UO Today Oregon Humanities Center

Leah Middlebrook, Comparative Literature and Spanish at the UO, is the in-coming director of the Oregon Humanities Center. She talks about her scholarship and what attracted her to the OHC. Paul Peppis, English at the UO, is the out-going director of the OHC, having served 11 years. He talks about his scholarship and how academia has changed during his 29-year career as a professor of English.

Writer Miriam Gershow's debut novel The Local News, published in 2009, was an Oregon Book Award Finalist. Her collection, Survival Tips: Stories was published in 2024. She teaches writing in the English Department at the University of Oregon.

Gershow discusses her writing and reads from Survival Tips.

Gabriela Pérez Báez, Linguistics, and 2023–24 OHC Faculty Research Fellow.

“Diidxazá is an Indigenous endangered Mesoamerican language spoken in southern Mexico. I will test out pacing and methods towards publication of a 10,000 entry Diidxazá-Spanish-English dictionary. I will focus on Spanish and English definitions and on different data sets in preparation for a full-scale process in AY24–25. The dictionary will be a peer-reviewed, electronic, open access publication which stands to make immeasurable contributions to the revitalization of Diidxazá and the advancement of the study of Mesoamerican languages.”

Devin Grammon is an assistant professor of Spanish Sociolinguistics, and an affiliate in the Spanish Heritage Language Program in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Oregon.

Grammon talks about his research on language learning among students studying abroad in Southern Peru and how linguistic variation can be used to perpetuate racism and discrimination.

He also talks about his current project as an OHC Faculty Research Fellow “Spanish in the Linguistic Landscape of Eugene, Oregon.”

Writer Maurice Carlos Ruffin is author of the novel The American Daughters published in 2024. He talks about his writing and teaching and reads a passage from The American Daughters.

Ruffin is an associate professor of Creative Writing at Louisiana State University.

He gave a reading at the University of Oregon on May 22, 2024, as a guest of the Creative Writing Program.

Aimée Morrison is an associate professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. She talks about her work to understand how people decide how to represent themselves online, what motivates those decisions, and what effects they have.

She also discusses her experience as a professional woman who has been diagnosed later in life with ADHD and her work to bridge scholarly and popular knowledge about neurodiversity.

On May 16th, 2024, Morrison gave a talk titled “Touch Grass” as the annual lecturer for the UO’s New Media and Culture Certificate program.