UO Today

Sacred Traces: Composers, Relics, and Art-Religion in Practice

In nineteenth-century Germany and Austria, music-lovers treated composers as saints by collecting relics and flocking to historic houses as pilgrims. These devotees to Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, and others left records of their activities in archival ephemera that are not the standard materials of musicology, and these offbeat sources provide a new window into what I call “art-religion in practice.” This lecture is populated by tourists who wrote heartfelt odes in museum visitors’ books and keepsake albums, men’s choirs who serenaded a Mozart shrine on a mountaintop, music-loving doctors who cherished composers’ remains, and Christ-like casts of Beethoven’s face that decorated parlor walls. I argue that nineteenth-century devotees modeled the “parasocial” relationships we recognize today in celebrity culture, which have led fans to seek out traces of the artist’s body and to cultivate more intimate modes of musical listening.

Claire Herbert’s research interests include Crime, Law and Deviance; Housing and Homelessness; Urban Sociology; Race and Ethnicity; and Poverty and Inequality.

Her monograph "A Detroit Story: Urban Decline and the Rise of Property Informality," was published in March 2021 by the University of California Press.

In this interview she discusses how people cope with housing insecurity and homelessness in Detroit and Eugene. She also talks about what drew her back to the UO.

"Caspar David Friedrich: Nature and the Self"

Best known for his atmospheric landscapes featuring contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies and morning mists, Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) came of age alongside a German Romantic philosophical movement that saw nature as an organic and interconnected whole. The naturalists in his circle believed that observations about the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms could lead to conclusions about human life. Many of Friedrich’s often-overlooked later paintings reflect his engagement with these philosophical ideas through a focus on isolated shrubs, trees, and rocks. Others revisit earlier compositions or iconographic motifs but subtly metamorphose the previously distinct human figures into the natural landscape.

In this revelatory book, Nina Amstutz combines fresh visual analysis with broad interdisciplinary research to investigate the intersection of landscape painting, self-exploration, and the life sciences in Friedrich’s mature work. Drawing connections between the artist’s anthropomorphic landscape forms and contemporary discussions of biology, anatomy, morphology, death, and decomposition, Amstutz brings Friedrich’s work into the larger discourse surrounding art, nature, and life in the 19th century.

https://ohc.uoregon.edu

Mattie Burkert is an assistant professor of English and Digital Humanities at the University of Oregon. Burkert’s research interests include Cultural Studies, Drama and Performance Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Renaissance and Early Modern Literary Studies, Restoration and 18th-Century Literary Studies. Her monograph "Speculative Enterprise: Public Theaters and Financial Markets in London, 1688-1763" was published in May 2021.

Burkert discusses the book, Digital Humanities, and her teaching.

https://ohc.uoregon.edu

Bathsheba Demuth, Assistant Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University, is an environmental historian, specializing in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. She is interested in the how the histories of people, ideas, places, and non-human species intersect.

Climate change and other alterations  to the Earth caused by human activity are often described in apocalyptic  terms: as Armageddon, or the end of the world. Nowhere is this more true than in the Arctic, where the rates of warming are twice that of temperate regions and have been visible for decades. In this lecture Bathsheba Demuth explores the Chukchi Peninsula, in far eastern Arctic Siberia.

The indigenous Chukchi people have traditionally been herdsmen and hunters of reindeer; those who live along the coasts of the Arctic Ocean, the Chukchi Sea, and the Bering Sea have customarily hunted sea mammals such as seals, whales, walruses, and sea lions.

Russia launched a series of vigorous military campaigns against the Chukchi in 1729. The Chukchi put up a ferocious resistance and, when surrounded, they frequently committed mass suicide rather than surrender. By the 1760s, the Russian government decided that the cost of vanquishing the Chukchi was too high in terms of money and troops and ended the war on the condition that the Chukchi cease attacking Russian settlers and pay the yasak (the yearly tax that native Siberians paid in furs).

In the 1930s, the Chukchi were forced into Soviet economic collectives which disrupted their indigenous lifeways. The Chukchi Peninsula became a region of mines and gulags. It’s a place that has experienced radical changes with Russian contact, the founding of the Soviet Union, and then with its dissolution.

Weaving a story of devoted Bolsheviks, Chukchi nomads, and herds of reindeer, Demuth will ask what kinds of narratives suit the empirical  experience of radical change, what is lost when we emphasize rupture, and what is gained by paying attention to the ruins left by past ways of living as we face a transformed Arctic and planet.

https://ohc.uoregon.edu

“Strong Winds and Widow Makers: A History of Workers, Nature, and Environmental Conflict in Pacific Northwest Timber Country, 1900 to the Present”

Steven Beda, History, and 2020-21 OHC Faculty Research Fellow

Those who follow environmental politics in the Northwest know that debates over the region’s forests tend towards the vitriolic, often pitting timber workers who want to protect their jobs against environmentalists who want to protect forest ecologies. My book shows that Northwest forestry politics needn’t be so acrimonious. Focusing on timber workers’ forest conservation efforts throughout the twentieth century, I uncover a largely forgotten history of cooperation between environmentalists and people from Northwest timber working communities, examine why this partnership dissolved, and offer solutions for how this partnership might be restored.

Major Jackson reads his poetry and discusses his work.

Jackson is author of five collections of poetry, including The Absurd Man (2020), Roll Deep (2015), Holding Company (2010), Hoops (2006) and Leaving Saturn (2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems.

Jackson is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University, and he serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.

On Wednesday, May 5, 2021, Jackson will give a virtual reading as a guest of the UO’s Creative Writing Program. Register: http://crwr.uoregon.edu

Bathsheba Demuth reads from and discusses her book "Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait," a comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic land and waters stretching from Russia to Canada. These frigid lands and waters became the site of an ongoing experiment: How, under conditions of extreme scarcity, would modern ideologies of capitalism and communism control and manage the resources they craved?

She will give a virtual talk "The Reindeer at the End of the World" on May 4, 2021. Register: https://ohc.uoregon.edu

Books-in-Print talk:

"Earth Matters on Stage: Ecology and Environment in American Theater" tells the story of how American theater has shaped popular understandings of the environment throughout the twentieth century as it argues for theater’s potential power in the age of climate change. Using cultural and environmental history, seven chapters interrogate key moments in American theater and American environmentalism over the course of the twentieth century in the United States. It focuses, in particular, on how drama has represented environmental injustice and how inequality has become part of the American environmental landscape.

Michael Fakhri talks about how he became interested in international trade law and food sovereignty. He describes his role as a Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, and he talks about how the coronavirus pandemic has affected vulnerable populations.