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Jill Galvan, assistant professor of English

July 14, 2010

Jill Galvan is an assistant professor of English who specializes in  Victorian and turn-of-the-century literature and culture. She is the author of The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult and Communication Technologies, 1859-1919.

What are your five favorite books and why?

Villette by Charlotte Brontë
I’m drawn to rich character studies, along with unusual narrative points of view, and the protagonist Lucy Snowe is a classic unreliable narrator. Then there’s her wryness; there are moments of her narration that make me laugh out loud. For a long time, I preferred this one to Brontë’s Jane Eyre. But I still have to work to get my students to appreciate Villette as much as I do.

Middlemarch by George Eliot
Eliot is a master of character psychology, and I find her perspective on humanity dead-on. It’s amazing how well she understands sympathy as the basis of morality, but also the many difficulties of sympathy — and how she can manage to build a great story around those heady ideas. With its long, intricate plot that you can easily sink your teeth into, this is just the type of novel that drew me to the Victorian period.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
More unreliable narration, wonderfully executed. The last paragraphs of the novel give me chills — they’re that masterfully ambiguous. Now that I have kids especially, I find Humbert Humbert difficult to stomach sometimes, but I’ll keep coming back to this novel because it’s that good.

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
I love the way the novel dances around Caddy as its center, but only ever lets you just glance at her. That structure exactly, movingly captures what she means in the other characters’ lives.

A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes
While I might not call it a favorite, it is a great book I only discovered recently — a kind of lost modernist work. It’s an interesting deconstruction of the idea of childhood innocence.

Booktalk highlights the literary opinions of faculty and staff at Ohio State. To nominate a colleague for a future Booktalk, e-mail Julia Harris at harris.587@osu.edu.

Tanya Erzen, Comparative Studies

April 7, 2010

What are faith-based prisons?

Twenty-one states have or are developing faith dormitories and programs, and Florida has created four faith- and character-based institutions that are the only entirely multi-religious state prisons in the country. Faith-based prisons and prison programs operate under the logic that religious prisons will transform prisoners from criminals to law-abiding citizens. Their mandate is that individual responsibility and transformation are the solution to high rates of incarceration. They view crime as a sin — a moral problem rather than a product of economics, racism and tough-on-crime policies. The idea of faith-based incarceration is part of a broader national trend toward therapeutic and individual solutions to social issues like drug addiction, welfare and imprisonment that emerged with the White House office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives under the Bush administration.

Why are states and the federal government
interested in faith-based prisons?

We’re living in a time period in which punishment rather than rehabilitation is the norm in US prisons, and the US leads the world in both number and percentage of people it incarcerates. Meanwhile, state governments spend nearly $50 billion a year on prisons. Given the budget crises many states now face, activists, prison officials and politicians are looking for solutions other than simply locking more people up: De-carceration (like the de-institutionalization of the mentally ill in the 1980s), new sentencing laws and movements for the abolition of the prison altogether.

Many of these strategies are politically unpopular, so the states have turned to faith-based prisons as a way to save money by outsourcing to religious volunteers and groups. Many states now contend these faith-based programs are a solution to overcrowding and recidivism. They argue that religion transforms individuals, therefore, we should build more prisons that volunteers and private religious companies can run cheaply. One example of this trend is happening in Oklahoma, where the state tentatively agreed to build a 600-bed prison in Wakita that would be run by Corrections Concepts, a non-profit Christian ministry, and would have only Christian classes and programs. They plan to hire an all-Christian staff and talk about the prison as a “mission field.”

What are the implications for the separation of church and state?

This issue was exemplified when Americans United for the Separation of Church and State sued Prison Fellowship Ministry for running an entire wing of an Iowa state prison as an evangelical program. The program required participants to become born-again Christians. Prison Fellowship Ministry was ordered to pay back the state millions of dollars. The Florida faith- and character-based prisons are careful to emphasize that everything is volunteer, all religious groups are respected and secular programming is written into the program. But coercion and surveillance happen in all kinds of ways — faith-based prisons and programs provide better living conditions, work-release assignments, job training and favor with the parole board. In Florida, individual chaplains oversee faith-based programs and volunteers rather than a central office that could monitor religious diversity and instances of proselytizing.

I’ve talked to many people in prison who claim that religion transformed their lives, but at the same time, faith-based imprisonment also raises disturbing issues of coercion, power and authority in US prisons.

Gordon Gee

April 9, 2009

President Gordon Gee

What are your five favorite books and why?
As a young man, I was absorbed with Shakespeare and Homer and all of the usual suspects. But to answer your question, I will stick with five contemporary authors. Continue reading ‘Gordon Gee’