Architectural design, technology and an interest in helping others are bringing students from the University of Oregon together with artisans in a city in southeastern Mali.

Peace Corps volunteers, Karmen Unterwegner and Maridee BonaDea, reached across the continents to bring architectural design assistance to an artisan center in Koutiala, Mali. Unterwegner received her bachelor’s degree in architecture in 2008 and posed a design opportunity on email to her former instructors in Eugene. When the department received word of this opportunity, Naoto Sekiguchi, adjunct instructor, seized the idea for his summer course. He contacted BonaDea to start up this cultural exchange project.

Sekiguchi and 12 students are developing design concepts for a new facility for the Union of Associations of Artisans of Koutiala (UAAK). Koutiala, population of 110,000, has the largest cotton mill in Mali and cotton is the country’s biggest export. The intended uses of this center are to support a diverse group of craftspeople to make and sell their work, to have a meeting place for business development trainings and to provide a daycare center. Craftspeople who are members of the union include tailors, Bogolan mud cloth makers, weavers, metal smiths and members of the building trades. The class will present final designs from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on Aug. 12, in room 279 Lawrence Hall, 1190 Franklin Blvd.

The students have used the Internet to post their ideas, models, designs and sketches. They have also added profiles and photos or sketches of themselves, as well as background research on the art and craft of Mali. They conducted studies on available building materials, climate and other details pertinent to building design. The studio website is http://uoarchkoutiala.com.

Recently, the students conducted a Skype conference with BonaDea and others involved with UAAK. Subsequently, the presidents of the different artisans’ associations began discussions about the possibilities for the building.

“The designs have stimulated the artisans of Koutiala to dream of possibilities,” said BonaDea. “This project brings that dream a bit closer.”

Digging into the history of one of the West’s most celebrated mining towns, Virginia City, Mon., UO students and faculty members laid the groundwork for research and documentation on African-American pioneers. The focus of the six-month project is the Jack Taylor house and store, built in 1864. From the 1860s until the 1920s these buildings were occupied by African-Americans who ran businesses in Virginia City. Taylor owned the property around 1894 and worked as a miner, laborer, and teamster. He also owned commercial property and homesteaded a land claim.

Kingston Heath, UO Historic Preservation Program director, and two graduate students, Chrisanne Beckner and Lisa Berenschot, examined the Taylor buildings to learn more about the role of African-Americans on the mining frontier. Others on the team included adjunct instructors, Kirk Ranzetta and Shannon Bell; Tom Hubka, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukie professor and UO visiting professor; and researcher Randall Heath.

The UO’s involvement with Virginia City is captured in an upcoming television production. The broadcast on Montana Public Broadcasting is called “Virginia City…Where History Lives” and will be aired in Montana on Aug. 20, 29 and 30. In the film, Heath is interviewed and there is footage of the students working on last summer’s documentation of the Frank Finney cabin.

The team prepared analysis of the buildings’ condition, documented the construction and building details, researched the historic dates and families who lived on the site. This data will contribute to a historic structures report for these two buildings for the Montana Heritage Commission.

Virginia City is a living town of 150 year round residents and an active tourist attraction as the best preserved gold mining town from the 1860s. Virginia City has over 100 historic buildings with artifacts and furnishings.

“Our research and graphic documentation is part of the efforts to demonstrate the cultural diversity that existed in this mining frontier and unique National Historic Landmark,” said Heath. “At present, such a nuanced history of underrepresented groups is absent from the historic interpretation narrative.”

Earlier this summer, nine landscape architecture students from the University of Oregon presented analysis and design ideas to the Willamette Falls Heritage Area Coalition (WFHAC) including Alice Norris, mayor of Oregon City.

Led by Rob Ribe, professor landscape architecture and director of the Institute of Sustainable Environment, the studio, “Restoring the Magnetism of Willamette Falls,” studied existing conditions, traffic patterns, visual attractiveness issues and design ideas for revitalizing the historic landscape legacies for Willamette Falls, the horseshoe-shaped waterfall located between Oregon City and West Linn on the Willamette River.  The studio produced maps regarding ports, plans and prescriptive design concepts for WFHAC.

“Establishing a heritage area is one of West Linn’s priorities and the coalition brings together representatives from Oregon City and West Linn as well as the county, state and other interested parties to make a National Heritage Area a reality,” said Jody Carson, West Linn City Council president.

The course met several of Ribe’s goals. “I am always attracted to work on complex problems with difficult institutional challenges when teaching,” he said. “These projects engage my interest in the interaction of policy, planning and design and they always teach my students a lot more by engaging in those interactions rather than just accepting a site, program and existing constraints, normally set in defining a design problem.”

Ribe’s studio was the final of three design studios offered by the UO’s Department of Landscape Architecture to examine design options for this unique area. WFHAC funded the studio to improve public access to the falls and eventually earn it special status as a national heritage area.

The UO was approached by Oregon State Parks to assist the planning and design staff in exploring options for the volunteer organization spearheading the effort.

“It was re-energizing to witness the students’ depth of understanding of the environment, the history, the design and the challenges of revitalizing this area,” said Norris. “Their work took us ‘outside the box’ and, I believe, will inspire us to think differently about pieces of our work.”

“We are working on a feasibility study for the national heritage area that will eventually be presented to Congress. [Professor Ribe’s students’] work is vital and will be incorporated into this document,” said Mark Davison, the master planning coordinator for the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department.

Seven UO faculty members have received Fulbright Scholar awards to teach and conduct research abroad during the 2009-10 academic year. Fulbright award recipients are selected on the basis of academic or professional achievement, as well as demonstrated leadership potential in their fields. The seven UO recipients are Dennis Galvan, Renee Irvin, John Miller, Doris Payne, William Rossi, Marc Schlossberg and Magid Shirzadegan.

Dennis Galvan, professor of international studies and political science, will depart this fall for a research grant in Senegal, West Africa. In his Fulbright year, Galvan is developing a network of scholars from across the West African region to explore hybrid institutions for managing conflict between ethnic groups. Over the last 20 years Galvan has done field work in and around Toucar, a small village in rural Senegal. His interest is in politics and economic development as seen, felt and understood from the bottom up. By doing research that’s very close to the lives and experiences of ordinary people, Galvan is able to show how, in places like Toucar, people neither fully embrace nor completely reject new, foreign ways of organizing free markets, setting up democracy or building nations.

“Instead they borrow a bit from their old traditions and mix in what they consider the best of modern models to make syncretic blends or hybrids,” says Galvan. “The resulting versions of markets, democracy and the nation might look pretty strange to Western eyes, but make a lot of sense to local people and, critically, hold their trust.”

For Renee Irvin, professor of planning, public policy and management, director of the nonprofit graduate certificate program, and coordinator of finance and operations for the school of architecture and allied arts, the lectureship award presents a wonderful opportunity to study personal income and wealth policy from an international perspective. Irvin will teach for one semester at Zhongshan University (also known as Sun Yat-Sen University) in Guangzhou, a heavily developed province in the South, close to the industrial powerhouse regions of Shenzhen and Hong Kong.

“I will also be able to observe China’s nonprofit/nongovernmental sector growth up close, which may lead to future comparative studies of U.S./Chinese civil society and social entrepreneurship,” she said.

John Miller, professor of couples and family therapy in the College of Education, will also travel to China. The objective of his project is to develop and study solution-focused therapy service to be piloted at the Institute of Developmental Psychology at Beijing Normal University. While most Chinese therapies are based on Western models, few studies have explored how to adapt the practice of therapy to fit the Chinese culture. The results of this project will help inform the development of culturally congruent therapies and aid in the effort to overcome common barriers to service around the world.

“It is a great honor for me to have a chance to conduct this research in China as a Fulbright scholar,” said Miller. “The award will provide a rare opportunity to spend a significant amount of time in China at a moment in history when there are many changes and advances occurring. My hope is that this will foster a line of research and scholarship that will continue for many years into the future.”

Doris Payne, professor of linguistics, will participate in the African Regional Research Program in Tanzania. She will work on linguistic analysis of Il-Parakuyo Maa (Masai), which is spoken in south-central Tanzania. The focus of the research is on verb and clause structure of the language, how many varieties are spoken in Kenya and the implications for developing a dictionary, grammar and other language materials for Maa speakers. The last research of the language was conducted around 1850 and a goal of the project is to evaluate how the language has changed.

This is the second Fulbright Scholar award for  William Rossi, professor of English. His first award was in 2002-03 when he received a lectureship in Heidelberg, Germany. His second award, this time in Freiburg, Germany, is a senior lecture/research award to “transplant Oregon Green Studies in Germany.” As a specialist in American literature and environmental humanities with particular interests in the writings of Henry David Thoreau, and a member of the English Department’s Environmental Literature faculty group, Rossi will teach courses in ecocriticism while collaborating with American Studies faculty at the University of Freiburg. Rossi’s project calls for transplanting Oregon approaches to Germany with the expectation that those approaches will be hybridized in return.

“Like many U.S. American Studies scholars, much of my work as a scholar and teacher of American transcendentalism and environmental studies has been pursued within an exclusively U.S. framework,” said Rossi.

Marc Schlossberg, professor in the department of planning, public policy and management, will depart for the United Kingdom in August where he has accepted a Fulbright award with the University of Sheffield. His research project, “Sustainable City Design, Active Transportation and Citizen Engagement,” will examine how urban form influences walking and biking. Specifically, he will look at neighborhood design, children’s travel routes to school, and citizen’s role and engagement in neighborhood mapping. Schlossberg will also teach two courses.

“I expect this Fulbright award to open many doors, initiate a new avenue of applied research for me personally, and add breadth and depth to the new Sustainable Cities Initiative at the University of Oregon,” said Schlossberg.

Magid Shirzadegan, director of international student and scholar services, participated in an international education administrators award in Korea last month.

“Participation in the Fulbright in Korea opened my eyes to a very rich culture. In spite of the small size of the Korean peninsula and constant threat by its powerful neighbors, it has been thriving economically and technologically. I believe one of the main explanations for this success story lies in the strength and resilience of Korean people,” said Shirzadegan.

Shirzadegan and other participants visited more than 10 institutions of higher education in Seoul, Taegu, Daejeon and Pusan. “Most major universities in Korea teach hundreds of courses in English attracting thousands of students from all over the world, primarily from East and South-East Asia,” he said. “The experience and knowledge I gained from the Fulbright would not only benefit me and my own work, but it could also be useful to the larger community of faculty and administrators at the UO.”

The Fulbright Scholar Program, sponsored by the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, is America’s flagship international educational exchange program. Since its inception in 1946, the Fulbright Program has sponsored approximately 273,500 American and foreign scholars. Recipients are selected based on academic or professional achievement as well as demonstrated leadership potential in their fields.

Faculty members of the School of Architecture and Allied Arts were co-authors on two of the most-cited academic papers published in 2000-2008 by the Journal of the American Planning Association. Both articles, published in 2006, examined the connection between neighborhood design, physical activity and health.

Citation of one’s research by others is an indication of the contributions the cited paper has had in subsequent research in a field of study. The two UO-connected papers were among the top 11.

Marc Schlossberg and Jessica Greene, both associate professors in the department of planning, public policy and management, were lead authors of “School Trips: Effects of Urban Form and Distance on Travel Mode,” which appeared in the Summer 2006 issue. The research looked at neighborhood design and the likelihood of children to walk or bike to school. Other co-authors were Page Paulsen Phillips, then a UO graduate student, and Bethany Johnson and Bob Parker, both PPPM instructors.

In the Winter 2006 issue, Schlossberg and Jean Stockard, also a PPPM professor, were co-authors of “Active Community Environments and Health,” a paper that examined metropolitan areas across the country to understand the connection between urban form and overall health of the population. Graduate student Scott Doyle, now a planning specialist in Ithaca, N.Y., and undergraduate student Alexia Kelly-Schwartz also were co-authors.

Taken together, the research shows that areas with better street connectivity result in more walking and better overall health of the population. The results also point to the need to retrofit less well connected suburban areas of the country as a necessary prerequisite for more sustainable and active forms of transportation such as biking and walking. The goal of the research is to increase biking and walking as more significant shares of overall transportation trips.

“I am very honored to be not only among the top 11 cited articles in the most prestigious academic journal in my field, but to be the only researcher to have two citations in the top 11,” Schlossberg said. “The research, however, was conducted with teams of colleagues and students at the University of Oregon. So I think, more than anything, this recognition shows the high level of skill and the desire for collaborative research within the department.”

Brian W. Matthews, a UO physicist in the Institute of Molecular Biology, was profiled in the June 26 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry as part of the journal’s long-running centennial series.

Two groundbreaking studies from the 1970s by the Australian-born Matthews were republished and noted for their contributions to the understanding of thermolysin, an enzyme used widely in research on protein structure. Matthews was first to publish the three-dimensional structure of the enzyme in 1972. Two years later he provided an important electron density map. His work shed remarkable light on its various interactions.

The two articles reprinted by JBC appeared in 1974 and 1977. Matthew’s conclusions, according to the journal, have held up in all subsequent studies of proteins taken from thermophiles, organisms that thrive in extremely hot environments such as hot springs at Yellowstone National Park or deep-sea hydrothermal vents.

Matthews joined the UO faculty after completing a postdoctoral fellowship, 1967-69, at the National Institutes of Health. He continues to study protein folding and stability. He also is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator

“Deception in the Marketplace: The Psychology of Deceptive Persuasion and Consumer Self Protection,” will be published May 12, by Routledge Academic/Psychology Press. The book is written by three professors of marketing at the Lundquist College of Business, David Boush, Marian Friestad and Peter Wright.

This is the first scholarly book to fully address the topics of the psychology of deceptive persuasion in the marketplace and consumer self-protection. Chapters cover theoretical perspectives on deceptive persuasion; different types of deception tactics; how deception-minded marketers think; prior research on how people cope with deceptiveness; the nature of marketplace deception protection skills; how people develop deception protection skills in adolescence and adulthood; prior research on teaching consumers marketplace deception protection skills; and societal issues such as regulatory frontiers, societal trust, and consumer education practices.
–Submitted by Peter Wright

Delving into the World War II internment history of Japanese Americans, students from the University of Oregon’s department of architecture will design ways to tell the story.

During spring term, students in Kevin Nute’s architecture studio will design visitor interpretative facilities at Minidoka National Historic Site in Idaho and at the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center in Portland.

To gather research from the individuals whose lives were most affected by the internment, the university will host a free, public lecture series. Four lectures, entitled “Outside Inside: The Pacific Northwest’s Japanese American Internment Remembered,” will be given, including a discussion with former internees who attended UO as students.

The lectures will examine social, legal and racial aspects of the internment and their relevance today. All lectures will be held in 177 Lawrence Hall, 1190 Franklin Blvd.

• Wednesday, April 15, 6 p.m.: Peggy Nagae, “The Legal Implications of Japanese American Internment: Then and Now.” Nagae was the lead attorney for the Yasui vs. the United States appeal, former assistant dean of the University of Oregon School of Law, and principal, Peggy Nagae Consulting.

• Wednesday, May 6, 6 p.m.: Henry Sakamoto, Alice Sumida, George Azumano and Kennie Namba, “Experiences of Japanese American Internees from Oregon.” Three former UO students and a veteran of the all-Japanese 442nd Infantry Regiment, all held at Minidoka, Idaho.

• Wednesday, June 3, 7 p.m.: Wendy Janssen, “Remembering the Japanese American Internment in the Pacific Northwest: The Future of Minidoka National Historic Site.” Janssen is the superintendent for the National Park Service for Minidoka National Historic Site in southern Idaho where the majority of Oregon’s Japanese American population was incarcerated between 1942 and 1945.

The architecture studio and accompanying lecture series are sponsored by the UO’s Joel Yamauchi Fund donated by MulvannyG2 Architects, the university’s Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity and the President’s Office. Along with thousands of other Japanese Americans from Oregon, Yamauchi’s grandfather, parents and older brother were sent to Minidoka internment camp during World War II. His father George was one of the many who enlisted in the U.S. military while being held in internment.

During the early 1940s, a Presidential Executive Order forced all people of Japanese ancestry living in the western United States to be placed in internment camps. While a majority of the 120,000 men, women and children incarcerated were born in the United States, they were sent to the internment based on their ethnicity.

For information about the series or for accommodation, call 541-346-3656.

Reuben Zahler, professor at the Robert D. Clark Honors College, was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities summer stipend. He will go to Venezuela this summer for a month of archival work to finish his book.

Professor Joseph Fracchia won the Sherl K. Coleman and Margaret E. Guitteau Professorship in the Humanities for the next academic year. The award provides faculty with a teaching fellowship during one academic quarter, and then with a research fellowship the following quarter to pursue full-time research on one or more of the topics explored in the course.

Professor Susanna Lim was awarded the Ernest G. Moll Faculty Research Professorship in Literary Studies for the next academic year. The fellowship is awarded each year to the Oregon Humanities Center Research Fellowship applicant with the most outstanding proposal in the field of literary studies. The Moll Professor receives a course buy-out for one term, to be spent in residence at the Oregon Humanities Center, as well as a $1,000 research account to be used during the fellowship year.

The University of Oregon has received grant funding from the Office of Postsecondary Education to implement Project ExCEL- UO ( Expanding Cultural Awareness of Exceptional Learners at the University of Oregon). The goal of Project ExCEL is to improve the experience of students with disabilities at the UO by providing all faculty members with additional information and training related to understanding and teaching students with disabilities. This professional development model will be implemented collaboratively by faculty in Special Education and Clinical Sciences and Disability Services. The model includes three interrelated training components that together are designed to impact the overall culture of the university in ways that make it more responsive to the needs of students with disabilities.

In order to effectively use the grant funding, a survey has been designed for all teaching faculty. If you are currently teaching, or have taught classes in the past, please take the time to complete the survey. Your input is valuable; it will help us assess the current campus climate and plan future instructional opportunities for the duration of the grant.

The survey should take about 20 minutes to complete. In addition, please accept an Allann Brothers discount coupon as a token of our appreciation for your time. Both the survey and the coupon are available at http://www.uoregon.edu/~allisonl/.

There is a written consent form at the beginning of the survey. By indicating “yes” you are giving consent to participate. Your participation is voluntary.

For more information, contact Allison Lombardi, project coordinator at 541-255-9405 or allisonl@uoregon.edu.

The University of Oregon is well known for the opportunities it offers undergraduates to conduct original research while completing their degree programs. Five UO faculty members recently demonstrated why the UO has that reputation by mentoring students enrolled in their classes in conducting original research. Students earned $1,000 scholarship awards in the UO Libraries’ annual Undergraduate Research Awards competition.

The faculty mentors are Ron Mitchell, political science; Jon Palfreman, journalism and communication; Peggy Pascoe, history; Jeremy Piger, economics; and Sherwin Simmons, art history. Each taught a course that required students to complete original research papers or projects, and nominated a student who won an award.

Mitchell’s student, Katherine Boom, won an award for her paper, “The Convention for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna: Examining State Behavior under Binding and Nonbinding Accords.” Boom wrote her paper for Mitchell’s Political Science 477 course, “International Environmental Politics.”

Two of Palfreman’s students in his Journalism 410 course, “Documentary Flux,” produced a documentary film project, “Reinventing Ed’s Coed.” Students John Rosman and Eric Rutledge shared the scholarship prize.
In Pascoe’s History 407 seminar, “Gender, Race, and Sex in U.S. History,” student Mike Lobel wrote an award-winning paper entitled “Indomitable Spirits: The Interrelationship Between the Women’s Suffrage and the Prohibition Movements in Oregon from 1883 to 1914.”

A student in Piger’s Economics 607 class, “Econometrics I—Time-Series Econometrics,” also received an Undergraduate Research Award. Kiwako Sakamoto researched and wrote “An Examination of the Time Series Evidence on AK-Style Endogenous Growth Models.”

Simmons nominated student Adam Lesh for an award. Lesh wrote his paper, “Saint-Victoire: The Enduring Motif,” in Simmons’s Art History 353 course, “Modern Art, 1880-1950.”

Members of the faculty selection committee for the 2009 Undergraduate Research Awards were Andrew Bonamici (chair), associate university librarian, Instructional Services, UO Libraries; Barbara Jenkins, director, Instructional Services and Campus Partnerships, UO Libraries; and Alisa Freedman, assistant professor, East Asian Languages and Literature.

The annual competitive Undergraduate Research Awards program, which is in its fourth year, honors UO students who produced outstanding original research and scholarship in the previous calendar year using resources available through the UO Libraries. The awards are made possible by endowments established through the generous support of Milton C. and Barbara B. Sparks and Jon and Lisa Stine, as well as gifts from Walter and Gretchen Barger.

This year’s award recipients and their sponsoring faculty members will be honored for their achievements at an awards dinner, and electronic copies of winning papers will be deposited in Scholars’ Bank, the university’s open access archive for University of Oregon research, publications, and supporting materials in digital form. For more information on the Undergraduate Research Awards, visit http://libweb.uoregon.edu/general/libaward.html.

Art history professor Andrew Schulz is off campus this year studying an overlooked period of Spanish history — 1750 to 1820 — when cultural and visual contributions of the Spain’s Islamic past began to surface in the works of European artists, writers and politicians.

Schulz says he was drawn to the period when he inadvertently stumbled onto a lot of material almost nine years ago in Madrid while working on his book “Goya’s Caprichos: Aesthetics, Perception, and the Body,” which earned him the 2007 Eleanor Tufts Prize from the American Society for Hispanic Art Historical Studies.

“I first became interested in the legacy of Islamic Spain quite by accident in the Spanish national library, when I came across a quite amazing collection of prints made in the 18th century documenting the Alhambra and the Great Mosque in Córboda,” Schulz said. “In the course of researching that publication, which translates in English as ‘The Arabian Antiquities of Spain,’ I came to realize that there was much larger story that had never been told regarding 18th-century fascination with the Islamic past in Spain, a story that relates not only to art and architecture, but also to literature and language.”

Schulz is in Los Angeles through June as a Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute. Last fall, he was a visiting scholar in Zamora, Mexico, at the Center for Historical Studies at the College of Michoacán. A large portion of Schulz’s research leave is funded by a 2008-09 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which began in April 2008 and ends in March. Schulz was among 96 fellows chosen from over 1,250 applicants and funded to pursue advanced research that usually results in a major completed project.

Every year since 1985 the Getty Research Institute, operated under the umbrella of the J. Paul Getty Trust, has invited scholars, artists, and other cultural figures from around the world to work in residence on projects that bear upon its annual research theme. This year’s theme is “Networks and Boundaries.” Schulz is focusing on the historical construction of boundaries involving ‘Moorish’/Spanish, Muslim/Christian and East/West that in many ways, he says, governs 21st century conceptions of the arts and collective historical identity of the Iberian Peninsula.

Schulz has been commissioned by the J. Paul Getty Museum to write a book, “Goya and the Art of the Bullfight,” which will feature a painting of the bullfight made by Goya late in his career and which is in the Getty collection.

Schulz returns to campus in the fall, when he will resume teaching and become head of the art history department.