Adélékè Adéèkó

Hired as a full professor in the Department of English and named a Humanities Distinguished Professor, Adélékè Adéèkó (Ph.D., University of Florida) specializes in African and African American Literature, with expertise in postcolonial studies. He has published two books, the most recent of which is entitled The Slave’s Rebellion: Literature, History, Orature (Indiana University Press, 2005). He is currently working on two book projects, one of which explores the ways language use is expected to change social experience in African American poetry. The other book examines the many transformations of the panegyric in contemporary southwestern Nigerian culture. Professor Adéèkó has taught a range of courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, most recently at the University of Colorado where he was associate professor of English as well as chair of the Department of Comparative Literatures and Humanities. Some of these courses include Freshman English; Modern Critical Theory; Postcolonial Literature, Theory, and Criticism; and Pan-African Literature.

Weihong Bao

Weihong Bao (Ph.D., University of Chicago) joins our Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures as an assistant professor specializing in modern Chinese cinema and media culture. Her dissertation, Baptism by Fire: Spectatorship and Aesthetic Affect in Chinese Cinema from Shanghai to Chongqing, investigates questions of spectatorship and aesthetic affect in modern Chinese cinema and media up to 1945. Her most recent publication is an essay in Camera Obscura on the vernacular translation of the serial queen in Chinese silent films, 1927-1931. Professor Bao is also interested in the relationship between Chinese cinema and drama, as well as the aesthetics and politics of sound. Her teaching covers a wide range of subject matter, including media aesthetics, Chinese cinema, Chinese drama, and comparative studies on Japanese and Chinese film. Among her other duties at Ohio State, she will be a member of the Interdisciplinary Committee on Film Studies.

Richard Fletcher

Richard Fletcher (Ph.D., University of Cambridge) is an assistant professor in the Department of Greek and Latin. His research interests include Latin literature and philosophy of the Rpublican and Imperial periods, the reception of Plato and traditions of Platonism, and methods and theories of cultural translation in the ancient world and beyond. His dissertation was entitled Apuleius’ Plato: The Role of Biography in the Exegesis of Philosophy; and he has published essays on the intertextual dynamic between Hesiod’s Catalogue of Women and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and on Julia Kristeva’s reconfiguration of the Bakhtinian theory of the novel, as developed in ancient literary genres. This year, Professor Fletcher will teach courses on Gender and Sexuality in Antiquity, Genre and Identity in Roman Philosophy (graduate seminar), Masterpieces of Greek Literature in Translation, and Masterpieces of Latin Literature in Translation (Honor’s course).

Lisa Downing

Nationally known for her scholarship in the history of modern philosophy, Lisa Downing (Ph.D., Princeton University) joins our Department of Philosophy as a full professor. She has published a number of essays, with John Locke and George Berkeley as frequent subjects. She has plans to write a book on Berkeley as part of Routledge’s new series The Routledge Philosophers; and is currently completing a book manuscript on empiricism and Newtonianism, which will provide a philosophical analysis of the controversy surrounding Newton’s dynamics, particularly his theory of gravity, in the early 18th century. Professor Downing is also the recipient of several major grants and fellowships, including a year-long fellowship from the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a Mellon Fellowship for conducting research at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

Snjevana Buzov

Snjezana Buzov (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is an assistant professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. With research specializations in Ottoman history and literature as well as Islamic law, Professor Buzov's dissertation was entitled The Lawmaker and His Lawgivers: The Role of Legal Discourse in the Change of the Ottoman Imperial Culture. In addition to Turkish and Arabic she speaks and/or does research in several other languages, French, German, Russian, Latin, and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (her native language). Professor Buzov is the author of a number of essays and translations, several of which examine cultural perceptions of outsiders or minority groups within Balkan nations. In the fall, she will teach a course on intellectuals in the Middle East.

Ray Cashman

Ray Cashman (Ph.D., Indiana University) joins our Department of English as a specialist in folklore. His most recent position was in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alabama-Birmingham. The author of numerous articles on Irish oral traditions, customs, and material culture, Professor Cashman has recently completed a book manuscript, “Characters and Community: Storytelling on the Irish Border,” which provides an ethnographic study of storytelling as equipment for living in a mixed Catholic-Protestant border community. He has also served as a consultant, fieldworker, and organizer of exhibits for a variety of public folklore societies, including the Alabama Folklife Program and Traditional Arts Indiana. The focus of his research is commemoration, collective memory, and identity; besides Ireland, he has conducted research in the American South, Southwest, and Midwest.

Lilia Fernandez

Hired in 2005 as an assistant professor in the Department of History, Lilia Fernandez (Ph.D., Ethnic Studies, University of California-San Diego), spent last year at the University of Illinois as a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow. While there, she worked on her book manuscript on Latino/a migration and community formation in Chicago from 1945-1980. Her research interests include Latino/a immigration history, race and ethnic identity formation, women’s history, and urban renewal and gentrification. Professor Fernandez has been awarded various fellowships from such institutions as the Ford Foundation, the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She has published articles on Latino/a education, Latino/a youth culture, and community displacement of Mexican Americans in Chicago. Professor Fernandez will teach courses on Chicana/o and Latina/o History and Latina/o Studies. Her appointment includes an affiliation with the Latino/a Studies Program.