Below is a list of all Graduate student accomplishments for the 2015-2016 academic year:

Zeynep Aydogdu received a Comparative Studies Travel Award to conduct fieldwork research at the Islamic Society of North America Annual Convention titled “Stories of Resilience: Strengthening the American Muslim Narrative.” She was also awarded an Arts and Humanities Graduate Research Small Grant to give a paper titled “Cosmodern Logic? The Miseries of Multiculturalism in Teju Cole’s Open City and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man” at the American Comparative Literature Association’s 2016 Annual Meeting. She also has been involved in outreach and gave a talk to an OSU resident hall student group on crushing the “Muslim stereotype.” She successfully passed her candidacy exams in March.

Cristina Benedetti presented “The Bonus Expeditionary Force: Exploring the Veterans March on the United States Capitol in 1932” at the American Folklore Society Annual Meeting in Long Beach in October, and will present “Community Collaboration and Organizational Stability: How Three Ohio Arts Organizations Manage their Volunteer Reliance” at the Society for Cultural Anthropology biennial meeting in Ithaca in May (for which she received a departmental travel award).  She received a Democracy Studies seed grant in January to help fund her dissertation research in Washington, D.C. this spring and summer.

Kay Clopton presented “Poetics of Sound and Death: The function of Nature and Effects in Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service” at The Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference in Seattle, Washington on March 24, 2016 (supported by a departmental graduate student travel award). She published “Manga and Silent Film: Building a Bridge Between Modern Gitaigo, Giongo, and the Benshi” in the International Journal of Comic Art, volume 17, number 2.

Dan DiPiero received a departmental graduate student travel award and an Arts and Humanities Small Grant to present “On Music and Politics: Thinking Rancière Through the Notion of Contingency” at the annual conference of the American Comparative Literature Association in Cambridge. The ACLA seminar was called “Divisions on a Ground: Rancière and Music.”

Carolyn Elerding was awarded the Presidential fellowship for 2016-17. Elerding presented papers at the Marxist Reading Group in Gainesville, Florida and at Historical Materialism in Toronto. Elerding published a short review in Socialism & Democracy called “Walter Benjamin, Popular Critic.” Another article is currently under review with Postmodern Culture. Elerding gave two guest lectures, one in feminist pedagogy at OSU and the other in film studies at Otterbein University. In addition, Elerding completed the Preparing Future Faculty program.

Kati Fitzgerald was funded during the 2015-2016 academic year by a Chinese Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship issued by the East Asian Studies Center of The Ohio State University. She was awarded the Jonathan T. Y. Yeh Award for Student Scholarship in Asian and Asian American Folklore by the Transnational Asia/Pacific Section of the American Folklore Society for her paper “Nangsa Ohbum and Lama Shakya Gyaltsen as Manifestations of Chakrasamvara and Vajravarahi,” presented at the American Folklore Society Annual Meeting on October 17, 2015. She received a departmental grant to support travel to this presentation. She also organized a panel, “Diaspora and Digitization: Examining Artistic and Religious Practices of Tibet and India,” and presented the paper “Performative Mythology: Tibetan Opera in America” at the 9th Annual OSU/IU Student Conference in Folklore and Ethnomusicology in Columbus, OH on April 22, 2016. Kati published three short sections entitled “Tibetan Dance,” “Tibetan Music,” & “Tibetan Masks” in Siyuan Liu (Ed.), Routledge Handbook of Asian Theatre. Kati received a CGS Career Development Grant for participation in a summer workshop on Classical Tibetan with Yeshi Jigme Gangne. She received a Chinese Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship from the East Asian Studies Center of The Ohio State University for participation in Beijing Normal University’s Princeton in Beijing Summer Language Intensive from June to August 2016. She was also awarded a Mershon Center for International Security Studies Pre-Dissertation Travel Grant for exploratory research in Nangchen, Qinghai Province, China this coming fall. 

Amy Gregg is currently finishing her dissertation, Modern American Medicine and its Nineteenth Century Origins at the Intersection of Industrialism, Capitalism, and Professionalism. She is applying for positions and preparing to spend the summer at Colonial Williamsburg where she will be conducting educational programs about eighteenth century medicine and pharmacy. Given Amy’s area of concentration, she is excited to have the opportunity to connect the public with the history of American medicine and pharmacy. 

Leighla Khansari’s paper, entitled “The Reluctant Fundamentalist: A Counter-Example to Rey Chow’s Definition of Narrative of Captivity,” got accepted for presentation at the 2017 MLA conference. She also gave a conference paper, “Muslim Caliban and England’s Popular Culture,” at the” Popular Culture and the Deep Past” conference, hosted by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the Ohio State University, 2016. Additionally, she presented “Sycorax: A Manifestations of the Superimposition of Islamic Identity,” at the Comparative Studies departmental colloquium on April 11. Leighla served as the graduate student representative on the graduate studies committee and moderated a panel at the undergraduate student colloquium on April 8.

Bishal Karna will be presenting a paper at the 11th East-West Philosophers’ Conference organized by the East-West Center and University of Hawaii in May. His paper is based on his ethnographic fieldwork in Ryumonji Zen Monastery, Dorchester, Iowa. He received a graduate student travel award from the department, an Arts and Humanities Graduate Research Small Grant, and Career Development Grant from Council of Graduate Students in support of his attendance and presentation at the conference.

Perry Miller delivered a paper, “Reading Subjectivity at the Juncture of Literature and Cultural Politics: Asian American Women and the Psychoanalytic Revolt” at the Fifth Annual Western Michigan University Medical Humanities Conference, September 24-25, 2015 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, with the support of a travel grant from the Department of Comparative Studies.

Eleanor Paynter presented “Migrant Literature with an Activist Voice: Igiaba Scego’s Adua in Context” at the annual conference of the American Comparative Literature Association in Cambridge, MA. She received a graduate student travel award and an Arts & Humanities Graduate Research Small Grant in support of this presentation. Her poem “Gassho Attic” is forthcoming in the graduate student interdisciplinary journal Anamesa.

Amanda Randhawa was selected as a William J. Fulbright research scholar to India. As a Fulbright-Nehru research scholar she will conduct one year of ethnographic dissertation research. At Ohio State, Amanda received an Arts and Humanities Research Small Grant, a Edward J. Ray Travel Award for Scholarship and Service, and a Comparative Studies travel grant. Amanda presented papers at the The Ohio State/Indiana University Student Folklore Conference, The American Academy of Religion, The Annual Conference on South Asia, and the American Folklore Society Annual Meeting. She co-authored an article, “This Too Shall Pass: The Afterlife of a Proverb,” with Amy Shuman that is forthcoming in Studies in Jewish Education. Some of her ethnographic photography from rural South India was published in Sacred Matters: Materiality in Indian Religions, edited by Tracy Pintchman and Corinne Dempsey (SUNY PRESS) and she was an exhibit consultant for the exhibition “Sacred Realm: Blessings and Good Fortune Across Asia,” at the International Museum of Folk Art in Sante Fe, NM. During the spring semester, Amanda was a part-time Visiting Assistant Professor at Denison University in the department of Religion. In June, she’ll present her work at the Conference for the Study of Religion in India. 

In October 2015, Afsaneh Rezaei presented “’My Stealthy Freedom’: Gender, Power, and Repositioning of the Self in Women’s Narratives of Public Unveiling in Iran” at the annual meeting of the American Folklore Society in Long Beach, CA. She received an Arts and Humanities Small Grant and a graduate student travel award from the department in support of this presentation. In April 2016, she presented “’Sepandar-what?!’ The Reinvention of the Ancient Persian Celebration of 'Day of Love'” as part of the panel “(Re)negotiating Tradition” at the 9th OSU/IU Student Conference in Folklore and Ethnomusicology in Columbus, OH.

Jasmine Stork presented her research on asexuality in fanfiction at the Popular Culture Association Conference this year, supported by a Comparative Studies graduate student travel award. She was also accepted to the College of Public Health and will be completing a Master's in Public Health along side her PhD in Comparative Studies.

This spring, Caroline Toy presented two papers based on her MA research, titled “Making (Fictional) Sacred Space: Fan Pilgrimage and Embodied Narratives” and “Journeys into the Fictional: Sherlock Fan Pilgrimage and Embodied Narratives” at the American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting and the Popular Culture Association Annual Conference respectively. She is grateful for funding from the Arts and Humanities Graduate Research Small Grant, the Council of Graduate Students Career Development Grant, and the Department of Comparative Studies Travel Fund. She also co-chaired a panel of student researchers representing the Religious Soundmap Project of the Global Midwest (for which she is the OSU Project Manager) at the American Academy of Religion Midwest Region Conference, supported by the Sheila Hiltner Fund. With colleagues in and outside Comparative Studies, she participated in a roundtable on Fan Studies at the OSU/IU Folklore and Ethnomusicology Student Conference. With Jasmine Stork, Caroline also co-founded the Fan Studies Student Association at Ohio State, a networking, resource, and reading group for graduate and advanced undergraduate students working on all aspects of fan and audience communities across the university. She successfully defended her MA thesis on April 28.

Vidar Thorsteinsson received an Arts and Humanities Graduate Research Small Grant and a Comparative Studies graduate student travel award to present his paper titled “Automatons and Literary Machines: Immaterial labor in Gissing’s New Grub Street” at the 2016 Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference.