UO Today

"Japan on American TV" explores political, economic, and cultural issues underlying depictions of Japan on U.S. television comedies and the programs they inspired. Since the 1950s, U.S. television programs have taken the role of “curators” of Japan, displaying and explaining selected aspects for viewers. Beliefs in U.S. hegemony over Japan underpin this curation process. "Japan on American TV" takes a historical perspective to understand the diversity of Japan parodies and examines six main categories of television portrayals representing different genres and comedic forms: (1) stereotypes of judo instructors (1950s and 1960s); (2) samurai parodies (prevalent in the 1970s); (3) the Bubble Economy Era in Sesame Street’s Big Bird in Japan (1988); (4) “Cool Japan” parodies (1990s through the present); (5) eager fans in sketch series (2010s); and (6) makeover reality shows (2019). These examples show changing patterns of cultural globalization and perpetuate national stereotypes while verifying Japan’s international influence. Television presents an alternative history of American fascinations with and fears of Japan.

Christina Rosan is an associate professor of Geography and Urban Studies at Temple University. Her first book "Governing the Fragmented Metropolis Planning for Regional Sustainability" (2016) examines metropolitan governance and land use planning in Boston, Denver, and Portland, OR. Her forthcoming book (co-authored with Stephen Wheeler) "Reimagining Sustainable Cities: Strategies for Designing Greener, Healthier, More Equitable Communities" will be published by the University of California Press in December 2021. On October 27th, 2021, Rosan will give a virtual talk “Reimagining Cities to be Sustainable, Healthy, Resilient, Green, and Equitable” as a guest of the Oregon Humanities Center. https://ohc.uoregon.edu

The Last Visit was published in 2019. It was the winner of the 2018 Donald Justice Poetry Prize. He reads some poems and discusses his work. On October 20th, 2021 Abushanab will give a virtual reading as a guest of the University of Oregon’s Creative Writing Program. http://crwr.uoregon.edu

President Schill discusses how the UO is preparing to safely welcome students back to campus for in-person learning. He also talks about the work happening at the Knight Campus, several new majors available to undergraduates, and more.

Kory Russel, an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon, discusses his work on Container-Based Sanitation solutions in the global south. He talks about the positive impact the solution has on mitigating climate change. Russel also describes the work of the Landscape4Humanity initiative that has partnered with SquareOne Villages in Eugene to enhance transitional housing living spaces.

Kristen Bell discusses her work exploring the experiences of incarcerated people who were sentenced to life sentences with possible parole as juveniles. She critiques parole-release decision making processes and the lack of enrichment programing available to inmates. Bell will be a 2021-22 Oregon Humanities Center Faculty Research Fellow working on her project "Philosophy of Punishment Behind Bars."

"This book project is a cultural history of prisoners of war and the literature they wrote and published during the era of the U.S. Civil War. It focuses on southern men held in northern prisons. These men played important roles in developing a unique genre of southern history commonly called the “Lost Cause,” which at once exalts southern military leadership and outlines southerners’ justifications for secession, slavery, and white supremacy. Their stories illustrate how this pernicious regional history took shape. In the process, it also reveals insight into wartime carceral culture and its impact on authorship and readership in the twentieth century."

Katherine Kelp-Stebbins is an Assistant Professor and Associate Director of the Comics Studies Program at the University of Oregon. She is also an affiliated faculty member in New Media and Culture Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

Her monograph "How Comics Travel: Publication, Translation, Radical Literacies" is under contract with The Ohio State University Press.

Kelp-Stebbins (with Ben Saunders) is co-curating “The Art of the News: Comics Journalism” an exhibition at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art that will be on view during Fall 2021.

“Cars, Trains, and Trolleys: Infrastructures of the Urban Space in the Andes (1900-1952)”

Javier Velasco, PhD candidate, Romance Languages, and 2020-21 OHC Dissertation Fellow

In my dissertation on the discursive construction of the Andean urban space, I explore how literary writing and other cultural texts represented, decoded and re-imagined the physical infrastructure of the city of La Paz during the years of formation and consolidation of the hegemonic project of the “criollo” elites between 1900 and 1952. From the category of “infrastructure,” referred to physical networks that constitute the underlying framework of a social system, I analyze the way in which the city’s infrastructures (railways, trains, trolleys, telegraph wires, roads and more) were as important in the physical actuality of the city as they were in shaping the economic, cultural and aesthetic modernity at the base of the literary production of the criollo elites. I refer to this process as the infrastructural construction of the “seignorial” space.

UO alumna Kimberly Johnson, is the interim Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and Student Success at the University of Oregon.

She graduated from UO with a Bachelor of Science degree in Ethnic Studies in 2001 and went on to earn her masters of College Student Counseling and Personnel Services at the University of Maryland.

Johnson is also a writer. Her novel "This is My America" was published in 2020 by Random House.

Johnson discusses the novel and the numerous issues it addresses: mass incarceration, death penalty, systemic racism, and white supremacy.