Faculty and Staff Notes

Associate Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey presented his paper "Fugitive Landscapes and the Challenge of Black Atlantic Cartographies: Brazil, 1763" at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. Rarey's paper was one of eleven invited presentations at Dumbarton Oaks' Spring Garden and Landscape Studies Symposium, entitled "Environmental Histories of the Black Atlantic World: Landscape Histories of the African Diaspora," organized by N. D. B. Connolly and Oscar de la Torre. The symposium brought together archaeologists, historians, art historians, and landscape architects to discuss and debate place-based histories of landscapes, waterscapes, and environments of the Black Atlantic world from the fifteenth through the twentieth century.

Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Allegra Hyde published an essay on "Exit Strategies" in fiction at LitHub. She also published short fiction titled "Mobilization," about a vast herd of RVs, in the latest issue of Story. In Conjunctions, she published a short story titled "Dear Employee" about a eco-utopian vision for job redistribution. "Dear Employee" will be reprinted in Harper's Magazine this summer.

Professor of East Asian Studies Sheila Miyoshi Jager published her latest book, The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia, "A dramatic new telling of the dawn of modern East Asia, placing Korea at the center of a transformed world order wrought by imperial greed and devastating wars."

Assistant Professor of Philosophy Amy Berg received a summer stipend of $6000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities for her book project on living a well-rounded life.

Sidnhy Cheng, Tiffany Yuen, and Visiting Assistant Professor Daniel Zipp presented their research supported by Oberlin College’s student research assistantship grant at the annual meetings of the Urban Affairs Association in Nashville, TN. Their presentation focusing on Cleveland’s Asiatown neighborhood was entitled “From Chinatown to Asiatown: The Evolution of Asian American Neighborhoods.”

Associate Professor of Music Theory Joseph Lubben presented a paper, "Las síncopas hipermétricas," and a poster, "La enseñanza de la síncopa en el conservatorio del siglo XXI" at the inaugural meeting of SATMUS (la sociedad de análisis y teoría musical) in Madrid on April 21 and 22. Both papers were delivered in Spanish.
 

Assistant Professor of Theater Kari Barclay's newest article on asexuality in theater was recently published in March 2023's Theatre Topics. The article builds on their play, Can I Hold You?, which Kari wrote in 2018 and was one of the first plays to explore asexual identity.

Professor of Classics Kirk Ormand recently published an article, “Intertheatricality and Narrative Structure in the Electra Plays,” in A Companion to Aeschylus, eds. J.A. Bromberg and P. Burian. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (2023), 145-157.  Ormand analyzes the use that Sophocles and Euripides make of Aeschylus' Oreseteia, often casting events from it as fictional or contrafactual narratives spoken by the characters in their own plays on the Electra myth.

Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Allegra Hyde published her third book, the speculative story collection The Last Catastrophe. Comprised of fourteen short stories and a novella, the collection imagines vegan zombies, a herd of RVs, a finishing school in space, and more, to speak to futures rife with disaster. Booklist noted in a starred review that THE LAST CATASTROPHE exposes "the absurdities of trying to survive in a world increasingly warped by climate change, hunger, and capitalist priorities." The Chicago Review of Books called the collection both "funny" and "remarkably hopeful" despite its subject matter.

Read interviews with Hyde about The Last Catastrophe at Electric Literature, Shondaland, The Creative Independent, and also listen to podcasts from the Ohio Center for the Book, Keen on, Austin Liti Limits, among other venues. To read about and listen to a playlist inspired by the collection, check out Largehearted Boy.

Associate Professor Cynthia Taylor was a panelist for Meeting of the Minds: Inclusive Pedagogy, a panel on Peer Instruction organized by The National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT).