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 previous pandemics.
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 white persons and institutions, with the centuries-long violence.
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 as he describes the impact of this mistake all the way to our current times.
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.