Faculty News

May 2009: Talks

Chadwick Allen, English, "Siting Earthworks in Allison Hedge Coke's Blood Run."  Plenary address, LitFest 2009, University of Dayton, March 28; "Tonto as Aural Indian: Rethinking the Western through The Lone Ranger Radio Show,"  American Studies Program, Austin College, Sherman, Texas, April 6.

Alan Beyerchen, History, appeared with Paul Reitter of the German Department on WOSU's Open Line, hosted by Fred Anderle on April 21, Holocaust Remembrance Day. 

Graeme Boone, Music, presented "No More Than a Page", a series of informal faculty research discussions, Thursday, April 30 in the University Hall Museum.  Dr. Boone will present his work on Mandalas and the Grateful Dead.   

Kevin Boyle, History, gave three lectures, one at Omaha's Metropolitan Community College as part of the OAH's distinguished lecture program; another at Alabama A & M, which used Arc of Justice for its Reading Across the Curriculum Program; and a third, the annual Five College Graduate Program lecture at University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Alice Conklin, History, "Travelling Out:  Fieldwork, Colonialism, and the Recasting of French Anthropology in Interwar France," annual meeting of the Society for French Historical Studies in St. Louis, March 26-28.

Kathy Fagan, English, Book signing for publication launch of Lip., AWP Conference, Chicago, IL. Feb 13; Panel for posthumous publication of Penelope Austin's Bow, AWP Conference, Chicago,  IL, Feb 13; Reading, New Ohio Review at Ohio University, Feb 26; Reading and class visit, Muskingum College. March 27; Reading and class visit, LaSalle University, Philadelphia, PA, March 26; Reading. Blacksmith House, Boston, MA, March 30, 2009; Reading and Q&A, Ohio Wesleyan University, April 14;  Roundtable Discussion on Writing, Editing, & MFA Programs, Ohio Wesleyan University, April 15;  Reading, Get Lit Conference, Spokane, WA, April 17; Panel and Workshop, Get Lit Conference. Spokane, WA, April 18; Reading with Simon Armitage, Get Lit Conference. Spokane, WA, April 19;

On April 3, at the Expanding Literacy Studies interdisciplinary and international conference by graduate students for graduate students, hosted by OSU and sponsored by LiteracyStudies@OSU, Harvey J. Graff, English and History, participated in a plenary session devoted to a retrospect examination of his book The Literacy Myth: Literacy and Social Structure in the Nineteenth-Century City after Thirty Years. Graff responded to presentations from doctoral students from the Universities of Illinois, Wisconsin, and St. Andrews.  Professor Graff also participated in the Twentieth Anniversary Symposium of the advanced studies (Tema) Department of Child Studies as the guest of the University of Linkoping, Sweden on April 23-24.

Donna Guy, History, was invited by Alpha Psi Lambda to facilitate a discussion of Cesar Chavez, his life as a civil rights leader, and current immigrant labor issues on April 8. She also held a workshop on how to identify sexual violence, at Archer Hall on April 29. On May 1 she led two history workshops at the Second OSU Arts and Humanities Day for 8th Graders.

Hannibal Hamlin, English, "Rethinking Shakespeare and Religion," invited respondent to two special seminars, Shakespeare Association of America, Washington, DC, April 9 and 11.

Sarah-Grace Heller, French and Italian, gave a lecture at the Phoenix Museum of Art, "Fashion in the Middle Ages?" in conjunction with the exhibit "Medievalism: Fashion's Romance with the Middle Ages," on March 31.

Wendy S. Hesford, English, "Ethical Visions: Children's Human Rights and Rhetorical Agency," Rhetoric and Communication Lecture Series, University of California, Irvine, April 14.

Pranav Jani, English, "When India Is In Vogue: What Langston Hughes teaches us about Slumdog Millionaire," Panelist, "Comparative Racializations: A forum," the U.S. Ethnic/Postcolonial Studies Area Group, Department of English, The Ohio State University.  Columbus, April 10.

Lee Martin, English, read from his work and taught a master class at Denison University, April 7-9.

Margarita Mazo, Music, was invited to present a paper, "Igor Stravinsky Performing the Self and Les Noces' Shifting Conceptualization," at the symposium "Between Neoclassicism and Surrealism: Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in the Context of the Russian-French Connection, 1900s-1920s" at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University, in April 2009. The Symposium celebrated the centennial anniversary of the Ballets Russes. Professor Mazo's paper "Decoding Lament in the Brain and Body. A Pilot Study" has been accepted for the 2009 meeting of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music at the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland, in August 2009.  She has been also invited to present her research in cognitive Ethnomusicology at the Showa Music University, Kawasaki, Japan, in July of 2009. 

Robert McMahon, History, participated in a session on his new book on Dean Acheson at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, D.C., on March 18.  He gave a paper at an international conference in Beijing on April 17 and delivered the keynote address at a conference on the Cold War, on April 25, at the London School of Economics.

Gabriella Modan and Amy Shuman, English, "Positioning the Interviewer: Ingroup/outgroup identity and strategic uses of embedded orientation in interview narratives." Colloquium on Narratives in Sociolinguistic Interviews, American Association for Applied Linguistics, Denver, March 24.

Lucy Murphy, History, presented "'Damned Yankee Court and Jury': Colonization and Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Wisconsin," for the University of Georgia Early American History Seminar, in Athens, April 24.

Mineharu Nakayama, East Asian Languages and Literatures, presented "Nominative case marking and verb inflection in L2 grammar: Evidence from Japanese college students' compositions" at the 2009 Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics, Keio University, Tokyo, Japan, March 14 with N. Yoshimura.

Chris Otter, History, presented "Global Markets, Local Pathologies: The Making of the Modern British Diet" as part of the Pitzer College Center for Social Inquiry series on "Global Issues in Public Health and Food," on April 28. He also conducted a seminar on the history of modern meat production.

Chan E. Park, East Asian Languages and Literatures, delivered with Kathy Foley of UCSC a reading of their original play, "Intertwined Lives: Korean and Western Women," in the Art-Theatre-Community: Sharing the Stage! Conference, University of California Santa Cruz, March 7; and lecture/performances of her adaptation: Hungboga, a Tragicomic P'ansori of Economic Hardship, with Happy Ending! at St. Lawrence University's World Music, March 10 and Columbia University's Center for Korean Research, March 11.

Dana Renga, French and Italian, recently delivered the following talks: "Kinsey in Sicily," and the NeMLA convention in Boston, an invited lecture called "Marketing the Mob" at the University of New Hampshire and "National Memory and Repressed Trauma: Screening 'Confino'" at the MLA convention in San Francisco.

Elizabeth Renker, English, "Herman Melville in the Age of Realism," Trinity College, Hartford, CT, March 31; Allan K. Smith Visiting Scholar, Trinity College, Hartford, CT, March 30-31.

Carolyn Skinner, English, "'Stuck in the Middle with You': Challenging the Local/National Dichotomy in Writing Center Discourse," East Central Writing Centers Association Conference, West Lafayette, IN, April 2009.

David Staley, History, designed "Iconoclasm/Luddism: On Violence Against Objects," a digital art installation displayed at the 2009 American Association for History and Computing annual meeting at George Mason University, April 3-4. 

David Stebenne, History, appeared (along with Professor of Political Science Paul Beck and Professor Emeritus of Political Science John Kessel) on WOSU's Open Line show on Monday, April 6th to discuss the G20 Summit and other issues concerning the first three months of the Obama Administration; Professor Stebenne was also interviewed on April 29 by WTVN Radio about the Obama administration's first one hundred days; and on April 30 by the Ohio News Network (ONN) about Chrysler Corporation's descent into bankruptcy.  He received a Mershon Center Faculty Research Grant to support research on his new book project (a political history of the USA from the 1930s through the 1960s).

Galal Walker, East Asian Languages and Literatures, presented "Pathways to Advanced Skills, 1993-2009" at the 50th Anniversary of the Title VI Programs in Washington DC, March 19. The talk covered the work of the OSU National East Asian Languages Resource Center over the past fifteen years. The talk was accompanied by a multi-media presentation developed by Minru Li and the Hypermedia Studio of the Foreign Language Center led by Diane Birckbichler.  Professor Walker also gave a plenary "Best Practices" presentation entitled "Challenges and Opportunities in the Field of K-12: The case of the State of Ohio" at the International Education Programs Services Conference in Crystal City, Maryland, Feb. 3.

Andreá N. Williams, English, "Imagining a Black President: Political Leadership, Racial Identity, and the Cultural Work of African American Literature," African American Studies Symposium, U of Texas at San Antonio, April 3.

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, History, presented "Eldridge Cleaver goes to Pyongyang, Hanoi, and Peking:  Third World Internationalism and Radical Orientalism during the Viet Nam Era," and led/facilitated a student leadership/activism workshop at Hamilton College, New York, on April 8.  She presented "Rethinking Global Sisterhood:  Peace Activism and Women's Orientalism" and screened her digital narrative "The Takeover" at the "American Crossroads: Migration, Communities, and Race" Conference held at the University of Texas, Austin, on April 16.  She presented "Compulsory Heteronormativity and the Politics of Asian/Asian American Nationalism" and also served as the chair and commentator for a panel on "Grassroots Organizing, Transnational Politics:  Housing Struggles in the Asian American Movement" at the Association for Asian American Studies Annual Meeting, held in Honolulu, Hawaii, on April 24 and 25.