This initiative built on the enthusiastic response to the Office of Research’s COVID-19 Seed Funding Program by targeting projects that showcase the distinctive affordances of the arts and humanities in addressing this global crisis. The pandemic was a stark reminder that innovative and compassionate responses are essential to address the wide range of consequences for individuals, communities and nations and to craft sustainable responses. Collectively, we hope to chart new ways to address pandemic-revealed disparities and pandemic-related research that reveals that neither crisis nor remedy exist without culture.

See Also

• "Why arts and humanities are vital to post-COVID recovery" by Faculty Director Wendy S. Hesford, published in University World News
• Letter from the Faculty Director
• Methods Conversation One | Bodies in Virtual Space
• Methods Conversation Two | Bodies in Public Space

Audiences and Online Reception: Before and After COVID-19
This project examined the impact of COVID-19 and quarantine experiences on artistic and cultural production and reception by examining historical precedents, situating audiences within their cultural and political milieu, and imagining possible futures based on how audiences are currently forming. Collaborators deepened contextual understanding of the artistic and humanistic dimensions of the pandemic by forging interdisciplinary, intellectual communities and innovating mechanisms for developing and sharing research under current constraints. In so doing, collaborators fostered long-term, mutually-beneficial relationships that support the work of artists and scholars who struggling in the state of emergency.

Principal Investigators: Harmony Bench (Dance), Yana Hashamova (Slavic), Hannah Kosstrin (Dance) Danielle Schoon (Near Eastern Languages and Cultures)

COVID Conversations: Life in a Time of Corona
This project was a Center for Folklore Studies (CFS) 12-part monthly podcast series. Each episode featured two individuals – one from Ohio and one from a different part of the world – who shared a distinct arts- and/or humanities-related professional or personal identity. Created and hosted by BBC-trained radio producer and broadcaster Rachel Hopkin, the contributors discussed and compared how their parallel involvements in the arts and humanities have informed their experience of life during the Coronavirus pandemic in their respective homes. The was distributed via the CFS’s podcast stream and local radio stations around Ohio.

• Principal Investigator: Katherine Borland (Comparative Studies, Center for Folklore Studies)
• Collaborators: Cassie Patterson (Center for Folklore Studies), Rachel Hopkin (Independent radio producer and folklorist), Paul Kotheimer (ASC Tech), Amy Shuman (English), David Staley (Humanities Institute, Center for the Humanities in Practice), Nick Spitulski (Humanities Institute), Luke Dennis (WYSO: the NPR affiliate station for the Greater Dayton area), Cristina Benedetti (Independent Folklorist, Ohio Arts Council), Patricia Williamsen (Ohio Humanities), David Merkowitz (Ohio Humanities), Robert Colby (Ohio Humanities)

Cultural Preservation and the Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans
This project explored the response of the Mardi Gras Indians — participants in a Black parading tradition in New Orleans — to the threats that the Coronavirus pandemic posed to this rich cultural practice. Since its origins in the nineteenth century, the parading tradition has been a creative, dynamic response to economic and social oppression built on a foundation of artistic and cultural African survivalism. The pandemic, like the Hurricane Katrina floods, disproportionately devastated the Black community because of structural inequality, while limits on group gatherings cut to the heart of a practice that culminates in neighborhood parades that celebrate artistry and community. This project captured the ongoing efforts of these culture-bearers to maintain this crucial tradition as well as the mutual aid work of its female practitioners, the Queens.

Principal Investigators: Virginia Cope (English-Newark), Tiyi Morris (African and African American Studies)

Dance in the Time of COVID-19
This project iwa designed for a group of dance art makers at The Ohio State University to partner virtually with dance art-making students from The University of Cape Town in South Africa to create dance art in response to the COVID-19 global crisis. Both groups were diverse, with enrolled students from various parts of both countries, representing myriad life experiences. Together, they engaged, communed, learned and created a computer dance art project shared with the goal to transform their dance to a live dance performance.

• Principal Investigators: Nadine George Graves (Dance), Nya McCarthy Brown (Dance)
• Collaborator: Lane Czaplinski (Wexner Center for the Arts)
• External Collaborator: Gerard Samuel (University of Cape Town)

Designing a Post-Pandemic Return to Campus
In order to develop a post-pandemic approach to bringing students back to their campus community, it is important to study the individual journey of students from diverse perspectives (majors/colleges/years/backgrounds, physical abilities). Through this project, collaborators sought to understand the ways in which place and people interact, identifying the human, physical, and digital touchpoints along their journey, how COVID-19 interrupted and put up roadblocks to that journey, and what solutions could be proposed to allow students to feel safe returning to their campus community. The workshop and design sprint will included three activities (student survey, journey narrative exercises, and participatory design workshop) and the outcomes of these were shared out with committees as they were completed.

Principal Investigators: Rebekah Matheny (Design), Stephanie Orr (Office of Distance Education and eLearning)

Designing for Public Health: Humanities and Arts Leading Transforming During COVID-19
This project created an online library of innovative public health measures amplifying arts and humanities methods and practices to serve the public good and health needs of populations during the pandemic. The project sourced illustrative instances and exemplars of innovative solutions that address social and behavioral challenges involved in the COVID-19 pandemic, entered thick descriptions of these into a database, then analyzed them to support informed development of further initiatives and public dissemination.

• Principal Investigators: Sébastien Proulx (Design, DESIS Lab), Susan Melsop (Design, DESIS Lab), Rebekah Matheny (Design), Will Nickley (Design), Hazal Gumus-Ciftci (Design), Adam Fromme (College Nursing)
• External Collaborators: Alessandra Bazzano (Tulane University), Laura Murphy (Tulane University)

Documenting of Latinas/os/x in Ohio Stories During COVID-19 Through Performed Storytelling
This publicly-engaged project collected oral histories of Latinas/os/x during COVID-19 in Ohio and made them available to the public on a digital platform. In addition, stories were performed live (or virtually), in order to model best practices for transformational community engagement through storytelling. The video recorded performances were shown to students enrolled in coursework for the health professions to help future health care providers develop both a sense of cultural humility in working with Latinx patients and an understanding of health disparities for Latinx populations.

Principal Investigators: Glenn Martinez (Spanish and Portuguese), Elena Foulis (Spanish and Portuguese, Center for Latin American Studies, Center for Ethnic Studies, Center for Folklore Studies), Palo Pinillos Chávez (Spanish and Portuguese), Elizabeth Fitzgerald (College of Nursing, Michael V. Institute for Teaching and Learning, Center for Ethics and Human Values, Center for Latin American Studies), Tatiana Friedman (Center for Languages, Literatures and Cultures), Micah Unzueta (undergraduate student)

Investigating Human Dignity in Practice During the COVID-19 Crisis
This cross-disciplinary project mobilized the strengths and support of the GAHDT, Ohio State’s College of Medicine and the Department of English’s MA in Medical Humanities to capture how human dignity is practiced — especially during global health crises. To do this, collaborators collected and analyzeed first-person narratives from medical professionals who provided frontline care during the COVID-19 pandemic. Results from the study helped to suss out some of the creative ways medical professionals provide dignified patient care despite ongoing health inequities and a critical shortage of human and nonhuman resources. After documenting localized, quotidian tactics for enacting human dignity, collaborators will scale analyses such that they help to improve both patient care and medical education curricula.

• Principal Investigators: Christa Teston (English), Melissa Guadrón (graduate student, English); Graduate Association of Mental Health Action and Advocacy
• Collaborators: Ohio State College of Medicine and the Medical Humanities Program

Measuring Artists' Challenges and Resilience After COVID-19
Collaborators developed survey questions to be included on the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) survey in spring of 2022 that spoke to COVID-related impacts on employment, creative practice and resilience among artists, thus expanding what we know about the impact of COVID-19 on the art world. They interviewed artists, arts practitioners and higher education arts leaders, consulted scholarly literature, assessed emerging policy and grey literature and compared ideas to those captured in other alumni and higher education surveys about the impacts of COVID-19. These insights were used to develop survey questions, conduct cognitive testing and revise survey questions after fielding comments from the arts community.

Principal Investigators: Rachel Skaggs (Arts Administration, Education and Policy), Elizabeth Cooksey (Sociology, CHRR, Institute for Population Research)

Muted, Isolated and Displaced by Social Distancing
The creative work of artists during times of crises have served as testaments to individual and shared interpretations of reality. COVID-19 and social distancing isolated and muted musicians and other performing artists by destroying the common spaces they have used and shared for centuries. The project addressed the communal experience during the COVID-19 crisis from the viewpoint of the artist focusing on new methods of creating collaborative work, conveying meaning and engaging the public in ensemble performances. The exploration of new creative methods to be used in reinvented shared rehearsal and performance spaces was facilitated by the commissioning of new work to be composed for movement and/or music ensembles and that portrays the impact of COVID-19 on individuals, communities, culture and humanity.

• Principal Investigators: Eugenia Costa-Giomi (Music); Nadine George Graves (Dance)
• Composers: Jan Radzynski, Thomas Wells
• Music Ensemble Conductors: Marc Ainger, Sonic Ensemble; Russel Mikkelson; Wind Symphony: Jordan Saul, Women’s Glee Choir; Robert Ward, Men’s Glee Choir; Michelle Wibbelsman (Spanish and Portuguese); Andean Ensemble
• Dance Composers and Studio Instructors: Eddie Taketa, Contemporary Movement Practices and Composition; Crystal Michelle Perkins, Africanist Foundations; Daniel Roberts, Contemporary Movement Practice and Composition; Susan Van Pelt Petry, composition and improvisation; Mitchell Rose, Dance Film; Norah Zuniga-Shaw, ACCAD
• Ohio State Virtual Gallery
• Michael Mercil (Art)

Ohio State Pandemic Collaborative
This project produced a series of virtual town halls titled “The Ohio State Pandemic Series,” led by national and international thought-leaders who addressed the COVID-19 pandemic and global health crises more broadly through the role of the arts and humanities. These thought-leaders had expertise in some of humanity’s worst health crises — ranging from racism as a global health emergency to Black Death, HIV, and the COVID-19 pandemic — and all utilized the arts and humanities to frame an intervention, solution or greater understanding of the emergency. The pandemic series spanned the academic year of 2020-2021, with one speaker per month, culminating in two capstone events: 1) A nationally broadcast panel discussion (The Pandemic Series Retrospective) between the invited speakers on the role arts and humanities play in health emergencies in which traditional approaches have been stretched beyond their capacities, and 2) A virtual summit (The Ohio Summit on Medical and Pre-Medical Education) for regional collaborators on how to change the educational infrastructure in Ohio to foster more socially- and intellectually-diverse and resilient student populations in medical and health-science professional schools.

Principal Investigators: Diane Brogan-Habash (College of Medicine, Center for Integrative Medicine), Julia Nelson Hawkins (Classics), Tracie McCambridge (College of Medicine), Jennifer Olejownik (College of Medicine, Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services), Elizabeth Weinstock (EquitasHealth, Columbus Veteran’s Administration, Franklin Correctional Center)

Pandemic Pedagogies: Precursors, Paradigms and Portents
Pandemic Pedagogies was multidisciplinary faculty collaborative. The project worked across the arts, humanities and sciences to create a set of pedagogical tools that informed and inspired students with questions about belonging, empathy, ethics and stigma that were vital to understanding the social impacts of pandemics past, present and future. They created a set of nested games/simulations to be used in high-school and college classrooms. These activities looked intently at pandemics in their bodily, historical, scientific, spatial and moral dimensions.

• Principal Investigators: PI: Thomas McDow (History), Co-PI and Project Coordinator: Jim Harris (History)
• Collaborators: Dana Howard (Center of Bioethics (COM), Philosophy), Jesse Kwiek (Microbiology), Susan Van Pelt Petry (Dance)

Poetry and COVID-19: A Collaboration Between Creative Writers and Environmental Scientists
This project represented a unique collaboration between five poets and environmental scientists creating writing related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Four Ohio poets and one from out of state started discussions with scientists working in areas relevant to environmental concerns significant to the crisis. Writers reached out to different local Ohio communities through workshops on how to use writing to process the crisis. The culmination of the project was two panels featuring the scientists and poets discussing the outcomes of the project, and the writing was published in a special issue of the international journal Magma Poetry. Bringing together creative and scholarly approaches, this project asked scientists and creative writers to work together to answer key questions related to the current pandemic: What does science tell us about the current crisis? How can we find new ethical ways of being, a world beyond this crisis? The findings will be published in a special issue of international journal Magma Poetry.

• Principal Investigator: Zoe Brigley Thompson (English)
• Collaborator: Kerry Ard (School of Environment and Natural Resources)
• External Collaborator: Ruth Awad (Columbus Poet) and others

Political Discourses During COVID-19 and the Impact on International Education
As language, by itself and as an embodiment of culture, is a powerful symbolic system that people use to design, create and control discourses, linguistic, sociolinguistic and sociocultural investigations of political discourses should belong at the core of our understanding of the humanistic impact of the COVID-19 crisis. In this project, collaborators took a multi-disciplinary approach to interpret American and Chinese political discourses about COVID-19 and explored how political language use and rhetorical framing during COVID-19 shaped individual and collective experiences and perspectives in the context of international education. The study contributed to the understanding of how participants of international education comprehend and cope with COVID-related political discourses in both their home and host countries, which may be at odds with each other at times.

Principal Investigators: PI: Zhiguo Xie (East Asian Languages and Literature), Co-PI: Cindy Xinquan Jiang (Office of International Affairs)

The Quarantine Cookbook: Documenting Migrant Food Networks Under COVID-19
The Quarantine Cookbook is a collection of critical and creative pieces addressing the intersection of migration and food during the COVID-19 crisis. Contributions came from writers, chefs, restaurateurs and artists, as well as home cooks and local immigrant families in Columbus, Ohio, and around the country. Each essay was accompanied by a recipe that has been important to the author during the COVID-19 pandemic. Collaborators also built a companion website to The Quarantine Cookbook, where members of the public were invited to submit their stories and recipes from the quarantine period. This site includes a dedicated page for The Ohio State University community, which serves as a living archive of the experiences of students, faculty and staff in isolation during the crisis.

Principal Investigators: Philip Gleissner (Slavic), Harry Kashdan (French and Italian)

The Recovery Project: Actions of Survival, Archives of Resilience
The Recovery Project built a community-engaged archive of pandemic testimonies and make an immediate contribution for our collective mental health and critical well-being. Using rhetorical, discourse and narrative analysis, this project used a combination of targeted interactive surveying, crowdsourcing via social media and correspondence, and scholarly analysis so that the energy and knowledge of thousands of people could be gathered — but also easily sifted through and used. The project thus created a focused, scalable archive where information can be parsed and mental-health support shared. In its digital space, this project provides a template to immediately address the mental-health needs and wellness of frontline workers and also presents a flexible best-practices model, global in scope, for understanding the role of media and social testimonies amidst a pandemic.

• Principal Investigators: Amrita Dhar (English, Newark Campus), Sona Kazemi-Hill (GAHDT Postdoctoral Researcher, Disability Studies), Margaret Price (English)
• Collaborators: Amy Shuman (English), Teri Murphy (Mershon Center), Lucille Toth (French and Dance), Hemachandran Karah (IIT-Madras, Social Sciences and Humanities)

Talking in the Clinic: Barriers and Facilitators of Chronic Disease Adherence
In the absence of pharmacologic and preventive measures for COVID-19, what the healthcare system is able to offer patients at high risk for COVID-19 complications is management of chronic disease; yet, patients with complex chronic disease (multiple co-morbid diseases or hard-to-control disease) are more likely than healthy patients to have barriers to care adherence. Using methodological and theoretical approaches from sociolinguistics and academic medicine, this study identified patient reported barriers to care adherence and the different ways that healthcare providers could encourage (or, conversely, thwart) discussion of those barriers during clinical encounters. There is little data from patients’ perspectives on their barriers, thus, in order to develop recommendations that may lead to improved care adherence, a detailed understanding of what those barriers are, especially from the patient perspective, is necessary. Barriers themselves and discussions about them are present in clinical encounters making it a rich site for revealing these problems and improving patients’ care adherence.

Principal Investigators: Gabriella Modan (English), Seuli Bose Brill (College of Medicine), Nathan Richards (graduate student, English)

Virtual Field Lab
This project created a Virtual Field Lab, which mirrored the real‐life situations that social work students find themselves in during field experiences. Using arts-based research and development methods, VR simulations were created to push the embodied experiences of field education into remotely-delivered distance learning opportunities that addressed the needs of foundational curriculum content to first‐year Master of Social Work students. The Virtual Field Lab provided realistic active learning opportunities for knowledge‐building and perspective‐taking and development and application of concrete social work practice skills.

• Principal Investigators: Maria Palazzi (Design, ACCAD), Lauren McInroy (Social Work)
• Collaborators: Katie Klakos (CSW), Alex Oliszewski (Theatre, ACCAD), Vita Berezina‐Blackburn (ACCAD), Jeremy Patterson (ACCAD)

What does Religion Sound Like in the Age of COVID-19?
This project was a collaborative, sonic-based exploration of American religious life in the age of COVID-19. Building on a special initiative of the American Religious Sounds Project, collaborators gathered audio recordings documenting how religious practice changed during the time of social distancing and church closings. These recordings were integrated into an existing digital archive. Collaborators also created an interactive digital exhibit based on what they learned, which was featured on a website and in a sound installation at the Urban Arts Space in summer 2021.

• Principal Investigators: Isaac Weiner (Comparative Studies), Lauren Pond (Center for the Study of Religion)
• Collaborators: Alison Furlong (Center for the Study of Religion, ASC Tech), Katherine Borland (Comparative Studies, Center for Folklore Studies), Cassie Patterson (Center for Folklore Studies), Merijn van der Heijden (Urban Arts Space), Jeremy Stone (Urban Arts Space)

Ancient Indigenous Monuments and Modern Indigenous Art
The Newark Earthworks Center (NEC) and the Barnett Center for Integrated Arts and Enterprise (Barnett Center) will collaborate to bring American Indian artists, writers, scholars, and activists for short residencies to explore the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks (HCE) of central Ohio and engage with students and faculty. Each five-day residency would include an inclusive and expansive tour of the HCE; two video interviews, one pre-and one post-HCE encounter; a public presentation; and a master class or other medium-appropriate masters experience.

Principal Investigators: Marti Chaatsmith (Newark Earthworks Center) and Christine Ballengee Morris (Barnett Center for Integrated Arts and Enterprise)

Indigenous Ohio: OSU and Native Arts and Humanities Past and Present
This interdisciplinary program conceived of by the members of OSU’s American Indian Studies program that asks regionally-focused questions about indigeneity  across  the  Ohio  region.  Indigenous  Ohio  will  foster  interdisciplinary  inquiry  across  the  OSU  campus  and  broader  Midwestern academic  communities with  questions  impacting  indigenous  studies  and  practices  in the arts and humanities; highlight  the  depth  of  North  American  indigenous  studies  at  The  Ohio  State  University;  facilitate  and encourage  student  involvement  with  indigenous  North  American  arts  and  humanities;  and  explore  a  diverse range of ways that indigenous arts and humanities focused in the  Ohio region can engage global issues.

• Principle Investigators: Cheryl L. Cash (Comparative Studies), John N. Low (Comparative Studies), Daniel  Rivers (History)
• Collaborators: Matthew A. Anderson (Molecular  Biology), Mark Bender (East Asian Languages and Literatures), Robert Cook (Anthropology), Shannon Gonzales-Miller (Office of Diversity and Inclusion), Kenneth D.  Madsen (Geography), Lucy Murphy (History), Elissa Washuta (English)

K’acha Willaykuna : Andean and Amazonian Indigenous Arts and Humanities Collaboration
K’acha Willaykuna: Andean and Amazonian Indigenous Arts and Humanities Collaboration, will bring together several strategic, interdisciplinary initiatives that affirm Ohio State’s commitment to the study of and critical engagement with Indigenous cultures of Abya Yala (the Indigenous denominator for the American continent in its entirety). Project collaborations center around a fundamental appreciation of material cultural production, oral traditions and performance practices as key sites of Andean and Amazonian Indigenous knowledge, memory and meaning making.

Principal Investigators: Elvia Andia Grageda (Department of Spanish and Portuguese), Alcira Dueñas (History), Pamela Espinosa de los Monteros (University Libraries), Richard Fletcher (Arts Administration, Education and Policy),  Megan Hasting (Center for Latin American Studies), Guisela LaTorre (Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies), Michelle Wibbelsman (Spanish and Portuguese)

The Ohio State University Prison Education Exchange Project
This project aimed to increase the number and disciplinary range of Inside-Out Prison Exchange® courses offered through Ohio State Columbus and Newark, and also to build a college-in-prison education program at Ohio State in collaboration with local colleges also participating in Inside-Out.

Principal Investigators: Mary Thomas (WGSS) Tiyi Morris (AAAS, Newark) Angela Bryant (Sociology, Newark)

Transformative Access Project: Moving from Inclusion to Equity
The purpose of this project is to re-imagine “access” as an intersectional process that centers race, ethnicity, disability, class, gender, and sexuality. Drawing upon community-based and interdisciplinary points of view, the Transformative Access Project will introduce innovative methods of gathering, researching, and making in order to amplify both Ohio State’s and participants’ collective knowledge.

Principal Investigators: Margaret Price (English), Nicholas Flores (Comparative Studies), Evelyn Hoglund (Speech and Hearing) Maurice Stevens (Comparative Studies)

2020 Grant Cycle

Arts-Based Anti-Racist Initiatives in High Schools
This team plans to build upon pilot efforts in anti-racism and DEAI (diversity, equity, accessibility and inclusion), using the Wexner Center for the Arts’ international, contemporary programming — films, art, performances, readings — to spark important conversations and integrate anti-racist efforts into curricula.

• Lead PI: Johanna Burton, Wexner Center for the Arts
• Community Partner: Big Walnut High School
• Co-Investigator: Joni Acuff, College of Education and Human Ecology

Hidden Figures Revealed: Dynamic History and Narratives of Black Mathematicians at The Ohio State University
Nearly 200 mathematicians have earned degrees in mathematics at Ohio State who identify as Black, and many have become prolific researchers, authors, high school teachers, economists, department chairs, lawyers and university presidents, yet they remain “hidden.” This case study will be the first comprehensive historical study of Black mathematicians at a single U.S. institution.

• Lead PI: Ranthony Edmonds, Department of Mathematics
• Community Partners: Jerolyn Barbee, National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center of the Ohio History Connection; David Goldberg, The National Math Alliance
• Co-Investigators: Cathy Ryan, Department of English; Jasmine Roberts, School of Communication; Elizabeth Newton, Battelle Center/Integrated Systems Engineering, Public Policy; Joshua Edmonds, Office of Diversity and Inclusion

2021 Grant Cycle

Increasing Black Women in Ohio Elected Office
Principal Investigator: Wendy Smooth (Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies; Political Science)

Racial Pathways
Principal Investigators: Stephanie Dodd (Ohio Campus Compact) • Clayton Hurd (Ohio Campus Compact) • Richard Kinsley (Ohio Campus Compact) • Zoë Plakias (Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics) • Maurice Stevens (Comparative Studies) 

Using a STEAM Model to Develop Access Pipeline for Middle Grade Students in Columbus Metro Schools
Principal Investigators: Melvin Pascall (Food and Science Technology) • Nick White (Department of English