Faculty in the Department of Comparative Studies are listed below, including particular areas of expertise within Comparative Studies. In parentheses are faculty members’ doctoral institutions and, when applicable, other formal departmental affiliations.
Associate Professor Philip Armstrong (Ph.D. in Art History, 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 theory. Recent publications include Reticulations: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Networks of the Political (U of Minnesota P, 2009), Jean-Luc Nancy, Politique et au-delà: Entretien avec Philip Armstrong and Jason Smith (Galilée, 2011), and (with Laura Lisbon and Stephen Melville) As Painting: Division and Displacement (MIT Press and Wexner Center, 2001).
Professor Nina Berman (Ph.D. in German, University of California, Berkeley) is interested in 19th and 20th-century culture and literature(modernity, postcolonial fiction, minority literature, travel literature, translation); globalization, colonialism, orientalism; Germany and the Middle East, Middle Ages to present; 19th and 20th century Germany and Africa. Her publications include German Literature on the Middle East: Discourses and Practices, 1000-1989 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011); Impossible Missions: German Economic, Military, and Humanitarian Efforts in Africa 37 (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 (Ph.D. in Folklore, Indiana University)studies and teaches about the artfulness of ordinary life, and the ways in which traditional expressive arenas constitute contested terrain. Her current book projects include a collection of reflective essays on international volunteering in Central America, co-edited with Abigail E. Adams and entitled: Good Works in Central America?: Reflections from the Academy on the Practice of International Volunteering; and a text, tentatively entitled, Engendering Folkloristics and Folklorizing Feminism, co-written with Amy Shuman. She also plan to produce a film on the interactions of tourism and traditional performance in the Palo de Mayo Festival of Bluefields, Nicaragua. In her teaching she works particularly with undergraduate students to develop and hone interpretive, synthesizing and analytic skills through shared inquiry, team research and writing.
Leo Coleman (Ph.D. in Anthropology, Princeton University) is Associate Professor in science and technology studies. His research areas include political anthropology, South Asian studies, technology and globalization, and urban theory, with a focus throughout on ethnographic encounters, interpersonal exchanges, and interactions between people, things, infrastructures, and political ideals. He has conducted field and archival research in Delhi, Edinburgh, and London, and he is working on a book about the politics of electrification and urban change in Delhi, India, based on his research into colonial electrical installations and present-day privatization of electricity in India’s capital city. He is also the editor of Food: Ethnographic Encounters (Berg, 2011), which includes essays about what we learn about other people when we share their foods and conditions of life and about the changing conditions of food production and consumption around the world. He has published articles on ethnographic method, urbanism and solitude, infrastructure and politics, and legal knowledge, as well as several review essays on the overlapping histories of science studies and cultural anthropology. Core themes of his teaching include: modern technologies and subjectivity; nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrial and urban growth; colonialism and globalization; and sustainability as both a technological and political issue. Dr. Coleman's ongoing research focuses on questions of civic belonging, the environment, and the conditions for and sustainability of urban life.
Associate Professor Theresa Delgadillo (Ph.D. in English, University of California, Los Angeles) Theresa Delgadillo's work has been devoted to three areas: spirituality and religion, African Diaspora and Latinidad, and Latino/as in the Midwest. Her objects of study have included novels, autobiographies, memoirs, photographic collections, feature and documentary films, poetry and music. In research and teaching I explore the intersections among gender, sexuality, race and nation as well as critique these categories; engage with comparative, transnational and migratory paradigms
and movements; pursue transdisciplinary knowledge; and desire to make socially transformative knowledge possible.Future projects will focus on twentieth and twenty-first century comparative ethnic, multiethnic, postcolonial and women's texts in the Americas. She is interested in exploring topics such as spirituality, religion, nationalism, transnationalism, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, class, cultural and social change, history, memory, remembrance,diaspora, exile, identity, community, interpretation, networks, cross-cultural exchange, justice, intersectionality, hybridity, immigration and war in literature, visual culture and music
Professor of Comparative Studies and French and past 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). His next book, Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike, is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press.
Professor David Horn (Ph.D. in Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley) is past Chair of the Department of Comparative Studies and current secretary of the Board of Trustees. 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 15-volume Encyclopedia of Religion (Macmillan, 2005). Additionally, he is the director of the Ohio State University Center for the Study of Religion.
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, the comparative philosophy of religion, 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 more recently published a book on Japanese Shinto, Shinto: The Way Home (University of Hawaii, 2004) and co-edited Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook. He is currently working on a historical survey of Japanese philosophy as a companion work to the Sourcebook.
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).
Associate Professor Miranda Martinez (Ph.D. in Sociology, New York University) specializes in Latino and Puerto Rican Studies, particularly in relation to urbanization and she has published widely in this area, including Power at the Roots: Gentrification, Community Gardens and the Puerto Ricans of the Lower East Side (Lexington Books, 2010). She is currently conducting research on community responses to the foreclosure crisis in low income neighborhoods in Brooklyn, New York.
Nada Moumtaz (Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center) is Assistant Professor of Comparative Studies and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. Her research and teaching interests are in the relationships among law and religion in Islamic cultures. Her dissertation addresses questions about the charitable endowment, or waqf, and its function as a religious act in the postcolonial world, issues that are central to the contemporary Middle East. Her next research project investigates the meaning of the “Islamic City” with a comparative perspective centered on Beirut, Lebanon.
Dorothy Noyes (Ph.D. in Folklore and Folklife, University of Pennsylvania) is 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.
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, 2005). He recently completed (with Richard Danford and Robin Gill) the first critical, English language edition of Luis Frois' "Striking Contrasts in the Customs of Europe and Japan" (1585).
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 (Ph.D. in American Studies, University of Pennsylvania) is Chair of the Department of Comparative Studies. His research interests include cultural theory, popular music, cultural musicology, U.S. cultural history, U.S. popular culture. His courses provide undergraduate students with the opportunity to examine 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,” which is forthcoming from Duke University Press, 2012.
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).
Noah Tamarkin (Ph.D. in Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz) is Assistant Professor of Comparative Studies. His research examines the social circulation of genomics, postcolonial citizenship, and the racial and religious politics of belonging. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, his research and teaching are also informed by science and technology studies, feminist studies, African studies, and Jewish studies. He is currently writing a book manuscript Jewish Blood, African Bones: The Afterlives of Genetic Ancestry, which analyzes how Lemba South Africans reconcile their understanding of their genetic test results as proof that they have Jewish blood with their active pursuit of claims to ancient bones now reburied at the World Heritage Site Mapungubwe, a thirteenth century southern African kingdom. His research has appeared in the Annals of the American Academy of Social and Political Science, The
Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies, and is forthcoming in the August 2014 issue of Cultural Anthropology. His courses encourage students to critically examine technologies of power and belonging through topics such as science and technology studies, sexuality studies, and race and the body. His ongoing research moves from the politics of recognition to the politics of incarceration to examine the introduction and implementation of legislation to expand South Africa’s national criminal DNA database. This work considers the social, cultural, and political implications of genomics as it emerges as a global technology of governance and as a form of postcolonial development.
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 seven 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); 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 (I.B. Tauris, 2009); and The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion (Princeton UP, 2011).
Professor Julia Watson (Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine, focus in French, German, and English) specializes in life narrative (in writing and other media) and theories of autobiography. She currently serves as Associate Dean for Recruitment and Diversity in the College of Arts and Sciences. Other research and teaching interests include autographics, 20th- and 21st-century postcolonial and multicultural autobiography and novel, feminist theory and women's writing, and film. She has, with Sidonie Smith, co-written Reading Autobiography: A Guide to Interpreting Life Narrative (U Minnesota P, 2001; second, expanded edition 2010) and co-edited five collections: De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography (U Minnesota P, 1992); Getting a Life: The Everyday Uses of Autobiography (U Minnesota P, 1996); Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (U Wisconsin P, 1998), Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance (U Michigan P, 2002), and Before They Could Vote: American Women’s Autobiographical Writing, 1819-1919 (U Wisconsin P, 2006). She has published over 30 essays, authored singly and with Smith. Her current projects include a co-authored book on autobiographical hoaxes, and essays on the autographic work of Bobby Baker and Alison Bechdel, and the memoir of Patti Smith. She serves on the editorial boards of AutoBiography (UK), and Women’s Studies Quarterly, and has held two Fulbright fellowships and a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Fellowship.
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 .
Isaac Weiner (Ph.D. in Religion and Culture, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) is Assistant Professor. His research focuses on the politics of religious pluralism in the U.S. and in relationships among religious contact, sensory and material culture, and law. His first book, “Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism,” is forthcoming from New York University Press. The book analyzes the politics of religious pluralism in the U.S. by attending to disputes about religious sound in the public realm and explores how these disputes have offered a surprisingly productive site for exploring competitions over public power, social order, and legitimacy in American society and for analyzing the concrete mechanisms through which Americans have managed their religious differences.