UO Today

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar and writer. She has worked over two decades as an independent scholar using Nishnaabeg intellectual practices and currently teaches at the Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning in Denendeh.

Simpson is the author of numerous books including As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance (2017), the novel Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies (2020), A Short History of the Blockade: Giant Beavers, Diplomacy and Regeneration in Nishnaabewin (2021), and the forthcoming Rehearsals for Living with Robyn Maynard.

Simpson will give a virtual talk on Rehearsals for Living on April 5th, 2022, as the Oregon Humanities Center’s 2021–2022 Clark Lecturer.

Sheela Bora Hadjivassiliou,  PhD candidate, Romance Languages, 2021-22 OHC Dissertation Fellow

“My dissertation explores a series of narratives (novels, plays, and screenplays) that challenge the fictions of the utopian creole island and postcolonial multicultural success. In these alternative narratives, twentieth and twenty-first century authors from the Caribbean, Indian Ocean, and France use tropes, toponymy (the study of place names) and transgression (of normative expressions of gender, race and class) to depict how subaltern bodies—undocumented migrants, “low-caste” and “no-caste” individuals, and sex workers—destabilize the neoliberal logic of the economies in which they participate through their embodied and affective actions.”

Writer Paisley Rekdal is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Utah, and Utah's Poet Laureate. She discusses and reads from her latest collection of poetry "Nightingale" and talks about her nonfiction book "Appropriate: A Provocation." Rekdal also describes her multimedia project "West: A Translation."

On April 7, 2022, Rekdal will give a reading as a guest of the University of Oregon’s Creative Writing Program.

Kristen Seaman is an associate professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, and an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Classics at the University of Oregon. Seaman is a 2021–2022 Oregon Humanities Center Coleman-Guitteau Professor. The teaching fellowship has funded her development of a new undergraduate class “Ancient Jewish Art and Architecture” which she will teach in spring 2022. She discusses her research and the class.

Ron Jude is a professor of Photography at the University of Oregon. His recent project 12 Hertz is on view at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art through March 13, 2022. He discusses the exhibition and his other work and teaching.

Craig Kauffman, Political Science, OHC/CAS subvention recipient (co-authored with Pamela L. Martin)

With the window of opportunity to take meaningful action on climate change and mass extinction closing, a growing number of communities, organizations, and governments around the world are calling for Rights of Nature (RoN) to be legally recognized. RoN advocates are creating new laws that recognize natural ecosystems as subjects with inherent rights, and appealing to courts to protect those rights. Going beyond theory and philosophy, in this book Craig Kauffman and Pamela Martin analyze the politics behind the creation and implementation of these laws, as well as the effects of the laws on the politics of sustainable development.

Middle Eastern American Theatre explores the burgeoning Middle Eastern American theatre movement with a focus on Arab American, Jewish American, Armenian American, Iranian American, and Turkish American theatres, playwrights, directors, and actors. By exploring the rich religious and cultural heritage of this diverse group, the book interrogates the rich and paradoxical nature of the term ‘Middle Eastern’ through the dramas written and performed by those in the Diaspora.

Julius McGee is an assistant professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon.

Professor McGee’s research and teaching address questions at the intersection of structural inequality, development processes, and environmental change. His work engages scholarship in the fields of environmental sociology, environmental justice, climate justice, critical theories of race, energy transitions and technological displacement, and socio-ecological systems.

McGee earned his M.A. and PhD in Sociology at the University of Oregon.

Nathan Harris is author of the New York Times bestseller and nationally acclaimed novel The Sweetness of Water. It was an Oprah’s Book Club pick and one of President Obama’s favorite books of 2021.

Harris earned his B.A. in English from the University of Oregon in 2014. He was a recipient of the Creative Writing Program’s Kidd Prize.

On February 16th, 2022, Harris will give a virtual reading as a guest of the University of Oregon’s Creative Writing Program. (https://crwr.uoregon.edu)

Jovencio de la Paz is an assistant professor and the curricular head of Fibers in the School of Art and Design at the University of Oregon.

An artist, writer, and educator de la Paz’s work explores the intersection of textile processes such as weaving, dye, and stitchwork as they relate to broader concerns of language, histories of colonization, migrancy, ancient technology, and speculative futures.