Events

Stories – narratives of the past – are necessary in all collectivities that seek to constitute and maintain themselves.  In modern times, competitive states have sought to mobilize all resources and bio-power in their territory by adopting singular, linear histories of the state, nation and civilization.  But, ironically, just as these singular stories were becoming […]

Despina Kakoudaki’s work focuses on literature, film, visual and cultural studies, and the history of technology. Her new book, titled Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural Work of Artificial People, traces our fascination with mechanical and constructed people, such as robots, cyborgs, androids and automata. Despina Kakoudaki is Associate Professor at American […]

Helen, the Spartan queen whose abduction by Paris the prince of Troy ignited the ten-year-long Trojan War, may be regarded as the femme fatale par excellence. The prominence of Helen’s images in the Greek tradition is as notable as their complexity and ambiguity. Alongside commonplace condemnations of Helen as the cause of a devastating war, […]

Migrant Teachers investigates an overlooked trend in U.S. public schools today: the growing dependence on overseas trained teachers, as federal mandates require K-12 schools to employ qualified teachers or risk funding cuts. A narrowly technocratic view of teachers as subject specialists has led districts to look abroad, Lora Bartlett argues, resulting in transient teaching professionals […]

Pulse (2001) Would you like to meet a ghost? About as bleak a depiction of apocalypse as you’re ever likely to come across, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse is a J-Horror film in which short episodic vignettes slowly disclose a world where ghosts outnumber people and people have been reduced to black ashy stains on the wall. […]

Mathematical knowledge has traditionally been taken to be absolutely objective, i.e. completely independent of contingent facts about the agents who discover the results. Today, this absolutistic view of mathematics has been challenged by a number of different theories. Most noticeably, social constructivists such as David Bloor and Donald MacKenzie have stress the influence social factors […]

Noted film and cultural studies critic Meaghan Morris will give a seminar on the theme of "parochial blockbusters". The seminar will center on a discussion of her essay, "Transnational Glamour, National Allure: Community, Change and Cliché in Baz Luhrmann’s Australia", which is available for downloading at http://ihr.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Morris-Transnational-Glamour-final.pdf, and which should be read before the seminar. […]

Cowell College, Stevenson College & Languages and Applied Linguistics present: The Miriam Ellis International Playhouse XIV Theater Pieces in Five Languages with English Subtitles Chinese Three Pots of Tea by Ting-Ting Wu & Students Directed by Ting-Ting Wu French Scenes from Marius and Fanny by Marcel Pagnol Directed by Miriam Ellis Hebrew Songs of Israel […]