Ben Caplan

Ben Caplan (Ph.D., UCLA) joins the Department of Philosophy as an associate professor, having previously taught at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, and at the University of California, Los Angeles. He specializes in metaphysics and philosophy of language. Professor Caplan has published in top-tier journals such as Mind, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and the Philosophical Review on the metaphysics of change, the content of experience, and the semantics of demonstratives. His co-authored work on Gottiob Frege was the subject of a conference at the University of London in 2005. Currently Professor Caplan is working on the nature of sets and the ontology of art. He has received the Prince of Wales Gold Medal in Moral and Mental Philosophy from the Department of Philosophy at McGill University, the Rudolf and Ina Carnap Essay Prize from the Department of Philosophy at UCLA (three times), the Robert M. Yost Prize for Excellence in Teaching also from the Department of Philosophy at UCLA, and a Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. This year, Professor Caplan is teaching Symbolic Logic, Advanced Metaphysics, an Honors Introduction to Philosophy, and a seminar in metaphysics.

Sara Crosby

Sara Crosby (Ph.D., Notre Dame), an assistant professor in the Department of English (Marion campus), specializes in 19th-century U.S. literature. She is working on a book entitled "The Female Poisoner and Civilizing Mixtures in Popular American Literature, 1840-1864," which investigates the question of why so many antebellum American texts focus on women who poison men. Professor Crosby's quest for an answer to this question led her to the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) in Massachusetts, where her research was funded by a long-term National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. While at the AAS, she discovered that the female poisoners who play such a central role in 19th-century American literary works by celebrated authors such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, have real-life counterparts in print media of the time, including trial transcripts, newspapers, and a sensational genre of "true" female poisoner pamphlets. Professor Crosby is also the author of an essay on contemporary female action heroes, published in the collection Action Chicks (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004). In her teaching, she attempts to motivate students by showing them how literary critics resemble detectives, asking them to uncover and solve the mysteries of a literary work by using creative role-playing and analysis of textual "clues."

Derek Heng

Joining our Department of History (Marion campus) as an assistant professor, Derek Heng (Ph.D., University of Hull, UK) focuses on Southeast Asian history in his teaching and research. His primary specialization is the pre-modern economic interaction between Southeast Asia and China; in pursuing this research he takes an integrative approach by employing both Chinese and Southeast Asian textual and archaeological data. Professor Heng also has expertise in the pre-modern state formation of coastal port-states in Maritime Southeast Asian history and in the historiography of Singapore's past. Before joining our History department, he taught for five years at the National University of Singapore and was responsible for setting up the public history internship program between the National Heritage Board (Singapore) and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore. His writings have been published by the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies and the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. He has also edited a volume entitled New Perspectives and Sources on the History of Singapore: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach (published by the National Library Board, Singapore). His current project is entitled "Trade and Diplomacy: Sino-Malay Relations in the 10th – 14th Centuries AD." This year, he is teaching courses in the pre-modern history of China, historical thought and methodology, and world history before AD 1500.

Merrill Kaplan

Hired with a joint appointment in the Department of English and the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Merrill Kaplan (Ph.D, University of California, Berkeley) specializes in Scandinavian languages and literatures, as well as folklore and mythology. As an assistant professor, she will teach courses this year on Nordic Mythology and Medieval Culture, Vikings and the Norse in Popular Culture, the U.S. Folk Experience, and Legend. Professor Kaplan has published essays in Gripla, Ibsen Studies, Scandanavian Studies, and Journal of English and German Philology. From 2001-2003, she also served as reviews editor for Culture Analysis: An Interdisciplinary Forum on Folklore and Popular Culture, an on-line journal based at Berkeley. She is currently working on a book entitled "The Irruption of the Past in Nornagests þáttr [The Tale of Nornagestr] and Allied Texts," which compares the tensions between narrator and audience within frame tales to those between informant and collector during the collection of folklore. Professor Kaplan is the recipient of a number of awards and fellowships, including the Aurora Borealis Prize (twice) for the best graduate student paper in Area Studies presented at an annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Scandanavian Studies, an American Scandinavian Foundation Fellowship, and a Fulbright-Hays Grant to conduct research in Norway.

Morgan Liu

Morgan Liu (Ph.D., University of Michigan) was hired in 2005 as an assistant professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, but this is his first year at Ohio State since last year he was completing a three-year term as a Junior Fellow in the prestigious Society of Fellows program at Harvard University, which gives scholars of exceptional promise at an early stage of their careers an opportunity to devote themselves to their scholarship. Professor Liu is a cultural anthropologist studying Islamic practice in post-socialist Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan), the former Soviet Union, and northwestern China. His interests also include the ethnography of the state, space, embodiment, phenomenology, agency, and emergence. Currently he is writing a book, "Yearning for a Khan: A Social Imaginary of Post-Soviet Transformation in Central Asia." This year Professor Liu teaches courses on the cultures of the Middle East, on Central Asian societies, and on the City and Culture.

Tiyi Morris

Tiyi Morris (Ph.D., Purdue University) joins the Department of African American and African Studies (Newark campus) as an assistant professor specializing in Black women's activism and women's contributions to the Civil Rights movement. She is the author of a chapter, "Local Women and the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi: Re-visioning Womanpower Unlimited," published in Groundwork: The Local Black Freedom Movement in America (New York University Press, 2005). In this chapter, she examines Womanpower Unlimited, founded by Claire Collins Harvey on May 29, 1961, in Jackson, Mississippi. Originally established to help the Freedom Riders in their efforts to spread the cause of civil rights for African Americans, Womanpower Unlimited expanded to related forms of activism such as organizing voter registration drives, providing youth education, and promoting peace. The chapter is also part of a longer project that Professor Morris is working on, tentatively titled "Black Women's Civil Rights Activism in Mississippi: The Story of Womanpower Unlimited." She is also author of the Foreword to Black Power in the Belly of the Beast, edited by Judson Jeffries (University of Illinois, 2006). Professor Morris's previous position was in the History Department at DePauw University. This year, she will teach Introduction to African American and African Studies, the History of African Americans in the Age of Slavery, the History of African-Americans from Emancipation to the Present, and Introduction to Women's Studies.

Declan Smithies

An assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy, Declan Smithies (Ph.D., New York University) also holds an appointment as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Research School at the Australian National University, where he will be affiliated with the Australian Research Council project, "Consciousness and the Hegemony of Representation." His primary research fields are epistemology and philosophy of mind. While at NYU, Professor Smithies received several significant fellowships, including one that supported work on his dissertation, Rationality and the Subject's Point of View. In this work, he developed an internalist theory of rationality in an effort to explain the relationship between consciousness and rationality. During his first year at Ohio State, Professor Smithies will teach an Honors Introduction to Philosophy, Advanced Philosophy of Mind, Advanced Philosophy of Language, and a seminar in epistemology.