The Humanities Institute

Weekend With Shakespeare
2023-08-04 - 2023-08-05 | UCSC Arboretum
Join Shakespeare scholars and artists for two days of lectures, discussions, and demonstrations about the 2023 Season’s main stage productions, The Taming of the Shrew and King Lear.
The Weekend with Shakespeare Lecture Series is free, however seating is limited! Please email Rebecca Clark, Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s Education Coordinator, at rebecca@santacruzshakespeare.org, to reserve your spot.
Please see schedule for Weekend with Shakespeare below (subject to change). Weekend with Shakespeare is sponsored in partnership with Santa Cruz Shakespeare.
Lecture Series on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew: Friday, August 4

12-12:15 Welcome
12:15-1:15 In conversation with actors from The Taming of the Shrew
1:15-1:30 Break
1:30-2:30 In conversation with Katie O’Hare, dramaturg of The Taming of the Shrew, and Rebecca Clark, Education Programs Manager, Santa Cruz Shakespeare
2:30-3:00 Break with refreshments
3:00-4:00 Presentation on The Taming of the Shrew by Katherine Steele Brokaw, Associate Professor of English and Co-Founding Artistic Director, Shakespeare in Yosemite (UC Merced)

For those who have purchased a ticket to see the evening performance of The Taming of the Shrew:

7:00-7:15 Pre-performance discussion of ‘5 Things to Look Out For’ with Katherine Steele Brokaw
8:00 Performance of The Taming of the Shrew at The Grove.

Lecture Series on Shakespeare’s King Lear: Saturday, August 5

12-12:15 Welcome
12:15-1:15 In conversation with Paul Whitworth about King Lear
1:15-1:30 Break
1:30-2:30 In conversation with Dr. Ariane Helou, dramaturg of King Lear, Dr. Philippa Kelly, Resident Dramaturg for the California Shakespeare Theater and Adjunct Professor of Theater at Mills College and San Jose State University, and Dr. Michael Warren, Emeritus Professor of Literature (UC Santa Cruz) and Textual Consultant, Santa Cruz Shakespeare
2:30-3:00 Break with refreshments
3:00-4:00 Presentation on King Lear by Sean Keilen, Professor of Literature and Director of Shakespeare Workshop (UC Santa Cruz) and Head of Dramaturgy, Santa Cruz Shakespeare

For those who have purchased a ticket to see the evening performance of King Lear:

7-7:15 Pre-performance discussion of ‘5 Things to Look Out For’ with Sean Keilen
8:00 Performance of King Lear at The Grove

* Parking is limited at the UCSC Arboretum. Carpooling is encouraged!
* Light refreshments will be served, but feel free to bring lunch.
Katherine Steele Brokaw is Associate Professor of English at UC Merced. She the author of Staging Harmony: Music and Religious Change in Late Medieval English Drama (2016), which won the David Bevington Award for best new book in early English drama studies. She is also the co-founder of Shakespeare in Yosemite, which produces free Shakespeare in Yosemite National Park every April with a combination of student, professional, and community actors, and of EarthShakes Alliance, which brings together eco-minded theaters from around the world.
Sean Keilen is Professor of Literature and UC Santa Cruz, the founder of Shakespeare Workshop, and Head of Dramaturgy at Santa Cruz Shakespeare.

Dickens Universe: A Tale of Two Cities
2023-07-22 - 2023-07-29 | UCSC
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 2023, the Dickens Universe will feature A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. A historical novel set in London and Paris at the time of the French Revolution, its plot involves many sensational and melodramatic elements: imprisonment in the Bastille and the bloody Reign of Terror; lost children and body doubles; heroism and sacrifice.
Yet contained within this plot are resonances that pull readers beyond England and France, and beyond the temporal frames of one, albeit momentous, historical conflict. Comparison and doubling abound, as the title’s two (European) cities multiply outward, toward Bombay (now Mumbai), Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic), Victoria (Australia), Santiago (Chile). Likewise, the revolution in question is not limited to the Napoleonic Wars, but manifold, involving civil unrest and violent uprisings both domestic (the Chartist movement) and abroad, from Jamaica to the US, South Asia, the Antipodes, and beyond (as in the 1946 propaganda film A Tale of Two Cities about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki).
Now in its 42nd year of operation, the Dickens Universe combines features of a scholarly conference, a festival, a book club, and summer camp. Participants include people of all ages and walks of life—distinguished scholars, graduate students, undergraduates, retirees, young professionals, high school teachers, anyone who loves to read and who enjoys long Victorian novels.

Here are some of the things that make the Universe such a special experience.

The college lifestyle: participants live on campus, eat together in the student dining hall, have time to meet and come to know each other in different ways.
Everyone is reading the same book. We all have this one important thing in common.
The range of activities—formal lectures, small discussion groups, films, daily Victorian teas, performances, and Victorian dancing.
The Universe offers a week of total immersion in the world of Victorian fiction with friendly, like-minded colleagues in a beautiful setting. Whether we’re returning to a Dickens novel that everyone knows and loves, or branching out into a Victorian novel by another author who might be less familiar, during the Universe we build a community out of our passion for reading, talking with one another, and bringing Victorian culture to life.

The Universe offers a week of total immersion in the world of Victorian fiction with friendly, like-minded colleagues in a beautiful setting. Whether we’re returning to a Dickens novel that everyone knows and loves, or branching out into a Victorian novel by another author who might be less familiar, during the Universe we build a community out of our passion for reading, talking with one another, and bringing Victorian culture to life.
The Dickens Project is a Multi-campus Research Unit (MRU) of the University of California. Its research activities have been supported by extramural grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. Department of Education, the California Council for the Humanities, the California Arts Council, the Exxon Education Foundation, dues from member schools, and private gifts. Activities for the general public are supported in part by contributions to a private, non-profit organization, the Friends of the Dickens Project.

Santa Cruz Shakespeare 2023 Season Opening Night
2023-07-13 | The Audrey Stanley Grove in Delaveaga Park, 501 Upper Park Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95065, United States
Tickets are now on sale for Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s 2023 season, featuring The Book of Will and The Taming of the Shrew. Co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute. The season runs from July 13-August 27.

The Book of Will, by Lauren Gunderson – Directed by Laura Gordon
A love letter to William Shakespeare, this moving and joyful comedy tells the story of the two actors, friends of Shakespeare’s, who worked to preserve his plays and legacy seven years after his death. This beat-the-clock race to collect all of Shakespeare’s plays into one book delights audiences with a tale full of color characters, and provides a glimpse into a little known story about how his work survives and thrives to this day. SCS’s production of The Book of Will is part of a year-long celebration honoring the 400th anniversary of the printing of the First Folio and stars out-going Artistic Director Mike Ryan, and in-coming Artistic Director Charles Pasternak.
The Taming of the Shrew, by William Shakespeare – Directed by Robynn Rodriguez
One of Shakespeare’s most raucous comedies, in The Taming of the Shrew characters struggle against the roles they have been prescribed by gender, class, or age. While the results of these struggles provide some of the most hilarious moments in the canon, they also leave us with unsettling questions about the human cost of maintaining the status quo. Thorny, funny, and deeply human, Kate and Petruchio are two of Shakespeare’s most fascinating characters. Out of place because of their honesty in a world of deception, can these two broken people find happiness where they least expect it?

Dickensland: The Curious History of Dickens's London
2023-06-25 13:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Virtual Event
Please join the Santa Cruz Dickens Fellowship and the Santa Cruz Pickwick Club for our June Pickwick Club talk by author and historian Lee Jackson who will be discussing Dickens’s London.
Lee Jackson, author of Dickensland (Yale, 2023) will discuss the curious history of London’s Dickensian tourist destinations. Louisa May Alcott, visiting in 1866, was typical of the innumerable American tourists who would arrive in subsequent decades, enraptured by the dream-like quality of the Victorian metropolis seen through a Dickensian lens (‘I felt as if I’d got into a novel’). But did tourists truly encounter ‘Dickens’s London’ or merely a ‘Dickensland’ shaped by the demands of Dickens fandom (dubbed by Victorian newspapers ‘The Dickens Cult’) and canny heritage entrepreneurs?

Lee Jackson is an author and historian, creator of the popular online sourcebook of Victoriana ‘The Dictionary of Victorian London‘ and an academic advisor to the Charles Dickens Museum. His previous non-fiction books include Dirty Old London (Yale, 2014) and Palaces of Pleasure (Yale, 2019).
If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to reach out at dpj@ucsc.edu

Ottessa Moshfegh, Lapvona
2023-06-21 19:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Presented by Bookshop Santa Cruz, Ottessa Moshfegh (My Year of Rest and Relaxation) will discuss her recent novel Lapvona, available in paperback June 20th. In a village in a medieval fiefdom buffeted by natural disasters, a motherless shepherd boy finds himself the unlikely pivot of a power struggle that puts all manner of faith to a savage test.
Little Marek, the abused and delusional son of the village shepherd, never knew his mother; his father told him she died in childbirth. One of life’s few consolations for Marek is his enduring bond with the blind village midwife, Ina, who suckled him when he was a baby, as she did so many of the village’s children. Ina’s gifts extend beyond childcare: she possesses a unique ability to communicate with the natural world. Her gift often brings her the transmission of sacred knowledge on levels far beyond those available to other villagers, however religious they might be. For some people, Ina’s home in the woods outside of the village is a place to fear and to avoid, a godless place.
Among their number is Father Barnabas, the town priest and lackey for the depraved lord and governor, Villiam, whose hilltop manor contains a secret embarrassment of riches. The people’s desperate need to believe that there are powers that be who have their best interests at heart is put to a cruel test by Villiam and the priest, especially in this year of record drought and famine. But when fate brings Marek into violent proximity to the lord’s family, new and occult forces upset the old order. By year’s end, the veil between blindness and sight, life and death, the natural world and the spirit world, will prove to be very thin indeed.

Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from New England. Eileen, her first novel, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Death in Her Hands, her second and third novels, were New York Times bestsellers. She is also the author of the short story collection Homesick for Another World and a novella, McGlue. She lives in Southern California.
Micah Perks is the author of a memoir, a short story collection, and two novels. Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the New Guard Machigonne 2014 Fiction Prize, residencies at Blue Mountain Center and MacDowell, and the Independent Publisher’s Gold Medal. The Guardian included her last book in the Top Ten Novels about the Apocalypse. She directs the creative writing program at UCSC.
This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

Ecological Utopia: From the Victorians to Us with Professor Deanna K. Kreisel
2023-06-10 13:00 - 15:00, 2023-05-06 13:00 - 15:00, 2023-04-08 13:00 - 15:00 | Virtual Event
Please join the Friends of the Dickens Project for our spring Friends Faculty Fellowship talk series by Associate Professor Deanna K. Kreisel (University of Mississippi) who will be discussing “Ecological Utopia: From the Victorians to Us.”
Over the course of three sessions, we will have an opportunity to explore Victorian responses to their changing environment, with a particular focus on William Morris’s utopian novel News from Nowhere.
Virtual Sessions | Zoom Registration

April 8: Research Talk: It’s the End of the World and We Know It: Ecological Grief and the Work of Utopia
May 6: William Morris’ News from Nowhere, Chapters 1-20
June 10: Discussion: News from Nowhere Chapters 21-32, excerpts from Half-Earth Socialism by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass

The first session will consist of a presentation about my current research. I am currently working on a book entitled It’s the End of the World and We Know It: Ecological Grief and the Work of Utopia, which is about ecological mourning and utopian thinking from the Victorian period to the present. The book begins with a discussion of the ‘utopia craze’ of the late 19th century—of which Morris’s novel was a key part—and also discusses the work of John Ruskin and other early environmentalist writers. The latter part of the book explores recent and present-day responses to ecological change, including literary responses, and considers our own “ecological mourning” as a legacy of Victorian thinking. It ends with a discussion of recent on-the-ground ecotopian experiments.
The second and third sessions will consist of an in-depth discussion of News from Nowhere. In Session Two we will discuss the first half of Morris’s novel and contemporary Victorian responses to it; in the final session we will discuss the second half of the novel alongside some short excerpts from recent writers on climate grief and ecotopia.
Deanna Kreisel is Associate Professor of English and co-director of Environmental Studies at the University of Mississippi. She is the author of ‘Economic Woman: Demand, Gender, and Narrative Closure in Eliot and Hardy,’ as well as articles on Victorian literature and culture in PMLA, Representations, ELH, Novel, Mosaic, Victorian Studies, Nineteenth Century Literature, and elsewhere. She is the co-editor, along with Devin Griffiths, of a special Victorian Literature and Culture issue on “Open Ecologies” and the volume ‘After Darwin: Literature, Theory, and Criticism in the Twenty-First Century.’

Bookshop Santa Cruz presents: An evening with Ocean Vuong
2023-06-08 19:00 - 20:30 | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
In this deeply intimate second poetry collection (in paperback June 6th), Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother’s death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong contends with personal loss, the meaning of family, and the cost of being the product of an American war in America. At once vivid, brave, and propulsive, Vuong’s poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicenter of the break.
The author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds, winner of the 2016 Whiting Award, the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize, and a 2019 MacArthur fellow, Vuong writes directly to our humanity without losing sight of the current moment. These poems represent a more innovative and daring experimentation with language and form, illuminating how the themes we perennially live in and question are truly inexhaustible. Bold and prescient, and a testament to tenderness in the face of violence, Time Is a Mother is a return and a forging forth all at once. This event is presented by Bookshop Santa Cruz, and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute.

Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds and the New York Times bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. A recipient of the 2019 MacArthur “Genius Grant,” he is also the winner of the Whiting Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize. His writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.
PRAISE:
“Piercing . . . The poems in Time Is a Mother give us a path to examine the complexities of what it means to lose a mother, and what it means to embrace family and the self even when we want to look away. In Vuong’s tender yet unflinching words, we are reminded that only a mother can carry a beating heart within her body.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“Like Orpheus descending into the underworld, Vuong takes us to the white-hot limits of his grief, writing with visionary fervor about love, agony, and time . . . Aesthetically ambitious and ferociously original . . . Here, he breaks open and rebuilds.” —Esquire, “The Best Books of Spring 2022”
“That’s the essence of Vuong’s talent: he alchemizes deeply individual experiences with universal emotions into what is both familiar and new. . . . We need no more proof of Vuong’s importance in the poetic canon.” —Chicago Review of Books

The Deep Read: Community Salon
2023-06-07 18:00 - 20:00 | The Seymour Marine Discovery Center, 100 McAllister Way, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
On June 7, we’ll be hosting a salon—co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute and Lookout Santa Cruz—focused on actions we can all take in the face of climate change. Ecology Action, Elkhorn Slough Foundation, and Regeneración Pajaro Valley will lead the discussion moderated by UCSC Professor of Humanities and Journalism Jody Biehl.

Not in Santa Cruz? Register for Zoom access.

About The Deep Read
This event is part of The Humanities Institute’s Deep Read Program that invites curious minds to think deeply about literature, art, and the most pressing issues of our day. We read books from a wide range of genres, exploring their implications on our politics, inner lives, and communities.

Luis Alberto Urrea - Good Night, Irene
2023-06-06 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz is delighted to welcome bestselling author Luis Alberto Urrea (The House of Broken Angels) back to the store for a reading and signing of his new novel Good Night, Irene, which was inspired by his own family’s history: his mother’s heroism as a Red Cross volunteer during World War II. This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
“Good Night, Irene is a beautiful, heartfelt novel that celebrates the intense power and durability of female friendship while shining a light on one of the fascinating lost women’s stories of World War II.” —Kristin Hannah

What if a friendship forged on the front lines of war defines a life forever? In the tradition of The Nightingale and Transcription, Good Night, Irene is a searing epic based on the magnificent and true story of heroic Red Cross women.
In 1943, Irene Woodward abandons an abusive fiance in New York to enlist with the Red Cross and head to Europe. She makes fast friends in training with Dorothy Dunford, a towering Midwesterner with a ferocious wit. Together they are part of an elite group of women, nicknamed Donut Dollies, who command military vehicles called Clubmobiles at the font line, providing camaraderie and a tast of home that may be the only solace before troops head into battle.
After D-Day, these two intrepid friends join the Allied soldiers streaming into France. Their time in Europe will see them embroiled in danger, from the Battle of the Bulge to the liberation of Buchenwald. Through her friendship with Dororothy and a love affair with a courageous American fighter pilot named Hans, Irene learns to trust again. Her most fervent hope, which becomes more precarious by the day, is for all three of them to survive the war intact.
Taking as inspiration his mother’s own Red Cross service, Luis Alberto Urrea has delivered an overlooked story of women’s heroism in World War II. With its affecting and uplifting portrait of friendship and valor in harrowing circumstances, Good Night, Irene powerfully demonstrates yet again that Urrea’s “gifts as a storyteller are prodigious” (NPR).
A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his landmark work of nonfiction The Devil’s Highway, now in its 30th paperback printing, Luis Alberto Urrea is the author of numerous other works of nonfiction, poetry, and fiction, including the national bestsellers The Hummingbird’s Daughter and The House of Broken Angels, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. A recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, among many other honors, he lives outside Chicago and teachers at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Bookshop Santa Cruz Presents: Stacey Abrams, Rogue Justice
2023-06-04 19:00 - 21:00 | Rio Theater, 1205 Soquel Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95062, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz is thrilled to welcome #1 New York Times bestselling author and political leader Stacey Abrams to discuss her new book Rogue Justice and the craft of writing. This event will take place at the Rio Theatre (1205 Soquel Avenue, Santa Cruz) and is cosponsored by NAACP Santa Cruz County, The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, and the Santa Cruz Community Credit Union.

NOTE: Limited tickets available—purchase today! Venue size selected by the author.
ROGUE JUSTICE: The #1 New York Times bestselling author of While Justice Sleeps returns with another riveting and intricately plotted thriller, in which a blackmailed federal judge, a secret court and a brazen murder may lead to an unprecedented national crisis. Drawn from today’s headlines and woven with her unique insider perspective, Stacey Abrams combines twisting plotlines, wry wit, and clever puzzles to create another immensely entertaining suspense novel.
STACEY ABRAMS is a New York Times bestselling author, entrepreneur and political leader. She served as Minority Leader in the Georgia House of Representatives, and she was the first black woman to become gubernatorial nominee for a major party in United States history. Abrams has launched multiple nonprofit organizations devoted to democracy protection, voting rights, and effective public policy. She has also co-founded successful companies, including a financial services firm, an energy and infrastructure consulting firm, and the media company, Sage Works Productions, Inc.

Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC)
2023-06-02 14:00 - 17:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Linguistics Department’s annual Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC) will be held Friday, June 2nd, from 2:00 – 5:00pm in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge & Courtyard. The Distinguished Alumnus speaker will be Caroline Andrews who is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Zurich. We hope you will attend.

Futurescapes: Projects from the Coha-Gunderson Collective
2023-06-02 - 2023-06-03 | The Institute of the Arts & Sciences Gallery, 100 Panetta Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Humanities Institute presents “Futurescapes: Projects from the Coha-Gunderson Collective,” a multi-media exhibition by UCSC students and alumni winners of the Coha-Gunderson Prize in Speculative Futures.
13 winners of the Coha-Gunderson prize in Speculative Futures, a prize competition made possible by UCSC alumni Peter Coha (Kresge ’78, Mathematics) and James Gunderson (Rachel Carson ’77, Philosophy, and UCSC Foundation Board Trustee), will exhibit creative work in a variety of media.
Schedule:

Friday, June 2: Opening & Reception 4:00-8:00pm
Saturday, June 3: 12:00-5:00 pm

The exhibition is the culmination of a year-long workshop. All prior winners—undergraduates, graduate students, and alumni from across the campus—chose to participate, and each brings their unique skills and media to the exhibit: VR, visual art, film, digital media, textual materials, and performance art. The thirteen participants met biweekly for ten weeks to dialogue with campus experts, brainstorm their projects, plan the exhibit, and discuss some of the greater existential questions that arose: how can we think of the future without idealism but also without apocalyptic pessimism? What is the purpose of socially or scientifically relevant art, and can it intervene in the precarious present? How might thinking speculatively about the past impact the present and possible futures?
Exhibitors
Aidan Andreasen (“Talos Machine”) is a third-year AGPM major & made this project for you to enjoy; Haoran Chang (“Fair Sai Re Pi VR”) is a multimedia artist and researcher who received an MFA in Digital Art and New Media at UCSC in 2021; Rafael Franco (“Future Farmers of Amerika: Poems from the Year 2054”) is a second-year PhD student in Literature at UCSC studying Gothic literature; Willow Gelphman (“Mr. Marple’s One-Way Ticket to the Great Unknown”) is a writer and visual artist who received BAs in Art and Literature from UCSC in 2021; Mitra Ghaffari (“Bicycle Island [A dónde nos lleva]”) is a second-year Social Documentation MFA student and bike guide; Chisato Hughes (“Treasure Island”) is a filmmaker based in the Bay Area working in nonfiction and hybrid, speculative forms; Ant(onia) Lorenzo (“[Au]xiology: Living Atoms”) is an interdisciplinary artist and organizer committed to practices of decolonization and reciprocity & is finishing their MFA in Environmental Art and Social Practice at UCSC; Aaron Samuel Mulenga (“Tenga Tenga, Can I Help You Carry Your Load?”) is a fourth-year PhD in History of Art and Visual Culture whose work engages with contemporary African art and the reclamation of local African histories; Chloe Rickards (“The Cordyceps Corner”) is a data analyst, visual artist, and cosplayer who received a Master’s in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from UCSC in 2022 and is interested in the more fantastical aspects of speculative futures; Oana Tenter (“Treasure Island”) is a documentary filmmaker from Romania whose work immerses her in histories that bear on the present; Lior Shamriz (“Even a Dog in Babylon is Free”) is a filmmaker and an artist based in Santa Cruz, pursuing a Ph.D. in the Film and Digital Media department at UCSC; Saul Villegas (“Deep-Sea Coral III”) is a first-year MFA candidate in DANM using art to create a revolving system from the mental, physical, and virtual environment and inviting people to participate in the viewer experience through digital mixed-media works; Jingtian Zong (“Don’t Ride Over a Crack You’ll Break Your Mother’s Back”) is an artist and researcher who probes technology and power, public space (on and offline) and collective memories through a feminist perspective, currently a first-year MFA candidate in Environmental Art and Social Practice at UCSC.
Carla Freccero, Project Coordinator, is a professor of Literature & History of Consciousness at UCSC. Hannah Newburn, PhD candidate in Literature, served as THI liaison for the collective.
* * *
Many people contributed to making this exhibition possible.
Carla Freccero wishes to thank the faculty and professional experts who visited the workshop: Christopher Connery, Lindsey Dillon, Anna Friz, Theresa Hice-Fromille, Mark Nash, Laurie Palmer, Sarah Papazoglakis, Jennifer Parker, Micah Perks, Jessica Taft, and Zac Zimmer. She also wishes to thank those who played a critical role within the project itself: Hannah Newburn, GSR for the group; Aaron Samuel Mulenga, resident curator; and Saul Villegas, coordinator of publicity and the virtual exhibit.
A special thanks goes to select members of the cluster: Alex Calderwood, Michael McCarrin, Matt Polzin, and Zac Zimmer.
Staff and Faculty in the Humanities and Arts contributed their expertise, efforts and equipment: at THI (Sharon Kinoshita, interim Faculty Director; Irena Polic, Managing Director; Saskia Nauenberg Dunkell; Jessica Guild; Hannah Newburn); in the Arts (Louise Leong and Colleen Jennings); in the Humanities (Humanities Academic Services and Yuri Cantrell, ITS and Humanities Liaison).
Thank you to the Institute for Arts and Sciences (IAS) at UC Santa Cruz (Rachel Nelson, Director and Chief Curator; Maia Kamehiro-Stockwell, Tam Welch) for the venue and so much more.
Thanks as well to Cari Napoles, Senior Director of Development for the Humanities Division.
* * *
Project Descriptions
*Aidan Andreasen, Talos Machine
Talos Machine is an interactive story set in the year 3142. The reader takes the role of a Ganymede police detective investigating the final homo sapiens’ death. To make sense of this case file, they’ll need to research everything 3142 has to offer using Omnipedia, an encyclopedia of everything. And who knows, this might be about more than a single human’s demise.
Talos Machine is an “open website” experience – readers can visit any page on Omnipedia whenever they’d like, until they’re ready to definitively solve the mystery. This case won’t be cracked by following the exploits of a main character – the reader themselves must think like a detective, as it’s up to them to connect the dots between ideas and put their theories to the test.
Central to the world of 3142 is a superintelligent AI, the Orecomp Intelligence, which possesses powers far exceeding those of any living being. It has sustained a stable solar system society for nearly 1100 years, but stable does not mean familiar. The world of Talos Machine was created from our attempts to answer a deceptively challenging question: what does it mean to be human? What is it about us, right here and right now, that we truly care about and must work to preserve?
Talos Machine was first written in 2021, when it felt like its potentially future-defining topics and questions were largely underdiscussed. A mere two years later, the concept of intelligent AI has gone mainstream. Some of the speculative futures depicted in Talos Machine might not be speculative for much longer. Our actions today will decide the sort of destiny we have before us. Talos Machine is neither a best-case nor worst-case scenario – but hopefully becoming a detective in Ganymede will get readers thinking about what kind of future they want to see.
*Haoran Chang, Fair Sai Re Pi VR
Fair Sai Re Pi VR is a multisensory VR experience that invites audiences to experience a fictional fire therapy based on the one sold by a real Chinese pyramid scheme company named QuanJian that went bankrupt in 2020 after a scandal erupted about the scheme. The experience is a reenactment of the real company, a simulation of a simulation. It performs a critique of the company’s capitalistic logic of exploitation, its solidification of hierarchy, and the values of excessive consumption, and questions the relationship between Western modernity and the philosophy of Chinese Traditional Medicine. The playful and surreal pseudo-therapy brings the contradiction between the philosophy of CTM—emphasizing wholeness—and the pyramid scheme business model with its strict hierarchical order. Fire is very common in CTM, like cupping.
This project, however, is less about the efficacy of CTM and more about how the tradition is displaced and remade in a society dominated by the ideology of technology from the West. Fire, in this VR experience, is a motif existing between “natural” fire, the fire to “cure the diseases” and “cultural” fire, the fire situated in the network of pyramid scheme structures that burns participants financially. This project is also related to a conceptual framework of “Emersive VR” that I proposed in my thesis. Different from the idea of Immersive VR, Emersive VR intends to break the singularity of virtual space. In the original version of this project, participants enter a room and lie down on a custom-made massage bed with physical mechanisms, such as a heat fan, water spray, and heat blanket, connected to the VR program Arduino (in this edited version, audience will only be immersed visually in VR). Rather than being isolated in a singular space rendered by the VR headset, bodies are situated in a liminal space between the virtual and physical, fiction and reality.
*Rafael Franco, Future Farmers of Amerika: Poems From the Year 2054
Future Farmers of Amerika: Poems From the Year 2054 is a collection of poems that gives voice to the unheard narratives of immigrant farmworkers in California’s Central Valley. Written in 2021, the collection features a diverse array of poetic forms, including epistolary, free verse, and diary entries. Audiences can also listen to readings of a selection of these poems using the corresponding QR code. Especially central to these poems is language and translation. Much narrativization of farmwork in the Central Valley gets recounted by third parties, and thus the native Spanish-speaking voices get erased, despite the fact that most Central Valley farm work is by immigrants who speak solely Spanish. This creates a tension between the English-language narratives about farm work and the actual experiences of farm workers. The inability to translate many of the words about farm work labor from Spanish to English mirrors the failure to translate farmworkers’ experiences into the English language, thus foregrounding the incomplete nature of the narratives we read and hear in the media.
The collection serves as a vessel that projects the stories of farmworkers into the future. By evoking a year in the near future, the stories hope to blur the lines between past, present, and future, all while anticipating the future itself. Together, the form, time, and language of this collection incentivize readers and listeners to diversify the perspectives from which they pay attention to the silenced voices of immigrant farm work labor. However, the collection also aims to recognize its own limitations. This exhibition is not a complete account of immigrant farm work in the Central Valley. Rather, it hopes to penetrate dominant narratives of farm work labor and production, creating a space in which to listen to the voices of immigrant farm workers. In promoting attentive listening practices, the exhibit invites viewers to carry these previously lost or forgotten literary voices into the future.
*Willow Gelphman, Mr. Marple’s One-Way Ticket to the Great Unknown
Mr. Marple’s One-Way Ticket to the Great Unknown is the epic tale of one lowly billionaire’s quest to win over an entire small, conservative, majority-straight/white town in the midwest. A mysterious wormhole appears on the outskirts of Midville, and the baffled locals are unsure what to do with it until Mr. Marple arrives with the intent to transform it into a tourist destination. He has a vision, he has a plan, and he has a particular knack for quickly dissolving dissent in whatever form it may arise.
Written in comic form, the reader gets to meet a wide cast of characters who act both individually and as a collective. There is no one main character, but rather a number of faces and storylines that thread together into a whole. While the townspeople have strength in numbers, they are limited by shortsightedness and a disbelief that anyone like Marple would do anything to threaten people like them. Their culture is dominant and their faith in their bootstraps is unwavering. While resembling Marple in all ways except power, the people of Midville are nothing but an obstacle now that they are in his way. “Mr. Marple” imagines a situation where white colonialist values “Ouroboros” themselves.
*Mitra Ghaffari, Bicycle Island [A dónde nos lleva]
In response to the transportation standstill during Cuba’s economic crisis of the 1990s, the government distributed 1.2 million bicycles in public workplaces and schools throughout the island. Havana’s city planning was temporarily organized to accommodate bike infrastructure; however, once foreign oil supply was restored, bicycles faded from view as their parts rusted, broke, and were abandoned. Bicycles became a symbol of the worst of the economic crisis and were associated with hardship and scarcity. Bicycle Island (A dónde nos lleva) offers a contemporary portrait of the bicycle as a re-adopted resource during the pandemic and a critical tool for the future of the island.
An intimate portrait of place, people, and movement, Bicycle Island displays various artistic interpretations of the bicycle, and includes collaborations with muralists, musicians, artisans, and puppeteers. These artistic representations and a mosaic of portraits of bicycle users combine to communicate the city’s history, culture, and projected future, tracing embodied associations to urban space and contrasting the bicycle with other transportation methods. Bicycle Island guides a future orientation for urban mobility on the island, archiving a collective effort to reclaim the bicycle as a central and celebrated tool of Havana’s future.
All songs were performed live by the Ensemble Interactivo de La Habana on August 2nd, 2022.
*Chisato Hughes & Oana Tenter, Treasure Island [see below]
*Ant(onia) Lorenzo, [Au]xiology: Living Atoms
(Au)xiology is a portmanteau of the symbol for the element gold, from the Latin aurum, and axiology, the study of value and valuation. It was originally a pedagogical and art-based collaboration with undergraduate students asking questions about our society’s values, the ways they are shaped, their impacts on material reality, and how art might contribute to shifting them. Within a 10-week course, students used research-based inquiry into gold’s materiality, histories, and effects to collectively analyze notions of value and dominant worldviews. In the months after the course concluded, their research has become part of a work of episodic story-telling narrated by atoms that all find themselves composing a pair of gold earrings in 2023.
This exhibition stages three episodes in the life of these atoms. The first, a decade or so from now, when a mining company scandalizes the speculative market by dusting an ore sample with gold. The second, nearly a half-century later, where the gold atoms are nanoparticles, collecting microplastics in the human bloodstream. And the third, where the atoms drift in a vast region of oceanic waters. Each of the gold’s futures is informed by a reckoning with our contemporary moment, where “gold futures” are both theoretical and traded daily.
*Aaron Samuel Mulenga, Tenga Tenga, Can I Help You Carry Your Load?
In 2021, I created a performance piece entitled Tenga Tenga, Can I Help You Carry Your Load? This performance was created to remember the Tenga Tenga, who were African porters used by the British to carry their soldiers’ equipment in the First World War. The efforts of the Tenga Tenga aided the British and Allied forces in southern Africa to win the war over the German forces. A stone cenotaph was erected in the town of Mbala in northern Zambia to commemorate the Tenga Tenga.
Through my project I aim to use speculative fiction to imagine what our present moment would look like if recognition and acknowledgement were given to the individual Africans who participated in the First World War as carriers. How would this shift the imagination of the War and who was present in it? This project utilizes installation, performance and moving image to provide an avenue for the speculative futures of the Tenga Tenga to be considered.
*Chloe Rickards, The Cordyceps Corner
The Cordyceps Corner is an interactive science station that explores a future where the Cordyceps genus of fungus evolved to infect animals. At the Cordyceps Corner, guests will examine the world from the perspective of a parasite, learn what The Last of Us got wrong, and discover the medicinal applications of a caterpillar-killing species of the fungus.
Central to this project is Cordyceps: An Illustrated Field Guide, a booklet of original watercolors and descriptions from this speculative future. The Illustrated Field Guide takes a closer look at the mechanisms of infection, the life cycle of the fungus, and the manifestation of symptoms in its hosts. The Illustrated Field Guide highlights how infectious diseases operate within an ecology – one that expands beyond humans.
Visitors will also find real samples of cordyceps, medicinal tinctures, and other materials related to the traditional medicinal use of cordyceps. Cordyceps have been a part of human history for hundreds of years. Its fruiting bodies are cultivated from caterpillars to boost the immune system and to treat fatigue and kidney problems.
The Cordyceps Corner invites you to bring a sense of childlike wonder in the face of death, decay, healing, and medicine. Ask questions, get your hands dirty, and immerse yourself in a world of fungi.
*Oana Tenter & Chisato Hughes, Treasure Island
To many in the city, San Francisco’s Treasure Island is out of sight, out of mind. Born from trash in the event of the 1939 World’s Fair, the island became host to the navy and its radiological testing during American wars abroad, and is currently a quiet, ghostly site for Section 8 housing, storage containers, transitional homes, and empty barracks. Simultaneously and urgently, the island is undergoing significant changes: highrises are being erected, transportation fares have increased, and storage buildings converted to event venues and microbreweries for city-dweller getaways. Our project aims to make these various transitions on the island visible and speculate on a future that is malleable.
Treasure Island (working title) is an experimental installation piece drawing from old archival footage from the island’s World’s Fair, naval training videos and propaganda, and recent observational footage taken with residents at Home Free, a transitional home for formerly-incarcerated survivors of domestic violence. The project invokes the island’s past histories–and its contested present as a toxic landscape–asking questions about what might be remediated from the proverbial rubble. What does (or can) healing from violence–structural, imperial, interpersonal–look like? How do we learn from past traumas and hold state bodies accountable in our orientation towards the future? These questions come about in anticipation of the island’s redevelopment into an “Eco-City of the Future,” a plan made for the island by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 2011. The exhibit consists of a three-screened installation with one running soundscape.
*Lior Shamriz, Even a Dog in Babylon is Free
In a letter written in the 7th century BC by the Babylonians to the Assyrian king Esarhaddon, the Babylonians defend the rights of foreigners in their city and call on the Assyrian king to afford them the same privileges they receive as Babylonians. They write that “even a dog, when entering the gates of Babylon, shall be protected.”
The film is constructed as a series of repetitive iterations inspired by the musical “Passacaglia” form, in which continuous variations of a base melody unfold throughout a piece. Each sequence begins with a conversation between Lior Shamriz, the film’s director, and Myriam Ali-Ahmad, a Los Angeles-based Lebanese actor. We learn that Ali-Ahmad was invited by Shamriz to act in a faux documentary as a process of world-building for Shamriz’s future project, a speculative feature film taking place in a West Asia that was never colonized by France or Britain. After the conversation, we see Myriam Ali-Ahmad in character as Souhaila, a fictional artist in the Federal States of West Asia, the entity now encompassing most of what used to be the Ottoman Empire. Souhaila is then shown working on a video poem that utilizes ancient texts. She comments on the letter the Babylonians wrote to Esarhaddon: why did the Babylonians need to denigrate the status of dogs to elevate foreigners in their city? With each iteration, the texts Souhaila is working with and her mode of engagement with them change, as the historical knowledge base in the “world” of the film modulates.
Even a Dog in Babylon is Free is an investigation of how our understanding of the past shapes our interactions with the world and of the relationship between our sense of historical linearity and our political worldview. In one of the iterations, for example, the discovery of an ancient West Asian school of thought that opposed the hierarchy between gods, people, and non-human animals prompts Souhaila to work with a different text. At the same time, the film questions our need to reevaluate the past in order to conceive different futures.
2K Video, Sound, 2023
Performers: Myriam Ali-Ahmad, Su-jin Kim Holmes, Alexandra Panzer, Mitra Ghaffari
Camera: Lior Shamriz, Hannah Jayanti
Recordist: Oana Tenter
*Saul Villegas, Deep-Sea Coral III
Environmental pollution on land shifts into the atmosphere through time and passes along the water and ecologies undersea. Deep Sea Coral III uses archival submersible footage from the Hawaiʻi Undersea Research Lab (HURL) and scientific data culled from ancient denizens of the sea comprising a biological archive for oceanographers of “multi-millennial timescales.” Extracted artifacts, such as deep-sea coral, serve as paleo-recorders of biogeochemical information. Thinking of that microenvironment that accumulates in geological time and looking for a way of seeing these archives through a multi-spatial perspective, I designed an immersive virtual world representing the deep sea.
My process begins by placing authentic artifacts in a virtual environment to re-create the sensation of submersible dives through digital media. Deep-Sea Coral III invites viewers to engage with these altered photographs and video footage through the speculative lens of the underwater world. My goal is to inspire future researchers to find new ways to reimagine deep-sea archives and ways to exhibit such archival materials for those who remain above.
*Jingtian Zong, Don’t Ride Over a Crack, You’ll Break Your Mother’s Back
Don’t Ride Over a Crack, You’ll Break Your Mother’s Back is a two-channel video and installation that investigates cracks in the American road infrastructure from an outsider’s perspective. Channeling the artist’s testimony of a bike accident in Santa Cruz to the history of U.S. highway development, the project tests the speculative ground upon which our contemporary reality is constructed and the twisted relationship between the two.
Its title adapted from a popular rhyme among American children, “Step on a Crack, Break Your Mother’s Back,” the project asks: Which bodies do a failed road infrastructure impact the most? A suspected alternative version of the rhyme, “Step on a Crack, and Your Mother Will Turn Black” (or in some sources, “You Would Marry A Black Person”), indicates a backdrop of how cracks might, in both material and symbolic forms, target certain bodies rather than others. Surrounded by journalistic photos of its socio-geographical context, the crack over which the artist had their bike accident is transplanted into the IAS gallery and invites contemplation at the intersection of social responsibility, mobility, and vulnerability.
Where is the boundary between the private and the public? Taking the U.S. highway system as its test field, the project poses this question that has become increasingly important in the post-pandemic era, and that immigrant narratives often further complicate. In the 2-channel video, images of early Fordism productions and Futurama, the 1939 New York World’s Fair, are juxtaposed with footage of cracked roads in Santa Cruz and on the artist – an Asian woman’s skin, exploring how the private and the public, although often kept separate, are deeply intertwined.

Jairus Banaji Reading Group
2023-06-01 17:30 - 19:00 | Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Vernaculars of Travel in South Asia and the Middle East cluster invites you to the final event of their THI working group, which will be a reading group (5:30 – 7) and dinner (7pm – 8:30pm) on Thursday, June 1st. Please RSVP by Friday May 26th with Muriam Davis (muhdavis@ucsc.edu) to receive the readings and event location.
For the reading group, we have decided to read selections from Jairus Banaji’s work on the relationship between theory and history, commercial capitalism, and the global south. We will focus on three pieces: 1) the Appendix of his “A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism” 2) a piece on “Globalising the History of Capital” 3) an article from Historical Materialism on “Putting Theory to Work” and lastly 4) his essay on Islam and the Mediterranean. We’ve also attached 5) a piece on “Opium, Capitalism and Financial Markets.”
We’d also like to mention that Banaji will be giving a talk at UCSC on May 26th at noon (on Zoom). Zoom links will be sent out to reading group participants as soon as it is available.

Living Writers - Mai Der Vang
2023-06-01 17:20 | Virtual Event
Mai Der Vang is the author of Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press, 2021), winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, an American Book Award, and a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, along with Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the First Book Award from the Academy of American Poets. The recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, her poetry has appeared in Tin House, the American Poetry Review, and Poetry, among other journals and anthologies. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State.

Sponsored by The Puknat Literary Endowment, The Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Laurie Sain Endowment, The Humanities Institute, Bookshop Santa Cruz, and Two Birds Books (where the writers’ books are available for purchase)

Celebrating the Humanities Spring Awards
2023-06-01 16:00 - 19:00 | Cowell Provost House, Cowell Provost House, Cowell Service Rd‎ University of California Santa Cruz, Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Please mark your calendars for Thursday, June 1, 2022 as we acknowledge the achievements of our outstanding students and faculty at the annual Celebrating the Humanities Spring Awards event. This year, the hybrid event will take place at the Cowell Provost House with the program beginning at 4 p.m and a reception to follow the ceremony. Friends and families of awardees are encouraged to attend.

Sebastián Gil-Riaño Reading Group – Mellon Sawyer Seminar on “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine”
2023-06-01 12:15 - 13:45 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
“Indigenous Health and Infrastructures of Race” – In the past few decades, biomedical researchers and human biologists have called for more ethical guidelines for conducting fieldwork on Indigenous groups in South America. Included among these proposals is a call for greater “epidemiological surveillance” of remote Indigenous groups with the aim of reducing health disparities. This bioethical concern is driven by an understanding of colonial history, which presumes that without biomedical intervention Indigenous groups inevitably succumb to European diseases upon contact. In this reading group, we will explore how such bioethical narratives are themselves a product of a deep-seated colonial project that Daniel Nemser has called “the Infrastructures of Race.”
Email Jennifer Derr at jderr@ucsc.edu for a copy of the readings.
Sebastián Gil-Riaño is an Assistant Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennyslvania. Born in Colombia and raised in Canada, he is a historian of science who studies transnational scientific conceptions of race, culture, and indigeneity in the twentieth century. His first book, The Remnants of Race Science: UNESCO and Economic Development in the Global South will be published by Columbia University Press on August 31st, 2023.
This event is part of the “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” Sawyer Seminar series.

Roxanne Euben - The Power of Humiliation: Rhetoric, Retaliation and Resistance
2023-05-31 15:30 - 17:00 | Charles E. Merrill Lounge
From Trump to ISIS to the Arab uprisings, invocations of humiliation pervade the political landscape. But what does ‘humiliation’ mean exactly, and how does it work rhetorically? In this lecture on her current research, Professor Roxanne Euben develops an account of humiliation anchored in the way people actually use it in language, with a particular focus on Islamist rhetoric about the ‘humiliation of Islam’ and invocations of humiliation during the 2011 Egyptian Uprising. These cases illustrate broad patterns in how humiliation constructs collective powerlessness, but also how it operates to demand dramatically different responses.
Roxanne L. Euben (University of Pennsylvania) is a political theorist whose research has helped pioneer a new area of inquiry often referred to as “comparative political theory.” This is an understanding of political theory not as coextensive with Euro-American canonical texts ‘from Plato to NATO,’ but rather as inclusive of intellectual traditions and practices of the “non-West” and global South, as well as of indigenous traditions in, but not of, “the West.” Euben’s special area of expertise and research is Muslim and Euro-American political thought, and her scholarship has addressed such topics as Muslim cosmopolitanism; jihad; martyrdom and political action; travel and translation; gender and humiliation; shared perspectives on science and reason; the politics of visual and verbal rhetorics; and digital time. She is the author of Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism (Princeton, 1999), Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge (Princeton, 2006), and Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts and Contexts from Al-Banna to Bin Laden (Princeton, 2009), written and edited in collaboration with Muhammad Qasim Zaman. She has been published across a wide spectrum of scholarly journals, including Perspectives on Politics, Political Theory, The Review of Politics, The Journal of Politics, International Studies Review, and Political Psychology.
This event is presented by the Department of Politics and co-sponsored by the Center for Middle East and North Africa.

Sebastián Gil-Riaño – Stolen Evidence: Indigenous Children and Bio-historical narratives of the Western Hemisphere during the Cold War
2023-05-31 12:15 - 13:45 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The talk is sponsored by the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine
This talk examines how anthropologists and human biologists used abducted Indigenous children in South America as sources of evidence for a variety of bio-historical research projects during the Cold War. From 1930 to 1970, human scientists studying the Aché — a traditionally nomadic hunter-gatherer group in Paraguay — used evidence derived from measuring, bleeding, and observing children in the service of research projects concerned with reconstructing global human migrations in the Western hemisphere. Through studies of Aché children and families, scientists like the French naturalist Jehan Albert Vellard, the U.S. human geneticist Carleton Gajdusek, and the French structural anthropologists Pierre and Helen Clastres discerned ancient patterns of migration by considering the diffusion of cultural and linguistic traits, the process of genetic drift in populations, and the immunological effects of European conquest. Yet many of the Aché children used in these studies had been abducted and sold as servants to neighboring ranchers. By highlighting the use of stolen Indigenous children as research objects in Cold War human diversity research, my talk uncovers the enduring and violent colonial structures that made this knowledge possible as well as the ethical and legal protocols and forms of Indigenous resistance that emerged in response.
Sebastián Gil-Riaño is an Assistant Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennyslvania. Born in Colombia and raised in Canada, he is a historian of science who studies transnational scientific conceptions of race, culture, and indigeneity in the twentieth century. His first book, The Remnants of Race Science: UNESCO and Economic Development in the Global South will be published by Columbia University Press on August 31st, 2023.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
RSVP by 11 AM on the day of the colloquium, and you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Dickens and Victorian Psychology: Introspection, First-Person Narration, and the Mind by Tyson Stolte
2023-05-28 13:00 - 15:00 | Virtual Event
Please join the Santa Cruz Dickens Fellowship and the Santa Cruz Pickwick Club for our May Pickwick Club talk by Associate Professor Tyson Stolte (New Mexico State University) who will be discussing Dickens and Victorian Psychology.
Dickens and Victorian Psychology returns Dickens’s fiction to the midst of nineteenth-century debates about the nature of the mind, reading Dickens’s experiments with first-person point of view as part of his larger effort to insist upon a dualist psychology in the face of new physiological theories of consciousness. While psycho-physiology was widely seen by Victorian readers as a materialist threat to belief in our immortality, Dickens’s incorporation into his fiction of the introspection that remained the key methodology for dualist psychologies allowed him to insist upon the irreducibility of consciousness—and the possibility of the mind’s surviving the body. Through a reading of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, however, this talk will also show how psycho-physiologists worked to drain the shared language of Victorian psychology of any meaning beyond the physical, making it ever more difficult to theorize a psychology that transcended the here and now.

Tyson Stolte is an associate professor in the Department of English at New Mexico State University. His book Dickens and Victorian Psychology: Introspection, First-Person Narration, and the Mind was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. He has also published articles on such topics as Dickens, Robert Browning, Edward FitzGerald, Victorian psychology, and nineteenth-century theories of matter and energy.

POSTPONED - Linguistics Colloquia: Julia Swan
2023-05-26 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Julia Swan, SJSU
Over the course of each year, the Linguistics department hosts colloquia by distinguished faculty from around the world.
For full speaker and event information, please visit: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/colloquia/index.html

Living Writers - Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
2023-05-25 17:20 | Virtual Event
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is the author of the National Book Award finalist The Undocumented Americans. Her work, which focuses on race, culture, and immigration, has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Vogue, Elle, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, n+1, The New Inquiry, and Interview magazine. Born in Ecuador, she later became one of the first undocumented students admitted to Harvard University.

Sponsored by The Puknat Literary Endowment, The Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Laurie Sain Endowment, The Humanities Institute, Bookshop Santa Cruz, and Two Birds Books (where the writers’ books are available for purchase)

Benoit Challand – Violence and Representation in the Arab Uprisings
2023-05-25 15:00 - 16:30 | Humanities 1, Room 520, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
This event is sponsored by the THI Research Cluster Vernaculars of Travel in South Asia and the Middle East and Center for the Middle East and North Africa (CMENA) and co-sponsored by the Department of Sociology
Providing a longue durée perspective on the Arab uprisings of 2011, Benoît Challand narrates the transformation of citizenship in the Arab Middle East, from a condition of latent citizenship in the colonial and post-independence era to the revolutionary dynamics that stimulated democratic participation in the region in 2011. Considering the parallel histories of citizenship and marginalization in Yemen and Tunisia, Challand develops innovative theories of violence and representation. He argues that a new collective imaginary, or the collective force of the people, emerged as a force, representing itself as the sovereign power that could decide when violence ought to be used to protect all citizens from corrupt power. Shedding light upon uprisings in Yemen, Tunisia, but also elsewhere in the Middle East, this book offers deeper insights into conceptions of violence, representation, and democracy. It compares the post-2011 efforts to build a decentralized political order in Tunisia with the calls for federalism in Yemen, and the shared demands for democratic accountability over the means of coercion.
Benoit Challand is Associate Professor of Sociology at The New School for Social Research, New York. He is author of the books Violence and Representation in the Arab Uprisings (Cambridge University Press, 2023), and Palestinian Civil Society: Foreign Donors and the Power to Promote and Exclude (Routledge, 2009). His work has been translated into Arabic and he has numerous co-authored publications such as The Arab Uprisings and Foreign Assistance (co-edited with F. Bicchi and S. Heydemann, Routledge 2016), and Imagining Europe: Myth, Memory and Identity, co-authored with Chiara Bottici (Cambridge University Press 2013). He is also interested in democratic theory, Western European Marxism, and settler colonialism.

Hannah Zeavin – Hot and Cool Mothers
2023-05-24 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This event is co-sponsored by The Center for World History
From the mid-1940s until the 1960s and beyond, class, race, and maternal function were linked in metaphors of temperature in pediatric psychological studies of Bad Mothers. Newly codified diagnoses of aloof “refrigerator mothers” and overstimulating “hot mothers” were inseparable from midcentury conceptions of stimulation, mediation, domesticity, and race, including Marshall McLuhan’s theory of hot and cool media, as well as maternal absence and (over)presence, echoes of which continue in the present in terms like “helicopter parent.” Whereas autism and autistic states have been extensively elaborated in their relationship to digital media, this talk attends to attributed maternal causes of “emotionally disturbed,” queer, and neurodivergent children. The talk thus elaborates a media theory of mothering and parental “fitness.”
Hannah Zeavin is a scholar, writer, and editor, and works as an Assistant Professor at Indiana University and a Visiting Fellow at the Columbia University Center for The Study of Social Difference. Zeavin is the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (MIT Press, 2021) and at work on her second book, Mother’s Little Helpers: Technology in the American Family (MIT Press, 2024). Articles have appeared in American Imago, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Technology and Culture, Media, Culture, and Society, and elsewhere. Essays and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming from Dissent, The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, n+1, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. In 2021, Zeavin co-founded The Psychosocial Foundation and is the Founding Editor of Parapraxis, a new popular magazine for psychoanalysis on the left, which will be releasing its first issue in Fall 2022.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
RSVP by 11 AM on the day of the colloquium, and you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Hannah Zeavin - Sigmund Freud: Tele-Analyst
2023-05-23 17:00 - 18:30 | Humanities 2, Room 359
In The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy, Hannah Zeavin shows that, far from a recent concern in the COVID-19 pandemic, teletherapy is as old as psychoanalysis itself. It may be well known that Sigmund Freud routinely used media metaphorically in his theories of the psychic apparatus; this talk recovers the early history of Freud’s real use of media in therapies over distance.
Zeavin reads epistolary and postal conventions in Freud’s moment, intertwined with Freud’s own epistolary self-analysis (in correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess) and the unconventional treatment by correspondence of his only child patient, the agoraphobic “Little Hans,” in order to rethink the coincidental origins of psychoanalysis and teletherapy, and to help us think through narratives of loss that attend current uses of technology to mediate therapy.
Free and open to the campus community and the public.
Presented by the Center for World History.

The Deep Read: Elizabeth Kolbert in Conversation with Ezra Klein
2023-05-21 16:00 - 17:30 | Quarry Amphitheater
Join us for the culminating event of the 2023 Deep Read—a live discussion with Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Elizabeth Kolbert and NY Times columnist and podcast host Ezra Klein. We’ll discuss this year’s Deep Read book, Under a White Sky, which depicts the stark changes and emerging technologies affecting our climate and world.
This event will take place at the UC Santa Cruz Quarry Amphitheater. Students, staff, alumni, and the broader community are invited to join and think deeply with two of the greatest minds working today to explain our complicated world. While this event will not be live streamed, it will be recorded. Deep Read Community members will be the first to receive the video once it goes live following the event.

Schedule
3:00pm – Meet our community partners
4:00pm – Program begins
About the Speakers
Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1999. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, her book about mass extinctions that weaves intellectual and natural history with reporting in the field began as an article in The New Yorker. It won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in the General Nonfiction category and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle awards for the best books of 2014. Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future was a national bestseller and was named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post, Time, Esquire, Smithsonian Magazine, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal.
Ezra Klein is an Opinion columnist and podcast host at the New York Times. His podcast, The Ezra Klein Show, receives more than a half-million downloads per episode and is routinely in the top 25 podcasts on Apple’s charts. Prior to his work at the Times, Klein founded and launched Vox, the popular explanatory news site. As Vox’s editor-in-chief, and then its editor-at-large, he helped create Explained on Netflix. In 2020, Klein published Why We’re Polarized, a bestselling examination of the forces driving polarization and paralyzing politics in the United States. Klein is a UC Santa Cruz alumnus.
Parking
Free parking for this event will be in the East Remote Lot 104. There will be free shuttles taking attendees from the parking lot to the venue.
Deep Read Faculty Salon
On May 4, you’ll be able to join the conversation—either in person or online—at a salon-style event where our participating professors will lead a discussion of the book with UCSC students and the broader Deep Read community. Learn more here.

About The Deep Read
This event is part of The Humanities Institute’s Deep Read Program that invites curious minds to think deeply about literature, art, and the most pressing issues of our day. We read books from a wide range of genres, exploring their implications on our politics, inner lives, and communities.

Humanities Division Graduate Student Awards Celebration
2023-05-19 16:30 - 19:00 | Cowell Provost House, Cowell Provost House, Cowell Service Rd‎ University of California Santa Cruz, Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join us on Friday, May 19, 2023 as we acknowledge the achievements of our exceptional graduate students at the inaugural Humanities Division Graduate Student Awards Celebration! This in-person event will take place at the Cowell College Provost House. The program will begin at 4:30 p.m, with a reception to follow the ceremony. Friends and families of awardees are encouraged to celebrate with us. This event will follow the campus-wide Graduate Symposium and Graduate Alumni Brunch.

Alice Yang in Conversation with Cathy Choy: Author of "Asian American Histories of the United States"
2023-05-18 19:00 - 20:30 | Santa Cruz Public Library – Capitola
In celebration of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we are pleased to present an engaging opportunity to learn about the histories that make up the Asian and Pacific Islander Diaspora in the United States. Join us for light refreshments and a lively discussion with UCSC Professor of History Alice Yang and Cathy Choy.
To register for this event, visit the Santa Cruz Public Library website.
Catherine Ceniza Choy is an award-winning Asian American historian and professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Asian American Histories of the United States (2022) published by Beacon Press in their ReVisioning History book series. The book features the themes of violence, erasure, and resistance in a nearly 200 year history of Asian migration, labor, and community formation in the US. It was awarded a 2022 Kirkus Star from Kirkus Reviews for books of exceptional merit; named a Best of 2022 Nonfiction Book by Kirkus Reviews and Ms. Magazine; and featured in the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s 2023 National Day of Racial Healing book list and the Texas Library Association’s 2023 Texas Topaz Reading List.
Choy’s first book, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History (2003), explored how and why the Philippines became the leading exporter of professional nurses to the United States. Empire of Care received the 2003 American Journal of Nursing History and Public Policy Book Award and the 2005 Association for Asian American Studies History Book Award. Her second book, Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America (2013), unearthed the little-known historical origins of Asian international adoption in the United States beginning with the post-World War II presence of the U.S. military in Asia. A CHOICE book review of Global Families concluded: “A useful corrective to one-dimensional, romantic portraits of adoption that saturate popular culture today. Summing Up: Highly recommended. *** All levels/libraries.” Choy also co-edited the anthology, Gendering the Trans-Pacific World (2017), with Judy Tzu-Chun Wu.
An engaged public scholar, Choy has been interviewed and had her research cited in many media outlets, including ABC 20/20, The Atlantic, CNN, Los Angeles Times, NBC News, New York Times, ProPublica, San Francisco Chronicle, and Vox, on topics such as anti-Asian, coronavirus-related hate and violence, the disproportionate toll of COVID-19 on Filipino nurses in the United States, and racism and misogyny in the March 16, 2021 Atlanta spa shootings.
Choy is Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Belonging, and Justice in UC Berkeley’s Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS). She is a former Department Chair of Ethnic Studies (2012-2015, 2018-2019) and a former Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies Division (2019-2021). Choy received her Ph.D. in History from UCLA and her B.A. in History from Pomona College. The daughter of Filipino immigrants, she was born and raised in New York City. She lives in Berkeley with her husband Greg Choy.
Alice Yang is chair of the History Department at the University of California at Santa Cruz and co-directs the Center for the Study of Pacific War Memories. She is also the oral history co-director of the Okinawan Memories Initiative. Between 2010 and 2020, she served as provost of Stevenson College at UCSC. Alice teaches courses on Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander history, transnational memories of the Pacific War, oral history, and comparative redress and reparations. Her publications include Historical Memories of the Japanese American Internment and the Struggle for Redress, Major Problems in Asian American History (co-editor), and What Did the Internment of Japanese Americans Mean? (editor). She is currently completing a manuscript on historical memories of Japanese American women’s activism between 1941 and 2021. She is also preparing an exhibit on Japanese American women’s history that is being funded by a California Civil Liberties Public Education Fund grant. She has served as a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American History and an advisory board member for the exhibit Then They Came for Me: Japanese American Incarceration during World War II and the Demise of Civil Liberties. Her research has been funded by awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Luce Foundation, and a UCSC Public Humanities, Digital, and Community-Engaged Research Fellowship.

The Maya K. Peterson Explorations in History Seminar Series: Inaugural Lecture by Asif Siddiqi
2023-05-17 14:00 - 16:00 | Cowell Provost House, Cowell Provost House, Cowell Service Rd‎ University of California Santa Cruz, Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
You are invited to attend the inaugural lecture for The Maya K. Peterson Explorations in History Seminar Series, taking place on Wednesday, May 17th, 2023, at 2:00pm at the Cowell Provost House. This event will also be livestreamed and recorded: Maya K. Peterson Explorations in History Seminar Series Inaugural Lecture.
Drawing on insights from Maya Peterson’s work on water management projects in Central Asia, this talk focuses on the design and construction of the infamous White Sea-Baltic Canal in the Soviet north in the early 1930s. Known colloquially as the Belomor Canal, this was the very first infrastructural project to use mass forced labor from the emerging Gulag camp system. Despite the death of some 10,000 laborers in building the canal, the project was advertised internationally as a successful monument to the ability of humans to remake the natural world. In his paper, Professor Siddiqi focuses on the role of scientists and engineers who designed and built the canal, one which came to represent a form of “hydraulic monumentalism” so emblematic of Soviet modernity. As instruments of a form of internal colonization of Soviet space, these scientists and engineers embraced, some under coercion and some freely, the use of mass forced labor as a solution to large-scale engineering projects across the Soviet Union. The outcome was a deeply damaging but enduring relationship between scientific expertise, the natural environment, and the constitution of Soviet empire.
Asif Siddiqi is a professor of history at Fordhamm University, and specializes in the history of science and technology and modern Russian history.

This event is being sponsored by The Maya K. Peterson Memorial Endowment, the UCSC History Department, and The Humanities Institute.
The Maya K. Peterson Explorations in History Seminar Series at UCSC honors the life and spirit of a brilliant scholar, teacher, and mentor whose career was cut short by her untimely death in 2021. A specialist in Russian, Central Asian and environmental history, Maya was a valued member of UCSC’s faculty in the History Department and the Humanities Division. The Explorations in History Seminar Series celebrates Maya’s passions for the study of history, for dialogue between the humanities and the sciences, and for innovative scholarship across disciplines—passions that she shared generously with students, colleagues, and communities around the globe.

Chiara Bottici - Anarchafeminism
2023-05-16 14:00 - 16:30 | Humanities 1, Room 420, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
History of Consciousness Spring 23 Speaker Series.
In person and via zoom.
Please see the History of Consciousness Speaker Series website for further details.

Deep Read San Diego Salon
2023-05-15 18:00 - 20:30 | Stone Brewing Liberty Station, 2816 Historic Decatur Rd UNIT 116, San Diego, CA, 92106, United States
Join fellow Deep Readers for a special event at Stone Brewing in Liberty Station on May 15, 2023, to discuss this year’s Deep Read book: Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Elizabeth Kolbert. We’ll learn about the stark changes taking place in the world and explore the efforts to adapt and survive in this era of climate change.

Please RSVP to reserve your spot at this exciting event, as space is limited.
As part of The Deep Read program of The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, this event is designed to invite curious minds like yours to think deeply about literature, art, and the most pressing issues of our day. Even if you haven’t read the book, we encourage you to come and enjoy the discussion and connect with fellow San Diego alumni.
Beer and light bites provided by Steve Wagner (Crown), a UC Santa Cruz alumnus & co-founder of Stone Brewing!
To learn more about The Deep Read, and to sign up for the program, please visit https://thi.ucsc.edu/deep-read/.
Faculty Speaker: Laura Martin (Ph.D. ’08, literature) began working with The Humanities Institute team in 2019 on the Deep Read Initiative, a community reading program that brings together undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, staff, alumni, and members of the community to think deeply about literature, art, and important issues of our time. Laura teaches the undergraduate Deep Read course at Porter College, manages the Deep Read program, and assists with other THI projects. She is a literary scholar, writer, and teacher, and she holds a PhD in Literature from UC Santa Cruz.
About the host: Steve Wagner (Crown) is a co-founder of the national brewing company Stone Brewing and an alumnus of UC Santa Cruz. He is a strong supporter of the university’s Humanities Institute, the Literature Department, and affiliated graduate students. Wagner was transformed by his time as a student at UCSC, where he studied English literature and was inspired by the radical education system and inspiring professors.

Opus Cope: Screening and Dialogue
2023-05-15 13:20 | DARC 108, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Filmmaker Jae Shim screens his award-winning documentary Opus Cope: An Algorithmic Opera which celebrates the groundbreaking work of algorithmic composer David Cope (UCSC emeritus Professor) and the profound ways in which humans and machines (AI) can be creative.
David Cope has been a firm believer that creativity is everywhere, and his work reflects these values of compassion and understanding, where humans and AI are not necessarily at odds with each other. This collaboration between human and machine resulted from his own creative block in the 80’s which led to the first algorithmically composed opera.
Presented by the Music Department and cosponsored by the Arts Research Institute and The Humanities Institute.

Crossing Borders - An Evening of Philosophical Discussion
2023-05-13 18:00 - 22:00 | Institute of the Arts and Sciences, 100 Panetta Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Large and small, visible and hidden, borders weave in and out of our lives along varied dimensions. Some we can see, many we cannot. Some we celebrate, others confine us. Some we are aware of, many remain undiscovered. There are political borders and national borders; psychological, social, scientific, and biological borders. What are borders? Can anything be conceived as involving a border? Come think with us on the evening of May 13 at the new Institute of the Arts and Sciences building, designed for vibrant possibility. Choose among rooms with synchronic presentations and performances, led by poets, philosophers, scientists, and artists. Muse with us, ponder with us, and talk with one another, as together each of us travels across, within, and at the borders calling to us on this particular evening.
This event is brought to the public by the Center for Public Philosophy and the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, with support and participation of The Humanities Institute, Cowell College, and the Philosophical Slug Society.
Free and open to the public
To read more about this event see The Institute of the Arts and Sciences website.

Santa Cruz County History Fair
2023-05-13 13:00 - 17:00 | Felton Community Hall, 6191 Highway 9, Felton, CA, 95018, United States
Celebrate Santa Cruz County’s diverse history by connecting with local historical and cultural organizations and groups. Enjoy hands-on activities, artifacts, photographs, publications, and more. Between 20 and 30 local museums, historians, historical societies, and other groups will have displays and activities. Presented by the San Lorenzo Valley History Museum. Co-sponsored by the Felton Community Hall and the Humanities Institute. Free admission.

Linguistics Colloquia: Argyro Katsika
2023-05-12 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Argyro Katsika, UC Santa Barbara
Over the course of each year, the Linguistics department hosts colloquia by distinguished faculty from around the world.
For full speaker and event information, please visit: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/colloquia/index.html

The Miriam Ellis International Playhouse (MEIP XXI)
2023-05-12 - 2023-05-14 | Stevenson Event Center
Cowell College, Stevenson College and the Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics will present the 21st season of the Miriam Ellis international Playhouse (MEIP XXI), May 12, 13, and 14, at 7:00 PM in the Stevenson Event Center at UCSC. The program of fully-staged multilingual performances in French, Japanese, and Spanish, with English supertitles, will be performed by Language students and directed by their instructors.
There is no admission charge; parking in adjacent lots is $5.00.
This year’s presentation in Japanese will consist of a demonstration of a Taiko performance of “Yashiro no Uta (The Song of the Shrine) composed by Ikuyo Conant/ Artistic Director of Watsonville Taiko Group, after a brief explanation of what Taiko is.
French will be represented by Art (Art), a light reflection on the value of art, adapted and directed, from the eponymous play by Yasmina Reza, by Renée Cailloux.
Finally, Spanish will bring us “Rompiendo el hielo” (“Breaking the Ice”), an original contemporary comedy piece, written and performed by students, that follows a grocery store staff on a not so ordinary day.
Over the years, our multilingual theater presentations have attracted loyal audiences, who look forward to experiencing their native or acquired languages in this unusual format, and we cordially invite the community to attend this year’s presentation.
For more information, please contact Renee Cailloux (rcaillou@ucsc.edu) or consult https://cowell.ucsc.edu/academics/cw-related-programs/meip/index.html.

Transnational Turns and the Future of China Studies
2023-05-12 - 2023-05-13 | Virtual and In Person
What does it mean to do China studies at this global conjuncture? What has “transnational” got to do with it, why now, and why again? What future promises and possibilities can it still bring? This two-day workshop featuring multi-disciplinary scholars of China and Chinese studies, as well as a conversation with Rey Chow, Duke University, on the thirtieth anniversary of her publication Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Indiana University Press, 1993). For full workshop description and program, please click here.
This event will be held in person in Humanities 1, Room 210. For participants who would like to join the workshop virtually, please register here.
Organized by the Transnational China research hub, a seed project at the Humanities Institute, funded by the UCSC Office of Research. Co-sponsored by UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television and the Fudan-UC Center on Contemporary China.

Future Ancestral Technologies Exhibition Opening
2023-05-12 | Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History
Future Ancestral Technologies is an exhibition by Cannupa Hanska Luger with mixed-media sculpture, regalia, and video, all based in myth, science fiction, and Indigenous futurism.
Science fiction has the power to shape collective thinking and serves as a vehicle to imagine the future on a global scale. Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Future Ancestral Technologies is Indigenous science fiction. It is a methodology, a practice, a way of future dreaming, rooted in a continuum. Future Ancestral Technologies is an approach to making art objects, video, and land based performance with the intent to influence global consciousness. This Indigenous-centered science fiction uses creative storytelling to radically reimagine the future. Moving sci-fi theory into practice, this methodology conjures innovative life-based solutions that promote a thriving Indigeneity.
This Indigenous science fiction is characterized by regalia, tools, shelter, transportation, and technology which invite the viewer to experience multiple points of entry into Luger’s sci-fi narrative and myth telling through multiple symbiotic landscapes. The ongoing narrative developed by installation and land based work articulates future spaces in which Indigenous people harness technology to live nomadically, reclaiming hyper-attunement to land and water. Luger’s Future Ancestral Technologies is a story, a methodology, a practice, a way of futurism, that suggests alternative approaches to recognizing the future with reverence.
Using art practice to adopt science fiction, Future Ancestral Technologies is a context for dismantling time to imagine the distant future and dream of sustainable approaches to the lived experiences of the generations to come. Using traditional craft and the act of making creates futuristic potential, the process imagines, enacts and prototypes experiences and technologies that promote Indigenous cultures to thrive into the future.
Future Ancestral Technologies challenges and empowers humans—from individuals to industries—to visualize an Indigenous future and to practice empathy and resourcefulness in epochs to come.
“Future Ancestral Technologies looks to customs in order to move us forward, advancing new materials and new modes of thinking by utilizing science fiction theory, creative storytelling, Indigenous technology and contemporary materials and the detritus of capitalism to present time bending landscapes of myth. ” –Cannupa Hanska Luger
This exhibition will run from May 12-September 3, 2023 and is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute.
For full exhibition information please visit: https://www.santacruzmah.org/exhibitions/future-ancestral-technologies
Header Image: Future Ancestral Technologies ++ a generation of new myth ++ 3 channel video installation, featuring monster slayer regalia, mirí aráda + awá ahbáaxi. (image still) Cannupa Hanska Luger 2021. Photo by Gabe Fermin.

Creating Art in/with Community: A Conversation with Josúe Rojas and Professor John Jota Leaños
2023-05-11 19:00 - 20:30 | The Institute of the Arts & Sciences Gallery, 100 Panetta Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Join us for a public conversation at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences between artist Josúe Rojas and Professor John Jota Leaños (Executive Committee of the Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas). Josué Rojas is a Salvadoran-American artist from the Bay Area who has done murals throughout the country. Exploring subjects such as identity, immigration, and culture in his work, Rojas will be discussing his artistic practice in/with community. He is the Huerta Center’s artist-in-residence for Spring quarter, a residency which is being generously cosponsored with the Arts Research Institute’s Arts and Oppression initiative, the Institute for Arts and Sciences, The Humanities Institute, and the UC National Center for Free Speech and Civil Engagement’s VOICE initiative.

This event is free and open to the public.

Living Writers - Ryan Eckes
2023-05-11 17:20 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Ryan Eckes is a poet from Philadelphia. He recently finished writing a book called General Motors about labor and the influence of public and private transportation on city life. Other books include Valu-Plus and Old News (Furniture Press 2014, 2011). His poetry can be found in Tripwire, Slow Poetry in America Newsletter, Public Pool, and elsewhere. He won a Pew Fellowship in 2016.

Sponsored by The Puknat Literary Endowment, The Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Laurie Sain Endowment, The Humanities Institute, Bookshop Santa Cruz, and Two Birds Books (where the writers’ books are available for purchase)

Anna Barry-Jester Reading Group – Mellon Sawyer Seminar on “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine”
2023-05-11 12:15 - 13:45 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Mellon Sawyer Seminar on “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” will welcome Anna Barry-Jester, who will lead a reading group exploring explanations of the causes of drug-resistant tuberculosis and the subsequent policy implications. One article looks at the history of TB control policy, and how “cost-effective” strategies bred drug resistance. Two recent commentaries debate the deployment of new TB treatments in absence of sufficient diagnostic capacity. A fourth article examines the legality of a policy framework that gave different treatment protocols for resource-poor and resource-rich countries. Barry-Jester hopes we can draw on past and current policy debates and decisions to discuss the narratives surrounding what causes drug-resistant TB in order to think about policies at scale.
Email Jennifer Derr at jderr@ucsc.edu for a copy of the readings.
Anna Barry-Jester is a public health reporter with ProPublica. Previously, she was a senior correspondent covering public health at Kaiser Health News. Her series “Underfunded and Under Threat,” with colleagues at KHN and The Associated Press, investigated how chronically underfunded public health departments buckled under the strain of the coronavirus pandemic. The project won awards from the Online News Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her reporting on harassment and menacing threats endured by public health officials was the basis of an episode of “This American Life,” and PEN America later awarded its PEN/Benenson Courage Award to the officials who she profiled. Barry-Jester has lived and worked in Latin America and Southeast Asia, where she has reported, photographed and filmed stories in more than a dozen countries. She was a writer at FiveThirtyEight and a producer at Univision and ABC News.
This event is part of the “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” Sawyer Seminar series.

From Symptom to Story: Understanding an Epidemic of Kidney Disease in Central America
2023-05-10 18:00 - 20:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
What does it mean to construct a “cause” of disease? What is the primary source material we consult as we write the narrative of a new disease? When it comes to public health, how do we fairly and accurately reflect scientific evidence, personal experience, and community knowledge? In this talk, journalist Anna Maria Barry-Jester will use these questions to chart the history of a particular epidemic of chronic kidney disease that, since the early aughts, has been recognized as a leading cause of death in parts of Central America. In the two decades that followed, the global understanding of this condition has expanded to a growing list of communities, including war-torn parts of Sri Lanka, agrarian sectors of India and migrant guest workers from Nepal. Drawing from nearly 20 years of reporting — including interviews, photography, video, and scientific literature — Barry-Jester will explore the shifting narratives of the emergence of a disease and interrogate what becomes evidence and how it informs public understanding of disease and its causes.
Please email Jennifer Derr (jderr@ucsc.edu) if you would like to RSVP for this event.
Anna Barry-Jester is a public health reporter with ProPublica. Previously, she was a senior correspondent covering public health at Kaiser Health News. Her series “Underfunded and Under Threat,” with colleagues at KHN and The Associated Press, investigated how chronically underfunded public health departments buckled under the strain of the coronavirus pandemic. The project won awards from the Online News Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her reporting on harassment and menacing threats endured by public health officials was the basis of an episode of “This American Life,” and PEN America later awarded its PEN/Benenson Courage Award to the officials who she profiled. Barry-Jester has lived and worked in Latin America and Southeast Asia, where she has reported, photographed and filmed stories in more than a dozen countries. She was a writer at FiveThirtyEight and a producer at Univision and ABC News.
This event is part of the “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” Sawyer Seminar series.

Kathleen Cruz Guttierrez – Vernaculars of Plant Knowing: Woven Transformations in the Early 20th-Century Davao Gulf
2023-05-10 12:00 - 13:20 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
In this talk, Gutierrez will share from her first book project on the history of colonial botany in the Philippines. The book argues that vernaculars of plant knowing made and unmade botany at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when imperial Anglo-European botanists banded together to steady the philosophical and practical tenets of the science under an internationalist banner. Taking as her case study the contrapuntal story of Bagobo weavers and the acceleration of abacá plantations in the Philippines, Gutierrez demonstrates the disciplinary makings of the science that enabled transformative settler-colonial currents in the Pacific colony’s southern gulf.
Kathleen “Kat” Cruz Gutierrez is Assistant professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2021 and 2022, she completed Mellon-funded postdoctoral and interdisciplinary residencies at the Humanities Institute of the New York Botanical Garden and the Oak Spring Garden Foundation. A specialist of the history of science and the plant humanities, she is the co-editor of the forthcoming special issue “Science and Technology Studies in the Philippines” in Philippine Studies. Since joining UCSC, she has also served as co-PI on the interdivisional campus-community research initiative, Watsonville is in the Heart.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
RSVP by 11 AM on the day of the colloquium, and you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Virtual Reality as ‘Virtual Traveling’ for Student & Public Engagement with Historic Sites
2023-05-10 09:15 - 16:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
3D technologies, such as LiDAR and photogrammetry, are being used by archaeologists at sites all over the world, frequently to record the state of preservation of standing architecture or document field excavations. But 3D and Virtual Reality (VR) can also be used to digitally ‘re-imagine’ or visualize aspects of historic places that are no longer accessible due to landscape change, the passage of time, and modern development. Students and the public can ‘virtually travel’ across space and time, experiencing visualizations of historic sites on different continents or centuries in the past. This one-day event, Virtual Reality as ‘Virtual Traveling’ for Public Engagement with Historic Sites, brings together scholars working on the question of Humanities VR and ‘virtual travel’ for presentations and discussion. The workshop will focus on questions of user experience and interaction, educational design, ethics, and the concept of ‘cultural presence’ when virtually traveling (gaming scholar Erik Champion’s theory of ‘being there, then’).

Presenters

Dr. Rita Lucarelli, Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, UC Berkeley
Dr. Eiman Elgewely, School of Design, Virginia Tech
Dr. Matthias Lang, Bonn Center for Digital Humanities, Bonn University
Dr. Vincenzo Lombardo, Department of Informatics, Università degli Studi di Torino
Ph.D. Candidate Maureen McGuire, History of Art and Visual Culture, UCSC
Dr. Cameron Monroe, Anthropology, UCSC
Dr. Martin Rizzo-Martinez, State Park Historian II & Tribal Liaison Santa Cruz District, California State Parks

Organized by Dr. Elaine Sullivan, History, UCSC and sponsored by the Humanities Institute

2023 Helene Moglen Lecture in Feminism and Humanities with Wendy Brown – After Humanism and the Nation State: More Democracy, Democracy that is More, or Democracy No More?
2023-05-09 16:00 - 18:00 | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
In most accounts of dangers to democracy today, the value of the object is assumed. At the same time, we know that the “demos” of Western democracy violently excludes all nonhuman life and much of humanity too. Democracy is no form apart from this content, no principle floating freely above these histories. Democracy also requires certain cultural, educational and economic conditions; certain spatialities and temporalities; and modest access to visible levers of power. Absent these, the vox populi may well become a terrible, and terrifying, screech. This talk reflects on these and other predicaments of democracy today. It asks, without answering, how to approach this imperiled creature now.

In-person attendance
The lecture will begin at 4:00pm, with a Q&A and reception to follow.
Doors will open at 3:30pm

Virtual attendance
Wendy Brown (Crown ’77, Politics and Economics double major) is UPS Foundation Professor in Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and Class of 1936 Chair, Emeritus, at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author, most recently, of In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (2019) and Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber (2023). From 1989-99, Professor Brown taught at UCSC in the Department of Women’s Studies and worked closely with Helene Moglen to build Feminist Studies.
This lecture is presented by the Center for Cultural Studies and made possible by the Helene Moglen Lecture in Feminism and Humanities for the Center for Cultural Studies Endowment, The Humanities Institute, and the Department of Politics.
If you have any questions or concerns, please contact Sadie Lynn at sklynn@ucsc.edu.

Encore Papers & Presentations
2023-05-05 11:00 - 14:00 | Namaste Lounge – College 9, Namaste Lounge, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
This crip-friendly event is an opportunity to learn about what your UCSC colleagues are doing in their Disability Studies work. Presenters will present works-in-progress, or re-deliver papers they have given in professional venues (such as conferences, workshops, etc.). Attendees are invited to actively and passively participate, and speakers will provide notes, a script, and/or links to slides for access. The event is presented by the Humanities Institute’s Disability Studies Cluster.
SCHEDULE
Autism Life Writing
Caitlin Flaws, Literature
Autoethnography, Undone: Towards a Crip Critique of Ethnographic Realism
Megan Moodie, Anthropology
Beyond UDL: Improving Accessibility through Asynchronous Activities
Dr. Brenda Sanfilippo, Writing Program
The Mortification of Harvey Leach
Dr. Michael Chemers, Performance, Play & Design
Toward an Access Manifesto for the Food Limited
Dr. Amy Vidali, Writing Program
What Might a History Course on Disabilities in East Asia Look Like?
Dr. Noriko Aso, History
NOTE: This is a scent-free event. If you need a specific accommodation for this event (including professional captioning and/or ASL interpreting), please contact Amy Vidali at avidali@ucsc.edu with what you need. (Disclosing why you need this accommodation is not required.)

Debjani Bhattarcharyya – Climate Ledgers: Atmospheric Politics, Risk and Liability in the Indian Ocean, 1770-1850
2023-05-05 10:00 - 12:00 | Virtual Event
“Climate Ledgers” is a part of the UC Santa Cruz Center for South Asian Studies 2022-2023 lecture series, Futures.

Speaker:
Professor Debjani Bhattarcharyya, University of Zurich

The 41st West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
2023-05-05 - 2023-05-07 | Stevenson College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL, pronounced /ˈwɪkfəl/) is an annual linguistics conference, held in the spring at a university in western North America. It is a top international venue for researchers in theoretical linguistics, studying any aspect of human language from a formal perspective, including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and their interfaces. The first WCCFL was held in 1982, and it has previously been hosted by UC Santa Cruz four times, most recently in 2012. The 41st West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 41) will take place on May 5-7, 2023 at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Invited speakers:
Luke Adamson, Rutgers University
Dorothy Ahn, Rutgers University
Eva Zimmerman, University of Leipzig
At this time, all talks in both main and special sessions are planned for in person presentation. In addition to one in-person person session, there will be one virtual poster session.
Full conference information can be found at: https://babel.ucsc.edu/wccfl41/

The Deep Read: Faculty Salon
2023-05-04 18:00 - 20:00 | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
On May 4, you’ll be able to join the conversation—either in person or online—at a salon-style event where our participating professors will lead a discussion of this year’s Deep Read book, Under a White Sky, with UCSC students and the broader Deep Read community.
Faculty Speakers

Jorge Menna Barreto, Environmental Art
Mike Beck, Marine Sciences, Director of the Center for Coastal Climate Resilience
Jody Biehl, Literature and Science Communication Program
Sikina Jinnah, Environmental Studies

Not in Santa Cruz? Register for Zoom access.
Event Logistics
Bicycling, car pooling, ridesharing, and public transportation are encouraged as parking is limited. If you drive to the event, please plan to park in UCSC Lot #115 or 116. To reach these lots, proceed through the main entrance to campus, continue up the hill from the information kiosk on Coolidge, then turn right at the Ranch View/Carriage House Road stoplight into the Carriage House/Campus Facilities parking lot. The Hay Barn is a 5-minute walk across the street from the parking lot. There will be directional signage to help you get to the correct parking lot and Barn entrances. Overflow parking will be available at lot 122. Download a parking map here.

About The Deep Read
This event is part of The Humanities Institute’s Deep Read Program that invites curious minds to think deeply about literature, art, and the most pressing issues of our day. We read books from a wide range of genres, exploring their implications on our politics, inner lives, and communities.

On Salon: Reading Series
2023-05-04 17:30 - 19:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
On Salon: A new reading series featuring UCSC’s incredible writers and poets. Join us for a new quarterly reading series sponsored by the Literature Department featuring graduate and undergraduate creative writers: Angie Sijun Lou, Kristen Nelson, Alicia Gutierrez, Fio Harden, Isla Oyguy, Charissa Zeigler.

Labor Hope, Labor Reality: Organizing Unions in 2023 - An Evening with E. Tammy Kim
2023-05-03 17:30 | Namaste Lounge – College 9, Namaste Lounge, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
On Wednesday, May 3, at 5:30pm in the Namaste Lounge (College Nine), New Yorker writer and co-host of the podcast Time to Say Goodbye E. Tammy Kim will be giving a talk on the state of labor activism and organizing, followed by a panel discussion with writer, organizer, and doctoral candidate in Sociology Sarah Mason and Unite Here member and organizer Martha Hernandez. This event is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute and UCSC Library, with support from the Anthropology Department.
E. Tammy Kim is a contributing writer at The New Yorker who covers labor and the workplace, arts and culture, and the Koreas. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and the Nation, among many other publications. With Jay Caspian Kang, she co-hosts the podcast Time to Say Goodbye, which New York Magazine described as “not just about the concept of ‘Asian America,’ but, in many ways, the broader discourse of race in America, which it tries to complicate in provocative, meaningful ways.” A contributing editor at Lux, she has been an Alicia Patterson fellow and a fellow at Type Media Center, and she is the current Writer-in-Residence at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU. She also co-edited Punk Ethnography, a book about contemporary world music.
Sarah Mason is a writer, organizer, and PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her writing has appeared in the New Left Review, Logic Magazine, the Guardian, and New Politics. She is a head steward in UAW 2865.
Martha Hernandez is a member of Unite Here. A union leader in the Dream Inn, where she has worked as a housekeeper for twenty-six years, Hernandez is a Union Shop Steward and member of the Union Negotiating Committee. She was named Union Member of the Year in 2015.

Unsettled Borders: The Militarized Science of Surveillance on Sacred Indigenous Land Book Talk and Celebration
2023-05-03 16:00 - 17:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Unsettled Borders: The Militarized Science of Surveillance on Sacred Indigenous Land, examines the ongoing settler colonial war over the US-Mexico border from the perspective of Apache, Tohono O’odham, and Maya who fight to protect their sacred land. Exploring the logic of borders, Schaeffer turns to Indigenous sacred sciences and ancestral land-based practices that are critical to reversing the ecological and social violence of surveillance, extraction, and occupation.
Felicity Schaeffer is a UCSC Professor of Feminist Studies and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies. She is also the author of Love and Empire: Cybermarriage and Citizenship across the Americas, and co-editor of Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship.
This event is presented by the Feminist Studies Department, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, and The Center for Racial Justice

Hanna Musiol – Wounded Landscapes and Maps of Hurt: Breaths, Scars, and Tender Story-Sharing
2023-05-03 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This event is co-sponsored by Film and Digital Media
Maps always sense and often cut. Much has been written about their violence, as an overture for the genocidal touch, as a prospecting tool priming landscapes for material and narrative extraction, or as an instrument of attritional social neglect (Lo Presti). Hegemonic cartographies live off of elisions of “disposable bodies” and on demarcation lines which construct architectures of harm (Lambert). This talk focuses instead on scars, gasps of pain, cartographic story-sharing, and maps of hurt. It is thus an homage to marginalized but not marginal bodies, stories and breaths, all demanding oxygen, care, delight, and a “right to co-existence” (Holmes). Drawing on the work of feminist, diasporic, and critical race thinkers, architects, poets, human geographers, and Indigenous Arctic mixmedia practitioners—Katherine McKittrick, Olga Lehmann, Pia Arke, Afaa Weaver, Laura Lo Presti, Johnny Pitts, Eliane Brum, Viktorija Bogdanova, among many others—Musiol will center on site-specific cartographic acts of “tender narration” involving artivists, architects, mappers, students, and literary scholars working together in art galleries, on the page, in our classrooms, and in the streets (Tokarczuk). Specifically, she will meander across several sites and rehearsals of remapping: Afaa Weavers’s and Viktorija Bogdanova’s poetic maps of spaces that “hurt us” and Sissel Bergh’s textual cartographies of South Sámi coast; monumental, yet ephemeral urban-scale poetic storytelling actions taking over the streets, pages, bodies, and facades in Trondheim and Hiedanranta; and, finally, site-specific pedagogies of cartographic story-sharing, which draw on the ambulatory, resuscitative, biosocial oxygen-delivery affordances of poetry (in polylingual urban poetic ensembles and Søstrene Suse’s Radiokino listening seances). The talk will conclude with reflection about the cartographic acts of “repair,” tenderness, and “unlearning” (Azoulay), asking, after Josie Billington and Pia Arke, how we, literary and cultural scholars and students, can attend to the wounded bodies and landscapes “personally,” using our meager disciplinary tools and “enfleshed” cartographies of hurt (Sharpe).
Hanna Musiol (PhD, Northeastern University) is Professor of Modern/Contemporary Literature at NTNU (Norway) and a 2022–2023 Human Rights Fellow at SUNY Binghamton (US). Her research interests include transnational literary studies, site-specific transmedia storytelling and reparative reading practices, and critical theory, with emphasis on migration, environmental humanities / political ecology, and environmental and human rights. She publishes frequently on aesthetics and justice, and her work has appeared in DHQ, ASAP/J, Environment, Space, and Place, Technology of Human Rights Representation, Journal of American Studies, and Writing Beyond the State. Musiol regularly co-organizes city-scale curatorial, public humanities, and civic-engagement initiatives and exhibitions, such as Narrating the City, Of Borders and Travelers, Spectral Landscapes, and Resist as Forest. She is based in Trondheim, where she frequently collaborates with grassroots urban storytelling initiatives such as Literature for Inclusion & Poetry without Borders. She is currently involved in several transborder research projects devoted to spatial storytelling: Narrating Sustainability, One by Walking, Environmental Storytelling, and Environmental Practices Across Borders.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
RSVP by 11 AM on the day of the colloquium, and you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Alev Çinar - The Predicament of Islamic Decoloniality in Turkey: Sufi Political Thought and the “Great East” Project of Necip Fazıl Kısakürek
2023-05-02 14:00 - 16:30 | Humanities 1, Room 420, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
After winning its battle against the occupying colonial powers during The War of Independence in 1919-1922, Turkey set on a secular, Westernizationist path toward modernization under Mustafa Kemal’s leadership. Turkey spent what can be referred to as its postcolonial period under its founding ideology, Kemalism, which launched a West-oriented secular modernization project that framed the Ottoman system and Islam as inferior, backward, and uncivilized. First forms of what I refer to as “Islamic decolonial thought,” or Islamic decoloniality, emerged against this backdrop in the 1950s, which later developed into a collection of diverse intellectual movements constituting the current Islamic intellectual field (IIF) in Turkey. This study examines the Sufi-based political thought of Turkish Muslim poet and writer Necip Fazıl Kısakürek (1904-1983) as one of the pioneers of Islamic decolonial thought in Turkey. Necip Fazıl, who is current President Erdogan’s main ideological inspiration, was the founder and lead writer of the The Great East (Büyük Doğu) journal published in 1943-1978, which is considered to be Turkey’s first Islam-based political journal that was instrumental in inspiring numerous political and intellectual movements currently active in the IIF.
Alev Çınar is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Bilkent University, Turkey. She received her M.A. in Sociology from Bogazici University; Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania, and completed two postdoctoral fellowships at the International Center for Advanced Studies, New York University, and the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

She is the author of Modernity, Islam and Secularism in Turkey: Bodies Places and Time; co-editor of Urban Imaginaries: Locating the Modern City, and of Visualizing Secularism and Religion: Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, India. She also has articles that have appeared in journals such as the Comparative Studies in Society and History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Theory, Culture and Society, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. She is currently serving on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Middle East Studies.
History of Consciousness Spring 23 Speaker Series.
In person and via zoom. Please see the History of Consciousness Speaker Series website for further details.
Talk co-sponsored by CMENA.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood Discussion Series
2023-04-30 13:00 - 15:00, 2023-03-26 13:00 - 15:00 | Virtual Event
The Mystery of Edwin Drood Discussion Series
February 26, March 26, and April 30 at 1:00-3:00 PM | Virtual Event
The next three Pickwick Club sessions will focus on Dickens’s last and most enigmatic work, the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood. Considered by many lovers of detective fiction to be the ultimate mystery novel, since its author died without providing a solution, Drood has challenged and intrigued the imaginations of generations of readers.
Join Dickens enthusiast, writer, and Friends of the Dickens Project board member, Carl Wilson for a series of discussions about this book. Wilson notes:
“I first read Drood in 1980 when Leon Garfield published his completion of the novel. I was fascinated then, and still am, by his theory that Dickens would have presented Jasper as a divided self, anticipating Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde by almost twenty years. Although no one will truly know, that theory has stayed with me since, and I would suggest that first-time readers pay close attention to Dickens’s various descriptions of Jasper throughout the five completed and sixth partially completed monthly numbers.”
Reading Schedule
February 26: Chapters 1-9
March 26: Chapters 10-16
April 30: Chapters 17-End
Questions to consider for the first session: The opening chapter reads like almost nothing else that Dickens wrote. What is the purpose of such tortuous writing? What is the result of Dickens choosing to write much of the opening pages in present tense? Wilkie Collins thought that Drood was “the melancholy work of a worn-out brain.” Do you agree?
More Information: https://dickens.ucsc.edu/resources/pickwick-club/2023-02-edwin-drood.html
Registration: https://ucsc.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEkdOmurTgjGdIQ0pyOjIhtspXltHg3huWg
The Santa Cruz Pickwick (Book) Club, a branch of the Dickens Fellowship, is a community of local bookworms, students, and teachers who meet monthly to discuss a nineteenth-century novel. The Santa Cruz Public Libraries provide support for the reading group.

Caste, Class, and Race: Inter-Areal Studies of Socio-Cultural Contradiction
2023-04-28 13:00 - 17:00 | Humanities 2, Room 259
Please join us for the Spring 2023 Aurora Workshop: Caste, Class, and Race: Inter-Areal Studies of Socio-Cultural Contradiction
Keynote: Caste ~ Race Equations: Where is the Caribbean?
Susan Gilman, University of California, Santa Cruz, Literature
Lectures & Discussions:
G.S. Sahota, UCSC
Laura Brueck, Northwestern University
Ivy Wilson, Northwestern University
Kirsten Silva Gruesz, UCSC
Zoom: 99270004783 PW: [REDACTED]
Presented by the Aurora Chair in Sikh/Punjabi Studies and co-sponsored by the Center for South Asian Studies and The Humanitites Institute

Liberation Pedagogy: bell hooks and Teaching/Learning as Emancipatory Practice featuring Jody Greene
2023-04-27 17:45 - 19:45 | University Center, Bhojwani Room, CA, United States
UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning (CITL) invites you to our 2023 Convocation featuring CITL’s Founding Director Jody Greene. From its foundation, CITL has drawn inspiration and wisdom from the work of the late bell hooks, educational visionary and early proponent of active and activist learning. According to hooks, our practices of teaching and learning can and should be as transformative and revolutionary as what we teach. More than three decades ago, not long after she finished her graduate work on this campus, hooks offered us a roadmap to transform educational practice to be equitable, student-centered, relationship-rich, and dynamically engaged. In this talk, Jody will revisit hooks’ influence on recent efforts to reshape teaching and learning at UC Santa Cruz as it takes up the challenge of being a genuinely minority-serving institution.
As CITL comes to the close of its seventh year, we are marking the end of the first phase of our development. This Spring, CITL will be merging with Online Education to create a single, integrated Teaching and Learning Center. In June, Founding Director Jody Greene will be stepping down to make way for new leadership for the Center in the next phase of its evolution. Please join us at 5:00pm for a reception, followed by the lecture which will begin at 5:45pm.
Register to attend in person – RSVP requested by April 18, 2023
Register to attend virtually
Jody Greene came to UC Santa Cruz in 1998 and has served as Professor of Literature, Feminist Studies, and the History of Consciousness. Their research interests include seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British literature; non-dualist Western philosophy, especially the work of Spivak, Derrida, and Nancy; human rights and international law; queer studies; and the history of literary discourse and literary institutions.
Recent publications include a collection, co-edited with Sharif Youssef, The Hostile Takeover: Human Rights after Corporate Personhood (Toronto, 2020), and op-eds in publications such as The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed. They are the recipient of the UCSC Humanities Division John Dizikes Teaching Award (2008), the Disability Resource Center Champion of Change Award (2018), and, twice, of the UCSC Academic Senate Excellence in Teaching Award (2001, 2014). In 2016, they were appointed the founding Director of the Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning (CITL), and they now serve as UCSC’s first Associate Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning. In 2021, they were appointed Special Advisor to the CP/EVC for Educational Equity and Academic Success.
Each year, CITL hosts a convocation to bring together educators across the campus and from the local community to explore significant topics in teaching and learning in higher education. Each year’s keynote address is free and open to the public. This event is presented by the Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning (CITL), and co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute.
Questions? Please contact the University Events Office at specialevents@ucsc.edu.

Living Writers - Laura Jaramillo
2023-04-27 17:20 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Laura Jaramillo is a poet and critic from Queens, New York living in Durham, North Carolina. Her books include Material Girl (subpress, 2012) and Making Water (Futurepoem, 2022). She holds a PhD in critical theory from Duke University. She co-runs the North Carolina-based reading and performance series Paradiso.

Sponsored by The Puknat Literary Endowment, The Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Laurie Sain Endowment, The Humanities Institute, Bookshop Santa Cruz, and Two Birds Books (where the writers’ books are available for purchase)

Roberta Wue - Inventing the Chinese Craftsman: Amoy Chinqua and the 18th Century Export Portrait
2023-04-27 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 520, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The sudden appearance of painted and unfired clay portraits of western merchants in the burgeoning China trade of the early eighteenth century marks some of the earliest manifestations of Chinese trade portraiture or trade “art” – and Chinese artisan. Originating with the craftsman Amoy Chinqua (active 1716-20), these curious and vivid portraits function in a new space of intercultural commerce and exchange, as articulated through their unusual materials, crafting, and authorship.
Roberta Wue works on late Qing and early twentieth-century China, with a particular interest in painting, photography, print culture, and intermediality. Her work examines issues of audience and picturing, while analyzing genre, heterogeneity and hybridity, seriality, and movement in modern Chinese art and visual culture. She is the author of Art Worlds: Artists, Images, and Audiences in Late Nineteenth-Century Shanghai.

Free and open to the campus community and the public.
Presented by the Center for World History.

"DOLORES" Film Screening and Distinguished Social Sciences Alumni Award
2023-04-26 17:45 - 20:00 | Del Mar Theatre
Please join us on April 26, 5:45-8 p.m. at the Del Mar Theatre to honor Peter Bratt, the 2023 Social Sciences Distinguished Alumni Award recipient, and view his film DOLORES, which will be introduced by Jennifer Seibel Newsom. After the screening, Associate Professor Sylvanna Falcón will lead a conversation with Peter.

Peter Bratt (1986 Cowell College, Politics) is a Rockefeller Fellow, a Peabody Award winner, an Emmy-nominated film producer, writer, director, community organizer, and social justice activist. Born and raised in San Francisco by a strong, indigenous, single mother from Peru, his family was part of the American Indian Occupation of Alcatraz, the Wounded Knee stand-off, and the Farm Workers Movement.
Peter wrote, produced and directed DOLORES, a feature documentary about civil rights icon Dolores Huerta that was executive produced by legendary musician Carlos Santana. DOLORES debuted at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival and has won numerous awards, including a 2018 Peabody Award and a Critic’s Circle Award.
Presented by the Division of Social Sciences and the Delores Huerta Research Center for the Americas. Co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute.

Eric Stanley - Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable
2023-04-26 16:00 - 17:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Eric Stanley in conversation with FMST/CRES Prof. Nick Mitchell & FMST Grad Student Kaiya Gordon.
Presented by the Feminist Studies Department.
Recent advances in LGBTQ rights have been accompanied by a rise in attacks against trans, queer and/or gender-nonconforming people of color. In Atmospheres of Violence, theorist and organizer Eric A. Stanley shows how this seeming contradiction reveals the central role of racialized and gendered violence in the US — a structuring antagonism in our social world. Drawing on archives of suicide notes, AIDS histories, surveillance tapes, and prison interviews, Stanley offers a theory of anti-trans/queer violence in which inclusion and recognition are forms of harm rather than remedies. Calling for trans/queer organizing and world-making beyond these forms, they point to abolitionist ways of life that might offer livable futures.
Join via zoom link here.
Eric A. Stanley is the Haas Distinguished Chair in LGBT Equity and an associate professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley, where they are also affiliated with the Program in Critical Theory.

Christopher Silver – Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music across Twentieth-Century North Africa
2023-04-26 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This event is co-sponsored by Jewish Studies
In Recording History, Christopher Silver provides the first history of the music scene and recording industry across twentieth century Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. In doing so, he offers striking insights into Jewish-Muslim relations through the rhythms that animated them. For more than six decades, thousands of phonograph records flowed across North African borders. The sounds embedded in their grooves were shaped in large part by Jewish musicians, who gave voice to a changing world around them. Their popular songs broadcast on radio, performed in concert, and circulated on disc carried with them the power to delight audiences, stir national sentiments, and frustrate French colonial authorities. In asking what North Africa once sounded like, Silver will introduce the UCSC community to a world of many voices, whose music defined their era and still resonates into our present.
Christopher Silver is the Segal Family Assistant Professor in Jewish History and Culture in the Department of Jewish Studies at McGill University. He earned his PhD in History from UCLA. Recipient of grants from the Posen Foundation, the American Academy of Jewish Research, the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, and the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, Silver is the author of numerous articles on North African history and music, including in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Jewish Social Studies, and Hespéris-Tamuda. He is also the founder and curator of the website Gharamophone.com, a digital archive of North African records from the first half of the twentieth century. His first book Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music Across Twentieth Century North Africa was published in June 2022 with Stanford University Press.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, April 26, you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Karen Feldman - The Reality of Suspicion: On Blumenberg, Felski, and Bottomless Critique
2023-04-25 14:00 - 16:30 | Humanities 1, Room 420, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
–—History of Consciousness Spring 23 Speaker Series.
In person and via zoom.
Please see the History of Consciousness Speaker Series website for further details.

Linguistics Colloquia: Christian Ruvalcaba
2023-04-21 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Christian Ruvalcaba, UC Santa Cruz
Over the course of each year, the Linguistics department hosts colloquia by distinguished faculty from around the world.
For full speaker and event information, please visit: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/colloquia/index.html

2023 Sidhartha Maitra Memorial Lecture featuring Dr. Partha Mitter
2023-04-20 17:30 - 19:30 | UC Santa Cruz Silicon Valley Campus
Intense debate has recently been centered on the notion of a cosmopolitanism that arose with colonial era globalization. Cosmopolitanism naturally presupposes travel but what about those who stay at home? The migration of ideas and cross-cultural exchanges made possible by the spread of hegemonic languages and print culture created a virtual cosmopolis that has continued to our day.
Dr. Mitter’s talk will focus on the dynamics, peculiarities and biases of this world.

If you are unable to attend in person, you can join us virtually. Click here to register for the virtual event.

Partha Mitter is a writer and historian of art and culture, specializing in the reception of Indian art in the West, as well as in modernity, art and identity in India, and more recently in global modernism. He studied history at London University and did his doctorate with E. H. Gombrich (1970). He began his career as Junior Research Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge (1968-69) and Research Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge (1970-74). In 1974 he joined Sussex as a Lecturer in Indian History, retiring in 2002 as Professor in Art History. He is an Adjunct Research Professor Carleton University, Ontario, Canada
His publications include Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1977: Chicago University Press Paperback, 1992; Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2013); Art and Nationalism in Colonial India 1850-1922: Occidental Orientations (Cambridge University Press, 1994); Indian Art, Oxford Art History Series (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002); The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde – 1922-1947 (Reaktion Books, London, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2007).
Mitter was Radhakrishnan Lecturer at All Souls College, Oxford in 1992 and Getty Visiting Professor at Bogazici University, Istanbul in 2011. He has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts; and CASVA, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. In 2000 he was invited by the Indian Government to set up the School of Art and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.
In 1982 he curated and wrote an introduction to the catalogue of an exhibition on the history of Indian photography for the Photographers Gallery, London. At present he is Emeritus Professor in Art History, University of Sussex, Member of Wolfson College, Oxford and Adjunct Research Professor, Carleton University, Ontario, Canada. In 2008 he received an Honorary D.Lit. degree from the Courtauld Institute, London University.

Anuradha Luther Maitra received her Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University, and has served UC Santa Cruz in many capacities: Professor of Economics, Special Advisor to the Chancellor on International Initiatives, UC Santa Cruz Foundation Trustee and President. In the year 2001, she established the Sidhartha Maitra Lecture Series on Humanism, Reason and Tolerance in memory of her late husband “with a little bit of help from my friends”: Vikram Seth delivered the Inaugural Lecture ‘Friendship and Poetry’, and Kiran and Arjun Malhotra provided the founding endowment.

This premier campus event series seeks to enrich the intellectual life of the campus and the community, and is made possible thanks to the Sidhartha Maitra Memorial Lecture endowment.
This event is co-sponsored by the Center for South Asian Studies.

PhD+ Workshop - VOCES Drafting Stages with Melissa Rosario
2023-04-20 12:00 - 13:30 | Zoom, CA, United States
Drafting Stages is a series of intimate conversations with speakers working inside and outside of academia and at different points in their careers about writing as an evolving and non-linear process. Focusing on conditions, inspirations, and methods, each speaker will offer personal insight into their processes and the messiness and vulnerabilities of drafting stages.
The invited speaker for this session is Dr. Melissa Rosario (she/they), a mixed-race queer nonbinary femme who lives and works in Puerto Rico. Drawing on their training as an anthropologist and her own journey of self-healing, Melissa founded and leads the Center for Embodied Pedagogy and Action (CEPA). CEPA is a practice-based initiative dedicated to the decolonization of mind-body-spirit of organizers, artists, and healers. It is a space for diaspora and island-based Boricuas and close allies who want to co-create a culture of reclamation that transforms inheritances and patterns into collective liberation. They understand it to be a tool for healing as it allows us to create new possibilities and agreements for our future while also opening space to speak truths that have remained on the margins of our awareness. She has published in Anthropology and Humanism, AnthroNow, and Curriculum Inquiry and is a co-author of Decolonizing for Organizers, a practice-based manual for activists unlearning and healing from colonization. Her first book is under review and is tentatively titled Another Country: Reclaiming Freedom in Puerto Rico.

The conversation will be facilitated by Dr. Gina Athena Ulysse, Professor in the Feminist Studies Department at UCSC. This event is presented by GANAS Graduate Pathways and VOCES and is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute.

About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the seventh year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by The Humanities Institute. We meet monthly to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Black Sound Symposium at Indexical
2023-04-20 - 2023-04-23 | Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Black Sound Symposium at Indexical is a 4-day event full of concerts, talks, workshops, screenings, and interdisciplinary dialogue rooted in Black sound and Black sonic space. The symposium aims to create and sustain community; to celebrate curiosity, wonder, disobedience, collaboration, and play in artistic work; to expand anti-racist and activist pedagogy and methodologies in and outside of our institutions; and to honor the long and rich lineages of Black virtuosity that have been diminished and erased from artistic canons and social consciousness.
“Black studies and anticolonial thought offer methodological practices wherein we read, live, hear, groove, create, and write across a range of temporalities, places, texts, and ideas that build on existing liberatory practices and pursue ways of living in the world that are uncomfortably generous and provisional and practical and, as well, imprecise and unrealized. The method is rigorous, too. Wonder is study. Curiosity is attentive.”
-Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories
The Black Sound Symposium is partially sponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz & the Visualizing Abolition public scholarship initiative at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, UC Santa Cruz. Please visit the Black Sound Symposium website for the full symposium schedule and details.

Karina Walters - Transcending Historical Trauma: How to Address American Indian Health Inequities and Promote Thriving
2023-04-19 18:00 - 19:30 | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Throughout history, settler colonialism has endeavored to erase the lived experiences and histories of American Indian and Alaska Native Peoples. Yet, Indigenous populations, particularly Indigenous women, remain strong and resilient pillars of communities. Oftentimes these [her]stories are missed in public health initiatives as a result of settler colonialism’s perpetual drive to erase and silence. In this talk, Dr. Walters will explore the latest advances in designing culturally derived, Indigenist health promotion interventions among American Indian and Alaska Native women. The talk will describe the indigenist methodological innovations utilized in the NIH funded Yappalli Choctaw Road to Health, a culturally focused, land-based obesity and substance abuse prevention program as well as the national multi-site Honor Project Two-Spirit Health Study. Consistent with tribal systems of knowledge, both studies illustrate the importance of developing culturally derived health promotion interventions rooted in Indigenist thoughtways and land-based practices to promote Indigenous thrivance and community well-being.

Dr. Karina L. Walters (MSW, PhD) is the recently appointed Director of the Tribal Health Research Office at the National Institute of Health. She is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, a Katherine Hall Chambers University Professor at the University of Washington School of Social Work, and an adjunct Professor in the Department of Global Health, School of Public Health, and Co-Director of the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute (IWRI) at the University of Washington. Dr. Walters is world renowned for her expertise in developing behavioral and multi-level health interventions steeped in culture to activate health-promoting behaviors. She has written landmark papers on traumatic stress and health, historical and intergenerational trauma, and originated the Indigenist Stress-Coping model. She has led 22 NIH-funded studies, is one of the leading American Indian scientists in the country, and is only one of two American Indians (and the only Native woman) ever invited to deliver the prestigious Director’s lecture to the Wednesday Afternoon Lecture Series (WALS) at the NIH. She is the first American Indian Fellow inductee into the American Academy of Social Welfare and Social Work (AASWSW).

Event logistics: Bicycling, car pooling, ridesharing, and public transportation are encouraged as parking is limited. If you drive to the event, please plan to park in UCSC Lot #115 or 116. To reach these lots, proceed through the main entrance to campus, continue up the hill from the information kiosk on Coolidge, then turn right at the Ranch View/Carriage House Road stoplight into the Carriage House/Campus Facilities parking lot. The Hay Barn is a 5-minute walk across the street from the parking lot. There will be directional signage to help you get to the correct parking lot and Barn entrances. Overflow parking will be available at lot 122. Download a parking map here.
If you have disability-related needs, please contact us at thi@ucsc.edu or call 831-459-1274 by April 12, 2023.
This event is part of the “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” Sawyer Seminar series.

Valuing Engaged Scholarship in the Tenure and Promotion Process
2023-04-19 15:30 - 17:30 | Rachel Carson College Red Room, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join Campus + Community in a forum with campus leaders about taking stock of engaged scholarship in the tenure and promotion process at UC Santa Cruz and across the UC system. UCSC has developed several new sets of guidelines that will help engaged scholars to talk about and elevate their teaching and research. These guidelines will also help departments, deans, the Committee on Academic Personnel (CAP) and senior leadership to evaluate engaged scholar files. Presenters will share the ways that campus is seeking to support engaged scholarship in the merit process and will take questions from the audience about how to move forward.
Register to attend virtually
Register to attend in person
Featuring:

Rebecca London – Faculty Direct of Campus and Community and Associate Professor of Sociology
Herbie Lee – Vice Provost for Academic Affairs
Jasmine Alinder – Dean of Humanities
Susan Gillman – Professor of Literature and Committee on Academic Personnel

The workshop starts at 3:30 p.m. with a reception starting at 4:30 p.m.
For more information, visit the Campus and Community website.
Questions? Contact Campus + Community: cam_com@ucsc.edu

Kristin Lawler – Surfing, Capitalism, and the Refusal of Work
2023-04-19 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
In this talk, I will examine surfing as a countercultural practice and will consider the ways in which it constitutes a lived refusal of the logic of capital. I will look at several contemporary and historical iterations of the surf image in popular culture to think through its political significance, and will survey the state of the new field of “surf studies.”
Kristin Lawler is Professor of Sociology at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in New York City. She is author of The American Surfer, published in 2011, and co-editor of the forthcoming volume Roll and Flow: the Political Ontology of Surf and Skate. Her work appears in numerous edited collections, including Feminism and the Early Frankfurt School (forthcoming); Class: the Anthology; Nietzsche and Critical Social Theory; Bohemias in Southern California; and The Critical Surf Studies Reader. She is a contributing member of the editorial board of the journal Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination and a member of the board of directors of the Institute for the Radical Imagination.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
RSVP by 11 AM on the day of the colloquium, and you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

What’s Happening in Peru? Interdisciplinary Perspectives on a Structural Crisis
2023-04-18 17:00 - 18:30 | Virtual Event
Peru has been in a state of political and humanitarian crisis since early December 2022 when protests erupted in the wake of former President Pedro Castillo’s unsuccessful attempt to shut down Congress to avert an impeachment. When acting President Dina Boluarte–Castillo’s former vice president—announced that elections would not be held until May 2024, Peruvians across the country took to the streets first to demand elections and a constitutional assembly and then, when the national police violently repressed protests, to demand Boluarte’s resignation. Months later, more than 60 Peruvians have died, including 47 protestors killed by state forces, mostly from Southern Andean regions of the country, and Boluarte has refused to resign.
The current situation in Peru is the latest expression of a deep structural crisis, rooted in historical relations of dominance since colonial times in the highly centralized country. This is reflected in the long-standing conflictive relationship between the capital, Lima, and the other regions, which has polarized the public debate even more. The role of media and emerging technologies have played a crucial role in how these protests have been represented, adding fire to this polarization. To understand this multidimensional crisis from multidisciplinary perspectives, this round table features scholars from both the humanities and social sciences who will reflect on the historical, social, cultural, economic, and political implications of the ongoing crisis for the future of Peru.
Panelists
Aldair Mejía (Photojournalist, Lima) is a photojournalist based in Lima, Peru. He currently focuses his work on political issues, social conflicts, portraits, concerts, among other events in the country. During the last years Aldair has been working as a collaborator for the EFE agency of Spain and Diario La República, his photographs have been published by agencies such as CNN in Spanish, EFE Agency, New York Times, Clarín, La Vanguardia, Washington Post, etc. He is also a member of the Association of Photo Journalists of Peru (AFPP). Finalist in the IPYS contest, Recognition in the 35 Awards, Second Place in the Photojournalism category in the Entel contest, Winner in the PhotoEspaña contest.
Cecilia Mendez (UCSB) is a Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A Peruvian historian specialized in the social and political history of Peru in the national period, she received her Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and numerous prestigious awards, including the Howard Cline book prize for her book The Plebeian Republic (Duke, 2005). Her work calls the attention on the importance of late eighteenth-century, and nineteenth-century political developments in shaping modern conceptions nationhood, citizenship, and “race” in Peru. She has investigated the historical relationship between the peasants and the militaries, and the role of war and the army in the construction of the state. She is a columnist for the Peruvian newspaper La República.
Carlos Molina-Vital (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) currently works as an instructor and director of the Quechua Program at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has two master’s degrees in Linguistics: one from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (2005), the other from Rice University, in Houston, Texas (2012). He is currently finishing his doctorate in Andean Studies (Linguistics) at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. His studies of the Quechua languages ​​include varieties spoken in Ancash, Ayacucho, Apurimac, and Cuzco in Peru. Since 2018, he has coordinated the QINTI project (Quechua Innovation and Teaching Initiative). With his collaborators he is currently writing Ayni, which aims to an open access manual for Southern Quechua and intended to help teachers and students of Quechua in the United States and around the world draw on the shared characteristics and diversity of Quechua varieties mutually intelligible in Peru and Bolivia.
Mariela Noles Cotito (Universidad del Pacífico, Lima) is a Professor of Political Science and of Discrimination and Public Policy at Universidad del Pacifico, in Lima, Peru. Her research agenda includes topics of gender equality, social inclusion policies in Peru, and how the intersection of different systems of oppression position different groups of people outside of the scope of legal protection. Most recently she is focused on exploring the effectiveness of ethnoracial legislation to promote and protect the rights of Afrodescendants in Peru. She holds a Law degree from the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru, an LLM from the University of Pennsylvania, and two MA degrees in Latin American Studies and Political Science from the University of South Florida. Concurrently, she has held positions in the Ministry of Women and Vulnerable Populations and the Ministry of Culture in Peru, and a top advisory position in the Office of Women and Equality of the Metropolitan Municipality of the City of Lima on issues of diversity and social inclusion.
Nelson Pereyra (Universidad Nacional San Cristóbal de Huamanga, Ayacucho) is a historian, graduated from the National University of San Cristóbal de Huamanga, with master’s studies at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru and Pablo de Olavide University in Spain. In addition, he holds a Ph.D. in History with a Mention in Andean Studies. His lines of research are related to the political participation of peasants in the formation of the Peruvian State and to regional history and culture. He has recently published the books: History, Memory and Symbolism of Holy Week in Ayacucho, State, Memory and Contemporary Society in Ayacucho, Cusco and Lima (edited together with Claudia Rosas) and Living and Active regions: Knots and Foundations of Contemporary Peru (co-authored with Susana Aldana Rivera).
Moderators
Alejandra Watanabe Farro (LALS, UCSC)
Amanda Smith (Literature, UCSC)
Carla Hernández Garavito (Anthropology, UCSC)
Co-organized with Saskia Nauenberg Dunkell (The Humanities Institute, UCSC)

Registration required to receive the zoom link.
In Spanish with simultaneous English interpretation
This event is presented by The Humanities Institute and co-sponsored by the Department of Latino and Latin American Studies, the Spanish Studies program, Arts Research Institute, and the Dolores Huerta Research Center.

¿Qué está pasando en el Perú? Perspectivas interdisciplinarias para entender una crisis estructural
Desde principios de diciembre del 2022, el Perú atraviesa una crisis política y humanitaria cuando estallaron las protestas a raíz del intento fallido del expresidente Pedro Castillo de cerrar el Congreso para evitar la vacancia por incapacidad moral. Cuando la presidenta en funciones Dina Boluarte –exvicepresidenta de Castillo– anunció que las elecciones no se realizarían hasta mayo de 2024, peruanos de todo el país salieron a las calles primero para exigir elecciones y asamblea constituyente y, cuando la Policía Nacional y el Ejército reprimieron violentamente las protestas, exigir la renuncia de Boluarte. Meses después, más de 60 peruanos han muerto, incluidos al menos 47 manifestantes asesinados por las fuerzas estatales, en su mayoría de las regiones andinas del sur del país, y Boluarte se niega a renunciar.
La situación actual del Perú es la expresión más reciente de una profunda crisis estructural, arraigada en históricas relaciones de dominio desde la época colonial en un país altamente centralizado. Esto se refleja en la conflictiva relación entre la capital, Lima, y ​​las demás regiones, que ha polarizado aún más el debate público. El papel de los medios y las nuevas tecnologías ha jugado un papel crucial en la forma en que se han representado estas protestas, agregando tensión a esta polarización. Para comprender esta crisis estructural desde perspectivas multidisciplinarias, esta mesa redonda convoca académicos de las humanidades y ciencias sociales para reflexionar colectivamente sobre las implicaciones históricas, sociales, culturales, económicas y políticas de la crisis actual para el futuro de Perú.
Panelistas
Aldair Mejía es Fotoperiodista, en Lima,Perú, cuyo trabajo se centra principalmente en coberturas de prensa. Actualmente enfoca su labor en temáticas políticas, conflictos sociales, retratos, conciertos, entre otros acontecimientos en el país. Durante los últimos años Aldair ha estado trabajando como colaborador para la agencia EFE de España y Diario La República, sus fotografías han sido publicadas las agencias, como CNN en español, Agencia EFE, New York Times, Clarín, La Vanguardia, Washington Post, etc. También es miembro de la Asociación de Foto Periodistas del Perú (AFPP). Finalista en el concurso IPYS, Reconocimieno en los 35 Awards, Segundo Puesto en la categoria de Fotoperiodismo en el concurso de Entel, Ganador en el concurso de PhotoEspaña.
Cecilia Mendez es profesora de Historia en la Universidad de California, Santa Bárbara. Historiadora peruana especializada en la historia social y política del Perú en el período nacional, recibió su Ph.D. de la Universidad Estatal de Nueva York en Stony Brook, y varios prestigiosos premios, incluido el premio del libro Howard Cline por su libro The Plebeian Republic (Duke, 2005). Su trabajo llama la atención sobre la importancia de los desarrollos políticos de finales del siglo XVIII y del siglo XIX en la formación de las concepciones modernas de nación, ciudadanía y “raza” en el Perú. Y han investigado la relación histórica entre los campesinos y los militares, y el papel de la guerra y el ejército en la construcción del Estado. Es columnista del diario peruano La República.
Carlos Molina-Vital se desempeña como instructor y responsable del Programa de Quechua en el Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos y Caribeños de la Universidad de Illinois en Urbana-Champaign. Tiene dos maestrías en Lingüística: una de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (2005), la otra de la Universidad Rice, en Houston, Texas (2012). Actualmente está terminando su doctorado en Estudios Andinos en la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Sus estudios de las lenguas quechuas incluyen variedades habladas en Ancash, Ayacucho, Apurímac y Cuzco en Perú. Desde 2018 coordina el proyecto QINTI (Iniciativa de Innovación y Enseñanza Quechua, por sus siglas en inglés). Con sus colaboradores está escribiendo actualmente Ayni, que busca ser un manual de acceso abierto para quechua sureño y destinado a ayudar a profesores y estudiantes de quechua en los Estados Unidos y en todo el mundo a partir de las características compartidas y la diversidad de las variedades quechua mutuamente inteligibles habladas en Perú y Bolivia.
Mariela Noles Cotito es profesora de Ciencia Política, y Discriminación y Políticas Públicas en la Universidad del Pacífico. Es abogada por la PUCP; máster en Derecho por la University of Pennsylvania; máster en Estudios Latinoamericanos y máster en Ciencia Política, con una concentración en Etnicidad en Países Andinos, por la University of South Florida. Su portafolio de investigación incluye temas de derechos humanos, igualdad de género y no discriminación, así como el análisis de políticas públicas de inclusión en el país. Ha sido parte de equipos técnicos en el Ministerio de la Mujer, el Ministerio de Cultura y la Gerencia de la Mujer de la Municipalidad Metropolitana de Lima.
Nelson Pereyra es historiador, egresado de la Universidad Nacional de San Cristóbal de Huamanga, con estudios de maestría en la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú y en la Universidad Pablo de Olavide en España. Además, es doctor en Historia con Mención de Estudios Andinos. Sus ejes de investigación están relacionados con la participación política de los campesinos en la formación del Estado peruano y con la historia y cultura regional. Recientemente ha publicado los libros: Historia, memoria y simbolismo de la Semana Santa de Ayacucho, Estado, memoria y sociedad contemporánea en Ayacucho, Cusco y Lima (editado junto a Claudia Rosas) y Regiones vivas y activas: nudos y fundamentos del Perú contemporáneo (en coautoría con Susana Aldana Rivera).

Max Weiss: Revolutions Aesthetic
2023-04-17 12:30 - 14:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Please join us for a talk by Professor Max Weiss (Princeton University), who will be discussing his new book on cultural production in Ba’thist Syria, Revolutions Aesthetic: A Cultural History of Baʻthist Syria (Stanford University Press, 2022). Revolutions Aesthetic reconceptualizes contemporary Syrian politics, authoritarianism, and cultural life. Engaging rich original sources—novels, films, and cultural periodicals—Weiss highlights themes crucial to the making of contemporary Syria: heroism and leadership, gender and power, comedy and ideology, surveillance and the senses, witnessing and temporality, and death and the imagination. Revolutions Aesthetic places front and center the struggle around aesthetic ideology that has been key to the constitution of state, society, and culture in Syria over the course of the past fifty years.
Lunch will be served. Any graduate students would like a copy of his book, please contact muhdavis@ucsc.edu.

PhD+ Workshop - Grants and Fellowships
2023-04-14 14:30 - 16:00 | Graduate Student Commons
Grants and Fellowships for Scholars in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences
Learn how to make your fellowship and grant proposals competitive to a wide range of selection committees. We’ll discuss what does and does not need to be in a research proposal, the proper tone and form, and ways to tease out the larger stakes of individual research projects and avoid the jargon of field-specific descriptions. This session will help you craft a research proposal that appeals to a broad academic audience. This workshop will be an opportunity for graduate students to learn about The Humanities Institute’s funding resources as well as strategies for acquiring extramural support, including from national funding organizations like the SSRC.
The workshop will be led by Catalina Vallejo (Program Director for the SSRC Just Tech Program) and Sharon Kinoshita (Interim Faculty Director at The Humanities Institute and Professor of Literature). As part of the workshop, Saskia Nauenberg Dunkell (Research Programs and Communications Manager at The Humanities Institute) will also share an overview of THI resources to support graduate students with fellowship applications.
Catalina Vallejo is program director for the Social Science Research Council’s Just Tech Program. Catalina holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Virginia, an M.A. in cultural studies from Universidad de los Andes, and a B.A. in sociology from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Her doctoral work focused on post-conflict in Colombia and Peru and was funded by the SSRC and the National Science Foundation. Before joining the SSRC, she worked in development consulting. She is fluent in English and Spanish, grew up in Bogotá (Colombia), and travels frequently to the region.
https://www.ssrc.org/staff/vallejo-pedraza-diana-catalina/
Sharon Kinoshita is a Professor of Literature. She co-directs the mediterraneanseminar.org and has been PI or co-PI for a five-year UC Multicampus Research Project, a UC Humanities Research Institute Residential Research Group, and four National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institutes in Mediterranean Studies. She has served as first- or final-round fellowship reviewer for the ACLS, the Stanford Humanities Center, the American Academy in Berlin, and other institutions.
This event will be held in-person in the Graduate Student Commons (GSC) Fireside Lounge.
Please RSVP using your UCSC email address:
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This event is being presented by The Humanities Institute and co-sponsored by the Graduate Student Commons.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the seventh year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by The Humanities Institute. We meet monthly to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Linguistics Colloquia: Bryan Donaldson
2023-04-14 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Bryan Donaldson, UC Santa Cruz
Over the course of each year, the Linguistics department hosts colloquia by distinguished faculty from around the world.
For full speaker and event information, please visit: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/colloquia/index.html

Paisley Currah – This Anti-Trans Moment: Resisting the Right and the Center
2023-04-14 12:00 - 14:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The current assault on transgender people in the United States seems relatively new, but in fact governments have been regulating the lives of transgender people for decades—from contradictory rules for sex classification to bans on Medicaid coverage to rules about gender-appropriate comportment. In this talk, Currah situates these legislative attacks within a longer history of (trans)gender governance.
Paisley Currah is a Professor of Political Science and Women’s Gender Studies at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the co-founder of the leading journal in transgender studies, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Currah’s book, Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity, published last year by New York University Press, reveals the hidden logics that have governed sex classification policies in the United States in the past and shows what the regulation of transgender identity can tell us about society’s approach to sex and gender writ large.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Please note: this is a hybrid event. To receive a link, please RSVP by 11 AM on the day of the colloquium, and you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Deep Read Partner Event: Confronting Climate Change
2023-04-13 18:00 - 20:00 | Zoom, CA, United States
The Deep Read is partnering with Confronting Climate Change, an annual public lecture series that brings together scientists, artists, policy experts, and community members to discuss our planet’s wellbeing and share solutions for our future.
This online event will spark conversation and thought on how research in the natural and social sciences can lead to climate change solutions and preserve the overall environmental health and wellbeing of our planet.
We invite members of the community and general public to engage and participate in the Zoom-based event on Thursday, April 13, at 6 p.m.

Panel Discussion
Presenters will discuss the social and economic transformations that will be required in order to address the health impacts of climate change, and together we will think about how climate change might inspire us to work towards a more livable future.
Speakers
Julie Livingston, New York University
Matthew Huber, Purdue University
Bharat Venkat, UC Los Angeles
Moderator
Andrew Mathews, UC Santa Cruz
Learn more and register.

Living Writers - Zaina Alsous
2023-04-13 17:20 | Virtual Event
Zaina Alsous is the author of the poetry collection A Theory of Birds (University of Arkansas Press, 2019), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award and the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Lemon Effigies (Anhinga Press, 2017), winner of the Rick Campbell Chapbook Prize. Her poetry, reviews, and essays have been published in Poetry magazine, Kenyon Review, the New Inquiry, Adroit, and elsewhere. She edits for Scalawag Magazine, a publication dedicated to unsettling dominant narratives of the southern United States.

Sponsored by The Puknat Literary Endowment, The Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Laurie Sain Endowment, The Humanities Institute, Bookshop Santa Cruz, and Two Birds Books (where the writers’ books are available for purchase)

THI Public Fellowship Information Session
2023-04-12 14:00 - 15:00 | Virtual Event
Curious about becoming a THI Public Fellow? Not sure how to find the right partner organization? If you’re thinking about applying your expertise in the public sphere or exploring career opportunities beyond academia, then you may be interested in THI’s Public Fellowship program.
Public fellowships provide opportunities for doctoral students in the Humanities to contribute to research, programming, communications, and fundraising at non-profit organizations, cultural institutions, or companies and expand their skills in a non-academic setting while engaged in graduate study.
Please join us for a second information session about the 2023 THI Public Fellows program and learn about Summer 2023 opportunities.
All THI Public Fellow applicants are required to attend an Info Session or meet with THI Staff by April 14th, 2023. Final applications are due on April 20, 2023.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the seventh year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by The Humanities Institute. We meet monthly to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grants/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.
RSVP here:
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Paromita Vohra – The Lovers’ Argument: What Bollywood Songs Taught Me About Making Documentaries
2023-04-12 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
As a documentary filmmaker, working in India, and especially as one interested in political conversation and social change, you inherit a form. The documentary form ostensibly exists outside commercial mainstream Indian cinema, privileges realism, and is marked by ethical nobility and commitment, and a willingness to be a little bit bored for a political cause. Shorn of frivolity, of excess, of emotional unpredictability and most importantly of pleasure, such settled pieties of the documentary form are difficult to accept. Instead, I offer, a kind of Hindi film duet, as the basis for thinking about documentary form: the lover’s argument which invokes shared experience, seduction, dangerous knowledge, revelation and pleasure. What kind of politics might this aesthetic suggest, when the argument is made in the service of connection, not conquest?
The talk will be illustrated with clips from my work.
Paromita Vohra is a filmmaker and writer who works with a range of forms, including film, comics, digital media, installation art and writing to explore themes of feminism, desire, urban life and popular culture. Her work has been exhibited at the Tate Modern, the Wellcome Gallery and the National Gallery of Modern Art, and screened around the world. Her films as director include the documentaries Unlimited Girls, Q2P, Where’s Sandra? and Morality TV and the Loving Jehad: Ek Manohar Kahanai, among others and a series of short musical films including The Amourous Adventures of Megha and Shakku in the Valley of Consent. She has written the fiction feature Khamosh Pani, the documentaries Skin Deep, Stuntmen of Bollywood, and If You Pause, the play Ishquiya:Dharavi Ishtyle and the comic Priya’s Mirror. She has published several essays on film, popular culture, love and desire as well as short stories and writes a weekly newspaper column, Paro-normal Activity in Sunday Mid-day. In 2015 she founded the Agents of Ishq, an award-winning digital platform for conversations on sex, love and desire in India and is currently its Creative Director.
This event is sponsored by the Center for South Asian Studies. The Center for South Asian Studies is delighted to welcome its first South Asian artist/activist-in-residence, Paromita Vohra. Paromita will be in residence at UCSC from April 10-April 24, 2023.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, April 12, you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Humanities Faculty Research Forum
2023-04-12 10:00 - 11:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Understanding Your Research Support Ecosystem
Please join us in person for a brief presentation about the Research Cycle followed by a meet-and-greet with the team that supports your research. Breakfast will be served.

For those who cannot attend in person, the presentation portion of the event will be available on Zoom.
Opening Remarks
Jasmine Alinder
Dean of Humanities
John MacMillan
Interim Vice Chancellor for Research
Moderated by
Irena Polić
Assistant Dean for Research and Engagement, Humanities
Featuring
Deirdre Beach
Executive Director, Sponsored Research Administration
Heather Bell
Director of Research Development
Sarah Carle
Executive Director of Foundation Relations
Caitlin Charos
Research Development Specialist, Humanities & Humanistic Social Sciences
Mayra Gonzales-Adler
Proposal Analyst, Office of Sponsored Projects
Alison Hansen
Accounting/Research Manager, Humanities
Nutan Mellegers
Associate Director, Office of Sponsored Projects
Katie Novak
Finance Director, Humanities
Caroline Rodriguez
Associate Director, Corporate and Foundation Relations

Legal Studies Program Annual Distinguished Lecture: Coming to Understand Latino Anti-Black Bias
2023-04-05 14:00 - 16:00 | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join us as we welcome Tanya Katerí Hernández to discuss her book Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality. Praised as the “most important Afro-Latina voice on civil rights today,” Hernández argues that unmasking Latino anti-Black bias is essential for fostering multiracial democracy in the United States.

This event is open to all. Copies of Racial Innocence will be available for purchase.
The UCSC Legal Studies Program and Professor Hernández are making 50 copies of the book available free to UCSC students who attend.
Tanya Katerí Hernández is the Archibald R. Murray Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law, and an Associate Director of Fordham’s Center on Race, Law and Justice. She is the author of Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality.

Co-sponsored by: Center for Racial Justice, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department, Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas, Feminist Studies Department, History Department, Latin American and Latino Studies Department, Philosophy Department, Politics Department, Sociology Department, and The Humanities Institute

C. Nadia Seremetakis – A Journey through Border Spaces of the Everyday
2023-04-05 12:00 - 13:30 | zoom, CA, United States
This talk is co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology
The border is the shared topos of the anthropologist, the historian, the archaeologist, the artist, the musician and the poet, as they all bring into dialogue the past and future with the present, the inside with the outside, the particular with the general, ideas with the senses. This lecture explores border and trauma spaces through a journey of antiphonic witnessing and memory as a way of (re)establishing a self-reflexive relationship with the past that changes the positioning of the present. Drawing on 30 years of conscious and unconscious fieldwork, writing, teaching and practicing multimedia public anthropology, I reflect on my own antinomic subject position in my discipline as a so called “native,” or “indigenous” ethnographer and also as a diasporic, American-trained, post-Boasian anthropologist.
C. Nadia Seremetakis is Professor of cultural anthropology and the author of seven books including poetry. She is best known for her ethnographies The Senses Still, The Last Word: Women Death Divination, and Sensing the Everyday, written in two languages. Born and raised in Greece, she studied and taught in New York where she lived for more than two decades and later joined the University of the Peloponnese. She has conducted fieldwork in various parts of the world and to this day she divides her life between USA and Europe.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
RSVP by 11 AM on the day of the colloquium, and you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Christopher Silver – Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music across Twentieth-Century North Africa
2023-04-03 12:00 - 13:30 | Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
In Recording History, Christopher Silver provides the first history of the music scene and recording industry across twentieth century Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. In doing so, he offers striking insights into Jewish-Muslim relations through the rhythms that animated them. For more than six decades, thousands of phonograph records flowed across North African borders. The sounds embedded in their grooves were shaped in large part by Jewish musicians, who gave voice to a changing world around them. Their popular songs broadcast on radio, performed in concert, and circulated on disc carried with them the power to delight audiences, stir national sentiments, and frustrate French colonial authorities. In asking what North Africa once sounded like, Silver will introduce the UCSC community to a world of many voices, whose music defined their era and still resonates into our present.
Christopher Silver is the Segal Family Assistant Professor in Jewish History and Culture in the Department of Jewish Studies at McGill University. He earned his PhD in History from UCLA. Recipient of grants from the Posen Foundation, the American Academy of Jewish Research, the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, and the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, Silver is the author of numerous articles on North African history and music, including in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Jewish Social Studies, and Hespéris-Tamuda. He is also the founder and curator of the website Gharamophone.com, a digital archive of North African records from the first half of the twentieth century. His first book Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music Across Twentieth Century North Africa was published in June 2022 with Stanford University Press.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
RSVP by 11 AM on the day of the colloquium, and you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

PhD+ Workshop - VOCES Drafting Stages with Melissa Johnson
2023-03-30 17:30 - 19:00 | Zoom, CA, United States
Drafting Stages is a series of intimate conversations with speakers working inside and outside of academia and at different points in their careers about writing as an evolving and non-linear process. Focusing on conditions, inspirations, and methods, each speaker will offer personal insight into their processes and the messiness and vulnerabilities of drafting stages.
The invited speaker for this session is Melissa Johnson, Professor of Anthropology and Environmental Studies and chair of the Race and Ethnicity Studies program at Southwestern University, a small liberal arts college near Austin, Texas. Her research and writing are primarily focused on Belize’s rural Afro-Caribbean communities and the inter-relationship between ecologies, economies, and racial formations, both historically and in the present day in these communities. Along with her book, Becoming Creole: Race and Nature in Belize (Rutgers 2018), she has numerous articles in a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary journals, and several scholarly projects underway, including work on the racial history of Southwestern University.

The conversation will be facilitated by Dr. Gina Athena Ulysse, Professor in the Feminist Studies Department at UCSC. This event is presented by GANAS Graduate Pathways and VOCES and is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute.

About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the seventh year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by The Humanities Institute. We meet monthly to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

2023 Latino Role Models Conference
2023-03-25 09:00 - 13:00 | Cabrillo College Crocker Theater, 6500 Soquel Dr., Aptos, CA, 95003, United States
This exciting FREE annual conference features Latino/a college students and professionals and performances inspiring students to achieve their dreams for college and career. This year, we are excited to welcome Olga Talamante as the keynote speaker! The conference is conducted in Spanish with English translation at the Crocker Theater, Cabrillo College. Please complete the registration below to ensure your spot at this year’s conference on March 25th, 2023 from 9:00-1:00 PM.
Esta emocionante conferencia anual GRATUITA presenta a estudiantes y profesionales latinos / a universitarios y representaciones que inspiran a los estudiantes a alcanzar sus sueños universitarios y profesionales. Este año, esperamos dar la bienvenida a Olga Talamante como oradora principal! La conferencia se lleva a cabo en español con traducción al inglés al teatro Crocker, Cabrillo College. Complete el registro a continuación para asegurar su lugar en la conferencia de este año el 25 de marzo 9:00-1:00 PM.

Olga Talamante is Executive Director Emerita of the Chicana Latina Foundation (CLF). She became the first Executive Director of CLF in January 2003 serving in that position until she retired in March of 2018.
Ms. Talamante’s family migrated from Mexico to Gilroy, California in the early 1960’s where they worked in the farm fields for several years. Those formative years formed the basis for her activism as an organizer and supporter of the nascent United Farm Workers labor union. She is widely respected for her long-standing community activism and leadership. During the mid-seventies, she became well known for her experience as a political prisoner in Argentina. As a result of a successful grass-roots campaign, she was released after spending 16 months in an Argentine prison. After returning to the United States, she remained active in the Chicana/o, Latin American solidarity, LGBTQ and progressive political movements. She serves on several boards and currently co-chairs the Caravan for the Children, which advocates for the release, reunification and healing of the children separated at the southern border. She holds a B.A. in Latina American History from UC Santa Cruz and an Honorary Doctorate Degree from the School of Education at the University of San Francisco. During the month of October 2022, she received the following awards: The Visionary Award from Horizons Foundation, The Rosario Anaya Community Service Award from The San Francisco Latino Heritage Committee, The History Maker Award from the GLBT Historical Society and the Distinguished Citizen award from the Commonwealth Club.
Erandi García, originally from Morelia, Mexico, has worked in various media outlets in Mexico and the United States, such as: TV Azteca Michoacán, Univision 67 and Telemundo 48 in the Bay Area. She has won the Emmy Award for excellence in news, among other distinctions. Erandi is the founder of a non-profit organization called Juntos Podemos whose mission is to inform and educate the Spanish-speaking population about public health and safety. She currently works for the Hospice Giving Foundation in Monterey, California. When she’s not working, Erandi likes to walk on the beach, hike, and plan the next adventure with her family.

PhD+ Workshop – THI Public Fellowship Information Session
2023-03-24 13:30 - 14:30 | Virtual Event
Curious about becoming a THI Public Fellow? Not sure how to find the right partner organization? If you’re thinking about applying your expertise in the public sphere or exploring career opportunities beyond academia, then you may be interested in THI’s Public Fellowship program.
Public fellowships provide opportunities for doctoral students in the Humanities to contribute to research, programming, communications, and fundraising at non-profit organizations, cultural institutions, or companies and expand their skills in a non-academic setting while engaged in graduate study.
Please join us for an information session about the 2023 THI Public Fellows program on March 24, 2023, and learn about Summer 2023 opportunities.
All THI Public Fellow applicants are required to attend the Info Session on March 24th, 2023 or meet with THI Staff by April 14th, 2023. Final applications are due on April 20, 2023.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the seventh year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by The Humanities Institute. We meet monthly to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grants/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.
RSVP here:
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NEH Funders Panel
2023-03-24 11:00 - 12:30 | Virtual Event
To watch this Zoom recording of this virtual discussion with Senior Program Officers from the National Endowment for the Humanities, please email Caitlin Charos.

Featuring:
Jill Austin is a senior program officer in the Division of Public Programs at NEH. She arrived at NEH in 2015 after two decades of work in museums and nonprofits that serve museums. Prior to her role at NEH, Austin was a curator at the Chicago History Museum for ten years. Her last exhibition, The Secret Lives of Objects, featured objects boasting mysterious pasts from the permanent collection and opened in 2015. Another major exhibition, Out in Chicago: LGBT History at the Crossroads, opened in 2011 and was the result of a three-year curatorial collaboration with historian Jennifer Brier of the University of Illinois, Chicago. They also co-edited and contributed to an accompanying anthology of essays of the same title on Chicago LGBT and queer history. With Brier, she also contributed a chapter to Susan Ferentinos’ anthology Interpreting LGBT History at Museums and Historic Sites. Previously, Austin served as a curator at Detroit Historical Museums and was an exhibition and publication coordinator at Exhibitions International, a New York-based traveling exhibitions firm that specialized in design and the decorative arts. She got her start in the museum field as an educator at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. A native of southeast Michigan, she earned a BA in history/classics from Eastern Michigan University, and received an MA in the history of art and architecture from the University of Pittsburgh.
Julia Huston Nguyen is a Senior Program Officer in the Division of Education Programs. She earned an undergraduate degree in history and German studies from Mount Holyoke College and a Ph.D. in history from Louisiana State University. Julia’s graduate training focused on the pre-Civil War American South, with emphasis on the Lower Mississippi River Valley. She has published numerous articles on education, domestic service, and religion in antebellum and Civil War-era Mississippi and Louisiana. She came to the Endowment in 2004 from Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, where she was an assistant professor of history, and she has also taught at Louisiana State University and River Parishes Community College. In the Division of Education Programs, Julia works with all of the division’s programs and serves at the program lead for Humanities Initiatives at Community Colleges, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and Tribal Colleges and Universities.

A Reading with Ross Gay & Chris Mattingly
2023-03-21 19:00 - 20:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
FREE IN-STORE EVENT: Bookshop Santa Cruz is delighted to welcome New York Times bestselling author Ross Gay (The Book of Delights) and local poet Chris Mattingly for a very special evening of poetry and conversation. This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
Ross Gay’s newest book is Inciting Joy:
In these gorgeously written and timely pieces, prize winning poet and author Ross Gay considers the joy we incite when we care for each other, especially during life’s inevitable hardships. Throughout Inciting Joy, he explores how we can practice recognizing that connection, and also, crucially, how we can expand it.
In “We Kin,” Gay thinks about the garden (especially around August, when the zucchini and tomatoes come in) as a laboratory of mutual aid; in “Share Your Bucket,” he explores skateboarding’s reclamation of public spaces; he considers the costs of masculinity in “Grief Suite”; and in “Through My Tears I Saw,” he recognizes what was healed in caring for his father as he was dying.
In an era when divisive voices take up so much airspace, Inciting Joy offers a vital alternative: What might be possible if we turn our attention to what brings us together, to what we love?
Taking a clear-eyed look at injustice, political polarization, and the destruction of the natural world, Gay shows us how we might resist, how the study of joy might lead us to a wild, unpredictable, transgressive, and unboundaried solidarity. In fact, it just might help us survive.

Ross Gay is the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Delights: Essays and four books of poetry. His Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award; and Be Holding won the 2021 PEN America Jean Stein Book Award. He is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project. Gay has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He teaches at Indiana University.

Chris Mattingly is a poet in Santa Cruz. He is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, Scuffletown (Typecast, 2013) and The Catalyst (Pickpocket, 2018) as well as over two dozen limited-run chapbooks and artist’ books. His poetry and non-fiction have appeared in The Greensboro Review, Louisville Review, Trigger, Lumberyard, Still, Some Call it Ballin’, and Forklift, OHIO. Chris is co-founding editor of alla testa, a kitchen press devoted to producing far out field recordings, hand-made artist’ books, and letter press chapbooks. Some of his work is on display at thepoetchrismattingly.com.

Taija McDougall – Plantations Derivations
2023-03-21 14:00 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 420, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Plantations Derivations with Taija McDougall (UC Irvine).
This talk is part of the History of Consciousness Winter 2023 Speaker Series.
This event will be in person in Humanities 1 Room 420 or virtually via zoom.
For full speaker and event information, please visit: https://histcon.ucsc.edu/news-events/news/histcon-winter23-speaker-series.html

Let’s talk about ChatGPT Panel
2023-03-21 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual and In Person
ChatGPT rolled out as a disruptive and instantly polarizing new technology. Should we see it as an impediment or an asset to student learning? Should we just look to other new technologies to detect student use of ChatGPT, or could there be pedagogical applications of ChatGPT that could further learning? On campus, faculty are shaping the future of ChatGPT through their choices in the classroom. We hope you will join us on Tuesday, March 21, from 12:00-1:30 to learn about how ChatGPT works and to hear from UC Santa Cruz faculty on how they are thinking about and even incorporating ChatGPT in their course planning. Panelists include Leilani H. Gilpin, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering; Zac Zimmer, Associate Professor of Literature; and Jennifer Parker, Professor of Art. This event is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute and Humanizing Technology, Humanities Division.
To attend, join us in the Teaching and Learning Lab (McHenry Library 2359), or register by Zoom.
CITL event page with more info: https://citl.ucsc.edu/resources/chatgpt/

PhD+ Workshop - Community as Rebellion
2023-03-21 10:00 - 11:30 | Zoom, CA, United States
Community as Rebellion offers a meditation on creating liberatory spaces for students and faculty of color within academia. Through personal experiences and analytical reflections, García Peña invites us—in particular Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian women—to engage in liberatory practices of boycott, abolition, and radical community-building to combat the academic world’s tokenizing and exploitative structures. She argues that the classroom is key to freedom-making in the university, urging teachers to consider activism and social justice as central to what she calls “teaching in freedom”: a progressive form of collective learning that prioritizes the subjugated knowledge, silenced histories, and epistemologies from the Global South and Indigenous, Black, and brown communities. By teaching in and for freedom, we not only acknowledge the harm that the university has inflicted on our persons and our ways of knowing since its inception, but also create alternative ways to be, create, live, and succeed through our work.
Community as Rebellion can be accessed here. Please ensure you are logged into your McHenry Library Account.
Dr. Lorgia García-Peña is a writer, activist and scholar who specializes in Latinx Studies with a focus on Black Latinidades. Her work is concerned with the ways in which antiblackness and xenophobia intersect the Global North producing categories of exclusion that lead to violence and erasure. Through her writing and teaching, Dr. García Peña insists on highlighting the knowledge, cultural, social and political contributions of people who have been silenced from traditional archives. She is the author of three books , the award-winning The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nations and Archives of Contradictions (Duke, 2016) which was translated and published in Spanish by Editorial Bonó in 2020; Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective (Duke, 2022) and Community as Rebellion (Haymarket, 2022). Additionally, her work has been covered in several publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Boston Review and Harper’s Bazaar. She has appeared on CNN, BBC, MSNBC, Univision and Telemundo and is a regular contributor to NACLA and Asterix Journals.
An engaged scholar committed to liberating education and bridging the gaps that separate the communities she comes from (Black, immigrant, working) and the university, Dr. García Peña is also a co-founder of Freedom University Georgia, a school that provides college instruction to undocumented students and the co-director of Archives of Justice a transnational digital archive project that centers the life of people who identify as Black, queer and migrant. She has been widely recognized for her public facing work: in 2022 she received the Angela Davis Prize for Public Scholarship, in 2021 the Margaret Casey Foundation named her a Freedom Scholar, and in 2017 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) presented her a Disobedience Award for the co-founding of Freedom University. Additionally, her scholarship has been supported by the Ford Foundation, The Johns Hopkins University African Diaspora Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Future of Minority Studies Fellowship. García-Peña received a PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and an M.A. in Latin American and Latino Literatures from Rutgers University. Currently, she serves as the Mellon Professor and Chair of the Department in Studies of Race, Colonialism and Diaspora at Tufts University.
Please RSVP using your UCSC email address:
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This event is sponsored by The Humanities Institute and co-sponsored by the Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the seventh year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by The Humanities Institute. We meet monthly to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Linguistics Colloquia: Marc Garellek
2023-03-17 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Marc Garellek (UC San Diego)
Over the course of each year, the Linguistics department hosts colloquia by distinguished faculty from around the world.
For full speaker and event information, please visit: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/colloquia/index.html

Persian New Year Celebration
2023-03-16 18:30 - 20:00 | Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History
Join us for a Persian New Year Celebration, the rebirth of nature at the beginning of Spring, when Iranian people are combatting with darkness for a new day (Nowruz) with the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom, Zan, Zendegee, Azadee.” This Nowruz celebration is free! Presentations will be made by elected officials and Iranian speakers alongside music and refreshments. Come with family and friends, everyone is welcome.
This event is presented in collaboration with the City of Santa Cruz, SILCA, UCSC ISU, and the UCSC Center for Middle East and North Africa.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez – Restoring Continuity: Notes on History and Fiction
2023-03-16 17:00 - 19:00 | University Center, Bhojwani Room, CA, United States
The Humanities Division and The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz invite you to join us for the Hayden V. White Distinguished Annual Lecture, featuring Juan Gabriel Vásquez. Guests who attend in person are invited to join us for a reception with light refreshments and beverages at 5:00 p.m.
In 1935, as Europe witnessed the rise of fascism, Paul Valéry tried to identify in a lecture the origins of the crisis. Things were better, he said, when people were able to understand their present moment as the result of past events, when “continuity reigned in the minds”. In this lecture, Juan Gabriel Vásquez will discuss why that sense of continuity with the past is in fact indispensable, for individuals and societies alike, and he will suggest that fiction –the literary imagination of the historical past– might be uniquely adept at restoring it when it is broken.
Click here to register to attend this event in person
Click here to register to attend this event virtually
Juan Gabriel Vásquez is the author of numerous novels, including The Shape of the Ruins, which was shortlisted for the 2019 International Man Booker Prize; Reputations, a New York Times Best Book of the Year; and The Sound of Things Falling, a National Bestseller and winner of the 2014 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Vásquez’s novels have been published in twenty-five languages worldwide. After sixteen years living in France, Belgium, and Spain, he now resides between Bogotá and New York City.
The Hayden V. White Distinguished Annual Lecture Series is made possible by the support of the Thomas H. and Josephine Baird Memorial Fund, an endowment that supports yearly lectures relevant to historical and cultural theory, and to ensure that Hayden White’s legacy and intellectual spirit is honored and sustained.

Mohamed Hamed – Arabic Language Resources in the UC System and Beyond
2023-03-16 14:00 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Center for the Middle East and North Africa (CMNEA) is hosting a talk by Mohamed Hamed geared to help students and faculty in the UC system advance their Arabic language research and locate sources. He will be offering an overview of online resources, and covering issues such as interlibrary loan as well as transliteration. There will also be time for you to pose any questions that you might have.
Students are invited to meet with Dr. Hamed over lunch on March 16th. Please email Muriam Davis (muhdavis@ucsc.edu) to RSVP.
Mohamed Hamed joined the University of California, Berkeley Library in 2017 as the new Middle Eastern & Near Eastern Studies Librarian. Mohamed joins the Library from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where, for the last seven years, he has been the Middle Eastern & African Studies Librarian. He has earned a BA, MA, and PhD in Library and Information Science from Cairo University. Previous professional affiliations include The American University in Cairo, Santa Monica College Library, and Arabic Language instruction at UNC Chapel Hill. Professionally Mohamed has participated in several key organizations including the Middle East Librarians Association, the Africana Librarians Council, and the Arab Federation for Libraries and Information.
This event is presented by the Arabic Colloquium at The Humanities Institute, funded by the UC Humanities Network, and co-sponsored by the Center for Middle East and North Africa.

Jennifer Egan, The Candy House
2023-03-15 19:00 - 20:30 | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes bestselling author Jennifer Egan, one of the most celebrated writers of our time, who will discuss The Candy House (in paperback March 7th), her “inventive, effervescent” (Oprah Daily) novel about the memory and quest for authenticity and human connection.
This event will take place at the Cowell Ranch Hay Barn on the UC Santa Cruz campus, and is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
The Candy House opens with the staggeringly brilliant Bix Bouton, whose company, Mandala, is so successful that he is “one of those tech demi-gods with whom we’re all on a first name basis.” Bix is forty, with four kids, restless, and desperate for a new idea, when he stumbles into a conversation group, mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or “externalizing” memory. Within a decade, Bix’s new technology, “Own Your Unconscious”–which allows you access to every memory you’ve ever had, and to share your memories in exchange for access to the memories of others–has seduced multitudes.
In the world of Egan’s spectacular imagination, there are “counters” who track and exploit desires and there are “eluders,” those who understand the price of taking a bite of the Candy House. Egan introduces these characters in an astonishing array of narrative styles–from omniscient to first person plural to a duet of voices, an epistolary chapter, and a chapter of tweets. Intellectually dazzling, The Candy House is also a moving testament to the tenacity and transcendence of human longing for connection, family, privacy, and love.

Jennifer Egan is the author of six previous books of fiction: Manhattan Beach, winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction; A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Keep; the story collection Emerald City; Look at Me, a National Book Award Finalist; and The Invisible Circus. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Granta, McSweeney’s, and The New York Magazine. Her website JenniferEgan.com.

Visit https://www.bookshopsantacruz.com/jennifer-egan for more information.

Dr. Agnieszka Otwinowska-Kasztelanic - Do L2 and L3 learners benefit from training their awareness of cross- linguistic similarity?
2023-03-15 17:00 - 18:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
The Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics Winter Colloquium
Words whose form is similar across languages: cognates (formally and semantically similar) and false cognates (formally similar) are claimed to be learned differently than non-cognates. Raising learners’ “cognate awareness” means consciously focusing their attention on cross-linguistic similarity between L1 and L2 words. However, it is unclear if L2 learners really need to be made aware of cognateness. Another question is whether focusing on L1-L2 similarity is enough, considering that many students are learning a foreign language not as their L2, but as their L3. In this talk I will discuss whether raising “cognate awareness” indeed modulates the effectiveness of learning words in a foreign language. First, I will briefly present two classroom quasi-experiments concerning the acquisition of L2-English cognates and non-cognates by language learners with L1-Polish. Then, I will move on to a naturalistic classroom experiment on learning words in Italian as L3 by L1-Polish learners with L2-English. The talk will present robust and ecologically-valid evidence on acquiring cognates in a foreign language.

Dr. Agnieszka Otwinowska-Kasztelanic, The University of Warsaw

Elizabeth McKenzie, The Dog of the North
2023-03-14 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
FREE IN-PERSON EVENT: Acclaimed local writer Elizabeth McKenzie will be in conversation with Karen Joy Fowler about McKenzie’s highly-anticipated new novel, The Dog of the North. This event is cosponsored by Catamaran Literary Reader and The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
“Even funnier, even more romantic than McKenzie’s wonderful last, The Portable Veblen, this is a screwball comedy worthy of a Preston Sturgis screenplay. You will be surprised, delighted, and grateful to be aboard The Dog of the North with the admirable Penny Rush as she faces every challenge her wild and crazy family can throw at her. A book that lifts the spirits.” —Karen Joy Fowler, author of Booth
Penny Rush has problems. Her marriage is over; she’s quit her job. Her mother and stepfather went missing in the Australian outback five years ago; her mentally unbalanced father provokes her; her grandmother Dr. Pincer keeps experiments in the refrigerator and something worse in the woodshed. But Penny is a virtuoso at what’s possible when all else fails.
Elizabeth McKenzie, beloved novelist of California and its idiosyncrasies, follows Penny on her quest for a fresh start. There will be a road trip in the Dog of the North, an old van with gingham curtains, a piñata, and stiff brakes. There will be injury and peril. There will be a dog named Kweecoats and two brothers who may share a toupee. There will be questions: Why is a detective investigating her grandmother, and what is “the scintillator”? And can Penny recognize a good thing when it finally comes her way?
This slyly humorous, thoroughly winsome novel finds the purpose in life’s curveballs, insisting that even when we are painfully warped by those we love most, we can be brought closer to our truest selves.

Elizabeth McKenzie is the author of the novel The Portable Veblen, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize; a collection, Stop That Girl, shortlisted for The Story Prize; and the novel MacGregor Tells the World, a Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Library Journal Best Book of the Year. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and was recorded for NPR’s Selected Shorts.

Karen Joy Fowler is the New York Times bestselling author of six novels and three short story collections. Her 2004 novel, The Jane Austen Book Club, spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list and was a New York Times Notable Book. Fowler’s previous novel, Sister Noon, was a finalist for the 2001 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. Her debut novel, Sarah Canary, won the Commonwealth medal for best first novel by a Californian, was listed for the Irish Times International Fiction Prize as well as the Bay Area Book Reviewers Prize, and was a New York Times Notable Book. Fowler’s short story collection Black Glass won the World Fantasy Award in 1999, and her collection What I Didn’t See won the World Fantasy Award in 2011. Her most recent novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves won the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction and was short-listed for the 2014 Man Booker Prize. Her new novel Booth published in March 2022. She is the co-founder of the Otherwise Award and the current president of the Clarion Foundation (also known as Clarion San Diego). Fowler and her husband, who have two grown children and seven grandchildren, live in Santa Cruz, California. Fowler also supports a chimp named Caesar who lives at the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Sierra Leone.
