Mayanthi Fernando works on Islam, secularism, and the politics of difference in the North Atlantic. Her current project tracks the secular genealogies of the recent posthumanist turn. Reading this scholarship alongside other traditions of nonhuman ontologies, including Islamic sciences of the unseen, she asks whether we might rethink “natureculture” as “supernatureculture.”

Mayanthi Fernando is an associate professor of Anthropology at UCSC, and the director of the Center For Emerging Worlds. Her current project attends to the nexus of sex and religion in the articulation of modern secularity, analyzing how the secular state’s project of regulating and transforming religious life is interwoven with its project of sexual normalization, i.e. the production of secular, sexually “normal” citizens. She is interested in how proper religion and proper sexuality are mutually constituted (often in opposition to each other) by secular rule.

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The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. The sessions consist of a 40-45 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center provides coffee, tea, and cookies.

All Center for Cultural Studies events are free and open to the public. Staff assistance is provided by the Institute for Humanities Research.