Voices of Excellence

Michelle Wibbelsman, Associate Professor of Latin American Indigenous Cultures, ethnographic studies and ethnomusicology in the department of Spanish and Portuguese, studies ritual and politics, aesthetics and power, festival and ritual practices of meaning-making memory in indigenous communities in northern Ecuador. She also discusses the “Dancing with Devils” exhibit now on display i...

Vladimir Sloutsky, Professor of Psychology, researches conceptual development and interrelationships between cognition and language. His most recent publication describes how humans can learn about categories without explicit teaching. Categories-Keep-Us-Alive-Says-Vladimir-Sloutsky_otter_ai Download

David Brakke, Professor and Joe R. Engle Chair in the History of Christianity in the Department of History, studies and teaches the history and literature of ancient Christianity from its origins through the fifth century, with special interest in asceticism monasticism, Gnosticism, biblical interpretation, and Egyptian Christianity. He discusses why the Gnostics and their views were considered so...

Doug Alsdorf, Professor in the School of Earth Sciences, researches satellite hydrology, large tropical wetlands, and geophysics. He describes himself as driven by curiosity, to ask “why is that there?” or “what is that over there?” Join him as he discusses the value of scientific curiosity and more with David Staley on this week’s Voices of Excellence. How-To-Be-Curi...

Jesse Fox, Associate Professor in the School of Communication, researches the effects and implications of new media technologies, including virtual worlds, video games, social network sites, and mobile applications. Virtual reality has gone through booms and busts in the 15 years she’s been studying it, so she talks about what it can and cannot do (ex., VR isn’t an empathy machine) wit...

Michael White, Professor of Linguistics, researches how to enable computers to usefully converse with people in natural language. He’s seen the ability of predictive text become so good that it’s created concerns about the ethical uses of it. He discusses this and more with David Staley on this week’s Voices of Excellence Siri-Which-OSU-Researcher-Is-On-This-Weeks-Voice-of-Excell...

Ruchika Prakash, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Center for Cognitive and Behavioral Brain Imaging, researches neuroplasticity in the context of healthy aging, and neurological disorders, specifically, multiple sclerosis. Her lab’s findings include ways that meditation can improve your behavioral and neural functioning. Mindfulness-Meditation-Can-Improve-Mental-and-Physical-Healt...

Isis Barra Costa is an Assistant Professor in Contemporary Brazilian Cultural and Literary Studies in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese with research interests in Brazilian literature and culture, cyber literature and art activism in the Americas performance studies, and Latin American cinema, among others. Her research started with the question of how religious men...

Tristram McPherson, Professor of Philosophy, examines foundational philosophical questions about ethics, specifically meta-ethics; epistemology; and conceptual ethics. He looks at whether there are ethical facts that answer ethical questions and what the relationship is between God and ethical claims, among other areas. Examining-the-Complexity-of-Ethics-With-Tristram-McPherson_otter_ai Download

John Grinstead, Professor and Interim Chair in Spanish and Portuguese, researches developmental linguistics, developmental semantics and pragmatics, and children’s comprehension of syntax. Ten years ago, he began using stop-motion movies in his experiments on language development, and the Despicable Me “minions” were a well-known and experimentally useful choice. For more about h...

Virginia Rich, Associate Professor of Microbiology and the Director of the eMERGE Biology Integration Institute, studies global change microbiology, microbial meta-omics, and “Genes-to-Ecosystems” inquiry. She’s spurred on in her work by the problem of not knowing how the biosphere as a whole will respond to climate change. VoE – Virginia Rich Download

Sam White, Professor of History, studies environmental history and uses natural and human records to reconstruct past climate variability and extreme weather. He discusses the methods that historians use to get a more complete picture of the past, such as how an intense drought and famine impacted the Ottoman Empire in the 1500s. %22History Is Detective Work,%22 Says Historian Sam White Download

Professor of History David Steigerwald teaches courses in 20th-century American history from World War I through the 1960s. He also researches and writes about alienation, a composite term that refers to the sense people have of not really being in control of their everyday lives. His emerging book argues that post WWII power structures pushed toward a hyper organization of society that devalued i...

Richard Samuels, Professor of Philosophy, researches cognitive development, reasoning, computational models of psychological capacities, and modular theories of cognition. He describes why cognitive science is different from psychology and why children can acquire the ability to count and to do basic arithmetic.

Greg Anderson, Professor of History, specializes in ancient Greek history, historical thoughts, and critical theory. In his most recent book The Realness of Things Past , he proposes a new way of doing history that is a fundamentally different way of thinking about reality for people who lived in the past.

Alexander Thompson, Professor of Political Science and Senior Faculty Fellow at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, conducts research in international relations with an emphasis on the politics of international organizations and law. From the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to the Kyoto Protocol to the Paris Agreement, countries have tried different tactics to deal wit...

Tom Hawkins, Associate Professor of Classics, looks at the ways that societies create social hierarchies and how the lower ends of those hierarchies interact with the higher. His forthcoming book explores the way Greek and Roman literary models and themes have been used, appropriated, and hacked by Haitian authors.

Sarah-Grace Heller, Associate Professor of French, specializes in medieval French and Occitan literature, language, and material culture. Her most recent book is a cultural history of fashion in a medieval age. She describes her sources from sumptuary laws to conduct literature to poetry and beyond to host David Staley on this week’s Voices of Excellence.

Scott Levi, Professor and Chair of the Department of History and Interim Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, specializes in the social and economic history of Central Asia. His most recent book is The Bukharan Crisis: A Connected History of 18th-Century Central Asia , which he describes as “the first time I’ve ever written a book by accident.”

Bruce Weinberg, Professor of Economics, studies the economics of innovation and creativity. In this area, potentially small numbers of individuals can have a large impact on how our understanding and knowledge evolves, which is rare among economic activities.

Gregory Jusdanis, Humanities Distinguished Professor of Classics, researches modern Greek literature and culture, including the poet C. P. Cavafy. His recent work has been a biography of Cavafy, co-written with Peter Jeffries, exploring, among other areas, how Cavafy rejected his early poetry and found new expressions in his later years.

Kevin Richards, Lecturer and Outreach Coordinator in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, defines the “metaverse” as the embodied Internet. His research follows the work of John Dewey who argued that the more immersed people are in what they’re doing, the more they’ll remember and be able to learn.

Michael Mercil, Emeritus Professor of Art, has created sculpture, drawing, painting, landscape architecture, film, and performance for regional and national exhibitions. His installations at Ohio State have included bean fields by the Wexner Center and a virtual pasture of Shetland sheep.

Christian Kleinbub, Professor of History of Art, studies the arts of the Italian Renaissance, with particular focus on issues of image theory, naturalism, the body, and period conceptions of vision and the visionary. He joins host David Staley on this week’s Voices of Excellence podcast to describe his research and how where vision “landed” in the body was of central importance t...

Mark Moritz, Professor and Graduate Studies Chair in Anthropology, studies the transformation of African pastoral systems, specifically examining how pastoralists adapt to changing ecological, political, and institutional conditions. He shares some of the results of his research with pastoralists in the far north region of Cameroon with David Staley on this week’s Voices of Excellence.