UO Today

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...

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...

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...

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 His...

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 Univer...

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 b...

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...

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 operationalize...

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, a...

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...

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...

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, transnation...

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 multilingua...

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 i...

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 invo...

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...

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 P...

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 marke...

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 Studen...

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: A...