ENGLISH, CREATIVE WRITING - Nathan Harris graduated with a B.A. in English from the UO, and is now a New York Times best-selling author. His book, The Sweetness of Water, has been a smash hit.

CREATIVE WRITING - Kirstin Valdez Quade was a graduate student in the creative writing program when Professor Ehud Havazelet offered that advice. Today Quade, MFA ’09 (creative writing), is an award-winning novelist and creative writing professor at Princeton University who is, she says, “profoundly grateful” for the program and Havazelet, who died in 2015.

ENGLISH - Together with a team at the University of Idaho, librarians at the UO received a $49,919 digital humanities advancement grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop new technology-focused teaching plans for humanities courses.

ENGLISH - Ben Saunders, a UO professor of comic studies, is working with Marvel Comics on a new collaboration series with publisher Penguin Classics. The first three books published in the series will be “Black Panther,” “Captain America” and “The Amazing Spider-Man,” with Saunders serving as the series editor and author of the scholarly introductions for the latter two.

ENGLISH - Visitors to the Museum of Natural and Cultural History will be able to explore unicorn horns, witch bottles and more at the “Magic in Medieval Europe” exhibit, on view beginning Saturday, Oct 23. Curated by Martha Bayless, professor of English and director of the Folklore and Public Culture Program at the UO, the exhibit offers an enchanted journey through the Middle Ages.

FOLKLORE - The UO campus, which is dotted with buildings built in the 19th century, has its fair share of ghost stories. While some of them are far-fetched, others have developed lives of their own among students and faculty members.

ENGLISH - Mat Johnson, a professor in the Creative Writing Program in the College of Arts and Sciences, is the UO’s newest Philip H. Knight Chair. Johnson joined the UO faculty in 2018 after a decade teaching at the University of Houston’s creative writing program.

Sixteen UO faculty members are being honored with the Presidential Fellowships in Humanistic Studies for their contributions to the arts and humanities. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the College of Arts and Sciences is recognizing and celebrating both the 2020 and 2021 fellows together.

The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art will livestream the premiere of “Sanctuary: A Performance,” an artist collaboration exploring the collective experience of women and queer people of color seeking refuge from persecution under the ongoing violence of colonization.