Summer is here, and with it the chance to reflect on the past year at the Oregon Humanities Center (OHC). Even during challenging times like these, we have many successes to celebrate. We at the OHC have an enduring dedication to supporting humanities faculty and graduate and undergraduate students with their research, teaching, and publication pursuits, while providing free educational programs for campus and our larger community.
A highlight from this past year is that we welcomed Leah Middlebrook, professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish, as the new director. In addition to leading the OHC, advocating for the humanities in many different forums, conducting her own research, and developing new courses, Leah delivered a talk on her second book, Amphion: Lyre, Poetry, and Politics in Modernity (2024), which you can listen to on the OHC’s YouTube channel or wherever you listen to podcasts.
OHC public events are often the most visible part of our mission. Our 2024–25 Re-imagine speaker series highlighted the original human superpower of our capacity to transform the world around us via imaginative thought. Four scholars
delivered lectures on topics ranging from Indigenous sovereignty, Queering reproductive justice, the impacts of artificial intelligence on human jobs, and the ecosystem of social change. The speakers also visited undergraduate and graduate classes and met with faculty who have overlapping research and intellectual interests.
The OHC offers an almost weekly Work-in-Progress or Book-in-Print talk, many at room capacity, delivered by faculty and graduate students on their OHC-supported research or a newly published book. We also hosted evening Wine Chats where UO humanities faculty deliver a lecture on a topic they are researching or a book they’ve just published. All our events are free and open to the public.
This was our third year running the Humanities Undergraduate Archival Fellowship (HUAF) in collaboration with the UO Libraries Special Collections and University Archives. Two fellows spent 20 weeks processing collections of archival materials and creating digital finding guides that can be accessed for free. More about this exciting program on page 2.
Having dedicated time to focus on research or to develop a new course is a critical need of UO humanities faculty and graduate students. This past year the OHC supported 11 faculty research fellowships, 3 faculty teaching fellowships, 4 graduate dissertation fellowships, and 4 graduate research fellowships from the Clark Honors College, College of Arts and Sciences, School of Music and Dance, College of Design, and the School of Journalism and Communication. Research and teaching fellows represented a wide range of departments including Anthropology; East Asian Languages and Literatures; English; History; History of Art and Architecture; Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies; Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies; Linguistics; Musicology; Philosophy; German and Scandinavian; and Romance Languages.
The OHC works behind the scenes to advocate for the humanities on and off campus, and more broadly. We are active members of several professional organizations including the Big 10 Academic Alliance of centers and institutes, Western Humanities Alliance, National Humanities Alliance, and the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes. These groups were recently mobilized to push back on the current federal administration’s disastrous cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which resulted in UO faculty losing federal research grants. While this is an unprecedented loss, the OHC continues to advocate for and advance humanities research at the UO.
Given these new challenges, one important success this year was raising $40,000 to support faculty research. Our work would not be possible without the generous support of our donors, the Vice President for Research and Innovation, and the Provost. This support is critical to ensuring the humanities continue to thrive, especially during difficult times.
We look forward to seeing you in the fall and continuing to foster this community.