UO Today: Recent Episodes
Oregon Humanities Center
The Oregon Humanities Center is the sole interdisciplinary umbrella organization for the humanities at the University of Oregon. We encourage scholars to articulate their ideas in language that is accessible both to scholars in other fields and to the general public. The OHC sponsors a wide array of free public programs designed to provide a forum for discussion of and reflection on important issues.
which argues that current data technologies fail to create equality because they are built on a flawed understanding of it, often exacerbating social divisions instead of bridging them. NYT piece: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/20/magazine/colin-koopman-interview.html
Work-in-Progress talks with Hessam Abedini, PhD candidate, Comparative Literature and 2025–26 OHC Dissertation Fellow.This project examines how to translate the Persian epic Shahnameh (AD 1010) without imposing Western literary conventions on it. Previous English translations have compared the Persian poet Firdausi to Homer, distorting the epic’s unique cosmological framework that blends pre-Islamic Iranian traditions, Islamic theology, and Neoplatonic philosophy. The research proposes translation methods that preserve Iranian concepts like divine glory and cosmic order, allowing readers to encounter this masterwork on its own cultural terms rather than through Western frameworks. 025–26 OHC Dissertation Fellow.This project examines how to translate the Persian epic Shahnameh (AD 1010) without imposing Western literary conventions on it. Previous English translations have compared the Persian poet Firdausi to Homer, distorting the epic’s unique cosmological framework that blends pre-Islamic Iranian traditions, Islamic theology, and Neoplatonic philosophy. The research proposes translation methods that preserve Iranian concepts like divine glory and cosmic order, allowing readers to encounter this masterwork on its own cultural terms rather than through Western frameworks.
Mérida Mehaffey is an interdisciplinary scholar based in Brooklyn, New York. She is currently a master’s student at Bard Graduate Center, where she studies museum ethics, curatorial practice, and Native American material culture. Mérida graduated from the University of Oregon in 2018 with a bachelor's degree in Environmental Studies and History. She returned to campus on May 7th, 2026 to deliver the keynote address for the Undergraduate Research Symposium. Research Notes:Gantt Gurley is an associate professor of Scandinavian in the Schnitzer School of Global Studies and Languages at the University of Oregon where he is also a faculty fellow in the Clark Honors College and a faculty affiliate in Folklore and Public Culture, Judaic Studies, and Medieval Studies. He talks about the research he has been conducting on the Jewish legend of the golem.
Selected Poems; The Hurting Kind, which was a finalist for the Griffin Prize; The Carrying, which won the National Books Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award; and Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award. Limón is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was named a 2024 Time Magazine Woman of the Year. She is the author of two picture books, In Praise of Mystery as well as And, Too, The Fox, and was the editor of the anthology You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World. She served as the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States.
Show notes:David ShulmanHeike MoserWalter MignoloCharles L. Briggsunesco.org/enhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ifo0xb3uLyc
Dancing Opacity: Contemporary Dance, Transnationalism, and Queer Possibility in Senegal' published by University of Michigan Press in 2025.https://press.umich.edu/Books/D/Dancing-Opacity2https://www.dancestudiesassociation.org
(NYU Press, 2025). The book is based on interviews with people in Oregon from various racial groups, and brings multiple racial groups’ opinions together to weigh in on the ways in which race contours national belonging and affects sense of self, everyday life and wellness, and aspirations for the future. This book highlights the value of inquiring how people from various racial backgrounds perceive their fit in the nation and reveals how race matters to belonging in multifaceted ways.
which explores the idea of possession as a form of performative mask, utilizing Michel Leiris's ethnographic study of Ethiopian Zars in the 1930s.Joyce Suechun Cheng is an associate professor of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Oregon. She is joined in conversation by Edgar Garcia an associate professor of English at the University of Chicago.
As a performer, Caicedo has established herself as one of the leading interpreters of Iberian and Latin American art song. She talks about her background and the repertoire she aims to elevate in the world of music. Caicedo was artist-in-residence at the UO's School of Music and Dance January 20-22, 2026. She shared her expertise in Latin American and Iberian vocal music with lectures, performances, and a masterclass.
on January 29, 2026.https://blogs.uoregon.edu/oregonhumanitiescenter/multimedia/news/christopher-brown-grabs-our-attention-with-jazz/
(1917)Undergraduate Perspectives:John Knutson, B.A. English, UO 2025; and 2025 Humanities Undergraduate Research Fellow
The “Attention” series explores the dynamics of how, why, and what we focus on shapes our reality and creates our purpose. Also known as concentration, alertness, focus, notice, awareness, heed, regard, and consideration—Attention is the fundamental cognitive ability to sustain one’s energy on a specific pursuit or thought. The OHC’s 2025–26 Robert D. Clark Lectureship features three UO faculty members discussing, from their own perspectives, how attention connects us to others and allows us to experience the world around us. Santiago Jaramillo is an associate professor in the Department of Biology and the Institute of Neuroscience. His lab studies auditory cognition—how the brain helps us hear the world (recognize sounds, pay attention to sounds, remember sounds, etc). Their research is performed on mice so advanced techniques can be utilized to measure individual neurons of different classes and change their activity with high precision. While their work focuses on the healthy brain, rather than any specific disorder, their studies can help others understand and address disorders related to hearing (tinnitus, auditory processing disorders, age-related hearing loss, etc) and inspire better artificial hearing systems.Kate Mondloch is a professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory. Her research interests focus on late 20th- and early 21st-century art, theory, and criticism, particularly as these areas of inquiry intersect with the cultural, social, and aesthetic possibilities of new technologies. Her research fields include media art and theory, installation art, feminism, new media, science and technology studies, digital humanities, human flourishing, and mindfulness in higher education. She is especially interested in theories of spectatorship and subjectivity, and in research methods that bridge the sciences and the humanities. Forest Pyle is a professor of English and Cartoon and Comics Studies. His interests include 19th-century British Literary Studies, Literary and Critical Theory, Poetry and Poetics, Postmodern and Contemporary Literary Studies, and Visual Culture. His current research project explores the persistence and extensions of Romanticism in some of the more adventurous forms of contemporary music, art, film, and literature.
Work-in-Progress talk with Alejandro Marin, PhD candidate, Romance languages, and 2025–26 Oregon Humanities Center Dissertation Fellow.Migration today is often framed as crisis, but literature reveals it as a site of creativity and resistance. Contemporary novels from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Equatorial Guinea portray movement across borders as an opportunity to forge new communities and reimagine belonging. My research examines how these texts challenge dominant narratives of displacement, offering fresh insights into diaspora, kinship, and the politics of memory. I focus on three authors, Karla Suárez (Cuba), Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel (Equatorial Guinea), andLoida Maritza Pérez (Dominican Republic), who write from migrant, exilic, or diasporic postions, foregrounding solidarity with contemporary migrants and reconfiguring our understanding ofmigration through their work. The New Errancy illuminates the aesthetic, political, and culturalelements incorporated into these narratives, providing a more dynamic view of migration. These authors portray non-biological family formations, evolving family dynamics across generations, gendered dimensions of mobility, transnational and diasporic identities, and circular migration that frames return as feasible and meaningful.I primarily draw on Édouard Glissant’s concepts of relation identity, circular nomadism, and errancy as rhizomatic practices; Stuart Hall’s theories on cultural identity and diaspora; Luisa Campuzano’s perspectives on uprooting and settlement; Michael Ugarte’s critique of rigid categories like emigrant, immigrant, and exile; Remei Sipi Mayo’s analysis of gender and migration; and Juan Flores’s reflections on diaspora to trace transnational cultural practices linking origin and destination communities.
Friedrich Nietzsche: “On Truth and Lies in an Extra Moral Sense”Oregon Humanities Center: https://ohc.uoregon.eduUndergraduate Perspectives:Emma Kersgaard talks about her experience as a Humanities Undergraduate Archival Fellow.
Work-in-Progress talk with Anita Chari, professor of Political Science, and 2025-26 OHC Faculty Research Fellow.This project explores the political implications of the trauma-informed turn and examines the contemporary resonance of trauma in the public sphere as well as the current critical consensus that trauma discourse is part of the problem rather than the solution to our contemporary political woes. It explores how trauma-informed practices could be mobilized towards the creation of public cultures of care and repair, serving as the foundation of a politics that is less polarized, more capable of navigating human vulnerability, and ultimately generative of a public sphere that is able to navigate the conflict, agonism, and discomfort that are integral to the practice of democracy.
published by University of Minnesota Press in 2025.• https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517918736/the-abyss-stares-back/Undergraduate Perspectives:Payton Rosello was an English and Psychology major who graduated in June 2025. She gives her take on being a 2025 Humanities Undergraduate Archival Fellow.
Emily Moore is the Instruction and Outreach Archivist, and Mahala Ruddell is the Lead Processing Archivist in Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Oregon. They discuss their work and the value of UO's collections. They also talk about some of the curious things they have come across in the archives.• uoregon.edu/special-collections• uoregon.aviaryplatform.com• oregondigital.orgResearch Notes:Abigail Fine, assistant professor of Musicology in the UO's School of Music and Dance, talks about her new book "The Composer Embalmed: Relic Culture from Piety to Kitsch" which was published by the University of Chicago Press in June 2025. She also offers other titles to explore relic culture.• "The Author's Effects: On Writer's House Museums" by Nicola J. Watson• "Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture" by Deborah Lutz• "Cranioklepty" by Colin Dickey• "The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors" by Judith Pascoe
Leah Middlebrook, assistant professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature, and director of the Oregon Humanities Center talks about her new book "Amphion: Lyre, Poetry, and Politics in Modernity."Research Notes:Lowell Bowditch, professor and department head of Classics, discusses her recent book "Roman Love Elegy and the Eros of Empire."
Courtney M. Cox, assistant professor of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies, talks about her newly-published book "Double Crossover: Gender, Media, and Politics in Global Basketball."In the book, Cox follows athletes, coaches, journalists, and advocates of women’s basketball as they pursue careers within the sport. Despite all attempts to contain them or prevent forward momentum, they circumvent expectations and open new possibilities within and outside of the game. Throughout the book, Cox explores the intersection of race and gender against the backdrop of the WNBA, NCAA, and other leagues within the United States and around the world. Blending interviews and participant observation with content analysis, she charts how athletes and advocates of women’s basketball illuminate new forms of navigating the global sports-media complex.
Poet Henri Cole is author of eleven collections of poetry and a memoir. His latest collection, The Other Love, is forthcoming in summer 2025. He and Leah discuss his sonnets and his approach the form. He reads two poems from the collection Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets 1994–2022.On April 17th, 2025, Cole gave a reading as a guest of the UO’s Creative Writing Program.
In an era of increased isolation where civic deserts, disinformation, and technological dependence separate us from one another, how can we reimagine our capacity for deeper connection and sustainable collaboration in our current reality? Deepa Iyer, a social justice advocate, leads an exploration of the pathways that strengthen ecosystems for social change in this talk.Deepa Iyer is a South Asian American writer, strategist, and lawyer. Her work is rooted in Asian American, South Asian, Muslim, and Arab communities where she spent fifteen years in policy advocacy and coalition building in the wake of the September 11th attacks and ensuing backlash. Currently, Deepa leads projects on solidarity and social movements at the Building Movement Project, a national nonprofit organization that catalyzes social change through research, strategic partnerships, and resources for movements and nonprofits.
Ryan Tucker Jones, History, and 2024–25 OHC Faculty Research Fellow. This interdisciplinary global history integrates the newest, exciting advances in whale science to reinterpret the last 500 years of human-cetacean relations. In the past decades, satellite tagging, drone footage, DNA analysis, and long-term behavioral studies have revealed whale lives in unprecedented detail. The newest cetacean science not only reveals ways that whales experienced this history, but also casts new light on the crucial global stories of colonization, industrialization, and the creation of a modern, interconnected world.
William Hatungimana is an assistant professor of Global Studies in the Schnitzer School of Global Studies and Languages at the University of Oregon. He discusses his work on immigration and African-China relations. He also talks about the classes he teaches ie: "International Cooperation and Conflict" and "Transnational Migration."Research Notes-ICYMIKemi Balogun is an associate professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Sociology, and director of African Studies at the University of Oregon. She discusses her book "Beauty Diplomacy: Embodying an Emerging Nation" published in 2020. The book takes a look inside the world of Nigerian beauty contests to see how they are transformed into contested vehicles for promoting complex ideas about gender and power, ethnicity and belonging, and a rapidly changing articulation of Nigerian nationhood.
Salvador Herrera is an assistant professor of Latinx Literature and Cultural Production in the Department of English at the University of Oregon. He discusses his work exploring transborder aesthetics providing Tanya Aguiñiga's "Metabolizing the Border" project as an example. He also talks about the classes he teaches and the value of UO's pursuit of becoming a Hispanic-serving Institution.Research Notes:Devin Grammon and Sergio Loza talk about their recently published book "Aquí se habla: Centering the Local and Personal in Spanish Language Education" co-edited with Adam Schwartz and Dalia Magaña. Devin is an assistant professor of Spanish Sociolinguistics. Sergio is an assistant professor of Spanish Linguistics and the director of the Spanish Heritage Language Program. Both are in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Oregon. They will participate in a book release talk on Wednesday, May 21, 2025 at 4 p.m. in the Centro Cultural César Chávez at Oregon State University.Dalia Magaña's book: https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814214817.html Adam Schwartz's: book: https://www.multilingual-matters.com/page/detail/?k=9781800416901 Article by Devin Grammon: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6sd7h1ts
Deepa Iyer is a South Asian American writer, strategist, and lawyer. She leads projects on solidarity and social movements at the Building Movement Project. Deepa talks about her social change ecosystem framework which includes ten roles that many people play in the service of social change values. And she talks about her children's picture book "We Are the Builders!"Deepa Iyer: https://www.deepaiyer.comResearch Notes:Neil O'Brian, assistant professor of Political Science at the UO, discusses his new book "The Roots of Polarization: From the Radical Realignment to the Culture Wars" which was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2024. Neil O'Brian: https://neilobrian.comEric Schickler: https://sites.google.com/berkeley.edu/eric-schicklerDaniel Schlozman: https://www.danielschlozman.netChristina Wolbrecht: https://christinawolbrecht.com
Based on five years of ethnographic research, Allison Pugh offers a humanistic response to the rise of AI, one that probes the profound meaning of human connection, reckons with the challenges of seeing and being seen, and reimagines what we know of ourselves and others in light of the automation challenge. Allison Pugh is a professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. She writes about how people forge connections and find meaning and dignity at work and at home. In her latest book The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World (2024), Pugh develops the concept of “connective labor,” the collaborative work of emotional recognition. This includes three key components—empathetic listening, emotion management, and the act of “witnessing,” in which one individual reflects what they have seen and heard. Drawing on years of interview and observational data, Pugh shows how in sectors like education, healthcare, and therapy, this work is increasingly systemized—a process that she argues makes it ripe for eventual mechanization. In the face of teacher shortages and hype around “chatbot therapists,” Pugh makes a case for connective labor’s value to society and the potential consequences for inequality should it become a scarce commodity.
David Wacks, Romance Languages, and 2024–25 OHC Faculty Research Fellow. In this project I study medieval translations, chronicles, legends, and plays based on the Hebrew Bible from the Iberian Peninsula’s three religious traditions. I show how Muslim, Jewish, and Christian authors draw on shared languages and traditions, stage the religious polemics of the day, and how, under the surveillance of the Spanish Inquisition, clandestine Jews and Muslims read their own traditions into Christian retellings of the Hebrew Bible.
Allison Pugh is professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University and author of "The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World." She talks about the importance of connective labor, the collaborative work of emotional recognition. She will give a talk "Re-imagining the Other/Ourselves: Finding the Human in the Age of AI" on April 17, 2025.Research Notes:Melissa Graboyes, History, University of Oregon, and director of the Global Health Research Group, talks about she includes undergraduate students in her research endeavors in global health and the history of malaria.
Nicholas Forster is an assistant professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Oregon. He talks about his interest in cinema and Black performance, and the book he is writing about Bill Gunn, an unsung hero of Black filmmaking.Research Notes:Stephen Rodgers is the Edmund A. Cykler Chair in Music and Professor of Music Theory and Musicianship at the School of Music and Dance at the University of Oregon. He talks about his project: Art-Music-Performance—a mobile performance and exhibition space.
Parmida Mostafavi is an assistant professor of Anthropology who studies the connections between race, capital, and consumerism, with a focus on the material culture of the Iranian diaspora. Research Notes (26:34): Lanie Millar, associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese, discusses her book "Forms of Disappointment. Cuban and Angolan Narrative After the Cold War" (SUNY Press, 2019), which argues that late 20th and early 21st century Cuban and Angolan novels enact a poetics of disappointment: narrative techniques which constitute a new formal and affective relationship to the histories of revolution shared across the South Atlantic.
Olivia Wing, PhD candidate, History, and 2024–25 OHC Dissertation Fellow.By the late 1960s Asian American youth played a central role in the creation of a pan-Asian American political identity. My dissertation seeks the pre-1960s origin of youth’s increasing prominence in the creation of Asian American cultural citizenship by examining intersections of youth, gender, and leisure/recreation. Charting the trajectory of Chinese and Japanese American youth involvement in beauty pageants, sports, and public celebrations, my project uncovers regional histories of community formation and representation that contextualize later interethnic tension and coalition.
Eleanor Paynter is a scholar, teacher, poet, and Assistant Professor of Italian, migration, and global media in the School of Global Studies and Languages at the University of Oregon. She discusses her book "Emergency in Transit: Witnessing Migration in the Colonial Present"(https://www.ucpress.edu/books/emergency-in-transit/paper), her teaching, and what attracted her to the UO.The chapbook on tanks she mentioned is out of print, but a related piece is still up here at Diagram https://thediagram.com/16_2/paynter.htmlAnother chapbook is here: https://dulcetshop.myshopify.com/products/oceano-eleanor-paynterHere's the podcast I hosted at Cornell: https://open.spotify.com/show/1uu5mmNxbVdJUJgZwXAeK4Research Notes (24:15):Christopher Chávez is the Carolyn S. Chambers Distinguished Professor of Advertising and the director of the Center for Latina/o and Latin American Studies at the University of Oregon. He discusses his new book "Isle of Rum: Havana Club, Culutral Mediation and the Fight for Cuban Authenticity." (https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/delaware/isle-of-rum/9781978838833/)
Candace Bond-Theriault discusses the need to center LGBTQIA+ communities in the conversation about reproductive health, rights, and justice. Bond-Theriault asserts that for reproductive justice to be truly successful, we must acknowledge that members of the LGBTQIA+ community often face distinct, specific, and interlocking oppressions when it comes to these rights. Family formation, contraception needs, and appropriate support from healthcare services are still poorly understood aspects of the LGBTQIA+ experience, which often challenge mainstream notions of the nuclear family.Candace Bond-Theriault, JD., LL.M. is a queer lawyer, writer, mother, and social justice advocate working at the intersections of law, policy, reproductive health rights, racial justice, LGBTQIA+ liberation, economic justice, and democracy reform. She is Adjunct Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Howard University, and Senior Director of Policy at the Black Women’s Health Imperative.Her book Queering Reproductive Justice: An Invitation (2024), blends advocacy with a legal, rights-based framework and offers a unified path for attaining reproductive justice for LGBTQIA+ people.
Aycan Akçamete is an assistant professor of Comparative Literature and Theatre Arts at the University of Oregon. She talks about her book project "Staging Turkey at Arcola Theatre: Intercultural Networks and Cosmopolitan Spectatorship" and her teaching.Research Notes:Mattie Burkert is an associate professor of English and Digital Humanities, and author of "Speculative Enterprise: Public Theaters and Financial Markets in London, 1688–1763" (University of Virginia Press, 2021)https://londonstagedatabase.uoregon.eduhttps://www.r18collective.org
Patty Krawec is an Anishinaabe/Ukrainian writer and speaker belonging to the Lac Seul First Nation in Treaty 3 territory in Ontario, Canada. She is author of "Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future."
Candace Bond-Theriault, author of "Queering Reproductive Justice: an Invitation," discusses the intersectionality of the reproductive justice movement and its core values. In Research Notes, Judith Raiskin and Linda Long discuss the Eugene Lesbian Oral History Project and the resulting documentary Outliers and Outlaws. https://outliersoutlaws.uoregon.edu
Patty Krawec is an Ojibwe Anishinaabe and Ukrainian writer and speaker. An activist and former social worker, she belongs to Lac Seul First Nation in Treaty 3 territory and resides in Niagara Falls, Ontario. Her first book, "Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future" was published in 2022 by Broadleaf Books. Her second book, "Bad Indian Book Club," will be published later in 2025. Patty discusses her Indigenous and Ukrainian background and how she approaches relation, spirituality, history, and activism.
Karl Scholz, President of the University of Oregon, discusses the UO's new strategic plan and how the Big Ten's Academic Alliance will benefit the university.
Lim's project is a cultural history of race in South Korea that examines ideas and practices of race in literary and cultural production and discourse shaped at the nexus of modern Korean history and globalization processes. She examines Korean racial formation through literature, K-pop, and TV dramas like Squid Game. She explores how Koreans’ ideas of race were informed by their experiences under Japanese colonialism and U.S. neo-colonialism, connecting Korean studies with concepts like racial formation, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness.
In a world increasingly defined by crisis, public service institutions like colleges, universities, and nonprofit organizations require capable, dynamic, and trustworthy leadership—yet stories of leadership failures there abound. The problem, Kathleen Fitzpatrick argues in Leading Generously, is a fundamental mismatch between the communal purposes that leaders must serve and the individualistic structures under which they operate.Transforming institutions so they can be resilient in the face of uncertain futures will require a similar transformation in leadership practices, turning hierarchies into collective and collaborative spaces designed for the common good. Doing so, however, requires a willingness to reimagine the idea of leadership itself. Kathleen Fitzpatrick explores not just the problems with the institutional status quo but also the tools to transform it. Her wide-ranging research brings together key theories of leadership with the experiences of successful leaders whose stories demonstrate innovative possibilities for collaboration in the service of institutional transformation.Kathleen Fitzpatrick is Interim Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies and Professor of English at Michigan State University. Prior to assuming this role, she was Director of DH@MSU and founding director of Mesh Research, a lab focused on the future of digital scholarly communication. Her work across her career has focused on building resilient, sustainable scholarly communities and transforming their processes of communication to foreground connection, conversation, and collaboration.
Beata Stawarska, Philosophy and 2024–25 Oregon Humanities Center Faculty Research FellowMy project engages with the untranslated and relatively unknown theoretical writings by L. S. Senghor, the first president of independent Senegal, a poet, and a philosopher. I will translate selected essays and author an article dealing with the topic of vital force in Senghor’s philosophy. I will argue that Senghor’s ideas are rooted in the traditional West African culture, especially Serer animism, wherein life and death, bodies and spirits, are interdependent rather than mutually opposed. Senghor’s philosophy indicates therefore a departure from European efforts to articulate an African ontology of life force.
Christopher Long, Provost of the University of Oregon, began his tenure at UO in June 2024. He discusses what attracted him to UO and his leadership style, which he characterized as relationship based, and values informed. He also talks about UO's participation in the Big Ten Academic Alliance, the importance of open access publishing, and the Humane Metrics Initiative.
A Work-in-Progress talk with Zachary Wallmark, Musicology, and 2024–25 OHC Faculty Research FellowMy project explores American cultural and social history through the lens of musical instruments. I offer critical examinations of the development, popularization, and sonic palette of instruments that have played an iconic role in American (and global) music and culture: banjo, trumpet, steel guitar, saxophone, electric organ, drumset, electric guitar, synthesizer, and turntables.
Leah Middlebrook, Comparative Literature and Spanish at the UO, is the in-coming director of the Oregon Humanities Center. She talks about her scholarship and what attracted her to the OHC. Paul Peppis, English at the UO, is the out-going director of the OHC, having served 11 years. He talks about his scholarship and how academia has changed during his 29-year career as a professor of English.
Writer Miriam Gershow's debut novel The Local News, published in 2009, was an Oregon Book Award Finalist. Her collection, Survival Tips: Stories was published in 2024. She teaches writing in the English Department at the University of Oregon.Gershow discusses her writing and reads from Survival Tips.
Devin Grammon is an assistant professor of Spanish Sociolinguistics, and an affiliate in the Spanish Heritage Language Program in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Oregon.Grammon talks about his research on language learning among students studying abroad in Southern Peru and how linguistic variation can be used to perpetuate racism and discrimination. He also talks about his current project as an OHC Faculty Research Fellow “Spanish in the Linguistic Landscape of Eugene, Oregon.”
Writer Maurice Carlos Ruffin is author of the novel The American Daughters published in 2024. He talks about his writing and teaching and reads a passage from The American Daughters. Ruffin is an associate professor of Creative Writing at Louisiana State University. He gave a reading at the University of Oregon on May 22, 2024, as a guest of the Creative Writing Program.
Aimée Morrison is an associate professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. She talks about her work to understand how people decide how to represent themselves online, what motivates those decisions, and what effects they have.She also discusses her experience as a professional woman who has been diagnosed later in life with ADHD and her work to bridge scholarly and popular knowledge about neurodiversity. On May 16th, 2024, Morrison gave a talk titled “Touch Grass” as the annual lecturer for the UO’s New Media and Culture Certificate program.
Moeko Yamazaki, PhD candidate, History, and 2023–24 OHC Dissertation Fellow“My dissertation critically examines the logistics industry by looking at the history of FedEx. I examine how economic deregulation, the expansion of precarious employment, and the weakening of labor unions made the growth of logistics possible. I demonstrate that the logistics industry enabled businesses and consumers to enjoy the benefits of the technological developments of speed and efficiency while preserving the longstanding power dynamics of capitalist industrial relations in which the most vulnerable workers pay the greatest cost.”
Joe Buck is the Vice President for Advancement at the University of Oregon. He talks about the fundraising priorities for the university and the value of philanthropy for higher education.
Poet and critic Mark Jarman is author of twelve poetry collections and four books of essays. His most recent book of poetry is Zeno’s Eternity published in 2023. He discusses his work and reads from his recent collection. Jarman gave a reading at the University of Oregon on May 2nd, 2024, as a guest of the Creative Writing Program.
Katherine Kelp-Stebbins, Comics and Cartoon Studies, and 2023–24 OHC Faculty Research Fellow.“My project examines graphic reportage as a tool for documenting international human rights struggles. The book considers how reporter-artists use comics to tactically and ethically intervene in discourses of injustice and representation. Via their subjective verbal-visual mediality, comics challenge the differential optics by which some lives are made more or less visible and valuable. Questioning how journalistic objectivity has overdetermined the documentation of humanitarian crises, the book uses comics to rethink the evidentiary claims of the image.”
Three UO humanities faculty whose scholarship engages the natural sciences in various ways talk about their work across the divide between the science and the humanities and why that work matters: why it is important for humanists to study the sciences, to work with scientists, and to interrogate the two cultures’ divide, especially in this moment.Vera Keller, Professor and Department Head of History, is a historian of early modern Europe particularly interested in the emergence of experimental science and the entanglements of research with capitalism, colonialism, and political economy and more broadly in the history of knowledge, of research, and of the research disciplines. Nicolae Morar is an Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and Philosophy, and associate member of the UO Institute for Ecology and Evolution. Professor Morar’s research interests lie at the intersection of biology, ecology, and bioethics. His work considers how various conceptual analyses in the philosophy of biology and ecology influence and transform debates in bioethics, and in ethics broadly construed.Cera Smith is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies and Black Studies. Professor Smith’s research focuses on twentieth and twenty-first century U.S. Black literature, Black Studies, and the health humanities. Their current book project analyzes how and why U.S. Black artists use biology to depict racialized life.
Arigon Starr is an enrolled member of the Kickapoo Tribe of Oklahoma. She is an award-winning musician, composer, actor, playwright, and artist. She created the comic Super Indian. Arigon Starr gave the final talk in this year’s Indigenous Comics Speaker series on April 22nd, 2024, hosted by the Native American and Indigenous Studies program and the Comics and Cartoon Studies program at the University of Oregon.
Chandler James is an assistant professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon, who specializes in American Politics, with a focus on the U.S. presidency and public opinion. In addition, he is a committed environmentalist and outdoorsman. He joined the UO faculty in fall 2023.
Nina Amstutz is an Associate Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Oregon. Professor Amstutz along with Portland artist and activist Cleo Davis curated the exhibition “Policing Justice” which is on view at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art through May 19, 2024.
Stephen J. Shoemaker, Religious Studies, and 2023–24 OHC Faculty Research Fellow.“My project will provide something that has long been needed: a book-length study of the historical figure of Muhammad, the formation of the Qur’an, and the beginnings of Islam that is both grounded in the methods of historical criticism and aimed at the general reader. Unfortunately, this important perspective has been largely absent from public discourse on Islam, and it is this significant gap that my book aims to fill.”
Maxwell Foxman is an assistant professor of Media Studies and Game Studies in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. Professor Foxman’s primary research focus is on how games and play interact with non-game contexts and media professions. This research engages several overlapping realms such as immersive media, game journalism, esports, and game production.Foxman is the co-author of Mainstreaming and Game Journalism with David Nieborg which was published in 2023 by the MIT Press.
Laura Pulido professor of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies and Geography at the University of Oregon where she studies race, environmental justice, and cultural memory. Her research explores the relationship between race, place, and social and environmental processes. She has devoted much of her career to studying environmental racism, especially how racism is conceptualized and operationalized in the scholarship and practice of environmental justice. Most recently, she has been studying how white supremacy and white nationalism impact climate denial and refusal.
Three UO humanities scholars with extensive expertise in the philosophy of AI, computation, digital humanities, information politics, and data ethics engage, through perspectives rooted in the humanities, the challenges that AI and other data-driven technologies increasingly present today.Ramón Alvarado, assistant professor of Philosophy and Data Science Initiative, the Data Ethics coordinator, and author of Simulating Science: Computer Simulations as Scientific Instruments (2023)Mattie Burkert, associate professor of English, director of the Minor in Digital Humanities, the interim director of the New Media and Culture Certificate, and the Principal Investigator and Project Director for the London Stage DatabaseColin Koopman, professor of Philosophy, author of How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person (2019), and the project lead of the Our Data, Our Selves web project.
Miguel Gualdrón Ramírez is an assistant professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. His research interests include Critical Philosophy of Race, Latin American and Caribbean Philosophy, Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art, 18th and 19th century German Philosophy, and 20th century Continental Philosophy. Gualdrón Ramírez studied philosophy as an undergraduate and MA student at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, and earned a PhD in Philosophy from DePaul University, Chicago. Before joining UO, he was Assistant Professor in the Philosophy and Religion Department at the University of North Texas (2021-2023) and Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Oxford College of Emory (2018-2020).
Artist Omar Khouri was born in London and spent his childhood in Lebanon. In 2002, he graduated from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston with a BFA in illustration. After spending a year in Los Angeles working in cinema and television, he returned to Beirut. In 2006, Khouri cofounded Samandal Comics Magazine, the first experimental comics periodical in the Arab world. He is currently Samandal’s Editor-in-Chief and one of its many international contributing artists. In 2010, Khouri's sociopolitical satire Utopia won Best Arabic Comic book at the Algerian International Comic Book Festival. His work spans many art forms including painting, comics, animation, theatre, film, and music. Khouri is currently artist-in-residence for the UO’s Comics and Cartoon Studies program. He is producing a U.N. report on the right to food in comics form as a collaboration with Law professor Michael Fakhri and English and Comics Studies professor Kate Kelp-Stebbins. This work is in conjunction with professor Fakhri’s appointment as Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food for the United Nations.
Diego Mauricio Cortés is an Assistant Professor of Global Media at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. Professor Cortés’s research intersects alternative and community media, Latin American Indigenous studies, religious studies, and popular culture. Through this multidisciplinary practice, he examines formations of contemporary Indigeneities in the Andes, transnational evangelicalism, American whiteness, and media representations of the war on drugs. Professor Cortés is currently working on a book manuscript that explores the repercussions of the rapid expansion of evangelicalism (non-denominational American Christianity and Pentecostalism) among Andean Indigenous communities in Colombia, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Prior to joining the UO faculty in fall 2023, Professor Cortés was an assistant professor of Communication Studies at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford.
Sergio Loza, Romance Languages, Director of the Spanish Heritage Language Program, and 2023–24 OHC Faculty Research Fellow.My project explores the collective experiences of Latinx students who served as student ambassadors for the Spanish heritage Language program at the University of Oregon. These student ambassadors collaborate in various administrative tasks as well as advocate for multilingualism and Latinx representation on campus by organizing events on campus. The design, implementation, and outcomes of this program highlight the applied ways in which social justice educational frameworks can inform innovative programmatic initiatives that enrich the educational experiences of Latinx students.
Devin Grammon, Romance Languages and 2023–24 OHC Faculty Research Fellow.The idea that bilingual signage helps to create welcoming and inclusive public spaces for U.S. Spanish speakers is complicated by the inequitable treatment of English and Spanish on many signs in terms of translation quality, text size, fonts, and other factors. My project examines bilingual public signs in downtown Eugene in order to explore how representations of Spanish can reinforce racializing stereotypes about U.S. Latinos and construct a public sphere that is hostile to members of this ethnolinguistic group.
Glynne Walley, East Asian Languages and Literatures and 2023–24 OHC Ernest G. Moll Research Fellow in Literary Studies.The 19th-century adventure novel Eight Dogs by Kyokutei Bakin is one of the most influential books in Japanese history and a key example of the spread of literary ideas and techniques across the the Sinosphere. It’s also one of the longest novels in world history. My project involves a complete annotated translation in multiple volumes, each with an introduction examining a different aspect of the work; the next introduction will look at the publishers who undertook this massive project.
Cole Pauls is a Tahltan comics artist, illustrator, and printmaker from Haines Junction, Yukon Territory. He earned a BFA in Illustration from Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Pauls has created three graphic novels: Dakwäkãda Warriors (2019), Pizza Punks (2021) and Kwändür (2022).Cole Pauls gave the second talk in this year’s Indigenous Comics Speaker series on February 21st, 2024 hosted by the Native American and Indigenous Studies program and the Comics and Cartoon Studies program at the University of Oregon.
Poet Aaron Baker is an associate professor in the Department of English at Loyola University Chicago where he teaches Creative Writing. Baker’s first collection Mission Work, published in 2008, won the Katherine Bakeless Award for a First Book of Poetry and the Glasgow/Shenandoah Prize for Emerging Writers. Baker’s second poetry collection Posthumous Noon, published in 2018, won the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize. Baker gave a reading at the University of Oregon on February 14th, 2024 as a guest of the Creative Writing Program.
Books-in-Print talk with Lamia Karim, Anthropology and 2018–19 OHC Faculty Research Fellow. Castoffs of Capital draws on fieldwork in Bangladesh to examine how female garment workers experience their work and personal lives within the stranglehold of global capital. Anthropologist Lamia Karim focuses on relations among work, gender, and global capital’s targeting of poor women to advance its market penetration, showing how women navigate these spaces by adopting new subject formations.
Christopher Newfield, Director of Research at the Independent Social Research Foundation in London and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Newfield is a leading scholar of Critical University Studies. He has recently published two books on the metrics of higher education: Metrics that Matter: Counting What’s Really Important to College Students (2023) and The Limits of the Numerical: The Abuses and Uses of Quantification (2022). In addition, Newfield wrote a trilogy of books on the university as an intellectual and social institution: Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880–1980 (2003); Unmaking the Public University: The Forty Year Assault on the Middle Class (2008); and The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (2016). He will give a talk titled: “Jobs and Universities: A Tale of Two Futures” on Thursday, March 7 at the University of Oregon as the Oregon Humanities Center’s 2023–2024 Cressman Lecturer.
Joyce Wei-Jo Chen is an assistant professor of Historical Keyboards in the School of Music and Dance at the University of Oregon. As a solo harpsichordist, Professor Chen has performed throughout the United States, France, Belgium, and Taiwan. Chen is also a Ph.D. candidate in Historical Musicology at Princeton University and expects to defend her dissertation, “Musica Experientia/Experimentum: Acoustics and Artisanal Knowledge in the Global Seventeenth Century,” in May 2024. In addition, Chen holds a Doctor of Musical Arts in Harpsichord Performance from Stony Brook University and a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley. Chen joined the UO faculty in fall 2023.
Strong Winds and Widow Makers: Workers, Nature, and Environmental Conflict in Pacific Northwest Timber Country (2022)Steven Beda, History and 2020–21 OHC Faculty Research Fellow.Often cast as villains in the Northwest’s environmental battles, timber workers in fact have a connection to the forest that goes far beyond jobs and economic issues. Steven C. Beda explores the complex true story of how and why timber-working communities have concerned themselves with the health and future of the woods surrounding them. Life experiences like hunting, fishing, foraging, and hiking imbued timber country with meanings and values that nurtured a deep sense of place in workers, their families, and their communities. This sense of place in turn shaped ideas about protection that sometimes clashed with the views of environmentalists–or the desires of employers. Beda’s sympathetic, in-depth look at the human beings whose lives are embedded in the woods helps us understand that timber communities fought not just to protect their livelihood, but because they saw the forest as a vital part of themselves.
Cintia Martínez Velasco is an assistant professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. Her research and teaching interests include feminist philosophy, gender theory, decolonial philosophy, and critical theory in Latin America. She earned her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 2019, where she taught Philosophy from 2018 to 2022. Professor Martínez Velasco joined the UO faculty in fall 2022.
Jesús Ramos-Kittrell is an assistant professor of Musicology at the University of Oregon. His research covers the early modern period and more current analyses of globalization, merging music studies with social history, cultural studies, and literary theory. Ramos-Kittrell's monograph Playing in the Cathedral: Music, Race, and Status in New Spain was published by Oxford University Press in 2016. His edited volume Decentering the Nation: Music, Mexicanidad, and Globalization, published in 2020, won the Society for Ethnomusicology’s 2021 Ellen Koskoff Edited Volume Prize.
Morgan Thomas earned their MFA in 2016 from the University of Oregon’s Creative Writing Program. Their debut collection Manywhere: Stories, published in 2022, was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, Lambda Literary’s Transgender Fiction Prize, the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and Publishing Triangle’s Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction. Claire Luchette earned their MFA in 2017 from the University of Oregon’s Creative Writing Program. They are an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Binghamton University in New York. Their novel Agatha of Little Neon was published in 2021. Thomas and Luchette gave readings at the UO on January 10th, 2024 as guests of the Creative Writing Program.
Poet Matthew Dickman is a visiting assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of Oregon. He discusses his work and reads from his latest collection. He is the author of the collections All-American Poem (2008) winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, Mayakovsky’s Revolver (2012), and Wonderland (2018). In 2016 he co-authored a collection Brother with his brother Michael. His latest collection Husbandry was published in 2022.
Cera Smith is an assistant professor of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon. They specialize in twentieth and twenty-first century U.S. Black literatures, Radical Protest Literatures of the U.S., Black Studies, Critical Race Theories, Affect Theory, Gender and Sexuality, Histories of Science and Medicine, and Health Humanities. Smith’s book project, Vivified Viscerality: Bioscience and the Black Interior in U.S. Black Literature and Sculpture, demonstrates how and why U.S. Black artists use biology to depict racialized life.
Sergio Loza is an assistant professor of Spanish and director of the Spanish Heritage Language Program at the University of Oregon. Loza’s interests include Spanish heritage language education and pedagogy, linguistics, sociolinguistics, U.S. Spanish, and critical language awareness. As a 2023–2024 Oregon Humanities Center Faculty Research Fellow, he is working on a project titled “Innovation in Spanish Heritage Language Program Administration: Development and Outcomes of a Latinx Ambassador Program.”
Jordan D. Schnitzer (UO BA 1973) is president of Schnitzer Properties and Director of the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation. Schnitzer began collecting contemporary prints in 1988. Today, the collection exceeds 20,000 works and includes many of today’s most important contemporary artists. He discusses his philanthropy and art collection. The interview is in Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art with the new exhibition “Strange Weather: From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation” which is on view through April 7, 2024.
Michael Yahgulanaas is a Haida multi-media artist. His publications include the bestselling graphic novels "Flight of the Hummingbird," "RED: a Haida Manga," and most recently "JAJ: a Haida Manga." He discusses his art and graphic novels.Michael Yahgulanaas gave the first talk in this year’s Indigenous Comics Speaker series on October 11, 2023, hosted by the Native American and Indigenous Studies program and the Comics and Cartoon Studies program at the University of Oregon.
Joseph Michael Sussi, PhD candidate, History of Art and Architecture, and 2023–24 Dissertation Fellow.My dissertation analyzes how contemporary artists Kim Abeles, Karin Bolender, and Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, use bodily sensing to make toxicity legible and to reveal the entanglements between places and pollution. Artists producing multi-sensory work can uniquely step beyond the boundaries that delimit policy formation and scientific research thus allowing for more nuanced and critical investigations of environmental violence. Sensing toxicity with these artists reveals how corporeality and culture are linked through the experience of contaminated geographies.
Karl Scholz is the 19th President of the University of Oregon. He began his tenure on July 1, 2023.Scholz discusses the advantages for UO athletics to join the Big Ten conference in August 2024 and he outlines five areas on which he intends to focus at UO. In addition, Scholz talks about why the liberal arts are important at UO.
Michael Aronson, Cinema Studies, and 2023–24 OHC Faculty Research FellowIn 1922, despite the efforts of African American activists in our region, The Birth of a Nation, made its widespread return to movie theaters across the Pacific Northwest. All the involved theaters were operated by John Hamrick, an influential Seattle exhibitor and a member of the KKK. This project is designed to recover and analyze this (re)exhibition history of the Klan’s cinematic urtext, to establish exactly how the region’s Klan made use of it in this postwar cultural moment, and how Hamrick and his industry made use of the Klan.
Raye Hendrix, PhD candidate, English, and 2023–24 Dissertation Fellow.My dissertation examines the intersections of contemporary American poetry and invisible, or imperceptible, disabilities. This project centers disabilities that are both physically and socially “invisible” (or misunderstood). For these disabilities there are outward perceptions of “normalcy” until that perception is shattered by way of interruption, or what I term the moment of “rupture.” This project investigates how these disabilities appear in American poetry, focusing on the moments at which they cease to be invisible and “rupture” poetic and social convention.
Chris Poulsen is the Tykeson Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) at the University of Oregon. He is also a climate scientist and a professor of Earth Science. Dean Poulsen’s research seeks to understand the causes of past climate change on Earth and what lessons they hold for predicting our future climate. Before coming to the UO in 2022, Poulsen was the associate dean for natural sciences in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan from 2018 to 2022. He discusses why a liberal arts education is important and the role of the humanities in CAS’s liberal arts mission.
Britney Wilson is an associate professor of Law and Director of The Civil Rights and Disability Justice Clinic at New York Law School. Prior to NYLS, Wilson was a staff attorney at the National Center for Law and Economic Justice, a Bertha Justice Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights, and a Marvin M. Karpatkin Fellow in the Racial Justice Program at the American Civil Liberties Union. Born with Cerebral Palsy, Wilson has written and spoken extensively about disability and the intersection of race and disability for various media outlets, including The Nation, Longreads, and This American Life.
Caroline Lundquist is an Instructor of Philosophy and a participating faculty member in the Prison Education Program at the University of Oregon. In addition, she is an affiliated faculty member in the Clark Honors College, and the managing editor of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy. As a 2022-2023 Oregon Humanities Center Wulf Professor, Lundquist revised and taught a course titled “Ethics Through Science Fiction” for incarcerated students in UO’s Prison Education Program.
Spike Gildea, Linguistics, and 2022–23 OHC Faculty Research Fellow.“Traditional storytellers in the Amazon use ideophones, words that speakers associate with specific actions and emotions, to help bring a story to life. I will analyze a recorded Werikyana (Cariban) story as told by a master story-teller, producing two English and two Portuguese translations to illustrate the importance of ideophones in this genre. Then I will compare Werikyana ideophones with those in related languages to see how many ideophones I can reconstruct to the ancestral language, Proto-Cariban.”
Spike Gildea, Linguistics, and 2022–23 OHC Faculty Research Fellow.“Traditional storytellers in the Amazon use ideophones, words that speakers associate with specific actions and emotions, to help bring a story to life. I will analyze a recorded Werikyana (Cariban) story as told by a master story-teller, producing two English and two Portuguese translations to illustrate the importance of ideophones in this genre. Then I will compare Werikyana ideophones with those in related languages to see how many ideophones I can reconstruct to the ancestral language, Proto-Cariban.”
Analisa Taylor, Romance Languages, and 2022–23 OHC Faculty Research Fellow.Between 19:00 and 29:00 there is a buzzy interference sound.
Ursula Pike is the author of "An Indian Among los Indígenas: A Native Travel Memoir" published in 2021 by Heyday Books. She discusses her book which chronicles her experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Bolivia.A member of Northern California’s Karuk Tribe, Pike grew up in Daly City, California, Portland, and Washington State. She has an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the Institute of American Indian Arts, a master’s degree in Economics from Western Illinois University, and a BA in Economics from Portland State University.
Anne Rose Kitagawa is the Chief Curator of Collections & Asian Art and the Director of Academic Programs at the University of Oregon’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. Kitagawa discusses the exhibition she curated “Framing the Revolution: Contemporary Chinese Photographs from the Jack and Susy Wadsworth Collection” which is on view through August 27, 2023.
Britney Wilson is an associate professor of Law and Director of the Civil Rights and Disability Justice Clinic at New York Law School. Prior to her current position, Professor Wilson was a staff attorney at the National Center for Law and Economic Justice, a Bertha Justice Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights, and a Marvin M. Karpatkin Fellow in the Racial Justice Program at the American Civil Liberties Union. Born with Cerebral Palsy, Wilson has written and spoken extensively about disability and the intersection of race and disability for various media outlets including The Nation, Longreads, and This American Life, NPR, PBS Newshour, Colorlines, and The Huffington Post. Professor Wilson has also testified about issues facing people with disabilities before both local and international governing bodies, including the New York City Council and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Also, an accomplished writer and artist, Wilson has published and performed short stories, creative nonfiction essays, and poetry, including on the HBO series Brave New Voices. On May 16th, 2023, Britney Wilson will give a talk “Down for the Cause: Grace, Space, and Belonging in Social Movements” as a guest of the Oregon Humanities Center and part of the 2022–23 “Belonging” series.
Laura Pulido, Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies and Geography; and 2022–23 OHC Faculty Research Fellow.I am analyzing how National Historic Landmarks represent process of white supremacy and settler colonization in the U.S. Based on both archival analysis and fieldwork, we explore both the racial and colonial processes inherent in the creation of these sites, as well as how they are represented. We identified four forms of representation: erasure, valorization, multiculturalism, and acknowledgement. We are publishing these findings as an historical atlas that illustrates how white innocence and denial have been instrumental in the territorial development of the U.S.
Anita Chari is an associate professor of Political Science and faculty-in-residence at the Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon. Chari employs embodied and trauma-informed pedagogies in her teaching. She also participates in the UO's Prison Education Program.
Natalia Molina is a Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California’s Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences. Her research explores the intertwined histories of race, place, gender, culture, and citizenship. She is the author of the award-winning books, How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts (2014) and Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1940 (2006). A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community was published in 2022.
Lisa Abia-Smith, Director of Education at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, and Senior Instructor in the School of Planning, Public Policy, and Management. Her research interests include Arts and Healthcare, Marginalized Communities, Art Education, Disability Studies, Museum Studies, and Arts Management. Abia-Smith discusses the numerous education programs offered by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art.
Natalia Molina is a Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Her research explores the intertwined histories of race, place, gender, culture, and citizenship. Molina is the author of three monographs: Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1940 (2006), How Race is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts (2014), and A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community (2022). On April 18th, 2023, Natalia Molina will give a talk “A Place in the Narrative: Telling Underdocumented Stories” as the Oregon Humanities Center’s 2022-2023 Cressman Lecturer and part of the “Belonging” series.
Poet Kate Daniels is the Edwin Mims Professor emerit of English and former director of Creative Writing at Vanderbilt University. Daniels is the author of six collections of poetry, The White Wave (1984) won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize; The Niobe Poems (1988) received honorable mention for the Paterson Poetry Prize; Four Testimonies (1998) and A Walk in Victoria’s Secret (2010) were selected by Dave Smith for the Southern Messenger Series published by LSU Press. Three Syllables Describing Addiction was published in 2018 and In the months of my son’s recovery was published in 2019. Her most recent book Slow Fuse of the Possible: A Memoir of Psychoanalysis and Poetry was published in 2021. On April 13, 2023, Daniels will give a reading as a guest of University of Oregon’s Creative Writing Program.
Britt Wray’s hopeful talk demonstrates the emotional and existential effects of living in a warming world—and how we can get through them together. Although anxieties surrounding the climate crisis can cause us to burn out, give up, and question deeply personal decisions like whether to have children, working through these anxieties can unlock a deep capacity to care for and act on climate issues. We need to look at the climate crisis as a whole—not just the political or technological issues, but the mental health consequences as well. These effects can be severe, even leading people affected by climate events to experience PTSD and a loss of identity. To combat this, Britt presents practical tips and strategies for healthily and productively dealing with our emotions, living with climate trauma, and strengthening our communities so we can combat climate change together.
Priscilla Yamin, Political Science and 2022–23 OHC Faculty Research Fellow.“In this talk, I focus on “social egg freezing,” (defined as freezing eggs outside of medical necessity, infertility or in cases of same-sex families) and ask, not how has it changed women’s lives, but why it hasn’t. Rather than examining individual women, I focus on the laws, institutions, discourse, and economic imperatives in which this technology is shaped and how it reproduces unequal motherhood, and new forms of market domestic labor.”
My guest today is Samoan writer and art critic Lana Lopesi, an assistant professor in the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon. She joined the faculty in fall 2022. In addition to numerous articles and chapters, she is the author of two books: False Divides: How Do We Get to Know Each Other Again? (2018) and Bloody Woman: Essays (2021). Her edited volume Pacific Arts Legacy Project is forthcoming in 2023. In 2023 Lopesi was awarded the New Zealand Order of Merit in recognition of her services to the arts. The award is one of the highest honors bestowed by the New Zealand government.
Britt Wray is a Human and Planetary Health Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine’s Centre on Climate Change and Planetary Health. She is the author of the book Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis (2022).Her research focuses on the mental health impacts of the climate crisis on young people and frontline community members, socio-emotional resilience and capacity building for vulnerable communities, and public engagement for improved mental wellbeing and planetary health. On March 8th, 2023, Britt Wray will give a talk “How to Cope with Climate Anxiety: Saving the Earth and Saving Ourselves” as the Oregon Humanities Center’s 2022-2023 Kritikos Lecturer and part of the “Belonging” series.
"Memories of Betrayal and Betrayal of Memory: Narratives of Defeat in Chile and Argentina" Yosa Vidal Collados, PhD candidate, Romance Languages, and 2022–23 OHC Dissertation Fellow"My dissertation questions the current cultural boom of fictional and non-fictional works on the politics of memory, characterized by a Manichaean rhetoric of heroes versus enemies, heroes versus traitors. Analyzing a testimony, a graphic novel, and a play, I argue that representations of betrayal, often evoking terrible forms of torture and suffering, allow us to critique a patriarchal and epic vision of the traumatic past in the Global South."
Writer Putsata Reang is a veteran journalist whose writings have appeared in national and international publications, including the New York Times, Politico, the Guardian, Ms, The Seattle Times, and the San Jose Mercury News. Putsata was born in Cambodia and raised in Corvallis, Oregon. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Journalism at the University of Oregon. Her memoir Ma and Me was published in 2022. She teaches memoir writing at the University of Washington School of Professional and Continuing Education.
Knight takes a deep dive on twenty artists who inspired him to use his art to address social issues—artists like Ollie Harrington, Langston Hughes, Octavia Butler, Oscar Michaux, James Baldwin, alongside current artists like Dread Scott, Public Enemy, and Fly.
Writer Thomas Belle is Director of Creative Writing and Associate Professor of English at Tulane University. He is the author of 5 books including Lost in the Game: A Book About Basketball, published in 2022. Beller reads from a work in progress and talks about his book about basketball. He also shares a story about his visit with Barry Lopez in 2020.On February 22, 2023, Beller will give a reading as a guest of the University of Oregon’s Creative Writing Program.
Danielle Conway is the Dean and Donald J. Farage Professor of Law at Penn State Dickinson Law. Dean Conway gave a talk titled “Practicing Antiracism Unapologetically: Using Professor Derrick Bell’s thesis of the permanence of racism as inspiration for 'Building an Antiracist Law School, Legal Academy, and Legal Profession’” on February 1st, 2023, as this year’s Derrick Bell Lecturer. The annual Derrick Bell Lecture honors Bell, who from 1980 to 1985 was the first African American to serve as dean of the UO School of Law. He wrote extensively about race in the United States and challenged academic institutions he served to commit to diversity.
Katherine Kelp-Stebbins, Comics and Cartoon Studies, University of OregonIn How Comics Travel: Publication, Translation, Radical Literacies, Katherine Kelp-Stebbins challenges the clichéd understanding of comics as a “universal” language, circulating without regard for cultures or borders. Instead, she develops a new methodology of reading for difference. Kelp-Stebbins’s anticolonial, feminist, and antiracist analytical framework engages with comics as sites of struggle over representation in a diverse world. Through comparative case studies of Metro, Tintin, Persepolis, and more, she explores the ways in which graphic narratives locate and dislocate readers in every phase of a transnational comic’s life cycle according to distinct visual, linguistic, and print cultures. How Comics Travel disengages from the constrictive pressures of nationalism and imperialism, both in comics studies and world literature studies more broadly, to offer a new vision of how comics depict and enact the world as a transcultural space.
Whitney Phillips is an assistant professor of Digital Platforms and Ethics in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. Phillips studies the connections between political communication, interpersonal communication, and information dysfunction. Her monograph This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture was published by MIT Press in 2015. She has co-authored two books with Ryan Milner: The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online in 2017, and You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and Our Polluted Media Landscape in 2021. Her forthcoming book Share Better and Stress Less: A Guide to Thinking Ecologically about Social Media will be published in 2023. Phillips earned her PhD in English with a folklore and digital culture focus from the University of Oregon in 2012. She joined the UO faculty in fall of 2022.
Cartoonist Keith Knight is the creator of the comic strips The K Chronicles and The Knight Life, and the socio-political single panel called (t)hink. Knight was a co-creator, co-writer, and an executive producer on the Hulu streaming series Woke, which was inspired by his comix and life in San Francisco. On February 7, 2023 Knight will give a lecture titled “The Intersection of Art and Social Justice” as the 2022-2023 Colin Ruagh Thomas O’Fallon Memorial lecturer. His talk is part of the Oregon Humanities Center’s 2022-2023 themed speaker series on the topic of “Belonging.”
Johanna Bard Richlin, Anthropology and 2020–21 Faculty Research Fellow.Why do migrants become more deeply evangelical in the United States and how does this religious identity alter their self-understanding? In the Hands of God examines this question through a unique lens, foregrounding the ways that churches transform what migrants feel. Drawing from her extensive fieldwork among Brazilian migrants in the Washington, DC, area, Johanna Bard Richlin shows that affective experience is key to comprehending migrants’ turn toward intense religiosity, and their resulting evangelical commitment.The conditions of migrant life—family separation, geographic isolation, legal precariousness, workplace vulnerability, and deep uncertainty about the future—shape specific affective maladies, including loneliness, despair, and feeling stuck. These feelings in turn trigger novel religious yearnings. Evangelical churches deliberately and deftly articulate, manage, and reinterpret migrant distress through affective therapeutics, the strategic “healing” of migrants’ psychological pain. Richlin offers insights into the affective dimensions of migration, the strategies pursued by evangelical churches to attract migrants, and the ways in which evangelical belonging enables migrants to feel better, emboldening them to improve their lives.Looking at the ways evangelical churches help migrants navigate negative emotions, In the Hands of God sheds light on the versatility and durability of evangelical Christianity.
Poet Jayme Ringleb is an assistant professor of English at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina. Ringleb’s debut collection So Tall It Ends in Heaven was published by Tin House in 2022. Ringleb’s poems have appeared in AGNI, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry. They are the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and fellowships to the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and the Lambda Literary Writers Retreat. Ringleb is an alum of the UO’s Creative Writing Program, where they earned their MFA. On January 18, 2023, Ringleb will give a reading with poet Alycia Pirmohamed as a guest of University of Oregon’s Creative Writing Program.
Vidusha Devasthali is the Senior Director of Foundation Relations at the University of Oregon. She talks about the importance of research funding by private foundations.
Alex Segrè Cohen is an assistant professor of Science and Risk Communication in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. She also serves as a research associate in the Center for Science Communication Research. She talks about how people make decisions about their behavior as it relates to risks such as COVID-19 and climate change.
Adriana Miramontes Olivas is the new curator of Academic Programs and Latin American and Caribbean Art at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. Miramontes Olivas oversees the JSMA’s Latinx collection, which has been one of the fastest growing areas of art in the museum. She talks about some upcoming exhibits.
Ka’ila Farrell-Smith is a Klamath Modoc visual artist, writer, and activist. Utilizing painting and traditional Indigenous art practices, her work explores space in between the Indigenous and western paradigms. Her painting Enrollment is featured in the exhibition Many Wests: Artists Shape an American Idea on view at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art through December 18, 2022.
Writer Betsy Bonner is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Oregon. Bonner is the author of the poetry collection Round Lake (2016) and the memoir The Book of Atlantis Black: The Search for a Sister Gone Missing, an NPR Best Book of 2020. She reads from Round Lake and discusses her writing.
Juliet Schor is an Economist and a professor of Sociology at Boston College. She discusses her research on consumer society and consumer culture, working hours and lifestyles, environmental degradation, the sharing economy. Schor is the 2022 Wayne Morse Chair in Law and Politics. She gave a talk "Gig Economy: Predatory Platforms, Precarious Work" as part of the Morse Center’s two-year focus on Making Work Work.
Sarah Wald, Environmental Studies and English, and 2022–23 Oregon Humanities Center Faculty Research Fellow at the University of Oregon.
This project examines the movement to diversify public lands access, outdoor recreation, and employment in the US. It focuses on organizations, social media accounts, and cultural productions (films, graphic novels, creative non-fiction) that counter the whiteness of outdoor recreation, public lands advocacy, and conservation. I use an environmental justice lens to analyze the stories told about race, nature, and nation in the movement. These stories offer new ways to imagine environmental belonging and political action for just futures.
Sister Helen Prejean is the founder of the Ministry Against the Death Penalty and the author of "Deadman Walking: The Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty That Sparked a National Debate." She discusses her work with death row inmates and talks about why the death penalty should be abolished. Sister Helen will speak at the UO on October 27, 2022 as a guest of the UO's Prison Education Program.
Damian Radcliffe, is the Carolyn S. Chambers Professor in Journalism at the University of Oregon. He discusses how the media and the practice of journalism have evolved in recent decades. He also talks about the decline of the publics' trust in journalism, the effect of social media, and the importance of local media.
Anshuman Razdan (AR), Vice President for Research and Innovation at the University of Oregon, discusses his work in spatial modeling and computer engineering. He also talks about his goals as the newly-appointed VP for Research and Innovation.
Patrick Phillips is the Interim President of the University of Oregon and Professor of Biology. He discusses the acquisition of the old Concordia campus in Northeast Portland and how the Ballmer Institute and other UO Portland programs will be occupying that campus. Phillips also talks about his goals for this academic year and issues surrounding diversity.
Coté is from the Nuu-chah-nulth community of Tseshaht on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Coté has dedicated her personal and academic life to creating awareness around Indigenous health and wellness issues and in working with Indigenous peoples and communities in revitalizing their traditional foodways. Her current book, A Drum in one Hand, A Sockeye in the Other: Stories of Indigenous Food Sovereignty from the Northwest Coast (UW Press, 2022) examines how cultural foods play a major role in physical, emotional, spiritual, and dietary wellness.
Raoul Liévanos is an associate professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon. He is an affiliated faculty member in the departments of Environmental Studies and Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies. His interests include Environment, Health, and Risk; Urban Sociology; Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration; Organizations and Institutions; Social Movements; Spatial Pattern Analysis and Geographic Information Systems; Historical- Comparative Sociology; and Qualitative Methods.
Sarita Gupta is the Vice President of the Ford Foundation’s U.S. Programs, overseeing the foundation’s domestic work including Civic Engagement and Government, Creativity and Free Expression, Future of Work(ers), Technology and Society, Disability Rights, and Gender, Racial, and Ethnic Justice.
She is the co-author, with Erika Smiley, of The Future We Need: Organizing for a Better Democracy in the Twenty-First Century, published by Cornell University Press in April 2022.
Gupta is serving as this year’s Wayne Morse Chair.
Annelise Heinz, History, and 2021–22 OHC Faculty Research Fellow.
For two decades after radical feminism and gay liberation emerged as influential movements in the 1960s, a subculture of “lesbian feminists” created dense networks across North America. They sought political, sexual, and personal liberation by building alternative communities enabled by economic self-sufficiency. I plan to write a national history of lesbian feminism through spatial and textual analysis, titled Collective: How Lesbian Feminists Reimagined Society. I argue that the idea of the home—of dismantling a patriarchal private sphere—became a focus for a lesbian feminist reimagining of liberation.
Historian Charles Chavis, Jr. discusses the process of researching and writing "The Silent Shore: The Lynching of Matthew Williams and the Politics of Racism in the Free State" (2022). He focuses on the institutional and descriptive challenges of archival research and the importance of community archives in the fight for transformative justice.
Dr. Charles Chavis, Jr. is the founding Director of the John Mitchell, Jr. Program for History, Justice, and Race at George Mason University’s Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, where he is also an Assistant Professor of Conflict Analysis and Resolution and History.
Hannah Thomas is an assistant professor of Dance at the University of Oregon. She discusses her approach to teaching dance, especially hip-hop. She talks about the new BFA in Dance that has been added to the curriculum and Duck Jam and their upcoming showcase on June 1.
Professor Thomas joined the faculty in fall 2021.
Drew Nobile, Music Theory, and 2021–22 OHC Faculty Research Fellow.
Popular songs are not just composed; they are sung. My project looks at relationships among song form (verses, choruses, etc.), lyrics, and especially how those lyrics are sung. My argument is that the sound of the voice is not a so-called “secondary parameter” but a fundamental aspect of song structure, one as central to a song’s identity as its notes and chords. Expanding our concept of musical structure in this way recasts traditional notions of musical complexity and value, which may help finally put to rest the tired notion that popular music is musically simplistic.
“Dura Europos in Its Conceptual Context between Eurasian Fantasy and Mandate Archaeology”
Jaś Elsner is Professor of Late Antique Art at Oxford University and Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Art at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He works on art and its many receptions in antiquity and Byzantium including into modernity. He is the author or editor of several books including Art and the Roman Viewer (Cambridge University Press 1995), Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text (Princeton University Press 2007), The Art of the Roman Empire: 100-450 AD (Oxford University Press 2018), and Empires of Faith in Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press 2020).
This lecture is sponsored by a Sherl K. Coleman-Margaret E. Guitteau Professorship in the Humanities from the Oregon Humanities Center and is part of the Spring 2022 Ancient Jewish Art and Architecture Lecture Series.
Kathryn Schwarz is a professor of English at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of What You Will: Gender, Contract, and Shakespearean Social Space (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), and Tough Love: Amazon Encounters in the English Renaissance (Duke University Press, 2000). On May 5th, 2022, Schwarz gave a talk titled “The Ethic of Contagion: Debt, Death, Love, Plague” as the UO English Department’s 2022 Weatherhead Lecturer.
Katrina Maggiulli, PhD candidate, Environmental Studies, and 2021–22 OHC Dissertation Fellow.
My dissertation seeks to better understand how popular essentialist understandings of species are operationalized through U.S. conservation policy to create materially specific species realities. I mark key foundations of these essentialist views on species in the eugenics-supported purity rhetoric of early U.S. conservation and show how contemporary debates over biotechnology as a conservation tool and speculative imaginaries of future species enable a rethinking of these restrictive and normative views on species being.
Steven Fine is Dean Pinkhos Churgin Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University and the Director of the Yeshiva University Center for Israel Studies. His research focuses on the literature, art, and archaeology of ancient Judaism. He is the author of several books including This Holy Place: On the Sanctity of the Synagogue during the Greco-Roman Period (University of Notre Dame Press 1997), Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World (Cambridge 2005), Art History and the Historiography of Judaism in the Greco-Roman World (Brill 2013), and The Menorah: From the Bible to Modern Israel (Harvard University Press 2016).
This lecture is sponsored by a Sherl K. Coleman-Margaret E. Guitteau Professorship in the Humanities from the Oregon Humanities Center and is part of the Spring 2022 Ancient Jewish Art and Architecture Lecture Series.
Charles Chavis, Jr. is an assistant professor of Conflict Resolution and History, and the Founding Director of the John Mitchell, Jr. Program for History, Justice, and Race at the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University.
His monograph "The Silent Shore: The Lynching of Matthew Williams and the Politics of Racism in the Free State" was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in January 2022.
Chavis discusses how historical understandings of racial violence and civil rights activism can inform current and future approaches to peacebuilding and conflict resolution.
Krystale Littlejohn is an assistant professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon. She is an affiliated faculty member in the Global Health Program and the Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies Program.
Littlejohn’s research focuses on the intersection of race, gender, and reproduction.
Her monograph Just Get on the Pill: The Uneven Burden of Reproductive Politics was published in 2021.
Burke Hendrix, Political Science, and 2021–22 OHC Faculty Research Fellow. This book project examines several American Indian political thinkers in the period between the American Revolution and the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, with a focus on their responses to key events in US politics and Indian policy. It is intended to fill a gap in teaching materials for courses in American political thought within Political Science and related fields. Chapters will center on explication and analysis of short, easily-assignable primary sources from authors including William Apess, Elias Boudinot, Charles Eastman, Arthur C. Parker, Zitkála-á, and Robert Yellowtail.
Laura Lee McIntyre, interim dean of the University of Oregon’s College of Education, and Jennifer Pfeifer, professor of Psychology, have been appointed to the faculty of The Ballmer Institute for Children’s Behavioral Health, which was established by a gift from Connie and Steve Ballmer on March 1st, 2022. They discuss the mission of the institute and the impact it will have on schools and the children of Oregon.
John Arroyo is an assistant professor in the School of Planning, Public Policy, and Management at the University of Oregon. Professor Arroyo is an affiliated faculty member in the Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies department as well as in the Historic Preservation program at the UO in Portland. He serves on the boards of the Center for Environmental Futures, the Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies, and the Collaborative for Inclusive Urbanism.
In January 2021, the University of Oregon received a 4.52-million-dollar grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to create the Pacific Northwest Just Futures Institute for Racial and Climate Justice (JFI). Arroyo, JFI's director, discusses the mission of JFI
The Sound of Exclusion: NPR and the Latinx Public. Christopher Chávez, Media Studies, University of Oregon
As a network that claims to represent the nation, NPR asserts unique claims about what it means to be American. In The Sound of Exclusion, Christopher Chávez critically examines how National Public Radio conceptualizes the Latinx listener, arguing that NPR employs a number of industry practices that secure its position as a white public space while relegating Latinx listeners to the periphery. These practices are tied to a larger cultural logic. Latinx identity is differentiated from national identity, which can be heard through NPR’s cultivation of an idealized dialect, situating whiteness at its center. Pushing Latinx listeners to the edges of public radio has crucial implications for Latinx participation in civic discourses, as identifying who to include in the “public” audience necessarily involves a process of exclusion.
Chávez analyzes NPR as a historical product that has evolved alongside significant changes in technology, industry practice, and demography. In The Sound of Exclusion, Chávez asks these pressing questions: What kind of news organization was NPR intended to be? What has it become over time? In what ways is it evolving to meet the needs of a nation, in which U.S. Latinxs are becoming an increasingly larger portion of the American public that NPR serves? Informed by more than fifty in-depth interviews conducted with public radio practitioners from all aspects of the business, Chávez addresses how power is enacted in everyday broadcast practices. By interrogating industry practices, we might begin to reimagine NPR as a public good that serves the broad and diverse spectrum of the American public.
Erich Gruen is Gladys Rehard Wood Professor of History and Classics Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley. His research deals with Hellenistic history, Roman history, and Jews in the Greco-Roman world. He is the author of several books including The Last Generation of the Roman Republic (University of California Press 1974), The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome (University of California Press 1984), Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition (University of California Press 1998), Diaspora: Jews amidst Greeks and Romans (Harvard University Press 2004), Rethinking the Other in Antiquity (Princeton University Press 2011), Constructs of Identity in Hellenistic Judaism (De Gruyter 2016), and Ethnicity in the Ancient World – Did It Matter? (De Gruyer 2020).
This lecture is sponsored by a Sherl K. Coleman-Margaret E. Guitteau Professorship in the Humanities from the Oregon Humanities Center and is part of the Spring 2022 Ancient Jewish Art and Architecture Lecture Series.
When much of the world entered pandemic lockdown in spring 2020, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and musician, and Robyn Maynard, a Canadian writer and scholar, and author of Policing Black Lives: State violence in Canada from slavery to the present, began writing each other letters—a gesture sparked by friendship and solidarity. They had a desire for kinship and connection in a world shattering under the intersecting crises of pandemic, police killings, and climate catastrophe. Focusing on her first letter, Simpson shares her experiences of this transformative collaboration in her virtual talk “Rehearsals for Living: My First Letter.”
Ellen Peters, Philip H. Knight Chair and Director of the Center for Science Communication Research in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. Her research interests concern how people judge and decide, and how evidence-based communication can boost comprehension and improve decisions in health, financial, and environmental contexts. She is author of Innumeracy in the Wild: Misunderstanding and Misusing Numbers.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar and writer. She has worked over two decades as an independent scholar using Nishnaabeg intellectual practices and currently teaches at the Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning in Denendeh.
Simpson is the author of numerous books including As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance (2017), the novel Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies (2020), A Short History of the Blockade: Giant Beavers, Diplomacy and Regeneration in Nishnaabewin (2021), and the forthcoming Rehearsals for Living with Robyn Maynard.
Simpson will give a virtual talk on Rehearsals for Living on April 5th, 2022, as the Oregon Humanities Center’s 2021–2022 Clark Lecturer.
Sheela Bora Hadjivassiliou, PhD candidate, Romance Languages, 2021-22 OHC Dissertation Fellow
“My dissertation explores a series of narratives (novels, plays, and screenplays) that challenge the fictions of the utopian creole island and postcolonial multicultural success. In these alternative narratives, twentieth and twenty-first century authors from the Caribbean, Indian Ocean, and France use tropes, toponymy (the study of place names) and transgression (of normative expressions of gender, race and class) to depict how subaltern bodies—undocumented migrants, “low-caste” and “no-caste” individuals, and sex workers—destabilize the neoliberal logic of the economies in which they participate through their embodied and affective actions.”
Writer Paisley Rekdal is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Utah, and Utah's Poet Laureate. She discusses and reads from her latest collection of poetry "Nightingale" and talks about her nonfiction book "Appropriate: A Provocation." Rekdal also describes her multimedia project "West: A Translation."
On April 7, 2022, Rekdal will give a reading as a guest of the University of Oregon’s Creative Writing Program.
Kristen Seaman is an associate professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, and an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Classics at the University of Oregon. Seaman is a 2021–2022 Oregon Humanities Center Coleman-Guitteau Professor. The teaching fellowship has funded her development of a new undergraduate class “Ancient Jewish Art and Architecture” which she will teach in spring 2022. She discusses her research and the class.
Ron Jude is a professor of Photography at the University of Oregon. His recent project 12 Hertz is on view at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art through March 13, 2022. He discusses the exhibition and his other work and teaching.
Craig Kauffman, Political Science, OHC/CAS subvention recipient (co-authored with Pamela L. Martin)
With the window of opportunity to take meaningful action on climate change and mass extinction closing, a growing number of communities, organizations, and governments around the world are calling for Rights of Nature (RoN) to be legally recognized. RoN advocates are creating new laws that recognize natural ecosystems as subjects with inherent rights, and appealing to courts to protect those rights. Going beyond theory and philosophy, in this book Craig Kauffman and Pamela Martin analyze the politics behind the creation and implementation of these laws, as well as the effects of the laws on the politics of sustainable development.
Middle Eastern American Theatre explores the burgeoning Middle Eastern American theatre movement with a focus on Arab American, Jewish American, Armenian American, Iranian American, and Turkish American theatres, playwrights, directors, and actors. By exploring the rich religious and cultural heritage of this diverse group, the book interrogates the rich and paradoxical nature of the term ‘Middle Eastern’ through the dramas written and performed by those in the Diaspora.
Julius McGee is an assistant professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon.
Professor McGee’s research and teaching address questions at the intersection of structural inequality, development processes, and environmental change. His work engages scholarship in the fields of environmental sociology, environmental justice, climate justice, critical theories of race, energy transitions and technological displacement, and socio-ecological systems.
McGee earned his M.A. and PhD in Sociology at the University of Oregon.
Nathan Harris is author of the New York Times bestseller and nationally acclaimed novel The Sweetness of Water. It was an Oprah’s Book Club pick and one of President Obama’s favorite books of 2021.
Harris earned his B.A. in English from the University of Oregon in 2014. He was a recipient of the Creative Writing Program’s Kidd Prize.
On February 16th, 2022, Harris will give a virtual reading as a guest of the University of Oregon’s Creative Writing Program. (https://crwr.uoregon.edu)
Jovencio de la Paz is an assistant professor and the curricular head of Fibers in the School of Art and Design at the University of Oregon.
An artist, writer, and educator de la Paz’s work explores the intersection of textile processes such as weaving, dye, and stitchwork as they relate to broader concerns of language, histories of colonization, migrancy, ancient technology, and speculative futures.
A’Lelia Bundles is the author of "On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker," a book about her great-great-grandmother who was a successful entrepreneur in the early 20th century. Her nonfiction book is the inspiration for Self Made, a fictional Netflix series starring Octavia Spencer.
She will give a talk titled “Your First Duty Is to Humanity: Echoes of Derrick Bell in Madam C.J. Walker’s Activism and Entrepreneurship” as the UO Law School’s Derrick Bell Lecturer on February 9, 2022.
Poet Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach is author of the collections "The Many Names for Mother," "Don't Touch the Bones," and the forthcoming "40 WEEKS." She reads some poems and discusses her work. Dasbach will give a virtual reading on January 26, 2022 as a guest of the UO's Creative Writing Program (https://crwr.uoregon.edu). https://ohc.uoregon.edu
What will it take to inspire and empower a critical mass to act in time to safeguard our climate, civilization, and the living world? In her new book, "Under the Sky We Make: How to Be Human in a Warming World" (2021), Lund University sustainability scientist Kimberly Nicholas argues that it’s a combination of facts, feelings, and action. Three guiding principles to make this shift from exploitation to regeneration are to simultaneously promote human and planetary health and well-being; reduce harmful practices at their source; and strengthen the resilience of both human and natural communities. For each of us, figuring out how to contribute to, sustain, and find meaning and joy in this work is a primary duty of being alive at this moment.
Born and raised on her family’s vineyard in Sonoma, California, Nicholas studied the effect of climate change on the California wine industry for her PhD in Environment and Resources at Stanford University. In her research, she studies the connections between people, land, and climate. Her goal is to understand how to steward ecosystems to support a good life for everyone alive today, and leave a thriving planet for future generations.
Lynn Stephen, Anthropology, OHC/CAS subvention recipient and 2015-16 OHC research fellow.
From covering the massacre of students at Tlatelolco in 1968 and the 1985 earthquake to the Zapatista rebellion in 1994 and the disappearance of forty-three students in 2014, Elena Poniatowska has been one of the most important chroniclers of Mexican social, cultural, and political life. In Stories That Make History, Lynn Stephen examines Poniatowska’s writing, activism, and political participation, using them as a lens through which to understand critical moments in contemporary Mexican history. In her crónicas—narrative journalism written in a literary style featuring firsthand testimonies—Poniatowska told the stories of Mexico’s most marginalized people. Throughout, Stephen shows how Poniatowska helped shape Mexican politics and forge a multigenerational political community committed to social justice. In so doing, she presents a biographical and intellectual history of one of Mexico’s most cherished writers and a unique history of modern Mexico.
Terry McDonald is the Executive Director of the St. Vincent de Paul Society of Lane County. He has served SVdP for over 50 years, 37 as Executive Director. McDonald is an alumnus of the University of Oregon having earned a bachelor's degree in History and Political Science, and a master's degree in Education. He discusses the vast array of services SVdP provides, as well as its retail, recycling, and manufacturing enterprise.
Kimberly Nicholas, Associate Professor of Sustainability Science at Lund University in Sweden, is the author of "Under the Sky We Make: How to be Human in a Warming World" (2021), and the monthly climate newsletter “We Can Fix It.” In her research, she studies the connections between people, land, and climate. Her goal is to understand how to steward ecosystems to support a good life for everyone alive today, and leave a thriving planet for future generations. On January 12th, 2022, Nicholas will give a virtual talk “Facing Climate Change with Facts, Feelings, and Action” as the Oregon Humanities Center’s 2021-2022 Cressman Lecturer and part of the “Imagining Futures” series.
https://ohc.uoregon.edu
Krista Chronister, Vice Provost of Graduate Studies at the University of Oregon, and professor of Counseling Psychology in the College of Education, discusses her research on partner violence and survivors’ vocational and economic development. Chronister was named the VP of Graduate Studies in June 2021. She talks about her goals for the Division of Graduate Studies and how they support graduate students.
“Unsettled Ecologies: Alienated Species, Indigenous Restoration, and U.S. Empire in a Time of Climate Chaos” Lisa Fink, PhD candidate, Environmental Studies, and 2021–22 OHC Dissertation Fellow.
This project investigates the relationship between environmental conservation discourses of species invasion and the racialization of immigrants in the U.S. In doing so, it traces environmental thinking about invasive species from Western/colonial, Indigenous, and anti-imperialist perspectives within the context of settler colonialism, immigration, and climate change I examine how racial and settler colonial logics undergird Western/colonial approaches, echoing anti-immigrant sentiment. Dialectically, I explore responses emerging out of Indigenous and non-European settler communities that do important culture-shifting work around human-nature interaction and notions of belonging.
Daniel Martinez HoSang is an associate professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, and American Studies at Yale University; and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Political Science and serves on the Education Studies Advisory Committee. Prior to joining the faculty at Yale in 2017, HoSang was an associate professor (and department head) of Ethnic Studies and Political Science at the University of Oregon.
His new book A Wider Type of Freedom: How Struggles for Racial Justice Liberate Everyone (University of California Press, fall 2021) provides a survey of transformative visions of racial justice in the United States. HoSang brings together stories of the social movements, intellectuals, artists, and cultural formations that have centered racial justice and the abolition of white supremacy as the foundation for a universal liberation. He taps into moments across time and place to reveal the longstanding drive toward a vision of universal emancipation.
Ari Purnama, assistant professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Oregon, talks about growing up in Indonesia and what led to his interest in film studies and filmmaking. He discusses his approach to his scholarship as well as his practice as a filmmaker. Purnama recommends a film that he finds especially interesting.
"Speaking for Themselves: Rancheras and Respectability in Mexican California, 1800-1850"
Yvette Saavedra, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and 2021–22 OHC Faculty Research Fellow
My book project explores how ideas of gender, sexuality, and nationalism took shape in early nineteenth century Los Angeles. In Mexican Los Angeles, women who violated social ideals of gender honor and propriety, were labeled with the letters MV—which stood for “mala vida,” or bad lives, as a punishment for their alleged illicit behaviors and transgressions of social norms. Although intended as a mark of shame, I regard la mala vida as a form of proto-feminism that allowed women to live outside immediate patriarchal supervision and helped them negotiate their social positions and identities. Rather than focusing solely on women regarded as honorable mothers of the nation, I examine the so-called “bad women” who rejected imposed ideas of feminine propriety to show how they redefined ideas of womanhood, nationhood, and motherhood on their own terms.
Daniel Martinez HoSang, Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, and American Studies at Yale University (formerly at University of Oregon), discusses his numerous publications including the forthcoming "Under the Blacklight: The Intersectional Vulnerabilities that Covid Lays Bare" (Haymarket Press, Spring 2022, co-edited with Kimberle Crenshaw). HoSang will give a virtual talk "A Wider Type of Freedom: How Struggles for Racial Justice Liberate Everyone" on Wednesday, December 1, 2021. Register: ohc.uoregon.edu
Michelle McKinley, Law, and 2021–22 OHC Faculty Research Fellow.
“Bound Biographies” charts the travel experiences of Afro-Iberians who left the peninsula in service of their owners, or as freed itinerant persons as they forged their lives in the Americas in the first two centuries of Spanish expansion and settlement in the New World. The project examines Afro-Iberian life on the Iberian Peninsula, traces Afro-Iberian travelers as they relocate in various port towns in the Americas, and follows their return to the peninsula after living for considerable periods of time in the New World. “Bound Biographies” is a geographically ambitious, multi-sited project that uses the sources to reconstruct the experience of black mobility that was not forced. It explores the lives of black travelers in an early diaspora that was not exclusively tied to—yet indelibly shaped by—the transatlantic slave trade.
Aris Hall, coordinator of the Lyllye Reynolds-Parker Black Cultural Center at the University of Oregon, talks about the resources available at the center and how she supports Black students at the UO socially and academically.
Adrian Parr, Dean of the College of Design at the University of Oregon, is a transdisciplinary scholar whose work intersects in Philosophy, Aesthetic Theory, and environmentalism. She discusses her recent books and films, as well as what attracted her to the University of Oregon in spring of 2021.
Kristen Bell, Law, and 2021–22 OHC Faculty Research Fellow. My fellowship project focuses on writing a book proposal for work in philosophy of punishment. The book will address questions about justice and punishment through the lens of narratives from people who are currently incarcerated. The chapters of the book will emerge through iterative correspondence with people who were sentenced to life terms as juveniles and whom I’ve previously taught in prison. I seek to explore philosophical questions around punishment in a way that is accessible to the public and helps spur interest in reform of the criminal legal system.
There are estimates that the U.S. population could reach 438 million by 2050. Where will these people be housed? What kind of metropolitan regions will they live in? Will these regions be sustainable or equitable or even livable? Is it only a dream that we can create sustainable, healthy, resilient, green, and equitable cities? Christina Rosan considers these questions in her talk.
Christina Rosan is an associate professor of Geography and Urban Studies at Temple University. Her forthcoming book (co-authored with Stephen Wheeler) "Reimagining Sustainable Cities" will be published by the University of California Press in December 2021.
Sameer Pandya, associate professor of Asian American Studies at U.C. Santa Barbara, is author of "The Blind Writer: Stories and a Novella" and a novel "Members Only." He discusses the novel and reads a passage. Pandya will give a virtual reading on Nov. 10, 2021 as a guest of the UO's Creative Writing Program. Register: crwr.uoregon.edu
Alicia Salaz discusses her work as an academic librarian in United Arab Emirates and Qatar, as well as her last position at Carnegie Mellon University. She talks about what drew her to work at the University of Oregon and the strengths of the UO Libraries.
"Japan on American TV" explores political, economic, and cultural issues underlying depictions of Japan on U.S. television comedies and the programs they inspired. Since the 1950s, U.S. television programs have taken the role of “curators” of Japan, displaying and explaining selected aspects for viewers. Beliefs in U.S. hegemony over Japan underpin this curation process. "Japan on American TV" takes a historical perspective to understand the diversity of Japan parodies and examines six main categories of television portrayals representing different genres and comedic forms: (1) stereotypes of judo instructors (1950s and 1960s); (2) samurai parodies (prevalent in the 1970s); (3) the Bubble Economy Era in Sesame Street’s Big Bird in Japan (1988); (4) “Cool Japan” parodies (1990s through the present); (5) eager fans in sketch series (2010s); and (6) makeover reality shows (2019). These examples show changing patterns of cultural globalization and perpetuate national stereotypes while verifying Japan’s international influence. Television presents an alternative history of American fascinations with and fears of Japan.
Christina Rosan is an associate professor of Geography and Urban Studies at Temple University. Her first book "Governing the Fragmented Metropolis Planning for Regional Sustainability" (2016) examines metropolitan governance and land use planning in Boston, Denver, and Portland, OR. Her forthcoming book (co-authored with Stephen Wheeler) "Reimagining Sustainable Cities: Strategies for Designing Greener, Healthier, More Equitable Communities" will be published by the University of California Press in December 2021. On October 27th, 2021, Rosan will give a virtual talk “Reimagining Cities to be Sustainable, Healthy, Resilient, Green, and Equitable” as a guest of the Oregon Humanities Center. https://ohc.uoregon.edu
The Last Visit was published in 2019. It was the winner of the 2018 Donald Justice Poetry Prize. He reads some poems and discusses his work. On October 20th, 2021 Abushanab will give a virtual reading as a guest of the University of Oregon’s Creative Writing Program. http://crwr.uoregon.edu
President Schill discusses how the UO is preparing to safely welcome students back to campus for in-person learning. He also talks about the work happening at the Knight Campus, several new majors available to undergraduates, and more.
Kory Russel, an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon, discusses his work on Container-Based Sanitation solutions in the global south. He talks about the positive impact the solution has on mitigating climate change. Russel also describes the work of the Landscape4Humanity initiative that has partnered with SquareOne Villages in Eugene to enhance transitional housing living spaces.
Kristen Bell discusses her work exploring the experiences of incarcerated people who were sentenced to life sentences with possible parole as juveniles. She critiques parole-release decision making processes and the lack of enrichment programing available to inmates. Bell will be a 2021-22 Oregon Humanities Center Faculty Research Fellow working on her project "Philosophy of Punishment Behind Bars."
"This book project is a cultural history of prisoners of war and the literature they wrote and published during the era of the U.S. Civil War. It focuses on southern men held in northern prisons. These men played important roles in developing a unique genre of southern history commonly called the “Lost Cause,” which at once exalts southern military leadership and outlines southerners’ justifications for secession, slavery, and white supremacy. Their stories illustrate how this pernicious regional history took shape. In the process, it also reveals insight into wartime carceral culture and its impact on authorship and readership in the twentieth century."
Katherine Kelp-Stebbins is an Assistant Professor and Associate Director of the Comics Studies Program at the University of Oregon. She is also an affiliated faculty member in New Media and Culture Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
Her monograph "How Comics Travel: Publication, Translation, Radical Literacies" is under contract with The Ohio State University Press.
Kelp-Stebbins (with Ben Saunders) is co-curating “The Art of the News: Comics Journalism” an exhibition at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art that will be on view during Fall 2021.
“Cars, Trains, and Trolleys: Infrastructures of the Urban Space in the Andes (1900-1952)”
Javier Velasco, PhD candidate, Romance Languages, and 2020-21 OHC Dissertation Fellow
In my dissertation on the discursive construction of the Andean urban space, I explore how literary writing and other cultural texts represented, decoded and re-imagined the physical infrastructure of the city of La Paz during the years of formation and consolidation of the hegemonic project of the “criollo” elites between 1900 and 1952. From the category of “infrastructure,” referred to physical networks that constitute the underlying framework of a social system, I analyze the way in which the city’s infrastructures (railways, trains, trolleys, telegraph wires, roads and more) were as important in the physical actuality of the city as they were in shaping the economic, cultural and aesthetic modernity at the base of the literary production of the criollo elites. I refer to this process as the infrastructural construction of the “seignorial” space.
UO alumna Kimberly Johnson, is the interim Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and Student Success at the University of Oregon.
She graduated from UO with a Bachelor of Science degree in Ethnic Studies in 2001 and went on to earn her masters of College Student Counseling and Personnel Services at the University of Maryland.
Johnson is also a writer. Her novel "This is My America" was published in 2020 by Random House.
Johnson discusses the novel and the numerous issues it addresses: mass incarceration, death penalty, systemic racism, and white supremacy.
Sacred Traces: Composers, Relics, and Art-Religion in Practice
In nineteenth-century Germany and Austria, music-lovers treated composers as saints by collecting relics and flocking to historic houses as pilgrims. These devotees to Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, and others left records of their activities in archival ephemera that are not the standard materials of musicology, and these offbeat sources provide a new window into what I call “art-religion in practice.” This lecture is populated by tourists who wrote heartfelt odes in museum visitors’ books and keepsake albums, men’s choirs who serenaded a Mozart shrine on a mountaintop, music-loving doctors who cherished composers’ remains, and Christ-like casts of Beethoven’s face that decorated parlor walls. I argue that nineteenth-century devotees modeled the “parasocial” relationships we recognize today in celebrity culture, which have led fans to seek out traces of the artist’s body and to cultivate more intimate modes of musical listening.
Claire Herbert’s research interests include Crime, Law and Deviance; Housing and Homelessness; Urban Sociology; Race and Ethnicity; and Poverty and Inequality.
Her monograph "A Detroit Story: Urban Decline and the Rise of Property Informality," was published in March 2021 by the University of California Press.
In this interview she discusses how people cope with housing insecurity and homelessness in Detroit and Eugene. She also talks about what drew her back to the UO.
"Caspar David Friedrich: Nature and the Self" Best known for his atmospheric landscapes featuring contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies and morning mists, Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) came of age alongside a German Romantic philosophical movement that saw nature as an organic and interconnected whole. The naturalists in his circle believed that observations about the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms could lead to conclusions about human life. Many of Friedrich’s often-overlooked later paintings reflect his engagement with these philosophical ideas through a focus on isolated shrubs, trees, and rocks. Others revisit earlier compositions or iconographic motifs but subtly metamorphose the previously distinct human figures into the natural landscape.
In this revelatory book, Nina Amstutz combines fresh visual analysis with broad interdisciplinary research to investigate the intersection of landscape painting, self-exploration, and the life sciences in Friedrich’s mature work. Drawing connections between the artist’s anthropomorphic landscape forms and contemporary discussions of biology, anatomy, morphology, death, and decomposition, Amstutz brings Friedrich’s work into the larger discourse surrounding art, nature, and life in the 19th century.
https://ohc.uoregon.edu
Mattie Burkert is an assistant professor of English and Digital Humanities at the University of Oregon. Burkert’s research interests include Cultural Studies, Drama and Performance Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Renaissance and Early Modern Literary Studies, Restoration and 18th-Century Literary Studies. Her monograph "Speculative Enterprise: Public Theaters and Financial Markets in London, 1688-1763" was published in May 2021.
Burkert discusses the book, Digital Humanities, and her teaching.
https://ohc.uoregon.edu
Bathsheba Demuth, Assistant Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University, is an environmental historian, specializing in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. She is interested in the how the histories of people, ideas, places, and non-human species intersect.
Climate change and other alterations to the Earth caused by human activity are often described in apocalyptic terms: as Armageddon, or the end of the world. Nowhere is this more true than in the Arctic, where the rates of warming are twice that of temperate regions and have been visible for decades. In this lecture Bathsheba Demuth explores the Chukchi Peninsula, in far eastern Arctic Siberia.
The indigenous Chukchi people have traditionally been herdsmen and hunters of reindeer; those who live along the coasts of the Arctic Ocean, the Chukchi Sea, and the Bering Sea have customarily hunted sea mammals such as seals, whales, walruses, and sea lions.
Russia launched a series of vigorous military campaigns against the Chukchi in 1729. The Chukchi put up a ferocious resistance and, when surrounded, they frequently committed mass suicide rather than surrender. By the 1760s, the Russian government decided that the cost of vanquishing the Chukchi was too high in terms of money and troops and ended the war on the condition that the Chukchi cease attacking Russian settlers and pay the yasak (the yearly tax that native Siberians paid in furs).
In the 1930s, the Chukchi were forced into Soviet economic collectives which disrupted their indigenous lifeways. The Chukchi Peninsula became a region of mines and gulags. It’s a place that has experienced radical changes with Russian contact, the founding of the Soviet Union, and then with its dissolution.
Weaving a story of devoted Bolsheviks, Chukchi nomads, and herds of reindeer, Demuth will ask what kinds of narratives suit the empirical experience of radical change, what is lost when we emphasize rupture, and what is gained by paying attention to the ruins left by past ways of living as we face a transformed Arctic and planet.
https://ohc.uoregon.edu
“Strong Winds and Widow Makers: A History of Workers, Nature, and Environmental Conflict in Pacific Northwest Timber Country, 1900 to the Present”
Steven Beda, History, and 2020-21 OHC Faculty Research Fellow Those who follow environmental politics in the Northwest know that debates over the region’s forests tend towards the vitriolic, often pitting timber workers who want to protect their jobs against environmentalists who want to protect forest ecologies. My book shows that Northwest forestry politics needn’t be so acrimonious. Focusing on timber workers’ forest conservation efforts throughout the twentieth century, I uncover a largely forgotten history of cooperation between environmentalists and people from Northwest timber working communities, examine why this partnership dissolved, and offer solutions for how this partnership might be restored.
Major Jackson reads his poetry and discusses his work.
Jackson is author of five collections of poetry, including The Absurd Man (2020), Roll Deep (2015), Holding Company (2010), Hoops (2006) and Leaving Saturn (2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems.
Jackson is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University, and he serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.
On Wednesday, May 5, 2021, Jackson will give a virtual reading as a guest of the UO’s Creative Writing Program. Register: http://crwr.uoregon.edu
Bathsheba Demuth reads from and discusses her book "Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait," a comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic land and waters stretching from Russia to Canada. These frigid lands and waters became the site of an ongoing experiment: How, under conditions of extreme scarcity, would modern ideologies of capitalism and communism control and manage the resources they craved?
She will give a virtual talk "The Reindeer at the End of the World" on May 4, 2021. Register: https://ohc.uoregon.edu
Books-in-Print talk: "Earth Matters on Stage: Ecology and Environment in American Theater" tells the story of how American theater has shaped popular understandings of the environment throughout the twentieth century as it argues for theater’s potential power in the age of climate change. Using cultural and environmental history, seven chapters interrogate key moments in American theater and American environmentalism over the course of the twentieth century in the United States. It focuses, in particular, on how drama has represented environmental injustice and how inequality has become part of the American environmental landscape.
Michael Fakhri talks about how he became interested in international trade law and food sovereignty. He describes his role as a Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, and he talks about how the coronavirus pandemic has affected vulnerable populations.
Daniel Gómez Steinhart, Cinema Studies, and 2020-21 OHC Faculty Research Fellow
This book examines the history of Hollywood productions in Mexico from the mid-1940s until the early 1970s. Drawing on archival materials, it sheds light on how Hollywood formed a close relationship with the Mexican film industry through a mix of investment, production, and talent exchange. Ultimately, this project historicizes current debates about production outsourcing, trade, and immigration between the United States and Mexico while revealing the complicated cross-cultural exchanges that have long connected these two countries.
Stephon Alexander is a theoretical physicist and avid jazz saxophonist. He authored "The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe." Alexander is president of the National Society of Black Physicists. His forthcoming book "Fear of a Black Universe: An Outsider's Guide to the Future of Physics" will be published in August 2021.
Writer Jamel Brinkley reads and talks about his short story collection A Lonely Man. He discusses the craft of his writing. #literature #creative #writing. https://ohc.uoregon.edu
Fiction writer Jason Brown is an associate professor of Creative Writing at the University of Oregon. He is the author of three short story collections. The most recent is "A Faithful but Melancholy Account of Several Barbarities Lately Committed: A Novel in Stories" published in 2019. Brown reads from the collection and discusses his writing.
Naomi Oreskes, Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University, is a world-renowned geologist, historian of science, and public speaker. She is a leading public intellectual on the role of science in society, the reality of anthropogenic climate change, and on anti-scientific disinformation campaigns. Co-sponsored by the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics.
Ryan Jones is associate professor of History at the University of Oregon. He holds the Ann Swindells Chair. His research interests include Russian history, Pacific history, and global environmental history.
Jones is the author of Empire of Extinction: Russians and the Strange Beasts of the Sea, 1741–1867 published by Oxford University Press in 2014. His next book Red Leviathan: The Soviet Union and the Secret Destruction of the World’s Whales is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.
Naomi Oreskes, the Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, is the author or co-author of seven books including Merchants of Doubt (2010), The Collapse of Western Civilization (2014), Discerning Experts (2019), Why Trust Science? (2019), and Science on a Mission: American Oceanography from the Cold War to Climate Change forthcoming in April 2021.
In 2018 she was named a Guggenheim Fellow for a new book project with Erik Conway, The Magic of the Marketplace: The True History of a False Idea, forthcoming from Bloomsbury Press.
On March 12th, 2021 Naomi Oreskes will give a virtual lecture “Can Science Be Saved?” as the Oregon Humanities Center’s 2020-2021 Cressman Lecturer. Register at https://ohc.uoregon.edu
Michelle M. Jacob, an enrolled member of the Yakama Nation and Professor of Indigenous Studies and Director of the Sapsik’ʷałá (Teacher) Education Program in the Department of Education Studies at the University of Oregon. She also serves as affiliated faculty in the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies, and affiliated faculty in the Environmental Studies Program.
Jacob is author of Yakama Rising: Indigenous Cultural Revitalization, Activism, and Healing (published in 2013) and Indian Pilgrims: Indigenous Journeys of Activism and Healing with Saint Kateri Tekakwitha (published in 2016). She co-edited, with Stephany RunningHawk Johnson, On Indian Ground: A Return to Indigenous Knowledge-Generating Hope, Leadership and Sovereignty through Education in the Northwest, published in 2019.
Her latest books are, The Auntie Way: Stories Celebrating Kindness, Fierceness, and Creativity and Huckleberries and Coyotes: Lessons from Our More than Human Relations, both published in 2020.
Maxwell Foxman is an assistant professor of Media Studies and Game Studies in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. He describes Game Studies as an academic discipline and talks about the presence of games and play in non-game contexts. Foxman is a member of the UO's Esports and Game Research lab which examines college-level esports and how esports is institutionalizing in university and college campuses.
"My book seeks to diversify Soviet intellectual history by highlighting a cohort of writers, creative artists, and scholars, primarily from Central Asia and the Caucasus, who were involved in cultural outreach to the postcolonial world. Postcolonial encounters, unlike travel to the West, affirmed Soviet ideology during the Cold War. Exploring the impact of anti-imperialism and non-Western cultural traditions on the creative work of non-Russian cultural elites, my book also shows that “Afro-Asian solidarity” shaped their civic activities, social networks, and identities."
Lesley Jo Weaver is an associate professor of Global Studies at the University of Oregon, and author of "Sugar and Tension: Diabetes and Gender in Modern India." Weaver, along with former colleagues at the University of Alabama, produce an interdisciplinary podcast called “Speaking of Race.” She discusses her research in India and Brazil. Weaver also talks about her class Global Story of Race and the "Speaking of Race" podcast. [speakingofrace.ua.edu]
Françoise Baylis is a bioethicist and a University Research Professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and author of "Altered Inheritance: CRISPR and the Ethics of Human Genome Editing." She discusses some of the ethical issues surrounding gene editing technology and the need for "slow science." Baylis also talks about the COVID-19 pandemic and the ethics of immunity passports and vaccine certificates.
Shuangting Xiong, PhD candidate, East Asian Languages and Literatures, and 2020-21 OHC Dissertation Fellow
"My dissertation examines how melodrama, a quintessentially bourgeois form, was utilized and repurposed across different media by intellectuals and writers to produce new affective experiences, to cultivate new political subjectivities, and to make revolution in modern China. I argue that revolutionary melodrama functions as an emotional pedagogy in which abstract revolutionary ideas and ideals are made emotionally legible, and political solidarities more possible, to people at the micro-level of individuals and families."
Paul Peppis speaks with Vien Truong, a policy expert and strategist who works on building an equitable green economy. Her firm, Eco Equity, advises lawmakers, universities, and organizations on developing an inclusive workforce, creating sustainable economies, and equitable environmental policies. She currently serves as the Senior Director of Global Engagement and Sustainability with Nike. Vien will give a virtual lecture on Tuesday, February 2, 2021. Register for her talk at: ohc.uoregon.edu
Jina Kim, East Asian Languages and Literatures, and 2020-21 OHC Faculty Research Fellow
"My book project attends to the junction between sound and literature in focusing on works written for radio broadcast from the Japanese Colonial Period. In the chapter “Performing Historical Anecdotes: Yadam Boom on Radio and Stage,” I demonstrate the relationship between yadam as a traditional literary narrative that has oral origins and its remediazation through the advent of the microphone and radio. That remediazation ironically facilitated oral storytelling contests, making Korean language and tradition more audible and often serving a kind of pedagogical purpose for the Korean listeners—who, in the late 1930s, were colonial subjects living under a Japanese language soundscape."
Tara Keegan, PhD candidate, History, and 2020-21 OHC Dissertation Fellow My project examines Native survival in post-Gold Rush California and the ways in which Native individuals and communities shaped early 20th-century society and culture in Northern California’s “Redwood Empire.” Through a sports history that traces the implications of the first official “ultramarathon” in U.S. history, the project offers insights into the essential contributions of Native historical actors in developing regional economy and identity.
Poets Michelle Peñaloza and Tina Mozelle Braziel are alumni of the UO’s Creative Writing Program.
Michelle Peñaloza's collection Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire, published in 2019, won the 2018 Hillary Gravendyk National Poetry Prize.
Tina Mozelle Braziel's collection Known by Salt, published in 2019, won the 2017 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry.
Peñaloza and Braziel will give virtual readings of their work on January 20th, 2021 as guests of the UO’s Creative Writing Program.
Melissa Graboyes is an associate professor of Medical History and African History in the Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon. Graboyes talks about her experience living in Italy when COVID-19 hit, and shares her perspectives as a public health expert. "It's good the vaccine is not available to the mass public for another few months. Now is the time for the hard work of public health communication, reaching out and listening to why people are hesitant to take the vaccine, and trying to meet them where they are—to find the place where they are comfortable getting vaccinated—because that's critical for everyone's health."
How can centuries of environmental exploitation and social injustice in the U.S. be unraveled? Robin Robin Morris CollinMorris Collin, the Norma Paulus Professor of Law at Willamette University College of Law, shares her passion for creating solutions to remedy environmental injustice.
Anthony Leiserowitz (UO Environmental Studies MS 1998, PhD 2003), Senior Research Scientist and Director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, is an expert on public opinion and public engagement with the issues of climate change and the environment. His research investigates the psychological, cultural, and political factors that influence environmental beliefs, attitudes, policy support, and behavior.
Climate change is one of the most daunting challenges of our time. Americans have diverse and sometimes opposing views about global warming, fundamentally shaping the political climate of climate change. Anthony Leiserowitz will explain recent trends in Americans’ climate change knowledge, attitudes, policy support, and behavior and discuss strategies to build public and political will for climate action.
Robin Morris Collin, the Norma Paulus Professor of Law at Willamette University’s College of Law, was the first U.S. law professor to teach sustainability courses in a U.S. law school. She discusses the importance of foregrounding environmental justice when working toward sustainability. Morris Collin was a professor at University of Oregon's Law School 1993 to 2003. She cofounded UO's Coalition Against Environmental Racism’s Environmental Justice conference and the Sustainable Business Symposium, both of which continue into their second decade.
On December 8th, 2020 Morris Collin will give a virtual lecture “The Geography of Injustice and the Ecology of Reparations” as the Oregon Humanities Center’s 2020-2021 Colin Ruagh O'Fallon Memorial Lecturer. Her talk is part of this year’s Climate Justice series. Register at ohc.uoregon.edu
Matt Sandler, director of the MA program in American Studies in the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University, is the author of "The Black Romantic Revolution: Abolitionist Poets at the End of Slavery" published by Verso Books in 2020. He discusses how Black poets in the 19th century articulated their ideas about slavery, emancipation, freedom, and activism. Sandler reads "Free Labor" by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.
Sandler states, "We are still in a state of arrested development as a result of the conflict around slavery."
Anthony Leiserowitz, founder and Director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, and Senior Research Scientist at the Yale School of the Environment.
His interdisciplinary research seeks to understand the psychological, cultural, political, and geographic factors that shape human environmental perception, decision making, and behavior.
Leiserowitz earned both his master's degree and PhD in Environmental Studies from the University of Oregon.
On November 19th, 2020 Leiserowitz will give a virtual lecture “Climate Change in the American Mind” as the Oregon Humanities Center’s 2020-2021 Kritikos Lecturer in the Humanities. His talk is part of this year’s Climate Justice series.
Writer Kimberly King Parsons discusses and reads from her short story collection Black Light. She talks about how she crafts characters and her use of first-person, present tense narrative. Parsons will give a book talk on November 11, 2020 at 4:30 p.m. (PST). Register at crwr.uoregon.edu
Mark Watson, Interim Dean of University of Oregon Libraries, discusses how the libraries have responded to the COVID crisis. He also talks about the rich resources the library has curated to address diversity, equity, and inclusion; especially anti-racism. In addition, Watson explains the history of the controversial murals in the Knight Library and how the UO has responded. Watson has worked at UO Libraries since 1986. He describes how his work as a librarian has changed over the years and what the future may hold.
Audrey Lucero, associate professor of Education Studies and Director of Critical and Sociocultural Studies in Education at the University of Oregon, directs the newly launched Latinx Studies minor. Lucero talks about her work investigating the oral language development of young Spanish-English bilingual children. She also discusses the UO's new Latinx Studies minor.
Poet Juliana Gray reads her poetry and discusses her use of macabre humor in her work. She will give a virtual reading on Wednesday, October 14, 2020 as a guest of the University of Oregon's Creative Writing Program. Register at crwr.uoregon.edu
Michael Schill, President of the University of Oregon, discusses some of the challenges the university has faced this year: COVID-19, the toppling of the pioneer statues, and wildfire smoke. He also talks about the new Black Studies minor, how most classes will be online for the fall term, and how the university will provide a rich experience for first-year students. Schill also shares that he recently adopted a dog, Max.
Avinnash Tiwari, Career Instructor of English and Composition, and the acting director of the newly formed Black Studies Program at the University of Oregon, discusses the history of establishing the program and the why the academic study of Black history, Black literature, and anti-Black racism is important.
Timothy Williams, assistant professor of History in the Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon, discusses his monograph Intellectual Manhood: University, Self, and Society in the Antebellum South, and his co-edited volume Prison Pens: Gender, Memory, and Imprisonment in the Writings of Mollie Scollay and Wash Nelson, 1863-1866. In addition, he explains why it's important to understand the intellectual and cultural history of the antebellum and Civil War South. Williams will be an Oregon Humanities Center Faculty Research Fellow during the 20-21 academic year, working on his current book project "Civil War Prisons and the Problem of Confederate Memory."
David Mura, writer, memoirist, and performance artist, is a third-generation Japanese American whose family was interred during World War II. He discusses his recent book A Stranger's Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing and explains how writing necessitates an exploration of one's identity. Mura gave a reading and craft talk as a guest of the UO's Creative Writing Program on February 19, 2020.
Ruha Benjamin presents the concept of the “New Jim Code” to explore a range of discriminatory designs that encode inequity: by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies, by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions, or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Benjamin considers how race itself is a kind of tool designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice and discuss how technology is and can be used toward liberatory ends. Benjamin challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold, but also the ones we manufacture ourselves.
Jacqueline Cordova-Arrington, assistant professor of Flute in the School of Music and Dance at the University of Oregon, talks about her experiences as a Fulbright Fellow with the Berlin Philharmonic, and as a fellow in Carnegie Hall's Ensemble Connect program. She also discusses how to reduce barriers for young people of color who are interested in classical music. In addition, Cordova-Arrington explains why teaching and community engagement are important aspects of her career as a musician.
Janet Dewart Bell is the author of Lighting the Fires of Freedom: African American Women in the Civil Rights Movement, and the widow of Derrick Bell, former dean of the UO's School of Law. She talks about some of the women she interviewed for her book: Myrlie Evers, Leah Chase, Gloria Richardson, and Gay McDougal. Bell also talks about her late husband who worked to increase diversity in the academy. She spoke at the UO, along with Duke Law professor Guy-Uriel Charles, on February 10, 2020 at the School of Law's annual Derrick Bell Lecture.
Ruha Benjamin, associate professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, is the author of Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. She discusses how new technologies encode old forms of segregation and gives some examples of bias in technology. Benjamin explains why humanists and social scientists should be integral participants in the tech industry. Benjamin gave a talk titled "Beyond Buzzwords: Reimagining the Default Settings of Technology and Society" on February 4, 2020 as the Oregon Humanities Center's 2019-20 Cressman Lecturer. Her talk was part of the "Convergence: intersections between the sciences and humanities" series.
Brian Gillis is a professor of art in the College of Design and the director of the Center for Art Research (CFAR), which is housed in the 510 Oak building in downtown Eugene. Gillis talks about the CFAR as a collaborative, artist-run platform for experimentation and exchange rooted in art making. The Center cultivates diverse modes of engagement related to the practices of contemporary artists by supporting speculative research, discourse, exhibitions, and publications. Gillis also talks about his art practice and teaching.
Ramón Alvarado, assistant professor of Philosophy and an affiliate of UO's Data Science Initiative, discusses his work in data ethics. He defines the concepts of big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence; and talks about the bias of algorithms and the emergence of surveillance capitalism. Alvarado also describes the ethics of technology class he taught in fall 2019.
Gabriele Hayden is Assistant Librarian for Research Data Management and Reproducibility in the Data Services Department of the University of Oregon Libraries. She discusses the resources available to help faculty and students manage their research data and materials. Hayden, with a PhD in English Literature from Yale University, is uniquely situated to help humanities scholars understand how to manage and store the data their research generates.
Amanda Cote, assistant professor of Media Studies and Game Studies in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon, discusses her interest in Game Studies and the significance of the field. She also talks about her forthcoming book Gaming Sexism: Gender and Identity in the Era of Casual Video Games, and describes esports and its popularity among gamers. The UO now has a varsity esports team.
Cheryl Hartup, Curator of Academic Programs and Latin American and Caribbean Art at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art; and Danielle Knapp, the McCosh Curator at the Jordan Schnitzer of Art, discuss the museum's Common Seeing collaboration with the UO's Common Reading program. This year the exhibit responds to Helena Maria Viramontes's novel, Under the Feet of Jesus. The curators describe the works of art on view. "Resistance as Power: A Curatorial Response to Under the Feet of Jesus" is on view through February 23rd, 2020.
Provost Patrick Phillips discusses his role as the chief academic officer of the University of Oregon. He is working on filling some academic leadership vacancies as well as working to hire and retain faculty from diverse backgrounds. Phillips also talks about his work as an award-winning evolutionary biologist and the development of the SCORE (Students of Color Opportunities in Research Enrichment) program.
John Arroyo, assistant professor in the School of Planning, Public Policy, and Management at the University of Oregon, joined the faculty in fall 2019. He describes his interdisciplinary approach to urban design and planning. Arroyo discusses his interest in how Mexican immigrants create community in suburban areas to help allay their fear of harassment. His current book project is Shadow Suburbanism: Mexican Everyday Life and Fear in Greater Atlanta.
John Weber, Executive Director of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, discusses his Oregon roots and his aspirations for the museum. Weber took over as Executive Director on October 1, 2019 after Jill Hartz retired.
Stacy Alaimo, professor of English and Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon, is an internationally recognized scholar of American literature, ecocultural theory, environmental humanities, and gender theory. She discusses her three books about posthuman environmental politics, and defines the concept of "carbon-heavy masculinity." Alaimo also talks about her current book project Composing Blue Ecologies: Science, Aesthetics, and the Creatures of the Abyss. Alaimo joined the UO faculty in fall 2019 after a 25 year tenure at the University of Texas at Arlington.
Lucy Jones, 2019-20 Wayne Morse Chair of Law and Politics, is the founder of the Dr. Lucy Jones Center for Science and Society, and the author of The Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us (and What We Can Do About Them). She discusses how scientists can better communicate about the impact of their research with decision makers and the public to effect policies. Jones was in residence at the UO October 7th to November 5th, 2019. During her time on campus she gave talks in Eugene and Portland, participated in a class, and met with local officials on disaster preparedness issues.
Courtney Cox, assistant professor of Race and Sport in the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies, joined the faculty in Fall 2019. She discusses disparities of gender, race, and class in sports organizations. Cox comments on the recent NCAA vote to permit college athletes to benefit financially from the use of their name, image, and likeness.
Helena María Viramontes, the Goldwin Smith Professor of English at Cornell University, is the author of numerous short stories and two novels, Their Dogs Came with Them and Under the Feet of Jesus. She discusses her writing and Under the Feet of Jesus which is the University of Oregon's 2019-20 Common Reading selection. Viramontes also reads a passage from the book.
Brent Dawson, assistant professor of English at the University of Oregon, and a 2019-20 Oregon Humanities Center Ernst G. Moll Fellow in Literary Studies. He discusses his book project Worldly Muck: The Matter of Universality in English Renaissance Literature. Dawson explains the importance of studying historical literature.
Poet Geri Doran, associate professor of Creative Writing at the University of Oregon, discusses her latest collection Epistle, Osprey (2019) and reads her poetry. Doran will give a reading on November 20, 2019 as part of the Creative Writing Program's 2019-20 Reading Series.
Kirby Brown (Cherokee Nation), associate professor of English and Native American Studies at the University of Oregon, and Jennifer O'Neal (Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde), assistant professor of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon, offer a preview of the conference "Engaged Humanities: Partnerships between Academia and Tribal Communities." The conference features the annual Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples lecture, panel presentations by tribal elders and scholars, a concert reading of the play Salmon is Everything, and a screening of the documentary Promised Land which chronicles the Chinook and Duwamish tribes' struggle for federal recognition. The conference takes place November 8-9, 2019 at the University of Oregon on Kalapuya Ilihi.
Michael Schill, president of the University of Oregon, shares his enthusiasm for several campus projects and initiatives. The recently-opened Willie and Donald Tykeson Hall houses the new, integrated academic advising and career planning center. The Knight Campus is due to open June 2020. UO and OHSU have teamed up to combat cancer and other diseases with a joint center in biomedical data science. And the new Black Cultural Center, named for UO alumna Lyllye Reynolds-Parker, is set to open October 12, 2019.
Working with a team of collaborators, Harvard University professor and political theorist Danielle Allen has developed ten design principles for effective, equitable, and self-protective civic agency in a digital age. These principles provide guidance to those functioning as civic actors, and to those who are designing platforms or organizations to cultivate, support, or channel civic involvement.
Allen on Tuesday, May 21, 2019 on the UO campus as the OHC’s 2018–19 Kritikos Lecturer in the Humanities.
Camisha Russell, assistant professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon, discusses her book The Assisted Reproduction of Race, which examines how concepts of race are reinforced by reproductive technologies. Russell talks about how race is a social construct and asks, "what does the idea of race do?" and posits that race is a technology (something made and used).
Artist and filmmaker Philip Haas discusses his performance installation "Sculpture Breathes Life into Painting and Music" which had a world premiere exhibition at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art May 29 through June 9, 2019. He presents excerpts from the performance. Interview begins at 02:50.
Jill Hartz, Executive Director of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art since 2008 will retire in 2019. She discusses how the museum established an academic mission during her tenure as well as enhanced its many public programs. In addition Hartz talks about how programs have broadened to serve diverse communities.
Danielle Allen, James Conant University Professor at Harvard University, is the director of Harvard's Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. Allen discusses the deficiency of civics education in America resulting from policies wrought by polarized politics. She talks about the importance of egalitarian and participatory democracy. Her Democratic Knowledge Project identifies skills, knowledge, and habits citizens need to participate in democracy; and how to participate in a digital space while being intentional about self protection. Additionally Allen reflects on her memoir Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A. about her cousin who was incarcerated 11 years prior to his death at a young age. Allen gave a talk titled "The Ethics of Public Participation in a Digital Age" on May 21, 2019 as the Oregon Humanities Center's 2018-19 Kritikos Lecturer.
Lindsey Mazurek, assistant professor of History at the University of Oregon, is a specialist in the ancient history of the Mediterranean region. She discusses her study of the cult of Isis in Greece during the Roman occupation and the associated material culture. Mazurek also talks about her work with the Mediterranean Connectivity Project, a digital humanities initiative that maps social connectivity during the Roman Empire.
Daniel Gómez Steinhart, assistant professor of Cinema Studies, discusses his book Runaway Hollywood: Internationalizing Postwar Production and Location Shooting, which focuses on Hollywood filmmaking in Europe after World War II. Steinhart also talks about "Hollywood Style," a class he developed and taught as a 2018-19 Oregon Humanities Center Teaching Fellow. The class examined the history and evolution of film technology and aesthetics.
Chuck Collins, senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC, directs their Program on Inequality and coedits Inequality.org. He is author of Is Inequality in America Irreversible? Collins discusses the roots of economic inequality and the racial wealth divide in the United States and describes how social welfare policies can remedy inequality. He offers solutions that would reverse the concentration of wealth and power. Collins's talk on April 17, 2019 as the Oregon Humanities Center's 2018-19 Tzedek Lecturer was part of The Common Good series.
Chuck Collins, senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC, directs their Program on Inequality and coedits Inequality.org. He is author of Is Inequality in America Irreversible? Collins discusses the roots of economic inequality and the racial wealth divide in the United States and describes how social welfare policies can remedy inequality. He offers solutions that would reverse the concentration of wealth and power.
Autumn Shafer, assistant professor of Public Relations in the School of Journalism and Communication, talks about her enthusiasm for teaching and engaging undergraduate students in research. Shafer discusses some her research projects that aim to develop effective messaging about health promotion. She and her students developed a successful campaign to improve students' understanding of sexual consent. Shafer and her colleague Jesse Abdenour are recipients of a 2019 Faculty Research Award. Their project will focus on how journalists report on concussions among young athletes and develop strategies to create more effective narratives.
Justin Driver, the Harry N. Wyatt Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School, discusses his book The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind. He talks about how the law and courts shape public education in America. Driver gave a lecture titled “Are Public Schools Becoming Constitution-Free Zones?” on April 8th, 2019 as part of this year’s African American Workshop and Lecture Series.
Philip Scher, professor of Anthropology and Folklore and Public Culture, organized the exhibition "Visual Clave: The Expression of the Latino/a Experience through Album Cover Art, 1940-1990" at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. Scher discusses the social and cultural influences that have shaped Latin music and the iconography used by the album cover artists. The exhibition is on view through April 21st, 2019.
One of the most horrific—and least acknowledged—effects of mass incarceration is the epidemic of mental illness in our jails and prisons. Alisa Roth, journalist and author of Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness, will explain how this happened—and how we can fix it.
Journalist Alisa Roth is the author of Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness, an investigation into the crisis of mental illness in the US criminal justice system. A former staff reporter at Marketplace, Roth’s work has also appeared on NPR, and in The New York Times and New York Review of Books.
Journalist Alisa Roth is author of Insane: America's Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness. She discusses the mental healthcare crisis in the U.S. criminal justice system. Roth gave a talk at the UO titled "America's Hidden Mental Health Crisis" on March 12, 2019 as the 2018-19 Lorwin Lecturer in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.
José M. Cortez, assistant professor of English at the University of Oregon, discusses his approach to the teaching of writing and rhetoric to students from diverse backgrounds. He talks about the importance of creating a scholarly community and wrapping students into research. He shares that the UO's commitment to diversity and inclusion, the SAIL program, and research opportunities for undergraduates are some of the things that attracted him to the faculty at the UO.
Cheryl Harris, the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the UCLA School of Law, discusses how she came to the law and the argument she presents in her influential Harvard Law Review article "Whiteness as Property." She also talks about Derrick Bell and how he inspired her work. Harris gave the UO School of Law's Derrick Bell Lecture on February 19, 2019. Her talk titled "Affirmative Action Chronicles: From the Era of Colorblindness to White Nationalism" was part of this year's African American Workshop and Lecture Series.
Writer Karen Thompson Walker, assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of Oregon, is author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Age of Miracles and most recently The Dreamers, which was published in January 2019. Thompson Walker reads from The Dreamers and discusses her writing.
Yvette Alex-Assensoh, Vice President for Equity and Inclusion and professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon. She talks about her role as the UO's chief diversity officer. Alex-Assensoh discusses how the UO encourages enrollment of underrepresented minority students and its efforts at diversifying the faculty. She also talks about how the UO supports undocumented students.
Thi Bui, artist and author of the illustrated memoir The Best We Could Do, a chronicle of her family's journey from war-torn Vietnam to America. The Best We Could Do is the University of Oregon's Common Reading book for 2018-19. Bui talks about her process of writing and illustrating the book.
The Oregon Humanities Center’s 2018–19 Robert D. Clark Lecture was delivered by Nalini Nadkarni, professor of Biology from the University of Utah. Nadkarni discusses how her experiences as a scientist precipitated her explorations into diverse ways of engaging humans with the natural world. Her lecture took place on Wednesday, January 30, 2019
Forest ecologist Nalini Nadkarni discusses her work studying the unique ecosystems in tropical and temperate rainforest canopies. She has developed novel ways to share scientific knowledge to a wide range of public audiences and has created programs to bring science and nature to the incarcerated. Nadkarni gave a talk "Tapestry Thinking: Weaving the Threads of Humans and Nature" on January 30th, 2019 as the Oregon Humanities Center's Robert D. Clark Lecturer.
Fiction writer, Cai Emmons, is author of the novels His Mother's Son, The Stylist, and most recently Weather Woman. She talks about the protagonist and themes in Weather Woman and reads from the book. Emmons earned an MFA in fiction from the University of Oregon's Creative Writing Program.
Mae Ngai, professor of History and Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies at Columbia University, is the 2018-19 Wayne Morse Chair. She discusses the history of immigration to the United States; and talks about how restrictive immigration policy leads to increased illegal immigration. Ngai critiques the Trump administration's rhetoric and political stance on immigration. She is the author of Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Ngai gave a talk "Nation of Immigrants: A Short History of an Idea" on January 16, 2019.
Emily Eliza Scott, assistant professor of the History of Art and Architecture and Environmental Studies at the UO, discusses her interdisciplinary work in art and the public sphere, visual cultures of climate change, and social and environmental justice. She describes how her nearly ten years of work as a National Parks Service Ranger continues to influence her scholarship.
Gabe Paquette, Dean of the Robert D. Clark Honors College and professor of History at the University of Oregon, discusses his forthcoming book The European Seaborne Empires: From the Thirty Years War to the Age of Revolutions. Paquette also talks about the unique opportunities the Honors College offers students and the importance of the liberal arts.
Annelise Heinz, assistant professor of History at the University of Oregon, discusses her current book project Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture.
Artist Matthew Picton discusses his cartographic sculptures in the Artist Project Space at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. The "Cultural Mapping" exhibition is on view through January 20, 2019.
Robert Guldberg, Vice President and Robert and Leona DeArmond Executive Director of the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact at the University of Oregon. Guldberg discusses his work in regenerative medicine and bioengineering. He also talks about the Knight Campus facilities and how it will create the intellectual infrastructure to establish Oregon as a center for both research and development.
Erin McKenna, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon, discusses her work in human/animal ethics. Her books Pets, People, and Pragmatism and Livestock: Food, Fiber, and Friends describe why it's important to understand animals' species-specific behaviors, breed tendencies, and individual variations in order to establish an ethic of respect when relating to animals.
Matt Rader, assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, is the author of four poetry collections—the most recent titled Desecrations; and a critically acclaimed collection of short stories titled What I Want to Tell Goes Like This. Rader earned an MFA from the UO's Creative Writing Program in 2008. He discusses his work and reads from Desecrations.
Steven Beda, assistant professor of History at the University of Oregon, discusses his research on labor movements in the timber industry and environmentalism in the Pacific Northwest during the 20th century. He talks about the tensions that arose between rural timber workers and urban industrial workers. His current book project is Strong Winds and Widow Makers: A History of Workers, Nature, and Environmental Conflict in the Pacific Northwest Timber Country, 1900–present.
Artist and activist, Dianna Cohen is one of 30 artists featured in the exhibit "Plastic Entanglements: Ecology, Aesthetics, Materials" on view at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art through December 30, 2018. Cohen is also the co-founder and CEO of the Plastic Pollution Coalition, a global alliance of hundreds of individuals, organizations, and businesses working to stop plastic pollution. Cohen gave a lecture titled "Plastic Pollution: Art to Action" on October 17, 2018 as the Oregon Humanities Center's 2018-19 O'Fallon Memorial Lecturer in Art and American Culture.
Inspired by her creative work with ubiquitous plastic bags, artist Dianna Cohen co-founded the Plastic Pollution Coalition, a global alliance of individuals, organizations, businesses, and policymakers working toward a world free of plastic pollution and its toxic impacts on humans, animals, waterways and oceans, and the environment. Cohen speaks about her artwork and the pervasive problem of plastic pollution. She inspires conversation and action around the issue of plastic pollution, alternatives, and solutions. At a time when sustainability is an international concern, Cohen asks us to rethink our relationship with plastic and consider the material as a valued resource instead of waste.
University of Oregon Journalism instructors, Todd Milbourn and Lisa Heyamoto, cofounded The 32 Percent Project as 2017-18 Agora Faculty Innovation Fellows. The project is a national community engagement project that explores what drives and disrupts trust in the news media. They discuss how citizens define trust and how journalists can earn it. And they offer a critique of the traditional economic model of news organizations.
Diana Garvin, Assistant Professor of Mediterranean Studies in the Department of Romance Languages at the UO, discusses her interest in the Mediterranean and East African regions during Fascist rule in Italy—particularly the political and culinary legacies of colonialism. She also talks about her approach to teaching. Garvin's current book project is Feeding Fascism: Tabletop Politics in Italy and Italian East Africa, 1922–1945.
Michael Schill, President of the University of Oregon, discusses the institutional focus on student success and timely graduation. Recently the 4-year graduation rate has improved from 48% to 56%. In addition, Schill talks about faculty hiring for the Knight Campus, the interdisciplinary data science initiative, the Black Cultural Center, and the 10-year anniversary of PathwayOregon. Schill recently donated his entire performance bonus to create a scholarship fund to assist first-generation college students who attend UO.
Current debates on the future of public lands call for a focus on who is included in the ‘public.’ Who is inside the circle and who is not? Whose voices are heard, and whose are silenced? Indigenous people have largely been excluded from decision-making involving public lands—as has their sophisticated environmental philosophy and practice, derived from traditional ecological knowledge. How might the indigenous concepts of the personhood of non-human beings expand our notion of the public good? This talk explores facets of how respectful engagement with indigenous knowledge might re-draw the boundaries of “We, the People” as we consider our relationship to ancestral ‘public’ lands.
Marsha Weisiger is the Julie and Rocky Dixon Chair of U.S. Western History, and associate professor of History and Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon. Along with Barbara and Carlisle Moore Professor of English and Environmental Studies Stephanie LeMenager, Weisiger is co-director of UO's Center for Environmental Futures. Weisiger talks about her interests in the American West and environmental history. She also discusses the focus of the Center for Environmental Futures and its recent award of $600,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic and writer Margo Jefferson discusses her book On Michael Jackson and her memoir Negroland. Her memoir recounts her memories of coming of age among the midcentury Negro elite in Chicago. Jefferson talks about how ideals of black respectability impacted the ways young black women thought about and treated their bodies and appearance. Jefferson gave lectures titled "From 'I' to 'We': The Role of the Citizen-Critic" at the University of Oregon in Eugene and Portland on May 30th and 31st, 2018 as the Oregon Humanities Center's 2017-18 Kritikos Lecturer in the Humanities.
May 30, 2018. Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic and writer Margo Jefferson gives the 2017-18 Kritikos Lecture in the Humanities, part of the "We the People" series. Jefferson is the author of Negroland: A Memoir.
Andre Dubus III, discusses how writing saved him from a violent and self-destructive path as a young man. He reads from his recent collection Dirty Love and talks about imagination and creativity. Dubus's forthcoming novel Gone So Long will be published in October 2018. He gave a reading at the UO on May 10, 2018 as a guest of the Creative Writing Program.
Margaret Hiza Redsteer is a research scientist focused on geology, landscape ecology, water quality, climate change and its impacts on Native American communities, and tracking these impacts using local and traditional knowledge. She discusses how climate change is impacting the Navajo Nation. Redsteer was a keynote speaker for the Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples Lecture on May 9th, 2018, the opening event of the Environmental Justice, Race, and Public Lands Symposium held at the UO May 9-11, 2018.
Jason Josephson-Storm is Chair and Associate Professor of Religion at Williams College. He discusses his research interests in East Asian religions and philosophy; European intellectual history; and theories of religion, philosophy, and sociology. Josephson-Storm gave a talk based on his book The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of Human Sciences at the UO on May 3, 2018 as a guest of the Department of Religious Studies.
Sarah Wald, associate professor of English and Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon, discusses her book The Nature of California: Race, Citizenship, and Farming Since the Dust Bowl. Wald also talks about the significance of the Environmental Humanities and Food Studies. She describes the "Environmental Justice, Race, and Public Lands" symposium, which will be held May 9-11, 2018 at the UO.
Poet Mary Jo Salter discusses and reads from her latest collection The Surveyors. Salter is a coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry and a professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. On April 19th, 2018, Salter gave a reading as a guest of the UO's Creative Writing Program.
Fiction writer Danielle Evans, winner of the 2011 National Book Foundation's 5 under 35 honor, discusses her writing and reads from her short story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self. The book won the 2011 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Evans talks about how she develops the voice and complexity of her characters. She gave a reading at the UO on April 12, 2018 as a guest of the English Department, with support from the Oregon Humanities Center's Coleman-Guitteau Professorship.
Anna Brady, a third-year law student at the University of Oregon, discusses her work with Utah Diné Bikéyah, a Native American organization that developed the proposal for the now-threatened Bears Ears National Monument.
Melissa Graboyes, assistant professor of History in the Clark Honors College, discusses her book The Experiment Must Continue: Medical Research and Ethics in East Africa, 1940-2014. She also talks about the book she is currently coediting, Everyday Life on the African Continent: Fun, Leisure and Expressivity. In addition, Graboyes talks about the focus of the study abroad program for UO students in Zanzibar, Tanzania she organizes each summer. Graboyes will further her research next year as a 2018-19 OHC Faculty Research Fellow.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York. She is also the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. Kimmerer discusses how indigenous wisdom has enlightened her science. She also shares the Anishinaabe creation story of Skywoman and the lessons the story teaches us about our relationship with the Earth.
Filipino-American fiction writer Mia Alvar reads from her short story collection In the Country, and discusses her writing. Alvar gave a reading at the University of Oregon on February 22, 2018 as a guest of the Creative Writing program.
Joseph Lowndes, associate professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon, discusses the history of the New Right and conservative populism. He also talks about the Trump presidency and the fiscal policies that are contributing to the disenfranchisement of white working class voters.
Eugene artist Keith Achepohl and Jill Hartz, Executive Director of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, discuss "Vision of Nature | Vessel of Beauty," an exhibition of work by Achepohl. Achepohl created the work with inspiration from his experiences at the Morris Graves Foundation Artist Residency, The Lake, in Loleta, California. Achepohl discusses his residency at The Lake and his intimate relationship with the flora in his work. "Vision of Nature | Vessel of Beauty" is on view at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art through April 29th, 2018.
Joy Harjo, an enrolled member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, is a poet, musician, and author. She is the Professor and Chair of Excellence at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Harjo discusses and reads her poetry. Her eight books of poetry include the recent Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, How We Became Human-New and Selected Poems: 1975–2001, and The Woman Who Fell From the Sky. Her memoir Crazy Brave, was published in 2012. On February 2nd, 2018 Harjo gave a poetry reading at the University of Oregon. Her visit to Eugene was in collaboration with the National Endowment for the Arts' Big Read initiative.
Artist Margaret Coe and McCosh Associate Curator Danielle Knapp discuss "Mark Clarke and Margaret Coe: Our Lives in Paint," a retrospective exhibition in the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. Eugene painters Margaret Coe and the late Mark Clarke shared a remarkable partnership in life and art. Coe talks about Clarke's approach to painting the Oregon landscape, as well as how her own work has evolved throughout her career. The exhibition is on view at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art through April 1st, 2018.
Leslie Alexander, associate professor of History at the University of Oregon, and author of African or American?: Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-1861. Alexander discusses the challenges of identity and politics emancipated Blacks faced in antebellum New York. She also talks about the thriving Black settlement of Seneca Village. The village was destroyed in 1857, twenty-two years after its establishment, to make way for the development of Central Park. In addition, Alexander talks about her current research about the establishment of Haiti as a free Black republic and its symbolic power for Blacks in 19th-century America.
Shoniqua Roach is an assistant professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Oregon. Roach discusses her research interest in post-civil rights era black popular culture, especially the work of transgressive black female performers—Pam Grier in 1970s Blaxploitation films, and hip-hop artist Nicki Minaj. In addition, Roach talks about the black feminist speaker series she is organizing for the 2018–19 academic year.
Curtis Austin is associate professor of History at the University of Oregon, and author of Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party. He joined the faculty in fall 2017 after six years at Ohio State University. Austin discusses the history of the Black Panther Party.
Joshua Piker, professor of History at the College of William and Mary, discusses his research focus on the relationship between the Creek Indians and British colonists in South Carolina and Georgia in the early 18th century. Piker is also editor of William and Mary Quarterly, a journal of early American history and culture.
Kristin Yarris is an assistant professor of International Studies and the director of the Global Health minor at the University of Oregon. She discusses her book Care Across Generations: Solidarity and Sacrifice in Transnational Families which examines the dynamics of care that result when Nicaraguan mothers migrate for work, leaving their own mothers responsible for their children. Yarris also talks about teaming up with UO English professor Mary Wood to teach an interdisciplinary course called "Mind, Madness, and Society: Schizophrenia Across Cultures and Genres." Finally, Yarris describes the new minor in Global Health which launched in Fall 2017.
Robin Coste Lewis is the poet laureate of Los Angeles and a writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California. Her first collection Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems was widely praised by critics and honored with the 2015 National Book Award for Poetry. Lewis discusses her poetry and reads from the collection. On November 16, 2017 Lewis gave a reading from Voyage of the Sable Venus as a guest of the Creative Writing Program.
Laura Pulido, UO professor of Ethnic Studies and Geography, discusses her research interests in critical human geography, political activism and social movements, environmental justice, Chicanix Studies, and Los Angeles. She also talks about how the disciplines of Ethnic Studies and Geography intersect. A self-described scholar activist, Pulido co-authored A People's Guide to Los Angeles—a "radical guidebook."
James Harper, associate professor in the UO Department of the History of Art and Architecture, discusses "The Barberini Tapestries: Woven Monuments of Baroque Rome" exhibition. Harper, a specialist in 16th- and 17th-century Italian art, curated the exhibition. It is on view at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art through January 21st, 2018.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and filmmaker, Jose Antonio Vargas, discusses his life and career as an undocumented immigrant. He also talks about the work of his non-profit organization Define American. Vargas was in residence as the Morse Chair at the UO's Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics in conjunction with the Center's 2017-19 them of inquiry, "Borders, Migration, and Belonging."
Jayanth Banavar, Provost and Senior Vice-President, and professor of Physics at the University of Oregon. Topics Banavar discusses include his role as Provost, the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact, and the UO's Presidential Initiative on Data Science. Banavar also talks about his research examining the geometry and scaling of living organisms, as well as the geometry and physics of proteins.
Irish-born artist Barbara MacCallum discusses her exhibit of mixed-media sculptural work at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. "Barbara MacCallum: Appropriating Science" is on view through January 28, 2018.
Michael Schill, president of the University of Oregon, gave an interview on UO Today on September 19th.
President Schill spoke about the Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact—detailing its importance to the UO, Eugene, and the State of Oregon. Schill explained how the establishment of the Knight Campus will lead to collaborative research among UO faculty and with colleagues at OHSU. Other topics discussed during the interview include: recent and imminent university leadership hires, the Institutional Hiring Plan, the Diversity Action Plan, free speech vs. safety on campus, the new Sexual and Gender-Based Harassment and Violence Complaint and Response Policy, and the impact of the recent decision on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).
Daisy-O'lice Williams, associate professor of Architecture, discusses her research on Architecture programs at historically black colleges and universities, the work of architect Paul Revere Williams, and a project called Freedom's Fortress which visualizes spaces associated with the Contraband Decision during the Civil War at Ft. Monroe, Virginia.
Erin Moore, associate professor in the Department of Architecture and in the Environmental Studies Program. Moore's professional practice, research, and teaching explore architecture in the context of environmental ethics, fossil fuel consumption, carbon sequestration, and climate change. Moore contributed to the UN's first "Experts' Summary Report on Harmony with Nature Addressing Earth Jurisprudence" which was presented to the UN's Division for Sustainable Development in 2016.
Seismologist Lucy Jones recently completed 33 years of service with the U.S. Geological Survey. Jones founded the Dr. Lucy Jones Center for Science and Society to foster the understanding and application of scientific information in the creation of more resilient communities. Jones also developed the Great ShakeOut earthquake drill. She gave a talk titled "The Fault Lies Not in Our Stars: Why Natural Disasters Become Human Catastrophes" on March 9, 2017 as the 2016-17 Clark Lecturer in the Humanities.
Nicolae Morar, assistant professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies; and John Holmes, Director of Ethics for PeaceHealth Oregon and adjunct instructor of Philosophy. They discuss teaching "Clinical Ethics" at the University of Oregon during winter 2017. The class examines theoretical ethical problems that arise in medical care. Half of the class is held at Sacred Heart Hospital at River Bend where students explore the practical application of ethics in a health care setting. Morar developed the class with support from the OHC's Robert F. and Evelyn Nelson Wulf Professorship in the Humanities.
Brett Rushforth, assistant professor of History at the University of Oregon. He discusses his most recent book Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France, which explores slavery as practiced by Native Americans and French colonists.