Fred Moten Reading

Please join us for the second event in the Spring 2017 Hallie Ford Literary Series at Willamette University, a reading by Fred Moten, acclaimed poet and scholar of African American literature and culture. The reading will take place on Wednesday, March 8, at 4:30 p.m. in the Hatfield Room of Willamette’s library. The event is free and open to the public.

Fred Moten, Professor of English, U of California

is the author of eight volumes of poetry, including The Feel Trio, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of a California Book Award. His most recent collections include, The Little Edges, published by Wesleyan University Press in 2015, and The Service Porch, published by Letter Machine Editions in 2016; his scholarly books include In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, and The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, coauthored with Stefano Harney. He teaches at the University of California, Riverside.

In 2009, Moten was recognized as one of ten “New American Poets” by the Poetry Society of America. Poet and nonfiction author Maggie Nelson writes of his work, “With insistence, music, and a measured softness, Fred Moten’s poems construct idiosyncratic, critical canons that invite our research and repay our close attention. … It is hard to make poetry that shimmers on such an edge. Moten does so, and then some.”

Read Moten’s poem “The Salve Trade” here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/53480

And read a recent interview here: http://lithub.com/an-interview-with-fred-moten-pt-i/

(Image source: http://english.ucr.edu/people/faculty/fred-moten)
(Text source: Scott Nadelson, Hallie Ford Chair in Writing; Department Chair of English)


Louis Bunce: Dialogue with Modernism Exhibit

January 21 – March 26, 2017

Melvin Henderson-Rubio Gallery

The Mark O. Hatfield Library will exhibit a few Modernism art works created by Portland artist Louis Bunce through March 26th, 2017.  Also included in this exhibit are a collection of books from our stacks on the topic of Modernism in the arts, all of which are available to check out.

(From the Hallie Ford Museum of Art’s blog post…)

The Hallie Ford Museum of Art is pleased to present a major retrospective exhibition for Louis Bunce (1907-1983), a legendary Portland painter, printmaker, and teacher who taught at the Museum Art School from 1946 to 1972 and who influenced several generations of Oregon artists. Organized by Professor Emeritus of Art History and Senior Faculty Curator Roger Hull, the exhibition will chronicle the artist’s career over a 57 year period and features 49 paintings drawn from public and private collections throughout the United States.

Hull says, “Bunce was Oregon’s archetypal modern artist of the mid-twentieth century. ‘Louie,’ as he was called, was ambitious, gregarious, fun-loving, women-loving, antic and outrageous. He was deadly serious when it came to art-making and engaged with it all: Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Post-Modernism, and at the end of his life almost operatic Romanticism.”

Born in Wyoming, Bunce moved with his family to Oregon in his youth, studied at the Museum Art School for a year, and moved to New York in the late 1920s to study at the Art Students League. At the League, he met Jackson Pollock, another Wyoming native, and they established an on-going friendship that lasted until Pollock’s death. In fact, it was Bunce who introduced Pollock to artist Lee Krasner, who would eventually become Pollock’s wife. Although Bunce returned to Portland, Oregon, he maintained strong ties with many other notable artists of the New York School throughout his career.

As a painter and printmaker, Bunce was a rising star in American art of the 1940s and 1950s. In painting, his WPA work from the 1930s gave way to inventive Surrealist forms in the 1940s, to nature-based abstract expressionist work in the 1950s and 1960s. He and his work were featured in a full-color article in Life magazine in 1957, and he was represented in New York by the John Heller Gallery and the Doris Meltzer Gallery. In the 1970s, he experimented with hard-edge geometric compositions and Pop-related imagery while his last works feature light-saturated seascapes.


Faculty Colloquium: Richard Francaviglia

Dear Colleagues,

Please join us this week, Friday, February 3rd at 3 pm. in the Hatfield Room for our second Faculty Colloquium of this semester. Treats will be provided.

Richard Francaviglia
, Professor Emeritus
Title: Imagining the Atacama Desert 

Through the analysis of maps and written narratives I will demonstrate how the Atacama Desert of South America was discovered, and then re-discovered, over nearly five centuries in a series of sequential phases. From about 1530 to 1700, “Atacama” designated a remote but strategic political province whose lack of population rather than desert climate was emphasized. After about 1700, however, the Atacama began to be identified as an arid region as a result of increasingly scientific mapping and exploration. In this transitional phase, the Atacama was part of a broader pattern in which the political mapping of empires was gradually supplemented by thematic physical or scientific mapmaking. In the third stage, which began in the mid-1830s, the Atacama Desert became linked to increasingly strong nationalist impulses and the rapidly growing power of international corporate developments in transportation and mineral extraction. In the fourth and current stage, which began about 1945, the Atacama began to be promoted and marketed as the quintessential desert worth experiencing for its uniqueness — something early explorers would have found incomprehensible. Past, present, and future, the Atacama reveals much about how places are discovered, and then re-discovered, through time.

Please feel free to invite students to attend this talk.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Doreen Simonsen and Daniel Rouslin
Faculty Colloquium Coordinators


Hallie Ford Literary Series: David Shields

Please join us for the first event of the Spring 2017 Hallie Ford Literary Series, a reading by acclaimed essayist David Shields on Thursday, February 2, at 7:30 p.m. The event takes place in the Hatfield Room of Willamette’s Hatfield Library and is free and open to the public. Books will be for sale courtesy of the Willamette Store.

David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of twenty books, including Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (named one of the best books of 2010 by more than thirty publications), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), and Black Planet (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award). Just published is War Is Beautiful (powerHouse, November 2015), a critical examination of war photography in the New York Times. His newest book, Other People: Takes & Mistakes, is forthcoming from Knopf in February 2017. The recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, Shields has published essays and stories in the New York Times MagazineHarper’sEsquireYale ReviewVillage VoiceSalonSlateMcSweeney’s, and Believer. His work has been translated into twenty languages.

In his review of Reality Hunger in the New York TimesLuc Sante calls Shields “a benevolent and broad-minded revolutionary, urging a hundred flowers to bloom, toppling only the outmoded and corrupt institutions. His book may not presage sweeping changes in the immediate future, but it probably heralds what will be the dominant modes in years and decades to come.”

Read the whole review here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/books/review/Sante-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Or watch David interviewed by Stephen Colbert here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/15/stephen-colbert-author-in_n_538869.html


Faculty Colloquium: Maegan Parker Brooks

Dear Colleagues,

Please join us this week, Friday, January 27th at 3 pm. in the Hatfield Room for our first Faculty Colloquium of this semester. Treats will be provided.

Maegan Parker Brooks
, Assistant Professor of Civic Communication and Media
 

Title:  Emmett’s Life Matters: Enthymematic Reasoning and Memetic Representation in Contemporary Public Discourse

The name, the face, and the story of Emmett Till, the black teenager who was lynched in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman, are reemerging in America’s collective consciousness. This presentation will consider how the figure of Till figures within contemporary verbal and visual media. I will examine popular newspaper and magazine articles, as well as widely-circulated memes, explicating their implicit social knowledge premises in relation to three audience groups. For contemporary activists, establishing connections between Till, the mid-twentieth century Black Freedom Movement, and America’s current racial climate offers direction to a nascent movement. For experientially external yet sympathetic audiences, evoking the Till tragedy provides form and substance to the abstract condition of mourning endured by blacks in America. For those external and previously disinterested audiences, memes visually linking Till to the contemporary deaths of unarmed black youth create dialectical tensions which hold the affective capacity to stimulate an acknowledgment of how post-racial inaction perpetuates entrenched patterns of injustice.

Please feel free to invite students to attend this talk.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Doreen Simonsen and Daniel Rouslin
Faculty Colloquium Coordinators


Faculty Colloquium: Sarah Bishop

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Sarah Clovis Bishop, Associate Professor of Russian, will talk at this Friday’s Faculty Colloquium on Performing the Poet: Elena Shvarts’s “The Visible Side of Life.” Dec. 2nd @ 3 pm. in the Hatfield Room. Treats will be provided.

In 2010, director Boris Pavlovich and actress Yana Savitskaya created and staged The Visible Side of Life, a one-woman show based on the prose and poetry of Elena Shvarts (1948-2010), a central figure in late Soviet and post-Soviet Russian literature. Then based in Kirov, Russia at the “Theater on Spasskaya,” Savitskaya and Pavlovich had been exploring Shvarts’s verse for over a year, delving into her autobiographical prose to understand it more fully. Just as they were ready to approach the poet about their work, they learned of her death. They abandoned their poetic etudes and turned instead to a dramatic work in which they imagined the last hours of the poet’s life. Pavlovich has described it as a “quasi-biography”; an image of “our Elena Shvarts whom we failed to meet.”

The performance has since traveled to St. Petersburg, Shvarts’s home, and is now part of the repertory at the Bolshoi Drama Theater (BDT). Most recently, the show received its American premiere at Princeton, Harvard, and right here at Willamette. I will discuss the performance in its various incarnations, highlighting the many boundaries that it tests–between reality and fantasy; the visible and invisible; prose and poetry; performer and audience.

All are invited to attend this talk. We look forward to seeing you there.

Doreen Simonsen and Daniel Rouslin
Faculty Colloquium Coordinators


Faculty Colloquium: Rethinking the Oregon Story

Please join us this week, Friday, November 18th at 3 pm. in the foss_smHatfield Room for our ninth Faculty Colloquium of this semester.  Treats will be provided.

Christopher Foss
, Adjunct Professor, Tokyo International University of America
 

Title:  Rethinking the Oregon Story: The Importance of International Affairs to Oregon’s Political History Since World War II

Oregon’s political history has traditionally been summed up by a self-confident, even triumphal, phrase: “The Oregon Story”.  In the narrative expounded by proponents of The Oregon Story, visionary political leaders—particularly Governors Tom McCall and Robert Straub—and a variety of like-minded grassroots politicians and activists saved post-World War II Oregon from the urban decay and environmental degradation that plagued many other states.  My work argues, by contrast, that the real Oregon story had less to do with innovations within the state, and more to do with the state’s relationship to the world.  By refocusing Oregon’s political history on elected officials who were active in international affairs, and by analyzing patterns of defense spending, trade, and immigration, this project encourages us to reconceive the Oregon story beyond state—and even national—boundaries.  I contend that after World War II, Oregon became not only a more livable state thanks to McCall and Straub, but, perhaps surprisingly, a more economically and culturally diverse place, thanks to a new focus by its civic, business, and community leaders on the ways it is interconnected with the globe.

Please feel free to invite students to attend this talk.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Doreen Simonsen and Daniel Rouslin
Faculty Colloquium Coordinators


Annual Tree of Giving Book Drive

The annual Tree of Giving Book Drive has officially begun.

The Hatfield Library, The Willamette Store and the Bistro are seeking donations of new or slightly used children’s books to be donated to Swegle Elementary School‘s library. We also encourage you to donate hats, gloves and scarves for students at Swegle.

The last day to donate is Tuesday, December 20. Items can be dropped off at The Willamette Store, Hatfield Library, Bistro or Sparks Athletic Center.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask. Attached is an image of the poster for distribution on social media.

Thank you for your support!

 

2016-tog-poster

 

 

 


(Update January 4th, 2017)

Thank you for your support of the 2016 Tree of Giving Book Drive sponsored by the Mark O. Hatfield Library, the Willamette Store and the Bistro. We collected 171 books, 20 pairs of gloves, 6 scarves and 4 hats. The books will be added to Swegle Elementary School’s library and the gloves, scarves and hats will be distributed by the employees and teachers to students in need.

Again, thank you for your continued support and we look forward to the 2017 book drive.


Faculty Colloquium: Doing Data Science

chengsmPlease join us tomorrow, Friday, November 4th at 3 pm. in the Hatfield Room for our seventh Faculty Colloquium of this semester.  Treats will be provided.

Haiyan Cheng
, Associate Professor of Computer Science
 

Title:  Doing Data Science

Computational Science and Engineering combines theory and experiments for scientific discovery. It is interdisciplinary in nature, requiring subject knowledge in 1) applied discipline, 2) mathematics and 3) computer science. With the evolutionary extension of statistics capable of dealing with the massive amount of data produced today, data science has becoming the new trend, and it helped scientific discovery extending from natural science to humanities and social sciences.

My research deals with designing new computational algorithms to make forecast models more accurate. Specifically, I optimally combine observational data with the model forecast data through a method called “Data Assimilation”.

In this talk, I will report how the amount of available observational data has changed and inspired my research. I will report two of my sabbatical projects that involving hands-on data science. The first one is my experience participating a Datathon (an intensive programming competition) at a computational social science conference; using social media data to answer U.S. election related questions. The second one is my experience participating a one-week workshop, using real criminal data to infer networks for predictive policing.

Finally, I will talk about the basics in doing data science and introduce commonly used tools.

Please feel free to invite students to attend this talk.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Doreen Simonsen and Daniel Rouslin
Faculty Colloquium Coordinators


Faculty Colloquium, Ivan Welty

Please join us this Friday, September 16th at 3 pm. in the Hatfield Room for our second Faculty Colloquium of this semester. Treats will be provided.

Ivan Welty, Associate Professor of Philosophy

Title: My Semester in Hanoi

Abstract: Last year I spent 6 months in Hanoi as a Fulbright US Scholar. In this talk, I’ll describe the experience, concentrating on (1) the current scene in Vietnam as I came to understand it; (2) tips for colleagues weighing their own Fulbright applications, including practical matters like housing and children’s schooling; and (3) possibilities for future collaboration and exchange with partners in Vietnam. So my aim is both to report my experience and to arouse interest at Willamette in Fulbright and Vietnam.

Please feel free to invite students to attend this talk.