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.

Chris Poulsen is the Tykeson Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) at the University of Oregon. He is also a climate scientist and a professor of Earth Science. Dean Poulsen’s research seeks to understand the causes of past climate change on Earth and what lessons they hold for predicting our future climate. Before coming to the UO in 2022, Poulsen was the associate dean for natural sciences in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan from 2018 to 2022. He discusses why a liberal arts education is important and the role of the humanities in CAS’s liberal arts mission.

Britney Wilson is an associate professor of Law and Director of The Civil Rights and Disability Justice Clinic at New York Law School. Prior to NYLS, Wilson was a staff attorney at the National Center for Law and Economic Justice, a Bertha Justice Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights, and a Marvin M. Karpatkin Fellow in the Racial Justice Program at the American Civil Liberties Union. Born with Cerebral Palsy, Wilson has written and spoken extensively about disability and the intersection of race and disability for various media outlets, including The Nation, Longreads, and This American Life.

Caroline Lundquist is an Instructor of Philosophy and a participating faculty member in the Prison Education Program at the University of Oregon. In addition, she is an affiliated faculty member in the Clark Honors College, and the managing editor of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy.

As a 2022-2023 Oregon Humanities Center Wulf Professor, Lundquist revised and taught a course titled “Ethics Through Science Fiction” for incarcerated students in UO’s Prison Education Program.

Spike Gildea, Linguistics, and 2022–23 OHC Faculty Research Fellow.

“Traditional storytellers in the Amazon use ideophones, words that speakers associate with specific actions and emotions, to help bring a story to life. I will analyze a recorded Werikyana (Cariban) story as told by a master story-teller, producing two English and two Portuguese translations to illustrate the importance of ideophones in this genre. Then I will compare Werikyana ideophones with those in related languages to see how many ideophones I can reconstruct to the ancestral language, Proto-Cariban.”

Spike Gildea, Linguistics, and 2022–23 OHC Faculty Research Fellow.

“Traditional storytellers in the Amazon use ideophones, words that speakers associate with specific actions and emotions, to help bring a story to life. I will analyze a recorded Werikyana (Cariban) story as told by a master story-teller, producing two English and two Portuguese translations to illustrate the importance of ideophones in this genre. Then I will compare Werikyana ideophones with those in related languages to see how many ideophones I can reconstruct to the ancestral language, Proto-Cariban.”