Decolonizing ARH 209 History of Japanese Art

Instructor: Akiko Walley
Funded Amount: $10,660

To problematize the conventional narrative of Japanese art history, this project will overhaul ARH 209 (History of Japanese Art) by incorporating the art of the Ryūkyū Kingdom and the Ainu. The Ryūkyū was the independent kingdom that occupied the southern islets of the Japanese archipelago. The Ainu are the indigenous people who dwelled on the northern-most island now called Hokkaidō.

Japanese art history as it is taught today in Japan and elsewhere is based on the template established during this period of Japan’s imperial expansionism.This project proposes an alternate model of an art history of Japan that is more proactively place-centric, replacing the present ethnocentric discourse (i.e., art history of the Japanese people). This conceptual shift will allow the course to diversify the singular linear progression of history into histories, that is, a more nuanced interweaving of multiple temporal threads.

Public Humanities for Eugene in the Undergraduate Curriculum 

Instructors: Julie Weise and Rabbi Meir Goldstein
Funded Amount: $15,640

This project will create a cluster of two a 300-level digital humanities courses, “Creating Jewish History” in the Judaic Studies department and “Race & Migration in Eugene” in the History department. Both courses engage undergraduates in conducting original primary source research on the histories of minority communities in Lane County and sharing that research with the public on a common web platform. Students will work in small groups to create a public-facing digital project that interprets and presents local histories to the wider community.

Insider Critiques of Capitalism – A Course for Future Business Leaders and Policy Makers 

Instructor: Josh Skov
Funded Amount: $7,320

This project creates a new course that explores both the problems within western and global capitalism and the multitude of complaints and proposed reforms from observers within the system itself. The course seeks to remedy a gap in business education by leading students through a series of ‘insider critiques’ of the current capitalist system. 

A Web-Based Brain Imaging Research Experience

Instructor: Nicole Dudukovic
Funded Amount: $11,320

This project addresses the challenge of providing an accessible undergraduate research experience for students who are interested in studying the human brain.  Given the time and expense required to run a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, relatively few undergraduates can get hands-on experience with brain imaging data, yet there are many students who would like to be involved in brain imaging research.  The planned website would provide step-by-step video tutorials, modules, and instructions for using existing large-scale brain imaging datasets that are publicly available to ask novel research questions. This website will first be used and piloted in my PSY 449/549 Cognitive Neuroscience course and then made available to other faculty and graduate students who have brain imaging expertise to share with undergraduate researchers.