Staff

Dr. Sean Latham, Director

Sean Latham is the Pauline McFarlin Walter Professor of English at The University of Tulsa where he serves as Editor of the James Joyce Quarterly and founding Director of the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities.

He is an internationally recognized expert in the field of modernism and is the author or editor of seven books, including Am I a Snob? (2003), The Art of Scandal (2009) and the Cambridge Companion to Ulysses (2014).

 

 

Dr. Nicole Bauer, Associate Director

Nicole Bauer is Assistant Professor of European History at the University of Tulsa, and she was a fellow with the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities in 2021-22. She specializes in cultural history and early modern France. She is also working on a book on contemplative traditions and how they can help academics build resilience and thrive.

Dr. Dayne Riley, Assistant Director

Dr. Riley’s position is made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He oversees three exhibitions and coordinates talks aligned with them.  He will also help to develop and organize the OCH’s public events.

Dayne returns to OCH after participating in the Center’s 2015-2016 seminar on Humor as a graduate student research fellow.  A May 2020 graduate of TU, he earned his Ph.D. in English literature with an emphasis in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British literature. William Shakespeare, John Milton, Aphra Behn, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift–he loves them all and is currently writing a scholarly book on alcohol, tobacco, and trade in British satire.

While he comes to us from a very different research background, he is already getting excited about this new and interesting challenge.  As Assistant Director, Dayne hopes to contribute meaningfully to downtown Tulsa’s burgeoning arts and humanities scene.  He is most excited to help his Tulsa community grow and to have meaningful, rich conversations about books, movies, music, and art.

Alex Isaak, Special Projects Coordinator

Alex Isaak is a two-time Emmy Award Winning journalist with more than six years of producing experience. Before shifting her focus to nonprofits and the humanities, she worked at KOTV – News On 6 as the 5 PM newscast producer and produced special live coverage for big breaking news events, including a two-hour digital livestream during the 2022 Midterm Elections. Her work has received state-wide recognition, as she was recently named a finalist for the 2023 Great Plains Journalism Award. She is also the co-creator and producer for the Talk Film Society podcast, Dream Little Deeper, a critical retrospective of the Walt Disney Animation Studios.

Alex graduated from the University of Tulsa in 2019 with degrees in Media Studies and Creative Writing and was awarded the Dr. Robert Doolittle Top Media Studies Senior. She is also a graduate from TU’s Honors College.

 

Nathan Blue, Graduate Assistant

Nathan Caleb Blue splits his time between the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities and the Bob Dylan Institute. He is a doctoral student in English and Creative Writing who has worked in the Bob Dylan Archive® studying fan letters sent to Dylan in 1966. For his MA capstone project, he applied the tools and methodologies of the digital humanities to analyze metadata gathered anonymously from these fan letters. By utilizing the resources of the Institute and its proximity to the Bob Dylan Center, Blue investigates and reports on the ways in which a burgeoning, young mass fandom circulated in 1966–in teen fan magazines, fan clubs, record stores, schools, and beyond. His interests span across the long twentieth century, with a particular focus in literary modernism and concepts of celebrity in periodicals and new media.

Danika Bryant, Graduate Assistant