News and Events
Events
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. New assistant professors Lynn Itagaki, Robyn Warhol-Down, Rebecca Wanzo, and David Ruderman will be joining the department. Margaret Goscilo also signed on this year as a senior lecturer and Niamh O'Leary will be with us this year as a visiting 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
Robyn Warhol-Down, Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English, spent 26 years on the faculty at the University of Vermont before coming to Ohio State to join Project Narrative. A self-described "California person," she received her Ph.D. in 1982 from Stanford University and her B.A. from Pomona College in 1977. She wrote Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel, which lays out an early justification for feminist narratology and develops the notion of the "engaging narrator" in feminine nineteenth-century texts; and Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Popular Forms, a study of the ways sentimental, romantic, and serial texts work to establish and reinforce gendered performance in fans of TV, Hollywood film, and fiction. Her interests include feminist theories of the body, narratological approaches to fiction, nineteenth-century women's writing in English worldwide, and Victorian literature. Her current projects include Narrative Refusals, a study of the unnarratable in fiction, which examines narrators in nineteenth-century British novels who either say they won't tell something, or else tell something that didn't happen in place of saying what did; Romancing the Archive, a collection of scholars' accounts of their adventures with archival materials, co-edited with Helena Michie; a book on four approaches to narrative co-authored with Jim Phelan, Peter Rabinowitz, David Herman, and Brian Richardson; and the English Institute's volume on "Genre," of which she is editor. Her husband, Rich Down, and her 14-year-old son, Seth Warhol-Streeter, are in Vermont, so she is back-and-forth between Columbus and Burlington. She finds Columbus much better for shopping, among its many advantages over Vermont as a place to live.
Assistant Professor
Lynn Itagaki earned her Ph.D. in English and her M.A. in Asian American Studies from UCLA. She holds a joint appointment in English and Women's Studies and works with the Program in Asian American Studies. In addition to her research and teaching interests in 20th-21st century U.S. literature, she also specializes in Asian American cultural studies, comparative race theory, feminist theory, and visual culture. She taught most recently at the University of Montana in Missoula and was the visiting scholar in Women's Studies at OSU in 2008; during her two quarters in residence here, she developed the four-part film series, "Asian/Pacific Islander Women, Activism and Art," that highlighted a broad range of current issues facing API women today. She is currently finishing a book manuscript, Racial Burnout: The 1992 Los Angeles Crisis and the Cultural Politics of the Post Civil Rights Era, and is beginning her next project on how contemporary forms of spectatorship change the rights and responsibilities of global citizens. She has published articles and reviews in journals such as African American Review, Amerasia Journal, and MELUS. She enjoys knitting unwearable objects while on endless car trips to Montana, Texas, and the East Coast, as well as while watching college and pro football games each and every fall weekend.
Rebecca Wanzo received her Ph.D. in English from Duke University. Her research interests include theories of affect, African American literature and culture, critical race theory, and popular culture--particularly the history of popular genre fiction in the U.S. and graphic storytelling. She has published articles and book chapters about science fiction, child abduction, law and literature, African American women and performance, and superhero comics. Her first book, The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling, looks at the how citizens frames stories about suffering to make their claims legible to the state. Her current book project, The Melancholic Patriot, examines representations of African American citizenship in comic art.
Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich earned her PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She specializes in early modern literature, especially drama, women writers, and history of the book. Her current book project analyzes the political negotiations enacted through entertainments performed at aristocratic homes for Elizabeth I's royal progress visits. An article taken from this project, "Lady Russell, Elizabeth I, and Female Political Alliances through Performance," appeared in the spring 2009 issue of English Literary Renaissance. In her spare time, she enjoys traveling, practicing yoga, cooking, and theater-going.
Originally a Californian, assistant professor D. B. Ruderman holds a PhD from the University of Michigan and a BA from the University of California, Berkeley. D. B. (David) specializes in nineteenth-century British poetry and poetics, yet also has a strong interest in psychoanalysis, music, twentieth-century American poetry, and aesthetic theory. His articles have been published in Victorian Poetry, Prism(s): Essays in Romanticism, and the American Psychoanalyst.
Senior Lecturer
Margaret Goscilo earned her Masters and PhD (1984) degrees at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Originally pursuing Renaissance studies, she soon changed her specialty to the novel and the nineteenth century. Her dissertation, a comparative study of the bastard hero's significance in novels by Fielding, James, Stendhal, Dostoevsky and Gide, was published in 1992 by Garland Press. She has written articles on such diverse interests as film ("Deconstructing The Terminator"), art history ("Impressionist Exhibition of 1874"), translation ("On English Translations of Stendhal's Red and the Black")and metafiction ("John Fowles's Pre-Raphaelite Woman: Interart Strategies and Gender Politics"). Currently she is completing a co-written study of representation of the ex-Cold-War enemy in American and Russian cinema between 1989 and 2005. She has taught as a generalist in diverse institutions both abroad (Switzerland, France) and stateside (Pennsylvania, Vermont, Minnesota).
Visiting CIC Fellow
Niamh J. O'Leary completed her Ph.D. at the Pennsylvania State University in 2009. She researches and teaches Renaissance literature, with a special emphasis on Shakespeare and non-Shakespearean drama. Her current book project examines representations of communities of women in Renaissance drama and argues that drama, as the genre of attachment, provides access to a whole landscape of female alliances beyond the traditional dyadic model of friendship. Other research interests include Renaissance revenge tragedy, storytelling in Renaissance drama, and the popular literature of 17th-century England. Outside the classroom, she enjoys travel, hiking, knitting, and karaoke.
