Faculty Advisory Committee

Joel Burcham: Associate Professor of Music (Voice), School of Music

Dr. Burcham is a professor of music (voice) in OU’s School of Music. An operatic tenor, Dr. Burcham has performed in numerous roles with professional opera companies all around the United States, including Utah Opera, Central City Opera, Madison Opera, Knoxville Opera and Painted Sky Opera. He has also performed as a concert soloist across the US and internationally. Dr. Burcham is also a specialist in heavy metal music and hard rock, and he serves as primary songwriter, lyricist, vocalist and rhythm guitarist for the heavy metal recording project Thlipsis.

Bill Endres: Assistant Professor, English

Dr. Endres'principal research explores early medieval manuscripts. He studies their mysteries and what can be learned by representing their materiality through digital technologies. His recently published book is titled Digitizing Medieval Manuscripts: The St Chad Gospels, Materiality, Recoveries, and Representation in 2D & 3D.

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.

Ronnie Grinberg: Assistant Professor, History

Dr. Grinberg’s research and teaching interests are in twentieth century America, American Jewish history, women’s and gender history, intellectual history, and social movements. Her forthcoming book, Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals will be published by Princeton University Press in 2024. It examines the New York intellectuals, a prominent group of mostly male Jewish writers and critics at mid-century, through the lens of gender and ethnicity and in the process tells a larger story about the role of masculinity in American intellectual and political life in the second half of the twentieth century.

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.

Amel Khalfaoui: Associate Professor of Arabic, International and Area Studies

Dr. Khalfaoui is currently Assistant professor of Arabic Language and Linguistics at the University of Oklahoma with a joint appointment in the Department of International and Area Studies and the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics. She has previously taught Linguistics and Arabic at the University of Minnesota, Macalester College, and Florida Atlantic University. Her area of specialization is linguistic pragmatics. 

Angela Person: Assoicate 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.  

Andreana C. Prichard: Associate Professor of African History, Honors College

Dr. Prichard is the Wick Cary Associate Professor of Honors and African History. She is an historian of nineteenth and twentieth century East Africa, and her research focuses generally on the history of Western evangelical development initiatives in East Africa. Since 2018, Dr. Prichard has been working on a project about the history of orphanages, of Western evangelical development initiatives in Africa, and of the global “do-gooder” economy in East Africa.

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