Events

How did Algerian Jews respond to and appropriate France's newly conceived "civilizing mission" in the mid-nineteenth century? The mission to civilize may have been rooted in French Revolutionary ideals of regeneration, enlightenment, and emancipation, but it developed "on the ground" as a strategic response to the challenges of controlling the diverse and unruly populations of […]

The The Writing Program’s 2011 Reading Series has been cancelled on 01/12/2011 due to illness. Chuck Atkinson will be reading poetry. Sarah Rabkin will be reading from her forthcoming book, What I Learned at Bug Camp: Essays on Finding a Home in the World. Stephen Sweat will be presenting on the representation of literacy in […]

Nick Montfort will read from his recent book, Riddle & Bind (Spineless Books, 2010), which contains poems that relate to his work in digital media. These include riddles (figuratively describing something that is left for the reader to guess) as well as constrained writing à la Oulipo. Then, he'll read some of the output of […]

The customary critique of Mother Teresa reads her image as a compromised mass commodity, the anointed saint who habitually produces the “third world” as her necessary gutter. While it is certainly the case that global icons of her ilk lure consumers into commodity fetishism, isolating them from social relations, we see these recursive images routinely […]

Professor Cooppan’s in-progress Race, Writing, and the Literary World System combines the economic analysis of world systems theory, world literature models of global literary movement, traditional theory and history of the novel, and psychoanalytic and philosophical studies of political affect. It explores how literary economies have helped to express, translate, shape, and contest the history […]

Curveship is an interactive fiction (IF) development system that adds support for interactive narrating -- automatic narrative variation that is accomplished through text generation. For 30 years, IF development systems have done very well at allowing us to build and manipulate world models, which are then encountered by players using text-based interfaces. Curveship aims to […]

In the late nineteenth century, a socialist workers' movement burst onto the scene in New York City's immigrant Jewish "ghetto." Over subsequent decades and in cities around the country, hundreds of thousands of men and women participated in this Jewish labor movement. They recast Jewish culture and community, and made a strong imprint on American […]

The following one-line Commodore 64 BASIC program: 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 continually generates a pleasing random maze pattern. In this talk, I argue that this tiny program can serve as a Rosetta Stone to help us understand the interconnected cultural and technical aspects of creative computing, practices of using the computer expressively and […]

Abstract: It is well known that the distribution of wh-remnants in sluices, unlike the distribution of wh-phrases in non-elliptical questions, is largely immune to island effects, as illustrated by the contrast below. (1) Irv and someone were dancing together, but I don’t know who. (Ross 1969) (2) * Irv and someone were dancing together, but […]

Dr. Sullivan is currently project coordinator for the Project for the Implementation o f an Undergraduate Humanities Curriculum in Digital Cultural Mapping at UCLA. She has excavated at the Greco-Roman site of Karanis in the Egyptian Fayoum for the past two seasons as part of the UCLA project at the site. Poster availablehere. For more […]