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! 

Spend a term in Tuscany with GEO Study Abroad! In this info session, we'll talk about winter and spring quarter programs in Siena, Italy. We'll dive into course content, excursions, finances, and how to get started on your study abroad journey. Plus, hear from program alumni about their experiences!

Programs we'll discuss: Italian Language and Culture in Siena, Food, Culture, and Sustainability in Siena, Politics in Italy

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 

Please join the Department of Geography for the colloquium series talk: “Unmapping the World with Palestine 1492: A Report Back” with Linda Quiquivix, PhD.

Let's unmap the world and build it anew with Palestine 1492: A Report Back, a witness testimony that challenges cartographies from above by listening to the struggles of Palestinians, Zapatistas, Panthers, and jaguars from below.

Quiquivix is a geographer, writer, artist, and popular educator of Maya roots, and author and illustrator of Palestine 1492: A Report Back (Wild Ox Books, 2024). Her work brings together geography, storytelling, and imagination with the ongoing work of creating a world where many worlds fit. She is a child of the undocumented migrant community in California from Mexico and Central America. For more than 25 years, she has had the honor of learning from, living with, and being a part of communities in the global struggle for life in the United States, Chiapas, Guatemala, and Palestine. She is also host of WW4: A Podcast Syllabus. Learn more about her work at  www.quiqui.org.

Environmental concerns—from nature conservation to air and water quality—are often associated with progressive politics. But under Fascisms past and present, ecological ideas have also animated authoritarian projects. This speaker series examines how dictatorships mobilize nature as both metaphor and material resource. As a metaphor, agrarianism evokes Fascism’s foundational mythos: the dictator will restore the country’s glorious national past. To live a rural, old-fashioned lifestyle was to be a more patriotic citizen. “Italy must be ruralized!” proclaimed Benito Mussolini in 1927. As a material resource, nature is often put to use in service of eugenics and racial hygiene.

Our speakers will examine the professional biographies of the scientists, industrialists, and entrepreneurs hired by Fascist regimes to determine the limits of biological possibility. Case studies from empire and the colonies will investigate the Fascist programs for experimental plant nurseries, animal breeding, and chemical trials. Rather than treating eco-fascism as a contradiction in terms, our speakers will situate it within longer histories of environmental planning, population management, and technocratic governance. They will explain how dictatorships use the tools of authoritarian governance to modify the environment in their pursuit of more Fascist futures.

Please join us for these illuminating discussions.

Talk details:

Bread from Air: Nitrogen Capture and the Atmospheric Imagination in Fascist Italy

At the end of the nineteenth century, nitrogen, the seventh most abundant element in the galaxy, became the focus of a discourse of scarcity. Essential to the material composition of all life, nitrogen came to seem scarce as demand increased for two classes of compounds that fueled modern life: fertilizers and explosives. The nitrogen problem, as it came to be known, seemed to have an obvious solution: a limitless supply of nitrogen would be available if the nitrogen gas (N₂) that composes roughly 78% of the atmosphere could be "captured" and "fixed" to other elements. Although that solution posed a scientific challenge, since nitrogen gas is unreactive, the very possibility—and then its realization—transformed the sky into a new frontier, promising agricultural and industrial productivity and military power. Nitrogen capture engendered fantasies of economic revival and social and cultural renewal.

In her talk, Falkoff will show how these fantasies, and the nitrogen-capture industry that grew alongside them, became central to fascist ideology—animating the belief that Italian genius could transform scarcity into abundance, and shaping initiatives from the Battle for Wheat to the Battle for Births, economic autarky, and imperial expansion. Charting nitrogen discourse across speeches, advertising, technical writing, and futurist works in paint, ceramic, and prose—from Montecatini's campaigns to the essays of novelist-engineer Carlo Emilio Gadda—she traces how nitrogen staged the tensions central to Italian fascism: between materialism and vitalism, global circulation and national appropriation, the organic and the inorganic, labor and magic, intervention in natural cycles and creation ex nihilo.

For more information, please contact Prof. Diana Garvin, dgarvin@uoregon.edu.

Supported by: Department of Romance Languages, Italian Sector.

The Latinx Studies Program invites you to our fall reception with friends and colleagues. Join us for paletas and aguas frescas from Peek-A-Boo Delight!

Enjoy an afternoon of great conversation, community, and delicious frozen treats as we kick off the new academic year!

Free and open to all Latinx studies minors and students interested in the minor.