Rasel Ahmed
Assistant Professor
Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Arts
Rasel Ahmed (any pronouns) is a filmmaker, cultural organizer, and Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University's Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Arts.
Rasel's filmmaking and research revolve around themes of displacement, citizenship, kinship, and their intersection with queer identity.
Rasel's filmmaking draws its primary inspiration from his cultural and political memories as a displaced person, frequently adopting a hybrid format that blurs the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction.
Other than filmmaking, Rasel is the co-founder and executive director of an archiving organization called Queer Archives of the Bengal Delta.
The transnational archive collects, preserves, and reflects on Bangladeshi queer lived experiences that have been erased from public memory.
Rasel is also the co-founder and editor of the first Bangladeshi LGBTQ magazine titled Roopbaan.
Jeffrey H. Cohen
Professor
Department of Anthropology
Jeffrey H. Cohen is a professor of anthropology at Ohio State University.
Recipient of the 2022 award for community-engaged scholarship, his work focuses on migration, food ways, well-being, indigenous response to Covid-19, and the digital divide.
In addition to long-term research in Oaxaca, Mexico he co-directs project Panchavati with the Bhutanese Community of Central Ohio.
His books include:
- Cooperation and Community: Economy and Society in Oaxaca
- The Culture of Migration in Southern Mexico
- The Cultures of Migration: The Global Nature of Contemporary Movement
- Eating Soup without a Spoon: Anthropological Theory and Method in the Real World
Hollie Nyseth Nzitatira
Associate Professor
Department of Sociology
Hollie Nyseth Nzitatira, Associate Professor of Sociology, examines the causes and consequences of genocide, mass violence, and human rights violations.
She has published over 50 articles on these topics, and her current book project, funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, analyzes reentry and reintegration after genocide.
Hollie engages in atrocity forecasting efforts, collaborates with nonprofits and museums dedicated to atrocity prevention and education, and is the Global Editor in Chief of the International Association of Genocide Scholars Policy Brief Initiative.
She teaches classes on violence and leads an education abroad trip to Rwanda every summer, for which she has received:
- The Ohio State’s Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching
- The Distinguished Diversity Enhancement Award
- The College of Arts and Sciences’ Outstanding Teaching Award
Christopher S. Parmenter
Assistant Professor
Department of Classics
Christopher Stedman Parmenter is an ancient historian specializing in the intertwined histories of race, culture, and long-distance trade in Archaic and Classical Greece.
My book project, entitled Racialized Commodities: Long-distance Trade, Mobility, and the Making of Race in Ancient Greece, c. 700-300 BCE (under contract with Oxford University Press), asks how and why Greeks came to see their Mediterranean neighbors—like the “grey-eyed Thracians” and “dark-skinned Ethiopians” listed by the poet Xenophanes around 550 BCE—as racialized ‘Others’ in the middle of the first millennium.
My articles cover a wide range of topics, including:
- Slavery in the world of the Archaic Black Sea
- The archaeology of Archaic Cyprus
- Egyptianizing religious practices in the Archaic Greek world
- The politics of Blackness in American classical studies during the Cold War
- The reemergence of ‘race’ as a concept in premodern Mediterranean archaeology following the ‘genomic revolution’ of the 2010s
Two current article projects explore how the late eighteenth century abolitionists Olaudah Equiano (1745-97) and Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846)--both writing before the professionalization of Classics--interpreted slavery in ancient Greece and Rome.
As a side project, I have written on migration, whiteness, and the racialization of the Armenian American diaspora for Ajam Media Collective.
Jennifer Suchland
Associate Professor
Department of Slavic and East European Languages Cultures
Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Jenny Suchland (she/her) studies how human rights categories emerge and are contested with a focus on labor exploitation, gender violence, and human trafficking.
Suchland’s book Economies of Violence: Transnational Feminism, Postsocialism, and the Politics of Sex Trafficking (2015) is an analysis of the resurgence of global anti-trafficking discourses at the end of the Cold War which, in turn, created a human rights deficit at the heart of anti-trafficking.
Her current work includes a book manuscript on the anti-trafficking moniker “modern day slavery,” essays on sexuality and nationalism in Russia, as well community collaborations on public education and social justice.
A recent recipient of an ACLS/Mellon Foundation Scholars and Society Fellowship, she currently is a faculty fellow in the Global Arts and Humanities Society of Fellows.
Lucille Toth
Assistant Professor
Department of French and Italian
Originally from a small village in the south of France, Lucille Toth moved to Montreal, Canada when she was 21 to study francophone literatures.
Today an Assistant Professor of French at the Ohio State University, her research interests lie at the intersection of dance, literature, medical humanities, and migration studies.
Her first book Danses et pandémies. Du sida à la covid-19 (Dance and Pandemics. From AIDS to COVID-19) came out in 2022.
Trained in contemporary dance, Lucille is also the founder and artistic director of On Board(hers), a dance project based on the testimonies of immigrants.