Faculty and Staff Notes

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.

Assistant Professor of German Jessica Resvick presented the paper "Character and Type in the Realist Novel: Dickens and Freytag" at the workshop Figures, Types, and Images of the Social in the 19th and 20th Century: Practices of Social Imagining in the History of Knowledge and the Sciences. The workshop was co-hosted by the University of Erfurt and the Friedrich Schiller University Jena.

Associate Professor of Organ Jonathan Moyer played the second inaugural recital of a new pipe organ by C.B. Fisk at Hong Kong Baptist University on November 22. In addition to a lecture demonstration, he accompanied the University Cantoria in a performance of the Mozart Requiem.

Retired English Professor Robert Pierce’s journal article “Is Timon of Athens?” was published November 12 in Essays in Criticism.

Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and Religion Shari Rabin coedited the newly released Oxford Handbook of American Jewish History.

Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Uche Okonkwo had her essay “Crafting Narrative Tension” published in the latest issue of Prairie Schooner (vol. 99, no. 2). The issue features the theme of “writers on writing,” with writers celebrating, lamenting, and reflecting on the writing and publishing process.

Asif Iqbal, Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Postcolonial World Literature, has published the article, The Language Movement in East Pakistan and the Bengali Ekushey Fiction as Postcolonial Resistance in the South Asian Review as well as a review of the book India’s Bangladesh Problem: The Marginalization of Bengali Muslims in Neoliberal Times by Navine Murshidin, in the recent print edition of South Asian Review.

Professor of Psychology and Environmental Studies Cindy Frantz has a new coauthored publication with Bryn Kearney '25, “Overcoming Pluralistic Ignorance—Brief Exposure to Positive Thoughts and Actions of Others Can Enhance Social Norms Related to Climate Action and Support for Climate Policy”, in Sustainability, 17(22), 10318 Kearney, B., Petersen, J. E., & Frantz, C. M. (2025).

Visiting Assistant Professor of History Jonathan van Harmelen, published an article with the New Republic on ongoing congressional investigations into ICE currently being held in Los Angeles. Van Harmelen was also recently named editor of the journal Southern California Quarterly.