Collaborators

Principal Investigators

Angela Brintlinger has a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Wisconsin/Madison and is Chair of the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Director of the Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, and Professor of Slavic Studies at Ohio State University. Brintlinger writes primarily about Russian literature, culture, and film, and has expertise in biography, war, emigre culture, food studies, and translation. She held the Fulbright Distinguished Chair of Slavic at Warsaw University and regularly leads student tours across Central and Eastern Europe.

Yana Hashamova is Professor at the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Core Faculty of the Film Studies Program, Affiliate Faculty of the Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme, Comparative Studies, Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Mershon Center for International Security Studies. She is the first international scholar to be named Honorary Research Associate at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (Institute of Culture and Memory Studies). Dr. Hashamova is also editor of the Slavic and East European Journal, the publication of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages. In her work, she strives to establish links between political ideology and constructs of national and gender identities in cultures, while analyzing post-Soviet conditions.

She has authored and edited several books as well as published over 30 articles and book chapters in the areas of Russian and Balkan film, media, and literature, all examining national, ethnic, and gender representations.

Dorothy Noyes is Professor of Folklore at The Ohio State University with a joint appointment between the Departments of English and Comparative Studies and courtesy appointments in Anthropology, French and Italian, and Germanic Languages and Literatures; she also teaches in the Program in International Studies.

She is the director of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies and directed the Center for Folklore Studies from 2005 to 2014. In 2019-20 she is serving as Humanities Faculty Fellow for the Methods and Practices Amplifier of the Global Arts+Humanities Discovery Theme.

Noyes studies political ritual and the traditional public sphere in Europe; she also writes on folklore theory and on the international policy careers of culture concepts. She is the author of Fire in the Plaça: Catalan Festival Politics After Franco (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Humble Theory: Folklore’s Grasp on Social Life (Indiana University Press, 2016); and Sustaining Interdisciplinary Collaboration: A Guide for the Academy, with Regina F. Bendix and Kilian Bizer (University of Illinois Press, 2017). Her current book project is Exemplary Failures: Gesture and Pedagogy in Liberal Politics.

Faculty Collaborators

Rasel Ahmed is an Assistant Professor of Theatre, Film, and Media Arts. He is a community-based filmmaker who uses traditional cinematic tropes and techniques to combine documentary with fantasy. Characters in his films function as an anchor to synthesize the iconography, visual metaphor, and psychogeography of cinematic spaces. Ahmed’s experimental videos are a means to explore his dialogical relationship with displacement, citizenship, border, and loneliness. He uses a combination of participatory documentation, archival research, and collaborative re-enactment to finalize the performance and movement choices in the film. Ahmed has an MFA in Visual Arts with a concentration in Moving Image from Columbia University. He also runs a community-based transnational Queer archive and is the founder of Bangladesh’s first LGBT magazine Roopbaan. He is the recipient of Freedom From Religion Foundation Award, Center Global Leadership Award, Atlas Corps Fellowship, Royal Commonwealth Society Associate Fellowship, Point Foundation Scholarship, GAAPA/Prism Foundation Scholarship, Davis-Putter Scholarship, Chinn Scholarship, Chowdhury Center Fellowship, Columbia University Visual Arts Scholarship, Swedish Institute Leadership Fellowship, and State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program.

Ashley Bigham is an Assistant Professor at the Knowlton School of Architecture and co-director of Outpost Office. She has been a Fulbright Fellow in Ukraine, a MacDowell Fellow, and a Walter B. Sanders Fellow at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. At The Ohio State University, she is an affiliate faculty member of the Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies. In addition, she is a collaborative partner and visiting faculty at the Kharkiv School of Architecture in Ukraine.

Ashley’s creative work and writing engage architecture through a study of consumption and domesticity, focusing on architecture’s entanglement with the production and fulfillment of consumer desire. She is the editor of Fulfilled: Architecture, Excess, and Desire (Applied Research + Design, 2022). Her writing and work has appeared in publications such as MAS Context, Dialectic, The Architect’s Newspaper, Metropolis, Mark, CLOG, and Surface.

Sarah Van Beurden is an Associate Professor of History, History of Art, and AAAS. Dr. Van Beurden earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Leuven in Belgium, and her Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania. She is a historian of modern African and transnational history, with a focus on the cultural history of colonial and postcolonial central Africa. She is interested in the ways culture is constructed, represented, and used in political contexts and has published on the history of museums, art restitution, decolonization, heritage and conservation politics, as well as the history of anthropology and art history. Her book, Authentically African: Arts and the Transnational Politics of Congolese Culture (New African Histories Series, Ohio University Press, 2015) investigates the role of museum politics in the legitimation of the Belgian colonial regime and the postcolonial Mobutu regime in Congo/Zaire. It tells a history of decolonization as a struggle over cultural categories, the possession of cultural heritage, and the right to define and represent cultural identities. Her work has appeared in journals such as The Journal of African History, History and Anthropology, Critical Interventions, and Radical History Journal.  Her current research focuses on the history of cultural planning, craft economies, and art education in central Africa. She is a frequent media contributor on topics such as African art restitution and Belgian colonialism and its legacies. For more on the topic of art restitution, see for example: Podcast History Talk, “Who Owns the Past? Museums and Cultural Heritage Repatriation,” produced by Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective (January 2019).