Faculty
Frederick Aldama
Professor of English and Associate Faculty of Comparative Studies, Aldama uses the tools of narrative theory and cognitive science in his teaching and scholarship on US Latino and Mexican Cinema. His regularly taught film courses include, “Mexico in Cinema” and "Greed, Vengeance, and Love in Ethnic Technicolor", among others. Author and editor of seven books and is currently completing, Mexico in Cinema. He has published essays on films such as Robert Rodriguez’s El Mariachi, Edward James Olmos’s American Me as well as on topics more generally that cover isssues of race, cognition, and emotion in film adaptation. He is series co-editor of "Cognitive Approaches to Literature and Culture" (University of Texas Press) and sits on the editorial boards of Narrative, Journal of Narrative Theory, and Narrative & Image.
Chadwick Allen
Chadwick Allen (Ph.D. University of Arizona) is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Ethnic Studies Coordinator. His areas of interest are postcolonial literatures and theory; American Indian and New Zealand Maori literatures and cultures; and frontier studies and western literature. He has published articles on postcolonial theory, the discourse of treaties, and the construction of contemporary American Indian and Maori identities. His book is entitled Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts (Duke University Press, 2002).Visit Dr. Allen’s website at http://people.cohums.ohio-state.edu/allen559/
Graeme Boone
Professor Boone’s primary specialization is in Renaissance music. A native of San Francisco, he was educated in California, Paris and Boston, and taught at Haverford College at Harvard University. He wrote his dissertation on the songs of Guillaume Dufay, and has written articles and a monograph on subjects involving paleography, musical analysis and the relationship between poetry and song. Professor Boone has pursued interests in American popular music and its underlying folk traditions, and in ethnomusicology. He co-edited a book of essays on the analysis of rock music (UNDERSTANDING ROCK, 1997) and a book of writings in jazz history. As a professor, he has a wide range of music courses, and as a performer, specializes in guitar, banjo and other American folk instruments.
David Brewer
David A. Brewer teaches courses on the intertwined histories of reading, theater-going, and the viewing of visual art, particularly in the eighteenth century. He also offers classes on several American film genres, including musicals and teen comedies. He is the author of a book on what could be termed eighteenth-century fan fiction--_The Afterlife of Character, 1726-1825_ (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005)--and is currently working on how readers from all over the eighteenth-century Anglophone world dealt with anonymous and pseudonymous publications.
David Bruenger
David Bruenger has been professionally and personally in the mix of music, media, commerce, and culture as a performer, teacher, administrator, writer, and researcher for many years. His current research focuses on the changing patterns of music creation and reception resulting from 21st century digital technologies and social media. He has also written about the historical relationships between music and media, as well as the economics and social functions of music. At OSU, Bruenger is Director of the new Music, Media, and Enterprise program and will be teaching interdisciplinary classes focusing on the economic and cultural aspects of music and media. Current course offerings include “Protest in American Music and Media”, which examines both the economic and political motivations for protest art; “Music, Enterprise, & Society,” an introduction to the various ways music intersects with commerce and culture; and “Music and the Social Media,” a course that will examine the impact of digital technologies and Internet-based social networking on 21st musical and “remix” commerce and culture. Previously, he has taught courses on the histories of Rock, Jazz, and American “roots” styles, including Blues, Country, and Tejano; as well as other courses about American music and culture and the music industry. Bruenger has also been a commercial music contractor, concert presenter, and arts administrator for clients ranging from individuals to universities and major corporations. His performing experience extends from the pit of Broadway shows to symphony halls and beyond, including a wide array of combos, both esoteric and commercial, as well as bar bands of all description.
Lucy Caswell
Lucy Shelton Caswell is the founding curator of The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library, the largest and most comprehensive academic research facility documenting printed cartoon art in the United States. Professor Caswell teaches courses in the history of newspaper comic strips and the history of American editorial cartoons. She has curated more than forty cartoon exhibits and is the author of several books and articles, including “Drawing Swords: War in American Editorial Cartoons” [American Journalism 21:2, 13-45.]
Marjorie Chan
My paternal grandpa was a "paper son" when he landed in Vancouver ("Saltwater City"), Canada, in 1919. Like thousands of Chinese before him, for the privilege of stepping onto Canadian soil, he had scraped and begged and borrowed to pay the $500 head tax exacted from every "heathen Chinee". (Thank heaven and earth a $1000 head tax was only discussed and not enacted!) Here, north of California, is yet another "Gold Mountain" where grandpa and dad alike savored "married bachelorhood" at the prime of life. Us formerly "fatherless" kids grew legs and wings in the heart of Chinatown: city within a city, live chickens gawking and squawking at passers-by, firecrackers and lion dancers extolling the Chinese New Year, heaven and hell on earth, the sights and sounds and smells and tales there encountered spurring some of us to greater curiosity to capturing and presenting the life and times of North America's early Chinese. A full-fledged linguist now, my research lets me peck and scratch for bygone kernels, linguistic roots, put down by early Chinese like my grandpa, like my father, settlers building early Chinatowns, laying down the tracks for future souls, while making "Gold Mountain" their new home.
For more information, see my website: http://people.cohums.ohio-state.edu/chan9/
Associate Professor
Dept. of East Asian Languages and Literatures
362 Hagerty Hall
1775 College Road
Columbus, OH 43210
Phone: 614-292-3619
Fax: 614-292-3225
Daniel Collins
Daniel E. Collins is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Slavic and East European Languages. He teaches courses on Slavic Linguistics, Culture, and Folklore, including Introduction to Slavic Folklore: The Vampire in East European and American Culture (Slavic 130), Medieval Moscow (MRS 213), and Modern Czech Literature and Film (Slavic 245). He is currently conducting research on the everyday life and language of medieval Russia, as revealed in recently discovered birchbark letters, and on images of evil in Slavic folk belief.
Brenda Dervin
Ron Emoff
Ron Emoff is Associate Professor in The School of Music (Ethnomusicology) and the Department of Anthropology (Cultural Anthropology). He has performed ethnographic research in Madagascar, Southwest Louisiana, and most recently, the French Antilles. Interests include postcolonial theory, performance analysis, critical theory, constructions of place, spirit possession, recollecting the past, complexities of nationhood
Jared Gardner
Jared Gardner teaches courses in american literature, popular culture, and film theory and history from the silent era through contemporary digital cinema. He is bouncing around between three projects at the moment: one on myths of origins in the 1920s and 30s U.S. cinema, one on the intersections between film and comics from 1895 to today & a book on early American periodical culture. He is co-editor of the journal American Periodicals, and author of Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
http://people.cohums.ohio-state.edu/gardner236/
Kenneth Goings
Kenneth W. Goings received his Ph.D. in History from Princeton University. Goings is a specialist in African American history. His research interests include African American urban history, African American popular culture and material culture. Besides the African American and African Studies introductory course, Professor Goings teaches courses in African American history and African American popular culture. His current research interests include Black Collectibles and African American Southern history.
Harvey Graff
John Hellmann
Sarah Iles Johnston
Sarah Iles Johnston is Professor of Greek and Latin and Director of the Center for the Study of Religion. She is interested in how religions (both ancient and modern) validate themselves and their practices, and how those practices affect and are affected by the media of their time.
Valerie Kinloch
Valerie Kinloch, Ph.D., is a professor in Literacy Studies in the School of Teaching & Learning. Her research interests include the socio-cultural lives, literacies, and collaborative engagements of urban youth and adults in and out-of-school spaces. She is the author of several journal articles, including “Revisiting the Promise of Students’ Right to Their Own Language: Pedagogical Strategies” (2005, in CCC) and “‘The white-ificaton of the hood’: Power, politics, and youth performing narratives of community” (2007, in Language Arts). Her co-authored book, Still Seeking an Attitude: Critical Reflections on the Work of June Jordan, was released in 2004, and her most recent book, June Jordan: Her Life and Letters, was published in 2006. Valerie was awarded a Spencer Foundation Research Grant and a Grant-in-Aid from the National Council of Teachers of English to support work on the literacy and activist practices of African American and Latino high school and first generation college students in Harlem (NYC). This work examines how community gentrification and a politics of place impact the lives, literacies, and cultural identities of urban youth of color.
Linda Mizejewski
Linda Mizejewski, Professor of Women’s Studies, specializes in feminist film theory and cultural studies. She is the author of Divine Decadence: Fascism, Female Spectacle, and the Makings of Sally Bowles (Princeton, 1992) and Ziegfeld Girl: Image and Icon in Culture and Cinema (Duke, 1999). Her most recent book is Hardboiled and High Heeled: The Woman Detective in Popular Culture (Routledge, 2004). She has been the recipient of two Fulbright teaching awards, an ACLS Fellowship, and the OSU Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching.
http://womens-studies.osu.edu/people/person.cfm?ID=222
Laura Podalsky
Barry Shank
Trained in the interdisciplinary field of American Studies, Barry Shank pursues the interrogation of the American experiment through research in commercial popular culture and cultural history. His courses provide undergraduate students with the opportunity to investigate 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 lay 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 published in such journals as American Studies, boundary 2, and Radical History Review, and he has served on the editorial boards of American Quarterly and American Music.
Amy Shuman
Author of articles on conversational narrative, literacy, political,food customs, feminist theory and critical theory and of Storytelling Rights: The Uses of Oral and Written Texts by Urban Adolescents." and Other People's Stories: Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy. Guggenheim Fellow and Recent fellow at the Hebrew University Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem. Currently completing a book on political asylum narratives.
Ruby Tapia
Ruby C. Tapia is an Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at OSU. Her research and teaching focuses on women in/and visual culture, engaging in a sustained way the experiences, representations, and cultural production of women of color, as well as the theoretical formulations of critical race feminism and feminist media studies. She teaches courses such as "Race, Memory, and Motherhood in Visual Culture" and "Women and Visual Culture," in which students examine how the discursive technologies of race, sexuality, gender, and class produce not only images but visualities . . . ways of seeing. Her current project is a book manuscript entitled Conceiving Images: Racialized Visions of the Maternal, which focuses on how popular representations and institutional practices produce maternal bodies through visual and narrative codes of race. Latinas are central to her research in visual culture and to her specific engagements with the maternal experiences of women of color. She received her PhD in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego and her B.A. in Literature and Africana Studies from Cornell University.
Abril Trigo
Abril Trigo is Distinguished Humanities Professor of Latin American Cultures at the Ohio State University. His areas of specialization include Latin American Cultural Studies, literary and cultural theory, theater, film, and popular culture.He has published extensively on Latin American cultural studies, with particular emphasis on the historical formation of national imaginaries and their articulation to popular culture (rock, graffiti, candombe, soccer, etc.). His publications include Caudillo, estado, nación. Literatura, historia e ideología en el Uruguay. (Gaithersburg, MD: Hispamérica, 1990), ¿Cultura uruguaya o culturas linyeras? (Para una cartografía de la neomodernidad posuruguaya.) (Montevideo: Vintén Editor, 1997), and Memorias migrantes. Testimonios y ensayos sobre la diáspora uruguaya (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo Editora/Montevideo: Ediciones Trilce, 2003), and The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader, co-authored with Ana Del Sarto and Alicia Ríos (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). Currently, he is working on Crisis y transfiguración de los estudios culturales latinoamericanos, and A Critique of the Political-Libidinal Economy of Culture, a theoretical inquiry on contemporary culture.
Alan Woods
Alan Woods directs the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute, and is an associate professor in the Department of Theatre at The Ohio State University. His research areas include popular culture and the creation and reification of stereotypes; he is also teaches in the area of censorship. He is active in archiving new works for the theatre, and the TRI now includes over 500 manuscripts of new plays. His own short plays have been produced in and the . Instrumental in arranging an exchange agreement between the Tshwani University of Technology in
