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Moddelmog Appointed Department Chair

January 6, 2015

Moddelmog Appointed Department Chair

Photo of Chair Debra Moddelmog

Originally published June 1, 2014

Debra Moddelmog has been appointed chair of the Ohio State Department of English beginning June 1, 2014. A member of the English faculty since 1986, Moddelmog brings a wealth of institutional knowledge and administrative experience to this leadership position. She served as chair of the department's Promotion and Tenure Committee from 2009 to 2014 and as director of the Diversity and Identity Studies Collective at Ohio State (DISCO) from 2010 to 2013. In addition, Moddelmog has spent the last 12 years coordinating the university's Sexuality Studies Program, which she founded in 2002. She is a member of the affiliated faculty in both the Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies and the Department of Comparative Studies, and from 2004 to 2007, she served as an associate dean in the College of Humanities.

In addition to leading one of the country's largest English departments, Moddelmog will continue to serve as an assembly delegate for the Modern Language Association and to work on two state-of-the-field essays, one on Hemingway, gender, and sexuality critiscism and the other on Modernism and Sexology, as well as her book-length study of Havelock Ellis's influence on modernist and Harlem Renaissance writers. She is also co-editing (with Joe Ponce) a collection of essays on Samuel Steward and directing four doctoral dissertations and two undergraduate theses.

Moddelmog is the author of Readers and Mythic Signs: The Oedipus Myth in Twentieth-Century Fiction and Reading Desire: In Pursuit of Ernest Hemingway, and co-editor of Ernest Hemingway in Context. She has written numerous articles on twentieth-century American writers and sexuality-based topics and has received the following university and departmental awards: the Ohio State Distinguished Diversity Enhancement Award, the College of Humanities Diversity Enhancement Award, and the Marlene B. Longenecker English Faculty Leadership and Teaching Award.