The Humanities Institute

Rebecca Hernandez — Categories, Identities, and Objects: Naming Native Art
2021-04-14 12:15 - 13:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Virtual Event
This presentation will examine the inherent complexities in the academic study and public representation of American Indian culture(s), and how the categorization and defining of Native American objects aids in the construction of American Indian identity.

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, April 14th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.
Rebecca Hernandez is currently the Director of the American Indian Resource Center at UC Santa Cruz, where she is focused on the retention of Native students and developing programs that promote a better understanding of American Indian culture(s) and lifeways at UCSC. She has worked in university administration for 15 years and taught courses in universities and community colleges. Her PhD is in American Studies with a concentration in Native American Studies and Visual Culture. She also holds an MFA in Exhibition Design and Museum Studies.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather online at 12:10 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.
*2020-2021 colloquia will be held virtually until further notice. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own coffee, tea, and cookies to the session.

Reparations for Black Americans: The Road to Racial Equality in California and Beyond
2021-04-15 16:00 - 17:00 | Virtual Event
In 2020, California established the nation’s first state task force to study and make recommendations on reparations for the institution of slavery, the atrocities that followed the end of slavery, and the discrimination against freed slaves and their descendants from the end of the Civil War to the present. Although the movement for reparations extends to the eighteenth century, it has gained new momentum in recent years. Join us for a conversation with some of the country’s leading experts and advocates for reparations, to discuss these questions and more:

How does the movement for reparations fit into efforts to close the racial wealth gap and promote racial equity?
Why study and discuss reparations in California?
What are the connections between the California task force and national debates about reparations?
What might reparations for Black Americans at a federal level look like in the 21st century?

Limited number of FREE books available to event registrants (priority will be given to UCSC students).
Co-sponsored by: The Institute for Social Transformation, Center for Racial Justice, and Office for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at UC Santa Cruz.
William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen are co-authors of the 2020 book, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century, which makes a powerful case for Black reparations and offers a detailed roadmap for an effective reparations program.
William A. Darity Jr. is the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, Economics and Business, and Director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. Darity’s research includes a focus on inequality by race, class and ethnicity, stratification economics, the economics of reparations, the Atlantic slave trade and the Industrial Revolution. He is a past president of the National Economic Association and the Southern Economic Association.
A. Kirsten Mullen is a folklorist and the founder of Artefactual, an arts-consulting practice, and Carolina Circuit Writers, a literary consortium that brings expressive writers of color to the Carolinas. Mullen’s research focuses on race, art, history and politics. She was a member of the Freelon Adjaye Bond concept development team that was awarded the Smithsonian Institution’s commission to design the National Museum of African American History and Culture. She is a past president of the North Carolina Folklife Institute.
Anne Price is the first woman President of the Insight Center for Community Economic Development. She has worked in the public sector on a wide range of issues including child welfare, hunger, workforce development, community development and higher education. Anne was one of the first national leaders to examine narratives about race and wealth. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, The Nation, The Washington Post, The Mercury News, The Wall Street Journal, Citylab, O Magazine, and other publications. Anne holds a BA in Economics from Hampton University and a Master’s Degree in Urban Affairs and Public Policy from the Milano School of Management and Urban Policy in New York City.
Congresswoman Barbara Lee was born in segregated El Paso, Texas. As a single mother raising two sons, she attended Mills College in Oakland, and later received her Master’s in Social Work from the University of California, Berkeley. In 1998, she was elected to serve California’s 9th congressional district (now the 13th) in a special election. Currently, Congresswoman Lee is a member of the House Appropriations Committee and Chair of the subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations. She serves as Co-Chair of the Steering & Policy Committee, former Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, Chair Emeritus of the Progressive Caucus, Co-Chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus Health Task Force, and Co-Chair of the Pro-Choice Caucus. As Co-Chair, Rep. Lee works to ensure that committees reflect the diversity, dynamism, and integrity of the Democratic Caucus. As a member of the House Democratic Leadership, she is the highest ranking African American woman in the U.S. Congress.

How to Live Like Shakespeare
2021-04-19 12:00 - 13:00, 2021-04-26 12:00 - 13:00, 2021-05-03 12:00 - 13:00, 2021-05-10 12:00 - 13:00, 2021-05-17 12:00 - 13:00, 2021-05-24 12:00 - 13:00 | Virtual Event
This series of noontime conversations will feature key passages by Shakespeare, selected for what they reveal about life and living. What are the virtues or capacities that Shakespeare took to be essential to social, spiritual, and civic happiness? How do Shakespeare’s speakers think out loud about values and ends, and how does Shakespeare think in and through his characters about matters of meaning? What images did Shakespeare offer and what words did he choose to make these themes tangible to his actors and audiences and worthy of sharing with others?

Co-hosted by Julia Lupton (UC Irvine) and Sean Keilen (UC Santa Cruz)
Mondays at noon, April 5, 12, 19, 26, May 3, 10, 17, 24
Themes addressed will include Imagination, Friendship, Fortitude, Empathy, Justice, Forgiveness, Hope, and Courage.
Julia Reinhard Lupton is professor of English at UC Irvine and the co-director of the New Swan Shakespeare Center. She is the author or co-author of five books on Shakespeare and the editor or co-editor of many volumes and journal issues. Recent works include Shakespeare Dwelling: Designs for the Theater of Life and Face to Face in Shakespearean Drama, co-edited with Matthew Smith. Professor Lupton is a Guggenheim laureate and a former Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America. Her current projects address Shakespeare, virtue, and wisdom literature. She is an award-winning teacher and community educator.
Sean Keilen is Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz and the Director of UCSC Shakespeare Workshop. He is the author of Vulgar Eloquence: On the Renaissance Invention of English Literature and an editor of many volumes of criticism, most recently The Routledge Research Companion to Shakespeare and Classical Literature (with Nick Moschovakis). He is writing a book about scholars in Shakespeare’s plays and what the modern humanities might learn from them. Professor Keilen is a Guggenheim laureate and an award-winning teacher and community educator. Since 2013, he has worked closely with Santa Cruz Shakespeare, a professional theater company in Northern California.
For information, contact Julia Lupton, jrlupton@uci.edu.
Co-sponsored by UCI’s New Swan Shakespeare Center and THI’s Shakespeare Workshop.

Saidiya Hartman: The Afterlife of Slavery
2021-04-19 16:00 - 17:30 | Virtual Event
The Humanities Institute is honored to welcome esteemed Professor Saidiya Hartman for a free, live, online conversation about her relationship to the archives of Black life, the intersections between history and literature, and the politics of memory.
Confronting slavery and its long, unfinished aftermath, Hartman’s work is a brave, imaginative, genre-bending exercise in historical resurrection. Through a hybrid of documentary research and informed speculation, Hartman gives us back the stories of those enslaved and struggling for freedom.
In the interdisciplinary spirit of innovative scholar and historian Hayden White, Professor Hartman will engage in a public conversation with two leading UC Santa Cruz humanities scholars, literary critic Vilashini Cooppan and historian Greg O’Malley.
Register

This event is the Inaugural Hayden V. White Distinguished Annual Lecture and kicks off UC Santa Cruz’s 2021 Alumni Week April 19 – 25. Check the schedule for more events and ways to connect with the campus community.
The Hayden V. White Distinguished Annual Lecture Series is made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. and Josephine Baird Memorial Fund, via an endowment that supports yearly lectures relevant to historical and cultural theory, and to ensure that Hayden White’s legacy and intellectual spirit is honored and sustained.

Saidiya Hartman is the author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, and Scenes of Subjection. A MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, she has been a Guggenheim Fellow, Cullman Fellow, and Fulbright Scholar. She has published articles in journals such as South Atlantic Quarterly, Brick, Small Axe, Callaloo, The New Yorker and The Paris Review. She is a professor at Columbia University and lives in New York.
Vilashini Cooppan is professor of literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she teaches comparative and world literature, with an emphasis on postcolonial theory, genre theory, memory studies, and affect theory. She has published extensively on world literature, and on memory and trauma. She is the author of Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing and is completing a book titled The World at Large: Memoryscapes in World Literature.
Greg O’Malley is associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His first book, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807, received four awards: The American Historical Association’s Forkosch Prize for British history; the AHA’s Rawley Prize for Atlantic history; The Owsley Award from the Southern Historical Association; and the Goveia Prize from the Association of Caribbean Historians. He is currently writing a new book, The Escapes of David George: An Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom in the Revolutionary Era.

*Homepage Photo: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

(Re)Enacting Revolution: Dread Scott and Erin Gray
2021-04-20 16:00 - 17:30 | Virtual Event
Dread Scott’s recent large-scale art project, Slave Rebellion Reenactment, was a community-engaged performance reenacting the largest rebellion of enslaved people in U.S. history. Prof. Gray, UC Davis, will join him in conversation about art, revolution, and reenactments. This is the next event in Visualizing Abolition, an online program featuring artists, activists, scholars, and others united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition.

Visualizing Abolition is a series of online events organized in collaboration with Professor Gina Dent and featuring artists, activists, and scholars united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition. Originally, Visualizing Abolition was being planned as an in-person symposium. Due to the ongoing pandemic, the panels, artist talks, film screenings, and other events will instead take place online. The events accompany Barring Freedom, an exhibition of contemporary art on view at San José Museum of Art October 30, 2020-March 21, 2021. To accompany the exhibition, Solitary Garden, a public art project about mass incarceration and solitary confinement is on view at UC Santa Cruz. Barring Freedom travels to NYC John Jay College of Criminal Justice April 28-July 15, 2021.

Dread Scott makes revolutionary art to propel history forward. His work is exhibited across the US and internationally. In 1989, his art became the center of national controversy over its transgressive use of the American flag, while he was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. President G.H.W. Bush called his art “disgraceful” and the entire US Senate denounced and outlawed this work. Dread became part of a landmark Supreme Court case when he and others defied the new law by burning flags on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. Dread’s studio is now based in Brooklyn.
Dr. Erin Gray is a writer, educator, and activist currently living in occupied Huichin (Oakland, California). Erin is an assistant professor of Black Literary and Cultural Studies in the English department at UC Davis, where she writes and teaches at the intersections of critical theory and visual and performance studies to interrogate the aesthetic production of racist and anti-racist thought. Erin’s current book project, The Moving Image of Lynching: Liberalizing Racial Terror in the Long Photographic Century, theorizes the co-emergence and continuing imbrication of lynch law and racial liberalism as constitutive elements of U.S imperial power. Her co-edited anthology, The Black Radical Tradition in the United States, is forthcoming from Verso Press in 2021. She has published essays in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory, The International Feminist Journal of Politics, Truthout, and Viewpoint.

Visualizing Abolition is organized by UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences in collaboration with San José Museum of Art and Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery. The series has been generously funded by the Nion McEvoy Family Trust, Ford Foundation, Future Justice Fund, Wanda Kownacki, Peter Coha, James L. Gunderson, Rowland and Pat Rebele, Porter College, UCSC Foundation, and annual donors to the Institute of the Arts and Sciences.
Partners include: Howard University School of Law, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Jessica Silverman Gallery, Indexical, The Humanities Institute, University Library, University Relations, Institute for Social Transformation, Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery, Porter College, the Center for Cultural Studies, the Center for Creative Ecologies, and Media and Society, Kresge College.

Susan Lepselter — Left-Standing
2021-04-21 12:15 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
Left-Standing is a performance of written and video poems. The video does not illustrate the writing; rather the two media become an interconnected poetics. Together, these forms of poetry engage visual, aural, and affective dimensions of ordinary human encounters with the nonhuman world. The overall scenario presents encounters both with animals who wander a suburban neighborhood after a woods has been razed and developed, and with the trees, grasses, waters, and crops in the leftover woods and its surrounding farmlands. Lepselter’s presentation evokes a world at a moment of ecological, social, and epistemological precarity and continuity.

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, April 21st; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.
Susan Lepselter is Associate Professor of American Studies, and Adjunct Professor of Anthropology, Cultural Studies and Folklore, at Indiana University Bloomington. She takes an interdisciplinary approach to narrative and poetics in the United States, and has published work on UFO stories, conspiracy theories, dream narratives, and hoarding shows. She is currently completing a multimedia book of poetry supported by a New Frontiers award from Indiana University. Her book The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity and UFOs in the American Uncanny (University of Michigan Press, 2016) won the 2017 Society for Cultural Anthropology Bateson Prize.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather online at 12:10 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.
*2020-2021 colloquia will be held virtually until further notice. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own coffee, tea, and cookies to the session.

Lunchtime chat with Humanities Dean Jasmine Alinder
2021-04-21 13:00 - 14:00 | Virtual Event
Please join the Humanities Division’s newest Dean, Jasmine Alinder, to hear her thoughts on her first year as Dean as well as her inspirational vision for the growth and development of the Humanities Division. A brief talk on these topics will be followed by a casual question and answer period. All are welcome!

Living Writers: Anthony Cody
2021-04-22 17:20 - 18:55 | Virtual Event
Anthony Cody is the author of Borderland Apocrypha, winner of the 2018 Omnidawn Open Book Prize selected by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and finalist for a 2020 National Book Award. He is a CantoMundo fellow from Fresno, California. His poetry has appeared in Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, The Boiler, ctrl+v journal, among others. Anthony is a member of the Hmong American Writers’ Circle and co-edited How Do I Begin? A Hmong American Literary Anthology. He is a recent MFA-Creative Writing graduate from Fresno State where he continues to collaborate with Juan Felipe Herrera and the Laureate Lab Visual Wordist Studio. Anthony has received fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, and Desert Nights, Rising Stars Conference. He provides communication support to CantoMundo, and serves as an associate poetry editor for Noemi Press.

Michelle Sheehan Linguistics Colloquium
2021-04-23 09:00 | Virtual Event
For more information, please see the Linguistics Department Colloquia page.

Conflict and Revolutionary Possibility in North Africa: Sudan, Algeria, and the Western Sahara
2021-04-23 10:00 - 11:30 | Virtual Event
In the past several years, moments of political opposition and revolutionary possibility have continued to unfold across North Africa. In 2018, protest erupted in Sudan. Algeria followed when in 2019, President Bouteflika announced his intention to seek a fifth term. In the Western Sahara, the Polisario Front resumed its armed struggle in 2020 after the end of a twenty-nine year-long UN mediated cease-fire. Featuring Khalid Medani (McGill University), Vivian Solana (Carleton University), and Farida Souiah (Aix-Marseille University), this event will explore the evolution of revolutionary politics in contemporary North Africa, which has received relatively less attention in the media than the protests that, a decade ago, comprised the “Arab Spring.” Our panelists will shed light on the underlying causes of resistance in each national context as well as its broader implications for regional politics, including questions of pacification, peace, and the politicization of undocumented migration in the region. This event is presented by THI’s Center for the Middle East and North Africa.

Vivian Solana is an Assistant Professor at Carleton University’s Department of Sociology & Anthropology in Ottawa, Canada.Based on long-term ethnographic research in Sahrawi refugee camps located in Southern Algeria, her work studies the social regeneration of the political struggle for the decolonisation of Western Sahara. With a focus on women and youth, she examines everyday forms of political labor that sustain and regeneratethe Sahrawi movement for national independence within the sovereign spaces of other nation-states.
Farida Souiah holds a PhD (Cum Laude) in Political Science from Sciences Po Paris and is currently a research associate at Aix-Marseille University, France, in the Centre méditerrannéen de sociologie, de science politique et d’Histoire. Farida studies migration, international mobility and protest. She is particularly attentive to symbolic constructions, social imaginaries and the politicization of migration.
Khalid Mustafa Medani is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University, where he is also Chair of the African Studies Program. He is the recipient of a Carnegie Scholar on Islam award between 2007-2009. His book, entitled“Black Markets and Militants: Informal Networks in the Middle East and Africa,” is forthcoming later this year from Cambridge University Press.

Aimee Meredith Cox — Cosmic Cartographies // BodyStorming
2021-04-28 12:15 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
This talk/participatory workshop will draw from the methods and theoretical orientation of two of Cox’s current projects. The first, Cosmic Cartographies, explores how people define and actualize strategies for Black liberation and is inspired by the ways in which a group of multigeneration Black women activists articulate their physical and psychic relationship to space in Cincinnati. The second, BodyStorm, tracks the social choreography, mobilities, gestures, ways of experiencing the body, and what we might even call dance techniques that are emerging in this time of intensified uncertainty and precarity, as a response to the present and, potentially, as a way of practicing for the future. Cox’s presentation and audience engagement will employ the embodied knowledge and relational techniques developed within and across both projects to explore our own capacities to access new ways of feeling, comprehending, and being in the world.

This colloquium is co-sponsored by the Anthropology Department and the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) program.
RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, April 28th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.
Aimee Meredith Cox is an anthropologist, writer, movement artist, and critical ethnographer. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Anthropology and African American Studies departments at Yale University. Aimee’s first monograph, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Duke 2015), won the 2017 book award from the Society for the Anthropology of North America and a 2016 Victor Turner Book Prize in Ethnographic Writing. She is the editor of the volume Gender: Space (MacMillan, 2018). Aimee is also a dancer and choreographer. She performed and toured internationally with Ailey II and the Dance Theatre of Harlem and has choreographed performances as interventions in public and private space in Newark, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn. Aimee is currently working on two book projects based on ethnographic research among Black communities in Cincinnati, Ohio; Jackson, Mississippi; Clarksburg, West Virginia; and Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn. This overall project is called “Living Past Slow Death.”
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather online at 12:10 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.
*2020-2021 colloquia will be held virtually until further notice. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own coffee, tea, and cookies to the session.

Jodi Dean: Anti-Communism and the Barriers to Liberation
2021-04-29 16:00 - 18:00 | Virtual Event
COVID, climate change, and capitalism present a set of fundamental crises. What will it take for the left to be adequate to the task of addressing them? This talk will consider the barriers constituted by the continuation of anti-communist assumptions. It will draw out the limits of left “assemblism,” state-phobia, and amorphous inclusivity and highlight the necessity of a disciplined struggle for state power. If the problems are as severe as the ever-present evocations of dystopian catastrophe indicate, then the only way forward is the revolutionary seizure of the state and the immediate building of socialism.

Moderated by UC Santa Cruz Professors Debbie Gould (Sociology) and T. J. Demos (History of Art and Visual Culture)
Jodi Dean is Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY. She is the author or editor of thirteen books, including Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies (Duke 2009), The Communist Horizon (Verso 2012), Crowds and Party (Verso 2016), and Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging (Verso 2019).
Beyond the End of the World comprises a year-long research and exhibition project and public lecture series, directed by T. J. Demos of the Center for Creative Ecologies, bringing leading international thinkers and cultural practitioners to UC Santa Cruz. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Culture. For more information visit beyond.ucsc.edu

Documenting Justice: Panel Discussion w/ Dee Hibbert-Jones, Nomi Talisman, and guests
2021-05-04 16:00 - 17:30 | Virtual Event
The Institute of the Arts and Sciences is pleased to present ‘Documenting Justice,’ a screening of short films curated by Dee Hibbert-Jones, professor, art, UCSC, and filmmaker Nomi Talisman, followed by a panel discussion by the filmmakers. The documentary films on prisons and justice will be available to watch online between April 30 – May 4. Advance registration required for online access to viewing the films and attending the discussion. See below for information on the films.

Huntsville Station, 2020, 14’
Jamie Meltzer and Chris Filippone
Every weekday, inmates are released from Huntsville State Penitentiary, taking in their first moments of freedom with phone calls, cigarettes, and quiet reflection at the Greyhound station up the block.
Beyond the Wire (working title), 2020, 15’
Ted Griswold
Former Army Ranger Chris Pesqueira experiences freedom after 33 years at Soledad State Prison in California. He leans into a community of formerly incarcerated veterans for support as he takes his first steps back into society.
What Happened to Dujuan Armstrong? 2020, 19’
Lucas Guilkey
When a young man mysteriously dies in a Bay Area jail, his mother begins a determined quest to find out what happened to him, but quickly runs into the opaque and powerful position of American sheriffs.
Laps, 2015, 17’
R.J. Lozada
The San Quentin 1000 Mile Running Club is a group of men incarcerated at California’s historical San Quentin State Prison who find temporary solace in long distance running. Laps captures a regular training day in the recreation yard.
The Box, 2021, 16′
James Burns
The Box is a hybrid short film immersing audiences in the realities of solitary confinement through interviews with three people, one of whom is the film’s director, who spent a combined 9 years in solitary.
Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman are collaborative filmmakers whose animated short documentary Last Day of Freedom was awarded a Congressional Black Caucus Veterans Braintrust Award, the California Public Defenders Association Gideon Award, a Northern California Emmy, Best Short at the International Documentary (IDA) Awards, and was nominated for an Academy Award. Their films have been supported by the IDA Enterprise Fund grant, NEA, Cal Humanities Documentary Project Grant, and the Pacific Pioneer Fund, among others. Hibbert-Jones and Talisman are Guggenheim Fellows, MacDowell Colony Fellows, Creative Capital awardees and recipients of the Filmmakers Award from The Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University. They are currently residents at SFFilmHouse. They live and work in San Francisco, CA.

Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance
2021-05-04 17:30 - 19:00 | Virtual Event
On Tuesday, May 4, 2021 at 5:30pm–7:00pm, there will be a University Forum to celebrate the launch of Counterpoints featuring original research from multiple campus contributors including SJRC’s Just Biomedicine research cluster and the No Place Like Home initiative.
Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance (PM Press) brings together cartography, essays, illustrations, poetry, and more in order to depict gentrification and resistance struggles from across the San Francisco Bay Area and act as a roadmap to counter-hegemonic knowledge making and activism.

Learn more about book launch and the contributors.
The Science & Justice Research Center’s Just Biomedicine research cluster, contributed a chapter titled: ‘Just Biomedicine on Third Street? Health and Wealth Inequities in San Francisco’s Biotech Hub.’ The Third Street project brings into view for public discussion the effects of the resulting financial and ideological investments in an imagined “future of medicine,” and how they are changing the political landscapes, built environments, and health of Bay Area residents right now.
The Transportation, Infrastructure, and Economy contribution by Kristin Miller (Sociology).
The No Place Like Home project contributed a visual summary and map from their large-scale study of the affordable housing crisis for Santa Cruz County tenants. The survey results provide a springboard for the study’s wider discussion of local and regional policy options in addressing the housing crisis, particularly for renters.
Co-Sponsored by University Relations, The Science & Justice Research Center, The UC Santa Cruz Institute for Social Transformation, The Humanities Institute, the Genomics Institute, and departments of Sociology and Feminist Studies.

Larisa Jasarevic — Beekeeping in the End Times
2021-05-05 12:15 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
A family of would-be migrants reenacts a swarm hunt at their former apiary in northeastern Bosnia. Their folk spells were well-attuned to the sorts of crises that tatter old human-apian ties, except the latest: extreme weather and emigration. Meanwhile, one tepid February, shepherds reflect on gratitude as their sheep graze by the growing coal-power plant. “The End is not yet,” they say. These are snapshots of what Jasarevic calls the quiets of disaster. Sharing a rough cut of a story from an ethnographic film, Jasarevic’s presentation concerns disaster ecology, Islamic eschatology, and ethnography as a homesteading craft.

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, May 5th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.
Larisa Jasarevic is an independent scholar and a 2021 Wenner-Gren Fejos Fellow. An anthropologist, she has research interests in bodies and health, nature, and eschatology. A beekeeper and a homesteader, she is developing dread about multispecies climate futures. Her second book, Beekeeping in the End Times(IUP), is in preparation. She taught for a decade at the University of Chicago.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather online at 12:10 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.
*2020-2021 colloquia will be held virtually until further notice. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own coffee, tea, and cookies to the session.

Living Writers: Toya Groves and Muriel Leun with Literature Graduate Student Mia Boykin
2021-05-06 17:20 - 18:55 | Virtual Event
Toya L. Groves is a lifelong teacher and writer who currently works with formerly incarcerated students at Laney College in Oakland, California. She holds a BA in African American studies from UC. Berkeley, a MA in Women’s Spirituality from Sofia University, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College. Her writing includes attributes that reveal both the challenges of her journey while also highlighting the victory of forgiving herself and those who once trespassed against her. After losing the use of her right dominant hand in a car accident she re-learned to write and navigate the world, as a black person and as a woman, literally single handedly. It is her life’s work to illuminate the dark, by telling the story of Motherhood as she sees and experiences it with hopes to inspire others to raise up their voices in chants for healing, love, and freedom.
Mia Boykin is a daughter of California, originally born and raised in Los Angeles and currently finds home in The Bay. Known mainly by her stage/pen name, Mimi Tempestt, she is a multidisciplinary artist and poet. She is the creator of the wonderful archival interview series Black.Queer.Alive. which highlights the personal narratives of Black and queer people throughout the world. Her debut collection of poems, The Monumental Misrememberings, is forthcoming with Co-Conspirator Press. She was chosen for Lambda Literary Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices for poetry in 2021, and is currently a creative fellow at The Ruby in San Francisco.
Muriel Leung is the author of Imagine Us, The Swarm, forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2021, and Bone Confetti, winner of the 2015 Noemi Press Book Award. A Pushcart Prize nominated writer, her writing can be found in The Baffler, Cream City Review, Gulf Coast, The Collagist, Fairy Tale Review, and others. She is a recipient of fellowships to Kundiman, VONA/Voices Workshop and the Community of Writers. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Gold Line Press and the Poetry Co-Editor of Apogee Journal. She also co-hosts The Blood-Jet Writing Hour Podcast with Rachelle Cruz and MT Vallarta. She is a member of Miresa Collective, a feminist speakers bureau.

Special Issue Launch: Borderland Regimes and Resistance in Global Perspective
2021-05-07 11:00 - 12:30 | Virtual Event
This roundtable celebrates the launch of the Critical Ethnic Studies special issue “Borderland Regimes and Resistance in Global Perspective.” Taking up sites that range from US/Mexico, to the Mediterranean, to Palestine/Israel, and beyond, the special issue’s contributors move past superficial comparisons and think through the circulation of technologies, expertise, policing, and surveillance alongside the circulation of anti-colonial strategies via transnational social movements. By bridging conversations that are typically kept in separate academic silos — for example, critical refugee studies, Asian American studies, Black studies, Native studies, Middle East studies, European critical migration studies, comparative colonial studies — this collaboration has generated rigorous and empirically grounded investigations of borders that respond to the urgent challenges of our current moment as they relate to questions of migration and displacement.

Panelists:

Josen Diaz (University of San Diego)
Ivan Char-Lopez (UT Austin)
Loubna Qutami (UCLA)
Jennifer Mogannam (UC Davis)
Leslie Quintanilla (SF State)
Emily Hue (UC Riverside)
Davorn Sisavath (Fresno State)
Nick Mitchell (UCSC)

Presented by The Humanities Institute’s Border Regimes and Resistance in Global Perspective Cluster

Geographies of Kinship: A Conversation with Filmmaker Deann Borshay Liem and Adoption Rights Activist Kim Stoker
2021-05-10 14:40 - 16:00 | Virtual Event
THI’s Forgotten Wars Research Cluster and the Center for Racial Justice have partnered to present a conversation on the war-forged Korean adoptee diaspora with the director of Geographies of Kinship Deann Borshay Liem and adoption rights activist Kim Stoker, facilitated by Amy Ginther (Theater Arts). (About the film: In a tale about the rise of Korea’s global adoption program, four adult adoptees who were raised in foreign families return to their country of birth, mapping the geographies of kinship that bind them to a homeland they never knew. Along the way they question the policies and practices that led South Korea to become the world’s largest “sending country”—with 200,000 children adopted out to North America, Europe, and Australia. Emboldened by w’hat they have experienced and learned, they become advocates for birth family and adoptee rights, support for single mothers, and historical reckoning).

It is recommended that attendees view the film before the event. Attendees with an @ucsc.edu email may watch the film for free at this website (under school email films, click “Geographies of Kinship”): https://www.newday.com/watch-now
Deann Borshay Liem has over twenty years experience working in development, production and distribution of independent documentaries. She produced, directed, and wrote the Emmy Award-nominated documentary, First Person Plural (Sundance, 2000) and the award-winning films, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee (PBS, 2010) and Memory of Forgotten War (with Ramsay Liem; PBS, 2015). She served as executive producer for Spencer Nakasako’s Kelly Loves Tony (PBS, 1998) and AKA Don Bonus (PBS, 1996, Emmy Award); On Coal River by Francine Cavanaugh and Adams Wood (Silverdocs, 2010); Ishi’s Return by Chris Eyre (PBS, 2016); and Breathin’: The Eddy Zheng Story by Ben Wang (PBS, 2017). She also co-produced Special Circumstances by Marianne Teleki (PBS, 2009) and Burqa Boxers by Alka Raghuram (2016), and served as story editor for the award-winning film, The Apology, by Tiffany Hsiung (HotDocs, 2016). She was the former director of the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) where she supervised the development, distribution and broadcast of new films for public television and worked with Congress to support minority representation in public media. A former Sundance Institute Fellow, Deann directed, produced, and wrote the new documentary, Geographies of Kinship.
Kim Stoker lived in South Korea for almost twenty years. She was a leading activist for adoptee rights with Adoptee Solidarity Korea (ASK), the first adoptee-run political advocacy group of its kind. Returning to the country of her birth and building a life there has indelibly changed her outlook on the world, on the Koreas, and on international adoption. She’s currently based back in the United States where she works as a writer and editor.

Futures: Sora Han, Adrienne Maree Brown and Savannah Shange
2021-05-11 16:00 - 17:30 | Virtual Event
Visualizing Abolition, the year-long program featuring artists, activists, scholars, and others united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition, concludes with a conversation on strategies, activism, and liberatory futures with Sora Han, Adrienne Maree Brown and Savannah Shange.

Visualizing Abolition is a series of online events organized in collaboration with Professor Gina Dent and featuring artists, activists, and scholars united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition. Originally, Visualizing Abolition was being planned as an in-person symposium. Due to the ongoing pandemic, the panels, artist talks, film screenings, and other events will instead take place online. The events accompany Barring Freedom, an exhibition of contemporary art on view at San José Museum of Art October 30, 2020-March 21, 2021. To accompany the exhibition, Solitary Garden, a public art project about mass incarceration and solitary confinement is on view at UC Santa Cruz. Barring Freedom travels to NYC John Jay College of Criminal Justice April 28-July 15, 2021.

Sora Han is the Director of the Culture & Theory Ph.D. Program at UC Irvine, and an Associate Professor of Criminology, Law and Society with courtesy appointments in the School of Law and African American Studies. Her first book, Letters of the Law (Stanford University Press 2015), extends the theoretical insights of critical race theory to produce new readings of American law’s landmark decisions on race and civil rights. She is also the co-author of the law casebook, Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law, Third Edition (Edward Elgar Publishing 2020). She is currently working on two books: Slavery as Contract: A Study in the Case of Blackness, which brings together poetics, contract law and afro-pessimist theory to think beyond the property metaphor of slavery; and Mu, the First Letter of an Anti-Colonial Alphabet, an experimental text on the “anagrammatic scramble” (Nathaniel Mackey) of the unconscious materiality of abolitionism. Recent publications on these new lines of research include “Slavery as Contract,” in Law and Literature (2016) and “Poetics of Mu” in Textual Practice (2018).
Adrienne Maree Brown is the author of Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds and the co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements. She is the cohost of the How to Survive the End of the World and Octavia’s Parables podcasts. adrienne is rooted in Detroit.
Savannah Shange is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz and serves as principal faculty in Critical Race & Ethnic Studies. Her research and teaching interests include state violence, late liberal statecraft, multiracial coalition, ethnographic ethics, queer politics, and abolition. Her book, Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Anti-Blackness and Schooling in San Francisco (Duke 2019) is an ethnography of the afterlife of slavery as lived in the Bay Area.

Visualizing Abolition is organized by UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences in collaboration with San José Museum of Art and Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery. The series has been generously funded by the Nion McEvoy Family Trust, Ford Foundation, Future Justice Fund, Wanda Kownacki, Peter Coha, James L. Gunderson, Rowland and Pat Rebele, Porter College, UCSC Foundation, and annual donors to the Institute of the Arts and Sciences.
Partners include: Howard University School of Law, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Jessica Silverman Gallery, Indexical, The Humanities Institute, University Library, University Relations, Institute for Social Transformation, Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery, Porter College, the Center for Cultural Studies, the Center for Creative Ecologies, and Media and Society, Kresge College.

Evren Savcı — Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam
2021-05-12 12:15 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
Savcı will speak about her book Queer in Translation, which draws on the case of Turkey’s 16 years of AKP governance to intervene in Queer Studies’ separate — indeed, diagonically opposed — approaches to neoliberalism and to Islam. She theorizes “neoliberal Islam” as a unique regime that brings together economic and religious moralities to deploy marginality onto ever-expanding populations instead of concentrating it in the lower echelons of society, and she suggests that sexual liberation movements are the most productive places from which to theorize neoliberal Islam, as well as to imagine resistances to it. After an initial presentation, Savcı will then be in conversation with Mayanthi Fernando (UCSC).

This colloquium is a joint event with the Center for the Middle East and North Africa (CMENA).
RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, May 12th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.
Evren Savcı is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Her first book Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam (2021, Duke University Press) analyzes sexual politics under contemporary Turkey’s AKP regime with an eye to the travel and translation of sexual political vocabulary. Her second book project, tentatively entitled Failures of Modernization: Polygamy, Islamic Matrimony and Cousin Marriages in the Turkish Republic, turns to those sexual practices that were deemed “uncivilized” and either heavily discouraged or outlawed by the Turkish Republic. Savcı’s work on the intersections of language, knowledge, sexual politics, neoliberalism, and religion has appeared in Journal of Marriage and Family; Ethnography; Sexualities; Political Power and Social Theory; Theory & Event; Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion; GLQ, and in several edited collections.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather online at 12:10 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.
*2020-2021 colloquia will be held virtually until further notice. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own coffee, tea, and cookies to the session.

Noura Erakat: Palestine as an Anti-Racist Struggle?
2021-05-12 15:30 - 17:00 | Virtual Event
Legal Studies Program Distinguished Lecture presents Professor Noura Erakat (Rutgers University): Palestine as an Anti-Racist Struggle?
More information and Zoom info: https://legalstudies.ucsc.edu/news-events/news/news-article.html
This event is co-sponsored by THI’s Center for the Middle East and North Africa.

Ji Young Kim: La prosodia del Uptalk en el Español de Herencia
2021-05-12 16:00 - 17:00 | Virtual Event
El objetivo de este estudio es investigar los patrones entonativos del uptalk en el español de los hablantes de herencia en Los Ángeles, cuyos padres emigraron de México. El uptalk, también llamado High Rising Terminal (HRT), se trata de la entonación ascendente en enunciados declarativos. Generalmente se considera que el uptalk es un rasgo prosódico del inglés, sobre todo el acento valley girl de California. Puesto que los hablantes de herencia son bilingües en español e inglés, se supone que el uso de uptalk es una muestra de la transferencia del inglés al español. Aunque el uptalk se ha investigado mayoritariamente en las variedades del inglés, es importante tener en cuenta el hecho de que este fenómeno prosódico también se observe en otros idiomas, incluso el español. Por ejemplo, en México, el uptalk es una de las características estereotipadas del habla fresa. Por lo tanto, antes de hablar sobre la influencia del inglés en el español de los hablantes de herencia, es primordial analizar la variación lingüística del español del lugar de origen. En este trabajo, se usó el sistema de etiquetaje Sp_ToBI (Beckman et al., 2002; Prieto y Roseano, 2010) para comparar los contornos entonativos del uptalk de los hablantes de herencia y los hablantes monolingües de español. También se analizó la realización acústica del uptalk de los dos grupos. Los datos muestran que los monolingües producen el uptalk con los contornos más dinámicos y con un ascenso final más empinado que los hablantes de herencia. De estos hallazgos se sugieren estudios futuros para explicar la divergencia prosódica del uptalk de los hablantes de herencia.
Please click here to join the Zoom event: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/4712467066?pwd=[REDACTED]
PRESENTATION WILL BE IN SPANISH
Presented by UCSC Spanish Studies and the Department Of Languages and Applied Linguistics.
Ji Young Kim es profesora asistente de la Universidad de California en Los Ángeles. Sus áreas de especialización son la fonética y fonología del español, la adquisición de lenguas de herencia, y el bilingüismo. Su investigación se centra en la realización de los segmentos y la prosodia del español como lengua de herencia, el acento de herencia, y la variación fonética del español de EEUU. Ha publicado artículos sobre estos temas en revistas académicas y es co-editora de la edición especial de la revista Languages “Heritage Speaker Phonetics and Phonology: Testing Models and Expanding the Range of Data.”

Pasolini in Morocco: The Geopolitics of Cinematic Space and Transnational Production
2021-05-12 16:00 - 17:00 | Virtual Event
Morocco, and especially the desert oasis of Ouarzazate, is well-known as a destination for big-budget Hollywood film productions like The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988) and Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000). Well before those films, however, iconoclastic Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) shot his Oedipus the King in the same region in 1966. Some of his films’ other locations were found elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East: Persia, Eritrea, Palestine, and Yemen. Pasolini’s films are deeply invested in their respective locations, just as the filmmaker himself was invested in the idea that encounters with “Third World” peoples and places held a radical potential for rethinking the relations of capitalist modernity. In turning, in particular, to his Moroccan Oedipus, this talk addresses the entangled relations of Orientalism and anticolonial aesthetics and the politics of race, queer desire, eroticism, and space in Pasolini’s work. Moreover, it does so by thinking with the Moroccan films and filmmakers that have made political and aesthetic engagements with his work. Using a critical analysis of Pasolini’s Oedipus and an engagement with the film’s Moroccan interlocutors such as Ali Essafi, Daoud Aoulad-Syad, and Ahmed Bouanani, this talk will offer a theoretical investigation of Pasolini’s afterlives in the Maghreb.

Peter Limbrick is professor of film and digital media at UC Santa Cruz. He is the author of Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi (University of California Press, 2020) and Making Settler Cinemas (Palgrave, 2010) as well as articles in journals like Third Text, Camera Obscura, and Cinema Journal. In 2013 he curated a retrospective of Moroccan filmmaker Moumen Smihi’s films, which screened at the Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley), Block Cinema (Chicago), and Tate Modern (London).
About the Series
The annual Visual and Media Cultures Colloquia (VMCC) at UC Santa Cruz are a collaboration between the graduate programs in Film and Digital Media Department and Visual Studies in the History of Art and Visual Culture Department. The series brings an array of cutting-edge scholars to speak on a broad spectrum of subjects. This event is co-sponsored by THI’s Center for the Middle East and North Africa.

Forging Ties, Forging Passports: Migration and the Modern Sephardi Diaspora
2021-05-13 11:40 - 13:15 | Virtual Event
Forging Ties, Forging Passports is a history of migration and nation-building from the vantage point of those who lived between states. Devi Mays traces the histories of Ottoman Sephardi Jews who emigrated to the Americas—and especially to Mexico—in the late nineteenth century through World War II, and the complex relationships they maintained to legal documentation as they migrated and settled into new homes. Mays considers the shifting notions of belonging, nationality, and citizenship through the stories of individual women, men, and families who navigated these transitions in their everyday lives, as well as through the paperwork they carried.

Zoom link will be sent out prior to the event.
Devi Mays is Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies and History at the University of Michigan. Her book, Forging Ties, Forging Passports: Migration and the Modern Sephardi Diaspora (Stanford University Press, 2020) won the 2020 National Jewish Book Award in Sephardic Culture. She is working on two new projects, the first focusing on Ottoman and North African Jews as tastemakers in fin-de- siècle and interwar Paris with Julia Phillips Cohen, and the second an introduction to and translation of Izmir-based Ottoman Jewish journalist Alexandre Ben Ghiat’s Ladino diary of World War I, entitled Two Steps from the Abyss: An Ottoman Jewish Witness to War.
This presentation will be given during Professor Alma Heckman’s Spring Course offering, HIS 185I: Latin American Jewish History in the Modern Period.

Sites of Memory, Spaces of Dispute: Missions and Monuments in the United States
2021-05-13 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
Join the Research Center for the America for their final event of the “Memory Studies in the Americas” thematic series which explores how markers or symbols of memory are imagined and disputed. Listen to presentations on the San Gabriel mission in Tovaangar (known as Los Angeles today) by Dr. Catherine Ramírez (Professor, Latin American and Latino Studies) and Confederate monuments in Virginia by Dr. Kate Jones (Associate Professor, History), as they weave the personal with the scholarly to explore the contested terrain of memory in the United States. The Q&A will be facilitated by Dr. Rebecca Hernandez, Director of the American Indian Resource Center at UC Santa Cruz. Closed captioning and an ASL interpreter will be provided. This event is free and open to the public and co-sponsored with the Institute for Social Transformation and The Humanities Institute.

Dr. Catherine S. Ramírez
Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and is a scholar of migration, citizenship, race, and gender; Mexican American history; Latinx literature and visual culture; comparative ethnic studies; and speculative fiction. She is the author of Assimilation: An Alternative History (2020) and The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory (2009) and she is a co-editor of Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship (forthcoming in 2021). She has also written for the New York Times, The Atlantic, and Public Books.
Dr. Catherine Jones
Associate professor of History at University of California, Santa Cruz. She completed her PhD in History at the Johns Hopkins University in 2007. Her first book, Intimate Reconstructions: Children in Postemancipation Virginia, was published with the University of Virginia Press in 2015. It won the Grace Abbott Book Prize from the Society for the History of Children and Youth in 2016. She is currently at work on a book about the history of child incarceration in the post-Civil War era. She has published articles in the Journal of Southern History, J19, and the Journal of the Civil War Era.

CANCELLED: Reflections on Movement and Movement-Building
2021-05-14 11:00 - 12:30 | Virtual Event
This event has been cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances.
What does it mean to conjure a world without borders, a world without prisons, and a world without the carceral logics that detain and deport? How do we understand the connections and potential coalitions among struggles against policing and prisons, mobilizations against border fortification, and movements to create a more just university such as the COLA strike? This panel explores the abolitionist imperative to eradicate borders—which is fundamentally distinct from imperialist, neoliberal, and liberal humanitarian demands for borderlessness—as one that necessarily brings the prison industrial complex, immigrant detention, border fortification, and labor struggles into the same analytical frame.

Panelists:

Nunu Kidane (Priority Africa Network)
Nick Mitchell (UCSC)
Gave Evans (UCSC, PhD student)
Taylor Wondergem (UCSC, PhD student)
Ilaria Giglioli (New College of Florida)

Presented by The Humanities Institute’s Border Regimes and Resistance in Global Perspective Cluster

Gregg Mitman - Empire of Rubber: Scenes from Firestone’s Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia
2021-05-17 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
Thom Gentle Environmental History Lecture
Empire of Rubber: Scenes from Firestone’s Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia
In the early 1920s, Americans owned 80 percent of the world’s automobiles and consumed 75 percent of the world’s rubber. But only one percent of the world’s rubber grew under the U.S. flag, creating a bottleneck that hampered the nation’s explosive economic expansion. To solve its conundrum, the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company turned to a tiny West African nation, Liberia, founded in 1847 as a free Black republic.
Empire of Rubber tells a riveting story of of ecology and disease, of commerce and science, and of racial politics and political maneuvering, as Firestone sought to transform Liberia into America’s rubber empire. Drawing upon excerpts from Mitman’s forthcoming book, this talk illuminates how Black activists, writers, scientists, diplomats, and businesspeople across the African diaspora rallied to support or oppose the experiment that was Firestone in Liberia. It also offers an intimate portrait of how industrial ecologies, born of racial capitalism, shaped the relationships among people, trees, chemicals, machines, and parasites on what became a Jim Crow corporate enclave on African soil.

Gregg Mitman is the Vilas Research and William Coleman Professor of History, Medical History, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His latest book, Empire of Rubber: Firestone’s Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia, will be published by The New Press in the fall of 2021.

This lecture is made possible by the generosity of Thom Gentle (Cowell ’69, History), a pioneer class alumnus who established The Thom Gentle Endowment for History to support student awards in environmental history as well as lectures of distinguished speakers with an environmental emphasis. Presented by the UC Santa Cruz Center for World History.

Music for Abolition: Artist Panel w/ Curator Terri Lyne Carrington and Guests
2021-05-18 16:00 - 17:30 | Virtual Event
Music for Abolition, directed and curated by Terri Lyne Carrington, is a project bringing together musicians across a variety of genres to create a soundtrack—and provide a heartbeat—to our shared struggle for abolition. Expressing grief, rage, exhaustion, and resolution in the face of the U.S. history of racism and oppression, the music resonates with calls of freedom.
Join us May 18 for a conversation about the role of sound and music in the struggle for prison abolition with the participating musicians, including Lisa Fischer, Kris Davis, Val Jeanty, Lily Finnegan, Maimouna Youssef aka “Mumu Fresh”, Queen Cora Coleman, Nicholas Payton, Jason Moran, Malcolm Jamal-Warner, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Nicole Mitchell, Sarah Elizabeth Charles, Dianne Reeves, Camila Cortina Bello, Elena Pinderhughes, Orrin Evans, Eric Revis, Terri Lyne Carrington and Social Science.

Music for Abolition videos can be found here.
Visualizing Abolition is a series of online events organized by Dr. Rachel Nelson, Director, Institute of the Arts and Sciences and Professor Gina Dent, Feminist Studies. The events feature artists, activists, and scholars united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition. Originally, Visualizing Abolition was being planned as an in-person symposium. Due to the ongoing pandemic, the panels, artist talks, film screenings, and other events will instead take place online. The events accompany Barring Freedom, an exhibition of contemporary art on view at San José Museum of Art October 30, 2020- June, 2021. To accompany the exhibition, Solitary Garden, a public art project about mass incarceration and solitary confinement is on view at UC Santa Cruz.
Three-time GRAMMY® award-winning drummer, producer, educator and activist, Terri Lyne Carrington started her professional career as a “kid wonder” while studying under a full scholarship at Berklee College of Music in Boston. In the mid ’80’s she worked as an in-demand drummer in New York before gaining national recognition on late night TV as the house drummer for both the Arsenio Hall Show and Quincy Jones’ VIBE TV show.
In 1989, Ms. Carrington released a GRAMMY®-nominated debut CD on Verve Forecast, Real Life Story, and toured extensively with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock, among others. In 2011 she released the GRAMMY®Award-winning album, The Mosaic Project, featuring a cast of all-star women instrumentalists and vocalists, and in 2013 she released Money Jungle: Provocative in Blue, which also earned a GRAMMY®Award, establishing her as the first woman ever to win in the Best Jazz Instrumental Album category.
To date Ms. Carrington has performed on over 100 recordings and has worked extensively with luminary artists such as Al Jarreau, Stan Getz, Woody Shaw, Clark Terry, Cassandra Wilson, Dianne Reeves, James Moody, Yellowjackets, Esperanza Spalding, and many more. Additionally, Ms. Carrington is an honorary doctorate recipient from Berklee, and currently serves as Founder and Artistic Director for the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice.
In 2019 Ms. Carrington was granted the Doris Duke Artist Award, a prestigious acknowledgement in recognition of her past and ongoing contributions to jazz music. Her current band project, Terri Lyne Carrington and Social Science (a collaboration with Aaron Parks and Matthew Stevens), released their debut album, Waiting Game, in November, 2019 on Motema Music.

Aarti Sethi & Navyug Gill — Dissent: Farmers, Protests, India
2021-05-19 12:15 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
The farmers protests in India have ignited a widespread resistance movement globally. Focused initially on repressive farm laws enacted by the Indian state, the protests have now expanded to include broader environmental, social and political concerns impacting the livelihood, independence and sustenance of working people. What was first seen as an agrarian protest movement has become a rallying call for much-needed debates on dissent, casteism, gender, and economic justice.

This colloquium is a joint event with the Center for South Asian Studies (CSAS).
RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, May 19th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.
Aarthi Sethi is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. Her primary research interests are in agrarian anthropology, political-economy and the study of South Asia. She holds degrees in political science, and cinema and cultural studies, from Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University in 2017, and before joining Berkeley, she had postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard and Brown universities. She has previously published on, and has ongoing research and teaching interests in, urban ethnography, and cinematic, media and visual cultures.

Navyug Gill is a scholar of modern South Asia and global history. He is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at William Paterson University. He received a Ph.D. from Emory University, and a B.A. from the University of Toronto. His research explores questions of agrarian change, labor history, caste politics, postcolonial critique and global capitalism. Currently he is completing a book on the emergence of the peasant and the rule of capital in colonial Panjab. His academic and popular writings have appeared in venues such as the Journal of Asian Studies, Economic and Political Weekly, Outlook, Al Jazeera, Law and Political Economy Project, Borderlines and Trolley Times.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather online at 12:10 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.
*2020-2021 colloquia will be held virtually until further notice. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own coffee, tea, and cookies to the session.

A Fortress in Brooklyn, Michael Casper and Nathaniel Deutsch
2021-05-19 16:00 - 17:00 | Virtual Event
Join authors Michael Casper and Nathaniel Deutsch in conversation with Lila Corwin Berman about Casper and Deutsch’s new book A Fortress in Brooklyn.
The Hasidic community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn is famously one of the most separatist, intensely religious, and politically savvy groups in the entire United States. A Fortress in Brooklyn tells the remarkable story of how the community survived in one of the toughest parts of New York City during an era of steep decline, only to later resist and also participate in the unprecedented gentrification of the neighborhood. Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper unravel the fascinating history of how a group of determined Holocaust survivors encountered, shaped, and sometimes fiercely opposed the urban processes that transformed their gritty neighborhood, from white flight and the construction of public housing to rising crime, divestment of city services, and, ultimately, extreme gentrification. By showing how Williamsburg’s Hasidim rejected assimilation while still undergoing distinctive forms of Americanization and racialization, A Fortress in Brooklyn presents both a provocative counter-history of American Jewry and a novel look at how race, real estate, and religion intersected in the creation of a quintessential, and yet deeply misunderstood, New York neighborhood.

Michael Casper received his Ph.D. in history from UCLA and has contributed to American Jewish History and the New York Review of Books.
Nathaniel Deutsch is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he holds the Murray Baumgarten Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies and is the Faculty Director of The Humanities Institute and the Director of the Center for Jewish Studies. Among his other books are Inventing America’s “Worst” Family: Eugenics, Islam, and the Fall and Rise of the Tribe of Ishmael and The Jewish Dark Continent: Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement, for which he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Lila Corwin Berman is Professor of History at Temple University, where she holds the Murray Friedman Chair of American Jewish History and directs the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History. She is author of The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion-Dollar Institution, as well as Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit, and Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity. Her articles have appeared in the Washington Post, the Forward, as well as several scholarly journals.

Jonas Staal: Deep Future Propagandas
2021-05-20 12:00 - 14:00 | Virtual Event
Propaganda manufactures consent and establishes normativity; it constructs reality and makes worlds. The propagandas of our present produce the futureless futures of dystopian normativity: the libertarian geoengineering of drowned worlds, Flat Earth dark-age anti-globes, and eco-fascist genocide. But these are not the only options available. From popular mass movements to new planetary unions and transnational party-forms, the art of counter-power organizing is struggling for the means of production of the future, to ensure meaningful survival in interspecies comradeship and a biosphere for all. At the intersection of political and artistic imagination, between organizing work and utopian activism, this presentation will sketch the morphologies of a deep future propaganda.

Moderated by T. J. Demos and Martabel Wasserman
Jonas Staal is a visual artist whose work deals with the relation between art, propaganda, and democracy. He is the founder of the artistic and political organization New World Summit (2012–ongoing) and the campaign New Unions (2016–2019). With BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, he co-founded the New World Academy (2013-16); with Florian Malzacher he is currently directing the utopian training camp Training for the Future (2018-ongoing); and with Laure Prouvost he is co-administrator of the Obscure Union. His exhibition-projects include: Art of the Stateless State (Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana, 2015), After Europe (State of Concept, Athens, 2016), The Scottish-European Parliament (CCA, Glasgow, 2018) and Museum as Parliament (with the Democratic Federation of North Syria, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 2018-ongoing). With a PhD research on propaganda art at Leiden University in the Netherlands, Staal’s most recent book is Propaganda Art in the 21st Century (The MIT Press, 2019).
Beyond the End of the World comprises a year-long research and exhibition project and public lecture series, directed by T. J. Demos of the Center for Creative Ecologies, bringing leading international thinkers and cultural practitioners to UC Santa Cruz. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Culture. For more information visit beyond.ucsc.edu

Living Writers: Joan Naviyuk Kane
2021-05-20 17:20 - 18:55 | Virtual Event
Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from Ugiuvak (King Island) and Qawiaraq (Mary’s Igloo). The author of eight collections of poetry and prose, she teaches poetry and creative nonfiction at Harvard, is a lecturer in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism and Diaspora at Tufts, and was founding faculty of the graduate creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She’s currently a Visiting Fellow of Race and Ethnicity at The Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University, and the 2021 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Creative Writing and Journalism at Scripps College. Her second book, Hyperboreal (winner of the 2012 Donald Hall Prize), will be published in translation by Editions Caractères this summer, and a collection of new poems, Dark Traffic, will be published in the Pitt Poetry Series in September. She raises her sons in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

CANCELLED: PhD+ Publishing Workshop
2021-05-21 11:00 - 12:30 | Virtual Event
This event has been cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances.
As co-editors of the recently published special issue of Critical Ethnic Studies on Borderland Regimes and Resistance in Global Perspective, we invite you to join us for a workshop focused on academic journal article publishing. We will cover: adapting elements from your dissertation into journal articles; creating your own publication pipeline; navigating the journal submission, review, and publishing process; and dealing with rejections. We will also discuss the process of submitting to journal special issues, such as ours–including how to pitch your work to a special issue, how to work with editors on your piece during revise-and-resubmit, and how to propose a guest-edited special issue.

Panelists:

Jenny Kelly (UCSC)
Camilla Hawthorne (UCSC)

Presented by The Humanities Institute’s Border Regimes and Resistance in Global Perspective Cluster

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

Migrant Futures: South Asia and The Middle East (II) Jagged Environments
2021-05-21 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
Presented by the Center for South Asian Studies and the Center for the Middle East and North Africa. Featured speakers: Amita Baviskar (Professor, Sociology-Anthropology and Environmental Studies, Ashoka University) and Gökçe Günel (Assistant Professor, Antropology Rice University).

Roumyana Pancheva Linguistics Colloquium
2021-05-21 13:20 | Virtual Event

Yasmeen Daifallah — Theorize and Decolonize: Critiques of Colonial Subjectivity in Contemporary Arab Thought
2021-05-26 12:15 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
What does it take to cultivate decolonized subjects in postcolonial times? When anti-colonial struggles are all said and done, and the dust settles on a profoundly reshaped social, economic, and political landscape in their wake, what kinds of intellectual and political labor are required to undo colonized subjectivities and to gradually and systematically produce decolonized ones in their stead? This talk brings the oeuvres of central contemporary Arab thinkers to bear on these questions and discusses what the current resonances of their thought might be for our times.

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, May 26th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.
Yasmeen Daifallah is Assistant Professor of Politics at UCSC and has been teaching there since January 2019. She arrived by way of UMass-Amherst, the University of Southern California, and UC Berkeley, where she also earned her PhD in political science. She has research interests in critical and postcolonial theory, comparative political theory, and Arab and Islamic political thought.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather online at 12:10 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.
*2020-2021 colloquia will be held virtually until further notice. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own coffee, tea, and cookies to the session.

One year later, have we gotten anywhere?
2021-05-26 18:00 | Virtual Event
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was murdered when a white police officer placed his knee on Floyd’s neck. Coast-to-coast, protests erupted, and, locally, Santa Cruz police Chief Andy Mills took a knee alongside Mayor Justin Cummings and a sea of protestors in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.
But while that might be a sign of progress, there have been other signs that America, and Santa Cruz, haven’t moved forward like some might have hoped in terms of racial justice in the past year.
From the shootings of other young Black men nationally to “no white guilt” rocks turning up in Santa Cruz County to hate being directed at Asian Americans here and elsewhere, there’s a lot to ponder one year after Floyd’s killing.

Lookout Santa Cruz invited some key community voices to speak about how far they believe we’ve come, both as a community here in Santa Cruz County and as a nation. The list of speakers will include:
Dr. David H. Anthony III has been a professor of African History at UC Santa Cruz since 1988. Anthony’s focus on research includes: African and African-American history, art, music, literature and cinema; Eastern and Southern Africa; African languages; Indian Ocean world; African and African American linkages; Islamic civilization; African diaspora studies; World history. Anthony is a leader in campus public service, and has participated in a broad range of events such as film screenings, public talks and exhibitions, including the UC Santa Cruz Annual Martin Luther King, Jr Memorial Convocation.
Cat Willis is the Founder and Executive Director of the Tannery World Dance and Cultural Center. She is a founding member of the Santa Cruz County Black Coalition for Justice and Racial Equity and is founding director of the Black Health Matters Initiative alongside community partners; County Park Friends, United Way of, NAACP Santa Cruz Chapter, Blended Bridge, and the SCC Black Coalition for Justice and Racial Equity. She currently sits on the Community Foundation of Santa Cruz County RISE Together leadership circle and the Santa Cruz County’s Commission on Anti-Racism, Economic & Social (CARES) Justice.
Spike Wong is local playwright and former school teacher. Born in Watsonville, Spike had the quintessential 1950’s small town California upbringing. His father’s parents had landed here while they were agricultural laborers and cannery workers. After his father’s WWII military service in the US Army Air Force, he eventually became a partner in a grocery store. His mom was a business and school secretary through most of her working career. Through their hard work, all three of their sons graduated from college.
Maria Cadenas is the executive director of Santa Cruz Community Ventures, which is committed to developing compassionate and local equitable economies that contribute to the region’s well-being. Her work focuses on the development of scalable models to address income and wealth gaps, especially those faced by communities of color and women. In the words of Community Action Board of Santa Cruz County’s MariaElena De La Garza: “Maria is a fierce advocate for the community impacted by poverty. She offers tangible and thoughtful solutions to make our community stronger!”
This event is presented by Lookout Santa Cruz and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute.

Bombay Katta: The City and its Poor
2021-05-27 16:00 - 18:00 | Virtual Event
Katta signifies casual and engaged conversation, but unlike its distant cousin the Bengali Adda, it also denotes a space where friends come to talk and listen. Juned Shaikh and Sheetal Chhabria speak to histories of labor, poverty and caste in colonial and postcolonial Bombay.

Sheetal Chhabria is Associate Professor of History at Connecticut College. She researches the histories of capitalism, the production of space, and the governance of labor, poverty and inequality.

Juned Shaikh is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He studies labor, cities, caste, and Marxism in South Asia. His next project is on the life and times of a scientist who became an important leader of the communist movement in India, Gangadhar Adhikari.

This is event is part of the Towards Justice Lecture Series presented by the UC Santa Cruz Center For South Asian Studies.

Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference
2021-05-28 13:20 - 17:00 | Virtual Event
Towards the end of the spring quarter each year, the Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC) showcases the research of the department’s undergraduate students. This conference always features as an invited speaker, a distinguished alumnus or alumna of the department.
For more information and to register, please visit the Linguistics Department website at: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/conferences/lurc.html

Articulating Trust: A cross-disciplinary roundtable conversation
2021-05-29 13:00 - 14:30 | Virtual Event
“Articulating Trust: A cross-disciplinary roundtable conversation about language rights and socio-linguistic justice in higher education and beyond” will be followed by a Q&A and discussion with the audience.
In this conversation, we are hoping to further develop the notion of Language Rights, recently applied to the context of higher education. The right to one’s own linguistic variety marks an overdue departure from the deeply entrenched norm that would restrict the language of knowledge and thought to a so-called “standard” language. In this roundtable we hope to begin to articulate a related and practical notion of Linguistic Trust, where interlocutors in research and educational roles invite other interlocutors to participate while using a non-standard variety. Our main question will be: How could an invitation to participate in a “non-standard” variety be articulated? What are some of the strategies or cues which could be leveraged to invite our interlocutors to use non-standard varieties, especially in settings (such as classroom teaching, mentoring, researching) in which hegemonic norms would dictate the exclusive use of a standard variety? By bringing together scholars from different disciplines we hope to open up a conversation about what it means to build trust in sociolinguistic diversity and how hegemonic linguistic norms can be subverted – one interaction at a time.

For more information and to receive the Zoom link to discussion, please see: https://sites.google.com/ucsc.edu/articulatingtrust/home
Hosted by Linguistics, Anthropology, and co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute.
Roundtable Participants:
Kara Hisatake received her PhD in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz and writes about settler colonialism, language politics, decolonization, race, and gender in Hawai’i and the broader Pacific. Her work appears in Archiving Settler Colonialism: Culture, Space, and Race (2018), edited by Yu-ting Huang and Rebecca Weaver-Hightower, and in Amerasia. She currently teaches high school in Honolulu.
Kelsey Sasaki is a Ph.D. candidate in Linguistics. Since 2016, she has worked with speakers of Santiago Laxopa Zapotec on a variety of projects, from psycholinguistic studies to public language-learning classes. This year, she is a THI Public Fellow of Senderos, a local nonprofit that serves the Latino/a/x community.
Dr. Bahiyyah Maroon is a nationally recognized thought leader on equity and social change. She’s appeared in Women’s Health, Self, Bustle, and Health Daily. Out magazine named her a top ten innovator in the nation for her contributions to social change by dignified design. Dr. Maroon is the CEO of Polis, an applied research institute. She is also a proud recipient of the U.S. President’s Volunteer Service Award for her contributions to equity in STEM education. She received her doctorate in anthropology from UCSC. Dr. Maroon has provided strategic insights to Intel Corporation, Harvard University, the US Dept. of Justice, and the US Dept. of Labor among others. Dr. Maroon is passionate about deploying social science to create solutions that result in a more compassionate and equitable world.
Megan Moodie is a cultural anthropologist who specializes in feminist theory and disability politics. Her current project looks at the ways that women living with chronic pain negotiate work, family, and medical spaces and engage in forms of self advocacy and political organizing in which complex chronic illness becomes a site of identification or “biosociality.” As an essayist, fiction writer, dramatist/screenwriter, and film critic who often engages with audiences outside academia, she frequently works at the arts/social sciences interface; building on a long tradition in anthropology in which creative practices inform social science research, she is the founder of the Center for Artful Ethnography here at UC Santa Cruz, which will be a hub for innovative teaching and research.
Ivy Sichel is a syntactician with a growing interest in Language and Society in the US and in Israel. Her recent work focuses on ideology, identity, and the state, in the emergence and consolidation of modern vernacular Hebrew in the 20th century, in Israel/Palestine. She is trying to understand what it means for a language to be gendered or racialized, through the prism of emergent Modern Hebrew, which, although perhaps unique in terms of the historical conditions that led to its emergence, is arguably exemplary of the ways in which our languages are always sedimented, politically and ideologically.

Alice Waters, We Are What We Eat
2021-06-01 18:00 - 19:00 | Virtual Event
Legendary chef and food activist Alice Waters will be in conversation with bestselling author Michael Pollan about her new book, We Are What We Eat: A Slow Food Manifesto—an impassioned plea for a radical reconsideration of the way each and every one of us cooks and eats. This event is presented by Bookshop Santa Cruz, and cosponsored by the Humanities Institute.

In We Are What We Eat, Alice Waters urges us to take up the mantle of slow food culture, the philosophy at the core of her life’s work. When Waters first opened Chez Panisse in 1971, she did so with the intention of feeding people good food during a time of political turmoil.
Customers responded to the locally sourced organic ingredients, to the dishes made by hand, and to the welcoming hospitality that infused the small space–human qualities that were disappearing from a country increasingly seduced by takeout, frozen dinners, and prepackaged ingredients. Waters came to see that the phenomenon of fast food culture, which prioritized cheapness, availability, and speed, was not only ruining our health, but also dehumanizing the ways we live and relate to one another.
Over years of working with regional farmers, Waters and her partners learned how geography and seasonal fluctuations affect the ingredients on the menu, as well as about the dangers of pesticides, the plight of fieldworkers, and the social, economic, and environmental threats posed by industrial farming and food distribution. So many of the serious problems we face in the world today–from illness, to social unrest, to economic disparity, and environmental degradation–are all, at their core, connected to food. Fortunately, there is an antidote. Waters argues that by eating in a “slow food way,” each of us–like the community around her restaurant–can be empowered to prioritize and nurture a different kind of culture, one that champions values such as biodiversity, seasonality, stewardship, and pleasure in work.
This is a declaration of action against fast food values, and a working theory about what we can do to change the course. As Waters makes clear, every decision we make about what we put in our mouths affects not only our bodies but also the world at large–our families, our communities, and our environment. We have the power to choose what we eat, and we have the potential for individual and global transformation–simply by shifting our relationship to food. All it takes is a taste.
“In this warm, passionate and very personal book Alice Waters lays out a stunningly convincing case for changing the way we eat. No jargon, no big words, just Alice walking about all the things that matter most to her. I’m going to give this book to everyone I love.” — Ruth Reichl, author of Save Me the Plums
Alice Waters is the executive chef, founder, and owner of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California. As the vice president of Slow Food International, founder of the Edible Schoolyard Project, and the winner of numerous awards, including three James Beard Awards and the National Humanities Medal, she has helped bring food awareness to people all over the world.

PhD+ Workshop - Careers in the Tech Industry
2021-06-03 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
How’d You Get That Job?!
Are you interested in a career in the tech industry? Want to learn how to leverage the skills and experiences you’ve gained as a graduate student for these positions? Join us for a panel discussion with UCSC graduate student alumni as they share their experiences with the job search, developing application materials that effectively spotlight your skills, and forging their own career paths. Panelists will also share how they landed their current positions at various tech companies!
Date: Thursday, June 3, 2021
Time: 12:00-1:30pm
Panelists include:
Alina I’vette Fernandez, Ph.D., Latin American and Latino Studies (UX Researcher for Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives, CITI)
Sarah Papazoglakis, Ph.D., Literature (Privacy & Trust Product Specialist, Facebook)
Emily Sloan-Pace, Ph.D., Literature (Professor in Residence, Zoho Corporation)
Aaron Springer, Ph.D., Computer Science (Senior Quantitative UX Researcher, Google)
Parul Wadhwa, M.F.A. Digital Arts and New Media (Consultant Storyteller for Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Extended Reality)
Luke Winstrom, Ph.D., Physics (Data Science & Machine Learning Manager, Apple)
For more information about panelists, see: https://graddiv.ucsc.edu/grad-horizons/industry-job-search.html

This event is co-sponsored by: Career Center, University Relations, Graduate Division, Graduate Student Commons (GSC), The Humanities Institute, and Baskin School of Engineering.

About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the fifth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by The Humanities Institute. We meet monthly to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grants/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more. The workshop series is open to University of California faculty, staff, and students. *Note that all 2020-2021 PhD+ workshops will be held virtually until further notice.

PhD+ Workshop – Proposal Writing: Framing Your Research for Grants and Fellowships
2021-06-04 11:00 - 12:30 | Virtual Event
Proposal Writing: Framing Your Research for Grants and Fellowships
Learn how to make your fellowship and grant proposals competitive to a wide range of selection committees. We’ll discuss what does and does not need to be in a research proposal, the proper tone and form, and ways to tease out the larger stakes of individual research projects and avoid the jargon of field-specific descriptions. This session will help you craft a research proposal that appeals to a broad academic audience.
The workshop will be led by Sean Keilen (Literature Department), Holly Unruh (Executive Director, Arts Research Institute), Saskia Nauenberg Dunkell (THI Research Program Manager), and Matthew Tedford (Art and Humanities Research Development GSR).
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the fifth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by The Humanities Institute. We meet monthly to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grants/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more. *Note that all 2020-2021 PhD+ workshops are open to University of California faculty, staff, and students and will be held virtually until further notice.
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Celebrating the Humanities: Spring Awards
2021-06-04 16:00 - 17:00 | Virtual Event
We hope you will join us for our annual celebration recognizing student and faculty academic achievement in the Humanities Division at UC Santa Cruz. Friends and family are welcome.
Even though we are not able to celebrate together in person as we usually do, we can still come together online to honor the outstanding accomplishments of our students and faculty. Our virtual event will include live remarks from Chancellor Larive and Humanities Dean Jasmine Alinder, congratulating our exceptional scholars.
Be sure to come with a glass to raise!

Program:

Welcome from Humanities Dean Jasmine Alinder
Congratulatory remarks from Chancellor Cynthia Larive
Award presentations:
The 2020–21 Distinguished Humanities Undergraduate Alumni Award
The Dean’s and Chancellor Awards
The Bettina Aptheker Award for Research on Sexual, Gendered, and Racial Violence
The Coha / Gunderson Prize in Speculative Futures
The Dizikes Teaching Award & The Janette Dinishak Scholarship
The Sol and Esther Draznin Memorial Scholarship in Classical Studies
The Kenneth Andrew Gram Memorial Scholarship
The David A. Kadish Humanities Scholarship
The Raihan Kadri Memorial Scholarship
The Siobhan O’Neill Scholarship
The Humanities Institute Undergraduate Research Awards
Conclusion: a toast to our students!

For questions, please contact Rafferty Lincoln via rlincoln@ucsc.edu
Congratulations to our accomplished awardees!

Undiscovered Shakespeare: Troilus and Cressida - PT 1
2021-06-09 18:30 - 20:30 | Virtual Event
This three-part virtual reading of one of Shakespeare’s most unusual tragedies continues the “Undiscovered Shakespeare” collaboration between Santa Cruz Shakespeare, The Humanities Institute, and The Shakespeare Workshop. Join us as we read through this play episodically on Zoom, and dig into the text with lectures from scholars and conversations with the cast. Swinging wildly between bawdy comedy, epic history, and tragic romance, Troilus and Cressida plays about against the backdrop of the Trojan War. With its examinations of honor, fidelity, pretension, romance, and war, this is a play that Joyce Carol Oates described as an “implicit debate between what is essential in human life and what is only existential.”

Schedule: The three sessions will last approximately two hours (including an intermission) and will begin at 6:30pm PST.
Sessions are free to the public, and participants are not obligated to attend every meeting of the program. Video of the episodes will be available once each airs and all will remain available until one week after the final episode.
*Participants reading along should expect for the first meeting about each play to cover acts one and two; the second meeting to cover acts three and four; and the third meeting to cover act five.
June 9, 16, and 23: Troilus and Cressida with guest scholar Catherine Nicholson (Yale).
Play Synopsis: In the latter years of the Trojan War, Prince Troilus, the youngest son of King Priam, is having difficulty on the battlefield because he is in love with a woman named Cressida. He solicits her uncle to help him win her, and despite her misgivings, Cressida gives in to her feelings and agrees to the match. Soon after, however, she is given to the Greeks in exchange for a Trojan prisoner of war. In the Greek camp, Troilus spies on her exchanging flirtations with a Greek soldier, Diomedes, and disavows her faithlessness, promising revenge. Meanwhile, Hector, the champion of the Trojans, seeks a one-on-one challenge with a Greek champion. The Greeks seek to convince Achilles to fight Hector after their champion Ajax makes peace with Hector. At first, Achilles refuses. When Hector kills his protégé Patroclus, however, Achilles returns to battlefield, captures Hector, and has him killed. The outcome of the war remains undecided.
Texts available from Folger Shakespeare Library at: https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/
Undiscovered Shakespeare is a public arts and humanities series co-produced by Santa Cruz Shakespeare, UCSC Shakespeare Workshop, and The Humanities Institute. It brings professional actors and scholars together with the public for an online staged reading and discussion of works that do not have a prominent place in the repertoire of modern theater companies. In Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare explores the legend of the Fall of Troy from the perspective of an adolescent love affair. In the process, he also scrutinizes the ideals of heroism, honor, faithfulness, love, and duty that his era derived from Homer’s story.

Undiscovered Shakespeare: Troilus and Cressida - PT 2
2021-06-16 18:30 - 20:30 | Virtual Event

Watsonville is in the Heart: Oral History Project Panel
2021-06-17 18:00 - 19:30 | Virtual Event
In this program Santa Cruz Public Libraries will talk with Roy Recio, founder of Tobera Project and curator of the “Watsonville is in the Heart” exhibit. Roy Recio, other members of the Filipino community, and UCSC graduate students will share their passion for a new project aimed at preserving the local history and heritage of Filipino families in Santa Cruz County — the “Watsonville is in the Heart: Oral History Project.” Panelists will share what draws them to this work and why these stories are so important.

This program is being done in partnership with the UC Santa Cruz Humanities Institute and Watsonville Public Library for Book to Action 2021. For more information and other programming, please visit: https://www.cityofwatsonville.org/2197/Book-To-Action
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Los invitamos a participar en una conversación con Roy Recio, fundador de Tobera Project y conservador de la exhibición “Watsonville is in the Heart“. Roy Recio, otros miembros de la comunidad filipina, y estudiantes graduados de la Universidad de Santa Cruz, compartirán su pasión por un nuevo proyecto con el objetivo de preservar la historia local y el patrimonio de las familias filipinas del Condado de Santa Cruz: el proyecto oral “Watsonville is in the Heart”. Los panelistas compartirán lo que los atrae a este proyecto y por qué estas historias son tan importantes.
Este programa se realiza en asociación con el Instituto de Humanidades de UC Santa Cruz y la Biblioteca Pública Watsonville para el programa Book to Action 2021.

Undiscovered Shakespeare: Troilus and Cressida - PT 3
2021-06-23 18:30 - 20:30 | Virtual Event

The Pickwick Book Club: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
2021-06-27 14:00 - 17:00 | Virtual Event
The Pickwick Book Club is a community of local bookworms, students, and teachers who meet monthly to discuss a nineteenth-century novel. Perhaps the best known and most widely beloved of Dickens’s works, A Christmas Carol is the story of one man’s conversion from miserly misanthropy to a belief in the goodness of mankind and an acceptance of his place in the larger human community. Set against a background of social and economic distress during the “hungry ‘forties” in England, the Carol is at once an indictment of economic individualism and a powerful exploration of dreams, memory, and the importance of self-reflection.

For more information about this event, please visit: https://dickens.ucsc.edu/resources/pickwick-club/index.html

Open Now - Out of the Ashes: Stories from the CZU Lightning Complex Fires
2021-07-02 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Set upon a historical archive of art, objects, and stories from communities affected by the 2020 CZU Lightning Complex Fires, for decades the MAH has archived and stored oral histories, artifacts, and more from the natural disasters that have impacted the history of our community. This collection has allowed Santa Cruz County historians and educators to more deeply understand and learn from those moments of impact.
In the summer of 2020, the CZU Lightning Complex Fire burned more than 80,000 acres, led to the evacuation of more than 60,000 people and the destruction of over 900 homes. Wanting to capture and document this moment Santa Cruz Sentinel photojournalist, Shmuel Thaler, and NPR radio producer and former history curator, Nikki Silva, teamed up with the MAH to begin documenting some of the personal stories of people who have been impacted by the fire.
Following a public call-out for stories through October 2020, the exhibition will showcase this expansive historical archive of art, objects, and stories collected by Shmuel, Nikki, and the MAH alongside artwork from local artists displaced by the fires. Taking a moment to acknowledge the tragedy our community has endured during an already devastating year, the exhibition will showcase the voices, stories, and art of resilience, grief, and community care of Santa Cruz County. The exhibition will run from July 2nd, 2021 – July 24th, 2022.
Presented by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz with additional support provided by the History Forum.

Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants
2021-07-06 18:00 - 19:00 | Virtual Event
Bookshop Santa Cruz presents #1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Pollan for a discussion of his new book, This Is Your Mind on Plants, a radical challenge to how we think about drugs, and an exploration into the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants—and the equally powerful taboos.

Please note: This Is Your Mind on Plants will publish on July 6th, 2021, the date of the event. Books will not be available for pickup/shipping prior to publication date. Tickets and event are produced by ExtendedSession, in partnership with Book Passage.
Of all the things humans rely on plants for—sustenance, beauty, medicine, fragrance, flavor, fiber–surely the most curious is our use of them to change consciousness: to stimulate or calm, fiddle with or completely alter, the qualities of our mental experience. Take coffee and tea: People around the world rely on caffeine to sharpen their minds. But we do not usually think of caffeine as a drug, or our daily use as an addiction, because it is legal and socially acceptable. So, then, what is a “drug”? And why, for example, is making tea from the leaves of a tea plant acceptable, but making tea from a seed head of an opium poppy a federal crime?
In This Is Your Mind on Plants, Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs–opium, caffeine, and mescaline–and throws the fundamental strangeness, and arbitrariness, of our thinking about them into sharp relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs while consuming (or, in the case of caffeine, trying not to consume) them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants. Why do we go to such great lengths to seek these shifts in consciousness, and then why do we fence that universal desire with laws and customs and fraught feelings?
In this unique blend of history, science, and memoir, as well as participatory journalism, Pollan examines and experiences these plants from several very different angles and contexts, and shines a fresh light on a subject that is all too often treated reductively–as a drug, whether licit or illicit. But that is one of the least interesting things you can say about these plants, Pollan shows, for when we take them into our bodies and let them change our minds, we are engaging with nature in one of the most profound ways we can. Based in part on an essay published almost twenty-five years ago, this groundbreaking and singular consideration of psychoactive plants, and our attraction to them through time, holds up a mirror to our fundamental human needs and aspirations, the operations of our minds, and our entanglement with the natural world.
“Building on his lysergically drenched book How to Change Your Mind (2018), Pollan looks at three plant-based drugs and the mental effects they can produce. . . . A lucid (in the sky with diamonds) look at the hows, whys, and occasional demerits of altering one’s mind.” —Kirkus (starred review)
Michael Pollan is the author of eight books, including How to Change Your Mind, Cooked, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and The Botany of Desire, all of which were New York Times bestsellers. He is also the author of the audiobook Caffeine: How Coffee and Tea Made the Modern World. A longtime contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Pollan teaches writing at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley. In 2010, Time magazine named him one of the one hundred most influential people in the world.

Jody Greene - The Great Reset: University Teaching and Learning after COVID
2021-07-12 18:30 - 20:00 | Virtual Event
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about many permanent changes in college teaching and learning. The pandemic has not only precipitated but also accelerated changes already underway at UCSC and elsewhere—from technological enhancements to trauma-informed teaching. Join Professor Jody Greene
in conversation with Stephanie Chan, UCSC alumna and Foothill College professor. Chan and Greene will discuss UCSC’s history of educational innovation and what teaching and learning might look like post-pandemic. The audience will have plenty of time to engage with Chan and Greene and ask questions.

Jody Greene is associate vice provost for teaching and learning and professor of literature at UC Santa Cruz. She is also the founding director of UCSC’s Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning. In addition to educational and organizational development in higher education, Greene’s research interests include intellectual property, human rights, and the history of the institution of literature. Her most recent writing, on teaching and learning trends in higher education, appeared in Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Stephanie Chan is assistant professor of English at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, California. She teaches courses in composition and literature and recently co-authored a curriculum with which the College will inaugurate its new Ethnic Studies program. She got her Ph.D. in literature from UCSC in 2014, specializing in Asian Pacific American literature and culture. She is proud to have served as a TA in Professor Greene’s class while doing her graduate studies. She runs ultra-marathons in her spare time.

Opening today: Santa Cruz Shakespeare 2021 Season
2021-07-24 | The Audrey Stanley Grove in Delaveaga Park, 501 Upper Park Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95065, United States
We are thrilled to announce that Santa Cruz Shakespeare will be back to live, in-person performances this Summer! Tickets are on sale now! Capacity will be limited, and safety measures will be in place to ensure a fun time for everyone.

Plays in the year’s season:
RII:
Text by William Shakespeare
Conceived and Adapted by Jessica Kubzansky.
July-August 2021
Live at The Grove (Streaming Option Available)
The story that sets the Wars of the Roses in motion, Jessica Kubzansky’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Richard II tells the story of that king’s ill-fated reign using only three actors. What is our responsibility when a bad leader rightfully occupies the throne? This exploration of divine right, capricious leadership, and bloody insurrection is packed with contemporary political relevance. A critic’s choice pick when it premiered at the Boston Court theatre in Los Angeles, Charles McNulty, critic for the LA Times, called the play a “feat of ingenious stagecraft.”
The Agitators:
By Mat Smart
July-August 2021
Live at The Grove (Streaming Option Available)
This play, by Mat Smart, tells the story of Fredrick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony. Over the forty-five volatile years that they knew one another, they were friends, allies, and adversaries. Their hopes and dreams for equality brought them to common ground and political battlefields. As agitators, they were not content to let either our nation or each other rest in complacency, and their respective fights for racial justice and gender equity continue to this day.
The Humanities Institute is a proud sponsor of the 2021 Santa Cruz Shakespeare Season.

The 40th Annual Dickens Universe featuring A Christmas Carol
2021-07-26 - 2021-07-30 | Virtual Event
The Dickens Universe is an annual gathering of scholars, teachers, and members of the general public who share a love of Dickens’s writings and his era. In 2021, the Universe will feature A Christmas Carol. Because of public health concerns and to ensure the safety of its participants, the 2021 Universe will take place online for the second consecutive year.
Perhaps the best known and most widely beloved of Dickens’s works, A Christmas Carol is the story of one man’s conversion from miserly misanthropy to a belief in the goodness of mankind and an acceptance of his place in the larger human community. Set against a background of social and economic distress during the “hungry ‘forties” in England, the Carol is at once an indictment of economic individualism and a powerful exploration of dreams, memory, and the importance of self-reflection. An early experiment in time-travel, the Carol has undergone countless adaptations and rewritings, many of which will be addressed during the week-long program of events.

Explore A Christmas Carol in small break-out groups and presentations by distinguished international faculty.
Join a community of avid Dickens readers and lovers of his work.
Learn more about the history of Christmas in Victorian England.
Discuss the relevance of A Christmas Carol through its modern reinterpretations.

Immerse yourself in the world of Charles Dickens. Learn about the author’s life and work through lectures, group discussions, and Victorian events at the 40th annual Dickens Universe.

A note from Director John Jordan: The Dickens Project made the difficult decision to change our 2021 Dickens Universe plans. Because of uncertainties about whether it will be possible to hold an in-person Universe next July, the Executive Committee decided to convert the 2021 Universe entirely into a virtual, online event. Because we still want very much to do the Iola Leroy/David Copperfield conference as a live, in-person event, we decided to postpone it one more year, until the summer of 2022. By that time, we anticipate we should be able to convene again on the Santa Cruz campus.

Violins of Hope + Intonations Discussion Panel
2021-08-07 11:00 - 12:00 | Virtual Event
The Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, America’s longest-running festival of new orchestral music, presents its second-ever virtual season over two weekends in Summer 2021: July 31-August 1, and August 7-8.
“Violins of Hope + Intonations Discussion Panel” is a dynamic live-streamed conversation offering insights about the Violins of Hope and the creation of Intonations, the culmination of an extensive SF Bay Area collaboration begun in 2020 to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. This informative precursor to the performance includes a brief history of Jewish musical life by musicologist/violinist Cookie Segelstein. Then director/producer Elena Park moderates a discussion featuring composer Jake Heggie, librettist Gene Scheer, mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke, and James Grymes, author of “Violins of Hope: Instruments from the Holocaust”. Questions welcomed from viewers via chat window.
Click here to read instructions on how to view the discussion: https://cabrillomusic.org/2021-season/how-to-view/
Support for this event was provided by the Humanities Institute, the Neufled Levin Chair in Holocaust Studies, and Temple Beth El.

Intonations: Songs from the Violins of Hope
2021-08-07 19:00 - 20:00 | Virtual Event
The Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, America’s longest-running festival of new orchestral music, presents its second-ever virtual season over two weekends in Summer 2021: July 31-August 1, and August 7-8.
Cabrillo Festival’s presentation of composer Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer’s INTONATIONS: Songs from the Violins of Hope is the culmination of an extensive SF Bay Area collaboration begun in 2020 to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. “The Violins of Hope” are a collection of violins of the Holocaust, many used in the concentration camps, which have been meticulously restored by Israeli luthiers Amnon and Avshalom Weinstein. Inspired by James Grymes’ book “Violins of Hope,” INTONATIONS tells the extraordinary tale of six of these storied instruments. Directed by Elena Park with cinematography by Frazer Bradshaw, this moving work features mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke, violinist Benjamin Beilman, the St. Lawrence String Quartet, and youth violinist Thais Chernyavski performing the full chamber version of the work. The 45-minute performance interweaves portions of the orchestral version of the music, recorded remotely by the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra.
Click here for more information on how to join and the program notes: https://cabrillomusic.org/2021-season/intonations-concert/
Support for this event was provided by the Humanities Institute, the Neufled Levin Chair in Holocaust Studies, and Temple Beth El.

Slugs and Steins: The Neurodiversity Perspective of Autism: What it is and How it Matters
2021-08-09 18:30 - 20:00 | Virtual Event
According to the neurodiversity perspective some neurocognitive differences that are taken to be disorders should instead be understood as forms of human diversity. Proponents of this perspective, as it applies to autism, claim that autism is an ineliminable aspect of an autistic person’s identity and that atypical functioning and modes of experience associated with autism are made disabling by lack of accommodation by society, not by the condition itself. This talk will critically examine conceptual, ethical, and political dimensions of the neurodiversity perspective on autism to explore its significance both within the academy and outside it.

Janette Dinishak is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Associate Director of the Center for Public Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in the philosophy of psychology and psychiatry, the 20th century Austrian philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the ethics and epistemology of other minds. Much of her research and teaching takes an interdisciplinary perspective and focuses on autism, disability, neurodiversity, and the pathologization of human differences.

A Year Ago Today: Communities Reflect on the CZU Lightening Complex Fires
2021-08-16 18:00 - 19:30 | Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History
“As a way to begin talking about the disaster, we invited people to bring in objects found in the ashes of their homes to be photographed and to tell us the stories these objects conjure. The objects salvaged from the ashes and the stories that emerge, build, one to the next, revealing details of daily life, the power of nature and the fragility of the world we have created.” —Shmuel Thaler and Nikki Silva
Join Shmuel Thaler, Nikki Silva, and collaborators from across the county as we collectively reflect on the one year anniversary of the 2020 CZU Lightning Complex Firesand imagine a path forward together. This event will highlight the stories of those affected by these fires as part of the MAH’s new exhibition Out of the Ashes, which features an ongoing film and audio archiving project by Shmuel and Nikki who began collaborating with MAH in September 2020 to document and record some of the personal stories of those who were impacted by these devastating fires.
The evening will also feature a preview screening of Contents Inventory by local filmmaker Irene Lusztig who has also been working closely with affected members of the community to document and share their stories. We hope you’ll join us at the MAH for an evening of collective storytelling and visioning our next steps as a community that continues to deal with the threat of fire and climate change. Comments and recommendations provided during this program will help shape an ongoing series of programs that will run throughout the year.
This event is presented with support from the Humanities Institute, the James Dolkas and Karl Mertz Memorial Fund at the Community Foundation of Santa Cruz County, Kitchen Sisters Productions, and California Humanities.

Excellent Sport: A Shakespeare Game Show
2021-08-22 14:00 - 15:30 | Virtual Event
Test your knowledge of Shakespeare! Our most excellent game show will be hosted by Professors Julia Lupton (UCI English) and Sean Keilen (UCSC Literature). Additional revels will be hosted by Professor Eli Simon (UCI Drama). Enjoy a festival of questions designed to enlighten and amuse, interspersed with scenes from Shakespeare and music inspired by the Bard, featuring Jason Feddy.

Read about our earlier trivia game, hosted by the UCI Libraries, here.
Free and open to all. This event is a co-production of the Shakespeare Workshop at UC, Santa Cruz and the New Swan Shakespeare Center at UC, Irvine.

Opening today - Do You Know My Name?
2021-09-03 | Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History
Inspired by the MAH publication of the same name, uncover inspiring stories about Santa Cruz County residents from the early 20th century to the present.
Get to know the overlooked, hidden, and relatable histories of the people of Santa Cruz County from the 19th century to today. Popping-up in a breakout history pod inside our Santa Cruz County History Gallery, the exhibit will also debut online in the Winter of 2020.
Pulling from the MAH publication by the same name, Do You Know My Name?, uncover the stories of ordinary people who never made the news, never rose to fame, yet overcame adversity to find fulfillment in art, invention, or community.
Connect to the everyday histories of our community as the exhibit ushers everyone in as valuable and necessary contributors to the historical record of Santa Cruz County. Your story, like those featured in the exhibit, informs our County’s history as much as the monumental, newsworthy moments.
Honoring Phil Reader, the Santa Cruz historian to whom the publication is dedicated, the exhibit will draw from the experience, materials, and expertise of local historical societies, community members, and original oral histories.

Sandra Cisneros: Martita, I Remember You / Martita, te recuerdo
2021-09-08 19:00 - 20:30 | Virtual Event
TICKETED VIRTUAL EVENT: Bookshop Santa Cruz is delighted to welcome acclaimed and bestselling author Sandra Cisneros for a ticketed online event celebrating her new book, Martita, I Remember You/Martita, te recuerdo. Cisneros will be in conversation with Rubén Martínez. This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

A long-forgotten letter sets off a charged encounter with the past in this poignant and gorgeously told tale masterfully told by Sandra Cisneros, the celebrated bestselling author of The House on Mango Street, in a beautiful dual-language edition. Read more about the book, author, and event here.
All tickets include entry to the virtual event plus a paperback copy of the book. Shipping or store pickup options are available.
“Cisneros’s language and rhythm of her prose reverberate with Corina’s longing for her youth and unfulfilled promise. The author’s fans will treasure this.” —Publishers Weekly

Envisioning Careers With A Humanities PhD: A UC Humanities Virtual Retreat
2021-09-15 - 2021-09-17 | Virtual Event
Envisioning Careers With A Humanities PhD: A UC Humanities Virtual Retreat
September 15 – 17, 2021 | 9 AM – 12 PM (PDT)

Join us for a career exploration retreat for Humanities PhD students and faculty advisors. The UC Humanities Network event will feature sessions on exploring careers in and beyond the academy, reflecting on your skills, and preparing for interviews.
Registration: bit.ly/UCCareerFutures
Details: bit.ly/UCCFSchedule
Main Presenters:
Derek Attig, PhD (U of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
Annie Maxfield, MS (Director of Graduate Career & Professional Development, University of Texas at Austin)
Katina Rogers, PhD (University of Colorado, Boulder).

This virtual retreat is sponsored by the UCI Humanities Center.

Frequency: A Festival of Light, Sound & Digital Culture
2021-09-16 - 2021-09-19 | Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History
Frequency is a new biennial festival of light, sound, and digital culture hosted in and around the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. This 4-night downtown takeover activates the museum, neighboring gardens and plazas with installations of site-responsive work, live performances, interactive technologies, and immersive experiences from local and international artists.
Frequency is a mostly free event. While all outdoor installations can be visited at no cost, there is a small entrance fee to the MAH, where some indoor artworks and programs are hosted. This event is co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute.

Ruth Ozeki: The Book of Form and Emptiness
2021-09-29 18:00 - 19:00 | Virtual Event
TICKETED VIRTUAL EVENT: Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes bestselling author and staff favorite Ruth Ozeki for an online discussion of The Book of Form and Emptiness, her brilliantly inventive novel about loss, growing up, and our relationship with things. Ozeki will be in conversation with writer Katie Kitamura. Cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz and Vroman’s Bookstore.
“This compassionate novel of life, love and loss glows in the dark. Its strange, beautiful pages turn themselves. If you’ve lost your way with fiction over the last year or two, let The Book of Form and Emptiness light your way home.” —David Mitchell, Booker Prize-finalist author of Cloud Atlas and Utopia Avenue

One year after the death of his beloved musician father, thirteen-year-old Benny Oh begins to hear voices. The voices belong to the things in his house—a sneaker, a broken Christmas ornament, a piece of wilted lettuce. Although Benny doesn’t understand what these things are saying, he can sense their emotional tone; some are pleasant, a gentle hum or coo, but others are snide, angry and full of pain. When his mother, Annabelle, develops a hoarding problem, the voices grow more clamorous.
At first, Benny tries to ignore them, but soon the voices follow him outside the house, onto the street and at school, driving him at last to seek refuge in the silence of a large public library, where objects are well-behaved and know to speak in whispers. There, Benny discovers a strange new world. He falls in love with a mesmerizing street artist with a smug pet ferret, who uses the library as her performance space. He meets a homeless philosopher-poet, who encourages him to ask important questions and find his own voice amongst the many.
And he meets his very own Book—a talking thing—who narrates Benny’s life and teaches him to listen to the things that truly matter.
With its blend of sympathetic characters, riveting plot, and vibrant engagement with everything from jazz, to climate change, to our attachment to material possessions, The Book of Form and Emptiness is classic Ruth Ozeki—bold, wise, poignant, playful, humane and heartbreaking.
“Once again, Ozeki has created a masterpiece. Her generous heart, remarkable imagination, and brilliant mind light up every page.” —Karen Joy Fowler
Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest. She is the award-winning author of three novels, My Year of Meats, All Over Creation, and A Tale for the Time Being, which was a finalist for the 2013 Booker Prize. Her nonfiction work includes a memoir, The Face: A Time Code, and the documentary film, Halving the Bones. She is affiliated with the Everyday Zen Foundation and teaches creative writing at Smith College, where she is the Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities.
Katie Kitamura‘s most recent novel, A Separation, was a finalist for the Premio von Rezzori and a New York Times Notable Book. It was named a best book of the year by over a dozen publications, translated into 16 languages, and is being adapted for film. Her two previous novels, Gone To The Forest and The Longshot, were both finalists for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. A recipient of fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and Santa Maddalena, Katie has written for publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, Granta, BOMB, Triple Canopy, and Frieze. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.

Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads
2021-10-05 19:00 - 20:30 | Virtual Event
TICKETED VIRTUAL EVENT: Bookshop Santa Cruz is thrilled to host local and award-winning author Jonathan Franzen for the launch event of his new book, Crossroads, which tells the story of a Midwestern family across three generations, mirroring the preoccupations and dilemmas of the United States from the Vietnam War to the 2020s. This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

Click here for tickets to this special virtual event, which include a signed copy of Crossroads.
Bookshop Santa Cruz is exclusively able to offer personalized, autographed copies of Crossroads. Details available with ticket purchase.
A tour de force of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense, its action largely unfolding on a single winter day, Crossroads is the story of a Midwestern family at a pivotal moment of moral crisis. Jonathan Franzen’s gift for melding the small picture and the big picture has never been more dazzlingly evident.
It’s December 23, 1971, and heavy weather is forecast for Chicago. Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless—unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem’s sister, Becky, long the social queen of her high-school class, has sharply veered into the counterculture, while their brilliant younger brother Perry, who’s been selling drugs to seventh graders, has resolved to be a better person. Each of the Hildebrandts seeks a freedom that each of the others threatens to complicate.
Jonathan Franzen’s novels are celebrated for their unforgettably vivid characters and for their keen-eyed take on contemporary America. Now, in Crossroads, Franzen ventures back into the past and explores the history of two generations. With characteristic humor and complexity, and with even greater warmth, he conjures a world that resonates powerfully with our own.
Jonathan Franzen is the author of Purity, The Corrections, and Freedom, among other novels, and works of nonfiction including Farther Away and The Kraus Project, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the German Akademie der Künste, and the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and lives in Santa Cruz, California.

PhD+ Workshop – Using Twitter Professionally
2021-10-06 11:30 - 13:00 | Graduate Student Commons
Learn how to promote your research and create a virtual community of Tweeple. This workshop will be led by Kayla Isenberg, (Senior Director of Digital Engagement, University Relations).
The Division of Graduate Studies’ professional communication workshop on “Using Twitter Professionally” is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2021-2022 PhD+ series. Workshops presented by the Division of Graduate Studies are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.

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

PhD+ Workshop – Developing A Digital Reputation
2021-10-07 11:40 - 13:10 | Graduate Student Commons
Learn tips on how to distinguish yourself from the crowd and create a lasting impression in an evolving digital communications landscape. This workshop will be led by Andrea Limas (Assistant Director of Communications, Social Sciences Division).
The Division of Graduate Studies’ professional communication workshop on “Developing a Digital Reputation” is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2021-2022 PhD+ series. Workshops presented by the Division of Graduate Studies are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.

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

Living Writers: Giannina Braschi
2021-10-07 17:20 - 18:55 | Virtual Event
Giannina Braschi was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She was a fashion model, singer, and tennis champion in her teen years. She studied literature in Madrid, Rome, London, and Rouen before settling in New York City. With a Ph.D. in Hispanic Literatures from State University of New York, Stony Brook, she taught at Rutgers University, City University of New York, and Colgate University. She has published on Cervantes, Garcilaso, Machado, Lorca, and Bécquer. A Literature Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, Braschi has won awards/grants from Ford Foundation, Danforth Scholarship, New York Foundation for the Arts, Reed Foundation, InterAmericas, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, Rutgers, and PEN. PEN has called Braschi “one of the most revolutionary voices” in Latin American Literature today. Her work is a hybrid of poetry, fiction, theater, and political philosophy. Braschi has published numerous works in Spanish, Spanglish, and English, including El imperio de los sueños (Anthropos, 1988), Yo-Yo Boing! (Latin American Literary Review Press, 1998) and United States of Banana (AmazonCrossing, 2011). Her scholarly publications include a book on Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and essays on Cervantes, Garcilaso, Machado, and García Lorca. Her collected poems were translated into English by Tess O’Dwyer as Empire of Dreams (Yale University Press, 1994). Her life’s work is the subject of Poets, Philosophers, Lovers: on the Writings of Giannina Braschi (Latinx and Latin American Profiles, Pittsburgh, 2020), a collection of essays edited by Frederick Luis Aldama and Tess O’Dwyer with a foreword by Ilan Stavans. The United States Library of Congress calls her work “cutting-edge, influential and even revolutionary.” In recent years, her avant-garde writings have appeared in far-ranging cultural spaces such as television comedy, chamber music, art and design, theater, and ecologic urbanism.

The World Beyond Us: A Living Writers Series – Taking advantage of our (hopefully) last virtual Living Writers this Fall, 2021, this series will be centered on writers working and living outside the United States, writers who look beyond the U.S. in their work, and writers who work in languages other than English. Due to the prohibitive cost of travel and lodging, many of these writers would have been difficult if not impossible to bring in person. Some writers will read with their translators, extending the conversation to the art of translation as well. Two of these translators are Literature Department professors and one a Literature Department graduate student, highlighting the creative translation work being done in our own department. The U.S. publishes very little work in translation, just 3% of the books published in the U.S. are translations, compared to other countries (50% of Italy’s books are translations, for example). Thus, this series will expose students (as well as faculty and community members) to exciting writers, writing and translations they very likely are not familiar with.
This series will also include one night of California speculative writers, Claire Vaye Watkins and Cathy Thomas, who will read and talk about California Futures. This California Futures evening will be sponsored by The Humanities Institute Research Cluster Speculatively Scientific Fictions of the Future.

PhD+ Workshop – Designing a Professional LinkedIn Profile, Using LinkedIn to Network & Job Search Q&A
2021-10-12 11:40 - 13:10 | Graduate Student Commons
Participants will view an instructional video by former Career Center Career Coach Christina Hall prior to class. Class time will consist of Q&A and workshopping LinkedIn profiles, using LinkedIn tools. This workshop will be led by Leezel Ramos (Associate Director of Career Engagement, Career Success).
The Division of Graduate Studies’ professional communication workshop on “Designing a Professional LinkedIn Profile, Using LinkedIn to Network & Job Search Q&A” is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2021-2022 PhD+ series. Workshops presented by the Division of Graduate Studies are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.

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

Feminism in Mexico: Intergenerational and Transnational
2021-10-12 12:00 - 14:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
This panel discussion will be led by Distinguished Professor Eli Bartra, Professor of Feminist Studies at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco, Mexico City. Professor Bartra is the author of “Feminism and Folk Art” (2018) and “Women in Mexican Folk Art” (2011), and is a leading activist on feminist issues in Mexico City. Also on the panel is Anna Lee Mraz Bartra, an independent scholar from Mexico who holds a Ph.D. in Political and Social Sciences from the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico, with a focus on women in Mexico and cross cultural social activism. Introductory remarks will be provided by Professor Norma Klahn, Professor of Literature Emerita, UCSC.

This event is being co-sponsored by the UC Santa Cruz Feminist Studies Department, Latin American and Latino Studies Department, History Department, The Humanities Institute, and the Humanities Division.
***UC Santa Cruz COVID-19 protocols state that all on-site indoor events with expected attendance of 25 or more attendees will require proof of vaccination or a recent negative COVID-19 test result (taken within 72 hours of the start of the event) for admittance.
These entrance requirements can be met in the following ways:
1) Any attendee can show their CDC Vaccine Card (phone image acceptable) or digital vaccine record from the State of California. International attendees may show their translated vaccine record.
OR
2) Any attendee can show a negative COVID-19 test result from the last 72 hours (must be a lab PCR test; home tests/antigen tests are not valid).
***Prior to arriving for this event, all visitors must complete a symptom check survey, which can be accessed here: https://ucsantacruz.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_24vMSiDcxZp6VRX
Questions regarding this event can be directed to Pedro Castillo: pcastle@ucsc.edu

History and Modern Media - book talk with John Mraz
2021-10-12 16:00 - 18:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
In this lecture, Professor John Mraz, Research Professor, Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, Universidad Autonoma de Puebla, Mexico on “History and Modern Media”, will discuss his most recent book published in 2021 by Vanderbilt University Press. John is a distinguished scholar on Mexican photo history and visual culture in Mexico. He is also the author of “Photographing the Mexican Revolution” (2012) and “Looking for Mexico: Modern Visual Culture and National Identity” (2009). Moreover, John is a UCSC alum and obtained his Ph.D from the Department of History at UCSC in the mid-1980’s. Introductory remarks will be provided by Professor Pedro Castillo, Professor of History Emeritus, UCSC.

This event is being co-sponsored by the UC Santa Cruz Feminist Studies Department, Latin American and Latino Studies Department, History Department, The Humanities Institute, and the Humanities Division.
***UC Santa Cruz COVID-19 protocols state that all on-site indoor events with expected attendance of 25 or more attendees will require proof of vaccination or a recent negative COVID-19 test result (taken within 72 hours of the start of the event) for admittance.
These entrance requirements can be met in the following ways:
1) Any attendee can show their CDC Vaccine Card (phone image acceptable) or digital vaccine record from the State of California. International attendees may show their translated vaccine record.
OR
2) Any attendee can show a negative COVID-19 test result from the last 72 hours (must be a lab PCR test; home tests/antigen tests are not valid).
***Prior to arriving for this event, all visitors must complete a symptom check survey, which can be accessed here: https://ucsantacruz.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_24vMSiDcxZp6VRX
Questions regarding this event can be directed to Pedro Castillo: pcastle@ucsc.edu

Thomas Serres - Reflections on Abject Victimhood and the Impossibility of Post-Islamism: The trajectory of the Rachad Movement
2021-10-13 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual and In Person
This presentation looks at the trajectory of former Algerian Islamists belonging to the opposition movement Rachad, who denounce state exactions perpetrated during the civil war of the 1990s. In so doing, the talk focuses on the notion of “abject victimhood,” to think about the legal and political challenges faced by actors once associated with an Islamist insurgency. Moreover, it shows how the production of abjection and that of victimhood are both entangled and conflicting, as the former serves to restore state power, while the latter supports revolutionary claims. This discussion also questions the possibility of a genuine form of “post-Islamism” in a context characterized by the impunity of state actors and the impossibility for those associated with political Islam to escape the vilifying discourses associated with counter-terrorism.

Thomas Serres is an Assistant Professor in the Politics department at UCSC. His research spans the field of Middle Eastern studies, critical security studies and comparative politics, and combines an ethnographic approach with a conceptual apparatus inspired by critical theory. He is particularly interested in the effects of protracted and entangled crises (popular uprisings, “war on terror,” refugee crisis, neoliberalization) in North Africa and beyond. His first book, entitled The Suspended Disaster: Governance by Catastrophization in Bouteflika’s Algeria, studies Algerian politics as a system of governance based on the management of a seemingly never-ending crisis and the systematic endangerment of the political order. An updated and expanded version of this book is currently under contract with Columbia University Press, after the French version was published with Karthala in 2019. Thomas has also published articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Middle East Critique, Interdisciplinary Political Studies and L’Année du Maghreb. Lastly, he has also co-edited a volume entitled North Africa and the Making of Europe: Governance, Institutions, Culture, which was published by Bloomsbury Academic Publishing in 2018.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
For Fall 2021, the colloquium will take a hybrid format. Attendees have the option to attend in person in Humanities 210 or to watch the presentation on zoom. Those who attend in person must adhere to the campus mask mandate for all indoor activities and must complete UCSC’s symptom-check form before coming to campus. In person attendees are asked to please arrive at 12pm so that the event coordinators can verify the symptom check has been completed. To attend remotely via zoom, please RSVP in advance, and you will receive a zoom link on the morning of the colloquium. In most cases, speakers will appear remotely so that they will not have to present wearing a mask. To RSVP for the full Fall colloquium series, please use this form. If you have any questions about the colloquium, please contact Piper Milton (pmilton@ucsc.edu).
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

PhD+ Workshop – Public Speaking
2021-10-14 11:40 - 13:10 | Graduate Student Commons
Learn how to craft your talk, warm up, deal with nerves, and engage your audience. This workshop will be led by Bri McWhorter (Activate to Captivate, Founder/CEO).
The Division of Graduate Studies’ professional communication workshop on “Public Speaking” is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2021-2022 PhD+ series. Workshops presented by the Division of Graduate Studies are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.

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

Living Writers: Lesley Nneka Arimah
2021-10-14 17:20 - 18:55 | Virtual Event
Lesley Nneka Arimah was born in the UK and grew up in Nigeria and wherever else her father was stationed for work. Her stories have been honored with a National Magazine Award, a Commonwealth Short Story Prize and an O. Henry Award. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, GRANTA and has received support from The Elizabeth George Foundation and MacDowell. She was selected for the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 and her debut collection WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A MAN FALLS FROM THE SKY won the 2017 Kirkus Prize, the 2017 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and was selected for the New York Times/PBS book club among other honors. Arimah is a 2019 United States Artists Fellow in Writing. She lives in Las Vegas and is working on a novel about you.

The World Beyond Us: A Living Writers Series – Taking advantage of our (hopefully) last virtual Living Writers this Fall, 2021, this series will be centered on writers working and living outside the United States, writers who look beyond the U.S. in their work, and writers who work in languages other than English. Due to the prohibitive cost of travel and lodging, many of these writers would have been difficult if not impossible to bring in person. Some writers will read with their translators, extending the conversation to the art of translation as well. Two of these translators are Literature Department professors and one a Literature Department graduate student, highlighting the creative translation work being done in our own department. The U.S. publishes very little work in translation, just 3% of the books published in the U.S. are translations, compared to other countries (50% of Italy’s books are translations, for example). Thus, this series will expose students (as well as faculty and community members) to exciting writers, writing and translations they very likely are not familiar with.
This series will also include one night of California speculative writers, Claire Vaye Watkins and Cathy Thomas, who will read and talk about California Futures. This California Futures evening will be sponsored by The Humanities Institute Research Cluster Speculatively Scientific Fictions of the Future.

Jess Walter - The Cold Millions
2021-10-14 19:00 | Virtual Event
VIRTUAL EVENT: Award-winning author Jess Walter will join us online for a discussion of his bestselling novel The Cold Millions (available in paperback on September 28th). Walter will be in conversation with acclaimed local writer Karen Joy Fowler. Cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UCSC.
“The Cold Millions is a literary unicorn: a book about socio-economic disparity that’s also a page-turner, a postmodern experiment that reads like a potboiler, and a beautiful, lyric hymn to the power of social unrest in American history. It’s funny and harrowing, sweet and violent, innocent and experienced; it walks a dozen tightropes. Jess Walter is a national treasure.” —Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See

The paperback edition of The Cold Millions will be published on September 28th and can be ordered here.
The Dolans live by their wits, jumping freight trains and lining up for day work at crooked job agencies. While sixteen-year-old Rye yearns for a steady job and a home, his older brother, Gig, dreams of a better world, fighting alongside other union men for fair pay and decent treatment. Enter Ursula the Great, a vaudeville singer who performs with a live cougar and introduces the brothers to a far more dangerous creature: a mining magnate determined to keep his wealth and his hold on Ursula.
Dubious of Gig’s idealism, Rye finds himself drawn to a fearless nineteen-year-old activist and feminist named Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. But a storm is coming, threatening to overwhelm them all, and Rye will be forced to decide where he stands. Is it enough to win the occasional battle, even if you cannot win the war?
An intimate story of brotherhood, love, sacrifice, and betrayal set against the panoramic backdrop of an early twentieth-century America, The Cold Millions offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of a nation grappling with the chasm between rich and poor, between harsh realities and simple dreams.
Jess Walter is the author of the number one New York Times bestseller Beautiful Ruins, the national bestseller The Financial Lives of the Poets, the National Book Award finalist The Zero, the Edgar Award–winning Citizen Vince, Land of the Blind, the New York Times Notable Book Over Tumbled Graves, and the story collection We Live in Water. He lives in Spokane, Washington, with his family.
Karen Joy Fowler is the author of three short story collections and six novels including We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award. The Jane Austen Book Club spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list and was a New York Times Notable Book. Fowler’s short story collection, Black Glass, won the World Fantasy Award in 1999, and her collection What I Didn’t See won the World Fantasy Award in 2011. Fowler and her husband, who have two grown children and seven grandchildren, live in Santa Cruz, California.

Plenary of the Media and Society Lecture Series at Kresge College with Tongo Eisen-Martin
2021-10-14 19:00 - 20:00 | Virtual Event
Kresge College presents the keynote Plenary of the Media and Society lecture series, featuring San Francisco Poet Laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin, in conversation with Kresge faculty, including Novelist-Poet Daniel Pearce (UCSC Writing Program) and Associate Professor Anjuli Verma (Politics / Legal Studies). They will discuss language and media in the history of slavery and policing, and will including readings of Eisen-Martin’s newest works.
This opening event for Kresge’s lecture series is also a key feature of Kresge’s Core course, Power and Representation, and will offer you a glimpse into what Kresge freshman learn and discuss as they embark on a journey of critical thinking in their liberal arts education. Co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute.

American Book Award winning Tongo Eisen-Martin (MA, Columbia University; Poet Laureate of San Francisco) combines incisive poetic vision with practical activism, confronting problems of justice in sound, word, and dialogue. Eisen-Martin’s poetry and education work to build conscientious and intellectual energy for prison-abolition and police-defunding movements by exposing criminal justice inequity, mass incarceration, and police atrocities, including the extrajudicial killing of Black people. His someone’s dead already (Bootstrap Press, 2015) was nominated for a California Book Award; and Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights, 2017) earned him accolades, including a shortlisting for the 2018 Griffin International Poetry Prize.
From the Poetry Foundation: Griffin Prize judges cited Eisen-Martin’s as work that “moves between trenchant political critique and dreamlike association, demonstrating how, in the right hands, one mode might energize the other—keeping alternative orders of meaning alive in the face of radical injustice … His poems are places where discourses and vernaculars collide and recombine into new configurations capable of expressing outrage and sorrow and love.”

Sharika Thiranagama - In Memoriam: Stories of Dissent in Sri Lanka
2021-10-15 10:00 - 12:00 | Virtual Event
Sharika Thiranagama is Associate Professor in Anthropology and President of the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies. Her research has focused on various aspects of the Sri Lankan civil war. Primarily, she has conducted research with two different ethnic groups, Sri Lankan Tamils and Sri Lankan Muslims. Her research explores changing forms of ethnicisation, the effects of protracted civil war on ideas of home in the midst of profound displacement and the transformations in and relationships between the political and the familial in the midst of political repression and militarization. Since 2014, Sharika Thiranagama has also carried out new work in Kerala, South India centering on Dalit agricultural communities in Kerala, South India. She examines how communist led political mobilization both transformed every day and political mobilization as well as reconfiguring older caste identities, re-entrenching caste inequities into new kinds of private neighborhood life.

Presented by THI’s Center for South Asian Studies.

PhD+ Workshop – Career Diversity and Humanities Without Walls
2021-10-15 11:00 - 12:00 | Virtual Event
What does career diversity look like for a humanities PhD? How do we empower ourselves now to make values-driven choices about careers? What communities and resources are out there to help students and faculty think about these questions? In this workshop, we will discuss career diversity as an approach that can transform your thinking about yourself and others as well as your research and project planning in the present and the future. We will consider career diversity very broadly, from non-profit and foundation work to public humanities to the private sector.
The workshop is also an invitation to learn about the Humanities Without Walls (HWW) organization, its programming, and its annual summer workshop that offers humanities PhD students unparalleled exposure to career diversity possibilities as well as a stipend to fund selected students’ participation. The application to this summer’s HWW workshop, which is scheduled to be held in person at the University of Michigan, is now open. More information about the call for applications is available on THI’s website.
The panel will be led by UC Santa Cruz and Marquette University Humanities Without Walls Fellows:
Margaret (Maggie) Nettesheim-Hoffmann is the Associate Director of Career Diversity for the Humanities Without Walls consortium based at the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and is based at Marquette University. As a part of her work for the consortium, she is responsible for guiding HWW’s career diversity programming dedicated to transforming doctoral education for consortium partner schools and beyond. She is a co-PI on a $1.3M grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to Marquette University in support of HWW’s career diversity work and is completing a PhD in American History in the history of American philanthropy, capitalism, and progressive era political discourses critical of private wealth giving to public institutions. She was a HWW Predoctoral Career Diversity Fellow in 2017.

Morgan Gates is a PhD student in the Literature Department, Humanities Without Walls alum, and THI Public Fellow. As a Public Fellow, she has explored working with non-profits as a dramaturg, museum curator and program manager, archivist, and is currently a member of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History Publications Committee at work on an exciting new history publication for children. HWW has helped her imagine even more career possibilities and helped her learn to merge these experiences with her field research.

Aaron Aruck is a PhD Candidate in the History Department at UC Santa Cruz, where he studies how sexuality broadly defined became a critical organizing principle for public health programs, immigration enforcement, and border making at the midcentury US-Mexico border. He was also a THI Public Fellow at the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco and remains interested in public history. A HWW fellow in 2017, Aaron enjoyed learning how his research and skills could be employed in various jobs in the non-profit and legal worlds.

This workshop is co-presented by The Humanities Institute (THI) at UC Santa Cruz and Humanities Without Walls national consortium based at the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and is open to University of California faculty, staff, and students.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the sixth year of The Humanities Institute’s PhD+ Workshops. We meet monthly to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grants/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

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PhD+ Workshop – Slide Presentation Design
2021-10-19 11:40 - 13:10 | Graduate Student Commons
Students will view an instructional video by Sonya prior to class. Students will practice giving 3-minute-maximum presentations with slides about their graduate work. This workshop will be led by Sonya Newlyn (Professional Development Coordinator, Division of Graduate Studies).
The Division of Graduate Studies’ professional communication workshop on “Slide Presentation Design” is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2021-2022 PhD+ series. Workshops presented by the Division of Graduate Studies are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.

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

"By the Light of Burning Dreams: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution" with David Talbot and Margaret Talbot
2021-10-19 17:30 - 19:00 | Virtual Event
Salon.com founder and former editor-in-chief David Talbot and his sister Margaret, a longtime staff writer at the New Yorker, together explore the potential landscape of the 1960s and 1970s. Based on exclusive interviews, original documents, and archival research, By the Light of Burning Dreams explores critical moments in the lives of a diverse cast of iconoclastic leaders of the 20th-century radical movement.
Join us for our conversation moderated by Nikki Silva as she explores with Margaret and David Talbot and our panelists Madonna Thunder Hawk, Heather Booth, and Bill Zimmerman, the epiphanies that galvanized these modern revolutionaries and created unexpected connections and alliances between individual movements and across race, class, and gender divides.

Authors

David Talbot (Stevenson, ’73) is a journalist, author, activist, and independent historian.
Margaret Talbot is an essayist, non-fiction writer, and staff writer at The New Yorker.

Panel

Madonna Thunder Hawk is an activist and a veteran of every modern Native occupation from Alcatraz, to Wounded Knee in 1973, and more recently the NODAPL protest at Standing Rock.
Dolores Huerta is a co-founder of the United Farm Workers and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom; she has played a major role in the civil rights movement for over 50 years.
Bill Zimmerman is a political consultant and author, who managed Tom Hayden’s campaign for the U.S. Senate in the 1976 California primary.
Heather Booth is a civil rights activist, feminist, and political strategist and has been heavily involved in progressive causes.

Moderator

Nikki Silva (Porter, ’73) is co-executive producer of the public radio team, The Kitchen Sisters, who are creators of hundreds of stories for NPR and public broadcast. Her current NPR and podcast series is the Keepers.

Questions? Contact the UC Santa Cruz Special Events Office at specialevents@ucsc.edu.

Douglas Abrams - The Book of Hope
2021-10-19 18:00 - 19:30 | Virtual Event
VIRTUAL EVENT: Local author Douglas Abrams (The Book of Joy) will join Bookshop Santa Cruz for an online discussion of The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times, his wonderful new collaboration with environmentalist Jane Goodall. This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
“Vibrant with wry humor, scientific fact, grassroots advances, compassion, and spiritual depth, this compelling and enlightening dialogue of hope amplifies Goodall’s mantra: ‘Together we can. Together we will.” —Booklist, starred review.

The Book of Hope will be published on October 19th and may be preordered below.
Looking at the headlines—the worsening climate crisis, a global pandemic, loss of biodiversity, political upheaval— it can be hard to feel optimistic. And yet hope has never been more desperately needed.
In this urgent book, Jane Goodall, the world’s most famous living naturalist, and Douglas Abrams, the internationally bestselling co-author of The Book of Joy, explore through intimate and thought-provoking dialogue one of the most sought after and least understood elements of human nature: hope. In The Book of Hope, Jane focuses on her “Four Reasons for Hope”: The Amazing Human Intellect, The Resilience of Nature, The Power of Young People, and The Indomitable Human Spirit.
Drawing on decades of work that has helped expand our understanding of what it means to be human and what we all need to do to help build a better world, The Book of Hope touches on vital questions, including: How do we stay hopeful when everything seems hopeless? How do we cultivate hope in our children? What is the relationship between hope and action? Filled with moving and inspirational stories and photographs from Jane’s remarkable career, The Book of Hope is a deeply personal conversation with one of the most beloved figures in the world today.
While discussing the experiences that shaped her discoveries and beliefs, Jane tells the story of how she became a messenger of hope, from living through World War II to her years in Gombe to realizing she had to leave the forest to travel the world in her role as an advocate for environmental justice. And for the first time, she shares her profound revelations about her next, and perhaps final, adventure.
The second book in the Global Icons Series—which launched with the instant classic The Book of Joy with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu—The Book of Hope is a rare and intimate look not only at the nature of hope but also into the heart and mind of a woman who revolutionized how we view the world around us and has spent a lifetime fighting for our future.
There is still hope, and this book will help guide us to it.
Douglas Abrams is the New York Times bestselling co-author of The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the first book in the Global Icons Series. Douglas is also the founder and president of Idea Architects, a literary agency and media development company helping visionaries to create a wiser, healthier, and more just world. He lives in Santa Cruz, California.

Radhika Natarajan - Post-Imperial Contractions: Asian Migration and Marriage in Deindustrializing Britain
2021-10-20 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual and In Person
The talk explores how Asian women became unassimilable in social work and public discourse in 1970s Britain. In the context of decolonization and deindustrialization, the Pakistani woman who worked for wages posed a threat to the stability of the white male working class. To keep the Pakistani woman at home, social workers created new forms of intervention into marriages, offered English language classes to mothers at day care centers, and extended the hand of friendship. From this perspective, multiculturalist policies created Asian women as non-workers who needed extensive social welfare intervention. In doing so, these policies reproduced the working class as male and white and the Asian woman as trapped by tradition.

Radhika Natarajan is assistant professor of history and humanities at Reed College in Portland, OR. Her research focuses on the remaking of imperial strategies of managing difference during decolonization. Her article “Performing Multiculturalism: the Commonwealth Arts Festival of 1965” appeared in the Journal of British Studies, and she has also written essays on the transcolonial routes of community development and British social work intervention into Asian marriages. She is writing a book, Empire and the Origins of Multiculturalism, which examines encounters between British social work and migrants from the decolonizing empire during the era of the welfare state.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
For Fall 2021, the colloquium will take a hybrid format. Attendees have the option to attend in person in Humanities 210 or to watch the presentation on zoom. Those who attend in person must adhere to the campus mask mandate for all indoor activities and must complete UCSC’s symptom-check form before coming to campus. In person attendees are asked to please arrive at 12pm so that the event coordinators can verify the symptom check has been completed. To attend remotely via zoom, please RSVP in advance, and you will receive a zoom link on the morning of the colloquium. In most cases, speakers will appear remotely so that they will not have to present wearing a mask. To RSVP for the full Fall colloquium series, please use this form. If you have any questions about the colloquium, please contact Piper Milton (pmilton@ucsc.edu).
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Living Writers: Nouri al-Jarrah with translator Camilo Gómez-Rivas and Omar Pimienta with translator José Antonio Villarán
2021-10-21 17:20 - 18:55 | Virtual Event
Nouri al-Jarrah is a Syrian poet and influential poetic voice on the Arab literary scene. He has lived in exile and been publishing his poetry for nearly 40 years. His poetry draws on diverse cultural sources, and is marked by a special focus on mythology, folk tales and legends. A Boat to Lesbos and Other Poems (Banipal Books, 2018), is Nouri Al-Jarrah’s first collection in English translation. This powerful epic poem was written while thousands of Syrian refugees were enduring frightening journeys across the Mediterranean before arriving on the small island, and set out like a Greek tragedy, also has editions in French, Italian, Turkish, Spanish, Persian, and forthcoming in Greek – a truly international response to the torment of the Syrian people during these last few years.
Camilo Gómez-Rivas and Allison Blecker are the translators of Nouri al-Jarrah’s A Boat to Lesbos and Other Poems (Banipal Books, 2018). Gómez-Rivas is an Associate Professor of Mediterranean Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He specializes in the cultures, history, and literatures of the medieval and early modern western Mediterranean. His book, Law and the Islamization of Morocco under the Almoravids: the Fatwās of Ibn Rushd al-Jadd to the Far Maghrib, analyzes a group of legal consultative texts between Cordoba and the Far Maghrib (what is today Morocco) and argues that legal institutions developed in the latter in response to the social needs of growing urban spaces and the administrative needs of the first Berber-Islamic empire. He is currently working on a second book-length project on the social and cultural history of the reception of displaced populations in the medieval and early modern western Mediterranean: a history of the refugees of the “reconquista.” In addition to translating modern Arabic literature, he has also written on modern topics including legal reform in Morocco and Egypt. He received his PhD in Medieval Studies from Yale in 2009. After a two-year dissertation writing fellowship at Willamette University in, Salem, Oregon, he spent five years teaching in the Department of Arab and Islamic Civilizations at the American University in Cairo.
Omar Pimienta was born in Tijuana in 1978 and lives and works between San Diego and Tijuana. Pimienta has a Ph.D in Literature and an MFA from the University of California-San Diego as well as a B.A. in Latin American Studies, San Diego State University. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally at spaces such as the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; 5th Transborder Biennial with El Paso Museum of Art; MOCA Tucson. Arizona; Oceanside Museum of Art.; A Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA exhibit; Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach and the Paul Getty Museum Los Angeles, CA. His books of poetry include, Album of Fences (Cardboard House Press, 2018), Inspección secudaria (Atrasalante Poesía, 2017), El Álbum de las Rejas (Ediciones Liliputienses, 2016), Escribo desde aquí (Pre-Textos, 2010), La Libertad: ciudad de paso. (CECUT/ CONACULTA, 2006; New edition, Aullido libros, Huelva, España, 2008), and Primera Persona: Ella. (Ediciones de la Esquina /Anortecer, 2004; New Edition, Littera libros, Cáceres, España. 2009).
José Antonio Villarán is the translator of Omar Pimienta’s Album of Fences (Cardboard House Press, 2018). He has bilingual fluency (English and Spanish) as a writer, scholar, translator and instructor. He is the author of two books of poetry: la distancia es siempre la misma (2006) & el cerrajero (2012). He is the creator of the AMLT project (http://amlt-elcomienzo.blogspot.pe), an exploration of hypertext literature and collective authorship. His third book, titled open pit, is forthcoming from AUB in 2021. Areas of focus include: Creative Writing, Poetry/Poetics, Cross-Genre Literature, Literary Translation, US-Latinx Literature, Critical University Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. He holds an MFA in Writing from UCSD and a PhD in Literature with a Creative/Critical Writing Concentration from UCSC.

The World Beyond Us: A Living Writers Series – Taking advantage of our (hopefully) last virtual Living Writers this Fall, 2021, this series will be centered on writers working and living outside the United States, writers who look beyond the U.S. in their work, and writers who work in languages other than English. Due to the prohibitive cost of travel and lodging, many of these writers would have been difficult if not impossible to bring in person. Some writers will read with their translators, extending the conversation to the art of translation as well. Two of these translators are Literature Department professors and one a Literature Department graduate student, highlighting the creative translation work being done in our own department. The U.S. publishes very little work in translation, just 3% of the books published in the U.S. are translations, compared to other countries (50% of Italy’s books are translations, for example). Thus, this series will expose students (as well as faculty and community members) to exciting writers, writing and translations they very likely are not familiar with.
This series will also include one night of California speculative writers, Claire Vaye Watkins and Cathy Thomas, who will read and talk about California Futures. This California Futures evening will be sponsored by The Humanities Institute Research Cluster Speculatively Scientific Fictions of the Future.

Linguistics Colloquia: Mark Amengual - Phonetic interactions in multilingual speech
2021-10-22 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
About eight times each year, the Linguistics department hosts colloquia by distinguished faculty from around the world.
For full speaker and event information, please visit: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/colloquia/index.html

PhD+ Workshop – Website Design, WordPress
2021-10-26 11:40 - 13:10 | Graduate Student Commons
Learn how to design a better website and how to use WordPress. Prior to October 26, if you don’t already have a personal professional website, create one. UCSC provides free access to WordPress (with several design templates) to faculty, postdoctoral scholars, and graduate students. This workshop will be led by Jason Chafin (Senior Web Developer, University Relations).
The Division of Graduate Studies’ professional communication workshop on “Website Design, WordPress” is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2021-2022 PhD+ series. Workshops presented by the Division of Graduate Studies are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.

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

Naya Jones + Jennifer Steverson — The Art of Black Ecologies: A Virtual Studio Visit & Conversation
2021-10-27 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual and In Person
The concept of black ecologies underscores the undue impact of climate and environmental injustice on Black diaspora communities while lifting up “insurgent” Black ecological knowledge (Roane & Hosbey 2019). Join us for a virtual studio visit and conversation on art and black ecologies with independent scholar and artist Jennifer Steverson. Steverson uses indigo dye, textiles, and archives to highlight Black diaspora community and resilience practices created through art, craft, and agriculture. She will be in conversation with arts-based geographer Naya Jones (UCSC Sociology). This event is moderated by the UCSC Black Geographies Lab and is part of the growing Black Botany Studio.

Naya Jones (she/her/hers) is a UCSC Assistant Professor of Sociology and Core Faculty in the Global and Community Health Program. She is a geographer and cultural worker whose solo and collaborative work foregrounds Black geographies of health, ecologies, and healing in North and Latin America. She practices arts-based methods, from participatory film to ritual and botanical arts. Her current book and storytelling project focuses on African-American plant knowledge and the Great Migration. She initiated the Black Botany Studio, a research lab, to promote the study and art of black diaspora plant geographies.
Jennifer Steverson (she/her/hers) is an independent scholar and multi media artist based in Central Texas. Her work is informed by the cultural ecologies of the African Diaspora, specifically by the way that Black people have crafted community and resilience practices through art, craft, and agriculture. She completed her undergraduate work at Eugene Lang College, a division of the New School and her masters degree in Community and Regional Planning at UT Austin. Jennifer was a Hive Collective Artist in Residence in 2019. In 2020, she completed a Texas Folklife Apprenticeship focused on quilting. She was a researcher on the Carver Museum’s African American Presence exhibit which opened in February 2020. Her work has appeared in the Rootwork Journal.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
For Fall 2021, the colloquium will take a hybrid format. Attendees have the option to attend in person in Humanities 210 or to watch the presentation on zoom. Those who attend in person must adhere to the campus mask mandate for all indoor activities and must complete UCSC’s symptom-check form before coming to campus. In person attendees are asked to please arrive at 12pm so that the event coordinators can verify the symptom check has been completed. To attend remotely via zoom, please RSVP in advance, and you will receive a zoom link on the morning of the colloquium. In most cases, speakers will appear remotely so that they will not have to present wearing a mask. To RSVP for the full Fall colloquium series, please use this form. If you have any questions about the colloquium, please contact Piper Milton (pmilton@ucsc.edu).
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Living Writers: Lara Vapnyar
2021-10-28 17:20 - 18:55 | Virtual Event
Lara Vapnyar moved from Moscow to Brooklyn in the 1990s. Knowing very little English, she quickly picked up the language and soon began writing in it. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and Zoetrope: All-Story. She is the author of two short story collections, There are Jews in My House (Anchor, 2003) and Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love (Anchor, 2008) as well as four novels, Memoirs of a Muse (Vintage, 2006), The Scent of Pine (Simon & Schuster, 2014), Still Here (Hogarth, 2016), and Divide Me by Zero (Tin House Books, 2019). She lives in New York City with her family.

The World Beyond Us: A Living Writers Series – Taking advantage of our (hopefully) last virtual Living Writers this Fall, 2021, this series will be centered on writers working and living outside the United States, writers who look beyond the U.S. in their work, and writers who work in languages other than English. Due to the prohibitive cost of travel and lodging, many of these writers would have been difficult if not impossible to bring in person. Some writers will read with their translators, extending the conversation to the art of translation as well. Two of these translators are Literature Department professors and one a Literature Department graduate student, highlighting the creative translation work being done in our own department. The U.S. publishes very little work in translation, just 3% of the books published in the U.S. are translations, compared to other countries (50% of Italy’s books are translations, for example). Thus, this series will expose students (as well as faculty and community members) to exciting writers, writing and translations they very likely are not familiar with.
This series will also include one night of California speculative writers, Claire Vaye Watkins and Cathy Thomas, who will read and talk about California Futures. This California Futures evening will be sponsored by The Humanities Institute Research Cluster Speculatively Scientific Fictions of the Future.

Linguistics Colloquia: Josefina Bittar Prieto
2021-10-29 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States

PhD+ Workshop – Crafting the Contributions to Diversity Statement
2021-11-02 11:40 - 13:10 | Graduate Student Commons
Institutions of higher learning increasingly require faculty applicants to submit a statement of contributions to diversity. Learn what belongs in this statement and how to communicate it effectively. This workshop will be led by Herbie Lee, Ph.D. (Vice Provost for Academic Affairs).
The Division of Graduate Studies’ professional communication workshop on “Crafting the Contributions to Diversity Statement” is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2021-2022 PhD+ series. Workshops presented by the Division of Graduate Studies are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.

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

Giving Day
2021-11-03
THI is participating in Giving Day 2021!
Please considering donating to our Undergraduate Public Fellows Program!

PhD+ Workshop – Writing the Curriculum Vitae
2021-11-03 11:30 - 13:00 | Graduate Student Commons
Applications for academic positions require a CV, and some alternative-academic employers also require them. Even if your post-graduate career will be outside academia, having a CV in addition to a resume will help you realize your transferable skills. This workshop will be led by Veronica Heiskell, Ph.D. (Associate Director of Experiential Learning and Student Employment, Career Success).
The Division of Graduate Studies’ professional communication workshop on “Writing the Curriculum Vitae” is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2021-2022 PhD+ series. Workshops presented by the Division of Graduate Studies are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.

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

BuYun Chen - Making the Intangible Tangible: Craft, History, and the Ryukyus
2021-11-03 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual and In Person
How did the global and regional circulation of resources, techniques, and technologies transform local ecologies, practices, and livelihoods? Located between the East China Sea and the Pacific Ocean, the Ryukyu Kingdom (?-1879; modern-day Okinawa, Japan) was a vital entrepôt in the early modern world, facilitating the movement of goods and people between northeast Asia and southeast Asia. This talk situates craft practices and material knowledge at the center of Ryukyu history to explore the historical entanglements of materials, bodies, and skills in the making and remaking of culture.

BuYun Chen is Associate Professor of Asian history at Swarthmore College. She is the author of Empire of Style: Silk and Fashion in Tang China (University of Washington Press, 2019). Her current research explores the relationship between craft production, statecraft practices, and ecological change in the independent Ryukyu Kingdom (modern-day Okinawa, Japan) from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
For Fall 2021, the colloquium will take a hybrid format. Attendees have the option to attend in person in Humanities 210 or to watch the presentation on zoom. Those who attend in person must adhere to the campus mask mandate for all indoor activities and must complete UCSC’s symptom-check form before coming to campus. In person attendees are asked to please arrive at 12pm so that the event coordinators can verify the symptom check has been completed. To attend remotely via zoom, please RSVP in advance, and you will receive a zoom link on the morning of the colloquium. In most cases, speakers will appear remotely so that they will not have to present wearing a mask. To RSVP for the full Fall colloquium series, please use this form. If you have any questions about the colloquium, please contact Piper Milton (pmilton@ucsc.edu).
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Living Writers: Claire Vaye Watkins and Cathy Thomas
2021-11-04 17:20 - 18:55 | Virtual Event
Claire Vaye Watkins is the author of two novels I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness (Riverhead Books, 2021) and Gold Fame Citrus (Riverhead Books, 2015). She is also the author of the short story collection Battleborn (Riverhead Books, 2012), winner of the Story Prize, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. Battleborn was named a Best Book of 2012 by the San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, Time Out New York, and Flavorwire, and a Best Short Story Collection by NPR.org. In 2012, the National Book Foundation named Claire one of the 5 Best Writers Under 35. Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, One Story, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Best of the West 2011, Best of the Southwest 2013, and elsewhere.
Cathy Thomas is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has worked for NBC, CBS, Warner Bros. and in film development for Forest Whitaker. She is a script reader for Annapurna Pictures and Skydance Media. Some of her recent research is published in a chapter of Articulating the Action Figure: Essays on Toys and Their Messages; short stories and essays in Positive Magnets Journal; and a forthcoming memory project Wax on, Wax Off. She is Managing Editor of The C.O.U.P Project, a multi-platform dialogic journal engaged in acute critiques of power, privilege, domination, and the violences they produce. She received her Ph.D. in Literature with a Creative/Critical Writing Concentration at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she was awarded a UC President’s Dissertation Year Fellowship and examined carnivalesque in Caribbean literature with her spec fiction novel Poco Mas.

The World Beyond Us: A Living Writers Series – Taking advantage of our (hopefully) last virtual Living Writers this Fall, 2021, this series will be centered on writers working and living outside the United States, writers who look beyond the U.S. in their work, and writers who work in languages other than English. Due to the prohibitive cost of travel and lodging, many of these writers would have been difficult if not impossible to bring in person. Some writers will read with their translators, extending the conversation to the art of translation as well. Two of these translators are Literature Department professors and one a Literature Department graduate student, highlighting the creative translation work being done in our own department. The U.S. publishes very little work in translation, just 3% of the books published in the U.S. are translations, compared to other countries (50% of Italy’s books are translations, for example). Thus, this series will expose students (as well as faculty and community members) to exciting writers, writing and translations they very likely are not familiar with.
This series will also include one night of California speculative writers, Claire Vaye Watkins and Cathy Thomas, who will read and talk about California Futures. This California Futures evening will be sponsored by The Humanities Institute Research Cluster Speculatively Scientific Fictions of the Future.

Unbound: The Life and Legacy of Asian American Community Historian Judy Yung
2021-11-05 15:00 - 17:00 | Virtual Event
Through this event we aim to honor and celebrate Judith “Judy” Yung’s tremendous legacy as a UC Santa Cruz emerita professor of American Studies, community and public scholar of Chinese American history, pioneer of oral history methodology, prize-winning author, teacher, supportive colleague, and cherished mentor.

Please register by November 4, 2021
Program:

Welcome remarks by Professor Alice Yang (UCSC)
Remembrances by George Ow (Chinese American History Enthusiast and Philanthropist) and Buck Gee (Angel Island Foundation)
Community forum: Professor Alice Yang will moderate a conversation with alumni Mana Hayakawa, Lora Collier Chan, Kio Tong-ishikawa, Yukiya Jerry Waki
Academic forum: Professor Emerita Karen Tei Yamashita (UCSC) will moderate conversation with Professor Emerita Bettina Aptheker (UCSC), Professor Gordon Chang (Stanford), and Professor Erika Lee (U. of Minnesota)
Closing remarks from Humanities Dean Jasmine Alinder (UCSC)

This event is sponsored by:

Asian American/Pacific Islander Resource Center
Center for Racial Justice
Cowell College
Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department
Humanities Division
Oakes College

For any questions or accommodations, please contact Humanities Division Development Assistant Rafferty Lincoln, rlincoln@ucsc.edu

Jerome Morgan and jackie sumell - Abolition and Healing
2021-11-08 17:30 - 19:00 | DARC 108, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
This event is limited to the campus community and not open to the public.
We invite students, staff, and faculty to join us for a live conversation about incarceration, harm, and healing with Jerome Morgan and jackie sumell.
Jerome Morgan was wrongfully incarcerated at the age of 17 in Angola State Penitentiary for 20 years before he was fully exonerated in 2016. He is an entrepreneurship and organizer, mobilizing communities to confront systems of oppression and to create spaces to heal from the traumas caused by the criminal legal system. jackie sumell is an artist and abolitionist organizer. Her public art and garden project, Solitary Garden, a collaboration with Tim Young, who is currently on Death Row in San Quentin, is on view at UC Santa Cruz. Jerome and jackie will discuss their individual approaches to mutual aid and organizing against carceral systems. They will speak about their shared work with New Orleans youth at the Ngombo Café and Sanctuary, a café and healing space created by exonerees, artists, and activists which aims to “provide plant based products grown in tandem with incarcerated individuals to facilitate healing for the communities they have been accused of harming. It is through this unique collaboration that we envision a world without prisons.”
This event is collaboratively produced and sponsored by the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, the Dean of Humanities, The Humanities Institute, and the Education Department at UC Santa Cruz.
Of interest articles and writings by Jerome Morgan and collaborator:
“Education is Improvisation: Improvisation is Art”
“Go To Jail: Confronting a System of Oppression”
Jerome Morgan is a native New Orleanian who was wrongfully incarcerated at the age of 17 in Angola State Penitentiary for 20 years before he was fully exonerated in 2016. He is the Co-Founder/Programs Director of Free-Dem Foundations, Owner/Trauma Counselor with Jerome 4 Justice, LLC, Graphic Designer/Writer with Park Roots Productions, LLC, Real Estate Developer/Investor with J & A Justice Holdings, Inc, Social Justice Co-Facilitator/Community Activist with Students At the Center (SAC), Panelist for Criminal versus Gentlemen: What Defines The Black Male Image 1 & 2, co-author of “Unbreakable Resolve: Triumphant Stories of 3 True Gentlemen”, published in 2017 and “Go To Jail: Confronting a System of Oppression”, published 2021 and has conducted workshops at universities all over the country about how he overcame injustice. Morgan is a pioneer in Formerly Incarcerated Person (FIP) entrepreneurship, community-based business models, FIP peer mentoring, FIP youth advocacy and FIP literary works.
jackie sumell works at the intersection of abolition, social practice, and contemplative studies. She has spent the last 2-decades working directly with incarcerated folx, most notably, her elders Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout the U.S. and Europe. She has been the recipient of multiple residencies and fellowships including, but not limited to, an A Blade of Grass Fellowship, Creative Capital, Art 4 Justice, Robert Rauschenberg Artist-as-Activist Fellowship, Soros Justice Fellowship, Eyebeam Project Fellowship and a Schloss Solitude Residency Fellowship. sumell’s work invites us to imagine a landscape without prisons. She is based in New Orleans, Louisiana where she continues to work on Herman’s House, Solitary Gardens, The Prisoner’s Apothecary PLUS and several other community generated, advocacy based projects.
