THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Professor of Political Science
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- Professor, Department Chair, and CSEEES Director
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- Assistant Professor at the Knowlton School of Architecture
- Assistant Professor, Knowlton School of Architecture
Ashley Bigham is an Assistant Professor at the Knowlton School of Architecture and co-director of Outpost Office. She has been a Fulbright Fellow in Ukraine, a MacDowell Fellow, and a Walter B. Sanders Fellow at the University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. At The Ohio State University, she is an affiliate faculty member of the Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies. In addition, she is a collaborative partner and visiting faculty at the Kharkiv School of Architecture in Ukraine.
Ashley's creative work and writing engage architecture through a study of consumption and domesticity, focusing on architecture's entanglement with the production and fulfillment of consumer desire. She is the editor of Fulfilled: Architecture, Excess, and Desire (Applied Research + Design, 2022). Her writing and work has appeared in publications such as MAS Context, Dialectic, The Architect's Newspaper, Metropolis, Mark, CLOG, and Surface.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Political Science
Job Titles:
- Executive Director, Divided Community Project
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- Professor of Ottoman and Turkish History
Job Titles:
- Professor of Political Science
Christopher F. Gelpi is professor of political science at The Ohio State University. His primary research interests are the sources of international militarized conflict and strategies for international conflict resolution.
Gelpi is currently engaged in research on American public opinion and the use of military force, on popular attitudes and beliefs about terrorism, on modeling international conflict behavior in the laboratory, and on the impact of peace education curricula on the development of empathy. He has also published works on American civil-military relations and the use of force, the impact of democracy and trade on international conflict, patterns of transnational terrorist violence, the role of norms in crisis bargaining, alliances as instruments of control, diversionary wars, deterrence theory, and the influence of the international system on the outbreak of violence.
He is author of The Power of Legitimacy: The Role of Norms in Crisis Bargaining (Princeton University Press, 2002), co-author (with Peter D. Feaver) of Choosing Your Battles: American Civil-Military Relations and the Use of Force (Princeton University Press, 2004), and co-author (with Peter Feaver and Jason Reifler) of Paying the Human Costs of War: American Public Opinion and Casualties in Military Conflicts (Princeton University Press, 2009).
Job Titles:
- Student, Political Science
Cruz (Wenhao) Guan is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History. His dissertation focuses on the transformation of China from an empire to a modern nation-state from 1800 to 1937 based on the influences of cartography, modern education system, print culture, and Shanghai's publishing industry. By adopting a multi-layered perspective and interdisciplinary approaches from geography, his study will suggest that the birth of a new Chinese nation-state as defined in maps was a complex interaction in which the different, sometimes even contradictory, understandings of emperors, state officials, non-state-educated elites, and ordinary people collided and mixed.
Cruz is interested in modern China's print culture (especially the visual materials in different forms of publications), late imperial literati culture, the history of science and technology, and historical geography. He has presented his work at Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs (MCAA). He will also soon present two individual papers at Southwest Conference on Asian Studies (SWCAS) and Association for Asian Studies (AAS) 2024 Annual Conference.
Cruz has conducted several archival research trips in the U.S. and China in 2022-23 academic year, and his trips have received both OSU internal travel grants (Office of International Affairs, International Research and Scholarship Grant; The Department of History, The Retrieving the American Past Award and The Tien-yi Li Prize) and external fundings (Association for Asian Affairs, East and Inner Asia Council Small Grants).
He contributed a 2009 Chinese Central Television (CCTV) adaptation of the traditional Chinese drama, "The Return of the Soul at The Peony Pavilion (2009)," to The Chinese Theater Collaborative/華語戲聚.
In addition to being a GTA at the Department of History, Cruz is serving as the member of the 2023-24 History Department Graduate Student Advisory Committee (GSAC). He is also working with the History Department's Undergraduate Teaching Committee (UTC) as the representative for GSAC.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Law
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- Professor in the School of Music
- Professor of Music
Danielle Fosler-Lussier is professor in the School of Music at The Ohio State University.
Job Titles:
- Candidate, Political Science
Job Titles:
- Director
- Director, Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Studies
Emily Hardick is a Ph.D. candidate in African history (with minor fields in colonial history and dance studies). She is interested in the transnational circulation of dance performance and the cultural politics of performing arts within colonial and authoritarian regimes. Her work addresses these themes in the context of colonial and postcolonial Congo (DRC), from the 1930s to the early 1990s. Her dissertation examines the international tours of Congolese performance troupes, their relationships to Belgian arts organizations, and their role in the performance of colonial subjecthood and postcolonial national identity. Emily's research is supported by a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship, the Belgian Fulbright IIE Student Program Research Award, and the Belgian American Educational Foundation Fellowship.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Sociology
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- Assistant Professor of Political Science and Global Food Politics
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- Assistant Professor, Anthropology
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- Chairman in Military History
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- Andreas Dorpalen Professor of European History
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- Associate Professor of Political Science
Haifeng Huang is an Associate Professor of Political Science. His current research focuses on information flow and public opinion dynamics, including propaganda, misinformation, the relationship between global information and domestic opinion, and political trust, especially in the context of China. He has also studied economic reform, social transition, media freedom, and democratic electoral competition. His research has appeared in American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, Journal of Politics, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Perspectives on Politics, and Political Behavior, among other journals. He teaches courses on authoritarian politics, information politics, game theory, and Chinese politics. He was a Campbell National Fellow and the Susan Louise Dyer Peace Fellow at the Hoover Institution and is currently a non-resident scholar at the 21st Century China Center of UCSD. He will join OSU from the University of California at Merced.
Job Titles:
- Student, Political Science
is a PhD student in International Relations and Comparative Politics. Hamda's research interests are in development, foreign aid, international organizations, political violence, and gender, with particular focus in Eastern Africa. Hamda earned a MA in Global Finance, Trade, and Economic Integration from Josef Korbel School of International Studies, and BS/BA in economics and sociology from the Ohio State University. Additionally, Hamda previously worked as a researcher at the Pardee Center for International Futures.
Job Titles:
- Deputy Editor of American Sociological Review
J. Craig Jenkins is Academy Professor Emeritus of Sociology at The Ohio State University. He directed the Mershon Center for International Security Studies from 2011 to 2015 and is now senior research scientist.
His research focuses on the following major projects:
Rentier states and political conflict in the Middle East
Global political contention (including the World Handbook of Political Indicators IV project with Charles Lewis Taylor and Marianne Abbott)
Development and impact of the U.S. environmental movement (1900-2000)
Political economy of high technology development.
Climate change, migration and community disaster security in Bangladesh
Protest and the harmonization of international survey data
Jenkins is author of more than 100 referred articles and book chapters, as well as author or editor of several books including The Politics of Insurgency: The Farm Worker's Movement of the 1960s (1986); The Politics of Social Protest: Comparative Perspectives on States and Social Movements, with Bert Klandermans (University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Identity Conflicts: Can Violence be Regulated?, with Esther Gottlieb (Transaction Publishers, 2007) and Handbook of Politics: State and Society in Global Perspective, with Kevin T. Leicht (Springer, 2010).
He has received numerous awards, including the Robin M. Williams Jr. Award for Distinguished Contributions to Scholarship, Teaching and Service from the Section on Peace, War and Social Conflict of the American Sociological Association (2015), fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2009), Joan Huber Faculty Fellow (2003), chair of the Section on Committees of the American Sociological Association (1998-2000), chair of the Section on Political Sociology, ASA (1995-96), and chair of the Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements, ASA (1994-95). He was elected to the Sociological Research Association in 1993 and was a national security fellow at the Mershon Center for International Security at Ohio State in 1988, a Mershon Center professor from 2003-06 and chair of the Sociology Department, 2006-2010.
Jenkins has received numerous grants from funding agencies, including the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for Humanities and Russell Sage Foundation. In 2010-11, he received a Liev Eriksson Mobility Grant from the Norway Research Council. In 2011-12, Jenkins was a Fulbright Fellow to Norway and a visiting professor at the Peace Research Institute of Oslo (PRIO) in Oslo, Norway. In 2017, Jenkins and co-investigator Maciek Slomczynski received a $1.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation for a four-year project on "Survey Data Recycling: New Analytic Framework, Integrated Database and Tools for Cross-National Social, Behavioral and Economic Research."
Jenkins has served as deputy editor of American Sociological Review (1986-1989), and on the editorial boards of Journal of Political and Military Sociology, International Studies Quarterly, Sociological Forum,and Sociological Quarterly.
Job Titles:
- Candidate, Political Science
Job Titles:
- Candidate, Political Science
Job Titles:
- Historian
- Associate Professor of History
Jennifer Eaglin is a historian of modern Latin American energy development. She joined Ohio State University as an assistant professor of environmental history/sustainability in 2016. Her first book, Sweet Fuel: A Political and Environmental History of Brazilian Ethanol (Oxford University Press, 2022) examines Brazil's sugar-based ethanol industry. While most are aware of the US' corn-based ethanol industry, her book traces the growth of the Brazilian sugar-ethanol industry from the 1930s to the creation of the National Ethanol Program (Proálcool) in 1975 to the launch of the flex-fuel engine in the 2000s and the labor and water pollution issues that came along with it. Her next project focuses on the development of Brazil's nuclear energy industry. Eaglin's work has appeared in such journals as Environmental History and the Latin American Research Review.
At OSU, Eaglin teaches courses on the History of Brazil, the History of the Car, and Latin American Environmental History. In addition to her role in the History department, Eaglin is a core faculty member of the Sustainability Institute at OSU.
Eaglin received her Bachelor's from Spelman College, her Master's from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and her Doctorate from Michigan State University.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Political Science
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- Woody Hayes Senior Research Scientist
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- Assistant Professor of History
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- Associate Professor
- Director
- Director, Center for Folklore Studies
Katherine Borland is associate professor of comparative studies and director of the Center for Folklore Studies. She studies and teaches about the artfulness of ordinary life, and the ways in which traditional expressive arenas constitute contested terrain.
Borland's publications include International Volunteer Tourism: Critical Reflections on Good Works in Central America (Palgrave, 2013), a collection of reflective essays on international volunteering in Central America co-edited with Abigail E. Adams and based on a 2012 conference at the Mershon Center.
Currently, she is directing two ongoing engaged projects: Be the Street: A Performance Studies Project on Human Mobility and Placemaking, which cultivates theatre ensembles in the Hilltop neighborhood of Columbus; and Sharing Visions: Intergenerational Work in Appalachian Ohio, which supports succession planning among grassroots organizations in Perry County, Ohio. She continues to conduct research on international solidarity activism, grassroots environmentalism, and narratives of placemaking.
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Professor of Geography
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Theatre
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- Myers Chair in Global Military History
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- Visiting Scholar, George Washington University
is political science Ph.D. Candidate (ABD) at The Ohio State University, specializing in international relations and quantitative political methodology. Her research revolves around foreign policy decision-making and its implications for the use of force abroad. Maryum's dissertation investigates the sources and consequences of leader time horizons on the maintenance of coercive foreign policies, including military interventions and economic sanctions. She relies on experiments and within-case quantitative and qualitative data to build broader narratives about decision-making. Maryum is also a member of the Modeling Emergent Social Order (MESO) Lab at Ohio State, where she is developing a way to measure uncertainty in international conflict onset through structural estimation. In AY 2023-2024, Maryum will be a Hans J. Morgenthau Fellow through the University of Notre Dame. She holds an MA in political science from Indiana University and a BA in Political Science and Biology from Hofstra University.
Job Titles:
- Professor and Chair of Department of Geography
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences
- Associate Professor, Germanic Languages and Literatures
Matthew H. Birkhold is an associate professor in the College of Arts and Sciences and holds a courtesy appointment at the Moritz College of Law. He researches and writes about international law, property, indigenous peoples and the law, and the intersection of law, culture, and the humanities.
Prior to joining the Ohio State University, Birkhold worked as an attorney-adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State.
His first book, Characters before Copyright (Oxford University Press, 2019) uncovers the customary norms that regulated the use of fictional characters prior to the invention of copyright. He is currently writing a book about the ownership of icebergs. Birkhold has published articles on a range of subjects, including: Native American cultural property, the sale of meltwater, Greenlandic glaciers, and Arctic myths. His essays and op-eds have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, the Washington Post, the Paris Review, and Indian Country Today.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, Comparative Studies
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- Professor of History Director, East Asian Studies Center
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- Student, Political Science
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- Professor and Dean Emeritus, Moritz College of Law
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- Associate Professor of History
- Co - Editor of the Online Magazine Origins
- Specialist in Imperial Russian
Nicholas Breyfogle is a specialist in Imperial Russian history, c. 1700 to 1917, especially the history of Russian imperialism and the non-Russian nationalities of the tsarist empire. His research interests include Russian colonialism, inter-ethnic contact, peasant studies, religious belief and policy, and the history and culture of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Siberia.
He is also a specialist in environmental history. His writings have examined the history of earthquakes in Russia and the human history of water. He is currently working on an environmental history of the Lake Baikal region of Siberia, tentatively entitled "Baikal: The Great Lake and its People."
Breyfogle is author of Heretics and Colonizers: Forging Russia's Empire in the South Caucasus (Cornell University Press, 2005), which was awarded the Ohio Academy of History Book Award for 2006.
He is also co-editor of Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History (Routledge, 2007); guest editor of "Russian Religious Sectarianism," a thematic issue of the journal Russian Studies in History (Winter 2007-08); and guest co-editor (with Chris Otter and John Brooke) of "Technology, Ecology, and Human Health Since 1850," a thematic forum in Environmental History (October 2015), and "Health, Disease, and Environment in Global History," a thematic issue of the Journal of World History (December 2013).
Breyfogle works as co-editor of the online magazine Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, available at origins.osu.edu.
Job Titles:
- Director, Center for African Studies
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- Emeritus Professor
- Emeritus Professor and Academy Professor of Political Science
Paul A. Beck is Emeritus Professor and Academy Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University and co-coordinator of the Comparative National Election Project (CNEP), which has now conducted election surveys in 54 elections across the world.
Before retiring in 2012, Beck was Distinguished Professor of Social and Behavioral Science and Professor of Political Science with courtesy professor appointments in the School of Communication and Department of Sociology at Ohio State. He chaired the Department of Political Science from 1991 to 2004 and was dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences from 2004 to 2008.
Beck has published widely in leading professional journals on voting behavior, political parties, and public opinion. He was author/co-author of four editions of Party Politics in America (1988, 1992, 1997, and 2001) and co-editor of Voting in Old and New Democracies (2016) and Electoral Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies (1984).
In 2016, he co-authored articles on cross-national discussion networks in the International Journal of Public Opinion Research and Oxford Handbook of Political Networks. His co-authored 2017 article "Americans Are More Exposed to Difference than We Think" appears in Social Networks. His co-authored "What Happened to the Ground Game in 2016" is published in The State of the Parties 2018.
Currently, he is the co-PI for national post-election surveys in the United States 2016, France 2017, and Britain 2017 elections -- the latter supported by his fifth grant from the National Science Foundation. His most recent research papers have focused on the impact of "fake news" in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and on populist voting in recent elections in the United States, Britain, France, and Germany.
Beck is recipient of the Distinguished Scholar and Distinguished University Service awards from The Ohio State University and the American Political Science Association's Goodnow Award for distinguished service to the profession, and its Eldersveld Award for lifetime professional contributions to the field of political organizations and parties. Over the course of his career, Beck has chaired the thesis committees for 37 Ph.D. and 9 Honors students.
In recent years, he has provided political commentary for a wide variety of local, national, and international media.
Peace Matters: A Forum on the Discipline and Practice of Peace and Conflict Studies (2006-07)
Job Titles:
- Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of History
- Professor
Professor Hahn previously served as dean of Arts and Humanities in 2015-21 and as chair of the History Department in 2006-15. In 2002-15, he served as executive director of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), a professional society of some 1,400 members residing in 44 countries. He was elected by the membership to be president of SHAFR in 2018. In 2010, Ohio Governor Ted Strickland appointed Professor Hahn to a five-year term on the State of Ohio's War of 1812 Bicentennial Commission.
Professor Hahn has advised or co-advised more than three dozen doctoral dissertations in U.S. foreign relations history. He has taught thousands of undergraduates in courses on the history of U.S. foreign relations and modern U.S. history. He co-launched an undergraduate study abroad program on World War II and its impact on the modern world.
Professor Hahn earned his B.A. summa cum laude from Ohio Wesleyan University, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University, where he defended his dissertation with distinction. He won the 1998 Stuart L. Bernath Lecture Prize (for excellence in teaching and scholarship), and in 1995 he held a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship in Jerusalem.
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Historian
- History Department
Bruno Cabanes is the Donald G. and Mary A. Dunn Chair in Modern Military History. Prior to coming to Ohio State, he taught for nine years at Yale University.
Cabanes is a historian of 20th century Europe, and more specifically, the social and cultural history of war. He is particularly interested in the period of transition that followed World War I. He has analyzed this topic from a variety of angles: the demobilization of combat troops, the traumatic impact of war on soldiers and civilians, a comparative study of the different post-war periods in the 20th century, and, more recently, the environmental history of war and its aftermath.
His research on post-war transitions began with his doctoral dissertation, La Victoire endeuillée. La sortie de guerre des soldats français, 1918-1920 [Shrouded Victory: French Soldiers and the Transition to Civilian Life, 1918-1920] (Editions du Seuil, 2004). In this book, Cabanes studies the demobilization of the nearly 5 million French troops in 1918-1920, the various rituals and ceremonies that accompanied the literal and symbolic end of the war and the often uneasy integration of combatants back into their homes. At the collective level of societies, as well as at the individual level of survivors of the Great War, the transition from war to peace consisted of successive waves of demobilization and remobilization, making the boundaries between war and peace difficult to define. One of Cabanes' main points is that there was no "cultural demobilization" either accompanying or following the long process of sending French troops back home. La Victoire endeuillée was awarded the Gustave Chaix d'Est Ange Prize by the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques in Paris, and short-listed for the Augustin-Thierry Prize for the Best Book of the Year in Modern History in 2004.
His second monograph, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918-1924 (Cambridge University Press, 2014) won the Paul Birdsall Prize 2016, awarded biennially by the American Historical Association for a book on European military or strategic history since 1870. "Cabanes provides a riveting picture of the catastrophic humanitarian crisis that threatened global stability in the aftermath of World War I," the Birdsall Committee said. "Stateless refugees, wounded veterans, starving children, and displaced workers were among the multitudes in dire need of aid in the early years of that turbulent and painful ‘peace.' Cabanes foregrounds a Herculean humanitarian response undertaken by individuals and organizations during a time that resonates today. His work deserves a wide readership both within the academy and outside."
Cabanes' book, Août 14 (Éditions Gallimard, 2014) employs a cultural approach, telling the story of France's entry in World War I from the perspective of ordinary men and women caught in the flood of mobilization. The decisive month of August 1914 has often been studied from the viewpoint of diplomats and general staffs but rarely from the perspective of a country and its inhabitants in the grip of war. Through largely neglected sources such as eyewitness accounts, police notes, personal correspondence, and diaries, Cabanes brings back to life the passions, hopes, and illusions that historians often forget: the pain of separation and the anguish of what is to come, the fear of the enemy within, and the threat of invasion. Août 14, a finalist for a prestigious French book award, the Prix Fémina for nonfiction in 2014, was published in English translation as August 1914: France, The Great War and a Month that Changed the World Forever (Yale University Press, 2016).
Among other publications, Cabanes is the author of "Les vivants et les morts. La France au sortir de la Grande Guerre," in Sortir de la Grande Guerre, edited by Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Christophe Prochasson (Taillandier, 2008); "Le syndrome du survivant: histoire et usages d'une notion," in Retour à l'intime au sortir de la guerre, edited by Bruno Cabanes and Guillaume Piketty (Taillandier, 2009); "Negotiating Intimacy in the Shadow of War, (France, 1914-1920s)," in French Politics, Culture & Society (Spring 2013); "1919: Aftermath," in Cambridge History of the First World War, edited by Jay Winter (Cambridge University Press, 2014); and "Violence and the First World War," in Cambridge World History of Violence, edited by Philip Dwyer and Joy Damousi (Cambridge University Press).
Cabanes' most recent books are Les Américains dans la Grande Guerre [The Great War and the American Experience] (Gallimard, 2017) and Une Histoire de la Guerre [A History of War] (Seuil, 2018).
Cabanes serves on the advisory boards of the Historial de la Grande Guerre and the Museum of the Great War in Verdun. He is a member of the editorial boards of L'Histoire (since 1998), Vingtième Siècle. Revue d'histoire (since 2012) and Sensibilités. Histoire, Critique, Sciences Sociales (since 2016).
Job Titles:
- Professor Emeritus of Political Science
Job Titles:
- Professor of Human Security, Professor of Sociology
- Professor of International Security
- Professor of Sociology
Laura Dugan is Ralph D. Mershon Professor of Human Security and Professor of Sociology at The Ohio State University. Her research is motivated by the broader question of how leaders can reduce or enhance the risk of violence and other types of insecurities due to extremist ideologies and hateful intent. This work requires open-source data collection to capture more subtle day-to-day activities by leaders across the globe. As such, Dr. Dugan is co-co-principal investigator of the Government Actions in Terrorist Environments (GATE) datasets. The GATE data record government actions related to terrorists and their constituencies for a select set of countries since 1987. She is also a founding co-principal investigator for the Global Terrorism Database (GTD), the most comprehensive terrorism database available, as it records all known attacks across the globe since 1970 Furthermore, she also designs methodological strategies to overcome data limitations inherent in the social sciences.
Dr. Dugan has coauthored Putting Terrorism into Context: Lessons Learned from the World's Most Comprehensive Terrorism Database, along with more than sixty journal articles and book chapters. Her publications appear in journals such as the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Criminology, the American Sociological Review, Law and Society Review, as well as Terrorism and Political Violence, and the Journal of Peace Research. She serves on the Editorial Boards of Criminology and The Causes, Conduct, and Consequences of Terrorism book series by Oxford University Press and National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START).
Job Titles:
- Professor of Political Science
Job Titles:
- Editor
- Professor Emeritus of Political Science
Richard Gunther has research interests in Southern Europe, transitions to and consolidation of democracy, electoral behavior, and comparative political institutions and public policy. He is the international coordinator of the Comparative National Elections Project, and his current research involves comparative analyses of support for democracy and norms relating to citizenship, changes in the structure of partisan competition, and the impact of values on democratic participation.
Gunther is the author or editor of 14 books including Voting in Old and New Democracies, edited with Paul Beck, Pedro Magalhães and Alejandro Moreno (Routledge, 2016); The Politics of Spain, with José Ramón Montero (Cambridge University Press, 2009); Democracy, Intermediation, and Voting on Four Continents, edited with José Ramón Montero and Hans-Jürgen Puhle (Oxford University Press, 2007); and Democracy and the State in the New Southern Europe, edited with P. Nikiforos Diamandouros and Dimitri Sotiropoulos (Oxford University Press, 2006).
Gunther received the Political Science Department's Distinguished Teaching Award in 2009, the University Distinguished Scholar Award in 2006, the University Distinguished Service Award in 2004, and was Joan N. Huber Faculty Fellow from 2004-07.
Job Titles:
- Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Former Chair of the Department of Political Science
- Social and Behavioral Sciences Distinguished Professor Emeritus
Richard Herrmann is Social and Behavioral Sciences Distinguished Professor Emeritus and former chair of the Department of Political Science. He directed the Mershon Center for International Security Studies from 2002-11.
Herrmann has written widely on security affairs, international relations and foreign policy. He is author or editor of three books, including:
Transnational Identities: Becoming European in the EU (edited with Thomas Risse and Marilynn Brewer) (2004)
Ending the Cold War: Interpretations, Causation and the Study of International Relations (edited with Richard Ned Lebow) (2004)
Perceptions and Behavior in Soviet Foreign Policy (1985)
Herrmann has also published more than 30 articles and book chapters. His work has appeared in such journals as American Political Science Review, International Organization, International Security and World Politics. From 1990-95, he was co-editor of International Studies Quarterly, the flagship journal of the International Studies Association.
Besides his scholarship, Herrmann also has a wealth of practical experience. From 1989-91, he was a member of Secretary of State James Baker's policy planning staff at the U.S. Department of State. From 1992-95, he worked with the U.S. Information Agency to hold conflict resolution workshops for scholars and policy-makers from India, Pakistan, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Algeria, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United States. And in 1996-97 he was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations of New York task force that produced the book Differentiated Containment: Rethinking U.S. Policy in the Gulf.
Herrmann received the Faculty Award for Distinguished University Service in 2008 and was named Joan N. Huber Faculty Fellow in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences from 2007-10. He received a National Science Foundation grant for "Understanding Global Tensions: A Sociology and Political Science Workshop," with Katherine Meyer in 2004. Herrmann is also the recipient of fellowships from the Harriman Institute, Ford Foundation, and Mellon Foundation.
Job Titles:
- Historian
- Associate Professor of History and African and African American Studies
Sarah Van Beurden is a historian of colonial and postcolonial central Africa. She is interested in the ways culture is constructed, represented, and used in political contexts and has published on the history of museums, art restitution, decolonization, heritage and conservation politics, and the history of anthropology and art history. Her book, Authentically African: Arts and the Transnational Politics of Congolese Culture (New African Histories Series, Ohio University Press, 2015) investigates the role of museum politics in the legitimation of the Belgian colonial regime and the postcolonial Mobutu regime in Congo/Zaire. It tells a new history of decolonization as a struggle over cultural categories, the possession of cultural heritage, and the right to define and represent cultural identities. Her work has appeared in journals such as The Journal of African History, History and Anthropology, Radical History Journal, and African Arts. Her current research focuses on the history of cultural planning, craft economies, and art education in central Africa. She is a frequent media contributor on topics such as African art restitution and Belgian colonialism and its legacies.
Job Titles:
- Candidate, Political Science
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, Slavic
Associate Director Teri Murphy and International Alert Nepal researchers conducted interviews and focus groups in two western provinces and Kathmandu Valley. They met with a wide range of Nepalis - including government officials, academics, human right activists, journalists, NGO practitioners, and community leaders - to learn about their political priorities and on-going security concerns. Analysis of these discussions serves as the rationale for this 2-year research agenda.
Job Titles:
- Associate
- History Department
- Professor of History
Theodora Dragostinova is an associate profesesor of history at The Ohio State University. Her work focuses on nation-building, refugee movements, and minority politics in eastern Europe, with a particular emphasis on the Balkans.
Dragostinova is the author of Between Two Motherlands: Nationality and Emigration among the Greeks of Bulgaria, 1900-1949 (Cornell University Press, 2011). Her book was shortlisted for the Joseph Rothschild Prize in Nationalism and Ethnic Studies of the Association for the Study of Nationalities; and the Edmund Keeley Book Prize of the Modern Greek Studies Association. The book was awarded the Past President Bronze Award from the Association for Borderlands Studies.
Expanding her work on nationalism, in 2011 she organized at the Mershon Center, with Yana Hashamova, a conference entitled "Beyond Mosque, Church, and State: Negotiating Religious and Ethno-National Identities in the Balkans." The volume that resulted out of this conference is Beyond Mosque, Church, and State: Alternative Narratives of the Nation in the Balkans (CEU Press, 2016).
She is also working on a second book project, tentatively entitled "Communist Extravaganza," a transnational study of the years of late socialism in Bulgaria through an examination of cultural politics and national commemorations. Based on research in Bulgaria, Hungary, Great Britain, Austria, Germany, France, and the United States, this book engages the global Cold War order through the experiences of a small state, Bulgaria, and its cultural engagements with the world. In connection to this project, Dragostinova organized a workshop on Iron Curtain Crossings: Eastern Europe and the Global Cold War in March 2016 with support of a grant from the Mershon Center.
Dragostinova has been actively involved in the work of the Race, Ethnicity, and Nation (REN) Constellation of the History Department, which explores these three concepts in a comparative, transnational perspective. She was also a part of the team of eight faculty members who organized the first Ohio State University Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, under the title "CrossRoads: Culture, Politics, and Belief in the Balkans and South Asia." Between 2016-2018, she was a team members of the Global Mobility Project at Ohio State. She is currently a faculty fellow for the Im/Mobility focus area of the Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme while she is also leading the Migration, Mobility, and immobility Project.
Dragostinova has received grants and fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), and American Historical Association. The dissertation on which her book is based received the John O. Iatrides Prize from the Modern Greek Studies Association for the best English-language dissertation on a Greek topic. Her work has appeared in Nationalities Papers, Slavic Review, East European Politics and Societies, Journal of Genocide Research, and Journal of Contemporary History.
Job Titles:
- Academy Professor Emeritus of Sociology
Van Beurden has held fellowships at the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas in Austin, the Käte Hamburger Kolleg and Centre for Global Cooperation Research at University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany) and at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, where she was a member of the "Histories of Planning" workgroup from 2014 until 2018.
At The Ohio State University, she is an associate professor of History and African American and African Studies, and she is an affiliated faculty member of the Department of History of Art.
Job Titles:
- Chairman in National Security Studies and Professor of History
- Woody Hayes Senior Research Scientist
Job Titles:
- Fellow
- Director, Divided Community Project. Langdon Fellow in Dispute Resolution
William "Bill" Froehlich '11 is the current Langdon Fellow in Dispute Resolution and Deputy Director of the Divided Community Project at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. Professor Froehlich regularly teaches Moritz's longstanding mediation clinic where he trains students to mediate and supervises student mediators in several Columbus-area venues; he has also taught courses which focus on dispute systems design. He regularly trains mediators for the Supreme Court of Ohio and taught a mediation course at Pepperdine University.
In addition to recent invitations to present scholarship at Stanford and Yale, Professor Froehlich was awarded the International Institute for Conflict Prevention & Resolution's 2020 Outstanding Professional Article award for his article (co-authored with Nancy Rogers and Joseph Stulberg), Sharing Dispute Resolution Practices with Leaders of a Divided Community or Campus. Through his work with the Divided Community Project, Professor Froehlich regularly delivers presentations to community, elected, and police leaders, and has trained cohorts of community leaders from more than a dozen campuses, dozens of communities, and five state attorney general offices.
He graduated cum laude from Moritz in 2011 and served on the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law while in law school. In addition, he worked on public policy consensus building projects as a research fellow with the Election Law @ Moritz program, and served as research assistant in the areas of nonprofit law and professional responsibility. He has an undergraduate degree in math and political science from Denison University. Prior to his work at Ohio State, Froehlich worked in labor relations and practiced labor law as an associate attorney with Muskovitz & Lemmerbrock, LLC. Before beginning law school, he worked as a legislative aide in the Ohio Senate.
Job Titles:
- Professor and Chair of Slavic
- Professor and Chair of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures
Yana Hashamova is professor and chair of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures; core faculty of the Film Studies Program; and affiliate faculty of the Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme, comparative studies, film studies, women's, gender and sexuality studies, and the Mershon Center for International Security Studies.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor and Carter V. Findley Professor of Ottoman and Turkish History
Yiğit Akın is Associate Professor and Carter V. Findley Professor of Ottoman and Turkish History at the Ohio State University. He is a specialist of the history of the modern Middle East. His research interests include social and cultural history of the late Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey, with a particular focus on the First World War and its aftermath, war and society, nationalism, and social movements.
Akın is the author of two books. The first, Gürbüz ve Yavuz Evlatlar: Erken Cumhuriyet'te Beden Terbiyesi ve Spor (‘Robust and Vigorous Children': Physical Education and Sports in Early Republican Turkey) (İletişim, 2004), offers a new framework for thinking about the relationship between sports and physical education, governmentality, public health, and nationalism in early republican Turkey. It won the 2005 Distinguished Young Social Scientist Award from the Turkish Social Science Association.
His second book, When the War Came Home: The Ottomans' Great War and the Devastation of an Empire (Stanford, 2018), examines the Ottoman Empire's catastrophic experience of the First World War and analyzes the impact of the war on the empire's civilian population. When the War Came Home was named a 2018 Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title and won the 2019 Tomlinson Book Prize for the best work of history in English on World War One, awarded by the World War One Historical Association.
Akın is currently working on two book projects on the post-World War I years in the Ottoman Empire from a global perspective and the social and cultural history of death in the late Ottoman Empire and Republican Turkey.