Current News

The College will host its 10^th annual career-exploration event designed for Humanities majors, 6:00-8:30 pm, February 15, Faculty Club. Please announce in your classes and encourage your students to attend; students of all ranks will benefit from this interaction with alumni. Contact: College of Humanities, 292-1882.

Michael Les Benedict, History: "Brown v. Board of Education: Majorities, Minorities, and Public Policy," trans. Hitomi Yoshida, Kanto Gakuin Law Review 16 (December 2006): 97-120.

David Herman, English: review of Yesterday's Self: Nostalgia and the Immigrant Identity, by Andreea Deciu Ritivoi, Symploke 13.1-2 (2005): 360-362 [published in 2007].

Jeredith Merrin, English: Homophonic translation of Polish poem in Circumference #5 (November 2006): 146.

Doug Ramspeck [Sutton-Ramspeck], English-Lima: "Chiaroscuro" and "The Commotion," poems, The Worcester Review 27.1-2 (2006): 7, 2; "Imperial Twilight," poem, Xavier Review 26.1-2 (Spring/Fall 2006): 85; "The Marriage," poem, Pebble Lake Review 4.1 (Fall/Winter 2006): 30; and "Winter Ash," poem, Confrontation Magazine 96/97 (Fall 2006/Winter 2007): 299.

Beth Sutton-Ramspeck, English-Lima: review of Behind Her Times: Transition England in the Novels of Mary Arnold Ward, by Judith Wilt, Nineteenth-Century Literature 61.2 (September 2006): 263-67.

Graduate student Marissa Cull, English, has been awarded the Graduate Student Travel Award from the Shakespeare Association of America, to help offset costs for travel to this year's conference in San Diego.

Franco Barchiesi, African American and African Studies, presented "Land, Labor and Constitutionalism in the New World Economy: Lessons from South Africa and the Global South" at the Cornell University Law School, Ithaca, New York, January 26.

Daniel Hobbins, History, presented "Publishing before Print: Jean Gerson and the Medieval Mass Market" at the Medieval Colloquium Series at Northwestern University, December 7.

Lee Martin, English, read from his fiction at The Ohio State University at Marion, February 6.

Lucy E. Murphy, History-Newark, presented "'The damned Yankee court and jury': 'Wisconsin Fur Trade Families and the Imposition of the U.S. Court Systems in the Early 19^th Century," at the annual meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory, Williamsburg, Virginia, November 4, and "Married into the Tribe: Fur Trade Wives and Mothers in the Post-Fur Trade Era," at the annual meeting of the Center for French Colonial Studies, Naperville, Illinois, October 21.

The Writing Programs of the Department of English will sponsor the Writing Pedagogy Forum with the Digital Media Project Staff speaking on "Whose Text? Plagiarism, Copyright, and Cultural Differences," 1:30 pm, February 9, 131 Mendenhall Lab. Faculty, Lecturers, and Graduate Teaching Assistants are welcome; refreshments will be provided. Contact: Department of English, 292-6065.

Gerhild Scholz Williams (Washington University, St. Louis) will present "The Global and the Local: Wonders in the News," 2:30 pm, February 9, 90 Science and Engineering Library, in The Marvelous Lecture Series. Contact: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 292-7495.

David Sanson, Philosophy, will present "A Defense of Meinongian Presentism," 3:30 pm, February 12, 350 University Hall, in the Philosophy Colloquium. Contact: Department of Philosophy, 292-7914.

Local author Sandra Gurvis, will discuss her latest book: Where Have All the Flower Children Gone?, 6:00 pm, February 15, African American and African Studies Community Extension Center. Contact: 292-3922; visit http://aaascec.osu.edu.

The next Mother Tongue MFA Student Reading will be held 8:00 pm, February 15, Barley's Brewing Company, 467 North High Street. The reading, featuring Kim Brauer, Catie Crabtree, Don Pollock, Jesse Quillian, Letitia Trent, and Casey Ward, is free and open to the public.

The Writing Programs of the Department of English will sponsor the Writing Pedagogy Forum with the Digital Media Project Staff speaking on "Breaking the Routine: Creating Innovative Writing Assignments," 1:30 pm, February 16, 131 Mendenhall Lab. Faculty, Lecturers, and Graduate Teaching Assistants are welcome and refreshments will be provided. Contact: Department of English, 292-6065.

Lisa Downing, Philosophy, will present "Rationalism, Empiricism, and Mechanism," 11:30 am, February 21, 104 East 15^th Avenue, in the Horizons Lecture Series. Contact: Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities, 688-0265.

Author Lynn Emanuel will give a public reading, 7:30 pm, February 21, Wexner Film/Video Theatre. Contact: Creative Writing Program, 292-2242.

Susan Williams, English, will present " Autonomy and Collaboration: Or, Why I Study the History of Authorship," in the College's fifth Inaugural Lecture of the year at 4:30 pm, February 22, OSU Faculty Club. Readers of literature often find themselves wanting to know something about the author of the work they are reading: "No man can read a fine author, and relish him to his very bones, while he reads," as Herman Melville put it, "without subsequently fancying to himself some ideal image of the man and his mind." Yet that ideal image, as Melville also points out, is often at odds with the "real" person, and sometimes readers prefer to move away from biographical facts in order to focus on authors' texts and their meanings. Why, then, study authorship as its own subject? This lecture will explore that question, focusing in particular on the history of authorship in nineteenth-century America. During this time, the Romantic image of the author as hero vied with other conceptions of this role, including the author as social activist and as detailed observer of "real life." These various conceptions, in turn, hinged on a crucial debate about the relative values of autonomy and collaboration. Was the ideal author an autonomous prophetic genius or a collaborator with his or her publishers and readers? Could such collaboration itself provide an opportunity for increased autonomy and authority? This last question was particularly vexed for women and minority authors, who eventually led the way toward a more fluid understanding of the relation between autonomy and collaboration.

"A Literacy Studies Miscellany: Recent Work and Work in Progress," 11:30 am, February 23, 104 East 15^th Avenue, in the Graduate Student Interdisciplinary Seminar on Literacy Studies. Contact: Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities, 688-0265.

The Writing Programs of the Department of English will sponsor the Writing Pedagogy Forum with the Digital Media Project Staff speaking on "From One Screen to Another: Teaching Writing through Film," 1:30 pm, February 23, 131 Mendenhall Lab. Faculty, Lecturers, and Graduate Teaching Assistants are welcome and refreshments will be provided. Contact: Department of English, 292-6065.

Stephen Knight (Cardiff University) will present "Marvelous Merlin: Knowledge, Propphecy and Power," 2:30 pm, February 23, 90 Science and Engineering Library, in The Marvelous Lecture Series. Contact: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 292-7495.

Richard Gordon, Spanish and Portuguese, will present "The Performance of Late-Eighteenth-Century Portugal and Brazil in 'Novo entremez Os Malaquecos, ou Os costumes brazileiros' [ca. 1787]," 3:30 pm, February 23, 46 Hagerty Hall, for the Lusophone Globalicities Working Group. Contact: Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities, 688-0265.