Jennifer Mogannam - Palestinian-Lebanese Revolution-Making in Civil War Lebanon
2025-10-22 12:15 - 13:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This talk offers a framework for understanding the entangled fate of Palestinian and Lebanese liberation by situating the 1970s Palestinian revolution and Lebanese Civil War opposition front through a shared narrative. This talk will show how these two efforts not only organized jointly, but how their aspirations were shared and impactful of the social landscape in Lebanon. By situating these histories together, this talk will reframe the notion of “civil war” in Lebanon and dissect the concept of revolution for a free Palestine.

Jennifer Mogannam is an Assistant Professor of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies at UCSC and affiliate faculty with the Center for the Middle East & North Africa. Her research centers Palestinian and Arab movements of the 20th and 21st century. She also intervenes in the question of refugees, colonialism and imperialism, Palestinian feminism, violence, and third world solidarities.

Fall 2025 COLLOQUIUM SERIES
THE CENTER FOR CULTURAL STUDIES hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work-in-progress by faculty & visitors. We are pleased to announce our Fall 2025 Series. Sessions begin promptly at 12:15 PM and end at 1:30 PM (PST) in Humanities Building 1, Room 210.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Zine-Making Workshop with Christie George
2025-10-22 14:30 - 16:00 | Social Sciences 1, Room 261, Social Sciences 1‎ University of California Santa Cruz, College Ten, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Please join us for this year’s first anthropology colloquium/Abolition Medicine and Disability Justice event!

This event is in-person and virtual. Register for virtual participation here.
Christie George is a writer, curator and producer who has beenworking at the intersection of media, technology and social change for more than twenty years — first as a film distributor with Women Make Movies and later as the President of New Media Ventures for a decade. In her creative practice, she is interested in collaborative art, especially work that explores and expands the idea of collective authorship. Christie recently released “The Emergency Was Curiosity,” a book report, exhibition and event series about cultivating individual and collective creative attention. She has a BA from Yale University and an MBA with distinction from the University of Oxford where she was a Skoll Scholar and was awarded the Said Prize. Christie is a proud board member of the Indivisible Project.

Sponsored by the UCOP-sponsored MRPI in Disability Justice and Abolition Medicine, The Humanities Institute, and the Department of Anthropology

Mary Roach - Replaceable You
2025-10-23 19:00 - 20:00 | London Nelson Community Center, 301 Center St., Santa Cruz, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes #1 New York Times bestselling author Mary Roach for a discussion about Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy. In this irrepressible new work, Mary Roach explores the remarkable advances and difficult questions prompted by the human body’s failings. When and how does a person decide they’d be better off with a prosthetic than their existing limb? Can a donated heart be made to beat forever? Can an intestine provide a workable substitute for a vagina?

The body is the most complex machine in the world, and the only one for which you cannot get a replacement part from the manufacturer. For centuries, medicine has reached for what’s available–sculpting noses from brass, borrowing skin from frogs and hearts from pigs, crafting eye parts from jet canopies and breasts from petroleum by-products. Today we’re attempting to grow body parts from scratch using stem cells and 3D printers. How are we doing? Are we there yet? Irrepressible and accessible, Replaceable You immerses readers in the wondrous, improbable, and surreal quest to build a new you. This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
Mary Roach is the author of seven best-selling works of nonfiction, including Grunt, Stiff, and, most recently, Fuzz. Her writing has appeared in National Geographic and the New York Times Magazine, among other publications. She lives in California.

Linguistics Colloquium with Elsi Kaiser
2025-10-24 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Join the Linguistics Department for Elsi Kaiser’s talk, “Do Birds of a Feather Flock Together? Exploring Interpretation and Dissimilation of Third Person Pronouns in English and Finnish”.
Transitive clauses with two personal pronouns in coargument position (e.g. “she saw her”, “he helped him”) are perfectly natural in English. But perhaps surprisingly, such two-pronoun sequences are highly dispreferred in Finnish. To further our understanding of the notion of ‘prominence,’ I report a series of psycholinguistic studies and corpus analyses on two-pronoun sequences in English and Finnish. My recent work with Jina Song on English two-pronoun sequences shows that pronoun interpretation depends on referential structure in ways that cannot be reduced to Binding Theory: Interpretation of a subject pronoun depends on whether the clause contains a second pronoun. In other words, two-pronoun sequences exhibit distinct patterns, which we show are not reducible to semantic or syntactic parallelism. Furthermore, in striking contrast to English, I propose that Finnish is subject to a Pronoun Dissimilation Constraint: When two expressions in the same local domain are referentially distinct, realizing both as personal pronouns is dispreferred (and crucially, replacing one with an anaphoric demonstrative yields an acceptable sentence). I present evidence showing that the Pronoun Dissimilation Constraint cannot be reduced to a pure disambiguation phenomenon, nor to linear proximity, phonological similarity, or the presence of another option in the language’s anaphoric paradigm. I explore this phenomenon from a typological perspective in relation to other dissimilation phenomena, as well as obviation phenomena in languages with obviative-proximate systems. Time permitting, I will also present new data from English exploring the notion of prominence in transitive clauses from the perspective of spatial orientation effects, using a drawing task.

This event is in-person with an option to join virtually available.
Elsi Kaiser is a professor at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Southern California. She received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Elsi Kaiser’s primary research focus is in language processing and psycholinguistics. She investigates the processes and representations involved in comprehension and production, especially in domains that involve multiple aspects of linguistic representation (syntax, semantics, pragmatics), such as reference resolution.

Saturday Shakespeare - The Tragedy of King Richard II
2025-10-25 10:15 - 12:15, 2025-11-01 10:15 - 12:15 | Virtual and In Person
Saturday Shakespeare in Santa Cruz Presents The Tragedy of King Richard II by William Shakespeare Aptos Library on October 4, 11, 18, 25 & November 1, 2025 at 10:15 a.m. in the Aptos Library Betty Leonard Community Room (in person or join by Zoom). The first hour will be a conversation with the scheduled guest speaker followed by volunteer read aloud of the play. This event series is co-sponsored by the UC Santa Cruz Shakespeare Workshop.
For more information, Zoom Link, or to volunteer to be a reader, contact: saturdayshakespeare@gmail.com
Guest Speakers / Film Presentation

Oct 4: Sean Keilen: Professor of Literature, UC Santa Cruz; founding Director of Shakespeare Workshop. Serves as dramaturg at Santa Cruz Shakespeare. Readings: Act I, Scenes 1-4
Oct 11: Katie O’Hare: UCSC Graduate Dissertation on Shakespeare’s Henriad, which includes Richard II. She will begin teaching at UCLA in Fall 2025. Readings: Act II, Scene 1-4, Act III, Scene 1
Oct 18: Jessica Kubzansky: Artistic Director of Boston Court Pasadena, author ‘R2’, a re-envisioning of ‘Richard II’, performed by SC Shakespeare in 2021. Readings: Act III, Scenes 2-3, Act IV Scene 1 to line 162
Oct 25: Paul Whitworth: Professor Emeritus Theater Arts, UCSC. Began his career as an actor at the Royal Shakespeare Company 1976. Served as Artistic Director for Shakespeare Santa Cruz, 1996-2007. Readings: Act IV, Scene 1 line 163 to Act V, Scenes 1-8
Nov 1: Film Screening: Richard II: The Hollow Crown directed by Rupert Goold with Ben Whishaw, Rory Kinnear, David Suchet, Patrick Stewart, 2012, 148 minutes.

Día de los Muertos Celebration
2025-10-25 13:00 - 15:00 | Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, 705 Front St., Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Join us for the Día de los Muertos community celebration of traditional music, dance, and art at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History.
Enjoy live performances by Senderos’ Centeotl Danza y Baile and Ensamble Musical de Senderos. Stroll through the museum in a self-guided presentation of community altars.
Performances all day!
This event is presented by the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History in collaboration with Senderos, and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute. For more details, please visit the event page on the MAH’s website here.

Julian Brave NoiseCat - We Survived the Night
2025-10-27 19:00 - 20:00 | London Nelson Community Center, 301 Center St., Santa Cruz, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes Julian Brave NoiseCat who will share his stunning debut We Survived the Night. Drawing from five years of on-the-ground reporting, We Survived the Night paints a profound and unforgettable portrait of contemporary Indigenous life, alongside an intimate and deeply powerful reckoning between a father and a son. Soulful, formally daring, indelible work from an important new voice.
This event is cosponsored by the American Indian Resource Center and The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz. It will take place at the London Nelson Community Center. A student reception will be held at 6:30pm. The first 30 registered student attendees will receive free entry and a copy of We Survived the Night. All other attendees may purchase tickets using the button below.

“Written in gorgeous, sparse prose, We Survived the Night reads like a novel. Told with a blistering honesty, the truth and grit create a beautifully woven coyote story we haven’t heard before. This is a love letter to Oakland, to the Canim Lake Band Tsq’secen of the Secwepemc Nation, to a father from his son, to the act of being a Native person in the twenty first century finding ways to love even through all that wounds have opened and wrought. With this, Julian Brave NoiseCat has written a book I’ve been waiting my whole life to read.” —Tommy Orange
A stunning narrative from one of the most powerful young writers at work today—We Survived the Night (Knopf) interweaves oral history with hard-hitting journalism and a deeply personal father-son journey into a searing portrait of Indigenous survival, love, and resurgence.
Julian Brave NoiseCat’s childhood was rich with culture and contradictions. When his Secwépemc and St’at’imc father, an artist haunted by a turbulent past, abandoned the family, he and his non-Native mother were embraced by the urban Native community in Oakland, California, as well as by family on the Canim Lake Indian Reserve in British Columbia. In his father’s absence, NoiseCat immersed himself in Native history and culture to understand the man he seldom saw—his past, his story, where he came from—and, by extension, himself.
Years later, NoiseCat sets out across the continent to correct the erasure, invisibility, and misconceptions surrounding the First Peoples of this land, as he develops his voice as a storyteller and artist in his own right.
Julian Brave NoiseCat is a writer, Oscar-nominated filmmaker, champion powwow dancer, and student of Salish art and history. His writing has appeared in dozens of publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The New Yorker. NoiseCat has been recognized with numerous awards including the 2022 American Mosaic Journalism Prize and many National Native Media Awards. He was a finalist for the Livingston Award and multiple Canadian National Magazine Awards, and was named to the TIME100 Next list in 2021. His first documentary, Sugarcane, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary. Directed alongside Emily Kassie, Sugarcane premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, where NoiseCat and Kassie won the Directing Award in U.S. Documentary. NoiseCat is a proud member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq̓éscen̓ and descendant of the Líl̓wat Nation of Mount Currie. We Survived the Night is his first book.

On the Field, Making Archives - Music and Talks with Upatyaka Dutta
2025-10-28 10:00 - 11:30 | Music Center Room 131, 1156 HIGH STREET, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Within the everyday workspaces of Assam’s tea plantations, Adivasi tea tribes engage in listening, sounding, and music. At times, these sounds and music flow into Adivasi living areas known as “lines.” Upatyaka explores the dynamic relationship between the sounds of the workplace and the sociocultural life woven through tea plantation labor. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted across Assam’s tea estates and her experiences as a singer from the region, she listens to the voices of Adivasi women pluckers—their songs, conversations, and laughter; Adivasi and non-Adivasi interactions; and the broader soundscape in which they work.
Upatyaka Dutta is a doctoral candidate in Ethnomusicology at the University of Toronto and a 2024 recipient of the Society for Ethnomusicology’s 21st-Century Fellowship. Her broader research interests include sounds studies and community and collaborative archival practices.

Presented by the Center for South Asian Studies and co-sponsored by the UC Santa Cruz Music Department, The Kamil and Talat Hasan Endowed Chair for Classical Indian Music, and the Ali Akbar Khan Endowment for Classical Indian Music

± AI Initiative Meeting
2025-10-28 12:00 - 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Join us for a kick-off meeting about The Humanities Institute’s new ± AI Initiative. Learn about THI’s vision and funding opportunities and connect with colleagues who have overlapping interests in humanities and artificial intelligence. Bring your research ideas, projects, dreams, and plans to the discussion as we look at ways to further advance humanistic work on new technologies.
This brown bag lunch is open to current UCSC faculty and staff across campus involved in humanistic research, teaching, and administration who are interested in the development, uses, and impacts of artificial intelligence.
Please make sure to RSVP here:

Reading the Conjuncture with Dimitris Papadopoulos, Jim Clifford, Camilla Hawthorne, Gail Hershatter, Laurie Palmer, and Vanita Seth
2025-10-29 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Co-sponsored by History of Consciousness: earth ecologies x technoscience
What a vital occasion it would be to receive intellectual gifts that enable us to better grasp our current socio-ecological moment, especially as many of us feel short of interpretations. We are inspired by Stuart Hall’s conjunctural thinking, as we face a situation where intensive and condensed contradictions unfold—not from a single primary cause, but through intricate political and ecological, economic and cultural, social and geological articulations and re-articulations that shape the specificity of our present and reorder the coordinates of crisis and opportunity. This panel, along with the discussion that will follow, aims to be a moment of gift-giving—leaving behind conceptual, narratological, or visual gifts for those who seek to understand a present that is elusive and deeply troubling.
Jim Clifford, Professor Emeritus in History of Consciousness and founding director of the Center for Cultural Studies, is best known for his historical and literary critiques of anthropological representation, travel writing, and museum practices. His last book, Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the 21st Century (2013), is the third in a trilogy which also includes The Predicament of Culture (1988) and Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late 20th Century (1997). Jim is currently investigating the colonial legacies and future possibilities of ethnological museums in the former First World.
Camilla Hawthorne is a critical human geographer and associate professor of sociology and critical race and ethnic studies at UC Santa Cruz who studies migration, citizenship, racial capitalism, and the insurgent abolition geographies of the Black Mediterranean. She is the author of Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (2022), translated into Italian as Razza e cittadinanza. Frontiere contese e contestate nel Mediterraneo nero (2023), and co-editor of The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship (2021), The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity (2023), and Heartbreak and Other Geographies: Collected Works of Katherine McKittrick (forthcoming 2026). She also serves as program director of the Black Europe Summer School, an intensive course on citizenship, race, and the Black diaspora in Europe that is held for two weeks each summer in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Gail Hershatter is Research Professor and Distinguished Professor Emer. of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a former President of the Association for Asian Studies. Her books include The Workers of Tianjin (1986, Chinese translation 2016), Personal Voices: China Women in the 1980s (1988, with Emily Honig), Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (1997, Chinese translation 2003), Women in China’s Long Twentieth Century (2004), The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (2011; Chinese translation 2017) and Women and China’s Revolutions (2019). She is at work on a book provisionally entitled “Travels on the Revolution’s Edge.”
A. Laurie Palmer is an artist, writer, and teacher whose research-based work focuses on undoing and re-crafting human practices of relating with the material world towards building just, livable, and joyful social and environmental relations. Palmer just retired after 10 years in the Art Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she helped her colleagues build the Environmental Art and Social Practice MFA program.
Dimitris Papadopoulos is a transdisciplinary scholar working at the intersections of science and technology studies, the environmental humanities, and cultural and visual studies. He is Professor of History of Consciousness in the History of Consciousness Department, University of California, Santa Cruz.
Vanita Seth is an associate professor in the Politics Department.

Fall 2025 COLLOQUIUM SERIES
THE CENTER FOR CULTURAL STUDIES hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work-in-progress by faculty & visitors. We are pleased to announce our Fall 2025 Series. Sessions begin promptly at 12:15 PM and end at 1:30 PM (PST) in Humanities Building 1, Room 210.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Humanities Grad School 101
2025-10-29 17:00 - 18:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Are you curious about graduate school in the humanities? Join this Humanities Grad School 101 session, where we’ll hear from Associate Dean of Research Pranav Anand and stellar UCSC graduate students in History, Linguistics, Literature, and Philosophy. We’ll discuss important considerations for deciding to pursue graduate school and what to look for in an academic program and advisor. You’ll leave knowing how to decide whether grad school is right for you and what you can do now to prepare.

This is a hybrid event and will be hosted both in-person and on Zoom.
Dinner will be provided for those joining in person.

This event is presented by the Humanities Division Employing Humanities initiative.

When Human-Centered AI Encountered Digital Humanities: A Dialogue between Magy Seif El-Nasr and Minghui Hu
2025-10-30 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
What happens when the ethical and interpretive frameworks of the humanities meet the algorithmic and interactive architectures of artificial intelligence? This dialogue brings together two leading voices from distinct yet converging fields: Magy Seif El-Nasr, a pioneer in human-centered AI, game analytics, and interactive narrative design, and Minghui Hu, a historian and digital humanist, explores the cultural, religious, and intellectual history of China through computational and interpretive lenses.
Together, they will explore shared concerns—from narrative design and agency to ethical modeling and epistemological boundaries—charting new possibilities at the intersection of technology and the humanities. This conversation is not only a meeting of disciplines, but a reimagining of the collaborative future of AI and humanistic inquiry.
This event is sponsored by the Leading the Change Collaboration Series at UC Santa Cruz.

Living Writers with Aracelis Girmay
2025-10-30 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Wonder as the Source
Aracelis Girmay is a poet, teacher, and editor. Her poems trace the connections of transformation and loss across cities and bodies. She is the author of the poetry collections the black maria (2016), Kingdom Animalia (2011), and Teeth (2007). She was named a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. In 2011 Girmay was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and in 2015 she received a Whiting Award for Poetry. A Cave Canem Fellow and an Acentos board member, she led youth and community writing workshops. Girmay is the Knight Family Professor of Creative Writing at Stanford University.
About the Living Writers Series
The Living Writers Series (LWS) is a live reading series organized especially for the Creative Writing Program community at UCSC. There is a new series each quarter, and each series features writers with unique voices. The LWS is open to all creative writing students and the public.

Sponsored by the Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Humanities Institute, The Laurie Sain Endowment, and the Bay Tree Bookstore.

An Evening with Alice Waters
2025-10-30 19:00 - 20:00 | Rio Theater, 1205 Soquel Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95062, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz and The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz are delighted to welcome award-winning chef and food activist Alice Waters for a discussion about A School Lunch Revolution, “A blueprint for the ways in which we should feed our kids organic foods, both at home and at school.” (Epicurious)
In this wonderful, multigenerational cookbook for adults and children alike, Waters champions an empowered relationship between students and organic food, offering delicious recipes that will nourish future generations—and ourselves—from the inside out.

All tickets include a donation to the Edible Schoolyard Project and Life Lab.
Alice Waters is a chef and the founder/owner of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California. She has won numerous awards, including the National Humanities Medal, the French Legion of Honor Medal, the Cavaliere of the Italian Republic, the Julia Child Award, and three James Beard Awards. As vice president of Slow Food International and founder of the Edible Schoolyard Project, she has helped bring food awareness to people of all ages all over the world.
More information at Bookshop Santa Cruz – An Evening with Alice Waters

Seeds of Resurgence Cluster Meet and Greet
2025-11-01 13:00 - 16:00 | The Greenhouse Project, 152 Farm Rd, Santa Cruz, 95064, United States
Join the Seeds of Resurgence Research Cluster, in conjunction with The Greenhouse Project (TGP), as they host a gathering where people interested in the cluster can meet and eat and do something together with their hands. Participants will also build a seed undercommons (as opposed to a bank). Supplies will be provided. If you have any seeds from past seasons you’d like to contribute, please save them and bring them along.
Thanks to folks in TGP, we’ll be able to add some seeds collected from last year’s harvest, grown from seeds provided by the Palestinian Heirloom Seed Library.

This event will be hosted at The Greenhouse Project on the UCSC farm, at 152 Farm Rd. Additional information below:
UCSC Permitted and non-UCSC Pay-to-Park sites are available at Parking Lot 116 or Parking Lot 168. The closest bus access to the site is located at Hager Dr. and Village Rd. Please reach out if you have additional transportation needs in order to participate in programming.
We really want the space to be accessible to you, so if that’s a challenge in some way, please don’t hesitate to contact us. TGP is an outdoor community garden space within a farm setting. Accessible bathrooms are available on-site and limited accessible parking is available upon request. Please let us know if you have additional questions or requests related to accessibility.

This event is presented by the Seeds of Resurgence Research Cluster.

Giving Day 2025
2025-11-05 | Virtual Event
On November 5, 2025, UC Santa Cruz will celebrate the 10th anniversary of Giving Day, our signature 24-hour fundraising event that unites Slugs around the world in support of student success, research, and community programs. Over the past decade, thousands of donors have raised millions to provide scholarships, fuel groundbreaking research, strengthen basic needs programs, and ensure every student has the resources to thrive.
Show Your Love for the Deep Read!
Support The Deep Read today and help us continue to provide free access for students and the public to our author events, virtual and in-person salons with UC Santa Cruz faculty and community partners, and email series exploring the Deep Read book. Your gift also means we can give free books to every interested student each year.
Giving Day 2025 will feature eight humanities projects, exciting matches and challenges that amplify every gift, and a global community of Slugs rallying for one cause: expanding opportunity. Mark your calendar, sign up to be an Advocate, and join us as we make the 10th year of Giving Day our most impactful yet.
For more information: Giving Day 2025.

Nora Khan - Discernment: Unruly Images, Synthetic Media, and Evolving Critical Impulse
2025-11-05 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
What can criticism offer us in a world of unruly generative images and synthetic media? What precise language might we use for machine learning’s impact, or the wake of an algorithm? How must our practices of discernment and the critical impulse evolve in response to computational developments, to perhaps be more resilient and responsive?
This talk invites one to consider how our language might move with ‘intelligent’ systems and beings that simulate liveness and likeness. To navigate a present and future dominated by synthetic media, and created by predictive systems, we take up a practice of seeing through systems. This talk first explores the craft of developing a hybrid, strategic, collective and dissident criticism of technology. It second reviews cases of baffling, seemingly inarticulable experiences from early software experiments and artists’ interventions, into AI/ML. Third, it explores the evolution of language in response to material and symbolic systems that dramatically shape our creative approaches and cognition. Throughout, the talk explores evolving critical methods that help us better situate ourselves to identify a vast range of hidden fictions and beliefs about what technology is meant to do and be.
Nora N. Khan is an independent critic, essayist, curator, and educator based in Los Angeles. Her writing on philosophy of AI and emerging technologies is referenced heavily across fields. Formally, this work attempts to theorize the limits of algorithmic knowledge and locate computation’s influence on critical language. She is currently History and Theory faculty at SCI-Arc; previously she was Arts Council Professor at UCLA in Design Media Arts (2024-2025), and professor in Digital + Media at Rhode Island School of Design, where she was nominated for the John R. Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching (2018-2021). Her books are AI Art and the Stakes for Art Criticism (2025), Seeing, Naming, Knowing (2019) and Fear Indexing the X-Files (2017), with Steven Warwick. She is a member of the Curatorial Ensemble of the 2026 edition of Counterpublic, one of the nation’s largest public civic exhibitions, focused next on ‘Near Futures’. She was the Co-Curator with Andrea Bellini of the Biennale de L’Image en Mouvement 2024, A Cosmic Movie Camera, hosted by Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, and also curated Manual Override at The Shed (2020).

Fall 2025 COLLOQUIUM SERIES
THE CENTER FOR CULTURAL STUDIES hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work-in-progress by faculty & visitors. We are pleased to announce our Fall 2025 Series. Sessions begin promptly at 12:15 PM and end at 1:30 PM (PST) in Humanities Building 1, Room 210.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Nour Joudah - Palestine is the Countermap
2025-11-05 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Please join us for a talk with Nour Joudah at the second annual Possibilities of Palestinian Refusal: Against Disciplining Knowledge and Movement series!

The Palestinian experience, like that of many indigenous peoples, is one unbound by time; it occupies a simultaneity of temporalities in any given moment and is constantly finding ways to escape the settler colonial temporal trap. Decolonial praxis in the production of present and future spaces can range from operationalizing colonial archives to the remappings of destroyed towns. But in this moment of heightened genocide, this presentation argues that the most significant countermap to settler imaginaries and violence is Palestine itself. Beyond the rhetorical or symbolic power of the incredible survival of Palestinians, Palestine as a physical space (and the Gaza Strip in particular) stands as a living countermap that not only confronts and unsettles power relations with the Zionist regime, but serves as a counter-cartography on a global scale.
Nour Joudah is Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at UCLA and a former President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Geography at UC-Berkeley (2022-23). Dr. Joudah’s work examines mapping practices and indigenous survival and futures in settler states, highlighting how indigenous countermapping is a both cartographic and decolonial praxis. She also has a MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University.

This event is sponsored by The Center for Racial Justice.

Heirloom Seed Keepers Study Session
2025-11-05 17:00 - 19:00 | The Greenhouse Project, 152 Farm Rd, Santa Cruz, 95064, United States
Farmers and gardeners have long appreciated a wide variety of plants and have nurtured them for meals, healing, and exchange. But diversity too often has been surrendered to monocultures of fields and spirits, predisposing much of modern agriculture to uniformity and, consequently, vulnerability. Today it is primarily at the individual level—such as growing and saving a strange old bean variety or a curious-looking gourd—that any lasting conservation actually takes place.
To start building a common space of thinking together, we’re going to meet up and discuss the first and third chapter of Virginia de Nazarea’s Heirloom Seeds and Their Keepers. Nazarea studies seed-saving communities in the Philippines and the Global South, with special attention to the way farmers on the margins have preserved biodiversity and cultural memory. You can find the full text here. We know that time can be scarce in the thick of the quarter, so if you don’t get through all of the reading, no stress.

This event will be hosted at The Greenhouse Project on the UCSC farm, at 152 Farm Rd. More information below:
UCSC Permitted and non-UCSC Pay-to-Park sites are available at Parking Lot 116 or Parking Lot 168. The closest bus access to the site is located at Hager Dr. and Village Rd. Please reach out if you have additional transportation needs in order to participate in programming.
We really want the space to be accessible to you, so if that’s a challenge in some way, please don’t hesitate to contact us. TGP is an outdoor community garden space within a farm setting. Accessible bathrooms are available on-site and limited accessible parking is available upon request. Please let us know if you have additional questions or requests related to accessibility.

This event is presented by the Seeds of Resurgence Research Cluster.

Campus to Career - Job Talk with Rebecca Hernandez
2025-11-06 12:00 | Virtual Event
Wondering what you can do with your Arts or Humanities degree? Hear from a real professional on our campus with a background in both. Rebecca Hernandez is the inaugural Community Archivist at the UCSC University Library. In this job talk, she will tell us about her educational journey as a first-generation transfer student and share insights and reflections from her professional path. This event is intended for UCSC students interested in careers in higher education, museums, or archives.

Rebecca Hernandez earned a PhD in American Studies, specializing in American Indian art and material culture. She also holds an MA in American Indian Studies and an MFA in Exhibition Design and Museum Studies. With a wealth of experience in higher education, Rebecca has worked as both an administrator and a student affairs professional. Currently serving as the inaugural Community Archivist at the UC Santa Cruz University Library, she collaborates with community members to preserve the rich history and cultural heritage of Santa Cruz County.
Hosted by UCSC Humanities Division and UCSC Arts Division

Upatyaka Dutta - As We Sing, So Shall We Pluck
2025-11-06 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States

Living Writers with Ariel Gore
2025-11-06 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Wonder as the Source
Ariel Gore is an author, editor, and teacher. She makes books, zines, coloring books, and tarot cards. She is the founding editor & publisher of the Alternative Press Award-winning magazine Hip Mama and the author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction. Her latest, Hexing the Patriarchy, is out from from Seal Press. Her shameless novel/memoir, We Were Witches, was published by The Feminist Press. Her memoir, The End of Eve, has been called “Terms of Endearment meets Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Her anthology Portland Queer: Tales of the Rose City won the best “LGBT anthology” at the 22nd annual Lambda Literary Award in 2010. She teaches writing online at Ariel’s Gore’s School for Wayward Writers at the Literary Kitchen.
About the Living Writers Series
The Living Writers Series (LWS) is a live reading series organized especially for the Creative Writing Program community at UCSC. There is a new series each quarter, and each series features writers with unique voices. The LWS is open to all creative writing students and the public.

Sponsored by the Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Humanities Institute, The Laurie Sain Endowment, and the Bay Tree Bookstore.

PhD+ Workshop - Crafting the Research-Based Essay with Ariel Gore
2025-11-07 10:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Join award-winning author and editor Ariel Gore for a conversation and mini-workshop on translating your research for non-academic genres including personal essays, fiction, memoir/autofiction, and journalism. What does your reader need to know? How do you find a balance between your own voice and the words of others? What do you do about things like citation? A master of deeply-researched personal narrative, Gore will share decades of experience, take questions, and offer some tools to get started.
This event is open to graduate students as well as faculty.

Space is limited and first-come, first-serve, so register now!
Participants will receive a short excerpt of Ariel Gore’s new book, Rehearsals for Dying (The Feminist Press) via email upon registration but may want to consider reading the whole book or attending Gore’s Living Writers reading on 11/6.
Ariel Gore is a LAMBDA Award-winning editor and author of 13 books of hybrid feminist fiction and nonfiction, including the shameless novel/memoir We Were Witches, the how-to guide Hexing the Patriarchy, and the memoirs Atlas of the Human Heart, The End of Eve, and Rehearsals for Dying. She founded the American Press Award-winning zine Hip Mama. She also makes coloring books and tarot cards, and teaches writing online at Ariel Gore’s School for Wayward Writers at the Literary Kitchen. She often lives in Oakland, Santa Fe, and Brooklyn.

Sponsored by the UCOP-sponsored MRPI in Disability Justice and Abolition Medicine and The Humanities Institute PhD+ series.

Jay Afrisando - Shaping the Arts within Disability and Community of Diverse Bodies
2025-11-12 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
What does it look like when our creative process is driven by disability and community? How does the work develop, change, and differ from the already-established ways of making? In this talk, Jay Afrisando will share his recent and upcoming works focusing on how disability and community of diverse bodies drive the ways such works are created. The results include forms and methodologies that continuously evolve and possess an antidisciplinary nature, offering a new aesthetics that prioritizes humanity while questioning what it means to be an artist and what arts truly mean and represent.
Jay Afrisando, a medium-skin-toned male with bunned hair, sits on outdoor neighborhood concrete steps in a serious pose, with his fingers clasped and arms on his thighs. He wears dark blue jeans, a light gray sweatshirt, and black shoes. Photo: © DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program / Diana Pfammatter.
Jay Afrisando is a composer, multimedia artist, researcher, and educator. A neurodivergent, he works on aural diversity, disability, accessibility, and decolonizing arts through multisensory and antidisciplinary practice, manifested in music-theater, film, installation, witty storytelling, and other genre-bending experiences. He is a 2024-25 DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Fellow and Assistant Professor of Music at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His collaborative exhibition, “In Conversation,” curated by Kate Brehme and in collaboration with numerous artists living in Berlin and other cities, is currently on display at Galerie im Turm, Berlin, until November 23, 2025.

Fall 2025 COLLOQUIUM SERIES
THE CENTER FOR CULTURAL STUDIES hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work-in-progress by faculty & visitors. We are pleased to announce our Fall 2025 Series. Sessions begin promptly at 12:15 PM and end at 1:30 PM (PST) in Humanities Building 1, Room 210.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Faculty Grants Session with UCHRI
2025-11-12 15:00 - 16:00 | Virtual Event
Interested in faculty funding opportunities from the UC Humanities Research Institute and want to know more about the advisory committee selection process?
Join UCHRI Director Jaimey Fisher and Research Grants Program Director Sara Černe for a grants presentation and Q&A. This year UCHRI is offering up to $25,000 grants for collaborative research projects, support for projects connected to its theme of Sustenance, and expanded support for the UCHRI Manuscript Workshop and Research Development Program.

Please register in advance to receive the meeting link.

Campus to Career - Job Talk with Kim Angulo, Assistant Public Defender
2025-11-13 12:30 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Interested in an impact-driven career in law, public policy, or politics? Come hear from UCSC Humanities alum Kim Angulo, an Assistant Public Defender with experience in both law and public policy work. You’ll gain insights into how to enter these fields, considerations for knowing whether they’re a good fit for you, and ideas for how to put your humanistic training to work for public service.

This is a hybrid event and will be hosted both in-person and on Zoom.
Kim Angulo (she/her) graduated from UCSC in 2013 with her BA in Feminist Studies. She worked in the California State Capitol on public policy and politics for three years, focusing on courts, criminal justice, and human services. Kim attended UC Davis Law School from 2016 to 2019, gaining experience in Public Defense, Workers’ Rights, and Civil Rights. Kim has been an Assistant Public Defender representing people who cannot afford to hire an attorney for six years. She has represented hundreds of clients facing criminal charges and conducted misdemeanor and felony jury trials. She currently works in Mental Health Diversion.
This event is organized by the Humanities Division as part of the Employing Humanities Initiative.

Living Writers with Issa Quincy
2025-11-13 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Wonder as the Source
Issa Quincy is a British writer. He spent spent several years working as a film archivist. His poetry has appeared in The London Magazine and been anthologized by New Rivers Press. His fiction has appeared in Transition Magazine and The Kenyon Review. Quincy’s debut novel, Absence, is a haunting atmospheric exploration of memory, connection, and the lingering traces of the past. He is currently based in New York City.
About the Living Writers Series
The Living Writers Series (LWS) is a live reading series organized especially for the Creative Writing Program community at UCSC. There is a new series each quarter, and each series features writers with unique voices. The LWS is open to all creative writing students and the public.

Sponsored by the Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Humanities Institute, The Laurie Sain Endowment, and the Bay Tree Bookstore.

Decolonizing Surfing: A View from Morocco
2025-11-13 17:30 - 20:00 | Communications 150, Studio C
Film Screening and Panel Discussion: 5:30-7pm, Studio C
Reception: Communications 139, 7-8pm
Surfing is a sport dear to Santa Cruzians, as the city has branded itself the “Original Surf City USA” for over two decades. Despite the awe-inspiring image of individuals “rid[ing] pulses of energy moving through the ocean,” the sport is also embedded in a global history of colonization and displacement. The origins of surfing have been traced back to Peru and West Africa, though a more familiar variant is that surfing “discovered” by Captain James Cook in Hawaii in the nineteenth century, leading to a tourism craze that was disastrous for local populations.
Presented by the Center for the Middle East and North Africa, this film screening and panel discussion will explore the history of surfing and the ramifications of surf tourism for Morocco. Surfing was imported to Morocco by North American soldiers based near Rabat in the 1940s. By the 1970s the sport became more common, in large part thanks to the presence of European tourists. Americans also started flocking to Aghazout – an Amazigh fishing village as part of the so-called “hippie trail.” By the early 2000s, the government started actively promoting surf tourism, establishing official sporting organizations and dedicating resources to infrastructure and surf camps. This had a transformative effect on Moroccan youth culture as well, as surfing has generally been associated with economically and socially marginal individuals in Morocco, and female surfers have sought to challenge gender norms. In recent years, activists and artists have been organizing against the destruction of cultural heritage (notably troglodyte houses) in the cities of Tifnit and Imsouane and the displacement of their inhabitants. There are also environmental concerns, as waste and wastewater management are priorities for those who seek to protect the coast.
The film screening will feature a short documentary by Arté on gentrification and surfing in Morocco, followed by two short films by the Moroccan director Ilias El Faris (Azayz and Sukar). The discussion will explore the history of surfing in Morocco and the ways that global capitalism has changed traditional sporting practices. How have gender, class, and race shaped ideas of surfing in Morocco? How does surfing help elucidate the contrasts and contradictions of Moroccan society, and how have these norms shifted with the arrival of mass tourism?
The panel discussion will feature Yasmine Benabdallah, a PhD candidate in the Department of Film and Visual Media at UCSC, whose work highlights questions of decolonization, memory, and history in Morocco; Michael Vann, Professor of History at California State University, Sacramento, who is a specialist of French Indonesia as well as avid surfer who has written on the history of the sport for Jacobin; and Soufiane Belmkaddem, a Moroccan surfer and activist who is a member of Black Surf Santa Cruz.

Parking Info:
This is the communications building on Google maps.
This is a map with parking information: https://transportation.ucsc.edu/parking/campus-parking-map/#interactive-map
Park Mobile parking spots can be located in lot 139A. Alternative parking options include the Core West parking structure, which is located down the hill from the communications building.

Presented by the Center for the Middle East and North Africa (CMENA) and and co-sponsored by the Film and Digital Media Department.
Photo Credit: Heatheronhertravels.com, www.heatheronhertravels.com/

Building Alliances in Native American Education
2025-11-15 09:00 - 16:00 | Samper Hall, Cabrillo College, 6500 Soquel Dr, Aptos, 95003, United States
Are you an Indigenous leader or a public educator committed to fostering meaningful partnerships and enriching Indigenous education?
Join Cabrillo College for a free transformative one-day workshop designed to cultivate understanding, share best practices, and forge lasting alliances. “Building Alliances in Indigenous Education” offers a unique opportunity for dialogue and collaboration, empowering participants to enhance educational opportunities for local students and integrate Indigenous perspectives more effectively into public education.

Why Attend?
● Gain invaluable insights from leading regional voices in Indigenous education.
● Discover regional assets and resources that can strengthen Indigenous-focused curricula.
● Deepen your understanding of historical and literary knowledge and its critical role in contemporary education.
● Engage in cross-institutional dialogue about innovative teaching practices and curriculum development.
● Network with dedicated educators and Indigenous leaders to build a supportive community.
Learn more here: Event Overview.

Presented by Cabrillo College, Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History, Amah Mutsun Land Trust, AIRC, The History & Civics Project, and THI.

Broadsides No.2: Pairing Artworks with Poetry - Poetry Reading & Artist Talk
2025-11-15 16:00 - 18:00 | m.k. contemporary art, 703 Front Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Following the success of its 2023 debut, Broadsides No. 2 returns this fall to MK Contemporary Art Gallery with a compelling exploration of the dynamic relationship between poetry and visual art. The exhibition pairs nine nationally recognized poets with nine distinguished visual artists, presenting collaborative works that reveal the unexpected resonances between image and language.
The participating artists are celebrated for their ability to capture imagery with clarity and nuance, each recognized nationally for their contributions to contemporary art. The poets featured in Broadsides No. 2 are equally accomplished literary voices, with deep connections to the Santa Cruz community and beyond. Many are associated with the Morton Marcus Poetry Reading, an annual event honoring the legacy of one of Santa Cruz’s most beloved poets. This year’s reading takes place on Thursday, November 20 at UC Santa Cruz and features writer and poet Ellen Bass.
The exhibition is curated by Donna Mekis (poetry) and Rose Sellery (visual art), with broadside design by Gary Young, Director of the Cowell Press at UC Santa Cruz. Broadsides No. 2 is presented with support from The Humanities Institute and Special Collections & Archives at UC Santa Cruz.

Exhibition Events

Opening Reception with Poetry Reading & Artist Talk: Saturday, November 15, 4:00-6:00
First Friday Receptions: November 7 & December 5, 6:00-8:00

Visual Artists

Randy Beckelheimer
Glenn Carter
Linda Christensen
David Fleming
Melissa Kreisa
Quinn Peck
Margaret Rinkovsky
Rose Sellery
Bobby Williams

Poets

Killarney Clary
Nancy Miller Gomez
Lee Herrick
Stephen Kessler
Robin Magowan
Tom Meschery
Magdalena Montagne
Ayaz Pirani
Todd Turnidge

Image credit: Twirl by Quinn Peck

POSTPONED: Timescape of Rings with Stephen David Engel
2025-11-17 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This event has been postponed. An updated date will be announced in the coming weeks.
The History of Consciousness department invites you to the next talk in their Fall 2025 Research Colloquium series.
Stephen David Engel will read from an experimental history called “Timescape of Rings.” In it, he meditates on a 2,200-year-old redwood round with markers for historical events affixed to its rings—the birth of Jesus, the invention of gunpowder, the drafting of the Magna Carta, and on. By running his fingers over the rings, he recalls histories not commemorated by these markers, in particular revolts and egalitarian movements. From there, Stephen’s daydreams carry him back deeper in time, all the way back to the first woody trees some 385 million years ago.

This event is in-person and online. Register for the virtual option here.
Stephen David Engel is a transdisciplinary scholar who thinks across big scales of history and time and who writes about them using creative genres. His writing has appeared in Rethinking History, ROAR Magazine, The Anthology of Babel, and other publications. He holds a PhD from the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he received the Hayden White dissertation fellowship for excellence in historical theory. This spring, he will serve as Visiting Professor at Deep Springs College, an alternative liberal arts college in the California desert.

Writing Beyond the Academy: An Introduction to Trade Publishing for Senior Scholars
2025-11-18 13:00 - 14:30 | Virtual Event
Scholars are frequently called upon to share their expertise with a diverse range of publics outside academia—and this kind of engagement often begins with the publication of a book with a “trade press” (i.e., a commercial, non-university/academic publisher, with a powerful marketing and publicity apparatus). Not all academics want to do this kind of work. However, for those who do, there is often confusion about where to begin, and a lack of resources to help with the process. This info session is designed to demystify the process of finding an agent, landing a commercial book deal, writing more accessibly, and other skills related to making the transition into writing for the general public.

Scholars to Storytellers helps academics bridge the gap between university presses and commercial publishing, turning specialized knowledge into books that reach mainstream audiences and transform careers. In February 2026, Scholars to Storytellers will be leading a three-day retreat here in Santa Cruz to help senior academics write a trade book. This retreat will bring together scholars from across the country for a focused, immersive experience designed to cultivate mastery of all aspects of trade publishing and turbo-charge the transition to writing for popular audiences.
John Ghazvinian is a historian and author of “America and Iran: A History” (Knopf) named among the New York Times “100 Notable Books of 2021.” His work has appeared in Newsweek, the Washington Post, and The Nation. He is the founding director of Scholars to Storytellers — an initiative aimed at coaching senior scholars to reach wider readerships for their work.

CANCELLED: Vietnamerica - A Simulcast Film Screening and Discussion
2025-11-18 14:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Due to the planned strike activities on campus, this event has been cancelled.
Following the wars in Vietnam, over two million people fled to country with the collapse of the Republic of Vietnam. That exodus, referred to by many as “the boat people” resulted in nearly half dying while in flight, battling the elements, starvation, and pirates. Vietnamerica follows Master Nguyen Hoa as he returns to former refugee camps in Southeast Asia after three decades abroad to search for the graves of his wife and two children. Having fled Vietnam in 1981 on a boat with his family and friends, Hoa was the only survivor.
Each semester GETSEA brings together 20+ universities from across North America to watch a documentary film together, simultaneously, and then connect via Zoom for a discussion with the filmmakers afterwards. This fall, they are showing Vietnamerica to coincide with the upcoming 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War / 4th Vietnamese Civil War.
For more information please visit: GETSEA Simulcast Film Screening.

This event is presented by SEACoast.

Dr. Lyla June Johnston - Indigenous Relationships with the Land: The Roots of Regenerative Agriculture
2025-11-18 15:00 - 17:00 | UC Santa Cruz
To accomodate the planned strike action at UC Santa Cruz on November 18th, this event will take place at the base of campus near the intersection of Bay and High Streets.
Please join the More-than-Human(ities) Laboratory as we co-host Dr. Lyla June Johnston and her timely talk on indigenous knowledge and agricultural practices.
Dr. Lyla June Johnston is an Indigenous musician, scholar, and community organizer of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) and European lineages. Her messages focus on Indigenous rights, supporting youth, traditional land stewardship practices and healing inter-generational and inter-cultural trauma. She blends her study of Human Ecology at Stanford, graduate work in Indigenous Pedagogy, and the traditional worldview she grew up with to inform her music, perspectives and solutions. Her doctoral research focused on the ways in which pre-colonial Indigenous Nations shaped large regions of Turtle Island (aka the Americas) to produce abundant food systems for humans and non-humans.

Carla Hernández Garavito - Rethinking South American Archaeology Through the Work of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui: A Ch'ixi Approach
2025-11-19 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
South American Archaeology is living through a growing push towards a theoretical focus developed from within. Of particular influence is the concept of “coloniality”, an enduring form of colonialism that affects the frameworks of reference the colonized have of themselves. However, coloniality and the emphasis on “subaltern archaeologies” as a generalized category for the production of scholars hailing from then Global South can also paper over the hierarchies and inequalities within formerly colonized regions. In this paper, I explore the work of the Andean Oral History Workshop and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui as an avenue for centering Indigenous frameworks in South American Archaeology and moving beyond a universalizing approach to coloniality. I build on the concept of ch’ixi, “a color that is the product of juxtaposition, in small points or spots, of opposed or contrasting colors” or “something that is and is not at the same time” (Rivera Cusicanqui 2020:65), and propose that a ch’ixi archaeology emphasizes the choices of people and communities to make sense of their worlds as a space of creativity and transformation that overcome the binary of colonizer/colonized.

Carla Hernández Garavito is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A Peruvian archaeologist trained in the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, she completed her PhD at Vanderbilt University. Her work investigates the ways in which Andean communities in Peru made sense, transformed, and reinvented, colonial policies between the 15th century to the present. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, among others. Her work has been published in Spanish and English, and in several peer-reviewed journals. Her first book will be published by the University of Arizona Press in 2026.

Fall 2025 COLLOQUIUM SERIES
THE CENTER FOR CULTURAL STUDIES hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work-in-progress by faculty & visitors. We are pleased to announce our Fall 2025 Series. Sessions begin promptly at 12:15 PM and end at 1:30 PM (PST) in Humanities Building 1, Room 210.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Humanities at Work: Informational Interviewing
2025-11-19 12:30 | Virtual Event
Are you curious about your career options as a humanities student? Wondering how the professionals around you got to where they are? Join this interactive workshop to learn about informational interviewing*, a way you can use your curiosity to explore career possibilities and make meaningful professional connections. You’ll leave ready to reach out, learn from your role models, and build your network.

This event is virtual. Register here.
Attendees will enter a raffle for a Humanities tumbler!
*informational interview: a conversation with a professional you want to learn from about what they do and how they came to do it

This event is organized by the Humanities Division as part of the Employing Humanities Initiative.

Ellen Bass: Morton Marcus Poetry Reading
2025-11-20 18:00 - 19:30 | Cultural Center at Merrill, Merrill Cultural Center, UC Santa Cruz, Merrill College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join us for the 16th annual Morton Marcus Poetry Reading, featuring honored guest Ellen Bass. Poet Gary Young will host the program, and the evening will include an announcement of the winner of the Morton Marcus Poetry Contest (recipient receives a $1,000 prize).

Photo by: Irene Young
Ellen Bass’s most recent collection, Indigo, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Among her other books are Like a Beggar, The Human Line, and Mules of Love. Her poems appear frequently in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and many other journals. Among her awards are Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The NEA, and The California Arts Council, The Lambda Literary Award, and four Pushcart Prizes. She co-edited with Florence Howe the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks!, and her nonfiction books include the groundbreaking The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse and Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth. A chancellor emerita of the Academy of American Poets, Bass founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and the Santa Cruz, California jails, and teaches in the MFA writing program at Pacific University.
Gary Young is the author of several collections of poetry. His most recent books are That’s What I Thought, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award from Persea Books, and Precious Mirror, translations from the Japanese. His other books include Even So: New and Selected Poems; Pleasure; No Other Life, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award; Braver Deeds, winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize; Days; The Dream of a Moral Life, which won the James D. Phelan Award; and Hands. He has received a Pushcart Prize, and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and the Vogelstein Foundation, among others. In 2009 he received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Young was the first Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, and in 2012 he was named Santa Cruz County Artist of the Year. Since 1975 he has designed, illustrated, and printed limited edition letterpress books and broadsides at his Greenhouse Review Press. His fine print work is represented in numerous collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, The Getty Museum, and special collection libraries throughout the U.S. and Europe. He teaches creative writing and directs the Cowell Press at UC Santa Cruz.
This event is a part of the Fall UCSC Living Writers course, which features poets, novelists, academics, curators, and artists in conversation with one another, in person, across genre and media.
Purchase both poets’ works at: www.bookshopsantacruz.com

Parking Information
The Merrill Cultural Center is located in Merrill College, in the northeast corner of the campus core. Those walking or arriving by Metro bus or campus shuttle can take the steep path heading northeast from the Crown/Merrill bus stop.
For those driving from the Main Entrance, stay on Coolidge Drive. Shortly after Coolidge turns left and becomes McLaughlin Drive, turn right at the sign for Merrill College. At the top of the hill, veer right. There are ParkMobile parking spaces along the left side of the lot, and parking for “A,” “B,” and “C” permits along the right. There are two accessible parking spaces if you turn left at the top of the hill and two more if you turn right. Parking attendants will be on site to sell parking permits to event attendees.

The Morton Marcus Poetry Reading honors poet, teacher, and film critic Morton Marcus (1936–2009). Marcus was the 1999 Santa Cruz County Artist of the Year and a recipient of the 2007 Gail Rich Award. Among his published works are eleven volumes of poetry, including The Santa Cruz Mountain Poems, Pages from a Scrapbook of Immigrants, Moments Without Names, Shouting Down the Silence, Pursuing the Dream Bone and The Dark Figure In The Doorway; a novel, The Brezhnev Memo; and a literary memoir, Striking Through the Masks. He taught English and Film at Cabrillo College for thirty years, was the co-host of the radio program, The Poetry Show, and was the co-host of the television film review show, Cinema Scene. Learn more at: www.mortonmarcus.com
The Morton Marcus Poetry Archive can be found at UCSC Special Collections. Mort’s personal papers, manuscripts, and recordings reflect his legacy as a poet and educator, and his collection of poetry books, broadsides, literary magazines and correspondence with other poets and writers illuminate his deep involvement in, and passion for, the literary art of poetry.
Organizing Committee: Danusha Laméris, Donna Mekis, Mark Ong, Maggie Paul, Farnaz Fatemi, David Sullivan, Irena Polić, Teresa Mora, and Gary Young.
Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry Contest: Every year, the annual reading coincides with the The Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry Prize, a national poetry contest which honors Morton Marcus, “whose life and work inspired the writing of many students, friends, and emerging poets.” The contest is hosted by The Hive Poetry Collective. The Hive is a group of Santa Cruz poets creating a weekly radio show and live poetry events featuring a diverse roster of poets and seeks to bring a diverse community together in appreciation of all kinds of poetry by all kinds of people. This year’s contest will be judged by Nancy Miller Gomez. For more information visit: https://hivepoetry.org/morton-marcus-prize/
Support Poetry in Santa Cruz: The Annual Morton Marcus Poetry Reading is made possible due to campus and community co-sponsorships and generous contributions from members of our community, like you. To ensure we can continue to offer this poetry reading free and open to the public in honor and memory of Morton Marcus, and to have our lives deeply enriched by exceptional poetry, please consider making a gift to The Morton Marcus Poetry Reading Fund: thi.ucsc.edu/projects/morton-marcus-poetry-reading.
This community event is presented by the The Humanities Institute and co-sponsored by:
Bookshop Santa Cruz
Cabrillo College English Department
Cowell College
Donna F. Mekis
The Hive Poetry Collective
Living Writers Series
Ow Family Properties
Merrill College
Porter Hitchcock Modern Poetry Fund
Porter College
Side By Side Press
Special Collections & Archives
If you have disability-related needs, please contact us at thi@ucsc.edu or call 831-459-1274 by October 31.

Linguistics Colloquium with Liv Hoversten
2025-11-21 13:00 - 14:30 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Join the Linguistics Department for Liv Hoversten’s talk “Is Language Control in Comprehension Applied Within or External to the Lexicon?”
Bilinguals need to continually monitor and select the appropriate language(s) for the current context in order to communicate efficiently. Prominent models of bilingual word recognition posit that this selection process, known as language control, occurs externally to the lexicon based on the output of the word recognition system. According to these models, lexical representations from both languages are activated in parallel regardless of task demands or contextual cues that signal the relevance of each language. Only after this cross language activation has unfolded can nontarget language representations be suppressed, via a task/decision module separate from the lexicon.
In this talk, Hoversten will argue instead that task instructions and contextual cues, such as the prevalence of each language, operate directly within the lexicon to modulate the activation strength of lexical representations before and during word recognition. Using data from isolated word recognition and naturalistic sentence processing with eye- tracking and electroencephalography (EEG/ERPs) measures, she shows that the earliest signatures of lexical activation already reflect suppression of representations from the nontarget language. These findings challenge the assumption in models like BIA+ and Multilink that top-down language control is applied only post-lexically, suggesting instead that contextual relevance shapes lexical activation itself. While both languages remain potentially active, she proposes that they are dynamically weighted within the lexicon to restrict cross-language activation early during word recognition.

This event is in-person with an option to join virtually available.
Liv Hoversten is an Assistant Professor of Social Sciences at the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from UC Davis and a B.A. in Chemistry from St. Olaf College. Liv Hoversten’s current work in progress examines the role of parafoveal processing (i.e., the word to the right of the currently fixated word) during reading in native and non-native readers. Her research aims to answer questions about how readers with different linguistic backgrounds extract information from text for successful comprehension.

Seeds of Resurgence Community Seed Dinner
2025-11-22 14:30 - 17:30 | The Greenhouse Project, 152 Farm Rd, Santa Cruz, 95064, United States
At the second community dinner of the year, the afternoon is guided by Aaron Samuel Mulenga and Nkondelina Chileshe, a couple from Zambia—a nation nestled in the heart of southern Africa. They carry with them the spirit of their Bantu ancestors, whose journeys across the continent shaped not only language and culture but also the food that sustains generations. Among their favorite traditions is Ubwali, a humble yet deeply meaningful dish made from cornmeal. Known as Ugali in Eastern Africa, Pap in the south, and Fufu in the west, this staple tells a story of travel, settlement, and resilience—echoes of the great Bantu migrations that began in the mid–second millennium BCE.
As we gather, our hands and senses will trace the journey of the corn seed—its soft grind into meal, its transformation through patience and care. In this simple act of making, we touch the wisdom of generations who have listened to the rhythm of grain and fire. Through the warmth of Zambian cuisine, the flicker of film, and the cadence of folklore, we enter a world where food becomes memory, and memory becomes story.
Ubwali carries with it the taste of home and the echo of history—from family tables to moments of upheaval, like the 1990 riots sparked by a sudden rise in cornmeal prices. In its quiet strength, this dish reminds us that nourishment is never just sustenance—it is resistance, identity, and the heartbeat of a people.

Attendance is limited to the first 20 sign ups!
Nkondelina Chileshe works as a corporate lawyer, but her main interests are rooted in the use of public policy to shape a better Zambia and Africa at large for the community of under-resourced individuals. Aaron’s work as an artist and a scholar seek to preserve and share Zambian cultural histories of marginalized individuals.
Aaron Samuel Mulenga is an artist and a scholar whose work seeks to preserve and share Zambian cultural histories of marginalized individuals.

This event will be hosted at The Greenhouse Project on the UCSC farm, at 152 Farm Rd. More information below:
UCSC Permitted and non-UCSC Pay-to-Park sites are available at Parking Lot 116 or Parking Lot 168. The closest bus access to the site is located at Hager Dr. and Village Rd. Please reach out if you have additional transportation needs in order to participate in programming.
We really want the space to be accessible to you, so if that’s a challenge in some way, please don’t hesitate to contact us. TGP is an outdoor community garden space within a farm setting. Accessible bathrooms are available on-site and limited accessible parking is available upon request. Please let us know if you have additional questions or requests related to accessibility.

This dinner is part of the Seeds of Resurgence research cluster and is supported by University of the Future Award, ARI Collaborative Grant, and the THI Research Cluster for ‘Seeds of Resurgence’.

Glen Coulthard - Maoism without Guarantees: Third World Currents in Fourth World Anti-Colonialism with Glen Coulthard
2025-12-01 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 420, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
This lecture will provide a history of Red Power radicalization and Indigenous-Marxist cross-fertilization. It examines the political work undertaken by a small but dedicated cadre of Native organizers going by the name Native Alliance for Red Power (or NARP) in Vancouver, British Columbia (BC), from 1967 to the 1975. It argues that their political organizing and theory-building borrowed substantively and productively from a Third World-adapted Marxism which provided an appealing international language of political contestation that they not only inherited but sought to radically transform through a critical engagement with their own cultural traditions and land-based struggles. Not unlike many radicalized communities of color during this period, NARP molded and adapted the insights they gleaned from Third World Marxism abroad – with a focus on Maoism in particular – into their own internationalist critiques of racial capitalism, patriarchy, and internal colonialism at home. A focus will be placed on NARP’s application of a Red Power- Maoist critique of the political economy of extraction spanning from Palestine and the Middle East to Canada via the Oil Crisis of 1973.

Glen Coulthard is Yellowknives Dene and an associate professor in the First Nations and Indigenous Studies Program and the Departments of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), winner of the 2016 Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Frantz Fanon Award for Outstanding Book, the Canadian Political Science Association’s CB Macpherson Award for Best Book in Political Theory, published in English or French, in 2014/2015, and the Rik Davidson Studies in Political Economy Award for Best Book in 2016. He is also a co-founder of Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning, a decolonial, Indigenous land-based post-secondary program

Megha Majumdar - A Guardian and a Thief
2025-12-02 19:00 - 20:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes Megha Majumdar (A Burning) who will share her electrifying new novel that has recently been long-listed for the National Book Award and received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Booklist. A Guardian and a Thief, a piercing and propulsive tour de force, is set in a near-future Kolkata, India, ravaged by climate change and food scarcity, in which two families trying to protect their children must battle one another.

Megha Majumdar is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel A Burning, which was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and the American Library Association’s Andrew Carnegie Medal. It was named one of the best books of the year by media including The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, The Atlantic, Vogue, and TIME Magazine. A 2022 Whiting Award winner, she was born and raised in Kolkata, India, and holds degrees in anthropology from Harvard and Johns Hopkins. She is the former editor in chief of Catapult Books, and lives in New York. A Guardian and A Thief is her second novel.
More information at: Bookshop Santa Cruz – Megha Majumdar
Co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

Martabel Wasserman – Picturing California’s Carceral Landscape: Carleton Watkins’ Views of Alcatraz
2025-12-03 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Carleton Watkins, an iconic photographer of the 19th Century American West, is best known for his images of Yosemite that were used as testimony in the formation of the National Park system. This paper explores his previously understudied photographs of Alcatraz, taken over approximately three decades beginning in 1861. Through close readings of the changing island and surrounding ecosystems, I use Alcatraz to theorize how the carceral landscape took shape in California during and after the Civil War, and the role photography played in the project. The landscape is being constantly reconfigured, often by prison labor, as San Francisco becomes a nexus of global capitalism. I theorize his photographs as they relate large-scale resource extraction, surveillance and the eventual emergence of the prison industrial complex in California.
Martabel Wasserman is an artist, curator and scholar. Currently a Research Associate at the Center for Creative Ecologies, she is working on a manuscript Picturing the Rock: Alcatraz, Photography and the Making of California. She has exhibited at venues such as Human Resources in Los Angeles and the Museum of Art and Culture Santa Cruz. Curated exhibitions include Coastal/Border for the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time LA/LA and Reclaim Pride with the One Archives at University of Southern California.
Featured image: Carleton Watkins, Alcatraz and Black Point from Russian Hill, albumen silver print from glass negative, negative c. 1873–80, print c. 1879–85.

Fall 2025 COLLOQUIUM SERIES
THE CENTER FOR CULTURAL STUDIES hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work-in-progress by faculty & visitors. We are pleased to announce our Fall 2025 Series. Sessions begin promptly at 12:15 PM and end at 1:30 PM (PST) in Humanities Building 1, Room 210.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Armen Khatchatourov - Artificial Intelligence and its "contexts”: between ethics and politics
2025-12-03 15:00 - 16:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This talk will first examine the way in which the notion of context plays a central role in the history of the computer science and ubiquitous AI on the one hand, and in that of privacy and data protection on the other and, second, will examine the way in which this notion replays the conception of subjectivity, normativity and ethics. We will show how this evolution parallels the establishment of neoliberal – and more recently algorithmic – governmentality, and how it confronts us not only to the ethical but also to the political significance of ubiquitous AI. Our approach aims to make two contributions: a complementary proposal for the classification of AI, based on the evolving role that context plays in user’s action and ethos; and a renewed heuristic to grasp the articulation between the operationalization of AI systems and the preservation of socially constructed normativity.
Please register, we will circulate readings related to the talk:

Armen Khatchatourov is an Associate Professor of Information and Communication Sciences at the DICEN-IdF Lab, University Gustave Eiffel, Paris, France. With a dual background in engineering and the philosophy of technology, Armen has held research positions at leading institutions such as Institut Mines-Télécom and Sony Computer Science Lab Paris. His work spans digital identities, privacy, smart cities, and the societal impacts of Big Data and AI. He published Digital Identities in Tension: Between Autonomy and Control (ISTE/Wiley, 2019) and directed Corps Connectés. Figures, Fragments, Discours (Presses des Mines, 2022), and serves as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Études Digitales.

This event is presented by The Humanities Institute’s ± AI Initiative. It is sponsored by Villa Albertine – Cultural Services of the French Embassy. The event is open to all students, faculty, staff, and members of the public consistent with University policy and state and federal law.

Hebron Seed Bank Study Session
2025-12-03 17:00 - 19:00 | The Greenhouse Project, 152 Farm Rd, Santa Cruz, 95064, United States
Join the Seeds of Resurgence Research cluster as they gather to discuss readings related to the Hebron Seed bank, which Israeli forces destroyed in August. Participants will think together about how colonial power targets food sovereignty and what can be done to resist those acts of destruction.

This event will be hosted at The Greenhouse Project on the UCSC farm, at 152 Farm Rd. Additional information below:
UCSC Permitted and non-UCSC Pay-to-Park sites are available at Parking Lot 116 or Parking Lot 168. The closest bus access to the site is located at Hager Dr. and Village Rd. Please reach out if you have additional transportation needs in order to participate in programming.
We really want the space to be accessible to you, so if that’s a challenge in some way, please don’t hesitate to contact us. TGP is an outdoor community garden space within a farm setting. Accessible bathrooms are available on-site and limited accessible parking is available upon request. Please let us know if you have additional questions or requests related to accessibility.

This event is presented by the Seeds of Resurgence Research Cluster.

Christine Padoch and Nancy Peluso - Return to Nanga Jela
2025-12-04 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The history of hinterland communities is largely written in remote landscapes that today are often targeted for infrastructural development that forcibly relocates existing residents and transforms the land, obliterating those histories, and weakening communities.
In 1984/5 the Iban longhouse at Nanga Jela on Sarawak’s Engkari River in Malaysian Borneo, along with twenty-one other communities and a land area of 8500 ha disappeared because of the building of the Batang Ai Hydroelectric Dam and the creation of a 33 sq mile reservoir. With the drowning of these houses, lands, forests, and of multiple rivers and streams, the history of one of the longest-occupied and most historically rich Iban territories in Sarawak was gone. Many of the 3000 people who were displaced moved to government-created resettlement areas. Some left for other parts of Sarawak, and their descendants scattered around the world. All of those who were forced to leave their Batang Ai and Engkari homelands found their livelihoods completely transformed; none were free to pursue the rice agriculture and forest- and river-centered lives that they had known since their childhoods.
Three decades after this event, the ex-residents and descendants of Nanga Jela engaged in a process of reconstructing that submerged history and reconstituting an Engkari and Nanga Jela identity. Rescuing and sharing what images exist of the longhouse and its surrounding land- and waterscapes, collecting oral histories, geographical memories, genealogies, and a plethora of other local data, and employing multiple social media tools, the increasingly diverse, geographically dispersed community is regaining its history, knowledge of the lost land- and riverscapes, and its identity.
A team comprising Bobby Anak Nyegang and Itin Anak Langit, both born in Nanga Jela, and Christine Padoch, an anthropologist who spent more than two years in the longhouse, led the effort to assemble these and other materials into an image-rich bilingual (English and Iban) book that would be accessible to all in the Nanga Jela community, as well as a community-based archive. In this presentation, Padoch will discuss that complex process of writing the book, recently published as Pemulai ke NangaJela/Return to Nanga Jela and creating an archive together with the longhouse community to provide present and future descendants of the great longhouse on the Engkari River a written history of a landscape and a livelihood that has disappeared.

This event is both in-person and on zoom. Click above for virtual access.
Christine Padoch is a Senior Curator Emerita in the Center for Plants, People and Culture of the New York Botanical Garden. From 2011 to 2017 she was the Director of Research on Forests and Human Well-Being at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR). An anthropologist by training, she has spent about 50 years carrying out research on smallholder patterns of forest management, agriculture, and agroforestry in the humid tropics, principally in Southeast Asia and Amazonia. Previous to her position at CIFOR, Padoch was the Matthew Calbraith Perry Curator of Economic Botany at the NYBG. She is the author or editor of a dozen books and of approximately 100 scientific articles and book chapters. Christine Padoch has served as a scientific advisor to many international projects and has been a member of the boards of several international research institutions, including the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), the Amazon Institute for Environmental Research (IPAM), and the Earth Innovation Institute (EII). She holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University.
Nancy Lee Peluso is Professor of Environmental Social Science and Resource Policy in the College of Natural Resources and the Program Director of the Berkeley Workshop in Environmental Politics, housed in the Institute of International Studies. She serves as a faculty member in the Society and Environment Division of the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, where she teaches courses in Political Ecology. Her research since the 1980s has focused on Forest Politics and Agrarian Change in Southeast Asia, primarily in Indonesia. She has done field research in various parts of Indonesia—West and Central Java, East and West Kalimantan and in Sarawak, Malaysia. Her work addresses questions of property rights and access to resources, forest policy and politics, histories of land use change, and agrarian and environmental violence. She is the author or editor of three books: Rich Forests, Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance in Java (UC Press, 1992 – still available); Borneo in Transition: People, Forests, Conservation and Development (Oxford Press, 1996 and 2003, ed. with Christine Padoch); and Violent Environments (Cornell Press, 2001, ed. with Michael Watts.), and nearly fifty journal articles and book chapters. Professor Peluso speaks or reads four languages besides English. In 2003, she was awarded a Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship and is finishing a book manuscript tentatively titled, “Ways of Seeing Borneo: Landscape, Territory, and Violence”. She is currently working on a comparative study on the formation of “political forests” in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand as well as a book examining the entanglements of violence and territoriality in landscape history in West Kalimantan.

Presented by SEACoast and THI’s More-than-Human(ities) Laboratory cluster.

Living Writers Student Reading
2025-12-04 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Wonder as the Source
About the Living Writers Series
The Living Writers Series (LWS) is a live reading series organized especially for the Creative Writing Program community at UCSC. There is a new series each quarter, and each series features writers with unique voices. The LWS is open to all creative writing students and the public.

Sponsored by the Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Humanities Institute, The Laurie Sain Endowment, and the Bay Tree Bookstore.

John O. Jordan - Dickens and Soundscape: The Old Curiosity Shop
2025-12-07 13:00 - 14:30 | Virtual Event
Please join the Dickens Project for the rescheduled Dickens Universe talk by John Jordan, Dickens Project Co-Founder and Co-Director.
Critics have long recognized and commented on the striking visual quality of Dickens’s writing, including the ways in which his novels seem to have anticipated and even influenced the development of certain film techniques. With the exception of studies that focus on speech and voice, relatively little attention has been paid to Dickens’s representation of sound more generally. In this paper, Professor Jordan takes a sound studies approach to Dickens’s writing, focusing on The Old Curiosity Shop and examining the various uses to which sound is put in this exceptionally “noisy” book.

Register for the talk on zoom here.
John O. Jordan is a research professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the Co-Director of the Dickens Project. His primary research interests include Victorian literature and culture, Charles Dickens and narrative theory. John is the author of Supposing Bleak House and co-editor, with Robert Patten and Catherine Waters, of the Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens.

Decolonial AI: Designing Technologies for Generative Justice
2026-01-06 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The extraction of ecological value from nature, labor value from workers, and social value from communities constitutes the root cause of pollution, poverty and social domination. Indigenous traditions, commons-based production and related alternatives offer models in which value is not extracted, but rather circulated back to the human and non-human agencies that generated it. In this talk we will describe how this framework of “generative justice” can be used to design decolonized technologies. In Detroit our experiments develop AI and other applications in a platform for community-based economies. In Africa they are developed for a collective of crafters, artists and other creatives. We find that establishing democratized, regenerative value flows requires “full stack decolonization,” because extraction occurs at every layer from infrastructure to machine learning algorithms. The transition to worker-owned systems, in which they determine where AI will be located across the broad spectrum of human-machine agency possibilities, is a key component in developing pathways for egalitarian and sustainable futures.
Dr. Ron Eglash is the director of the Center for Generative Justice, and a former Professor in the School of Information at University of Michigan. Audrey Bennett is a professor in the Stamps school of Art and Design at the University of Michigan, and a University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor.

2026 Santa Cruz Fungus Fair
2026-01-09 - 2026-01-11 | London Nelson Community Center, 301 Center St., Santa Cruz, United States
Did you know that without fungus, we’d have no bread, cheese, beer, or wine? Or that anti-cholesterol medicine was developed from mushrooms? Come to the Santa Cruz Fungus Fair to learn fascinating and fun facts about beautiful and diverse species of mushrooms! This unique Santa Cruz area tradition draws thousands of visitors each January. View remarkable mushroom arts and crafts, taste unusual and exceptionally good fungal fare, and experience FFSC’s overriding mission: “We keep the fun in fungus!”

The Humanities Institute will be present at this event to promote the 2026 Deep Read, which will feature Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change our Minds, and Shape our Futures by British mycologist Merlin Sheldrake. We hope you’ll join us at the Fungus Fair and for this year’s Deep Read!

PhD+ Workshop - Grants and Fellowships
2026-01-14 16:00 - 17:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Grants and Fellowships for Humanities Scholars
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. It will also be an opportunity for graduate students to learn about The Humanities Institute’s funding resources as well as strategies for acquiring extramural support.
The workshop will be led by Pranav Anand (Faculty Director at The Humanities Institute and Professor of Linguistics) and Saskia Nauenberg Dunkell (Research Programs and Communications Director at The Humanities Institute).

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

Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty, and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia
2026-01-15 15:00 - 17:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
How do traditions and peoples grapple with loss, particularly when it is of such magnitude that it defies the possibility of recovery or restoration? Rajbir Singh Judge offers new ways to understand loss and the limits of history by considering Maharaja Duleep Singh and his struggle during the 1880s to reestablish Sikh rule, the lost Khalsa Raj, in Punjab.
Sikh sovereignty in what is today northern India and northeastern Pakistan came to an end in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the British annexed the Sikh kingdom and, eventually, exiled its child maharaja, Duleep Singh, to England. In the 1880s, Singh embarked on an abortive attempt to restore the lost Sikh kingdom. Judge explores not only Singh’s efforts but also the Sikh people’s responses—the dreams, fantasies, and hopes that became attached to the Khalsa Raj. He shows how a community engaged military, political, and psychological loss through theological debate, literary production, bodily discipline, and ethical practice in order to contest colonial politics. This book argues that Sikhs in the final decades of the nineteenth century were not simply looking to recuperate the past but to remake it—and to dwell within loss instead of transcending it—and in so doing opened new possibilities.
Bringing together Sikh tradition, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial thought, Prophetic Maharaja provides bracing insights into concepts of sovereignty and the writing of history.
Rajbir Singh Judge is Associate Professor of History and Associate Member of Asian and Asian American Studies at California State University, Long Beach. He specializes in the intellectual and cultural history of South Asia with a particular emphasis on Punjab and the Sikh tradition. His first book, Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty, and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia was published by Columbia University Press in 2024 and was awarded “Best First Book in the History of Religions” by the American Academy of Religion. He is currently working on his second book, A Critique of Contextual Reason, for which he was awarded membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in the 2024-2025 Academic Year. His publications have appeared in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Modern Asian Studies, Theory & Event, Cultural Critique, the Journal of the History of Sexuality, History & Theory, among others.

Sponsored by Sarbjit Singh Aurora Endowed Chair in Sikh and Punjabi Studies, Department of History, and Center for South Asian Studies.

Moulay Hicham Alaoui - Pacted Democracy in the Middle East: Religion, Politics, and the Struggle for Freedom
2026-01-16 15:00 - 17:00 | Charles E. Merrill Lounge
Join us for a book talk by Dr. Hicham Alaoui in which he will deliver insights about the battle for democracy in the Middle East, drawing upon his recent book, Pacted Democracy in the Middle East: Tunisia and Egypt in Comparative Perspective (Palgrave, 2022), also available in French (Le Cherche Midi, 2024) and Arabic (Dar Saqi, 2025). Reflecting an ongoing research agenda, the book provides a novel framework for imagining how democratic politics can emerge from social conflicts waged over religion and Islamism in the public sphere. Contrasting cases like Tunisia, Egypt, and other regional countries, it further illuminates the novel and oft-ignored connections between secular opposition, theological identity, and authoritarian rule in the Arab world.
Dr. Hicham Alaoui is a lecturer at Stanford University, where he teaches political science. He also serves on the Advisory Board of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. He is the founder and director of the Hicham Alaoui Foundation, which undertakes innovative social scientific research in the Middle East and North Africa. He is a scholar on the comparative politics of democratization and religion. His latest publications include Pacted Democracy in the Middle East: Tunisia and Egypt in Comparative Perspective (Palgrave, 2022), which has been translated into French and Arabic, as well as various other books, including the most recent co-edited book Political Economy, Power, and Cultural Heritage in the Arab World (Lynne Rienner, 2025) and co-authored book Making Aid Work: Dueling with Dictators and Warlords in the Middle East and North Africa (Lynne Rienner, 2025). He holds an A.B. from Princeton University, M.A. from Stanford University, and D.Phil. from the University of Oxford.

Co-presented by the Center for the Middle East and North Africa and the Politics Department.

Nurturing Difference - Parenting and Disability in a Careless Age
2026-01-20 18:00 | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
We’ll be discussing Danilyn Rutherford’s Beautiful Mystery: Living in a Wordless World (Duke University Press) and Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons – Can a game take care of us? (University of Chicago Press). Joined by Donna Haraway and Megan Moodie, and moderated by THI Faculty Director, Pranav Anand, the panel will discuss caregiving, parenthood, disability, language, meaning, and technology.
In an increasingly careless world where cruelty is celebrated and disability mocked, these two highly-readable scholars remind us that beautiful relationships of compassion, connection, communication, and empathy still exist. Rutherford recounts her experiences raising a high assistance-needs daughter, Millie, describing the importance of a web of caregivers who support and enrich their lives and the potential for human communication beyond words. Wardrip-Fruin writes about parenting in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, exploring how his own need for rest and care in the face of growing disablement reshaped his ideas about masculinity, fatherhood, and video game imaginaries. Both books speak to Wardrip-Fruin’s provocative question posed in the subtitle to Animal Crossing: New Horizons, “Can a game take care of us?” If the “game” is a resource-stripped, social media-driven capitalist competition where everyone must fight for survival, where basic welfare programs are being destroyed, what can we learn from care-centered disability worlds? At a time when we most need it, these scholar-parents give us extraordinary insight into the form of attention in which all our hopes rest: love.

If you have disability-related needs, please contact us at thi@ucsc.edu or call 831-459-1274 by January 13, 2026. ADA parking for this event will be available in lot 170, directly adjacent to the Cowell Ranch Hay Barn. Sign language interpretation will also be available during the event.
About Beautiful Mystery: Living in a Wordless World:
When Danilyn Rutherford and her husband Craig noticed that their six-month-old daughter Millie wasn’t making eye contact, they took her to their pediatrician. And an optometrist. Then a neurologist. Later, to a team of physical and occupational therapists. None of the doctors could give Millie a diagnosis, but it was clear that her brain was not developing at the rate it should. At an age when some children take their first steps, Millie had the cognitive ability and motor skills of a three-month-old. Three years later, Craig died suddenly of a heart attack and Danilyn found herself on the precipice of her anthropology career as a widow and single mother, still trying to solve the puzzle posed by Millie’s inaccessible mind.
Now in her twenties, Millie has never been able to express herself verbally, but she has a thriving social environment rooted in the people around her and in things her companions and family can see, hear, smell, and feel. Life in Millie’s world is far richer than might be immediately evident to those who think and communicate in conventional ways.
Beautiful Mystery explores what it means to be a person in the spaces between what we can and cannot say, and how we can fight to care for those we love when they don’t have the language to fight for themselves. Through her unique lens as a mother and an anthropologist, Rutherford tells the story of arriving in Millie’s world, what she found there, and how Millie showed her that words aren’t always what makes us human. Enlightening and deeply felt, Beautiful Mystery proves that you don’t have to understand someone to love them—a lesson that, if we all learned it, might allow us to live together in a fractured world.
About Animal Crossing: New Horizons: Can a game take care of us?
Animal Crossing: New Horizons was released on March 20, 2020—just as a pandemic kept many from family, work, restaurants, and the rest of their regularly scheduled lives. At its height, the game averaged one million copies sold per day, as players sought comfort, escape, and a virtual means of connection. In this book, game scholar Noah Wardrip-Fruin, isolated with his family by both lockdown and disability, explores the power of this game and the mixed emotions of a player and a parent trying to make it from one day to the next—while his kids’ obsession with Animal Crossing creates conflicts between them and pushback against family rules.
Wardrip-Fruin helps both Animal Crossing fans and newcomers understand the unexpected beneath the game’s surface: like the story of the first Animal Crossing, codesigned by an absent father seeking connection; like the hallmarks of video game manipulation, from “streak” bonuses to game-determined playtimes; like the appeal of endless shopping, in a kind of “safe” capitalism; and, of course, like the character quirks of a raccoon dog, Tom Nook, who provides a world of both safety and strange paternalism.
For many, this blockbuster game offered a comforting world compared to a reality of danger. In this first entry in the Replay series, Wardrip-Fruin offers an absorbing investigation of a game’s role in contemporary social life and a book that belongs on the shelf of anyone who loves or is puzzled by this Nintendo sensation.
Danilyn Rutherford is the president of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and a professor emerita of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Raiding the Land of the Foreigners: The Limits of the Nation on an Indonesian Frontier (Princeton, 2003), Laughing at Leviathan: Sovereignty and Audience in West Papua (Chicago, 2012), Living in the Stone Age: Reflections on the Origins of a Colonial Fantasy (Chicago, 2018), and, most recently, Beautiful Mystery: Living in a Wordless World (Duke, 2025).
Noah Wardrip-Fruin is a Professor of Computational Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He studies and makes video games and electronic literature. Before his most recent book, Noah authored or co-edited six books on games and digital media for the MIT Press, including The New Media Reader (2003). His collaborative art projects have been exhibited by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Krannert Art Museum, and a wide variety of festivals and conferences. Noah holds both a PhD (2006) and an MFA (2003) from Brown University, an MA (2000) from the Gallatin School at New York University, and a BA (1994) from the Johnston Center at the University of Redlands.
Megan Moodie is a Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. She is chair of the Disabled Faculty Networking Group and a core member of the disability studies initiative on campus. meganmoodie.github.io

This event is presented by the Abolition Medicine and Disability Justice Project, a UC Multicampus Research Program and Initiative and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute and is a featured event of THI’s year of Nourishment.

Lisa Wedeen - Whose Dialectic? Thinking with Fanon, Žižek, and Al Attar
2026-01-26 13:00 - 15:00 | Humanites 1, Room 320, Humanities and Social Science Facility, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
This talk begins with a question inspired by the work of the anthropologist David Scott, as to whether radical social transformation can remain a credible historical possibility if it is not undergirded by a belief in teleology. Does collectively willed transformation—the kind to which leftist and anticolonial movements have traditionally aspired—become unthinkable absent some degree of confidence in the arc of History bending toward social amelioration on its own? And if not, how do we begin adjudicating what counts as an emancipatory politics today? Put another way, this talk searches for forms that political hope might take in the disappointing and exhausted ruins of our postcolonial and post-socialist present. It approaches answers to these questions by examining a core concept in key narratives of leftist collective transformation, that is, by exploring anew the promise and limitations of “the dialectic.” It puts Frantz Fanon and Slavoj Žižek into conversation with the playwright Mohammad Al Attar, whose play While I Was Waiting not only shows us the dialectic in action, but in so doing offers a compelling approach to political transformation in the present.
Lisa Wedeen is a political scientist and the Mary R. Morton Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Known for her influential work on symbolic politics, authoritarianism, and the Middle East—particularly Syria—she combines interpretive methods with grounded ethnographic research. She is the author of Ambiguities of Domination, Peripheral Visions, and numerous widely cited articles that have shaped debates in comparative politics and political theory.

Co-presented by the Center for the Middle East and North Africa and the History of Consciousness Department

The Sheikh's Jews: Muslim-Jewish Relations in Interwar Algeria
2026-01-28 18:00 | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Center for Jewish Studies presents, The Helen Diller Distinguished Lecture in Jewish Studies.
Until the middle of the twentieth century, Algeria hosted an array of Jewish communities—some deeply-rooted, others more recently settled—that played important roles in North African society. French colonial rule, however, brought changes that profoundly reshaped Jews’ relationship to their Muslim neighbors. By the years leading up to the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), these changes had created new lines of solidarity—and new tensions—that cast doubt on Jews’ place in Algeria’s future. In this lecture, Professor Joshua Schreier will explore how the most prominent figure among Algerian Ulema, ͑Abd al-Ḥamīd Ben Bādīs (1889–1940), the undisputed leader of reformist Islam in interwar Algeria and a powerful influence on Algeria’s nascent nationalist movement, understood Jews, their relationship to Muslims, and the escalating conflict in Palestine.

Joshua Schreier’s research and teaching navigate the intersection of Jewish, Middle Eastern, North African, and French colonial history. His publications explore the ways colonialism in Algeria not only transformed the relationship between Jews and Muslims but also redefined what these identifiers meant. He is the author of Arabs of the Jewish Faith: The Civilizing Mission in Colonial Algeria (Rutgers, 2010), and The Merchants of Oran: A Jewish Port at the Dawn of Empire (Stanford, 2017), which was a National Jewish Book Award Finalist.

This event is a part of The Helen Diller Distinguished Lecture in Jewish Studies.

Geetha Sukumaran - Kanji Before and After Mullivaikkal: Resistance Histories of Jaffna
2026-01-29 10:00 - 11:30 | Virtual Event
Tamils in Northern and Eastern Sri Lanka endured a protracted civil war that ended in 2009 in Mullivaikkal. During the war’s end, hundreds of thousands of Tamils were murdered and several thousand were displaced. In this last phase, kanji (rice gruel) became the sole source of sustenance. Kanji, a versatile traditional Tamil dish that is central to religious festivals, also adapts to circumstances of scarcity. This talk situates Mullivaikkal Kanji within the broader Sri Lankan Tamil culinary tradition and explores how it became a symbol of resistance.

Dr. Geetha Sukumaran is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Feeding City Lab in the Department of Physical and Environmental Sciences.

This event is open to all students, faculty, staff, and members of the public consistent with University policy and state and federal law

Presented by the Center for South Asian Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute.

Fanon in Documentary Film: Algerian Legacies
2026-01-29 17:30 - 20:00 | Communications 150, Studio C
Film Screening and Panel Discussion: 5:30-7pm, Communications 150, Studio C
Reception: Communications 139, 7-8pm
Marking the centenary of Frantz Fanon’s birth, the Center for Middle East and North Africa is hosting a film screening of True Chronicles of the Blida Joinville Psychiatric Hospital, the recent film by Algerian director Abdenour Zahzah that focuses on his time in the psychiatric hospital in Blida, Algeria. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with Meryem Belkaïd (Bowdoin College), Isaac Julien (UCSC), and Mark Nash (UCSC) on the representation of Fanon’s work and life in film, from Julien and Nash’s classic 1998 documentary, Black Skin White Masks, to more recent films that focus on how Fanon’s time in Algeria shaped his intellectual and political commitments.
Meryem Belkaïd is the Harriet Sara Walker and Mary Sophia Walker Associate Professor of Humanities at Bowdoin College. Trained in both literature (PhD from La Sorbonne) and political science (Master degree from Science Po, Paris), her research focuses on a decolonial approach of North African cinema and literature. She is the author of From Outlaw to Rebel: Contemporary documentary in Contemporary Algeria (Palgrave 2023). Her works have appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of North African Studies, Fixxion and Expressions maghrébines. She is a regular contributor of the online magazine Orient XXI.
Mark Nash is a distinguished independent curator, film historian, and filmmaker with a specialization in contemporary fine art moving image practices, avant-garde, and world cinema. He holds a PhD from Middlesex University and an MA from Cambridge University. He is a professor in History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, where he founded the Isaac Julien Lab with his partner and long-time collaborator, Isaac Julien. His most recent publication, Curating the Moving Image (Duke UP, 2023), outlines several key concepts that range from exhibition architecture and curating as an affective and artistic practice to post-cold war aesthetics and contemporary Chinese art.

Isaac Julien is a filmmaker and installation artist who has been making films and producing film installations for over forty years. Recent works include All that Changes You. Metamorphosis (2025), Once Again… (Statues Never Die) (2022), Lina Bo Bardi – A Marvellous Entanglement (2019), and Lessons of the Hour – Frederick Douglass (2019). A retrospective of his work, Isaac Julien: I Dream a World, was exhibited at the De Young Museum in 2025. In 2018, Julien joined the faculty at the UC Santa Cruz where he is a Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities and leads the Moving Image Lab together with Mark Nash. Julien is the recipient of The Royal Academy of Arts Charles Wollaston Award in 2017. In 2022, he was awarded a Kaiserring Goslar Award in 2022, and he was granted a knighthood as part of the Queen’s Honours List.

Presented by the Center for the Middle East and North Africa and co-sponsored by the Film and Digital Media Department.

UC-Maghreb Working Group
2026-01-30 09:00 - 17:00 | Virtual and In Person
This workshop will bring together over a dozen scholars from the UC-system who research the Maghreb to share their work and exchange ideas. It is designed as a way of maintaining the rich network of expertise on this region found on the west coast. In addition to thematic panels, Susan Slyomovics (UCLA) will be presenting on her recently published work, Monuments Decolonized: Algeria’s French Colonial Heritage (Stanford University Press, 2024).
For a detailed program, or to receive the Zoom link, please contact cmenasc@ucsc.edu.
Participant list and workshop schedule to follow.

Susan Slyomovics – Monuments Decolonized: Algeria's French Colonial Heritage
2026-01-30 13:00 - 14:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
In this talk, Susan Slyomovics will discuss her new book, Monuments Decolonized: Algeria’s French Colonial Heritage. “Statuomania” overtook Algeria beginning in the nineteenth century as the French affinity for monuments placed thousands of war memorials across the French colony. But following Algeria’s hard-fought independence in 1962, these monuments took on different meanings and some were “repatriated” to France, legally or clandestinely. Today, in both Algeria and France, people are moving and removing, vandalizing and preserving this contested, yet shared monumental heritage. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interviews in both countries, she analyzes the colonial nostalgia, dissonant heritage, and ongoing decolonization and iconoclasm of these works of art.

This event is both in-person and virtual. Click above for the zoom link.
Susan Slyomovics is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Near Eastern Languages & Cultures at UCLA. She is the author of books and articles on the topics of reparations, anthropology of art, and cultural and material heritage of the Middle East and North Africa. Her recent book, Monuments Decolonized: Algeria’s French Colonial Heritage (Stanford University Press, 2024), received the 2025 Ed Bruner Book Award from the Council on Heritage and the Anthropology of Tourism (CHAT) of the American Anthropological Association.

Gregory O'Malley - The Escapes of David George
2026-02-02 19:00 - 20:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop welcomes prize-winning historian and UC Santa Cruz professor Gregory O’Malley for a discussion about his new book The Escapes of David George: An Odyssey of Slavery, Freedom, and the American Revolution—the dramatic story of a Black man’s relentless search for freedom in Revolutionary America.
This book tells the story of David George who in 1762 at the age of 19 escaped from a plantation in Virginia thus becoming a fugitive enslaved person. Using archival records and David’s own brief account of his life, which is the earliest written testimony by a fugitive enslaved person in North America, the book tells the story of David George’s relentless search for freedom in Revolutionary-era America and presents a unique perspective on our nation’s origins, principles, and contradictions.
Piecing together archival records and David George’s own brief account of his life—the earliest written testimony by a fugitive enslaved person in North America—Gregory O’Malley presents a thrilling narrative and a unique perspective on our nation’s origins, principles, and contradictions.
Gregory E O’Malley is professor of history at UC Santa Cruz and the author of The Escapes of David George: An Odyssey of Slavery, Freedom, and the American Revolution. His first book, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807, won the Forkosch, Rawley, Owsley, and Elsa Goveia awards. He is a key contributor to the SlaveVoyages.org, consulted on The 1619 Project, and lectures widely on the slave trade and related subjects.

Cosponsored by The Humanities Institute

George Saunders - Vigil
2026-02-03 19:00 | Rio Theater, 1205 Soquel Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95062, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes George Saunders, recipient of the 2025 National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, for a discussion about his wise, playful, electric novel Vigil, which takes place at the bedside of an oil company CEO in the twilight hours of his life as he is ferried from this world into the next.

Not for the first time, Jill “Doll” Blaine finds herself hurtling toward earth, reconstituting as she falls, right down to her favorite black pumps. She plummets towards her newest charge, yet another soul she must usher into the afterlife, and lands headfirst in the circular drive of his ornate mansion. She has performed this sacred duty 343 times since her own death. Her charges, as a rule, have been greatly comforted in their final moments. But this charge, she soon discovers, isn’t like the others: the powerful K. J. Boone will not be consoled, because he has nothing to regret. He lived a big, bold life, and the world is better for it. Isn’t it?
Vigil transports us, careening, through the wild final evening of an epic, complicated life. Crowds of people and animals—worldly and otherworldly, alive and dead—arrive, clamoring for a reckoning. Birds swarm the dying man’s room, a black calf grazes on the love seat, a man from a distant, drought-ravaged village materializes, two oil-business cronies from decades past show up with chilling plans for Boone’s postdeath future.
George Saunders is the author of thirteen books, including the novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Man Booker Prize, and five collections of stories, including Tenth of December, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the recent collection Liberation Day (selected by former President Obama as one of his ten favorite books of 2022). Three of Saunders’s books—Pastoralia, Tenth of December, and Lincoln in the Bardo—were chosen for The New York Times’s list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. Saunders hosts the popular Story Club on Substack, which grew out of his book on the Russian short story, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. In 2013, he was named one of the world’s 100 Most Influential People by Time. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.

This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute.

Kara Cooney - When Women Ruled the World
2026-02-05 17:30 | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Ancient Studies presents the 2026 Carl Deppe Lecture featuring Kara Cooney, who will present her lecture “When Women Ruled the World.”
Who were the women who once ruled the richest and most successful state of the ancient Mediterranean and African Bronze Age? Ancient Egypt’s female kings, including Hatshepsut and Nefertiti, ruled against all odds of the patriarchy in which they lived with real, unadulterated power. Yet many of these female leaders were judged harshly for taking power or erased from the historical record by the men who followed them, leaving them elusive historical figures surrounded by mystery and myth. In this lecture, Prof. Kara Cooney, Egyptologist and author of When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt, will go beyond the myths and shed light on these powerful female kings and their historical legacy.

Kara Cooney is a professor of ancient Egyptian art and architecture and chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. Specializing in social history, gender studies, and economies of the ancient world, she received her PhD in Egyptology from Johns Hopkins University. Her books include The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut’s Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt, When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt, and The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World. Her latest books include Recycling for Death: Coffin Reuse in Ancient Egypt and the Theban Royal Caches, Ancient Egyptian Society: Challenging Assumptions, Exploring Approaches, and Coffin Commerce.

Marion Nestle - Sustainable Food in the Trump Era
2026-02-12 18:00 | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
What is the state of sustainable food now, what are the forces affecting food choice, and what can we do about it? Join us for this year’s Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture featuring Marion Nestle — Mark Bittman’s “guiding light” on nutrition and Alice Waters’ “tireless warrior for public health” — for a bracing look at what’s on today’s menu and what’s in store.

Marion Nestle is a consumer advocate, nutritionist, award-winning author, and academic who specializes in the politics of food and dietary choice. Her research examines scientific, economic, and social influences on food choice and health, with an emphasis on the role of food industry marketing. Her books explore how politics affects food production, dietary intake, food safety, and human and planetary health. She is the author of books such as the classic, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety, What to Eat, and many more! Nestle is the emerita Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health and Professor of Sociology at New York University. She also holds an appointment as visiting professor in the Cornell Division of Nutritional Sciences. Her degrees include a Ph.D. in molecular biology and an M.P.H. in public health nutrition, both from the University of California, Berkeley.

The Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture Series is made possible by the Peggy Downes Baskin Humanities Endowment for Interdisciplinary Ethics which enables lively dialogue about ethics related challenges in interdisciplinary settings.

Of Body and Soul: Politics and Eschatology in the Pre-Modern Mediterranean
2026-02-17 - 2026-02-18 | UC Santa Cruz
This seminar explores how pre-modern debates over body and soulshaped political and eschatological thought in the Mediterranean. Each panel brings Jewish, Christian, and Islamic voices into dialogue, with Dante Alighieri’s oeuvre as a recurring point of comparison. Our aim is to situate questions of embodiment, psychology, soteriology, and collective destiny in light of their historical contexts and their wider intellectual and political implications.
Panels are organized around four thematic currents — Aristotelianism, Neoplatonism, Mysticism, and Political Eschatology — in order to examine how body-soul anthropology, political theology, and visions of history intersected in the pre-modern Mediterranean (12th–16th centuries).
This event will be live-streamed via a Zoom Webinar for anyone outside of the Santa Cruz who would like to attend. Please register for the live stream here: https://ucsc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_P3yCD6CxRwWY_MO6dJKAMg
Full event schedule here. The day’s program will feature:
Akash Kumar (University of California, Berkeley)

Alexander Green (University of Florida, The Hamilton School for Classic and Civic Education)
Talk title: “Maimonides on the Duality of Love”

Alison Cornish (New York University)

Andrew LaZella (The University of Scranton)
Talk title: “Averroes and the Aristotelian Left: The Latin Averroists’ Agent Intellect and Dante’s Empire”
Bettina Koch (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University)
Talk title: “The Challenged Souls: How the Abuse of Spiritual Power Threatens the Souls in Marsilius of Padua’s Defensor Pacis”
Carla Freccero (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Elliot Wolfson (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Talk title: “Transposition of the Material into the Angelic Body: Abraham Abulafia’s Polemic with the Christian Dogma of Incarnation”

Ethan H. Shagan (University of California, Berkeley)
Talk title: “The Protestant Emergence of ‘Secular’ Political Theology”

Filippo Gianferrari (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Heather Webb (Yale University)
Talk title: “The Forms of Affective Communities: Clare of Assisi, Dante, and Catherine of Siena”

Jason Aleksander (San José State University)
Talk title: “The Enigma of History in Nicholas of Cusa’s De ultimis diebus”
Massimiliano Tomba (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Nathanael Deutsh (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Paola Nasti (Northwestern University)
Talk title: “Temporal Anticipation of the Divine: Political Eschatology and the Realization of Humanity’s Likeness to God in Dante’s Monarchia”
Paula Pico Estrada (Universidad Nacional de San Martín)
Talk title: “Annihilation and Embodiment: St. Catherine of Genoa’s Doctrine of Purgatory as Political Eschatology”

Peerawat Chiaranunt (The University of Notre Dame)
Talk title: “Two Aspects of Local Motion in the Paradiso: subtilitas and agilitas”

Seyed N. Mousavian (Loyola University, Chicago)
Talk title: “Avicenna on the Human Soul, Body and Eschatology”

Theodore Cachey (The University of Notre Dame)
Talk title: “Mapping the Unmappable: Poetics, Participation, and the Body–Soul Problem in Dante’s Paradiso”

This event is sponsored by Siegfried B. and Elisabeth Mignon Puknat Literary Studies Endowment, Porter College, The Humanities Institute, the Italian Studies and the Literature Department, The Center for Jewish Studies, University of California Regents System Collaboration Funding, and San José State University Division of Research and Innovation.

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa - Kyi-dug, Tibetan Welfare Groups: Sharing Ups and Downs
2026-02-26 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
As many as 80,000 Tibetans fled to India and Nepal in 1959 following the Chinese occupation of Tibet. The establishment of a Tibetan government in exile helped foster a sense of belonging, but it was also through mutual aid groups, such as the kyi-dug, that Tibetan refugees took care of one another. The word kyi-dug: kyi for happiness, and dug for sorrow, carries an implicit notion that the kyi-dug is organized with the goal to comfort and support community members in times of crises. In this talk, Dhompa will braid a few different stories–– refugee aid packages in the early 1960s, kyi-dug and children, and ancestral divinities of land and people––to speak about resistance and belonging.

This event is both in-person and on zoom. Click above for the zoom link.
Tsering Wangmo Dhompa is the author of The Politics of Sorrow, an account of early Tibetan exile political life in India published by Columbia University Press (2025). She has several collections of poetry: My Rice Tastes Like the Lake, In the Absent Everyday and Rules of the House (all from Apogee Press, Berkeley), and a non-fiction book, Coming Home to Tibet (Shambhala Publications, 2014)
This event is open to all students, faculty, staff, and members of the public consistent with University policy and state and federal law.

Presented by the Center for South Asian Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute

Kitchen Counterculture: A Conversation About Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead, and the Food that Fueled a Revolution
2026-02-26 19:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz Presents Kitchen Counterculture: A Conversation About Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead, and the Food that Fueled a Revolution,” featuring award-winning food writer Gabi Moskowitz and journalist, teacher, and author Jim Newton. This event is cosponsored by the UC Santa Cruz The Humanities Division, The Humanities Institute, and the UCSC Special Collections & Archives.

Your RSVP helps us plan for your arrival and keep in touch with any changes. Thank you for registering!
Dead in the Kitchen, by Gabi Moskowitz: Kindly calling all Deadheads! Enjoy a variety of vibrant and delicious vegetarian and vegan recipes as you cook your way through Dead in the Kitchen: The Official Grateful Dead Cookbook, available just in time to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the legendary psychedelic rock band.
Welcome to the show! Dead in the Kitchen is the official, authorized Grateful Dead cookbook, a well-crafted extension of the vibrant, communal, free-spirited energy that the band and their legacy have graced us with for decades. Featuring the band’s iconic artwork, logos, and illustrations, this beautifully designed book brings the unmistakable Grateful Dead aesthetic to life on every page, making it a must-have collectible for devoted fans.
You’ll find recipes organized and inspired by not only the band’s timeless music, but also the loyal Deadheads that continue to find kindness and community amongst one another. Delight in dishes like the savory Curried Vegetable Pot Pie, the Meatless Meatball Sandwich, or a sweet bite of Pumpkin Cheesecake. With each recipe crafted to be simple and accessible for all, this is the perfect cookbook for novice cooks and seasoned pros alike. Find your flow in the kitchen as you create each flavorful dish and, if Jerry has taught us anything, don’t be afraid to improvise! This cookbook celebrates the Grateful Dead on each page and encourages more connection through gathering together and enjoying delicious food that’s good for feeding the mind, body, and soul.
Here Beside the Rising Tide: Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead, and an American Awakening, by Jim Newton: In 1965, in Palo Alto, Jerry Garcia opened a dictionary to a fable in which an appreciative soul repays the generosity of a traveler, a “gift of the grateful dead.” After a traumatic car accident that injured him and killed a close friend, Garcia had resolved to build his life around music. He had practiced relentlessly and caromed across the northern California folk and bluegrass scene. He had gathered up some fellow musicians and formed a band. Now they had their name. Following the history of the Grateful Dead means tracking American cultural history through a period of radical reconsideration. The Dead played at the Acid Tests and the Human Be-In and Woodstock, at the occupation of Columbia and the Bail Ball for People’s Park. They performed at the base of the Pyramids during a lunar eclipse, at Madison Square Garden to defend the rainforests, in San Francisco to sound the alarm over AIDS and at Huey Newton’s birthday party. For three decades, the band explored the meaning and limits of freedom. The radical message of the Dead, to reject the mainstream and build a bohemian community, radiated across the world, manifesting itself in art, music, business, and politics. Here Beside the Rising Tide tells the story of those disparate shafts of light, putting Garcia into a broader context while tracing his eventful life. Nearly a century after his birth, Garcia’s influence stretches onward, expressed in guitar licks and a gentle way of life, one of excellence and gratitude, chasing freedom, living moment to moment, guided by song-the gift of the Grateful Dead.
Gabi Moskowitz is the founder of BrokeAssGourmet.com, an award-winning website about inexpensive cooking. She’s written five cookbooks, and produced Freeform’s Young & Hungry, a situation comedy based on her life and writing. She lives in Marin County, California, with her husband and daughters.
Jim Newton is a journalist, teacher, and author of Justice for All, Eisenhower, Worthy Fights, and Man of Tomorrow. He was at the Los Angeles Times for twenty-five years as a reporter, bureau chief, editorial page editor, columnist, and editor at large. He lives in Pasadena, California, and teaches at UCLA, where he founded and edits the award-winning public affairs magazine Blueprint.

Writing Hangout with Tsering Wangmo Dhompa
2026-02-27 09:00 - 11:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
If we take a moment to examine our lives, we can find meaningful, even exciting connections between our mundane moments and the society we live in. In this workshop, we will write together to explore how we can find the words we need to create the communities we would like to be. All are welcome. No prior creative writing experience is required and prompts will be provided. Lunch and informal discussion to follow.
Tsering Wangmo Dhompa is the author of The Politics of Sorrow, an account of early Tibetan exile political life in India published by Columbia University Press (2025). She has several collections of poetry: My Rice Tastes Like the Lake, In the Absent Everyday and Rules of the House (all from Apogee Press, Berkeley), and a non-fiction book, Coming Home to Tibet (Shambhala Publications, 2014)
This event is open to all students, faculty, staff, and members of the public consistent with University policy and state and federal law.

Presented by the Center for South Asian Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute

Undiscovered Shakespeare: The Two Noble Kinsmen - Episode I
2026-03-04 19:00 - 21:00 | Virtual Event
Shakespeare returns to the characters and themes of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in what may have been the last play he had a hand in writing: The Two Noble Kinsmen. This time, however, the story of Theseus and Hippolyta, the disorienting experience of adolescent sexual desire, and the conflict of duties to sovereigns, parents, friends, and spouses are no laughing matter. They are over-shadowed by the play’s source text — Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, in which chance foils Theseus’s best efforts to create order out of chaos and meaning out of loss — and by Shakespeare’s own experience writing tragedy and tragicomedy.

Thomas Luxon is Professor of English, Emeritus at Dartmouth College, where he was also the inaugural Cheheyl Professor and Director of the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning. His teaching and scholarship focus on literature of the English Renaissance and Reformation, with a particular interest in John Milton, John Bunyan, John Dryden, and 17th-century English religion and politics. In his revelatory book, Single Imperfection: Milton, Marriage, and Friendship (Duquesne UP, 2005), Professor Luxon explores the impact of ancient theories of friendship on Milton’s conception of Reformation marriage, and during the pandemic, he contributed a lecture about the rivalry of friendship and marriage in Two Noble Kinsmen to Ian Doescher’s Shakespeare 2020 Project.
Undiscovered Shakespeare is a public arts and humanities series co-produced by Santa Cruz Shakespeare, UCSC Shakespeare Workshop, and The Humanities Institute. It brings professional actors and scholars together with the public for a staged reading and discussion of works by Shakespeare that are rarely produced.

Traveling Film Southasia - Film Screening Festival Launch
2026-03-05 17:00 - 19:00 | Communications 150, Studio C
Join the Center for South Asian Studies (CSAS) for a celebratory film screening event to launch Travelling Film Southasia, a mobile film festival highlighting 19 exceptional nonfiction productions of the last two years, originally screened at Film Southasia 2024 in Kathmandu. This year’s festival encapsulates a range of experiences on the Subcontinent with films from Nepal, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Myanmar, including CSAS Faculty Director Dolly Kikon’s recent film, Abundance.
Film Southasia (FSA) is a biennial festival that began in 1997 with the goal of popularizing documentary films so that they entertain, inform, and change lives. In addition to the festival that takes place in Kathmandu every two years, FSA organizes screenings, discussions, and workshops to promote Southasian non-fiction within the Subcontinent and around the world. Film Southasia believes that film is a powerful medium that not only helps better represent the region internationally, but also contributes immensely to introspection and to initiatives that bring change at the local level.
For more information: Traveling FSA 2025.
After the March 5 film festival launch event, the festival films will be available for streaming until March 20. Link and instructions for viewing to follow.
This event is open to all students, faculty, staff, and members of the public consistent with University policy and state and federal law.

Presented by the Center for South Asian Studies and co-sponsored by the Department of Film and Digital Media and The Humanities Institute.

The Trial of Spock — An Opera Workshop
2026-03-08 16:00 | Music Center Recital Hall
Join us as the creators of The Trial of Spock — An Opera present five scenes from an opera-in-progress by Ben Leeds Carson, Perre DiCarlo, and Lincoln and Lee Taiz. With co-authors John DeLancey, Camilla Hawthorne, and Michael Chemers.
Starring sopranos Nicole Koh, Sheila Willey, and Emily Sinclair; tenor Alex Boyer; baritones Joseph Calzada and Michael Kuo; and the Del Sol Quartet.
Join us for “Questions that Matter – How to Live Long and Prosper: Lessons from a Star Trek Opera,” a follow up conversation about the opera at Kuumbwa Jazz Center on March 13th.

Undiscovered Shakespeare: The Two Noble Kinsmen - Episode II
2026-03-11 19:00 - 21:00 | Virtual Event

Questions that Matter - How to Live Long and Prosper: Lessons from a Star Trek Opera
2026-03-13 19:00 | Kuumbwa Jazz Center
What do we need to live a fulfilling life? This essential question of the humanities feels especially pressing now, on the precipice of profound changes to our planet, our bodies, and our sense of human exceptionality. Join us for a conversation — and a music-and-drama masterclass — about speculative fiction from the Star Trek world, the myth of Orpheus, and what the operatic form can teach us about intelligence, humanity, and the good life.
More information and registration coming soon!
This event follows the “The Trial of Spock — An Opera Workshop” on March 8th. The opera creators will present five scenes from an opera-in-progress by Ben Leeds Carson, Perre DiCarlo, and Lincoln and Lee Taiz. With co-authors John DeLancey, Camilla Hawthorne, and Michael Chemers.
Questions That Matter is a public humanities series developed by The Humanities Institute and the community of Santa Cruz. It brings together, in conversation, two or more UC Santa Cruz scholars with community residents and students to explore questions that matter to all of us.

Karen Russell - The Antidote
2026-03-16 19:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes bestselling author Karen Russell (Swamplandia!) for a discussion about her latest novel The Antidote, which will be available in paperback on the night of the event. “The Antidote blends speculative and fantasy elements with rich language and vivid characters in an effort not to escape reality but to comment even more thoughtfully on it. . . . Russell’s lyrical writing dazzles on every page.” —The New York Times

Your RSVP helps us plan for your arrival and keep in touch with any changes. Thank you for registering!
The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a “Prairie Witch,” whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples’ memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate.
Karen Russell is the author of six books of fiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. She has received MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, she now lives in the Bay Area with her husband, son, and daughter. The Antidote, a national bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Award, is her second novel.
This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute.

Undiscovered Shakespeare: The Two Noble Kinsmen - Episode III
2026-03-18 19:00 - 21:00 | Virtual Event

Oceans of Dissent: A Feminist Commons
2026-04-03 - 2026-04-04 | UC Santa Cruz
We gather to forge new vernaculars of the geopolitical, to assemble spatial imaginaries of the “oceanic” that refuse rather than relent to the insistent march of capital and empire. To dissent here is an invitation to think more about the messiness and stuckness of our intellectual labors across histories of slavery, indenture, colonialism and more. This event is open to the campus community.
Further details about registration to come.
Any questions? Email Sadie Lynn at sklynn@ucsc.edu.

The Deep Read - A Conversation with Merlin Sheldrake
2026-05-31 | Quarry Amphitheater
Join us for a free, public conversation with British mycologist and author, Merlin Sheldrake, at UC Santa Cruz’s Quarry Amphitheater on May 31, 2026. He’ll discuss his New York Times bestseller, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change our Minds, and Shape our Futures with Deep Read Faculty Co-Lead, Professor of Literature Vilashini Cooppan, which reveals the foundational and nourishing role of fungal webs in our world, both in the past and today. Together, we’ll explore the dependence of all life—human, plant, animal, and beyond—on fungal networks and how the resulting interconnections provoke us to reconsider our understanding of existence, identity, intelligence, and more.
More information coming soon.

The Deep Read is an annual program of The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz made possible through the generous support of the Helen and Will Webster Foundation. We invite curious minds to think deeply about books and the most pressing issues of our contemporary moment.
