Centers and Institutes

Centers and Institutes


Centers and Institutes Research

Project Description
The Michael V. Drake Institute for Teaching and Learning offers eligible university instructors an incentive-based program that encourages the exploration, adoption, implementation and assessment of evidence-based instructional strategies. Instructional Redesign promotes scholarly teaching to support student academic success and to enhance the student experience. This proposal focuses on infusing IR with disciplinary pedagogy from the arts and humanities to support inclusive instruction.

Principal Collaborators 
Kay Halasek (English), Melinda Rhodes-DiSalvo (Michael V. Drake Institute for Teaching and Learning), David Sovic (Michael V. Drake Institute for Teaching and Learning), Joy Y. Balta (College of Medicine)

Project Description
This project will establish a vision for the transmission of identity and race through the embodiment of repertory acquisition of four internationally acclaimed Black women performers: Carolyn Adams, Dianne McIntyre, Bebe Miller and Ursula Payne. This project will elevate — via performance, oral history, archival research, summer workshops, digital preservation and communication methods, and publication — the historic dances of these women as represented through Black lives and Black bodies.

Principal Collaborators
Adélékè Adéèḳo (AAAS), Nadine George Graves (Dance), Valarie Williams (Dance), Larry Williamson Jr. (Hale Black Cultural Center), Crystal Perkins (Dance)

Project Description
Asian Futures brings together colleagues and constituencies across campus to develop a forward-looking framework for Asian Studies at Ohio State. The project will produce programming driven by key themes at the participating centers, including guest speakers, workshops and community engagement events. 

Principal Collaborators
The Humanities Institute
(Dir. David Staley), Center for the Study of Religion (Dir. Hugh Urban), Center for Folklore Studies (Dir. Katherine Borland), Center for Ethnic Studies (Dir. Namiko Kunimoto) and the South Asian Studies Initiative (Pranav Jani and Mytheli Sreenivas) in partnership with East Asian Studies Center (Dir. Etsuyo Yuasa), Center for Urban and Regional Analysis (Dir. Harvey Miller), Office of International Affairs

Project Description
This project includes academic research, a guest lecture series, two symposia, workshops and community events celebrating the music, dance and arts that have sustained BIPOC during the COVID-19 pandemic. This project will result in a joint publication and an audiovisual archive of the artistic production exhibited as part of the project. The programming will allow the Ohio State community to learn about racialized experiences of the pandemic, and it will provide resources to consolidate and expand interdisciplinary networks that will serve the Center for Ethnic Studies in its new institutional shape.

Principal Collaborators
Namiko Kunimoto (Center of Ethnic Studies), Jian Neo Chen (Asian American Studies), Christine Ballengee Morris (American Indian Studies), Inés Valdez (Latino/a Studies)

Project Description
This unique, multidisciplinary program attracts a diverse roster of students from across units at the university, as well as students from other colleges and universities, recent college graduates and those taking a gap year. These competitive internships offer real-world experience; exposure to arts-based careers; mentorship by and interaction with professionals across the center (as well as with visiting artists); and opportunities to pursue specialized interests. 

Principal Collaborators
Johanna Burton
(Wexner Center for the Arts), Dionne Custer Edwards (Wexner Center for the Arts), Karen Simonian (Wexner Center for the Arts), Alana Ryder (Wexner Center for the Arts)

Project Description
Climate Changing is an exhibition featuring a multi-generational group of nearly 20 artists from across the globe whose work takes on urgent social and environmental issues. At the same time, it considers the role of institutions in navigating these tumultuous times. While the exhibition is the core project, it will spark related events, scholarly contributions, online content, free talks and multidisciplinary programming before, during and after the winter 2021 exhibition run.

Principal Collaborators
Wexner Center for the Arts
(Dir. Johanna Burton)

Project Description
This project will develop a research agenda and academic programming. It will demonstrate that the thematic pairing of social and environmental issues in the focus and development of sustainability efforts represents a high-leverage strategy for environmental humanists. Outcomes will include:

  1. An arts and humanities research agenda advancing knowledge about the nexus of social justice and ecology as a problem-framing device for community engagement and sustainable development,
  2. New arts- and humanities-based courses and engaged coursework developed in the physical and intellectual spaces identified by the nexus of social justice and ecology,
  3. A year-long lecture series addressing the major themes and outcomes that emerge at the nexus of social justice and ecology, and
  4. A robust program evaluation.

Principal Collaborators
Beverly Vandiver
(Kirwin Institute), Elena Irwin (Sustainability Institute), Casey Hoy (InFACT), Piers Norris Turner (Center for Ethics and Human Values), John Brooke (Center for Historical Research), Rick Livingston (Humanities Institute)

Project Description
CMRS will host a series of lectures, demonstrations and events around the topic of ‘Experimental Archaeology.’ This year-long investigation will expand the traditional boundaries of ‘Experimental Archaeology’ beyond a focus on the recreation of buildings, technologies, things and environments, to also consider ‘Food Archaeology,’ or the preparation of meals using past recipes; and ‘Digital Archaeology,’ or the reconstruction of aspects of the past with the aid of computer technology.

Principal Collaborators
Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies
(Dir. Chris Highley)

Project Description
This project will embed three teams of teacher-scholars in the 2021 DMAC Institute by establishing the Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme Fellows at the Digital Media and Composition Institute. Collaborators will issue a call for proposals from teams of two teacher-scholars to create instructional modules on the broad topic of equity, diversity and inclusion in digital contexts. The instructional modules will include assignments, syllabi, curricula, workshops, classroom activities, bibliographies and community-engaged project ideas. Modules will become a part of the regular DMAC curriculum and serve as instructional materials that participants can use at their home institutions and within their local communities. Modules will be available to Ohio State instructors across disciplines and academic units who wish to use them in their classes and community outreach.  

Principal Collaborators
Scott Lloyd DeWitt (English), John Jones (English), Liz Miller (PhD Candidate in English)

Project Description
This grant supports a new youth summer camp program designed to provide school-aged musicians (grades 8-12) and college students with opportunities to create, perform, respond to and connect with a variety of global and popular music styles. This program will complement the camps that are regularly offered at the School of Music, which are Eurocentric in content and method. By focusing on popular and global music, this new camp will facilitate the recruitment of students who would rarely consider pursuing music studies in high education, who may not feel represented in music programs in their schools, and whose musical interests and talents would contribute to the mission of the SOM. Furthermore, it will allow for current SOM students to develop and apply a broader scope of culturally-relevant pedagogy that they can use as performers and educators throughout their career upon graduation from Ohio State. 

Principal Collaborators
Richard Palese (Music), Eugenia Costa-Giomi (Music) 

Project Description
The Hiphop Literacies Conference and book project will explore the Black Lives Matter philosophy and movement begun by three queer feminist women of color. Leading scholars, artists and activists of the post-Civil Rights Hiphop generations — including three Ohio State graduate students — will be invited to contribute chapters.

Principal Collaborators
Larry Williamson Jr. (Hale Black Cultural Center), Elaine Richardson (Teaching and Learning)

Project Description
This project will support the Intercultural Competence for Global Citizenship summer camp for middle school children in the Columbus area. In the affiliated service-learning course, undergraduates will be trained to teach language, cultural diversity, and global issues without essentializing, othering, or stereotyping. The course and camp increase awareness among the middle school students, their parents, and our undergraduates of the fundamental necessity of the qualities, skills, attitudes and knowledge associated with intercultural competence in order to function as a global citizen in the 21st century.

Principal Collaborators
Center for Languages, Literatures and Cultures
(Dir. Janice Aski); Department of French and Italian

Project Description
This project will build on the momentum of the current K’acha Willaykuna: Andean and Amazonian Indigenous Arts and Humanities Collaboration (funded by GAHDT) focusing on Indigenous material cultural production, oral traditions and performance practices as key sites of Indigenous knowledge, memory and meaning making.

Principal Collaborators
Scott Schwenter
(Center for Latin American Studies), Maria Palazzi (AACAD)

Project Description
This inter- and trans-disciplinary project will host a series of colloquia on key themes for the year 2020-2021, a major conference as well as a graduate student conference (2022) and a series of faculty workshops on curriculum development for new courses on religion and medicine. The long-term goal is to build stronger connections with the medical and nursing programs and to attract more of their students to classes and majors in religious studies, folklore, English and other fields in the arts and humanities.

Principal Collaborators
Center for the Study of Religion (Dir. Hugh Urban), Center for Folklore Studies (Dir. Katherine Borland), The Humanities Institute (Dir. David Staley)

Project Description
This five-day summer program will provide local students (ages 14-18) with insights on what it is like to be an Ohio State dance major. Intensive dancers will be chaperoned by upper-class dance majors; graduate students and faculty will provide instruction including but not limited to dance history, movement and repertory classes. The week will culminate in a public performance experience in the Barnett Theatre where participants will be offered the opportunity for on-site auditions for admission into the department.

Principal Collaborators
Nyama McCarthy-Brown (Dance)

Project Description
This grant will fund a year-long series of four multi-day workshops. This project will build upon and complement a number of other important initiatives at Ohio State that are engaged in rethinking graduate education in the humanities to make folklore work more public-facing and engaged and to prepare doctoral students for careers outside the academy. Additionally, the workshops will produce curricular materials, models and resources that can be shared with colleagues across the country who are anxious to develop an anti-racist and decolonial perspective in their folklore syllabi, research, public exhibitions and pedagogies.

Principal Collaborators
Katherine Borland
(Center for Folklore Studies), American Folklore Society

Project Description
The award will support honoraria for community speakers.

Principal Collaborators
Center for Ethnic Studies
(Dir. Namiko Kunimoto)

Project Description
This proposal supports the construct of this network and the implementation of a web-publishing platform for digital collections, drawing upon established expertise in a variety of units — ACCAD, University Libraries, Humanities Institute, TDAI, CURA, etc. — to support both funded and unfunded faculty and graduate-student research through collaboration, consultation, instruction and referrals within the network.

Principal Collaborators
Maria Palazzi (ACCAD), David Staley (Humanities Institute), Leigh Bonds (Digital Humanities Librarian), Matt Lewis (Design/ACCAD/TDAI)

Project Description
The release of the Land-Grab Universities Report in March 2020 has been accompanied by mounting calls to bring justice in response to the harm visited upon Native Americans during the establishment of states and land-grant universities. In this project, the Newark Earthworks Center seeks to fund a post-doctoral position that would create dialogue both within the Ohio State community and among other land-grant institutions on the truth and reconciliation topics as they relate to Indigenous peoples. Submitted in partnership with the Humanities Institute, this effort is designed in part to help build reciprocity and redistribution methodologies and engage in other humanities-based scholarship surrounding tribal issues and land-grant universities.

Principal Collaborators 
John N. Low (Newark Earthworks Center), Marti Chaatsmith (Newark Earthworks Center), Stephen Gavazzi (Human Sciences), Casey Hoy (InFACT), Brian Snyder (InFACT), Rick Livingston (Humanities Institute)

Project Description
This Summer Institute in Franklinton will facilitate university-community partnerships through co-designing workshops and demonstrate how project-based research and experiential learning can address real world challenges at a local level. It will illustrate the use of an ethical framework (based on the Principles of Inclusive and Equitable Civic Engagement).

Principal Investigators
Susan Melsop (Design), Sébastien Proulx (Design), Karen Hutzel (Arts Administration, Education and Policy)