UO Today

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...

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 Velas...

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....

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 thei...

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 la...

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 Visceralit...

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 S...

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...

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...

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 del...

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...

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 b...

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 scien...

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. Bo...

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 “Ethi...

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 ideopho...

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...

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...

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 represente...

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 Rac...

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...