The Humanities Institute

Celebrating the Humanities: Spring Awards and Retirement Celebration
2018-06-08 16:00 - 19:00 (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
Humanists study the stories of humanity, in all their wonderful and tragic manifestations. The annual “Celebrating the Humanities” event is an opportunity for you to participate in this never-ending exploration of what it means to be human.
Humanities Division’s awards acknowledge those who have achieved special recognition, distinctions and honors over the course of this last year. See the event program and all award winners here.

Celebrating the Humanities – 2018 Spring Awards from THI on Vimeo.
View our full event photo album on Flickr:

Program Schedule
4:00-5:00pm Spring Awards
5:00-5:30pm Undergraduate Research Fellowship Poster Session
5:30-7:00pm Retirement Celebration

38th Annual Dickens Universe Conference featuring Little Dorrit
2018-07-15 - 2018-07-21
The Dickens Universe is a unique cultural event that brings together scholars, teachers, students, and members of the general public for a week of stimulating discussion and festive social activity on the beautiful Santa Cruz campus of the University of California—all focused on one or two Victorian novels, usually (but not always) one by Charles Dickens.
View our full event photo album on Flickr:

In 2018, the Universe featured Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens. Full of contrasts—light and shade, comedy and pathos—Little Dorrit is one of the great social novels of the Victorian age. It takes as its central themes the prison of this lower world, the vicissitudes of love in middle age and the inescapable power of money. Intricately plotted and full of Dickensian humor and sentiment, the novel displays a broad social vision and remarkable psychological insight.
Now in its 38th year of operation, the Dickens Universe combines features of a scholarly conference, a festival, a book club, and summer camp. Participants include people of all ages and walks of life—distinguished scholars, graduate students, undergraduates, retirees, young professionals, high school teachers, anyone who loves to read and who enjoys long Victorian novels. Here are some of the things that make the Universe such a special experience:

The college lifestyle: participants live on campus, eat together in the student dining hall, have time to meet and come to know each other in different ways.
Everyone is reading the same book. We all have this one important thing in common.
The range of activities—formal lectures, small discussion groups, films, daily Victorian teas, performances, and Victorian dancing.

The Universe offers a week of total immersion in the world of Victorian fiction with friendly, like-minded colleagues in a beautiful setting. Whether we’re returning to a Dickens novel that everyone knows and loves, or branching out into a Victorian novel by another author who might be less familiar, during the Universe we build a community out of our passion for reading, talking with one another, and bringing Victorian culture to life.
More information and registration:
General Website: https://dickens.ucsc.edu/
Registration Link: https://dickens.ucsc.edu/universe/registration/index.html
Phone: (831) 459-2103
Email: cmahaney@ucsc.edu
Video Link: https://youtu.be/JJgV87yGBSs

Cabrillo Music Festival Community Night
2018-08-09 19:00 - 20:00 | Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium
The Humanities Institute is excited to announce a new public partnership with the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music. THI will serve as a sponsor of the Festival’s new Community Night event on August 9, 2018. Community Night will include a dynamic short concert of chamber works performed by members of the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra designed for new listeners. The program includes fan favorites from recent seasons plus a few surprises – all led by conductor Cristi Măcelaru.
To celebrate this new partnership, THI will make 100 free tickets available for Community Night. The first 50 people to request tickets through this online form will receive 2 free tickets.
“THI and the Cabrillo Festival share a deep commitment to telling stories that reflect diverse cultural backgrounds and speak to the human spirit. We’re honored to be part of the community they have cultivated for more than 50 years,” says Irena Polic, THI Managing Director.
The annual music festival serves as a celebration of music and community, bringing together players, composers and music lovers for two weeks of contemporary musical performances.
“The Festival’s rich tradition of showcasing new and experimental music embodies our goal of making culture accessible and meaningful to everyone in our community,” says Polic. “We’re proud to be a co-sponsor of Community Night and look forward to rolling out additional programming connected to the festival in the years ahead.”
The Cabrillo Festival runs from July 29 through August 12 and tickets are now on sale.

Weekend with Shakespeare
2018-08-11 - 2018-08-12 | UCSC Arboretum
Join Shakespeare scholars and artists for two days of lectures, discussions, and demonstrations about the 2018 Season’s mainstage productions, Romeo & Juliet and Love’s Labour’s Lost.
Weekend with Shakespeare Lecture Series: This year, the Weekend With Shakespeare Lecture Series is free! However, we suggest interested participants RSVP through The Santa Cruz Shakespeare website.
Weekend with Shakespeare is sponsored in partnership with Santa Cruz Shakespeare.
LECTURE SERIES SCHEDULE
DAY ONE Lecture Series, Love’s Labour’s Lost: Saturday, August 11
Noon welcome (light lunch provided)
12:15-1:15 – Sean Keilen, Professor of Literature (UC Santa Cruz), discusses Shakespeare’s wit in Love’s Labour’s Lost
1:15-1:30 – Break
1:30-2:30 – Conversation with Michael Warren, Emeritus Professor of Literature (UC Santa Cruz) and Head of Dramatugy at Santa Cruz Shakespeare, and Ashley Herum, Dramaturg for Love’s Labour’s Lost
2:30-3:00 – Break with refreshments and light snacks.
3:00-4:00 – Q&A with cast from Love’s Labour’s Lost, moderated Mike Ryan, Artistic Director of Shakespeare Santa Cruz .
**
7:00 – Bring your own picnic dinner at The Grove.
7:00-7:15 – Pre-performance talk: ‘5 Things to Look For,” with Sean Keilen
8:00 – Evening performance of Love’s Labour’s Lost.
DAY TWO: Lecture Series, Romeo & Juliet: Sunday, August 12
Noon Welcome (light lunch provided)
12:15-1:30 – Dr. Ariane Helou, Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies (UCLA) and Dramaturg for Romeo and Juliet, discusses poetry and transformation in Romeo and Juliet
1:30-2:15 – Break with refreshments and light snacks
2:15-3:30 – Workshop on sonnets with Mike Ryan and Sean Keilen
**
7:00 – Bring your own picnic dinner at The Grove.
7:00-7:15 – Pre-performance discussion of “5 Things to Look For,” with Ariane Helou
8:00 – Evening performance of Romeo and Juliet

Nido de Lenguas: Summer Camp
2018-09-29 10:00 - 16:00 | Santa Cruz Adult School, 319 La Fonda Ave, Santa Cruz, 95062, United States
Nido de Lenguas Summer Camp is free and open to the public. Registration is required. Please sign up online using the form or by emailing us at nidodelenguas@ucsc.edu.
What is Summer Camp?
It is a one-day event where anybody has the opportunity to learn about — and learn how to speak — a Oaxacan language. Currently, participants can choose the Zapotec of Santiago Laxopa or the Mixtec of San Martín Peras.
Summer Camp brings together community members with native speaker and linguists from UC Santa Cruz. There are fun group activities and fast-paced games, each geared toward learning a Oaxacan language.
Who comes to Summer Camp?
Participants are community members who were excited to discover the indigenous languages of Oaxaca, many spoken by their neighbors across the Monterey Bay area. Native speakers of Mixtec and Zapotec teach their languages, and linguistics professors and students from UC Santa Cruz facilitate the activities.
Date: Saturday, September 29, 2018
Time: 10 am to 4 pm
Where: Santa Cruz Adult School, 319 La Fonda Ave, Santa Cruz

Madhuri Shekar’s Queen + Panel
2018-09-29 14:00 - 17:00 | De Anza College, Cupertino, CA, United States
With prestigious accolade only days away, the numbers start adding up to an ethical dilemma for UC Santa Cruz graduate researchers, Ariel Spiegel [Stacy Fairley] and Sanam Rao [Nandini Ravindran], and their supervisor, Dr. Philip Hayes [Michael Boehm] in Madhuri Shekar’s Queen. Is financier, Arvind Patel [Snehal Pachigar], correct that their whole hypothesis is motivated by left-wing bias?
The drama directed by EnActe Arts’ Artistic Director and Founder, Vinita Sud Belani, and launches EnActe Art’s 2018-19 season dedicated to the telling of women’s stories in response to author Kamila Shamsie’s challenge to publishing houses for 2018 to be a year of publishing women.
Following the 2 pm performance on September 29, a panel of UCSC faculty will address the joys and challenges facing women in academia and scientific research. Featuring: Vilashini Coopan (Literature), Needhi Bhalla (Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology), and Jennifer Derr (History).

Tickets Required
UCSC Students, Faculty and Staff, use code UCSCQUEEN for free tickets.
General Seating $25.00
Student/Senior $10.00
Tickets available at https://www.tikkl.com/enacte/c/queen

Reyna Grande Book Launch: A Dream Called Home
2018-10-02 19:00 - 21:00 | Peace United Church, 900 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
UC Santa Cruz alumna, Reyna Grande, will discuss her new memoir, A Dream Called Home, in conversation with Micah Perks, UC Santa Cruz Literature Professor.
A DREAM CALLED HOME is Grande’s lyrical and moving follow-up to The Distance Between Us. This memoir tells the story of her pursuit to become the first in her family to earn a college degree at UC Santa Cruz and become an award-winning and bestselling author. Grande shares an inspiring, personal account of what it means to find a home and place of belonging in America as a undocumented, first-generation Latina.
Event Photos by Crystal Birns:

Get a copy of A Dream Called Home at Bookshop Santa Cruz, at the event, or at www.bookshopsantacruz.com. Free books will be given out to the first 50 UCSC students to attend (student ID required at the door).
Reyna Grande is the recipient of the 2015 Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature. Her first novel, Across a Hundred Mountains (Atria, 2006), received a 2006 El Premio Aztlan Literary Award, a 2007 American Book Award, and a 2010 Latino Books Into Movies Award. Her second novel, Dancing with Butterflies (Washington Square Press, 2009) was critically acclaimed and was the recipient of a 2010 International Latino Book Award, Best Women’s Issues, and a 2010 Las Comadres & Friends National Latino Book Club Selection. She was also a 2003 PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellow. The Distance Between Us was a 2012 National Book Critics Circle Awards Finalist and has been selected by numerous city-wide read programs, including Rochester Reads 2018, MacReads 2018, One Book/One Michiana 2018, All Henrico Reads 2018, Timberland Reads Together 2017, Telluride One Book/One Canyon 2017, Estes Park One Book/One Valley 2017, Saginaw One Book/One Community 2016, Camarillo Reads 2016, Roswell Reads 2015, and One Maryland/One Book 2014, among others. To learn more about Reyna Grande and her work, visit www.reynagrande.com.
Presented by: Bookshop Santa Cruz and The Humanities Institute
Co-sponsored by:
Research Center for the Americas
UCSC First Gen Initiative
Kresge College
UCSC Year of Alumni
Parking is limited. Please carpool or choose alternative transportation if you are able. If you have disability-related needs, please contact us at thi@ucsc.edu or call 831-459-1274.

Digital Humanities Meet Up
2018-10-08 16:00 - 18:00 | Cowell Provost House, Cowell Provost House, Cowell Service Rd‎ University of California Santa Cruz, Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join the Digital Humanities campus community for a Fall Quarter Meet Up. This is an opportunity to meet digital scholarship practitioners across campus and connect as we start a new year. The Meet Up is informal: please invite colleagues interested in building a DH portfolio and learning more about digital scholarship.
Zac Zimmer, Assistant Professor of Literature, will present a short paper, “Cryptography, Subjectivity and Spyware: From PGP Source Code and Internals to Pegasus,” to kick off a DH-focused conversation related to the 2018 – 2019 THI theme, Data and Democracy.
Read Cyberwar for Sale beforehand and come prepared to discuss the issues
This brief intervention will use two examples from the world of secure communications to explore the intersection of global norms of privacy and local conceptions of political subjectivity.
The first example is a book published by Philip Zimmermann and MIT Press in 1995. That 900-page tome was a hard copy print out of the source code for his open source implementation of the public-key RSA cryptosystem. In the early 1990s, Zimmermann was being prosecuted by the US Government for distributing his software. By publishing his source code as a book, Zimmermann claimed free speech protections, while resourceful users knew that by scanning the pages they’d be able to compile their own versions of the software. PGP has since gone through several iterations, yet remains a global standard for email encryption. And yet it is not foolproof. In 2017, The Citizen Lab reported an exploit used by the Mexican state. “Pegasus,” produced by the Israeli cyberarms firm the NSO Group, allowed Mexican authorities to surveil and target Mexican lawyers, journalists, activists, and others. Pegasus uses social engineering and “spear-phising” attacks to compromise communications systems. There is no cryptographic solution to Pegasus.
Through tracing the trajectory from PGP to Pegasus, I pose the following questions: Is there a work-around to surveillance society? Will Big Data recognize any other civil rights framework, other than “privacy”? Is there a way to “transmediate” cryptographic protocols, in the spirit of Zimmermann and MIT Press’ collaboration, in order to protect against exploits like Pegasus?

Co-sponsored by the Digital Scholarship Commons

Anita Sarkeesian and Ebony Adams: History vs. Women
2018-10-09 19:00 - 21:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Join us at Bookshop Santa Cruz for discussion and signing with Anita Sarkeesian and Ebony Adams, moderated by UCSC Professor of Film and Digital Media Shelley Stamp, about their new book, History vs. Women.
Rebels, rulers, scientists, artists, warriors and villains.
Women are, and have always been, all these things and more.
Looking through the ages and across the globe, Anita Sarkeesian, founder of Feminist Frequency, along with Ebony Adams PHD, have reclaimed the stories of twenty-five remarkable women who dared to defy history and change the world around them. From Mongolian wrestlers to Chinese pirates, Native American ballerinas to Egyptian scientists, Japanese novelists to British Prime Ministers, History vs Women will reframe the history that you thought you knew.
Featuring beautiful full-color illustrations of each woman and a bold graphic design, this standout nonfiction title is the perfect read for teens (or adults!) who want the true stories of phenomenal women from around the world and insight into how their lives and accomplishments impacted both their societies and our own.
Anita Sarkeesian is an award-winning media critic and the creator and executive director of Feminist Frequency, an educational nonprofit that explores the representations of women in pop culture narratives. Best known as the creator and host of Feminist Frequency’s highly influential series Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, Anita lectures at universities, conferences and game development studios around the world. Anita dreams of owning a life-size replica of Buffy’s scythe. She is the coauthor of History vs Women.
Ebony Adams, Ph.D. is an author, activist, and former college educator whose work foregrounds the lives and work of black women in the diaspora. She lives in Los Angeles with a steadily-increasing collection of Doctor Who memorabilia. She writes widely on film criticism, social justice, and pop culture, and is the coauthor of History vs Women.
This free event will take place at Bookshop Santa Cruz. While seating is open (chairs are usually set up an hour ahead of time), you can reserve you place in the signing line by preordering your copy of History vs. Women with a priority signing line voucher from Bookshop Santa Cruz below.
If you have any ADA accommodation requests, please contact bookshopevents@gmail.com by October 8th.

Chris Benner: "A Universal Technology Dividend? - Rethinking price, value, work and the commons"
2018-10-10 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
In this talk, Dr. Benner will discuss his current work exploring the idea of a Universal Technology Dividend. He will explore questions related to the common-property characteristics of technology and innovation, the monopolistic characteristics of information markets, and the need to rethink how we define work in contemporary labor markets.
Event Photos:

Chris Benner is the Dorothy E. Everett Chair in Global Information and Social Entrepreneurship, and a Professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He currently directs the Everett Program for Technology and Social Change and the Santa Cruz Institute for Social Transformation. His research examines the relationships between technological change, regional development, and the structure of economic opportunity, focusing on regional labor markets and the transformation of work and employment. He has authored or co-authored six books (most recently Equity, Growth and Community, 2015, UC Press) and more that 70 journal articles, chapters and research reports. He received his Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from the University of California, Berkeley.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. The sessions consist of a 40-45 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center provides coffee, tea, and cookies.
All Center for Cultural Studies events are free and open to the public. Staff assistance is provided by the Humanities Institute.

Living Writers: Samiya Bashir
2018-10-11 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Samiya Bashir is the author of three books of poetry: Field Theories, and Gospel, and Where the Apple Falls. Sometimes she makes poems of dirt. Sometimes zeros and ones. Sometimes variously rendered text. Sometimes light. Her work has been widely published, performed, installed, printed, screened, and experienced. Bashir holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, where she served as Poet Laureate, and an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she received two Hopwood Poetry Awards. Bashir lives in Portland, Oregon where she teaches at Reed College.

About Living Writers, Fall 2018: “Sentence & Sentience: Forms”
This series features seven contemporary poets, critics, and artists who each render, albeit in differing forms and across a diversity of experiences, the unit of the sentence for powerfully sentient effects. Whether through poetic argument, the fictive line, or the scholarly imagination, each of these authors explore questions of race, gender, sexuality, nature, and nation in their respective practices and forms.
*Note: All Readings, except for the Morton Marcus Reading, featuring Gary Snyder, will take place from 5:20-6:55 in the Humanities Lecture Hall on the dates listed below. The Gary Snyder Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry Reading will be held in the Music Recital Hall on November 15th from 6-8:00 PM.

All events are free and open to the public.

Nido de Lenguas: Clases
2018-10-11 17:30 - 19:00 | Small Schools Campus, 840 N. Branciforte Ave., Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Led by Maestra Fe Silva-Robles of Senderos, Clases is a monthly opportunity to learn Santiago Laxopa Zapotec in an interactive classroom setting. All oral instruction is in Spanish only; written materials are in Spanish and English. Maestra Fe and the Nido de Lenguas team collaborate extensively to produce a cohesive set of lessons. Each lesson is designed to introduce new sounds, vocabulary, and grammar, building on previous lessons. Students increase their language skills through a variety of group exercises. There is also homework, so students can keep their Zapotec skills sharp between classes.
Clases is free and open to the public. To attend, it is necessary to register online here:

Linguistics Colloquia: Ur Shlonsky
2018-10-12 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
“Subjects of copular constructions”
Ur Shlonsky, University of Geneve
More info at: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/colloquia/index.html

Ben Breen, When Drugs Became Global: Technologies of Intoxication in the Enlightenment
2018-10-15 18:30 - 20:00 | Forager, San Jose, 420 S 1st St, San Jose, CA, 95172, United States
Over the course of the seventeenth eighteenth centuries, psychoactive substances from opiates to cannabis to coffee underwent rapid globalization. Enlightenment thinkers were by no means immune to the allure of these novel drugs. Scientists and physicians tried to discover the “occult virtues” of these drugs through an array of experimental methods, including testing them on themselves. This talk explores how the globalization of drugs in the eighteenth century influenced Enlightenment-era science, commerce, and technology. It does so through three case studies: Jesuits observing ayahuasca ceremonies in South America, East India Company merchants sampling cannabis in South Asia, and the strange story of the invention of nitrous oxide.

Event Photos:

An alumni Council Silicon Valley Lecture

Sharad Chari: “Apartheid Remains”
2018-10-17 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
“Apartheid Remains” explores how people subjected to life in a patchwork landscape of industry and residence in the Indian Ocean City of Durban, South Africa, have sought to contest their social and spatial subjection across the 20th century, particularly in the revolutionary 1970s and 1980s, and in today’s racial capitalism.
Event Photos:

Sharad Chari is a geographer working at the interface of political economy, historical ethnography, Marxist geography, agrarian studies, Black and subaltern radical traditions and oceanic studies. He has spent time at the Michigan Society of Fellows and the ‘Anthrohistory’ program at Michigan, Geography at the LSE, and Anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand, before returning to Berkeley Geography. Sharad is a scholar of agrarian transition and industrialization in South India (his first book, Fraternal Capital, 2004) and has been working on South Africa since 2002 (on the book project Apartheid Remains which he is speaking from.) He has also begun new work on an oceanic conception of capitalism, in relation to the fetishism of ‘the Ocean Economy’ in the Southern African Indian Ocean region, focusing on the South African and Mozambican Indian Ocean littorals, Réunion and Mauritius. At Berkeley, he is also part of Berkeley Black Geographies and the Submergent Archive, both collective projects in Geography Department, and at WiSER he is part of the project on the Oceanic Humanities in the Global South.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. The sessions consist of a 40-45 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center provides coffee, tea, and cookies.
All Center for Cultural Studies events are free and open to the public. Staff assistance is provided by the Humanities Institute.

UCHRI Funding Workshop
2018-10-18 14:00 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
UCHRI has just announced their call for applications for the 2018-2019 Academic Year. Join us for an Information Session with Kelly Anne Brown (Associate Director, UCHRI) and Shana Melnysyn (UCHRI Competitive Grants) to learn more. UCHRI has released six new competitive grants. The workshop will address these new opportunities and cover what you need to know to apply.
One-on-one Consultations also available
Brown and Melnysyn will also be available for informal consultations about faculty-led research projects. Contact thi@ucsc.edu if you would like to set up time to meet with them.

David Lee: "Pictures of the Past - Introduction to the Rock Art of Western North America"
2018-10-18 16:30 - 19:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Ancient hunter-gatherer peoples across the globe painted and carved designs on rock walls for tens of thousands of years. The deserts of western North America contain some of the largest and most complex rock art sites known, and careful documentation of them has helped us to understand how these enigmatic images fit into the lives of the peoples who made them and their descendants. This lecture will explore many of the various rock art styles of this region and place them within the greater context of national and international rock art studies.
Free and open to the public
Metered parking available in lower Cowell-Stevenson lot (109)

David Lee is an independent rock art researcher, focusing on the function and context of Native American rock art in the Great Basin and the Mojave Desert. Beginning in 1996 he has documented rock art in California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Idaho, and Australia, and has authored and co-authored many papers and reports on the Mojave Desert, eastern California, and Australia. Since 2005 he has also been documenting rock art and associated traditional stories in northern Australia. He is a founding member of Western Rock Art Research, a non-profit organization dedicated to the study and management of rock art.
For more information on the lecture, please contact hedrick@ucsc.edu

PhD+ Workshop: "Navigating Career Choices Post-PhD - Reflections on Work and Identity"
2018-10-19 11:00 - 12:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
“Navigating Career Choices Post-PhD: Reflections on Work and Identity”
This workshop will provide space to discuss, critique, and engage with some of the thorny questions about transitioning to non-tenure track careers. Kelly Anne Brown, Associate Director of UCHRI, and Shana Melnysyn, Competitive Grants Officer at UCHRI, will share their perspectives as PhDs at work in an Institute that hires many PhDs. We will begin by engaging with a few examples of “quit lit” from across the affective spectrum, and discuss how we might approach them as primary sources in our research on broadening career horizons. We will ask graduate students to come prepared with questions about pursuing different kinds of work–particularly those they wouldn’t feel comfortable asking in other contexts.
Event Photos:

Please read these texts ahead of the workshop and join the conversation:

Just Another Piece of Quit Lit, by Joseph Conley
The Sublimated Grief of the Left Behind, by Erin Bartram
Thesis Hatement, by Rebecca Schuman
Quit Lit is About Labor Conditions, by Katie Rose Guest

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About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Please join us for the third year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by the Institute for Humanities Research. We meet monthly, over lunch, to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grants/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.
Lunch will be served.

Please RSVP below:
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Micah Perks Book Launch: True Love and Other Dreams of Miraculous Escape
2018-10-23 19:00 - 21:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz and The Humanities Institute welcomes local author Micah Perks to celebrate the publication of her new book, True Love and Other Dreams of Miraculous Escape.
Magical and funny, profound and seductive, the linked stories in True Love and Other Dreams of Miraculous Escape explore the life-bending power of love. In these interwoven lives, ardent desire meets a keen sense of reality deep in the heart of progressive California. When Sadie opens a funky bookstore in Santa Cruz, she is swept off her feet by Daniel, a true-blue romantic–athletic, bookish, from Santiago, Chile. Their connection is heady and erotic, and it echoes through the love lives around them: from Harry Houdini’s first encounter with the widow Winchester to the threatening intimacy between a wife and her brother to a grumpy teenager who inspires her divorced parents. Years later, when Sadie and Daniel take an overdue trip to Paris, their blended family doesn’t blend so well, sending them back to rediscover their roots. In these interconnected lives, the desire for passion is as strong as the desire to escape, and the terror of claustrophobic connection competes with the deepest human yearning. A funny, intoxicating look at the complexity and simplicity of embracing and running from love. By the award-winning author of What Becomes Us.
Micah Perks is the author of What Becomes Us, a novel; We Are Gathered Here, a novel; Pagan Time, a memoir; and a long personal essay from Shebooks, Alone In The Woods. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Epoch, Zyzzyva, Tin House, The Toast, OZY and The Rumpus, amongst many journals and anthologies. She has won an NEA, five Pushcart Prize nominations, and the New Guard Machigonne 2014 Fiction Prize. She received her BA and MFA from Cornell University and now lives with her family in Santa Cruz where she co-directs the creative writing program at UCSC. More info and work at micahperks.com.
Read more about Perks and her teaching in a recent interview by UCSC Literature PhD Student, Thais Miller.
This free event will take place at Bookshop Santa Cruz. Chairs for open seating are usually set up about an hour before the event begins.
If you have any ADA accomodation requests, please contact bookshopevents@gmail.com by October 22nd.

CANCELED: Cultural Studies Colloquium with Ashwini Tambe
2018-10-24 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
“Tropical Exceptions – Racial Logics in Twentieth Century Intergovernmental Age of Consent Debates” Legal age standards for sexual maturity are challenging enough to devise at the state or national level, but they are especially contentious at the intergovernmental level. Efforts at setting common standards have often been marked by imperial logics on the part of those proposing common standards and misgivings on the part of those most affected. Dr. Tambe’s talk traces how intergovernmental efforts at setting common age standards for sexual consent and marriage occasioned elaborate posturing and coding of racial difference. In the two cases Tambe discusses —League of Nations conventions on trafficking in the 1920s and United Nations conventions on marriage in the 1950s— she show how the proceedings staged contests between competing imperialisms and foregrounded moral differences between parts of the world. In effect, seemingly neutral age categories became a means to express geopolitical hierarchies and undercut formal liberal relationships of equivalence.
Ashwini Tambe studies how societies regulate sexual practices, and why sexual practices are freighted with political meaning. Her previous work has engaged the history of sex trade regulation in Bombay. Her forthcoming book focuses on age standards for sexual consent and the legal paradoxes in defining girlhood in India. She is also writing a book on academic feminism and the #MeToo movement, and co-editing a volume on the history and future of transnational feminist theory. She is the editorial director of Feminist Studies, the oldest US journal of feminist interdisciplinary scholarship.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. The sessions consist of a 40-45 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center provides coffee, tea, and cookies.
All Center for Cultural Studies events are free and open to the public. Staff assistance is provided by the Humanities Institute.

VENUE CHANGE: Living Writers - Khary Polk
2018-10-25 17:20 - 18:55 | Peace United Church, 900 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Khary Polk is an Assistant Professor of Black Studies & Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies at Amherst College. He attended Oberlin College as an undergraduate, where he majored in English with a concentration in Creative Writing, and received his Ph.D. in American Studies from New York University. Polk has written for the Studio Museum of Harlem, The Journal of Negro History, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Gawker, the journal Biography, and has contributed essays to a number of queer of color anthologies, including Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity Objectification, and the Desire to Conform, If We Have To Take Tomorrow, Corpus, and Think Again. His forthcoming book, We Don’t Need Another Hero: Race, Sexuality, and Black Military Workers Abroad, will be published by University of North Carolina Press in Fall 2019.

Living Writers Series Fall 2018: Sentence & Sentience: Forms
This series features seven contemporary poets, critics, and artists who each render, albeit in differing forms and across a diversity of experiences, the unit of the sentence for powerfully sentient effects. Whether through poetic argument, the fictive line, or the scholarly imagination, each of these authors explore questions of race, gender, sexuality, nature, and nation in their respective practices and forms.
*Note: All Readings, except for the Morton Marcus Reading, featuring Gary Snyder, will take place from 5:20-6:55 in the Humanities Lecture Hall on the dates listed below. The Gary Snyder Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry Reading will be held in the Music Recital Hall on November 15th from 6-8:00 PM.
All events are free and open to the public.

Markus Zusak: Book Discussion and Signing - Bridge of Clay
2018-10-25 19:00 - 21:00 | Santa Cruz Veterans Hall Auditorium
Markus Zusak, award-winning and internationally best-selling author of The Book Thief and I Am the Messenger, will celebrate the release of his highly-anticipated new book, Bridge of Clay, at an offsite and ticketed event. An unforgettable and sweeping family saga, written in powerfully inventive language and bursting with heart, as signature Zusak. Tickets for this celebration and book signing event are on sale at Bookshop Santa Cruz and at https://www.bookshopsantacruz.com/markus-zusak. This event is co-sponsored by Bookshop Santa Cruz and KAZU.
This offsite book discussion and signing event will be held at: Santa Cruz County Veterans Memorial Building, 846 Front St., Downtown Santa Cruz
TICKET PACKAGES: Ticket packages are $30.00, include one copy of Bridge of Clay and one ticket to the event. One companion ticket may be purchased for $10.00. (No book included. Limit one per full price ticket.)
The publication date of Bridge of Clay is October 9th, 2018. Ticket packages purchased before that date will include a voucher redeemable for one copy of Bridge of Clay (at Bookshop Santa Cruz on and after October 9th, or at the venue on the night of the event).
The breathtaking story of five brothers who bring each other up in a world run by their own rules. As the Dunbar boys love and fight and learn to reckon with the adult world, they discover the moving secret behind their father’s disappearance.
At the center of the Dunbar family is Clay, a boy who will build a bridge–for his family, for his past, for greatness, for his sins, for a miracle.
The question is, how far is Clay willing to go? And how much can he overcome?
Markus Zusak is the author of the extraordinary international bestseller The Book Thief and I Am the Messenger, an LA Times Book Award Finalist and Printz Award Honor book. He lives in Sydney, Australia, with his wife and children.

Sanctuary & Subjectivity Practices Workshop
2018-10-26 10:00 - 18:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Event Photos:

10:00 am – 12:00 pm
Session 1: Chair: Prof. Megan Thomas
“Re-rooting ‘We Refugees’: Lessons on the Conditions of Displacement from Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil” – Dr. Scott Ritner
“Sites of Emancipation: Contributions from a Rancièrian Perspective” – Hannes Glück
“Humanitarian Subjects in Neoliberal Times” – Veronika Zablotsky
12:00-1:30 pm: Lunch Break
1:30-3:30 pm
Session 2: Chair: Prof. Max Tomba
“Borders and Crossings: Lessons of the 1980s Central American Solidarity Movement for 2010s Sanctuary Practices” – Prof. Susan Coutin (skype)
“History, Sense, Sanctuary: The Time-Lapse Politics of Church Asylum” – Key MacFarland
“Hotspot Geopolitics versus Geosocial Solidarity: Contending Constructions of Safe Space for Migrants in Europe” – Prof. Katharyne Mitchell and Prof. Matthew Sparke
3:30-4:00 pm: Coffee break
4:00-6:00pm
Session 3: Keynote Address
“Time, Sanctuary, and Decoloniality: Notes from Manus Island Prison” – Prof. Anne McNevin
6:00-8:00 pm
Dinner at the Cowell Provost’s House

DATE CHANGE - Anne McNevin - "Time, Sanctuary and Decoloniality: Notes from Manus Island Prison"
2018-10-26 16:00 - 18:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Please note that this event date has changed and will now be on Friday, October 26th, 2018
Event Photos:

Anne McNevin is Associate Professor of Politics at The New School and is spending 2018-19 as a member of the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Her work focuses on the transformation of political belonging, the regulation of borders and migration, and spatiality and temporality in world politics. She is author of Contesting Citizenship: Irregular Migrants and New Frontiers of the Political (Columbia UP, 2011) and co-editor of Citizenship Studies. Her current research explores contemporary social movements that enliven a politics of membership and mobility beyond the terms of open/closed borders and citizen/migrant subjects.
Co-sponsored by: The After Neo-Liberalism Research Cluster and University of California Office of the President Multi-campus Research Programs and Initiative Funding

Linguistics Semantics-Pragmatics Workshop
2018-10-27 09:00 - 17:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
More info at: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/conferences/index.html

Jaron Lanier: How the Internet Failed and How to Recreate It
2018-10-29 19:00 - 21:00 | Music Recital Hall
The Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture, Presented by the Humanities Institute
The internet as it exists might destroy our world. In the developed countries, its arrival has corresponded to bizarre political dysfunction, while in the developing world, ethnic rivalries that had been waning have been re-ignited in the most grotesque fashion. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The internet was supposed to empower people and enrich culture and democracy. What went wrong was based on a simplistic, nerdy philosophy. The solution can be discerned, and it involves creating and strengthening societal structures that are in between giant tech platforms and individuals.
Event Photos by Crystal Birns:

Unable to join us for the event? View the recording here:

Jaron Lanier: How the Internet Failed and How to Recreate It” from IHR on Vimeo.
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.
Data and Democracy: This event kicks off a year of programming on “Data and Democracy.” The Humanities Institute will be hosting numerous events and other activities around this theme. As our society navigates shifting definitions of fake news, targeted ad programs, and compromised voting systems, it is essential that we work to understand the complex and often obscured relationship between data and democracy. During the 2018-2019 Academic Year, The Humanities Institute will lead a community-wide conversation about this topic through a range of events focused on the ethics of social media, online privacy, big data, and algorithmic bias.
Directions and Parking
The UCSC Music Recital Hall is located at 402 McHenry Rd, Santa Cruz, CA 95064
Parking lot attendants will be on site to sell permits and direct guests to available parking in the Performing Arts parking lot #126. Click here for directions.
If you have disability-related needs, please contact us at thi@ucsc.edu or call 831-459-3527.

Michel Feher: "Creditworthiness - The Political Stake of a Speculative Age"
2018-10-31 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Michel Feher’s current research and forthcoming book, Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age (Zone Books, September 2018) examines the extraordinary shift in conduct and orientation generated by financialization, particularly the new political resistances and aspirations that investees draw from their rated agency.
Event Photos:

Michel Feher is a philosopher who has taught at the École Nationale Supérieure, Paris, and at the University of California, Berkeley, and was recently a Visiting Professor at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the publisher and a founding editor of Zone Books, NY (in 1986) as well as the president and co-founder of Cette France-là, Paris (in 2008), a monitoring group on French immigration policy. He is the author of Powerless by Design: The Age of the International Community (2000) and, most recently, of Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age (2018); the co-author, with Cette France-là, of Xénophobie d’en haut: le choix d’une droite éhontée (2012) and Sans-papiers et préfets: la culture du résultat en portraits (2012) and the co-editor of Nongovernmental Politics (2007), with Gaëlle Krikorian and Yates McKee, and of Europe at a Crossroads/near Futures Online, with William Callison, Milad Odabaei and Aurélie Windels (2015).
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. The sessions consist of a 40-45 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center provides coffee, tea, and cookies.
All Center for Cultural Studies events are free and open to the public. Staff assistance is provided by the Humanities Institute.

Living Writers: Julian Talamantez Brolaski
2018-11-01 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Julian Talamantez Brolaski is the author of Of Mongrelitude (Wave Books, 2017), which was recently shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry; Advice for Lovers (City Lights 2012); and Gowanus Atropolis (Ugly Duckling Press, 2011. It is coediter of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life & Work of Kari Edwards, as well as lead singer and rhythm guitarist for the Brooklyn-based Juan & the Pines and Oakland-based The Western Skyline. Julian is currently at work on The Apache Pollen Path (forthcoming from University of New Mexico Press) with its grandmother, Inés Talamantez.

About Living Writers, Fall 2018: “Sentence & Sentience: Forms”
This series features seven contemporary poets, critics, and artists who each render, albeit in differing forms and across a diversity of experiences, the unit of the sentence for powerfully sentient effects. Whether through poetic argument, the fictive line, or the scholarly imagination, each of these authors explore questions of race, gender, sexuality, nature, and nation in their respective practices and forms.
*Note: All Readings, except for the Morton Marcus Reading, featuring Gary Snyder, will take place from 5:20-6:55 in the Humanities Lecture Hall on the dates listed below. The Gary Snyder Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry Reading will be held in the Music Recital Hall on November 15th from 6-8:00 PM.
All events are free and open to the public.

Kevin Dawson: “History Below the Waterline - Enslaved Salvage Divers Harvesting Seaports’ Hinter-Seas, c.1540-1840”
2018-11-07 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Kevin Dawson’s scholarship examines how enslaved Africans carried swimming, surfing, canoe-making, and canoeing skills to the Americas where they informed slave culture and were exploited by slaveholders. “History Below the Waterline” considers how enslaved Africans employed as salvage divers transformed shipwrecks, especially sunken Spanish treasure ships, into hinter-seas of economic production. Scholars typically situate seaports between hinterlands and overseas markets, assuming economies pivoted around rural production. This talk shifts our intellectual focus seaward to consider how enslaved aquanauts’ African-based expertise enabled them to harvest hinter-seas to produce capital that helped finance terrestrial production throughout the English Empire.
Kevin Dawson grew up surfing, swimming, and freediving in south Los Angeles County, all of which profoundly informed his scholarship. He received a BA from California State University, Fullerton and was awarded his PhD from the University of South Carolina in 2005, where his advisor was Dan Littlefield. Dawson’s scholarship and teaching focus on the African diaspora and Atlantic History from roughly 1444, when the Portuguese first sailed into Sub-Saharan Africa to 1888, when Brazil became the last country in the New World to abolish slavery.
He has conducted research throughout the continental US, Hawai‘i, the Caribbean, and West Africa and has published articles in the Journal of American History and Journal of Social History, as well as several chapters in edited volumes. His book Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the Africa Diaspora was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2018.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. The sessions consist of a 40-45 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center provides coffee, tea, and cookies.
All Center for Cultural Studies events are free and open to the public. Staff assistance is provided by the Humanities Institute.

Rachel Gross, The Jewish Deli Revival: Buying and Selling American Jewish Nostalgia
2018-11-08 13:30 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 520, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
In recent years, there has been a nostalgic resurgence of interest in the Jewish deli menu. Restaurateurs and purveyors of Jewish food are deliberately making American Jewish food fit for the twenty-first century, emphasizing sustainability, local produce, and a nostalgic longing for family and communal histories. By selling and consuming a revitalized deli cuisine, American Jews express their longing for authentic Jewish pasts, build community in the present, and pass on their values to future generations.

Prof. Rachel B. Gross is the John and Marcia Goldman Professor of American Jewish Studies in the Department of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University. She is currently working on a book entitled Feeling Jewish: Nostalgia and American Jewish Religion. She received her PhD from Princeton University.

Living Writers: Valeria Luiselli
2018-11-08 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Valeria Luiselli, Hofstra University, is a novelist and non-fiction writer. She is the author of Faces in the Crowd, Sidewalks, The Story of My Teeth, and Tell Me How It Ends. Twice nominated for both the Kirkus Prize and the NBCC Award, she is the two-time winner of an L.A. Times Book Prize, a recipient of the National Book Foundation “5 under 35” award, and the Bearing Witness Fellowship from the Art for Justice Fund. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, and McSweeney’s, among other publications, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. She lives and teaches in New York City.

Living Writers Series Fall 2018: Sentence & Sentience: Forms
This series features seven contemporary poets, critics, and artists who each render, albeit in differing forms and across a diversity of experiences, the unit of the sentence for powerfully sentient effects. Whether through poetic argument, the fictive line, or the scholarly imagination, each of these authors explore questions of race, gender, sexuality, nature, and nation in their respective practices and forms.
*Note: All Readings, except for the Morton Marcus Reading, featuring Gary Snyder, will take place from 5:20-6:55 in the Humanities Lecture Hall on the dates listed below. The Gary Snyder Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry Reading will be held in the Music Recital Hall on November 15th from 6-8:00 PM.

All events are free and open to the public.

Save the Waves Film Festival
2018-11-08 19:00 - 23:00 | Patagonia Outlet, 415 River St C, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The 10th annual Save The Waves Film Festival presented by UGG brings its west coast tour home with an epic evening of live music and international surf films at Patagonia Outlet in Santa Cruz, CA on Thursday, November 8th. The night’s festivities will feature world premieres of surf, adventure, and documentary films, as well as live music and a raffle at intermission. The Save The Waves Film Festival is a fundraiser for the Save The Waves Coalition and World Surfing Reserves, and all proceeds support their work to protect surf ecosystems.

This event will have a cash bar with offerings from Tito’s Vodka, Suerte Tequila, and Kona Brewery. To make our film festival more eco-responsible, we have eliminated single-use plastic cups at our bars. We will be selling stainless steel pint cups for $10 (one free drink with purchase!) or feel free to bring your own reusable cup. Thanks for helping us make this year’s film festival the greenest yet!
All Eventbrite ticketholders (pre-door sales) will receive a free raffle ticket at the door. Prizes include a Patagonia wetsuit, Firewire surfboard, GoPro Hero 6 Black, Peak Designs photographer’s messenger bag, Clif Bar prize pack + more!
**this is an all ages show**

Linguistics Colloquia: Gabriella Caballero
2018-11-09 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Gabriella Caballero, UC San Diego: The Interaction Between Lexical and Grammatical Tone in Choguita Rarámuri (Tarahumara)*
The cross-linguistic study of tone has largely focused on its lexical phonological properties, its phonetic implementation and interaction with other prosodic phenomena, but the morphological role of tone is still under-documented: What kind of morphological information may tone convey across languages? And what mechanisms regulate the outcome when there are lexical and grammatical tones in conflict?
This talk addresses these questions through the lens of Choguita Rarámuri (CR; Uto-Aztecan), a prosodically complex language of northern Mexico.

CR has three lexical tones exclusively realized in stressed syllables. Stress-accent is morphologically
conditioned and tonal patterns are partially predictable from stress. Yet there is evidence for grammatical tone and tonal classes independent of stress. We argue that the full range of grammatical tone patterns in CR follows from an analysis that incorporates tonal underspecification and construction-specific tonal patterns as output-oriented schemas. This analysis captures several properties of this system, including: (i) arbitrary relationship between tone patterns of related forms, (ii) heterogeneous nature of morphosyntactic classes expressed by tone melodies, and (iii) overwriting/avoidance of lexical tone by grammatical tone. We contrast this analysis with an alternative morphemic analysis that has been proposed in the literature (Spahr 2016), and argue that a construction-based analysis makes the correct empirical predictions.
* Work in collaboration with Austin German (UCSD/UT Austin)

More info at: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/colloquia/index.html

The Maghrib Workshop: Sovereignty, Crisis, and Narratives of Belonging
2018-11-10 09:00 - 18:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Maghrib Workshop: Sovereignty, Crisis, and Narratives of Belonging
Part I

Morning
8:30 am transportation from Hotel to Humanities 1 by carpool.

9:00 am Coffee and Introduction

9:30 Camilo Gómez-Rivas (UCSC) “Sanctuary, Refuge, and Displacement to the Maghrib during the Reconquista.”

11:00 Ashley V. Miller (UCB) “Designing Moroccan Heritage on the Economic Battlefield of World War I.”

12:30 Lunch

Afternoon
1:30 Idriss Jebari (Bowdoin) “Critical Thought, Nation-Building and Language Politics in the Maghreb.”

3:00 Break

3:15 Nouri Gana (UCLA) “Twilight Arabic: The Politics of Language in Postrevolutionary Tunisia.”

4:45 Concluding remarks

6:00 Dinner at Cowell Provost’s House

Don Rothman Endowed Award in First-Year Writing Ceremony
2018-11-13 13:30 - 15:00 | Humanities 2, Room 259
Please join the Writing Program in celebrating UC Santa Cruz’s ninth annual Don Rothman Endowed Award in First-Year Writing ceremony. UCSC VPDUE Richard Hughey, Humanities Dean Tyler Stovall, Writing Program Chair Tonya Ritola, and Writing Program faculty members will be attending the ceremony along with this year’s six winners and their families.
Please RSVP by completing this short survey.

Julie Livingston: “Self-Devouring Growth - A Planetary Parable”
2018-11-14 12:00 - 13:30
This talk, like the book from which it is drawn, calls into question the imperative of economic growth, tracing the unintended consequences of escalating consumption. Using a series of linked cases of successful economic growth (water, roads, and cattle in Botswana), it shows how insatiable growth, predicated on consumption, will inevitably overwhelm, a process Dr. Livingston terms self-devouring growth.

Julie Livingston is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University. She is the author of the forthcoming Self-devouring growth: a planetary parable told from Southern Africa (Duke University Press), Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic (Duke University Press), Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana (Indiana University Press), and numerous articles and essays and edited volumes and special journal issues. Livingston is the recipient of the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing, the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Wellcome Medal, and the American Association for the History of Medicine’s William Welch Medal. In 2013 she was named a MacArthur fellow.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. The sessions consist of a 40-45 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center provides coffee, tea, and cookies.
All Center for Cultural Studies events are free and open to the public. Staff assistance is provided by the Humanities Institute.

Isa Blumi - "The Ottoman Refugee and Euro-American Colonial Terror: A Global Story"
2018-11-14 15:30 - 17:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
“The Ottoman Refugee and Euro-American Colonial Terror: A Global Story”

Although the majority of Ottoman refugees in the 1878-1912 period remained internally displaced, significant numbers found their way to new continents, themselves in the throes of colonialist expansion. These pioneers’ stories require looking into the larger context of modern exploitation economies under which these Ottomans also suffered (and subsequently resisted in various ways). From recent studies we learn that the demand for cheap labor that absorbed such waves of Ottomans came from expanding labor-intensive plantation and mining operations as well as infrastructure development, long the investment of choice for private capital. As much as we must tell the violent resistance to the exploitative demands of capital, however, Isa Blumi identifies thousands of Ottoman refugees whose violent experiences with Euro-American imperialism intersected in Southeast Asia, Eastern Africa, and the Americas. In several cases, he will chart how colonialist-projects harnessed the capacity of Ottoman refugees (victims of expansionist European violence in their homelands) to subjugate indigenous peoples of what is today known as Southern Philippines, the Swahili hinterland, and the borderlands of an expanding US and Mexico/Comanche. In other words, Euro-American imperialism took its ‘destined’ genocidal turn by often calling on various Ottoman subjects to make themselves useful in ways contradictory to their normative place in world history.
Isa Blumi is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian, Middle Eastern and Turkish Studies at Stockholm University.
This event is sponsored by the newly revitalized Center for World History, which fosters a rich set of lectures, conferences, pedagogical workshops, and scholarly conversations. This programming enhances the intellectual life of faculty and students at UCSC across numerous disciplines interested in the human past. All Center for World History events are open to all members of the UCSC community and to the general public. More at: https://cwh.ucsc.edu/

Tzutu Kan: Maya Hip Hop
2018-11-15 16:00 - 18:00 | Kresge Town Hall
Tzutu Kan, hailing from what the Maya considered the belly button of the Universe — Lake Atitlan in the vernal Guatemala highlands — is a painter, sculptor, bio-builder, activist in the defense of native peoples, and hip hop artist who lays down rhymes in the ancient Mayan languages of Tz’utujil, Kaqchikel, and K’ichee.

Presentation at 4pm, followed by a performance.

World Philosophy Day at Humble Sea Brewing Co.
2018-11-15 18:00 - 20:00 | Humble Sea Brewing Company, 820 Swift St, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
World Philosophy Day?
Yes, it is a thing! Falling on the third Thursday of each November, World Philosophy Day celebrates the value and practice of philosophy.
This year, The Center for Public Philosophy and Humble Sea Brewing Co. are partnering to celebrate together. Come join us!
Featuring an Ask-a-Philosopher Booth staffed by some of your favorite local philosophers, delicious Humble Sea brews (including one Humble Sea is naming in honor of philosophy!), and all the ‘civic discourse’ you can handle! We can’t wait to celebrate with you – we’re going to get things going at 6pm this Thursday, November 15th.

Morton Marcus Poetry Reading with Gary Snyder and Special Guest Tom Killion
2018-11-15 18:00 - 20:30 | Music Recital Hall
View the full event recording online here.

Event Photos by Crystal Birns:

The Annual Morton Marcus Poetry Reading honors poet, teacher, and film critic Morton Marcus (1936–2009). Marcus, a nationally acclaimed poet, called Santa Cruz his home for more than fifty years. This annual poetry series continues Mort’s tradition of bringing acclaimed poets to Santa Cruz County, continues to acknowledge the significant role poetry has played in our community’s history, and works to maintain poetry’s influence in our county’s culture.
5:30 p.m. doors open / 6:00 p.m. program begins
The reading will conclude with a book signing and reception.
This event is free and open to the public, first come, first served.
Seating is limited and we anticipate a full event, so please plan accordingly.

Directions and Parking:
The UCSC Music Recital Hall is located at 402 McHenry Rd, Santa Cruz, CA 95064
Parking lot attendants will be on site to sell permits and direct guests to available parking in the Performing Arts parking lot #126. The cost for parking is $5. Click here for directions.
If you have disability-related needs, please contact us at thi@ucsc.edu or call 831-459-1274.
Event Program:
Poet Gary Young, will host the program, and the evening will include an announcement of the winner of the Morton Marcus Poetry Contest (recipient receives a $1,000 prize). This annual free event will have first-come, first-served seating. Doors will open at 5:30 PM. The reading will conclude with a book signing and reception.
Gary Snyder is a poet, environmentalist, Zen Buddhist and educator. Involved in the Beat movement, Snyder read at the famous Six Gallery reading alongside Allen Ginsberg. Snyder’s writing focuses on environmental concerns and Zen Buddhism. He is an environmental activist who is known for his simple, clear style, as well as his first-person descriptions of his experiences in the natural world. Snyder’s poetry is influenced by Japanese haiku and Chinese verse, in addition to his knowledge of anthropological factors like oral traditions. Over his long career, Snyder has written more than 20 books of poetry and prose. In 1975, his collection Turtle Island was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His 1992 collection, No Nature, was a National Book Award finalist and he received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2008.
Tom Killion is famous for his vibrantly colored woodcut prints of the California landscape. He was born and raised in Mill Valley, California, on the slopes of Mt. Tamalpais. The rugged scenery of Marin County and Northern California inspired him from an early age to create landscape prints using linoleum and wood, strongly influenced by the traditional Japanese Ukiyo-ë style of Hokusai and Hiroshige. He studied History at UC Santa Cruz, where he was introduced to fine book printing by William Everson and Jack Stauffacher. In 1975, he produced his first illustrated book on UCSC’s Cowell Press. After traveling extensively in Europe and Africa, Killion returned to Santa Cruz in 1977 and founded his own Quail Press, where he published his second book, “Fortress Marin”. Visit tomkillion.com to learn more.
About Morton Marcus: The Morton Marcus Poetry Reading event commemorates Santa Cruz poet Morton Marcus who was a poet, author, teacher, film critic, as well as an activist for the arts. Born in New York City, Morton spent most of his professional life in Santa Cruz, California, and he is strongly associated with its poetry and art community. For more information visit www.mortonmarcus.com. You can also view the Morton Marcus Archive in Special Collections at UCSC.
This community event is co-sponsored by:
The Humanities Institute
Living Writers Series
Porter Hitchcock Modern Poetry Fund
Special Collections & Archives
Cowell College
Porter College
Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems
Ow Family Properties
Poetry Santa Cruz
Cabrillo College English Department
Santa Cruz Writes
Bookshop Santa Cruz

Interdisciplinary Graduate Writing: Challenges and Strategies I
2018-11-19 12:30 - 14:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Do you struggle with dissertation writing? Us too! This workshop will provide a peer-led space for conversation among graduate students engaged in interdisciplinary dissertation writing in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. It offers resources and tools to push through common roadblocks in your advanced writing practice related to issues of voice, discipline-crossing work, organization, timeline, and procrastination.
Join this workshop to develop a clear set of writing goals and an accountability strategy. Participants will form writing groups and commit to accountable writing practices in the second session of this workshop as part of a new THI series. Part II of the workshop will be held on Monday, December 3.
The workshops will be led by Nadia Roche (Sociology) and Veronika Zablotsky (Feminist Studies).

This new program is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation through the THI Expanding Humanities Impact and Publics project and co-sponsored by CITL.

Living Writers: Alexandria Marzano Lesnevich
2018-11-21 17:20 - 18:55 | Peace United Church, 900 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of THE FACT OF A BODY: A Murder and a Memoir, recipient of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir and the 2018 Chautauqua Prize. Named one of the best books of the year by Entertainment Weekly, Audible.com, Bustle, Book Riot, The Times of London, and The Guardian, it was an Indie Next Pick and a Junior Library Guild selection, long-listed for the Gordon Burn Prize, short-listed for the CWA Gold Dagger, and a finalist for a New England Book Award and a Goodreads Choice Award. It has been published in the US, the UK, and the Netherlands; translations are forthcoming in Turkey, Korea, Taiwan, Spain, Greece, Brazil, and France. The recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, and Yaddo, as well as a Rona Jaffe Award, Marzano-Lesnevich lives in Portland, Maine and is an Assistant Professor of English at Bowdoin College.

All events are free and open to the public.

Book Presentation: Jai Sen's The Movements of Movements
2018-11-27 17:30 - 19:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Join us as Jai Sen discusses his ambitious anthology on social movements with a panel of commentators including Michelle Glowa (CIIS), Deborah Gould (UCSC), and Patrick King (UCSC).

Jai Sen is an activist/researcher/author on and in movement. Earlier an organizer, then a researcher into popular movement, for the past decade and more he has worked to promote critical engagement with the World Social Forum and emerging world movement – as moderator of the listserv WSFDiscuss and as coeditor of several books including World Social Forum: Challenging Empires and World Social Forum: Critical Explorations. He helped found and remains associated with CACIM and with OpenWord.

The Movements of Movements (PM Press/OpenWorld, 2017/18):
Our world today is not only a world in crisis but also a world in profound movement, with increasing numbers of people joining or forming movements: local, national, transnational, and global. The dazzling diversity of ideas and experiences recorded in this collection captures something of the fluidity within campaigns for a more equitable planet. These two volumes, taking internationalism seriously without tired dogmas, provides a bracing window into some of the central ideas to have emerged from within grassroots struggles from 2006 to 2010. The essays here cross borders to look at the politics of caste, class, gender, religion, and indigeneity, and move from the local to the global.

Refreshments will be served.

Peter Limbrick: “For a New Nahda - Moumen Smihi, World Cinema, and Arab Modernism”
2018-11-28 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Dr. Limbrick’s forthcoming book on Moumen Smihi connects the Moroccan filmmaker’s modernism to the Nahda or “Arab Renaissance” of the 19th-20th century, which re-energized Arab culture in dialogue with other languages and discourses. Offering new ways to think about world cinema and modernism in the region, Limbrick argues that Smihi’s radically beautiful films take up the Nahda’s challenge for a new age.
Peter Limbrick is Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media. He is the author of Making Settler Cinemas: Film and Colonial Encounters in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand (Palgrave 2010) and has published on transnational cinema and postcolonial culture in Cinema Journal, Camera Obscura, Third Text, Framework, Visual Anthropology and other journals. He has received fellowships from National Endowment for the Humanities and the UC President’s Research program and is currently finishing a book about Moroccan filmmaker Moumen Smihi, a key figure in the “new Arab cinema” that emerged in the late 1960s across North Africa and the Middle East. In 2013, he curated a major retrospective of Smihi’s work that has screened at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, Block Cinema, in Chicago, and Tate Modern, in London.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. The sessions consist of a 40-45 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center provides coffee, tea, and cookies.
All Center for Cultural Studies events are free and open to the public. Staff assistance is provided by the Humanities Institute.

Algorithms, Mobility, and Justice
2018-11-28 16:00 - 18:00 | Engineering 2, Room 599, Engineering 2 Building @ UCSC, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Are moral algorithms a reasonable solution for taking advantage of life-saving potentials of self-driving cars? In this talk, Neda Atanasoski (UCSC Professor of Feminist Studies) will engage the utilitarian framings that are dominant in the discourses on self-driving cars inclusive of the assumptions that are folded into the question above: that algorithms can be moral and self-driving cars will save lives. Drawing on feminist and care ethics, Atanasoski brings to fore the injustices built into current and future mobility systems such as laws and policies that protect car manufacturers and algorithmic biases that will have disproportionate negative impacts on the most vulnerable. Moreover, it is argued that a constricted moral imagination dominated by the reductive scenarios of the Trolley Problems is impairing design imagination of alternative futures. More specifically, that a genuine caring concern for the many lives lost in car accidents now and in the future—a concern that transcends false binary trade-offs and that recognizes the systemic biases and power structures—could serve as a starting point to rethink mobility, as it connects to the design of cities, the well-being of communities, and the future of the planet.
Neda Atanasoski is Professor of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz, Director of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and affiliated with the Film and Digital Media Department. Atanasoski has a PhD in Literature and Cultural Studies from the University of California, San Diego. Her research interests include race and technology; war and nationalism; gender, ethnicity, and religion; cultural studies and critical theory; media studies.
Nassim JafariNaimi is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media at the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech and the director of the Design and Social Interaction Studio which she established in 2013. JafariNaimi’s research engages the ethical and political dimensions of design practice and technology especially as related to democracy and social justice. Her research spans both theoretical and design-based inquiries situated at the intersection of Design Studies, Science and Technology Studies, and Human Computer Interaction. Her writing on topics such as participatory media, smart cities, social and educational games, and algorithms have appeared in venues such as Science, Technology, and Human Values, Design Issues, Digital Creativity, and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). JafariNaimi received her PhD in Design from Carnegie Mellon University. She also holds an MS in Information Design and Technology from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tehran, Iran.
Abhradeep Guha Thakurta is Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UC Santa Cruz. Thakurta’s research is at the intersection of machine learning and data privacy. Primary research interest include designing privacy-preserving machine learning algorithms with strong analytical guarantees, which are robust to errors in the data. In many instances, Thakurta harnesses the privacy property of the algorithms to obtain robustness and utility guarantees. A combination of academic and industrial experience has allowed Thakurta to draw non-obvious insights at the intersection of theoretical analysis and practical deployment of privacy-preserving machine learning algorithms.
Co-Sponsored by: THI Data and Democracy Initiative, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, and the Feminist Studies Department, and the Science & Justice Research Center

Invitation and Object: Reframing the Study of Palestine
2018-11-29 15:00 - 17:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
“Welcome to Gaza: On the Politics of Invitation and the Right to Tourism”
Jennifer Kelly, Associate Professor, UCSC
In between Israeli military incursions, Palestinians in Gaza have described their colonial condition and navigated their cleavage from the rest of Palestine through virtual collaborative projects that rehearse, satirize, and reimagine tourism. These projects refuse to position Gaza as solely a site of suffering, a site where tourism could never flourish; they instead ask what it would mean if Palestinians in Gaza could actually invite tourists, host their own tours, and control their own borders. Through virtual tours that simultaneously describe suffering and create joy, Palestinians in Gaza are combating not only the siege but also the representations of Palestinians in Gaza as under siege and nothing more.

“Revisiting the Question of Palestine”
Noya Kansky, FMST Graduate Student, UCSC
In this paper, I revisit Edward Said’s “Question of Palestine,” with specific attention to the activation of Palestine as object of study in contemporary humanities-focused research agendas. How are these research choices shaped by institutions and the left-leaning ethos of scholar activism, contemporary post-colonial and settler colonial studies and additionally political theory, and current debates on research ethics and epistemic production? What violences does this practice reinscribe and in what ways does the contemporary university contain and re-direct questions that frame Palestine as a stable object – often exceptionalized as a research site that is productive to those thinking about oppression and violence?

Pizza and drinks provided!

Living Writers: Duy Doan & Angie Sijun Lou
2018-11-29 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Duy Doan is a Vietnamese American poet and the author of We Play a Game, winner of the 2017 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. His work has appeared in Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Slate, and TriQuarterly. A Kundiman fellow, he received an MFA in poetry from Boston University, where he later served as director of the Favorite Poem Project. Doan has taught at Boston University, Lesley University, and the Boston Conservatory. He was born in Dallas, Texas.

Angie Sijun Lou is from Seattle. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Ninth Letter, Hyphen, The Margins, Nat. Brut, and others. She is the winner of the 2018 Cosmonauts Avenue Fiction Prize and has received fellowships and awards from the Academy of American Poets and Kundiman. She is pursuing a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California Santa Cruz.

Living Writers Series Fall 2018: “Sentence & Sentience: Forms”
This series features seven contemporary poets, critics, and artists who each render, albeit in differing forms and across a diversity of experiences, the unit of the sentence for powerfully sentient effects. Whether through poetic argument, the fictive line, or the scholarly imagination, each of these authors explore questions of race, gender, sexuality, nature, and nation in their respective practices and forms.
*Note: All Readings, except for the Morton Marcus Reading, featuring Gary Snyder, will take place from 5:20-6:55 in the Humanities Lecture Hall on the dates listed below. The Gary Snyder Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry Reading will be held in the Music Recital Hall on November 15th from 6-8:00 PM.

All events are free and open to the public.

Stuart Russell: “Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence”
2018-11-30 10:40 - 11:45 | Nat. Sci Annex Auditorium 101, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Stuart Russell will survey recent and expected developments in AI and their implications. Some are enormously positive, while others, such as the development of autonomous weapons and the replacement of humans in economic roles, may be negative. Beyond these, one must expect that AI capabilities will eventually exceed those of humans across a range of real-world decision making scenarios. Should this be a cause for concern, as Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and others have suggested? And, if so, what can we do about it? While some in the mainstream AI community dismiss the issue, I will argue that the problem is real and that the technical aspects of it are solvable if we replace current definitions of AI with a version based on provable benefit to humans.
Dr. Russell will appear as a guest lecturer for Dr. David Haussler’s Scientific Principles of Life class. All are welcome.

Stuart Russell, professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley, is one of the world leaders in this area, see, e.g. his TED talk here.

PhD+ Workshop: Values Driven Pedagogy
2018-11-30 11:00 - 12:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Defining a Values Driven Pedagogy Practice with Kendra Dority (CITL, UCSC Lit PhD)
This workshop invites participants to consider how teaching can be a site in which we define, cultivate, and enact a set of values. What values are communicated—explicitly and implicitly—in our classrooms through our teaching methods and assignments? How do pedagogical situations present opportunities for us to claim values that may contradict or transform institutional norms?

Kendra Dority, Associate Director for Programs at the UCSC Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning (CITL), will share her perspectives on pursuing post-PhD work that aligns with her values, and the pedagogical contexts that facilitated a values-driven inquiry. She will then facilitate activities and discussion around participants’ own values in relation to their teaching contexts.

About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Please join us for the third year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by the Institute for Humanities Research. We meet monthly, over lunch, to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grants/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.
Lunch will be served.
Please RSVP below:
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Interdisciplinary Graduate Writing: Challenges and Strategies II
2018-12-03 12:30 - 14:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Do you struggle with dissertation writing? Us too! This workshop will provide a peer-led space for conversation among graduate students engaged in interdisciplinary dissertation writing in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. It offers resources and tools to push through common roadblocks in your advanced writing practice related to issues of voice, discipline-crossing work, organization, timeline, and procrastination.
Join this workshop to develop a clear set of writing goals and an accountability strategy. Participants will form writing groups and commit to accountable writing practices in the second session of this workshop as part of a new THI series. Part I of this series will be held on Monday, November 19.
The workshops will be led by Nadia Roche (Sociology) and Veronika Zablotsky (Feminist Studies).

This new program is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation through the THI Expanding Humanities Impact and Publics project and co-sponsored by CITL.

Muriam Davis: “Colonial Genealogies of Racial Neoliberalism - Governing for the Market in Algeria, 1958-1965”
2018-12-05 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Prof. Davis’s current work studies how French attempts to introduce a market economy during the Algerian War of Independence transformed the prevailing understandings of racial difference organized around Islam. It highlights the continuities with the post-colonial period, when Algerian socialism introduced new economic practices that were a locus for expressing revolutionary values and national identity.
Muriam Haleh Davis is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of California Santa Cruz. Her research interests focus on questions of political economy, racial classification, and post-colonial studies in Algeria. She recently co-edited an edited volume entitled North Africa and the Making of Europe: Governance, Institutions and Culture (Bloomsbury Press, 2018). Her recent articles have appeared in the Journal of European Integration History and Journal of Contemporary History.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. The sessions consist of a 40-45 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center provides coffee, tea, and cookies.
All Center for Cultural Studies events are free and open to the public. Staff assistance is provided by the Humanities Institute.

Linguistics Colloquia: Gorka Elordieta
2018-12-07 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Gorka Elordieta, University of Basque Country
More info at: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/colloquia/index.html

Book of Joy Community Read
2018-12-09 14:00 - 16:00
Join Book of Joy author Doug Abrams, in partnership with Bookshop Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz Public Libraries, Temple Beth El, and The Humanities Institute for a community-wide discussion and celebration around the themes of kindness and joy. During this time of social and cultural division and at a time when many are feeling a sense of despair, The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World by the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu is an ideal book to discuss as a community. Abrams will share some of the rare footage from the historic meeting of these global icons in Dharamsala, India and will then facilitate a dialogue with several community faith leaders—Rabbi Paula Marcus, Father Cyprian Consiglio, Reverend Deborah Johnson, and Ven. Tenzin Chogkyi—who will talk about different spiritual traditions that lift up joy and compassion. The afternoon will conclude with a book signing and musical performance.
Free & Open to the Public. This event will take place at Temple Beth El, 3055 Porter Gulch Road, Aptos.
About the book: The Book of Joy has sold over a million copies around the world in over 38 countries. The Book of Joy was on the New York Times bestseller list for almost a year, awarded the prestigious Books for a Better Life Award, and chosen as one of “Oprah’s Favorite Things.”
About the panelists:
Senior Rabbi Paula Marcus has served Temple Beth El in a variety of capacities since 1979. She received her ordination and masters degree in Rabbinic studies in May 2004, from the Academy for Jewish Religion in Los Angeles. Rabbi Marcus sees activism and interfaith work as important aspects of her of her rabbinic work. She serves on the national board of T’ruah, a Rabbinic Human Rights organization. and has helped to facilitate workshops for Jewish Funds for Justice, Communities Organized for Relational Power in Action, Out in Our Faith and The Tent of Abraham.
Father Cyprian Consiglio is a Camaldolese Benedictine monk, currently serving as the prior of New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur. Having lived in the Santa Cruz area for ten years, he is well-known on the Central Coast as a musician, author, and teacher, particularly for his interreligious work.
Reverend Deborah Johnson is the founding minister and president of Inner Light Ministries in Soquel. A life-long social justice activist, Rev. Deborah is the successful co-litigant in two landmark cases in California – one set precedent for the inclusion of sexual orientation in the state’s Civil Rights Bill, the other defeated the challenge to legalizing domestic partnerships. A voice for compassion, equality, and reconciliation, her primary focus has been on coalition building, conflict resolution, public policy development, and cultural sensitivity awareness.
Ven. Tenzin Chogkyi is a Buddhist nun and teacher in residence at Land of Medicine Buddha in Soquel, California. Ven. Tenzin is also a certified teacher of Cultivating Emotional Balance and Stanford’s Compassion Cultivation Training, and has been teaching in prisons for over a decade.

Prof and a Pint: "Dickens and the Struggles of Marriage"
2018-12-10 18:30 - 20:00 | Forager, San Jose, 420 S 1st St, San Jose, CA, 95172, United States
Charles Dickens is known for his marriage plots: no matter what kinds of twists and turns threaten the path of true love, in the end David Copperfield gets his Agnes, Esther Summerson gets her Woodcourt, and John Harmon gets his Bella. But was marriage really a happy ending for the women in Dickens’s novels? What happened after the novels ended and the romantic triumph of successfully surviving a 900-page plot began to fade? This talk will trace the pitfalls of getting married in Victorian Britain—the financial threats to women, the uneven standards for husbands and wives, the legal ways marriage compromised individual identity—and will look at how a few famously salacious marital scandals (including Dickens’s own!) succeeded in transforming both law and literature in the 19th century.

Renée Fox is an assistant professor in the Literature department at UC Santa Cruz, where she teaches classes on Victorian literature and culture, Irish literature, gothic fiction, and Harry Potter. She is currently writing a book about reanimated bodies in 19th-century British and Irish literature—like mummies, vampires, and talking corpses—and is co-editing a Routledge Handbook of Irish Studies. She received her BA from Stanford and her Ph.D. from Princeton, and after a few years teaching in the English department at the University of Miami she is thrilled to be back in California at UCSC.
Renée co-directs The Dickens Project, a multi-campus research consortium headquartered at UC Santa Cruz that consists of nearly 50 participating universities from the US and overseas. The Dickens Project engages in and promotes research and graduate student training in Victorian literature and culture, focusing its energies not only on the production of new knowledge about the 19th century but also on the ways this scholarly work can be meaningful, exciting, and useful to wider, non-academic audiences. Every summer The Dickens Project hosts the Dickens Universe, a week-long conference on the UC Santa Cruz campus in which faculty, graduate students, and members of the general public gather together to discuss one novel by Charles Dickens. The Universe is part scholarly conference, part book club, part summer camp, and part Victorian festival: days are filled with lectures, discussion seminars, Victorian teas, and Victorian dance lessons, while evenings include movie screenings, parties, performances, and one final Victorian ball (costumes optional). More information about The Dickens Project can be found at https://dickens.ucsc.edu/index.html.
Prof and A Pint, An Alumni Council Silicon Valley Lecture:
Please join us for A Prof and A Pint, a monthly series of informal discussions, served over dinner and drinks, at Forager Tasting Room and Eatery. Brought to you by UC Santa Cruz Alumni, and helping to celebrate 2018 as the Year of Alumni, each talk will engage a UC Santa Cruz faculty member or grad student in discussion with you, the local community of Silicon Valley. Talks are held on the 2nd Monday of each month. Topics include everything from organic artichokes to endangered zebras. Self-driving cars to Shakespeare. Audience participation is encouraged. Enjoy a great meal and learn something while you eat!
Entry is free, but please consider ordering some food and drinks to support *Forager, our host. Current students and alumni, we encourage you to invite your friends, whether they are Banana Slugs or not, to be a part of the discussion.

Center for Public Philosophy: High School Regional Ethics Bowl
2019-01-12 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Teams of up to five high school students have the fall semester to develop their thinking on 15 real-world ethical questions (“cases”) put out in early September by the National High School Ethics Bowl organization. In the Winter, each team participates at a regional tournament (“bowl”). The team that is deemed to have displayed the most clarity, depth, and open-mindedness in their thinking go on to represent our region at the National Bowl in the Spring (held at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill). The Humanities Institute’s Center for Public Philosophy hosts the Northern California Regional Ethics Bowl at UC Santa Cruz. For more information visit: publicphilosophy.ucsc.edu/ethics-bowl

Public Events:
Semi-Final at 3:15pm
Final Round at 4:30pm
Humanities Lecture Hall

Linguistics Colloquium: Naomi Francis
2019-01-14 14:30 - 16:00 | Humanities 2, Room 259
More details available here.

Cancelled: Center for Cultural Studies Colloquium
2019-01-16 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This week’s Center Center for Cultural Studies Colloquium has been cancelled. See you next week!
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. The sessions consist of a 40-45 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center provides coffee, tea, and cookies.
All Center for Cultural Studies events are free and open to the public. Staff assistance is provided by the Humanities Institute.

Questions That Matter on KZSC
2019-01-17 12:00 - 13:00 | CA, United States
Tune in to KZSC to hear the upcoming Transformation Highway featuring Pranav Anand (Associate Professor of Linguistics), Lise Getoor (Professor of Computer Science and Engineering), and Nathaniel Deutsch (Director of the Humanities Institute) who will be discussing the upcoming event Questions That Matter: Data and Democracy

Ralina Joseph: "Postracial Resistance-Black Women, Media, and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity"
2019-01-17 13:30 - 15:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
“Post Racial Resistance-Black Women, Media, and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity” speaks about how African American women, celebrities. cultural products, and audiences subversively used the tools of postracial discourse– the media- propagated notion that race and race based discrimination are over– in order to resist its very tenets.
Ralina Joseph is a Associate Professor at the University of Washington, is Director of the Center for Communication, Difference and Equity (CCDE). Dr. Joseph’s second book, Postracial Resistance: Black Women, Media Culture, and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity, examines how African American women negotiate the minefield of “postracial racism.”
Feminist Studies Colloquium. Events are free and open to the public.

Linguistics Colloquium: Jess Law
2019-01-17 15:00 - 17:00 | Humanities 2, Room 259
Jess Law, Constraints on distributivity
Abstract

Living Writers: Sina Grace
2019-01-17 17:20 - 19:00 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
UCSC alum Sina Grace is the author and illustrator of the autobiographical Self-Obsessed and Not My Bag and the writer of Marvel’s Iceman comic series, featuring the first out gay superhero.
More info: https://qz.com/1105347/the-middle-eastern-american-writer-behind-marvels-iceman-the-most-visible-gay-superhero-yet/

Massimiliano Tomba: “Insurgent Universality - An Alternative Legacy of Modernity”
2019-01-23 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
An Alternative Legacy of Modernity” Insurgent Universality offers a new way of thinking political universality that radically differs from the legal universalism of human rights and cosmopolitanism. Assuming a conception of history that is not linear but articulated in a multiverse of historical temporalities, Insurgent Universality excavates an alternative trajectory of modernity, which originally bridges European and non-European political experiments.
Massimiliano Tomba is professor of History of Consciousness Department at University of California, Santa Cruz. His work aims at reconsidering predominant schemes of interpretation in political theory and universal history in order to open up political trajectories of modernity which constitute the terrain for an alternative canon. His publications include Krise und Kritik bei Bruno Bauer, Kategorien des Politischen im nachhegelschen Denken, trans. L. Schröder, Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang, 2005; La vera politica. Kant e Benjamin: la possibilità della giustizia, Macerata, Quodlibet, 2006; Marx’s Temporalities, trans. Sara Farris and Peter Thomas, Leiden, Brill, 2013; Attraverso la piccola porta. Quattro studi su Walter Benjamin. Milano, Mimesis, 2017.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. The sessions consist of a 40-45 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center provides coffee, tea, and cookies.
All Center for Cultural Studies events are free and open to the public. Staff assistance is provided by the Humanities Institute.

Nadine Theiler: "A Unified Semantics for Additive Particles"
2019-01-24 15:00 - 17:00 | Humanities 2, Room 259
English has several additive particles, which differ in their distribution. One of these is also, a
common choice to signal additivity in assertions and polar questions, (1a-b). It has been
suggested that this particle can’t appear in a wh-question without triggering a so-called
show-master interpretation (Umbach, 2012), in which the speaker already has a certain answer in
mind when asking the question, (1c).
(1) Mary danced all night.
a. John also danced.
b. Did John also dance?
c. #Who also danced?
In this talk, I will challenge this generalization based on a previously unnoticed class of
questions, which I call summoning questions. To account for the resulting more differentiated
empirical picture, I will generalize Beaver and Clark (2008)’s QUD-based account of additive
particles by lifting it to an inquisitive semantics setting (Ciardelli et al., 2018). This allows us to
capture the contribution of also in declaratives and interrogatives in a unified way, while still
accounting for its distributional restrictions.
Additive particles are just one example of expressions that can appear with declarative and
different kinds of interrogative clauses. In the remainder of the talk, I will briefly walk through
two other examples—clause-embedding verbs like know, and the German discourse particle
denn—to show how the proposed account of additive particles forms part of a larger research
program that aims to develop formally unified accounts of expressions in this family.

Nadine Theiler is a PhD student at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation in Amsterdam, where she is a member of the Inquisitive Semantics group.
Theiler’s research interests broadly relate to information exchange through linguistic communication, with a focus on question semantics. She is interested in the nature of questions as semantic objects as well as in the role that questions play in the structuring and interpretation of discourse.

PhD+ Graduate Student Workshop Series - Understanding the ACLS Public Fellows Program: Reflections from UCSC Alumni
2019-01-25 11:00 - 12:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Learn more about the ACLS Public Fellows program in conversation with two UCSC Grad Alums who have launched careers through the ACLS Public Fellows program.

Sophia Booth Magnone, Literature PhD, is the Development Manager & Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow at the Feminist Press. In her role at FP, she manages grant writing, individual giving, and fundraising events to support the operations of a small nonprofit book publisher. Prior to the ACLS fellowship, she studied and taught feminist literature, speculative fiction, and animal studies at UC Santa Cruz. Her writing has been published in Public Books, Palimpsest, Humanimalia, and more.

Michael Ursell is the manager of development and strategic partnerships at the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is also associate publisher of The Believer, a nationally circulated literary magazine. Previously, he worked at the Los Angeles Review of Books as a communications director and an editor for the nonprofit magazine’s poetry section. He arrived at LARB through the American Council of Learned Societies “Public Fellows” program. Michael holds a PhD in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he wrote about English and French Renaissance poetry and taught many classes, from Shakespeare to intro composition. His academic writing has appeared in publications including Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Connotations, and The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.

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About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Please join us for the third year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by the Institute for Humanities Research. We meet monthly, over lunch, to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grants/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.
Lunch will be served.
Please RSVP below:
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Living Writers: Myriam Gurba
2019-01-25 14:40 - 15:45
Myriam Gurba is a native Californian. She attended U.C. Berkeley thanks to affirmative action. She is the author of the 2017 memoir Mean, and two short story collections, Dahlia Season and Painting Their Portraits in Winter. Dahlia Season won the Edmund White Award, which is given to queer writers for outstanding debut fiction. The book was also shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award. Gurba is also the author of two poetry collections, Wish You Were Me and Sweatsuits of the Damned. She has toured North America twice with avant-garde literary and performance troupe Sister Spit. Gurba’s other writing can be found in places such as Entropy.com, TIME.com, and Lesfigues.com. She creates digital and photographic art that has been exhibited at galleries and museums. She works as a high school teacher.

Questions That Matter: Data and Democracy
2019-01-29 19:00 - 21:00 | Kuumbwa Jazz Center
Technology increasingly shapes our habits and defines our access to information. As our society navigates shifting sources of news, targeted advertising, and polarizing online rhetoric, it is essential that we work to understand the complex and often obscured relationship between data and democracy.
Join THI to explore how we got here and to imagine a more inclusive, open, and transparent future. Part of our conversation about Data and Democracy.
Featuring:
Pranav Anand, Associate Professor of Linguistics
Lise Getoor, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering
Moderated by:
Nathaniel Deutsch, Director of the Humanities Institute

Questions that Matter “Data and Democracy” from THI on Vimeo.
Event Photos by Crystal Birns:

If you have disability-related needs, please contact thi@ucsc.edu or call 831-459-1274 by January 25th.
Questions That Matter: A Series of Public Dialogues in Santa Cruz
A public humanities series developed by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz and the community of Santa Cruz – bringing together two or more UC Santa Cruz scholars with community residents and students to explore questions that matter to all of us. The series is a part of a strategic initiative of the Institute to champion the role and value of the humanities in contemporary life. At the University of California Santa Cruz, we understand that the humanities are a crucial element of any first-rate liberal arts education. Indeed, what distinguishes the best universities in the United States is the fact that the humanities are an integral part of their core curriculum, along with the arts and sciences. The series is designed as a lecture and conversation, with plenty of time built in for participant questions and answers. We invite you to join us on January 29, 2019 at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center for “Data and Democracy.”

Leta Hong Fincher: “The Feminist Awakening in China”
2019-01-30 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
On the eve of International Women’s Day in 2015, the Chinese government arrested five feminist activists and jailed them for thirty-seven days. The Feminist Five became a global cause célèbre, with Hillary Clinton speaking out on their behalf and activists inundating social media with #FreetheFive messages. But the Five are only symbols of a much larger feminist movement of university students, labor activists, civil rights lawyers, performance artists, and online warriors prompting an unprecedented awakening among young Chinese women. In Betraying Big Brother, journalist and scholar Leta Hong Fincher argues that the popular, broad-based movement poses the greatest challenge to China’s authoritarian state today.
Through interviews with the Feminist Five and other leading Chinese activists, Hong Fincher illuminates both the difficulties they face and their “joy of betraying Big Brother,” as one of the Feminist Five wrote of the defiance she felt during her detention. Tracing the rise of a new feminist consciousness now finding expression through the #MeToo movement, and describing how the Communist Party has suppressed the history of its own feminist struggles, Betraying Big Brother is a story of how the movement against patriarchy could reconfigure China and the world.
Leta Hong Fincher is a journalist, scholar and author of Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China (Verso 2018), which was named one of Vanity Fair’s top eight political books of fall 2018. Dr. Hong Fincher has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, Dissent Magazine, Ms. Magazine and others. She won the Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi award for her China reporting and is the first American to receive a Ph.D. from Tsinghua University’s Department of Sociology in Beijing. She also has a master’s degree from Stanford University and a bachelor’s degree with high honors from Harvard University. Her first book was the critically acclaimed Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China (Zed 2014). Hong Fincher was a Mellon Visiting Assistant Professor at Columbia University and recently moved to New York.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. The sessions consist of a 40-45 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center provides coffee, tea, and cookies.
All Center for Cultural Studies events are free and open to the public. Staff assistance is provided by the Humanities Institute.

Jessica Bauman: "What Refugees Taught Me About Shakespeare"
2019-01-31 17:00 - 18:30 | Kresge Town Hall
New York City theater director Jessica Bauman and UCSC Professor Cat Ramirez will explore the ways that the stories we hear and tell about refugees shape our responses to the worldwide migration crisis. They will ask, how can we connect with the full humanity of displaced people, and what role should the arts and humanities play in helping us to do so?
If you have disability-related needs, please contact thi@ucsc.edu or call 831-459-1274 by January 28th.
Click here for parking and directions to Kresge Town Hall
Jessica Bauman is a theater and film director, producer, teacher, and the founding artistic director of New Feet Productions. For her production, Arden/Everywhere, which reimagines Shakespeare’s comedy, As You Like It, as a play about refugees, she worked with refugees and immigrants from all over the world, both in New York and at Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya.

Cat Ramirez is an Associate Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the UC Santa Cruz specializing in race, gender, migration, and citizenship.

This event is generously co-sponsored by Shakespeare Workshop, The Humanities Institute, Porter College, Kresge College, and Cowell College.

Living Writers: Ronaldo V. Wilson
2019-01-31 17:20 - 19:00 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
UCSC Professor Ronaldo V. Wilson is an award-winning writer, artist and performer and co-founder of the critically lauded performance group Black Took Collective.

Maitra Memorial Lecture / Foundation Medal with Janet Yellen
2019-02-02 18:30 - 22:00
Join us as we present the Foundation Medal to Janet Yellen, distinguished fellow of Brookings Institution and former chair of the Federal Reserve. UC Santa Cruz is proudly recognizing influential women leaders as we champion diversity in all areas of human endeavor.

When Janet Yellen took office in 2014, she became the first woman to head the Federal Reserve. Previously, she served as vice chair of the Federal Reserve, CEO and president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisors under President Bill Clinton, and professor at the Haas School of Business atUC Berkeley.
She is noted for her patient, measured, and accessible explanations of monetary policy while being a thoughtful leader of the Federal Reserve. In her public appearances, she has addresses topics broader than monetary policy, including labor markets, unemployment, and poverty. She was considered by some to be the most powerful woman in America.
Presented in partnership with the Sidhartha Maitra Memorial Lecture.
Program will be followed by a dessert reception
The UC Santa Cruz Foundation Medal recognizes individuals of exceptionally distinguished achievement whose work and contribution to society exemplify the vision and ideals of UC Santa Cruz.
Presented in partnership with the Sidhartha Maitra Memorial Lecture Series
The Maitra Lecture Series was established by UC Santa Cruz Foundation Trustee Anuradha Luther Maitra in memory of her husband, Sidhartha—a scientist, entrepreneur, and admirer of humanist, rationalist, modernist thinkers. The lecture is a signature campus gathering, and integral to the intellectual life of the campus.

An Evening with Madeleine Albright
2019-02-05 19:00
Bookshop Santa Cruz presents an evening with Madeleine Albright, the United States’ first female Secretary of State, who will speak about her book, Fascism: A Warning, a personal and urgent examination of fascism in the twentieth century and how its legacy shapes today’s world. This ticketed event will take place at theKaiser Permanente Arena and is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz and Temple Beth El.
Of all the unanswered questions of our time, declared George Orwell in 1944, perhaps the most important is, What is fascism? Madeleine Albright has an answer: not as an explanation of the past, but as a warning for the present. As she shows with insight, humor, and personal storytelling, fascism not only endured through the twentieth century but now presents a more virulent threat to peace and justice than at any time since the end of World War II.
Written by someone who has not only studied history but helped to shape it, this call to arms teaches us the lessons we must understand and the questions we must answer if we are to save ourselves from repeating the tragic errors of the past.
Madeleine Albright served as America’s sixty-fourth Secretary of State from 1997 to 2001. Her distinguished career also includes positions at the White House, on Capitol Hill, and as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. She is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Madam Secretary, The Mighty and the Almighty, Memo to the President, and Read My Pins.
Event Photos by Shmuel Thaler:

Tickets are $23.00 and include 1 general admission ticket to the event and 1 pre-signed paperback copy of Fascism: A Warning. (The book is $17.99 and publishes on January 29.) All books will be distributed at the venue.
Please note that Madeleine Albright will not be doing a signing at the event.

Desmond Jagmohan: “Candor and Courage: Ida B. Wells and Fearless Speech”
2019-02-06 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
“Candor and Courage: Ida B. Wells and Fearless Speech”
This paper explicates Ida B. Wells’s argument that journalists and leaders have a moral obligation to speak fearlessly. To do so, I unearth the normative relationship between candor, courage, and duty underlying Wells’s anti-lynching editorials and reporting during the Progressive Era. First, I recount Wells’s argument that “yellow” and impartial journalism are, in different ways, responsible for the precipitous rise in the lynching of African Americans at the turn of the century. Yellow journalism uses sensationalism to fuel whites’ fear and anxiety and, at times, goes so far as to coordinate lynchings. The more fact-driven and impartial journalism of the New York Times does no such thing. But it substitutes cold facts for moral courage and thus shirks an important social responsibility. Second, and drawing on work by Michel Foucault, I contend that her willingness to risk death to expose the true causes of lynching to help others see their way toward justice and away from injustice exemplifies fearless speech, or what the ancients called parrhesia. Third, I question whether intrepid speech can be a moral obligation for journalists and leaders living under extreme persecution.

Desmond Jagmohan is an Assistant Professor in the Politics Department at Princeton University. He researches and teaches history of political theory, and he works primarily in the areas of American and African American political thought. He also has interests in slavery and modern political thought and historical methods. At the moment, he is completing his first book, which is titled Dark Virtues: Booker T. Washington’s Tragic Realism. Based on several years of archival research, the book recovers an unseen Booker T. Washington. It reconstructs his political ethics, including his moral defense of equivocation, concealment, and deception as political virtues under conditions of extremity. His second project takes up Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative to look at the broader philosophical relationship between property, personhood, and moral agency in the context of nineteenth-century American slavery. His work has been published in Perspectives on Politics, Politics, Groups, and Identities, and Contemporary Political Theory.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. The sessions consist of a 40-45 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center provides coffee, tea, and cookies.

All Center for Cultural Studies events are free and open to the public. Staff assistance is provided by the Humanities Institute.

Living Writers: Steven Church
2019-02-07 17:20 - 19:00 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Steven Church is the author of six books of nonfiction, most recently I’m Just Getting to the Disturbing Part: On Work, Fear, and Fatherhood, and he edited the essay anthology, The Spirit of Disruption: Selections from The Normal School. He’s a Founding Editor and the Nonfiction Editor for The Normal School: a Literary Magazine as well as the Series Editor for The Normal School Nonfiction Series from Outpost19. He’s the Coordinator of the MFA Program in Creative Writing.

Dickens and the Disaster of Marriage
2019-02-07 18:30 - 21:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
On the occasion of Charles Dickens’s 207th birthday, please join us a festive evening of birthday cake, discussion about Victorian marriage with Dickens Project Co-Director Renee Fox, and a film screening.
Charles Dickens is known for his marriage plots: no matter what kinds of twists and turns threaten the path of true love, in the end David Copperfield gets his Agnes, Esther Summerson gets her Woodcourt, and John Harmon gets his Bella. But was marriage really a happy ending for the women in Dickens’s novels? What happened after the novels ended and the romantic triumph of successfully surviving a 900-page plot began to fade? This talk will trace the pitfalls of getting married in Victorian Britain—the financial threats to women, the uneven standards for husbands and wives, the legal ways marriage compromised individual identity—and will look at how a few famously salacious marital scandals (including Dickens’s own!) succeeded in transforming both law and literature in the 19th century.
The Invisible Woman (2013) is a biopic about eighteen-year-old actress Ellen Ternan and her love affair with Charles Dickens.
Renée Fox is Co-Director of The Dickens Project and an assistant professor in the Literature department at UC Santa Cruz, where she teaches classes on Victorian literature and culture, Irish literature, gothic fiction, and Harry Potter. She is currently writing a book about reanimated bodies in 19th-century British and Irish literature—like mummies, vampires, and talking corpses—and is co-editing a Routledge Handbook of Irish Studies.

Elizabeth Allen: "Sanctuary and Medieval Kings"
2019-02-08 14:00 - 18:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
“Sanctuary and Medieval Kings” – Elizabeth Allen
American nationalist discourse casts sanctuary as “illegal”, but actually the practice always bears a relation to the law: sanctuary cities, universities, and churches call law to account. Sanctuary has a long legal history. In the Middle Ages, felons could avoid death by running to the church, and kings bolstered their sacral power by protecting them. At the same time, those who seek sanctuary exerted an influence upon their kings “from below,” calling upon them to live up to the role of merciful monarch. Examining medieval chronicles of a fallen justiciar and an infamous breach of sanctuary, this talk will offer a provocation to contemporary ideas about both kingship itself and sanctuary as a ‘weak’ form of social protest.
“A Constellation of Moments: Walter Benjamin on the Middle Ages, Sanctuary, and the Current Emergency” – James R Martel
Also featuring:
Stephen David Engel
Veronika Zablotsky

Co-Sponsored by the History of Consciousness Department

John Dizikes Memorial
2019-02-09 14:00 - 17:00 | Stevenson Event Center
John Dizikes, a professor emeritus of American Studies and a founding member of the faculty of the University of California, Santa Cruz, died at his home in Santa Cruz on December 26, 2018. He was 86.
Dizikes was a Harvard-trained historian who joined UC Santa Cruz the summer before the campus first opened its doors to students in 1965. He was drawn to the school’s commitment to undergraduates and its determination to be a different kind of modern research university—one organized around a system of smaller residential colleges that nurtured the student experience.
Over the course of 35 years, Dizikes was a professor of history, a professor and co-founder of the American Studies Department, provost of Cowell College from 1979-1983, and chair of the Council of Provosts.
Read More
Click here to register for the memorial

MLK Convocation: Melissa Harris-Perry
2019-02-11 19:00 - 21:00 | Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium
The annual convocation celebrates the life and dream of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by presenting speakers who discuss the civil rights issues of equality, freedom, justice, and opportunity. The convocation also seeks to build partnerships and develop dialogue within the campus community and with the local communities served by the university.

Speaker: Melissa Harris-Perry
Professor Melissa Harris-Perry is the Maya Angelou Presidential Chair at Wake Forest University. There she is founding director of the Anna Julia Cooper Center and co-director of Wake the Vote.
Harris-Perry is editor-at-large of Elle.com and a contributing editor at The Nation. From 2012-2016 she hosted the television show “Melissa Harris-Perry” on weekend mornings on MSNBC and was awarded the Hillman Prize for broadcast journalism. She continues to create and direct programs with the goal of creating diverse, quality American media.
She is an award-winning author and sought after public speaker, lecturing widely throughout the United States and abroad.Together with her husband, James Perry, she is a principal of Perry Partnership, oﬀering both political and private consulting.
Harris-Perry received her B.A. degree in English from Wake Forest University and her Ph.D. degree in political science from Duke University. She also studied theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Harris-Perry previously served on the faculty of the University of Chicago, Princeton University, and Tulane University. Professor Harris-Perry has been awarded honorary degrees from many universities including Meadville Lombard Theological School, Winston-Salem State University, Eckerd College, and New York University.
She and her family live in North Carolina.

This event is hosted/sponsored by: ACLU Santa Cruz Chapter, UCSC Chancellor’s Office, Inner Light Ministries, NAACP, and the City of Santa Cruz

Rescheduled to MARCH 12: Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism
2019-02-12 19:00 - 20:30 | Kresge Town Hall
THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED UNTIL MARCH 12.
Please join us then.
The landscape of information is rapidly shifting as new imperatives and demands push to the fore increasing investment in digital technologies. Yet, critical information scholars continue to demonstrate how digital technology and its narratives are shaped by and infused with values that are not impartial, disembodied, or lacking positionality. Technologies consist of a set of social practices, situated within the dynamics of race, gender, class, and politics, and in the service of something – a position, a profit motive, a means to an end.
In this talk, Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble will discuss her new book, Algorithms of Oppression, and the impact of marginalization and misrepresentation in commercial information platforms like Google search, as well as the implications for public information needs.

This talk is co-sponsored by Kresge College’s Media and Society Lecture Series, The Science & Justice Research Center, The Humanities Institute, and the Department of Sociology.
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Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble is an Associate Professor at UCLA in the Departments of Information Studies and African American Studies, and a visiting faculty member to the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor in Department of Media and Cinema Studies and the Institute for Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2019, she will join the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford as a Senior Research Fellow.
She is the author of a best-selling book on racist and sexist algorithmic bias in commercial search engines, entitled Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press).
Safiya is the recipient of a Hellman Fellowship and the UCLA Early Career Award. Her academic research focuses on the design of digital media platforms on the internet and their impact on society. Her work is both sociological and interdisciplinary, marking the ways that digital media impacts and intersects with issues of race, gender, culture, and technology. She is regularly quoted for her expertise by national and international press on issues of algorithmic discrimination and technology bias, including The Guardian, the BBC, CNN International, USA Today, Wired, Time, and The New York Times, to name a few.
Dr. Noble is the co-editor of two edited volumes: The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Culture and Class Online and Emotions, Technology & Design. She currently serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, and is the co-editor of the Commentary & Criticism section of the Journal of Feminist Media Studies. She is a member of several academic journal and advisory boards, including Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education. She holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Library & Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a B.A. in Sociology from California State University, Fresno where she was recently awarded the Distinguished Alumni Award for 2018.

Laurie Palmer: “Public Sun”
2019-02-13 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
“Public Sun”

A. Laurie Palmer ’s place-based work takes form as sculpture, public projects, and writing, and she collaborates on strategic actions in the contexts of social and environmental justice. Her book In the Aura of a Hole: Exploring Sites of Material Extraction (2014) investigates what happens to places where materials are removed from the ground, and how these materials, once liberated, move between the earth and our bodies. She is currently researching the shapes and structures of underground oil shale formations and continuing to develop work on The Lichen Museum, a massively distributed, inside-out institution that considers this slow, resistant, adaptive and collective organism as an anti-capitalist companion and climate change survivor.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. The sessions consist of a 40-45 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center provides coffee, tea, and cookies.

All Center for Cultural Studies events are free and open to the public. Staff assistance is provided by the Humanities Institute.

Book Talk: Marlon James - Black Leopard, Red Wolf
2019-02-18 19:00 - 20:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
We are thrilled to partner with Bookshop Santa Cruz to welcome award-winning author Marlon James for a reading and signing of his highly-anticipated novel, Black Leopard, Red Wolf, which is already being touted as a book that “will come to be seen as a classic of our times.” (NPR)
“A fantasy world as well-realized as anything Tolkien made.” —Neil Gaiman
The epic novel, an African Game of Thrones, from the Man Booker Prize-winning author of A Brief History of Seven Killings.
In the stunning first novel in Marlon James’s Dark Star trilogy, myth, fantasy, and history come together to explore what happens when a mercenary is hired to find a missing child. Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: “He has a nose,” people say. Engaged to track down a mysterious boy who disappeared three years earlier, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a group that comes together to search for the boy. The band is a hodgepodge, full of unusual characters with secrets of their own, including a shape-shifting man-animal known as Leopard.
As Tracker follows the boy’s scent—from one ancient city to another; into dense forests and across deep rivers—he and the band are set upon by creatures intent on destroying them. As he struggles to survive, Tracker starts to wonder: Who, really, is this boy? Why has he been missing for so long? Why do so many people want to keep Tracker from finding him? And perhaps the most important questions of all: Who is telling the truth, and who is lying?
Drawing from African history and mythology and his own rich imagination, Marlon James has written a novel unlike anything that’s come before it: a saga of breathtaking adventure that’s also an ambitious, involving read. Defying categorization and full of unforgettable characters, Black Leopard, Red Wolf is both surprising and profound as it explores the fundamentals of truth, the limits of power, and our need to understand them both.
This free event will take place in Bookshop Santa Cruz. Chairs for open seating are usually set up about an hour before the event begins. If you have ADA accommodation requests for this event, please e-mail info@bookshopsantacruz.com by February 16th. This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
Marlon James is the author of the New York Times bestseller A Brief History of Seven Killings, The Book of Night Women, and John Crow’s Devil. A Brief History of Seven Killings won the Man Booker Prize, the American Book Award, and the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.The Book of Night Women won the Minnesota Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as the NAACP Image Award. A professor at Macalester College in St. Paul, James divides his time between Minnesota and New York.
“Black Leopard, Red Wolf is the kind of novel I never realized I was missing until I read it. A dangerous, hallucinatory, ancient Africa, which becomes a fantasy world as well-realized as anything Tolkien made, with language as powerful as Angela Carter’s. It’s as deep and crafty as Gene Wolfe, bloodier than Robert E. Howard, and all Marlon James. It’s something very new that feels old, in the best way. I cannot wait for the next installment.” —Neil Gaiman
“This book begins like a fever dream and merges into world upon world of deadly fairy tales rich with political magic. Black Leopard, Red Wolf is a fabulous cascade of storytelling. Sink right in. I guarantee you will be swept downstream.” —Louise Erdrich
“James’ sensual, beautifully rendered prose and sweeping, precisely detailed narrative cast their own transfixing spell upon the reader. He not only brings a fresh multicultural perspective to a grand fantasy subgenre, but also broadens the genre’s psychological and metaphysical possibilities. If this first volume is any indication, James’ trilogy could become one of the most talked-about and influential adventure epics since George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire was transformed into Game of Thrones.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“[A] tour de force.” —The Wall Street Journal
“Sweeping, mythic, over-the-top, colossal, and dizzingly complex.” —The New York Times
“Awe-inspiring.” —Entertainment Weekly
“Thrilling, ambitious…both intense and epic.” —Los Angeles Times”An astonishing portrait of the politics of everyday life…Just as he is sharply aware of the nuances of their voices, James has the confidence not to deny his characters their humanity by turning them into moral exemplars, nor paper over the infected wounds that score across the country by suggesting that the loveliness of some of its territory makes up for the savage effects of poverty.” —The Washington Post

Jerry Zee: "Continent in Dust: China in Aerosol Phases“
2019-02-20 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
“Continent in Dust: China in Aerosol Phases“
Jerry Zee is an assistant professor at UCSC’s Anthropology Department. His work considers experiments in politics and environments in China’s meteorological contemporary.
This talk offers a political anthropology of strange weather. As Chinese deserts increasingly appear as latent dust storms, it tracks geo-meteorological phase shifts as they rework contemporary land and air into a substantial continuum. It tracks territorial governance as it shifts into experimental formations that draw into the choreographies of sand, wind, and dust that they seek to re-engineer.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. The sessions consist of a 40-45 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center provides coffee, tea, and cookies.

All Center for Cultural Studies events are free and open to the public. Staff assistance is provided by the Humanities Institute.

Gabriel Guillén: "¿Revolución o Candy Crush? Una conversación sobre y sus afines"
2019-02-20 17:15 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
La presencia de 691 “startups” del aprendizaje de lenguas en Angelist.co, una plataforma de inversión, debería alegrarnos como estudiantes de lenguas. Su lenguaje es, sin duda, prometedor. Sin embargo, no es oro todo lo que reluce. En esta charla exploraremos la relación entre los eslóganes de estas empresas, sus posibilidades reales y la teoría de la adquisición de lenguas. Del mismo modo, reflexionaremos sobre los retos y las posibilidades del emprendimiento social en el campo del aprendizaje de lenguas.
Gabriel Guillén is Assistant Professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS). In addition to his research on language learning and technology, he worked as a web developer and a reporter with more than 300 published articles in Spanish. At MIIS he teaches content-based Spanish courses focusing on social entrepreneurship and the use of media in the Hispanic world.
Light refreshments will be served.

James Loeffler, “The Right to Be Heard – Jews, Human Rights, and Global Democracy"
2019-02-20 18:00 - 19:00 | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Event Photos by Crystal Birns:

Presented by The Humanities Institute and The Center for Jewish Studies
2018 marked the 70th anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights amid a time of crisis for global democracy. It is imperative that we revisit the history of the modern Human Rights movement and reexamine the relationship between the Holocaust, the legal framework of Human Rights, and the struggle to find justice on the global scale.

In this talk, James Loeffler draws on his new book, Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, to revisit the 1948 moment in which modern human rights was born. This talk will also address the challenges and opportunities for minorities and stateless peoples by focusing on Jewish human rights pioneers who saw the Jewish state as an expression of global democracy. Join THI to ask where Human Rights come from, how Jews are part of the story, and if Zionism is in conflict with the modern Human Rights movement?

RSVP appreciated, seating is first come, first served. Reception to follow.

If you have disability-related needs, please contact thi@ucsc.edu or call 831-459-1274 by February 16th.
Parking and Directions to the UC Santa Cruz Cowell Ranch Hay Barn

James Loeffler is Jay Berkowitz Professor of Jewish History at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Between 2013 and 2015 he was a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellow in International Law and Dean’s Visiting Scholar at the Georgetown University Law Center. At UVa he teaches courses in Jewish and European history, Russian and East European history, international legal history, and the history of human rights.
His publications include Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press, 2018) and The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire (Yale University Press, 2010), and the forthcoming edited volume, The Law of Strangers: Jewish Lawyering and International Law in Historical Perspective (Cambridge University Press).
This event is part of the THI Data and Democracy Initiative, a project of Expanding Humanities, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
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The Helen Diller Distinguished Lecture in Jewish Studies
Every year, we honor Helen Diller, whose generous endowment continues to provide crucial support to Jewish Studies at UC Santa Cruz, by hosting a public lecture on campus by an internationally recognized scholar.
Visit our lecture archive online >

Public Fellowship Info Session
2019-02-21 11:00 - 12:00 | 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 interested in exploring career opportunities beyond the academy or applying your expertise in the public sphere, the Public Fellowship program might be right for you.
Please join us for an information session about The Humanities Institute’s Public Fellows program to learn more and hear from past Public Fellows. We will discuss the Summer and Year Long opportunities and describe some new partner organizations.
These fellowships provide the opportunity 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.

Coffee and cookies will be served.

Breanne Fahs: "Burn it Down: Firebrand Feminism and the Legacy of Second-Wave Radical Feminism"
2019-02-21 11:30 - 13:30 | Humanities 2, Room 259
Breanne Fahs is Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University. Her most recent book is Firebrand Feminism: The Radical Lives of Ti-Grace Atkinson, Kathie Sarachild, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and Dana Densmore.
This colloquium will consider the historical impact of second-wave radical feminism and its impact on contemporary iterations of collective forms of resistance, particularly around the subjects of feminist rage, sex and love, tactics of feminist resistance, and intergenerational knowledge- making.
Lunch will be provided

All Power to the People! Asian American Radicalism, Bay Area Universities, and the Third World Liberation Front
2019-02-21 17:00 - 19:00 | Kresge Town Hall
Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Pilipinx Historical Dialogue, Asian American/Pacific Islander Resource Center, and Anakbayan Santa Cruz are pleased to present:
ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE! Asian American Radicalism, Bay Area Universities, and the Third World Liberation Front
Featuring TWLF veterans Bruce Occena, Vicci Wong, and Emil de Guzman
An Intergenerational Dialogue and Panel
Thursday, February 21, 2019, 5-7 p.m.
Kresge Townhall
See also: Breakfast seminar – February 22 with pre-circulated materials
Generously sponsored by CRES, the Dean of Students, AA/PIRC, Education, The Humanities Institute, the Center for Labor Studies, Stevenson College, and the SUA VP of Diversity and Inclusion.

Living Writers: Alex Marzano Lesnevich
2019-02-21 17:20 - 19:00 | Peace United Church, 900 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
UCSC Living Writers, THI and the Hichcock Poetry Fund presents a reading of author Alex Marzano-Lesnevich’s book, “The Fact of a Body murder and a memoir and Kirstin Wagner.
Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of THE FACT OF A BODY: A Murder and a Memoir, recipient of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir and the 2018 Chautauqua Prize. Named one of the best books of the year by Entertainment Weekly, Audible.com, Bustle, Book Riot, The Times of London, and The Guardian, it was an Indie Next Pick and a Junior Library Guild selection, long-listed for the Gordon Burn Prize, short-listed for the CWA Gold Dagger, and a finalist for a New England Book Award and a Goodreads Choice Award. It has been published in the US, the UK, and the Netherlands; translations are forthcoming in Turkey, Korea, Taiwan, Spain, Greece, Brazil, and France. The recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, and Yaddo, as well as a Rona Jaffe Award, Marzano-Lesnevich lives in Portland, Maine and is an Assistant Professor of English at Bowdoin College.

Breakfast seminar: All the Power to the People!
2019-02-22 10:00 - 12:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Pilipinx Historical Dialogue, Asian American/Pacific Islander Resource Center, and Anakbayan Santa Cruz are pleased to present:
ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE! Asian American Radicalism, Bay Area Universities, and the Third World Liberation Front
Featuring TWLF veterans Bruce Occena, Vicci Wong, and Emil de Guzman
Breakfast seminar with pre-circulated materials *
Friday, February 22, 2019, 10 a.m.-12 p.m.
Humanities 202
* For access to materials, please contact Christine Hong (cjhong@ucsc.edu)
See also: An Intergenerational Dialogue and Panel – Thursday, February 21, 2019, 5-7 p.m. – Kresge Town Hall
Generously sponsored by CRES, the Dean of Students, AA/PIRC, Education, The Humanities Institute, the Center for Labor Studies, Stevenson College, and the SUA VP of Diversity and Inclusion.

PhD+ Graduate Student Workshop: Publishing Scholarly Articles with Gordon Hutner
2019-02-22 11:00 - 12:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Gordon Hutner is the editor of American Literary History, the scholarly he quarterly he founded 30 years ago. He is also the author or editor of numerous books and articles about American literature. These subject include the novel in the US, Jewish American writing, immigrant autobiographies, cultural iconography, and the future of the liberal arts in public higher education, among other diverse topics. Professor Hutner began his career at Kenyon College and the University of Virginia and has taught at the Universities of Wisconsin, Kentucky, and Illinois, where he is currently the Director of the Trowbridge Initiative in American Cultures. He has also taught at universities in Belgium, Italy, and Japan. Hutner is also the current president of Council of Editors of Learned Journals.
Publishing Scholarly Articles is a workshop in the practice of writing for peer-reviewed academic journals. We cover what to send, how to prepare for print, where to send, and when you should be circulating your work. The discussion will entail how to choose venues for your essays, how to understand readers’ reports, and how to understand editors’ purposes as well as offer some instruction in how to think about converting seminar essays, panel papers, and dissertation chapters into publishable articles. All welcome.

About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Please join us for the third year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by The Humanities Institute. We meet monthly, over lunch, to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grants/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.
Lunch will be served.
Please RSVP below:
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Friday Forum for Graduate Research: Alirio Karina
2019-02-22 12:30 - 13:45 | Humanities 1, Room 420, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Between Two Africas: “Nubia in the Ethnographic Imagination”
This paper explores the region and anthropologized people, of Nubia, examining how they are produced as (inhabiting) a borderland between two Africas- North Africa and Africa “proper.” By studying three museological movements in which the ethnographic appears and vanishes, together with two literary test animated by ethnographic concerns with representing Nubian people, Alirio Karina explores how the disavowal of the ethnographic (in all of its racial and cultural senses in Sudan and Egypt is an attempt to narrate of capitalist modernity in terms of ancient lineages, and against any sense of relation to the rest African continent, Karina argues that, in resurfacing the ethnographic, we may find a resistant frame through which to think Africanity north of the Sahara.
Alirio Karina is a PhD candidate in the History of Consciousness Department, with designated emphasis in the Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. Alirio’s dissertation examines ethnographic photographs, objects and text representing British Africa, exploring how these materials produce ideas of race, culture and continent that have shaped and may yet transform African political possibility.
Friday Forum for Graduate Research is supported by the Graduate Student Association, the Humanities Institute, and the following departments HAVC, Literature, History of Consciousness, Psychology, and Education.

Translating America/America Translated Symposium
2019-02-22 13:00 - 18:00, 2019-02-23 08:00 - 17:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
“Translating America/America Translated” is a two-day faculty-graduate student symposium on new hemispheric geographies and languages in pre-20th-century American literary studies. The symposium is funded by UCHRI and co-sponsoring units at UC Santa Cruz, UC Irvine, and UC San Diego. Highlighting translation, multilinguality and the transnational as indispensable features of literary studies today, the “Translating America/America Translated” symposium aims to re-situate scholarly and public narratives of American culture by way of multiple languages and various origin-points in space and time. It aims to move forward an important national conversation on the future of the field in its multilingual and multi-geographic dimensions and seeks to build a cohort of early-career comparative Americanist scholars.
Project Directors:
Susan Gillman, Literature, UC Santa Cruz
Kirsten Gruesz, Literature, UC Santa Cruz

Translating America/America Translated: A UC Faculty-Graduate Symposium
Humanities 1, Room 210
February 22, 2019 @ 1:00 pm – 6:00 pm
February 23, 2019 @ 9:00 am – 5:30 pm
Keynote speakers include six prominent scholars of hemispheric American studies:
Ifeoma Nwankwo (Associate Professor of English and Associate Provost, Vanderbilt University)
Jesse Alemán (Professor of English and American Studies, Univ. of New Mexico)
Anna Brickhouse (Professor of English and Director of American Studies, Univ. of Virginia)
Michelle Burnham (Professor of English, Santa Clara University)
Sara Johnson (Associate Professor of Literature of the Americas, UC San Diego)
Rodrigo Lazo (Professor of English and Spanish and Director, Humanities Core Program, UC Irvine)
Program:
Friday, February 22:
11 am-12:30pm PhD+ Writing Workshop on journal publication with Gordon Hutner, editor of American Literary History (lunch provided)
1:00-2:30pm
Welcome: Susan Gillman and Kirsten Silva Gruesz
Keynote 1: Ifeoma Nwankwo (Vanderbilt University) “Jim Crow Meets Racial Democracy”
2:30 pm Coffee and cookies (Humanities 1, Room 202)
2:45-4:15 pm Graduate Panel #1 – Personal Narratives: Translations, Republications, Reprintings

Timothy Fosbury (UCLA English), “Crèvecouer’s Bermudian Crisis”
Brian Flores (UCI English), “‘Y nosotros vivimos aquí en la frontera’: Modes of Framing Latina/o Identity in the Autobiographies of José Policarpo Rodriguez and Santiago Tafolla”
Emily Travis (UCSC Literature),“A vida simple: The Complex Afterlives of Alice Dayrell Brant’s Minha vida de menina”
RESPONDENT: Amanda Smith (UCSC Literature)

4:30-6:00 pm Keynote 2: Anna Brickhouse (University of Virginia) “Earthquake History in the Americas”
6:00-8:00 pm Opening reception and dinner at Cowell Provost House
Saturday, February 23:
8:30 am Coffee and muffins (Humanities 1, Room 202)
9:00-10:30am Graduate Panel #2 – Coloniality, Indigeneity, Power

Jenny Forsythe (UCLA Comparative Literature), “Ladrones, vagabundos, holgazones sin honra ni vergüenza: Inca Garcilaso’s Imperialist Translators Meet the Man in the Canoe”
Carlos Macías Prieto (UCB Spanish and Portuguese), “Domingo Chimalpahin’s Rewriting of Antonio de Morga’s Narrative of Black Conspiracy in 1612”
Amrah Salomón (UCSD Ethnic Studies), “Regeneración and Regeneration: Anti- Colonial Theory Across Borders”
RESPONDENT: Rodrigo Lazo (UCI English)

10:45 am-12:15 pm Keynote 3: Jesse Alemán (University of New Mexico) “When Cubans Go South: Learning the Language of Late Nineteenth-Century Southern Nationalism”
12:15-1:30 pm Lunch
1:30-3:00 pm Graduate Panel #3 – Nineteenth-Century Recoveries: Translating Texts and Places

Margaret McMurtrey (UCSB Religious Studies), “Singing Grace, Embodying Language and Place”
Gabriela Valenzuela (UCLA English), “Literary Wanderings: Nineteenth-Century Central American-U.S. Contact Zones and Spatial Imaginings”
Brandon Wild (UCI English), “Cincinnati: ‘El asombro de todos los que viajan la América del Norte’”
RESPONDENT: Sara Johnson (UCSD Literature)

3:00 pm Coffee and cookies (Humanities 1, Room 202)
3:15-4:45 pm Keynote 4: Michelle Burnham (Santa Clara U) “Archival Diving in the Global Pacific: Towards a New American Literary History”
4:45-5:30pm Closing roundtable, moderated by Susan Gillman & Kirsten Silva Gruesz
6:00-8:00 pm Closing reception and dinner at Cowell Provost House
About Translating America/America Translated:
This symposium on new hemispheric geographies and languages for American literary studies returns to historical moments that allow a reconsideration of language crossings as geographic alternatives to nation-bound paradigms. A 1998 conference on American empire at UC Santa Cruz produced groundbreaking work that has since become foundational, shifting the study of American cultures irrevocably away from an Atlantic-centered narrative of national development, and correspondingly toward languages other than English. Now, twenty years later, we revisit a once radically revisionist geo-timeline, dating to the 1998 centennial of the Spanish-American-Cuban War and recasting the history of US empire back from Cuba 1898 to an earlier time and place in the border treaty with Mexico in 1848. Critically examining the state of the discipline today, this symposium looks back still earlier: to the later eighteenth-century suturing of colonial to national studies that has proven exceptionally fruitful for scholars working across indigenous and multiple European colonial languages. Just as California’s demographic diversity prefigures that of the future United States at large, the University of California is rich in the human resources needed to re-invent a usable past for American cultural and literary studies. For more information visit: https://thi.ucsc.edu/projects/translating-america-america-translated
Sponsors:
“Translating America/American Translated” is hosted and staffed by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, with financial support from the University of California Institute for Humanities Research (UCHRI); the Siegfried B. and Elisabeth Mignon Puknat Endowment in Literary Studies and the Division of Graduate Studies at UC Santa Cruz; the Humanities Core Program at UC Irvine; and the Black Studies Project at the Humanities Center at UC San Diego.
“Translating America/America Translated” is hosted and staffed by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, with financial support from the University of California Institute for Humanities Research (UCHRI); the Siegfried B. and Elisabeth Mignon Puknat Endowment in Literary Studies and the Division of Graduate Studies at UC Santa Cruz; the Humanities Core Program at UC Irvine; and the Black Studies Project at the Humanities Center at UC San Diego.
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VISITING GRADUATE STUDENT PARTICIPANTS FROM OTHER UC CAMPUSES
Chip Badley (UCSB English)
Anastasia Baginski (UCI Comparative Literature)
Yui Kasane (UCSD Literature)
Amanda Kong (UCD English)
Efren López (UCLA English)
Lorena Vega Tamayo (UC Riverside Hispanic Studies)

Lise Getoor: "Responsible Data Science"
2019-02-26 19:00 - 21:00 | Music Center Recital Hall
The 53rd Annual Faculty Research Lecture will be given by Professor Lise Getoor on Tuesday, February 26, 2019 at the Music Recital Hall in the Performing Arts Complex.
“Responsible Data Science”
Data science is an emerging discipline that offers both promise and peril. Responsible data science refers to efforts that address both the technical and societal issues in emerging data-driven technologies. Prof. Getoor is a computer scientist who is well known for her theoretical work that integrates logic and probability to reason collectively and holistically about context in structured domains. In this lecture, she will describe some of the opportunities and challenges in developing the foundations for responsible data science. How can machine learning and AI systems reason effectively about complex dependencies and uncertainty? Furthermore, how do we understand the ethical and justice issues involved in data-driven decision-making? There is a pressing need to integrate algorithmic and statistical principles, social science theories, and basic humanist concepts so that we can think critically and constructively about the socio-technical systems we are building. In this talk, she will lay the groundwork for this important agenda.

Giving Day 2019
2019-02-27
UC Santa Cruz Giving Day is an energized 24-hour giving drive to support students, staff, and faculty initiatives. Join us in the circle of Giving on February 27th 2019 from 12 a.m. – 11:59 p.m. #give2UCSC
FIND A HUMANITIES PROJECT TO SUPPORT ON GIVING DAY:
Center for Public Philosophy
The Okinawa Memories Initiative
The Center for Cultural Studies Graduate Student Workshops in Race, Migration, and Sexuality
Center for World History Grad Conference
Nido de Lenguas (Language Nest)
Classics Alive!
History of Consciousness Graduate Student Research Fund

Dee Hibbert-Jones: “Last Day of Freedom & Run With It”
2019-02-27 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Professor Hibbert-Jones will be screening her academy award nominated short film “Last Day of Freedom.” When Bill Babbitt realizes his brother Manny has committed a crime he agonizes over his decision- should he call the police? Last Day of Freedom is a richly animated personal narrative that tells the story of Bill’s decision to stand by his brother, a Veteran returning from war, as he faces criminal charges, racism, and ultimately the death penalty. This film is a portrait of a man at the nexus of the most pressing social issues of our day – veterans’ care, mental health access and criminal justice. She will discuss Last Day of Freedom as well as her upcoming animated documentary Run With It on Troy Davis’ story. A black man accused of killing a white police officer in Savannah Georgia, USA.
Dee Hibbert-Jones is an Academy Award® nominated, Emmy® award winning documentary filmmaker; a Guggenheim Fellow and MacDowell Fellow. Working in collaboration with Nomi Talisman, she produces animated documentary films that explore the crisis in the criminal justice system and the US racial divide, challenging entrenched attitudes, immersing viewers in a complex world of feelings and experiences, engendering empathy and critical reflection. In 2015 they received the Filmmaker Award from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke, created to honor and support documentary artists whose works are potential catalysts for education and change. Hibbert-Jones was recently awarded a United States Congressional Black Caucus Veterans Braintrust Award in recognition for her “outstanding national commitment to civil rights, and social justice” and a Gideon award for “support to indigent minorities” for her film work.She a Professor of Art, Film, and Digital Art New Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. The sessions consist of a 40-45 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center provides coffee, tea, and cookies.
All Center for Cultural Studies events are free and open to the public. Staff assistance is provided by the Humanities Institute

International Women's Day: Celebrating Feminist Scholarship from the Americas
2019-02-28 13:30 - 17:00 | Cultural Center at Merrill, Merrill Cultural Center, UC Santa Cruz, Merrill College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Research Center for the Americas and Feminist Collective of Sisters in the Borderlands invite you to join us as we celebrate International Women’s Day with book talks by two leading feminist scholars. The first speaker is Dr. Ranita Ray of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas who will speak about her book The Making of a Teenage Service Class: Poverty and Mobility in an American City (University of California Press, 2017). The second speaker is Dr. Barbara Sutton of the University of Albany, SUNY who will speak about her book Surviving State Terror: Women’s Testimonies of Repression and Resistance in Argentina (New York University Press, 2018). Together, these books explore the critical themes of resistance, survival, intersectionality, and trauma/hardships in the Americas.
Schedule:
1:30 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. ~ Dr. Ranita Ray, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
3:00 p.m. – 3:20 p.m. ~ Break with light snacks
3:20 p.m. – 4:50 p.m. ~ Dr. Barbara Sutton, University at Albany, SUNY
About the Speakers:
Ranita Ray is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is an ethnographer specializing in women of color feminisms, children and youth, urban inequalities, and education and policing. Her book, The Making of a Teenage Service Class: Poverty and Mobility in an American City (University of California Press, 2018), challenges common wisdom that targeting “risk behaviors” among youth such as drugs, gangs, violence, and teen parenthood is key to breaking the cycle of poverty. Ray has published several other articles and book chapters related to children/youth, urban inequalities, race, class and gender, and co-authored a book titled As The Leaves Turn Gold: Aging Experiences of Asian Americans (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012). Ray is currently preparing a book manuscript that draws on rigorous fieldwork to explore how the relationship between policing, race, class, and gender shapes schooling experiences and educational trajectories of children growing up in marginalized communities in Las Vegas. Ray is actively involved in community-oriented research projects, and co-founder of Heating Youth Voices—a Connecticut based youth led organization.
Barbara Sutton is an Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University at Albany (SUNY). She is also affiliated with the departments of Sociology and of Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latino Studies at the same institution. She earned a law degree from the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina (her country of origin) as well as a doctorate in sociology from the University of Oregon. Professor Sutton’s scholarly interests include body politics, global gender issues, state violence and human rights, collective memory, and women’s movements, particularly in Latin American contexts. Her book, Bodies in Crisis: Culture, Violence, and Women’s Resistance in Neoliberal Argentina (Rutgers University Press, 2010) received the 2011 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize by the National Women’s Studies Association. Her new book, Surviving State Terror: Women’s Testimonies of Repression and Resistance in Argentina, was published by NYU Press in the Spring of 2018.

Karen Tei Yamashita Celebration
2019-02-28 17:20 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join us in a joyous celebration on the occasion of the retirement of Karen Tei Yamashita.
Karen Tei Yamashita is Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Living Writers reading featuring Karen Tei Yamashita, Seshu Foster, and testimonials from other UC Santa Cruz alumni.
This event is sponsored by The Literature Department, The Creative Writing Program, The Humanities Division, Porter College, Kresge College, Cowell College, Oakes College, Feminist Studies, Asian American/Pacific Islander Resource Center

Friday Forum for Graduate Research: Alessia Cecchet
2019-03-01 00:00 - 13:45 | Humanities 1, Room 420, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
“Eating and Resurrecting the Goats: Animal bodies, death, and Western cultural practices”
According to Norse mythology, two male goats, Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjóstr, pull Thor’s chariot. Once they have completed their labor, these animals can be eaten and resuscitated thereafter, in order to feed their god in an infinite loop of animal servitude. This myth epitomizes the focus of this dissertation, which will engage with the ways in which Western societies and culture negotiate animal depth and engage with the materiality of the animal body. This dissertation explores this relationship by focusing on the representation and cultural digestion of the animal body, specifically on the instances in which animal bodies are, like in the Norse myth, “brought back to life,” in order to serve human needs. Once dead, their bodies are rearranged-as in the case of taxidermy -so that’s Ann illusion of life can be represented to serve human needs-of knowledge and education, wonder and discovery, entertainment, and amusement. Consequently, this research focuses on how the animal body is used to mediate its own loss, in what seems to be a system created for human pleasure.
Alessia Cecchet is an experimental filmmaker and PhD candidate whose work is invested in the representation of non-human animals.
Friday Forum for Graduate Research is supported by the Graduate Student Association, the Humanities Institute, and the following departments HAVC, Literature, History of Consciousness, Psychology, and Education. It is a weekly interdisciplinary colloquium series for sharing graduate research across the humanities.

Curating a Decolonial Guide to Hawai'i: The Detours Project
2019-03-01 12:00 - 16:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Feminist Studies Colloquium: Curating a Decolonial Guide to Hawai’i – The Detours Project
Vernadette Vicuna Gonzalez, University of Hawai’i at Manoa
Friday, March 1 – HUM 1 room 210
12:00 to 2:00 pm
Lunch will be provided
Publishing Workshop: After the Colloquium, Prof. Gonzales, who is an Associate Editor
of the American Quarterly journal, will conduct a Publishing Workshop.
2:30 to 4:00 pm – HUM 1 room 210
The Detours project explores the fantasy of Hawai’i as an exotic destination for consumption by tourists, perverting the genre of the guidebook to produce alternative narratives, tours, mappings and images
of the islands, and concrete examples of moving from metaphors of decolonization
to material practices and everyday acts of resistance.
Vernadette Vicuna Gonzalez is Associate Professor of American Studies at University of Hawai’i at Manoa. Author of Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawaii’i and the Philippines, she also is co-editor with Hokulani Aikau, of Detours: A Decolonial Guide (under contract with Duke University Press).

Robert Nichols: Dilemmas of Dispossession in the Black Radical Tradition
2019-03-04 17:00 - 19:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Numerous political and intellectual traditions have sought to leverage the language of self-ownership as a tool of radical critique, including Marxism, feminism, and Critical Race Theory. But do we ‘own’ ourselves in any meaningful or politically productive sense? This lecture considers the dilemmas involved in this question with particular reference to the Black Radical Tradition, situating it within the broader framework of ‘dispossession’.
Robert Nichols is a McKnight Land-Grant Professor and Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities). His areas of research specialization include contemporary political theory (especially Critical Theory, Marx and Marxism, Foucault); the history of political thought (especially pertaining to imperialism and colonialism in the 19th century); and the contemporary politics of settler colonialism and indigeneity in the Anglo-American world.
