and the Christian Right (State University of New York Press, 2008), which was published in the Queer Politics and Cultures series at SUNY Press. She is currently at work on a book that analyzes compassionate antigay and anti-abortion social and political interventions of the Christian Right. Recent publications include "Where Liberty Reigns and God is Supreme: The Christian Right and the Tea Party Movement," New Political Science (2012), and “God, Gays, and Good-Enough Enemies,” Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society (2009).
Mathew Coleman (PhD University of California, Los Angeles), Associate Professor in the Department of Geography. Professor Coleman’s research interests are in geopolitics, immigration, and the geography of law. His current research focuses on immigration law and politics, more specifically on issues related to the U.S.-Mexico border, interior immigration enforcement, critical geopolitics, political geography, states and statecraft, geographies of power and resistance. Forthcoming publications include “Immigrant Il-legality: Geopolitical and legal borders in the US, 1882-present” (Special Issue: Migration, Mobility, and Geopolitics). Geopolitics 17, no. 1; “The local migration state: the site-specific devolution of immigration enforcement in the U.S. South,” Law & Policy 33, no. 4; and “Detention, deportation, devolution and immigrant incapacitation in the US, post-9/11” (Special issue: 9/11 + 10), The Geographical Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 177, no. 3.
Alice L. Conklin (Ph.D. Princeton University), Associate Professor in the Department of History. Professor Conklin teaches modern European history, with a particular focus upon 19th- and 20th-century France and its Empire. Her field specialties include colonial and post-colonial France, the history of the Social Sciences, modern African history, and European women's and gender history. Her book, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford, 1997; paperback edition 1998), examined the ways in which France’s liberal Third Republic produced a consensus on the legitimacy of imperialism through the notion of a special “mission to civilize” the less technologically advanced peoples of the globe. As a case study of how this mission worked on the ground in West Africa, A Mission to Civilize highlights the racist and republican elements that together influenced French policy-making. The book won the 1998 Book Prize of the Berskshire Conference of Women’s Historians. She is also the co-author of European Imperialism, 1830-1930: Climax and Contradictions, Problems in European Civilization Series (Houghton Mifflin, 1998), and co-edited a special issue of French Historical Studies, "Writing Colonial Histories" in 2005. Most recently she has published a new history of modern France, France and Its Empire since 1870, co-authored with Sarah Fishman and Robert Zaretsky (Oxford, 2010). She is currently completing a second monograph, tentatively entitled “In the Museum of Man: Ethnography, Race Science, and Empire, 1920-1950,” 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 by focusing on a particular ethnographic museum in Paris, the Musée de l’Homme. She has plans for a future project on the history of anti-racism in France, and Modern Europe more broadly, from the 1950s to the present. Fields of study include European history and modern European history.
Ignacio Corona (PhD Stanford University), Associate Professor of Literatures and Cultures of Latin America in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Professor Corona’s areas of specialization include Mexican and Chicano literature; contemporary Latin American literatures and cultures; discourse analysis applied to literature and political discourse; contemporary theories of semiotics and rhetorics. Current research projects are contemporary chronicles in Mexico and Latin America; theories of non-fiction literature; post-national musical identities; aesthetics, cultural identity and the practice of popular architecture; and violence and border theories.
John E. Davidson (Ph.D. Cornell University) Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures. Professor Davidson is Director of the OSU Film Studies Program and Executive Editor of the Journal of Short Film. His research interests are in film (especially German film) and visual culture, post-Enlightenment literature, and contemporary critical theories. Among his credits: Deterritorializing the New German Cinema; Framing the Fifties: Cinema in a Divided Germany (co-edited with Sabine Hake); and, recent chapters on Eberhard Fechner’s televisual aesthetic, Alexander Kluge’s Minutenfilme, Werner Herzog and American letters, Hartmut Bitomsky and the aesthetics of disappearing, as well as pieces in PMLA & American Imago.
Kirk Denton (Ph.D. University of Toronto), Professor of Chinese in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures. Professor Denton specializes in the fiction and literary criticism of the Republican period (1911-1949). He regularly teaches undergraduate courses in modern Chinese literature in translation, Asian American film, and Chinese film, as well as graduate courses and seminars on modern Chinese fiction, the writer Lu Xun, popular culture, Taiwan literature, and Chinese film. He is especially interested in the inception and formation of a discourse of modernity in the May Fourth period and how that discourse was to some degree informed and shaped by traditional concerns. Professor Denton's edited collection, Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature. 1893-1945, was published by Stanford University Press in 1996. Two years later, his The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and Lu Ling was also published by Stanford. He is associate editor of the Chinese section of The Columbia Companion to Modern East Literature (Columbia, 2003) and a coeditor of China: Adapting the Past, Confronting the Future (Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002). He is co-editor, with Michel Hockx, of Literary Societies in Republican China (Lexington, 2008). He also edited China: A Traveler's Literary Companion (Whereabouts, 2008). He has published several articles on museum culture, including in The China Quarterly and Japan Focus, and he is presently writing a book on the politics of historical representation in museums and memorial sites in Greater China entitled “Exhibiting the Past: Historical Memory and the Politics and Ideology of Museums in the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.” Areas of expertise include modern Chinese literature and historical memory in Greater China.
Jon E. Erickson (PhD University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee), Associate Professor in the Department of English. Professor Erickson is the author of The Fate of the Object: From Modern Object to Postmodern Sign in Performance, Art, and Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 1995) and numerous published articles in journals and edited volumes on theatre, performance theory, spectatorship, politics and ethics, drama and art. Courses and research concentrate on philosophy and literature, aesthetics and ethics, the phenomenology and reception of performance, the performance of subjectivity, modern/postmodern drama and fiction, tragedy and the tragic, Samuel Beckett, theatre and cinema, critical theory and political philosophy, and visual and conceptual art. He is an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Art. Select essays include “Is Nothing to Be Done?” Modern Drama (2007) (Beckett’s drama and justice); “On Mimesis (and Truth) in Performance,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism (2009); and “Tension and Release: The Production of Time in Performance,” Archaeologies of Presence: Acting, Performing, Being, eds. Nick Kaye, Gabriella Giannachi, Michael Shanks (forthcoming from Routledge, 2012). Areas of expertise include 20th-century British and American literature; critical theory; film studies; and modern and contemporary drama and literature.
Nancy Ettlinger (PhD University of Oklahoma), Associate Professor in the Department of Geography. Professor Ettlinger’s research interests are in critical human geography, neoliberalism, segregation, and democracy. As a critical human geographer she asks: How can critiques of our social, political, economic, and cultural environment offer insights into how to produce change? How are people governed and enrolled in a wide range of societal projects (e.g. neoliberalism, segregation, democracy), and what are the prospects for resistance? What is the relation between subjectivity and change? Underscoring these questions is a concern for the relation between individuals and larger-scale phenomena (firms, institutions, societal projects) and an interconnected view of social, political, economic, and cultural processes. Recent publications include “Governmentality as epistemology,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers (2011); “Bringing the everyday in the culture/creativity discourse,” Human Geography (2010); and “Whose capitalism? Mean discourse and/or actions of the heart,” Emotion, Space and Society (2009).
Lilia Fernández (Ph.D. University of California, San Diego), Associate Professor in the Department of History. Professor Fernández’s research interests include Latino/a immigration history, race and ethnic identity formation, urban renewal and gentrification, and women’s history. Her book, Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2012), examines Mexican and Puerto Rican migration, community formation, and social activism in Chicago from 1945 to 1975. Professor Fernandez has been awarded fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the University of California, San Diego and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She has published articles on Latino/a education, Latino/a youth culture, and community displacement of Mexican Americans in Chicago. Her most recent essay, “Of Migrants and Immigrants: Mexican and Puerto Rican Labor Migration in Comparative Perspective, 1942-1964” appears in the Journal of American Ethnic History (2010). Dr. Fernandez teaches the modern U.S. History survey, as well as courses on Chicana/o and Latina/o History and is affiliated with the Latino/a Studies Program. Fields of study include American history; US history since 1877, Latin American history, women's history; constellations include Power, Culture, and the State; and Race, Ethnicity, and Nation.
Lesley Ferris (PhD University of Minnesota), Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor and past Chair of the Department of Theatre. Professor Ferris is a director and scholar. Her research interests are focused on gender and performance, carnival, and the use of masks. Her books include Acting Women: Images of Women in Theatre (Macmillan,1990) and Crossing the Stage: Controversies on Cross Dressing (Routledge, 1993). She has published numerous essays, the most recent being "Cooking Up the Self': Booby Baker and Blondell Cummings 'Do' the Kitchen" in Interfaces: Women/Autobiography/ Performance/ Image, edited by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (University of Michigan Press, 2002). She has directed over 50 productions both in Britain and the U.S.A., 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). Most recently she directed Adrienne and Adam P. Kennedy's Sleep Deprivation Chamber. She has served as the Resident Director for the London Theatre Program in summer of 2000 and 2001. The Office of International Education awarded her an Outstanding Faculty Award in 2002 for her contributions to international education.
Jared Gardner (PhD Johns Hopkins University), Professor in the Department of English and the Film Studies Program. Professor Gardner’s research interests are in American literature, film, and popular culture. He is the author of Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787-1845 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Projections: Comics and the History of 21st-century Storytelling (Stanford University Press, 2012); and The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture (Illinois University Press, 2012). He also serves as director of the Popular Culture Studies program at OSU.
Kenneth Goings (PhD Princeton University), Professor and past Chair in the Department of African American and African Studies. Professor Goings specializes in 19th- and 20th-century African American history. His research interests include the history of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), the history of African Americans in the post-Emancipation South, African American popular culture, and African American urban history. He is the author of The NAACP Comes of Age: The Defeat of Judge John J. Parker (1990), which received the Outstanding Book Award on the Subject of Human Rights, Gustavus Myers Center, 1990; Mammy and Uncle Mose: Black Collectibles and American Stereotyping (1994), which also received the Outstanding Book Award on the Subject of Human Rights, Gustavus Myers Center, 1994; and co-edited with Raymond Mohl, The New African American Urban History (1996). He is the author of numerous articles, essays, and book chapters and book reviews. He has lectured extensively on black collectibles, the modern phase of the Civil Rights Movement, and the history of HBCUs. In 2001 he was appointed a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians. 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."
Fritz Graf (PhD University of Zurich), Distinguished University Professor, Department of Classics, and Director of Epigraphy Center. When asked how he did research, the great Latinist and Historian of Religion Eduard Norden (1868-1941) explained: "I keep all my ties in one big shoe-box. Every time I try to pull out one specific tie, all the others come out as well, because everything in there is so entangled. This is also the way I do research." Professor Graf’s 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 Magic in the Ancient World (Harvard University Press, 1997; originally in French, Paris 1994) and Greek Mythology: An Introduction (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993; originally in German, Munich 1985). 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; 2nd edition in preparation). Currently, he is preparing a study on “Festivals in the Imperial East: The Transformation of Ritual Culture in Late Antiquity.”
Harvey J. Graff (PhD University of Toronto), Ohio Eminent Scholar and Professor of English and History. Professor Graff directs the LiteracyStudies@OSU initiative. A comparative social historian, Graff is noted internationally for his research and teaching on the history of literacy (The Literacy Myth: Literacy and Social Structure in the Nineteenth-Century City [1979; new ed., 1991]; The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture and Society [1987, Italian ed., 1989, Critics' Choice Award of the American Educational Studies Society]; The Labyrinths of Literacy: Reflections on Literacy Past and Present [1987; new ed., 1995, Portuguese and Spanish translations in progress]; National Literacy Campaigns in Historical and Comparative Perspective [co-editor, l987, 2008]); the history of children, adolescents, and youth (Children and Schools in Nineteenth-Century Canada [co-author, 1979, 1994, in English and French]; Growing Up in America: Historical Experiences [editor, 1987]; Conflicting Paths: Growing Up in America [1995]); and urban history and studies. He has also written on family history; criminality; social structure and population; education; and methodology and theory in history, social science, and humanities. Recent publications include the chapter on history for The Social Worlds of Higher Education: Handbook for Teaching in a New Century, a project of the American Sociological Association; entry on literacy in the Oxford Companion to United States History, Looking Backward and Looking Forward: Perspectives on Social Science History (coeditor), and “Understanding Literacy in its Historical Contexts,” special issue, Interchange (co-editor). A selection of his essays on literacy appears in the distinguished series “Il Sapere Del Libro” (including Roger Chartier, Robert Darnton, and Donald McKenzie) from Edizioni Sylvestre Bonnard in Italy. Recent publications include, The Dallas Myth: The Making and Unmaking of an American City (2008); "Literacy Myths," with John Duffy, Encyclopedia of Language and Education (2007); Understanding Literacy in its Historical Contexts: Socio-Cultural History and the Legacy of Egil Johansson (co-editor, 2009); "The Literacy Myth at 30," Journal of Social History (2010); Literacy Myths, Legacies, and Lessons: New Studies (2011). He is now at work on a social history of interdisciplinarity, and several edited volumes. Areas of expertise include history of literacy; literacy studies; social and cultural history—North America, Western Europe, and comparative history of cities and urban society and culture; history of childhood, youth, and families; history of interdisciplinarity and disciplinarity; theory and method in humanities and social sciences.
Yana Hashamova (PhD (2) University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana), Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures and Director of the Slavic Center. She is also an associate faculty member of the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, the Film Studies program, and the Mershon Center for International Security 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 was published by 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. Areas of expertise include Russian and Balkan film, literature, and media; cultural studies; gender and sexuality studies; and identity (ethno-national and religious) studies.
Jane Hathaway (PhD Princeton University), Professor in the Department of History. Professor Hathaway specializes in the Ottoman Empire before 1800, with a particular focus on the Arab provinces. Until recently, her research focused on Egypt and, to a lesser extent, Yemen; her current research project is a book-length study of the office of Chief Harem Eunuch of the Ottoman Empire. She has published the following books: The Arab Lands under Ottoman Rule, 1516-1800, with contributions by Karl Barbir (Pearson/Longman, 2008), which won the Turkish Studies Association's M. Fuat Koprulu Book Prize in 2008; Beshir Agha, Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Imperial Harem (Oneworld Publications, 2006); A Tale of Two Factions: Myth, Memory, and Identity in Ottoman Egypt and Yemen (State University of New York Press, 2003), which won the Ohio Academy of History Publication Award in 2005; and The Politics of Households in Ottoman Egypt: The Rise of the Qazdaglis (Cambridge University Press, 1997), and the following edited volumes: The Arab Lands in the Ottoman Era: Essays in Honor of Caesar Farah (Center for Early Modern History, University of Minnesota, 2010); Al-Jabarti's History of Egypt (an edited primary source) (Markus Wiener Publishers, 2009); Mutiny and Rebellion in the Ottoman Empire (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002); and Rebellion, Repression, Reinvention: Mutiny in Comparative Perspective (Greenwood Publications, 2001). Fields of study include Islamic history; constellations include Comparative Empires and Religion in History.
Wendy S. Hesford (PhD New York University), Professor in the Department of English. Professor Hesford’s research and teaching interests are modern and contemporary rhetorical theory, human rights studies, visual culture, and transnational feminist studies. She is the author of Framing Identities: Autobiography and the Politics of Pedagogy (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), winner of the 1999 W. Ross Winterowd Book Award, and Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms (Duke University Press, 2011), winner of the 2012 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award. She is co-editor with Wendy Kozol of two collections, Haunting Violations: Feminist Criticism and the Crisis of the "Real" (University of Illinois Press, 2001) and Just Advocacy? Women's Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and the Politics of Representation (Rutgers University Press, 2005). She is co-author with Brenda Brueggemann of the textbook Rhetorical Visions: Reading and Writing in a Visual Culture (Prentice Hall, 2007). Her current research project, “Children’s Human Rights and States of Exception,” examines international and national news and advocacy media representations of children’s human rights and the differential visibility of the rights of children identified as living in-between or outside of citizenship. Professor Hesford is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including a NEH Summer Seminar fellowship, 2007 Visiting Scholar at Columbia University's Center for the Study of Human Rights, several OSU Seed Grants, OSU Research Enhancement Grants, Coca-Cola Critical Difference for Women Grants, and the Modern Language Association's Florence Howe essay award. She has published reviews and essays in a range of journals, including PMLA, Biography, College English, Journal of Human Rights, Humanity, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and TDR: Journal of Performance Studies, among others. She is past President of the Women's Caucus of the Modern Language Association and former Chair of the Executive Committee of the MLA Division of the History and Theory of Rhetoric and Composition. She is co-organizer (with Professor Amy Shuman) of the OSU Human Rights Working Group, sponsored by Humanities Institute. The Working Group will host a symposium, “Global Human Rights, Sexualities, and Vulnerabilities” Spring, 2013. Areas of Expertise include rhetorical theory; gender and sexuality studies; human rights studies; law and literature.
Pranav Jani (PhD Brown University), Associate Professor in the Department of English. Professor Jani’s teaching interests include postcolonial/world literature, history, and politics, especially of South Asia, Africa, Ireland, and the Arab world; 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 book, Decentering Rushdie: Cosmopolitanism and the Indian Novel in English, was published by Ohio State University Press in 2010. His areas of expertise include postcolonial studies, Asian American studies, and 20th-century British and American literature.
Sarah Iles Johnston (PhD Cornell University), Arts & Humanities Distinguished Professor of Religion in the Department of Classics. Professor Johnston is particularly interested in ancient Mediterranean religions. She was the Editor-in-Chief of Religions of the Ancient World: A Guide (Harvard UP, 2004) and 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). Areas of expertise include religions of the Ancient Mediterranean, myth, and archaic Greek poetry.
Robin Judd (Ph.D. University of Michigan), Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History. Professor Judd specializes in Jewish and European History. Her first book, Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and German-Jewish Political Life in Germany, 1843-1933, was published by Cornell University Press in 2007. Her new project is “Love at the Zero Hour: European War Brides, GI Husbands, and European Strategies for Reconstruction.” She has received several grants including the College of Humanities' Virginia Hull Research Award, an NEH summer stipend, the Coca Cola grant for Critical Difference, and the 2001 Clio award for teaching. She has presented her work in the United States, Europe, and Israel. She teaches modern Jewish history, German history and women's history. Fields of study include European history, modern European history, Jewish history; constellations include Human Conflict, Peace, and Diplomacy; Power, Culture, and the State; Race, Ethnicity, and Nation; Religion in History.
Gregory Jusdanis (PhD University of Birmingham), Humanities Distinguished Professor and Director of Modern Greek Studies in the Department of Classics. Professor Jusdanis 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), The Necessary Nation (Princeton University Press, 2001), and Fiction Agonistes: In Defense of Literature (Stanford University Press, 2010), and articles on romanticism, aesthetics, nationalism, multiculturalism, globalization, diaspora, and world literature. He has been awarded Guggenheim and Woodrow Wilson Fellowships. Areas of expertise include modern Greek literature and cultural studies.
Merrill Kaplan (PhD University of California, Berkeley), Associate Professor in the Department of English. Professor Kaplan specializes in Old Norse-Icelandic literature, folklore on and off the Internet, and nineteenth-century Norwegian literature and culture. She has published articles on irruptions of the past and the supernatural in Icelandic sagas; out-Thoring Thor in the Great Saga of Olaf Tryggvason; Ibsen's dramatic realism and the publication of folklore collections; the Icelandic reception of Ibsen's The Vikings at Helgeland. She teaches courses on Nordic mythology; the Medieval Icelandic saga; legend; myth; and Old Norse-Icelandic language. Her areas of expertise include British fascination with the Medieval North; legend and folk belief; myth and mythography; history of Folklore Studies; Old Norse-Icelandic literature; Scandinavian national romanticism; Medieval Iceland and Scandinavia education.
Stephen Kern (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley), Humanities Distinguished Professor in the Department of English. Professor Kern taught at Northern Illinois University, completing his time there as a Distinguished Research Professor, before coming to Ohio State in 2002. He has been awarded A.C.L.S., N.E.H., Rockefeller, and Guggenheim Fellowships and received the Ohio Academy of History Distinguished Historian Award for 2007. His area of specialization is modern European cultural and intellectual history of the 19th and 20th centuries. His current research project is on modernism and religion. His major publications are Anatomy and Destiny: A Cultural History of the Human Body (Bobbs-Merrill, 1975), The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918 (Harvard University Press, 1983, 2003), The Culture of Love: Victorians to Moderns (Harvard University Press, 1992), Eyes of Love: The Gaze in English and French Paintings and Novels, (Reaktion, 1996), A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought (Princeton University Press, 2004), and The Modernist Novel: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Fields of study are European history and modern European history; constellation is Religion in History.
Ethan Knapp (Ph.D. Duke University), Associate Professor in the Department of English. Professor Knapp’s research and teaching interests are in Medieval literature and cultural theory. He is the author of The Bureaucratic Muse and essays on various topics in medieval literature and theory. He is also editor of The Marxist Premodern (Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies special issue, Bruce Holsinger co-editor). Areas of expertise include critical theory and Medieval literature.
Patti Lather (PhD Indiana University), Professor in the School of Educational Policy and Leadership. Professor Lather’s 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 (PhD Ohio State University), Professor in the Department of English and Vice Provost in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion. Professor Lee is past Chair of both the Department of English and the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. 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 (Prentice-Hall, 2005); Granny Midwives and Black Women Writers: Double-Dutched Readings (Routledge, 1996), and Invisible Man's Literary Heritage: Benito Cereno and Moby Dick (Rodopi, 1978), 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. Areas of expertise include gender and sexuality studies, American literature, African American literature, feminist studies, and folklore.
Laura Lisbon (MFA Syracuse University), Associate Professor in the Painting and Drawing program of the Department of Art. Professor Lisbon’s paintings exhibit nationally and internationally, including in New York City, England, Holland and France. The Wexner Center for the Arts produced an exhibition and catalogue of her paintings in 1995. 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, As Painting: Division and Displacement, at the Wexner Center for the Arts and contributed to a substantial catalogue and symposium for the exhibition. With co-curators Phillip Armstrong and Stephen Melville, Professor Lisbon is co-editor for the year 2000 issue of the Belgian theoretical journal, La Part De L’oeil. In 2010, she exhibited works in “Le Paradox du Diaphane et du Mur” at the Tanneries and Galerie L’agart in Amilly, France with artists, Vincent Peraro, Bernard Moninot and Toni Grand.
Morgan Liu (PhD University of Michigan), Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. Professor Liu is a cultural anthropologist studying Islamic knowledge and practice in post-Soviet Central Asia, focusing on Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. He is interested in ethnographic approaches to the state, postsocialism, space, and agency. Courses he teaches are about Middle Eastern culture, Central Asia, Islamic revival and social justice, and cultural theory. Before coming to the Ohio State University he was a postdoc at the Society of Fellows, Harvard University. Professor Liu’s current project investigates the connections between prosperity and piety among the newly wealthy class in southern Kyrgyzstan, how Islam legitimates economic activity, and how Islam is understood to address systemic problems in post-Soviet society. His book is entitled Under Solomon’s Throne: Uzbek Visions of Renewal in Osh (University of Pittsburgh, 2012). The book concerns how ethnic Uzbeks in the ancient Silk Road city of Osh, Kyrgyzstan think about political authority and post-Soviet transformations, based on research using vernacular language interviews and ethnographic fieldwork of urban social life that began in 1993. An upcoming project concerns a comparative look at notions of just society across the Middle East, Russia, and Asia. Areas of expertise include cultural anthropology of Islamic knowledge and practice in post-Soviet Central Asia, focusing on Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.
Manuel Luis Martinez (PhD Stanford University), Associate Professor in the Department of English. Professor Martinez’ publications include Crossing, a novel (1998), Drift, a novel (2003), Countering the Counterculture: Rereading Postwar American Dissent from Jack Kerouac to Tomas Rivera (2004), and Day of the Dead, a novel (2010). He is the recipient of Ford Foundation grants, fellowships from the MacDowell Artists Colony, the PEN American Center Best Book by a Writer of Color, and the 2011 Dobie Paisano/Texas Institute of Letters Writing Fellow. Areas of expertise include contemporary American literature, Chicano/a literature, countercultural literature, 20th-century British and American literature, and creative writing.
Danielle Marx-Scouras (PhD Columbia University), Professor of French in the Department of French and Italian. Professor Marx-Scouras 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, La France de Zebda 1981-2004: Faire de la musique un acte politique was published by the Editions Autrement in Paris in 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 McHale (DPhil, Oxford University), Humanities Distinguished Professor in the Department of English. Professor McHale 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 (1987), Constructing Postmodernism (1992), and The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole (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). Areas of expertise include 20th-century British and American literature.
Koritha Mitchell (PhD University of Maryland, College Park), Associate Professor in the Department of English. Professor Mitchell specializes in late 19th- and early 20th-century African American literature, racial violence throughout American literature and culture, and black drama and performance. She has won fellowships from the David Driskell Center for the Study of the African Diaspora, the Ford Foundation, and the AAUW, and her book, Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930 (University of Illinois Press, 2011), focuses on black-authored lynching drama written before 1930. A brief selection of this research appears as "(Anti) Lynching Plays: Angelina Weld Grimké, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and the Evolution of African American Drama" in the edited volume Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem: African American Literature & Culture, 1877 - 1919 (New York University Press, 2006). Professor Mitchell is equally interested in examining the impact that racial violence has had on artists who work in forms other than drama. For example, see her article “Mamie Bradley’s Unbearable Burden: Sexual and Aesthetic Politics in Bebe Moore Campbell’s Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine” in CALLALOO (2008). While examining a novel prompted by Emmett Till's murder, this essay 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. Areas of expertise include U.S. ethnic and post-colonial studies; gender and sexuality studies; American literature to 1900; 20th-century British and American literature.
Linda Mizejewski (PhD University of Pittsburgh), Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Professor Mizejewski is the author of Divine Decadence: Fascism, Female Spectacle, and the Makings of Sally Bowles (1992), Ziegfeld Girl: Image and Icon in Culture and Cinema (1999), and Hardboiled and High Heeled: the Woman Detective in Popular Culture (Routledge, 2004). Her most recent book, It Happened One Night (2010), is part of the Wiley-Blackwell Studies in Film and Television. She is currently working on a book on contemporary women comics. Professor Mizejewski has been a Fulbright Lecturer in Slovakia and Romania, and her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. At Ohio State, she has won the Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award and the Harlan Hatcher Distinguished Faculty Award. Areas of expertise include popular culture, film studies, and comedy.
Gabriella Modan (PhD Georgetown University), Associate Professor in the Department of English. Professor Modan’s teaching and research interests are in linguistics; folklore; Jewish studies; gender and sexuality studies; ethnography; and sociolinguistics. Her research focuses on language and urban identity, with a focus on ethnic identity and the discursive construction of cities and city neighborhoods as particular kinds of places. She is also interested in ethnicity, gentrification, urban planning, narrative, intercultural communication, and language variation. She is the author of Turf Wars: Discourse, Diversity and the Politics of Place (Blackwell, 2007) and articles in linguistics, anthropology, and urban studies journals on the topics mentioned above. Areas of expertise include sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, ethnography, ethnicity, and place and space theory.
Debra Moddelmog (PhD Pennsylvania State University), Professor in the Department of English, Co-Director of Sexuality Studies, and Director and Co-Organizer of DISCO (Diversity and Identity Studies Collective at OSU: http://disco.osu.edu). Professor Moddelmog specializes in twentieth-century American literature, sexuality studies, and intersectionality studies. She is author of two books—Reading Desire: In Pursuit of Ernest Hemingway and Readers (Cornell University Press, 1999) and Mythic Signs: The Oedipus Myth in 20th-Century Fiction (Illinois University Press, 1993)—as well as numerous articles on twentieth-century American writers and sexuality-based topics. She is a recipient of the College of Humanities Diversity Enhancement Award, the Ohio State Distinguished Diversity Enhancement Award, and the Dr. Marlene B. Longenecker English Faculty Leadership and Teaching Award. Her current projects include Hemingway in Context (co-edited with Suzanne del Gizzo; forthcoming from Cambridge) and a study of Havelock Ellis's influence on modernist and Harlem Renaissance writers. Areas of expertise include gender and sexuality studies, 20th-Century American literature, and modernism.
Laura Podalsky (PhD Tulane University), Associate Professor of Literatures and Cultures of Latin America in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Professor Podalsky’s on-going interests involve the relationship between Latin American culture, politics, and socio-historical formations. Her main area of research is Latin American film, but she has developed projects on urban culture, gendered discourses, questions of affect, and, more recently, youth cultures. Her book, Specular City: Transforming Culture, Consumption, and Space in Buenos Aires, 1955-1973 (Temple University Press, 2004), analyzes new films, literature, magazines, advertising, architecture, and car culture, and discusses the material and discursive transformation of the Argentine capital in relation to contemporary struggles between middle-class and working-class sectors in the aftermath of the first Peronist administration. She is currently working on a book on contemporary Latin American cinema and the politics of affect. The manuscript explores the evocation and deployment of emotion in contemporary film as a response to the hyper-rationalist discourses of postdictatorial politics and neoliberalism. The project examines the recent documentaries of Fernando Solanas and Patricio Guzman, thrillers about the 1960s and 1970s and engages a variety of theoretical models on affect—from Raymond Williams' argument about structures of feeling, to the contributions of trauma studies, to Deleuzian-inspired accounts about “intensities.” By placing recent films alongside larger socio-cultural debates, the manuscript will suggest that such affectively-charged articulations register and address epistemological crises accompanying the breakdown of traditional political and social paradigms and call for a rethinking of traditional conceptualizations of the public sphere.
Martin Joseph Ponce (Ph.D. Rutgers University), Associate Professor in the Department of English. Professor Ponce’s teaching and research interests are in Asian American literature, African American literature, and queer studies. He is the author of articles on Carlos Bulosan, Langston Hughes, Jose Garcia Villa, and the Filipino diaspora. His book, Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading, was published by New York University Press in 2012. His current projects include a study of how competing imperialisms and nationalisms are mediated through sexuality in Asian American literature; an analysis of how non-normative desires and sexualities are framed in post-1965 Asian American literature; and a reconsideration of "identity politics" in 1960s and 70s ethnic cultures. Areas of expertise include gender and sexuality studies and 20th-Century British and American literature.
Charles Quinn (Ph.D. University of Michigan), Associate Professor of Japanese in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures. Professor Quinn teaches courses in Japanese language, language pedagogy, classical Japanese, and linguistics. His work in pedagogy seeks to more fully conceptualize language as a cultural phenomenon, and to develop instructional practices that answer to that conceptualization. Another pedagogical challenge that Japanese culture confronts us with is in helping learners develop a reliable feel for socially apt ways of referring to themselves and others. Professor Quinn’s interest in "everyday genres" has a parallel in his studies of classical Japanese, in the semi-regular ways in which purposes, audiences, words, and grammar mutually implicate one another. If an adept reader of any genre is attuned to these mutual associations, identifying and exemplifying them in significant numbers of text tokens seems like good pedagogy for classical Japanese, too. A book underway, “Classical Japanese in context: a reader's rhetoric of grammar,” aims to explore the consequences of this. Areas of expertise include Classical Japanese language, and linguistics and literature.
Shelley Fenno Quinn (PhD Indiana University), Associate Professor of Japanese in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures. Professor Quinn’s 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. Quinn teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on Japanese literature and culture, theatre and performance, and classical Japanese language.
Paul Reitter (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley), Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures. Professor Reitter specializes in German-Jewish literature and culture, German modernism, fin-de-siècle Vienna, and critical theory. He has written a number of articles and essays on Freud; Kraus; Kafka; Heine; the erotics of Viennese modernism; biographing Thomas Mann; Erich Auerbach and Edward Said; Holocaust historiography; Jewish self-hatred. His first book, The Anti-Journalist (University of Chicago Press, 2008) is a study of the Viennese critic and satirist Karl Kraus, and has been reviewed in The Forward, The German Quarterly, H-Net, The New York Review of Books (www.nybooks.com/articles/21976), and the Times Literary Supplement, which named The-Anti-Journalist one of the best books of 2008. Currently, he 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. His articles and essays have appeared in such forums as Jewish Social Studies; The German Quarterly; Harper's Magazine; The Nation; and the TLS.
Ileana Rodriguez (PhD University of California, San Diego), Professor of Literatures and Cultures of Latin America in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Professor Rodriguez’s areas of specialization include Latin American literature and culture; Caribbean and Central American narratives; feminist studies; post-colonial theory; and subaltern studies. Books include Guerrillas, and Love: Understanding War in Central America (University of Minnesota Press, 1996) and House/Garden/Nation: Space, Gender, and Ethnicity in Post-Colonial Latin American Literatures by Women (Duke University Press, 1994), as well as several others and a number of edited volumes. Her current research is on the methods of constructing discourses and defining fields of knowledge. Her work seeks to map conceptual routes, the long journey from Mercantilism to Neo-Liberalism. Her main quest is to enter the dynamics of discourse intersection itself and to follow its inner logic, 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. As discursive formations pass from wilderness into pastoral, and from pastoral into narratives of travel and exploration and from there into discourses on mining, industry, commerce and development, the natural process once narrated as disorder, ignorance, and entropy follows a curve that briefly passes through a moment of positivistic order, then seems to lead again towards narratives of entropy and chaos. How that process is written is her main purpose; how it mutates, enables and condones is her aim. As new enclosures of natural spaces get under way, and increasingly smaller margins of nature are assigned to "natives," the current processes of natural industrial development could betray these workings in reverse. The hermeneutics of cultural constructions are part of her discussion. Inevitably, she skirts the issues of civility, civitas, and civilization, as concepts counterposed to native/nature. The sources for this text are varied, and do not necessarily follow a chronological order. Rather, she advocates adjacency and wants to inscribe colonial texts into postcolonial discourse to pinpoint the continuities.
Tamar Rudavsky (Ph.D. Brandeis University), Professor in the Department of Philosophy. Professor Rudavsky’s areas of expertise include ancient and Medieval philosophy; Jewish and Islamic philosophy; and phenomenology and existentialism. She has published a number of books, including Maimonides (Blackwell-Wiley Press, 2010) and Time Matters: Time, Creation and Cosmology in Medieval Jewish Philosophy (SUNY Press, 2000), as well as a number of edited volumes, including Gender and Judaism: Tradition and Transformation (New York University Press, 1995) and, with S. Nadler, The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy: From Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century, (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Peter M. Shane (J.D. Yale Law School), Jacob E. Davis and Jacob E. Davis II Chair in Law. Professor Shane came to Ohio State in 2003 from Carnegie Mellon University's H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management. He is an internationally recognized scholar in administrative law, with a specialty in separation of powers law, and has co-authored leading casebooks on each subject. His research interests are in constitutional and administrative law (with special emphasis on separation of powers and the U.S. presidency), democratic theory, and cyberdemocracy theory and practice. In 2008-09, he served as executive director of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. Recent books include Stephen Coleman and Peter M. Shane, Connecting Democracy: Online Consultation and the Flow of Political Communication (MIT Press, 2012), and Peter M. Shane, Madison's Nightmare: Executive Power and the Threat to American Democracy (University of Chicago Preww, 2009). Areas of expertise include administrative law, civic engagement, Constitutional law, E-Democracy, judicial appointment, media and democracy, U.S. President, and separation of powers.
Amy Shuman (PhD University of Pennsylvania), Professor in the Department of English. Professor Shuman is the author of articles on conversational narrative, literacy, political theory, food customs, feminist theory, and critical theory. She has 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, 1994); 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 a recipient of the College of Humanities Exemplary Faculty Award, 2007. Areas of expertise include gender and sexuality studies, folklore, and critical studies.
Mytheli Sreenivas (Ph.D. Yale University), Associate Professor in the Department of History and the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Professor Sreenivas has research interests in women’s history, the history of sexuality and the family, colonialism and nationalism, and the cultural and political economy of reproduction. Her work has been supported by several grants, including from the Fulbright Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her book, Wives, Widows, Concubines: The Conjugal Family Ideal in Colonial India (Indiana University Press, 2008), was awarded the Joseph Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences from the American Institute of Indian Studies. Her current project, which examines the cultural history of population and reproduction in modern South Asia, is tentatively titled “Counting Indians: Population and the Body Politic, 1800-1970.” Professor Sreenivas teaches courses in History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies on modern South Asia, comparative women’s history, postcolonial and transnational feminisms, and world history. Fields of Study include women's history; constellations include Colonialism, Post-Colonialism, and the Origins of Globalization; Environment, Technology, and Science; and Race, Ethnicity, and Nation.
Michael D. Swartz (PhD SUNY Binghamton), Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. Professor Swartz 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 University Press, 1996) and Mystical Prayer in Ancient Judaism: An Analysis of Ma'aseh Merkavah (Coronet, 1992); and co-author, with Joseph Yahalom, of Avodah: Ancient Poems for Yom Kippur (Penn State University Press, 2005) and Hebrew and Aramaic Incantation Texts from the Cairo Genizah: Selected Texts from Taylor-Schechter Box K1 (1992), with Lawrence H. Schiffman. 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.
Mary Thomas (PhD University of Minnesota), Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Professor Thomas studies teenage girlhood in the United States, particularly gender, race and sexual identities, and racial segregation in high school spaces. She draws on a range of social, feminist, and psychoanalytic theories, and considers the role of space in subject formation. Her book, Multicultural Girlhood, is forthcoming from Temple University Press. She has co-edited, with V. Del Casino, Jr., A Companion to Social Geography (Oxford, Blackwell). Areas of expertise include are girlhood studies, feminist geography, and subjectivity and space.
Abril Trigo (PhD University of Maryland), Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese). Professor Trigo’s areas of specialization are Latin American cultural studies; 19th-Century Latin American thought; theater and film; popular culture and cultural theory; and globalization studies. His main publications include Critical Index of Uruguayan Theater/Indice critico del teatro uruguayo, co-edited with Graciela Míguez; Memorias migrantes. Testimonios y ensayos sobre la diáspora uruguaya. Rosario/Montevideo (Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2003); The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader, co-edited with Alicia Ríos and Ana Del Sarto (Duke University Press, 2004). Current research projects include “Crisis y transfiguración de los estudios culturales latinoamericanos.” This is a book-length essay that analyzes the main critical paradigms as well as the most significant debates that shaped the field of Latin American cultural studies, evaluates the present situation of the field, and projects its future directions in the larger context of globalization. He is also at work on “Para una crítica de la economía político-libidinal de la cultura.” This is also a book-length essay on the cultural global processes. It combines a critique of material production (economics), a critique of power (politics), and a critique of the production of desires and social meanings (the libidinal and the symbolic). The book will attempt to elaborate a critique of culture that brings together a critique of political economy, ideological hegemony and libidinal economy, the missing subject in cultural studies.
Shannon Winnubst (PhD Pennsylvania State University), Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Professor Winnubst is an invited editor and contributor to
a special edition of Foucault Studies: Foucault and Queer Theory (forthcoming 2012). Other recent articles and essays include“The Missing Link: Homo Economicus (Reading Foucault and Bataille Together),” Blackwell Companion to Foucault (forthcoming 2012) and “Sacrifice as Ethics: The Strange Religiosity of Neoliberalism,” in Negative Ecstasies: Georges Bataille and the Study of Religion (Indiana University Press: forthcoming 2012). She is the author of Queering Freedom (Indiana university Press, 2006), editor of Reading Bataille Now (Indiana University Pressm, 2006), and has published essays in journals such as Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy and Philosophy and Social Criticism, as well as numerous anthologies. In addition to ongoing work in French philosophy (especially on Foucault, Lacan and Bataille), her current book project focuses on the questions of ethics and difference in neoliberalism, developing a queer critique that highlights the intertwining incommensurabilities of race and sexuality in our contemporary milieu. Areas of expertise include 20th-century French theory, queer theory, and race and feminist theory.
Karen A. Winstead (PhD Indiana University), Professor in the Department of English. Professor Winstead’s research interests are in Medieval literature and comparative studies; Saints' legends; and religious, gender, and political issues in late-medieval literature and art. She is the author of Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England and John Capgrave's Fifteenth Century. She is also editor of John Capgrave's Life of Saint Katherine and editor/translator of Chaste Passions: Medieval English Virgin Martyr Legends. Areas of expertise include Medieval literature and gender and sexuality studies.
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu (Ph.D. Stanford University), Associate Professor in the Department of History. Professor Wu has a joint appointment with the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and is on the coordinating committee for the Asian American Studies Program as well as DISCO (The Diversity and Identity Studies Collective at OSU). She also serves on the board of editors for the Journal of Women's History. She teaches courses on modern U.S. history, Asian American history, women's history, immigration history, history of comparative racialization, the 1960s, intersectionality, women and labor, race and sex, and American women's movements. She is particularly interested in incorporating new media assignments into her classes. Her first book, Dr. Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity (University of California Press, 2005), is a biography of Margaret Jessie Chung (1889-1959), the first American-born Chinese female physician. This biography uses Chung's remarkable life to explore the shifting social norms of race, gender, and sexuality from the late Victorian era to the early Cold War period in U.S. society. Her current book project, tentatively titled "Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism 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. She also has published a number of articles that examine issues related to racialized notions of beauty and sexuality, the significance of western religion and medicine for the lives of Asian American women, and the significance of race, gender, and sexuality in fostering international political solidarity. Fields of study include women’s history; constellations include Race, Ethnicity, and Nation.
XVI. STAFF OF THE DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE STUDIES
Elizabeth Marsch is academic program coordinator.
Shu-Wen Tsai is the fiscal and human resources officer.