| M.W. Cavender, Ph.D. Associate Professor Phone: (419) 755-4318 Email: cavender.13@osu.edu Professor Cavender is a specialist in Russian history, with interests in 18th- and 19th-century Russian cultural, social and intellectual history. She is the author of Nests of the Gentry: Family, Estate and Local Loyalties in Provincial Russia (University of Delaware Press, 2007), as well as several articles and reviews, and edited, with Choi Chatterjee, David Ransel and Karen Petrone, Everyday Life in Russia Past and Present (Indiana University Press, 2014). | |
| Kent (Kip) Curtis, Ph.D. Associate Professor Phone: (419) 755-4380 Email: curtis.457@osu.edu Professor Kip Curtis specializes in Environmental History and Humanities with research and teaching foci on mining, environmental ideas, and food systems. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in modern United States history and environmental history and he offers independent studies in environmental history and environmental studies and sciences. Curtis also leads the Mansfield Ecolab Ecology as Social Justice initiative and directs the campus Ecolab internship program, including the campus microfarm. More detailed information on Professor Curtis’s work can be found here. | |
| Scoppas Poggo, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Phone: (419) 755-4202 Email: poggo.1@osu.edu Professor Poggo is originally from the Kuku people of the Southern Sudan. He began his studies in the United States in 1990, after having been a student in the Sudan and in England. He received his Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1999. He joined the faculty in the Department of African American and African Studies and the Ohio State Mansfield campus in the Fall of 1999. He has taught Introduction to African American and African Studies, as well as the sequences in African-American and African History sequences. Professor Poggo's primary research focus is the first civil war in the Sudan, 1955-1972. He has also done research on the political and social history of the Kuku people of the Sudan. His publications include "The First Sudanese Civil War: Africans, Arabs, and Israelis in the Southern Sudan, 1955-1972": New York: Palgrave Macmillan, February 2009."General Ibrahim Abboud's Military Administration in the Sudan, 1958-1964: Implementation of the Programs of Islamization and Arabization in the Southern Sudan," Northeast African Studies, 9, 1 (Michigan State University Press, 2007); "The Origins and Culture of Blacksmiths in Kuku Society of the Sudan, 1797-1955," Journal of African Cultural Studies (SOAS, University of London; Francis & Taylor, 2006):"The Politics of Liberation in the Southern Sudan: The Role of Israel, African Heads of State, and Foreign Mercenaries, 1967-1972," The Uganda Journal, 47 (The Uganda Society, 2002); "Kuku Religious Experiences in the Sudan and in Exile in Uganda, 1900-1972" in Gray, Richard Fadl, Hassan (eds.), Religion and Conflict in the Sudan 1(Nairobi: Africana Publishers, 2001): "Azande Reaction to Foreign Penetration, 1860-1890" in Spaulding, Jay and Beswick, Stephanie (eds.,The White Nile Black Blood: From Khartoum to Kampala (Lawrenceville, NJ: The Red Sea Press/Africa World Press, 2000). Professor Poggo is the recipient of the Seed Grant from the College of Humanities at The Ohio State University in 2001. He also received the 2002 College of Humanities Diversity Enhancement award. | |
| Heather Tanner, Ph.D. Associate Professor Phone: (419) 755-4368 Email: tanner.87@osu.edu My primary academic interests center around how noble and royal women and men exercised power, particularly in the tenth through mid-thirteenth centuries, in northern France, Belgium, and England. This has led me into the study of lordship, feudalism, administration, law and custom, as well as emotions and rituals, which as led to the publication of ten articles and books chapters, and over thirty conference presentations. My first book, Families, Friends and Allies: Boulogne and Politics in northern France and England c. 879-1160 (E.J.Brill Academic Publishers, 2004) offered a new model of political development for northern France (rather than feudalism). I edited and co-wrote the introduction to Medieval Elite Women and the Exercise of Power: Moving Beyond the Exceptionalist Debate (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019) that stemmed from an international conference I organized. I am finishing my second book – Silence and Her Sisters: The Inheriting Countesses of Boulogne, 1160-1260 – concerning female inheritance and governance in mid-twelfth to mid-thirteenth-century Picardy and Flanders. I am also in the beginning phases of two new projects. The first is an analysis of the countesses of Blois (1126-1241) as lords of their husbands’ and their own territories. The second is a collective endeavor of digital history to map the social networks of elite medieval women undertaken with fellow medievalists in the U.S. and Europe. I have won several prestigious fellowships including a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship and the Coca-Cola Critical Difference grant. While history is a passion, I also love cooking, music, dancing, reading (especially mysteries and S.F.), and hanging out with my family and friends. I’m a Navy brat who has moved 40 times; which means I went to 5 elementary schools, 4 junior high schools, and 3 high schools. I started college at George Mason University, then went to Ventura College for a semester, and finished up at UC Santa Barbara. I worked for 2 years in the insurance industry before returning to graduate school at UC Santa Barbara. Before coming to OSU-Mansfield, I taught at Bates College, U. of Oregon, and Lake Forest College. |