Employing Humanities Internships and Research Info Session #1
2024-10-03 12:00 - 12:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 202
Learn about paid internships and undergraduate research opportunities for Humanities Students including applications, timelines, and program details.
Open to all Humanities Majors and Minors. For more information please email humco@ucsc.edu.
Please visit the Humanities Student Events Calendar to see other exciting events happening for students in the Humanities Division.

Employing Humanities Internships and Research Info Session #2
2024-10-04 12:00 - 12:30 | Virtual Event
Learn about paid internships and undergraduate research opportunities for Humanities Students including applications, timelines, and program details. Info on how to join via Zoom can be found via the Humanities Division Linktree.
Open to all Humanities Majors and Minors. For more information please email humco@ucsc.edu.
Please visit the Humanities Student Events Calendar to see other exciting events happening for students in the Humanities Division.

Homage to Antoinette Swan & the Princes of Surf
2024-10-04 18:00 - 19:00 | Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, 705 Front St., Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Do you know about the three Hawaiian princes coming to Santa Cruz in 1885 and introducing surfing to the mainland? They didn’t come here by accident. Join historians Geoffrey Dunn and Kim Stoner and learn about Antoinette Swan and her ties to Hawaiian royalty. This talk is a sneak peek of more hidden stories we will share in an upcoming exhibition in 2025.

This event is presented by the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH) and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute.

Educator Workshop with the Amah Mutsun
2024-10-05 09:00 - 15:00 | Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History
Join the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History for a collaborative workshop connecting local educators with tribal leaders and scholars.
This workshop aims to deepen knowledge, clarify terminology, and provide a space for dialogue about incorporating a native perspective into K-12 curriculum.
Teachers will have the opportunity to work side-by-side with colleagues and tribal representatives as they consider the strengths and weaknesses of their current curriculum and consider ways that they might better incorporate an Indigenous perspective into future lessons.
Featuring: Valentin Lopez, Chairman of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band
Earn continuing education credit and join this FREE outdoor workshop on Saturday, October 5th from 9am-3pm at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History. Open to formal and informal educators of the Monterey Bay region. Light breakfast and lunch will be provided.
Learn more and register at: https://www.santacruzmuseum.org/10-5-educator-workshop-with-the-amah-mutsun/

This event is supported by The Humanities Institute, The History & Civics Project @ UC Santa Cruz, and The Bagelry.

Disrupting Imposter Phenomenon from the Inside Out with Silvia Austerlic
2024-10-08 11:30 - 13:00 | Virtual Event
Have you ever felt imposter phenomenon? Learn how to cultivate a growth mindset to disrupt it and move toward empowering ways of learning.
This event has two sessions: Oct 8, 11:30 – 1:00 p.m. via Zoom or Nov 5, 3:00 – 4:30 p.m. in Graduate Student Commons, Study Lounge 204. Register below to attend either session.

Silvia Austerlic is an intercultural educator, facilitator and consultant, and founder of Senti-pensante Connections, whose mission is to bridge inner work and social justice in service of individual transformation, social change, and collective action. A lecturer at UCSC Oakes College, she developed and teaches “Building an Inner Sanctuary,” which fosters the cultivation of inner and outer resources needed to show up for community-oriented action and social justice; and facilitates campus-wide learning events surrounding critical interculturality, self-leadership, healing justice, and fostering resilience and care in the community.

This event is a Graduate Division Professional Development Event co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our PhD+ workshop series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the ninth year of PhD+ Workshops at The Humanities Institute. This series covers a range of topics including possible career paths for humanities PhDs, securing grants and fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Employing Humanities Resume and Cover Letter Career Workshop
2024-10-08 13:30 - 14:30 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Having a fantastic resume and cover letter are the first steps towards securing part-time, full-time, on-campus or off-campus work. Join us for this informative workshop to learn best practices and resources for creating or updating your resume and cover letter.
Register on Handshake here!
Open to all Humanities Majors and Minors. For more information please email humco@ucsc.edu.
Please visit the Humanities Student Events Calendar to see other exciting events happening for students in the Humanities Division.

T.J. Demos – Counterinsurgent: Cop City, Abolition Ecology, and the Aesthetics of Counterreform
2024-10-09 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
If “climate apartheid” is on the rise, as Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò warns, then Cop City Atlanta—the multimillion-dollar new police training facility built by clear-cutting the city’s largest green space—offers an ominous flashpoint. For not only is Cop City’s contested construction (which is ongoing) an exemplary story of the violent repression of community activism at the nexus of abolition, decolonization, and environmentalism. It also spotlights the forces of contemporary counterinsurgency—including its aesthetic modalities—that are operating to prevent any political transformation beyond the status quo. If the environmental movement is losing in the struggle to stop world-ending climate change, then continuing to focus on practices of ecological repair is increasingly myopic, even escapist, without taking into account the forces blocking any meaningful change. How might a prehensive climate-justice-directed art history, and an insurgent arts of the possible, meaningfully respond?
T. J. Demos is Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, at University of California, Santa Cruz, and founding Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. Demos is the author of several books, including Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Sternberg Press, 2017); Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Sternberg Press, 2016); and The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis (Duke University Press, 2013) – winner of the College Art Association’s 2014 Frank Jewett Mather Award. He co-edited The Routledge Companion on Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (2021), was a Getty Research Institute Fellow (Spring 2020), and directed the Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar research project Beyond the End of the World (2019-21). His new book, Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come, 2023, is out from Sternberg Press.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

The Informational Interview with Lorato Anderson
2024-10-09 13:30 - 15:00 | Graduate Student Commons, Room 204, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, 95064
An informational interview is one you conduct with someone working in a field for an institution or company that you want to consider working in and for. How do you conduct an informational interview? What questions should you ask to get the best information about what it’s like to do that job for that organization? How do you network to locate people to ask for an informational interview?
This event has two sessions: Oct 8, 1:30 – 3:00 p.m. in Graduate Student Commons, or Oct 10, 12:00 – 1:30 p.m. via Zoom. Register below to attend either session.

As director of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the Division of Graduate Studies at UC Santa Cruz, Lorato Anderson focuses on advancing initiatives for minoritized graduate student support across multiple campus-wide projects and providing direct support to students, staff, faculty, and programs. Lorato graduated with a B.A. in Literature/Writing from UC San Diego and received her M.S. in Higher Education Administration and Policy from Northwestern University, where she researched and developed assessment models for English language learners and created multiple DEI programs that are still active. She has extensive experience in grant writing, teaching, advising, assessment, and creating long-lasting research-backed programs to promote minoritized undergraduate and graduate student success.
Lorato has worked on campus since 2016 and received the 2020 Outstanding Staff Achievement Award in Social Sciences. Her previous roles include graduate program adviser and coordinator for Latin American and Latino Studies (LALS) and Politics and undergraduate advisor for Psychology. She takes pride in incorporating social justice and empathetic advising strategies and teaching pedagogies into her work in advising, administration, and grant and program development.

This event is a Graduate Division Professional Development Event co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our PhD+ workshop series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the ninth year of PhD+ Workshops at The Humanities Institute. This series covers a range of topics including possible career paths for humanities PhDs, securing grants and fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

More-Than-Human(ities) Laboratory Cluster Meet and Greet
2024-10-09 14:00 - 16:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Join us for the inaugural More-than-humanities community gathering! Light refreshments will be served. This will be our chance to come together to get to know one another and shape the vision for the lab. We hope you will come, and we ask that you bring your 1-2 wishes for the lab to share with the community.
Learn more about the research cluster here.

Conflict Resolution with Anthony Keen-Louie
2024-10-09 15:00 - 16:30 | Graduate Student Commons, Room 204, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, 95064
Wherever there are groups of people, there will be conflict. However, conflict can be an opportunity to grow and improve if the right tools and resources are used. This workshop will explore conflict as a topic, share information about conflict resolution resources at UCSC, and provide some conflict resolution skills for participants to use in their careers that focus on building community.
This event is on Oct 9, 3:00 – 4:30 p.m. in Graduate Student Commons. Register below to attend the session.

Anthony Keen-Louie (he/him/his) is a seasoned student affairs professional and mediator and has worked with the UCSC Ombuds Office since August 2023. Previously he served at UCSD for eight years in residential life leadership roles supporting inclusive student community development with initiatives for student residents, including graduate students and students with dependents. Anthony has a master’s degree in Dispute Resolution from the USC Gould School of Law, where he now serves as an adjunct lecturer in law, and is a mediator, trainer, and group format mediator with the National Conflict Resolution Center. He also has a master’s degree in Higher Education/Student Affairs from New York University and a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from UC Riverside.

This event is a Graduate Division Professional Development Event co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our PhD+ workshop series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the ninth year of PhD+ Workshops at The Humanities Institute. This series covers a range of topics including possible career paths for humanities PhDs, securing grants and fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Identity in Focus: Media Representations and the 2024 Presidential Election
2024-10-09 19:00 | Virtual and In Person
This event is part of the 2024 U.S. Elections Forum Series – Power, Politics, and Our Democracy
UC Santa Cruz is excited to share our U.S. Elections Forum Series to provide a platform for deep conversations about our quickly changing and polarized democracy, and consider how to participate in and help shape our futures. How do power, politics, and the media landscape interact, disrupt, and reinforce one another? Join the conversation with our scholars and national thought leaders to learn more about how to think critically about our political processes and the nature of our democracy. There are six events in the series, all of them are offered online via Zoom, and three events have an in-person option. More information listed below. Events are free and open to the public.
For registration and full program information please visit: https://transform.ucsc.edu/events/2024-elections-forum-series/
Co-sponsored by: Institute for Social Transformation, Merrill College, The Humanities Institute, Science and Justice Research Center, Politics Department Democratic Discourse and Engagement Initiative, Kresge College, John R. Lewis College, and College Nine.

Mizanur Rahman--The Mass Uprisings in Bangladesh: Youth Mobilization, Political Possibility, and Precarity
2024-10-10 11:00 - 12:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Bangladesh’s recent student-led mass uprising which ousted the longstanding autocrat, Sheikh Hasina, from office is widely considered to have ushered in a new era in Bangladesh politics. How did the uprising, which began with a demand for student’s job quota reform, unfold, and eventually turn into a mass movement? What political possibilities and precarities lie ahead for post-uprising Bangladesh? What united people of different religions, regions, castes, classes, and generations to fight against authoritarian rule? What inspired them to fearlessly confront state violence and sacrifice their lives? This talk will treat these questions about recent and unfolding political events in Bangladesh and suggest that the mass uprising has been a struggle to reclaim people’s sovereignty and to recover their right to speak and reinstate their dignity.
Md Mizanur Rahman is a PhD candidate in Politics at UC Santa Cruz. His research focuses on liberalism and its critics, Islamic political thought, and religion and politics in South Asia. He is particularly interested in Bangladesh politics and has written on debates concerning Islam, modernity, and the politics of Islamic seminaries in Bangladesh.
This event is co-sponsored by the Center for South Asian Studies and the Center for Cultural Studies

Understanding October 7, 2023 and Israel’s War on the Gaza Strip
2024-10-10 12:30 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The UCSC Center for Jewish Studies presents an event with Joel Beinin, Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History, Emeritus at Stanford University.
How should we speak about the shocking October 7, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas and its allies which killed 1,139 people, 61% of them Israeli civilians, in a single day? What is the appropriate context for understanding the attack, Israel’s massive military, intelligence, and first response failure and its vengeful retaliation which has resulted in nearly 42,000 confirmed Palestinian deaths in the Gaza Strip, some 2/3 of them women and children with plausible estimates rising as high as 186,000? Is it possible to acknowledge the reality of the categories of “terrorism” and “genocide” while placing them in a broader historical context?

Due to the anticipated high demand and limited space for this event, in person attendance at this event will be reserved for the UC Santa Cruz campus community (staff, faculty, and students with a ucsc.edu email address). We will be requiring registration at the door in order to attend in person.
For those in the community who would like to watch Professor Beinin’s presentation, we will be offering the event via livestream, which you can access at: https://vimeo.com/event/4619142
Joel Beinin is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History, Emeritus at Stanford University. His research and writing focus on the social and cultural history and political economy of modern Egypt, Palestine, and Israel, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. He received his A.B. from Princeton University in 1970, A.M. from Harvard University in 1974, and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1982. He taught at Stanford from 1983 to 2019 with a hiatus as Director of Middle East Studies and Professor of History at the American University in Cairo in 2006-08. In 2002 he served as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America.
He has written or edited twelve books and over fifty academic articles and book chapters. His most recent book is A Critical Political Economy of the Modern Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2020); co-edited with Bassam Haddad and Sherene Seikaly. His books on Israel/Palestine include: The Independent Left in Israel, 1967-1993: A Collection in Memory of Noam Kaminer [in Hebrew] (November Books, 2019); co-edited with Carmel Kaminer, Matan Kaminer, Smadar Nehab Kaminer, and others; The Struggle for Sovereignty: Palestine and Israel, 1993-2005 (Stanford University Press, 2006); co-edited with Rebecca L. Stein; Was the Red Flag Flying There? Marxist Politics and the Arab-Israeli Conflict in Egypt and Israel, 1948-1965 (University of California Press, 1990); and Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising Against Israeli Occupation (South End Press, 1989); co-edited with Zachary Lockman.

Living Writers with Julián Delgado Lopera
2024-10-10 17:20 - 18:50 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Living Writers Series – Fall 2024
Growing Things
~ gardens, poems, emotions, relationships, stories, our artistic practices, carefully tended, beautifully ordered, rewilded and wild ~
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.
About the Author
Julián Delgado Lopera is the author of The New York Times acclaimed novel Fiebre Tropical (Feminist Press 2020), the Winner of the 2021 Ferro Grumley Award and a 2021 Lambda Literary award; a finalist of the 2020 Kirkus Prize in Fiction and the 2021 Aspen Literary Prize. Julián is also the author of Quiéreme (Nomadic Press 2017) and ¡Cuéntamelo! (Aunt Lute 2017) an illustrated bilingual collection of oral histories by LGBT Latinx immigrants which won a 2018 Lambda Literary Award and a 2018 Independent Publisher Book Award.
Julián’s received fellowships and residencies from The National Endowment for the Arts, Black Mountain Institute, Creative Work Fund, Hedgebrook, California Arts Council, San Francisco Arts Commission, Headlands Center for The Arts, Brush Creek Foundation of the Arts, Lambda Literary Foundation and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Their work has appeared in Granta, Teen Vogue, The Kenyon Review, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, The White Review, LALT, Four Way Review, Broadly, TimeOut Mag to name a few. They are the former executive director of RADAR Productions and one of the founders of Drag Queen Story Hour. They have been curating Latinx history projects in San Francisco for over 10 years in partnerships with places such as the GLBT Historical Society, SF Public Library, El/la Para Translatinas, Galería de la Raza and Brava Theatre. Born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia, Julián currently resides in San Francisco. Their second novel is forthcoming from Liveright. Watch their TED Talk here.

Sponsored by The Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Laurie Sain Endowment, The Humanities Institute, Bookshop Santa Cruz, and Two Birds Books, which provides books for purchase at the readings.

U.S. Elections and Democracy in Deeply Polarized Times: What are the Stakes and Opportunities?
2024-10-10 19:00 | Virtual and In Person

Festival of Monsters Public Festival
2024-10-11 - 2024-10-12 | Museum of Art & History, 705 Front Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The UC Santa Cruz Center for Monster Studies presents the 2024 Festival of Monsters opens Oct. 11-12 with a weekend of free public events for all ages. Festivities begin 5 p.m. Friday, Oct. 11, at the Museum of Art and History (705 Front St., Santa Cruz) with a reading and Q&A with Kiersten White, the New York Times Bestselling author of Hide. White will be reading from her new book Lucy Undying, a dark romantic fantasy novel that explores what happens to Lucy Westenra once she escapes Dracula’s thrall.
At 7 p.m., local company Circus of the Moon will perform Pluto’s Labryinth, a twisted journey of shadows and demons featuring aerialists, acrobats, and ensemble dance. Masks and memorabilia from horror design company Trick or Treat Studio will be on display.
At 7 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 12, there will be a free outdoor screening of the silent 1922 F.W. Murnau film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror on the Oakes College lower lawn (231 Oakes Road, Santa Cruz). Professor Emertius H.M. Leicester will introduce the classic vampire film, which stars Max Schreck as Count Orlok.
Events the weekend of Oct. 11-12 are free and first-come, first served.
Please visit here for registration and more information: https://www.monsterstudies.ucsc.edu/2024festpublic
The 2024 Festival of Monsters is grateful for the support of Porter College; Oakes College; The Arts Research Institute; The Humanities Institute; Sigfried and Elizabeth Mignon Puknat Endowment; University of California Humanities Research Institute; the UC Santa Cruz Department of Literature; the UC Santa Cruz Department of Performance, Play and Design; Crown College; Good Times; Trick or Treat Studios; Bookshop Santa Cruz; Atlantis Fantasyworld; James Gunderson and Peter Coha.

Bilingual California/California Bilingüe: Fronteras y Futuros
2024-10-11 18:00 | Music Center Recital Hall
Join us as we welcome Professor Ana Celia Zentella (professor emerita, UC San Diego) to discuss the political, social, and educational barriers that California’s Spanish-English bilinguals must overcome to ensure a bilingual future for themselves and their children. She suggests ways that students, parents, teachers, university faculty and community groups can contribute successfully.

This event is free and open to the public with free parking.
California is the state with the largest number of Spanish speakers in the USA; the approximately 15 million Spanish speakers represent 39.09 % of the state’s population (U.S. Census Bureau, 2024). The large numbers and long history of Spanish in California (as the official administrative language from 1542 to 1848) suggest the continuity of the language and bilingualism are ensured. But the state’s Spanish speakers, primarily of Mexican and other increasingly diverse origins, cross many political, economic, racial, and linguistic fronteras to arrive, survive, and thrive in California. The bilingual future of immigrants and their children and grandchildren is impeded by multiple barriers, beyond concrete walls at the border. We can and must ensure un futuro bilingüe with our teaching, research, and community outreach.
Major barreras include the demonization of Latinus and our Spanish and English by many – including political leaders – restrictive employment policies, and limited educational programs. In southern California, studies of border high school Latinus, Anglo university students, and transfronterizus – those who cross the border from Mexico to study in California – reveal that monolingual English speakers are not the only promoters of dismissive attitudes towards diverse ways of speaking Spanish and English. Labels like “fresas,” “nacos,” “sociales,” and “pochos mochos” build intra-Latinu walls and impede bilingual fluency, and Spanglish is widely misunderstood and maligned.
LEVANTA LA VOZ in the classroom and the community!
We must advocate for effective bilingual instruction that confronts these barriers, and organize parent workshops and dance and poetry projects that involve the community. Student and faculty research should be shared with political leaders, newspapers, and social media platforms. And let’s all celebrate International Mother Language Day on February 21st in creative ways. But what do you think will help guarantee el futuro bilingüe de California?
This event is the keynote address of the 1st Symposium on Spanish-English bilingualism in California, which will bring together leading scholars investigating the linguistic practices and patterns of variation across Spanish-English bilinguals throughout the state of California. This inaugural symposium will serve to engage researchers in cross-campus collaborations and interdisciplinary initiatives. Please visit the Symposium event page for more information.
Ana Celia Zentella, professor emerita (University of California, San Diego and Hunter College), is an anthro-political linguist recognized for her research on US Latinu languages, language socialization, “Spanglish,” and “English-only” laws. In 1996, Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger declared October 30 “Doctor Ana Celia Zentella Day” for “her leading role in building appreciation for language diversity and respect for language rights.” In 2015, the Latin American Studies Association’s Latino Section honored Zentella as Public Intellectual of the Year. In 2016, she received the Award for Public Outreach & and Community Service from the Society for Linguistic Anthropology. Professor Zentella was Inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022, and received the Distinguished Career Award from the Association of Latina/o and Latinx Anthropologists in 2023.
This event is sponsored by the Bilingualism Research Lab, Multilingual Hispanic Speech in CA, the Comparative Language Sciences Project, and the Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics.
If you have disability-related needs, please contact us at thi@ucsc.edu or call 831-459-1274 by October 4, 2024.

1st Symposium on Spanish-English Bilingualism in California
2024-10-12 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The 1st Symposium on Spanish-English bilingualism in California brings together leading scholars investigating the linguistic practices and patterns of variation across Spanish-English bilinguals throughout the state of California. This inaugural symposium will serve to engage researchers in cross-campus collaborations and interdisciplinary initiatives. The symposium’s keynote address will be given by Professor Ana Celia Zentella (professor emerita, UC San Diego) on October 11th at the Music Recital Hall. Please visit the keynote event page to register and for more information.
Full symposium schedule here. The day’s program will feature:

Abel Cruz (Santa Clara University)
Talk title: “Expressing diminutive meaning in heritage Spanish: Linking the heritage experience to diminutive use in everyday speech”

Ana Sánchez-Muñoz (California State University, Northridge)
Talk title: Empowering Californian Bilinguals through Heritage Language Education

Anne L. Beatty-Martínez (University of California, San Diego)
Talk title: Understanding Bilingualism in Context

Claudia Holguín Mendoza (University of California Riverside)
Talk title: Spanish language ideologies within the Latinx community in California: Critical Sociolinguistics and Pedagogical Implications

Claudia Sánchez-Gutiérrez (University of California, Davis)
Talk title: Linguistic belongingness in an Emerging HSI

Covadonga Lamar Prieto (University of California Riverside)
Talk title: Code-Meshing, diglossia and diaglossia in Californio Spanish and California Spanish

Ernesto R. Gutiérrez Topete (Pomona College)
Talk title: Place-dependent stop salience among Spanish-English bilinguals: Evidence from code-switching

Eve Higby (California State University, East Bay)
Talk title: Disentangling cross-language facilitation and interference in Spanish-English bilinguals

Gabriela Simon-Cereijido (California State University, Los Angeles)
Talk title: Linguistic Skills and Perspectives of Spanish-English Students in Health Professions

Gabriella Licata (University of California, Riverside)
Talk title: Examining generational bias differences towards Californian Spanish features

Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez (California State University Long Beach)
Talk title: From Northern (white) Spanish to Southern Cool Spanglish: Perceptual Dialectology in California

Ji Young Kim (University of California, Los Angeles)
Talk title: Predicting areas of convergence and divergence between heritage and monolingual Spanish based on the phonological development of Spanish and English

Justin Davidson (University of California, Berkeley)
Talk title: Legitimizing Spanish-English Contact in U.S. Spanish: Sociophonetic Variation in Spanish Orthographic <b> and <v>

Lauren Schmidt (San Diego State University)
Talk title: Exploring lived language experiences of Spanish-English bilinguals in the San Diego border region and how these shape issues of identity

Mark Amengual (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Talk title: Intergenerational language shift and interlingual influence in the acoustic realization of Spanish-speaking Californians

This event is sponsored by the Bilingualism Research Lab, Multilingual Hispanic Speech in CA, the Comparative Language Sciences Project, the Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics, and UC MRPI

Filipino American Heritage Month Festival
2024-10-12 12:00 - 17:00 | Watsonville City Plaza, 358 Main St., Watsonville, CA, 95076, United States
Join us for the 3rd annual Filipino American Heritage Festival on the Watsonville city plaza! Featuring vendors, performances, and food.
Co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute.

CLOTILDA: Resistance, Resilience, Remembrance, Rebuilding
2024-10-12 15:00 - 18:00 | Resource Center for Non Violence
Black divers were central to the reclamation of the Clotilda, the last known slave ship to transport kidnapped Africans to the United States.
In our coastal area, the unceded territory of the Amah Mutsun people and a place where Black servicemen and their families resettled after fighting in U.S. wars in the Pacific, Santa Cruz Black holds space to engage with Kamau Sadiki, a master diver with the Slave Wrecks Project, and Joycelyn Davis, a direct descendant through Charlie Lewis of the 110 Africans who were violently uprooted from their homes and communities.

Through a multigenerational conversation facilitated by Santa Cruz Black with Black studies students at UC Santa Cruz, we will consider how the reclamation of the wreck was an act of resistance to the world-shattering racialized and colonial violence of chattel slavery, an act of remembrance prompting us to consider waterways as a Black geography, and an act of community resilience and rebuilding.
How does the resurfacing of the wreck challenge generations of secrecy and silence?
How does it upend the presumption of closure and healing?
How has it impacted–across generations–the people of Africatown (aka Magazine/Plateau) in Mobile, Alabama?
This event is co-sponsored by the Slave Voyages project, the Humanities Division, John R.Lewis/College 9, and The Humanities Institute.

Dear Watsonville Screening and Q&A
2024-10-12 18:00 - 19:00 | PVA Porter Building, 280 Main Street, Watsonville, 95076, United States
In celebration of Filipino American History Month, join Watsonville is in the Heart and the Watsonville Film Festival for a screening of Dear Watsonville, a mixed-media documentary offering an intimate glimpse into the lives of the first generation of Filipino farmworkers to arrive in the Pajaro Valley as seen through the eyes of their children. A Q&A with the team who created the film will follow the screening.
Dear Watsonville was directed by Sandra Lucille and produced by Watsonville is in the Heart. It premiered in April 2024 as part of the art and history exhibition, Sowing Seeds: Filipino American Stories from the Pajaro Valley.

Kaveh Akbar: Martyr!
2024-10-13 19:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes acclaimed and bestselling author Kaveh Akbar for a discussion and signing of his phenomenal fiction debut Martyr!, which Tommy Orange calls, “An absolute jewel of a novel. A diamond. I haven’t loved a book this much in years. Kaveh’s writing is so thoroughly powerful and gorgeous you can feel it from where dreams come, and in all over your brain, and straight from the bottom of your heart. This book does everything. It is so entirely funny and sad and true and beautiful. Kaveh Akbar is one of my favorite writers. Ever.” This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

Your registration helps us plan for your arrival and keep in touch with any changes.
Thank you for registering!
“Akbar is a dazzling writer, with bars like you wouldn’t believe . . . What Akbar pulls off in Martyr! is nothing short of miraculous.” —The New York Times Book Review
A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.
Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.
Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.
Kaveh Akbar’s poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He is the author of two poetry collections: Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, in addition to a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic. He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine. He lives in Iowa City.

Ecologies of Care Workshop
2024-10-14 09:30 - 16:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Center for South Asian Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) invites you to launch an international collaboration, the Ecologies of Care Initiative. In partnership with the University of British Columbia (UBC), Simon Fraser University (SFU), and Lincoln University (LU) this initiative invites scholars at the forefront of the social sciences, arts, and humanities to address livability as a desired condition for all.
Situated in the Himalayan region, the Ecologies of Care Initiative will include conversations across the boundaries of contemporary nation-states, including Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Northeast India, and beyond. Known as the water towers of Asia, this region holds much of the world’s snow and ice beyond the North and South Pole. It is a site of incredible cultural and linguistic diversity, with hundreds of languages spoken and distinct colonial experiences that shape contemporary global Indigenous movements in South Asia. Ecologies of Care focuses on tracing how peoples along the Himalayas cobble together shifting livelihoods among rapidly shifting governmental-sponsored projects, including militarism, gender, environmentalism, and tourism.
For the Conference Program and more information, please visit: https://csas.ucsc.edu/ecologies-of-care-2024-25/

Laleh Khalili in conversation with Nidhi Mahajan--Palestine and the Maritime Politics of the Red Sea
2024-10-14 10:00 - 11:30 | Virtual Event
Thinking through the complexities of the Red Sea blockade, Professor Khalili will ask questions about how the entangled international and commercial control of maritime space deals with such disruptions in cargo and trade flows, and how the structure of global capital has to be taken into account in toto while waging a Gramscian war of position at local levels to leverage transformations more broadly.
Registration required to attend: Register here
Laleh Khalili is Al-Qasimi Professor of Gulf Studies and the Director of the Centre for Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter. Her most recent book is Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (Verso 2020), which examines the role of maritime infrastructures as conduits of movement of technologies, capital, people, and cargo.
Nidhi Mahajan is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. Her book project, Moorings: The Dhow Trade, Capitalism, and Sovereignty in the Indian Ocean, examines the marginalized mobile society of Muslim seafarers from Kachchh in western India who have become crucial intermediaries in global shipping as they move across South Asia, East Africa, and the Middle East.

Writing Psychology with Andrea Seeger
2024-10-14 14:30 - 16:30 | Graduate Student Commons, Room 204, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, 95064
Sometimes we can be our severest writing critics and biggest hindrances to writing success. Learn how to overcome psychological barriers and start writing in this interactive workshop. Participants will also learn about the VOCES Graduate Student Writing Center.
This event has two sessions: Oct 14, 2:30 – 4:30 p.m. in Graduate Student Commons, or Oct 23, 1:30 – 3:30 p.m. via Zoom. Register below to attend either session.

Andrea Seeger received a B.A. in Literature from UC Santa Cruz, an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Colorado (CU) Boulder, and an A.B.D. in English from UC Berkeley. Andrea has been teaching literature, writing, and social justice for over 20 years. She has taught writing and rhetoric in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric at CU Boulder and literature at UC Berkeley. She currently teaches social justice at UCSC’s Oakes College and writing through UCSC’s Writing Program. She is also a lecturer at Cabrillo College, where she teaches English. Andrea is deeply committed to student-centered learning and equitable access to quality education. Andrea’s scholarship focuses on the intersections of racial and gender formation in 20th-century American literature, and her work is deeply invested in social justice.

This event is a Graduate Division Professional Development Event co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our PhD+ workshop series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the ninth year of PhD+ Workshops at The Humanities Institute. This series covers a range of topics including possible career paths for humanities PhDs, securing grants and fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Mapping Hydrocommons Cultures in the Americas
2024-10-15 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
In this session, Lisa Blackmore and Alejandro Ponce de León will talk about a series of mapping processes that they’ve been engaged in with river communities in Latin America. They will explore how art and humanities research intersects with water activism and how collaborative editorial and curatorial work can support emergent and resilient practices that care for common waters. The session will involve some hands-on work to identify together these practices and the affective attachments that bind us to water.
Lisa Blackmore – Curator, researcher, educator, working between creative practice, collaborative projects and public outreach. Since 2018, she has been directing entre— ríos, a research and artistic platform that invents participatory and interdisciplinary methodologies, online and in person, that connect knowledges and communities to bodies of water. Lisa obtained her PhD in Latin American Cultural Studies from Birkbeck College in 2011 and is Senior Lecturer in Art History and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Essex, UK. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley. In 2023, she was a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow for her project Imagining the Hydrocommons: Art, Water and Infrastructure in Latin America.
Alejandro Ponce de León – Researcher, working at the intersection of environmental humanities and technoscience studies. He is the founder and co-editor of the Latin American Platform for Environmental Humanities, a collective that fosters dialogues on environmental thought across the Americas. His work has been published in Cultural Studies, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Humanidades: revista de la Universidad de Montevideo, Revista Tabula Rasa, Revista Endémico, Diffractions, Tapuya, Sociological Forum, among others. Alejandro is currently a visiting scholar at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study.
This event is presented by the THI 2024-25 research cluster, UC Santa Cruz More-Than-Human(ities) Laboratory.

Huerta Center Graduate Scholar CART Alternative Spring Break - Info Session
2024-10-15 15:00 | Virtual Event
2024-2025 CART Alternative Spring Break: Huerta Center Graduate Scholars
In Winter 2025, two graduate students will receive funding from the Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas (Huerta Center) and be trained by the University Library’s Center for Archival Research and Training (CART) to assist a UC Santa Cruz Archivist based at the Dolores Huerta Foundation in Bakersfield, CA in archival processing during Spring Break 2025 (March 24-28, 2025).
Attend the virtual information session on Tuesday, October 15th at 3pm to learn more. Register via Zoom below.

The Huerta Center Graduate Scholars will be trained in CART for up to 20 hours during Winter quarter, then travel to Bakersfield to participate in an “alternative spring break” program from March 24-28, 2025. There they will work alongside the UCSC Archivist and engage in archival processing of the Dolores Huerta Papers and the Huerta Foundation records.
Eligibility: Currently enrolled in a graduate program at UCSC at least through June 2025 (at least five credits, not on leave or filing fee, in good academic standing, within normative time). Priority will go to graduate students in the Humanities Division and the Latin American and Latino Studies department.
Learn more at: https://guides.library.ucsc.edu/cart/apply AND https://thi.ucsc.edu/call-for-applications-huerta-center-graduate-scholar/
This program is funded by The Humanities Institute of UC Santa Cruz, administered by the Huerta Center and the Latin American and Latino Studies department, and is part of a Mellon Foundation grant to establish new public archives preserving the legacy of social justice activist Dolores Huerta through a partnership with the Dolores Huerta Foundation.

Moving Money and Moving Power: Philanthropy Isn’t Neutral
2024-10-15 17:30 | Virtual and In Person

Festival of Monsters - Academic Conference
2024-10-16 - 2024-10-18 | UC Santa Cruz
Rising from the darkness, monsters bring to light the parts of our world we might rather see hidden. They come forth in times of growing prejudice, discrimination and othering. The 2024 Festival of Monsters (Academic Conference October 16-18) —hosted by the UC Santa Cruz Center for Monster Studies — explores the way monsters and tropes of monstrosity pervade our culture.
Held on the beautiful UC Santa Cruz campus, the 2024 Festival includes the conference, plus a performance, a live podcast recording and the Monsters Ball. This year’s academic conference includes panels on monstrous ecologies, black monstrosity, zombies, body horror and more. Independent video game designer and activist mattie brice and Professor Jerry Rafiki Jenkins (author of Anti-Blackness and Human Monstrosity in Black American Horror Fiction) will give the keynote talks.
For more information, please visit: https://www.monsterstudies.ucsc.edu/2024fest
The 2024 Festival of Monsters is grateful for the support of Porter College; Oakes College; The Arts Research Institute; The Humanities Institute; Sigfried and Elizabeth Mignon Puknat Endowment; University of California Humanities Research Institute; the UC Santa Cruz Department of Literature; the UC Santa Cruz Department of Performance, Play and Design; Crown College; James Gunderson and Peter Coha.

Lisa Blackmore: Hydrocommoning
2024-10-16 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
In this talk, Lisa will present ‘hydrocommoning’ as a concept to think with emergent water cultures by asking what work a theory and praxis of hydrocommoning might do to support transitions to alternative hydrosocial relations beyond modern urban and extractive paradigms. She will lay out a methodological route for interdisciplinary water research that takes seriously situated embodied knowledge and planetary hydrologies by arguing for the generative role of art in igniting multiscalar engagements with liquid ecologies. Drawing on projects developed through the entre—ríos collective, she will situate engaged curatorial practice as a response to calls in the environmental humanities to contribute aesthetic forms that support a reclaiming of common waters.
Lisa Blackmore is a researcher, curator and educator, working with water cultures in Latin America. Since 2018, she has been directing entre—ríos, a research and artistic platform for collaborative methodologies connecting communities to bodies of water. She is a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley and Senior Lecturer in Art History and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Essex, UK. Her recent publications include the co-edited volume Hydrocommons Cultures: Art, Pedagogy and Care Practices in the Americas (2024) and “Water” in Handbook to Latin American Environmental Aesthetics (2023). entre-rios.net / lisablackmore.net
Co-sponsored by UCSC’s More-Than-Human(ities) Laboratory.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Curating Your Digital Reputation with Lisa Nielsen
2024-10-16 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual and In Person
Your digital reputation refers to your presence on the internet, on social media platforms and on personal and professional websites. Learn tips on how to distinguish yourself from the crowd and create a lasting impression in an evolving digital communications landscape.
This event has two sessions: Oct 16, 12:00 – 1:30 p.m. via Zoom or Oct 30, 2:00 – 3:30 p.m. in Graduate Student Commons, Study Lounge 204. Register below to attend either session.

Lisa Nielsen has over 25 years of design and marketing experience in the private sector and with non-profits. From working at Apple Computer as an art director to running her own firm in San Francisco for 15 years, she knows what it means to be a good communicator and marketer. From startups to Fortune 500 clients, her adventures in marketing have built a depth of knowledge that she likes to share. Lisa is in her second decade at UC Santa Cruz as marketing director, overseeing a creative team of writers, videographers, and designers.

This event is a Graduate Division Professional Development Event co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our PhD+ workshop series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the ninth year of PhD+ Workshops at The Humanities Institute. This series covers a range of topics including possible career paths for humanities PhDs, securing grants and fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

WordPress Website Design with Jason Chafin
2024-10-17 13:30 - 15:00 | Graduate Student Commons, Room 204, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, 95064
Professional websites can boost your reputation and aid your networking and job search. UCSC provides free access to WordPress (with several design templates) to faculty, postdoctoral scholars, and graduate students.
Get design tips from Jason and get started using WordPress to make a blog or static website to showcase your graduate or postdoctoral work!
This event has two sessions: Oct 17, 1:30-3:00 p.m. in Graduate Student Commons, Study Lounge 204, or Nov 6, 12:00-1:30 p.m. via Zoom. Register below to attend either session.

Jason Chafin graduated from UC Santa Cruz in 1993 with a bachelor’s in environmental studies. He earned his master of environmental studies from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, and spent over a decade as an environmental planner. He switched gears in 2010 and became a web developer, working primarily with WordPress. He’s been with University Relations as the senior web developer in the Communications and Marketing Department since 2017.

This event is a Graduate Division Professional Development Event co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our PhD+ workshop series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the ninth year of PhD+ Workshops at The Humanities Institute. This series covers a range of topics including possible career paths for humanities PhDs, securing grants and fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Living Writers with Stacey D'Erasmo
2024-10-17 17:20 - 18:50 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Living Writers Series – Fall 2024
Growing Things
~ gardens, poems, emotions, relationships, stories, our artistic practices, carefully tended, beautifully ordered, rewilded and wild ~
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.
About the Author
Stacey D’Erasmo is the author of the novels Tea, A Seahorse Year, The Sky Below, Wonderland, and The Complicities. She is also the author of the nonfiction books The Art of Intimacy: The Space Between and The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry. D’Erasmo’s work has been published in The New York Times Book Review, New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, Interview, The New Yorker, and the Los Angeles Times. She was a Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University, received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction in 2009, and won the Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize from the Lambda Literary Foundation in 2012.
She is currently a Professor of Writing and Publishing Practices at Fordham University in NYC.

Sponsored by The Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Laurie Sain Endowment, The Humanities Institute, Bookshop Santa Cruz, and Two Birds Books, which provides books for purchase at the readings.

Dana Frank: What Can We Learn from the Great Depression?
2024-10-17 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop welcomes Dana Frank, UC Santa Cruz Professor Emerita of History, for a discussion about her new book What Can We Learn from the Great Depression?: Stories of Ordinary People & Collective Action in Hard Times. This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
“The most important book on the Great Depression in a generation. Dana Frank skillfully shows how working-class people experimented with new forms of organizing based on traditions of struggles against racism as well as class and gender oppression. Our understanding of the Great Depression and its contested legacies will never be the same thanks to this brilliant and timely book.” —Paul Ortiz, author of An African American and Latinx History of the United States.

Your registration helps us plan for your arrival and keep in touch with any changes.
Thank you for registering!
Drawing on little-known stories of working people, What Can We Learn from the Great Depression? amplifies voices that have been long omitted from standard histories of the Depression era. In four stories of resilience, mutual aid, and radical rebellion that will transform how we understand the Great Depression, Professor Dana Frank explores how ordinary working people in the US turned to collective action to meet the crisis of the Great Depression and what we can learn from them today. Readers are introduced to:

The 7 daring Black women who worked as wet nurses and staged a sit-down strike to demand better pay and an end to racial discrimination.
The groups who used mutual aid, cooperatives, eviction protests, and demands for government relief to meet their basic needs.
The million Mexican and Mexican American repatriados who were erased from mainstream historical memory, while (often fictitious) white “Dust Bowl migrants” became enshrined.
The Black Legion, a white supremacist fascist organization that saw racism, antisemitism, anti-Catholicism, and fascism as the cure to the Depression.

While capitalism crashed during the Great Depression, racism did not and was, in fact, wielded by some to blame and oppress their neighbors. Patriarchy persisted, too, undermining the power of social movements and justifying women’s marginalization within them. For other ordinary people, collective action gave them the means to survive and fight against such hostilities.
What resulted were powerful new forms of horizontal reciprocity and solidarity that allowed people to provide each other with the bread, beans, and comradeship of daily life. The New Deal, when it arrived, provided vital resources to many, but others were cut off from its full benefits, especially if they were women or people of color.
What Can We Learn from the Great Depression? shows us how we might look to the past to think about how we can shape the future of our own failed economy. These lessons can also help us imagine and build movements to challenge such an economy—and to transform the state as a whole—in service to the common good without replicating racism and patriarchy.
Dana Frank is Professor Emerita of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A well-regarded senior historian, she is the author of many books on labor, women, and social justice in the US and Honduras. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, The Nation, Foreign Affairs, and many other publications, and she has testified before both the US Congress and Canadian Parliament.

Mastering the Elevator Pitch with Nada Miljkovich
2024-10-21 14:00 - 15:30 | Graduate Student Commons, Room 204, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, 95064
In this interactive workshop, graduate students will learn how to craft a compelling and concise elevator pitch tailored to their specific goals—whether it’s securing funding, attracting partners, or landing clients.
Participants will explore techniques to clearly communicate their vision, project, or business in just a few sentences, leaving a lasting impression. Through guided exercises and real-world examples, participants will develop the skills they need to present their ideas confidently and spark interest in any professional setting.
This event has two sessions: Oct 21, 2:00-3:30 p.m. in Graduate Student Commons, Study Lounge 204, or Nov 4, 2:00-3:30 p.m. via Zoom. Register below to attend either session.

Nada Miljković is an experienced educator and digital arts expert with over a decade of teaching at UCSC. As a project manager and instructor at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Development (CIED), she focuses on fostering creativity, storytelling, and entrepreneurial skills in students. Passionate about empowering students with real-world tools, Nada prepares future leaders in both their professional and personal lives while pursuing a Ph.D. in Digital Arts at the University of Arts, Belgrade.

This event is a Graduate Division Professional Development Event co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our PhD+ workshop series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the ninth year of PhD+ Workshops at The Humanities Institute. This series covers a range of topics including possible career paths for humanities PhDs, securing grants and fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Book Celebration: Toxic City and A People’s History of SFO
2024-10-21 15:00 - 17:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Join the Center for Critical Urban and Environmental Studies to celebrate the release of two important new books by UCSC faculty exploring power, historical development, and environmental justice in the Bay Area: Lindsey Dillon’s Toxic City and Eric Porter’s A People’s History of SFO (both published by University of California Press). The authors will be in conversation with graduate students from the departments of History and Sociology.
A limited number of both books are available for graduate students – please contact kgalinde@ucsc.edu to receive a copy. Books are available for sale via the UC Press website for 30% off using the code UCPSAVE30.
About the Authors and Books
Toxic City: Redevelopment and Environmental Justice in San Francisco explores the impact of green gentrification in Bayview-Hunters Point, a historically Black neighborhood in San Francisco. Lindsey examines how revitalization efforts often threaten to displace long-time residents who have fought for toxic cleanup and urban redevelopment as a means of reparative justice. She links these struggles to broader issues of environmental racism and the legacy of slavery, arguing for a vision of environmental justice within the context of reparations. Lindsey Dillon is author of Toxic City and a critical human geographer and Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz.
A People’s History of SFO: The Making of the Bay Area and an Airport examines the history of San Francisco International Airport to uncover a rich narrative of development and power in the Bay Area from the eighteenth century to today. Eric highlights SFO’s pivotal role in the region’s evolution as a hub of commerce, innovation, and influence. By examining the airport’s colonial roots and its impact on trade, social dynamics, and environmental change, Porter reveals how individual actions intersect with larger systems of power. The book concludes by confronting the climate crisis and the challenges it poses to SFO and the surrounding community. Eric Porter is Professor of History and History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, where he also holds appointments in the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and Music Departments. His research and teaching interests include Black cultural and intellectual history, US urban and cultural history, and jazz and improvisation studies. Porter is author of A People’s History of SFO: The Making of the Bay Area and an Airport (University of California Press, 2024).

Hosted by the Center for Critical Urban and Environmental Studies (CUES). Co-Sponsored by the departments of History of Consciousness and Sociology, the Division of Social Sciences, the Institute for Social Transformation, and the Science & Justice Research Center.

Burnout: Recognizing, Preventing, Mitigating with Audrey Kim and Nicolette Severson
2024-10-22 16:00 - 17:30 | Graduate Student Commons, Room 204, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, 95064
Burnout is a state of exhaustion that can impact our work, personal lives, health, and overall sense of well-being and purpose. Join us to discuss common causes and symptoms, and learn strategies to recognize, prevent, and manage burnout.
This event is on Oct 22, 4:00-5:30 p.m. in Graduate Student Commons, Study Lounge 204. Register below to attend the session.

Prior to joining UCSC CAPS in 2001, Audrey Kim, Ph.D., worked in the corporate and nonprofit sectors and understands how burnout can be different and yet similar across various settings. Kim likes helping students gain insight into their problems and learn practical strategies for overcoming them. She especially enjoys working with graduate students and facilitating the Graduate Women’s Group at UCSC.
Nicolette “Niki” Severson, LCSW, has been on the team at CAPS since January 2021. She came to her work as a therapist by way of a background in academia, education, and research in public health and social work. Previous to UCSC, Severson worked with underserved populations in community mental health. She has firsthand experience with burnout from a variety of demanding work environments and is excited to talk about this critical topic.

This event is a Graduate Division Professional Development Event co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our PhD+ workshop series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the ninth year of PhD+ Workshops at The Humanities Institute. This series covers a range of topics including possible career paths for humanities PhDs, securing grants and fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Engaging Digital Democracy: Tools to Recognize Political Dis- and Mis-Information
2024-10-22 19:00 | Virtual and In Person

Noreen Khawaja – What is a University? Humboldt and HistCon in Perspective
2024-10-23 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This talk reteaches the history of the research university as a series of answers to the question of what symbols are for, what symbols can do. By answers I do not mean simply what scholars have said about these matters, but also what we have done, the worlds we have made in our teaching and in our shaping of the forms of the university itself. Two portraits stand at the center, each from public universities, each cases in which scholars themselves had an unusual degree of influence: the founding of the University of Berlin in the years before 1809 and the formation of the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz over the course of the 1970s-80s. Both institutions were established during periods of academic reform and state-building ambition. In both cases we find the imprint of a peculiarly Romantic myth—the idea of an intimate relation among three sets of maps: maps of a school, maps of culture, and maps of the mind.
Noreen Khawaja teaches in the Religion and Modernity program at Yale University. Her work examines the ideas, practices, and institutions of secular reason. She is the author of The Religion of Existence: Asceticism in Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Sartre (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and is currently at work on a history of the research university.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Mjriam Abu Samra - "Intergenerational, Anticolonial Vanguards: The Palestinian Transnational Student Movement in Historical Perspective"
2024-10-23 16:00 | Cervantes and Velasquez Conference Room, Bay Tree Building, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
This presentation focuses on the political potential of contemporary Palestinian transnational youth activism in Europe and USA. It compares student political engagement namely by examining the formation and development of the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) during what is regarded as the “golden age” of the Palestinian revolution (1960s-1970s) with contemporary initiatives, efforts and strategies of mobilization amongst Palestinian youth in shatat (Diaspora). By looking to the past through a historical continuum that has molded present-day Palestinian youth activism, I propose that new futures can only be made through methodologies that tether together time and space.
About the Speaker
Mjriam Abu Samra is a Marie Curie Post-Doc Fellow at the department of Anthropology at UC Davis with ties to the program in Middle East/South Asian Studies through the cooperation with her host institution University of Venice Ca Foscari in Italy.
Mjriam received her Ph.D. from the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford, UK and her MA in Middle East Politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), UK. Her research focuses on Palestinian transnational student and youth politics and Third World solidarities. Her work intervenes in the critical study of refugees, colonialisms, social movements and it is grounded on critical theories on subalternity and decolonization. As a MSC Postdoctoral Fellow Mjriam will be exploring the political potential of contemporary Palestinian transnational youth activism in the United States and Europe through an historical comparative lens.
Before joining UC Davis, Mjriam was based in Amman, Jordan, where she worked as gender expert for the Center of Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan and as Senior researcher and coordinator at the Al Nahda research center. She taught courses on international politics, developments, and history of colonialism at the University of Jordan and American education abroad programs in Amman.

This talk is presented by the Center for Racial Justice (CRJ) at UC Santa Cruz and co-sponsored by Feminist Studies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department, Students for Justice in Palestine, Faculty for Justice in Palestine, Center for South Asian Studies (CSAS), Center for the Middle East and North Africa (CMENA), Anthropology Department, Sociology Department, Politics Department, Center for Cultural Studies, and People’s University.
It is the first talk in a year-long speaker series, “Possibilities of Palestinian Refusal: Against Disciplining Knowledge and Movement.” For more information , please visit the CRJ website: https://crjucsc.com/

Employing Humanities - Humanities at Work: Making a Meaningful Career
2024-10-23 17:00 - 18:30 | Humanities 1, Room 202
The Humanities Career Engagement Specialist will lead an interactive workshop that will set you up to better understand how your humanities skills can prepare you for a fulfilling career. Free burritos for all who register through our Linktree here!
Open to all Humanities Majors and Minors. For more information please email humco@ucsc.edu.
Please visit the Humanities Student Events Calendar to see other exciting events happening for students in the Humanities Division.

The Center for Cultural Studies 35th Anniversary Conference
2024-10-24 - 2024-10-25 | UC Santa Cruz
Join us for a celebratory conference in collaborative form, including a conversation with founding director Jim Clifford, lightning talks on Cultural Studies keywords, dialogues, reflections by former graduate student affiliates, and a collective imagining of CCS’s next chapter.
Events begin Thursday, October 24 at 5:00 PM and run through Friday evening in Humanities 210 and the Oakes College Mural Room. For more information, view or download the full program.

For over three decades, the Center for Cultural Studies has hosted a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. Read more about the colloquium and the Center for Cultural Studies legacy here.

Academic Publishing with Martha Stuit and Erich van Rijn
2024-10-24 11:30 - 13:00 | Virtual and In Person
How do you choose a reputable academic journal to publish in? What are your copyrights? What is open access? Where do you find academic publishing support at UCSC beyond your program and department?
This event has two sessions: Oct 24, 11:30 a.m.-1:00 p.m. via Zoom, or Oct 29, 3:00-4:30 p.m. in Graduate Student Commons, Study Lounge 204. Register below to attend either session.

As scholarly communication librarian at the UCSC University Library, Martha Stuit provides author services, which cover publishing theses, dissertations, and academic articles and books; open access; and copyright. She also serves as the library’s liaison to the Division of Graduate Studies. Prior to becoming a librarian, she was a journalist. Martha has an M.S. in Information from the University of Michigan.
Erich van Rijn is executive director at the University of California Press where he leads book and journal publishing operations. Erich has been with the University of California Press since 1997 and has held positions in marketing, sales, operations, and finance. Prior to joining the press, he held positions in marketing at Oxford University Press and HarperCollins Publishers.

This event is a Graduate Division Professional Development Event co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our PhD+ workshop series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the ninth year of PhD+ Workshops at The Humanities Institute. This series covers a range of topics including possible career paths for humanities PhDs, securing grants and fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Living Writers with Carolina Ixta
2024-10-24 17:20 - 18:50 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Living Writers Series – Fall 2024
Growing Things
~ gardens, poems, emotions, relationships, stories, our artistic practices, carefully tended, beautifully ordered, rewilded and wild ~
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.
About the Author
Carolina Ixta is a writer from Oakland, California. A daughter of Mexican immigrants, she received her B.A. in Creative Writing and Spanish Language and Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz and obtained her Master’s degree in Education at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently an elementary school teacher whose pedagogy centers critical race theory at the primary education level. Shut Up, This is Serious is her debut novel.

Sponsored by The Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Laurie Sain Endowment, The Humanities Institute, Bookshop Santa Cruz, and Two Birds Books, which provides books for purchase at the readings.

Art and Artificial Intelligence: A Philosophical Investigation with Alice Barale
2024-10-28 13:00 | Virtual and In Person
The History of Consciousness department presents “Art and Artificial Intelligence: A Philosophical Investigation” with Alice Barale, University of Milan as part of the 2024-2025 HistCon Speaker Series.
Join us Monday, October 28 at 1pm PST in Hum 1 Rm 210 or register below to attend virtually:

It has been several years since the first artwork created with artificial intelligence was sold at the renowned auction house Christie’s in 2018. In the meantime, new types of artificial intelligence have emerged, enabling artists to conduct different experiments. However, the presence of AI in the artistic process continues to raise significant questions. How should its role be understood? And, more importantly, what new chances does it offer within the artistic field and beyond?
Alice Barale is a scholar of Aesthetics and Assistant Professor at the Department of Cultural and Environmental Heritage at the University of Milan. She has extensively researched Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin, authors to whom she has dedicated several essays and two monographs (“La malinconia dell’immagine,” FUP, 2009, and “La prima impresa: Shakespeare in Warburg e Benjamin,” Jaca Book, 2021). For Benjamin, she has edited and translated a new Italian version of “Origin of the German Trauerspiel” (Carocci, 2018). Among her most recent research interests are the philosophy of color (“Il giallo del colore,” Jaca Book, 2020) and the relationship between art and artificial intelligence. She has curated the collected volume “Arte e intelligenza artificiale. Be my GAN” (Jaca Book, 2020) and has just completed a new book on the subject, which will be published in November 2024.
Co-sponsored by Humanities in the Age of Artificial Intelligence & The Humanities Institute.

Proactive Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion with Lorato Anderson
2024-10-29 13:30 - 15:00 | Graduate Student Commons, Room 204, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, 95064
How do you proactively promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in your role as a graduate student, a researcher, a teaching assistant, and a peer and undergraduate mentor? Learn active steps you can take in every role to promote a just and welcoming environment at UCSC in every space.
Recommended Reading: Ely, Robin J., and Thomas, David A. “Getting Serious About Diversity: Enough Already with the Business Case.” Harvard Business Review, November-December 2020 Magazine Issue.
This event has two sessions: Oct 29, 1:30-3:00 p.m. in Graduate Student Commons, Study Lounge 204, or Oct 31, 12:00-1:30 p.m. via Zoom. Register below to attend either session.

As director of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the Division of Graduate Studies at UC Santa Cruz, Lorato Anderson focuses on advancing initiatives for minoritized graduate student support across multiple campus-wide projects and providing direct support to students, staff, faculty, and programs. Lorato graduated with a B.A. in Literature/Writing from UC San Diego and received her M.S. in Higher Education Administration and Policy from Northwestern University, where she researched and developed assessment models for English language learners and created multiple DEI programs that are still active. She has extensive experience in grant writing, teaching, advising, assessment, and creating long-lasting research-backed programs to promote minoritized undergraduate and graduate student success.
Lorato has worked on campus since 2016 and received the 2020 Outstanding Staff Achievement Award in Social Sciences. Her previous roles include graduate program adviser and coordinator for Latin American and Latino Studies (LALS) and Politics and undergraduate advisor for Psychology. She takes pride in incorporating social justice and empathetic advising strategies and teaching pedagogies into her work in advising, administration, and grant and program development.

This event is a Graduate Division Professional Development Event co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our PhD+ workshop series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the ninth year of PhD+ Workshops at The Humanities Institute. This series covers a range of topics including possible career paths for humanities PhDs, securing grants and fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Sandhya Shukla - Cosmopolitanism and Relationality: The Logic of the Cultural Studies We Need Now
2024-10-30 12:15 - 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
When Immanuel Kant suggested in 1798 that a citizenship of the world could be staged in Konigsberg without physical travel, he illuminated the dense heterogeneity of place. Kant’s insight might be seen to have informed many projects of British cultural studies that situated globality inside locality by focusing on the potential of working-class cultures built through migrancy and racialization in cities like London. US cultural studies, by contrast, underemphasized that local-global dynamic, perhaps because the crossings of daily experience that inspired scholars like Stuart Hall were hard to see through post-1970s America’s balkanization of racial and ethnic identities. And while Hall and others advocated an interdisciplinarity that took seriously the inextricability of representation and social life, this was not always fully attended to by the literary criticism that assumed the task of translating British cultural studies for the US academy. This cross-cultural talk brings together the earlier approaches of Hall and the Birmingham school with the histories and stories told about Harlem in order to propose working-class cosmopolitanism as a useful conceptual frame for the political present.
Sandhya Shukla is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Virginia. Her most recent work is Cross-Cultural Harlem: Reimagining Race and Place (Columbia University Press, 2024). She is also the author of India Abroad: Diasporic Cultures of Postwar America and England (Princeton University Press, 2003), and a co-editor of Imagining Our Americas: Toward a Transnational Frame (Duke University Press, 2007). Her work has appeared in publications such as American Quarterly, symploke, and Annual Review of Anthropology.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Walking in the Ecotone with Jim Clifford
2024-10-30 14:30 | Humanities 1
A not to be missed opportunity to explore the UC Santa Cruz Campus, on and off the footpaths with Professor Jim Clifford. We’ll wander among the trees, down in the ravines, out in the meadows. Pooling our different knowledges of environmental, social, cultural, technological and architectural history, we will try to disentangle the overlapping layers that constitute a unique environment. Meet in front of Humanities 1 at 2:30pm
Jim Clifford is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the History of Consciousness Department. Since his retirement he has photographed the campus, co-curated an exhibition about its history and published a book of Images and texts, In the Ecotone, that evokes the site’s “poetics of space,” its planning/design history, and its utopian potential.
Co-sponsored by: GeoEcologies + TechnoScience Conversations in the History of Consciousness Department and the Science and Justice Research Center

Decoding the Headlines: Top News Stories, Misinformation, and the 2024 Presidential Campaign
2024-10-30 19:00 | Virtual and In Person

"What Is It Like to Be a Bat?": Spooky Reading Group Potluck
2024-11-02 18:00 - 19:00 | Westlake Park, 149-111 Bradley Dr, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
On Saturday, November 2 from 6-7pm, we will have a SPOOKY READING GROUP POTLUCK at West Lake Park.
On theme for Halloween and Day of the Dead, Alisa Puga Keesey will lead us in a discussion of the essay “What is it like to be a bat?” (We think we can observe bats at dusk at West Lake!). Alisa wants the community to know that the essay is heavily philosophical and dense. In our first meeting, Flora Lu called for inclusivity in our group so that we can speak across disciplinary divides without alienating any of our members, so the discussion will welcome perspectives, questions, and confusions from all of our members.
Please sign up to bring a dish to share here. COSTUMES ENCOURAGED!
Presented by the THI 2024-25 research cluster, UC Santa Cruz More-Than-Human(ities) Laboratory.

A Post-Election Conversation
2024-11-06 12:15 - 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Join the CCS community as we process what just happened. We will be discussing electoral politics, the role of media in the election, political affects, and what is to be done. With: Liz Beaumont, Jody Biehl, and Daniel Wirls.
Liz Beaumont is Associate Professor of Politics and Legal Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Her research explores the politics and law of citizenship and constitutional democracy, with particular interests in problems of unequal citizenship, how citizens, civic groups, and movements seek to use, challenge, and transform rights and law. Her most recent book is the co-edited volume Civic Education in Polarized Times, New York University Press (2024).
Jody K. Biehl is an award-winning journalist and journalism educator. She spent 15 years as a reporter and editor, including at Germany’s Der Spiegel, before joining the faculty at SUNY Buffalo, where she redesigned the journalism program curriculum. She came to UCSC in 2021 and is a Humanities Divisional Associate Teaching Professor. She is interested in the role that community and local journalism play in society and serves as the Community Voices editor at Lookout Santa Cruz. In 2024, she was part of the Lookout team to win the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news reporting.
Daniel Wirls is Professor of Politics at UC Santa Cruz and author of numerous works on the history of Congress and the Senate as well as U.S. military policy and American political thought. His most recent book is The Senate: From White Supremacy to Government Gridlock (University of Virginia Press, 2021). Dan also serves on the board of the Council for a Livable World, the nation’s oldest anti-nuclear weapons political action committee.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

CANCELLED - Ellen Bass: Morton Marcus Poetry Reading
2024-11-07 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 15th 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).
Unfortunately we have had to cancel this event, Ellen has caught Covid.
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 Brad Crenshaw. 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
Poetry Santa Cruz
Porter Hitchcock Modern Poetry Fund
Porter College
Santa Cruz Writes
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.

Jim McCloskey: Clauses without verbs - The Irish landscape and beyond
2024-11-08 13:20 - 15:00 | Virtual and In Person
The Department of Linguistics is pleased to present Jim McCloskey (UC Santa Cruz) speaking on Clauses without verbs – The Irish landscape and beyond.
Please join us Friday, November 8 at 1:20pm in Humanities 1 – Room 210 or virtually via Zoom:

One of the ways (perhaps the principal way) in which contemporary Irish departs from the typological profile of a Standard Average European (SAE) language is in its intricate and rich subsystem of finite verbless clauses. This subsystem will be the focus of my talk.
There is existing work on the topic, but that work focuses almost exclusively on clauses which express copular relations (predicative, identificational, specificational). This talk will focus instead on the very large (and largely unstudied) class of predications which are verbless in their syntax but not copular in their semantics. It turns out that this sub-grouping includes many kinds of predication which have been of interest and importance in contemporary formal semantics and philosophy of language — almost all of the familiar modal expressions, comparative clauses, propositional attitude predicates, subjective attitude ascriptions, structures of weak quantification, predicates of temporal duration and frequency, predicates of knowledge, acquaintance and many other psychological states (but not physical states).
The first goal of the talk will be descriptive — to provide an overview (syntactic and semantic) of these predication types — with a view ultimately of answering the typological-theoretical question of what predication-types can in principle be expressed in a verb-free syntactic frame.
The second goal will be to develop a syntactic framework which can accommodate these patterns and make the correct distributional predictions and connections within the language.
The third goal will be to consider theoretical implications (some syntactic, some semantic), especially for the theory of extended projection and for the question of how roots are integrated into larger structures.

Online Platforms for Presenting Research with Kayla Isenberg
2024-11-12 10:00 - 11:30 | Virtual Event
Ready to promote your research on social media? This seminar will help you learn how! Explore how to promote your research and expertise on the text-based social media platforms Threads, Mastodon, and others. We’ll cover how to use each platform, how each works, how to communicate effectively on each platform, and how to pick the right platform for you and your goals.
This event is on Nov 12, 10:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. via Zoom. Register below to attend the session.

Kayla Isenberg is the senior director of digital engagement for UC Santa Cruz, where she runs digital strategy for the main campus social media properties and advises on divisional and other social media accounts across campus. She has over 15 years of experience in digital marketing and social media, working for a variety of companies, from startups to Fortune 500. She was listed on the Forbes 40 under 40 list for her work at Warner Bros Records. In her work in higher education, she has won multiple CASE awards for her work in digital marketing and social media at UC Santa Cruz and has been a featured speaker at CASE social media conferences.

This event is a Graduate Division Professional Development Event co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our PhD+ workshop series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the ninth year of PhD+ Workshops at The Humanities Institute. This series covers a range of topics including possible career paths for humanities PhDs, securing grants and fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Film Screening and Director's Discussion: Chaityabhumi
2024-11-12 12:30 - 14:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Chaityabhumi is a holy site that holds immense importance for the Dalit movement in India, as it is where Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar’s last rites were performed after his passing on December 6, 1956. Dr Ambedkar, often called the father of the Indian Constitution, dedicated his life to fighting the chains of caste oppression and bringing revolutionary change. He was a guiding light for the oppressed who dismantled discriminatory barriers and empowered them to reclaim their dignity and their rightful place in society.
This musical film will bring to light the history and cultural politics of how people commemorate December 6 at Chaityabhumi, Mumbai, and the relevance of this public event in contemporary India. It explores how the Dalit community comes together to honor this day and the political implications it holds for their identity and empowerment.
Somnath Waghmare is a Mumbai-based, Dalit-Buddhist film researcher and documentary filmmaker. He is the co-founder of the Ambedkarite Dalit song documentation project, ‘The Ambedkar Age Digital Bookmobile,’ for which he was awarded the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art Public Art Grant in 2020. He is also the founder of Begumpura Productions. His recent documentary, Chaityabhumi, has been screened globally, including at the London School of Economics and Columbia University. His past films include I am not a Witch (2016), The Battle of Bhima Koregaon: An Unending Journey (2017), Memories of Mangaon (2022), and There is No Caste Discrimination in IITs? (2023). He is currently working on a documentary biopic on American born Indian sociologist Gail Omvedt.

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

The Hive Live! Featuring Gary Young & Elizabeth Robinson
2024-11-12 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Hive Live! presents an evening of poetry with Gary Young and Elizabeth Robinson at Bookshop Santa Cruz.
Gary Young is a poet, artist, and translator. He is the author of nine collections of poetry, among them That’s What I Thought, and American Analects, both from Persea Books. His other books include Precious Mirror, translations from the Japanese; Taken to Heart: 70 Poems from the Chinese; 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; The Dream of a Moral Life, which won the James D. Phelan Award; and Hands. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the California Arts Council, among others. His print work is represented in collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Getty Center for the Arts. In 2009 he received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. He teaches creative writing and directs the Cowell Press at UC Santa Cruz.
Elizabeth Robinson is the author, most recently, for Excursive (Roof Books), Thirst & Sufeit (Threadsuns Press), and, collaboratively with Susanne Dyckman, Rendered Paradise (Apogee Press). In the past five years, Robinson has received Editors’ Choice Awards from Scoundrel Time and New Letters, and a Pushcart Prize. Vulnerabiity Index is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press in 2025.

Your registration helps us plan for your arrival and keep in touch with any changes.
Thank you for registering!
This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

Dolly Kikon – Abundance: Living with a Forest
2024-11-13 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
We welcome Dolly Kikon for a screening of her film Abundance: Living with a Forest and a talk about her work on Indigenous ecology in the Eastern Himalayan region.
Abundance: Living with a Forest (2024) is a filmic biography of foraging, forest, and jhum cultivation in Nagaland, a hill state in Northeast India where approximately 60% of the population depend on jhum cultivation. Jhum cultivation and foraging have been recognized as community practices of indigenous knowledge. However, both these practices and the forest to which they are intrinsically linked have been threatened by the plantation, monocropping, and infrastructure activities that have surged with the ongoing ceasefire between Naga armed groups and the government.
Abundance: Living with a Forest follows Zareno, a Lotha forager in the forest of Khumtsü, and traces the foraged edible plants as they make their way to the market in Wokha town. The film gestures to an impending loss that Indigenous communities encounter across the world.
Watch the trailer here:

Listen to the Title Song from the documentary:

Dolly Kikon is Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz and director of the Center for South Asian Studies. She is the author of Experiences of Naga Women in Armed Conflict: Narratives from a Militarized Society (2004); Life and Dignity: Women’s Testimonies of Sexual Violence in Dimapur (2015); Living with Oil and Coal: Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India (2019); with Bengt G. Karlsson, Leaving the Land: Indigenous Migration and Affective Labour in India (2019); with Duncan McDuie-Ram, Ceasefire City: Militarism, Capitalism, and Urbanism in Dimapur (2021); with Dixita Deka, Joel Rodrigues, Bengt G. Karlsson, Sanjay Barbora, and Meenal Tula, Seeds and Sovereignty: Eastern Himalayan Experiences (2023).

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Dr. Christian Alvarado - "The Storm in Kenya": The Mau Mau Uprising and pan-Africanist Thought in the mid-20th Century
2024-11-13 13:30 - 15:00 | Virtual and In Person
The History Department invites you to an upcoming talk by Dr. Christian Alvarado entitled “The Storm in Kenya:” The Mau Mau Uprising and pan-Africanist Thought in the mid-20th Century.
Join us in person from 1:30 – 3:00 pm (PT) in Humanities 1, Room 202 or join via Zoom here.
Historical work on the event most commonly known as the “Mau Mau Uprising”—which roiled late-colonial Kenya in the 1950s and captivated audiences the world over—has long been preoccupied with examining the political and economic origins of anticolonial resistance in the colony, the operations of British counter-insurgency efforts, and the legacy of each of these for post-independence Kenyan society. In distinction to these orthodox approaches to the study of Mau Mau, Alvarado’s current book project considers how this event impacted the political, economic, and cultural history of other parts of the African continent, as well as Europe and the Americas. This talk presents an account of the role “myths of Mau Mau” played in pan-Africanist thought both within and far beyond the borders of the colony during this period. Across the globe, understandings of this event served as a key touchstone in the attempt to forge international solidarities among communities both in support of colonial rule and those who sought to bring about its end. This talk focuses in particular on debates about Mau Mau as they arose in two important contexts in the contemporary pan-Africanist movement. First, an array of conferences, forums, and political meetings held on the continent during the late 1950s and early 1960s; second, in contemporary Garveyite political thought both in Africa and abroad. Considered together, these visions of what George Padmore called “the Storm in Kenya” illuminate new dimensions in the transnational history of not only Mau Mau, but African decolonization more broadly.
Dr. Christian Alvarado received his PhD in History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz and is President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in African American and African Studies at the University of California, Davis. His wide-ranging research situates the event most commonly known as the Mau Mau Uprising in late-colonial Kenya within the broader history of decolonization in 20th century Africa. By tracing how understandings of this event circulated across transnational networks and cultural formations, this work aims to show how the frameworks to which Mau Mau is put illuminate novel insights into global dimensions in the history of African decolonization. These frameworks include, but are not limited to, the history of the social sciences, notions of African ‘race relations,’ pan-Africanism, diverse memory communities, and conspiracist discourses. Across these seemingly disparate realms, Alvarado argues that Mau Mau serves as a way of probing contemporary and current debates regarding the ethics of (anti)colonial violence, the relationship between tradition and modernity, and the nature of decolonization. A historian by training, Dr. Alvarado’s interdisciplinary work is also in conversation with the fields of cultural studies, comparative literature, and political theory.

Public Speaking with Catherine Carlstroem
2024-11-13 14:00 - 16:00 | Graduate Student Commons, Room 204, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, 95064
These interactive in-person workshops provide an overview of strategies and best practices for public speaking, including managing anxiety, key delivery techniques, and composition tips for crafting clearer and more focused speeches, with an emphasis on the parameters of the Grad Slam’s short presentations.
This event has two sessions: Nov 13, 2:00 – 4:00 p.m. in Graduate Student Commons, Study Lounge 204, or Nov 19, 2:00 – 4:00 p.m. in Graduate Student Commons, Study Lounge 204. Register below to attend either session.

UCSC faculty and alum Catherine Carlstroem (PhD American Literature) is a longtime lecturer in Humanities at UCSC (over 30 years) and has enjoyed teaching public speaking for over 10 of these. Along with teaching, she coordinates the Cowell Core Course.

This event is a Graduate Division Professional Development Event co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our PhD+ workshop series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the ninth year of PhD+ Workshops at The Humanities Institute. This series covers a range of topics including possible career paths for humanities PhDs, securing grants and fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Project Paradiso - Episode Sixteen – The Futures of Dante's Paradiso: Reading Forward
2024-11-14 09:50 - 11:25 | Virtual and In Person
Join us for a conversation with Prof. Alison Cornish (New York University) and Prof. Arielle Saiber (Johns Hopkins University), about the challenges and opportunities of reading Dante’s Paradiso today, particularly in, but not limited to, the academic context. They will explore innovative future directions to take this poem to as many readers and diverse audiences as possible, and also why this should be done, especially in view of the textbook that will be complied as a result of this year-long webinar series.

This event will be will be in person at Oakes Acad 105 and via Zoom (registration required).
Dante’s Paradiso is the least studied and the least understood of the three parts of the Commedia. Yet it is arguably the most important for the dynamism and originality of the literary, theological, and philosophical inquiries that take place there. It is also a singularly important interpretive guide for a full understanding of the entire Commedia. It is a poem that asks to be tackled by a community of engaged readers. This year-long series of webinar workshops led by world-renowned scholars took readers on a deep reading of the Paradiso and an unforgettable journey to the heart of Dante’s universe. See the Project Paradiso page for full schedule.
Featuring:
Alison Cornish, Professor of Italian Studies at New York University and President of the Dante Society of America. She is the author of Reading Dante’s Stars (Yale, 2000), Vernacular Translation in Dante’s Italy: Illiterate Literature (Cambridge, 2011) a commentary on Dante’s Paradiso, translated by Stanley Lombardo (Hackett, 2017), and Believing in Dante: Truth in Fiction (Cambridge, 2022); as well as a number of essays on Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. During the seventh centenary of the poet’s death, she organized a crowd-sourced series of video conversations between members of the Dante Society of America, entitled “Canto per Canto: Conversations with Dante in Our Time.”
Arielle Saiber, Charles S. Singleton Professor of Italian Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. Saiber’s books include Images of Quattrocento Florence: Writings on Literature, History and Art co-edited with Stefano U. Baldassarri (Yale, 2000); Giordano Bruno and the Geometry of Language (Ashgate/Routledge, 2005); and Measured Words: Computation and Writing in Renaissance Italy (University of Toronto Press, 2017).
Saiber publishes primarily on Dante, on the intersections between premodern Italian literature and mathematics/science, and visual interpretations of Dante’s Commedia. She has also published on early print history, science fiction, and experimental electronic music. Her current research is on “altered states of consciousness” in medieval and Renaissance Italian literature.
She has co-edited a number of special issues of academic journals: for Configurations, “Mathematics and the Imagination” (2009) with Henry S. Turner; for Dante Studies, “Longfellow and Dante” (2010) with Giuseppe Mazzotta; for California Italian Studies, “Sound” (2014) with Deanna Shemek; and for Science Fiction Studies, “Italian Science Fiction” (2015) with Salvatore Proietti and Umberto Rossi. She is currently co-editing with Proietti an anthology of Italian science fiction in English for Wesleyan University Press’s Early Classics of Science Fiction series.
Her doctoral dissertation on Giordano Bruno won Yale’s Field Prize (2000), and in 2004 she received the Karofsky Prize for teaching at Bowdoin. She has been a fellow at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici in Naples, Italy (1998-1999), the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2003-2004), and Villa I Tatti – Harvard’s Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy (2008-2009). She also received an NEH Fellowship (2008-2009), the MLA’s Scaglione Publication Award (2016), the Newberry Library’s Weiss-Brown Publication Award (2017), the American Initiative for Italian Culture’s Bridge Book Award (2018), and the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts’ Kendrick Book Prize (2019) for her book Measured Words.
In 2006 she built the web-based archive, Dante Today: Sightings and Citings of Dante’s Work in Contemporary Culture, which she now co-edits with Beth Coggeshall.
She co-edits the new book series Proximities: Experiments in Nearness with David Cecchetto for the University of Minnesota Press.

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

Crafting the CV with Veronica Heiskell
2024-11-14 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
Applications for academic positions require a CV, and some industry, government, and nonprofit employers also require them. Learn how a CV differs from a resume, about hybrid CV-resumes, what goes on a CV, and what order to put information depending on the type of academic institution you’re applying to and for what type of position.
This event is on Thu, Nov 14, 12:00 – 1:30 p.m. via Zoom. Register below to attend the session.

Veronica Heiskell has worked for over fourteen years in diversity and career centers in a variety of higher education institutions and currently serves as director of experiential learning at Career Success. Her goal is to remove as many barriers as possible for all students to pursue meaningful experiential learning opportunities. She completed her bachelor’s degree in psychology with a minor in LGBT studies at UCLA, her master’s degree in counseling and guidance in higher education at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and her doctorate in higher education administration at UT Austin. Her dissertation research focused on sense of belonging for exploratory students.

This event is a Graduate Division Professional Development Event co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our PhD+ workshop series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the ninth year of PhD+ Workshops at The Humanities Institute. This series covers a range of topics including possible career paths for humanities PhDs, securing grants and fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Archives in Action
2024-11-14 14:00 - 17:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
2 PM | “Getting Into the Archive: Tales from Inside”
Paul Erickson, Director of the Clements Library, University of Michigan
This presentation will seek to demystify the process of applying for support for humanities research from libraries and archives by explaining it from the inside. It will offer suggestions for how to increase your chances of receiving fellowship support for your work.
Paul Erickson is the Randolph G. Adams Director of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan, a leading collection of early Americana. In 1993 Paul got his first experience administering fellowship programs for scholars from the humanities and social sciences, and that is work that he has done for most of the past 20 years.
3 PM | “Gloria Anzaldua and her Spectral Archives”
Brenda Lara, UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, UC Santa Cruz
4 PM | “Archives in Dos Hemisferios: Reading Nineteenth-Century Spanish-Language Newspapers in Havana, New York, and Paris”
Davis Luis-Brown, Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and English, Claremont Graduate University

This event is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute and the Director of Hispanic-Serving Research Initiatives. It is organized in conjunction with the Literature Department’s graduate course, “Print Culture and Archives.”
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the ninth year of PhD+ Workshops at The Humanities Institute. This series covers a range of topics including possible career paths for humanities PhDs, securing grants and fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Jasbir Puar - Field Notes: Colonial Power at the Thresholds of Gender Studies
2024-11-14 16:00 | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Feminist Studies Department at UC Santa Cruz is pleased to host Jasbir Puar, Distinguished Faculty of Arts Professor, Global Race Studies at the University of British Columbia, presenting Field Notes: Colonial Power at the Thresholds of Gender Studies.
Jasbir Puar’s research focuses on how the liberal state, sexuality, and bio-politics bear on our understanding of disability. In her most recent book, The Right to Maim, Prof. Puar uses the concept of “debility”— bodily injury and social exclusion brought on by economic and political factors — to disrupt the category of disability, and shows how debility, disability, and capacity constitute an assemblage that states use to control populations. Interrogating Israel’s policies toward Palestine, she outlines how Israel brings Palestinians into biopolitical being by designating them available for injury.
Jasbir Puar is a Distinguished Faculty of Arts Professor of Global Race Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her most recent book, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017, Duke University Press) explores how the liberal state, sexuality, and biopolitics bear on our understanding of disability, culminating in an interrogation of Israel’s policies toward Palestine.

Wenyi Shang - Moving Beyond the Streetlight: How Computational Methods Can Open Up New Directions in Humanities Research
2024-11-18 12:00 | Virtual and In Person
Join us for an engaging talk by Wenyi Shang, titled Moving Beyond the Streetlight: How Computational Methods Can Open Up New Directions in Humanities Research.
The “streetlight effect” describes an observational bias relevant to the humanities and social sciences, where researchers tend to focus on the questions limited by the scales of materials they can directly comprehend. The application of computational methods in the humanities research has the potential to transform this landscape, providing interpretative tools to offer new insights into the macroscopic trends that studies at the individual and microscopic scale often fail to reveal. This talk presents two case studies to demonstrate how computational methods can open up new directions in humanities research. The first uses machine learning models to classify English poetry by lexicon and prosody, shedding new light on the distinction between “genre” and “form.” The second applies social network analysis to explore the structural characteristics of political networks in Northern Song (960–1127 C.E.) China, revealing changes in political culture during the period.
Please join us in person in Humanities 1, Room 210 or via Zoom
Wenyi Shang is an Assistant Professor at the School of Information Science & Learning Technologies at the University of Missouri. He earned his Ph.D. from the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and his bachelor’s degree from Peking University, China. His research focuses on digital humanities, addressing scholarly inquiries in history and literature through computational methods. He has employed network analysis to investigate social structures and transformations in political culture in premodern Chinese societies, and used text mining to study literature, uncovering novel perspectives on cultural changes reflected in literary texts. Both methods frequently intersect with machine learning models.

LinkedIn with Eric Curiel
2024-11-18 15:00 - 16:30 | Virtual Event
LinkedIn is a powerful tool to network and search for jobs. We will go over tips to update your LinkedIn profile to help recruiters find you, explore ways to identify alumni with similar career paths and interests on LinkedIn, and show you how to connect effectively with them to expand your network. We will also go over best practices for searching for jobs.
This event is on Mon, Nov 18, 3:00 – 4:30 p.m. via Zoom. Register below to attend the session.

Eric Curiel has worked for over ten years in supporting college students in pursuing successful careers and currently serves as associate director of career engagement in Career Success. He is passionate about supporting students, especially those from underrepresented populations, to be successful. He completed his bachelor’s degree in ecology and evolution from UC Santa Cruz in 2014. Eric enjoys being outdoors, photography, and watching soccer.

This event is a Graduate Division Professional Development Event co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our PhD+ workshop series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the ninth year of PhD+ Workshops at The Humanities Institute. This series covers a range of topics including possible career paths for humanities PhDs, securing grants and fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Contributions to Diversity Statement with Judith Estrada
2024-11-19 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual and In Person
Judith Estrada, Ph.D.
Assistant Vice Chancellor
Office for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (ODEI)
This event has two sessions: Nov 19, 12:00 – 1:30 p.m. via Zoom, or Nov 20, 1:30 – 3:00 p.m. in Graduate Student Commons, Study Lounge 204. Register below to attend either session.

This event is a Graduate Division Professional Development Event co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our PhD+ workshop series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the ninth year of PhD+ Workshops at The Humanities Institute. This series covers a range of topics including possible career paths for humanities PhDs, securing grants and fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Public Film Screening and Filmmaker Q&A: A Feeling Greater than Love with Mary Jirmanus Saba
2024-11-19 19:00 | Communications 150, Studio C
In her directorial debut, Mary Jirmanus Saba deals with a forgotten revolution, saving from oblivion bloodily suppressed strikes at Lebanese tobacco and chocolate factories. These events from the 1970s, which held the promise of a popular revolution and, with it, of women’s emancipation were erased from collective memory by the country’s civil wars. Rich in archival footage from Lebanon’s militant cinema tradition, the film reconstructs the spirit of that revolt, asking of the past how we might transform the present. FIPRESCI International Critics Prize Winner at the 2017 Berlinale Forum.
– Malgorzata Sadowska
Mary Jirmanus Saba is a geographer who uses film and other media to explore labor movement histories, connections among unstable landscapes and legacies of colonialism in the Arab World, Latin America and Turtle Island and the ever-present resilience of everyday life. Her debut feature film A Feeling Greater Than Love (2017) premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival Forum where it received the FIPRESCI International Critics Prize, making several “Best of 2017” lists. From 2006-2008, she produced the community broadcast television program, Via Comunidad with art collective Vientos del Sur in Ibarra, Ecuador. A avid producer of anonymous and collective agitprop, her latest film Mahdi Amel in Gaza (2024) is screening in community spaces, protest sites, and sometimes festivals. Saba is a member of UAW Labor for Palestine, the People’s CDC and a UC Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Santa Cruz in Film and Digital Media.
Preceded by a workshop: Mon. November 18, 4 – 7 PM, Comm. 139
In this workshop filmmaker and scholar Mary Jirmanus Saba will discuss her recent work on films made in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, exploring the emergence of the “character driven resilience documentary.” Using her own work as an example, Saba will facilitate a discussion about the political economy of arts funding and social movements.
To join the workshop, RSVP to ilusztig@ucsc.edu.

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

Giving Day 2024
2024-11-20 | Virtual Event
Mark your calendar for Wednesday, November 20 and join us for UC Santa Cruz’s annual Giving Day—a 24-hour online fundraising event dedicated to supporting projects that enrich the UCSC student experience.
Giving Day is an opportunity to unite the entire UCSC community—students, alumni, faculty, and friends—to create a lasting, positive impact on our students, the community, and the world. Let’s show our Banana Slug pride and rally together to support the next generation of changemakers.
Whether supporting student success, funding cutting-edge research in the sciences or technology, or advancing humanities and the arts, your gift on November 20 will help fuel programs and initiatives that make UCSC a unique place. You can make an impact in a way that resonates with you.
Our mission to provide high quality educational and research experiences for our students, regardless of their backgrounds and financial circumstances is more important than ever. Your support is crucial to ensuring we deliver on that mission.
Learn more at give.ucsc.edu/giving-day-2024

POSTPONED: Lara Sheehi - "The Imperative to Refuse Psychic Intrusion in Palestine-Lebanon Solidarities"
2024-11-20 16:00 | Cervantes and Velasquez Conference Room, Bay Tree Building, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
This talk will discuss the ways psychic intrusions are central features of settler colonial logics and how they are used with specific intent to disrupt solidarities. Palestine-Lebanon solidarities will be used as a “case study” to read the psycho-politico-affective forces that demobilize.
About the Speaker
Lara Sheehi (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar, and a Research Fellow at the University of South Africa’s Institute for Social and Health Sciences. She is the founding faculty director of the Psychoanalysis and the Arab World Lab. Prof. Sheehi’s work takes up decolonial and anti-oppressive approaches to psychoanalysis, with a focus on liberation struggles in the Global South. She is co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022), which won the Middle East Monitor’s 2022 Palestine Book Award for Best Academic Book. Prof. Sheehi is the President of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA, Division 39), co-editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality, co-editor of Counterspace in Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, and an advisory board member for the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network and the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. She is currently working on a new book, From the Clinic to the Street: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures (Pluto Press).

This talk is presented by the Center for Racial Justice (CRJ) at UC Santa Cruz and co-sponsored by Feminist Studies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department, Students for Justice in Palestine, Faculty for Justice in Palestine, Center for South Asian Studies (CSAS), Anthropology Department, Sociology Department, Politics Department, Center for Cultural Studies, People’s University, and Institute for Social Transformation.
This talk is a part of the year-long speaker series, “Possibilities of Palestinian Refusal: Against Disciplining Knowledge and Movement.” For more information , please visit the CRJ website: https://crjucsc.com/

CANCELLED - California Community Colleges Panel Discussion
2024-11-21 14:00 - 16:00 | Graduate Student Commons, Room 204, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, 95064
Learn how to apply to (first step: register with and upload your CV to the CCC Registry) and what it’s like to work for a California community college by talking to director of the CCC Registry, Beth Au, moderator of the panel, and a panel of UCSC graduate student alumni and a former UCSC postdoc, all of whom currently work for a CCC.
This event is on Thu, Nov 21, 2:00 – 4:00 p.m. in Graduate Student Commons, Study Lounge 204. Register below to attend the session.

Moderator
Beth Au
Director, California Community Colleges Registry
Beth Au has a master’s degree in Asian American Studies from UCLA. She has been director of the California Community Colleges (CCC) Registry since 2002. As director, she oversees and manages cccregistry.org and hosts annual job fairs for the college system every January.
The CCC Registry is the state chancellor’s job board for faculty, management and staff opportunities at all 73 districts and 116 colleges across California. The CCCs are the largest higher education employer in the world with over 60,000 faculty, administrators and staff across the state.
In her role as a recruiter, she frequently works with UC graduate students and postdocs through UC Career Centers and Graduate Divisions to host CCC interest panels. During Covid, she pivoted the informational panels and 1:1 sessions with job seekers to a virtual format and has continued recruitment in the online environment. She has counseled over 400 job seekers in Zoom sessions since May 2020 and continues to use Zoom to maintain outreach and recruitment. Several of the job seekers she has coached have been offered full-time, tenure track positions at a CCC since 2022.
Beth is available for 1:1 Zoom sessions on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. to offer CCC application and career advice. Reach out to her directly at aub@yosemite.edu to schedule a session.

Panelists
Francesca “Chesa” Caparas
Instructor, English, Women’s Studies, and Asian American Studies
De Anza College, Cupertino
Chesa Caparas (she/they) has a B.A. and M.A. in modern literature from UC Santa Cruz. She is faculty in English, Women’s Studies, and Asian American Studies at De Anza College. In her classes she explores literature and pop culture, the intersections of technology with race and gender, and the ethical applications of artificial intelligence. In 2022, she was a Fulbright Scholar to the Philippines where she researched media and information literacy. She is currently pursuing a master’s in Information and Knowledge Strategy at Columbia University.

Jasmeet Dhaliwal, Ph.D.
Instructor, Geology, Earth and Environmental Sciences
Chabot College, Hayward
Jasmeet Dhaliwal received her Ph.D. in earth science from UC San Diego and held a postdoctoral researcher position at UC Santa Cruz until accepting a position as a geology and earth and environmental sciences instructor at Chabot College. She worked with Beth Au to prepare the application to Chabot.

Sarah Gerhardt, Ph.D.
Chemistry Department Chair and Instructor
Cabrillo College
Sarah started teaching immediately after receiving her Ph.D. in physical chemistry from UCSC. She started as a lecturer at Santa Clara University teaching general and physical chemistry and moved to Cabrillo College to teach general, introductory, and biological chemistry, the last for allied health sciences. She also participated in the ACCESS program at UCSC as a community college liaison for several summers. After having two children (teaching while pregnant and at night while her children were young) and several years as a lecturer, Sarah did a postdoctorate in molecular, cell, and developmental biology under Professor Harry Noller at UCSC. She returned to teaching general and introductory chemistry full-time at Monterey Peninsula College 2011 to 2017. Since August 2017, she has taught general chemistry full-time at Cabrillo College and is currently chair of Cabrillo’s Chemistry Department.

Brian Malone, Ph.D.
Professor of English
De Anza, Cupertino
Brian Malone (he/him) is a tenured professor of English at De Anza College in Cupertino. He teaches classes in composition and English literature, in addition to serving on the leadership team for Guided Pathways and as project director for a Title III: Strengthening Institutions Program grant. He previously served as tenure review coordinator for the college. He holds an A.B. from Harvard University and an M.A. from the University of Virginia. He received a Ph.D. in literature from UC Santa Cruz in 2014, with a dissertation focusing on the nineteenth-century novel in England and France.

Melissa-Ann Nievera-Lozano, Ph.D.
Ethnic Studies Professor
Evergreen Valley College, San José
Melissa-Ann Nievera-Lozano is a full-time ethnic studies professor at Evergreen Valley College in San Jose. She obtained her A.A. in sociology from Southwestern College, B.A. in sociology from UC San Diego, M.A. in Asian American studies from San Francisco State University, and both an M.A. and Ph.D. in education from UC Santa Cruz. She is co-editor of the Pilipinx Radical Imagination Reader (2018), and a contributing author to the anthologies Fight the Tower: Asian American Women Scholars’ Resistance and Renewal in the Academy (2019), the SAGE Encyclopedia of Filipina/x/o American Studies (2022), as well as Closer to Liberation: Pin[a/x]y Activism in Theory and Practice (2023). Her work draws from women-of-color radical thought to address how intersectional struggles of racism, classism, cisheteropatriarchy, and body terrorism impact us every day.

Andrea Seeger, A.B.D.
Lecturer, Social Justice, Literature, Writing
Oakes College, UCSC
Faculty, English Department
Cabrillo College, Aptos
Andrea Seeger, a Santa Cruz native, returned a few years ago to her hometown after academic wandering. She received her undergraduate education at UCSC, first studying mathematics, then completing her B.A. in literature. She has an M.A. in English literature from the University of Colorado Boulder and is A.B.D. in English at UC Berkeley. Andrea has been teaching literature, writing, and social justice for nearly 20 years. She has taught writing and rhetoric in The Program for Writing and Rhetoric at CU Boulder and literature at UC Berkeley. She currently teaches social justice at Oakes College and writing through the UCSC Writing Program. She also lectures in English at Cabrillo College. Andrea recently served as the director of the UCSC Writing Center and its VOCES Graduate Student Writing Center, an HSI Initiative. Andrea is deeply committed to student-centered learning and equitable access to a deep, quality education.

Randy Villegas, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Political Science
College of the Sequoias, Visalia
A product of public education institutions, Randy Villegas is an associate professor of political science at College of the Sequoias and a trustee for the Visalia Unified School District Board of Education. Before beginning graduate school, Villegas worked as a journalist and an organizer in Bakersfield, CA. He has been a recipient of numerous awards, including the 2020 CARE-UC Innovation Fellowship and the American Political Science Association (APSA) Fund for Latino Scholarship. He is currently featured in the Unity Exhibit of the California State Capitol Museum for his work around social justice issues in the Central Valley. After being appointed to the Visalia Board of Trustees in December 2021, he was elected by the voters of area 6 to continue serving in November 2022. Randy is honored to serve our students, families, and community.

This event is a Graduate Division Professional Development Event co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our PhD+ workshop series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the ninth year of PhD+ Workshops at The Humanities Institute. This series covers a range of topics including possible career paths for humanities PhDs, securing grants and fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Christmas Carol Dramaturgy Talk with Santa Cruz Shakespeare
2024-11-21 17:30 - 18:30 | Santa Cruz Public Library – Downtown Branch, 224 Church Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Join Santa Cruz Shakespeare for a presentation and talk by their brilliant Christmas Carol dramaturgs Dr. Renee Fox (UC Santa Cruz), Dr. Michael Chemers (UC Santa Cruz), and Charles Pasternak (SCS Artistic Director). Renee and Michael will discourse on Dickens and his marvelous novella. Q&A to follow. Expertise breeds love; don’t be a Scrooge; join SCS in nerding out over this beautiful story!

Chris Benner & Manuel Pastor - Charging Forward
2024-11-21 19:00 - 20:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes Chris Brenner and Manuel Pastor for a reading and signing of their new book Charging Forward: Lithium Valley, Electric Vehicles, and a Just Future—a clarion call for justice in the quest for clean energy.
“Charging Forward brilliantly uses the Valley to illustrate what’s at stake as we move to a clean energy world. Clear-eyed that we cannot change the way we deliver power until we change who wields power, Benner and Pastor offer both hard-headed analysis and hope for a just future.” —Van Jones

Chris Benner is the director of the Institute for Social Transformation and the Everett Program for Technology and Social Change at UC Santa Cruz, where he is also the Dorothy E. Everett Chair in Global Information and Social Entrepreneurship, and a professor of environmental studies and sociology. He has co-authored five books with Manuel Pastor, including Equity, Growth and Community: What the Nation Can Learn From America’s Metro Areas, and Solidarity Economics: Why Mutuality and Movements Matter. He lives in Santa Cruz, California.
Manuel Pastor is the director of the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California where he is also a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and American Studies and Ethnicity and the inaugural holder of the Turpanjian Chair in Civil Society and Social Change. He has co-authored five books with Chris Benner, including Equity, Growth and Community: What the Nation Can Learn From America’s Metro Areas, Solidarity Economics: Why Mutuality and Movements Matter, and Charging Forward: Lithium Valley, Electric Vehicles, and a Just Future (The New Press). Pastor is also the author of State of Resistance: What California’s Dizzying Descent and Remarkable Resurgence Mean for America’s Future (The New Press). He lives in Los Angeles.
This event is cosponsored by the Institute for Social Transformation at UC Santa Cruz and The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

Kunal Purohit - H-Pop, The Secretive World of Hindutva Popstars
2024-11-22 12:30 - 13:45 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Can a song trigger a murder?
Can a poem spark a riot?
Can a book divide a people?
Away from the gaze of mainstream urban media, across India’s dusty, sleepy towns, a brand of popular culture is quietly seizing the imagination of millions, on the internet and off it. From catchy songs with acerbic lyrics to poetry recited in public gatherings to social media influencers shaping opinions with their brand of “breaking news” to books rescripting historical events, “Hindutva Pop,” or H-Pop, is steadily creating societal acceptability for Hindutva’s core beliefs. Award-winning, independent journalist Kunal Purohit travels through India, profiling some of H-Pop’s most prolific and popular creators, inquiring whether they are driven by ideology or commerce and asking what motivates the audience to consume its daily dose of bigotry.
Kunal Purohit is an award-winning, independent journalist, documentary film-maker, and podcast creator. Over the past two decades, Kunal has written on issues of development, politics, and inequality. More recently, his work has focused on hate crimes and the rise of Hindu nationalism. He is the recipient of the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Civic Journalism (2012), the Statesman Award for Rural Reporting (2014), and the UNFPA-Laadli Media Award for Gender Sensitive Reporting (2014 and 2019).

Presented by the Center for South Asian Studies (CSAS) and co-sponsored by the Music Department, the Kamil and Talat Hasan Endowed Chair for Classical Indian Music, the Ali Akbar Khan Endowment for Classical Indian Music, and The Humanities Institute.

Slide Design with Sonya Newlyn
2024-11-25 14:00 - 15:30 | Graduate Student Commons, Room 204, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, 95064
Have you ever inflicted a boring slide presentation on an audience? Learn tips and techniques for using slides the way they should be used, as visual aids to your spoken-word presentation.
Prior to attending this workshop, review this slide design page.
This event is on Mon, Nov 25, 2:00 – 3:30 p.m. in Graduate Student Commons, Study Lounge 204. Register below to attend the session.

Sonya Newlyn provides professional development programming for graduate students and postdoctoral scholars for the Graduate Division. In addition to the Professional Communication Certificate Program, she organizes the winter quarter Graduate Student Leadership Certificate Program and schedules individual professional development events available to all graduate students and postdoctoral scholars. She also organizes the annual Grad Slam and the Graduate Symposium. She received her master’s degree in English literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her bachelor’s degree in English literature from Emory University, where she also minored in anthropology.

This event is a Graduate Division Professional Development Event co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our PhD+ workshop series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the ninth year of PhD+ Workshops at The Humanities Institute. This series covers a range of topics including possible career paths for humanities PhDs, securing grants and fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Interviewing and Negotiating the Job Offer with Veronica Heiskell
2024-12-03 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
Learn interviewing strategies to land a job offer. Then, learn how to negotiate the best salary and benefits package when you receive the job offer.
This class offers strategies that apply to both academic and alternative-to-academic job applications and negotiations. The negotiation strategies also apply to asking for raises, job reclassifications, and title and responsibility changes.
This event is on Tue, Dec 3, 12:00 – 1:30 p.m. via Zoom. Register below to attend the session.

Veronica Heiskell has worked for over thirteen years in diversity and career centers in a variety of higher education institutions and currently serves as director of experiential learning at Career Success. Her goal is to remove as many barriers as possible for all students to pursue meaningful experiential learning opportunities. She completed her bachelor’s degree in psychology with a minor in LGBT studies at UCLA, her master’s degree in counseling and guidance in higher education at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and her doctorate in higher education administration at UT Austin. Her dissertation research focused on sense of belonging for exploratory students.

This event is a Graduate Division Professional Development Event co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our PhD+ workshop series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the ninth year of PhD+ Workshops at The Humanities Institute. This series covers a range of topics including possible career paths for humanities PhDs, securing grants and fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

An Evening with Marilynne Robinson: Noel Q King Memorial Lecture
2024-12-03 18:30 - 20:00 | Rio Theater, 1205 Soquel Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95062, United States
Marilynne Robinson, a prolific novelist and essayist, is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a National Humanities Medal. President Barack Obama applauded “her grace and intelligence in writing.” Her most recent book, Reading Genesis, is a meditation on the origins of humankind and the meaning of God’s enduring faith in humanity.
This year, Marilynne Robinson will deliver the Noel Q. King Memorial Lecture to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Humanities Institute and explore the Institute’s annual theme: Humanity. The Noel Q. King Memorial Lecture honors the life and work of Noel King, a founding faculty member of Merrill College and advocate for the comparative study of world religions.

Marilynne Robinson is the recipient of a 2012 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama, for “her grace and intelligence in writing.” She is the author of Gilead, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Home, winner of the Orange Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Lila, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her first novel, Housekeeping, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. In 2021, all four Gilead novels were selected for Oprah’s Book Club. Robinson’s nonfiction books include Reading Genesis, What Are We Doing Here?;The Givenness of Things, When I Was a Child I Read Books, Absence of Mind, The Death of Adam, and Mother Country.
This event is presented by The Humanities Institute and Porter College and co-sponsored by Merrill College, Bookshop Santa Cruz, and Shakespeare Workshop.
Noel Q. King came to UCSC in the late Sixties as a “founding father” of Merrill College. Born in India and educated in England, he spent 14 years in Africa heading departments of religious studies before being hired to do the same at Santa Cruz. Professor King was a prominent and beloved figure here on the hill. After he died in 2009, the Noel Q. King Memorial Lecture Series was started as a way to keep religious studies, and Noel King’s idiosyncratic spirit, alive at UCSC. This year, Marilynne Robinson will deliver the Noel Q. King Memorial Lecture.

Laliv Melamed – On Intimacy and Other Sovereignties
2024-12-04 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
How can we explain decades of Israeli civil society’s consensus around a regime of oppression and impunity? What mediated attachments and disavowals mandate settler colonial violence? This talk follows what the private media complex in order to articulate the intimate channels through which state sovereignty is distributed, structured and internalized. A prerequisite to the current genocidal moment, this research analyzes the seamless paths of mundane violence in the post-Oslo Jewish-Israeli public sphere.
Laliv Melamed is a Professor of Digital Film Cultures at the Goethe University, Frankfurt. Her work focuses on media and forms of governance in Israel-Palestine. Melamed is the author of Sovereign Intimacy: Private Media and the Traces of Colonial Violence (University of California Press, 2023).

Co-sponsored with the Film and Digital Media Department and the Institute of Arts and Sciences.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

A Discussion of Mike Wilson’s book, What Side Are You On?, with Professor Felicity Amaya Schaeffer
2024-12-04 16:00 - 18:00 | Merrill Provost House, Provost's Residence, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join us for a discussion of Mike Wilson’s book What Side Are You On? with Professor Felicity Amaya Schaeffer on Wednesday, December 4th, from 4:00-6:00pm at Merrill Provost’s House, Public Living Room. Light refreshments will be provided.
Mike Wilson is a dedicated humanitarian and co-author of What Side Are You On? with Dr. Jose Antonio Lucero. His work addresses the intersections of poverty, racism, and colonialism, with a focus on migrant rights and humanitarian aid along the border. Known for establishing water stations for migrants on tribal lands, Mike’s advocacy often places him at odds with both the U.S. government and his own Indigenous community. His recent book offers a profound examination of these critical issues.
Felicity Amaya Schaeffer is Professor of the Feminist Studies Department and the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department, as well as an Affiliate Faculty in Latin American and Latinx Studies at UC Santa Cruz.

Co-sponsored by the UCSC History Department, the Feminist Studies Department, the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department, the Latin American and Latino Studies Department, the Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas, the Peggy And Jack Baskin Foundation, Cowell College, Merrill College, Porter College, Rachel Carson College, Stevenson College, and the Council of Provosts.

Living Writers Student Reading
2024-12-05 17:20 - 18:50 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Living Writers Series – Fall 2024
Growing Things
~ gardens, poems, emotions, relationships, stories, our artistic practices, carefully tended, beautifully ordered, rewilded and wild ~

Sponsored by The Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Laurie Sain Endowment, The Humanities Institute, Bookshop Santa Cruz, and Two Birds Books, which provides books for purchase at the readings.

Casting the Dice: A Dialogue on Migration Through Music
2024-12-05 18:00 - 19:30 | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join us for a special event with composer Iván Enrique Rodríguez and UC Santa Cruz scholar Amy Argenal to discuss the complex experiences of migrants, the many challenges of seeking asylum and refuge in the United States, and the power of music as a tool for social change.
Presented by The Humanities Institute and the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, the event features “Casting the Dice,” an orchestral work narrated and composed by Rodríguez and based on stories collected from migrants around the world. The piece, which premiered at the Cabrillo Festival in Summer 2024, examines the lived experiences of people who have been displaced, delving into the connections of immigrants and refugees with their homelands, and their personal journeys as they navigate rebuilding their lives in a new country.
Rodríguez will discuss his process composing this orchestral piece with Argenal, a scholar of migration, human rights educator, and active collaborator with local immigrant and refugee rights organizations. Alongside the conversation, attendees will get a chance to connect with groups that offer resources to migrants in Santa Cruz County and advocate for just immigration policies, providing an opportunity to learn about ways to support local efforts in our community.
This event is free and open to the public but we ask that you please register.

Dr. Iván Enrique Rodríguez, a Puerto Rican composer, is acclaimed for his gripping, dramatic music rooted in social justice and Puerto Rican heritage. His notable works include A Metaphor for Power, addressing Latinx and equality issues, and Casting the Dice, about refugees and immigration, commissioned by the Cabrillo Festival. His music has been performed in major venues like Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, as well as in refugee camps across Europe. Rodríguez received the 2019 ASCAP Leonard Bernstein Award and the 2023 ASCAP Rudolf Nissim Prize. He earned his doctorate from The Juilliard School.
Dr. Amy Argenal is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Community-Engaged Research and Learning in the Sociology Department. She completed her doctorate in International and Multicultural Education at the University of San Francisco, where she also received her Master’s in the same area of study. She received her second Masters in Human Rights from Mahidol University in Thailand. Her current research focuses on the root causes of migration from Central America and explores methodologies that bring the narratives of migrant communities to the forefront.
Event Logistics
Parking is available in UCSC Lot #115 or 116 but we also encourage bicycling, car pooling, ridesharing, and public transportation. To reach the UCSC lots, proceed through the main entrance to campus, continue up the hill from the information kiosk on Coolidge, then turn right at the Ranch View/Carriage House Road stoplight into the Carriage House/Campus Facilities parking lot. The Hay Barn is a 5-minute walk across the street from the parking lot. Overflow parking is available at lot 122. Download a parking map here.

Co-sponsored by the UC Santa Cruz Department of Sociology, Department of Latin American and Latino Studies, Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas, the Arts Research Institute, the Institute for Social Transformation, and the Santa Cruz Welcoming Network.

Slug Book Club Holiday Party with the Deep Read
2024-12-05 20:00 | Cowell Conference Room, Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join us for an undergraduate holiday party with the Slug Book Club and the Deep Read. Come for pizza and drinks as well as holiday crafts and a literary white elephant exchange ($10-$15 budget). We’ll be handing out copies of this year’s Deep Read book, James by Percival Everett, and discussing opportunities to participate in the Deep Read program.

American Analects: Book Launch and Poetry Reading
2024-12-08 15:00 - 17:00 | m.k. contemporary art, 703 Front Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Please join us for the release of American Analects, poems by Gary Young and Feasting on the World, an exhibition at MK Contemporary Art Gallery, paintings by Gene Holton paired with poems by Gary Young. Gary Young will be reading from his new book inspired by his friend and mentor Gene Holton.
Presented by MK Contemporary Art Gallery and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute, UC Santa Cruz: Special Collection Archives, UC Santa Cruz: The Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History; Bookshop Santa Cruz; The Hive Poetry Collective; and Santa Cruz Public Libraries.
More info at: www.mkcontemporary.art.
American Analects uses the Analects of Confucius as an inspiration to mediate upon the life, death, and the subsequent loss of the poet’s influential, beloved mentor—the painter Gene Holtan. These poems are juxtaposed with poems about other losses—of parents, of friends and friends of friends. Still, this is not a dour book. Many poems celebrate our ability to inspire, to comfort, and to nurture one another. In the end, American Analects is about resiliency, about moving on from personal loss, from the pandemic, and from catastrophic fires, to rejoice in what remains.
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.

Slugs and Steins with Professor Renee Fox and Professor Elaine Sullivan - The Curse of the Mummy
2024-12-09 18:30 - 20:00 | Virtual Event
This talk focuses on a new UCSC Humanities course called “The Curse of the Mummy,” co-taught by Associate Professor of Literature Renée Fox and Associate Professor Elaine Sullivan. Combining analysis of 19th-century Egyptology’s transformation of ancient Egypt into a European fantasy with study of ancient Egyptian culture itself, the course relies on the collaborative expertise of an Egyptologist and a Victorian studies scholar to discover how and why the ancient past can become integral to contemporary identity, society, and aesthetics.
The talk will focus on the genesis of the course, some of the bizarre mummy literature it covers, the ways it relates to Professor Fox’s and Professor Sullivan’s current (and very different) research, and why mummies are a perfect subject to think about the intersections and divergences between different Humanities disciplines.

Renee Fox is Associate Professor of Literature, the Jordan-Stern Presidential Chair for Dickens and Nineteenth-Century Studies, Co-Director of the Dickens Project, and Co-Director of the Center for Monster Studies at UC Santa Cruz. She is the author of The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature (The Ohio State University Press, 2023), co-editor of the Routledge International Handbook of Irish Studies (Routledge, 2021), and co-editor of the forthcoming Race, Violence, and Form: Reframing Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Liverpool University Press, 2025). Her other publications include essays and articles on topics ranging from Victorian acrobats to Dracula’s gothic realism to epitaphic form in Irish poetry, and she’s currently at work on a new book entitled Violent Reading: 19th-Century Ireland and the Politics of Genre.
Elaine Sullivan (M.A. and Ph.D. in Egyptian Art and Archaeology at Johns Hopkins University) is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Sullivan is an Egyptologist and a Digital Humanist whose work focuses on applying new technologies to ancient cultural materials. Her born-digital publication, Constructing the Sacred (Stanford University Press, 2020, awarded prizes by the American Historical Association and the Archaeological Institute of America), utilizes a geo-temporal 3D model of the necropolis of Saqqara (near modern Cairo) to investigate questions of ritual landscape at the site. She was the project coordinator of the Digital Karnak Project, a multi-phased 3D virtual reality model of the famous ancient Egyptian temple complex of Karnak.
Slugs and Steins are free informal lectures served up over Zoom. Brought to you by the UC Santa Cruz Alumni Association, each talk will engage one of our favorite professors in discussion with you, the local community of Silicon Valley, and beyond. We will cover everything from organic artichokes to endangered zebras, self-driving cars to Shakespeare. All are welcome. Audience participation is encouraged.
Watch past Slugs and Steins events here.
Questions? Contact the UC Santa Cruz University Events office at specialevents@ucsc.edu.

Humanities Division Graduate Awards Make-up
2024-12-12 16:00 - 18:00 | Merrill Provost House, Provost's Residence, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Dean Jasmine Alinder will recognize Kimberly Tallbear (Ph.D. ’05, History of Consciousness) with the 2023-2024 Distinguished Humanities Graduate Alumni award. Professor Tallbear will give remarks, and we will recognize graduate student awards from last year, with a reception following.
The event will take place at the Merrill Provost House from 4 – 6 pm. We also plan to display graduate student publications and other research projects completed since 2021. Information about how to display work is included in the RSVP form below.

Please RSVP by Tuesday December 3rd to attend. We are looking forward to seeing you there!

Global Soccer Culture: How Immigrants Created the World's Game
2025-01-06 18:00 | Cultural Center at Merrill, Merrill Cultural Center, UC Santa Cruz, Merrill College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Global Soccer Culture
How Immigrants Created the World’s Game
Prof. Laurent Dubois (U. of Virginia) in Conversation with Dr. Anju Reejhsinghani
Monday, January 6, 2025
6 pm || Cultural Center @ Merrill

Kick off your winter quarter with this inspiring conversation between renowned global soccer historian Dr. Laurent Dubois and Dr. Anju Reejhsinghani, Vice Chancellor of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
How have immigrants and immigration created a culture of soccer that spans the globe? What is at stake in current struggles over immigration for the future of soccer as “the world’s game”?
Laurent Dubois is John L. Nau III Bicentennial Professor in the History and Principles of Democracy at the University of Virginia. He is the author of seven books, including Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France (2010) and The Language of the Game: How to Understand Soccer (2018).
Anju Reejhsinghani is Inaugural Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer, UC Santa Cruz. A former tenured history professor in the University of Wisconsin System, Dr. Reejhsinghani is a scholar of race, gender, sport, and diaspora in the Americas.

This event is co-sponsored by Merrill College, the UCSC Office for Diversity and Inclusion, the History department, The Center for World History, the Council of Provosts, and the Merrill Programs and Leadership Office.

Zionism: Past, Present, Future?
2025-01-13 18:00 - 19:30 | Music Center Recital Hall
Zionism is one of the most fraught terms in contemporary politics. But what exactly is Zionism, what is its history, and what have been (and are today) its many meanings to diverse groups? Why have so many embraced different versions of Zionism, and, on the flip side, why and how has Zionism been critiqued, both among its proponents as well as its detractors? What is the future of Zionism, particularly in the wake of Israel’s devastating assaults on Gaza and Lebanon following the Hamas organized massacres of Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023? Please join the UCSC Center for Jewish Studies in a panel conversation featuring, Liora Halperin (University of Washington), Shaul Magid (Dartmouth), and Dov Waxman (UCLA); prominent scholars of the history of Zionism, who will address these questions and many more.

Registration required for event entry. Seating will be first come, first served.
Prof. Halperin is Professor of International Studies and History, and Distinguished Endowed Chair of Jewish Studies, at the University of Washington. She is an historian of Israel/Palestine with particular interests in nationalism and collective memory, Jewish cultural and social history, language ideology and policy, and the politics of colonization and settlement. She is the author of The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Past (Stanford, 2021), a study of the European Jewish agricultural colonies established in late nineteenth-century Ottoman Palestine and the politics of their twentieth-century commemoration and Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948 (Yale, 2015), which was awarded the Shapiro Prize from the Association for Israel Studies for the best book in Israel Studies. She is currently working on a book about the diverse urban Jewish communities of late 19th/early 20th century Ottoman Palestine and the way a wide range of later groups and political movements, both Zionist and anti-Zionist, have commemorated and promoted narratives about this history.
Shaul Magid is a rabbi, Visiting Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at Harvard Divinity School, and Distinguished Fellow in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. He teaches Modern Judaism at Harvard Divinity School and is a senior research fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard. He has written extensively on Zionism, anti-Zionism, Diasporism, and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. He is the author of many books and essays, most recently Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (2021) and The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance (2023). His present book project is The Political Theology of Yoel Teitelbaum of Satmar – Zionism as Anti-Messianism.
Dov Waxman is the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Professor of Israel Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He is the author of four books: The Pursuit of Peace and The Crisis of Israeli Identity: Defending / Defining the Nation (2006), Israel’s Palestinians: The Conflict Within (2011), Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict over Israel (2016), and The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: What Everyone Needs to Know (2019). His writing has also been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Time, Slate, and many other publications.

This event is presented by the Center for Jewish Studies and co-sponsored by Porter College.

Kim Tallbear – Settler Love Is Breaking My Heart: Sex, Kin, and Country
2025-01-15 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Settler sexuality, family, and “love” are key to sustaining settler property relations in the US and Canada. In this in-process book chapter (a shorter version was previously published in a 2024 edited volume), I draw on the work of historians, anthropologists, and science and technology studies (STS) scholars who have investigated the history of state- sanctioned marriage and monogamy in the US, Hawai’i, Canada, and Europe. I also build on popular and academic polyamory literatures, Native American and Indigenous Studies and critical race theory. In addition, (auto)ethnographic examination of eco-erotic, polyamorous, and other more-than-monogamous relating inform alternative concepts of anticolonial relating after the unsettling of settler sex and family. Finally, I center the role of country—both music and place—to think through and beyond unsustainable settler- colonial practices of making relations with human loves and more-than-human loves. Decolonization is more sustainable with music.
Kim TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate) is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience, and Society, Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta. She is the author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. In addition to studying genome science disruptions to Indigenous self-definitions, Dr. TallBear studies colonial disruptions to Indigenous sexual relations. She is a regular panelist on the Media Indigena podcast. She is also a regular media commentator on topics including Indigenous peoples, science, and technology; and Indigenous sexualities. You can also follow her Substack newsletter, Unsettle: Indigenous affairs, cultural politics & (de)colonization at https://kimtallbear.substack.com.

WINTER 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 Winter 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.

Living Writers with Andrea Cohen
2025-01-16 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Living Writers Series – Winter 2025
Grief Sequence
Not to suppress mourning (suffering)…but to change it, transform it…after Prageeta Sharma & Roland Barthes
Andrea Cohen is the author of eight poetry collections; her latest is The Sorrow Apartments (2024). You can also find her writing in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Threepenny Review, and The New York Review of Books, etc. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and residencies at MacDowell. Over the years, she has taught at The University of Iowa, Emerson College, UMASS-Boston, The Fine Arts Work Center, and Merrimack College; starting this spring, she will teach at Boston University. She also directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series. Her hometown is Atlanta, Georgia.
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 Puknat Literary Endowment, The Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Laurie Sain Endowment, The Humanities Institute, Bookshop Santa Cruz, and Two Birds Books (where the writers’ books are available for purchase).

Marc Matera - Race After Empire: Racial Capitalism in Southern Africa and “Race Relations” in Britain
2025-01-22 12:15 - 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
“Race relations” became synonymous with various obstacles to the “integration” of Commonwealth migrants in postwar Britain and, ultimately, shorthand for social and political issues perceived to be related to racial differences in general. However, interest in race relations did not center initially on Caribbean, South Asian, and African migrants to metropolitan Britain. Before the mid-1960s, race relations served as a means of conceptualizing and grappling with “problems of the end of Empire,” and efforts to study and manage them focused on centers of extractive industries in British settler colonies in Africa.
This talk demonstrates how white liberals and business leaders in colonial Africa provided institutional models and much of the personnel and start-up capital for a race relations industry in Britain that depoliticized racism and delegitimated anticolonial and Black Power politics by attributing them to racial identification. Studies of and policies targeting race relations in 1960s Britain emerged alongside and in connection with efforts to manage, co-opt, or divert the transformative potential of decolonization and to shape postcolonial futures with neoliberal solutions. From this perspective, when it comes to liberal politics of race, as the South African artist William Kentridge suggests (“Art in a State of Siege (100 Years of Easy Living),” 1988), “London is a suburb of Johannesburg”.
Marc Matera is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century (University of California Press, 2015). He coauthored The Global 1930s: The International Decade (Routledge, 2017) with Susan Kingsley Kent and The Women’s War of 1929: Gender and Violence in Colonial Nigeria (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) with Misty L. Bastian and Susan Kingsley Kent. He recently contributed to and coauthored introductory and concluding essays for a thematic issue of Modern British History, “Marking Race in Twentieth Century Britain”. The research for Professor Matera’s talk was supported in part by a research fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.

WINTER 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 Winter 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.

Ambika Aiyadurai - Caring for Humans and Nonhumans: Challenges in India’s Wildlife Conservation
2025-01-23 10:00 | Virtual Event
Organized by the Center for South Asian Studies, this talk examines different meanings of care in India’s wildlife conservation. Drawing on fieldwork and case studies from across the country, Professor Aiyadurai will discuss various forms of care in protecting endangered species and preventing extinction. Addressing the role of wildlife conservationists and Indigenous people, the talk asks how and in what ways the notions of care for humans and nonhumans among these groups vary, overlap, and sometimes compete against each other. How do we reconcile the conflicts emerging through the hierarchical nature of the ethics of care in wildlife conservation?

Ambika Aiyadurai is Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar. Her research interests include human-animal relations and community-based wildlife conservation.
This talk is a part of the Center for South Asian Studies Ecologies of Care 2024-25 Lecture Series.

Living Writers with Venita Blackburn
2025-01-23 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Living Writers Series – Winter 2025
Grief Sequence
Not to suppress mourning (suffering)…but to change it, transform it…after Prageeta Sharma & Roland Barthes
Works by Venita Blackburn have appeared in The New Yorker, NY Times, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Story Magazine, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Paris Review, and others. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship in 2014 and several Pushcart prize nominations. She received the Prairie Schooner book prize for fiction, which resulted in the publication of her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, in 2017 and earned a place as a finalist for the NYPL Young Lions award among other honors. Blackburn’s second collection of stories is How to Wrestle a Girl, 2021, finalist for a Lambda Literary Prize and was a NY Times editor’s choice. Her debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, is about the mania of grief, all of human history and a lesbian assassin at the end of the world and was selected as one of the NYTimes and NPR’s best books of 2024. She is the founder and president of Live, Write, an organization devoted to offering free creative writing workshops for communities of color. Her hometown is Compton, California, and she is an Associate Professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.
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 Puknat Literary Endowment, The Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Laurie Sain Endowment, The Humanities Institute, Bookshop Santa Cruz, and Two Birds Books (where the writers’ books are available for purchase).

Accidentally Wes Anderson: Adventures in Santa Cruz
2025-01-24 | Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, 705 Front St., Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
With support from Santa Cruz County and The Humanities Institute, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History (MAH) is proud to present Accidentally Wes Anderson: Adventures in Santa Cruz—an exhibition that pays tribute to the world of travel photography, community, and adventure, where architecture, design, and aesthetics converge in stunning symmetry reminiscent of the iconic filmmaker’s visual style.
The exhibit will run from January 24th – May 18th.
This is an adventure. Join us to discover the most interesting places on Earth, both near and far, inspired by the eponymous director’s cinematic vision. Produced in collaboration with brand and social media community Accidentally Wes Anderson (AWA), this exhibition takes guests on a visual journey to the most beautiful, idiosyncratic locations around the globe—including Santa Cruz County—all seemingly plucked from the whimsical world of filmmaker Wes Anderson.
From impossibly grand hotels and chateaus to idyllic lighthouses, cable cars, and train carriages, AWA explores the filmmaker’s distinct aesthetic, whether a perfectly symmetrical landscape or a European city brimming with technicolor structures. The MAH exhibition, which will include a selection of community-sourced images of quirky places and locales in Central Coast California, is also presented as homage to the centennial celebration of the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk’s Giant Dipper roller coaster, an Anderson-esque vintage wooden coaster that debuted in 1924.
Born off the back of a viral online phenomenon and community of the same name, AWA celebrates the undeniable visual vernacular of one of cinema’s greatest filmmakers. Each of the locations highlighted in the exhibition boasts the recognizable singular aesthetic that is oh-so typical of film master Wes Anderson. Bright, vivid, and often slightly jarring to reality, AWA collects the world’s most Anderson-like sites in all their faded grandeur and pop-pastel colors, telling the story behind each stranger-than-fiction location. Authorized by Anderson himself, the exhibition and its companion books celebrate much of the weird and wonderful architecture that exists in our unique world, paying tribute to travel, photography, community, and adventure.
AWA photo contributors have been called “adventurers” who range from travelers, architects, history buffs, artists, editors, photographers, to teachers, students, and all walks of life intrigued by the wonders of the world and civilization.

Banner Image: Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, photo by Ludwig Favre, @ludwigfavre.

Winter 2025 Aurora Lecture Series: Francesca Orsini — Varieties of Realism
2025-01-24 10:00 | Virtual Event
Join us Friday, January 24th at 10am PST for Varieties of Realism, a lecture by Francesca Orsini with discussants: G.S. Sahota and Rahul Parson.

Francesca Orsini is Professor Emerita of Hindi and South Asian Literature, School of Oriental and African Studies – University of London
Rahul Parson is Assistant Professor of Hindi Literature and Culture, South & Southeast Asian Studies – University of California, Berkeley
G.S. Sahota is Aurora Chair in Sikh and Punjabi Studies, Associate Professsor of Literature – University of California, Santa Cruz

We Are the Middle of Forever: A More-Than-Human(ities) Lab Book Club Discussion with Stan Rushworth
2025-01-24 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Please join us for a conversation with Stan Rushworth, who will be discussing his latest book We Are the Middle of Forever, which places Indigenous voices at the center of conversations about today’s environmental crisis. Event attendees will be expected to have read the book, which will be provided free of charge to anyone who would like to participate.

Please sign up here for a free copy of the book. If you would like a copy to read over the winter break, please sign up by December 2nd. Registrations received after December 2nd will receive their books in January.
Professor Amanda Smith will email all the registrants with a time to pick up their book.
An American Library Association Notable Book, We Are the Middle of Forever draws on interviews with people from different North American Indigenous cultures and communities, generations, and geographic regions, who share their knowledge and experience, their questions, their observations, and their dreams of maintaining the best relationship possible to all of life. A welcome antidote to the despair arising from the climate crisis, We Are the Middle of Forever will be an indispensable aid to those looking for new and different ideas and responses to the challenges we face.
This event is presented by the THI More-Than-Human(ities) Laboratory Research Cluster.
Stan Rushworth is a teacher of Native American literature and the author of Sam Woods: American Healing, Going to Water: The Journal of Beginning Rain, Diaspora’s Children, and (with Dahr Jamail) We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth (The New Press). He lives in Northern California.

Dan Zimmer - From Left/Right to Up/Down: Technological Transcendence, Ecological Collapse, and a New Polarity in Politics
2025-01-27 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The first guest of the Winter ’25 lineup of the HistCon Speaker Series will be joining us next week! Dan Zimmer will give his talk “From Left/Right to Up/Down: Technological Transcendence, Ecological Collapse, and a New Polarity in Politics” on Monday, January 27th, at 1pm in Hum 1 Rm 210.
If you are unable to make it in person, you can register to attend virtually via the Zoom at this link.
About From Left/Right to Up/Down:
Recent years have seen a growing number renounce the anthropocentrism of the modern Left/Right political spectrum to champion nothing less than the cause of Life itself. This talk charts how the totality of Life became a source of political concern and maps the consequences. It traces the beginning of these developments back to mid-20th century cybernetics before proceeding to show how the environmental crises of the 1970s split the servants of Life into competing camps: one wing striving to ensure that human beings do not overstep Life’s planetary boundaries and the other seeking to use artificial intelligence to free Life from all earthly limits to growth. The talk introduces an Up/Down dichotomy as a heuristic tool to help observers better parse this growing opposition. It concludes by warning that the growing struggle between Life’s partisans may come to resemble less the human-scale conflicts of Western political modernity than a new war of religion.
Dan Zimmer is a political theorist who studies the planet-scale application of human power, with a transdisciplinary focus on nuclear weapons, global warming, and artificial intelligence (AI). He received a doctorate in political science from the Government Department of Cornell University and has since studied contemporary issues in climate science and AI with STS scholar Paul Edwards as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. He now works as a lecturer in the Stanford Civic, Liberal, and Global Education Program and is currently completing a book manuscript that traces the emergence of the human species as a political object from Aristotle to the atom bomb to the Anthropocene.
This talk is co-sponsored by Humanities in the Age of Artificial Intelligence & The Humanities Institute.

Sophia Azeb – Mapping the “Arab” in Pan-African Political Culture
2025-01-29 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Amid the US-backed Israeli genocide in Palestine and the UAE-backed genocide in Sudan, the constellation of transnational and multiracial movement solidarities forged throughout the myriad capitalist and colonialist crises of the 21st century continue to reckon with the precarity of their uneven legibility across various regional, continental, and global contexts. Expanding on the titular catalogue essay composed alongside The Art Institute of Chicago’s current exhibition, Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, this talk navigates a genealogy of similarly unsettled anticolonial solidarities throughout Africa and its diaspora during the Non-Aligned era. By narrowing in on the contentious relationship between “North” and “Sub-Saharan” African artistic production in this period – particularly during the 1969 “First” Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers – I explore how varying articulations and mis/translations of Blackness, Arabness, and Africanness in the political and cultural realm ultimately elude a stable and coherent Pan-African sensibility. However, I also contend that the necessarily fleeting nature of these cultural encounters did still chart routes towards an African diasporic relation of difference that strives towards the most emancipatory possibilities of a transnational and anticolonial practice of solidarity.
Sophia Azeb (she/they) is an assistant professor of Black Studies in the Department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Sophia’s current book project, Another Country: Translational Blackness and the Afro-Arab, explores the currents of transnational and translational blackness charted by African American, Afro-Caribbean, African, and Afro-Arab peoples across 20th century North Africa and Europe. Prior to joining the faculty at UC Santa Cruz, Sophia was a member of the faculty collective that founded the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. Sophia is a frequent contributor to The Funambulist magazine.

WINTER 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 Winter 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.

Francesca Orsini — East of Delhi: Multilingual Literary Culture and World Literature
2025-01-31 10:00 | Virtual Event
Join us Friday, January 31st at 10am PST for a discussion with Francesca Orsini on East of Delhi: Multilingual Literary Culture and World Literature, in conversation with G.S. Sahota and Rahul Parson. This event is part of the Winter 2025 Aurora Lecture Series.

Francesca Orsini is Professor Emerita of Hindi and South Asian Literature, School of Oriental and African Studies – University of London
Rahul Parson is Assistant Professor of Hindi Literature and Culture, South & Southeast Asian Studies – University of California, Berkeley
G.S. Sahota is Aurora Chair in Sikh and Punjabi Studies, Associate Professsor of Literature – University of California, Santa Cruz

Geographies of Dissent: A Trans/Feminist Dialogue
2025-01-31 11:00 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Feminist Studies presents Geographies of Dissent — a dialogue centering trans/feminist vernaculars of the geopolitical, and how current histories of occupation and authoritarianism have impacted feminist projects of dissent.

The first 20 students who register for the full day will receive
their choice of one of the speakers’ books.

11am | Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World
Asli Zengin – Assistant Professor, Rutgers University
In Violent Intimacies, Asli Zengin traces how trans people in Turkey creatively negotiate and resist everyday cisheteronormative violence. Drawing on the ethnographic history of trans communal life in Istanbul, Zengin develops an understanding cisheteronormative violence that expands beyond sex, gender and sexuality.
12:30 | Lunch provided
1:30pm | Defiant Disrobing and Double Dissent in Feminist Thought
Naminata Diabate – Associate Professor, Cornell University
Naminata Diabate is a scholar of sexuality, race, biopolitics, and postcoloniality, whose research explores African, African American, Caribbean, and Afro-Hispanic literatures, cultures, cinema, and new media. Her book, Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa, won the African Studies Association Best Book Award in 2021 and the African Literature First Book Prize in 2022.

American Patchwork Quartet
2025-01-31 19:00 | Kuumbwa Jazz Center
The Humanities Institute and Kuumbwa Jazz is pleased to present American Patchwork Quartet (APQ) on Friday, January 31, 2025 at 7:00PM!
Join the live concert and support American Patchwork Quartet’s mission to reclaim the immigrant soul of American Roots Music as APQ weaves modern immigrant dreams into songs.

American Patchwork Quartet (APQ), led by multi-Grammy award-winning guitarist/vocalist Clay Ross, binds timeless American folk songs with jazz sophistication, country twang, West African hypnotics, and East Asian ornamentation. APQ’s sound is a masterful confluence of tradition and innovation, transcending culture, politics, and ideology.
A southern-born roots music aficionado, Ross is also the founder of the world-renowned Gullah group Ranky Tanky. In APQ, Ross intertwines with other Grammy-winning artists: Falguni Shah, an eleventh-generation Hindustani classical vocalist, Yasushi Nakamura, an internationally acclaimed Issei jazz bassist, and Clarence Penn, a drumming protégée of Ellis Marsalis whose fibers were honed by African American church traditions.
APQ resonates as a potent symbol of unity in diversity. It stands testament to the notion that, from a collage of varied backgrounds, a coherent and beautiful whole can be fashioned. Mirroring America’s cultural mosaic, APQ stitches together a story that’s both intricate and resilient. The fabric of their music is genuine—it neither feigns tolerance nor presents an overly-embellished image of unity. Instead, each carefully chosen piece dives deep into America’s patchwork soul and shares the joys, sorrows, and unwavering hope of a nation crafted by shared dreams and diverse histories.
Far from being a haphazard collection of musical scraps, APQ is a deliberately designed homage to America’s past and a showcase of its dynamic present. It beckons listeners to meditate upon our shared identity and relish in the musical threads that bind us. Just as an intricately designed quilt becomes a cherished family heirloom, when the distinct patterns of APQ’s music align in perfect harmony, the result is both a blanket of warmth and a timeless treasure.
Sponsored by The Humanities Institute at UCSC.

Zhongmin Chen — "Re-evaluating the Development of the Chinese Language"
2025-02-03 13:20 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Fusional Linguistics Initiative presents, Zhongmin Chen (Fudan University) speaking on “Re-evaluating the Development of the Chinese Language: the ‘One-center Multi-Layer’ Development Hypothesis.” This talk will take place Monday, February 3 at 1:20pm in Humanities 1 – Room 210.
Language is humanity’s most vital tool for communication, making the study of its evolution inherently linked to the dynamics of human activity, society, history, and other influencing factors. Based on the historical and cultural contexts of language development, the evolution of language can be broadly categorized into three models:
1. The Family Tree Model – exemplified by Indo-European languages.
2. The Polycentric Mixed Model – observed in regions such as Australia, Papua New Guinea, and the Balkans.
3. The One-Center Multi-Layer Model – characteristic of East and Southeast Asian languages, including Chinese.
This presentation delves into the historical and social contexts underlying these evolutionary models and highlights their defining characteristics. It also demonstrates the methodology used to analyze historical linguistic layers, with examples drawn from the lexical, syntactic, and phonetic features of various Chinese dialects and East Asian languages.
Zhongmin Chen (陈忠敏) is Professor of Chinese Linguistics at Fudan University (Shanghai). He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from University of California, Berkeley. He works on experimental phonetics, historical linguistics, and Chinese dialectology.
