Please join us The Helen Diller Distinguished Lecture in Jewish Studies, which promises to be a lively conversation between Ethan Michaeli, award-winning author of the new book, Twelve Tribes: Promise and Peril in the New Israel, and Nathaniel Deutsch, Baumgarten Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Taking place on May 24th at 6:00 PM. RSVP to attend virtually here. Twelve Tribes explores tribalism in Israel and Palestine by weaving together personal histories of ordinary citizens from all…

A native of New Orleans, Barbara McCullough has spent most of her life in southern California. Her initial interest was in photography but the moving image, immediacy, and possible forum for ideas set her on a path of exploration. McCullough's work progressed to examining the creative process of artists but always maintaining a fascination with experimental film and video. McCullough sees herself as part of the continuum of African American storytellers whose aim is to preserve knowledge by capturing the…

Keynote Lecture: Monica Popescu, McGill University - "Cold War Internationalism and Frayed Alliances," Thursday, May 26, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM. Join us virtually at by clicking here. Click here to download the Socialist World Cultures Conference Program. Monica Popescu is Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar of African Literatures in the Department of English at McGill University. She is the author of At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies and the Cold War (2020), South African Literature beyond the Cold…

LIVING WRITERS UCSC, SPRING 2022 presents: CELEBRANT: SOUND ACTIONS CELEBRANT: SOUND ACTIONS showcases interdisciplinary writers who deeply engage in various sonic forms, whether the libretto and the operatic, sound and visual art, acoustic music and songwriting, or embodied meditations to explore the possibilities in being attentive to sound, as action and celebrant through writing.  This hybrid series features an array of writers and artists who work across several modes (text, multi-media, meditation, and performance) exploring what happens between sound and/as verbal language,…

"choose to begin/ from the ground up, literally:" is a conversation whose title is borrowed from Ulysse’s mixed-media assemblage, “Woodswork/Rasanblaj,” digital photos—tree roots, exposed by sun, open field, capturing frey of feeling, living and striated bark— and poetry, where—“No One Could/Save me but you.” This presentation operates between urgencies, where Ronaldo V. Wilson will reflect on and with Gina Athena Ulysse’s meditations, work that leads and pulls from the earth into what Ulyssee describes as the “ancestral imperative,”—here: material forms,…

Drawing from her research on solidarity tours in Palestine, Jennifer Kelly shows how solidarity tourism in Palestine functions as a fraught localized political strategy, and an emergent industry, through which Palestinian organizers refashion conventional tourism to the region by extending deliberately truncated invitations to tourists to come to Palestine and witness the effects of Israeli state practice on Palestinian land and lives. She shows how Palestinian organizers both extend and redefine this invitation to witness, as well as intervene in…

The Dickens Universe is a unique cultural event that brings together scholars, teachers, students, and members of the general public for a week of stimulating discussion and festive social activity on the beautiful Santa Cruz campus of the University of California—all focused on one or two Victorian novels, usually (but not always) one by Charles Dickens. In 2022, the Dickens Universe will pair one of the best-known novels of Dickens, David Copperfield, with the most famous of all nineteenth-century African-American novels, Frances…