Debra Moddelmog

Debra’s research has centered upon intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, nation, dis/ability, and religion in relation to 20^th-century fiction and, more recently, popular culture.  Her recent projects have investigated historical formations—such as companionate marriage, Hoover’s FBI, and the Defense of Marriage Act—to explore how norms about gender, race, and (especially) sexuality have been established and, consequently, transgressed in American society and literature.  One of Debra’s primary subjects of investigation is Ernest Hemingway and his afterlife via posthumous publication, popular culture, marketing, and literary criticism; her book that deals with this subject is Reading Desire: In Pursuit of Ernest Hemingway (Cornell 1999).  She has also written essays on how the anxiety of same-sex marriage surfaces in Hollywood romantic comedy and on coming out in the classroom by destabilizing identity.  Currently, she is working on a project about the queer influence of sexologist Havelock Ellis on modernist writers.

Maurice Stevens

Maurice’s research interests focus on the formation of American identities in and through visual culture and performance, historiography, and historical memory in relation to “trauma theory,” critical race theory, critical psychoanalytic theory and popular cultural performance.

Judy Wu

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu joined the faculty of Ohio State University in 1998 after receiving her Ph.D. in History at Stanford University. She specializes in the fields of Modern U.S. History, Ethnic Studies, as well as Women's/Gender/Sexuality Studies. She is the author of Dr. Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity (University of California Press, 2005) as well as many articles. Click here for book press site.

Her current book project, tentatively titled "Radicals on the Road: Third World Internationalism and American Orientalism during the Viet Nam Era," is under contract with Cornell University Press for a series on U.S. and the World that is edited by Mark Bradley and Paul Kramer. This work focuses on the international travels of American antiwar activists during the U.S. War in Viet Nam. It specifically explores how these encounters with Asian culture, politics, and people shaped the radical imaginary of U.S. activists of varying racial, gender, and sexual identifications.

Martin Joe Ponce

Joe’s main research project, currently titled "Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading," offers an expansive analysis of twentieth-century Filipino literature produced mostly, but not exclusively, in the United States. Since there does not exist a full-length consideration of this literature, the study's main contribution lies in its theory of interpretation. It argues that this body of work demands to be read within a transnational context shaped by U.S. imperialism and migration. Although Filipino literature in the U.S. has usually been treated as a subset of Asian American literature, he contend that a diasporic frame situating it in relation to Philippine and U.S. cultures provides a more historically nuanced account of the ways that colonialism, imperialism, and migration impact literary production.