Kathyrn Campbell-Kibler

Kathyrn Campbell-Kibler, new assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics, has arrived from Stanford and Michigan to establish a new laboratory for sociolinguistic study. The Sociolinguistics Lab will allow for perception experiments, research on stored archival material, recording and transcription of sociolinguistic data, and conversation between various points of connection across the university from psychology to English. Kathryn's work focuses on the phenomenon of sociolinguistic priming, whereby a change in response can be predicted based on exposure to semantic and social cues. If social cognition explains how we activate stereotypes, and linguistic cognition explains how we process language, Kathryn's research proposes to bring together these two forms of making meaning. If Humanities is a connection of linked networks, the work of Kathryn Campbell-Kibler is better connected, and more closely linked to a wider range of networks, than most.

Theodora Dragostinova

Theodora Dragostinova, new assistant professor in the Department of History, is interested in the nature of national identity, and how loyalties to a nation change over time. Nationality is a social construct, more a matter of political rhetoric and social negotiation than a primordial impulse, and Theodora's work investigates the strategies by which individuals and societies develop a state of belonging, adopting a version of history as a national myth. Her project, Between Two Motherlands: Nationality and Emigration among the Greeks of Bulgaria, studies this question, focusing on the Balkan Peninsula during the first half of the twentieth century. Theodora comes to us from Auburn University; her Ph.D., from the University of Illinois, was awarded the 2007 John O. Iatrides Prize for the best English-language dissertation on a Greek subject.

Georges Tamer, M.S. Sofia Chair in Arabic Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, comes to us from the Freie Universität Berlin, where he was guest professor in Arabic Studies. Georges Tamer completed his Habilitation at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg with a study of Hellinistic images of time in Pre-Islamic poetry and the Koran. He has studied philosophy with Jürgen Habermas and written on the work of Leo Strauss; his next project, and his first written in English, will be on The Concept of Time in the Koran. Born in Lebanon, Georges Tamer teaches us that the Arabic culture is and has always been a pluralistic one, with Ancient Philosophy, Eastern Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all playing separate and overlapping roles. At the same time, modern Arabic culture is dependent on the vividness of the past, and Islam provides a deep continuity—in Tamer's words, a "red thread"—that runs through all aspects of religious and secular life. "The Sofia Chair," says Tamer, "provides me with perfect freedom to define the field, and will allow me to bring my teaching and my research into perfect balance." He hopes to establish a post-doc research group, in the name of the Sofia Chair, to explore the various aspects of Arabic culture in the past and present. We are extremely fortunate to have a person of such wide and deep learning, and with such an obvious commitment to both his teaching and his scholarship, on our faculty.

Nathan Wallace

Nathan Wallace, new assistant professor in the Department of English (Marion), comes to us from the University of Notre Dame, where he completed both his M.F.A. and his Ph.D. His dissertation studied Anglo-Irish relations in the works of Edmund Burke, Matthew Arnold, and Edward Dowden; he has published on "Shakespeare Biography and the Theory of Reconciliation in Edward Dowden and James Joyce" for English Literary History. His wide array of interests include visual culture, Enlightenment philosophy, and British and Irish literatures.

Ludmila Isurin, new assistant professor in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures, studies the transformative effect of displacement, both linguistically and culturally, on people who leave a world behind. For the past three years Ludmila was the Language Director for the Slavic Department, and her primary interests are in psycholinguistics: at a conference on "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Code-switching," co-organized by her at Ohio State this December, she presented a paper on triggered code-switching (using more than one language) in bilinguals, a joint project with Dutch scholars. Her book project, Russian Diaspora: Language and Identity, examines the linguistic effects of emigration on Russian Jews and non-Jews into four separate worlds: the United States (particularly Brooklyn), Germany, Israel, and Australia.

Sandra Macpherson

Sandra Macpherson, new associate professor in the Department of English, returns to us from the University of Chicago: we are very glad to have her back with us on the faculty. Her work is based on the ethical possibilities of texts: how literary forms illustrate questions of accountability and agency, questions that develop concurrently in literature, law, and philosophy through the 17th and 18th centuries. Her book, Harm's Way: Tragic Responsibility in the Novel Form, forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press, examines the way that strict legal notions of liability play themselves out in the genre of the novel, where characters can be held accountable for their actions whether or not they are aware of the consequences. Her new work is on indifference, and whether a refusal or inability to adopt an ethical position can itself be considered an ethics. In the spring she will be teaching a graduate seminar on Vitalist and Material Philosophies and the question of bodily meaning, a question which will be taken up through pastoral poetry and pornography.