Bracing for the Pomp and Circumstance
This year, more than 3,000 undergraduate and graduate students will graduate from the College of Arts and Sciences. For everyone who works in CAS (and anywhere at the University of Oregon), getting students across the finish line is the collective goal.
What do typical CAS students experience during there time here? Hear from five students — four undergraduates and one graduate — who reflect on their college experiences and share some insights to encourage and help future CAS majors.
Read more about what's happening in CAS in the May issue of CAS Connection.
Congratulations, Graduating Ducks!
The College of Arts and Sciences’ departments will hold commencement ceremonies on Monday, June 15, 2026.
News from CAS
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We Love Our Supporters
Gifts to the College of Arts and Sciences can help our students make the most of their college careers. To do this, CAS needs your support. Your contributions help us ensure that teaching, research, advising, mentoring, and support services are fully available to every student. Thank you!
What’s Happening in CAS?
Why is storytelling so important for College of Arts and Sciences students, whether they're pursuing creative writing or neuroscience? With the advent of AI and constant technological innovation, it's more important than ever to bring humans together. Find out more how the craft of storytelling is preparing students for an ever-changing world.
Also in the April CAS Connection issue, an economist weighs in on why the war in Iran and closure of the Strait of Hormuz leads to high prices around the world; alum, filmmaker and Olympic runner Alexi Pappas shares her perspective on ambition and failure; and a chemist shares research on how we can make labs more accessible for students — and more.
Undergraduate Studies
Wherever your academic goals eventually take you at the UO, all Ducks begin their journey with foundational courses in CAS. More than 60 percent of students go on to pursue a major in a CAS department or program. With more than 50 departments and programs, there’s an intellectual home for almost any interest, talent, or career aspiration.
Graduate Studies
The College of Arts and Sciences offers more than 30 master's programs and more than 20 doctoral programs across a diverse range of disciplines. Both as contributors to research teams and through their own scholarship and teaching, our CAS graduate students are indispensable to the vitality of the UO academic mission.
Student Support Services
We provide our students with a variety of resources to help you thrive inside and outside the classroom. Through Tykeson Advising, we provide comprehensive academic and career advising from the start of your journey at the University of Oregon. Learn about career preparation and get assistance in selecting the very best classes. Connect with labs, libraries, IT and tutoring. Find your community on campus.
World-Class Faculty
The College of Arts and Sciences faculty members are a driving force of the high-output, high-impact research activity that has earned the UO membership in the prestigious Association of American Universities (AAU). Our world-class faculty members are inspiring teachers.
Among them are five members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, four members of the National Academy of Sciences. They are committed to helping students discover their academic passion. Every day, they work to expand students’ intellectual horizons, preparing them for life after college with real-world knowledge and skills.
Meet our Dean
In the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS), we are committed to excellence in research and teaching, student success, and diversity, equity, and belonging.
A liberal arts education—one that offers a breadth of intellectual approaches and perspectives and depth in a major discipline—is the foundation to a purposeful life as a life-long learner, engaged citizen, and leader. The skills you will learn here—from written and verbal communication to analytical and quantitative reasoning, to compassion and understanding—are those that employers seek and will open the door to a wealth of opportunities.
You will find more than 50 majors and a multitude of minors within CAS, and seemingly endless opportunities for personal exploration and discovery. Whether you are an incoming first-year student, a grad student or a transfer student, you can map an exciting future and be part of a fun, warm, engaged liberal arts community here. Come join us. And go Ducks!
The College of Arts and Sciences includes:
Happening at CAS
1:00 p.m.
Please join us Wednesday afternoons for a free cup of coffee, pastries, and conversation with your history department community! We’re excited to continue this tradition for our history undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff. We hope to see you there!
2:00–5:00 p.m.
All students enrolled in WR 121z, 122z, 123, and/or 199 are invited to the Writing Lab for writing and research help on any stage of your composition projects. We will have writing support specialists and a research librarian available to help as many students as possible.
We will also have snacks, coffee, and prizes! Come get support before your last writing projects are due!
2:00–5:00 p.m.
Drop-In @ the Composition Writing Lab for writing and research help on any project for the first-year Composition course series: WR 121z, WR 122z, or WR 123! We are partnering with UO Libraries for support on research and sources, and will have knowledgeable graduate tutors available for questions about citations, organization, revision, and for feedback in any area that you're working on.
Grab-and-go resources, coffee and candy/snacks, and door prizes will be available for attendees!
5:30 p.m.
The Oregon Humanities Center presents a Wine Chat with Faith Barter: ”Incantation: The Power of Legal Language and Black Feminist Imagination”
Afro-Canadian poet and scholar M. NourbeSe Philip has written that “Law and poetry both share an inexorable concern with language—the ‘right’ use of the ‘right’ words, phrases, or even marks of punctuation; precision of expression is the goal shared by both.” In fact, this shared concern is often incantatory: it has the power to call worlds into being, by using mere words to induce shared beliefs and actions. Historically, legal systems have wielded this power in notoriously violent and anti-Black ways. And yet, Black writers have long experimented with legal writing’s worldmaking potential as a possible site of freedom practice.
At her Wine Chat, Faith Barter will trace the surprising common ground between legal language and Black feminist fiction and poetry, examining its historical roots as well as its contemporary implications in texts like Ketanji Brown Jackson’s recent dissenting opinion in Trump v. CASA.
Barter is an associate professor of Black Studies and English at the University of Oregon. She is author of Black Pro Se: Authorship and the Limits of Law in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (2025). Organized around four legal forms—appeal, confession, jurisdiction, and precedent—the book demonstrates how Black writers creatively used them to challenge the logics of their oppression. Reading Black writers not merely as witnesses or victims but as visionaries for what the legal system could be, the book excavates the importance of legal thinking in the African American literary tradition.
The Wine Chat is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be provided. Beverages are available for purchase, and a food cart is on the premises of Capitello Wines. There is ample parking at Banner Bank across the street.