Welcome Back to a New School Year
As a new school year kicks into gear, NMCC wants to send a note of welcome (and welcome back) to NMCC students, new prospective students, and our faculty affiliates.
As you get ready for your classes, we wanted to draw your attention again to the list of NMCC-eligible courses. We updated this list over summer, so check it out to see if there’s a course of interest to you that can count toward your NMCC certificate.
We also wanted to draw your attention to one new course offering that came online over summer so would not have been on your radar back in Spring. Jeremiah Favara’s ‘Digital Cultures and Sexualities’ in WGS will interrogate digital cultures as multi-faceted sites composed of material technologies, social practices, and cultural meanings that convey ideas about sexuality and gender. Drawing on the work of gender studies and new media scholars, the course will explore how sexuality and gender is articulated through narratives of technological innovation, the role of sexuality and the digital in processes of identity formation, and the possibilities and limits of digital worlds for disrupting, reinforcing, and/or challenging sexualized and gendered dynamics of power. For more information on the course see our latest NMCC blog post.
Lastly, Colin and Laura just wanted to again introduce ourselves as the new NMCC leadership. Colin Koopman (Associate Professor of Philosophy) has taken over as Director of NMCC from Kate Mondloch in the College of Design — Colin works on the politics of information, media archaeology, and data genealogy. Laura Strait (an advanced Ph.D. candidate in Media Studies in SOJC) is our new social media coordinator and administrative assistant — she works on feminism and technology, and new media and social movements.
The two of us are excited to work toward further deepening the NMCC community here on campus. We will be organizing a few open houses over the course of the year as well as a few academic-plus-social events, including a faculty book discussion, and (we hope) an invited guest lecture. Stay tuned on the blog for details on our upcoming Fall open house. In the interim, contact one or both of us with any NMCC questions you may have and we can set up a meeting or chat via email. We’re here for you.
NMCC Founding Director 
Bonnie Sheehey is a third-year PhD candidate in the Philosophy Department. Her research interests include social and political philosophy, pragmatism, 20th century French philosophy, critical theory, and media theory. She is currently working on a dissertation that “traces a philosophical mode of critique disentangled from the habits of judgment through the work of William James, Michel Foucault, and Bruno Latour. In this project, I attend to the resources these figures provide for contemporary debates in political philosophy and new media theory that concern the relation between critique and normativity.”
Ellen Gillooly-Kress is a first-year PhD student in Theatre Arts, in her third year here at the University of Oregon after receiving her MA in Linguistics in 2016. Her research has focused on “the intersection of cognitive processing of language in performance, specifically with actors and memorized lines. My focus was on cospeech gesture—what the actors were doing with their hands while speaking—and how it manifests when actors are trying to recall memorized speech. I’m fascinated by how our spontaneous behaviors we do when we are speaking every day manifest in certain kinds of “realistic” performance that is taught as part of the American theatrical tradition. I’m interested in using empirical data to reinforce the pedagogical discoveries made in the creative classroom.”