Wendy Petersen-Boring

Interdisciplinarity has been at the center of Professor Petersen-Boring’s scholarship and teaching from the start. In addition to courses in History such as Women and Gender in Medieval Europe, Love and Reason in the Middle Ages, Dante, and The Crusades, she offers many courses that wrestle with contemporary challenges at the intersection of ethics, climate change, and activism, such as Western Civilization and Sustainability, The Inner Life of Activism, and Climate/Race/Economy: New Systems Thinking.

Petersen-Boring has team-taught multiple courses with colleague David Gutterman (Politics, Policy, Law and Ethics), and most recently the two have collaborated on a multi-year research grant and class, The Conversation Project, an initiative to teach dialogue across differences. In Spring ‘24, they took Conversation Project students to N. Ireland to the conflict resolution center, The Corrymeela Community, to co-create a summit on Sustaining Hope and Creating Belonging.

Petersen-Boring is particularly passionate about community engaged learning and places students with a wide variety of community partners across Oregon. Petersen-Boring lives in Corvallis with her spouse where she is active in disability justice and loves hiking, skiing, running, gardening, and spending time with her two grown children.