Voices of Excellence

Associate Professor Treva Lindsey of the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies specializes in African American women’s history, Black popular and expressive culture, Black feminism(s), hip hop studies, critical race and gender theory, and sexual politics. She researched Black women’s beauty culture by delving into newspapers from the late 19th and early 20th centuri...

Scott Swearingen, Assistant Professor in the Department of Design, studies game design, collaborative gaming, and animation, and worked as a game designer on award-winning games and franchises, including Medal of Honor , The Simpsons , and The Sims . He talks with David Staley about how games define our culture and why he values face-to-face interactions that games can engage.

Jennifer Brello, Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science, serves as the Director of the Ohio State University Aphasia Initiative, a free program for people living with loss of communication ability due to brain injury. Aphasia can make mundane tasks like ordering a cup of coffee very challenging, and Brello describes to host David Staley the benefits of therapy...

Julia Nelson Hawkins, Associate Professor in the Department of Classics, leads a group of clinicians and humanities scholars in the Discovery Themes-funded project “Humanities in the Pandemic” that seeks to increase academia and public awareness about the role that arts and humanities play in global health crises. She talks with David Staley about the project and what we can learn from...

Shannon Winnubst, Professor and Chair of the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, researches queer and trans studies, race theory, psychoanalytic theory, and 20th century French theory. Energized by the Black Lives Matter movement, she talks about new language that is emerging in the public sphere to name systemic racism and the deeper encounter it offers, especially for whit...

Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literature Katra Byram, is a core member of Project Narrative and co-editor of The Ohio State University Press book series. Her current research examines the complicated and, for her, ambivalent roles played by German mothers and grandmothers in post-war German literature.

“There was a time after the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 where Americans, others in Europe, and other places in the world discounted Russia as a global power. And this was a mistake,” says Nicholas Breyfogle, Associate Professor, Director of the Goldberg Center, and an expert on Russian and Soviet history and global environmental history, especially the history of water. Listen in a...

Judson Jeffries, Professor of African American and African Studies, researches media studies, public policy, Homeland Security, African American politics, and police-community relations. He sees the BLM protests as having a new kind of participant and perhaps a new kind of possibility for success.

Kristi Williams, a Professor in the Department of Sociology, researches the influence of family and other personal relationships on mental and physical health, with a particular focus on gender and life course variations in those patterns. She is particularly interested in exploring how the more trauma people experience, the worse their health is and how that can be treated.

How readers engage with what they encounter in reading has ethical significance, says Ashley Hope Pérez, Assistant Professor of Comparative Studies. In addition to having written three novels, she researches fiction with an eye to how it shapes the way that readers respond to others in the real world.

Heather Allen, Dow Professor and Ohio State Distinguished Scholar in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, researches molecular organization, ion pairing, and hydration at aqueous interfaces. She describes her work as taking the very basic units of life and asking, “How do they respond to an electric field or slight changes in pH and environment?”

Trevon Logan, Hazel C. Youngberg Trustees Distinguished Professor of Economics and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, researches economic history, economic demography, and applied micro economics. He joins David Staley on this week’s Voices of Excellence to discuss the economic history of African Americans.

Elena Foulis, Coordinator for the Spanish for Heritage Language program in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and host of the Ohio Habla podcast, joins David Staley on this week’s Voices of Excellence. She discusses her work as a public humanist, how she engages students in her classes, and what she learns hosting her very popular podcast.

Cynthia Clopper, Professor and Chair of the Department of Linguistics, researches speech sounds: how we produce them, their acoustic characteristics, and their perception by listeners. She says that every time we say a word, like “cat,” it’s subtly different.

Professor of Sociology Elizabeth Cooksey studies social demography, life course transitions, and the development of youth and children. She also serves as the Director of the Center for Human Resource Research, which started the first national longitudinal survey 55 years ago. The data from the study has been used in thousands of articles.

Professor Laura Kubatko, from the Department of Statistics and the Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology, is amazed by the advances she’s seen in her career in how scientists translate “observations into formal mathematical or statistical models.” Moreover, this is, for her, the “fun part,” because they collaborate to explain “why [we] think [a...

Professor of Psychology Laura Wagner studies how children acquire language and learn about meaning, such as the progression of time in storytelling. Their interpretations of even simple stories like the famous chicken joke reveal hidden meanings about complicated linguistics and complex concepts of time.

The School of Music’s Barry Green has served as the Principal Bassist for the Cincinnati Symphony, the California Symphony, and the Sun Valley Idaho Summer Symphony. His book, The Inner Game of Music , has sold over a quarter of a million copies . He shares his thoughts on music, musicianship, and how to drown out the negative thoughts in your head so you can play better music.

Meow Hui Goh, an Associate Professor of Chinese in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, researches medieval Chinese literature, medieval Chinese literary and cultural history, memory and text in medieval China, and the instrumentality of medieval Chinese literature. She is completing a new book manuscript, The Double Life of Chaos: Living Memory and Literature in Early Medieval...

Gina Osterloh, Assistant Professor of Art, sees her photographic practice as embodying the printed image, drawing, film, and performance as it explores the resonances between the physical body and its representational imprint, trace or stand in. She offers insight into the role of looking and vision in creating one’s identity, as well as being a site of tremendous pressure and pleasure.

Professor of Geography, Associate Vice Provost for Academic Enrichment, and Executive Director of the Honors and Scholars Center, Ola Ahlqvist studies cartography, land cover change, geographic information, and online maps. He also looks at the impact that the definition of terms has on research, such as what defines a forest.

Distinguished University Professor and Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor in the Department of English, Jim Phelan, also serves as Director of Medical Humanities and Director of Project Narrative. He joins David Staley to define narrative theory, identify the many audiences built into narratives, and discuss how “narrative competence enhances medical competence.”

Annika Peter, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy, works at the interface of particle physics and astronomy to discover the secrets of dark matter. She shares her research on galaxies, particles, and constellations.

Linda Mizejewski, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, researches comedy and women comedians as well as women detectives in popular culture. She joins David Staley to discuss her research and suggests some great classic movies to watch.

A Professor in the School of Earth Sciences and Director of the Mineral Physics Research Group, Wendy Panero studies the behavior of materials under the high pressure and temperature of the Earth’s interior.