Humanities Faculty Spotlight:

Seven Stars in the Humanities: A Humanities Pleiad

A monthly series featuring the achievements of seven faculty members in the College of Humanities. A Pleiad is the term for a group of seven particularly illustrious persons, after the seven daughters of Atlas, who were transformed into the Pleiades, stars found in the constellation Taurus and used for navigation since antiquity. The word derives from the Greek word πλειν, which means to sail: this month, the College of Humanities sails by the light of the Pleiad below.

Rebeka Campos-Astorkiza, new assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, can be found in her laboratory amid computers, microphones, and speech analysis software to advance the College of Humanities’ already sterling reputation in Hispanic Linguistics. Her new Speech Analysis Lab will be able to present and analyze acoustic data both visually and aurally, so that students and faculty will be able to see the sound they hear mapped by computer. Rebeka will teach advanced seminars on experimental approaches to Spanish phonology as well as courses on speech pronunciation as related to language teaching. When she isn’t found in her lab, she will be found in the field, gathering information from native speakers in the Basque and Asturian regions of Spain.

Jonathan Burgoyne, new assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, has need of only one piece of equipment for his research: a magnifying glass. His work on medieval manuscripts, particularly the work of the 14th century Spanish writer Juan Manuel, has led him to publish his first book, Reading the Exemplum Right: Fixing the Meaning of El Conde Lucanor, just out from North Carolina Press. Taking the canonical text of Manuel’s moral stories, Jonathan follows the reception of the tales through to the present day, all the time fixing his attention to variants in the text as it changes over time.

Jim Phelan, Humanities Distinguished Professor in the Department of English, has received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to conduct a Summer Seminar on Narrative Theory here in Columbus during the summer of 2008. The seminar, “Rhetoric and Ethics in Fiction and Nonfiction,” will guide its participants through a concentrated study of contemporary narrative theory as well as a range of narratives from Ian McEwan's Atonement to Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. It will pay special attention to the connection between authors' rhetorical strategies and purposes and the ethical dimensions of their work. The seminar will also provide an opportunity for the participants to pursue their own research projects in narrative theory. This is the second time Jim has been awarded a grant for this topic.

May Mergenthaler, new assistant professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, has studied in Hamburg, at Johns Hopkins, in Berlin, and at Princeton: we are delighted that she has arrived at Ohio State. A 17th and 18th century specialist, May works on Romantic readings of Romanticism – a deliberate return to the original interplay between author and reader in Friedrich Schlegel and his circle (August Wilhelm Schlegel, Caroline Schlegel, Novalis, Dorothea Veit, and Schleiermacher). Romanticism was deeply implicated in dialogue, aspiring to a state of perfect communication that it modeled on the ancient Greeks, and particularly on Socrates. And if perfect communication is the model for any teacher, particularly one in a foreign language department, it is clear that May Mergenthaler will be able to bring her teaching and research together in an ideal way.

Bernhard Malkmus, new assistant professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, is a student of the picaresque form, with a dissertation from the University of Cambridge on the journeying rogue in Melville, Kafka, Mann, Bellow, Kosinski, Grass, and others. The fact that he comes from Konstanz by way of Frankfurt, Prague, Cambridge-Massachusetts, Cambridge-England, and Goldsmith’s College in London only lends credibility to his narrative of the wandering hero. This winter he will teach a graduate seminar on the German picaresque tradition, which will place that tradition in the wider context provided by Valdés, Voltaire, and the rise of the English novel. His next project will take him to the English and German colonies of Africa for historical research on the conflicted and often self-deluding motives that led the two rival empires to establish and then abruptly dismantle a presence in Namibia, South Africa, Tanganyika, Kenya and elsewhere.

Richard Samuels, new full professor in the Department of Philosophy, works primarily on issues in the philosophy of psychology and the foundations of cognitive science. In particular, he is interested in theories of cognitive architecture. According to many contemporary approaches to the study of cognition, minds are structured mechanisms; and the search for that structure has often led to modular accounts, on which minds are composed of lots of highly specialized mechanisms. Richard’s work on the nature of reasoning argues for a non-modular approach, in which judgment and decision-making cannot be so easily compartmentalized. His Ph.D. at Rutgers on the nature and philosophical implications of evolutionary psychology led to positions at the University of Pennsylvania and King’s College, London. It is a great privilege to welcome him to the College of Humanities, a place where non-modular thinking thrives.

Snjezana Buzov, assistant professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, has received an American Council of Learned Societies Southeast European Studies Program Conference grant to organize the conference, “Conversion to Islam and Islamization in the Early Ottoman Balkans,” to be held in Sarajevo, Bosnia. The conference investigates the fascinating history of the Balkans, which were Ottoman before they were Austro-Hungarian, Yugoslavian, or independent, in terms of the degree to which each particular area embraced Islam in the 14th to 17th century. Some parts of the Balkans, like Bosnia and Albania, underwent a general conversion to the Islamic faith; in other parts the process was more cultural, literary, and architectural than it was religious. The discussion has obvious implications for present-day notions of Islamic influence, and no one is more capable of negotiating these cross-national and cross-temporal boundaries than Snjezana, who is herself a professor of Turkish and a native of Bosnia.