Associate Director’s 2023 letter

Jena TurnerSummer has finally arrived after what seemed like a longer than usual winter. Even with this late arrival, we at the Oregon Humanities Center (OHC) have been busy wrapping up the 2022–23 activities and preparing for next year’s exciting suite of programs and the center’s 40th anniversary celebration.   

This past year, the OHC focused our public programs on the theme of Belonging. This included a five-part lecture series that sought to expand understanding of what is belonging, exclusion and barriers to belonging, created and contested spaces of belonging, and how ideas of belonging reinforce historical patterns. The speakers explored this theme through topics on climate destabilization, disability justice, Indigenous sovereignty, immigration, and racial justice—helping foster conversations about what it means to belong, who decides who belongs, and how to create more inclusive systems for everyone.  

This focus on belonging gave us an opportunity to reflect on how a humanities center like the OHC is uniquely positioned to create spaces of belonging by connecting different communities and individuals together to form an intellectual network that pursues new knowledge and ways of knowing through research, teaching, internships, fellowships, programs for the public, scholarly publication, research interest groups, event funding, and digital resources. We built new programs and experiences, supported our ongoing activities, and increased access to the knowledge production happening on campus.  

The OHC strives to foster, increase access to, and disseminate the innovative knowledge produced at the UO. Though we’ve had a YouTube channel since 2014, we have seen an increase in viewership of our online resources since the pandemic. We understand why—because the OHC’s online resources provide easy access to a trove of well-organized playlists of lectures, talks, and interviews on our YouTube channel and SoundCloud that can be accessed for free at ohc.uoregon.edu/multimedia. The OHC even has a video history of the UO that was completed in 2009 and is available for viewing. Also, with the help of an undergraduate student worker, we started an exciting project last fall to improve the quality and accuracy of the closed captions on the online videos because the YouTube autogenerated transcripts are rife with errors. We are committed to continuing this project to make sure this knowledge is in an accessible format.  

Charlotte Coté, an Indigenous woman with long brown hair speaks at a microphone.
Charlotte Coté (Tseshaht) shared stories about the river that brings nourishment to her people on October 6, 2022.

A core activity of the center is supporting faculty (early, mid, and late career) who are conducting research—discovering new knowledge, making linkages to our past, and generating ideas to help us understand where we are going. This past year, with the financial support of the OHC’s endowment, the Vice President for Research and Innovation, and the Provost, the OHC was able to support ten faculty research fellows, giving each a 10-week term off from teaching so they could focus their efforts on research, writing, communicating, and sharing their findings and new interpretations with the public, students, campus, and each other.  

The humanities on campus is represented through a wide-ranging collection of different academic departments and research and teaching methods. This year’s faculty research fellows represented the following areas: Anthropology; Architecture; English; Environmental Studies; History; Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies; Interior Architecture; Linguistics; and Political Science. An additional four faculty received prestigious teaching awards from the OHC to create or reimagine courses for undergraduate and graduate students. These courses included Global Health History, Sociology of Property, Ethics Through Science Fiction, and Frontiers of the Life Sciences.  

Keith Knight, a Black man wearing a beanie cap and a soccer team scarf, is gesticulating and speaking into a microphone.
Cartoonist Keith Knight spoke about art and social justice as the O’Fallon lecturer on February 7, 2023.

The OHC also supports undergraduate and graduate student research, school to career internships, and fellowships. In 2022–23, the OHC supported seven graduate student fellowships—three focusing on the writing of their dissertation, and the other four starting the research that will eventually transform into their dissertation. Additionally, the OHC launched a new collaboration with the UO Libraries that provided two undergraduate students with internship credits and a paid research fellowship to work with Special Collections and University Archives on cataloging and creating a digital humanities exhibit for a collection of papers that have never been available to the public before.  

This intellectual community building requires sustenance and is not possible without the dedicated donors and supporters who give their time and money to ensure the center continues to thrive. This past spring, the OHC put out a call for applications to join the community Board of Visitors (BOV), which help advise the center, and provide friend- and fundraising for the center. But, we need more help, so if you are interested in joining in this important effort to help shape the humanities, please apply to join the BOV today by going to ohc.uoregon.edu/people/board-of-visitors.  

We look forward to celebrating the OHC’s 40th anniversary with you and connecting with you at our events next year where we hope to continue to build community and create a space of belonging. In the fall, we will announce our exciting lineup of speakers and events for 2023–24 under the theme “Humanities Matter(s)”. Until then, have a rejuvenating summer.