UO Today

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" tak...

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 Gr...

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...

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’ justificatio...

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...

“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 duri...

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 publishe...

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 source...

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...

"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,...

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...

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 descri...

“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 ag...

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 Po...

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...

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 Ameri...

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 his...

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