Humanities

a group of students behind cinema cameras and lights

 

 

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.

 


News from Humanities

CREATIVE WRITING – Creative writing professor Mat Johnson's new graphic novel, "Backflash," deals with loss and grief in a wild, time-traveling thriller where nostalgia is a superpower. Portland-based artist Steve Lieber provided the illustrations that mix humor and heart.
CLASSICS - After more than two decades of digging in the volcanic ash covering the ancient city, associate professor of classics Kevin Dicus in the College of Arts and Sciences plans to delve into a mound of dirt he hopes is covering Roman garbage so he can study how the residents used it. Between digs, Dicus teaches Latin, mythology, classical archaeology, Roman architecture and Pompeii in the University of Oregon Classics department.
CREATIVE WRITING - Bestselling author and CAS faculty member Karen Thompson Walker has found success as a writer—and as a creative writing associate professor—by asking "what if?." She also incorporates it into her classroom, where her primary teaching focus is on fiction with a catastrophic or fantastical element.

All news »

We Love Our Supporters

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Your Gift Changes Lives

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!

Give to CAS

World-Class Faculty in the Humanities

headshot of Stephen Shoemaker

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).

a portrait of Stacy Alaimo in a hall

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

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. 

Paris, France cityscape at night

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.

Explore the GSL

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

harry wonham

Happening at CAS

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

UO College of Arts & Sciences (@uocas) • Instagram photos and videos

Feb 10
Coffee Shop Chat with Profs Kohler and Sayre

Join LiveMove for a coffee shop chat with Senior Instructor Nick Kohler (Geography) and Professor Gordon Sayre (English/Folklore). Drop in and chat about car cultures, Geographic...
Coffee Shop Chat with Profs Kohler and Sayre
February 10
Lawrence Hall Willcox Hearth

Join LiveMove for a coffee shop chat with Senior Instructor Nick Kohler (Geography) and Professor Gordon Sayre (English/Folklore). Drop in and chat about car cultures, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), human-environment interactions, automobility, car-centrism, the future of transportation, ecocriticism, and more.

There will be free pastries and coffee while supplies lasts! Open to all.

Feb 10
Physical Chemistry Seminar - Measuring Energy Landscapes for Biomolecules with Native Mass Spectrometry 2:00 p.m.

Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry Physical Chemistry Seminar Series Professor James Prell, University of Oregon Measuring Energy Landscapes for Biomolecules ...
Physical Chemistry Seminar - Measuring Energy Landscapes for Biomolecules with Native Mass Spectrometry
February 10
2:00 p.m.
Willie and Donald Tykeson Hall 140

Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry Physical Chemistry Seminar Series

Professor James Prell, University of Oregon

Measuring Energy Landscapes for Biomolecules  with Native Mass Spectrometry

Advances in instrumentation for structural biology and bioanalytical chemistry have enabled the study of ever larger and more dynamic biomolecules and biomolecular complexes. Native ion mobility-mass spectrometry offers advantages for interrogating small, heterogeneous, and dynamic samples while preserving much high-order structure even as analytes are transferred from buffered aqueous solution into the gas phase. Deliberate, precisely controlled heating of the resulting ions inside the mass spectrometer can result in collision-induced dissociation and/or unfolding (CID/U) of non-covalent complexes, revealing structural information that can be exceptionally difficult to access with conventional techniques. However, to date, a quantitative understanding of CID and CIU as a function of acceleration potentials, gas pressure and identity, and other factors has been lacking.

Our recently introduced software suite (IonSPA) can quantitatively predict ion heating, cooling, and motion in such experiments and be used to determine dissociation and unfolding barriers, which are crucial information for interpreting experimental data in terms of structures and chemical properties of the solution-phase biomolecules. We further show that this model can be used to reconcile data acquired using very different instrumentation from a variety of vendors, a key step in tethering these readily available experiments to a universal physical chemistry framework.

Feb 10
Composition Writing Lab Drop-In Hours 3:00 p.m.

Students taking WR 121z, 122z, or 123 are invited to drop by the Tykeson 3rd floor Writing Lab (glass room, 351) for candy and quick writing support. Our GE Writing Support...
Composition Writing Lab Drop-In Hours
February 10–March 10
3:00–4:00 p.m.
Willie and Donald Tykeson Hall 351

Students taking WR 121z, 122z, or 123 are invited to drop by the Tykeson 3rd floor Writing Lab (glass room, 351) for candy and quick writing support. Our GE Writing Support Specialists (tutors) are available to help you with any part of a WR assignment, from coming up with ideas to reading to revising to polishing up a final draft. Join us!

Mondays 3-4 and Thursdays 2-3, beginning week 4, for the rest of Winter quarter 2025.

Feb 10
Organic/Inorganic/Materials Chemistry Seminar: A Journey from Long Acenes to Cyclacenes 4:00 p.m.

Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry Organic/Inorganic/Materials Seminar Series Professor Holger Bettinger, University of Tübingen Hosted by Mike Haley A Journey...
Organic/Inorganic/Materials Chemistry Seminar: A Journey from Long Acenes to Cyclacenes
February 10
4:00 p.m.
Willamette Hall 110

Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry Organic/Inorganic/Materials Seminar Series

Professor Holger Bettinger, University of Tübingen Hosted by Mike Haley

A Journey from Long Acenes to Cyclacenes

Acenes are a fundamentally and technologically important class of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Their small HOMO-LUMO gap is a blessing for materials properties but a curse for synthesis, characterization, and handling. My research group has achieved acenes of unprecedented lengths under the stabilizing conditions of matrix isolation and on-surface synthesis that allowed gaining an understanding of acene properties up to pentadecacene (15acene).[1] The key to success is the application of a protection group strategy that enables the release of acenes under these extreme conditions. The cyclic versions of acenes, cyclacenes, are unknown despite significant synthetic efforts since Edgar Heilbronner’s 1954 proposal. I will address expected properties of these zig-zag nanohoops and discuss strategies of their experimental realization using the low-temperature high-vacuum techniques in our laboratory.[2]

1. a) C. Tönshoff, H. F. Bettinger, Photogeneration of Octacene and Nonacene, Angew. Chem., Int. Ed. 2010, 49, 4125, 10.1002/anie.200906355; b) B. Shen, J. Tatchen, E. Sanchez-Garcia, H. F. Bettinger, Evolution of the Optical Gap in the Acene Series: Undecacene, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2018, 57, 10506, 10.1002/anie.201802197; c) Z. Ruan, J. Schramm, J. B. Bauer, T. Naumann, H. F. Bettinger, R. Tonner-Zech, J. M. Gottfried, Synthesis of Tridecacene by Multistep Single-Molecule Manipulation, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2024, 146, 3700, 10.1021/jacs.3c09392; d) Z. Ruan, J. Schramm, J. B. Bauer, T. Naumann, L. V. Müller, F. Sättele, H. F. Bettinger, R. Tonner-Zech, J. M. Gottfried, On-surface Synthesis and Characterization of Pentadecacene and its Gold Complexes, submitted for publication 2024. 2.  a) D. Gupta, A. Omont, H. F. Bettinger, Energetics of Formation of Cyclacenes from 2,3-Didehydroacenes and Implications for Astrochemistry, Chem. Eur. J. 2021, 27, 4605, https://doi.org/10.1002/chem.202003045; b) J. B. Bauer, F. Diab, C. Maichle-Moessmer, H. Schubert, H. F. Bettinger, Synthesis of the [11]cyclacene framework by repetitive Diels-Alder cycloadditions, Molecules 2021, 26, 3047, 10.3390/molecules26103047; c) A. Somani, D. Gupta, H. F. Bettinger, Computational Studies of Dimerization of [n]-Cyclacenes, J. Phys. Chem. A 2024, 128, 6847, 10.1021/acs.jpca.4c02833.