UO Today

Writer Putsata Reang is a veteran journalist whose writings have appeared in national and international publications, including the New York Times, Politico, the Guardian, Ms, The Seattle Times, and the San Jose Mercury News.

Putsata was born in Cambodia and raised in Corvallis, Oregon. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Journalism at the University of Oregon.

Her memoir Ma and Me was published in 2022. She teaches memoir writing at the University of Washington School of Professional and Continuing Education.

Knight takes a deep dive on twenty artists who inspired him to use his art to address social issues—artists like Ollie Harrington, Langston Hughes, Octavia Butler, Oscar Michaux, James Baldwin, alongside current artists like Dread Scott, Public Enemy, and Fly.

Writer Thomas Beller is Director of Creative Writing and Associate Professor of English at Tulane University. He is the author of 5 books including Lost in the Game: A Book About Basketball, published in 2022.

Beller reads from a work in progress and talks about his book about basketball. He also shares a story about his visit with Barry Lopez in 2020.

On February 22, 2023, Beller will give a reading as a guest of the University of Oregon’s Creative Writing Program.

Danielle Conway is the Dean and Donald J. Farage Professor of Law at Penn State Dickinson Law.

Dean Conway gave a talk titled “Practicing Antiracism Unapologetically: Using Professor Derrick Bell’s thesis of the permanence of racism as inspiration for 'Building an Antiracist Law School, Legal Academy, and Legal Profession’” on February 1st, 2023, as this year’s Derrick Bell Lecturer.

The annual Derrick Bell Lecture honors Bell, who from 1980 to 1985 was the first African American to serve as dean of the UO School of Law. He wrote extensively about race in the United States and challenged academic institutions he served to commit to diversity.

Katherine Kelp-Stebbins, Comics and Cartoon Studies, University of Oregon

In How Comics Travel: Publication, Translation, Radical Literacies, Katherine Kelp-Stebbins challenges the clichéd understanding of comics as a “universal” language, circulating without regard for cultures or borders. Instead, she develops a new methodology of reading for difference. Kelp-Stebbins’s anticolonial, feminist, and antiracist analytical framework engages with comics as sites of struggle over representation in a diverse world. Through comparative case studies of Metro, Tintin, Persepolis, and more, she explores the ways in which graphic narratives locate and dislocate readers in every phase of a transnational comic’s life cycle according to distinct visual, linguistic, and print cultures. How Comics Travel disengages from the constrictive pressures of nationalism and imperialism, both in comics studies and world literature studies more broadly, to offer a new vision of how comics depict and enact the world as a transcultural space.

Whitney Phillips is an assistant professor of Digital Platforms and Ethics in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon.

Phillips studies the connections between political communication, interpersonal communication, and information dysfunction.

Her monograph This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture was published by MIT Press in 2015. She has co-authored two books with Ryan Milner: The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online in 2017, and You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and Our Polluted Media Landscape in 2021.

Her forthcoming book Share Better and Stress Less: A Guide to Thinking Ecologically about Social Media will be published in 2023.

Phillips earned her PhD in English with a folklore and digital culture focus from the University of Oregon in 2012. She joined the UO faculty in fall of 2022.

Cartoonist Keith Knight is the creator of the comic strips The K Chronicles and The Knight Life, and the socio-political single panel called (t)hink.

Knight was a co-creator, co-writer, and an executive producer on the Hulu streaming series Woke, which was inspired by his comix and life in San Francisco.

On February 7, 2023 Knight will give a lecture titled “The Intersection of Art and Social Justice” as the 2022-2023 Colin Ruagh Thomas O’Fallon Memorial lecturer. His talk is part of the Oregon Humanities Center’s 2022-2023 themed speaker series on the topic of “Belonging.”

Johanna Bard Richlin, Anthropology and 2020–21 Faculty Research Fellow.

Why do migrants become more deeply evangelical in the United States and how does this religious identity alter their self-understanding? In the Hands of God examines this question through a unique lens, foregrounding the ways that churches transform what migrants feel. Drawing from her extensive fieldwork among Brazilian migrants in the Washington, DC, area, Johanna Bard Richlin shows that affective experience is key to comprehending migrants’ turn toward intense religiosity, and their resulting evangelical commitment.

The conditions of migrant life—family separation, geographic isolation, legal precariousness, workplace vulnerability, and deep uncertainty about the future—shape specific affective maladies, including loneliness, despair, and feeling stuck. These feelings in turn trigger novel religious yearnings. Evangelical churches deliberately and deftly articulate, manage, and reinterpret migrant distress through affective therapeutics, the strategic “healing” of migrants’ psychological pain. Richlin offers insights into the affective dimensions of migration, the strategies pursued by evangelical churches to attract migrants, and the ways in which evangelical belonging enables migrants to feel better, emboldening them to improve their lives.

Looking at the ways evangelical churches help migrants navigate negative emotions, In the Hands of God sheds light on the versatility and durability of evangelical Christianity.

Poet Jayme Ringleb is an assistant professor of English at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina. Ringleb’s debut collection So Tall It Ends in Heaven was published by Tin House in 2022.

Ringleb’s poems have appeared in AGNI, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry. They are the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and fellowships to the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and the Lambda Literary Writers Retreat.

Ringleb is an alum of the UO’s Creative Writing Program, where they earned their MFA.

On January 18, 2023, Ringleb will give a reading with poet Alycia Pirmohamed as a guest of University of Oregon’s Creative Writing Program.

Vidusha Devasthali is the Senior Director of Foundation Relations at the University of Oregon. She talks about the importance of research funding by private foundations.