Tag: Humanities

St. Michael the Archangel: his Role in Early Christianity

Presenter: Madeline Salzman

Faculty Mentor: Dianne Dugaw, Maile Hutterer

Presentation Type: Oral

Primary Research Area: Humanities

Major: English Literature, Art History

St. Michael the Archangel occupies a unique place in early Christian art and literature, especially when compared with the other angels present in biblical material. Due to his specialized role in these narratives, St. Michael represents a powerfully-syncretic link for early Christian communities, where local traditions were adapted to new Christians ones, as well as a protector and advocate for new followers of a mysterious God. By analyzing his characteristics with those of other angels, such as St. Gabriel’s, we see with greater clarity St. Michael’s dynamic role as warrior, judicator, and protector, and how early Christians further developed and expanded his role in their faith and beliefs. Through this, we can see the creation and adaptation of legends tied to physical locations, such as the legend surrounding Mont St. Michel. His popularity spans much of the former Roman Empire, and he often seen as a figure that substitutes for God and Heaven in Byzantine art. By analyzing biblical sources, legendary materials, and art historical examples, we recognize the evolution of St. Michael’s iconography and impact, and the far-reaching effects of his role in shaping early Christian art and literature.

James Baldwin Across Literary Forms

Presenter: Samuel Rodgers

Faculty Mentor: Courtney Thorsson, Mark Whalan

Presentation Type: Oral

Primary Research Area: Humanities

Major: English, Economics

Funding Source: Humanities Undergraduate Research Fellowship, Oregon Humanities Center, $2500

My research focuses on the work of 20th-century American author and activist James Baldwin. Fifty years after his career started, our country is still facing a deeply troubling racial divide, and we consistently turn to Baldwin’s words to reconcile this divide, rather than the words of his contemporaries. Broadly, I wanted to know why. Specifically, I posit that this lasting political utility and cultural relevance stems from Baldwin’s adaptability to the various literary forms he uses to address these complex ideas around race and identity. I highlight three forms throughout my project, and analyze the ways in which Baldwin adapts the same general arguments to each.

The first section, on Baldwin’s Another Country, argues that the novel’s central metaphor of indebtedness is crucial for understanding Baldwin’s enduring approach to racial hatred. In the second section, I read two films that Baldwin appears in as extensions of his written work, and explicate the ways that these public appearances reiterate the underlying political element of his writing. The final section is on non-fiction, and here I draw comparisons between The Fire Next Time and Ta-Nahisi Coates’ 2015 book Between the World and Me. The collective goal of these three sections is to illustrate Baldwin’s rhetorical versatility, account for his current political utility, and redirect his value back into the literary context in which it originated.

“Neat, Clean, Shaved, and Sober”: Philip Marlowe as the Modern Knight in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

Presenter: Braden Prillwitz

Faculty Mentor: Mai-Lin Cheng

Presentation Type: Oral

Primary Research Area: Humanities

Major: Environmental Science, Clark Honors College

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler is the epitomic hardboiled detective novel of the 1930s, with the primary character, Phillip Marlowe, as the modern iteration of the chivalrous knight. The knight is a literary character that has long represented idealized masculine values and behavior. This research project investigates the factors that informed Chandler’s depiction of masculinity through use of various primary sources, such as newspaper reviews of Chandler’s novel, in conjunction with secondary sources, such as biographical information on Chandler and scholarly articles examining The Big Sleep. This study found that other scholars of literature corroborate Marlowe’s similarity to the chivalrous knight figure, and that Chandler’s boyhood family situation and his time spent living in the population-dense city of Los Angeles as a young man seem to have informed his decision to center his novel on a morally-correct detective. The Big Sleep was Chandler’s opportunity to define his idea of masculinity for the readers of his generation.

“Then Brynhild Laughed”: Female Heroism and Changing Tradition in Volsunga Saga

Presenter: Basil Price

Faculty Mentor: Gantt Gurley, Michael Peixoto

Presentation Type: Oral

Primary Research Area: Humanities

Major: Art, Medieval Studies

The legend of Sigurd the Dragonslayer is one of the most long-lived heroic tales in the European imagination, and the characters of Sigurd Fafnisbane, Gudrun, and Brynhild are legendary. Nonetheless, the character of Brynhild, described by Theodore Andersson as “the most complete psychological portrait, male or female in Icelandic literature” saw constant evolution and change. Her place within the legend is dependent upon missing sources, such as the hypothetical Lay of Brynhild, and the lost Meiri text. Her role is further complicated by changes in the narrative due to Christianization and regional variation between Icelandic and Germanic versions. The Icelandic narrative emphasizes her heroic traits, her self-determination, and her magical properties. But the Germanic variations are not nearly as positive, reducing her character to an eroticized prize for Sigurd to win. Although there are incongruities between Icelandic The Saga of the Volsungs and The Poetic Edda, by analyzing specific, shared motifs in conjunction with the Germanic Thidrek’s saga, it is possible to evaluate Brynhild’s role in the lost Meiri manuscript. Her virginity, her reaction to Sigurd’s death, and her relationship with Gudrun throughout the texts indicate that, just as Andersson claimed, Brynhild’s role in the Meiri is one of complex psychology, heroic self-agency, and laughter.

Canopy Connections 2016: Nurturing Connections in H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest.

Presenter: Kennedy Potts

Co-Presenters: Paige Book, Garrett Davidson, Artesia Hubbard, Allison Humphrey, Skyland Worman

Faculty Mentor: Kathryn Lynch, Kassandra Hishida

Presentation Type: Oral

Primary Research Area: Humanities

Major: Environmental Science

Children in the United States are becoming increasingly detached from nature, which has the potential to lead to a future in which the citizens of the U.S. are less environmentally literate than ever. Aside from the undeniable role of nature in our survival as a species, building children’s connection with nature has been shown to improve focus and enhance academic performance. These outcomes motivate our program, which works to build a connection between young people and the environment. The 2016 Canopy Connections Team is part of the Environmental Leadership Program at the University of Oregon, which engages students in collaborative, interdisciplinary service-learning projects addressing environmental education needs in our community. Together, we created a curriculum that will reach over 250 local middle-school students through 9 day long field trips. The field trip takes place in an old-growth ecosystem at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest (HJA) in Blue River, OR. It introduces middle-school students to several long-term ecological research projects being conducted at HJA. Using hands-on, place-based activities, we aim to empower students to gain awareness about the environment and take action to protect it. In addition, through our partnership with the Pacific Tree Climbing Institute, participants will ascend 90-feet up a Douglas-fir tree. By immersing students in an old-growth forest, we hope to strengthen their connection to the magnificent place we call home as well as inspire future environmental stewardship.

Masculinist or Humanist? An Analysis of Rhetoric in College Debate

Presenter: Amanda Perkins

Faculty Mentor: Trond Jacobsen

Presentation Type: Oral

Primary Research Area: Humanities

Major: History, French

Funding Source: HURF, $2,500

The National Parliamentary Debate Association (NPDA) tends to be male dominated and those who do not identify as men are a definitive minority. As a representative of the University of Oregon in collegiate debate, I have consistently observed a culture of masculinity. It is my perception that the most successful teams competitively are generally those who engage in debate in a masculine way by using aggressive techniques in their logic and language. I have researched feminist theories of argumentation and rhetoric and using these works, I have formulated ideas about what types of argumentation and rhetoric are gendered masculine. At the David Frank Tournament of Scholars in February 2016, I facilitated a focus group with debaters on the NPDA circuit to diversify my perspective of how masculinity presents itself in the debate space. My theoretical research coupled with the focus groups have allowed me to create a unique inventory of recognizable ways masculinity presents itself in rhetoric and argumentation. With this information, I have watched various debate rounds and recorded specific observations about performances of masculinity within them using ethnographic research methods. This project culminates in a specific analysis of how masculinity exists within this space and how it correlates to competitive success.

School House Blues: How the Bureau of Indian Affairs used the Burns Indian School to Limit Responsibility to the Northern Paiute Indians of the Burns Colony

Presenter: Madeleine Peara

Faculty Mentor: Kevin Hatfield, Jennifer O’Neal

Presentation Type: Oral

Primary Research Area: Humanities

Major: Spanish

The role of the Burns Indian School in the Burns Paiute community was greatly impacted by Burn’s status as a colony rather than a reservation. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) considered the Burns Paiutes “landless” and as a result, denied financial assistance on the grounds of ineligibility. My research addresses the role of the Indian school in Burns given this unusual status; questions: what was the role of the Indian School in the Burns community during the early 1930s, and did its status as a colony affect its responsibilities? What were the goals of the school administrators and Indian agents in the school’s establishment? To what end did the school promote Western culture? In addressing questions, I analyze general correspondence, a survey conducted by a visiting teacher, governmental records and depositions. I argue that for the BIA, the school acted as the arm of the federal government in Burns and the creation of the Burns Indian School was a step in the process of relinquishing responsibility for the funding and provision of education for Paiute children, which included Americanization of the children so that they would be acceptable to the public school. My research is salient because it tells a different story than the predominant narrative about Indian education, and focuses on a community who are underrepresented and misrepresented in historical research.

The Anthropocene and the Reinvention of the Human

Presenter: Maxfield Lydum

Faculty Mentor: Parker Krieg

Presentation Type: Oral

Primary Research Area: Humanities

Major: English

The project approaches the relationship between the Anthropocene, the proposed name for a new geologic time period in which humans are the primary force of change, and narrative. The project sets out to discover the ways in which the Anthropocene can change the way we tell stories about ourselves. The project introduces Roy Scranton’s claim that the Anthropocene means the end of human life as we know it and argues that this creates a new challenge for authors: to create narrative that arises out of an Anthropocene consciousness. With Don DeLillo’s Point Omega as a focal point, the essay describes what this consciousness can look like. It is characterized by an understanding of the human’s presence in space and time, a development that might signal an essential change in human identity. Our entering into the Anthropocene is also an entering into the realm of space-time. The document itself claims that the Anthropocene will indeed force us to reimagine the possibilities of narrative because it has already forced us to rethink identity. Narrative has the possibility of giving this Anthropocene-consciousness a body and allowing it to press its feet into the sands of geologic time.

Understanding Gender-biased Government Control

Presenter: Xiaoran Li

Co-Presenters: Jessica Hawe, Chris Wilson

Faculty Mentor: Julie Heffernan

Presentation Type: Oral

Primary Research Area: Humanities

Major: Education

Funding Source: Population press; The Washington Post

China published one-child policy in 1979. That works well in those years. However, the rate of abortion sharply increased in China. Therefore, in 2001, government published a new law to prohibit using B ultrasound to examine infants’ gender. Until 2005, Chinese government decided to abolish one-child policy. Another section that we are hoping to look into is how women hold less than 20% of the political power in Congress. A shocking statistic when over half of the population is made up of women. This is determined by many factors, one being how girls are almost invisibility put into tracks towards non-feminine professions, and pushed away from college majors like Business and Law. We hope to express how these tracks are formed, and how the politician decisions about gender made in the government is from a very unbalanced gender system. Branching off the idea that structures of government benefit from gender-biased population control, our group will allot a portion of our project to highlight and critique how young people fit within those power structures. The feature example of gender-biased government (school) control will be the existence and policing of dress code. We will go into detail the history of gender-biased body policing in schools and the radical idea that young people, particularly young women, can be politically charged against normative culture.

The Threshold of the Sublime: Standing in Awe and Fear in José María Heredia’s “En el Teocalli de Cholula”

Faculty Mentor: Justine Parkin

Presentation Type: Oral

Primary Research Area: Humanities

Major: Spanish, Comparative Literature

My research explores the interactions between humans and nature as they appear in Cuban writer José María Heredia’s prose poem “En el Teocalli de Cholula.” I argue that María Heredia engages with the sublime by presenting a simultaneous awe and fear of nature. This analysis centers on a close reading of the selected poem and draws from Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant’s conceptualizations of the sublime and contemporary, eco-critical approaches of Allen Carlson and Noël Carroll. Burke distinguishes between the beautiful and the sublime in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, but Kant provides a more critical and complex definition of the sublime in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, a more acute definition I use in my reading of María Heredia’s poem. In “Appreciation and the Natural Environment” Carlson offers three, near-emotionless, ways of viewing the aesthetics of nature while Carroll adds the importance of emotion to Carlson’s preferred model of appreciation in Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays. From this paper, readers will come to recognize that if they were to stand and look onto el Teocalli de Cholula, they too would be in the presence of the sublime. This research is significant as it crosses temporal and geographical boundaries to better understand the unique human experience of the sublime.