The Social Justice minor provides interdisciplinary academic classes in which students think critically about social justice and experiential learning activities in which students engage in the work of social justice.
The studio art program is an interdisciplinary curriculum that enables students to gain a deeper understanding of their own ideas and how they relate to larger historical and cultural contexts. Courses at the 100 level stress fundamental aspects of visual literacy. Courses numbered 200 through 499 offer increasingly intensive study in painting, printmaking, sculpture, expanded media, and drawing. We have an outstanding scholarship program, and we encourage majors to apply for these awards.
The course requirements for students pursuing a Theatre Arts option are designed with the intention of allowing students and their faculty advisers to devise a program most suited to the student's specific needs and objectives.
User experience and research focuses on the psychological aspects of the field of human’s interactions with computer technologies. User experience research is a subarea of Human Computer Interaction and the behavior sciences.
The School of Writing, Literature, and Film offers a Writing Minor that is distinctive and flexible. Coursework toward a the Writing Minor may be taken on-campus or through Ecampus, or with a combination of on-campus and Ecampus courses.
More information about medical school, and careers in medicine, can be found at the College of Science's Premedical website. The medical preceptorship program is designed for junior and senior pre-medical students interested in gaining valuable experience in the medical field. Students are matched with community physicians according to the student's interests and availability in local hospitals, clinics and physicians' offices.
On April 14th at the OSU CH2M HILL Alumni Center, over 620 people instantly quieted as Dean of the College of Liberal Arts Larry Rodgers took the stage to introduce renowned poet Rita Dove. There was not an empty seat in the house as she accepted the prestigious Stone Award, presented to her by President Ed Ray. Rita spoke on the importance of poetry to the world, read several of her poems from her new collection, and answered questions from the audience on her writing process and her opinions on written versus spoken word.
Grassroots Books and Music, a small bookstore in downtown Corvallis, was also in attendance. The store had contacted the publisher of Rita’s new collection of poems and was able to make the book available to the OSU community nearly a month before it will be released to anyone or anywhere else in the world.
Earlier that day Rita spoke to the graduate students of the School of Writing, Literature, and Film and gave a second reading the following day at the First Congregational United Church of Christ in Portland.
The video below, shown at both the Corvallis and Portland readings, depicts the outreach to bring Rita's poetry to the community in honor of her visit to receive the Stone Award. These events included writing workshops in local schools and public libraries led by OSU School of Writing, Literature, and Film graduate students, a painting and collage class inspired by Rita’s works, and a public lecture on “Reading Rita Dove” by Dean Larry Rodgers.
Rita Dove served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993 to 1995 and Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. She has received numerous accolades, including three lifetime achievement awards, 25 honorary doctorates and the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Dove is the only poet to receive both the National Humanities Medal (1996) and the National Medal of the Arts (2011). Dove holds the Commonwealth Professor of English chair at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she has been teaching since 1989.
The Stone Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement honors a major American author who has created a body of critically acclaimed literary work and has been—in the tradition of creative writing at OSU—a dedicated mentor to succeeding generations of young writers.
OSU alum Patrick F. Stone ('74) and his wife, Vicki, established the prize to spotlight what they see as one of OSU’s best kept secrets: the MFA Program in Creative Writing, which has a growing reputation for its emphasis on mentoring students, building community and reaching out to underserved populations—including at-risk youth and military veterans. The Stones’ $600,000 commitment has allowed OSU to award prizes in 2012, 2014 and 2016, and will continue to provide award funding through an endowment. The honorarium for the award is $20,000, making the Stone Prize one of the most substantial awards for lifetime literary achievement offered by any university in the country.
A new course section of ENG/HISTORY 485/585 Winter Term 2016 gives students an opportunity to delve into literary and public history while learning about new technologies and research methods:
Winter term of 2016, Dr. Ehren Pflugfelder and Dr. Raymond Malewitz team-taught ENG/HIST 485/585, a newly designed course in the Digital Humanities. The course moved from theory to practice, with a specific focus on student-driven digital humanities projects built around available archival material for the noted author Bernard Malamud. Malamud, the author of The Natural, The Magic Barrel, and numerous short story collections, was a past winner of the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the O. Henry Award. The course focused special attention to the time he spent teaching, writing, and living in Corvallis (1949-1961), and centered upon his 1961 academic novel A New Life, written about his time at OSU. Because Malamud’s archival materials have yet to be systematically studied and because they offer insight into both the life of OSU’s most important literary figure, the course represents an excellent learning opportunity for students to explore these materials. Designed for high-impact teaching that gives students real-world experiences, the course rapidly introduces students to contemporary theories, methods, and tools associated with the burgeoning field of digital humanities. Professors Pflugfelder and Malewitz believe the course combined critical thinking with visualization and digital media skills and resulted in projects that are now hosted through OSU’s Valley Library.
Oregon State University's high residency MFA program in Corvallis has a long tradition of excellence in producing and teaching creative writing, going all the way back to the 1950s when the future distinguished novelist William Kittredge was a student here, and Bernard Malamud won a National Book Award while teaching in the English Department.
This is a distinguished past, but our present is even more remarkable.
Creative Writing has never been more vital or successful at OSU than it is right now, with a nationally competitive pool of applicants in fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction, full funding for all our students through GTA and GRA positions, with full tuition waiver, a vibrant Visiting Writers Series.
Founded in 2002, the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing has produced a superlative track record, bringing regional and national attention to OSU.
Our program has already begun to produce graduates with national publications, including Oregon Book Award-winning short story writer Scott Nadelson, essayist and poet Charles Goodrich, novelist and fly-fishing journalist John Larison, novelist Charity Shumway, and Jesse Donaldson. Nia Stephens, who graduated in 2005, has signed to publish a series of six novels for young adult African American readers.
If you are interested in applying for our MFA program, please see the MFA Application Guidelines.
