UO Today

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."