Faculty and Staff Notes

Assistant Professor of East Asian Religions Andrew Macomber received a travel grant to do research in Japan this winter from the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies, with the support of the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission. His project is "The Spread and Visualization of Demonic Disease: Illustrated Buddhist Medical Manuscripts in the Medieval Countryside."

Associate Professor of Creative Writing Emily Barton was awarded a competitive fellowship by the Hawthornden Foundation. She will spend Winter Term 2026 at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland working on her novel-in-progress.

Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy Jillian Scudder visited Ohio State University on December 3 and 4 for a well-attended special public lecture hosted by the Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics, followed by a book signing. In addition, she gave a special colloquium for CCAPP on science communication the following day.

Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Joshua Sperling published the article “Tapping the Source: Raoul Peck’s James Baldwin and the archival backstage of I Am Not Your Negro” in the journal Adaptation (Oxford Academic).

At the recent Association for Jewish Studies conference in Washington, D.C., Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies Matthew Berkman participated in two roundtables, “Jewish Studies at a Crossroads: Antisemitism, Israel, and the Crisis in Higher Education” and “Powers of Jewish Studies.”

Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Nicholas Anderman published the article “Coffee and Hernias, Cotton and Death: The Bay Area Waterfront Writers and Artists, 1977–1994” in the labor magazine Long-Haul. Co-written with a former student, the piece describes how a group of longshore worker-artists chronicled the arrival of the shipping container to the San Francisco Bay Area. The essay was recently quoted by the historian Adam Tooze in his influential newsletter Chartbook.

Assistant Professor of East Asian Religions Andrew Macomber gave a talk at the American Academy of Religion conference in Boston on November 24, for a panel he co-organized on "Visualizing Buddhism and Medicine." His talk was titled "When Disease-Demons Attack! Illustrated Narratives and the Horror of Buddhist Graphic Medicine in Japan."

Professor of Classics Drew Wilburn recently presented his research in two different venues. At the International Conference on Ancient Magic, held at Ohio State University in October, he presented the paper “The Role of Architectural Magic in Protecting the Family from Illness and Misfortune,” which explored a mosaic from Kephalonia and two wall paintings discovered at the site of Karanis, Egypt. At the 2025 American Society of Overseas Research in Boston in late November, he presented a paper with Grayson Ross ’25 titled “The Karanis Housing Project: Using GIS and Big Data to Reassess Site Occupation.” This paper detailed the work of the research team at Oberlin College, focusing on two buildings: a granary and a barracks building. The paper incorporated Ross’ 2025 honors research in Archaeological Studies. 

Professor of Anthropology Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway became president-elect of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology in November 2025. She will serve in this capacity through November 2027, then will become president of the society for another two-year term. Among her duties, she will be responsible for organizing and hosting the organization's biennial conference.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion Francesca Chubb-Confer convened and presented on a roundtable on "Bollywood, Hindutva, and Pedagogy" at the 2025 American Academy of Religion conference in Boston. Chubb-Confer’s research—about teaching religion, especially Islam, through cinema and popular culture—was made possible by Oberlin students in the fall 2025 class Gods at the Movies: Religion in Bollywood Film.