UO Today

Glynne Walley, East Asian Languages and Literatures and 2023–24 OHC Ernest G. Moll Research Fellow in Literary Studies. The 19th-century adventure novel Eight Dogs by Kyokutei Bakin is one of the most influential books in Japanese history and a key example of the spread of literary ideas and techniques across the the Sinosphere. It’s also one of the longest novels in world history. My project involves a complete annotated translation in multiple volumes, each with an introduction examining a different aspect of the work; the next introduction will look at the publishers who undertook this massive project.

Cole Pauls is a Tahltan comics artist, illustrator, and printmaker from Haines Junction, Yukon Territory. He earned a BFA in Illustration from Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Pauls has created three graphic novels: Dakwäkãda Warriors (2019), Pizza Punks (2021) and Kwändür (2022). Cole Pauls gave the second talk in this year’s Indigenous Comics Speaker series on February 21st, 2024 hosted by the Native American and Indigenous Studies program and the Comics and Cartoon Studies program at the University of Oregon.

Poet Aaron Baker is an associate professor in the Department of English at Loyola University Chicago where he teaches Creative Writing. Baker’s first collection Mission Work, published in 2008, won the Katherine Bakeless Award for a First Book of Poetry and the Glasgow/Shenandoah Prize for Emerging Writers. Baker’s second poetry collection Posthumous Noon, published in 2018, won the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize. Baker gave a reading at the University of Oregon on February 14th, 2024 as a guest of the Creative Writing Program.

Books-in-Print talk with Lamia Karim, Anthropology and 2018–19 OHC Faculty Research Fellow. Castoffs of Capital draws on fieldwork in Bangladesh to examine how female garment workers experience their work and personal lives within the stranglehold of global capital. Anthropologist Lamia Karim focuses on relations among work, gender, and global capital’s targeting of poor women to advance its market penetration, showing how women navigate these spaces by adopting new subject formations.

Christopher Newfield, Director of Research at the Independent Social Research Foundation in London and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Newfield is a leading scholar of Critical University Studies. He has recently published two books on the metrics of higher education: Metrics that Matter: Counting What’s Really Important to College Students (2023) and The Limits of the Numerical: The Abuses and Uses of Quantification (2022). In addition, Newfield wrote a trilogy of books on the university as an intellectual and social institution: Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880–1980 (2003); Unmaking the Public University: The Forty Year Assault on the Middle Class (2008); and The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (2016). He will give a talk titled: “Jobs and Universities: A Tale of Two Futures” on Thursday, March 7 at the University of Oregon as the Oregon Humanities Center’s 2023–2024 Cressman Lecturer.

Joyce Wei-Jo Chen is an assistant professor of Historical Keyboards in the School of Music and Dance at the University of Oregon. As a solo harpsichordist, Professor Chen has performed throughout the United States, France, Belgium, and Taiwan. Chen is also a Ph.D. candidate in Historical Musicology at Princeton University and expects to defend her dissertation, “Musica Experientia/Experimentum: Acoustics and Artisanal Knowledge in the Global Seventeenth Century,” in May 2024. In addition, Chen holds a Doctor of Musical Arts in Harpsichord Performance from Stony Brook University and a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley. Chen joined the UO faculty in fall 2023.

Strong Winds and Widow Makers: Workers, Nature, and Environmental Conflict in Pacific Northwest Timber Country (2022) Steven Beda, History and 2020–21 OHC Faculty Research Fellow. Often cast as villains in the Northwest’s environmental battles, timber workers in fact have a connection to the forest that goes far beyond jobs and economic issues. Steven C. Beda explores the complex true story of how and why timber-working communities have concerned themselves with the health and future of the woods surrounding them. Life experiences like hunting, fishing, foraging, and hiking imbued timber country with meanings and values that nurtured a deep sense of place in workers, their families, and their communities. This sense of place in turn shaped ideas about protection that sometimes clashed with the views of environmentalists–or the desires of employers. Beda’s sympathetic, in-depth look at the human beings whose lives are embedded in the woods helps us understand that timber communities fought not just to protect their livelihood, but because they saw the forest as a vital part of themselves.

Cintia Martínez Velasco is an assistant professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. Her research and teaching interests include feminist philosophy, gender theory, decolonial philosophy, and critical theory in Latin America. She earned her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 2019, where she taught Philosophy from 2018 to 2022. Professor Martínez Velasco joined the UO faculty in fall 2022.

Jesús Ramos-Kittrell is an assistant professor of Musicology at the University of Oregon. His research covers the early modern period and more current analyses of globalization, merging music studies with social history, cultural studies, and literary theory. Ramos-Kittrell's monograph Playing in the Cathedral: Music, Race, and Status in New Spain was published by Oxford University Press in 2016. His edited volume Decentering the Nation: Music, Mexicanidad, and Globalization, published in 2020, won the Society for Ethnomusicology’s 2021 Ellen Koskoff Edited Volume Prize.

Morgan Thomas earned their MFA in 2016 from the University of Oregon’s Creative Writing Program. Their debut collection Manywhere: Stories, published in 2022, was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, Lambda Literary’s Transgender Fiction Prize, the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and Publishing Triangle’s Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction. Claire Luchette earned their MFA in 2017 from the University of Oregon’s Creative Writing Program. They are an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Binghamton University in New York. Their novel Agatha of Little Neon was published in 2021. Thomas and Luchette gave readings at the UO on January 10th, 2024 as guests of the Creative Writing Program.