CINEMA STUDIES - Assistant Professor Masami Kawai gained insight into the importance of story last spring at the Sundance Institute in Utah. She was among those selected for a two-week workshop during which—under the eye of talents such as actor Ed Harris, a four-time Academy Award nominee—filmmakers rehearsed, shot, and edited scenes from working projects.

LINGUISTICS - Over the past 50 years, hip hop has grown from a popular music genre to a cultural revolution that spans the globe, affecting everything from fashion to language. Linguistics Professor Rachel Weissler explores the profound influence of hip hop on the English language.

ENGLISH - English Associate Professor Courtney Thorsson's new book, The Sisterhood, explores a group of influential Black women writers and thinkers—including Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Margo Jefferson—who met during the late '70s to talk about writing, culture and liberation.

EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES, ASIAN STUDIES - Fulbright Scholar and CAS Professor Alisa Freedman is chronicling the rise of women’s scholarship during a five-month trip to Vietnam, where she's helping women professors find their footing in the academic publishing world.

PHILOSOPHY - Barbara Muraca, a philosophy associate professor, participated in United Nations-organized research focused on “relational values” between humans and nature. She hopes to emphasize the importance of viewing humans and nature as connected rather than separate entities. Muraca and a team of academics appear as authors in an article published in the August 2023 issue of Nature.

ENGLISH - In The Sisterhood: How A Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture, Courtney Thorsson, an associate professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences, tells the story of a group of Black feminist writers and thinkers in a critically acclaimed book that has been called a model for literary histories.

LINGUISTICS - For the last 30 years, Department of Linguistics Professor Spike Gildea has partnered with Native communities in Brazil to document and analyze the Werikyana language, which today is spoken as a first language by only a handful of people.

ENGLISH, SOCIOLOGY, SPANISH, THEATRE ARTS - The Distinguished Teaching Awards recognize exceptional teaching that is inclusive, engaged and research-informed. This year’s winners are Jocelyn Hollander, Faith Barter, Alex Zunterstein, Kirby Brown, Robin Hopkins, Tannaz Farsi, Patricia Rodley and Michael Moffitt.

PHILOSOPHY, SOCIOLOGY - Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy will have a three-day 40th-anniversary conference at the University of Oregon, which runs from Wednesday, Sept. 6 through Friday, Sept. 9. The conference, titled Hypatia’s Promise: Opening the Archives, Charting Feminist Futures, will look back at the journal’s early days, as well as host panels featuring academics from around the US and Latin America and celebrate the archive at the UO.