Humanities Faculty Spotlight:

College Welcomes New Faculty!

For the 2005-06 academic year, the College of Humanities welcomes 27 new faculty members. In the next several issues of the Humanities Express, we will be featuring these colleagues, all of whom, as you’ll see, are doing fascinating research and teaching in their respective fields. Here, then, for the month of September and in no particular order, are six of our new colleagues.

Greg Anderson (Ph.D., Yale University) has been hired by our Department of History as an assistant professor, specializing in ancient Greece. His first book, The Athenian Experiment: Building an Imagined Political Community in Ancient Attica, 508-490 B.C., has earned excellent reviews since its publication by the University of Michigan Press in 2003. Anderson has also published articles on Greek history, athletics, and politics. He has received an award for excellence in teaching and several research fellowships.

Ana Del Sarto (Ph.D., The Ohio State University) joins the Department of Spanish and Portuguese as an assistant professor with a focus in modern Latin American literatures and cultures. She is one of the co-editors of the important collection Latin American Cultural Studies Reader (Duke University Press, 2004) and has published articles on such topics as "Cinema Novo" (New/Third Cinema), cultural critique in Latin America, and the thinking of Carlos Monsiváis, a famous critic and chronicler of contemporary Mexican culture. Del Sarto is currently writing a book entitled Failures of Memory, Memories of Failure, which she worked on while a Scholar in Residence of the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society at Bowling Green State University last fall.

Robert J. McMahon (Ph.D., University of Connecticut), an internationally recognized expert in American foreign relations, joins us as a full professor with a joint appointment in the Department of History and the Mershon Center, where he will be the Ralph D. Mershon Distinguished Professor. The author of three books on the Cold War in Southeast Asia, McMahon has recently published an overview entitled The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2003). He has also edited seven volumes of documents on the Cold War era for the U.S. State Department. His new research deals with the United States as a "Vulnerable Titan" on the world stage during the past 60 years.

Joe Ponce (Ph.D., Rutgers University) is an assistant professor in the Department of English, specializing in Asian American literatures and cultures. His dissertation traces a history of Anglophone Filipino literature from the 1920s to the present, with a focus on three writers who migrated from the Philippines to the U.S.: José Garcia Villa, Carlos Bulosan, and Jessica Hagedorn. He has published on Langston Hughes and Bulosan and has received several research fellowships, including an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship. Besides Asian American literature, he teaches African American literature and culture, 20th-century American literature, and sexuality studies.

Mytheli Sreenivas (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) joins us an assistant professor holding a joint appointment in the Departments of History and Women's Studies. Her area of concentration is South Asian history and culture, with a focus on gender issues within that context. She has published essays on families and property under colonial law in India, on global perspectives on gender in the classroom, and on Tamil women's magazines in Colonial India. Before being hired by Ohio State, Sreenivas was an assistant professor of History and Director of Women’s Studies at the University of Connecticut-Stamford.

Gabriel Uzquiano Cruz (Ph.D., MIT) is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy and an internationally recognized expert in philosophical logic and metaphysics. He has written numerous articles on these subjects, including several recent essays on unrestricted quantification. His research often deals with paradox, with intriguing titles such as "The Supreme Court and the Supreme Court Justices: A Metaphysical Puzzle." Uzquiano Cruz’s co-edited collection, Absolute Generality, has been contracted with Oxford University Press and is expected to appear next year.