The Holbrook Years 2002–2007 chronicles the tenure of Karen A. Holbrook, thirteenth president of The Ohio State University, from the extensive search process to her departure. As the thirteenth volume of history of presidents of The Ohio State University, it includes the personal and public life Holbrook, the first woman and research scientist to lead The Ohio State University.

The OSU Board of Trustees and its presidential search committee found in Holbrook’s experience many reasons to invite her to lead Ohio’s flagship institution of higher education. Foremost among them was her familiarity with academic medicine, which they thought would give her a special understanding of OSU’s growing medical center. She was particularly interested in fostering multi-disciplinary programs and emphasizing outreach via pre-collegiate programs to broaden the pipeline for students who saw The Ohio State University as a goal.

Michelle Zerba’s Modern Odysseys explores three major writers in global modernism from the Mediterranean, Anglo-European Britain, and the Caribbean whose groundbreaking literary works have never been studied together before. Using language as an instrument of revolution and social change, C. P. Cavafy, Virginia Woolf, and Aimé Césaire gave expression to the forms of human experience we now associate with modernity: homoeroticism, transsexuality, and racial consciousness. More specifically, Zerba argues that Odyssean tropes of diffusion, isolation, passage, and return give form to works by these writers but in ways that invite us to reconsider and revise the basic premises of reception studies and intellectual history.
 
Combining close readings of literary texts with the study of interviews, essays, diaries, and letters, Zerba advances a revisionary account of how to approach relationships between antiquity and modernity. Instead of frontal encounters with the Odyssey, Cavafy, Woolf, and Césaire indirectly—but no less significantly—engage with Homer’s epic poem. In demonstrating how such encounters operate, Modern Odysseys explores issues of race and sexuality that connect antiquity with the modern period.
 

In this compelling interdisciplinary study of what has been called the "century of illegitimacy," Lisa Zunshine seeks to uncover the multiplicity of cultural meanings of illegitimacy in the English Enlightenment. Bastards and Foundlings pits the official legal views on illegitimacy against the actual everyday practices that frequently circumvented the law; it reconstructs the history of social institutions called upon to regulate illegitimacy, such as the London Foundling Hospital; and it examines a wide array of novels and plays written in response to the same concerns that informed the emergence and functioning of such institutions. By recreating the context of the national preoccupation with bastardy, with a special emphasis on the gender of the fictional bastard/foundling, Zunshine offers new readings of "canonical" texts, such as Steele's The Conscious Lovers, Defoe's Moll Flanders, Fielding's Tom Jones, Moore's The Foundling, Colman's The English Merchant, Richardson's Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison, Burney's Evelina, Smith's Emmeline, Edgewort's Belinda, and Austen's Emma, as well as of less well-known works, such as Haywood's The Fortunate Foundlings, Shebbeare's The Marriage Act, Bennett's The Beggar Girl and Her Benefactors, and Robinson's The Natural Daughter.

Why We Read Fiction offers a lucid overview of the most exciting area of research in contemporary cognitive psychology known as “Theory of Mind” and discusses its implications for literary studies. It covers a broad range of fictional narratives, from Richardson’s Clarissa, Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment, and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Nabokov’s Lolita, and Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. Zunshine’s surprising new interpretations of well-known literary texts and popular cultural representations constantly prod her readers to rethink their own interest in fictional narrative. Written for a general audience, this study provides a jargon-free introduction to the rapidly growing interdisciplinary field known as cognitive approaches to literature and culture.