Faculty and Staff Notes

Lecturer of Creative Writing Amanda Hodes' new poem "Climate Glitch" was published in the winter/spring issue of Gulf Coast Literary Journal (38.1).

Assistant Professor of East Asian Religions Andrew Macomber published a Japanese translation of Abe Yasurō’s article "The Five Forms Liturgy and the Five Viscera Mandala: The Genealogy of the Religious Body in Medieval Japan." It appeared in Japanese Religions.

Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Ghassan Abou-Zeineddine was awarded a grant from the Ohio Arts Council to support the writing of his new story collection, There’s Plenty of Sunshine Where You’re Headed (Tin House/Zando, spring 2027). In eight tragicomic stories set across Lebanon and Dearborn, Michigan, the collection explores the complexities of the Arab and Arab American experience. 

Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Ghassan Abou-Zeineddine gave a talk on the art of comedic writing in fiction in the Creative Writing Lecture Series at Columbia University on January 28.

Professor of Comparative American Studies Gina Pérez and Shelley Lee (Brown University) co-host the podcast The Confluence: Ethnic Studies and the Public Good. It is part of a larger initiative Lee is directing at Brown University's Cogut Institute for the Humanities called The Origins and Afterlives of Ethnic Studies. The first episode features an interview with Robin D.G. Kelley (University of California, Los Angeles) and George Lipsitz (emeritus, University of California, Santa Barbara).

Professor of Comparative American Studies Gina Pérez wrote an op-ed that appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer analyzing the ways narratives around the killing of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in January resonate with responses to the killing of four church women from the Diocese of Cleveland in the 1980s by the Salvadoran National Guard. Both then and now, the blaming of victims reflects a disturbing culture of impunity that allows state actors to use lethal violence against those who question the status quo.

Associate Professor of Politics and Comparative American Studies Jenny Garcia, along with Christopher Stout (University of California, San Diego) and Katherine Tate (Brown University), published the book Black Voices in the Halls of Power: Race and Rhetorical Representation in Congress (Cambridge University Press). 

Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy Jillian Scudder gave an invited lecture on some of the stories in her book The Milky Way Smells of Rum & Raspberries to the Cuyahoga Astronomical Association on February 9 in Berea, Ohio.

Professor of Classics Kirk Ormand chaired a panel and delivered an address at the annual meeting of the Society for Classical Studies in San Francisco, the culmination of his year as SCS president. The panel, titled “Good Classics in Bad Times,” examined the need to study the ancient Mediterranean in socially responsible ways, amid the context of attacks on DEI in higher education. Ormand’s talk, “Father Lycambes and the Frog Brigade,” used the archaic Greek poetry of Archilochus to argue for resistance against deployment of federal agents in American cities and anti-trans rhetoric.

Associate Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey delivered the lecture "Unsettled Maps: Black Cartographies of Brazil’s Long Eighteenth Century" at the Department of History of Art & Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh on January 29. Rarey's lecture was part of the department's "Reparative Histories of Art" series. Funded by the Mellon Foundation, the project seeks new methods to center and rethink social justice in the discipline of art history.