Willamette University Associate Professor and Chair of Creative Writing and General Fine Arts at PNCA Kristin Bradshaw has been named a Fulbright U.S. Scholar for 2024-2025, joining the ranks of Nobel Laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, and world-renowned academic experts. Bradshaw, who creates poetic investigations that combine writing, letterpress, collage, photography, and sound recording, will head to Belgium in spring 2025 to serve as a visiting scholar at the University of Antwerp’s Ruusbroec Institute. She hopes to gain knowledge and experience that will shape her interdisciplinary teaching, bringing new opportunities to PNCA students.
Bradshaw examines Flemish Emblem books from the 1500s and 1600s, reflecting her Master of Arts in Religion from Yale Divinity School while also creating a body of text-image artwork in line with her current practice. “As someone who’s teaching art and design, I’m really interested in this sort of history of image and text working together,” she says. Antwerp and Belgium “have a real history of this art, and I’m excited to link my work and studies in printmaking, writing, history, and religion.”
“I’m intrigued at the blurring or conflation of writing and image-making,” Bradshaw says, adding that she is able to bring together image and text across the PNCA curriculum. “I guess I’m the fragment person — the image maker — and like using language to make images.”
The professor says she considers herself the most fortunate person on campus. “I teach a rotation of classes that have intersection points without being redundant,” she says, including Image Text Media, which examines media literacy, technology, and artwork. “We have a whole section on social media as a constructed space linked to technology. But we can also look at it as a space that you can manipulate,” she adds. Another image and text course includes students from animation art, creative writing, and printmaking.
These project-based courses allow students at PNCA to use skills learned in different classes. “I’m trying to help people generate the text and then figure out where it lives in the world,” she says.
Bradshaw loves how her interdisciplinary classes allow input from students with a variety of interests. “You know, always having fresh eyes from different perspectives, different age ranges — it really opens things up, keeps things fresh.” She adds that her Fulbright work “will inform the coursework, the rotation I’m already teaching, and the print media program.”
