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.

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), Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World (Cambridge 2005), Art History and the Historiography of Judaism in the Greco-Roman World (Brill 2013), and The Menorah: From the Bible to Modern Israel (Harvard University Press 2016).

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.

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 by Johns Hopkins University Press in January 2022.

Chavis discusses how historical understandings of racial violence and civil rights activism can inform current and future approaches to peacebuilding and conflict resolution.

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 thought within Political Science and related fields. Chapters will center on explication and analysis of short, easily-assignable primary sources from authors including William Apess, Elias Boudinot, Charles Eastman, Arthur C. Parker, Zitkála-á, and Robert Yellowtail.

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 children of Oregon.