The departments and programs of the Humanities Division are committed to the study of human meaning as it is expressed in diverse languages, explained in diverse literatures, and reflected upon from diverse philosophical and religious perspectives. Students seek to understand the values and purposes that make practices and systems worthwhile. In an increasingly interconnected world, the ability to critically consider how individuals and communities make sense of their world is an essential skill. Explore majors, minors, concentrations, and academic programs in the humanities.
American English Institute
Arabic Studies
Chinese
Chinese Flagship Program
Cinema Studies
Classical Civilization
Classics
Comparative Literature
Creative Writing
Comics and Cartoon Studies
Digital Humanities
Disability Studies
English
News from Humanities
All news »
We Love Our Supporters
Gifts to the College of Arts and Sciences can help our students make the most of their college careers. To do this, CAS needs your support. Your contributions help us ensure that teaching, research, advising, mentoring, and support services are fully available to every student. Thank you!
World-Class Faculty in the Humanities
Stephen Shoemaker
Professor of Religious Studies
Stephen Shoemaker teaches courses about Christian traditions and is a prolific contributor to research related to ancient and early medieval Christian traditions in early Byzantine and Near Eastern Christianity.
Shoemaker has received research fellowships over the years and received two in 2024 to complete the translation of the earliest surviving Christian hymnal from sixth-century Jerusalem, which is in Old Georgian. The fellowships include one from the National Endowment for the Humanities for 2024–2025 and a Senior Fellowship funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation).
He recently published The Quest of the Historical Muhammad and Other Studies on Formative Islam (2024) and is the co-author of The Capture of Jerusalem by the Persians in 614 CE (2024).
Stacey Alaimo
Professor of English
Stacey Alaimo’s research explores the intersections between literary, artistic, political, and philosophical approaches to environmentalism. She has published three books and more than 60 scholarly articles, on such topics as toxins, gender and climate change, environmental justice, queer animals, Anthropocene feminisms, marine science studies, the blue humanities, and new materialist theory.
Her concept of trans-corporeality has been widely taken up in the arts, humanities and sciences. She has been interviewed many times in print and podcasts. Her work has been translated into at least 12 languages and has inspired several art exhibitions.
Her fourth book, The Abyss Stares Back: Encounters with Deep Sea Life (2025), explores the science and aesthetics of deep-sea creatures since the 1930s. Alaimo currently serves as the English department’s director of graduate studies and is a core faculty member in the Environmental Studies Program.
Lowell Bowditch
Professor of Classics
Lowell Bowditch is the head of the Department of Classics. Her research explores the interface between the literature and socio-political relations of Augustan Rome.
Her newest project addresses issues of free speech and censorship in the early imperial age. She explores this through the work of Ovid in the context of the growing authoritarianism of the Augustan regime, with the planned book to draw comparisons with the contemporary political landscape.
Her previous work focused on love elegy and Roman imperialism from postcolonial perspectives. Along with multiple articles and research papers, she is the author of two books and a commentary, including the most recent, Roman Love Elegy and the Eros of Empire (London and New York 2023).
Bowditch came to the UO in 1993 and particularly enjoys mentoring classics undergraduates and master’s students.
School of Global Studies and Languages
At the School of Global Studies and Languages (GSL), UO students engage with diverse cultures, languages, histories, and lifeways across the world. Students of the humanities, from Cinema Studies to Religious Studies, will broaden and deepen their education in their field by viewing it—and experiencing it—through a global lens. GSL prepares our graduates for life after college with an interdisciplinary curriculum, innovative language teaching, abundant learning opportunities outside the classroom, and paths of study that lead to many options for real-world careers.
Research in the Humanities
Inquiry in humanities fields centers around our collective human experience. Our stories are told in many forms, be it a script, a screenplay, a religious text, in literature or in folktales. Researchers in the humanities employ tools of analysis to explore the long history and rapidly changing landscape of ideas, values and beliefs that coalesce in a different sort of knowledge about reality and human life.
Explore Other Majors and Minors in the College of Arts and Sciences
Meet our Dean
The departments and programs of the Humanities Division share a commitment to the study of human experience as it is expressed in diverse languages and cultures throughout history and across the world. A Humanities education encourages students to think creatively, independently, and critically about the human past, present, and future. Whether they choose to focus on cinema, classical languages, or philosophical ideas, Humanities students learn to reason, to build arguments, to write and communicate with confidence and conviction, and to view the world and its challenges from multiple perspectives.
Our College of Arts and Sciences is committed to providing students with a genuine liberal arts education, which means that we strive to expose students to more than one way of knowing. We want our students to appreciate the profound differences—and the no-less profound similarities—in the way a philosopher, a biologist, and a political scientist approach the same questions about the human condition. The unique lens provided by the Humanities departments and programs at UO is an essential part of that liberal arts education, which we believe prepares students to live meaningful lives in the world.
Harry Wonham
Divisional Associate Dean, Humanities
Happening at CAS
noon
The Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies welcomes Kit Myers, Assistant Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Merced, for a talk on “The Violence of Love: Race, Adoption, and Family in the United States.”
12:00 pm on Friday, April 25 in EMU Crater Lake North (Room 146) Free and Open to the Public
The Violence of Love challenges the narrative that adoption is a solely loving act that benefits birth parents, adopted individuals, and adoptive parents–a narrative that is especially pervasive with transracial and transnational adoptions. Using interdisciplinary methods of archival, legal, and discursive analysis, Kit W. Myers comparatively examines the adoption of Asian, Black, and Native American children by White families in the United States. He shows how race has been constructed relationally to mark certain homes, families, and nations as spaces of love, freedom, and better futures–in contrast to others that are not–and argues that violence is attached to adoption in complex ways. Propelled by different types of love, such adoptions attempt to transgress biological, racial, cultural, and national borders established by traditional family ideals. Yet they are also linked to structural, symbolic, and traumatic forms of violence. The Violence of Love confronts this discomforting reality and rethinks theories of family to offer more capacious understandings of love, kinship, and care.
Cosponsored by the Mellon Foundation.
Kit Myers is transracial and transnational adoptee from Hong Kong and grew up in Oregon. He is currently an assistant professor in the Department of History & Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of California, San Diego in ethnic studies and his B.S. in ethnic studies and journalism from the University of Oregon. His book, The Violence of Love: Race, Family, and Adoption in the United States, was recently published with the University of California Press (2025). Myers has published journal articles in Adoption Quarterly, Critical Discourse Studies, Adoption & Culture, and Amerasia. He has also written on issues of race and policing. He serves on the executive committee for the Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture and previously served on the leadership team of the Adoption Museum Project. When Myers is not working, he loves spending time with his partner and two kids, being in nature, watching sports, coaching his daughters' soccer teams, and visiting family in Oregon.
1:00 p.m.
Phi Alpha Theta Honor Society invites history majors and minors to lunch and a study session! We’ll enjoy free food, study for midterms, and mingle with history students!
Friday April 25th from 1-3 PM in McKenzie Hall 375 Free and open to all Department of History majors and minors
2:00 p.m.
The Department of Cinema Studies proudly announces the 10th Annual Harlan J. Strauss Visiting Filmmaker Series with award-winning Director Sean Wang.
Join cinema studies for masterclass with award-winning Director Sean Wang. He will share his creative process for developing and directing scenes from his independent feature DÌDI , including ideas and techniques for casting, blocking, and working collaboratively on set with both talent and crew.
Open to UO students • Priority to CINE majors • Space is limited Register to attend by April 14.
For more information about the masterclass and to RSVP, please visit cinema.uoregon.edu.
Sean Wang is an Academy Award®-nominated filmmaker from the Bay Area. He began his career developing and directing commercials at Google Creative Lab. Since then, his work has screened at globally renowned film festivals including Sundance, SXSW, and TIFF. He is a former Sundance Ignite and TAAF fellow, and 2023 Sundance Screenwriters and Directors Lab Fellow. In 2024, he was named a BAFTA Breakthrough Artist and received the Sundance Vanguard Award for Fiction.
His most recent short film, Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó (Grandma & Grandma), premiered at SXSW 2023 where it won the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award and was acquired by Disney+. It went on to screen at dozens of film festivals worldwide, earning top honors at AFI Fest and SIFF, and was nominated for Best Documentary Short Film at the 96th Academy Awards.
His feature directorial debut, Dìdi (弟弟), premiered in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival where it won the U.S. Dramatic Audience Award, Special Jury Prize for Best Ensemble Cast, and was acquired by Focus Features for a global theatrical release. Sean was nominated by the DGA for Outstanding Directorial Achievement of a First-Time Feature Film and the film was named a New York Times Critics Pick, nominated for 4 Independent Spirit Awards, winning 2 for Best First Screenplay and Best First Feature, and was named one of the top ten independent films of 2024 by the National Board of Review.
The UO Cinema Studies Visiting Filmmaker Series is Funded by the Generous Harlan J. Strauss Visiting Filmmaker Endowment.
2:30–4:30 p.m.
We are pleased to host Dr. Roberto Cabeza of Duke University for our 36th annual Fred Attneave Memorial Lecture on April 25th at 2:30pm in Gerlinger Lounge. Dr. Cabeza’s research uses brain imaging techniques to explore how memory and brain activity are connected, and how this relationship changes as we age.