UO Today

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 Sovereignty from the Northwest Coast (UW Press, 2022) examines how cultural foods play a major role in physical, emotional, spiritual, and dietary wellness.

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 Information Systems; Historical- Comparative Sociology; and Qualitative Methods.

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 Twenty-First Century, published by Cornell University Press in April 2022.

Gupta is serving as this year’s Wayne Morse Chair.

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 national history of lesbian feminism through spatial and textual analysis, titled Collective: How Lesbian Feminists Reimagined Society. I argue that the idea of the home—of dismantling a patriarchal private sphere—became a focus for a lesbian feminist reimagining of liberation.

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 the John Mitchell, Jr. Program for History, Justice, and Race at George Mason University’s Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, where he is also an Assistant Professor of Conflict Analysis and Resolution and History.

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 identity as its notes and chords. Expanding our concept of musical structure in this way recasts traditional notions of musical complexity and value, which may help finally put to rest the tired notion that popular music is musically simplistic.

“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 and the Roman Viewer (Cambridge University Press 1995), Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text (Princeton University Press 2007), The Art of the Roman Empire: 100-450 AD (Oxford University Press 2018), and Empires of Faith in Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press 2020).

This lecture is sponsored by a Sherl K. Coleman-Margaret E. Guitteau Professorship in the Humanities from the Oregon Humanities Center and is part of the Spring 2022 Ancient Jewish Art and Architecture Lecture Series.

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 English Department’s 2022 Weatherhead Lecturer.

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 early U.S. conservation and show how contemporary debates over biotechnology as a conservation tool and speculative imaginaries of future species enable a rethinking of these restrictive and normative views on species being.