Faculty Advisory Committee

Renée Brode, Associate Professor (Lighting Design), School of Drama

Renée is a lighting designer for theater, musicals, opera, and dance who has worked in theaters across the US, Canada and internationally. Recently, she designed the lighting for the production of The Fantasticks at Stages Repertory Theater in Houston that opened their new theater space. Also in Houston, she was lighting designer for the HGO world premiere of Prince of Players which was remounted at Florentine Opera. In NYC, Renée designed the Broadway lab of Beetlejuice and was Associate Lighting Designer for Farinelli and the King at the Belasco Theatre.  She has worked internationally across Canada and as an associate for various US and Canadian national tours including Rent, Cats, and a production of Swing! that toured to Japan.  She was awarded the 2014 Houston Press Theatre Award for Best Lighting Design for The Whipping Man, directed by Seth Gordon. Renée has a BFA and MFA from York University and is a member of Associated Designers of Canada/IATSE ADC659.

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.

Erin Duncan-O'Neill, Associate Professor of Art History

Specializing in nineteenth-century European art history, Erin's research focuses on the creative response of artists to the pressures of censorship, specifically on print culture, politics, and censorship in France from the July Monarchy to the Third Republic. Her book, Art Against Censorship: Honoré Daumier, Comedy, and Resistance in 19th-Century France (Manchester University Press, 2024) investigates Honoré Daumier’s subversive paintings of seventeenth-century literary subjects in moments when political speech was censored. The story of Daumier’s persistent, seditious engagement with social and political issues under regimes of strict censorship provides historical context and a set of strategies for larger questions about art’s important role in resistance to censorial regimes.

Kalenda Eaton, Professor, African and African-American Studies

Dr. Kalenda Eaton is a Professor in the Clara Luper Department of African & African American Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Her specific research focuses on African American experience in the western United States and women's studies. She has contributed to volumes on gender in the American West, approaches to teaching western literature, and has edited and co-edited publications on Oklahoma History. Dr. Eaton is a Fulbright scholar, and the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Park Service.

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.

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.

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.

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.  

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

Sarah Tracy: Associate Professor, History of Medicine and Nutrition

Sarah Tracy's research focuses on the politics of nutrition, diet, and substance use in America, as they pertain to health and chronic disease from 1800 to the present. Her books include Alcoholism from Reconstruction to Prohibition (2005) Altering American Consciousness (2004), and Conversations With Food (2020). Tracy is completing a biography of nutritional physiologist and epidemiologist Ancel Keys (1904-2004).  Keys helped shape the Western diet by developing the K Ration during WWII; conducting starvation and rehabilitation experiments to guide postwar re-feeding efforts in Europe; pursuing global epidemiological studies of diet and heart health; and championing the health benefits of the Mediterranean diet in bestselling cookbooks.