Ohio Northern’s School for the Humanities and Global Cultures recently hosted a showcase of humanities publication. The event saw a full house with six publications from faculty of many disciplines.
The night started with the introduction of Dr. David Strittmatter.Dr.Strittmatter, Assistant Professor of History, discussed his publication Memory, Heritage, and Preservation in 20th Century England. He gave a summary of the book, citing various examples of locations in England that have changed hands and evolved since the historic moments that made them, and how they are treated in the long run wrapping up his summary asking, “What story do we want to tell our selves?”
From there, Dr. Kanishka Sen, Associate Professor of Spanish was brought to the podium. He spoke of his translation of Horacio Quiroga’s Selected Short Stories: A Spanish- Bengali, Bengali- Spanish Bilingual Anthology. He spoke passionately about the man behind the book comparing him to the poet Edgar Allen Poe in style. He also discussed some of the complexities of translating a work from one language to another.
After Dr.Sen, Dr. Ray Person, Professor of Religion, discussed his publication Scribal Memory and Word Selection: Text Criticism of the Hebrew Bible. He spoke confidently and collectively about the history of transferring texts of the bible over generations and how that affects its meaning. He discussed the human nature of passing down and transferring text and how the texts can be misinterpreted for ideological reasons or can even be misconstrued for other words in translation stating, “Scholars of ancient and medieval literature understand that text of existent manuscripts, and no one manuscript is the same. Both are written by hand.”
From there, Senior Creative Writing major Chrys Goldy gave an introduction to Dr. Jennifer Pullen of the English Department and her publication Fantasy Fiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology. She brought a creative blurb about her book talking about her time growing up, reading books obsessively, and falling in love with fantasy and sci-fi. She also discussed her history with “Genre fiction” and how this subject is often shunned in academia saying, “Sci-fi and fantasy was beginning to coalesce, no one had yet decided what respectable writers should write, no one had yet said hey, we can only write about bad marriages and poverty, sorry.” She went on to discuss the impact of her publication being something she was proud to have put into the world saying, “When I was approached by Bloomsbury to write a proposal for a creative writing textbook and anthology, focused on fantasy fiction, much like a heroine in a romantic comedy I said yes a thousand times, yes.”
Senior Philosophy major Michael Kirchner introduced Dr. Robert Hartman of the Philosophy Department and his publication A Christian Ethics of Blame: or God Says Vengeance is Mine. He approached discussing his work a bit differently, by bringing forward ethical arguments and philosophical scenarios which he laid out in his book to give a sampling of his writing.
The final speaker of the night was Associate Professor of English Dr. Douglas Dowland with his publication We, Us, and Them: Affect and American Nonfiction from Vietnam to Trump. He started by giving thanks to the Heterick Memorial Library for its resources and materials, then dedicated the book to his students: “…As I teach, you inspire me, you push me, you challenge me, and I know that I push and challenge and inspire you back…” He went on to discuss the image of the American dream, and the American Nightmare through the lens of the gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, summing up Thompson’s views saying “What Thompson’s record shows is how vile through all his moralizing and condemning for all of his insulting and invective, leads us back to the ultimately vague sense of the nation as somehow beyond redemption. it shows what happens when hostility is substituted for sobriety, populism for democracy, the people for all the people.”
The event came to a close with a 4 question Q&A which was less formal. Questions concerned Dr. Strittmatter’s Titanic J-term course, a reading from Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and a reading from Dr. Sen’s translation in Bengali to a joyous applause. Dr. Jennifer Moore, Director of the School of Humanities and Global Cultures, MC’d the event.