UO Today

Morgan Thomas earned their MFA in 2016 from the University of Oregon’s Creative Writing Program. Their debut collection Manywhere: Stories, published in 2022, was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, Lambda Literary’s Transgender Fiction Prize, the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and Publishing Triangle’s Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction.

Claire Luchette earned their MFA in 2017 from the University of Oregon’s Creative Writing Program. They are an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Binghamton University in New York. Their novel Agatha of Little Neon was published in 2021.

Thomas and Luchette gave readings at the UO on January 10th, 2024 as guests of the Creative Writing Program.

Poet Matthew Dickman is a visiting assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of Oregon. He discusses his work and reads from his latest collection.

He is the author of the collections All-American Poem (2008) winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, Mayakovsky’s Revolver (2012), and Wonderland (2018). In 2016 he co-authored a collection Brother with his brother Michael. His latest collection Husbandry was published in 2022.

Cera Smith is an assistant professor of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon. They specialize in twentieth and twenty-first century U.S. Black literatures, Radical Protest Literatures of the U.S., Black Studies, Critical Race Theories, Affect Theory, Gender and Sexuality, Histories of Science and Medicine, and Health Humanities.

Smith’s book project, Vivified Viscerality: Bioscience and the Black Interior in U.S. Black Literature and Sculpture, demonstrates how and why U.S. Black artists use biology to depict racialized life.

Sergio Loza is an assistant professor of Spanish and director of the Spanish Heritage Language Program at the University of Oregon.

Loza’s interests include Spanish heritage language education and pedagogy, linguistics, sociolinguistics, U.S. Spanish, and critical language awareness.

As a 2023–2024 Oregon Humanities Center Faculty Research Fellow, he is working on a project titled “Innovation in Spanish Heritage Language Program Administration: Development and Outcomes of a Latinx Ambassador Program.”

Jordan D. Schnitzer (UO BA 1973) is president of Schnitzer Properties and Director of the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation. Schnitzer began collecting contemporary prints in 1988. Today, the collection exceeds 20,000 works and includes many of today’s most important contemporary artists. He discusses his philanthropy and art collection. The interview is in Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art with the new exhibition “Strange Weather: From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation” which is on view through April 7, 2024.

Michael Yahgulanaas is a Haida multi-media artist. His publications include the bestselling graphic novels "Flight of the Hummingbird," "RED: a Haida Manga," and most recently "JAJ: a Haida Manga."

He discusses his art and graphic novels.

Michael Yahgulanaas gave the first talk in this year’s Indigenous Comics Speaker series on October 11, 2023, hosted by the Native American and Indigenous Studies program and the Comics and Cartoon Studies program at the University of Oregon.

Joseph Michael Sussi, PhD candidate, History of Art and Architecture, and 2023–24 Dissertation Fellow.

My dissertation analyzes how contemporary artists Kim Abeles, Karin Bolender, and Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, use bodily sensing to make toxicity legible and to reveal the entanglements between places and pollution. Artists producing multi-sensory work can uniquely step beyond the boundaries that delimit policy formation and scientific research thus allowing for more nuanced and critical investigations of environmental violence. Sensing toxicity with these artists reveals how corporeality and culture are linked through the experience of contaminated geographies.

Karl Scholz is the 19th President of the University of Oregon. He began his tenure on July 1, 2023.

Scholz discusses the advantages for UO athletics to join the Big Ten conference in August 2024 and he outlines five areas on which he intends to focus at UO. In addition, Scholz talks about why the liberal arts are important at UO.

Michael Aronson, Cinema Studies, and 2023–24 OHC Faculty Research Fellow

In 1922, despite the efforts of African American activists in our region, The Birth of a Nation, made its widespread return to movie theaters across the Pacific Northwest. All the involved theaters were operated by John Hamrick, an influential Seattle exhibitor and a member of the KKK. This project is designed to recover and analyze this (re)exhibition history of the Klan’s cinematic urtext, to establish exactly how the region’s Klan made use of it in this postwar cultural moment, and how Hamrick and his industry made use of the Klan.

Raye Hendrix, PhD candidate, English, and 2023–24 Dissertation Fellow.

My dissertation examines the intersections of contemporary American poetry and invisible, or imperceptible, disabilities. This project centers disabilities that are both physically and socially “invisible” (or misunderstood). For these disabilities there are outward perceptions of “normalcy” until that perception is shattered by way of interruption, or what I term the moment of “rupture.” This project investigates how these disabilities appear in American poetry, focusing on the moments at which they cease to be invisible and “rupture” poetic and social convention.