Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation
The Oregon Humanities Center presents its 2025–26 speaker series centered on the theme of “Attention.” The “Attention” series will explore the dynamics of how, why, and what we focus on shapes our reality and creates our purpose. Also known as concentration, alertness, focus, notice, awareness, heed, regard, and consideration—Attention is the fundamental cognitive ability to […]
Work-in-Progress talk with Jessica M. Johnson, PhD candidate, History of Art and Architecture, and 2025–26 OHC Dissertation Fellow During the Georgian era, a period noted for the transatlantic slave trade and the development of racial theory, an individual’s class could outweigh their race. My dissertation considers the utilization of portraiture by wealthy and influential Blacks […]
Joamette Gil, illustrator, cartoonist, and writer. This academic year the Latinx Scholars Academic Residential Community (ARC) is reading the comic anthology Mañana: Latinx Comics from the 25th Century which features 27 young-adult stories by creators from across the United States and Latin America. The futures these artists imagine stretch from the depths of Earth’s oceans […]
Books-in-Print talk with Joyce Suechun Cheng, History of Art and Architecture, in conversation with Edgar Garcia, English, University of Chicago. In interwar Paris, the encounter between surrealism and the emerging discipline of ethnology led to an intellectual project now known as “ethnographic surrealism.” In her book, The Persistence of Masks: Surrealism and the Ethnography of […]
Location TBA Edgar Garcia, Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago and a poet and scholar of the hemispheric cultures of the Americas. Garcia works on the literatures and cultural practices that tend not to be taken seriously as literature and culture: the contemporary literature, visual art, legal philosophy, and environmental thinking of […]
Christopher Brown and his jazz band Each moment of our lives presents us with opportunities and challenges for us to make decisions that will shape the next minute, hour, day, week, month, year, and decade to come. If we want positive outcomes, the challenge is learning how to string together appropriate decisions in each moment. […]
Work-in-Progress talk with Abigail Fine, Musicology, and 2025–26 OHC Faculty Research Fellow. NOTE: this talk will take place in Collier House. In nineteenth-century Europe, most middle-class people kept a friendship album: handwritten poems, drawings and musical snippets offered by loved ones. While the practice waned in the twentieth century, popular music magazines published hundreds of […]
Work-in-Progress talk with Cera Smith, Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies; and 2025–26 OHC Faculty Research Fellow. Scientific racism and discrimination in American healthcare make bioscience seem irredeemable for many Black Studies scholars. Consequently, critics often attempt to disassociate race from biology, instead emphasizing Black people’s psychological, emotional, and intellectual complexity to reject racist dehumanization. This […]
Work-in-Progress talk with Dong Hoon Kim, Cinema Studies, and 2025–26 OHC Faculty Research Fellow. My project explores how North Korean cinema represents gender, sexuality, and national identity, particularly through representations of women and womanhood in major state-sponsored films. It examines how these films, while politically driven, gained mass popularity and reflected shifting national ideologies during […]
Followed by Q&A with director Jeff Gipe.
