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. Zenia Kish, Associate Director
Dr. Kish graduated from NYU with her PhD in American Studies, completed a post-doc at Stanford University, and is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Tulsa. Her expertise is deeply interdisciplinary. During her master’s degree at Western University in Ontario, Dr. Kish began worked on representations of racialized otherness in media depictions of Hurricane Katrina survivors. At NYU, she studied the Great Recession and the financial cultures that emerged out if it, furthering her studies of critical race theory, US empire, food politics, and digital media cultures.
During Dr. Kish’s post-doc fellowship, she deepened her interest in critical food and agriculture and joined an NSF-funded project about the future of food as imagined in Silicon Valley. Recently she co-edited a collection of essays Food Instagram: Identity, Influence, and Negotiation, the first of its kind to explore Instagram and food studies.
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 an experienced newscast, video and podcast producer with more than six years of 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.
Daniel Thater, Graduate Assistant
Daniel Thater is a PhD student in English at the University of Tulsa. At TU, he works as an instructor of writing, an editor at the James Joyce Quarterly and a graduate assistant for the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities.
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 with 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.