Humanities Faculty Spotlight:

New Faculty Profiles

This month we continue our series on new faculty in the College of Humanities, with profiles of seven more outstanding colleagues who have joined us this year.

Franco Barchiesi (Ph.D. in Sociology, University of the Witwatersand, Johannesburg) has been hired as an Assistant Professor in our African American and African Studies Department. Professor Barchiesi has published widely on the topic of the "new" South Africa, especially in terms of the politics, labor, and social movements of the region. His doctoral dissertation is on "Social Citizenship and the Transformations of Wage Labor in the Making of Post-Apartheid South Africa, 1994-2001." Among his many research productions, he is the co-editor of Rethinking the Labour Movement in the "New South Africa" (London: Ashgate, 2003). His most recent study on South African social movements is forthcoming in Challenging Hegemony: Social Movements and the Quest for a New Humanism in Post-Apartheid South Africa, edited by Nigel Gibson (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2006). The recipient of numerous grants for his research, he most recently taught in the Department of Politics at the University of Bologna (Italy). He is currently teaching courses on introductory African history and politics and on South African history.

Hired as an Assistant Professor of English (Mansfield campus), Susan Delagrange (Ph.D., Ohio State University) specializes in digital media and visual rhetoric, with intersecting interests in feminist rhetoric, teaching with technology, composition studies, and business and professional communication. Prior to joining the faculty, she was the Director of the Writing Center at Mansfield since 1994 and of the First-Year Writing Program since 1999. Professor Delagrange's dissertation, "Technologies of Wonder: (re)Mediating Rhetorical Practice," argues that the visual must be viewed as a legitimate form of rhetoric so as to enrich our understanding of teaching today's students who typically inhabit an environment rich in technology. She is also a contributor to The Bedford Bibliography for Teachers of Basic Writing (2002) and assistant editor of Rhetorical Visions: Writing and Reading in a Visual Culture, forthcoming from Prentice Hall. Her teaching covers a wide range of subjects, including basic writing, composition, rhetorical analysis, professional writing, and digital media and English studies.

Robert Hughes (Ph.D., Comparative Literature, Emory University) has been recently hired as Assistant Professor of English at OSU-Newark. He specializes in American literature, with additional interests in psychoanalysis, and literary theory at the intersection of ethics and aesthetics. His current book project, a revision of his dissertation, examines the problem of witnessing that occurs in three works of early American fiction. Within the context of revolutionary America, these works present an impossible ethical imperative: to bear witness to an event, the nature of which cannot be precisely determined, by putting it properly into language. Professor Hughes has published part of this project as an article in Arizona Quarterly. He is also co-editor of the collection After Lacan: Clinical Practice and the Subject of the Unconscious (State University of New York Press, 2002). At the Newark campus this year, Professor Hughes is teaching English composition as well as courses in American literature.

Carolina López-Ruiz (Ph.D., University of Chicago) joins our Department of Greek and Latin as an Assistant Professor, with a concentration in Greek Language and History. The completion of her dissertation, "The Sons of Earth and Starry Heaven: Greek Theogonic Traditions and Their Northwest Semitic Background," was supported by a Whiting Dissertation Scholarship given at the University of Chicago. She also received the Edward L. Ryerson Fellowship in Archaeology, which allowed her to do archaeological research in Greek, Phoenician, and Iberian Sites in Southern Spain in the summer of 1999. Professor López-Ruiz has published several essays and book reviews, and is co-editor of the collection "Colonialism in Ancient Iberia: Rethinking Phoenician, Greek, and Indigenous Encounters," currently under review. Her teaching and research specialties include Archaic Greek Literature, History and Archaeology, Greek and Near Eastern Contacts, and Phoenician and Greek colonization.

Koritha Mitchell (Ph.D., University of Maryland) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English with a specialization in African American literature. Her dissertation examines thirteen black-authored lynching plays written before 1935, in the midst of mob violence. Rather than call attention to the brutalized body, these scripts spotlight the family left behind. Mitchell argues that the genre is less concerned with convincing whites that lynching is wrong and more focused on building and sustaining black communities. Professor Mitchell received a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship and has published a portion of her study as an essay. This year, she will teach honors composition, survey of African American literature, special topics in African American literature, and introduction to graduate study in African American literature, 1900-present.

Joining our Department of Philosophy as an Assistant Professor, David Sanson (Ph.D., UCLA) has research and teaching expertise in metaphysics and medieval philosophy. He is currently transforming several chapters from his dissertation, "Being and Time: The Metaphysics of Past and Future in a Dynamic World," into self-standing articles, including "The Essentially Unreal Past' and "Is the Past Hypothetical?" Professor Sanson is also co-authoring a history of the liar paradox in Arabic philosophy from the 9th to 15th centuries. While a graduate student at UCLA, he was awarded two fellowships and was the recipient of two teaching awards. This year, Professor Sanson will teach an undergraduate course on medieval philosophy, and a graduate course on the metaphysics of time and change, among others.