About this Website

The Ohio State Humanities Institute Research Connector Database is aimed at building connections between faculty, staff, and students affiliated with the Humanities Institute and our five affiliated Centers.

Ohio State is a huge university with many potential connections across department lines, but because of its size, networking can feel overwhelming. This tool can help colleagues easily identify potential partners for collaboration or simply to meet for coffee.

Below, you’ll find additional information about the purpose, operation, and design of this website. To learn more about the purpose of the database, please see "Purpose of this Website." To learn more about how to find relevant and important information on this website, please see "What’s On this Website." If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please reach out to our staff at huminst@osu.edu

Purpose of this Website

The Humanities Institute has created this interactive database to help you meet, engage, and collaborate with colleagues. One of the tremendous advantages of working in the Arts and Humanities at Ohio State University is the large number of fellow researchers and creative practitioners. This is also one of the great challenges. With so many active scholars and artists spread across two dozen departments, attempting to find colleagues with interests and projects that overlap with yours can be very difficult.

This connector tool offers several ways for you to identify potential connections. The main navigation lets you choose any of the Institute's centers, any person with an active profile on the site, or any of more than 100 research areas as a starting point to explore.

In the Arts and Humanities, research areas are often highly personal and specific, representing the constant innovation that drives our fields. In order to encourage connections, we have constructed meta-disciplines, and these are what appear in both the main site navigation and the graphic visualization. Clicking on a name in the graph or in the “People” list enables you to see that person’s profile, and on that page you will find both the meta-disciplines as well as their more specialized interests.

What's on this Website?

Any affiliated faculty, staff, fellows, and students in the Humanities Institute (HI), the Center for Ethnic Studies (CES), Center for Folklore Studies (CFS), Center for the Study of Religion (CSR), Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CMRS), and Melton Center for Jewish Studies (MCJS) may be included in this database.

In the summer of 2023, the team at the Humanities Institute sent out a survey to collect research interest information from all affiliated faculty, staff, and students which formed the basis of our initial database. Using these research interests, we compiled lists of "meta-categories" (a.k.a. Research Interests) to link people together based on some commonalities we found in their areas of expertise. These "meta-categories" may not fully describe the depth of individuals' research interests but are meant to provide an opportunity to start a conversation about shared research potential.

Each of the pages under "Affiliation" contain more information about:

Each of the pages under "People" contain more information about:

Each of the pages under "Research Interest" contain more information about:

Please note that Emeritus/Emerita and non-OSU affiliates are not included on this database. If you wish to learn more about our Emeritus/Emerita and non-OSU affiliates, please visit the websites linked on each centers' page.

Additionally, if you did not receive a link to complete the survey of research interests but are included anywhere in the list of people affiliated with one of our centers, please let us know and we will send a link to you!