Team

Katie Trostel received her PhD in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a teacher-scholar dedicated to building the College’s capacity in the public humanities and its connection to the Rust Belt region since 2018. Additionally, she’s an active member of the multi-campus Anisfield-Wolf Faculty Group housed at Case Western Reserve University and committed to teaching and learning through the award-winning canon. Relevant public-facing writing includes: “Cleveland Divided: Rust Belt Revival” and “Discovering Reading-in-Place–The Act of Joining Stories and Geography.” She has shared her work on the emplaced humanities and the Rust Belt as a discussant in the working group entitled “Public Humanities in Practice” on the development of a locally-rooted, modular journalism course at the Modern Language Association’s Annual Meeting in 2022; as a roundtable organizer for “Confronting Racism and Celebrating Diversity: Cleveland’s Anisfield-Wolf Book Award” at the Modern Language Association’s Annual Convention in 2020; as a presenter at the Association for General and Liberal Studies Virtual Constitute in 2021, “Teaching Public-Facing Scholarship in the Rust Belt”; and as an invited speaker for the National Humanities Alliance’s Annual Meeting in 2022, “Engaging Undergraduates through the Public Humanities” and at the 2022 University of New Hampshire’s Summer Institute in the Public Humanities. Additionally, Trostel is a founding member of the Venice Ghetto Collaboration and the co-editor of the collection, The Venice Ghetto: A Memory Space That Travels–a work that extends her commitment to emplaced humanities methodologies.

Jacob Waldenmaier is the chair of philosophy and religious studies at Ursuline College and holds a DPhil and MSt from the University of Oxford. He grew up primarily in the Cleveland area and has taught at many colleges and universities in Northeast Ohio. His research and teaching specializations include the ethics of belief and epistemic responsibility, biomedical ethics, logic, political philosophy, and philosophies of science, mind, and religion. His work has been published in the Jefferson Journal of Science and Culture, an edited volume entitled Complex Migration of Global Citizens, and a collection on the Psychoanalysis of Religion, and he has presented his research at the American Society for Bioethics & Humanities, the American Philosophical Association, and the American Academy of Religion. Waldenmaier also serves on John Carroll University’s Institutional Review Board and, informally, writes poetry.

Valentino Zullo is the Anisfield-Wolf Postdoctoral Fellow in English and the Public Humanities at Ursuline College. For nearly 10 years he has run the “Get Graphic” program at the Ohio Center for the Book at Cleveland Public Library where he was the Scholar-in-Residence. He leads book discussions on comics, organizes comics-making workshops, lecture series and other programs hosted at spaces around the city including the Rising Star Coffee Roastery. He also leads the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Book Club at Cleveland Public Library which meets at Bookhouse Brewery. He is devoted to the teaching of literature both in the classroom and in the community. As a licensed independent social worker, he has also worked in hospitals and managed care facilities around the city of Cleveland, which informs his understanding of literature. He recently co-edited a volume with Vera J. Camden on Wonder Woman entitled Wonder Woman: 80 Years Later collecting the papers and presentations from the 2016 Wonder Woman Symposium, a three-day event, which partnered Kent State University with Cleveland Public Library, and was sponsored by the Ohio Humanities Council. In addition to being American Editor of the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, he has published in both academic and popular venues including, The Journal of Popular Culture, Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, American Imago, Asylum, and PopMatters.

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