Center for the Humanities

J Nicole von Germeten | Professor of History and Associate Dean

nicole.vongermeten@oregonstate.edu

Nicole von Germeten leads the Center for the Humanities, and also serves as the Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and the lead administrator for the Marine Studies undergraduate degree.

Joy Jensen | Research Program Coordinator

joy.jensen@oregonstate.edu

Joy Jensen helps structure and coordinates residency and fellowship programs for PRAx, the Spring Creek Project, and the Center for the Humanities. She works with artists, writers, scientists, students, and our partners to shape meaningful, productive experiences. As an Oregon Master Naturalist, she’s actively engaged with ecological restoration projects, community wildfire preparedness, and conducting bird surveys for conservation groups and private landholders. Her favorite USGS Breeding Bird Survey route lets her explore the rugged and beautiful Oregon Siskiyous. She can also fix your typewriter. 

David Robinson | Director Emeritus 

David Robinson served as Director of the Center for the Humanities from 2001 to 2017. Before retirement, Robinson held the position of Oregon Professor of English, the first endowed professorship in the College of Liberal Arts at Oregon State University. In 1994, he was awarded an OSU Distinguished Professorship. His research has focused on the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau and other authors connected with the New England Transcendentalist movement. From 1988-2008 he was author of the chapter “Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller and Transcendentalism” in American Literary Scholarship, the annual review published by Duke University Press. And from 1989-1998, through grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, he conducted a series of Summer Seminars for School Teachers on the OSU campus that brought U.S and international educators together for intensive studies of Thoreau and American cultural transformation.

Robinson has held research fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and in 2010, was elected a Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society. His writings include a study of Emerson’s later work, Emerson and the Conduct of Life (Cambridge University Press, 1993), and a study of Thoreau’s work as a naturalist and environmental philosopher, Natural Life: Thoreau’s Worldly Transcendentalism (Cornell University Press, 2004).