UO Today

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 So...

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 In...

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...

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 n...

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 t...

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...

“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 an...

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 Englis...

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 ear...

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),...

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...

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 t...

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 chi...

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 Am...

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 practic...

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 o...

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 kinsh...

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 th...

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 No...

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 t...

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...