Willamette River at sunset

Humanities Summit: Strengthening the Humanities at the University of Oregon

Friday, June 2, 2023
3–6:30 p.m., location provided with registration
Register

3–3:20 p.m. Welcome and opening remarks
“State of the Humanities at the UO”
Paul Peppis, Director, Oregon Humanities Center, and Professor, English. Professor Peppis is an award-winning teacher and scholar of Anglo-American modernisms. His work examines relations between early 20th-century literature and life, theory and practice, and assumes that research and teaching can integrate these allegedly incompatible realms. His scholarship studies early 20th-century literary works and cultural productions to reassess modernism’s diverse engagements with the social, political, scientific, and popular movements of its time. He has published two books, Sciences of Modernism: Ethnography, Sexology, and Psychology (Cambridge, 2014) and Literature, Politics, and the English Avant-Garde (Cambridge, 2000). He is currently working on a book project, tentatively titled “Popular Modernisms,” which studies a selection of early 20th-century popular cultural products that work from inside particular popular cultural media and genres to make them new. 

3:20–4 p.m. Panel 1 and discussion
“Advocating and Advancing the Humanities at the UO”
Kirby Brown, Associate Professor of English and Director of Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS). Professor Brown’s research interests include Native American literary, intellectual, and cultural production from the late 18th century to the present, Indigenous critical theory, and studies in sovereignty/self-determination, nationhood/nationalism, modernism/modernity, and genre. He has served as co-organizer of the Alternative Sovereignties: Decolonization Through Indigenous Vision and Struggle and Engaged Humanities: Partnerships between Academia and Tribal Communities conferences, and co-curator of a UO Libraries exhibit on the Sac and Fox Olympian and athlete Jim Thorpe. His book, Stoking the Fire: Nationhood in Cherokee Writing, 1907–1970, was published in 2018 by University of Oaklahoma Press. He is the faculty co-director for the Native American and Indigenous Studies Academic Residential Community, an advisor for the UO/Otago Indigenous Cultural Exchange program, and a founding member of the UO Native Strategies Group. He is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

Gabriela Martínez, Professor of Journalism and Department Head of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Professor Martínez is an international award-winning documentary filmmaker who has produced, directed, or edited more than 12 ethnographic and social documentaries. Her early documentary work includes Ñakaj and Textiles in the Southern Andes, Mamacoca and Qoyllur Rit’i: A Woman’s Journey. Her most recent work includes Media, Women, and Rebellion in Oaxaca and Keep Your Eyes On Guatemala. She is a scholar who specializes in international communication and the political economy of communication. She has served as associate director for the Center for the Study of Women in Society (CSWS) and director for the Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies (CLLAS). She is a professor in the School of Journalism and Communication and affiliated faculty with the Latin American Studies Program (LAS), Cinema Studies Department, and the Folklore and Public Culture Program.  

4–4:40 p.m. Panel 2 and discussion
“Navigating the University to Strengthen the Humanities”
Lamia Karim, Professor and Department Head of Anthropology. Professor Karim is a cultural anthropologist working on women, work, neoliberalism, state, NGOs, and Islam in Bangladesh and South Asia. She has over twenty-five years of research experience and has conducted multiple research projects on women and development. Her research has been widely published in peer-reviewed journals, edited volumes, blogs, and op-eds. She has published two books, Castoffs of Capital: Work and Love among Garment Workers in Bangladesh (University of Minnesota Press, 2022) and Microfinance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh (University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Her pioneering research on work, gender, development, state, microfinance, and religious movements has received major national awards and grants from the National Science Foundation, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, Fulbright Fellowship Program, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and a Faculty Fellowship at the Institute for Labor Studies at Humboldt University, Berlin.

Mark Whalan, Horn Endowed Professor and Department Head of English. Professor Whalan specializes in American modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. He has published five books: The Letters of Jean Toomer, 1919–1924 (University of Tennessee Press, 2006); Race, Manhood and Modernism in America: The Short Story Cycles of Sherwood Anderson and Jean Toomer (University of Tennessee Press, 2007); The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro (University Press of Florida, 2008); American Culture in the 1910s (Edinburgh University Press, 2010); and most recently, World War One, American Literature, and the Federal State (Cambridge University Press, 2018). He is the co-editor of the Edinburgh University Press monograph series Modern American Literature and the New Twentieth Century. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of American Studies, and has published in American Literary History, African American Review, Modernism/Modernity, American Art, Studies in American Fiction, Modern Fiction Studies, and the Journal of American Studies.    

4:40–5:20 p.m. Panel 3 and discussion
“Collaborating to Strengthen the Humanities at the UO” 

“Outliers and Outlaws: Stories from the Eugene Lesbian History Project”
Judith Raiskin, Associate Professor, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Professor Raiskin co-created The Eugene Lesbian Oral History Project with Linda Long, Curator of Manuscripts in UO Special Collections and University Archives. The project consists of filmed interviews of 83 lesbian-identified women who lived in Eugene between 1965 and 1995. Based on the interviews, Professor Raiskin has created a website and an interactive digital exhibit that shares perspectives from all the narrators, provides historical and scholarly context on different topics, and offers links and ideas for teaching this material: outliersoutlaws.uoregon.edu. She is working on Outliers and Outlaws, a documentary about lesbian Eugene. Professor Raiskin has also published on same-sex parenting: “Parenting Without Protection: How Legal Status Ambiguity Affects Gay and Lesbian Parenthood” in Law and Social Inquiry. As a literary critic, Professor Raiskin edits the Norton Critical Edition of Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea and is the author of Snow on the Cane Fields: Women Writers and Creole Subjectivity (University of Minnesota Press, 1995).

Lauren Willis, Curator of Academic Programs, Museum of Natural and Cultural History. She works closely with faculty, academic departments, and student groups to increase the visibility and use of the museum on campus and to foster out-of-classroom learning. In collaboration with campus and community partners, Willis develops exhibits and programs that center the stories of groups and individuals whose perspectives have been historically excluded, including “Racing to Change: Oregon’s Civil Rights Years—The Eugene Story,” as well as the museum’s most recent exhibit, “Outliers and Outlaws—Stories from the Eugene Lesbian History Project.”

“The Chinese in Latin America”
Roy Chan, Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures. Professor Chan is a literary comparatist who specializes in modern Chinese and Russian literatures. His book, The Edge of Knowing: Dreams, History, and Realism in Modern Chinese Literature (University of Washington Press, 2017), examines the rhetoric of dreams and reality and its relationship to issues of literature, modernity, and revolutionary utopianism in modern Chinese fiction. His second project explores modern Chinese literature’s speculative relationship to Russia and the world. He is preparing a third monograph project on law and the perennial crisis of normativity in modern Chinese-speaking cultures. Research interests include modern literature, realism, narrative, the imperial imagination, and popular culture, among others. Theoretical concerns include Marxism, post-Hegelian philosophy, gender and sexuality, formalism, and sociolinguistics.

Lanie Millar, Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures. Professor Millar’s research interests include the circulation of texts and tropes around the Global South, with a particular focus on the Caribbean and Africa. Her book, Forms of Disappointment: Cuban and Angolan Narrative After the Cold War (SUNY Press, 2019), examines how late 20th- and early 21st-century Cuban and Angolan novels revisit literary forms and practices associated with the early years of revolutionary enthusiasm. Research for this project was supported by the Kluge Center at the U.S. Library of Congress and the Luso-American Development Foundation/Arquivo Nacional Torre do Tombo in Lisbon, Portugal. She is currently working on a translation of Angolan intellectual Mário Pinto de Andrade’s essays on African liberation, national development, and Black cultural vindication. Other projects underway include a book on gender and empire in contemporary Luso-Afro-Brazilian fiction, and a new project on speculative geographies and lifeless bodies in Latin American literature.  

5:20–5:30 p.m. Post-summit follow-up
Caucuses and action. Signup sheets for faculty to get involved in furthering the humanities at the UO.
Facilitator: Lanie Millar

5:30–6:30 p.m. Reception
Connect with your colleagues. Beverages and heavy hors d’oeuvres provided along with a no-host bar.

Resources

National Endowment for the Humanities

National Humanities Alliance

National Humanities Center

American Academy of Arts and Sciences: Humanities Indicators Project

Humanities Lab at Arizona State University

Books

Articles

UO Today interviews