Alumni Stories:
Rebecca A. Adelman completed her Ph.D. in Comparative Studies in 2009 and joined the Department of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County shortly thereafter. She is now an Associate Professor in MCS and affiliate faculty for the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, and has also taught in UMBC’s Intermedia and Digital Arts M.F.A. program. She is currently serving as co-chair of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Women’s Faculty Network.
Her research focuses on the intersections of visual culture and militarized violence, with particular interest in questions of ethics, affect, and imagination. Her first book, Beyond the Checkpoint: Visual Practices in America’s Global War on Terror (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), maps the visual circuits linking the terrorized American nation-state, its citizens, and its enemies by exploring the practices of image creation, circulation, and consumption that animate these relationships. She is currently at work on two new book projects. Singly, she is finalizing a manuscript entitled Figuring Violence: Affect, Imagination, and Contemporary American Militarism that explores the intersections of fantasy, violence, and sentimentality as they coalesce around certain militarized figures, under contract with Fordham University Press. And she is collaborating with Wendy Kozol (Oberlin College) on a project about quotidian visual cultures of living, dying, and surviving in conditions of militarized violence, The War In-Between. In 2016, she won a University System of Maryland Board of Regents Award for Excellence in Research.
She makes her internet home at rebeccaaadelman.com and otherwise lives in Baltimore.
Damon Berry
"Since graduating with my PhD in 2014 I have been a visiting professor in the Department of Religious Studies at St. Lawrence University. St. Lawrence, or “SLU,” is a small liberal arts college in (very) upstate New York, about twenty minutes from the Canadian border at Cornwall.
I am now in my third year as a visitor, and I am looking forward to beginning my tenure-track position as assistant professor of American religions and contemporary issues in religion at SLU next fall. I am also happy to report that my first book will be coming out at about that same time from Syracuse University Press in their series on religion and politics. It is titled Blood & Faith: Christianity in American White Nationalism, and in it I explore the fraught relationship between Christianity, even racist and Anti-Semitic forms of Christianity, and American white nationalism, the various reasons why religious alternatives were invented to replace it, and what the consequences of this have been for white nationalists, especially those among the “Alt-Right,” who have sought to access and transform the Republican Party and the conservative movement."
Lindsay Bernhagen
After graduating with a PhD in Comparative Studies in 2013 and spending the next few years working as an instructional consultant at the University Center for the Advancement of Teaching at Ohio State, Lindsay recently accepted a position as the director of the newly-created Center for Inclusive Teaching and Learning (CITL) at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point--which happens to be in her hometown. Lindsay is drawn to the field of educational development because it allows her to focus on the aspect of higher education that most energizes her--teaching--while also providing opportunities for engaging research using the methodologies and lenses of inquiry and analysis that she developed during her doctoral program. As she will tell anyone who asks, even though she did not get a degree "in education" (a frequent, if inaccurate, assumption about the typical background of educational developers), she could not do her job in the way she does or as well as she does if she had not gotten a doctoral degree in Comparative Studies.
Beyond her position at UWSP, Lindsay serves her field nationally. She was elected to serve on the Core Committee of the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education (POD) and chairs the POD Grants Committee (after rotations as chair of the POD Diversity Committee and POD Adjunct/Part-Time Special Interest Group). Lindsay also maintains an active research agenda, and recently received an honorable mention for the Christine A. Stanley Award for Research in Diversity and Inclusion in Educational Development for an article titled "A View from the Margins: Situating CTL Staff in Organization Development" (co-authored with Emily O. Gravett, James Madison University). Both that article and another she and Dr. Gravett wrote, "Educational Development as Pink Collar Labor: Implications and Recommendations" were published in POD's premier publication, To Improve the Academy. Lindsay and Dr. Gravett are currently co-editing a special issue of New Directions for Teaching and Learning looking at the role of identity in educational development that has generated substantial interest from several of the field's most established scholars. Watch for it in 2018!
Brian Michael Murphy was an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont and has recently accepted an assistant professorship at Bennington College in VT. His poems have been published in Birmingham Poetry Review, SLAB, and Queen Mob's Teahouse, among other places. His article "Bomb-proofing the Digital Image," originally published in Media-N, recently appeared in Italian translation in the journal Ácoma. His book manuscript-in-progress, titled We the Dead: Preserving the White Race in America, traces the entangled histories of archival preservation and the preservation of whiteness in the United States, from the Depression-era to the present. He blogs for the Kenyon Review, where he writes about media preservation, race, film, and hip hop culture, and in the summers, he teaches creative writing in the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop. Previously, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies at Miami University, where he was nominated for the Outstanding Professor Award, and received a commendation from the Center for Teaching Excellence. He writes, "I earned my M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Studies, a radically interdisciplinary department at The Ohio State University, where graduate students are required to take courses both within and outside the department, and customize their coursework according to their line of inquiry. It was difficult, and exhilarating, to create my own pathway through multiple fields of scholarship. It required rigor, creativity, humility, and a sense of adventure to take part in seminars in Queer and Feminist Narrative Theory, Disability Studies, Performance Theory, the History of Photography, and Geographies of Power. At the same time, I was able to apply my knowledge in the courses I taught, thus concretizing my understanding of various scholarly fields and how they related to my research."
Michael McVicar, Department of Religion, Florida State University.
Michael J. McVicar researches the relationship between religion and politics in twentieth-century U.S. history, with a specific focus on the emergence of the American conservative movement in the post-World War II era. Since receiving his PhD from the Ohio State University in 2010 he has taught courses on contemporary evangelicalism, theory and method in religious studies, and gender and sexuality in religion.
Publications include: Christian Reconstruction: R. J. Rushdoony and American Religious Conservatism. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
Review in: American Historical Review, Books & Culture, Church History, Church History & Religious Culture, Faith For All of Life, First Things, H-Net, Journal of American History, Journal of Church & State, Political Science Quarterly
Research in progress: God’s Watchers: Domestic Intelligence Gathering and Religious Activism from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Under contract with the University of North Carolina Press.
“My current research explores the complex interaction between religion, domestic surveillance, and the growth of political conservatism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. culture. I am writing a book and completing several essays that trace the complex historical relationships between private detective agencies, Protestant parachurch organizations, and law enforcement agencies from the end of the Civil War to the Watergate scandal of the 1970s. Unlike recent works in American religious history that focus on the problems of secularism and the legal boundaries of church and state, my research concentrates on surveillance to argue that historians have paid far too much attention to problems of belief, theology, and legal precedent, and paid far too little attention to the mechanisms of social regulation and policing that have characterized American religious organizations.
Ultimately, my current line of inquiry seeks to illustrate how religious sensibilities in America shaped and were shaped by the surveillance techniques of a growing federal state. I hope that this work will be immediately relevant to current public discussions as citizens and policymakers debate private/public domestic surveillance operations developed by law enforcement agencies in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. While critics and supporters of programs such as the National Security Agency’s bulk digital data collection have suggested that private/public domestic intelligence gathering operations are the exception rather than the rule, my work explores how domestic surveillance has long been a private/public collaboration with roots in unlikely soil: American religious organizations.”
Michael Murphy has accepted the position of Assistant Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at SUNY Plattsburgh. SUNY Plattsburgh is a 6000-student liberal arts college in the State University of New York system. Michael will help design and implement programming that helps individual faculty and departments enhance their teaching. Programs and services include individual and unit consultations, classroom observations, teaching workshops, and faculty learning communities. The position also includes a very light teaching load.
Andrew Culp, PhD
Full-time Faculty Member in Media History and Theory, School of Critical Studies, California Institute of the Arts (CalArts)
Before graduate school, I was an activist who had grown dissatisfied with the daily grind of political advocacy. I wanted a space where I could slow down enough to really think through the social problems of our time. I was wary of overly scholastic approaches, as the academy has a tendency to turn contemporary issues into dull objects for heady reflection. The faculty of Comparative Studies did not shy away from the immediate relevance of what we studied, but encouraged active, engaged scholarship.
Rachel Wortman Morris, Ph.D.Joshua J. Kurz completed his PhD in Comparative Studies and joined the National University of Singapore (NUS) Global Studies Program as a Postdoctoral Fellow in 2014. He is now a Lecturer in Sociology and Global Studies at NUS, working toward promotion to Senior Lecturer and eventually tenure via the 'Educator Track' recently established at by the university. The Educator Track position allows him to focus on teaching while still providing a viable career path towards tenure. (More universities should try this!) Beyond basic job security, the track allows a focus on teaching and providing space for a research agenda. His favorite aspect of teaching is working with research students. To date he has supervised five undergraduate honors theses on a variety of topics related to globalization and issues related to migration and refugees. He has also supervised an MA thesis in Political Science on psychoanalysis and humanitarianism, and is currently supervising a second MA on affect and refugee identity. Given the emphasis on teaching, his research has slowed down, but the new pace has allowed him to focus on what he really values. He's finally returning to his dissertation The Figure of the Refugee to bring together his PhD research, new research on 'affective security', and photography. You can find him at www.joshuajkurz.com or somewhere in Southeast Asia, depending on the time of the year.
Saeed Honarmand is a lecturer and coordinator of the Persian department in The Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. Previously he taught Persian language, literature, and Iranian mythology and culture as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University. He has also been the director of the Persian Immersion Summer program at University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Studies from The Ohio State University. He has published 14 novels and literary books in Persian. among them two collections of essays on writers and thinkers such as Jacobson, Todorov, Ricoeur and Foucault. He has also translated works by these thinkers into Persian. Saeed has also published several papers in English about the Persian writer Sadeqi as well as works in modern Persian fiction. In addition, he has recently completed two Persian textbooks (Persian Language for English Speakers, elementary and intermediate levels) with a dictionary of Persian Idioms and Expressions, which will eventually include audio and video versions of his lectures.
Recent Graduates:
Self-help Literature"
Advisor: David Horn
Committee: Theresa Delgadillo, Robert Hughes
Current Position: Lecturer, OSU, Department of Comparative Studies
2015
Current Postion: Assistant Director, Center for Teaching Excellence, SUNY Plattsburgh
2014
Andrew Lyness
Dissertation: "Mobility, Poverty, and the Western Mythos: Chasing the Object of the U.S. Homeless Policy"
Advisor: Barry Shank
Committee: Leo Coleman, Theresa Delgadillo
Oded Nir
Dissertation: “Nutshells and Infinite Space: Totality and Global Culture”
Advisor: Philip Armstrong
Committee: Leo Coleman, Ethan Knapp (English)
External Reader: Frederic Jameson (Duke)
Current Position: Lecturer at OSU, Department of Comparative Studies
Ricky Crano
Dissertation: "Posthuman Capital: Neoliberalism, Telematics, and the Project of Self Control"
Advisor: Philip Armstrong
Committee: Brian Rotman, Kris Paulsen (History of Art)
External Reader: Alexander Galloway (NYU)
Current Position: Lecturer at Tufts University
Brian Murphy
Dissertation: "The Future of American Memory: Media Preservation, Photography, and Digital Archives"
Advisor: Barry Shank
Committee: Kris Paulsen (History of Art), Hugh Urban
External Reader: Ruby Tapia (University of Michigan)
Current Position: Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts, Champlain College
Damon Berry
Dissertation: “Blood Right: Racial Protectionism and the Problem of Christianity in American White Nationalism”
Advisor: Hugh Urban
Committee, Merrill Kaplan (German) and David Horn
External Reader: Michael Barkun (Syracuse University)
Current Position: Assistant Professor, St. Lawrence University
Tahseen Kazi
Dissertation: “Leadership in State Genesis: Creative Falsification, Guardianship, and the Crystallization of Sovereign Authority”
Advisor: Gene Holland
Committee: Philip Armstrong, Sonja Amadae (Political Science), Mathew Coleman (Geography)
External Reader: Luis Lobo-Guerrero (University of Groningen)
Current Position: Lecturer, Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, Georgia Tech
Josh Kurz
Dissertation: The Figure of the Refugee”
Advisor: Philip Armstrong
Committee: Leo Coleman, Mathew Coleman (Geography)
External Reader: Sandro Mezzadra (University of Bologna)
Current Position: 2014-16 Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Science (Global Studies Program), National University of Singapore.
Rashelle Peck
Dissertation: “Imperfect Resistance: Embodied Performances in Nairobi Underground Hip Hop”
Advisor: Barry Shank
Committee: Nina Berman, Maurice Stevens
Current Position: Director of Afrikana House and Instructor, Afrikana Studies, Oberlin College
Rita Trimble
Dissertation: “Conceiving a ‘Natural Family’ Order: The World Congress of Families and Transnational Conservative Christian Politics”
Advisor: Debra Moddelmog (English)
Committee: Tanya Erzen, Mytheli Sreenivas (History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies), Hugh Urban
Current Position: Instructor at Ohio Wesleyan University
2013
Lindsay Bernhangen
Dissertation: “Sounding Subjectivity: Music, Gender, and Intimacy”
Advisor: Barry Shank
Committee: Maurice Stevens, Mary Thomas (Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies)
Current Position: Senior Instructional Consultant and Coordinator for Associated Faculty and Academic Inclusion at the University Center for the Advancement of Teaching.
Andrew Culp
Dissertation: "Escape”
Advisor: Gene Holland
Committee: Philip Armstrong, Mathew Coleman (Geography)
Current Position: Visiting Assistant Professor of Rhetoric Studies at The University of Texas at Dallas
Joanna Spanos
“Redeeming Susanna Cox: A Pennsylvania German Infanticide in Community Tradition”
Advisor: Dorothy Noyes (English and Comparative Studies)
Committee: Richard Green (English), Margaret Mills (Near Eastern Languages and Cultures), and Randolph Roth (History).
Current Position: Honors Counselor, Arts and Sciences Honors Program, OSU
2012
Jennifer Black
Dissertation: “Lock My Body, Can't Trap My Mind: A Study of the Scholarship and Social Movements Surrounding the Case of Imprisoned Radical Mumia Abu-Jamal”
Advisor: Maurice Stevens
Committee: Tanya Erzen, Anthonia Kalu, James Upton
Current Position: Lecturer, OSU, Department of Comparative Studies
Kate Dean-Haidet
Dissertation: “Thanatopoiesis: The Relational Matrix of Spiritual End-of-Life Care”
Advisor: Thomas Kasulis
Committee: Tanya Erzen, Daniel Reff, Julia Watson
Current Position: Advanced Practice Nurse, Community Grief Program, OhioHealth Hospice
Wamae Muriuki
Dissertation: “That I Should Dance on the Earth: Shinran's Revaluation of ‘Karmic Afflictions’”
Advisor: Thomas Kasulis
Committee: Shelley Quinn (East Asian Langauges and Literatures), Daniel Reff
Current Position: Faculty, Philosophy and Religious Studies, University of Nairobi, Kenya
Peggy Reynolds
Dissertation: “Depth Technology: Remediating Orientation”
Advisor: Brian Rotman
Committee: Philip Armstrong, Barry Shank
Elo-hanna Seljamaa
Dissertation: “A Home for 121 Nationalities or Less: Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Integration in Post-Soviet Estonia”
Advisor: Dorothy Noyes
Committee: Margaret Mills (Near Eastern Languages and Cultures), Ray Cashman (English), Nicholas Breyfogle (History), Rick Hermann (Political Science)
Current Position: Researcher in the Department of Estonian and Comparative Folklore at the University of Tartu Estonia, Programme Director for English-language master’s programme in “Folkloristics and Applied Heritage Studies”; editor of special issue of Ethnologia Europaea Journal of European Ethnology Special issue: Silence in Cultural Practices
Beth Shively
Dissertation: "Happily Ever After: Gender, Romance and Relationships in the Christian Courtship Movement"
Advisors: Tanya Erzen and Mary Thomas (Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies)
Committee: Hugh Urban
Current Position: Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, Women's and Gender Studies Program, Central Michigan University
Rachel Wortman
Dissertation: “Facing the Waitlist: Visual Grammars of Organ Donation and Transplantation”
Advisor: Maurice Stevens
Committee: Philip Armstrong and David Horn
Current Position: Sr. Instructional Designer, Virginia Mason Institute
2011
Ilana Maymind
Dissertation: “Ethics in Exile: A Comparative Study of Shinran and Maimonides”
Advisors: Tom Kasulis and Tamar Rudavsky (Philosophy)
Committee: Lindsay Jones
Current Position: Lecturer at Wilkinson College of Humanities and Social Sciences in the Department of Religious Studies
Saeed Honarmand
Dissertation: “The Impact of the Modernity Discourse on Persian Fiction”
Advisor: Dick Davis (Near Eastern Languages and Cultures)
Committee: Philip Armstrong and Margaret Mills (Near Eastern Languages and Cultures)
Current Position: lecturer and coordinator of the Persian department in The Middle East, South Asian and African Studies Department at Columbia University
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/mesaas/faculty/directory/honarmand.html
2010
Sandra Garner
Dissertation: “What Sort of Indian will Show the Way?: Colonization, Mediation, and Interpretation in the Sun Dance Contact Zone”
Advisor: Lindsay Jones
Committee: Tanya Erzen, Richard Shiels (History), and Maurice Stevens
Current Position: Associate Professor in American Studies at Miami University (OH)
Kirsi Haënninen
Dissertation: “The Construction of Self in Finnish First-Person Supernatural Encounter Narratives”
Advisor: Dorothy Noyes
Committee: Sarah Iles Johnston (Greek and Latin) and Amy Shuman (English/Folklore)
Current Position: Postdoctoral Fellow in Folklore at the University of Turku, Helsinki
Michael McVicar
Dissertation: “Reconstructing America: Religion, American Conservatism, and the Political Theology of Rousas John Rushdoony”
Advisor: Hugh Urban
Committee: Philip Armstrong and Tanya Erzen
Current Position: Assistant Professor, Department of Religion, Florida State University
Dissertation is now a book: https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469622743/christian-reconstruction/
2009
Sumiko Eguchi
Advisor: Thomas Kasulis
Degree: Masters
Rebecca Adelman
Dissertation: “The Shadow Rules of Engagement: Visual Practices, Citizen-Subjectivity, and America's Global War on Terror”
Advisor: Ruby Tapia
Committee: Philip Armstrong and Maurice Stevens
Current Position: Associate Professor in the Media & Communication Studies program at University of Maryland Baltimore Campus (UMBC)
Book visual culture/global war on terror: http://www.umass.edu/umpress/title/beyond-checkpoint
Tracy Carpenter
Dissertation: “Recovering Women: Intersectional Approaches to African American Addiction”
Advisor: Amy Shuman (English)
Committee: Nina Berman, Valarie Lee (English), and Maurice Stevens
Current Position: Technical Trainer at Sunquest Information Systems and homeless shelter Intake Interviewer, Tucson, Arizona
Alana Kumbier
Dissertation: “Ephemeral Material: Developing a Critical Archival Practice”
Advisor: Maurice Stevens
Committee: Tim Choy, Leo Coleman, and David Horn
Current Position: Critical Social Inquiry and Digital Pedagogy Librarian at Hampshire College
Kennedy Waliaula
Dissertation: “The Incarcerated Self: Narratives of Political Confinement in Kenya”
Co-Advisors: Adeleke Adeeko and Nina Berman
Committee: Maurice Stevens
Current Position: Author and Executive, Nation Media Group, Nairobi, Kenya