UO Today

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 Database Colin 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 Fellow In 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.”

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 Beller 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 Oregon In 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.