Retirements

Steven Glaser, Professor of Piano in the School of Music and Longtime Melton Board member, announced his retirement this spring. Professor Glaser has taught at Ohio State since 1994 and joined the Melton faculty in 2002. He had an active stage career, with numerous tours of Europe, Israel, Taiwan, China, Africa, New Zealand and the United States, performing as a soloist, chamber music collaborator, and member of orchestras. He joined his colleague, Professor Jan Radzynski, to co-create the popular Melton series Jewish Music East and West, which ran annually starting in 2002 and featured performances by a diverse range of international Jewish artists, composers, and styles. Professor Glaser participated in many of these performances and often programmed the music of Jewish composers on recital tours here and abroad. He was a graduate of the Juilliard School of Music and taught at Texas Tech University and Penn State University prior to coming to OSU.

J. Albert Harrill, Professor Emeritus of History and Classics, now happily devotes full-time work to his major research project, a new historical-critical commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians for Yale University Press. This difficult text has long puzzled commentators because its dualistic language (“children of darkness,” “children of light”) shows remarkable affinities with the Jewish sectarian writings of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In addition to such exegetical studies, Harrill has published several recent articles on the social history of ancient Mediterranean religions. The first examines the teacher-student relationship imagined in a second-century CE Greek astrological manual, by a certain Vettius Valens. Harrill argues that the text promises the profession to be veritable mechanism of socialization, to gain clients, and aims the student away from the satisfactions of mundane desires otherwise permitted to aristocratic males in the Roman Empire (“Teacher and Student as Ideal Ascetics in the Astrological Handbook of Vettius Valens,” in Discipline, Authority, and Text in Late Antique Religion, ed. E. Muehlberger and B. Storin, 2025). The second explores a third-century Christian ghost story. The story, about a young widow’s corpse briefly becoming animated during its funeral, was turned meaningful by exhorting its readers to measure the success of this woman's life not in terms of its length but, rather, by the extent to which it fulfilled the honored (Greco-Roman) ideal of womanhood––thus countering “pagan” beliefs in the Restless Dead (“No Idle Hands: Tertullian’s Funerary Tale of a vernacula ecclesiae and Her Animated Corpse,” in Studia Patristica, 2026).

Michael Swartz, Professor Emeritus of Hebrew and Religious Studies in the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures, specializes in the cultural history of Judaism in late antiquity, rabbinic studies, early Jewish mysticism and magic, and ritual studies. In August 2025, Michael Swartz retired from teaching after thirty-one years at The Ohio State University. Since then, he has published an article, “Textual Archipelagos: Towards New Methods for the Study of Jewish Society in Roman Palestine,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 32 (2025), 230-49; and ten translations and annotations of Hebrew and Aramaic texts in The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization Vol. 3: Encountering Christianity and Islam, 600-1200, edited by Arnold E. Franklin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2026). He is also participating in a two-year international working group on magic in Jewish history and culture, sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Research at The Center for Jewish History and Cultures in New York.