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New Faculty in the Department of English

The Ohio State English Department is pleased and proud to welcome this year's new and visiting faculty. The new Assistant Professors in the Department this year are Thomas Davis, Noah Comet, Jonathan Buehl, and Cassandra Parente, and Full Professor Marica Farr will be joining the English department from the School of Education. Tammy Eckard also signed on this year as a Senior Lecturer and Mary Rose will be with us this year as a visiting faculty member. Last but not least is Ashley Byock, our Committee on Institutional Cooperation Fellow. We are glad to have them on board and wish them all a prosperous and enjoyable experience here at OSU.

Full Professor

Marcia Farr has a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Georgetown University. Her sociolinguistic research focuses on oral language use and literacy practices in social and cultural contexts. She recently completed a long-term ethnographic study of a Mexican transnational community living in Chicago and in their village-of-origin in northwest MichoacÃ¡n. This study, supported by grants during the 1990s from the Spencer Foundation, focused on one social network of families, their history as (rural, non-indigenous) rancheros within Mexico, and how they construct ranchero Mexican personhood and identity in their daily speech (Rancheros in ChicagoacÃ¡n: Language and Identity in a Transnational Community, University of Texas Press, 2006). Two recent edited books on ethnolinguistic diversity in Chicago contain many chapters that present the work of Ph.D. students whose research she directed during the 1990s (Ethnolinguistic Chicago: Language and Literacy in the Cityâ€™s Neighborhoods, Erlbaum, 2004; Latino Language and Literacy in Ethnolinguistic Chicago, Erlbaum, 2005). Her non-academic passion is dancing flamenco, and she teaches Sevillanas (the folk dance of Seville, Spain) as part of Folclor Hispano, an OSU student organization.

Assistant Professor

Thomas Davis earned his PhD at the University of Notre Dame. His research and teaching interests include 20th century literary and visual culture, philosophical aesthetics, and critical theory. An article on Henri Lefebvre, "What True Project Has Been Lost?: Henri Lefebvre and the Critique of Everyday Life" appears in Modernism and Theory: A Critical Debate and "Neutral War: L'instant de ma mort" will appear in 2009 in Clandestine Encounters: Philosophy and Literature in the Narratives of Maurice Blanchot. His current book project, Distressed Histories: Late Modernism and Everyday Life, 1929-1945, focuses on the preoccupation with the everyday at moments of historical crisis by a number of British and Irish writers. He's been known to squander money on records, flyers, and other subcultural ephemera from the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Noah Comet earned his Ph.D. from UCLA and his Masters from NYU. He researches and teaches British nineteenth-century (Romantic and Victorian) literature, with a special emphasis on English poetry and women writers. His current book project involves early-nineteenth-century women poets and Greek classicism. He has published articles and reviews in various academic journals and is the editor of An Electronic Concordance to Keats' Poetry. In 2007 he was the recipient of The Keats-Shelley Association's Carl H. Pforzheimer, Jr. Research Grant. He enjoys travel, amateur astronomy, playing guitar, and hiking with his unpredictable sidekick, Bentley the Boxer.

Jonathan Buehl completed his PhD at the University of Maryland in 2008. His specialty is Business and Professional Communication, and his research interests include visual rhetoric and the rhetoric of science and technology. Jonathan's current book project examines visual arguments in the discourses of the physical and biological sciences. Some of his other research topics include science-writing pedagogy, style in nineteenth-century botanical textbooks, and the rhetoric of technological innovators. As a technical-writing consultant in the business world, Jonathan has developed business-writing seminars for local firms and science-writing courses for biotechnology research organizations.

Cassandra Parente earned her PhD in Rhetoric and Composition from Texas Christian University in 2007. Focusing on the literacy skills and rhetorical practices of ethnic and working class communities, Parente's current works include a forthcoming chapter in Women Rhetors Between the Wars entitled "From Single Moms to Pistol Packin' Mamas: The Rhetorical Evolution of Appalachian Folksingers." She is currently working on a manuscript that traces the literacy acquisition of eleven post WWII Italian immigrants from their small neighborhood schools in Italy to workplaces in the U.S., highlighting the strategies of cultural resistance they learned throughout this journey.

Senior Lecturer

Tammy Eckard joins the English department as a senior lecturer. She specializes in American Sign Language and teaches ASL 101 and 102. Tammy earned her M.Ed. from The Ohio State University specializing in Deaf Education and Reading. She is a Certified Interpreter with the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf. Her most recent projects have been on Visual Phonics, Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Students Difficulties with Reading and Increasing American Sign Language Fluency and Immersion for High School Students. Eckard's special interests are in teaching/mentoring students studying to be ASL interpreters, research in American Sign Language linguistics, and Visual Curriculum. In her spare time, Eckard enjoys kayaking, traveling, and playing with her two children.

Visiting Faculty

Visiting Faculty member Mary Rose, who has a joint appointment this year with the Department of Linguistics, has a PhD in sociolinguistics from Stanford. She studies language variation and change in English and American Sign Language and her current research is about the extent to which the quality of older people's voices may be a part of how elders themselves organize their peer social groups around age identity.

Visiting CIC Fellow

Ashley Byock earned her Ph.D. from Northwestern University. She specializes in nineteenth-century American studies with an emphasis on narrativity, mourning, and the metaphorics of embalming. Her work examines how mourning functioned in both literary and cultural contexts in the formation and expression of individual and communal identities in the antebellum and Civil War contexts. She arrives at The Ohio State University after four years in Paris where she received fellowships to study critical theory and where she taught courses in American civilization at the UniversitÃ© Paris Diderot - Paris 7. Her work on embalming was published in a 2007 book from Rodopi Press. Her most recent publication looks an interdisciplinarity in American studies and will appear in a book to be published by the UniversitÃ© Nancy 2. She has won fellowships from the W.M. Keck Foundation and a Mellon grant to study at the Huntington Library (San Marino, CA). She is also a working photographer and avid traveler.