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. This month, we include three "binary stars:" three married couples in our junior ranks, all six of whom have found a home as new assistant professors in the College of Humanities.

Kristina Sessa and Christopher Otter join us as new assistant professors in the Department of History. Kristina's route to Ohio State went through Princeton, Berkeley, the American Academy in Rome, and Claremont McKenna College; Chris's passed through St. Anne's College, Oxford, Berkeley, the University of Exeter, the University of Manchester, and NYU. Kristina's research is on late Antiquity, particularly 4th-6th century Rome, and the concept of the household during the time of the early Papacy. Chris's attention is focused not on the house but the garden, or more broadly on food, agriculture, and technology, as a necessary corrective to military and cultural readings of historical development in Britain and Europe.

Dana Renga and Michael O'Riley join the faculty in the Department of French and Italian this year, coming to us from Colorado College. Dana completed her B.A. and Ph.D. at UCLA, where she wrote a dissertation on gender, culture, and history as seen through the lens of Italian film. Her subjects in that study range from Casanova to Silvio Berlusconi; she also has interests in French and Italian Holocaust Cinema. Michael did his B.A. at Saint Lawrence University and his Ph.D. at the University of Oregon. He has written a book on postcolonial haunting in francophone literature, and is now working on postcolonial literature in the Age of Terror, focusing on francophone cinema from The Battle of Algiers to the present day. We are delighted to have the Renga-O'Riley team on the faculty, both for their work in French and Italian and on behalf of the many other disciplines to which their work connects.

Louisa Shea and Bruce Fudge represent three departments in the College: Bruce is a new assistant professor in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, and Louisa has a joint appointment with Comparative Studies and French and Italian, also as an assistant professor. Of the three married couples joining the faculty in the College of Humanities this year, they are the most divergent in their research interests: Bruce is a classical Arabist, currently working on Shi-ite exegeses of the Koran (tafsir), while Louisa studies Enlightenment literature and thought, with a book project on cynicism and the Enlightenment (Diogenes in the Salon). Louisa comes to us from Rice by way of Smith College, where she did her B.A., Cambridge University, and then Harvard, where she completed a Ph.D. in Comparative Studies. Bruce comes by way of Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, McGill University, and Harvard University, where he did his Ph.D. in Arabic literature.

The Creative Writing Program in the Department of English has been named as one of "five up-and-coming programs" in the country by the Atlantic Monthly in its 2007 Fiction Issue. As the Director of the M.F.A. program, Lee Martin, says, "we like to think we have already 'arrived,' but still to be one of the 21 programs listed [...] is a good thing indeed and something we can all take pride in." This is another feather in the cap of a program that has seen several of its students receive national recognition: Don Pollock was awarded a contract with Doubleday for Knockemstiff, Christopher Coake, author of We're in Trouble, won the PEN/Bingham Prize and was named one of Granta Magazine's Best Young American Novelists, Erica Dawson was awarded the Anthony Hecht Poetry prize for her collection of poems Big-Eyed Afraid, and Holly Goddard Jones, author of Girl Trouble, has won a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award.