January 24 – Mengyang (Zoe) Zhao – Verify You Are Human: How Video Game Automation Intensifies Extraction of Platform Game Work
2024-01-24 12:00 - 13:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Part of a broader book project on the rise of platform video game work in China, this study examines the impact of automation fears on escalating labor extraction from gaming service workers. It reveals that platform workers are compelled to demonstrate their “pure manual” services, amidst concerns over automated tools infiltrating the industry. Such pressures lead to practices like live streaming and performing slowness as human labor validation, inadvertently increasing hidden labor and the risk of harassment. This study advocates for recognizing validation labor in explicating automation and labor control in the platform economy, and underscores evolving human-machine dynamics in the global data work landscape.
Zoe Zhao is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz. Their interdisciplinary research centers on digital labor, platformization, and social movements, with a particular focus on new forms of work, technology, diaspora and labor activism under platform and venture capitalism. Their art practice leverages gamification to reimagine ways of commoning and queering the care infrastructure.

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.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Living Writers with Undergraduate Alumna Sina Grace
2024-01-25 17:20 - 19:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Living Writers – Winter 2024 – Return of the Beloved: An Alumni Series
Sina Grace is the author and illustrator of the autobiographical Self-Obsessed, and Not My Bag, which recounts a story of retail hell. He acts as the artist for Shaun Steven Struble’s cult hit, The Li’l Depressed Boy, and handles art chores along with co-writing the Image Comics hit series, Burn the Orphanage.
Grace has also done illustrations for all-ages readers, including Among the Ghosts, written by Amber Benson, and Penny Dora & the Wishing Box, written by Michael Stock. His previous works include the slice-of-life Books with Pictures, and the neo-noir urban fantasy, Cedric Hollows in Dial M for Magic. For a time, he acted as Editorial Director for Robert Kirkman’s Skybound imprint at Image Comics. To date, he’s worked for Marvel Comics, IDW, Boom, Dynamite, Valiant and more. His essays have appeared on several websites, most notably Thought Catalog.
He lives in Los Angeles, where he can be found in coffee shops working on whatever the next thing may be.

Reza Aslan - An American Martyr in Persia
2024-01-25 18:00 - 19:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
In 1907, educator and American missionary Howard Baskerville traveled to Iran in the midst of a democratic revolution led by a group of brilliant young firebrands committed to transforming their country. The Persian students Baskerville educated inspired him to join them in their fight. Reza Aslan speaks with Jennifer Derr about Baskerville’s story and what it might teach us about our own ideals of constitutional democracy and whose freedom we support.

This event is free and open to the public.
Reza Aslan is a renowned writer, commentator, professor, Emmy- and Peabody-nominated producer, and scholar of religions. A recipient of the prestigious James Joyce award, Aslan is the author of three internationally best-selling books, including the #1 New York Times Bestseller, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. His producing credits include the acclaimed HBO series The Leftovers and the hit CBS comedy United States of Al. He is the host and Executive Producer of CNN’s Believer and Rough Draft with Reza Aslan, as well as co-host along with Rainn Wilson of the podcast Metaphysical Milkshake. Read Reza’s full bio here.
Presented by the Center for Middle East and North Africa, and co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute and Bookshop Santa Cruz.
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 January 18, 2024.

Project Paradiso: A Gateway to Dante’s Heaven - Episode Seven – Justice for All (Paradiso 19–21)
2024-01-26 09:00 - 10:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Virtual Event
Dante’s Paradiso is the least studied and the least understood of the three parts of the Commedia. Yet it is arguably the most important for the dynamism and originality of the literary, theological, and philosophical inquiries that take place there. It is also a singularly important interpretive guide for a full understanding of the entire Commedia. It is a poem that asks to be tackled by a community of engaged readers: here it’s your opportunity! This year-long series of webinar workshops led by world-renowned scholars will take you on a deep reading of the Paradiso and an unforgettable journey to the heart of Dante’s universe. This virtual series will reward both first-time and expert readers of the Commedia with an opportunity to delve deep into one of the most complex and daring speculative poems ever written. We’ll be meeting online almost every other week from October to May. See the Project Paradiso page for full schedule.

Akash Kumar is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on medieval Italian literature through the lens of Mediterranean and global culture, from the history of science to the origins of popular phenomena such as the game of chess. Recent work on a global Dante has appeared in the volume Migrants Shaping Europe, Past and Present (Manchester UP, 2022), MLN (2022), and the Blackwell Companion to World Literature (2020). Akash also serves as Editor of Dante Notes, the digital publication of the Dante Society of America.

Presented by the Humanities Institute and the Department of Literature Italian Studies. Sponsored by the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Siegfried and Elizabeth Mignon Puknat Literary Studies Endowment, and Porter College

Santa Cruz Pickwick Club
2024-01-28 13:00 - 15:00, 2024-02-25 13:00 - 15:00, 2024-03-24 13:00 - 15:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Virtual Event
Please join the Santa Cruz Dickens Fellowship and the Santa Cruz Pickwick Club for our monthly Pickwick Club meeting. New this year, we will be devoting an entire year to one novel instead of two, and will dive deeply into Great Expectations. Join Dickens enthusiasts and Pickwick Club members for a series of discussions about this book.

Charles Dickens depicts how a gentleman is made, not born, in this novel. Presented as Pip’s confessional autobiography, Great Expectations describes his childhood at the forge, his infatuation with the beautiful Estella, his shame at his working-class origin and his eagerness to be a gentleman, and eventually his life as a young man-about-town with “great expectations” of inheriting a fortune. Recalling these events as an adult, Mr. Pirrip is frank about his mistakes and shortcomings.
Recommended Edition: We recommend the Penguin Classics edition of the novel for its appendices and notes, but other versions are fine. First-time readers should avoid the Introduction if they don’t want spoilers. Download the novel to read at Gutenburg.org or to listen at LibriVox.org.
If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to reach out at dpj@ucsc.edu

Ariel Chan - "Bilingualism in Context: The Role of Language Experience and Cultural Identity in Language Processing"
2024-01-30 10:00 - 11:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 2, Room 259
The Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics is pleased to present:
“Bilingualism in Context: The Role of Language Experience and Cultural Identity in Language Processing”
with Ariel Chan, Ph.D.
Stanford University

Abstract
Bilingualism is inherently a social phenomenon with variation. Sociolinguistic research (e.g., Chen, 2008; Lo, 1999; Milroy & Wei, 1995) has demonstrated that bilinguals employ code-switching for identity construction. Meanwhile, recent psycholinguistic research (e.g., Beatty-Martinez et al., 2020; Kaan et al., 2020; Treffers-Daller et al., 2020) has emerged to consider individual differences within interactional contexts and social networks.
How do sociocultural factors, such as language experience and cultural identity, impact bilinguals’ cognitive and language processing?
What insights about language processing can we gain from cross-disciplinary psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic research?
In this talk, Ariel Chan will explore these two questions by examining code-switching among three groups of Cantonese-English bilinguals with diverse language experience and cultural identity from an integrated psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic perspective. To begin, she will present behavioral data from three experiments, examining how language experience and cultural identity modulate code-switching comprehension and production within a controlled laboratory context. In the second part of the talk, Chan will focus on naturalistic code-switching data in conversations. Using data from a map task, she will demonstrate how variation in language experience and cultural identity is reflected in the bilinguals’ code-switching patterns. The synthesis of experimental and qualitative data highlights the significant roles of both language experience and cultural identity in shaping cognitive and linguistic processes, underscoring the importance of incorporating sociocultural contexts into bilingualism research.

An Evening with Ross Gay & Chris Mattingly
2024-01-30 19:00 - 20:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
FREE IN-STORE EVENT: Bookshop Santa Cruz is delighted to welcome bestselling author Ross Gay (The Book of Delights, Inciting Joy) and local poet Chris Mattingly for an evening of poetry, plus a Q&A and a book signing.
Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His first collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller. His new collection of essays, Inciting Joy, was released by Algonquin in October of 2022.

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.

THI Coffee Hour
2024-01-31 11:00 - 12:00, 2024-02-07 11:00 - 12:00, 2024-02-14 11:00 - 12:00, 2024-02-21 11:00 - 12:00, 2024-02-28 11:00 - 12:00, 2024-03-06 11:00 - 12:00, 2024-03-13 11:00 - 12:00, 2024-03-20 11:00 - 12:00 (America/Los_Angeles) and 2 more dates | Humanities 1, Room 515, 1156 High St, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Humanities Institute is excited to welcome students, faculty, staff, and friends for a weekly Coffee Hour on Wednesdays, 11am to noon.
We invite you to visit our team, meet our new Faculty Director, Pranav Anand, and talk with us about your academic interests as well as upcoming THI events and programs. Learn about how THI supports Faculty, Graduate Students, and Undergraduate Students, including fellowship and grant opportunities, and hear more about our ongoing research initiatives and partnerships. Enjoy a free cup of coffee, pick up a THI sticker, and be a part of our humanities community.
Come say hi to us at the THI Suite, on the 5th floor of the Humanities 1 building. We look forward to seeing you!

Donna Haraway – Making Kin: Lynn Margulis in Sympoiesis with Sibling Scientists
2024-01-31 12:00 - 13:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Co-sponsored by History of Consciousness: GeoEcologies + TechnoScience Conversations
Sympoiesis is a simple word; it means “making with.” We live in a profoundly sympoietic world. This talk begins with Lynn Margulis (1938-2011), a multi-faceted biologist who co-founded the view of Earth as Gaia, a planet with wildly improbable gas ratios and with sustained, unlikely equilibria that only living beings could account for. Margulis thought that if bacteria had not already accomplished something, it was hardly worth doing. Indebted to Margulis, I explore the work of three contemporary biologists who together demonstrate the crucial game-changing ideas and research practices essential to partial healing on a damaged planet. The talk concludes by moving more deeply to naturecultures in the sympoiesis of the living and the dead and the vital practices of strong mourning.
Donna Haraway is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California Santa Cruz. She earned her PhD in Biology at Yale in 1972 and writes and teaches in science and technology studies, feminist theory, and multispecies studies. She has served as thesis adviser for over 60 doctoral students in several disciplinary and interdisciplinary areas. At UCSC, she is an active participant in the Science and Justice Research Center and Center for Cultural Studies.
Attending to the intersection of biology with culture and politics, Haraway’s work explores the string figures composed by science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, science and technology studies, and multispecies worlding. Her books include Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016); Manifestly Haraway (2016); When Species Meet (2008); The Companion Species Manifesto (2003); The Haraway Reader (2004); Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium (1997, 2nd ed 2018); Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991); Primate Visions (1989); and Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields (1976, 2004). Her books and articles are translated into many languages. Fabrizio Terravova made a feature-length film, titled Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival, ( 2016), and Diana Toucedo made Camille & Ulysse with Haraway and Vinciane Despret. With Adele Clarke she co-edited Making Kin Not Population (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018), which addresses questions of human numbers, feminist anti-racist reproductive and environmental justice, and multispecies flourishing.

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.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Linguistics Colloquia: Cynthia Yoonjeong Lee
2024-02-01 11:40 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Department of Linguistics is pleased to present:
“Articulating linguistic prosody: representation and choreography”
with Cynthia Yoonjeong Lee
University of Michigan

Abstract
During a communicative act, language users adeptly control and coordinate intricate movements of vocal tract organs, including the lips, tongue, and larynx, to craft linguistic messages. The spatiotemporal patterning of these vocal tract actions is systematically governed by how words are grouped into phrases and how important (prominent) words within phrases are highlighted in the language being spoken.
In this talk, Cynthia Yoonjeong Lee will share insights from a series of experimental studies that leverage quantitative approaches to investigate 1) the articulatory co-expression of phrasal and segmental tone, 2) prosodic structure in multiple modalities, and 3) articulatory and prosodic accommodation observed in dyadic interaction.
Findings shed light on the seamless integration of linguistic prosodic structure into multimodal speech production processes, with broader implications for typological generalization and variation, thereby enriching phonetic and linguistic theory.

Join us for this in-person talk on Thursday, February 1st at 11:40 am.
We look forward to seeing you at the talk!

Zhiying Qian - “Verb Bias and Plausibility in Native and Non-native Sentence Processing”
2024-02-01 17:00 - 18:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 202
The Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics is pleased to present:
“Verb Bias and Plausibility in Native and Non-native Sentence Processing”
with Zhiying Qian, Ph.D.
Florida State University

Abstract
The influence of the properties of a first language (Mandarin, Korean) on the comprehension of sentences in a second language (English) was investigated in a series of self-paced reading experiments.
Experiment 1 compared advanced native Mandarin- and Korean-speaking learners of English with native English speakers on how they resolved a temporary ambiguity (e.g., The referees warned [that] the spectators would probably get too rowdy.). The temporary ambiguity concerned whether the noun (the spectator) following the verb (warned) was the direct object or the subject of an embedded clause. Results showed that both higher and lower proficiency L1-Mandarin learners could use verb bias cues, but only higher proficiency L1-Korean learners could do so, indicating that L1 word order (Mandarin SVO; Korean SOV) influences how quickly L2 learners learn word-order-dependent cues about L2 structures.
Experiment 2 added plausibility manipulation, and the results showed that neither native speakers nor L2 learners used plausibility cues, challenging the claim that L2 learners rely primarily on lexical-semantic cues during real-time sentence processing.
Experiment 3 examined how native Mandarin speakers process this type of sentence in Mandarin and showed that Mandarin speakers were sensitive to verb bias but not to plausibility, contrasting claims that Mandarin speakers rely heavily on plausibility.

Living Writers with Undergraduate debut novelists Chiara Barzini & Rebecca Rukeyser
2024-02-01 17:20 - 19:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Living Writers – Winter 2024 – Return of the Beloved: An Alumni Series
Chiara Barzini is a screen, fiction, and journalism writer who was born in Rome and raised as a teenager in Los Angeles, where she became obsessed with canyons, quartz, and the Grateful Dead. When she moved to New York she steered her fascinations towards the discovery that a huge slab of granite beneath the city of Manhattan is the reason why nobody there is able to walk or think slowly. The absence of a mineral subterranean life and psychedelia in the city of Rome, made her return to the homeland a bit harsh, but opened her up to new interests including: abandoned castles and the nightlife of cattle.
She lives in Rome with her partner Luca, their children Sebastiano and Anita, two cats, and one dog.
Rebecca Rukeyser is the author of the novel The Seaplane on Final Approach (2022; Doubleday USA/ Granta Books UK). Her work has appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Believer, Granta, The Guardian, and Zyzzyva, among others, and was awarded the Berlin Senate Endowment for Non-German Literature. She’s a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Originally from Davis, California, Rebecca has lived and worked in South Korea, Japan, Turkey and China.
She currently lives in Germany, where she teaches creative writing at Bard College Berlin.

What Actually Happened in 1619: The Origins of Slavery in North America
2024-02-01 18:30 - 20:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Music Center Recital Hall
The New York Times’s The 1619 Project sparked controversy and conversation across the United States about the history and legacies of slavery. The project drew its name from a date, 1619, connected to the origins of American slavery, and its publication coincided with the four-hundredth anniversary of that event.
But what actually happened in 1619? The essays collected in The 1619 Project and the important public conversations that followed only touch on the events of that year, or even on the slave trade more generally. The 1619 Project focuses crucial attention on “arguing that slavery and its legacy have profoundly shaped modern American life,” with essays on slavery’s long-term impacts on American democracy, capitalism, incarceration, and even modern transportation.
Exploring these modern legacies is crucial, but many people still have only hazy notions of why 1619 was a key turning point.
This public event brings three historians of slavery together—one focused on the importance of slavery to colonial empires, one focused on captive experiences and health in the slave trade, and one focused on the introduction of African maritime culture (and surfing!) into the Americas—to wrestle with the question: What actually happened in 1619?
Join Professors Elise Mitchell (Princeton), Kevin Dawson (UC Merced), and Greg O’Malley (UC Santa Cruz) as we explore this issue in a free public forum.

Event Parking:
– A valid UCSC permit -OR- ParkMobile payment is required to park in all parking spaces on campus.
– If parking lot attendants are on site, guests can obtain a free permit to parking in lot 126. Attendants are scheduled to be on site from 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM for this event. Otherwise, purchase a permit using the ParkMobile app.
This event is presented by the Humanities Institutes and funded by a UC-MRPI Grant.

Before Justice: Meister's Legacies of Critique
2024-02-02 14:00 - 20:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The History of Consciousness Department is delighted to invite you for an upcoming celebration of Professor Robert Meister, who has been teaching at UC Santa Cruz for 50 years!
Please join us on Friday, February 2nd for an afternoon of discussion reflecting on Professor Meister’s research and teaching contributions, to be followed by a reception at the Cowell Provost House.
Discussion will run from 2 to 5:30 pm and reception begins at 6:00 pm.

Linguistics Colloquia: Drew McLaughlin
2024-02-06 11:40 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Department of Linguistics is pleased to present, Drew McLaughlin (Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language).
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

Nicole Starosielski – Socializing the Network
2024-02-07 12:00 - 13:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Co-sponsored by Film + Digital Media
This talk is a story about the ways that global digital infrastructure, especially the data centers and subsea cable networks that form the backbone of the internet, are produced out of tight-knit relationships that can weather geopolitical transitions, economic competition, and corporate tensions. I describe the process of “socializing” an infrastructure project, an essential part of the ongoing construction of a global digital network. Building a more sustainable internet, I show, is not only a process of technical coordination, of describing metrics, and of setting standards, but working within a globally-distributed and yet intimately connected geography.
Nicole Starosielski, Professor of Film and Media at the University of California-Berkeley, conducts research on global internet and media distribution, communications infrastructures ranging from data centers to undersea cables, and media’s environmental and elemental dimensions. Starosielski is author or co-editor of over thirty articles and five books on media, infrastructure, and environments, including: The Undersea Network (2015), Media Hot and Cold (2021), Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructure (2015), Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment (2016), Assembly Codes: The Logistics of Media (2021), as well as co-editor of the “Elements” book series at Duke 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.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

From the Roots - Favianna Rodriguez Artist Talk
2024-02-07 16:00 - 18:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Stevenson Event Center
The Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition Favianna Rodriguez: Power From The Roots opening January 9 and running through March 9, 2024.
Favianna Rodriguez is an Oakland based activist and artist beloved for her work tied to social justice movements, such as her iconic image of a butterfly with the text “Migration is Beautiful” mobilized in support of migrant justice. In recent years, Rodriguez has focused on figurative work related to plants, animals and climate justice. This exhibition asks: how do portraits of species relate to an ecology of social movements? The show is organized around local species impacted by climate change including coastal redwoods, mountain lions, coho salmon and butterflies, among others. These portraits of species are in dialogue with activist posters, demonstrating how social issues are fundamentally intertwined with environmental justice. For example, a collaged portrait of coho salmon, a keystone species that the Ohlone people relied on for food, will be surrounded by posters about decolonization and food justice. Viewers will explore activism from the roots- both in terms of systemic issues impacting our world today and the actual roots of the trees that inhabit our shared local ecosystem.
Join us for a talk with the artist on February 7th at Stevenson Event Center.
Presented by Cowell College. Co-Sponsored by the Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas, the UC Santa Cruz Institute of Arts and Sciences, The Humanities Institute, and UCSC HSI Initiatives.

Humanities Division Grad Slam Preliminary Round
2024-02-07 19:00 - 20:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Graduate Student Commons
Come out and support Humanities graduate students competing in their Grad Slam preliminary round for a chance to advance as a finalist to Grad Slam on March 2 at the Kuumbwa!
This event is presented by UCSC’s Division of Graduate Studies.

Linguistics Colloquia: Andrea Beltrama
2024-02-08 11:40 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Department of Linguistics is pleased to present:
Andrea Beltrama
University of Pennsylvania
speaking on
The interface between pragmatic reasoning and social perception: Towards an integrative view of inferences in communication

Abstract
Comprehenders systematically draw two varieties of inferences in linguistic communication: pragmatic inferences, concerning the message conveyed by an utterance; and sociolinguistic inferences, concerning the speaker’s identity – e.g., their demographic profile and personality traits. Both types of inference have been widely investigated in linguistics and beyond. Yet, much remains to be seen on how they interact with one another — and in particular, on whether, and how, comprehenders jointly rely on them when extracting information from linguistic utterances.
In this talk, I consider two case studies, each of which presents a novel perspective on this issue. In the first case study, I present evidence from two social perception experiments suggesting that comprehenders track a speaker’s adherence to, or violation of, the maxims of Relevance and Informativeness — together with the contextual reasons underlying these violations — to form an impression of the speaker. In the second case study, I present findings from two picture selection tasks suggesting that comprehenders reason about the speaker’s social identity to determine the precision with which they interpret numerical expressions.
Taken together, these findings unveil a bi-directional relationship between pragmatic reasoning and social perception, calling for a view of the semantics/pragmatics interface which encompasses social distinctions between speakers; and highlighting the role of sociolinguistic knowledge in pragmatic reasoning. They also underline the value of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of inferences in linguistic communication — one that combines experimental approaches to semantics and pragmatics with insights and methods from sociolinguistics and social psychology.

Join us in person for this special talk on Thursday, February 8th at 11:40 am!

Ying Yang - "Grammar, Interaction, and Social Context: The Evolution Story of 那na ‘that’"
2024-02-08 17:00 - 18:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 202
The Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics is pleased to present:
“Grammar, Interaction, and Social Context:
The Evolution Story of 那na ‘that’”
with Ying Yang, Ph.D.
University of Wisconsin – Madison

Abstract
Face-to-face conversation is the primordial form of human interaction and language is inherently a form of social behavior. However, spontaneous natural conversation remains one of the least explored discourse domains in linguistics. Using corpora compiled from transcriptions of spontaneous conversations, Yang’s research program investigates how language structures and grammatical patterns can be seen as emergent from interactional exigencies of ordinary conversation.
This particular talk focuses on the grammar of 那na in Mandarin Chinese conversation. Based on a 416,000-character conversational database, Yang examines how a demonstrative can shift from marking spatial deixis to signaling speaker stance.
This talk proposes a new perspective on demonstratives on a novel investigation focusing on their non-referential usages. Ying Yang shows that non-referential na is routinely used by speakers to express contrastive meaning, encode attitudinal stances that are often disaffiliative, taking the form of disagreements, challenges, or criticisms. The analysis also illustrates that the non-referential usages of na, though highly grammaticalized, are linked to the deictic meanings of the demonstrative. In doing so, this talk elucidates how looking at language in everyday conversation affects our understanding of the intricacies of grammar.

Join us for this special research talk on Thursday, February 8th at 5:00pm!

Cancelled - Project Paradiso: A Gateway to Dante’s Heaven - Episode Eight - Hierarchy and Diversity (Paradiso 3; 27–29 & 32)
2024-02-09 09:00 - 10:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Virtual Event
Dante’s Paradiso is the least studied and the least understood of the three parts of the Commedia. Yet it is arguably the most important for the dynamism and originality of the literary, theological, and philosophical inquiries that take place there. It is also a singularly important interpretive guide for a full understanding of the entire Commedia. It is a poem that asks to be tackled by a community of engaged readers: here it’s your opportunity! This year-long series of webinar workshops led by world-renowned scholars will take you on a deep reading of the Paradiso and an unforgettable journey to the heart of Dante’s universe. This virtual series will reward both first-time and expert readers of the Commedia with an opportunity to delve deep into one of the most complex and daring speculative poems ever written. We’ll be meeting online almost every other week from October to May. See the Project Paradiso page for full schedule.

Paola Nasti is Associate Professor of Italian Literature at Northwestern University. She has also taught, as an associate, in the United Kingdom. Her research focuses on Dante’s biblical, religious and theological culture. In addition to a monograph on the Solomonic tradition (Favole d’amore e “saver profondo”: la tradizione salomonica in Dante. Angelo Longo Editore, Ravenna 2007) she has published numerous essays on the scriptural theme: ‘Vocabuli d’autori e di Scienze e di libri ‘(Conv. II xii 5): Dante’s wisdom paths’, in Ledda, G. (ed.) Dante’s Bible: Mystical experience, prophecy and biblical theology in Dante. Centro Dantesco Onlus, Ravenna, 2011); ‘Dante and ecclesiology’, in: Hoeness, C. E. and Treherne, M. (eds.) Reviewing Dante’s Theology, Peter Lang,2013)’; ‘The stigmata and the love of the poor man of Assisi: Dante’s reinterpretations of a medieval topos’, in Christian Dante and religious culture in medieval Italy, Ravenna, Longo, 2018); ‘The triumph of Christ: anti-pietism in Comedy’, in Proceedings of the Conference “Theologus Dantes. Theological themes in the works and in the first commentaries”, Venice, Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, 2018, pp. 103-138).; ‘Religious Culture’, in Cambridge Companion to Dante’s Commedia, ed. by Z. G. Baranski and S. Gilson, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 158-172.in Proceedings of the Conference “Theologus Dantes. Theological themes in the works and in the first commentaries”, Venice, Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, 2018, pp. 103-138).; ‘Religious Culture’, in Cambridge Companion to Dante’s Commedia, ed. by Z. G. Baranski and S. Gilson, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 158-172.in Proceedings of the Conference “Theologus Dantes. Theological themes in the works and in the first commentaries”, Venice, Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, 2018, pp. 103-138).; ‘Religious Culture’, in Cambridge Companion to Dante’s Commedia, ed. by Z. G. Baranski and S. Gilson, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 158-172.
Presented by the Humanities Institute and the Department of Literature Italian Studies. Sponsored by the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Siegfried and Elizabeth Mignon Puknat Literary Studies Endowment, and Porter College

Davide Panagia: Political Theory, Democracy, and the Challenges of Algorithmic Governance
2024-02-12 11:30 - 14:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
In this talk I will raise some challenges that political theorists face when reflecting on the political import of algorithmic governance. I do not develop normative or epistemic insights into these challenges, and in fact suggest that such an approach is problematic. Rather, I proceed by articulating some aspects of the political ontology of algorithms that, I suggest, are decidedly different from our more conventional intuitions (classically derived from Aristotle) on what a medium is and how it operates. I then proceed to suggest that the biggest challenge raised to political and democratic thought by algorithmic governance regards a critical theory adequate to the claims of the medium. On this last point, I attempt to reconstruct what I believe are the basic conceptual elements that need to be considered in a political theory of algorithms.
Davide Panagia is a political theorist and Professor and Chair of Political Science at UCLA. He is a former Co-Editor of the journals Political Theory and Theory and Event. His forthcoming monograph publications include: Intermedialities: Political Theory and Cinematic Experience (Northwestern University Press, 2024) and Sentimental Empiricism: Politics, Philosophy, and Criticism in Postwar France (Fordham Un diversity Press, 2024).

Co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute Humanities in the Age of Artificial Intelligence Cluster and the History of Consciousness Department. This talk is a part of the HISC Winter 2024 Speaker Series.
The event will take place in-person in Humanities 1, Room 210 at 11:30am PST. Guests are also welcome to visit the HISC website to join virtually via Zoom. We look forward to seeing you there!

Wei Wang - “The Effect of Instruction on L2 Learners’ Interactional Competence: Listener Responses in Chinese as a Second Language”
2024-02-13 10:00 - 11:15 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 202
The Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics is pleased to present:
“The Effect of Instruction on L2 Learners’ Interactional Competence:
Listener Responses in Chinese as a Second Language”
with Wei Wang, Ph.D.
University of Houston

Abstract
This study investigates whether classroom instruction is effective in promoting L2 Chinese learners’ interactional competence (IC) as indexed by learners’ use of listener responses (LRs). LR refers to a response produced by a non-primary speaker, which provides information about how the just-prior utterances were understood by the listener.
Six types of LRs are examined in this study:
a) response particle such as o, a, en
b) reactive expression, e.g. dui ‘right’, shi ma ‘really’
c) repetition
d) assessment
e) tying expression
f) follow-up action
This study takes a quasi-experiment design, with an Experimental Group (n=17) receiving a semester-long IC instruction including LRs and a Control Group (n=11) with no IC instruction. All learners were asked to video-tape two unscripted conversations with a same L1 interlocutor, one at midterm and one at semester-end. Comparing the two groups’ changes in LR frequency, statistical tests reveal that they differ significantly in reactive expression and follow-up action; no significant effect is observed in the other four LRs. Subsequent qualitative analyses, guided by the conversation analysis framework, discover that LRs produced by the Experimental Group display increased linguistic complexity and variety as well as heightened sensitivity to intersubjectivity. The quantitative and qualitative evidence combined points to a likely positive effect of classroom instruction on L2 Chinese learners’ IC development as indexed by their use of LRs.

Join us for this special research talk on Tuesday, February 13th at 10:00 am!

Linguistics Colloquia: Anthony Yacovone
2024-02-13 11:40 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Department of Linguistics is pleased to present:
Anthony Yacovone
Tufts University / Massachusetts General Hospital
speaking on
Prediction is a piece of ceke: Developmental and psycholinguistic evidence for prediction of word-forms during natural language comprehension.

Abstract
For decades, psycholinguists have fiercely debated the role and centrality of prediction in human language. These debates center on whether people routinely predict specific lexical items and their word-forms during comprehension. To date, form-based prediction has been poorly replicated and only seems to emerge in the most constraining of experiments. These findings are often taken as evidence that form-based prediction is likely to be an artifact of how we study language in the lab, and thus, it is unlikely to play a central role in natural language processing.
In this talk, I will present three studies that use electroencephalography (EEG) to assess form-based prediction during naturalistic comprehension. Study 1 asks whether English-speaking adults predict the phonological form of upcoming words while listening to a children’s story. In Studies 2 and 3, I ask how prediction of this kind develops. I will end my talk by outlining my plans for future research and briefly discussing how this work might inform research efforts in linguistics more broadly.

Join us in person for this special talk on Tuesday, February 13th at 11:40 am!

Thenmozhi Soundarajan - The Trauma of Caste and the US Equity Movement: A Dalit Feminist Meditation on Survivorship, Healing, and Abolition
2024-02-14 12:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Virtual and In Person
Thenmozhi Soundarajan is a Dalit American commentator on religion, race, caste, gender, technology, and justice. She is the Executive Director of Equality Labs and the author of The Trauma of Caste: A Dalit Feminist Meditation on Survivorship, Healing, and Abolition.
This event is presented by the Center for South Asian Studies as a part of the 2023-2024 Lecture Series Crossings. The event is co-sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies, as a part of the weekly Cultural Studies Colloquium.
Join us in person in Humanities 1, Room 210, or register to attend virtually here.
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.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

The Hayden V. White Distinguished Annual Lecture - Lisa Lowe: Histories of the Colonial Present
2024-02-15 17:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, 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 Lisa Lowe. Guests who attend in person are invited to join us for a reception with light refreshments and beverages at 5:30 p.m.
Settler colonialism, slavery, migration, and imperial war have been integral to the emergence of the U.S. nation, state, and economy, and the consequences of these histories continue today. In this lecture Lowe examines colonial formations and their imbricated relations, their durability and the persistence of anti-colonial struggles against them, and asks: In what ways does a reckoning with colonial histories unsettle and transform the way we understand modernity, capitalism, and the political present? If this colonial historical past is not “over,” but is actively suppressed in national memory, how is it possible to conceive this longue durée as something unthought yet known, that is, a web of relation that we may be unable to think or fully fathom, even as we are reminded it is something we once knew?
Guests are also welcome to join the virtual webinar via Zoom. Simply register below. Thank you!

Lisa Lowe (Ph.D. ’86, literature) is Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies at Yale. A former student of Hayden White’s, Lisa Lowe received her Ph.D. in 1986. She is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work is concerned with the analysis of race, immigration, capitalism, and colonialism, the author of Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Cornell University Press, 1991), Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Duke University Press, 1996), and The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke University Press, 2015); she is co-editor of The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Duke University Press, 1997) and New Questions, New Formations: Asian American Studies, a special issue of positions: east asia cultures critique 5:2 (Fall 1997). Before joining Yale, Lowe taught at the University of California, San Diego and Tufts University. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Mellon Foundations, the School of Advanced Study at the University of London, the UC Humanities Research Institute, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

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.

Nishat Khan Sitar Performance
2024-02-17 18:00 - 21:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Music Center Recital Hall – UCSC, 402 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
A performance of Indian Classical Music with Nishat Khan (sitar) and Nitin Mitta (tabla)
Ustad Nishat Khan is one of India’s finest musicians and a virtuoso sitar player, transcending musical barriers with his provocative expression and spellbinding technical mastery. Nishat stands at the threshold of the future of sitar and Indian music with his uniquely invigorating and contemporary approach. He is the son and disciple of Ustad Imrat Khan, the nephew of the late Ustad Vilayat Khan and a member of one of the oldest and most prestigious musical families and schools in India – the Imdadkani Ganara of Etawah. Nishat draws on his own musical heritage that is the North Indian classical idiom as well as engages in other genres as diverse as Western classical music, jazz, Flamenco and Gregorian chant. He has worked with other major performers and composers such as John McLaughlin, Philip Glass, Paco Peña and Evelyn Glennie among many others.
Nitin Mitta is one of the most sought-after tabla players of his generation. He has performed with many of the top-notch Indian Classical Musicians worldwide. He has also collaborated with Grammy-nominated pianist Vijay Iyer and Carnatic electric guitarist R. Prasanna to produce their album titled Tirtha. Nitin’s gurus, Pandit G.Satyanarayana and Pandit Arvind Mulgaonkar, were disciples of Ustad Amir Hussain Khan, the legendary doyen of the Farukhabad Gharana of Tabla. Nitin has been mentoring many young tabla enthusiasts and also teaches Tabla at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Nitin has performed at the Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, at Lincoln Center, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
ADMISSION

General admission
Tickets available online via Eventbrite
Doors scheduled to open 30 minutes prior to event start time

PARKING

Lot 126 is the closest parking lot to the event
Parking is by UCSC permit, Park Mobile, or pay $5 cash/credit to the on-site parking attendant in Lot 126
More visitor information here

Presented by the Music Department and co-sponsored by the UCSC Center for South Asian Studies.

Linguistics Colloquia: Caroline Andrews
2024-02-20 11:40 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Department of Linguistics is pleased to present, Caroline Andrews (University of Zurich).
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

An Evening with Joe Garcia and Kate McQueen
2024-02-20 19:00 - 20:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Kresge’s Media & Society Series Presents, in Partnership with the Humanities Institute:
An Evening with Joe Garcia and Kate McQueen
Journalist Joe Garcia, whose viral essay “Listening to Taylor Swift in Prison” was published in the New Yorker last year, will be in conversation with writer, editor, and UCSC lecturer Kate McQueen. Garcia and McQueen will be discussing their major investigative piece about California’s parole process, which was recently published in Alta Magazine. (Because Garcia is presently incarcerated, he will be participating via phone.)
Joe Garcia is a journalist and Prison Journalism Project correspondent incarcerated in California. Garcia was previously a staff writer and the chair of the Journalism Guild for San Quentin News. In addition to prison publications, his work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Washington Post, and the Sacramento Bee.
Kate McQueen serves as the managing editor of Prison Journalism Project’s print newspaper, PJPxInside, and as an editorial advisor to Wall City, San Quentin’s prisoner-run quarterly magazine. McQueen is a writer and lecturer at University of California Santa Cruz, specializing in literary journalism, with a focus on narratives of crime and justice.
For any needs or accommodations, please email dapearce@ucsc.edu

Jun Borras – Land struggles and scholar-activism
2024-02-21 12:00 - 13:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Co-sponsored by Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions (SEACoast)
The talk will argue that land struggles as framed by agrarian, food and environmental justice movements have regained academic and political importance in recent years, but that in the era of fragmented working classes and environmental/climate crisis, these require rethinking and reframing. Mapping contemporary land issues of working classes, the talk will emphasise the need to look into the changing social dynamics in rural-urban, agriculture-nonagriculture continuum/corridor and production/social reproduction, and land/labour entanglements as useful reference points to think about political struggles around land and labour, livelihoods and ecological sustainability along class and intersecting axes of social differences (race/ethnicity, gender, generation). The talk will explore the small but important role played or ought to be played by scholar-activists in these political struggles. The talk will mobilise insights from Southeast Asia country cases (and by extension, southern China), and from some African countries and Colombia where I have ongoing field research.
Jun Borras is a Filipino migrant worker currently working as professor of agrarian studies at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of the Erasmus University of Rotterdam in The Hague, Netherlands. He is a long-time agrarian movement activist in the Philippines and internationally. He was a member of the International Coordinating Committee of the La Via Campesina during its formative years, in 1993-1996. He is a recipient of the European Research Council Advanced Grant, enabling him to study how land rushes shape global social life, and does fieldwork for this in Southeast Asia and China, Ethiopia and Colombia. He works in the tradition of, and at the same time studies, scholar-activism. He was Editor-In-Chief of Journal of Peasant Studies for 15 years until 2023. He co-organizes the regular International Writeshop in Critical Agrarian Studies and Scholar-Activism meant for PhD researchers and early career scholars from/in the Global South.

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.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Kuumbwa Jazz Presents: American Patchwork Quartet
2024-02-21 19:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Kuumbwa Jazz Center
Kuumbwa Jazz is pleased to present American Patchwork Quartet (APQ) on Feburary 21, 2023 at 7:00PM!
Join the live concert and support American Patchwork Quartet’s mission to reclaim the immigrant soul of American Roots Music as APQ weaves modern immigrant dreams into songs.
Tickets available for purchase here: American Patchwork Quartet – Kuumbwa Jazz
American Patchwork Quartet (APQ), led by multi-Grammy award-winning guitarist/vocalist Clay Ross, binds timeless American folk songs with jazz sophistication, country twang, West African hypnotics, and East Asian ornamentation. APQ’s sound is a masterful confluence of tradition and innovation, transcending culture, politics, and ideology.
A southern-born roots music aficionado, Ross is also the founder of the world-renowned Gullah group Ranky Tanky. In APQ, Ross intertwines with other Grammy-winning artists: Falguni Shah, an eleventh-generation Hindustani classical vocalist, Yasushi Nakamura, an internationally acclaimed Issei jazz bassist, and Clarence Penn, a drumming protégée of Ellis Marsalis whose fibers were honed by African American church traditions.
APQ resonates as a potent symbol of unity in diversity. It stands testament to the notion that, from a collage of varied backgrounds, a coherent and beautiful whole can be fashioned. Mirroring America’s cultural mosaic, APQ stitches together a story that’s both intricate and resilient. The fabric of their music is genuine—it neither feigns tolerance nor presents an overly-embellished image of unity. Instead, each carefully chosen piece dives deep into America’s patchwork soul and shares the joys, sorrows, and unwavering hope of a nation crafted by shared dreams and diverse histories.
Presented by Kuumbwa Jazz. Sponsored by The Humanities Institute.

Undiscovered Shakespeare: Henry VIII
2024-02-21 19:00 - 21:00, 2024-02-28 19:00 - 21:00, 2024-03-06 19:00 - 21:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Virtual Event
Join Santa Cruz Shakespeare, the UCSC Shakespeare Workshop, and The Humanities Institute, as we launch Undiscovered Shakespeare: Henry VIII, the fourth installment of our annual virtual Shakespeare program.
Register for all sessions here:

About Henry VIII:
Early in its first run in 1613, Henry VIII (1613) set the world on fire – if by “world” we mean The Globe, the theater in which Shakespeare’s company had performed since 1599. A stage canon set alight the building’s thatch roof and supporting timbers.
The play focuses on the fall of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Henry’s closest advisor, on Henry’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon and marriage to Anne Boleyn, and on the first stirrings of the English Reformation under Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury who gave us the Book of Common Prayer, before it culminates in the birth of Elizabeth I. In part, this play is about Henry’s effort to emerge from the shadow of his courtiers and determine his own fate as a king. In part, it is about the way that it feels to be on the losing end of history’s epoch-making struggles and how the theater might help us to acknowledge and commemorate those losses so that they don’t come back to haunt the future.
This is a most unusual play, unlike Shakespeare’s earlier meditations on the history of the English monarchy. Despite being very popular through the nineteenth century, Henry VIII is rarely seen in performance today, despite the current interest in television programs, films, and novels about the Tudor dynasty. This three-part, virtual reading, (February 21 and 28 and March 6) which is the fourth installment Undiscovered Shakespeare, a collaboration between Santa Cruz Shakespeare, The Humanities Institute, and UCSC Shakespeare Workshop, brings Shakespeare’s last history play alive again.
Come one, come all, for live theater and for lively conversation with actors, scholars, and each other!
Undiscovered Shakespeare is a public arts and humanities series co-produced by Santa Cruz Shakespeare, UCSC Shakespeare Workshop, and The Humanities Institute. It brings professional actors and scholars together with the public for a staged reading and discussion of works by Shakespeare that are rarely produced.
Episode 1: February 21, 2024, 7:00pm-9:00pm
Buckingham (Prologue through Act 2, Scene 1)
The play opens in the summer of 1520. Henry VIII has just returned from France, where he was attending The Field of the Cloth of Gold: a diplomatic summit and extravagant display of wealth, organized by Cardinal Thomas Wolsey to make peace between Henry and the French king, Francois I. The Duke of Buckingham and other English nobles resent the favor that Henry bestows on Wolsey, a commoner. Among themselves, they accuse the Cardinal of usurping the King’s sovereign powers, but soon it is Buckingham who finds himself on trial for treason. Queen Katherine warns Henry that excessive taxes, attributed to Wolsey’s influence at court, have brought his subjects to the brink of rebellion.
Episode 2: February 28, 2024, 7:00pm-9:00pm
Katharine and Wolsey (Act 2, Scene 2 through Act 3, Scene 2)
When Anne Boleyn enters King Henry’s life, he begins to search for valid reasons to annul his marriage to Queen Katherine, who has been his wife for twenty-four years. The Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk blame Henry’s change of heart on Wolsey. The Queen defends her marriage before the Pope’s legate, but the union is dissolved. Norfolk and Suffolk reveal the Cardinal’s enormous private wealth to the King. Wolsey understands his goose is cooked and reflects philosophically on his impending fall from grace with Thomas Cromwell, his loyal servant.
Episode 3: March 6, 2024, 7:00pm-9:00pm
Cranmer (Act 4, Scene 1 through Epilogue)
After Wolsey’s fall and death, King Henry finds a new spiritual advisor in Thomas Cranmer, the reformist Archbishop of Canterbury. He also appoints Thomas Cromwell, Wolsey’s servant, as his personal secretary and member of the Privy Council. Off stage, Anne Boleyn is crowned Queen, while Katherine dies of a broken heart before our eyes. Stephen Gardiner, the Bishop of Winchester and the enemy of Queen Anne, plots the downfall Cranmer and Cromwell, her allies, but King Henry outmaneuvers him, foiling the plot and demonstrating his superiority to his advisors. As the play ends, the year must be 1533, because the Queen gives birth to a daughter, Elizabeth. Cranmer prophesies a golden future for England that, by the time Shakespeare wrote this play, already belonged to England’s past.

Linguistics Colloquia: Jed Pizarro-Guevara
2024-02-22 11:40 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Department of Linguistics is pleased to present, Jed Pizarro-Guevara (University of Massachusetts).
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 with Poets Sarah Ghazal Ali and Julian Talamantez Brolaski
2024-02-22 17:20 - 19:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Living Writers – Winter 2024 – Return of the Beloved: An Alumni Series
Sarah Ghazal Ali is a poet, teacher, and editor. She is the author of Theophanies (Alice James Books, 2024), selected as the Editors’ Choice for the 2022 Alice James Award. A Stadler Fellow and recipient of The Sewanee Review poetry prize, her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, and other publications. She is the poetry editor for West Branch and an incoming Assistant Professor of English at Macalester College.
Julian Talamantez Brolaski (it / xe / them) is a poet and country singer, the author of Of Mongrelitude (Wave Books 2017), Advice for Lovers (City Lights 2012), and gowanus atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse 2011). Julian is a 2023 Bagley Wright lecturer, a 2021 Pew Foundation Fellow, and the recipient of the 2020 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry. Its poems were recently included in When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (2020) and We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat 2020). With its band Juan & the Pines, it released an EP Glittering Forest in 2019; Julian’s first full-length album, It’s Okay Honey was released in August 2023.

The Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture with Maryana Iskander - Humans in the Loop: Wikipedia’s Future in the Age of AI
2024-02-22 17:30 - 19:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Virtual and In Person
What role will humans play in shaping the future of the internet, especially given the meteoric rise of generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT? Wikipedia is tech-enabled, but very human-led. Each month, it receives more than 15 billion visits as people search for information online. The CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia, will share more about how Wikipedia is doubling down on humans in a world of machine-generated content. Learn more about how we should all be preparing for the future of knowledge.
Register here to join us in person.
Register here to to join us virtually.
The lecture will begin promptly at 6:00 p.m. and will be followed by a question and answer session. Guests are welcome to join us in person at 5:30 for a reception in the Cowell Ranch Hay Barn before the event begins or join the webinar via Zoom.
Maryana Iskander is the Chief Executive Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation. She has dedicated her career to breaking down systemic barriers of access to opportunity and education. Previously, she spent ten years as the CEO of Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator, a non-profit social enterprise focused on building African solutions to tackle the global crisis of youth unemployment, and received the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship in 2019. Maryana also served as the COO of Planned Parenthood, the Advisor to the President of Rice University, and a law clerk on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Maryana holds a BA magna cum laude from Rice University, an M.Sc. from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and a JD from Yale Law School, where she received a Distinguished Alumna Award.
This lecture series is co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute.

The Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture Series is a lively forum for the discussion and exploration of ethics-related challenges in human endeavors. The Ethics Lecture is made possible by the Peggy Downes Baskin Humanities Endowment for Interdisciplinary Ethics which enables the Humanities Division to promote a dialogue about ethics and ethics related challenges in an interdisciplinary setting. The endowment was established in honor of Peggy Downes Baskin’s longtime interest in ethical issues across the academic spectrum.

Project Paradiso: A Gateway to Dante’s Heaven - Episode Nine – Language (Paradiso 26)
2024-02-23 09:00 - 10:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Virtual Event
Dante’s Paradiso is the least studied and the least understood of the three parts of the Commedia. Yet it is arguably the most important for the dynamism and originality of the literary, theological, and philosophical inquiries that take place there. It is also a singularly important interpretive guide for a full understanding of the entire Commedia. It is a poem that asks to be tackled by a community of engaged readers: here it’s your opportunity! This year-long series of webinar workshops led by world-renowned scholars will take you on a deep reading of the Paradiso and an unforgettable journey to the heart of Dante’s universe. This virtual series will reward both first-time and expert readers of the Commedia with an opportunity to delve deep into one of the most complex and daring speculative poems ever written. We’ll be meeting online almost every other week from October to May. See the Project Paradiso page for full schedule.

Heather Webb (PhD Stanford 2004) is Professor of Italian Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Selwyn College. She is the author of The Medieval Heart (Yale, 2010), Dante’s Persons: An Ethics of the Transhuman (Oxford University Press, 2016), and Dante, Artist of Gesture (Oxford University Press, September 2022). With Zygmunt Baranski, she is editor of Dante’s ‘Vita Nova’: A Collaborative Reading (Notre Dame University Press, December 2023). With George Corbett, she is editor of Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy, 3 vols (Open Book Publishers, 2015, 2016, 2017). With Pierpaolo Antonello, she is editor of Mimesis, Desire, and the Novel: René Girard and Literary Criticism (Michigan State Press, 2015). She is Senior Editor of Italian Studies for pre-1700 material.
Presented by the Humanities Institute and the Department of Literature Italian Studies. Sponsored by the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Siegfried and Elizabeth Mignon Puknat Literary Studies Endowment, and Porter College

Linguistics Colloquia: Dustin Chacón
2024-02-27 11:40 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Department of Linguistics is pleased to present, Dustin Chacón (University of Georgia).
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

Charles Duhigg - Supercommunicators
2024-02-27 19:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes bestselling author Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habit) for a reading and signing of his new book, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection, a fascinating exploration of what makes conversations work—and how we can all learn to be supercommunicators at work and in life.
Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and the author of The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better. A graduate of Harvard Business School and Yale College, he is a winner of the National Academies of Sciences, National Journalism, and George Polk awards. He writes for The New Yorker and other publications, was previously a senior editor at The New York Times, and occasionally hosts the podcast How To!
This free event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

Come inside a jury room as one juror leads a starkly divided room to consensus. Join a young CIA officer as he recruits a reluctant foreign agent. And sit with an accomplished surgeon as he tries, and fails, to convince yet another cancer patient to opt for the less risky course of treatment. In Supercommunicators, Charles Duhigg blends deep research and his trademark storytelling skills to show how we can all learn to identify and leverage the hidden layers that lurk beneath every conversation.
Communication is a superpower and the best communicators understand that whenever we speak, we’re actually participating in one of three conversations: practical (What’s this really about?), emotional (How do we feel?), and social (Who are we?). If you don’t know what kind of conversation you’re having, you’re unlikely to connect.
Supercommunicators know the importance of recognizing—and then matching—each kind of conversation, and how to hear the complex emotions, subtle negotiations, and deeply held beliefs that color so much of what we say and how we listen. Our experiences, our values, our emotional lives—and how we see ourselves, and others—shape every discussion, from who will pick up the kids to how we want to be treated at work. In this book, you will learn why some people are able to make themselves heard, and to hear others, so clearly.
With his storytelling that takes us from the writers’ room of The Big Bang Theory to the couches of leading marriage counselors, Duhigg shows readers how to recognize these three conversations—and teaches us the tips and skills we need to navigate them more successfully. In the end, he delivers a simple but powerful lesson: With the right tools, we can connect with anyone.

Kailani Polzak – Voyage Visuality: European Representations of Oceania at the Intersection of Eighteenth-Century Racial Theory and Artistic Practice
2024-02-28 12:00 - 13:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Amid discussions about universal rights, contestations over land, and debates over the morality of chattel slavery, eighteenth-century Europeans increasingly sought to codify social hierarchy in observable physical differences. This project depended upon and spurred the production of circulatable pictures of bodies in the form of prints. At the same time, recent encounters between European and Pacific Islanders disrupted previously accepted human divisions based on a four-continent model. This talk will analyze prints made after European voyages in Oceania to consider how these works give form to interactions between different visual practices and ways of knowing. Though images made during the so-called “voyages of discovery” are often treated as mere illustrations, this talk will indicate how they do not simply replicate European racialist theories but rather reveal uncertainties and shifts in the visual epistemologies of race.
Kailani Polzak is an Assistant Professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in early-modern European visual culture, focusing on questions of intercultural contact, race, and colonialism in representations of the Pacific. Polzak’s current book project examines the graphic and printed works created about the circumnavigatory expeditions conducted by Britain, France, and Russia in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, and Hawaiʻi in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and traces how these pictures were mobilized in constructions of racial difference and geographical space. Her current research and publications emphasize the methodological questions raised by writing about and curating colonial histories from multiple perspectives.

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.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Mohamed Abdelaziz: Photogrammetry and Computer Graphics in Archaeology
2024-02-28 14:30 - 16:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Photogrammetry and Computer Graphics in archaeology: application on some terrestrial and underwater archaeological sites in the city of Alexandria, Egypt
In Alexandria-Egypt, CEAlex (Centre d’etudes Alexandrines) conducted the first scientific underwater excavations in 1994 on the submerged site of the remains of the ancient lighthouse of Alexandria near Qaitbey fort. In 2014, for the first time in Egypt, the center launched a 3D underwater photogrammetry data-gathering program to obtain a Digital Surface Model of the submerged site of the lighthouse, and a 3D model of some of its artifacts.
In this talk, digital heritage specialist and digital archaeologist Mohamed Abdelaziz will present the result of land- and underwater-based 3D reconstruction and documentation projects by the Center, including the capturing of entire archaeological sites, the virtual anastylosis (re-erection) of sculptural fragments of statues recovered from the sea, and new methods for viewing visible and (previously) invisible details of archaeological objects.

PhD+ Workshop - Grants and Fellowships
2024-02-29 15:30 - 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 202
Grants and Fellowships for Scholars in the Humanities
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.
The workshop will be led by Pranav Anand (Faculty Director at The Humanities Institute and Professor of Linguistics) and Caitlin Charos (Research Development Specialist, Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences). Clara Bergamini (PhD candidate in History) will discuss her role as Research Development GSR and how to set up a meeting to discuss funding opportunities. 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.

Pranav Anand, professor of the Linguistics Department at UC Santa Cruz, is THI’s new Faculty Director. Anand was awarded the John Dizikes Teaching Award in Humanities, and earlier this year served as co-principal investigator on a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to create a certificate program for engineering students to better understand the impact of technology on the world.

Caitlin Charos grew up in Stockton, California and earned degrees from University of Pennsylvania (B.A., English), University of York, U.K. (M.A., Cultures of Empire, Resistance, and Postcoloniality), and Princeton University (M.A., A.B.D., English). While pursuing a Ph.D. in English at Princeton University, Caitlin established herself as a researcher, teacher, and persuasive grant writer, and was awarded a fellowship funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for scholarship on global migration. Her research interests include postcolonial literatures, particularly literatures from southern Africa, gender and sexualities, race and ethnicity, and the novel. Caitlin began her career in research development as a fellow in Princeton’s Office of Corporate Engagement and Foundation Relations, where she helped connect faculty members to foundation funders with shared missions. She has supported faculty in securing significant grants from the The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, University of California Humanities Research Institute, and University of California Office of the President. She is a member of the National Organization of Research Development Professionals. Caitlin loves talking with faculty about their research and is dedicated to applying her experience in support of humanities and social sciences research at UCSC.

Saskia Nauenberg Dunkell is the Research Programs and Communications Manager at The Humanities Institute (THI). In her role, she manages research projects, graduate and undergraduate student programs, communications, and public humanities initiatives at the institute. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and is a Research Advisor for the UCSC Human Rights Investigations Lab for the Americas. Before moving to UCSC, she was an inaugural research affiliate at the Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA School of Law and yearlong National Science Foundation fellow at the Center for Conflict, Displacement, and Peacebuilding at the University of Cartagena, Colombia. Alongside her scholarship, she has directed Global Youth Connect’s Colombia Human Rights Delegation, worked at the International Peace and Security Institute’s The Hague Symposium on Post-Conflict Transitions and International Justice, and served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Kingdom of Tonga.

Clara Bergamini is a PhD candidate in history and Research development GSR at UC Santa Cruz. She is working on a dissertation tentatively titled “Mapping Imperial Japan’s Greatest Calamities: Learning Nation and Enacting Empire Through Disaster.” My research centers around how people’s experiences with and memories of crises and catastrophes shape society over time through moments of memory-making. Specifically, my research focuses on how the annual anniversaries of the 1923 Great Kantō Disaster and other disasters were used for various political and social programming during Japan’s imperial period.

Please RSVP using your UCSC email address:
Loading…
About the PhD+ Workshop Series

Tommy Orange - Wandering Stars
2024-02-29 19:00 - 20:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Santa Cruz Veterans Memorial Building, 846 Front Street, Santa Cruz, 95061
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes award-winning author Tommy Orange for a reading and signing of his new novel, Wandering Stars. The eagerly awaited follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-finalist breakout bestseller There There—winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, the John Leonard Prize, the American Book Award, and one of the New York Times‘s 10 Best Books of 2018—Wandering Stars traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School through to the shattering aftermath of Orvil Red Feather’s shooting in There There.
Tommy Orange is a graduate of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, he was born and raised in Oakland, California. His first book, There There, was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the 2019 American Book Award. He lives in Oakland, California.
Join us for this ticketed offsite event!
Purchase your tickets here.
This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz and will take place at the Veterans Memorial Building, 846 Front Street, Santa Cruz.

Night of Ideas
2024-03-01 17:00 - 21:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Institute of the Arts and Sciences, 100 Panetta Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
A global event, taking place simultaneously in more than 100 countries and 22 cities in the United States, Night of Ideas invites thought leaders, activists, performers, authors, and academics to engage the public in discussions around central questions that address major, contemporary global issues. First introduced in the United States in 2015 by the French Embassy, Night of Ideas is a nationwide phenomenon today, drawing tens of thousands of people to events across the country, for a nocturnal marathon of philosophical debates, performances, readings, and more.
On March 1, 2024, the first official Night of Ideas will be brought to the public in Santa Cruz!
Come think with us on the evening of March 1 at the 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, moves around and outside the many lines we draw in our world, among us, and between nature and humanity.
This event is brought to the public by the Center for Public Philosophy, the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, The Humanities Institute and Cowell College, partnering with Villa Albertine.

This event is free and open to the public. RSVP is required.

Night of Ideas 2024 Schedule
MAIN HALL
5:15pm: El Sistema/Estrellas de Esperanza – Music and Dance Performance
5:45pm: Welcome Remarks
6:30pm: Exhibition Walkthrough with IAS Director and Curator Rachel Nelson
7:30: Jay Afrisando – Do you think music is only for persons with ‘normal’ ears? I don’t.
8:20: Kalie Granier – Manji’o Cho’o
CONFERENCE ROOM (Room 1)
6pm: Ed Shanken – Technoshamanism: Towards Hybrid Techniques of Aesthetics and Healing
7pm: Terri Peszle – Outside the Lines: The Bhagavad Gita
8pm: Ana Pedroso – Breaching Faultlines: Playfulness with M. Lugones and F. Schiller
WEST ROOM (Room 2)
6pm: Juan Ruiz Cortes – Undocumented-everything, everywhere, all at once!
7pm: Luna HighJohn-Bey – Imagination, Liberation, & AI
8pm: Somreeta Paul – You are in my Mind – A Cartesian Nightmare
ONGOING
“Ask a philosopher a question” booth
Engage in conversation with other participants, guest speakers of members of the public.
Screening of Manji’o Cho’o, by Kalie Granier, in IAS Gallery Screening Room

Guest Speakers and Performers

El Sistema Santa Cruz/Pajaro Valley and Estrellas de Esperanza are two organizations giving the children of Watsonville/Pajaro Valley the keys to claim their cultural heritage and the tools to build their creative and social legacy through music and dance education.

Jay Afrisando is a composer, multimedia artist, researcher, and educator. He works on aural diversity, acoustic ecology, and cultural identity, focusing on disability and environmental justice, arts and accessibility, and decolonizing arts practices. He shares vital experiences and disseminates knowledge through various media and methods. He is an Assistant Professor of Music at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

To read more about all guests and performers visit: Night of Ideas — Institute of the Arts and Sciences

Grad Slam 2024
2024-03-02 19:00 - 21:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Kuumbwa Jazz Center
Grad Slam is a communication contest hosted by the UC Santa Cruz Graduate Division that is open to all graduate students, except those who have won 1st place in a previous Grad Slam. (Currently enrolled graduate students who have won 2nd or the people’s choice in a prior Grad Slam may enter again.) Participants have a maximum of three minutes to explain their graduate research or artistic endeavor to a general audience.
Prizes are $3000 to the winner, $1500 to the runner-up, $750 to the people’s choice (the last decided by text message voting, one vote per audience member, both those in person and watching the live-stream).
Every UC holds a Grad Slam, and the ten UC Grad Slam champions compete in the UC Office of the President Grad Slam in early May in San Francisco!
For more information about the Grad Slam visit: https://graddiv.ucsc.edu/calendar/grad-slam/index.html

Humanities in the Age of AI Lunch meeting
2024-03-04 12:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Virtual and In Person
The Humanities Institute Research cluster, “Humanities in the Age of AI,” is pleased to invite you to their lunch meeting scheduled for Monday, March 4th at 12pm in HUM 210. This meeting will have a hybrid attendance option on Zoom. Please join at noon to attend virtually.
Presenting their work on Machine Translation (MT) with Large Language Models (LLMs), Minghui Hu, Olayinka Iyinolakan, Michaela Barker, Johnny Li, Napat Srichan, Korben Tompkin and William Zhao will explore the integration of LLMs (Language Model Models) into translation engines. Our focus will be on how this integration can benefit academic translations and help to make low-resourced languages more accessible on the internet. Our translation engines are being tested on both OpenAI and the open-source LLM mistral. We will present our work-in-progress and welcome feedback as we continue with our research.
To learn more about current cluster projects and further information about upcoming speakers, please consult our website the events tab. The research cluster boasts a diverse group of core participants. This includes six esteemed faculty members from various disciplines, graduate students representing politics, history, literature, philosophy, feminist studies, and film and visual studies, and undergraduate scholars from computer science, computational media, and creative writing.
Attendees are cordially invited to bring their lunch. We will gather with our meals and take our seats. The first 10 minutes have been set aside to elucidate the cluster’s overview. Following this, we will go ahead with individual introductions. After a short five-minute recess, speakers will commence their presentations, anticipated to last for approximately 20 minutes. A structured dialogue on the topic will follow.
For those who prefer to schedule in advance, please note the dates for our brown bag meetings throughout the academic year: 10/2 (lunch provided), 11/6, 12/11, 1/8 (lunch provided), 2/12 (featuring Davide Panagia), 3/4, 4/8 (lunch provided), and 5/6.
THI will graciously cater on the three specified dates. For the remaining meetings, attendees are cordially invited to bring their lunch.

An Evening with Martha Mendoza and Juliet Linderman
2024-03-04 19:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
In Partnership with the Humanities Institute and City on a Hill Press
Kresge’s Media & Society Series Presents:
An Evening with Martha Mendoza and Juliet Linderman

Prize-winning Associated Press coauthors Martha Mendoza and Juliet Linderman will be speaking about journalistic collaboration and their groundbreaking investigation into the US Marine who abducted an Afghan child.
Martha Mendoza and Juliet Linderman are Associated Press investigative journalists and frequent coauthors. A UCSC alumna, Mendoza is the recipient of two Pulitzer Prizes, as well as an Emmy for her work on the Frontline–PBS collaboration Kids Caught in the Crackdown. Linderman’s work has been recognized with several awards, including honors from The Society of Professional Journalists and Investigative Reporters and Editors.

Chris Connery – China and the Mutations of Neoliberalism: Thoughts on the Current Conjuncture
2024-03-06 12:00 - 13:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
China’s economic and social development over the last 25 years has featured significant elements from the neoliberal playbook–ideologies of competition and human capital, market metrics, efficiency, suppression of labor rights, and more–coexisting with severe state limitations on private property, impediments to the formation of a capitalist class, and, especially in the last ten years, an expansion of state-owned enterprises and party control of the economy. This talk argues for the continued relevance of neoliberalism to an understanding of China today, and suggests that China’s particular and limited neoliberal character offers insights into the nature of contemporary capitalism, and of its antagonists.
Christopher Connery is Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz. He has published on early imperial Chinese literati culture (Empire of the Text: Writing and Authority in Early Imperial China); the oceanic mythos in early and late capitalism (“Pacific Rim Discourse”, “The Oceanic Feeling”, “Sea Power”, et al); the global 1960s (The Asian Sixties , The Sixties and the World Event, “The World Sixties”, “The End of the Sixties”); and contemporary Chinese intellectual politics and culture. Since 2010 he has been a member (writer, performer, political consultant) of Shanghai-based, Chinese-language theater group Grass Stage, which has performed throughout China, as well as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, and North America.

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.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Humanists in Tech Alumni Panel
2024-03-06 16:00 - 18:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Merrill Provost House, Provost's Residence, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
EVER WONDERED HOW YOUR HUMANITIES DEGREE CAN LEAD TO AN AWESOME CAREER IN TECH?
Join us for a lively discussion with successful Humanities alumni who have paved their way in the tech industry. They’ll share their stories, insights, and tips to help you navigate your own journey. This is a great opportunity to learn about possible career pathways in tech from Humanities Alumni who are in the field.
This event will take place in Merrill College Provost House on Wednesday, March 6th at 4:00PM. Appetizers and refreshments will be served.
Who’s Invited:

All Humanities undergraduate and graduate students
Participants in our Humanizing Technology Certificate Program

This is not your average event; it’s a chance to connect, learn, and get inspired! See below for more information about our alumni.

Please RSVP by Monday, March 4th to let us know you will be joining us!

Thank you, we can’t wait to see you there!

THE ALUMNI LINEUP

David Gleason, History & Literature B.A.
Healthcare Data – Anthem

Lily Ng, Linguistics B.A.
Technical Program Manager – Grammarly

Dr. Sarah Papazoglakis, Literature PH.D.
Senior Trust Strategist – META’s Reality Labs

Ryan Pittington, Literature B.A.
Global Head of User Operations – Asana

Emily Sloan-Pace, Literature PH.D.
Professor in Residence – Zoho Corporation

Jake Vincent, Lingusitics PH.D.
Language Engineer – Amazon Web Services

You can read more about our outstanding Alumni here: Alumni Bios – Hum Tech Panel

Moor Mother and James Gordon Williams in Concert
2024-03-06 19:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Music Center Recital Hall – UCSC, 402 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Co-sponsored by the Arts Research Institute, the Humanities Institute, and the Institute of Arts and Sciences
Audiences are invited to explore Black Quantum Futurism and Ubuntu philosophy in this collaborative performance featuring Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother), an American poet and composer, and pianist and composer James Gordon Williams, an assistant professor of music at UC Santa Cruz.
Join us at 6:30 PM prior to the performance to enjoy a complimentary cup of tea or coffee and a treat in the lobby.

ADMISSION

Self-service tickets available only on Eventbrite starting February 27.
Reminder: there is no ticket window at the event.

PARKING

Lot 126 is the closest lot to the event
Parking is by UCSC permit, Park Mobile, or pay $5 cash/credit to the on-site parking attendant
More visitor parking information available here

ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother) is a national and international touring musician, poet, visual artist, and Professor of Composition at the USC Thornton School of Music. Her work speaks to many genres from electronic to free jazz and classical music. Camae’s work has been featured at the Guggenheim Museum, The Met, Carnegie Mellon and Carnegie Hall, Documenta 15, the Berlin Jazz Festival, and the Glastonbury Festival. Through the lens and practice of Black Quantum Futurism the art she makes is a statement for the future, as well as a way to honor the present and its historic connections to a multitude of past realities and future outcomes.
James Gordon Williams is a dynamic composer, pianist, and cultural theorist. He has worked with artists Crystal Z. Campbell, Maria Gaspar, Fred Moten, Cauleen Smith, and Suné Woods. He has performed with pianist/composer Anthony Davis, bassist Mark Dresser, Joseph Jarman, Gregory Porter, George E. Lewis, Mark Dresser, Greg Osby, Charenée Wade as well as other musical luminaries. He held the piano chair for several years in the late Charli Persips’ Supersound band.
For more information visit the UCSC events calendar

Dr. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky - Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State
2024-03-07 17:00 - 18:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Dr. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky will present on his book, Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024), which reveals the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Between the 1850s and World War I, the Ottoman Empire welcomed about a million Muslim refugees from Russia. Empire of Refugees, examines how Circassian, Chechen, Dagestani, and other refugees transformed the late Ottoman Empire and how the Ottoman government managed Muslim refugee resettlement. North Caucasians established hundreds of villages throughout the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant. Most villages still exist today, including what is now the city of Amman. Empire of Refugees demonstrates that the Ottoman government created a refugee regime that predated refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. It offers a new way to think about migration and displacement in the Middle East. Grounded in archival research in ten countries, this book examines the migration of about a million Muslim refugees from Russia to the Ottoman Empire and rewrites the history of Muslim migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Dr. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky is a historian of global migration and forced displacement and Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research examines Muslim refugee migration and its role in shaping the modern world. He is the author of Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024). Based on research in over twenty archives in ten countries, the book explores the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Vladimir is currently writing a new book, which is a transnational history of Muslim displacement in the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia since 1850. His articles appeared in Past & Present, Comparative Studies in Society and History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Slavic Review, and Kritika. He received a Ph.D. in History from Stanford University and served as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University.

Living Writers with Former Professors Peter Gizzi & Nathaniel Mackey
2024-03-07 17:20 - 19:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Living Writers – Winter 2024 – Return of the Beloved: An Alumni Series
Peter Gizzi is the author of Now It’s Dark (Wesleyan, 2020), Sky Burial: New and Selected Poems (Carcanet, UK 2020), Archeophonics (Wesleyan, 2016), In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems 1987-2011 (Wesleyan, 2014), Threshold Songs (Wesleyan, 2011), The Outernationale (Wesleyan, 2007), Some Values of Landscape and Weather (Wesleyan, 2003), Artificial Heart (Burning Deck, 1998), and Periplum (Avec Books, 1992). He has also published several limited-edition chapbooks, folios, and artist books.
His honors include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets (1994) and fellowships in poetry from The Fund for Poetry (1993), The Rex Foundation (1993), Howard Foundation (1998), The Foundation for Contemporary Arts (1999), and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2005). He has twice been the recipient of The Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellow in Poetry at The University of Cambridge (2011, 2015-16). In 2018 Wesleyan published In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi.
He has held residencies at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, The Foundation of French Literature at Royaumont, Un Bureau Sur L’Atlantique, the Centre International de Poesie Marseille (cipM), and Tamaas.
His editing projects have included o·blēk: a journal of language arts (1987-1993), The Exact Change Yearbook (Exact Change/Carcanet, 1995), The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 1998), and with Kevin Killian, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 2008). For several years he was the Poetry Editor for The Nation. Since 2003, he has been a contributing editor to the journal, Conjunctions.
He has been on the faculty at Brown University (1993-95), the University of California, Santa Cruz (1995-2001), the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics Summer Program at Naropa (1998, 2007), The University of New Orleans Summer Program in Madrid (2004), Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg (2006), The Writer’s Workshop at The University of Iowa (Fall 2008), and the University of Cambridge (2010-11 and 2015-16). He currently works at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Born in Miami and raised in Southern California, poet, novelist, editor, and critic Nathaniel Mackey earned his BA from Princeton University and his PhD from Stanford University. Mackey is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Blue Fasa (2015), Nod House (2011), the National Book Award-winning Splay Anthem (2006), Whatsaid Serif (1998), and Eroding Witness (1985), which was chosen for the National Poetry Series. He has published several book-length installments of his ongoing prose work, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, beginning with Bedouin Hornbook in 1986. David Hajdu described the prose project as “not simply writing about jazz, but writing as jazz” in a 2008 New York Times Book Review piece on the fourth volume in Mackey’s series, Bass Cathedral (2007). Hajdu characterized the movement of language in the volumes as “kinetic and also contemplative, elegiac and mercurial, sometimes volatile.” The first three volumes of Mackey’s series were published together by New Directions in 2010. A recording of Mackey’s work Strick: Song of the Andoumboulou 16-25 was released in 1995 by Spoken Engine Company, with musical accompaniment by Royal Hartigan and Hafez Modirzadeh.

Michele Norris - Our Hidden Conversations
2024-03-07 19:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz and The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz welcome Peabody Award-winning journalist Michele Norris for a discussion of her new book Our Hidden Conversations: What Americans Really Think About Race and Identity—a transformative dialogue on race and identity in America, unearthed through Norris’s decade-long work at The Race Card Project.
Norris will be in conversation with Vilashini Cooppan, Professor of Literature and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz.
This is event is cosponsored by NAACP Santa Cruz County. This special event will take place at the Cowell Ranch Hay Barn and is free to attend thanks to the support of The Humanities Institute. Please register if you plan to join us! Your registration helps us plan for your arrival and keep in touch with any changes. Thank you!

The prompt seemed simple: Race. Your Thoughts. Six Words. Please Send.
The answers, though, have been challenging and complicated. In the twelve years since award-winning journalist Michele Norris first posed that question, over half a million people have submitted their stories to The Race Card Project inbox. The stories are shocking in their depth and candor, spanning the full spectrum of race, ethnicity, identity, and class. Even at just six words, the micro-essays can pack quite a punch, revealing, fear, pain, triumph, and sometimes humor. Responses such as: You’re Pretty for a Black girl. White privilege, enjoy it, earned it. Lady, I don’t want your purse. My ancestors massacred Indians near here. Urban living has made me racist. I’m only Asian when it’s convenient.
Many go even further than just six words, submitting backstories, photos, and heirlooms: a collection much like a scrapbook of American candor you rarely get to see. Our Hidden Conversations is a unique compilation of stories, richly reported essays, and photographs providing a window into America during a tumultuous era. This powerful book offers an honest, if sometimes uncomfortable, conversation about race and identity, permitting us to eavesdrop on deep-seated thoughts, private discussions, and long submerged memories.
The breadth of this work came as a surprise to Norris. For most of the twelve years she has collected these stories, many were submitted by white respondents. This unexpected panorama provides a rare 360-degree view of how Americans see themselves and one another.
Our Hidden Conversations reminds us that even during times of great division, honesty, grace, and a willing ear can provide a bridge toward empathy and maybe even understanding.
You can purchase your own copy of Our Hidden Conversations at Bookshop Santa Cruz.

Michele Norris is one of America’s most trusted voices in journalism, earning several honors over a long career, including Peabody, Emmy, Dupont, and Goldsmith awards. She is a columnist for The Washington Post Opinion Section, the host of the Audible Original Podcast, Your Mama’s Kitchen, and from and from 2002 to 2012 she was a cohost of NPR’s All Things Considered.
Vilashini Cooppan is Professor of Literature and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UCSC. She teaches and writes about comparative and world literature, the memory and legacies of colonial and racial violence, and literary theory. She is the author of Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing (Stanford UP, 2009), numerous journal articles and book chapters, and has co-edited the forthcoming volume Autotheories: Transdisciplinary Experiments in Self-Theorizing.

Project Paradiso: A Gateway to Dante’s Heaven - Episode Ten – A Drama of Choice at the Extremity of the Universe (Paradiso 27–30)
2024-03-08 09:00 - 10:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Virtual Event
Dante’s Paradiso is the least studied and the least understood of the three parts of the Commedia. Yet it is arguably the most important for the dynamism and originality of the literary, theological, and philosophical inquiries that take place there. It is also a singularly important interpretive guide for a full understanding of the entire Commedia. It is a poem that asks to be tackled by a community of engaged readers: here it’s your opportunity! This year-long series of webinar workshops led by world-renowned scholars will take you on a deep reading of the Paradiso and an unforgettable journey to the heart of Dante’s universe. This virtual series will reward both first-time and expert readers of the Commedia with an opportunity to delve deep into one of the most complex and daring speculative poems ever written. We’ll be meeting online almost every other week from October to May. See the Project Paradiso page for full schedule.

Alison Cornish is Professor of Italian Studies at New York University and President of the Dante Society of America. She is the author of Reading Dante’s Stars (Yale, 2000), Vernacular Translation in Dante’s Italy: Illiterate Literature (Cambridge, 2011) a commentary on Dante’s Paradiso, translated by Stanley Lombardo (Hackett, 2017), and Believing in Dante: Truth in Fiction (Cambridge, 2022). as well as a number of essays on Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. During the seventh centenary of the poet’s death, she organized a crowd-sourced series of video conversations between members of the Dante Society of America, entitled “Canto per Canto: Conversations with Dante in Our Time.”
Presented by the Humanities Institute and the Department of Literature Italian Studies. Sponsored by the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Siegfried and Elizabeth Mignon Puknat Literary Studies Endowment, and Porter College

Queer Religiously & Other Companion Stories
2024-03-08 10:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Virtual Event
Omar Kasmani is a guest-lecturer at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Freie Universitaet, Berlin. He is the author of Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy and Saintly Affects in Pakistan (Duke UP, 2022) and the editor of Pakistan Desires: Queer Futures Elsewhere (Duke UP, 2023).

More info on this event here. This event is presented by the Center for South Asian Studies as a part of the 2023-2024 Lecture Series Crossings.

Winter 2024 Aurora Lecture: Professor James Laine
2024-03-11 16:30 - 18:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 202
The Literature Department is pleased to invite you to the 2024 Winter Aurora Lecture featuring Professor James W. Laine, Arnold H. Lowe Professor of Religious Studies, Macalester College.
Join Professor James Laine for a lecture, entitled “Early Modern Cosmopolitanism: Steps on the Road to an Idea of Religious Tolerance” with discussants Anna Bigelow – Associate Professor of Religion at Stanford University and G.S. Sahota – Associate Professor of Literature and Aurora Chair at UC Santa Cruz.
Professor James Laine will be presenting the lecture on March 11th, as well as leading a book discussion of his Meta-Religion: Religion and Power in World History on March 12th.
For more information about the book discussion visit: Aurora Lecture Book Discussion.

Slugs and Steins with Pranav Anand
2024-03-11 18:30 - 20:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Virtual Event
Pranav Anand joins Slugs and Steins to deliver his talk titled “Language Models: A Selective History and Notes on the Future.” Drawing on the Humanities Division’s Humanizing Technology curriculum, will highlight some of the history of language models now ascendant in systems like ChatGPT. We will wend our way from early cryptography through the beginnings of machine translation, and into the data-rich present of large language models. Along the way, we will contemplate the ways that developments in technology have been driven by historical backdrop, and leverage that understanding to contemplate what the near future will look like.
Pranav Anand is a Professor of Linguistics at UC Santa Cruz and Faculty Director of the Humanities Institute, specializing in semantics and pragmatics, particularly in the study of context-dependence, perspectival expressions, and subjectivity. His work, which leverages linguistic fieldwork, logical analysis, philosophy of language, and computational linguistics, has examined affect and sentiment, debate and persuasion, narrative, ellipsis and fragments, and modality and knowledge.
Register for the Zoom Webinar below:

Questions? Contact the UC Santa Cruz University Events office at specialevents@ucsc.edu.
Slugs and Steins are free informal lectures served up over Zoom. Brought to you by the UC Santa Cruz Alumni Association, each talk will engage one of our favorite professors in discussion with you, the local community of Silicon Valley, and beyond. We will cover everything from organic artichokes to endangered zebras, self-driving cars to Shakespeare. All are welcome. Audience participation is encouraged.

Border Tech, Embodiment, and Gender
2024-03-12 11:30 - 13:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Namaste Lounge – College 9, Namaste Lounge, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join the UCSC Feminist Studies Department for the Border Tech Event: a roundtable conversation on Border Tech, Embodiment, and Gender with Diana J. Montaño (Washington University in St Louis), Irina Córdoba Ramírez (Universidad Nacional Autonoma of Mexico), and Iván Chaar López (University of Texas at Austin), moderated by USCC Professor Felicity Amaya Schaeffer. These three authors will give lightning talks on their recently published/forthcoming books. Lunch will be served following the event.
Iván Chaar López’ forthcoming book, The Cybernetic Border: Drones, Technology, and Intrusion shows how U.S. borders, since the 1970s, are more than walls or fences; they are regimes of datafication and racialization.
Irina Córdoba Ramírez’ book, Desarrollo agrícola y acuerdo políticos en el norte de México: Los centros de contratación de programa bracero, 1947-1964, considers how agricultural development in Northern Mexico affected internal migratory flows of Mexican actors before the Bracero Program shaped Mexico-U.S. migratory relations.
Diana J. Montaño’s book, Electrifying Mexico: Technology and the Transformation of a Modern City (2023) explores the role of electricity in Mexico’s economic and political evolution, especially investigating how inventions and adaptations served local needs while fostering new ideas of time and space, body and self, the national and the foreign.
This event is sponsored by the UCSC Peggy and Jack Baskin Endowed Chair in Feminist Studies, the Feminist Studies Department, the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department, UC Santa Cruz, Universidad Nacional Autonoma of Mexico Instituto de Investigaciones Historicas, and The University of Texas at Austin Department of American Studies.

Aurora Lecture Book Discussion with Professor James Laine
2024-03-12 16:30 - 18:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 202
Join Professor James Laine for a book discussion of his Meta-Religion: Religion and Power in World History (2014) in conversation with G.S. Sahota – Associate Professor of Literature and Aurora Chair at UC Santa Cruz.
Professor James Laine will also be presenting the Winter 2024 Aurora Lecture on March 11th. For more information about this event, please visit Winter 2024 Aurora Lecture.

Rahel Jaeggi: Progress and Regression
2024-03-18 14:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 420, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The History of Consciousness department is delighted to present Progress and Regression with Rahel Jaeggi (Humboldt University of Berlin)
This talk is part of the HISC Winter 2024 Speaker Series. Guests are invited to join us in-person in HUM 1, Room 420 at 2:00 pm PST, or join virtually via Zoom. We look forward to seeing you there!

About Progress and Regression
My paper deals with a question which has repeatedly preoccupied contemporary philosophical discussion and which seems to me to be indispensable for a critical theory of society in the tradition of left-Hegelian critique in particular—namely, the question of progress and regression. So what does it mean to understand social change as a movement of progression, or, respectively, regression? How can the concept of progress help us to understand, as Wendy Brown says “where we have come from and where we are going”, if where we are trying to go is towards emancipation – or at least away from the multi-crisis we are currently in? And in which respect does it prevent us from understanding this? How can we (and can we?) distinguish regressive from progressive or emancipatory movements? Read more
About Rahel Jaeggi
Rahel Jaeggi is Professor of Philosophy with a focus on Political Philosophy at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Since 2018 she is also director of the University’s Centre for Social Critique. She has researched and taught as a visiting professor at Yale University, Fudan University, and as Theodor Heuss Professor at The New School for Social Research. Jaeggi was also a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She is a prominent representative of critical theory, has received numerous awards, and is the author and co-editor of numerous books, including Alienation (2015), Critique of Forms of Life (Harvard University Press, 2018) and Fortschritt und Regression, which is about to be translated and will appear in English in 2025. She is currently a fellow at the Thomas Mann Haus in Los Angeles.

PhD+ Workshop - THI Public Fellowship Information Session
2024-03-21 15:00 - 16:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
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 2024 THI Public Fellows program to learn about Summer 2024 opportunities and hear from previous THI Public Fellows.
All THI Public Fellow applicants are required to attend an Info Session or meet with THI Staff by March 21st, 2024. Final applications are due on April 15, 2024.
The workshop will be led by Saskia Nauenberg Dunkell, THI Research Programs and Communications Director, and include a panel with recent Public Fellows, Rafael Franco-Flores (who worked with the GLBT Historical Society) and Wesley Viebahn (who worked with the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History)

About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the eighth 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:
Loading…

Project Paradiso: A Gateway to Dante’s Heaven – Episode 11 - The End of Imagination (Paradiso 33)
2024-03-22 09:00 - 10:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Virtual Event
Dante’s Paradiso is the least studied and the least understood of the three parts of the Commedia. Yet it is arguably the most important for the dynamism and originality of the literary, theological, and philosophical inquiries that take place there. It is also a singularly important interpretive guide for a full understanding of the entire Commedia. It is a poem that asks to be tackled by a community of engaged readers: here it’s your opportunity! This year-long series of webinar workshops led by world-renowned scholars will take you on a deep reading of the Paradiso and an unforgettable journey to the heart of Dante’s universe. This virtual series will reward both first-time and expert readers of the Commedia with an opportunity to delve deep into one of the most complex and daring speculative poems ever written. We’ll be meeting online almost every other week from October to May. See the Project Paradiso page for full schedule.

William Franke is a Dante scholar, a philosopher of the humanities, and a professor of comparative literature at Vanderbilt University. He has also been professor of philosophy at University of Macao (2013-2016); Fulbright-University of Salzburg Distinguished Chair in Intercultural Theology (2005-06); and Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung research fellow (1994- 95). His book Dante’s Paradiso and the Theological Origins of Modern Thought: Toward a Speculative Philosophy of Self-Reflection received the Hermes Award: Book of the Year in Phenomenological Hermeneutics from The International Institute for Hermeneutics (IIH), 2021 and he became Honorary Professor (Profesore Honoris Causa) of the Agora Hermeneutica.
In addition to six monographs on Dante, Franke’s critical theory books include Poetry and Apocalypse: Theological Disclosures of Poetic Language (Stanford University Press, 2009) and A Theology of Literature: The Bible as Revelation in the Tradition of the Humanities (Cascade, 2017). These works follow up on books tracing prophetic poetry from Homer and Virgil to Dante (The Revelation of Imagination, Northwestern University Press, 2015) and then forward from Dante through Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Leopardi, to more recent modern classics including Baudelaire, Dickinson, and Yeats (Secular Scriptures: Modern Theological Poetics in the Wake of Dante, Ohio State University Press, 2016).
In conjunction with his work on prophetic poetry, Franke has developed what he calls A Philosophy of the Unsayable (University of Notre Dame Press, 2014) reconstructing the apophatic tradition in On What Cannot Be Said (Notre Dame, 2007, 2 vols.). His Apophatic Paths from Europe to China (SUNY, 2018, Chinese Philosophy series) extends this project into an intercultural philosophy. His The Universality of What is Not: The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking (Notre Dame, 2020) explores applications of this philosophy to media studies, postmodern identity politics of race and gender, and cognitive sciences in their struggle with the humanities.
Dante monographs by William Franke
Dantologies: Theoretical and Theological Turns in Dante Studies – New York: Routledge, 2023 (forthcoming) Routledge Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture
The Divine Vision of Dante’s Paradiso: The Metaphysics of Representation – Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021 (304 + xx pages)
Dante’s Vita Nuova and the New Testament: Hermeneutics and the Poetics of Revelation – Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021 (299 + xix pages)
Dante’s Paradiso and the Theological Origins of Modern Thought: Toward a Speculative Philosophy of Self-Reflection – New York: Routledge, 2021 (334 + xxii pages) Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature Series
Dante and the Sense of Transgression: ‘The Trespass of the Sign’ – London and New York: Continuum [Bloomsbury Academic], 2013 Invited for New Directions in Religion and Literature Series, edited by Mark Knight and Emma Mason (200 + xv pages)
Dante’s Interpretive Journey – Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996 (242 + xi pages) Religion and Postmodernism series, edited by Mark C. Taylor
Presented by the Humanities Institute and the Department of Literature Italian Studies. Sponsored by the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Siegfried and Elizabeth Mignon Puknat Literary Studies Endowment, and Porter College

The Deep Read: NYC Salon
2024-04-03 18:30 - 20:30 (America/New_York) | Lot 15 inside Black Tap, 45 W 35th Street, New York, NY, 10016
Meet Humanities Dean Jasmine Alinder and UCSC faculty members for a special evening to learn about the Deep Read, this year’s featured book, and how you can get involved. The Deep Read, hosted annually by THI, invites curious minds to delve deeply into books guided by the expertise of UC Santa Cruz scholars. This year, we’re reading and thinking about Trust, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Hernan Diaz.
Our evening will feature light bites and a limited selection open bar. The first 50 guests will receive a copy of Trust to take home.
Don’t miss this chance to connect with fellow Slugs, engage with literature, and participate in this year’s Deep Read. Everyone is invited.

Participants
Humanities Dean Jasmine Alinder
Jasmine Alinder is the Humanities Division’s academic leader, the PI for the Mellon Foundation grant which supports her Employing Humanities Initiative, and a historian of photography and the incarceration of Japanese Americans.
Professor Pranav Anand
Pranav Anand is the Faculty Director of The Humanities Institute. He is a Professor of Linguistics focused on semantics, pragmatics, syntax, and computational linguistics.
THI Founding Director Irena Polić
Irena Polić has co-directed The Humanities Institute since 2008, serves as the Assistant Dean for Research and Engagement for the Humanities Division, and is the founding director of the Deep Read.
Associate Professor Zac Zimmer
Zac Zimmer is an interdisciplinary scholar of literature, culture, and technology in the hemispheric Americas and serves as a faculty lead for this year’s Deep Read.

About The Deep Read
The Deep Read is an annual program of The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz. Now in its fifth year, we invite curious minds to think deeply about books and the most pressing issues of our contemporary moment.

Gail Hershatter: Notes from the Life of a Peripatetic Revolutionary
2024-04-04 19:00 - 20:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Music Center Recital Hall – UCSC, 402 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Emeriti Association presents their annual Emeriti Faculty Lecture with Gail Hershatter who will give her lecture, “Notes from the Life of a Peripatetic Revolutionary.”
The event will take place in UCSC’s Music Recital Hall at 7:00 PM. Doors open at 6:30 PM.

Notes from the Life of a Peripatetic Revolutionary with Gail Hershatter
Xu Ming had many identities: coddled son of an elite family, patriotic activist, underground Communist organizer, Clark University graduate student, New York-based journalist, land reform organizer, Korean War negotiator, diplomat, politically disgraced Rightist, rural laborer, small-town junior high basketball coach, globe-trotting government economic advisor, eyewitness to the 1989 Tiananmen suppression. This lecture explores what we can learn from the life of a single individual about a canonical event of Big History—the Chinese Communist revolution.
About Gail Hershatter
Gail Hershatter is Research Professor and Distinguished Professor Emer. of History at UC Santa Cruz, and a former President of the Association for Asian Studies. Her books include The Workers of Tianjin (1986), Personal Voices: China Women in the 1980s (1988, with Emily Honig), Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (1997), Women in China’s Long Twentieth Century (2004), The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (2011), and Women and China’s Revolutions (2019).

Project Paradiso: A Gateway to Dante’s Heaven - Episode Twelve – Flower of Humanity: The Vergin Mary in Paradiso
2024-04-05 09:00 - 10:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Virtual Event
Dante’s Paradiso is the least studied and the least understood of the three parts of the Commedia. Yet it is arguably the most important for the dynamism and originality of the literary, theological, and philosophical inquiries that take place there. It is also a singularly important interpretive guide for a full understanding of the entire Commedia. It is a poem that asks to be tackled by a community of engaged readers: here it’s your opportunity! This year-long series of webinar workshops led by world-renowned scholars will take you on a deep reading of the Paradiso and an unforgettable journey to the heart of Dante’s universe. This virtual series will reward both first-time and expert readers of the Commedia with an opportunity to delve deep into one of the most complex and daring speculative poems ever written. We’ll be meeting online almost every other week from October to May. See the Project Paradiso page for full schedule.
Flower of Humanity: The Vergin Mary in Paradiso (Par. 23 and 31-33)
In lines of sublime beauty that fuse the fin’amor image of the rose with the ancient Marian type of the flos Iesse (Isa. 11:1), Dante tells us that Paradise itself, the candida rosa (Par. 31.1), is generated from the warmth of Mary’s womb: ‘Nel ventre tuo si raccese l’amore, / per lo cui caldo ne l’etterna pace così è germinato questo fiore’ (Par. 33.7-9). She is the termine fisso (3), the fixed point, upon which God’s plan of salvation turns. Without her fiat (Luke 1:28), Paradise would be a sterile bloom, deprived of the Love that breathes life into all things. Just so, it is her words that set Dante’s own journey in motion (Inf. 2.94-114) and it is she who mediates his final vision. Without her, one could argue, there would be no Commedia.
It is essential to recognize this centrality of the Virgin if one is to come to a proper understanding of her role in the Paradiso. Taking as its starting point the Prayer to the Virgin (Par. 33.1-39), this chapter will explore the multiple ways in which Mary is present in the third cantica (and more broadly of the poem as a whole), whether as a source of hope and grace, mediatrix, supreme example of humanity fulfilled, icon of the Church, or prophetic sign of the New Creation (Rev. 21.1). Ultimately, reading the poem in a Marian key, we may conclude that it is she, synthesis and apex of creation in all its beauty, who leads Dante (and possibly the reader too) into the heart of the Trinity where, become fully Christ, we too may glimpse something of the presence of God beneath all things.

Brian K. Reynolds teaches in the Italian Department and the Graduate Institute of Comparative Literature of Fu Jen Catholic University, Taipei, specializing in Medieval Italian Literature and in Mariology. He received his primary degree from University College Dublin in Italian and history and went on to carry out his postgraduate studies at UCD and Trinity College Dublin. He also taught in both of these institutions and in the Università degli Studi, Bari prior to moving to Taiwan. Reynolds has written and spoken widely on Dante Alighieri and on Italian courtly and religious literature of the Middle Ages. At present he is mid-way through a project to produce a hypertext of the Divine Comedy.
Reynolds is also a recognized expert on Patristic and Medieval Mariology having published a major study, Gateway to Heaven, on Marian doctrine and devotion as well as numerous articles and book chapters. He is currently completing the second volume of his Gateway to Heaven series, on Marian typological imagery. Reynolds is on the board of several journals including Claritas: Journal of Dialogue and Culture and Maria: A Journal of Marian Studies. He is the founder and convenor of the Dante in East Asia Network and is a member, specializing in Mariology, of the International Interdisciplinary Abba School, based in the Sophia University Institute.
Presented by the Humanities Institute and the Department of Literature Italian Studies. Sponsored by the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Siegfried and Elizabeth Mignon Puknat Literary Studies Endowment, and Porter College

CANCELLED - Linguistics Colloquia: Karlos Arregi
2024-04-05 13:20 - 15:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Department of Linguistics is pleased to present:
Karlos Arregi
University of Chicago
speaking on
The relation between head movement and periphrasis

Abstract
In joint work with Asia Pietraszko, I’ve been investigating the relation between head movement and the synthesis-periphrasis distinction in the verbal domain. We use the term “synthesis” to refer to verbal expressions in which the lexical verb bears all the verbal inflection in a clause (e.g. “rode” in English). In contrast, a periphrastic verbal expression additionally contains an auxiliary verb (specifically, “be” or “have”), and verbal inflection is distributed between the lexical verb and the auxiliary (e.g. “had ridden”).
We argue for two crosslinguistic generalizations: T-V Optionality and *V-Aux. According to T-V Optionality, languages vary as to whether T is in a head-movement relation with a verb. *V-Aux states that in periphrasis, the lexical verb and the auxiliary cannot be related by head movement. Existing analyses of periphrasis can account for one or the other generalization, but not for both.
We further argue that this tension between the two generalizations is resolved if we adopt the hypothesis that both head movement and periphrasis are tied to selection. More specifically, we propose that head movement is parasitic on a selectional relation (following Svenonius 1994, Julien 2002, Matushansky 2006, and Preminger 2019) and that auxiliaries are merged as specifiers selected by functional heads such as T (Pietraszko 2017).

Join us for this in-person talk on Friday, April 5th at 1:20 pm. We look forward to seeing you there!
For accessibility issues, please contact Sarah Amador (samador@ucsc.edu)

The Deppe Memorial Lecture with Professor Emily Gowers
2024-04-05 16:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Cowell Provost House, Cowell Provost House, Cowell Service Rd‎ University of California Santa Cruz, Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The UCSC Classical Studies Program presents The Carl Mark Deppe Memorial Lecture, taking place this Friday, April 5 at the Cowell Provost house at 4:00pm (reception to follow).
This year, Professor Emily Gowers (University of Cambridge) will be giving a talk titled “Sallust’s Salient Snails.”
The lecture will focus on a brief episode in Sallust’s Jugurtha, where a soldier’s encounter with some tiny snails and a tree in the African desert changes the course of history. Gowers will read it for its unusually detailed style of narrative, and ask what it tells us about the role of small things in historiography, as well as about Sallust’s conception of time and space and his own contribution as a historian.
All are welcome to attend this event. We hope to see you there!

Humanities in the Age of AI Lunch meeting
2024-04-08 12:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Humanities Institute Research cluster, “Humanities in the Age of AI,” is pleased to invite you to their lunch meeting scheduled for Monday, April 8th at 12pm in HUM 210. This month’s meeting will feature guest speakers Theresa Hice-Fromille (Ohio State University) and Sarah Papazoglakis (Lit PhD, ’18) on Afrofuturism for Tech: Creative Approaches to Design and Policy.
The Speculative Fictions and Futures Project was initiated in 2022 by Sarah Papazoglakis and Theresa Hice-Fromille. With an initial archive of 39 speculative fiction texts, the first stage of the project identified 10 common themes for an inclusive metaverse. The Afro-, Latinx-, Indigenous-, and Asian-futurist texts analyzed explore many marginalized perspectives on the hopes, fears, and challenges brought forth by emerging technologies. The project’s 25 recommendations provide builders (digital artists, computer scientists, linguists, policy experts, etc.) with concrete suggestions and real-life examples to implement in metaverse construction. The focus of this presentation is on the ways the project data can be used to creatively consider a pressing issue: the ethical codes that will shape the construction and use of emerging technologies. Incorporating lessons from diverse speculative texts encourages cultural inclusivity in ways that solely focusing on existing legal frameworks cannot.

SPEAKER BIOS
Theresa Hice-Fromille (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Geography at The Ohio State University with a PhD in Sociology and designated emphases in CRES and Feminist Studies from UC Santa Cruz. In 2022 she completed a summer THI public humanities fellowship with Meta’s Reality Labs where she co-developed a diverse speculative fictions archive that critically taxonomizes the technologies and futures portrayed in Afro-, Indigenous-, Asian-, and Latinx-futurist cultural productions. Throughout 2022 and 2023 she led presentations and equity workshops for developers that draw on insights garnered from this archive to inspire equitable and conscientious technological innovation. She is currently extending this work to include youth participatory action research (YPAR) and workshops for young people in the so-called “Silicon Heartland.”
Sarah Papazoglakis holds a PhD in Literature from University of California, Santa Cruz and is currently a Trust Strategist at Meta’s Reality Labs. In this role, she builds privacy and responsible innovation frameworks for emerging VR technologies and bridges the gap between AI research and consumer product use. Sarah draws from her humanities PhD to help product and engineering leaders imagine and define positive social impacts of future technologies and scope the requirements needed to build privacy- and trust-by-design into foundational product architectures.

The research cluster boasts a diverse group of core participants. This includes six esteemed faculty members from various disciplines, graduate students representing politics, history, literature, philosophy, feminist studies, and film and visual studies, and undergraduate scholars from computer science, computational media, and creative writing. To learn more about current cluster projects and further information about upcoming speakers visit: https://thi.ucsc.edu/clusters/humanities-in-the-age-of-artificial-intelligence/
The Humanities Institute (THI) will graciously cater lunch for this meeting. Once we have obtained our meals, we will gather and take our seats. The first 10 minutes have been set aside to elucidate the cluster’s overview. Following this, we will go ahead with individual introductions. After a short five-minute recess, speakers will commence their presentations, anticipated to last for approximately 20 minutes. A structured dialogue on the topic will follow.
For those who prefer to schedule in advance, please note the dates for our brown bag meetings throughout the academic year: 10/2 (lunch provided), 11/6, 12/11, 1/8 (lunch provided), 2/12, 3/4, 4/8 (lunch provided), and 5/6.
THI will graciously cater on the three specified dates. For the remaining meetings, attendees are cordially invited to bring their lunch.

Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Palestine
2024-04-08 15:00 - 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
UCSC Feminist Studies and Faculty for Justice in Palestine present Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Palestine with panelists: Lila Adib Sharif (Arizona State University), Jennifer Lynn Kelly (UC Santa Cruz), and Somdeep Sen (Roskilde University); the editorial collective of Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Palestine.
Join us for this panel discussion with excerpts from Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Palestine (Forthcoming, Duke University Press) on Monday, April 8th at 3:00 PM. Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Palestine showcases how Palestinians across Palestine and in the diaspora reshape forms of tourism to their homeland in order to lay claim to it in the midst of Israel’s settler-colonial project.
For more information visit: https://fjpucsc.org/

What Can Genomics Teach Us About Jewish History with Dr. Shamam Waldman
2024-04-09 18:00 - 20:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
This year’s Helen Diller Distinguished Lecture in Jewish Studies will be given by Dr. Shamam Waldman.
Join us on April 9th at Cowell Ranch Hay Barn for Dr. Waldman’s lecture titled:
“What Can Genomics Teach Us About Jewish History?”

Doors will open at 5:30PM. The talk will begin promptly at 6:00PM.

The study of population genetics, and specifically ancient DNA, can now offer new insights into Jewish history. One profound example is in our understanding of the origins and early history of Ashkenazi Jews. Scholars in a variety of disciplines have, for years, debated the topic, proposing different theories. Recent genetic analysis and research is helping to shed light on this long-standing puzzle. Another example of how population genetics can offer new insights concerns the genetic connections between the Bronze – Age Levant and present-day Jewish and Middle Eastern populations.
In this talk Dr. Shamam Waldman will share her perspective on these questions and the implications of new research based on ancient DNA. Dr. Waldman will present findings from two recent articles in Cell that she co- led: one analyzing DNA from 14th century Jews in Erfurt Germany which showed that the medieval Ashkenazi Jewish population was much more heterogeneous than the one today, and the other on the genomic history of the people of the Bronze-Age Southern Levant which showed migrations from the Caucasus and Iran into this region between about 2500-1000 CE.
Presented by the Center for Jewish Studies. Co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute and the Genomics Institute at UC Santa Cruz. This event is made possible by generous support from the Helen Diller Family Endowment and the Center for Jewish Studies at UC Santa Cruz.

Shamam Waldman completed her PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the field of population genetics, and she is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Reich Lab at Harvard University. Dr. Waldman developed computational and statistical methods to analyze ancient DNA. She used these methods to study the genetic connections between Canaanites and present-day Middle Eastern populations, as well as the genetic origins of Ashkenazi Jews. As a postdoctoral researcher she continues to study ancient DNA of Jews in Europe during the Middle Ages as well as hunter-gatherers from the Mesolithic period.

Juned Shaikh - The Afterlife of Confiscation: Engels’ The Origin of the Family in 1930s and 40s India
2024-04-10 12:15 - 13:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Gangadhar Adhikari returned to India from Germany in the 1920s with a tranche of books. He had recently completed his PhD in Chemistry in Berlin and had joined the Communist Party of Germany. Upon his return to India in 1928, he joined the Communist Party of India and was jailed in 1929 on charges of a conspiracy to commit treason against the colonial government. His books were impounded and many of them were returned to him upon his release in 1933. The same books were confiscated again in 1935. On the list of books was Friedrich Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. This book was returned to him again in 1936 with the assessment that it was a history book, not of instrumental use in political action. The book captured the imagination of some party intellectuals who believed that revolutionizing the family was crucial to a political and social revolution in India. Adhikari’s colleague in the party, Shripad Dange was inspired by it to chart the history of the Indian family. Engels’ categories were imported to make sense of the history of the family in India. This also occasioned a historical materialist reading of Indian epics and families, an engagement with orientalist readings, and evocations of primitive communism in Indian antiquity.
Juned Shaikh is Associate Professor of History at UCSC. He is currently working on a book on Gangadhar Adhikari.

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.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Native Speaker Series with Patty Krawec
2024-04-11 17:00 - 19:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Namaste Lounge – College 9, Namaste Lounge, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
You are invited to join the American Indian Resource Center‘s Native Speaker Series with Patty Krawec (Anishinaabe/Ukrainian), on April 11th, 2024, to be held at the Namaste Lounge located at College 9 and JRL at 5:00 PM-7:00 PM.
Guest author, Patty Krawec will share with us her most recent book titled: Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future. Her discussion will focus on building intentional movement and embodying radical rest, shedding self-care as a survival strategy, and thinking more collectively about community care. For those new to Patty Krawec, and to those that joined the AIRC Book Circle in the winter, then come join us in conversation. This event is open to all UCSC affiliates and guests!

Book Description
“Weaving her own story with the story of her ancestors and with the broader themes of creation, replacement, and disappearance, Krawec helps readers see settler colonialism through the eyes of an Indigenous writer. Settler colonialism tried to force us into one particular way of living, but the old ways of kinship can help us imagine a different future. Krawec asks, What would it look like to remember that we are all related? How might we become better relatives to the land, to one another, and to Indigenous movements for solidarity? Braiding together historical, scientific, and cultural analysis, Indigenous ways of knowing, and the vivid threads of communal memory, Krawec crafts a stunning, forceful call to “unforget” our history.”

This event is hosted in collaboration with UCSC’s: The Center for Reimsgining Leadership (CRL), OpenLab and the Vera Rubin Presidential Chair, Center for Coastal Climate Resilience (CCCR), Anthropology, Community Studoies and History Departments, College Nine and John R. Lewis College Co Curricular Programs Office (CoCo), The Humanities Institute (THI), Student Diversity and Inclusion program (ODEI/SDIP), Sustainability Office (SEJA/SO), People of Color Sustainability Collective (PoCSC), and the American Indian Resource Center (AIRC).

Living Writers with micha cárdenas
2024-04-11 17:20 - 18:55 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Living Writers Series – Spring 2024
Imaginaries)Un(bound: Race, Justice, Writing: The Living Writers Series, the Center for Racial Justice, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) present poets, theorists, fiction and hybrid artists working at the nexus of creative-critical practice in the struggle for justice with the imperative of imaginatively undoing the academic and disciplinary strictures that bind critical scholarship.
micha cárdenas, PhD, is an artist and Associate Professor of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies and Performance, Play & Design, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she directs the Critical Realities Studio. Her book Poetic Operations, Duke University Press (2022), proposes algorithmic analysis to develop a trans of color poetics. Poetic Operations was the co-winner of the Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize in 2022 from the National Women’s Studies Association. cárdenas’s co-authored books The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities (2012) and Trans Desire / Affective Cyborgs (2010) were published by Atropos Press.
She is a first generation Colombian American. Her solo and collaborative artworks have been presented in museums, galleries and biennials including the Thessaloniki Biennial in Greece, Arnolfini Gallery, De La Warr Pavilion in London, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, the Centro Cultural del Bosque in Mexico City, the Centro Cultural de Tijuana, the Zero1 Biennial and the California Biennial. Cárdenas is a member of the artist collective Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0; She posts updates on Mastodon at http://eldritch.cafe/@michacard

Book Talk with Laila Shereen Sakr: Arabic Glitch and Digital Palestine
2024-04-11 18:00 - 19:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Laila Shereen Sakr (UC Santa Barbara) will give her talk entitled, “Arabic Glitch and Digital Palestine” and present her recent book, Arabic Glitch: Technocultures, Data Bodies, and Archives.
Arabic Glitch explores an alternative origin story of twenty-first century technological innovation in digital politics—one centered on the Middle East and the 2011 Arab uprisings. Developed from an archive of social media data collected over the decades following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, this book interrogates how the logic of programming technology influences and shapes social movements. Engaging revolutionary politics, Arab media, and digital practice in form, method, and content, Laila Shereen Sakr formulates a media theory that advances the concept of the glitch as a disruptive media affordance. Playing with multiple voices that span across the virtual and the real, Sakr argues that there is no longer a divide between the virtual and embodied: both bodies and data are physically, socially, and energetically actual.
The concept of Arabic Glitch challenges the once dominant narratives about the relationship between technology and political agency that center Silicon Valley, as well as the study of digital art (specifically glitch art), the study of online social movements, and area studies of the Arabic-speaking Middle East and North Africa. It instigates interventions by demonstrating that twenty-first-century resistance movements are grounded in the 2011 Arab uprisings; showing how social media stage confrontations between state and resistors; introducing the valuable concept of data bodies, which keep the body and analog experience in digital knowledge production, and promoting software literacy. While “glitch” in popular parlance is typically understood as an unwelcome error, an Arabic glitch functions as both a visual artifact and conceptual “tear” in technologies and institutions–a tear that creates an opening for social change. The argument interweaves ideas from artistic practice with discussions of historical and social movements while considering technoculture in the Arab world through the framework of “glitch.”
Laila Shereen Sakr is Associate Professor of Media Theory and Practice at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research in media analytics and creative scholarship have deployed the idea, experimentation, and aesthetics of glitch to make a series of conceptual points culminating in her single-authored book, Arabic Glitch: Technoculture, Data Bodies, and Archives (Stanford University Press, 2023). At UCSB, she co-founded Wireframe, a studio promoting collaborative theoretical and creative media practice with investments in global, social, and environmental justice. She is Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Feminist Studies, Department of Media Arts and Technology, Center for Responsible Machine Learning, Center for Middle East Studies, and the Center for Information Technology and Society.
Presented by The Center for the Middle East and North Africa located within The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

Sowing Seeds: Filipino American Stories from the Pajaro Valley
2024-04-12 | Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, 705 Front St., Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History presents Sowing Seeds: Filipino American Stories from the Pajaro Valley — A community-driven exhibition that preserves and uplifts stories of Filipino migration and labor in Watsonville and the greater Pajaro Valley of Central California.
The exhibition culminates a four-year research initiative between community members, UC Santa Cruz students, scholars, and curators called Watsonville is in the Heart (WIITH). It brings together oral history, archival materials, and contemporary works of art to feature multidimensional narratives across four themes: labor, gender, conflict, and memory. The artists featured in Sowing Seeds include Minerva Amistoso, Binh Danh, Ant Lorenzo, Sandra Lucille, Johanna Poethig, Ruth Tabancay, Jenifer Wofford, and Connie Zheng.
To learn more about the exhibition visit: https://www.santacruzmah.org/exhibitions/sowing-seeds
This exhibition is presented with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, California Humanities, UCSC The Humanities Institute, UCSC Arts Research Institute, UCSC Arts Division, UCSC Office of Research, UCSC Division of Social Sciences, UCSC Center for Labor and Community, Monterey Peninsula Foundation, UCSC Committee on Research, Society of Hellman Fellows, and Rebecca Hernandez of the Rise Together Fund at Community Foundation Santa Cruz County.

Hindustani Music Concert featuring Uday Bhawalker and Sukhad Manik Munde
2024-04-12 19:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Music Center Recital Hall – UCSC, 402 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
As a part of the Indian Music Series, UC Santa Cruz is welcoming Uday Bhawalkar to campus for a concert on Friday, April 12. The renowned vocalist will be performing Dhrupad music, one of the oldest musical genres in the Hindustani tradition.
Uday Bhawalkar is an internationally recognized vocalist and professor in the department of ethnomusicology at the University of Washington. He is part of the Dagar family who has been known for their involvement in music since the 1500s, and has their own genre of Dhrupad music named after them.
Bhawalker will be accompanied by Sukhad Manik Munde, who also comes from a long standing musical family. Though known as a tabla player, for his upcoming performance Munde will be playing the pakhawaj, a two sided drum.
Tickets available through Eventbrite.
This event is co-sponsored by the Center for South Asian Studies.

TEDxSantaCruz
2024-04-13 09:00 - 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Cabrillo College Crocker Theater, 6500 Soquel Dr., Aptos, CA, 95003, United States
Co-sponsored by The Community Foundation of Santa Cruz County, Lookout Santa Cruz, The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, and many more.
The vibrant interplay of ideas, creative energy, and the rich tapestry of diversity within Santa Cruz County is the beating heart of TEDxSantaCruz.
This upcoming event is scheduled for Saturday, April 13, 2024, at the Crocker Theater. The theme for this event is “Rising Together.” It suggests a scale of collaboration that currently doesn’t exist. As a society, we are facing huge challenges such as climate change, preserving natural resources, racism, poverty, lack of health care, homelessness, and educational inequalities. Speakers will address big ideas and solutions to challenges at the local, regional, national and global levels.
For more information and to purchase tickets visit: https://tedxsantacruz.org/

Victorian Gaslighting with Professor Nora Gilbert
2024-04-14 13:00 - 15:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Virtual Event
Please join the Friends of the Dickens Project for our spring Friends Faculty Fellowship talk series by Associate Professor Nora Gilbert (University of North Texas) who will be discussing “Victorian Gaslighting”
As someone who co-specializes in Victorian literature and early Hollywood film, I’ve long been a fan of the darkly disturbing 1944 film Gaslight starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. During the first session of this series, I will provide an overview of an essay collection that I’m currently co-editing with Diana Bellonby and Tara MacDonald called Victorian Gaslighting: Genealogy of an Injustice, in which we trace the genealogy of gaslighting back to its Victorian roots by bringing together fourteen essays that examine a wide range of nineteenth-century literary texts through the lens of gaslighting. During the second session, we will have an in-depth discussion of the 1944 film version of Gaslight itself, which captures the “maddening” feeling of this particular form of emotional abuse so gut-wrenchingly well.
Nora Gilbert is an associate professor of English at the University of North Texas. She is the author of Better Left Unsaid: Victorian Novels, Hays Code Films, and the Benefits of Censorship (2013) and Gone Girls, 1684-1901: Flights of Feminist Resistance in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Novel (2023), as well as a number of other essays on Victorian literature and classical Hollywood film. Since 2017, she has served as the editor of the journal Studies in the Novel. She is the 2024 Spring Friends of the Dickens Project Faculty Fellow.
Virtual Sessions:

April 14: Book Talk: Victorian Gaslighting: Genealogy of an Injustice
May 19: Discussion: Gaslight (1944) –Directed by George Cukor

To register or watch the recordings visit: UCSC The Dickens Project

Opacity and Voice in Édouard Glissant and José María Arguedas with Benjamin Davis
2024-04-15 12:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Virtual and In Person
The History of Consciousness department presents Opacity and Voice in Édouard Glissant and José María Arguedas with Benjamin Davis, Saint Louis University.
This talk is a part of the Spring 2024 History of Consciousness Speaker Series. The History of Consciousness Speaker series is a quarterly series of talks by distinguished guests.
Recordings of previous lectures are available in the HistCon Speaker Series Archive.
To learn more visit: https://histcon.ucsc.edu/hisc_speaker_series/.

PhD+ Workshop – Creative Academic Publishing With Robin James
2024-04-16 12:00 - 13:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Virtual Event
This is an Arts Research Institute (ARI) workshop on creative academic publishing with Robin James. Robin James is an author and former academic, currently working as Editor of Philosophy, Literary Theory, and Music & Sound Studies at Palgrave Macmillan. She will conduct a workshop for junior scholars interested in turning their ideas into a successful book proposal. She will also discuss the details of the publication process, and how to pitch a project to an editor. This workshop is geared toward graduate students and early career faculty, and is appropriate for anyone wanting to learn more about academic publishing!
**Please rsvp to Holly Unruh, Executive Director, Arts Research Institute. Email hunruh@ucsc.edu for zoom link.
This workshop is presented by the Arts Research Institute and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2023-2024 PhD+ series.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the eighth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted (or co-sponsored) by The Humanities Institute. Our meetings provide the opportunity to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

57th Annual Faculty Research Lecture featuring Professor Gina Athena Ulysse
2024-04-16 18:00 - 19:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Quarry Amphitheater
The UC Santa Cruz Academic Senate is delighted to invite you to the 57th Annual Faculty Research Lecture Featuring Professor Gina Athena Ulysse, Feminist Studies Department:
The Whole Time…
A Redwoods Rasanblaj Epic Poem
sou 7 Pwen
Inspired by Sinéad O’Connor and 11th Hour’s caffeine chronicles, this epic stream of consciousness ethnographic poem meditates on origins, a theory of everything, the dark arts, shadow work in the upside down of arboreal classrooms in these redwoods on Indigenous Land of the so-called holy cross…
Lacing ancestral chants, cosmos spaciousness, history with misfit tales, and popular song, this non psychedelic surrealist journey explores the contours of linear and all-around time in search of aliveness on scorched earth while ruminating on the impossibility of all sentient beings everywhere experiencing peace among the plantocracy with their disdain for brilliance where praxis is a floating signifier and our humanity is routinely questioned. Improv dance by Linda Isabelle Francois Obas.

Gina Athena Ulysse is a Haitian American feminist artist-scholar. In the last three decades, her decolonial work as a cultural anthropologist has engaged in crossings and dialogues between the arts, humanities, and the social sciences. Her practice is rooted in what she calls rasanblaj – a gathering of ideas, people, things, and spirits. Her latest book is an abridged compilation A Call to Rasanblaj: Black Feminist Futures and Ethnographic Aesthetics (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2023) edited and with an interview by Penelope Papailas is translated in Greek by Vangelis Poulios. Her visual art has been featured on the covers of Frontiers, Feminist Formations, Meridians, and Feminist Studies. Over the years, she has performed at The Bowery, Bluestockings Bookstore, The British Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Cabaret Voltaire, Gorki Theatre, LaMaMa, Marcus Garvey Liberty Hall, MoMA Salon among other venues. She was an invited artist in the Biennale of Sydney in Australia in 2020. She will be participating in the Biennale of Dakar, Senegal, Spring 2024.
Linda Isabelle Francois Obas is an internationally known Haytian choreographer, performer and sociocultural activist. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of XPression Ayiti (2017) a dance company that is based on Haitian traditional dances. She was professionally trained in Haiti with JeanGuy Saintus, Jean Rene Delsoin, Gerald Florestal in classical techniques, modern dance, jazz and other forms. Her solo and company performances have been presented in colleges, concert theatres and festivals in Barbados, Benin, Cyprus, Dominican Republic, Guadeloupe, Guyana, Jamaica, Japan, The United States and Trinidad to name a few. She is developing Thera-LakAy, her holistic dance teaching pedagogy that relies on Haitian spirituality and traditional dance.

Event Details

This event is free and open to the public. Seating will begin at 5:30 p.m.
Parking permits will be available for purchase for $5 in lot 101 at Hahn Student Services, ”A” permits are required during the week until 8 p.m. Park Mobile options are available in this same lot. Please follow the event signage at the base of campus and a parking attendant will assist you.
The lecture will be held in person and also available to view via livestream.

Questions? Please contact the University Events Office at specialevents@ucsc.edu

Zirwat Chowdhury - Transacting Empire: Family Portraits
2024-04-17 12:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The UCSC Center for South Asian Studies presents Transacting Empire: Family Portraits with Zirwat Chowdhury on April 17th. Participants are invited to attend in person at HUM 1 room 210 or register via Zoom.
This talk traces across the disjointed pairing of two portraits an imperial form of kinship that emerged among covenanted servants of the East India Company in eighteenth-century Bengal. Noting the portraits’ departures from prevailing conventions in British family portraiture, the talk examines the overlapping “joint-stock” formations of domesticity and commercial partnership through which the Hastings-Hancock household accumulated and remitted its colonial wealth.

Zirwat Chowdhury is Assistant Professor of 18th- and 19th-Century European Art at UCLA. Her research explores the interconnected histories of art, visual culture, and aesthetic philosophy in 18th-century Britain, France, South Asia and the Atlantic World.

Co-sponsored by The Center for Cultural Studies and The Humanities Institute. This event is a part of The Center for South Asian Studies’ annual lecture series, Crossings and The Center for Cultural Studies’ Wednesday colloquium series.

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. Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Craig Reinarman and Gina Dent - From Drug Wars to Harm Reduction
2024-04-17 16:00 - 17:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join us for the 2024 Legal Studies Annual Distinguished Lecture: “From Drug Wars to Harm Reduction: Reflections on the Future of Addiction Research, Drug Policy, and Mass Incarceration” with Craig Reinarman (Sociology & Legal Studies – Emeritus and Community Studies) in conversation with Gina Dent (Feminist Studies and Legal Studies)
This event will take place Wednesday, April 17, 4-5:30 pm, at the UCSC Hay Barn. Doors will open at 3:30 pm for light refreshments and mingling. We hope to see you there!

Dr. Stephanie Lain - Spanish Vowel and Consonant Contributions to Talker Identification and Lexical Contrast
2024-04-17 17:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 202
The Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics presents:
SPANISH VOWEL AND CONSONANT CONTRIBUTIONS TO TALKER IDENTIFICATION AND LEXICAL CONTRAST
with Dr. Stephanie Lain
(UC Santa Cruz)

Abstract
Acoustic properties of the input determine how speech sounds are processed, categorized, and encoded in memory. This information is used to identify words and convey information about the speaker. The series of experiments described in this talk were undertaken with the goal of clarifying the roles vowels and consonants play in lexical decision making and talker identification in Spanish. Participants in the study were 101 listeners who self-identified as native speakers of Spanish. They performed one of six same-different auditory discrimination experiments which varied according to task (lexical decision or talker identification) and condition (unaltered stimuli, vowels excised, consonants excised). Responses from each participant were used to calculate a D prime score (evaluating the participant’s ability to discriminate between tokens), as well as a language dominance score (participants were Spanish/English bilinguals). Reaction times and null responses were also recorded. Results were analyzed using a multivariate 2 x 3 factorial analysis with language dominance as a co-variate, followed by univariate analyses to further examine the effects of independent variables. Findings from the current study largely confirm results from previous studies conducted in English which suggest a greater reliance on consonants when performing lexical decision tasks and vowels when performing talker identity tasks. From this, we may infer that variation observed in response to the acoustic properties of vowels and consonants appears be universal to linguistic processing and not a result of the interaction between speech sounds within a given language system. These results have implications for theories of speech perception, particularly with regard to the role of listener experience in the perception of phonemes and talker-specific acoustic properties.

Living Writers with Jennifer Tseng
2024-04-18 17:20 - 18:55 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Living Writers Series – Spring 2024
Imaginaries)Un(bound: Race, Justice, Writing: The Living Writers Series, the Center for Racial Justice, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) present poets, theorists, fiction and hybrid artists working at the nexus of creative-critical practice in the struggle for justice with the imperative of imaginatively undoing the academic and disciplinary strictures that bind critical scholarship.

Jennifer Tseng’s forthcoming book, Thanks for Letting Us Know You Are Alive, poems made with her late father’s English letters, won the Juniper Prize for Poetry and will be published by University of Massachusetts Press in spring 2024. She currently teaches literature and creative writing at University of California, Santa Cruz.

Peter Galison - Time: Physics, Film, History
2024-04-18 17:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Music Center Recital Hall – UCSC, 402 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Henri Poincaré’s and Albert Einstein’s reformulation of simultaneity was long seen as a development from imaginative thought experiments. But the all-too-material and the most abstract notions of time cross in essential ways (Swiss Patent Office, Paris Bureau of Longitude). Galison explores this intersection in collaboration with the artist William Kentridge (“The Refusal of Time,” 2012), pushing history, physics, and philosophy into a more associative-imaginative register. From there, Galison turns to the 10,000 year struggle to contain radioactive materials—a duration twice recorded in human history—and finally to the time of black holes, and the image of the photon ring.

Peter Galison is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor in history of science and physics at Harvard University. He currently directs the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard, a leading center for interdisciplinary research on black holes. His books include How Experiments End; Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics; Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps; and, with Lorraine Daston, Objectivity. His latest feature film is Black Holes | The Edge of All We Know.

Nauenberg History of Science Lecture
The Nauenberg History of Science Lecture was established in honor of Michael Nauenberg, a founding faculty member in the Physics Department at UCSC who came to the campus in 1966. During his distinguished academic career, he contributed to a remarkably broad range of fields, including particle physics, condensed matter physics, astrophysics, chaos theory, fluid dynamics, and the history of physics in the 17th-18th centuries.
Amongst Professor Nauenberg’s passions, he deeply believed in the importance of interdisciplinary scholarship connecting the sciences with the humanities. Following his retirement in 1994, he pursued his long-standing interests in the history of science, writing books and articles about Joseph Banks, Robert Hooke, Christiaan Huygens, and Isaac Newton. The Nauenberg History of Science Lecture series aims to bring the best historians of science to UCSC to share the importance of this interdisciplinary work with faculty, students, and interested community members. You can support the series by contributing here.

The Nauenberg History of Science Lecture is presented by the UC Santa Cruz Emeriti Association and co-sponsored by Crown College, the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP), the Arts Research Institute, and the History Department.

Project Paradiso: A Gateway to Dante’s Heaven - Episode Thirteen – Early Receptions
2024-04-19 09:00 - 10:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Virtual Event
Dante’s Paradiso is the least studied and the least understood of the three parts of the Commedia. Yet it is arguably the most important for the dynamism and originality of the literary, theological, and philosophical inquiries that take place there. It is also a singularly important interpretive guide for a full understanding of the entire Commedia. It is a poem that asks to be tackled by a community of engaged readers: here it’s your opportunity! This year-long series of webinar workshops led by world-renowned scholars will take you on a deep reading of the Paradiso and an unforgettable journey to the heart of Dante’s universe. This virtual series will reward both first-time and expert readers of the Commedia with an opportunity to delve deep into one of the most complex and daring speculative poems ever written. We’ll be meeting online almost every other week from October to May. See the Project Paradiso page for full schedule.

Simon Gilson is Agnelli-Serena Professor of Italian and Fellow of Magdalen College, University of Oxford. He has published widely on Dante’s reception in fourteenth-, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy. His publications include: Dante and Renaissance Florence (CUP 2005) and Reading Dante in Renaissance Italy: Florence, Venice and the ‘Divine Poet’ (CUP 2018).

Presented by the Humanities Institute and the Department of Literature Italian Studies. Sponsored by the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Siegfried and Elizabeth Mignon Puknat Literary Studies Endowment, and Porter College

Black Enlightenment with Surya Parekh
2024-04-22 12:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Virtual and In Person
The History of Consciousness department presents Black Enlightenment with Surya Parekh, Binghamton University.
This talk is a part of the Spring 2024 History of Consciousness Speaker Series. The History of Consciousness Speaker series is a quarterly series of talks by distinguished guests.
Recordings of previous lectures are available in the HistCon Speaker Series Archive.
To learn more visit: https://histcon.ucsc.edu/hisc_speaker_series/.
