HUMANITIES INSTITUTE
2014 – 2015
NEW PARTNERSHIP WITH THE AMERICAN ACADEMY IN BERLIN HUMANITIES WITHOUT WALLS
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Physics Activity Labs Enhanced with Technology (PALET Labs) Foster a New Way to Learn Physics These newly renovated spaces can hold up to 80 students and three instructors in one lab at the same time while providing a unique, comfortable learning environment. Not only do students have access to the latest laboratory equipment and technology, everything in the PALET Labs is designed for an optimal learning experience. Specially-designed tables and seating arrangements facilitate working in groups. Floor and ceiling installations muffle sound, lighting provides the right degree of brightness, and the floor plan provides ease in moving around. Two PALET labs are up-and-running and a third one is scheduled to be finished next academic year.
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ABOUT THE HUMANITIES INSTITUTE Founded in 1997, the Humanities Institute is an active community forum for exchange among scholars and citizens. It acts as a significant bridge between the university and the city of Columbus, as well as the broader public culture. The institute serves the university by encouraging exploration of the formative contexts of discovery, learning and engagement; examining recurrent problems and emergent issues across cultural milieus, disciplinary boundaries and historical periods; fostering creative inquiry at the intersections of the arts, humanities and social sciences; and engaging faculty, students and the community around ideas, values and movements that shape culture. The institute connects people, nourishes community, promotes intellectual innovation and celebrates vital traditions of wisdom, inspiration and understanding.
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WELCOME FROM THE DIRECTOR HUMANITIES WITHOUT WALLS PROVOST’S DISCOVERY THEMES LECTURER PROGRAM AMERICAN ACADEMY IN BERLIN PARTNERSHIP THE PUBLIC HUMANITIES LECTURE SERIES COLLABORATIVE WORKING GROUPS ENVIRONMENTAL CITIZENSHIP BEGINS AT HOME INSTITUTE ASSOCIATES OUR PARTNERS SUPPORT THE HUMANITIES INSTITUTE
Stained glass window in the George Wells Knight house, inscribed, Nothing is so Beautiful to the Eye as Truth to the Mind, John Locke ( 1632-1704)
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WELCOME FROM THE DIRECTOR Dear Friends: I am honored to write to you as the director of the Humanities Institute at The Ohio State University, and I’m grateful to have the opportunity to have that role at such an exciting time in the institute’s history. The Humanities Institute provides a place to raise and address fundamental questions about the role of humanities. Our mission is to support innovative and collaborative forms of inquiry, to enable discussion of institutional challenges and to promote broader understanding of humanities perspectives across the university and in the community. Acting on that aim, we have created a lecture series that will link the humanities with Ohio State’s new Discovery Themes. Last year, the series focused on the theme of Health and Wellness — in the fall, we hosted the eminent bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel for a talk on healthcare reform; and in the spring, the distinguished economist Deirdre McCloskey for a presentation on the academic study of happiness. This year, the institute’s Discovery Themes Lecture Series has merged with the Provost’s Discovery Themes Lecturer Program, and the institute played an important role in bringing to campus two eminent scholars who will be speaking this year: Sherry Turkle, a pioneering researcher on the effects of technology on human interactions; and the Pulitzer Prize-winning anthropologist Jared Diamond. In November 2012, we launched the Public Humanities Lecture Series, bringing together university constituencies and the community to explore and discuss a wide variety of issues that impact our lives daily and have profound implications for the quality of life in communities everywhere. The series opened with presentations by Louis Menand, one of the world’s leading public intellectuals; and Jill Lepore, Harvard University professor of history and author. It continued last year with lectures by Mark Edmundson, Tony Grafton and Eric Klinenberg, and will continue this coming year with a public conversation with celebrated author Zadie Smith. We also have two new programs to announce. One is a lecture series we are cosponsoring with the American Academy in Berlin — former academy fellow, poet and critic Susan Stewart (Princeton University) will be coming to campus in January 2015. The other program is an outreach course for economically disadvantaged adults who wish to gain experience in the humanities at the college-level. Both programs are described on page four. We are mindful of the responsibility of our mission and extraordinarily proud to play a significant part in promoting collaboration, dialogue, education and a forum for exchange of ideas. With that in mind, I would like to ask that you consider giving to the Humanities Institute. By investing in and supporting the work and events of the institute, you endorse our model of collaborative, interdisciplinary research, teaching and public engagement. And that, in turn, promotes and sustains a vibrant, curious and intelligent community. With warm regards,
Paul Reitter
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(L-R) Rick Livingston, Elizabeth Lantz, Paul Reitter
Director Paul Reitter Paul Reitter is professor of Germanic languages and literatures. His work has appeared in an array of venues, from Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society and American Imago to Harper’s Magazine, BOOKFORUM, The Paris Review, The Nation and The Times Literary Supplement, to which he is a regular contributor. Reitter is the author of Bambi’s Jewish Roots: Essays on German-Jewish Culture, On the Origins of Jewish Self Hatred and The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish SelfFashioning in Fin-de-Siècle Europe. He recently collaborated with Jonathan Franzen on The Kraus Project (2013), a widely discussed volume of translations and commentary. Associate Director Rick Livingston Rick Livingston, senior lecturer, Ohio State’s Department of Comparative Studies, has been with the Humanities Institute since its founding. He has research interests in environmental citizenship and ecocriticism, postcolonial and world literature, globalization studies, and literary and cultural theory. Livingston teaches courses in world literature and culture, nature and technology. Livingston is a member of Ohio State’s AWASH Focus Group (Animal Worlds in the Arts, Sciences and Humanities) in the Center for Ethics and Human Values, and he is currently working on the project, Bio-Presence: Bringing (Other) Animals into the Framework with an Ohio State Framework Award. He serves on the board of the Ohio Humanities Council and on the steering committee of the Humanities Without Walls consortium. He is also actively involved in the Ohio State’s Second-Year Transformational Experience Program (STEP). Administrative Assistant Elizabeth Lantz Elizabeth Lantz has an MFA in creative nonfiction from Ohio State. Her work has been published in various literary journals, including The Kenyon Review, American Literary Review and South Dakota Review.
HUMANITIES WITHOUT WALLS Linking humanities centers at 15 research universities throughout the Midwest and beyond Ohio State’s Humanities Institute is part of a consortium of 15 universities in the Midwest that has received a $3 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to create new avenues for collaborative research, teaching and the production of scholarship in the humanities, forging and sustaining areas of inquiry that cannot be created or maintained without cross-institutional cooperation. The Humanities Without Walls consortium will be the first of its kind to experiment at this large scale with cross-institutional collaboration. The Midwest consortium includes 13 institutions that belong to the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC): Indiana University, Michigan State University, Northwestern University, Ohio State, Penn State University, Purdue University; and the Universities of Chicago, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Wisconsin-Madison — plus the University of Notre Dame and the University of Illinois at Chicago.
The Mellon grant makes two initiatives possible: one supports the development of summer workshops for pre-doctoral students in the humanities who intend to pursue careers outside the academy; a second initiative will fund cross-institutional teams of faculty and graduate students pursuing research that focuses on a grand research challenge — the Global Midwest. The Global Midwest is intended to stimulate collaborative research that rethinks and reveals the Midwest as a key site — both now and in the past — in shaping global economies and cultures. Ohio State’s Humanities Institute has awarded six planning grants to develop proposals for the Global Midwest Initiative. Proposed projects range from an on-line journal of contemporary art in the Midwest to fracking on the Bakken Formation.
The six planning grants are:
Geontology of the Global Midwest The Bakken formation in North Dakota has emerged in recent years as one of the most important sources of oil in the United States; its exploitation has catapulted the United States from the world’s largest oil consumer into a net oil producer. This oil boom renders the Bakken formation a major player in the global politics of climate change, and its investigation an urgent task for understanding the global implications of the Midwest. The town of Williston, the site of the Bakken formation, is an administrative, technological and cultural hub for the Midwestern energy extraction economy, but it has also reconfigured the “geontology” — the systematic socio-political and aesthetic regulation of the land and its subterranean formations — throughout the region. The Geontology of the Global Midwest project seeks to rework the emergent conceptualization of the Anthropocene epoch to better capture the geontological dynamics of the Bakken extractive economy.
Latina/o Midwest This multi-faceted collaboration will engage multiple Midwestern audiences in the university and beyond in learning about the significance of Latina/o literature, art, theatre, performance and oral history in the Midwest. Participants will produce a volume on Latina/o Creativity in the Midwest; develop two traveling exhibits to be used in the region (one on Latina/o literature, art, theatre and performance; a second on oral histories); create curricular units for weekend reading clubs and launch online blog pages on The Latino Midwest and Mujeres Talk websites. Courtesy of the artist, Alejandro Gracia-Lemos
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The Midwest Heritage Language Network Ohio State’s Center for Languages, Literatures and Cultures seeks to engage with language scholars throughout the consortium to create the Midwest Heritage Language Network. The network will provide a platform to link researchers, teachers and community members throughout the region and provide a hub for ongoing research on heritage language communities in the Midwest. It will provide opportunities for curriculum development and dissemination of information across the region. Finally, it will serve as a clearinghouse for information that can benefit heritage language communities throughout the Midwest.
Re-Imagining the Global Midwest: Relocation, Rehabilitation and Reclamation Ohio State’s DISCO (Diversity and Identity Studies Collective at Ohio State) will examine the Midwest as a global crossroads through the themes of relocation, rehabilitation and reclamation. Relocation highlights the movement of people in the Midwest; rehabilitation refers to the efforts to normalize “deviant” populations; and reclamation foregrounds the efforts of marginalized people to reclaim their identity and autonomy.
The Religious Soundmap Project The Religious Soundmap Project will use audio recording and digital mapping technology to study the religious diversity of American cities. Student researchers will produce audio recordings of religious practices across a wide range of local sites. These recordings will be integrated, along with interviews, visual images and explanatory texts, onto a publiclyaccessible online mapping platform, which will provide a valuable research tool and pedagogical resource for specialists and non-specialists alike.
there there: an online journal of contemporary art This proposal will support the development of an online journal of contemporary global art, focused on works exhibited, and in some cases made in Ohio and the Midwest. Building from the new MA program in Contemporary Art and Curatorial Practice, the journal will showcase the amazing range of activity happening in museums, studios and gallery spaces across the region, and provide a collaborative platform for curators, artists and art historians working throughout the Midwest.
The Humanities Institute and the Land-Grant Mission The Humanities Institute plans to launch its first outreach course, Introduction to the Humanities, in fall 2015, with the goal of engaging and enabling economically disadvantaged members of the Columbus community to experience a college-level humanities course and begin working toward a college degree. Community participants will earn college credit, at no cost, and subsidies for childcare, transportation and books. “Our responsibility as a land-grant institution is to provide high-quality education for citizens of our community as
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well as to focus attention on the economic and social welfare of our community,” said Paul Reitter, institute director and creator of the course. “With this new course, members of the institute will work with residents to improve their critical reading and writing skills, as well as their speaking skills.” Plans are for the curriculum to consist of a broad survey of world culture. Partners in the new outreach effort will likely include the Columbus Literacy Council and Ohio State’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion.
THE PROVOST’S DISCOVERY THEMES LECTURER PROGRAM Our partnership in Ohio State’s Provost’s Discovery Themes Lecturer Program continues in the fall with a presentation by Sherry Turkle on Nov. 20, 2014 entitled Technology and Self. On April 2, 2015 we will host Jared Diamond for a presentation on The World Until Yesterday.
Nov. 20, 2014
April 2, 2015
Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, and founder and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Her work investigates the intersection of digital technology and human relationships, from the early days of personal computers to our current world of robotics, artificial intelligence, social networking and mobile connectivity. Turkle is the author of The Second Self: Computers and The Human Spirit; Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, and most recently, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other.
UCLA, is a scholar in the fields of anthropology, sociology and evolutionary biology. He is author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies and Collapse. In his new book, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?, Diamond compares life in modern, industrialized societies with traditional ways of life and argues that traditional societies have much to teach us about conflict resolution, care of elders and children, risk management, multilingualism and nutrition.
Sherry Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé
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Jared Diamond, professor of geography at
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Partnership with the American Academy in Berlin
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The Humanities Institute is pleased to announce a partnership with the American Academy in Berlin. Established in 1994, the academy is one of Europe’s most visible and effective institutions of transatlantic dialogue and has built up an extensive and enduring network in the corporate, academic and cultural communities in the United States and in Germany.
The institute and the academy will co-sponsor a lecture series bringing to Ohio State former fellows of the American Academy in Berlin, who, in recent years, have included such award-winning writers as Jonathan Lethem, Dexter Filkins and George Packer. The first lecture in the series is scheduled for Jan. 15, 2015 and will feature Susan Stewart, Avalon Foundation University Professor of the Humanities and director, Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, Princeton University. A poet and critic, she teaches the history of poetry, poetics and issues in aesthetics. Susan Stewart
Stewart’s most recent books of criticism are The Poet’s Freedom: A Notebook on Making and Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, which won the Christian Gauss Award. A former MacArthur Fellow, Stewart served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2005, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
(Front row l-r) Richard C. Holbrooke, Former President George H. W. Bush and Henry A. Kissinger
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Former President Bill Clinton
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THE PUBLIC HUMANITIES LECTURE SERIES Connecting people, nourishing community, catalyzing intellectual innovation and celebrating vital traditions of wisdom, inspiration and understanding.
Photo: Dominique Nabokov
Photo: Steve Heller. Courtesy Galerie St. Etienne, New York.
In 2012, the Humanities Institute introduced the Public Humanities Lecture Series, highlighting the broad relevance of the humanities with speakers who address, from humanist perspectives, topics of general interest. The 2014-15 year began with Artist Sue Coe presenting “Some Animals are More Equal Than Others” on Oct. 9. Professor Wendy Chun will speak Nov. 6 on “Race and/as Technology within the Network Imagination.” Author Zadie Smith will speak “On Writing and Culture” on Nov. 13.
SUE COE
WENDY CHUN
ZADIE SMITH
Oct. 9, 2014 Sue Coe is considered one of the foremost political artists working today. She has spent years documenting the atrocities committed by people against animals and continues to generate both prints and art on that subject. Coe’s 2010 exhibition at the Galerie St. Etienne, ELEPHANTS WE MUST NEVER FORGET: New Paintings, Drawings and Prints by Sue Coe, is being developed into a book-length narrative.
Nov. 6, 2014 Wendy Chun is professor of modern culture and media at Brown University. She has studied both systems design engineering and English literature, which she combines and mutates in her current work on digital media. Chun is author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics and Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. She is co-editor of a special issue of Camera Obscura entitled Race and/as Technology and co-editor Of New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader. She is currently visiting professor at Leuphana University (Luneburg, Germany) where she is completing a monograph entitled Imagined Networks.
Nov. 13, 2014 Professor of Creative Writing at New York University and novelist Zadie Smith was born in North London to an English father and a Jamaican mother. She read English at Cambridge, graduating in 1997. Her acclaimed first novel, White Teeth (2000), is a vibrant portrait of contemporary multicultural London, told through the story of three ethnically diverse families. The book won a number of awards and prizes, including the Guardian First Book Award, the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best First Book), and two BT Ethnic and Multicultural Media Awards (Best Book/Novel and Best Female Media Newcomer).
Coe’s 2012 exhibition at the Galerie St. Etienne, MAD AS HELL!, featured new work published in Cruel, a continued, critical look at the animal industry that builds upon her groundbreaking 1996 book Dead Meat. This past year, Coe was awarded the prestigious Dickinson College Arts Award in Carlisle Pennsylvania.
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Smith’s second novel, The Autograph Man, won the 2003 Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize for Fiction. Her third novel, On Beauty, won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction. Her novel, NW, was named as one of the New York Times ‘10 Best Books of 2012.’
COLLABORATIVE WORKING GROUPS Humanities Institute Faculty Working Groups develop twoyear collaborative programs that include public presentations, conferences, publications, courses, digital productions and more. The institute provides these groups with funding, meeting space, publicity and organizational support.
Continuity and Change in the Andes and Amazonia Michelle Wibbelsman (Spanish and Portuguese), Kendra McSweeney (Geography) and Alcira Duenas (History) The Andes and Amazonia working group hosts panel discussions among graduate students and a non-academic speaker as part of its brownbag lunch series. In addition to the working group’s Working Papers Series, a Reports from the Field session will be added each semester to help graduate students returning from dissertation fieldwork and at the midstream research moment between completion of data collection and initial stages of data organization and analysis. A mini symposium is in the works for 20152016.
Future of the University David Staley (History) and Frank Donoghue (English) The theme for this group’s initiative will be “The Humanities and the University: Past and Future.” A series of readings/discussions will be held on this topic, and speakers will be invited to address this broad theme. A year long futuring/foresight exercise will develop various scenarios concerning the future of the humanities and the university.
Humanities and Medicine Susan Lawrence (History), Julia Nelson Hawkins (Classics), Jim Phelan (English) and Dana Renga (French and Italian) The Humanities and Medicine working group seeks to establish Ohio State as a leading center for the study of medical humanities. Building on the success of the 2013
Conference on Narrative Medicine in the Twenty-First Century, the group seeks to enhance the teaching of and research on humanities and medicine currently being carried out across the university by creating a community among the scholars doing this work. The group recently hosted a workshop on Humanities in Medicine featuring Bernice L. Hausman, professor of English and the Edward S. Diggs Professor in the Humanities at Virginia Tech.
WORKING GROUPS FUNDED FOR A THIRD YEAR Americas Before 1900 Lisa Voigt (Spanish and Portuguese) and Molly Farrell (English) This groups plans to continue monthly interdisciplinary conversations about the cultures and histories of the western hemisphere before the industrial era. The group is eager to continue discussions that change the understanding of topics like the Caribbean, slavery, performance, economics, religion, medicine, writing and material culture in the early Americas.
(University of Louisville) will lead a research workshop based on her work investigating medieval condiments. Events also include talks by faculty, students and community members whose work touches on how analyzing objects gives insight into practices of human life.
Performance/Politics Harmony Bench (Dance), Ryan Skinner (Music) and Jennifer Schlueter (Theatre) In addition to co-sponsoring presentations in the Departments of Music, Theatre and Dance, the Performance/Politics working group will spend the year exploring the possibility and demand for a graduate interdisciplinary specialization in performance studies. We will be working with colleagues in the departments of art, comparative studies, dance, English, music, theatre and others to be determined.
PILOT WORKING GROUPS Community Arts Pilot Susan Melsop (Design) and Karen Hutzel (Arts Administration, Education and Policy)
This year Iberian Studies will be bringing in, or co-sponsoring, lectures and dissertation workshops on cross-border, global and transdisciplinary topics linking Portugal and Spain to other regions of the world. Also, the group will take up once more the possibility of a Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization in Iberian Studies.
Community art is often used as a tool for stimulating dialogue, for documenting community-rooted narratives and for encouraging self-empowerment; it is inspired by social justice activism and is grounded in the principle of cultural democracy. One of the targeted goals of this working group is to develop a Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization in Community Arts and Social Design to learn about various community arts and social design research and activities, academic courses and faculty at Ohio State involved in these endeavors.
Material Culture Studies
Music and Sound Pilot
Sarah Grace-Heller (French and Italian)
Isaac Weiner (Comparative Studies) and Ryan Skinner (Music)
This group will be organizing a series of events related to Ohio State’s Historic Costume & Textiles Collection’s exhibit on wedding finery, And the Bride wore (Sept. 17, 2014-May 9, 2015). Wendy Pfeffer
This working group formed in spring 2014. Tentative plans include a lecture on sound studies by Jonathan Sterne, professor and James McGill, chair in culture and technology at
Iberian Studies Rebecca Haidt (Spanish and Portuguese), Pedro Pereira (Spanish and Portuguese) and Carolina LopezRuiz (Classics)
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CHICAGO HUMANITIES FESTIVAL The Humanities Institute is proud to participate in Chicago’s annual Humanities Festival, a month-long Windy City blowout of speakers, panels, performances and workshops. Last year Institute Director Paul Reitter delivered Bambi’s Jewish Roots. This year, Lilia Fernandez, associate professor of history at Ohio State, will be a guest speaker at the festivities. She is the author of Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago.
CULTURES OF DEBT – DEFAULT SETTINGS The Humanities Institute’s series on The Debt Burden continues in 2014-15, with a focus on the cultural and political dynamics emerging from the aftermath of the financial crisis. Last year, the Debt Burden featured discussions on the causes and consequences of ballooning debt structures, the dual mandate of the Federal Reserve system, and the complexities of the student loan system. In 2014-15, the series continues with a look at the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, headed by former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray, and the effects of credit standards on social inequalities of race and ethnicity, among other topics.
WEEKEND WRITING WORKSHOP Coordinated by Elizabeth Lantz, Humanities Institute administrative associate, this weekend workshop was first initiated in partnership with the OSU Creative Writing Program. Joe Mackall (editor of River Teeth) taught the first year and Brenda Miller (editor of The Bellingham Review) the second year; Geeta Kothari (editor at The Kenyon Review) worked with mostly MFA alumni the third year, as did instructor Dinty Moore (editor of Brevity) the fourth year. Plans to expand the nonfiction focus of the workshop to include fiction are underway for year five.
ENVIRONMENTAL CITIZENSHIP INITIATIVE The Environmental Citizenship Initiative addresses the challenge of creating a culture of ecological literacy for the 21st century. Promoting transdisciplinary research, pedagogical innovation and critical conversation across entrenched intellectual fields, the initiative conjugates emergent themes in the arts and humanities — animal studies, eco-criticism, indigenous knowledges, global and postcolonial environmentalisms — with pressing questions about climate change, biodiversity, postindustrial urbanization, agro-ecological sustainability and socio-political resilience. Linked with transnational initiatives such as Humanities for the Environment (H4E), the Environmental Citizenship Initiative aims to develop resources and build capacity for collaborative engagement and deliberation. In past years, we have hosted visiting speakers including Steven Kellert (Yale), Ursula Heise (UCLA), David Orr (Oberlin) and John Tallmadge (Cincinnati), partnered with Ohio State’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching to develop a curriculum on sustainability and helped launch the Green Buckeyes program for incoming students. Current projects include collaborating with Ohio State’s AWASH (Animal Worlds in the Arts, Sciences and Humanities) on BioPresence: Bringing (Other) Animals into the Framework.
ENVIRONMENTAL CITIZENSHIP BEGINS AT HOME
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L.A.S.E.R./HUMANITIES INSTITUTE GRADUATE FELLOWS The L.A.S.E.R./Humanities Institute Graduate Student in Residence Fellows program is a collaboration between the Humanities Institute and Ohio State’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion’s Latino and Latin American Space for Enrichment and Research (L.A.S.E.R.). Fellows are selected on the basis of intellectual distinction, quality and precision of their dissertation proposal, and on the promise of further outstanding achievements in the areas of diversity, inclusion and scholarship on the Latin/o Americas. Current fellows are Randi Lopez, Jessica Rutherford, and Leticia Wiggins. Randi Lopez received her BA and MA in English literature and ethnic studies from the University of ColoradoBoulder. In 2013, she co-authored a paper, Decolonizing Pocahontas and Jigonsaseh through Xicana Feminist Theoretical Intervention. As a PhD student in English, Lopez will continue to theorize the archive, interrogating questions of digitization as a decolonial apparatus, arguing for greater access to archives. In addition, her teaching will focus on specifically bridging literature and writing to address discursive gaps regarding race in classrooms and on campuses.
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his past May, more than a dozen students took to the rivers and watersheds to learn about environmental citizenship.
Institute Associate Director Rick Livingston designed the May Session course, A Place Between The Rivers: Ecological Restoration and Environmental Citizenship in Central Ohio.
Jessica Rutherford completed her BA and MA degrees in Spanish literature at the University of Iowa. Rutherford is currently ABD in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Ohio State. She is a specialist in colonial Latin America and her research interests include Latin American literature and culture; indigenous literature of the colonial period; medieval Spanish literature and the history of the book and Afro-Brazilian culture and cultural studies. She is currently working on her dissertation, Magic, Medicine, and the Company of Jesus: Plants and Healing in the Early Modern Iberian Empires. Leticia Wiggins is a fourth year graduate student in Ohio State’s Department of History. She is studying the Chicano Movement (1970s-80s) in the Midwest as part of a greater dissertation project focusing on intellectual history of political ideas forming the basis of Midwestern Latino/a activism within a unique regional and institutional context. Her research interests include modern U.S. history; women, gender and sexuality studies and Latin American history, with a concentration on the relationship between institutions, place and activism.
bulk of the class took place outdoors at projects restoring wetlands, removing dams, preserving habitat and native biodiversity and bringing back ecological keystone species, such as bison, which have been absent from Ohio for almost 200 years. Livingston developed A Place Between the Rivers with an eye toward place and dialogue.
“My goal was to deepen students’ awareness and understanding of environmental citizenship by taking them beyond the classroom to witness, first-hand, environmental restoration projects along the rivers of Central Ohio — the Olentangy, the Scioto and Big Darby Creek,” said Livingston.
“Seeing the impact of these projects on the environment, and at the same time having the opportunity to engage with the people directly involved with the work, encourages students to question, analyze and ponder not only the impact of these projects but what it means to be an environmental citizen.”
Students in Livingston’s class did their share of readings in environmental philosophy and ecocritical reflection but the
“It’s critical that students develop a sense of citizenship and humanity that includes the physical world they live in.”
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McGill. The group is supporting a new initiative, called the Religious Soundmap Project, led by Isaac Weiner (recipient of an institute seed grant as part of the Humanities Without Walls initiative).
INSTITUTE ASSOCIATES Academic and nonacademic colleagues who contribute to the life of the Humanities Institute
FROM WORKING GROUP TO UNIVERSITY-WIDE PROGRAM LiteracyStudies@OSU Now a university-wide program, LiteracyStudies@OSU originated in 2004 as a working group of the Humanities Institute, with which it continues to partner. Led by Harvey Graff (English and History) with colleagues from across the arts and sciences; Leslie Moore (College of Education and Human Ecology); Amy Cohen (Moritz College of Law), Lorraine Wallace (College of Medicine) and Blaine Lilly (College of Engineering), the aim is to expand awareness and encourage the study of literacy through a variety of initiatives, including series on History of the Book, Literacy in Translation, Literacy in the Sciences, Literacy in Health and Medicine, the Graduate Interdisciplinary Seminar and the GIS in Literacy Studies. Plans for 2014-2015 include talks by Anthony Pym, professor of translation and intercultural studies, Rovira i Virgili University in Spain, on the Vatican’s translation policy; Bengt Sandin, professor of child studies, University of Linköping, on reading education reform in Sweden and Cynthia Brokaw, professor of history, Brown University, on Chinese book culture; programs on topics ranging from literacy campaigns to literacy in the sciences and forthcoming publications, including the collaboration by Daniel Reff (Comparative Studies) and Richard Danford (Marietta) on The First European Description of Japan, 1585 and Ohio State alumnus William Sturkey on the Mississippi Freedom Schools.
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Adam Davis is associate professor and William T. Utter/Clyde E. Williams, Jr. Professor of History at Denison University. He is the author of The Holy Bureaucrat: Eudes Rigaud and Religious Reform in ThirteenthCentury Normandy. During the 201415 academic year, Davis will serve as a research associate at the institute while working on his book, The Rise of the Medieval Hospital and the Formation of a Charitable Society in Champagne, for which he has been awarded a year-long fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Tamara Mann is a historian and writer. Mann received her doctorate in history from Columbia University and a master’s degree in theological studies from Harvard Divinity School. Her writing has appeared in such publications as The Washington Post, The Huffington Post and The Harvard Divinity Bulletin. As an associate at the institute, Mann will be working on a book-length project on the history of old age in the United States.
Alejandra Rojas Silva is an art historian specializing in colonial Latin America. In particular, her work studies the role of botanical illustration in the intellectual formation of the early modern Hispanic Empire. Her dissertation, Flora Incognita: Picturing the New World, investigates herbals produced in the New World in the mid-16th century, positing a connection between the representation of flora and the social position of the indigenous population.
Christian Zacher is professor emeritus, Ohio State’s Department of English. He served as director of the Humanities Institute from its inception in 1998 until June 2011. He is co-editor of The Encyclopedia of the American Midwest, and he most recently authored The Holbrook Years 2002-2007. Zacher has held a number of administrative positions at Ohio State including director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies; associate dean of humanities; chair of the Department of Comparative Studies and secretary of the University Senate.
OUR PARTNERS
The Ohio State University Humanities Institute
We would like to extend our deep appreciation to our many partners — both within the university and in the larger community — for their continued support and confidence in the quality and caliber of our programming. National affiliations and program partners:
DIRECTOR: Paul Reitter (reitter.4@osu.edu)
American Academy in Berlin
Department of Geography
Chicago Humanities Festival
Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes
Department of History
Humanities Without Walls Consortium
Department of History of Art
Imagining America
Department of Linguistics
Community Partners
Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures
Bexley Public Library
Department of Philosophy
Columbus Art Commission
Department of Political Science
Columbus Museum of Art
Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures
Jewish Community Center of Greater Columbus
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Ohio Humanities Council
Department of Theatre
Old Worthington Library
Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Ohio State partners: American Indian Studies
Disability Studies
Asian American Studies
DISCO (Diversity and Identity Studies Collective at OSU)
Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum
Film Studies
Center for Biomedical Ethics and Humanities
Goldberg Center, Department of History
Center for Folklore Studies Center for Life Sciences Education Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Center for the Study of Teaching and Writing College of Arts and Sciences College of Education and Human Ecology College of Medicine College of Nursing
Health Sciences Administration Institute for Chinese Studies, Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity Knowlton School of Architecture Latino/a Studies Latino & Latin American Space for Enrichment and Research LiteracyStudies@OSU Melton Center for Jewish Studies
College of Public Health
Mershon Center for International Security Studies
Comparative Ethnic and American Studies
Moritz College of Law
Department of African American and African Studies
The Ohio State University Alumni Association, Inc.
Department of Anthropology
Office of Academic Affairs
Department of Art
Office of Diversity and Inclusion
Department of Arts Administration, Education and Policy
Project Narrative
Department of Biology
School of Environment & Natural Resources
Department of Classics
School of Music
Department of Comparative Studies
Society of American Indians
Department of Consumer Sciences
Teaching and Learning
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ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR: Robert E. Livingston (livingston.28@osu.edu) ADMINISTRATIVE ASSOCIATE: Elizabeth Lantz (lantz.38@osu.edu) HUMANITIES INSTITUTE OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE MEMBERS: (Ohio State affiliates) Jonathan Burgoyne associate professor, Spanish and Portuguese Lilia Fernandez associate professor, history Angus Fletcher associate professor, English Richard Fletcher associate professor, classics Naomi Fukumori associate professor, east asian languages and literatures Jill Galvan associate professor, English Morgan Liu associate professor, near eastern languages and cultures Michael Neblo associate professor, political science Deborah Smith-Shank professor and chair, arts administration, education and policy Karl Whittington assistant professor, history of art
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