Events

The history department welcomes our students back to campus with a casual get-together! Join us for free pizza and beverages; learn what’s happening in the department this year; and connect with the history community.

Free and open to all history undergraduates, graduates, faculty, and staff!

The University of Oregon's Environmental and Natural Resources Law (ENR) Center and cross-campus partners will present the 20th Annual Rennard Strickland Lecture—featuring Bryan Newland (Ojibwe), former US Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs—via Zoom Webinar. Register for the webinar through Zoom or on our event page. 

Newland will present his virtual talk, "The Vanishing Indian Property Rights: How Federal Courts are Stripping Indians of the Rights to Their Own Lands." 

Bryan Newland is a citizen of the Bay Mills Indian Community, where he served as Tribal President from 2017 to 2021 and Chief Judge from 2013 to 2017. From 2021 to 2025, he served as Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs in the US Department of the Interior, where he led the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Indian Education, and Bureau of Trust Funds Administration. As Assistant Secretary, Newland helped coordinate a historic $45B investment in Indian Country; led the development of a co-stewardship policy to promote public-land management agreements between federal agencies and Tribal Nations; and worked to implement the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, a comprehensive effort to recognize the troubled legacy of federal Indian boarding school policies and to address these policies' intergenerational impact. Today, Newland is a principal attorney at Powers, Pyles, Sutter & Verville, PC, where he represents Tribal governments, Tribal business entities, and inter-Tribal organizations on a broad range of legal and policy matters. Newland received a JD from Michigan State University (MSU) College of Law, where he also earned an Indian Law Certificate, and a BA from James Madison College at MSU. He is a recipient of the National American Indian Court Judges Association's Judicial Excellence Award (2024) and the Clean Water Action Great Lakes Protectors Award (2020). 

Through its Native Environmental Sovereignty Project, the ENR Center established the Rennard Strickland Lecture series in 2006 to honor the legacy of former Oregon Law Professor and Dean Rennard Strickland, who retired that year and passed in 2021. An Osage citizen of the Cherokee Nation, Strickland contributed mightily to the field of Indian Law, the practice of legal education, and Oregon Law's ENR and Indian Law programs throughout his lifetime. In keeping with his assertion that "[i]f there is to be a post-Columbian future—a future for any of us—it will be an Indian future..." (Tonto's Revenge, 1997), the Rennard Strickland Lecture series has a thematic focus on Indigenous environmental-legal leadership and Tribal sovereignty in the twenty-first century. 

The 20th Annual Rennard Strickland Lecture is co-sponsored by the UO Department of Native American and Indigenous Studies, Oregon Law's Native American Law Students Association, and the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics. 

Oregon CLE credit pending. 

History and Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies invites our graduate students, faculty, and staff to a welcome back barbecue!

Spend an evening with History and Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies. Talk with old friends, meet new colleagues, and enjoy fine food and drinks.

All HIST and IRES graduate students, faculty, and staff are invited. Families warmly welcomed.

As the United States marks the 250th anniversary of its founding, this symposium returns to the bold universal promise of 1776—the claim that “all men are created equal” and endowed with “unalienable rights.” Cast at once as the rights of citizens of a new republic and as the rights of all of humankind, they also coexisted with a deep contradiction: the subjugation of Native Americans, enslaved people, and women. The principles at the heart of the U.S. founding launched a politics of rights whose origins and reverberations were transnational, even as access to them remained sharply unequal in practice.

“We Hold These Truths: 250 Years of the American Experiment at Home and Abroad” brings together a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and leading scholars of citizenship, political development, race, gender, immigration, and civil rights to reflect on this legacy. The panel will explore how America’s founding ideals have shaped struggles for inclusion at home and abroad, and how those ideals have been stretched, reinterpreted, and at times betrayed across two and a half centuries.

Refreshments will be available at 5:45pm.

Panelists:

Nick Kristof - New York Times

Megan Ming Francis - University of Washington

Peter Spiro - Temple University

Carol Nackenoff - Swarthmore University

Moderator:

Dan Tichenor - UO Knight Chair; Co-Director, Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics

Presented by the Schnitzer School of Global Studies and Languages and the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics.

Free and open to the public. No registration required.

This event will be livestreamed and recorded.  Join online

Thinking about doing an internship in Asia? The Freeman Internship Fellowships can help fund it!

The 2026-27 application deadlines are: 

• January 15, 2027 (spring and summer priority deadlines)
• April 22, 2027 (summer deadline)
• August 22, 2027 (fall and winter priority deadlines)
• November 22, 2027 (winter and spring priority deadlines)

The session will cover some basic info regarding Freeman application eligibility, required materials, and the application and award processes, while also providing an opportunity for participants to ask questions.

Apply by the priority deadlines to receive your award decision sooner! 

The Creative Writing Program invites you to a poetry reading with Melissa Range.

Melissa Range is the author of Printer’s Fist, winner of the 2025 Vanderbilt Literary Prize (Vanderbilt University Press, 2026), as well as Scriptorium (Beacon Press, 2016) and Horse and Rider (Texas Tech University Press, 2010). Range is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the American Antiquarian Society, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and MacDowell. Originally from East Tennessee, she teaches creative writing and American literature at Lawrence University in Wisconsin.

Free and open to the public. 

For more information about the Creative Writing Reading Series, please visit https://humanities.uoregon.edu/creative-writing/reading-series 

Join the Department of History for the Eugene History Pub Lecture by Professor Stephen Dueppen on Empires, Revolutions and City-States: West Africa in the Medieval Period.

The Eugene History Pub Lecture Series features talks by history scholars and experts on historical events, concepts, and research in a casual setting with local beer, wine, and food. Unless otherwise noted, talks take place at 7:00 p.m. on the second Monday of each month, from October through May. The lectures are free and open to the public and are held at Whirled Pies (199 W. 8th Avenue in Eugene).

The Oregon Humanities Center presents its 2026-27 endowed lectureship series centered on the theme of “Reading.”  

We are used to thinking about reading in relation to writing, musical scores, performances, and works of cinema and art. But as social animals, we read more broadly. We read the signs. We read the landscape. We read each others’ faces and body language. We “read the room.”  

Our speakers will consider how people observe, look for patterns, try to discern meaning. How does reading shape humanity, individually and collectively? What might taking an extended, intentional look at this activity—our constant reading—reveal? Using approaches honed by their disciplines, our invited speakerswill help us think about reading from a variety of directions.  

Saeed Jones is the author of the memoir How We Fight for Our Lives (Simon and Schuster), winner of the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction and the poetry collection Prelude to Bruise (Coffee House Books), winner for the 2015 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. His poetry and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times, Oxford American and GQ among other publications. His most recent book Alive at the End of the World (Coffee House Press) won the 2023 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Poetry.

Jones was the 2024-2025 artist-in-residence in the Media, Health and Medicine program at Harvard Medical School. His next book Home Out There, a memoir, is forthcoming from Washington Square Press. He cohosts the podcast Vibe Check with Sam Sanders and Zach Stafford.

Guest speaker: Fernando Ortiz-Moya, Assistant Professor, Waseda Institute for Advanced Study, Waseda University, Japan

Japan is shrinking. How are its cities and towns responding?

Traditionally, Japanese local governments, encouraged by national policy, have sought to halt or reverse their decline by luring urban migrants, increasing birth rates, attracting businesses, and curbing outmigration. This obsession with growth threatens to exhaust already limited resources, closing windows of opportunity for managing a soft landing.

Eventually, continuous shrinkage will force local governments to abandon growth-focused planning and redesign their communities: they must learn to shrink gracefully. Some municipalities are already charting this different course. This presentation argues that shrinking municipalities must break free from pro-growth strategies, embracing more sustainable approaches. These cities are putting socio-environmental concerns at the centre of their strategies, identifying new ways to transition successfully into smaller, sustainable communities.

Event sponsors:

School of Planning, Public Policy and Management; Department of Geography; Ecological Design Center; Global Studies Institute; Association of Pacific Rim Universities – Sustainable Cities and Landscapes Program; Center for Asian and Pacific Studies; and Japan Society for the Promotion of Science KAKENHI Grant

Curious about careers in sustainability, the environment, or climate solutions? Join us for Your Future in Sustainability, a FREE career exploration and networking event designed to help you connect with professionals working across the environmental and sustainability field.

Whether you’re interested in conservation, climate solutions, environmental science, policy, consulting, GIS, communications, or other sustainability-related career paths, this event is a chance to learn what careers in the field actually look like and how you can get there.

Come for either or both events! All are welcome!

• Industry Insights Panel | 4:00–5:00 p.m. Hear from professionals and alumni about their career journeys, industry trends, the skills employers are looking for, and how they got started in the field.
• Small-Group Networking | 5:00–6:30 p.m. Connect directly with professionals in a casual setting. Rotate between conversations, ask questions, learn about different career paths, and get advice about internships, jobs, fellowships, and other opportunities. FREE FOOD! 

Employers include: 

• Bring
• Nearbynature
• Wild Rockies Field Institute
• Northwest Youth Corps
• Cascade Raptor Center 
• AND MORE COMING SOON!  

You don’t need to have a specific career path figured out to attend. Whether you’re exploring sustainability for the first time, looking for an internship or job, or already planning a career in the environmental field, you’ll have the opportunity to make connections and learn from people working in the industry.

Come with questions, curiosity, and your future in mind.