Kirwan Institute - Ohio State University

Josh Bassett is Director of the Institute for Social Progress (ISP), a nationally affiliated civil rights, education, and public policy institute located at Wayne County Community College District in Detroit, Mich. In addition to his work in the field of civil rights, Bassett has taught film studies at Wayne State University and has both written critically on U.S popular cinema, with an emphasis on race and representation, and collaborated on several film projects. He is currently working on a film in collaboration with Detroit based filmmaker, Christopher Alexander, whose work has received several national awards, Arthur Jaffa, cinematographer of Spike Lee's "Crooklyn" and Julie Dash's "Daughters of the Dust," and Pierre Cottrell, internationally known film producer and prominent figure of the French New Wave.

Joyce Calamese has worked with the Columbus Urban League providing community health education for over 10 years. Her area of expertise and passion is HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted disease education. She has been a certified HIV/AIDS Trainer with the American Red Cross since 1991. During her tenure with the Urban League she has insisted on onsite HIV/AIDS testing and counseling, diabetes education, kidney evaluations, exercise and mental wellness programming for staff as well as customers. She is the mother of two daughters, Corinthia and Sonje and the grandmother to Anthony Charles and Sylvia. She is a seller and collector of antique Black memorabilia and a voracious reader of African American history, herbal health and biographies.

Caroline Clark is an Associate Professor in the School of Teaching and Learning in the College of Education and Human Ecology at The Ohio State University. Dr. Clark’s scholarship focuses on literacy practices across formal/school and informal settings and community-based literacy research with young people for social action. The contexts for this work have included co-researching literacy for social action with middle and high school students in after-school programs; investigating literacy practices in the context of teaching service-learning and content literacy courses; and conducting workshops with local teachers on media literacy, technology, and the English curriculum. Clark’s commitments to literacy research as a means for political action and social justice shape her scholarship and teaching, particularly recent work on her own university courses teaching against heterosexism and homophobia and understanding the connections between this work and anti-racist pedagogies.

(Top of Page)

Shannon Cochran received a Master of Arts degree in African-American and African Studies and a Master of Arts degree in Women’s Studies from OSU. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Women’s Studies, where she is researching race, gender, body politics, and representation. More specifically, her dissertation focuses on the ways that race, gender, class, and sexuality intersect with corpulence to shape specific performativities in visual and narrative cultures. Shannon has taught classes in African-American and African Studies and Women’s Studies. Currently, she is teaching Black Women Writers and U.S Women Writers in the Department of Women’s Studies.

James Damico is an Assistant Professor in Language Education at Indiana University, Bloomington. A former elementary and middle school teacher in New Jersey, James earned his Ph.D. at Michigan State University in Curriculum, Teaching and Educational Policy. He currently teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in critical reading, children’s literature, writing, and research methods. His research focuses on the ways children and young adults read and respond to a range of texts (including books, movies, and web sites) about socially complex topics, such as slavery, freedom and poverty.

Dr. Adrienne D. Dixson is an Assistant Professor in the School of Teaching and Learning at the Ohio State University. Dr. Dixson's research focuses on race and racial and gender identities in urban schooling contexts. Theoretically, she situates her scholarship within Critical Race Theory, Black Feminist theories and Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. Her most recent publications include "Tyranny of the Majority: Re-enfranchisement of African American Teacher Educators Teaching for Democracy" (with Jeannine E. Dingus), International Studies in Qualitative Research Journal (Nov. 2007); "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens: Black Women Teachers and Professional Socialization," (with Jeannine E. Dingus) Teachers College Record (Spring 2008, available online, November 2007) as well as her co-edited book with Celia K. Rousseau Anderson (University of Memphis), Critical Race Theory in Education: All God's Children Got a Song (2006, RoutledgeFalmer Press). CRT in Education received the 2006 Critics Choice Award from the American Educational Studies Association.

Ryan Friedman (B.A. University of Notre Dame, Ph.D. Northwestern University) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and the Department of Film Studies at the Ohio State University, where he teaches courses in American film, film theory, and African American literature. He has also held teaching appointments at Rice University and at Northwestern University. Currently, he is at work on a manuscript entitled *Negro Talking Pictures: African American Migration and Musical Performance in Early American Sound Film*, and his article, "Between Absorption and Extinction: Charles Chesnutt and Bio-political Racism," is forthcoming in *Arizona Quarterly*.

(Top of Page)

Jared Gardner is an Associate Professor of English and Film at The Ohio State University. He also serves as coordinator of the Popular Culture Studies Minor. Jared is the author of Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), and of several articles on American literature, film and comics.

J. Ronald Green is Professor of Film Studies in the Department of History of Art at the Ohio State University. Green’s most recently completed research centers on African-American independent filmmaker, Oscar Micheaux. Dr. Green’s writings on Micheaux and on other topics--including media arts policy and independent documentary and avant-garde films, video, photography, installation, and digital arts--have appeared in numerous highly respected media-arts journals. Currently, Green is writing a book tentatively titled Poor Cinema: The Case for Inexpensive Films, and a book on avant-garde cinema and recent art museum installation work. A recipient of numerous grants, fellowships, and awards, Green has also served as president of the National Alliance of Media Arts Centers, trustee of the American Film Institute, chair of the department of photography and cinema at the Ohio State University, and assistant director of the Media Arts Program at the National Endowment for the Arts.

Lakesia D. Johnson is a PhD Candidate and Lecturer in the Department of Women's Studies at The Ohio State University. She has a J.D. and a Master of Arts in Women's Studies from OSU. She has also held teaching positions and an administrative appointment at Denison University. At OSU, she has alternated between teaching two courses, U.S. Women Writers and The History of Western Feminist Thought. She also served for several years as a departmental advisor for the Department of Women's Studies. Her areas of specialization and research include Visual and Narrative Culture, Black Women's Studies, Sexuality Studies, Feminist Legal Theory and Critical Race Theory. She is currently completing her dissertation, The Iconography of the Black Female Revolutionary and New Narratives of Justice.

Michelle Farris Lewis attended Prairie View A& M University and received a BA in Communications with a minor in Theatre Arts and an MA in Counseling Education. While she was in school, Michelle joined the theatre troupe The Charles Gilpin Players, under the direction of C. Lee Turner, where her passion for the theatre and entertainment world blossomed. A member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Inc, Michelle Lewis has worked in the field of education for the past 11 years. Never denying her passion for the arts, in the fall of 2005, Michelle enrolled in the Movie Maker’s Academy at Houston Community College and honed her skills as an editor. Her dream is to work with Tyler Perry and become successful at producing her own films. Her mission is to empower women to follow their dreams, to raise smart articulate daughters, and to emerge triumphant in every situation.

 (Top of Page)

David McLaughlin is a doctoral student in the Latin American Literatures and Cultures program in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the Ohio State University. He is interested in globalization and transcultural flows (musical and otherwise), film, and popular musical cultures such as Cuban and Brazilian hip-hop.

Linda Mizejewski is a Professor of Women’s Studies at the Ohio State University. Her research focus is women in popular culture. She is the author of Divine Decadence: Fascism, Female Spectacle, and the Makings of Sally Bowles (1992), and Ziegfeld Girl: Image and Icon in Culture and Cinema (1999), both of which explore the meanings of women performers. Her third book, Hardboiled and High Heeled: the Woman Detective in Popular Culture, (Routledge, 2004) is an analysis of the female investigator character in cinema, television, and best-selling novels. Linda has been a Fulbright Lecturer in Slovakia and Romania, and her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. In 2004, she was a winner of Ohio State’s Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching.

Tom O’Brien is an Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Education Program on the OSU- Mansfield campus. His research emphasis is in the history of American education in the twentieth century. Using historical and ethnographic methods, and biography, Tom examines how school practices and structures have developed in social contexts to both extend and limit educational and social opportunities. He encourages himself to read broadly and draw from literature in law, philosophy, sociology, African-American studies, political science, multicultural studies, school leadership, school reform, and southern history. Tom is driven by a concern that American institutions and people pursue self interest without making a serious commitment to the collective good. For Tom, race has been the litmus test for this contention. While schooling also factors into his analysis, Tom’s scholarship identifies the obstacles to racial equality and seeks ways to reduce racism.

(Top of Page)

Maurice Stevens Having taught in Literature and Ethnic Studies at the University of California at San Diego, Maurice E. Stevens is now a member of the Department of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University. He took his B.A. in Religion and Anthropology from Princeton University and received his Ph.D. and M.A. from the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Dr. Stevens’ research interests include: the formation of American identities in and through visual culture and performance, critical psychoanalytic theory, historical memory in relation to “trauma theory,” critical race theory, popular cultural performance, and American, ethnic, gender and cultural studies. His first book is titled Troubling Beginnings: Trans(per)forming African-American History and Identity, and he is currently working on a second book called From the Past Imperfect: Towards a Critical Trauma Theory.

Abril Trigo is Distinguished Humanities Professor of Latin American Cultures at the Ohio State University. His areas of specialization include Latin American Cultural Studies, literary and cultural theory, theater, film, and popular culture. He has published extensively on Latin American cultural studies, with particular emphasis on the historical formation of national imaginaries and their articulation to popular culture. His numerous publications include Caudillo, estado, nación. Literatura, historia e ideología en el Uruguay. (Gaithersburg, MD: Hispamérica, 1990), and The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader, co-authored with Ana Del Sarto and Alicia Ríos (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). Currently, he is working on Crisis y transfiguración de los estudios culturales latinoamericanos, and A Critique of the Political-Libidinal Economy of Culture, a theoretical inquiry on contemporary culture.

(Top of Page)