The Ohio State Board of Trustees selected professor David Horn as the first faculty representative on its Academic Affairs and Student Life Committee.

“Faculty have always played a crucial role in the administration of the university, but until now the opportunities for faculty and trustees to have sustained conversations about academic issues and the needs of students have been limited,” said Horn, who teaches comparative studies and will join the board in May. “The decision to give faculty both a voice and a vote on this committee recognizes the potential value of that interaction.”

In addition to his role as chair of the Department of Comparative Studies, Horn served two terms on the University Senate and served as chair of the group’s Steering Committee.

“As a former chair of an interdisciplinary department, I’ve learned a lot about what does and doesn’t work,” Horn said. “And with the reorganization of the Arts and Sciences and the conversion to semesters, I expect there will be a number of proposals for new and exciting curricula coming through our committee.”

University administrators proposed adding a faculty member to the board’s committee in 2005 before the issue was further discussed by a committee of the University Senate in 2006. Horn’s appointment came after Faculty Council submitted five candidates to the trustees for consideration.

“It’s something we’ve been talking about for some time,” said Tim Gerber, chair of the Faculty Council, in a previous interview with The Lantern. “It rounds out the conversation about important issues on the board. We’ve been pleased with the receptiveness from the board and their willingness to select a member of faculty.”

Members of the board’s Committee on Trusteeship discussed the appointment at their meeting earlier this month, and were expected to announce the appointment during their session. Gerber said the board delayed the announcement to set it apart from other news that developed from the trustees’ meeting.

“They were so impressed with the faculty nominees that they wanted his selection to stand out from all the other news about athletic ticket prices, tuition and so on,” Gerber said.

Horn has been at OSU since 1990, after receiving a degree in cultural anthropology.

“I have always worked at the boundaries of anthropology, history and cultural studies of science,” Horn said. “I teach courses in social and cultural theory and on the relations of science and society. Right now, for example, I’m teaching an undergraduate course on medicine and the humanities that explores the ways medical knowledges are shaped by the historical and cultural contexts in which they emerge.”

Horn’s research over the years has focused on the history of the human sciences, from anthropology and criminology to social medicine, mostly in modern Italy and France. He is working on a book on automatic writing, a phenomenon that interested spiritualists, psychiatrists and artists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Horn will be a voting member of the Academic Affairs and Student Life Committee of the Board of Trustees and will serve a two-year term on the committee.