Oregon Humanities

We always love seeing how our partners across the country describe the work of the public humanities. This piece from our friends at Humanities New York gets right to the heart of what we do and why:

"Much of our political and digital culture encourages people to react before they have had time to think, interpret, or listen carefully. But human experience is rarely that clean or immediate. Most people understand their own lives through contradiction, memory, revision, and unfinished thought. The humanities make room for that reality."

Thanks to the HNY team for shining this light!

Read more:

www.humanitiesny.org

On this month's episode of The Detour—just in time for the World Cup—we talk with Georgia Cloepfil and Jules Boykoff, two Oregon authors who are also former pro soccer players, about politics, play, pain, and transcendence on and off the field.

https://oregonhumanities.org/rll/podcast/episode/jules-boykoff-and-georgia-cloepfil/

Congratulations to Sarah Fox, whose Watershed Rock Opera recently won an Oregon Heritage Award of Excellence. Fox was an Oregon Humanities Community Storytelling Fellow in 2025 while she was researching the production. Read about the project here: https://www.oregonhumanities.org/rll/magazine/currents-winter-2025/channeling-the-stories-of-the-local-watershed/

Congratulations—and a huge thank-you—to the team at Tonkon Torp LLP who were honored by the Multnomah Bar Association for their work on our lawsuit to hold the federal government to its commitment to fund state and territorial humanities councils.

Oregon Humanities Team at Tonkon Torp Honored with MBA Pro Bono Award of Merit Tonkon Torp attorneys Anna Sortun, Steven Wilker, Paul Balmer, and Gracey Nagle have been honored by the Multnomah Bar Association (MBA) with a 2026 Pro Bono Award of Merit. The award is in recognition of their work representing Oregon Humanities and the Federation of State Humanities Councils in Or...