John Brooke
Department of History
The Ohio State University Center for Historical Research provides a stimulating intellectual environment for studying important historical issues around the world. Each year the Center brings together scholars from various disciplines to examine issues of broad contemporary relevance in historical perspective. The annual program of the Center is organized around a central theme, which will be explored through a series of seminars. Since history is inherently a discipline that draws inspiration from the research methods of other academic disciplines, seminar leaders will be drawn from a range of fields whose scholarship relates to the annual themes, such as anthropology, art history, law, literary and cultural studies, philosophy, political science, geography and economics. The Center will also involve colleagues at Ohio State from history and other departments, since most of the annual themes proposed have broad interdisciplinary appeal. We welcome proposals for seminars aligned with our program theme.
Lesley Ferris
Department of Theatre
Lesley Ferris is both a director and scholar. Her research interests are focused on gender and performance, carnival, and the use of masks. Her books include Acting Women: Images of Women in Theatre (Macmillan,1990) and Crossing the Stage: Controversies on Cross Dressing (Routledge, 1993). She has published numerous essays the most recent being “Cooking Up the Self’: Booby Baker and Blondell Cummings ‘Do’ the Kitchen” in Interfaces: Women / Autobiography / Performance / Image, edited by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (University of Michigan Press, 2002).
Angus Fletcher
Department of English
Angus Fletcher’s research is driven by the pragmatic hypothesis (articulated in the twentieth century by John Dewey and The Chicago School, but extending back through Renaissance and ancient rhetoric) that literary form can serve as a technology for promoting democratic behaviors.
His recent book project, Comic Democracies: Practical Populism from Aristophanes to Denshawai (forthcoming), traces a half-dozen innovations in comic form—from the bait-and-switch style of Machiavelli’s La Mandragola to the Quixotic narrator of Tom Jones—that have been deployed by populist works such as Tom Paine’s Common Sense, The Declaration of Independence, and Frederick Douglass’ abolitionist speeches, to promote pluralism, risk-taking, adaptive imitation, the pursuit of happiness, eccentric governance, and other physical behaviors that have been empirically shown by modern political scientists to promote democratic practice.
His current book project, Thirteen Things that Literature Can Do, identifies thirteen different cognitive effects of literature—wonder, contempt, pity, amusement, horror, solace, curiosity, sympathy, restraint, paranoia, nostalgia, alienation, and belief—and traces the history of their formal development from Homer to Omeros, deriving thirteen simple formula for generating affect that can be used to engineer new literary works (and that can be empirically tested in modern psychology labs).
Elizabeth Hewitt
Department of English
Elizabeth Hewitt’s work concentrates on pre-1900 American and African American literature. Her book on correspondence and American political theory, Correspondence and American Literature, 1770-1865 was published by Cambridge University Press in 2005. She has also published essays on Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Charles Chestnutt, Judith Sergeant Murray, Pamela Zoline and antebellum business periodicals. She has also edited two volumes in the Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown series (published by Bucknell University Press), including Letters and Other Epistolary Writing. She is currently working on a monograph focused on the fiscal debates of the 1790s and their influence on the development of literary forms in the first decade of the United States.
Brian McHale
Department of English
McHale is currently engaged on two complementary projects that aim to finish off postmodernism, as it were–or at any rate to finish it off for myself, if not for anyone else. The first of these, nearing completion, is a Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism. The four main chapters key on four phases of postmodernism: the onset phase, which I date from the mid-1960’s; the “peak” phase, 1973-1989; an “interregnum” or “in-between” phase of uncertainty and reorientation, roughly coinciding with the 1990’s; and an aftermath or “coda” phase, dating from about 2001. Coupled with each of these historical chapters, literally as a side-bar, is the case-study of a motif that seems particularly to relevant to that phase: juxtaposed with the onset phase, a survey of late-twentieth-century versions and remediations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, which undergo a surprising revival and reorientation around the year 1966; juxtaposed with the “peak” phase, an account of the changing fortunes of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a touchstone of literary and cinematic postmodernism; coupled with the “interregnum” phase, the perennial figure of the angel, which achieves an unprecedented degree of cultural penetration and ubiquity in the nineties; and paired with the aftermath phase, the imagery of ruins, a venerable motif newly reimagined and reinterpreted in the post-September 11 moment.
The complementary project is an edited volume, The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature, which I am co-editing with Len Platt (Goldsmiths, London). The volume’s structure mirrors that of my Introduction, but with chapters contributed by 30-some experts on different aspects of literary culture during the postmodern decades. Between them, these two projects have forced my ongoing research into narrative in poetry onto the back burner, for the time being
Koritha Mitchell
Department on English
Koritha Mitchell specializes in African American literature, racial violence throughout U.S. literature and contemporary culture, and black drama and performance. She examines how texts, both written and performed, have helped terrorized families and communities survive and thrive. Her study Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930 (University of Illinois Press, 2011) won book awards from the American Theatre and Drama Society and from the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. Her essay “James Baldwin, Performance Theorist, Sings the Blues for Mister Charlie” appears in the March 2012 issue of American Quarterly and her Callaloo journal article “Love in Action” draws parallels between racial violence at the last turn of the century and anti-LGBT violence today. She recently completed a book manuscript, “From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture.”
Richard Samuels
Department of Philosophy
Samuels’ research focuses primarily on topics in the philosophy of psychology and foundations of cognitive science.
Robyn Warhol
Department of English
Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions, the anthology based on the Project Narrative Symposium on Queer and Feminist Narratologies held at OSU in May 2011, is now in press. Co-edited by Robyn Warhol and Susan S. Lanser (of Brandeis University), the collection will come out from the Theory and Interpretation of Narrative series at Ohio State University Press in May 2015. It lays out the present and future of feminist and queer narrative theories and contains new essays from sixteen scholars whose work has influenced and been influenced by queer and/or feminist narratology. The contents include essays by Warhol and Lanser as well as Alison Booth, Hillary Chute, Susan Fraiman, Susan Stanford Friedman, Suzanne Keen, Sue J. Kim, Jesse Matz, Wendy Moffat, Paul Morrison, Peggy Phelan, Valerie Rohy, Judith Roof, and Kay Young. Also included are responses by Claudia Breger, Shalyn Claggett, Abby Coykendall, Ellen Peel, and Joe Ponce.
Each of the scholars in the volume began with the questions, “What is feminist and/or queer about my work in narrative theory? What in my work within queer/feminist studies is guided by theories of narrative?” The results map out new directions for feminist and queer narratologies including intersectionality, animal studies, systems theory, graphic memoir, digital media, and global perspectives on religion, as well as new feminist/queer ways of thinking about topics that have long interested narrative theorists, such as life writing, temporality, and television studies. Twenty-five years after the inception of feminist narratology, the collection represents the continuing usefulness of narrative theory to projects in gender and sexuality studies, as well as the ongoing contributions of feminist/queer narratology to the field of narrative theory.