Clark Honors College Professor Lisa Wolverston
February 4, 2022
Story by Kayla Nguyen, CHC Communications
Photo by Jasper Zhour, CHC Communications
New Faculty-in-Residence Professor Lisa Wolverton describes her teaching goals at Clark Honors College as “working to make space for medieval stories.”
“I’m excited to turn students in the CHC on to the Middle Ages, to thinking about the distant past,” Wolverton said. “There are lots of ways we can think about our lives now by transposing them onto the past — looking at its own terms and learning from it.”
This winter, in “HC 221H: Encounters with God,” Wolverton dissects the complex relationship between human and divine. The class explores Christian spirituality in the Middle Ages at the level of the individual and in relation to broader changes in intellectual and artistic cultures over the course of a millennium.
“It’s really a course that's about examining the human condition in medieval Europe in a way that honors people at that time,” Wolverton said. “It’s not a history of theology or the Catholic Church as an institution— it’s a way of looking at what people think God is and how they talk about that. So, it’s kind of a survey, grounded in individual experience.”
Though Wolverton teaches primarily on European history, she offered a colorful perspective on the history of dogs in “HC 101: Dogs, Past and Present” last term.
“[Modern Western] pet-keeping culture, the one we take for granted, originates really in the 19th century,” Wolverton said. “We talk about domestication, and we talk about the animal mind. We sort of keep twisting the angles around it so we can do it from a lot of different sides, and that seems to suit [CHC].”
As a social historian, Wolverton is committed to conducting a thoughtful investigation into marginalized groups.
“I like to put my research in motion,” she said. “I’m interested in political power and how that’s grounded in social, economic, and cultural structures— but also how it’s dynamic, how resistance is manifested, and how power is exercised.”
Wolverton is excited to continue fostering an appreciation for historical narrative in her work within CHC.
“I’ve been here at UO for 22 years,” she said. “I’ve taught in the history department for a long time, and every once in a while, I’ve taught a class in the honors college. It just seemed, with this change with the faculty-in-residence program, I could build more of a base and contribute more at all levels of the curriculum.”