UO Today

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.

John Arroyo is an assistant professor in the School of Planning, Public Policy, and Management at the University of Oregon. Professor Arroyo is an affiliated faculty member in the Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies department as well as in the Historic Preservation program at the UO in Portland. He serves on the boards of the Center for Environmental Futures, the Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies, and the Collaborative for Inclusive Urbanism.

In January 2021, the University of Oregon received a 4.52-million-dollar grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to create the Pacific Northwest Just Futures Institute for Racial and Climate Justice (JFI). Arroyo, JFI's director, discusses the mission of JFI

The Sound of Exclusion: NPR and the Latinx Public. Christopher Chávez, Media Studies, University of Oregon

As a network that claims to represent the nation, NPR asserts unique claims about what it means to be American. In The Sound of Exclusion, Christopher Chávez critically examines how National Public Radio conceptualizes the Latinx listener, arguing that NPR employs a number of industry practices that secure its position as a white public space while relegating Latinx listeners to the periphery. These practices are tied to a larger cultural logic. Latinx identity is differentiated from national identity, which can be heard through NPR’s cultivation of an idealized dialect, situating whiteness at its center. Pushing Latinx listeners to the edges of public radio has crucial implications for Latinx participation in civic discourses, as identifying who to include in the “public” audience necessarily involves a process of exclusion.

Chávez analyzes NPR as a historical product that has evolved alongside significant changes in technology, industry practice, and demography. In The Sound of Exclusion, Chávez asks these pressing questions: What kind of news organization was NPR intended to be? What has it become over time? In what ways is it evolving to meet the needs of a nation, in which U.S. Latinxs are becoming an increasingly larger portion of the American public that NPR serves? Informed by more than fifty in-depth interviews conducted with public radio practitioners from all aspects of the business, Chávez addresses how power is enacted in everyday broadcast practices. By interrogating industry practices, we might begin to reimagine NPR as a public good that serves the broad and diverse spectrum of the American public.

Erich Gruen is Gladys Rehard Wood Professor of History and Classics Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley. His research deals with Hellenistic history, Roman history, and Jews in the Greco-Roman world. He is the author of several books including The Last Generation of the Roman Republic (University of California Press 1974), The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome (University of California Press 1984), Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition (University of California Press 1998), Diaspora: Jews amidst Greeks and Romans (Harvard University Press 2004), Rethinking the Other in Antiquity (Princeton University Press 2011), Constructs of Identity in Hellenistic Judaism (De Gruyter 2016), and Ethnicity in the Ancient World – Did It Matter? (De Gruyer 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.

When much of the world entered pandemic lockdown in spring 2020, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and musician, and Robyn Maynard, a Canadian writer and scholar, and author of Policing Black Lives: State violence in Canada from slavery to the present, began writing each other letters—a gesture sparked by friendship and solidarity. They had a desire for kinship and connection in a world shattering under the intersecting crises of pandemic, police killings, and climate catastrophe. Focusing on her first letter, Simpson shares her experiences of this transformative collaboration in her virtual talk “Rehearsals for Living: My First Letter.”

Ellen Peters, Philip H. Knight Chair and Director of the Center for Science Communication Research in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. Her research interests concern how people judge and decide, and how evidence-based communication can boost comprehension and improve decisions in health, financial, and environmental contexts. She is author of Innumeracy in the Wild: Misunderstanding and Misusing Numbers.