New Oregon Humanities Center endowment expands faculty research opportunities
The Oregon Humanities Center (OHC) is raising $40,000 to create an endowment fund that will support faculty research. The endowment will enable the OHC to expand opportunities in research and innovative teaching that will support the entire community.
“This research is pathbreaking, pushing the boundaries of how people think about society and the world around us,” said Leah Middlebrook, Director of Oregon Humanities Center.
The fund will directly support OHC faculty as they push the boundaries about how people think about society and relate to the world around us and lead innovative research that redefines the limits of what it means to be human.
“The humanities explore what it means to be human across time, cultures and space, and are highly relevant and necessary to understanding today’s challenges,” said Sergio Loza, OHC Fellow and assistant professor of Spanish Linguistics for the Department of Romance Languages. “The Oregon Humanities Center supports faculty, graduate, and undergraduate humanities research to advance new knowledge and scholarship.”
The endowment will fund the OHC faculty research fellowship, a unique opportunity that enables faculty to focus entirely on research for a whole academic term. This fellowship allows faculty to dive deeply into their research and make groundbreaking discoveries that contribute to the entire community. The research is shared with the community through publication, conferences, scholarly talks, free public events, and in the media.
“The Oregon Humanities Center Fellowship gave me the space and time necessary to really cultivate and to translate some of the scholarly insights that I’ve learned as a music historian, into the ability to actually play some of these techniques and really inhabit these as a performer,” said Zach Wallmark, OHC Fellow and Professor of Music at the School of Music and Dance. “This has really been invaluable for the process of this project.”
“The OHC Fellowship does a really great job of giving folks like myself the space to dialogue with others, to present it in a public forum. It’s an excellent way to promote the humanities, what it brings to the table, its value, on a larger public platform,” said Professor Loza.
A gift to the endowment will support OHC in expanding research, publication, teaching, and career readiness opportunities.
—By Rosie Martin, Advancement communications student associate