THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, Moritz College of Law
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, Departments of Theatre and Spanish and Portuguese
Ana Elena Puga is a scholar, translator, and dramaturg. Her research focuses on the intersection of aesthetics and politics in Latin American and US Latino performance. Theoretical research interests include cultural studies, transnationalism, globalization, human rights, gender, and race.
Her current book project, Desperate Acts: Spectacles of Suffering in the Performance of Migration, interrogates the reliance on melodrama in late twentieth and twenty-first century artistic and social performances featuring undocumented migrants from Latin America, especially women and children. Research on Desperate Acts is being supported by a 2010-2011 External Faculty Fellowship at Stanford University's Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.
Puga is also the author of Memory, Allegory, and Testimony in South American Theatre: Upstaging Dictatorship (Routledge 2008) and translator, with Mónica Núñez-Parra, of Finished from the Start and other Plays, an anthology of six works by Chilean playwright Juan Radrigán (Northwestern University Press 2008). Puga has published articles in the Latin American Theatre Review and Theatre Journal, among other journals. She co-founded LaMicro Theatre, dedicated to the staging of contemporary Spanish, Latin American and US Latino plays in English and bilingual productions.
On the undergraduate level, Puga has taught modern and contemporary Latin American and US Latino theatre, surveys of US theatre, European theatre, and dramaturgy. Her recent graduate seminars have focused on performance as it relates to migration, exile, commodification, and circulation.
Anna Babel is a sociolinguist and a linguistic anthropologist. Her research focuses on the relationship between language and social categories, particularly in settings of language contact. She has carried out long-term research in the Santa Cruz valleys of Bolivia, the setting of her ethnography, Between the Andes and Amazon. Her most recent work considers how we become aware of different ways of speaking, and conversely how our knowledge and beliefs about language influence the way that we speak. In addition to these areas of expertise, she teaches on the role of language in the construction of US and Latino/a/x identities.
Job Titles:
- Professor, Department of Anthropology [OSU Marion]
Job Titles:
- Professor, Department of Educational Studies, College of Education and Human Ecology
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor Emerita, Department of Anthropology
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor, Department of Teaching and Learning, College of Education and Human Ecology
Job Titles:
- Department of Comparative
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, Department of Teaching and Learning, College of Education and Human Ecology [OSU Newark
Job Titles:
- Historian
- Department of History
Daniel Rivers is a historian of LGBT communities in the twentieth century, Native American history, the family and sexuality, and U.S. radical social movements. He received his PhD in history from Stanford University, and his book, Radical Relations: Lesbian Mothers, Gay Fathers, and their Children in the United States since the Second World War, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in August of 2013. His publications also include articles on the history of gay and lesbian custody cases and the practice of queer oral history. He has been the recipient of a number of fellowships, including a Social Science Research Council fellowship, a Mellon fellowship at Smith College, a visiting fellowship with the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference, and a fellowship from the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning
- Assistant Professor, Department of Teaching and Learning, College of Education and Human Ecology
Dinorah Sánchez Loza is an assistant professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning. She is also affiliated with the Latino-a studies program. Her work is guided by one central question: What relationship exists between schooling and how youth come to think and act politically? Her research agenda has three broad areas of focus: (1) theories of settler colonialism and its resultant structuring of race, gender, and political/economic relations; (2) democracy and its limits within a racialized/colonial public sphere; and (3) the teaching and learning of politics and civic engagement. An ethnography, her most recent project examines US Government classrooms in two predominantly white, yet economically different high schools in central Ohio and interrogates the everyday lived experiences within them to analyze how schooling intersects with race and class to (re)produce political ideologies and practices. It investigates how issues of citizenship, democracy, and politics are taught and learned and how schooling experiences foster differential levels of understanding, power, and engagement in the public sphere.
Dr. Sanchez Loza has received the National Academy of Sciences/Ford Foundation Dissertation fellowship. While at Berkeley, she was selected into the Graduate Fellows Program through the Institute for the Study of Social Issues, received funding from Center for Right Wing Studies and the Graduate Division, and was awarded the multi-year Eugene Cota Robles Fellowship. She has also been a recipient of the Arthur Zankel Fellowship through Teachers College, Columbia University and selected to participate in the International Fellows Program through the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. Most recently, she has received grant funding through The Women's Place at the Ohio State University to continue her analysis of political ideologies among White adolescent girls across two schools in central Ohio.
A veteran educator, Dr. Sánchez Loza taught English Language Arts and Drama for seven years in an urban high school in south east Los Angeles and has since taught English to various age groups in Japan, provided professional development to teachers in the Dominican Republic, and designed and facilitated a critical research camp with high school students in Oakland, CA.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Social Work
- Assistant Professor, College of Social Work
Dr. Nancy Mendoza is an Assistant Professor of Social Work at The Ohio State University. Dr. Mendoza is committed to understanding the strengths and challenges of grandfamilies in order to create and deliver interventions that encourage self-care, communication, and empowerment. Dr. Mendoza's research focuses on building resilience in grandfamilies. She is also interested in culturally grounded research and the development of culturally grounded measures and interventions. Some of Dr. Mendoza's current projects includes conducting social network analysis to examine the relationship between social support and resilience in grandparents raising grandchildren; assessment of the human service landscape in central Ohio as it relates to grandparents raising their grandchildren; and implementation of a self-care program for grandparents raising grandchildren.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe
- Program Director, American Indian Studies Associate Professor, Department of English
Elissa Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and a nonfiction writer. She is the author of Starvation Mode and My Body is a Book of Rules, named a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. With Theresa Warburton, she is the co-editor of the anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment of the Arts, Creative Capital, Artist Trust, 4Culture, and Potlach Fund. Her book White Magic is forthcoming from Tin House Books.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Clinical Nursing, College of Nursing
Lizzie Fitzgerald, EdD, APRN, Psychiatric/PMHCNS-BC, has practiced as a mental health clinical nurse specialist, licensed marriage and family therapist and educator for the past 30 years. She was the president and owner of Dr. Elizabeth Moran Fitzgerald Inc., which was dedicated to families and caregivers of substance-exposed children. Later, she partnered with Peaceful Families to provide consultative services for children with emotional and behavior problems. She has facilitated success by students for whom English is not their primary language, and has led study-abroad experiences with baccalaureate students. She is an associate professor at the Donna and Allan Lansing School of Nursing and Health Sciences at Bellarmine University (KY), and a fellow of both the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities and the American Orthopsychiatric Association. Lizzie established the Edna M. Menke Community Scholar Endowed Fund for all to honor her mentor.
Job Titles:
- Associate
- Associate to the Dean for Special Projects, Fisher College of Business
Francisco-Xavier Gómez-Bellengé is Associate to the Dean for Special Projects in the Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University. He completed doctoral coursework in education at Cleveland State University and holds an M.A. in Medical Anthropology from Case Western Reserve University.
At Fisher College, Francisco coordinates the specialized business accreditation, assessment of learning, external reports, and works on a range of diversity issues. He is co-chair of the OSU Hispanic Oversight Committee, Board Member of the Central Ohio Diversity Consortium and of the National Society of Hispanic MBAs. He advises the Fisher Graduate Latino Association and the Vietnamese International Student Association.
In his prior work, he supervised several programs to prepare high school students for college and directed an educational research center.
Gina Osterloh's photographic practice embodies the printed image, drawing, film, and performance to explore the resonances between the physical body and its representational imprint, trace, or stand-in. Her photographs lay bare the perpetual juxtaposition between the artist's hand and the mechanical precision of the camera. While Osterloh has recently moved from Los Angeles, California - she cites her experience of growing up mixed-race in Ohio as a set of formative experiences that led her to photography and larger questions of being, identity, and how a viewer perceives difference.
Osterloh has exhibited internationally and nationally in places such as Hong Kong, Manila, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Yogyakarta, Madrid, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Columbus, and New York City. Recent solo exhibitions include Gina Osterloh at Higher Pictures; Slice, Strike, Make an X, Prick! at François Ghebaly Gallery; Nothing to See Here There Never Was at Silverlens Gallery; Group Dynamic at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), and Anonymous Front at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Group exhibitions include Ours is a City of Writers at the Barnsdall Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery; Energy Charge: Connecting to Ana Mendieta at Arizona State University Museum, Demolition Women curated by Commonwealth & Council at Chapman University; The Vexed Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design Manila, and Fragments of the Unknowable Whole at Urban Arts Space OSU. Her work has been reviewed in Art in America, The New Yorker Magazine, Hyphen Magazine, Art Asia Pacific, Asian Art News, Art Papers, Giant Robot,Artforum Critics Pick, and KCET Artbound. Honors and awards include a Fulbright in the Philippines, a Woodstock Center of Photography residency, and a Create Cultivate Grant with LACE and the LA County Arts Commission.
Job Titles:
- Professor, Departments of History of Art and Women 's, Gender and Sexuality Studies
- Specialist
Guisela Latorre is a specialist in modern/contemporary Chicana/o, and Latin American art with a particular emphasis on gender, and feminism. Her recent publications include "Chicana/o Artivism: Judy Baca's Digital Work with Youth of Color," (co-authored with Chela Sandoval in Learning Race and Ethnicity, MIT Press, 2007), "Rigoberta Menchú, Yemayá and Coyolxauhqui: Afro-Indigenous Aesthetics in Maestrapeace" (Critical Essays on Chicano Studies, Peter Lang, 2007), and "Postcolonial Critique or Desire? The Digital Media Work of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Keith Piper" (AfroGEEKS: Beyond the Digital Divide, Center for Black Studies, UC Santa Barbara, 2007.) She was also guest editor for the Chicana Art Focused Section of Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (Spring 2007.) In addition, Professor Latorre published Walls of Empowerment: Chicana/o Indigenist Murals of California (2008).
Job Titles:
- Postdoctoral Fellow on Race and Responsible Data Science
- Researcher and Writer
Harshavardhan Bhat is a researcher and writer interested in the social study of monsoonal futures. At OSU, he is a Postdoctoral Fellow on Race and Responsible Data Science with the Translational Data Analytics Institute and affiliated with the Center for Ethnic Studies. He earned his PhD at the School of Architecture and Cities at the University of Westminster where he was a PhD Research Fellow with the European Research Council funded project, Monsoon Assemblages. His dissertation was an interdisciplinary study of the airs of the South Asian monsoon and its transforming entangled relationship with anthropogenic matters and urbanization; and the ways in which they confront and animate monsoonal knowledge. He is currently thinking through concerns of a data analytics of liberation in a time of climate change. Recent writings can be found in GeoHumanities, Lo Squaderno, Hyphen Journal, Monsoon As Method (book), and International Relations in the Anthropocene (textbook) among others. He currently co-convenes a virtual reading/working group that's reading and learning towards a knowledge praxis of climate justice work. Prior to his PhD, Harsha has worked in academia and also consulted on public affairs and policy concerns for states and campaigns. Harsha is an alumnus of the 15/16 postgraduate program on the city at the Strelka Institute of Media, Architecture and Design and he holds an MSc in Comparative Politics (Conflict Studies) from the London School of Economics and Political Science. You can follow Harsha on Twitter @harsh_co.
Job Titles:
- Professor, Department of Anthropology
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor in the Knowlton School 's City
- Associate Professor, City and Regional Planning, Knowlton School of Architecture
Jesus J. Lara is an Associate Professor in the Knowlton School's City and Regional Planning Section at Ohio State University. From 2007 to 2013 he was an Assistant Professor in the landscape architecture section in the Knowlton School, and in 2007 he was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of New Mexico in the Urban and Regional Planning program. His research and pedagogy are centered on sustainable urban design, Latino Urbanism, community development, and on the sociocultural factors which influence planning and design. He is both co-editor and principal contributor in Remaking Metropolis: Global Challenges of the Urban Landscape (Routledge, 2013). He is also the guest editor and contributor of a special issue of Journal of Urbanism entitled, "International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability in 21st Century American Cities." Prof. Lara is also the lead curator and contributor with respect to the extensive literature review on Latino Urbanism found in the Oxford Bibliographies in Latino Urbanism. He is further the sole author of Latino Placemaking and Planning: Cultural Resiliency and Strategies for Re-urbanization (University of Arizona Press, 2018), a work which examines the application of the principles of Latino Urbanism in the revitalization of American cities.
Throughout his career Prof. Lara's research has focused broadly on topics related to emerging approaches to planning, design and development that responds to lifestyles, cultural preferences, and economic needs that are reflected in the built environment. This approach is evident in his current teaching, research and publications. Since joining the faculty in the City & Regional Planning program, he has built upon this foundation while narrowing his research into three primary subfields of planning enquiry. 1) Planning and placemaking for emergent immigrant communities, 2) Community development through service-learning education, and 3) Pedagogic approaches to sustainable urban design.
Prof. Lara received a Bachelor of Science in Landscape Architecture from California State Polytechnic University in 1994, a Master's in both Urban Planning and Landscape Architecture from the University of Southern California in 2001, and a Ph.D. in Environmental Design and Planning from Arizona State University in 2006. He was a Fulbright Fellow at Delft University of Technology and Wageningen University, the Netherlands, between 2003 and 2004, where he conducted research on sustainable urban design practices. Between 2014 and 2015 Prof. Lara was a visiting professor at the Institute for European Urban Studies (IfEU) at Bauhaus Universität, Weimar, Germany.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Associate Professor, Departments of English and Women 's, Gender and Sexuality Studies Affiliated Faculty, Film Studies Program
Jian Neo Chen is associate professor of queer studies in the departments of English and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Chen is affiliate faculty in the Film Studies program and former director of Sexuality Studies (2017-2018). Their research focuses on transgender and queer aesthetics and embodied practices in literature, visual culture and contemporary theory and their reimagining and reconstruction of social relations and movements. Their first book, Trans Exploits: Trans of Color Cultures and Technologies in Movement (Duke University Press, 2019), explores the displaced emergences of trans of color cultural expression and activism through performance, film/video, literature and digital media by the second decade of the twenty-first century, following fifty years of minimal civil rights reforms and renewed state and social technologies of racial gendering. Chen's research, teaching, writing and cultural organizing seek resonances with movements for gender, sexual, indigenous and racial liberation across different sectors and territories of the transnational US empire.
Chen serves on the editorial board of the Transgender Studies Quarterly. They were an invited visiting scholar at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University in Spring 2012. Before joining Ohio State, they were assistant professor and postdoctoral fellow at the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study from 2009 to 2011. Their curated transmedia projects have screened with the 6-8 Months Project, hosted by Kara Walker Studios in New York City; the New York MIX 24 Queer Experimental Film Festival; the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus and the NYU Asian/Pacific/ American Institute. Before graduate studies, Chen developed and organized a popular literacy, workplace rights program for Asian immigrant women working in informal garment, electronics, hotel and restaurant economies in Oakland, CA. They also produced community events and raised funds to counter state, public and interpersonal violence impacting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning communities in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Studies Director, Newark Earthworks Center [OSU Newark
John N. Low received his Ph.D. in American Culture at the University of Michigan, and is an enrolled citizen of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians. He is also the recipient of a graduate certificate in Museum Studies and a Juris Doctorate from the University of Michigan. He earned a BA from Michigan State University, a second BA in American Indian Studies from the University of Minnesota, and an MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago.
Professor Low previously served as Executive Director of the Mitchell Museum of the American Indian in Evanston, Illinois, and served as a member of the Advisory Committee for the Indians of the Midwest Project at the D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry Library, and the State of Ohio Cemetery Law Task Force. He has presented frequently at conferences including the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA)), American Society for Ethnohistory (ASE) and the Organization of American Historians (OAH). He continues to serve as a member of his tribes' Traditions & Repatriation Committee.
Dr. Low's research interests and courses at the Ohio State University - Newark include American Indian histories, literatures, and cultures, Native identities, American Indian religions, Indigenous canoe cultures around the world, Urban American Indians, museums, material culture and representation, memory studies, American Indian law and treaty rights, Indigenous cross-cultural connections, critical landscape studies, and Native environmental perspectives and practices.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Department of Comparative
Katherine Borland, Associate Professor, studies and teaches about the artfulness of ordinary life, and the ways in which traditional expressive arenas constitute contested terrain. Her current research projects include a book length study of Nicaraguan festival performances, entitled The Naked Saint: Masquerade and Identity in Contemporary Nicaragua, a study that includes considerations of traditional cross-dressing, carnivalesque performances, miracle discourse, and pilgrimage within a changing political climate. In her teaching she works particularly with undergraduate students to test theory against practice and practice against theory in order to build a solid foundation for critical inquiry.
Job Titles:
- Associate Director, Center for Ethnic Studies Lecturer, Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Job Titles:
- Professor, Department of History [OSU Newark]
Job Titles:
- Department of History
- Specialist
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor in the Higher Education
- Associate Professor, Department of Educational Studies, College of Education and Human Ecology
Marc Johnston Guerrero is an Associate Professor in the Higher Education and Student Affairs program, Department of Education Studies at The Ohio State University. He completed his Ph.D. in Education (with an emphasis in Higher Education & Organizational Change) at UCLA where he worked with Dr. Jane Pizzolato investigating the roles of culture and context on Asian American college students' development. Marc also did assessment and evaluation work as a Graduate Student Researcher for UCLA's Office of Residential Life and was selected as a Graduate Fellow in UCLA's Institute for Society and Genetics, which integrated his background in Human Biology (BS, Michigan State University) with Student Affairs Administration (MA, Michigan State University). Marc's research interests center on unpacking the many meanings of "diversity" in higher education, with specific attention to the experiences of Asian American, Pacific Islander, and mixed race college students. Before returning to school to pursue the doctorate, he served as the Director of the Asian Pacific American Student Affairs center at the University of Arizona
Job Titles:
- Associate Director of the Newark Earthworks Center
- Associate Director, Newark Earthworks Center
Marti L. Chaatsmith [Comanche/Choctaw] is Associate Director of the Newark Earthworks Center at The Ohio State University at Newark. Current initiatives include consulting with Ohio's Historic American Indian Tribes to develop sustainable relationships with tribal governments removed from Ohio on issues relating to their Midwest histories, tribal representation in the state, and the protection of indigenous historic and ancient places. Current multi-organizational projects include: contemporary Native responses to the earthworks in collaboration with the OSU American Indian Studies Program, the Ancient Ohio Trail - a website and heritage tourism project funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities, World Heritage Site nomination of Ohio's earthworks, and an interactive computer simulation model of the ancient lunar observatory at Octagon Earthworks funded by Battelle.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Department of English
Martin Joseph "Joe" Ponce is an associate professor in the English department and former coordinator of Asian American Studies. He received his bachelor's degree in English and Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his doctorate in English from Rutgers University. He teaches courses in Asian American, African American, and queer literatures and cultures. His book Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading was published by New York University Press in 2012.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor in the Department of Microbiology
- Assistant Professor of Microbiology and Microbial Infection & Immunity, Department of Microbiology
Matt Anderson is an assistant professor in the Department of Microbiology in the College of Arts and Sciences as well as the Department of Microbial Infection and Immunity in the School of Medicine. His work focuses primarily on the genetic determinants of clinically relevant phenotypes in the major human fungal pathogen Candida albicans. Researchers in his group combine experimental and computational approaches to understand how genetic variation in C. albicans alters interaction with the host and the clinical outcome during infection.
Dr. Anderson has authored a number of manuscripts exploring the consequences of genetic variation in Candida species including gene family expansions, noise in gene expression, genetic network evolution, and gene function following species divergence. During his training he has been actively involved with the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) and the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES). He is also a contributor to The Strong Heart Study, exploring aspects of cardiovascular health in Native Americans across the United States, and the Summer Internship for Indigenous people in Genomics (SING), which seeks to indigenize genomics research and train NA/AN/NH in genomic research.
Job Titles:
- Department of Comparative
Job Titles:
- Director, Center for Ethnic Studies Associate Professor, Department of History of Art
- Specialist in Asian American
Namiko Kunimoto was Director of Asian American Studies from 2017-2020 and helped create the Center for Ethnic Studies in 2018. She has been the Director of the Center for Ethnic Studies since 2019. Her work focuses on race, gender, and urbanization through art and visual culture. She has written on family photography during the Japanese-Canadian incarceration in "Intimate Archives: Japanese-Canadian Family Photography, 1939-1945," on displacement and labour in "Olympic Dissent: Art, Politics, and the Tokyo Games," and on the depiction of blackness in Japanese art in The Stakes of Exposure: Anxious Bodies in Postwar Japanese Art. As Director of the Center for Ethnic Studies at Ohio State University, she has organized community discussions on bystander training, panels on the incarceration of Japanese-American, Latino/a people, and First Nations peoples at Fort Sil, and workshops on how to take action against racism during COVID-19.
Namiko Kunimoto is a specialist in Asian American studies as well as modern and contemporary Japanese art. Her research interests include the visual politics of race and gender, art and diaspora, and issues of migration and nation-formation. Her essays include "Intimate Archives: Japanese-Canadian Family Photography, 1939-1945" in Art History, "Olympic Dissent: Art, Politics, and the Tokyo Games" in Asia Pacific Japan Focus, "Photographic Pluralities" in Blackflash Magazine, and "Tactics and Strategies: Chen Qiulin and the Production of Space" in Art Journal.
Job Titles:
- Program Director, Latino / a Studies Associate Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Paloma Martinez-Cruz, Ph.D. works in the area of contemporary hemispheric cultural production, women of color feminism, performance, and alternative epistemologies. Martinez-Cruz' book entitled Women and Knowledge in Mesoamerica: From East L.A. to Anahuac (University of Arizona Press, 2011) argues that healing traditions among Mesoamerican women constitute a hemispheric intellectual lineage that thrives despite the legacy of colonization. She is the translator of Ponciá Vicencio, the debut novel by Afro-Brazilian author Conceição Evaristo, about a young Afro-Brazilian woman's journey from the land of her enslaved ancestors to the multiple dislocations produced by urban life. She is the editor of Rebeldes: A Proyecto Latina Anthology, a collection of stories and art from 26 Latina women from the Midwest and beyond.
Job Titles:
- Professor, Department of Teaching and Learning, College of Education and Human Ecology
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures
Job Titles:
- Professor Emerita, Department of Arts Education, Administration and Policy
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Language Education Studies
- Associate Professor, Department of Teaching and Learning, College of Education and Human Ecology
Dr. Sayer is an Associate Professor of Language Education Studies. He was a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence in Puebla Mexico until 2012, when he moved to work at University of Texas at San Antonio until 2017.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of English
- Program Director, Asian American Studies Associate Professor, Department of English
Pranav Jani joined Ohio State in September 2004 and works on postcolonial literature and theory in the English department. His teaching is focused on South Asian and African writing and film, with a developing interest in literature from other colonized places, like Ireland, the Caribbean, and the Arab world, and South Asian culture in the US.
Pranav's interest in non-Western and US ethnic literature is driven, ultimately, by personal and political affiliations. Well-versed in Hindustani vocal music and Indian languages, formerly-versed in tabla, and a man who can make a mean rajma curry, he has always tried to meet the hyphenated identity thing head-on. Finally, Pranav's commitment as an antiwar activist and socialist has simply solidified since racial profiling has gotten, shall we say, more diverse and more personal after 9/11.
Pranav Jani is an associate professor of English with a focus in postcolonial studies and critical ethnic studies. His research and teaching interests lie in the literatures, cultures and history of colonized and formerly colonized people (in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Ireland) and people of color in the United States. In particular, Jani specializes in South Asia and the South Asian diaspora, Marxist theories of nationalism and colonialism, and the intertwined legacies of colonialism, settler colonialism and slavery.
A faculty member at the Newark campus, Professor Shiels specializes in American religious history and is the author of articles on that topic. His present research focuses on religious revivals and the formation of voluntary religious societies in New England from 1760 to 1840. He was the recipient of The Ohio State University-Newark Teaching Excellence Award in 1977, 1985, and 1988.
Job Titles:
- Director of Scholarships and Grants, Office of Diversity and Inclusion
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Multicultural and Equity
- Associate Professor, Department of Teaching and Learning, College of Education and Human Ecology
Timothy San Pedro is an associate professor of Multicultural and Equity Studies in the Department of Teaching and Learing. San Pedro's scholarship focuses on the intricate link between motivation, engagement, and identity construction to curricula and pedagogical practices that re-focus content and conversations upon Indigenous histories, perspectives, and literacies. He worked with the Native American Next Step program in Arizona to expand Native American subjects and content in Phoenix-area schools as well as led professional development workshops on the Navajo Reservation that co-constructed and co-envisioned lessons and pedagogical decisions to sustain and support the cultures of students.
His co-authored chapter with Valerie Kinloch in Humanizing Research titled "The Space between Listening and Story-ing: Foundations for Projects in Humanization" examines how trust, vulnerabilities, and the development of relationships (or story-ing) provide spaces to engage in transformative resistances and praxis in academic, community, and research settings with participants. Two publications are in press with the Journal of American Indian Education and Research in the Teaching of English.
He serves as the chair of the Department of Teaching and Learning's Equity and Diversity Committee and is a member of the Standing Committee on Research for the National Council of Teachers of English.
Job Titles:
- Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, Film / Video, Department of Theatre
Víctor Espinosa is a sociologist, ethnographer, and curator. His research focuses on the intersection of art and transnational migration. He is the author of Martín Ramírez: Framing His Life and Art (University of Texas Press, 2015) and El dilema del retorno: Migración, género y pertenencia en un contexto transnacional (El Colegio de Michoacan, 1998). Espinosa is currently working on a book project, Staging Migrant Suffering: Melodrama in Latin American and Latino Activism (under contract with the University of Michigan Press), with Ana Elena Puga (first author), Associate Professor, The Ohio State University.
Job Titles:
- Department of Anthropology
Job Titles:
- Assistant Vice Provost, Office of Diversity and Inclusion