Faculty and Staff Notes

In celebration of Arab American history month, Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Ghassan Abou-Zeineddine gave talks about his short story collection, Dearborn, at Temple University, Haverford College, Villanova University, and the University of Michigan—Ann Arbor, respectively. 

Frederick B. Artz Professor of History Leonard V. Smith gave a lecture on March 26 at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, on liberalism in Texas and French Algeria in the 1830s and 1840s. Smith will continue work on this project in 2025-26 as Bill and Rita Clements Senior Fellow at the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.

Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón published two new scholarly essays. The first, “Postmodern in a Domestic Sense: Carlos Pabón and the Postmodern Critique of the Nation in Puerto Rico, 1993–2003” , surveys and reconstructs the so-called “postmodern debate” in Puerto Rico, circa 1991–2004, by focusing on the work of a historian and critic who played a central role in this influential dispute. The second, “Labor, Colonization, and the Freedom from Restraint in Nicolás Pizarro Suárez's El monedero (1861)”, analyzes how a novel was used in the 19th century to propose a new path for the Mexican economy centered on labor.

Three members of the Division of Music Theory — Associate Professor Andrew Pau, Assistant Professor Christa Cole, and Visiting Assistant Professor Sylvie Tran — presented a special session titled "Constructing Identity in Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels's Omar (2022)" at the annual meeting of the Music Theory Society of New York State on April 5. The session was based on a panel that the three faculty members gave in conjunction with Omar at Oberlin in December 2024.

Associate Professor of Business and Chair of the Business Program Eric Lin's article "How Costly Is a Resume Gap for Executives?" was recently published in Harvard Business Review.

Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Ghassan Abou-Zeineddine participated in the panel “Innovations in Arab American Fiction” at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs in Los Angeles and also gave two off-site readings.

Assistant Professor of Statistics and Data Science Josh Davidson presented a paper at the American Association of Geographers annual meeting in March: “Socio-spatial Disparities in Access to Driver Education for Teens.” The paper is coauthored with Oberlin students Noah Elazar ’25 and Sangeetha Ramanuj ’25, and Dr. Megan Ryerson (University of Pennsylvania).

Visiting Assistant Professor of Writing and Communication Nate DeProspo gave the virtual talk “Animality and/as Alterity in Posthumanist Thought” at the Centre for Research in Posthumanities in Bankura, India. The presentation aimed primarily to complicate Heidegger’s infamous thesis that the animal is “poor in world,” while the human is “world-building.”

Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and Religion Shari Rabin published The Jewish South: An American History with Princeton University Press.

Assistant Professor of East Asian Religions Andrew Macomber published an article for the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, "Disease, Defilement, and the Dead: Buddhist Medicine and the Emergence of Corpse-Vector Disease."