Departmental Contacts

Todd Herzog holds faculty appointments in the Department of Asian, East European, and German Studies and the School of Communication, Film, and Media Studies at the University of Cincinnati, where he also directs the Digital Media program and the Niehoff Center for Film & Media Studies. He is author or editor of six books and has published over three dozen articles on topics ranging from the modernist crime story to the representation of history in the films of Quentin Tarantino. He is currently working on a book project on Vienna’s Prater and the History of Amusement.

Tanja Nusser is interested in animals, artificial reproductions and artificial humans, science (and maybe mad scientist too), in terror and catastrophes, and questions of the real. Her main research interests are literature since the 19th century, film studies, and history of science, disability studies, and gender studies, postcolonial and transnational theory.

She is author of a book on the German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger (2001) and one on artificial reproductions in literature and film (2011). She is co-editor of the book series Szenen / Schnittstellen (Fink Verlag, Germany) and co-edited volumes on the Berlin Republic. Reflections on / of German Unification (1990-2015) (2019), Kathrin Röggla (2017), Catastrophe and Catharsis: Perspective on Disaster and Redemption in German Culture and Beyond (2015), Engineering Life. Narrationen vom Menschen in Biomedizin, Kultur und Literatur (2008), Askese. Geschlecht und Geschichte der Selbstdisziplinierung (2005), Rasterfahndungen. Darstellungstechniken – Normierungsverfahren – Wahrnehmungskonstitution (2003), Techniken der Reproduktion. Medien – Leben – Diskurse (2002) and Krankheit und Geschlecht: Diskursive Affären zwischen Literatur und Medizin (2002).

Dr. Evan Torner works between three fields: German, Film, and Game Studies. After earning his teaching licensure in German from Grinnell College, he began work at the DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (2005), where he received an MA (2008), a Fulbright scholarship to study at Potsdam-Babelsberg (2009-2010), and a PhD in German with a certificate in Film Studies (2013). He subsequently spent 2013-2014 at Grinnell College as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, before accepting a position at the University of Cincinnati. In 2016, he became the director of the UC Game Lab, a hub of events and materials for games and playable media at UC. He was tenured in 2020 and, in 2025, accepted a position as a Niehoff Professor of Film & Media Studies.

Dr. Torner's work on East German cinema pertains to questions of representation in transnational genre productions, which also extends to his work on German science fiction. A lifelong player and facilitator of games, he joined the game studies subfield as a role-playing game specialist, and subsequently co-edited (with William J. White, 2012) Immersive Gameplay: Essays on Role-Playing and Participatory Media, which explores the intersection of role-playing and media. He is one of the founding editors of the Analog Game Studies journal (http://analoggamestudies.org), and has served as a long-time editor for the International Journal of Role-Playing.

Professor Hirayama ​teaches courses on Japanese and Chinese art history.  
Her research focuses on Japanese art criticism of the early twentieth century. Her recent publications include  “Inner Beauty: Kishida Ryūsei (1891-1929)’s Theory of Realism.” Edited by Minh Nguyen. New Essays in Japanese Aesthetics:  Philosophy, Politics, Culture, Literature, and the Arts. Lanham, MD: Lexington Press, 2017,  “Ishii Hakutei and the Journal Hōsun.”  Edited by Chris Uhlenbeck, Amy Riegle Newland, and Maureen de Vries. Waves of Renewal: Modern Japanese Prints, 1900-1960. Leiden: Hotei Publishing, 2015, “‘Fictionalized Truth’: Realism as the Vehicle for War Painting” in Art and War in Japan and Its Empire, 1931-1960 (2012),  “From Art without Borders to Art for the Nation: Japanist (Nihonshugi) Painting by Dokuritsu Bijutsu Kyōkai during the 1930s” in Monumenta Nipponica (2010), and Reflecting Truth: Japanese Photography in the Nineteenth Century (co-editor, 2005).  

She has delivered papers at venues such as the College Art Association conference, Association for Asian Studies conference, and Asian Studies Conference Japan.   Hirayama's service to the field included serving as an anonymous reviewer for Art Bulletin and Ars Orientalis.