Faculty and Staff Notes

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.

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.