Mark Anthony Arceño was named one of six recipients of the Arts & Sciences Staff Advisory Council's Outstanding Staff Award! Mark Anthony continues to remain grateful for this Department's support and ongoing professional development, as he continues to teach courses in food studies (for the Department of Comparative Studies, and the Department of French and Italian) and conduct ethnographic, winegrowing research, in addition to his responsibilities as Senior Academic Program Coordinator.

John Brooks will return in the autumn term as a tenure-track Assistant Professor! Currently, John is co-editing a special issue of Liquid Blackness that aims to re-theorize the affects and residues of Black sound by focusing on the liberating operations that it performs and the joyous thresholds over which it carries its listeners. He is also working on his second book that theorizes “rehearsal” as a performance sensibility that creates the conditions in which Black futures become imaginable and achievable.

Liliana Gil received an OIA International Research and Scholarship Grant for her project "Colonial Threads of Technological Improvisation"! Liliana will be conducting research in Brazil and Portugal during the summer to finalize her book manuscript Improvised Tech: Tactics for an Unequal World.

Ekundayo Igeleke has been awarded a Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme Graduate Team Fellowship for the upcoming academic year! Ekundayo notes that there is an epistemological void on Black men and radical care outside of self-help publications and state sanctioned, state sponsored care. Given this context, his project will focus on developing scholarship and organizing spaces to fill this void. Ekundayo will be researching and publishing his writings, curating a show that displays the range of Black masculinity and femininity through visual arts, performance, and literature, featuring all Columbus-based artists, and organizing men's healing circles and writing workshops with Black Men Build.

Abby Lindo accepted the position as our incoming Global Black Popular Musics scholar! She will join us in the autumn, with a joint appointment in the Department of Comparative Studies and the Department of African and African American Studies. Abby writes from the University of Florida, "I welcome the opportunity to be impactful in this role and I am excited to continue exploring the intersections of sound, race, gender, and power as a member of OSU's thriving scholarly community!"

Ashley Hope Pérez won Ohio State's Early-Career Faculty Excellence Award. She is also one of 8 GAHDT Faculty Fellows for the upcoming academic year! Ashley is looking forward to interweaving fiction writing (a novel in the works), public-facing efforts to resist book bans (the anthology Banned Together: Our Fight for Readers' Rights), and new scholarship on the narrative ethics of reading and writing "difficult" works. 

Van My Truong received a President's Postdoctoral Scholars Program Award. Van is working on a new archival project focusing on family photographs of the Vietnamese diaspora while completing a book manuscript entitled The Utopics of Migrant Melancholia, which theorizes the utopic imagination in contemporary migrant life.

Daniel Pavlovski joined us in Hagerty Hall as our Department's new Fiscal Associate! Daniel  graduated from the Fisher College of Business in 2022, specializing in HR. As he shared, "I am looking forward to collaborating with all the staff and faculty at Hagerty!"

Hugh Urban's newest book, The Path of Desire: Living Tantra in Northeast India, was published by the University of Chicago Press! This was the culmination of a project that Hugh had been working on for over 20 years, and it relates closely to his broader interests in the role of secrecy, sexuality, and politics in religion. It also engages the complex ethical and methodological questions involved in studying other cultures and religions, which are also things he has grappled with for a long time. 

Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth's new book, Finding the Singing Spruce: Musical Instrument Makers and Appalachia's Mountain Forests, was named as a finalist for the Weatherford Award for Best Book about Appalachia in the Non-Fiction category presented by Berea College and the Appalachian Studies Association! Jasper is now working on a book of essays about the intersections between everyday expressive culture and extraction in Appalachia. It draws out threads encountered in my ethnographic and archival research for Finding the Singing Spruce and my work in Southeast Ohio with the Ohio Field School. Planned chapters cover the past and future of liberatory movements in the archival record and video games; "big man" economic development and music; whiteness and mountain dulcimers; and comparative study of mushroom and boar/bear hunting in the hills of West Virginia and Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, among others.