Faculty Advisory Committee

Lewis Eliot - Assistant Professor of History

Lewis Eliot is a historian of race and slavery in the Atlantic world. He is currently working on a book about how enslaved rebellions in the Americas informed abolitionist ideologies in the British Empire. Lewis has also written articles about the reverberations of the Haitian Revolution in metropolitan Britain, the illegal inter-American slave trade, and the intersection of slaveholding and nationalism. He received his PhD from the University of South Carolina, MA from Queen’s University, Belfast, and BA from the School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London. His research has been funded by, among others, the Gilder Lehrman Institute, Library Company of Philadelphia, American Historical Association, and John Carter Brown Library. Dr. Eliot has a wide array of teaching interests, from the history of Blackness, race and racism, and slavery in the Atlantic world to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, the British Empire, and the African Diaspora.

Carol Rose Little, Assistant Professor and Advisor, Linguistics

Carol Rose Little obtained her PhD from Cornell University. She joined the Modern Languages, Literatures and Linguistics department as an assistant professor of linguistics in 2021. Prior to coming to OU, she was a postdoctoral researcher at McGill University. Her research program brings together syntax, semantics and morphology, rooted in a strong commitment to fieldwork and language documentation. She investigates possible structural variations crosslinguistically and how these structures interface with semantic computation. Her theoretical analyses draw on data collected from fieldwork with understudied languages, primarily the Mayan language Ch'ol. She has also published papers on Mi'gmaq, Finnish and Indonesian. She has been doing fieldwork with Ch'ol-speaking communities in Chiapas, Mexico since 2015. At OU, Dr. Little teaches syntax, semantics, introduction to linguistics and field methods. She strives to create a dynamic environment in her courses so that each student may come away with a deeper understanding of the material. Her holistic approach to teaching makes it so that students may apply skills and concepts learned in her courses outside the classroom.

Pete Froslie, Director of the School of Visual Arts; Professor of Art, Technology and Culture

Froslie's work examines the interplay between global political and economic systems and emerging climate and environmental concerns. His ongoing project, titled 'The Aesthetics of Capital,” seeks to visualize and comprehend the nature of capital through novel electro-mechanics and game engine-driven design.

Joseph Mansky, Assistant Professor of English

Joseph Mansky is Assistant Professor of English at OU, specializing in early modern literature. His first book, Libels and Theater in Shakespeare’s England: Publics, Politics, Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2023), studies the circulation of libels on and off the early modern stage. Ranging from Shakespearean drama to provincial pageantry, the book charts a public sphere poised between debate and defamation, free speech and fake news. He is currently working on a second book, titled Political Representation: A Literary History, 1558-1651, on the rhetorical genealogy of representation in early modern literature and political thought. His work has appeared in a number of scholarly journals, including the Review of English Studies, ELH, PMLA, Shakespeare Quarterly, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, and the Journal of Legal History. Forthcoming essays include an archival study of the curious career of Henry Wright—a virtually unknown alchemist, scholar, and spy who plied his dubious skills at the margins of the early seventeenth-century court—in Huntington Library Quarterly, and a piece on “Shakespeare, Populism, and the Public Sphere” for The Routledge Companion to Shakespeare and Politics. Prof. Mansky has received fellowship and grant support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Renaissance Society of America, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Huntington Library, and the Office of the Vice President for Research and Partnerships and the Arts & Humanities Forum at OU. He received his B.A. from Cornell University and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Before coming to OU, he taught courses at UC Berkeley, the City College of New York (CUNY), and Bard College.

Raina Heaton, Assistant Professor, Native American Studies

Dr. Heaton is a linguist interested in documenting and describing endangered and under-resourced languages. She specializes in working with language communities on projects related to language research and language revitalization. Specifically, she focuses on morphosyntactic typology within Mayan and Enlhet-Enenlhet languages. In addition to being faculty within the Native American Studies department, Dr. Heaton is the Curator of the Native American Languages Collection at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, where she is working to make language materials available digitally.

Sam Huskey: Professor, Classics & Letters

Dr. Huskey is creator of the Digital Latin Library, a Mellon-funded resource that publishes and curates critical editions of Latin texts and makes them digitally available to students and scholars. Dr. Huskey served as the chair of the Classics & Letters Department at OU from 2009-2019. He specializes in Digital Humanities, Latin poetry, and textual criticism.

Curtis Jones; Associate Professor (Printmaking), School of Visual Arts

Curtis Jones is a visual artist, and professor of printmaking in the School of Visual Arts. His primary media are screen printing, book arts, and installation, and he has exhibited his work around the world. He has a sustained interest in creating work that belies and transcends the simplicity of the materials and techniques from which it is created, basing his practice around repetition so as to exploit the overlapping relationships with ritual, meditation, obsession, psychosis, and modernity. In 2016, he co-founded Resonator Institute in Norman in order to foster the growth of artists, musicians, and other creative individuals in the community.

Roxanne Lyst, Associate Professor of Dance (Modern Dance), Graduate Student Liaison

A native of Annapolis, MD, Roxanne began her professional dance training in Washington D.C. under the mentorship of Alfred Dove and Adrian Bolton. She continued her studies at the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival and as a fellowship student at the Ailey School. Lyst has been a a member of AILEY II, The Philadelphia Dance Company (PHILADANCO), and The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT). She has toured nationally and internationally performing works choreographed by Alvin Ailey, Judith Jamison, Robert Battle, Twyla Tharp, Ulysses Dove, Lar Lubavitch, Paul Taylor, Ron Brown, Mauro Bigonzetti, Alonzo King, and many more. She has performed independently with Hope Boykin Dance, DANCE IQUAL, and Waheed Works. At PHILADANCO and AAADT Lyst taught company class, master classes around the world, and their perspective schools. Master of Fine Arts from Hollins University in 2013.

Angela Person: Associate Professor, Architecture; Director of Research Initiatives and Strategic Planning, Gibbs College of Architecture

Dr. Person is an architectural geographer and environmental designer whose research explores environment-society relationships. She is Director of Research Initiatives and Strategic Planning and Associate Professor at the Gibbs College of Architecture, as well as a lecturer of cultural geography. A collaborative scholar by nature, she is the co-author and co-editor of numerous books. Her current project (Locating the Agency of Architecture) calls for a qualitative paradigm shift in the ways built environments are engaged by scholars and design practitioners.  

Nathan Dougherty, Assistant Professor of Musicology

Nathan Dougherty is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Oklahoma, where he teaches graduate courses in music history and directs the Collegium Musicum. He is a specialist in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French song and song cultures, with broader interests in historical performance practices, gender studies, historiography, and the medical humanities. He has presented papers nationally and internationally at annual meetings of the American Musicological Society and France: Musiques, Cultures, 1789-1918 network, as well as at the Rocky Mountain Music Scholars Conference, the Indiana University Historical Performance Conference, and the University of Oregon Musicking Conference. His research has been supported by numerous fellowships and awards, including a Richard A. Zdanis Research Scholarship Award, a travel grant from the M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet Fund, a Graduate Affiliateship at the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, and a Case Western Reserve University Fellowship at the Library of Congress. He also maintains an active career as a tenor and haute-contre, and has sung with many of the nation’s leading early music ensembles, including Apollo’s Fire, Les Délices, The Newberry Consort, The Thirteen, Atlanta Baroque, Bourbon Baroque, and Trobàr. He received his PhD in Historical Musicology with an emphasis in Historical Performance Practice from Case Western Reserve University in 2022. He holds degrees in Early Music Performance from the University of Southern California and Vocal Performance from St. Olaf College.

Laurel C. Smith:  Associate Professor of Human Geography and Associate Chair, Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability

Dr. Smith is a cultural geographer who explores the geopolitics of knowledge production. Her fieldwork has focused specifically on how and why cultural activists work with academic advocates to create and circulate videos made by, with, and for Indigenous communities in Mexico, and her most recent project continues to pursue video video coproduction as a strategy to augment community agency and Tribal environmental sovereignty in Oklahoma.

Peter Soppelsa:  Assistant Professor, Department of History of Science, Technology, and Medicine

Dr. Soppelsa is Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at OU, and works in the fields of urban history, environmental history, and the history of technology. His research examines the experience of living with physical infrastructures as complex and fragile networked systems that are social-technological-environmental hybrids vulnerable to cascading infrastructure failures, critical resource shortages, physical accidents, and the upheavals of Associate Professor, Visual Arts