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.

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 

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.

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.

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

Professor Timothy Su, University of California, Riverside Hosted by Ramesh Jasti

Silicon Diamondoids: Atomically Precise Clusters of Crystalline Silicon

This talk will describe the synthesis, derivatization, and quantum transport properties of silicon diamondoids—atomically precise clusters of crystalline silicon. First, we describe strategies for the functionalization of the fundamental silicon diamondoid cluster, sila-adamantane. Mechanistic insights support that an aluminate-stabilized silylium at the 2-position of sila-adamantane is the terminal intermediate in its isomerization synthesis; we can intercept this intermediate to install halides at the 2-position. In addition, we can tetra-substitute sila-adamantane at its bridgehead positions with the same or different functional group, or precisely edit the skeletal structure of the adamantyl core by installing up to four Ge atom dopants at the bridgehead positions. We can extend this strategy to access, for the first time, the all-germanium adamantane. We have also developed radical-mediated approaches to catenate these clusters together to make supermolecules out of sila-diamondoid superatoms. As sila-adamantane represents the ultimate limit of miniaturization for nanocrystalline silicon, these regioselective approaches allow us to probe structure-property relationships in cluster models of silicon semiconductors at an atomically exact level. To showcase this, we show how the symmetry and dimensionality of sila-adamantane gives rise to unusual quantum interference effects in conductive single-molecule junctions studied with the scanning tunneling microscopy break-junction (STM-BJ) technique that may be controlled by chemical substitution. Finally, we exploit this phenomenon to create single-molecule conductance switches where we can mechanically toggle between different conductive pathways through the diamondoid cluster.

If you are interested in working in a literary agency, this is a chance to hear from a recent UO grad about how she landed a job at the prominent NY agency, Georges Borchardt, Inc. You'll also get an insider's perspective on the world of agenting.

Event sponsored by:

Comparative Literature, English, The School of Global Studies and Languages, and Romance Languages.

Screening and Q&A of BELLA, a film about American choreographer and dancer Bella Rebecca Lewitzky (January 13, 1916 – July 16, 2004), with Professor Walter Kennedy, Associate Producer.

In partnership with Dance Oregon and National Dance Week.

Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry Physical Chemistry Seminar Series

Professor David Limmer, University of California—Berkeley Hosted by: Marina Guenza

On the nature of chemical reactivity in atmospheric aerosol

Most of our intuition about chemistry stems from observations made in macroscopic beakers. Increasingly observations made in small containers, where surface to volume ratios are large, defy standard expectations suggesting that on the smallest scales chemical reactivity can be altered.

In this talk, I will discuss some of our work on chemical reactivity in the presence of extensive air-water interfaces, like that which occur in atmospheric aerosol. I will show how rates and mechanisms of reactions can vary dramatically in such heterogeneous environments and how modern computational tools can be deployed to render testable predictions.

Please join us Tuesday mornings for a free cup of coffee, pastries, and conversation with your history department community! We’re excited to continue this tradition for our history undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff. We hope to see you there!

Join the Department of History and Nicholas B. Breyfogle, University of Ohio, for a talk on “Drowning the Sacred Sea: Lake Baikal and the Hydroelectric Moment in World History."

Free and open to the public.

This paper examines the building of the Irkutsk Hydroelectric dam and the human-induced, hydroelectric flooding of Siberia’s Lake Baikal that began in the mid-1950s and transformed the water systems, fish and human ecologies, energy flows, and cultural practices (especially religious) of the diverse peoples of the region. The dam resulted in a rise in water depth of more than 4 meters around the lake. Whole communities found their villages drowned, water transport infrastructure disappeared, the shoreline was irrevocably changed, and the spawning grounds for the lake's endemic (and iconic) fish, the omul, were destroyed. The Shamanist Buriat communities found religious sites dropped underwater and struggled to prevent (and then culturally to absorb) the loss of these sacred sites. This paper explores the ways that hydrological and geological factors merged with economic and technological to generate interest in building a multi-dam cascade along the Angara river; the extensive efforts to prepare the lands that would be flooded by the dam; the rise of new ways of thinking about and using the lake; and finally the impact the dam had on the omul population (and the fishing industry that was based on them) Throughout, the paper places the Baikal story in the larger context of global hydroelectric development. 

Dr. Nicholas B. Breyfogle is Professor of History and Director of the Harvey Goldberg Center for Excellence in Teaching at The Ohio State University in Columbus, OH. He is a specialist in the history of Russia/Soviet Union and in global environmental and water history. He is the author/(co-)editor of multiple volumes, including Hydraulic Societies: Water, Power, and Control in East and Central Asian History (2023), Place and Nature: Essays in Russian Environmental History (2021), Nature at War: American Environments and World War II (2020), Eurasian Environments: Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russian and Soviet History (2018), Readings in Water History (2020), Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History (2007), and Heretics and Colonizers: Forging Russia’s Empire in the South Caucasus (2005). He is currently completing two books: “Baikal: the Great Lake and its People” and “Water: A Human History.”  Since 2007, Breyfogle has worked as co-editor of the online magazine/podcast/video channel Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, http://origins.osu.edu and most recently on Picturing Black History, https://www.picturingblackhistory.org/. In 2022, he was awarded The Herbert Feis Award for Distinguished Contributions to Public History from the American Historical Association. In 2024, his next co-edited book, Picturing Black History: Photographs and Stories that Changed the World will be published with Abrams Books.  

The Department of History Seminar Series runs throughout the academic year and features guest speakers from the top universities who share their perspectives on history. Visit history.uoregon.edu for more information about the seminar series.