Thank you for your generous gifts. You helped us reach our goal and then some!

Also, thank you to Amy and Alex Haugland for matching these gifts.

We have some exciting events coming up this winter. Read more in our newsletter.

Kemi Balogun, Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Sociology, gave a talk about her book Beauty Diplomacy: Embodying an Emerging Nation on November 6, 2020. 

She states, "The Oregon Humanities Center is a vibrant hub for interdisciplinary dialogue. My own scholarship has been enriched by attending and participating in OHC talks, workshops, and programming activities. The Oregon Humanities Center provided much needed funding to help me complete my sole book project as well as a co-edited volume during the crucial pre-tenure years. With this support, I was able to cover the inclusion of more images and maps which enlivened the books and made the scholarship much more tangible to readers. Without this support at the final stages of publication, the process would have been much more difficult."

About her book:

Even as beauty pageants have been critiqued as misogynistic and dated cultural vestiges of the past in the U.S. and elsewhere, the pageant industry is growing in popularity across the Global South, and Nigeria is one of the countries at the forefront of this trend. In a country with over 1,000 reported pageants, these events are more than superficial forms of entertainment. Beauty Diplomacy takes us inside the world of Nigerian beauty contests to see how they are transformed into contested vehicles for promoting complex ideas about gender and power, ethnicity and belonging, and a rapidly changing articulation of Nigerian nationhood.

Elizabeth (Betsy) Wheeler gave a Books-in-Print talk about HandiLand: The Crippest Place on Earth on Friday, October 16, 2020. Watch now.

"The Oregon Humanities Center has been a creative and vital partner in every phase of my 2019 book HandiLand. An OHC Faculty Research Fellowship gave me the time and seclusion to complete the first chapter that determined the book's subsequent direction. My OHC Work-in-Progress talk provided colleagues' feedback essential to developing the whole concept of the book and future of my scholarship. An OHC subvention grant supported permissions for the photographs and illustrations that brought my words about the lives and artistic depictions of young people with disabilities to vivid life."—Elizabeth Wheeler

“On Rising Together: Creative and Collective Responses to the Climate Crisis”

What might we learn from the people living on climate change’s front lines about the future that we share? In her talk, Rush will speak about a small community on the eastern shore of Staten Island––a place that hurricane Sandy both undid and remade from the ground up––investigating the storm’s aftermath and the radical decisions residents made about how to overcome their shared vulnerability. She will give voice to those who have been traditionally left out of environmental discourse and how we might make the conversation more whole moving forward.

Elizabeth Rush, professor of Creative Nonfiction, Brown University; and author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore (2018), spoke in Eugene on March 5, 2020 as the OHC's 2019-20 Clark Lecturer. Your gifts make events like this possible.

Watch now