Current News

Kevin Boyle, History, will present "Josie's Story: Looking for History in Some Very Small Places" in the College's final Inaugural Lecture of the year at 4:30 pm, May 30, OSU Faculty Club. For a quarter century historians have used finely-wrought stories of obscure people a heretical miller, a long-lost soldier, a frontier midwife to explore the cultures of particular times and places. While this approach has flourished in some fields, it has made almost no headway in twentieth-century American history. This presentation discusses the challenges of doing microhistories of the modern era and the joy of uncovering the past in some very small places. Contact: 292-1882.

Faculty and staff are invited to the College's 12th annual Baccalaureate at 3:30 pm, Saturday, June 10, in 131 Hitchcock Hall. Alumnus Brian Besanceney (B.A. History/Political Science) will give the Baccalaureate address. Mr. Besanceney is the assistant secretary for public affairs in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. RSVP: College of Humanities, 292-1882. Please encourage graduating students to participate. Visit the Student Information page.

Lee Abbott, English: All Things, All At Once: New and Selected Stories (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006).

Morris Beja, English: "The Seim Anew: Time, Memory, and Identity in Joyce and Modernist Literature," Papers on Joyce 10/11 (2004-2005): 29-44.

Jared Gardner, English: "Borders and Monuments," Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies (Spring 2005).

Erin McGraw, English: "George Saunders Veers From The Loopy," review of George Saunders' In Persuasion Nation, Raleigh News & Observer, May 14, 5-G

Graduate student Rachael Ball, History, has been awarded a U.S. Fulbright Grant to Spain for the academic year of 2006-07 for her dissertation project entitled, "Closing the Corrales: The Seventeenth-Century Theatre Crisis."

Graduate student Susan Delagrange, English, has won the Hugh Burns Dissertation Award for the best dissertation in Computers and Composition Studies.

Dorothy Noyes, English, has been named to the Advisory Board of the Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares (Madrid).

Dorothy Noyes, English, and Margaret Mills, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, have received funding from the Mershon Center and the Office of International Affairs Interdisciplinary Lectures, Seminars, and Conferences Program for a Center for Folklore Studies conference, "Folklore Archives and the State: Post-Socialist Negotiations." The conference, to be held May 3-5, 2007, will bring together 15 scholars from 12 countries to discuss the political uses of cultural archives.

Graduate student Ashley Overstreet, English, received the OSU Center for Folklore Studies' Patrick B. Mullen Award for her paper entitled, "'More Than Just a Job:' Acknowledging the Cognitive Practices and Values of Blue Top Waitresses."

Christopher Phelps, History, received a Helm Fellowship to research at the Lilly Library at Indiana University in Bloomington.

Graduate student Matthew Chudnow, East Asian Languages and Literatures, has won the Stanley J. Kahrl Award for Outstanding Student Essay for the best graduate student essay for his paper "The 'Kiritsubo' Chapter and 'The Song of Lasting Regret': Intertextual Dynamics in Murasaki Shikibu’s Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji), " which was written in Winter 2006 for Japanese 877: Topics and Problems in Japanese Literature

Jared Gardner, English, presented "Periodical Comics Archives and Access" and was chair of the "Periodical Comics and Cartoons," Research Society for American Periodicals Panel, American Literature Association, San Francisco, May.

Carole Fink, History, co-organized the conference, "Ostpolitik, 1969-1974: The European and Global Response" at the Mershon Center, co-sponsored by the German Historical Institute of Washington, DC., May 12-13. She presented "Israel: The Transformation of the 'Special Relationship'" on May 13.

Robin Judd, History, presented "Circumcision in Freud's Context: The State of the Art, 1856-1939" at the Freud's Foreskin: A Sesquicentennial Celebration of the Most Suggestive Circumcision in History, Colloquium, New York Public Library, May 10.

Graduate student Glenn Kranking, History, presented "The Swedish Identity Crisis and Colonial Sweden: 19th Century Neocolonial Expansion and the Swedish Diaspora in the Russian Empire" at the annual Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study conference in Oxford, Mississippi, May 4-6. The paper was nominated for the Aurora Borealis Prize for best graduate student paper in area studies presented at the conference.

Dorothy Noyes, English, presented "Settlers and Invaders: Festival Origins and Resentful Dependence in Seventeenth Century Languedoc." Colonization and Narrative Migrations: Legends of Occupation from the Mediterranean to the Americas, OSU Center for Folklore Studies, May 12.

Heather Tanner, History-Mansfield, presented "Feudalism in Fact and Fiction in Northern France" at the 41st International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 5.

The Sixth National Meeting, German-American Cross Currents and Exchanges in the 21st Century, takes place June 2-4.  Participants include John Maciuika (City University of New York Baruch College), Jutta Limbach, (Goethe Institut), Volker Berghahn (Columbia University), Stephen Dahms (Alfred E. Mann Foundation for Biomedical Engineering), Brenda P. Winnewisser (OSU Physics Department), and Theodore Ziolkowski (Princeton University). Contact: Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, 292-6985; visit the Alexander von Humboldt Association of America (AvHAA) Web site.

Students in Lewis Ulman’s section of English 569C will host an Open House, 1:45-3:15 pm, June 6, 343 Denney Hall, at which they will unveil their electronic scholarly editions of 18 previously unpublished manuscript letters held in Ohio State’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. The letters were written between 1862 and 1864 by William B. Anderson, a riverboat captain plying the Ohio River, to his wife. The editions follow the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative and the MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions, and incorporate media other than text, including high-resolution scans of the manuscript sources. The letters touch on domestic, commercial, and military matters, so the editions should interest students of American social history and cultural studies, American literature, the Civil War, business history, letter writing, textual editing, digital libraries, and multimodal composing. Contact: Lewis Ulman (ulman.1@osu.edu).

Faculty and staff are invited to participate in the Humanities Alumni Society’s inaugural Golf Outing on July 17 at the OSU Gray Course. Proceeds from the event benefit the Humanities Alumni Scholarship Fund which supports Humanities undergraduate students. For details, visit http://humanities.osu.edu/alumni/default.cfm. Contact: Shari Lorbach, 688-4532 or lorbach.1@osu.edu