Common Reading Signature Seminars

Our Common Reading selection for AY 2016-17 is Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. After reviewing some three-dozen books, Coates’ volume was the unanimous first choice of our selection committee (a group that includes about 20 faculty, students, and staff from across campus). 

Between the World and Me just won the National Book Award for nonfiction and has been widely celebrated as one of the best books of 2015. Toni Morrison has compared Coates to James Baldwin and has hailed the book as “required reading” by “the single best writer on the subject of race in the United States.”  Others have pointed out that such praise sells Coates short – that he may be one of the best writers on the subject of America today. The book is a wondrous, taut 160 pages. It has been called “a love letter written in a moral emergency.” It is not an easy book, but the world (our world) it describes is not an easy one. Written as a letter from a father to his teenage son, it offers a meditation on the liberation of the mind – as well as a call for justice, for a full response to the whole extent of one’s life. Between the World and Me is perhaps the perfect common reading book for an emerging adult audience in today’s United States.

We are calling for interested faculty to submit proposals for the inaugural Common Reading Signature Seminars by February 8th.   We are committed to representing as broad an array of disciplines as possible, so please do consider applying – and please reach out with any questions. vpugs@uoregon.edu

For proposal information:

http://fyp.uoregon.edu/content/common-reading-signature-seminars