Sir Isaac Julien - Inspire: Leading Ideas from UC Santa Cruz
2025-04-17 18:30 - 22:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | de Young Museum, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Dr, San Francisco, 94118, United States
When was the last time you felt inspired? Learned something new? Pushed boundaries? Let’s do that—again.
Experience an exclusive UC Santa Cruz evening with complimentary wine and hors d’oeuvres as we celebrate with world renowned artist, and UCSC faculty member, Sir Isaac Julien whose retrospective exhibit Isaac Julien: I Dream a World is opening at the de Young Museum.
Reconnect with UC Santa Cruz alumni, parents, and friends at this special event in San Francisco. Enjoy the chance to network, engage with your vibrant UCSC community, and participate in a thought-provoking discussion led by our brilliant faculty.

Sir Isaac Julien, Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities
Julien, a filmmaker and installation artist, blends film, dance, photography, music, theatre, and sculpture into powerful multi-screen narratives. A Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at UC Santa Cruz, he co-leads the Moving Image Lab and teaches in the History of Consciousness Department. His honors include the 2017 Royal Academy Charles Wollaston Award, the 2022 Kaiserring Goslar Award, a knighthood, and a 2024 British Academy Fellowship.
“Isaac Julien: I Dream a World” will be at the de Young Museum April 12-July 13 and will feature 10 major video installations by the British artist, a genre he has pioneered.
Jennifer González, Professor of the History of Art and Visual Culture
González writes about contemporary art with an emphasis on installation art, digital art and activist art. She is interested in understanding the strategic use of space by contemporary artists and by cultural institutions such as museums. More specifically, she has focused on the representation of the human body and its relation to discourses of race and gender.
Hosted by, Chancellor Cynthia Larive
As the 11th chancellor of the University of California at Santa Cruz, Cynthia Larive leads an institution known worldwide for its interdisciplinary approach to high impact research, for seeking solutions to the world’s greatest challenges and for its commitment to social and environmental justice. UC Santa Cruz joined the Association of American Universities in 2019 and the Association of Pacific Rim Universities in 2020, remarkable achievements that underscore the impact and quality of the university’s research and teaching across the five academic divisions of Arts, Baskin Engineering, Humanities, Physical and Biological Science, and Social Science. Under her leadership, in 2022 UC Santa Cruz was ranked No. 1 in the nation among top research universities for racial and gender diversity in leadership.
Learn more about the INSPIRE series events here. The INSPIRE series has something for all UCSC alumni, parents, and friends.

Giuseppe Longo - From the Alphabet to AI: Discretizing the World
2025-04-21 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The History of Consciousness department, in collaboration with the Humanities in the Age of AI Cluster, is pleased to present “From the Alphabet to AI: Discretizing the World” delivered by Giuseppe Longo. The talk will take place April 21st at 1pm in Humanities 1 Room 210, with a virtual attendance option available. To attend virtually, join here.
The invention of the alphabet marked a fundamental shift in our epistemic relation to the world. In particular, the Greek alphabet played a crucial role in shaping our cultures, leading up to today’s “term re-writing machines” that are transforming our lives. The vision of a world that can be fully described in elementary and simple components lies at the foundation of two techno-sciences of great interest and power. We informally compare the perspectives developed in cognitive and natural sciences through the lens of differing mathematical tools, e.g. continuous vs discrete mathematics. Both historical and contemporary scientific alternatives will be briefly discussed.
Giuseppe Longo is a Research Director CNRS (Emeritus), Cavaillès interdisciplinary center of Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris (ENS), formely in the Dept. of Mathematics and Computer Science, at ENS (1990-2012). He has been Professor of Mathematics for Informatics, University of Pisa (1981-1990) and adjunct professor, School of Medicine, Tufts U., Boston (2013-19). He spent three years in the USA (Berkeley, M.I.T., Carnegie Mellon) as researcher and visiting professor, and frequent visitor in Oxford (GB) and Utrecht (NL). Founder and editor-in-chief (1990-2015) of Mathematical Structures in Computer Science, Camdridge U.P.., he is (co-)author of more than 100 papers and six books. In the last 20 years, he extended his research interests and work to the epistemology of mathematics and theoretical biology.

Deep Read Salon: The Craft of James
2025-04-22 18:00 - 19:30 | Virtual Event
Join us for a virtual Deep Read salon on Percival Everett’s James featuring UC Santa Cruz Professors of Literature and Creative Writing, Micah Perks and Karen Tei Yamashita. Professors Perks and Yamashita will discuss the writing craft and techniques of the novel, offering insights on the book from their perspective as novelists and memoirists. Their presentations will be followed by an audience Q&A period, which will be moderated by Professor of Literature and Deep Read Faculty Co-Lead, Vilashini Cooppan.

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

TechnoScience Improv
2025-04-23 12:15 - 14:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This roundtable improv (12.15-2.00pm) brings together ten UCSC scholars working on social, historical, and cultural studies of science, technology and medicine. The event will be structured around eight open, improvised conversations, each beginning with a question from a different panelist exploring emerging practices, speculative transformations, and critical imaginings of technoscience, health and ecology.
Participants include:
Karen Barad, Distinguished Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness.
James Doucet-Battle, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Co-Director of the Science & Justice Research Center.
Kat Gutierrez, Assistant Professor in the History Department.
Dimitris Papadopoulos, Professor of History of Consciousness in the Department of History of Consciousness.
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Professor of History of Consciousness in the Department of History of Consciousness.
Jenny Reardon, Professor of Sociology and the Founding Director of the Science & Justice Research Center.
Warren Sack, Professor of the Software Arts in the Film + Digital Media Department.
Kriti Sharma, Assistant Professor of Critical Race Science and Technology Studies in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies.
Matt Sparke, Professor of Politics in the Politics Department and Co-Director of Global and Community Health.
Zac Zimmer, Associate Professor of Literature in the Literature Department.

Co-sponsored by History of Consciousness: earth ecologies x technoscience conversations, Center for Cultural Studies, Global and Community Health, and the Science & Justice Research Center.

Debbie Millman - Love Letter to a Garden
2025-04-23 19:00 - 20:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz presents Debbie Millman, award-winning artist, designer, and the host of the podcast Design Matters, will discuss her beautiful new book Love Letter to a Garden, a visual story of falling in love with gardening—and the philosophies that work conjures.

Debbie Millman always thought of herself as a bad gardener. Nevertheless, she kept trying. Over the years she came to realize that no one is a bad gardener—a garden is a journey that develops over time, through space, and evolves along with our hearts. In Love Letter to a Garden, Debbie Millman shares her journey to make and grow a garden—and the plants she has collected along the way—a process that started with handed-down houseplants from beloved friends and a lone peony.
Debbie Millman has been named “one of the most creative people in business” by Fast Company, and “one of the most influential designers working today” by GDUSA. Millman is an illustrator, author, educator, and host of the podcast Design Matters. Broadcasting for 19 years, Design Matters is one of the first and longest running podcasts in the world. The show won a Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in 2011, and Apple has named it one of their “All Time Favorites” three times. In 2023 the show won two Webby’s, three Communicator Awards, a Signal Award, three awards from The Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts, and earned an Ambie nomination.
More information at: Debbie Millman, Love Letter to a Garden | Bookshop Santa Cruz
Co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

Connections to land with Mercedes Dorame, joined by Aspen Mays, Unseen California
2025-04-24 15:00 - 16:30 | Digital Arts Research Center #108
Mercedes Dorame uses her artistic process to examine and rebuild her relationship with the land. This talk will explore personal, social, and institutional connections to home, site, and land. These concepts intersect within her work as an Indigenous artist as she addresses both the taught and erased histories the land holds, as well as its broader identity in relation to ideas of landscape photography. Centering on Indigenous relationships, reciprocity, and kinship with the land, her work interrogates tangible, centered, and embodied experiences within lens-based practice.
Dorame will speak about her work and multi-year engagement with Unseen California. She will then be joined by Karolina Karlic, Director and Founder of Unseen California and artist Aspen Mays, part of the project’s first cohort for a round table discussion about the project and their publication, Language Has No Weather: Field Notes from Unseen California. Copies will be available for sale.
Sponsored by: Art Department Environmental Art + Social Practice MFA Program, American Indian Resource Center, Unseen California, Arts Research Institute, The Humanities Institute.

Amanda Batarseh - Rooted Movements: The Radical Poetics of Palestinian Space
2025-04-24 16:00 - 18:00 | Virtual Event
The Center for Racial Justice (CRJ) is proud to present Rooted Movements: The Radical Poetics of Palestinian Space with Amanda Batarseh, Assistant Professor of Literature at UC San Diego.
Analyses of Palestinian poetics often expose the violent structure of ongoing-Nakba — the Zionist settler-colonial uprooting and removal of Palestinians (both physically from the land and physiologically from life) since 1948. Thinking beyond colonial epistemology, however, is not merely a task of refuting settler-colonial narratives but of dismantling the very ways of knowing that produce them. This talk re-centers a Palestinian analytic through the lens of “radicality,” which encompasses both Palestinian rootedness and revolutionary movement. This radicality both predates and regenerates in contravention of settler colonialism’s violent uprootings/removals, unsettling colonial-national constructs of spatial belonging, and cohering the decolonization of literary analysis to then decolonization of our physical geographies. Palestinian writers navigate the dynamic tensions between rootedness and movement to forge liberatory pathways, opening up alternative horizons of political and creative possibility.

Amanda Batarseh (بطارسة / bah–taar–say) is Assistant Professor of Literature at UC San Diego. Her teaching and research focuses on Palestinian literature, Arabic literature, Arab American and Arab diaspora literature, Indigenous studies, Mediterranean studies and comparative literature. Her research has been supported by the UC Humanities Research Institute, Hellman Fellowship, Faculty Career Development Program and the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program.
Co-sponsored by Feminist Studies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES), Students for Justice in Palestine, Faculty for Justice in Palestine, Center for Cultural Studies, Center for South Asian Studies (CSAS), Center for the Middle East and North Africa (CMENA), Anthropology Department, Sociology Department, Institute for Social Transformation, and People’s University.
Part of the year-long speaker series, Possibilities of Palestinian Refusal: Against Disciplining Knowledge and Movement. For more information, visit the CRJ website: https://crjucsc.com/.

Dr. Siva Vaidhyanathan - The High Cost of Outsourcing Thought: On the Ideology of Artificial Intelligence
2025-04-24 17:00 - 20:00 | Cultural Center at Merrill, Merrill Cultural Center, UC Santa Cruz, Merrill College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Each year, the TLC hosts a convocation to bring together educators across the campus and from the local community to explore significant topics in teaching and learning in higher education. Each year’s keynote address is free and open to the public.
This year’s Convocation speaker will be Dr. Siva Vaidhyanathan, who will present his talk, The High Cost of Outsourcing Thought: On the Ideology of Artificial Intelligence.
His talk will examine the ideas that have motivated the rush to deploy both generative artificial intelligence and predictive artificial intelligence into our computer systems and our lives. It will consider the effects on our collective intelligence and our habits of creativity and collaboration. What problem do we hope to solve with this suite of technologies? What do we gain? What do we lose? And how should those questions shape how educators and students interface with these technologies?
Afterwards, Dr. Vaidhyanathan will be joined in conversation by THI Faculty Director and Linguistics Professor Pranav Anand.

Dr. Siva Vaidhyanathan is the Robertson Professor of Media Studies and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2018), Intellectual Property: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2017), and The Googlization of Everything — and Why We Should Worry (University of California Press, 2011). After five years as a professional journalist, he earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He is a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities and a Faculty Associate of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. He was born and raised in Buffalo, New York, and resides in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Pranav Anand is Professor of Linguistics and Faculty Director of The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz. His research investigates how context mediates the interpretation of language, and has explored the interpretation of subjectivity, persuasive tactics, bias, evidence, belief, time, and narrative structure.

To view past convocations visit: TLC | About Convocation

Linguistics Colloquia: Matt Wagers - Setting Healthy (mnemonic) Boundaries
2025-04-25 13:20 | Humanities 1, Room 202
The Department of Linguistics is pleased to present Matt Wagers, speaking on Setting Healthy (mnemonic) Boundaries.
This is an in-person event. You can also join virtually via Zoom.
Nearly 20 years ago, Lewis & Vasishth (2005) applied the ACT-R modeling framework to language processing by creating an English parser fragment embedded in an associative memory. McElree (2000) and McElree, Foraker & Dyer (2003) informed this development by providing earlier arguments in favor of such a content-addressable memory. This proved to be hugely influential because it offered a general theory of dependency resolution which could be made precise by reference to any particular theory of linguistic features. Both strands of thought reoriented thinking in the field away from models of working memory that required serial search procedures and, generally, the discovery of widespread interference effects has vindicated that shift.
Much recent research has made progress in delineating what the representations are (Yadav et al. 2023, Keshev et al. 2025) and how they can be learned in an unsupervised manner (Ryu & Lewis, 2021). Relatively unexplored is how to characterize the information that can be attended to simultaneously, sometimes called the “focus of attention” (Oberauer & Hein, 2012). This is an important commitment of models like ACT-R and provides an attractive point of articulation to theories of locality or linguistic domains. In this talk, I will survey what we know (and don’t know) about the focus of attention in language processing (Wagers & McElree, 2013, 2022) and relate it to recent thinking about the dynamics of context encoding (Healey, Long & Kahana, 2019; Balachandran, Wagers & Rich, 2025).
Over the course of each year, the Linguistics department hosts colloquia by distinguished faculty from around the world. For more information: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/colloquia/index.html

Saturday Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream
2025-04-26 10:00 | Aptos Library, 7695 Soquel Dr, Aptos, 95003, United States
Saturday Shakespeare in Santa Cruz Presents A Midsummer Night’s Dream, featuring a series of readings and conversations held Saturday mornings from April 26 to May 24, 2025. The 1st hour will be spent in conversation with a guest speaker, and during the 2nd hour volunteers will read aloud part of the play. During the final session, on May 24th, a film will be presented. Meetings will take place in the Aptos Library Community Room (in person) and over Zoom (virtual).
For more information, Zoom link, or to be a reader, contact: saturdayshakespeare@gmail.com
The guest speaker on April 26 is Michael Warren, Emeritus Professor of Literature, UC Santa Cruz, former dramaturg for Santa Cruz Shakespeare. Readings: Act 1, Scenes 1 & 2
All Scheduled Meetings

April 26: Michael Warren
May 3: Julia Lupton
May 10: Charles Pasternak
May 17: Sean Keilen
May 24 (Film Screening)

Vive Oaxaca Guelaguetza
2025-04-27 10:00 - 16:00 | Branciforte Small Schools Campus, 840 N Branciforte Ave, Santa Cruz, CA, 95062, United States
The Vive Oaxaca Guelaguetza is an authentic cultural festival with food, dance, music, and crafts presented each spring by Senderos. This local festival is like the traditional fiestas celebrated each summer in Oaxaca, Mexico. Guelaguetza is a Zapotec word that means “a commitment of sharing and cooperation.” Guelaguetza is a celebration that honors the gods for sufficient rainfall and a bountiful harvest.
The festival is located on a field, feel free to bring blankets and low chairs. Admission is $10.00 per person; children under 5 admitted free.
More information at: Vive Oaxaca Guelaguetza | Senderos

Carolyn Fornoff – Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change
2025-04-28 12:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
In this talk, Carolyn Fornoff will discuss her recent book, Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change (Vanderbilt Press, 2024). Her book assesses contemporary trends in the representation of environmental crisis in order to suggest that there has been a shift away from evidentiary modes focused on proving the existence of environmental harms, to more “subjunctive” modes that imagine the world as it could be or should be.
Carolyn Fornoff is assistant professor of Latin American studies at Cornell University. Her work examines how Mexican and Central American cultural production responds to environmental crisis. Her first monograph, Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change, was published in 2024 with Vanderbilt University Press. She is also the co-editor of two volumes in the environmental humanities: Timescales: Thinking Across Ecological Temporalities (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema (SUNY Press, 2021). Fornoff currently cochairs the Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession for the Modern Language Association.
This event is presented by the THI More-Than-Human(ities) Laboratory Research Cluster.

The Deep Read: Faculty Salon on James
2025-04-29 18:00 - 19:30 | Virtual and In Person
Join us for a salon-style event at the Hay Barn on campus where our participating Deep Read faculty, Professors Susan Gillman (Literature), akua naru (Music), and Greg O’Malley (History), will give brief presentations and discuss James with the Deep Read community in a Q&A moderated by Deep Read Faculty Co-Lead, Laura Martin. Participants can also attend virtually.

In person at the Cowell Ranch Hay Barn. Doors open at 5:30pm.
Event Logistics: Bicycling, carpooling, ridesharing, and public transportation are encouraged as parking is limited on campus. If you drive to the event, please plan to park in UCSC Lot #115 or #116. To reach these 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. There will be directional signage to help you get to the correct parking lot and the Hay Barn entrance. Overflow parking will be available in lot #122. Download a parking map here.

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

Tricia Rose - Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives - And How We Break Free
2025-04-30 11:00 - 12:30 | Humanities 1, Room 202
UCSC Feminist Studies and the UCSC Music Department proudly present Tricia Rose—an internationally respected speaker, award-winning writer, and leading scholar of African American culture, racial inequality, and gender—for a conversation about her book Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives – And How We Break Free.
On May 2nd, UCSC Feminist Studies and the UCSC Music Department will also host Lifting As We Rhyme: 50 Years of Black Feminist Sonic World Making – a roundtable discussion with Tricia Rose, UCSC Humanities Professor Gina Dent, and UCSC Music Professor and hip hop artist akua naru. More information available here.

Tricia Rose is the Director of the Systemic Racism Project at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study, and Chancellor’s Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University. Rose is the author of Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994), Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk About Sexuality and Intimacy (2003) and The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop and Why It Matters (2008). Her most recent book, Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives-And How We Break Free (2024), is part of a larger public engagement and learning project featuring the How Systemic Racism Works interactive website (release in 2025).

M. Ty – It Is Time to Say to the Water, “Disobey”: Reflections with the Art of Jumana Emil Abboud
2025-04-30 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Perhaps water is a mouth that runs toward unwritten histories. This possibility comes closer to the senses in the work of Jumana Emil Abboud, an artist whose practice is grounded in Palestinian landscapes—and the refusal to cede them to their brutal equation with narratives of damage that colonial occupation programmatically inflicts. For some time, Abboud has attended thoughtfully to the waterscapes surrounding Galilee and Jerusalem—reanimating the folktales that they harbor, bringing them into the color of a fresh image, and taking the time to search for what has been said to have disappeared irrevocably. Keeping company with Abboud’s art, this talk reflects on what water can hold and how the connection to its reservoirs of memory might be sustained—in defiance of state violence and settler agribusiness, which together sever Palestinians from the life-giving waterways with which their ancestral knowledge is interspersed. Come see how ecological sensitivity and counter-colonial remembrance course together in Abboud’s art; and how she practices literacy in invisibility, all while refreshing the sense—without which history devolves into propaganda—that the erasure of evidence does not mean that nothing is there.
M. Ty is an ember of a diaspora. They are an Assistant Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Spring 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 Spring 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.

The Deep Read: East Bay Alumni Salon
2025-04-30 19:00 - 20:30 | Orinda, Private Home
The Deep Read is coming back to the East Bay!
The Humanities Institute invites East Bay alumni and Deep Readers to a special event at the home of UC Santa Cruz alumna and Foundation Trustee SB Master (Cowell ’75) to discuss this year’s Deep Read book, the 2024 National Book Award-winning novel James by Percival Everett. The event is designed to invite curious minds to think deeply about literature, art, and the most pressing issues of our day. Even if you haven’t read the book, we encourage you to come and enjoy the discussion and connect with fellow East Bay alumni and Deep Readers. Refreshments provided by our host, SB Master. Please register by April 23, as space is limited.

Event Participants: Jasmine Alinder (Humanities Dean), Irena Polić (Deep Read Co/Founder, THI Managing Director), Vilashini Cooppan (Deep Read Faculty Co-Lead, Professor of Literature), Laura Martin (Deep Read Faculty Co-Lead, THI Research Program Manager, Lecturer)

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

Lifting As We Rhyme: 50 Years of Black Feminist Sonic World Making with Tricia Rose, Gina Dent, and akua naru
2025-05-02 15:00 | Cultural Center at Merrill, Merrill Cultural Center, UC Santa Cruz, Merrill College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
UCSC Feminist Studies and the UCSC Music Department proudly present Lifting As We Rhyme: 50 Years of Black Feminist Sonic World Making—a roundtable discussion featuring Tricia Rose, internationally respected speaker, award-winning writer, and leading scholar of African American culture, racial inequality, and gender. Rose will be joined by Humanities professor Gina Dent and Music professor and hip hop artist akua naru. Join these dynamic artists/scholars for a spirited discussion on how black feminist artists have had a transformative impact on black cultural movements in hip hop.
On April 30th, UCSC Feminist Studies and the UCSC Music Department will also host a book talk with Tricia Rose, who will discuss her most recent book, Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives – And How We Break Free. More information available here.

Tricia Rose is the Director of the Systemic Racism Project at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study, and Chancellor’s Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University. Rose is the author of Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994), Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk About Sexuality and Intimacy (2003) and The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop and Why It Matters (2008). Her most recent book, Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives-And How We Break Free (2024), is part of a larger public engagement and learning project featuring the How Systemic Racism Works interactive website (release in 2025).
Gina Dent is Professor of Humanities and Faculty Research Director at the Institute of the Arts & Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Currently, she serves as Principal Investigator and Co-Director for Visualizing Abolition.
akua naru is a hip hop artist, poet, producer, performer, and Assistant Professor of Hip Hop, at University of California, Santa Cruz.

Saturday Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream
2025-05-03 10:00 | Aptos Library, 7695 Soquel Dr, Aptos, 95003, United States
Saturday Shakespeare in Santa Cruz Presents A Midsummer Night’s Dream, featuring a series of readings and conversations held Saturday mornings from April 26 to May 24, 2025. The 1st hour will be spent in conversation with a guest speaker, and during the 2nd hour volunteers will read aloud part of the play. During the final session, on May 24th, a film will be presented. Meetings will take place in the Aptos Library Community Room (in person) and over Zoom (virtual).
For more information, Zoom link, or to be a reader, contact: saturdayshakespeare@gmail.com
The guest speaker on May 3 is Julia Lupton, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UC Irvine, dramaturg for UCI’s New Swan Summer Festival. Readings: Act 2, Scenes 1 & 2; Act 3, Scene 1
All Scheduled Meetings

April 26: Michael Warren
May 3: Julia Lupton
May 10: Charles Pasternak
May 17: Sean Keilen
May 24 (Film Screening)

The Deep Read: A Conversation with Percival Everett
2025-05-04 16:00 - 17:30 | Quarry Amphitheater
Join us for a free, public conversation with author, Percival Everett, at UC Santa Cruz’s Quarry Amphitheater on May 4 at 4pm. He’ll discuss his National Book Award-winning novel James with Deep Read Faculty Co-Lead, Professor of Literature Vilashini Cooppan. We’ll consider how Everett depicts the possibility of humanity in this novel about the brutality of slavery, the performance of race, and the value of language and literacy. Doors open at 3pm, and we’ll be entertained before the author event from 3-4pm by The Cedar Street Jazz Duo featuring cellist Dr. Renata Bratt and guitarist Brian Fitzgerald.

Event Logistics: All guest parking will take place at the East Remote Parking Lot (Lot 104). Parking will be free on Sunday. We encourage sustainable transport such as carpooling, biking, or utilizing METRO transit services whenever possible. Enter campus through UCSC’s main entrance located at the intersection of Bay and High St. There will be signs directing you to the “Quarry Event.” Shuttle services will be provided. If guests are planning to walk from the lot, please make time for a 15- 20 walk to the Quarry Amphitheater gates. ADA parking will be located at the Bay Tree Bookstore Parking Lot 102. Each vehicle must display a valid, DMV-issued ADA placard or plate to be able to park in this area. For these and any further ADA accessibility accommodations please email Quarry@ucsc.edu.

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

Dmitri Nikulin - Bartleby, the Inscrutable Scrivener: On the Negative Constitution of Action
2025-05-05 13:00 | Virtual and In Person
The History of Consciousness department is pleased to announce the first speaker in their Spring 2025 Speaker Series, Dmitri Nikulin, who will be joining them next Monday May 5th to give his talk “Bartleby, the Inscrutable Scrivener: On the Negative Constitution of Action”. The talk will be held in Hum 1 Rm 420 at 1pm with a virtual attendance option.
Please register here in advance for virtual access.
In Melville’s celebrated story Bartleby the Scrivener, everything is put in the negative. The inscrutability and seeming incomprehensibility of the main character’s actions and the challenge presented by his famous “speech-act” of “I prefer not to” makes it particularly challenging to narrate the story and make sense of it. Bartleby comes in negative relief, elusive in his seeming ordinariness. For this reason, one has to use uncommon philosophical and literary means, including apophatic accounts and alliteration, in order to describe the indescribable, pointing toward unutterable strangeness and barely explainable human goodness. Bartleby’s acting is inscribed into his mode of being. He writes but does not read and almost does not speak beyond “I would prefer not to.” Not exercising self-reflection, he does not display any interiority. His apparent non-thinking is translated into an action bound by negativity, which eventually halts and evaporates. In “preferring not to,” Bartleby wills nothing. Yet, since nothing is nothing, it cannot be willed. Such a will is not a rational will that claims itself for itself as moral and establishes itself in an act of autonomous volition. It is the will that does not will itself and thus wills to stop willing. It is the will that negates and suppresses but does not destroy itself. In this way, the act of willing nothing does not annihilate the will altogether but rather suspends itself. This establishes a logic of preference that does not prefer anything and hence prefers nothing. The action defined by Bartleby’s silent and motionless being is therefore the action of non-preference.
Dmitri Nikulin is Professor of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York. His interests range from ancient and early modern philosophy to philosophy of literature and of history. He is the author of a number of books including Matter, Imagination and Geometry (Ashgate, 2002), On Dialogue (Lexington, 2006), Dialectic and Dialogue (Stanford University Press, 2010), Comedy, Seriously (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), The Concept of History (Bloomsbury, 2017), Neoplatonism in Late Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2019), Critique of Bored Reason (Columbia University Press, 2022), and Non-Being in Ancient Thought (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

Sandy Rodriguez - Mapping Conflicts across the Californias: The Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón
2025-05-06 17:30 - 18:45 | UCSC Science and Engineering Library, Room 206, 580 Red Hill Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join celebrated Los Angeles-based Chicana artist and researcher Sandy Rodriguez for a conversation about her ongoing series Codex Rodriguez-Mondragon with UCSC Professors Jennifer Gonzalez (HAVC) and Kirsten Silva Gruesz (Literature). Sandy Rodriguez’s works are strongly influenced by both the 16th-century colonial and present-day incidents along the US-Mexico border, her works map resistance to the ongoing cycles of violence on communities of color by blending historical and recent events. The artist uses painstakingly hand-processed color from native plant- and earth-based materials according to Mexican treatises on painting that forge connections to land, bridging past and present.
Sandy Rodriguez (b. 1975, National City, CA) is a Los Angeles-based artist and researcher, and first generation Chicana raised on the US-Mexico border. Her Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón is made up of a collection of maps and paintings about the intersections of history, social memory, contemporary politics, and cultural production. Rodriguez earned her BFA from California Institute of Arts.
Rodriguez’s works can be found in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Amon Carter Museum, the Denver Art Museum, the Mellon Art Collection and others. She has been honored with multiple fellowships and awards, including most recently the 2025-2026 Kully Distinguished Fellowship in American Art from The Huntington Library Art Museum & Botanical Garden, a 2024 US Latinx Art Fellowship, the 2023 Jacob Lawrence Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the 2023 Hermitage Greenfield Prize.
Sponsored by The Humanities Institute’s Knowing California Research Cluster and the Patricia and Rowland Rebele Fund for the History of Art and Visual Culture.

Banner Image: Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón, Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA, November 4,2018 – Jan 27, 2019. Image courtesy of and © Studio Sandy Rodriguez.

A Conversation with Journalist Jazmine Hughes
2025-05-06 19:00 | Namaste Lounge – College 9, Namaste Lounge, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Interested in Journalism? Come for a conversation with writer and editor Jazmine Hughes.
Jazmine Hughes is a writer and editor, and the recipient of two National Magazine Awards. Hughes was a longtime member of the editorial staff at the New York Times, where she penned profiles of cultural figures including Lil Nas X, Whoopi Goldberg, Danny DeVito, Viola Davis, and Judge Judy.

This event is presented by Kresge’s Media and Society Series and City on a Hill Press, with support from The Humanities Institute, The Alumni Association, The Council of Provosts, and the department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies.

Deirdre de la Cruz – “It’s Your Curse,” and Other Lessons in Repairing Historical Harm
2025-05-07 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The University of Michigan possesses extensive archival, photographic, archaeological and natural history collections from the Philippines, many of which were built during the American colonial period from objects, images, and ancestors taken without the consent of local source communities. This talk introduces a multi-year, collaborative effort by Michigan faculty, curators, collection managers, students, and community partners to develop and enact reparative approaches to these collections. It reflects on how the historical and contemporary specificities of the Philippines and its diaspora both contribute to and complicate on-going conversations around museums, repatriation, and historical justice.
Deirdre de la Cruz is a historian and anthropologist whose work examines global formations and global relations from the historical and cultural vantage point of the Philippines. Her first and second books trace the discursive, material and performative processes through which the Philippine emerges as a major spiritual and religious center over the long twentieth century. For the last several years, de la Cruz has also served as co-PI of ReConnect/ReCollect: Reparative Connections to Philippine Collections at the University of Michigan, a collaborative project of public scholarship that seeks to repair historical harm by creating models for more ethical and equitable Philippine collections. De la Cruz is Associate Professor of History and Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan and currently serves as Director of the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History. She is also an award-winning teacher, and with U-M undergraduates has been building The Philippines and the University of Michigan, an online exhibit of student-led original research and writing on the history of the relationship between the Philippines and the University of Michigan.
Sponsored by the Center for Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions.

Spring 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 Spring 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.

Jaco de Swart - Dark Matter, Dirty Xenon, and the Limits of Laboratory Experiments
2025-05-07 15:00 - 16:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The History of Consciousness earthecologies x technoscience conversations and the Science and Justice Research Center are pleased to invite you to the following talk entitled Dark Matter, Dirty Xenon, and the Limits of Laboratory Experiments with Jaco de Swart (MIT, Visiting Scholar at Science and Justice Research Center). This event will take place May 7th at 3pm in Humanities Building 1, Room 210.
Laboratory sciences crucially depend on experiments being clean. But what is clean? In this talk, I open up versions of clean relating to different ontological registers, and trace the material practices of cleaning as they are attuned to experimental specificities. My case is the XENONnT experiment in the Gran Sasso Mountains of Italy which is meant to detect dark matter in the form the hypothetical WIMP – the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle. This experiment is clean when it is ‘free from signals that mimic dark matter’. In practice, such cleanliness has been difficult to achieve – soaps may be radioactive, steel may spread electronegativity, and humans are altogether dangerously filthy. And because, at least thus far, dark matter remains elusive, it is impossible to tell whether the meticulously cleaned detector is adequately clean. Additional cleaning efforts will make the detector sensitive to neutrino particles: a background that cannot be cleaned away. As the experimenters dread the possibility that this means their experiment will end in limbo, other physicists are now trying to detect other hypothetical dark matter particles with other kinds of experiments, requiring other kinds of cleanliness. The XENONnT experiment itself, meanwhile, has had to ensure that it does not interfere with environmental cleanliness, as per the demands of the surrounding society.
This work is done in collaboration with Annemarie Mol (University of Amsterdam).
Jaco de Swart is an AIP Helleman Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT’s Program in STS and Department of Physics, and a Visiting Scholar at the UCSC’s Science and Justice Research Center. He received his PhD at the Institute of Physics at the University of Amsterdam, was a postdoctoral researcher at the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research and has held visiting positions at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study. His research focuses on historical and anthropological studies of open problems in cosmology, and he is currently writing a book on the history of dark matter under contract with MIT Press. De Swart is also a member of several physics collaborations to help develop social and environmentally responsible research practices. He has a passion for science communication—appearing in PBS NOVA’s Decoding the Universe—and is bassist in the band X Raiders.

Living Writers with Tsering Wangmo Dhompa
2025-05-08 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 – Spring 2025
Insight, Writings: Third World and Other Imaginaries
Tsering Wangmo Dhompa‘s most recent work is The Politics of Sorrow (Columbia University Press). Other works include the chapbook Revolute (Albion Books, 2021) three collections of poetry: My Rice Tastes Like the Lake, In the Absent Everyday and Rules of the House (all from Apogee Press, Berkeley). Dhompa’s first non-fiction book, A Home to Tibet was published by Penguin India. Dhompa is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Villanova University.
About the Living Writers Series
The Living Writers Series (LWS) is a live reading series organized especially for the Creative Writing Program community at UCSC. There is a new series each quarter, and each series features writers with unique voices. The LWS is open to all creative writing students and the public.

Sponsored by the Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, the Laurie Sain Endowment, the Humanities Institute, The Literature Department, Creative Writing Program, and the Center for Racial Justice.

Nauenberg History of Science Lecture with Jessica Riskin
2025-05-08 17:30 | The Seymour Marine Discovery Center, 100 McAllister Way, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Professor of Insects and Worms: Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and his Life-Made World
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) was the Professor of Insects and Worms at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Living through the storms of the French Revolution and Napoleonic period, he founded biology, coining the term to name a new science devoted to all and only living things, and authored the first theory of evolution. Lamarck’s science was foundational to modern biology, yet its radicalism – he usurped God’s monopoly on Creation and re-assigned it to mortal, living beings – brought him and his ideas plenty of trouble. During Lamarck’s lifetime, Napoleon and his scientific inner circle hated him and did what they could to undermine him. Charles Darwin then adopted central elements of Lamarck’s theory, but after Darwin’s death, his most influential followers re-interpreted his theory to eradicate all traces of Lamarckism, rendering organisms once again the passive objects of outside forces, allowing room for an omnipotent God working behind the scenes. This conception of living organisms as passive in the evolutionary process has remained dominant since the turn of the twentieth century. In contrast, in Lamarck’s theory, living beings were active, creative, self-making and world-making. Elements of this very different conception of living organisms have recently, gradually been returning to mainstream biology in fields such as niche construction and epigenetic inheritance. The lecture will present Lamarck’s radical, embattled, and perhaps re-emerging approach to living things, their evolutionary and ecological agency, and the science that studies them.
May 8, 2025
Reception 5 p.m.
Lecture 5:30 p.m.
La Feliz Room, Seymour Marine Discover Center and Virtual
Free and open to the public

Jessica Riskin is Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University where she teaches modern European history and the history of science. Her work examines the changing nature of scientific explanation, the relations of science, culture and politics, and the history of theories of life and mind. Her books include The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick (2016), which was awarded the 2021 Patrick Suppes Prize in the History of Science from the American Philosophical Society, and Science in the Age of Sensibility (2002), which received the American Historical Association’s J. Russell Major prize for best book in French history. She is a regular contributor to various publications including Aeon, the Los Angeles Review of Books and the New York Review of Books.

Nauenberg History of Science Lecture
The Nauenberg History of Science Lecture was established in honor of Michael Nauenberg, a founding faculty member in the Physics Department at UCSC who came to the campus in 1966. During his distinguished academic career, he contributed to a remarkably broad range of fields, including particle physics, condensed matter physics, astrophysics, chaos theory, fluid dynamics, and the history of physics in the 17th-18th centuries.
Amongst Professor Nauenberg’s passions, he deeply believed in the importance of interdisciplinary scholarship connecting the sciences with the humanities. Following his retirement in 1994, he pursued his long-standing interests in the history of science, writing books and articles about Joseph Banks, Robert Hooke, Christiaan Huygens, and Isaac Newton. The Nauenberg History of Science Lecture series aims to bring the best historians of science to UCSC to share the importance of this interdisciplinary work with faculty, students, and interested community members. You can support the series by contributing here.
The Nauenberg History of Science Lecture is presented by the UC Santa Cruz Emeriti Association and co-sponsored by the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department, History Department, and Science and Justice Research Center.

PhD+ Workshop - Academic Book Publishing with the University of Minnesota Press
2025-05-09 11:00 - 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Join Jason Weidemann, an Editorial Director at the University of Minnesota Press, for a “publishing bootcamp” workshop, geared toward graduate students, post docs, and early career scholars working on their first books. Together we’ll discuss information on the editorial process – how to talk to editors, revising the dissertation, and proposals.
Time will be left for sharing current works and what presses attendees might look into. Jason’s itinerary allows for additional one-on-one consultations to practice pitching works, etc. To schedule a time, contact: colleen@ucsc.edu.

Jason Weidemann is an Editorial Director at the University of Minnesota Press. Jason Weidemann seeks manuscripts that make field-defining interventions in their core disciplines, contribute to interdisciplinary conversations, and communicate to readers beyond the academy, including activists, policymakers, community members, and general readers. His broad interests in Native and indigenous studies includes literary studies, the social sciences, legal studies, and education. He also acquires works in cultural and human geography, science and technology studies, anthropology, and sociology. Special interests include environmental politics, multispecies ethnography, urban studies, global flows of labor and capital, and Asian studies. Of specific interest are manuscripts that examine the social and racial dimensions of medicine and science. Proposals for translations from Japanese are welcomed, specifically science fiction and critical theory. He is also interested in manuscripts on the social aspects of video games and digital communication. Subject areas: anthropology, Asian studies, media studies, geography, Native and Indigenous studies, sociology, science and technology
For more information: https://scijust.ucsc.edu/2025/04/15/may09-uminnpress/
Co-hosted by the UCSC Science & Justice Research Center, The Humanities Institute, and the Division of Graduate Studies.

BayPhon 2025 at UCSC
2025-05-10 09:30 - 18:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
UCSC Linguistics is hosting BayPhon, a workshop on Phonetics and Phonology, on Saturday, May 10, 2025. BayPhon brings together faculty and students from linguistics departments in the region, including Stanford, UC Berkeley, San José State, and UCSC.
BayPhon is part of a tradition known as “Phrend” (and before that, “Trend”), where linguistics departments in the broader Bay Area (San José State, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz) come together at one of our institutions to stay in touch about research and provide opportunities for students and faculty to present their work on phonetics and phonology.
Please see this website for the program and more information.

Saturday Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream
2025-05-10 10:00 | Aptos Library, 7695 Soquel Dr, Aptos, 95003, United States
Saturday Shakespeare in Santa Cruz Presents A Midsummer Night’s Dream, featuring a series of readings and conversations held Saturday mornings from April 26 to May 24, 2025. The 1st hour will be spent in conversation with a guest speaker, and during the 2nd hour volunteers will read aloud part of the play. During the final session, on May 24th, a film will be presented. Meetings will take place in the Aptos Library Community Room (in person) and over Zoom (virtual).
For more information, Zoom link, or to be a reader, contact: saturdayshakespeare@gmail.com
The guest speaker on May 10 is Charles Pasternak, actor, director, Artistic Director of Santa Cruz Shakespeare. Readings: Act 3, Scene 2; Act 4, Scene 1
All Scheduled Meetings

April 26: Michael Warren
May 3: Julia Lupton
May 10: Charles Pasternak
May 17: Sean Keilen
May 24 (Film Screening)

SOLD OUT: Isabel Allende - My Name Is Emilia del Valle
2025-05-11 16:00 - 17:30 | Rio Theater, 1205 Soquel Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95062, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz presents New York Times bestselling author Isabel Allende (A Long Petal of the Sea and The House of the Spirits) who will join us to celebrate the release of My Name Is Emilia del Valle, a spellbinding historical novel in which a young writer journeys to South America to uncover the truth about her father—and herself.
Event experience includes author talk, audience Q&A, and a hardcover copy of My Name Is Emilia del Valle.
This event is now sold out. Please visit Bookshop Santa Cruz to join the waitlist.
A riveting tale of self-discovery and love from one of the most masterful storytellers of our time, My Name Is Emilia del Valle introduces a character who will never let hold of your heart.
Born in Peru and raised in Chile, Isabel Allende is the author of a number of bestselling and critically acclaimed books, including The Wind Knows My Name, Violeta, A Long Petal of the Sea, The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, Eva Luna, and Paula. Her books have been translated into more than forty-two languages and have sold more than eighty million copies worldwide. She lives in California.
More information at: Isabel Allende, My Name Is Emilia del Valle | Bookshop Santa Cruz
Co-sponsored by the Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas and The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

Sophia Azeb - Black Anticolonialism and Radical Relation
2025-05-12 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 420, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The History of Consciousness department is pleased to announce the next speaker in their Spring 2025 Speaker Series, Sophia Azeb, who will deliver her talk entitled “Black Anticolonialism and Radical Relation” on Monday, May 12th at 1pm in Humanities Building 1, Room 420.
This talk explores the radical anticolonial subjectivities forged across what Richard Iton suggests as “diasporic breathing room,” or – in my own interpretation – the ungeographic sensibilities that Black study offers transnational and translational theories of decolonisation. Focusing on the productive tensions emergent from 20th century Black anticolonial practice – particularly the unmapping tendencies of Frantz Fanon – this talk attends to the cultural, political, and affective matrix of anticolonial possibilities and limits emergent from across the African diaspora. This emphasis on how Black anticolonial practice draws upon the unsettled spatial orientation of the diaspora, which informs Black anticolonial epistemologies, does not presume that racial identity itself is fixed, or that meanings made from identity and experience constitute an anticolonial politic in and of itself. Rather, the ever shifting, “undecidable blackness” that instructs and shapes particular anticolonial pursuits towards the horizon of decolonisation make legible a set of radical subjectivities that embolden anticolonial sociality beyond the “authenticating geography” of the nation-state.
Sophia Azeb is an assistant professor of Black studies in the Department of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies at UCSC. Her book, tentatively titled “Another Country: Translational Blackness and the Afro-Arab,” follows the circuits of transnational and translational blackness charted by African American, Afro-Caribbean, African, and Afro-Arab peoples across 20th century North and West Africa and Europe.

A Multidisciplinary Perspective on Italy and Its Culture
2025-05-12 16:30 - 19:00 | Humanities 2, Room 359
The Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics and the Italian Language Program cordially invite you to a multidisciplinary event on Italy and its culture. Well-renowned UCSC professors from a variety of disciplines ranging from literature to history, from science to engineering and computer science will offer a multidisciplinary perspective on Italy and its culture. Participants will explore the nexus between language and culture The event will be in English and open to all majors.
Featuring Filippo Gianferrari, Stefania Gori, Roberto Manduchi, Stefano Profumo, and Massimiliano Tomba.

Filippo Gianferrari is an Assistant Professor of the Literature Department
Stefania Gori is a Professor of the Physics Department
Roberto Manduchi is a Professor of the Computer Science and Engineering Department
Stefano Profumo is a Professor of the Physics Department
Massimiliano Tomba is a Professor of the History of Consciousness Department

Program:
4:30Pm – 4:45PM | Opening remarks with Gabriella Notarianni Burk, PhD
4:45Pm – 5:30Pm | Italy and Science with Prof. Stefania Gori, Prof. Stefano Profumo, and Prof. Roberto Manduchi
Break (10 minutes)
5:45Pm – 6:30Pm | Italy and Humanities with Prof. Massimiliano Tomba and Prof. Filippo Gianferrari
Refreshments (6:30Pm – 7:00Pm)

Slugs and Steins with Associate Professor Muriam Davis - What Does it Mean to "Decolonize" Knowledge?
2025-05-12 18:30 - 20:00 | Virtual Event
The country of Algeria, located in North Africa, experienced one of the most violent struggles for independence of the twentieth century. The war against France, which lasted from 1954–62 has become a paradigmatic case study of the historical process known as decolonization and inspired classic films such as the Battle of Algiers, as well as texts such as Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. This talk will explore how Algerian intellectuals sought to break away from Eurocentric models of knowledge production and nation-building in the decades following independence. Their reflections focused on language and the need to increase the reach of higher education. They also reflected on the ways in which disciplinary boundaries—between sociology and anthropology, or between philosophy and sociology—were rooted in colonization. By focusing on historical actors that sought to find new ways to organize higher learning, it will explore how the university was—and continues to be—an institution shaped by political struggles and emancipatory hopes.

Muriam Haleh Davis is an Associate Professor of History and the Director of the Center for the Middle East and North Africa at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her first book, Markets of Civilization: Islam and Racial Capitalism in Algeria, was published by Duke University Press in 2022. She also co-edited North Africa and the Making of Europe: Governance, Institutions, and Culture, which was published by Bloomsbury Press in 2018. She is co-chair of the editorial committee for MERIP (Middle East Research and Information Project) and is co-editor of the Maghreb Page for Jadaliyya. She has previously held fellowships at the European University Institute in Florence, the IMéRA in Marseille and the The Merian Center for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb (MECAM) in Tunis. Her public-facing writing and commentary has appeared in the LA Review of Books, Al Jazeera English, MERIP and Jadaliyya as well as on France 24 and NPR.
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? Please contact University Events at specialevents@ucsc.edu.

Akum Longchari – Reimagining Humanization, Just Peace, and Healing through an Indigenous Lens
2025-05-13 13:30 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Join the Center for South Asian Studies for a presentation by Aküm Longchari, the Center’s Scholar in Residence.
From an Indigenous perspective, peace processes in the first quarter of the 21st century have been focused on State-building, where questions of justice and peace remained a matter of privilege and power rather than a right of all peoples. State-led processes tend to focus on ending physical violence in armed conflict, without addressing the violence of unjust political, social, economic, and cultural structures, which led to the conflict in the first place. This dialogue seeks to “Reimagine Humanization, Just Peace, and Healing through an Indigenous Lens,” as an emancipatory bottom-up framework, applying intercultural and interdisciplinary approaches which amplifies the values of a shared humanity.
Aküm Longchari is an educator in peacebuilding, co-founder and publisher of The Morung Express (2005), an independent English-language newspaper based in Nagaland. Aküm holds an LLB, MA in Conflict Transformation, and a PhD which focused on Self Determination as a Resource for JustPeace.
Presented by the Center for South Asian Studies. Co-Sponsored by the UC Santa Cruz Indigenous Faculty Network and The Humanities Institute.

Keith David Watenpaugh - Who Has the Human Right to Charge Genocide?
2025-05-13 15:20 - 16:55 | Porter 144, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, 95064, United States
Keith David Watenpaugh will deliver the first talk in the CMENA Student Choice Speaker Series, titled “Who Has the Human Right to Charge Genocide?: Reclaiming Genocide as a Powerful Justice Tool Requires Moving Beyond the 1948 Genocide Convention.”
The 1948 Genocide Convention doesn’t work – at least not for peoples seeking justice for mass atrocity. It does work to protect most states that have destroyed a people, in whole or in part, from ever being held responsible for committing the “crime of crimes.” As the public and academic understanding of genocide has been shaped by the narrow and legalistic interpretation of the genocide idea in the Convention, that understanding has been used to deny the right of victims of historical and contemporary mass atrocity to argue that they have faced genocide. The putative failure to meet the international legal standard not only reenacts the colonial and racist origins of the statute itself but has also been a way to negate and deny the legitimacy or veracity of broader justice claims by communities of victims. Once denied, these communities are no longer eligible for the kinds of restorative justice and global attention that the charge of genocide carries. Denial and its afterlives has shape the right of indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere and Australasia, descendants of enslaved Africans in diaspora, Armenians, Assyrians, Kurds, and most recently Palestinians to charge genocide.
In this talk, historian and theorist of human rights, Prof. Keith David Watenpaugh, argues that historians, international lawyers, humanities scholars and those in law and public policy should stop using the Convention’s terms to define genocide. Rather he asks us to embrace an understanding of genocide closer to Raphael Lemkin’s original proposal and as outlined in his Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation – Analysis of Government – Proposals for Redress, (1944) to reclaim the genocide idea as both a powerful human rights tool of analysis and justice, and a basis for making violence and mass atrocity more visible, actionable and preventable.
Keith David Watenpaugh is professor and founding director of Human Rights Studies at the University of California, Davis. He is author and editor of several books, including the multiple-award winning Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism (University of California Press, 2015.) His articles appear in the American Historical Review, Perspectives on History, Social History, Journal of Human Rights, Humanity, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Education, and Newsweek; his work has been translated into French, German, Armenian, Arabic, Turkish and Persian. He has lived and worked in Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, Armenia, Iraq, and Egypt. In addition to awards from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in 2019 he received the Institute of International Education Centennial Medal and in 2021 for defending the right to education, and in 2021 the Edmund O’Brien Award for Individual Achievement in Human Rights Education by Human Rights Educators-USA.

Contesting Techno Fascisms Now!
2025-05-13 15:30 - 17:00 | Namaste Lounge – College 9, Namaste Lounge, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
This panel explores ways that fascism today manifests in unexpected sites and imaginaries, including visions of techno-utopia, nationalist movements for animal rights and calls to colonize outer space.
The panelist assembled here will each take a keyword of the emergent fascist trends and think through ways to contest fascisms now.
Panel Participants:

Neda Atanasoski; Professor and Chair, Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies, University of Maryland. Keyword: Eugenic Fascism

Felicity Amaya Schaeffer; Chair, CRES and Professor FMST, UCSC. Keyword: Eugenic Fascism

Neel Ahuja; Professor, Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies, University of Maryland. Keyword: Environmental Fascism

Erin McElroy; Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Washington. Keyword: Techno-Feudalism

CANCELLED: Murad Idris – Dialogue for Hate: A Global Genealogy
2025-05-14 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This lecture posits hate, dialogue, and their conjunction as fundamental for the contemporary moralization of violence and hierarchy. It analyzes how the two terms operate through a series of disavowals, displacements, and transubstantiations, tracking their place in the history of political thought, structures of minoritization, and contemporary formations where they became rhetorical vehicles and conceptual nodes for anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian policies and discourses. Out of this history, the hateful subject emerges, indexed by the deployment of a demand for dialogue. The lecture then outlines three global moments in which hate and dialogue were pegged to the development of refugee and terrorism discourses, outlining how the two terms traveled as a covering trope that psychologizes violence. The imputation of hate and the veneration of dialogue have long had a polemical edge: their moralization was grafted to and elaborated against Palestinians.
Murad Idris is Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan. His award-winning book, War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought (Oxford, 2019), examines how philosophers fantasize about peace in order to promote hierarchy, war, and repression. He co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory (Oxford, 2020), with Leigh Jenco and Megan Thomas, and co-authored Political Theory: A Global and Comparative Introduction (SAGE, 2025), with Leigh Jenco and Paulina Ochoa Espejo. He is completing projects about Sayyid Qutb’s global and critical thought, the genealogies of racializing Islam, and the politics of hate and dialogue. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania with specializations in Political Theory and Middle East Politics.

Spring 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 Spring 2025 Series. Sessions begin promptly at 12:15 PM and end at 1:30 PM (PST) in Humanities Building 1, Room 210.
This event is co-sponsored by the Global Political Thought Working Group. Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Ying Jin - Nurturing Hearts and Minds: Implementing Social Emotional Learning Principles in World Language Classrooms
2025-05-14 13:30 - 15:00 | Humanities 2, Room 259
Join the Department of Applied Linguistics for a professional development workshop featuring Ying Jin, the 2018 ACTFL National Teacher of the Year, who will present her talk titled “Nurturing Hearts and Minds: Implementing Social Emotional Learning Principles in World Language Classrooms.” Refreshments will be provided.

This event is funded by the Peter Rushton and Jacqueline Ku Endowed Memorial Fund. For questions email etu6@ucsc.edu.

The Maya K. Peterson Explorations in History Seminar Series: Andy Bruno - An Environmental History of the Tunguska Mystery
2025-05-15 12:30 - 14:00 | Cowell Provost House, Cowell Provost House, Cowell Service Rd‎ University of California Santa Cruz, Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The third annual Maya K. Peterson Explorations in History Seminar Series will take place on Thursday, May 15th, 2025, at 12:30pm at the Cowell Provost House. This event will be livestreamed and recorded (link to be provided soon).
This year’s guest speaker is Andy Bruno, Stephen F. Cohen Chair of Russian History and Professor, Indiana University Bloomington. Professor Bruno’s lecture is titled “An Environmental History of the Tunguska Mystery.”
In 1908, the Tunguska explosion in Siberia knocked down an area of forest larger than London. While most scientists now believe that an airburst from an asteroid caused the blast, unmistakable remnants of a space rock have never been found. Over the last century, the mysterious nature of the event has prompted a wide array of speculation and investigation, including from science fiction writers and voluntary researchers. Some have even explained Tunguska as a nuclear explosion triggered by aliens. This presentation will recount the intriguing history of the Tunguska event and the investigations into it. Foregrounding the significance of mystery in environmental and Soviet history, it will show how efforts to understand the explosion have shaped the treatment of the landscape, how uncertainty allowed alternative forms of knowledge to enter scientific conversations, and how cosmic disasters have influenced the past and might affect the future.
Andy Bruno works as a professor in the Department of History at Indiana University Bloomington, where he holds the Stephen F. Cohen Chair of Russian History. A specialist in the environmental history of the Soviet Union, he is the author of The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History (2016) and Tunguska: A Siberian Mystery and its Environmental Legacy (2022), which recently appeared in paperback.
This event is made possible by The Maya K. Peterson Memorial Endowment and is co-sponsored by the UCSC History Department.

The Maya K. Peterson Explorations in History Seminar Series at UCSC honors the life and spirit of a brilliant scholar, teacher, and mentor whose career was cut short by her untimely death in 2021. A specialist in Russian, Central Asian and environmental history, Maya was a valued member of UCSC’s faculty in the History Department and the Humanities Division. The Explorations in History Seminar Series celebrates Maya’s passions for the study of history, for dialogue between the humanities and the sciences, and for innovative scholarship across disciplines—passions that she shared generously with students, colleagues, and communities around the globe.

Anita Say Chan - Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future
2025-05-15 13:00 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Join us for a talk by Anita Say Chan, author of Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future (UC Press, 2025). This event will take place May 15th at 1pm in Humanities 1, Room 210. To attend the event via Zoom, join using the link below.

Living Writers with Maria Elena Ramirez
2025-05-15 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 – Spring 2025
Insight, Writings: Third World and Other Imaginaries
Maria E. Ramirez is a woman of Chicana, Puerto Rican, and Apache ancestry. She was actively involved in the student movement in the late sixties, where students, along with their parents, marched and demanded that their community be part of all the higher education systems, which at the time were overwhelmingly white. She became deeply involved with the Los Siete organization in San Francisco due to the awareness she gained in the Vacaville prison project at UCB. She left UCB to devote herself full-time to be in solidarity with all the diverse communities in San Francisco. In 1972, she became one of the first Chicanas to visit the People’s Republic of China through the Chinese Friendship Association. Eventually, returning to her home in Union City, still guided by social and Earth Justice movements, she went on to get her master’s and has now served as a community college counselor for over 25 years and developed her own one-woman storytelling show, Chicana Herstory. She continues to be involved in her community against gentrification and environmental pollution and is co-founder of Families United for Equity, which advocates for the developmental disabled community.
About the Living Writers Series
The Living Writers Series (LWS) is a live reading series organized especially for the Creative Writing Program community at UCSC. There is a new series each quarter, and each series features writers with unique voices. The LWS is open to all creative writing students and the public.

Sponsored by the Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, the Laurie Sain Endowment, the Humanities Institute, The Literature Department, Creative Writing Program, and the Center for Racial Justice.

Graduate Research Symposium
2025-05-16 13:00 - 16:00 | McHenry Library, Information Commons
The 2025 Graduate Research Symposium will be held on Friday, May 16, 1-4 p.m. (Pacific) at McHenry Library, Information Commons (South on the Main Floor).
The Graduate Division hosts the Graduate Symposium annually in the spring. All graduate students are eligible to participate and may do so in person or virtually via Zoom. (Recipients of qualifying fellowships are required to participate.) The event is free and open to the public. Judges representing UCSC staff, postdoctoral scholars, graduate student alumni, UCSC Foundation trustees, and community members determine an overall best presentation and five academic division best presentations.
– Prizes –
Best Overall Presentation of the Symposium: $1000
Best Presentation of the Arts Division: $250
Best Presentation of Baskin Engineering: $250
Best Presentation of the Humanities Division: $250
Best Presentation of the Physical and Biological Sciences Division: $250
Best Presentation of the Social Sciences Division: $250
More information here. See the 2025 presentation schedule here.

The Deppe Memorial Lecture with Professor Dan-El Padilla Peralta
2025-05-16 16:00 | Cowell Provost House, Cowell Provost House, Cowell Service Rd‎ University of California Santa Cruz, Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The UCSC Classical Studies Program presents The Deppe Memorial Lecture, taking place Friday, May 16th at the Cowell Provost house at 4:00pm (reception to follow).
Professor Dan-El Padilla Peralta (Princeton University) will be giving a talk titled “The Bringer of Fire: Prometheus in Santo Domingo.”
This lecture will examine the Prometeo of the Dominican poet, playwright, and novelist Héctor Incháustegui Cabral (1912-1979). Published together with adaptations of Sophocles’s Philotectes and Euripides’s Hippolytus in 1964, Cabral’s take on Aeschylus is an underappreciated turning-point in Dominican and Caribbean experiments with Greek tragedy — and an effective springboard for critical reflection on the cross-hatching of race, politics, and classical reception in the 20th- and 21st-century Black Aegean.
All are welcome to attend this event. We hope to see you there!

Saturday Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream
2025-05-17 10:00 | Aptos Library, 7695 Soquel Dr, Aptos, 95003, United States
Saturday Shakespeare in Santa Cruz Presents A Midsummer Night’s Dream, featuring a series of readings and conversations held Saturday mornings from April 26 to May 24, 2025. The 1st hour will be spent in conversation with a guest speaker, and during the 2nd hour volunteers will read aloud part of the play. During the final session, on May 24th, a film will be presented. Meetings will take place in the Aptos Library Community Room (in person) and over Zoom (virtual).
For more information, Zoom link, or to be a reader, contact: saturdayshakespeare@gmail.com
The guest speaker on May 17 is Sean Keilen, Professor of Literature, UC Santa Cruz; founding Director of Shakespeare Workshop, Santa Cruz Shakespeare dramaturg. Readings: Act 4, Scene 2; Act 5, Scene 1
All Scheduled Meetings

April 26: Michael Warren
May 3: Julia Lupton
May 10: Charles Pasternak
May 17: Sean Keilen
May 24 (Film Screening)

Nick Kawa and Alisa Keesey – Microbes at Work: The Vital Role of Bacteria and other Microbial Life in Sanitation Systems in the US and Uganda
2025-05-19 15:30 - 17:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Wastewater treatment operators in the American Midwest wryly describe their job as “bacteria farming,” but they also insist that microbes are the ones who “do all the work” at treatment plants. Meanwhile, slum activists in Uganda suggest that they “work with microbes” to provide essential sanitation services where the state has failed to provide safe toilets. In this talk, we delve deeper into these observations about microbial laboring and human laboring with microbes in these two distinct contexts. First, we examine insights from wastewater treatment workers and soil scientists in Columbus, Ohio, to explore how microbes serve as key mediators that not only metabolize urban residents’ bodily excesses in wastewater treatment processing but also constitute the bulk of wastewater solids, which are increasingly used as a soil amendment applied on agricultural lands. Second, we turn attention to slum activists, waste scientists, and entrepreneurs in Kampala, Uganda, who are working to capture “anal resources” and advance container-based sanitation and community-scale composting. The diversion of human waste away from Lake Victoria is especially urgent as nutrients-out-of-place are driving eutrophication and the extinction of indigenous fish species. Through these two case studies, we show how the disruption of socio-ecological systems brought on by industrial capitalism—known in some scholarly circles as the “metabolic rift”—is not strictly characterized by a break in the cycling of nutrients back to the land but also a derangement of social relations with microbial life that requires remediation.
Nick Kawa is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Ohio State University. His research relies primarily on qualitative approaches to understanding human cultural relationships to soils, plants, and bodily waste. He is the author of the forthcoming book After the Flush: Rethinking the Future of Human Waste (University of California Press), based on nearly a decade of research on the modern sanitation system in the U.S. as well as the growing call for alternative models that can enact more sustainable futures.
Alisa Keesey is a PhD candidate in the Dept. of Anthropology at UCSC. Her research explores the global sanitation crisis, the water pollution crisis impacting Lake Victoria’s fishing communities, “nutrients-out-of-place,” and soil politics. As the director of GiveLove, a WASH sector (water, sanitation and hygiene) non-profit, she has worked in eight countries with a wide range of diverse stakeholders and environmental activists to promote composting, sustainable land use, food security, and local resiliency in the context of climate change. Alisa also worked for over a decade with women farming groups to lead on-farm biodiversity initiatives in Uganda aimed at protecting shea trees and establishing the first fair trade shea cooperative. Alisa holds a B.A. in International Relations from San Francisco State University, a M.S. in International Agricultural Development from University of California, Davis, and a M.A. in Cultural Anthropology from UCSC.
This event is presented by the THI More-Than-Human(ities) Laboratory Research Cluster.

CANCELLED - When Human-Centered AI Encountered Digital Humanities: A Dialogue between Magy Seif El-Nasr and Minghui Hu
2025-05-20 12:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Humanities Institute Research cluster, Humanities in the Age of AI, presents “When Human-Centered AI Encountered Digital Humanities: A Dialogue between Magy Seif El-Nasr and Minghui Hu.”
What happens when the ethical and interpretive frameworks of the humanities meet the algorithmic and interactive architectures of artificial intelligence? This dialogue brings together two leading voices from distinct yet converging fields: Magy Seif El-Nasr, a pioneer in human-centered AI, game analytics, and interactive narrative design, and Minghui Hu, a historian and digital humanist, explores the cultural, religious, and intellectual history of China through computational and interpretive lenses.
Together, they will explore shared concerns—from narrative design and agency to ethical modeling and epistemological boundaries—charting new possibilities at the intersection of technology and the humanities. This conversation is not only a meeting of disciplines, but a reimagining of the collaborative future of AI and humanistic inquiry.

Soraya Murray – Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination
2025-05-21 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Soraya Murray’s forthcoming Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination (MIT, 2026) is the first dedicated examination of popular movies classified as “thrillers” that channel societal anxiety or dread about advanced technologies like supercomputers, robotics, AI, biotech, military weaponry, and digital surveillance. Technothriller is about the changing imagination of technology within an American context and its role in engineering some of the most profound ideologies of modern life. Murray considers beloved but often underrated films from the 1970s to the present, like The Andromeda Strain (1971), Westworld (1973), Rollerball (1975), Demon Seed (1977), WarGames (1983), The Hunt for Red October (1990), Jurassic Park (1993), Clear and Present Danger (1994), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), the Mission:Impossible franchise (1996- ), Ex Machina (2014), Tenet (2020), M3GAN (2022), and The Creator (2023) to think through deeply embedded popular beliefs about technology, innovation, and their imaginaries—in other words, the mechanics of power within our technological lives. In short, Technothriller is about the troubled, sometimes catastrophic relationships between humans and their innovations.
Soraya Murray (PhD Cornell) studies contemporary visual culture, especially film and video games. She is an Associate Professor in the Film + Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Murray’s first book, On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space (I.B. Tauris, 2018, paperback Bloomsbury 2021), considers video games from a visual culture perspective and how they both mirror and are constitutive of larger societal fears, dreams, hopes and even complex struggles for recognition. Murray is currently co-editing an anthology with media and games scholar TreaAndrea Russworm on antiracist futures in games and play, and will soon publish her second single-author book, Technothriller.

Spring 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 Spring 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.

Chris Jadallah - What Could Be More Innocent Than Planting Trees? Land-Based Pedagogies as a Site of Contestation
2025-05-22 16:00 - 18:00 | Cervantes & Velasquez Room, Baytree Conference Center, Bay Tree Conference Center, UC Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Center for Racial Justice is proud to present What Could Be More Innocent Than Planting Trees? Land-Based Pedagogies as a Site of Contestation with Chris Jadallah, Assistant Professor of Environmental Justice and Education at UC Los Angeles.
Land education, as both theory and pedagogy, works to unsettle the colonial dynamics that often remain quietly buried within land relations and learning environments. In this talk, Chris Jadallah will think with the geographies of Palestine to engage in a critical reading of two landscapes – pine forests and olive groves – to confront the ways in which settler colonial inheritances manifest across ecologies. From this reading, he will discuss how pedagogical experiences and curricular designs rooted in land, for example, tree planting activities that are pervasive environmental education, can serve to either reinscribe colonial dynamics or, alternatively, can be designed in ways that build transnational solidarities and prefigure decolonial futures.
Co-sponsored by Feminist Studies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES), Students for Justice in Palestine, Faculty for Justice in Palestine, Center for Cultural Studies, Center for South Asian Studies (CSAS), Anthropology Department, Sociology Department, Institute for Social Transformation, and People’s University.
Part of the year-long speaker series, Possibilities of Palestinian Refusal: Against Disciplining Knowledge and Movement. For more information, visit the CRJ website: https://crjucsc.com/.

Living Writers with Angel Dominguez
2025-05-22 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 – Spring 2025
Insight, Writings: Third World and Other Imaginaries
Angel Dominguez is a Latiné poet of Yucatec Maya descent born in Hollywood and raised in Van Nuys, CA, by their immigrant family. They now live amongst the redwoods of Bonny Doon, CA. They’re the author of several books of poetry and prose, including Desgraciado (Nightboat Books, 2022) and, most recently, the 10-year anniversary edition of their debut work, Black Lavender Milk (Noemi Press, 2024). They were the 2023 Poet in Residence at the University of Arizona’s Poetry Center in Tucson and the 2021 Mazza writer in residence for San Francisco State University. They currently serve as managing editor for Lilac Press. You can find Angel’s work online and in print in various publications, including BOMB Magazine, The Berkeley Poetry Review, FENCE, SFMOMA Open Space, and elsewhere. You can find Angel in the redwoods or ocean.
About the Living Writers Series
The Living Writers Series (LWS) is a live reading series organized especially for the Creative Writing Program community at UCSC. There is a new series each quarter, and each series features writers with unique voices. The LWS is open to all creative writing students and the public.

Sponsored by the Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, the Laurie Sain Endowment, the Humanities Institute, The Literature Department, Creative Writing Program, and the Center for Racial Justice.

Linguistics Colloquia: Elena Anagnostopoulou - Rethinking Clitics: A View From Greek
2025-05-23 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
The Department of Linguistics is pleased to present Elena Anagnostopoulou (University of Crete and IMS-FORTH), speaking on Rethinking Clitics: A View From Greek.
This is an in-person event. You can also join virtually via Zoom.
In this talk, Elena Anagnostopoulou will revisit the relationship between clitic doubling and object agreement in connection to the syntax of clitics, via an assessment of three recent proposals on Greek clitic doubling. She will offer novel evidence based on co-ordination resolution supporting the view that clitic doubling involves a dependency between a clitic with iφ and a DP with iφ. Finally, she will highlight arguments that, in her view, are crucial to decide between different versions of movement analyses.
Over the course of each year, the Linguistics department hosts colloquia by distinguished faculty from around the world. For more information: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/colloquia/index.html

Raï Concert: Fella Oudane
2025-05-23 18:00 | Woodhouse Brewery, 119 Madrone St., Santa Cruz, United States
Please join the Center for the Middle East and North Africa (CMENA) for a Raï concert at Woodhouse Brewery on Friday, May 23rd at 6pm. Raï is a popular genre of music that achieved global prominence with artists like Khaled and Cheb Mami, and it has come to embody Algeria’s rebellious spirit. CMENA Faculty Director Muriam Haleh Davis has put together this Spotify playlist if you would like to learn more!
Fella Oudane, an LA-based vocalist and percussionist, will be performing alongside the North African band, Terga. The concert is free and open to all ages.

CANCELLED - The Center for the Middle East and North Africa & Kuumbwa Jazz Present: Cheb Nasro
2025-05-23 19:00 | Kuumbwa Jazz Center
The Cheb Nasro concert scheduled for Friday, May 23 has been CANCELLED due to unforeseen circumstances. We apologize for any inconvenience and appreciate your understanding.

Nasreddine Souidi, known as Cheb Nasro, is a singer, composer, and songwriter who is best known for his Romantic Rai music. He is one of the most famous Romantic Rai singers in the Arabic speaking world. He has released more than 130 albums with popular hits such as “Libini W Binha” and “Ndirak Amour.”
Cheb Nasro was born on November 30, 1969, in the city of Ain Temouchent, Algeria. When he was eleven months old he and his family moved to the city of Oran where he grew up. Cheb Nasro began singing at a young age and in 1987 at age eighteen released his first album, which sold millions of copies. Cheb Nasro works with a number of music labels in Algeria including Disco Maghreb, Santana, Redson, and Sunhouse, as well as Mondo Melodia in the USA.

Presented by the Center for the Middle East and North Africa at UC Santa Cruz and the Kuumbwa Jazz Center. Co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute.

Saturday Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream
2025-05-24 10:00 | Aptos Library, 7695 Soquel Dr, Aptos, 95003, United States
Saturday Shakespeare in Santa Cruz Presents A Midsummer Night’s Dream, featuring a series of readings and conversations held Saturday mornings from April 26 to May 24, 2025. The 1st hour will be spent in conversation with a guest speaker, and during the 2nd hour volunteers will read aloud part of the play. During the final session, on May 24th, a film will be presented. Meetings will take place in the Aptos Library Community Room (in person) and over Zoom (virtual).
For more information, Zoom link, or to be a reader, contact: saturdayshakespeare@gmail.com
The final session on May 17 features a film presentation. Directed by Michael Hoffman & starring Christian Bale, Rupert Everett, Calista Flockhart, Kevin Kline, Michelle Pfeiffer & Stanley Tucci (120 minutes).
All Scheduled Meetings

April 26: Michael Warren
May 3: Julia Lupton
May 10: Charles Pasternak
May 17: Sean Keilen
May 24 (Film Screening)

Anneeth Hundle - Insecurities of Expulsion: Afro- Asian Entanglements in Transcontinental Uganda
2025-05-28 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
As part of the Spring 2025 Aurora Lecture Series and the Cultural Studies Colloquium, we welcome Anneeth Kaur Hundle, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Presidential Chair in Social Sciences to Advance Sikh Studies at the University of California, Irvine, for her lecture entitled “Insecurities of Expulsion: Afro- Asian Entanglements in Transcontinental Uganda.”
In 1972, Ugandan president Idi Amin expelled close to 80,000 South Asians of Ugandan heritage from the country by dictatorial decree. This talk revisits this weighty historical event, arguing that it is neither an exceptional nor a parochial event, neither a result of primordial Afro-South Asian racial conflict, nor an opening into a redemptive search for Afro-South Asian interracial solidarities. The talk explores the aftermaths and continuous nature of the expulsion event, examining its effects and affects; the images, representations, and differentiated experiences and memories of the event; and the tense and ambivalent practices of citizenship, sovereignty, and governance that have emerged in the decades following the expulsion. It describes Afro-Asian entanglements in transcontinental Uganda through the lenses of race, ethnicity, class, caste, religion, gender, and sexuality, arguing for stronger attention to knowledge production on global Afro-South Asian connections and the continued dynamics of community, citizenship, and identity on the African Continent as central to envisioning Black African self-determinism, racial reconciliation, and interracial pluralisms during shifting imperial, postcolonial, nationalist, and geopolitical times. Finally, the talk examines the significance of global anthropologies of expulsion in relation to the ongoing contemporary mass expulsions under the Trump regime in the US.citizenship, and identity on the African Continent as central to envisioning contemporary Black African self-determinism, racial reconciliation, and interracial pluralisms.
Anneeth Kaur Hundle is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Presidential Chair in Social Sciences to Advance Sikh Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She trained in anthropology and gender studies at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and has previously held appointments at UC Berkeley, UC Merced, and Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. Hundle has recently published Insecurities of Expulsion: Afro-Asian Entanglements in Transcontinental Uganda (Duke University Press, 2025), an anthropological examination of citizenship and the ambivalent politics and processes of racial nonreconciliation in post-Asian expulsion Uganda and the study of scholarly and epistemological expulsions from the contemporary university. She has also published in several peer-reviewed journals, including American Anthropologist, Public Culture, and Critical Ethnic Studies, and is currently working on a book project on Sikh and Punjabi and Black and Afro-Diasporic encounters that engages with her interests in Sikhism and global South Asian and African diasporas, critical religious and secularism studies; race, religion, caste, labor-capital relations, gender and sexuality; feminist anthropology and critical university studies. At UCI Anthropology, she has led Sikh Studies and Punjabi language program-building and many other initiatives, including the Sikh feminisms working group from 2020-2022. She currently serves as Associate Editor of the journal Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory.
Co-sponsored with the Aurora Endowment for Sikh Studies.

Spring 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 Spring 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.

Terry Burke - The UCSC Center for World History in its World Historical Contexts
2025-05-29 13:30 - 15:00 | Virtual and In Person
What are the relevant contexts in which we should situate the UCSC Center for World History? Terry Burke (Professor Emeritus, History Department) will discuss this question in his upcoming talk, “The UCSC Center for World History in its World Historical Contexts.” The talk will be held both in-person in Humanities I, Room 210, and online via Zoom.
Burke proposes we locate it in what he calls the “World History Moment” (late 1960s-early 2000s), and will add relevant contexts during the course of the talk. The lecture will then move to an overview of the emergence of world history in the UC system in the 1980s-2000s, focusing on the World History Workshop, a UC Multi-Campus Research Group (MRG) founded by Kenneth Pomeranz and Burke. The UCSC Center for World History and its connections to the UC project – as well as its major accomplishments – will be reviewed.
Burke’s talk will conclude by asking where world history stands today, and will offer ways it might be revived.

G.S. Sahota and Susan Gillman - Du Boisian Double Consciousness, Global Sikh Diasporas, and Sikh Studies
2025-05-29 15:30 - 17:00 | Virtual and In Person
As part of the Spring 2025 Aurora Lecture Series, join G.S. Sahota and Susan Gillman for a conversation on Du Boisian Double Consciousness, Global Sikh Diasporas, and Sikh Studies. The conversation will take place on Thursday, May 29th, from 3:30 to 5:00 PM in Humanities 1, Room 202, with the option to attend via Zoom.
Susan Gillman is Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Co-editor of Next to the Color Line: Gender, Sexuality, and W.E.B. Du Bois.
G.S. Sahota is the Aurora Chair in Sikh and Punjabi Studies and Associate Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Living Writers Student Reading
2025-05-29 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 – Spring 2025
Insight, Writings: Third World and Other Imaginaries

Sponsored by the Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, the Laurie Sain Endowment, the Humanities Institute, The Literature Department, Creative Writing Program, and the Center for Racial Justice.

Threads of Love: The AIDS Memorial Quilt
2025-05-30 | Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, 705 Front St., Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
In partnership with The Diversity Center (TDC) and The Humanities Institute, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History (MAH) is proud to present the Threads of Love: The AIDS Memorial Quilt—a powerful exhibition that reflects on the profound impact the HIV/AIDS epidemic had on the LGBTQ+ community. It celebrates the enduring resilience, love, and activism that has defined their collective journey.
The exhibit will run from May 30th – June 29th.
Threads of Love is more than an art exhibit; it is a living love letter to the past, present, and future of the LGBTQ+ community. The exhibit seeks to educate, inspire, and engage visitors in a reflection of the challenges faced during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis and the meaningful exploration of our shared history. As Santa Cruz Pride marks its 50th anniversary, the Threads of Love exhibit serves as a celebration of our community’s ongoing commitment to social justice, advocacy, mutual support, and well-being.
Central to the exhibit will be panels from the AIDS Memorial Quilt, a poignant reminder of the lives lost and the memories that continue to sustain us. Alongside the AIDS Memorial Quilt, will be a display of a diverse collection of artwork created by local students and community members displaying the focus of HIV/AIDS awareness, prevention, and education. Threads of Love was inspired by a Queer teen from Santa Cruz High School who expressed a desire to see the AIDS Memorial Quilt after attending The Diversity Center’s youth programming event at the Queer Santa Cruz exhibit at the MAH.
As part of this initiative, The Diversity Center will be hosting monthly art workshops where community members can create art for the exhibit. More information here.

Banner Image: Display of AIDS quilts at Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium, 1989. Donated by T. Lark Letchworth to the Santa Cruz County LGBTQ+ Collection, MAH Archives.

Art as Social Transformation with Roger and DeAnna Cummings
2025-05-30 12:00 - 13:30 | Digital Arts Research Center #108
As co-founders of Juxtaposition Arts (JXTA) in Minneapolis, Roger Cummings’ and DeAnna Cummings’ practices operate at the intersection of art, social justice, and community development.
JXTA functions as a “social sculpture” – a living artwork that extends beyond conventional art-making into community engagement. What began in 1995 with nine students has evolved into a comprehensive campus employing 70+ young people annually through our mentor-apprentice model.
Our work centers Black aesthetic traditions, particularly from urban environments, challenging institutions that have historically marginalized these forms. We navigate “white space” in art institutions, philanthropy, and urban development by creating interventions that reclaim public space and amplify Black creativity.
Through Environmental Design, Graphic Design, Contemporary Art, and Tactical Urbanism Labs, we’ve built a pipeline of creative talent while addressing economic disparities. This approach transforms both individuals and communities, demonstrating how art can catalyze social change and economic opportunity.
Sponsored by: Art Department Environmental Art + Social Practice MFA Program, The Humanities Institute, Unseen California

Celebratory Collabo & Share Fest with Clara Bergamini, Yagmur Kizilay, and Mary Jirmanus
2025-05-30 13:00 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Join the More-than-human(ities) Lab for their final event of the year where they will reflect on what they have learned from the lab and dream of future possibilities for the cross-disciplinary community that they have built. Collaborative reflections and wishes will take place from 1-1:30pm. They will then close the lab by learning about the work of three of our early-career community members and offering them feedback. Clara Bergamini, Yagmur Kizilay, and Mary Jirmanus will participate in their final share session of the year. Light snacks will be provided.
Dr. Yağmur Kızılay, a Fulbright Postdoctoral Researcher at UCSC Literature Department, will be speaking on “An Exploration of Affective Dimension of the Environmental Narratives in the Blue Humanities in Raising Environmental Consciousness for the Preservation of Bodies of Water.”

Mary Jirmanus Saba, UC Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the Film and Digital Media Department, will be speaking on transformative movements through the perspective of Lebanese philosopher Mahdi Amel. Regarding the possibilities of transformative movements, Amel wrote that in the colonized world, “the worker is a peasant,” attached to the village, and not untethered from the countryside. This ambivalent statement (which described Amel himself) is the provocation for thinking about how we all might relate to the land, and transformative politics.
Clara Bergamini, a PhD candidate in the Department of History, will share a quick preview of her dissertation chapter, currently titled “Contextualizing an Urban Catastrophe.” The bulk of her dissertation looks at the social and political history of the 1923 Kantō earthquake that destroyed most of Tokyo and all of Yokohama. However, the goal for this particular chapter is to position it more firmly in environmental humanities through an examination of both the socio-political and environmental circumstances that laid the groundwork for the catastrophe.

Slow Seminar: Moorings by Nidhi Mahajan
2025-06-02 09:30 - 11:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Center for Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions (SEACoast), the Center for South Asian Studies (CSAS) and the Center for the Middle East and North Africa (CMENA), invite you to a Slow Seminar on the new book: Moorings: Voyages of Capital Across the Indian Ocean by Nidhi Mahajan, Assistant Professor of Anthropology. Reception to follow. Opening comments will be made by Juned Shaikh, Associate Professor of History.

Advance copies of the reading will be made available after May 16 to those who R.S.V.P. indicating that they plan to attend. Wish to purchase your own copy? Receive 30% off at ucpress.edu with code UCPSAVE30.

Isaac Blacksin - Making Death Meaningful: On Journalism's Humanitarian Desire
2025-06-02 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 420, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The final guest of the Spring 2025 HistCon Speaker Series will be one of HistCon’s own, alumnus Isaac Blacksin! He will be joining us on Monday, June 2nd, to give his talk “Making Death Meaningful: On Journalism’s Humanitarian Desire” at 1pm in Hum 1 Rm 420. If you are unable to make it in person, you can register to attend virtually via Zoom.
Lauded journalism from the 2016-17 battle for Mosul, Iraq, revealed gross underestimates of US-caused civilian harm from anti-Islamic State operations, exemplifying journalism’s ability to “speak truth to power.” Yet in questioning official death tallies, journalists failed to challenge the rationale offered for this harm: an accidental exception or necessary excess to justified violence. By focusing on individuated and corporeal suffering, by categorizing violence as lawful or extreme, and by attending to immanent violence – rather than the structures perpetuating violence – as the central problem of war, journalism emphasized the moral dynamics of militarism while mystifying its political logic. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in and around Mosul during the battle, this talk assesses war reportage in its contemporary humanitarian mode. It tracks a transformation in the journalistic representation of war from the effects of policy on populations to the effects of violence on the innocent, with implications for popular understandings of violence from Ukraine to Palestine.
Isaac Blacksin is Assistant Professor of Critical Media Studies in the Department of Communication and Journalism at Texas A&M University. He is the author of Conflicted: Making News from Global War (Stanford University Press, 2024) and co-editor of a recent issue of boundary 2 on the life and thought of Norman O. Brown. Isaac’s work – on violence, fantasy, and the politics of representation – appears in journals such as Public Culture, Media, War & Conflict, and HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory.
After the talk, all attendees are invited to continue the conversation over dinner and drinks at Abbott Square at 5:30pm.

Donna Haraway - Thick, Slimy, Squishy, Squiggly & Generative
2025-06-03 15:30 - 18:00 | McHenry Library (3rd Floor), Special Collections
Join the UCSC Special Collections & Archives for a conversation with Donna Haraway titled “Thick, Slimy, Squishy, & Generative,” featuring History of Consciousness alumni Chela Sandoval (’93), Katie King (’87), and Caren Kaplan (’87).

Please register by May 20. Limited space is available; plan to arrive early for seating. The conversation will start promptly at 4:00pm and the event will continue afterwards with browsing in the archives.
Together with Haraway, these History of Consciousness alums will revisit the collaborative, interdisciplinary, and transformative modes of thinking that shaped their time at UCSC in the 1980s and ’90s—and that continue to animate their work today. Reflecting on this shared historical moment, the conversation will trace the intersections, evolutions, and generative entanglements of their ideas over time—and consider why collectivity, friendship, integrity, and humor remain vital tools for navigating what Haraway has called the “thick and slimy” urgencies of our present.
This event also marks the opening of an exhibition that showcases select materials from the Donna Haraway Papers, newly processed by the 2024-2025 CART Fellow and available for research at UCSC’s McHenry Library.
Organized by the University Library’s Elisabeth Remak-Honnef Center for Archival Research and Training (CART) and 2024-2025 CART Fellow Annika Berry.

Ussama Makdisi – Palestine, Late Colonialism, and the Question of Genocide
2025-06-04 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Co-sponsored by the Center for the Middle East and North Africa (CMENA)
This talk explores the relationship between modern philozionism in the West and the denialism of the Palestinians. The nineteenth-century European Zionist idea of implanting and sustaining an exclusively Jewish nationalist state in multireligious Palestine was a response to European racial antisemitism. But it was also premised, from the outset, on the erasure of native Palestinian history and the political significance of their centuries-old belonging on their own land.
Dr. Ussama Makdisi is Professor of History and Chancellor’s Chair at the University of California Berkeley. He has published widely on Ottoman and Arab history as well as on U.S.-Arab relations and U.S. missionary work in the Middle East. Professor Makdisi’s most recent book, Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World, was published in 2019 by the University of California Press. He is also the author of Faith Misplaced: the Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations, 1820-2001 (Public Affairs, 2010), The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (University of California Press, 2000), and Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Cornell University Press, 2008), which was the winner of the 2008 Albert Hourani Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association, the 2009 John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association, and a co-winner of the 2009 British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize given by the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies. Professor Makdisi has also published articles in the Journal of American History, the American Historical Review, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and in the Middle East Report. He has held fellowships at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin), the Carnegie Corporation, and the American Academy of Berlin.

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.

Amending Worlds: Projects from the Coha-Gunderson Creativity Workshop
2025-06-05 | Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, 705 Front St., Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Coha-Gunderson Creativity Workshop, housed in The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, presents a multi-media exhibition by UCSC graduate and undergraduate students and alumni winners of the Coha-Gunderson Prize in Speculative Futures. The Amending Worlds exhibition includes installations, performances, visual art, film & video, and a computer game, distributed throughout the museum’s spaces. Prizewinners come from a range of disciplines, including Anthropology, Art, Computational Media, Environmental Art and Social Practice, Film and Digital Media, Literature, and Politics.
The Coha-Gunderson Prize in Speculative Futures prize was established by THI’s Speculatively Scientific Fictions of the Future project and is made possible by alumni Peter Coha (Kresge ’78, Mathematics) and James Gunderson (Rachel Carson ’77, Philosophy, and UCSC Foundation Board Trustee).
The exhibition opens on June 5th, 2025 and runs until June 15th, 2025. The exhibition launches in conjunction with The Humanities Institute’s Night at the Museum event, which will also feature a panel discussion about speculative fiction to engage scholars, practitioners and publics in creative speculation with and about the works.
Exhibition Projects:
Shades of Fake Green Grass, Hannah Barrett
Shades of Fake Green Grass is a collection of short stories that focus on the day-to-day lives of ordinary people, and their ordinary problems, through a technologically dystopian lens.
Hannah Barrett is a writer with a current focus on science fiction. She aims to compel readers toward internal dialogues that teach us how to better engage with the world.
a portal, Yasmine Benabdallah
a portal includes a video installation and a micro-chapbook, part of a project linking Brazil, Morocco, and Portugal through a shared history of colonization, enslavement, and a forced exodus across the Atlantic. a portal explores memory, archives, and non-linear time, and foregrounds our bodies’ resonances through time and space, calling on them to erode, wash over, and imagine liberatory futures.
Yasmine Benabdallah is a Moroccan filmmaker and visual artist whose work explores memory, performance, diaspora, archives, rituals, and time travel.
Whispers of Wear, Kristine Buriel
The Selveger Collective gets its name from a portmanteau of “selvage”- a stitched edge that prevents a fabric from unraveling and “salvager”- those who prevent something from being lost. Walk into the archives and don the clothes of wearers’ past and hear the stories weaved into the threads. Scan to gain insight from those whose hands touched the cloth.
Kristine Buriel is an interdisciplinary artist focused on making and craft. She uses technology to preserve the process and human story so that it can be shared and not forgotten.
Night Lights for Squid, Chaelim Lim
Squid are said to be attracted to light. Powerful lights are used during the night for squid fishing. However, scientists aren’t able to explain why some squid hide away from the lights, under the shadows of the vessel. Are the lights overwhelming for squid individuals? What if squid could create their own night lights? What stories would these lights tell?
Chaelim Lim is an artist based in Seoul who researches disaster investigation in a fictional manner. She explores architecture that amplifies the gestures of more-than-human beings in disaster discourse.
A Martian Manifesto, Jorge Antonio Palacios
A Martian Manifesto is a text and series of installations experimenting with craft and new media to create outdoor social sculptures. Through re-enacting speculative practices of the deep future and on Mars, this process-oriented work is metabolized into a manifesto of science fiction, gesturing towards alternative ways of being with each other, technology, and the world.
Jorge Antonio Palacios is an artist from Yanawana/San Antonio, Texas. They use foraging, digital media, writing, and installation as methodologies for investigating relationships between land, technology, displacement, and decolonization.
The Third Person, Rowan Powell
The Third Person, taken from the writing of the Diggers in 1649, refers to someone who relates to land without private ownership. Drawing on this idea, the work stages a hypothetical conversation between ‘ravers’ and ‘ranters,’ old and new. Through exchanges of soil, wood, linen, repurposed texts and symbols, the installation journeys through political romanticism– hope and dissolution expressed through squatting, trespassing, free parties and intentional communities.
Rowan Powell is a writer and researcher currently working with trees, chickens, film, and dancing. Their research draws on place(s), tracing attempts at reaching to what is buried.
olam ha-ba (the world to come), Tyler Rai
This project is a growing conversation between Palestinian and Lebanese heirloom seeds, the soils of coastal California, and communities of seed savers. Through these seeds in exile, the project explores how heirloom seeds encompass entire cosmologies and ancestral technologies for resistance, hope, and birthing the world to come.
Tyler Rai is a transdisciplinary artist whose work investigates cultural inheritance, ecological entanglements and solidarity work as a form of ancestral memory. She collaborates with seeds, stones, bodies, and soils.
Sea of Paint, Hongwei Zhou
Sea of Paint is a narrative-driven video game that explores the issues around contemporary machine learning-based AI technology. The player engages in dialogue with a “spirit” conjured from the Sea — an ever-recording flow of data. The game asks how our ideas of memory, labor and care are brought into tension with the prevalence of data-driven AI.
Hongwei Zhou is a video game educator and researcher. He is interested in thinking about the entanglement of game systems and technoculture.
Support Team:
Matt Polzin
GSR for the Coha-Gunderson Creativity Workshop
Matt Polzin is a fiction writer and researcher whose work focuses on queer utopia, interspecies relationships, and the Midwest.
Valerie Sainz
2024-25 Humanities EXPLORE Fellow, The Coha-Gunderson Exhibition and the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History
Valerie Sainz is a History and History of Art & Visual Culture major (Museums, Heritage, and Curation concentration).
Carla Freccero
PI, The Coha-Gunderson Prize in Speculative Futures; Coordinator, The Coha-Gunderson Creativity Workshop
Carla Freccero is Distinguished Professor of Literature & History of Consciousness, UCSC.
– Special thanks –

Peter Coha (Kresge College ’78, Mathematics) and James Gunderson (Rachel Carson College ’77, Philosophy and UCSC Foundation Board Trustee)
Matt Polzin, Graduate Student Researcher
Valerie Sainz, EXPLORE Fellow
The Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (Marla Novo, Deputy Director; Natalie Jenkins, Exhibitions Manager; Shanti Nagwani, preparator)
The Humanities Institute (Pranav Anand, Faculty Director; Irena Polic, Managing Director; Saskia Nauenberg Dunkell, Research Programs & Communications Director; Jessica Guild, Event and Operations Manager)
UCSC Faculty Guests: Micah Perks (Literature); Alison Laurie Palmer (Art); Claudio Bueno (Art); Soraya Murray (History of Art & Visual Culture); Maria Puig del la Bellacasa (History of Consciousness)

Shakespeare Talk with Dr. Sean Keilen
2025-06-05 17:00 - 18:00 | Santa Cruz Public Library – Downtown Branch, 224 Church Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Join Dr. Sean Keilen, professor of literature at UCSC and lead dramaturg at Santa Cruz Shakespeare, for an exciting talk about SCS’ summer Shakespeare offerings: comic masterpiece, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and thrilling romance, Pericles. Artistic Director Charles Pasternak will be in attendance. Q&A to follow.

UCSC Night at the Museum – Amending Worlds
2025-06-05 19:00 | Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, 705 Front St., Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
JOIN US for The Humanities Institute’s annual Night at the Museum featuring Amending Worlds, a panel discussion about speculative fiction and a multi-media exhibition by UCSC graduate and undergraduate students and alumni winners of the Coha-Gunderson Prize in Speculative Futures. The panel will feature Micah Perks (UC Santa Cruz), Cathy Thomas (UCSB), and Kim Tallbear (University of Alberta), moderated by Carla Freccero (UC Santa Cruz).
This year, THI is marking our 25th anniversary. The celebration will culminate with Night at the Museum, an event which welcomes members of the public to experience the ongoing exhibitions and gallery spaces at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History for free.

Doors and exhibits open at 6pm, event program will begin at 7pm.
AMENDING WORLDS EXHIBITION RUNS JUNE 5-15, 2025 – CLICK HERE FOR FULL PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS.
Amending Worlds includes installations, performances, visual art, film & video, and a computer game, distributed throughout the museum’s spaces. Prizewinners come from a range of disciplines, including Anthropology, Art, Computational Media, Environmental Art and Social Practice, Film and Digital Media, Literature, and Politics.
Carla Freccero is Distinguished Professor of Literature and History of Consciousness at UCSC, where she has taught since 1991. She is the author of Father Figures; Popular Culture: An Introduction; and Queer/Early/Modern. She has co-edited collections on Premodern Sexualities; Species, Race and Sex; and Animal Studies. She publishes in early modern literature, queer and feminist theory, and animal studies.
Micah Perks is the author of a short story collection, a memoir and two novels. Her most recent novel, What Becomes Us, won an Independent Publishers Book Award and was named one of the Top Ten Books about the Apocalypse by The Guardian. Her short stories and essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies. She has won a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and residencies at Blue Mountain Center and MacDowell. She received her BA and MFA from Cornell University. She is a professor at UCSC in the Literature Department and has taught Women and the Apocalypse and US Feminist Utopias.
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 sexualities. She is a regular panelist on the Media Indigena podcast and 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.
Cathy Thomas is a writer, filmmaker, and creative critical scholar whose work on the ‘Black Fantastic’ and decolonial feminist thought is enriched by discovering modes of play and resistance in comic books, literature, through cosplay, while wining up at Caribbean Carnival. As she approaches tenure, she is juggling 3 novels, 2 comic books, 1 trade book collaboration, 1 scholarly monograph, and 1 experimental textile+digital+sound art installation for a 2028 museum exhibition, all in various states of completion, delay, ecstasy, and exhaustion. She is an Asst Prof of English at UCSB and the Director of the UCSB Creative Critical Writing Initiative.

The Coha-Gunderson Creativity Workshop, housed in The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, presents a multi-media exhibition by UCSC graduate and undergraduate students and alumni winners of the Coha-Gunderson Prize in Speculative Futures. The Amending Worlds exhibition includes installations, performances, visual art, film & video, and a computer game, distributed throughout the museum’s spaces. Prizewinners come from a range of disciplines, including Anthropology, Art, Computational Media, Environmental Art and Social Practice, Film and Digital Media, Literature, and Politics.
The Coha-Gunderson Prize in Speculative Futures prize was established by THI’s Speculatively Scientific Fictions of the Future project and is made possible by alumni Peter Coha (Kresge ’78, Mathematics) and James Gunderson (Rachel Carson ’77, Philosophy, and UCSC Foundation Board Trustee).
The exhibition opens on June 5th, 2025 and runs until June 15th, 2025. The exhibition launches in conjunction with The Humanities Institute’s Night at the Museum event, which will also feature a panel discussion about speculative fiction to engage scholars, practitioners and publics in creative speculation with and about the works.
Exhibition Projects:
Shades of Fake Green Grass, Hannah Barrett
Shades of Fake Green Grass is a collection of short stories that focus on the day-to-day lives of ordinary people, and their ordinary problems, through a technologically dystopian lens.
Hannah Barrett is a writer with a current focus on science fiction. She aims to compel readers toward internal dialogues that teach us how to better engage with the world.
a portal, Yasmine Benabdallah
a portal includes a video installation and a micro-chapbook, part of a project linking Brazil, Morocco, and Portugal through a shared history of colonization, enslavement, and a forced exodus across the Atlantic. a portal explores memory, archives, and non-linear time, and foregrounds our bodies’ resonances through time and space, calling on them to erode, wash over, and imagine liberatory futures.
Yasmine Benabdallah is a Moroccan filmmaker and visual artist whose work explores memory, performance, diaspora, archives, rituals, and time travel.
Whispers of Wear, Kristine Buriel
The Selveger Collective gets its name from a portmanteau of “selvage”- a stitched edge that prevents a fabric from unraveling and “salvager”- those who prevent something from being lost. Walk into the archives and don the clothes of wearers’ past and hear the stories weaved into the threads. Scan to gain insight from those whose hands touched the cloth.
Kristine Buriel is an interdisciplinary artist focused on making and craft. She uses technology to preserve the process and human story so that it can be shared and not forgotten.
Night Lights for Squid, Chaelim Lim
Squid are said to be attracted to light. Powerful lights are used during the night for squid fishing. However, scientists aren’t able to explain why some squid hide away from the lights, under the shadows of the vessel. Are the lights overwhelming for squid individuals? What if squid could create their own night lights? What stories would these lights tell?
Chaelim Lim is an artist based in Seoul who researches disaster investigation in a fictional manner. She explores architecture that amplifies the gestures of more-than-human beings in disaster discourse.
A Martian Manifesto, Jorge Antonio Palacios
A Martian Manifesto is a text and series of installations experimenting with craft and new media to create outdoor social sculptures. Through re-enacting speculative practices of the deep future and on Mars, this process-oriented work is metabolized into a manifesto of science fiction, gesturing towards alternative ways of being with each other, technology, and the world.
Jorge Antonio Palacios is an artist from Yanawana/San Antonio, Texas. They use foraging, digital media, writing, and installation as methodologies for investigating relationships between land, technology, displacement, and decolonization.
The Third Person, Rowan Powell
The Third Person, taken from the writing of the Diggers in 1649, refers to someone who relates to land without private ownership. Drawing on this idea, the work stages a hypothetical conversation between ‘ravers’ and ‘ranters,’ old and new. Through exchanges of soil, wood, linen, repurposed texts and symbols, the installation journeys through political romanticism– hope and dissolution expressed through squatting, trespassing, free parties and intentional communities.
Rowan Powell is a writer and researcher currently working with trees, chickens, film, and dancing. Their research draws on place(s), tracing attempts at reaching to what is buried.
olam ha-ba (the world to come), Tyler Rai
This project is a growing conversation between Palestinian and Lebanese heirloom seeds, the soils of coastal California, and communities of seed savers. Through these seeds in exile, the project explores how heirloom seeds encompass entire cosmologies and ancestral technologies for resistance, hope, and birthing the world to come.
Tyler Rai is a transdisciplinary artist whose work investigates cultural inheritance, ecological entanglements and solidarity work as a form of ancestral memory. She collaborates with seeds, stones, bodies, and soils.
Sea of Paint, Hongwei Zhou
Sea of Paint is a narrative-driven video game that explores the issues around contemporary machine learning-based AI technology. The player engages in dialogue with a “spirit” conjured from the Sea — an ever-recording flow of data. The game asks how our ideas of memory, labor and care are brought into tension with the prevalence of data-driven AI.
Hongwei Zhou is a video game educator and researcher. He is interested in thinking about the entanglement of game systems and technoculture.
Support Team:
Matt Polzin
GSR for the Coha-Gunderson Creativity Workshop
Matt Polzin is a fiction writer and researcher whose work focuses on queer utopia, interspecies relationships, and the Midwest.
Valerie Sainz
2024-25 Humanities EXPLORE Fellow, The Coha-Gunderson Exhibition and the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History
Valerie Sainz is a History and History of Art & Visual Culture major (Museums, Heritage, and Curation concentration).
Carla Freccero
PI, The Coha-Gunderson Prize in Speculative Futures; Coordinator, The Coha-Gunderson Creativity Workshop
Carla Freccero is Distinguished Professor of Literature & History of Consciousness, UCSC.
– Special thanks –

Peter Coha (Kresge College ’78, Mathematics) and James Gunderson (Rachel Carson College ’77, Philosophy and UCSC Foundation Board Trustee)
Matt Polzin, Graduate Student Researcher
Valerie Sainz, EXPLORE Fellow
The Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (Marla Novo, Deputy Director; Natalie Jenkins, Exhibitions Manager; Shanti Nagwani, preparator)
The Humanities Institute (Pranav Anand, Faculty Director; Irena Polic, Managing Director; Saskia Nauenberg Dunkell, Research Programs & Communications Director; Jessica Guild, Event and Operations Manager)
UCSC Faculty Guests: Micah Perks (Literature); Alison Laurie Palmer (Art); Claudio Bueno (Art); Soraya Murray (History of Art & Visual Culture); Maria Puig del la Bellacasa (History of Consciousness)

Through the Decades: 50 Years of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz
2025-06-06 15:00 | Stevenson Event Center
Join Feminist Studies on June 6 in honoring 50 years at UC Santa Cruz. The event will be held at 3pm at the Stevenson Event Center, with a reception to follow.

The event will be live-streamed for those who cannot attend in person. Click here to watch.
Feminist Studies was established as the Women’s Studies program at UC Santa Cruz in 1974. Since its founding, this pioneering department has been home to some of the field’s most prominent thinkers and has produced scores of alumni who have gone on to make contributions in a range of professions.
For this celebratory event, we have assembled a panel of eight alums who will engage with Distinguished Feminist Studies Professor Emerita Bettina Aptheker to discuss what Feminist Studies has meant to their careers, their lives, and society at large. Our panelists:
Nancy Lemon (Kresge ’75, Women’s Studies) – Retired Director of the Domestic Violence Practicum and Seminar at UC Berkeley School of Law and member of the first graduating class
Blanca Tavera (Oakes ’86, Women’s Studies) – Domestic violence activist, founder of Defensa de Mujeres, and retired professor at the San Jose State University School of Social Work
Nicole Nichols (nee Nasser) (Cowell ’99, Literature and Women’s Studies) – Adult-Gerontology Acute Care Nurse Practitioner in Trauma Surgery and Surgical Critical Care at UC Davis Medical Center, and adjunct faculty at University of Nevada, Reno
Naomi Marks (Merrill ’00, Earth Sciences and Women’s Studies) – Geochemist, Associate Program Leader for Nuclear Counterterrorism and Counterproliferation, and Deputy Director of the Glenn T. Seaborg Institute at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Kate Schatz (Stevenson ’03, Literature and Creative Writing) – New York Times bestselling author of the Rad Women series and Do the Work: An Anti-Racist Activity Book, with W. Kamau Bell
Kim Angulo (Merrill ’13, Feminist Studies) – Assistant Public Defender at the Sacramento County Public Defender’s Office
Sarah Elkotbeid (Crown ’18, Environmental Studies and Feminist Studies) – Environmental Health Equity and Community Partnerships Advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council
Halima Kazem (Ph.D. ’22, Feminist Studies) – Associate Director of Stanford’s Program in Feminist, Gender & Sexualities Studies
We hope to see you as we mark the passage of 50 years and celebrate the generations of activists and feminist scholars who have contributed to the passionate pursuit and expansion of feminist thought and advocacy at UCSC!

Abraham Verghese - The Covenant of Water
2025-06-08 18:00 - 19:30 | Rio Theater, 1205 Soquel Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95062, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz presents New York Times-bestselling author Abraham Verghese (Cutting for Stone) for a discussion and signing of The Covenant of Water, available in paperback on May 6th. This stunning epic of love, faith, and medicine is set in Kerala, South India, and follows three generations of a family seeking the answers to a strange secret. Abraham Verghese will be in conversation with Rose Feerick.
“One of the best books I’ve read in my entire life. It’s epic. It’s transportive . . . It was unputdownable!”—Oprah Winfrey

An instant New York Times and indie bestseller, The Covenant of Water has sold more than two million copies worldwide and was widely named as a best book of the year. Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, Abraham Verghese’s long-awaited, masterful novel follows three generations of a Christian family in Kerala, South India, that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning.
Abraham Verghese is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the author of the NBCC Award finalist My Own Country and the New York Times Notable Book The Tennis Partner. His most recent book, Cutting for Stone, spent 107 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and sold more than two million copies worldwide. It was translated into more than twenty languages and is being adapted for film by Anonymous Content. Verghese was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama, has received six honorary degrees, and is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He lives and practices medicine in Stanford, California where he is the Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor in the Stanford University School of Medicine. A decade in the making, The Covenant of Water is his first book since Cutting for Stone.
Rose Feerick is Co-Director of Wisdom & Money, a non-profit organization that offers retreats for affluent individuals who seek to align their financial resources with their spirituality in service of the common good. She also serves as one of the ministers of the Pescadero Community Church. Rose has a BA in Theology from Georgetown University and an MDiv from the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University. She lives in Santa Cruz, California and is the mother of two young adult sons.
More information at: Abraham Verghese, The Covenant of Water | Bookshop Santa Cruz
Co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

Slugs and Steins with Assistant Professor E. Hande Tuna - You Can Imagine Dragons… But Not That Female Infanticide Is Good? The Puzzling Limits of Imagination
2025-06-09 18:30 - 20:00 | Virtual Event
You can imagine flying on the back of a dragon. You can picture a talking rabbit solving crimes, or a world where time runs backward. So why is it so hard to imagine that slavery is morally good, or that killing your baby girl is the right thing to do? This talk explores a weird and wonderful puzzle in the philosophy of imagination known as imaginative resistance—the experience of hitting a mental wall when a story asks us to imagine not just impossible things, but morally alien things. Why do our moral beliefs seem to stick, even in fiction? If imagining is “just pretending,” why do some make-believe scenarios feel off-limits or even offensive? Through examples from literature and film, we’ll explore what this resistance reveals about how imagination works, and how deeply our values shape what we’re able or willing to imagine.
No background in philosophy is required. Just bring your imagination and maybe a little skepticism.

Emine Hande Tuna is a philosopher who spends her time thinking seriously about things that don’t exist—like square circles, guilt-free villains, and moral worlds where injustice is good. She’s an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at UC Santa Cruz, where she writes and teaches about imagination, aesthetics, and why some stories just won’t sit right with us. Her book on Kantian Art Criticism is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. She’s also at work on a second book, Imaginative Resistance (under contract with Oxford University Press), which she’ll be developing next year as a Quinn Fellow at the National Humanities Center (a rare kind of fellowship—one that didn’t mysteriously disappear).
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.

Late Night Editions: Isaac Julien
2025-06-12 18:00 - 21:30 | de Young Museum, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Dr, San Francisco, 94118, United States
The de Young is hosting, Late Night Editions: Isaac Julien on Thursday, June 12, 2025, a special after-hours event celebrating the powerful exhibition Isaac Julien: I Dream a World.
Enjoy a vibrant evening exploring the cinematic world of Isaac Julien: I Dream a World — a stunning fusion of film, politics, and personal narrative — alongside live music, food trucks, a nostalgic glamour photo booth by Syd Studios, and after-dark access to exhibitions and our sculpture garden.
Come for the art. Stay for the vibes. Reserve your tickets now — limited availability! UC Santa Cruz community members get 20% off general admission with the code FIRSTEDITION at checkout.

What’s included:

Syd Studios nostalgic photo booth by Syd Yatco
Live DJ sets curated by IN SESSION
Food trucks from Off the Grid
Cash bar
Access to: Isaac Julien: I Dream a World, Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm, Matisse’s Jazz Unbound, Osher Sculpture Garden & James Turrell’s Three Gems

Banner Image Credit: Thousand Words Photobooth

Rachel Kushner - Creation Lake
2025-07-02 19:00 - 20:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes Rachel Kushner, two-time finalist for both the Booker Prize and National Book Award, for a reading and signing of her acclaimed novel Creation Lake, available in paperback July 1st. This “wickedly entertaining” (The Guardian) novel about a seductive and cunning American woman who infiltrates an anarchist collective in France is a propulsive page-turner filled with dark humor.

Creation Lake is a novel about a secret agent, a thirty-four-year-old American woman of ruthless tactics and clean beauty who is sent to do dirty work in France. “Sadie Smith” is how the narrator introduces herself to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to her lover, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian she has met by “cold bump”—making him believe the encounter was accidental. Like everyone she targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her. Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her “contacts”—shadowy figures in business and government—instruct. First, these contacts want her to incite provocation. Then they want more.
Rachel Kushner is the author of the New York Times bestseller Creation Lake, her latest novel; The Hard Crowd, her acclaimed essay collection; and the internationally bestselling novels The Mars Room, The Flamethrowers, and Telex from Cuba, as well as a book of short stories, The Strange Case of Rachel K. She has won the Prix Médicis and been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, and was twice a finalist for the Booker Prize and the National Book Award in Fiction. Creation Lake was also longlisted for the National Book Award. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books have been translated into twenty-seven languages.
More information at: Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake | Bookshop Santa Cruz
Co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

Princes of Surf 2025: Heʻe Nalu Santa Cruz Exhibit Opening
2025-07-18 | Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, 705 Front St., Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History (MAH) is proud to present Princes of Surf 2025: Heʻe nalu Santa Cruz, an exhibition that spotlights how three Hawaiian princes—David Kawananakoa, Jonah Kuhio Kalaniana’ole, and Edward Keliiahonui— introduced surfing to the U.S. mainland via Santa Cruz in 1885 and rode the wave of legacy and relevance to Santa Cruz County.
This exhibition will run from July 18, 2025 – January 4, 2026.
Santa Cruz is the birthplace of surfing in North America, and the original “Surf City.” Although historical evidence clearly documents its 1885 arrival and local adoption by 1896, confusion about its origin remains. Its pioneers were Polynesian, in contrast to the stereotype (reinforced by movies and TV) that it is a predominantly white male sport, and despite the fact that many BIPOC individuals take part. Furthermore, the tale of Antoinette Swan—who was also a surfer underscores the fact that women are an important part of surfing’s origins.
More information at: https://www.santacruzmah.org/exhibitions/hee-nalu-ma-2025

Santa Cruz Shakespeare Opening Night
2025-07-18 20:00 | The Audrey Stanley Grove in Delaveaga Park, 501 Upper Park Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95065, United States
Tickets are now on sale for Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s 2025 Season, “No One is Alone” featuring A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Into the Woods, Pericles, and “Master Harold”…and the Boys. Co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute.
The 2025 season runs from July 18 – September 20.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare | July 13 – Sept. 31
Into the Woods by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine| July 15 – Sept. 7
Pericles by William Shakespeare and George Wilkins | July 29 – Aug. 30
“Master Harold”…and the Boys by Athol Fugard | Sept. 4 – 20

Dickens Universe - The Old Curiosity Shop
2025-07-20 - 2025-07-26 | UC Santa Cruz
The Dickens Universe is a unique cultural event that brings together scholars, teachers, students, and members of the general public for a week of stimulating discussion and festive social activity on the beautiful Santa Cruz campus of the University of California—all focused on one or two Victorian novels, usually (but not always) one by Charles Dickens.
In 2025, the Dickens Universe will feature The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens. Most people remember the novel for its famous and climactic death scene, featuring one of Dickens’s most beloved (and reviled) girl heroines, Little Nell. It is a novel full of interesting scenes, themes, and curiosities. Featuring a gallery of Dickens’s most grotesque characters, it explores the idea of deformity, especially as it contrasts with the angelic innocence and strangely embodied beauty of Little Nell. Its picaresque roots make it an adventure story as well as an allegory of moral journey; its interest in the urban landscape, its pleasure and dangers, suggest Dickens’s social concerns.
Now in its 45th year of operation, the Dickens Universe combines features of a scholarly conference, a festival, a book club, and a summer camp. Participants include people of all ages and walks of life—distinguished scholars, graduate students, undergraduates, retirees, young professionals, high school teachers, and anyone who loves reading and enjoys long Victorian novels.

The Dickens Project: The Curiosity Gala
2025-07-25 18:30 - 23:00 | College Nine and John R. Lewis Multipurpose Room, College Ten, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join The Dickens Project for The Curiosity Gala on July 25, 2025, as we celebrate the 45th annual Dickens Universe Conference!
Now open to the public, this enchanting evening invites community members to don their finest Victorian attire and enjoy a night of lively entertainment—including Victorian dance lessons, casino tables, a raffle, postprandial potations, and a live auction!
Hosted by The Dickens Project, The Dickens Universe is a unique cultural event that brings together scholars, teachers, students, and members of the general public for a week of stimulating discussion and festive social activity on the beautiful Santa Cruz campus of the University of California—all focused on one or two Victorian novels, with this year’s novel being Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop.

Tickets are $50 with all purchases from the evening’s activities going to support The Dickens Project’s educational programs.
Gala Details (This event is 21+):

6:30 PM: Doors Open
7:00-8:00 PM: Live Auction – Bid on Dickens-related items, including a first-edition of The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens
8:00 PM: Announcement of the 2026 Dickens Universe Novel – Purchase a copy from local bookseller Liz Pollock of the Cook’s Bookcase
8:15-11:00 PM: Victorian Ball and Gaming – Dance to nineteenth-century music performed by the Great Expectations Orchestra, with dances led by dance instructor Annie Laskey

Questions about The Curiosity Gala? Email: mabingha@ucsc.edu
About The Dickens Project: The Dickens Project is a Multi-campus Research Unit (MRU) of the University of California. Its research activities have been supported by extramural grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. Department of Education, the California Council for the Humanities, the California Arts Council, the Exxon Education Foundation, dues from member schools, and private gifts. Activities for the general public are supported in part by contributions to a private, non-profit organization, the Friends of the Dickens Project.

The Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music
2025-07-27 | Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music presents the full spectrum of orchestral possibility, illuminating vibrant hues of music today. This transformative season features over 20 composers, nine in residence, seven guest artists, and the Festival Orchestra, four Festival commissions and bringing three world premieres to life.
In celebration of the 50th Anniversary of LGBTQIA Pride in Santa Cruz and the legacy of queer voices that have shaped the Festival, we present a co-commission by Jake Heggie. The season also showcases a new Creative Lab commission by Darian Donovan Thomas honoring the queer experience, and pays tribute to luminaries who have influenced the Festival, including Lou Harrison, John Corigliano, and Jennifer Higdon.
The 2025 Season: Colorful & Courageous runs from July 27 – August 10, 2025.

Season highlights include: Guest Conductor Daniela Candillari to conduct first 2 concerts of the season, 3 world premieres, 5 West Coast premieres, 9 composers in residence. Festival commissions include an orchestral song cycle by Stacy Garrop, the second Creative Lab featuring a multidisciplinary work by Darian Donovan Thomas, and a new co-commission by Jake Heggie featuring original text by Taylor Mac.
LUMINA – Friday, August 1, 8pm
The 63rd season kicks off with guest conductor Daniela Candillari leading the Festival Orchestra in works by John Corigliano, Nina Shekhar, and Missy Mazzoli.
CHASING LIGHT – Saturday, August 2, 7pm
For the second Festival concert, guest conductor Candillari leads the Festival Orchestra in works by Rene Orth, Stacy Garrop, Aleksandra Vrebalov, and Julia Wolfe, presenting a palette of compositions that both illuminate and embolden.
FAMILY CONCERT, Sunday, August 3, 1pm
The Festival’s cherished free Family Concert program features Karen LeFrak‘s delightful Sleepover at the Museum, an accessible and charming story for audiences of all ages. Alight with adventure, it’s a scavenger hunt brought to life through clever instrumentation and musical motives.
BECOMING – Saturday, August 9, 7pm
The second weekend of the Cabrillo Festival welcomes the return of Maestro Măcelaru with a program featuring the Cabrillo Festival’s second Creative Lab with a world premiere by Darian Donovan Thomas, a tribute to the enduring legacy of Festival Co-Founder Lou Harrison, and a powerful work by Anna Thorvaldsdottir.
RISING – Sunday, August 10, 7pm
The Cabrillo Festival concludes with a vibrant symphonic tapestry featuring the bold musical palettes of composers Adolphus Hailstork, Jennifer Higdon, Tyson Gholston Davis, and a new co-commissioned song cycle by Jake Heggie.
All events will be held at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium at 307 Church Street in Downtown Santa Cruz.
More information available here.

Weekend with Shakespeare
2025-08-16 - 2025-08-17 | UCSC Arboretum
Dig deeply into this season’s Shakespeare productions with a special weekend of lectures, discussions and hands-on activities. In partnership with UCSC’s Shakespeare Workshop and The Humanities Institute, this is a wonderful opportunity to learn more about each play during the day and then enjoy the production that same evening.
This year, Weekend with Shakespeare will be held at the UCSC Campus on August 16th (Pericles) and August 17th (A Midsummer Night’s Dream).
Admission is free to all, but seating is limited. Please register below to reserve your seats.

Schedule for Weekend with Shakespeare
Saturday, 8/16 — Pericles by William Shakespeare and George Wilkins

11:00 – Welcome (Sean Keilen, UCSC)
11:15 – Actor Panel (Charles Pasternak and members of the company, SCS)
12:15 – Boxed lunch (courtesy of Shakespeare Workshop)
1:00 – Visiting Scholar (Claire McEachern, UCLA)
2:00 End of program

Sunday, 8/17 — A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

11:00 – Welcome (Sean Keilen, UCSC)
11:15 – Actor Panel (Charles Pasternak and members of the company, SCS)
12:15 – Boxed lunch (courtesy of Shakespeare Workshop)
1:00 – Visiting Scholar (Claire McEachern, UCLA)
2:00 – End of program

Sean Keilen is Professor of Literature and UC Santa Cruz, the founder of Shakespeare Workshop, and Head of Dramaturgy at Santa Cruz Shakespeare.
Charles Pasternak is Artistic Director at Santa Cruz Shakespeare, before which served as Artistic Director of The Porters of Hellsgate Theatre Co in Los Angeles for over fifteen years. He has had a wide-ranging career as an actor and director at theatres across this country including American Players Theatre, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, The Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles, three seasons with The Shakespeare Festival of St. Louis and four with Shakespeare Santa Cruz.
Claire McEachern is Professor of English at the UC Los Angeles. She is the author of Believing in Shakespeare: Studies in Longing (Cambridge, 2018); The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590-1612 (Cambridge, 1996); and editor of eight of Shakespeare’s plays including the Arden 3 Much Ado About Nothing (2015). Her essay collections include the Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy (Cambridge, 2nd edition, 2015), and, with Debora Shuger, Religion and Culture in Renaissance England (Cambridge, 1997).

SALA 2025: The South Asian Literature and Art Festival
2025-09-13 - 2025-09-14 | Menlo College, 1000 El Camino Real, Atherton, CA, 94027, United States
Organized by Menlo College in collaboration with Art Forum SF, the South Asian Literature and Art Festival (SALA) showcases contemporary reflections on literature and art from the sub-continent and its diaspora. Showcasing South Asian culture and diasporic concerns, it features highly-acclaimed, contemporary South Asian speakers as well as over twenty panel discussions on art, literature, poetry, cinema, culinary arts, and more. This year’s theme, “thoughts without borders,” draws our attention to the need to come together in our contemporary moment to examine the borders we create, such as caste, class, gender, and nationhood, which can serve to separate instead of connect us.
The Festival will take place September 13-14 at Menlo College in Atherton, and it is co-sponsored by the UC Santa Cruz Center for South Asian Studies.
For more information, please visit the Festival website: https://www.salafestival.org/

John Scalzi - The Shattering Peace
2025-09-18 19:00 - 20:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes acclaimed science fiction master John Scalzi who, after a decade, returns to the galaxy of the Old Man’s War series with the long awaited seventh book, The Shattering Peace. This event is co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute.
“John Scalzi writes science fiction that is fun, intelligent, and irreverent. I haven’t enjoyed science fiction this much in years.” —Christopher Paolini, author of Eragon

Your RSVP helps Bookshop plan for your arrival and keep in touch with any changes. Thank you for registering!
THE PEACE IS SHATTERING: For a decade, peace has reigned in interstellar space. A tripartite agreement between the Colonial Union, the Earth, and the alien Conclave has kept the forces of war at bay, even when some would have preferred to return to the fighting and struggle of former times. For now, more sensible heads have prevailed – and have even championed unity.
But now, there is a new force that threatens the hard-maintained peace: The Consu, the most advanced intelligent species humans have ever met, are on the cusp of a species-defining civil war. This war is between Consu factions… but nothing the Consu ever do is just about them. The Colonial Union, the Earth and the Conclave have been unwillingly dragged into the conflict, in the most surprising of ways.
Gretchen Trujillo is a mid-level diplomat, working in an unimportant part of the Colonial Union bureaucracy. But when she is called to take part in a secret mission involving representatives from every powerful faction in space, what she finds there has the chance to redefine the destinies of humans and aliens alike… or destroy them forever.
John Scalzi is one of the most popular science fiction authors of his generation. His debut, Old Man’s War, won him the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. His New York Times bestsellers include The Last Colony, Fuzzy Nation, Redshirts (which won the Hugo Award for Best Novel), The Last Emperox, The Kaiju Preservation Society, and Starter Villain. Material from his blog, Whatever, has earned him two other Hugo Awards. He lives in Ohio with his wife and daughter.

Doreen Lee - The Urban Grotesque
2025-09-29 10:00 - 12:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
The Center for Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions (SEACoast) invites you to a Slow Seminar on the new book: The Urban Grotesque: Jakarta’s Financial Lives by Prof. Doreen Lee, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Northeastern University. Opening comments will be made by Dr. Kirsten Keller.

Advance copies of the reading will be made available to those who R.S.V.P. indicating that they plan to attend.

More-than-Human(ities) Lab Meet-and-Greet
2025-09-30 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The More-than-Human(ities) Lab is a multidisciplinary “playgroup”–to borrow from Anna Tsing–dedicated to sharing resources in support of collaborative environmental humanities research. Launched in 2024 as a research cluster of The Humanities Institute, MtH offers speaking events, reading groups, and manuscript “share seshes” for those interested in the more-than-human and with different intellectual, artistic, and community-engaged roots. From its start, our sincere aim has been to make the group a collaborative place.
To this end, we invite you to our lab’s meet-and-greet on Tuesday, September 30 from 12:00-1:30pm in Humanities 1, 210. Light refreshments will be served. This will be our chance to come together to get to know one another, share one wish, question, and/or response for/to the lab, and discuss lab activities for the year ahead.
The welcome will feature a reading by poet and essayist Pedro Uc Be from Buctzotz, Yucatán. Pedro is one of the foremost voices against the development of the so-called Maya Train. His work explores how language is inseparable from land and how environmental ethics are frequently embedded within language itself.
You may also sign up for updates on the website linked above. This event is open to UCSC faculty, students, and staff only.

Saturday Shakespeare - The Tragedy of King Richard II
2025-10-04 10:15 - 12:15, 2025-10-11 10:15 - 12:15 | Virtual and In Person
Saturday Shakespeare in Santa Cruz Presents The Tragedy of King Richard II by William Shakespeare Aptos Library on October 4, 11, 18, 25 & November 1, 2025 at 10:15 a.m. in the Aptos Library Betty Leonard Community Room (in person or join by Zoom). The first hour will be a conversation with the scheduled guest speaker followed by volunteer read aloud of the play. This event series is co-sponsored by the UC Santa Cruz Shakespeare Workshop.
For more information, Zoom Link, or to volunteer to be a reader, contact: saturdayshakespeare@gmail.com
Guest Speakers / Film Presentation

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

Filipino American History Month Festival
2025-10-04 12:00 - 18:00 | Watsonville City Plaza, 358 Main St., Watsonville, CA, 95076, United States
Join us in celebrating Filipino American History Month with a powerful day of culture, art, food, and community—honoring the legacy of the Manong Generation and the stories that shaped the Pajaro Valley. This event is presented by the Tobera Project and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute and Watsonville is in the Heart.
Featuring:

Live Performances
Filipino Food
Local Makers & Artists
Cultural Showcases
Family-Friendly Fun

Falafel Welcome Lunch with The Center for the Middle East and North Africa
2025-10-06 12:00 - 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Center for the Middle East and North Africa invites all CMENA affiliates and students to a falafel welcome lunch. Come catch up with one another, meet CMENA faculty, and learn about the Middle Eastern and North African Studies (MENAS) Minor.

Humanities Division Experiential Learning Info Session
2025-10-07 16:00 - 16:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Join us for an info session with Kylie Rachwalski, Assistant Director of Experiential Learning in the UCSC Humanities Division to learn more about Humanities EXCEL and EXPLORE Programs for humanities undergraduate students.

Humanities EXCEL is a paid internship program for Humanities majors and minors, connecting you with community organizations where you’ll gain hands-on experience, mentorship, and real-world skills.
Humanities EXPLORE is a paid undergraduate research program where you work on faculty-led research projects, deepening your academic experience while building career-ready skills.

Both programs pay $20/hour for working 10–15 hours per week. Some positions run September–June, while others run January-June (or into the summer).
More information and zoom link at: Humanities EXCEL and EXPLORE Programs.

This Info Session is being led by the Humanities Division. The Mellon Foundation, The Helen and Will Webster Foundation, The Humanities Institute, the UCSC Humanities Division, and private donors generously support the Humanities EXCEL and EXPLORE Programs.

The Memoirs of Robert & Mabel Williams: African American Freedom, Armed Resistance, and International Solidarity
2025-10-07 17:30 | Oakes Learning Center, UCSC
Presented by The Center for Racial Justice. Cosponsored by Oakes College. Free and open to the public.
Born in Jim Crow–era Monroe, North Carolina, Robert F. Williams and Mabel R. Williams were the state’s most legendary African American freedom fighters.

The Williamses’ leadership in Monroe was just the beginning of a lifelong pursuit of freedom and justice for Black people in the United States and for oppressed populations throughout the world. Their activism foreshadowed major developments in the civil rights and Black Power movements, including Malcolm X’s advocacy of fighting oppression “by any means necessary,” the emergence of the Black Panther Party, and Black solidarity with Third World liberation movements.
Robert documented his experiences in Monroe in his classic 1962 book, NEGROES WITH GUNS, and completed a draft of his memoir, WHILE GOD LAY SLEEPING, months before his death in 1996. Mabel began a memoir of her own before her death in 2014. The family selected John Bracey Jr., Akinyele K. Umoja, and Gloria Aneb House to edit and complete the manuscripts, which are presented together in this book, offering a gripping portrait of these pioneering freedom fighters that is both deeply intimate and a fierce call to action in the ongoing fight against racial injustice.

Akinyele K. Umoja is a professor of Africana studies at Georgia State University.
Lisa Williams is the daughter-in-law of Robert and Mabel Williams.

Master Class: Jaron Lanier – Music & The Future of Humanity
2025-10-07 19:00 | Kuumbwa Jazz Center
Jaron Lanier is a musician, computer scientist, visual artist, writer, technologist, and futurist who is considered a founder of the field of virtual reality. In Music & The Future of Humanity Lanier will be joined by the Free Waves trio, featuring Tim Jackson and Zack Olsen, singer/songwriter Harper Simon, Haruki Fujii and members of the Santa Cruz Symphony.
Can’t make it in-person? You can stream it! Click here to register.

This event is presented by Kuumbwa Jazz Center, and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute

María Puig de la Bellacasa - Inheriting the Burdens of Human–Soil Belonging
2025-10-08 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Co-sponsored by History of Consciousness: earth ecologies x technoscience

This talk offers a speculative reading of practices that reclaim and reimagine human–soil relations within the legacies of anthropocentric, productionist, and colonial ecologies. I explore how soils come to epitomize planet Earth, life, death and memory, as well as the fraught significance of writing alternative stories of soil belonging amid the rise of white supremacist autochthonism. When nostalgic pasts and anticipated futures lose their appeal, learning from soils becomes a way of surfacing time—bringing up temporalities that resist linearity. Soil-centered worlds reorient attention toward the mixed, impure, and generative potentialities of more-than-human belonging.
María Puig de la Bellacasa works at the intersection of environmental humanities, socio-cultural studies of science, and feminist theory. Her book Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More-than-Human Worlds (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) brings feminist materialist care theory into conversation with debates on more-than-human ontologies and ecological practices. She is also co-editor of Ecological Reparation (Bristol University Press, 2023) and Reactivating Elements (Duke University Press, 2022). Her talk draws from a manuscript in progress, tentatively titled When the Word for World is Soil, which explores shifting human-soil relations across science, ecological movements, and aesthetics in visual art and public culture.

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

Talking Tales of the Undead
2025-10-08 18:30 - 20:00 | Santa Cruz Public Library – Downtown Branch, 224 Church Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Get ready for the season with vampires, ghouls and zombies!

Join UC Santa Cruz professors Michael Chemers (The Monster in Theater History), Renée Fox (The Necromantics), and Kimberly Lau (Specters of the Marvelous) as they discuss the histories and politics of vampires, ghouls, zombies and other undead monsters in literature, theater, and pop culture.

The Center for Monster Studies at UC Santa Cruz aims to explore the role of monsters in culture and humanities. Monsters play a role in the representation of some of the most challenging problems facing our world: matters of race and religion, social justice, and environmental threats.

Sociality, Science, and Surveillance: Plantations in the 21st Century
2025-10-09 - 2025-10-10 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Center for South Asian Studies (CSAS) at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in partnership with Santa Clara University, invites you to a two-day academic workshop exploring the effects and imprints of the plantation complex on life and land in South Asia and beyond.
South Asia has had a long, complicated history with plantations. The indentured world that it engineered took every form of life under its control. With its intact economic, scientific, social, cultural aspects, the plantation complex survived into the post-colonial period in South Asia and among its historically displaced communities worldwide. UC Santa Cruz’s Dolly Kikon and Sanjay Barbora and Santa Clara University’s Mythri Jegathesan will convene a lively discussion on the sociality, science, and surveillance that structure the plantation worlds of 21st-century South Asia.
The workshop will take place from 9am-4:00pm on Thursday, October 9, with a dinner and reception to follow, and it will reconvene on Friday, October 10, from 9:30am-5:30pm.
For the full Conference Program and more information, please visit: https://csas.ucsc.edu/2025-26-events/
Photo credit: Dolly Kikon; Rani, Assam; 2023

Orientation to Community Archiving
2025-10-13 15:00 - 16:30 | Humanities 2, Room 259
Learn about the importance of preserving and documenting the history and culture of our community through archiving.
We will discuss how the rise of interest in Community Archives has transformed the way collective memories are curated, capturing forgotten and suppressed voices, reshaping our understanding of what archives are and how they function, and challenging long-held assumptions about the role of professionals in mediating and sharing history.

Rebecca Hernandez is currently the inaugural Community Archivist at the UC Santa Cruz University Library, where she collaborates with community members to preserve the rich history and cultural heritage of Santa Cruz County. Her academic background includes a PhD in American Studies, MA in American Indian Studies, and an MFA in Design.

A virtual option is available. Space is limited.
More information available here.
This event is presented by the The Humanities Division Employing Humanities Program and UC Santa Cruz Special Collections & Archives.

Slugs and Steins with Professor Kimberly Lau - Race and the European Fairy Tale: The Making of a White Genre
2025-10-13 18:30 - 20:00 | Virtual Event
In this talk, Kimberly Lau offers intertwined readings of several cognate fairy tales that revolve around true and false brides, beginning with Black slaves and white fairies in 17th-century Naples and tracing their evolution into (implicitly raced but unmarked) kind and unkind girls in 19th-century Germany. Through her readings, Lau illustrates some of the ways that culturally specific, historical ideas about race, racial thinking, and racism have contributed to the development of the European fairy tale as a genre as well as to the creation of the fairy tale’s enduringly white world.

Kimberly J. Lau is Professor of Literature and Provost of College Nine and John R. Lewis College. She is the author of Specters of the Marvelous: Race and the Development of the European Fairy Tale (2025); Erotic Infidelities: Love and Enchantment in Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber” (2015), Body Language: Sisters in Shape, Black Women’s Fitness, and Feminist Identity Politics (2011), and New Age Capitalism: Making Money East of Eden (2000), as well as articles in a number of interdisciplinary journals. Her research interests include fairy tales, folklore, and fantasy; feminist theory and critical race studies; the intersection of popular and political cultures and monster studies.
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.

Malcolm Gladwell—Revenge of the Tipping Point
2025-10-14 19:00 - 20:00 | Rio Theater, 1205 Soquel Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95062, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes #1 New York Times bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell for a discussion about Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering. In this provocative new work, Malcolm Gladwell returns for the first time in twenty-five years to the subject of social epidemics and tipping points, this time with the aim of explaining the dark side of contagious phenomena.

This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz

Why is Miami…Miami? What does the heartbreaking fate of the cheetah tell us about the way we raise our children? Why do Ivy League schools care so much about sports? What is the Magic Third, and what does it mean for racial harmony? In this provocative new work, Malcolm Gladwell returns for the first time in twenty-five years to the subject of social epidemics and tipping points, this time with the aim of explaining the dark side of contagious phenomena.
Through a series of riveting stories, Gladwell traces the rise of a new and troubling form of social engineering. He takes us to the streets of Los Angeles to meet the world’s most successful bank robbers, rediscovers a forgotten television show from the 1970s that changed the world, visits the site of a historic experiment on a tiny cul-de-sac in northern California, and offers an alternate history of two of the biggest epidemics of our day: COVID and the opioid crisis. Revenge of the Tipping Point is Gladwell’s most personal book yet. With his characteristic mix of storytelling and social science, he offers a guide to making sense of the contagions of modern world. It’s time we took tipping points seriously.
Malcolm Gladwell is the author of eight New York Timesbestsellers: The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, David and Goliath, Talking to Strangers, The Bomber Mafiaand Revenge of the Tipping Point. He is also the co-founder of Pushkin Industries, an audio production company that produces audiobooks like Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon, as well as podcasts including Revisionist History, Broken Record, The Happiness Lab, Against the Rules, and Medal of Honor: Stories of Courage. Gladwell has been included in the Time 100 Most Influential People list and was named one of Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers. Previously, he was a staff writer for The New Yorker. Gladwell was born in England and grew up in rural Ontario. He lives in New York.

Festival of Monsters
2025-10-15 - 2025-10-18 | UC Santa Cruz
Held on the beautiful UC Santa Cruz campus, the 2025 Festival of Monsters academic conference (Oct. 15-18) includes panels on cannibalism, classic monsters, child monsters and the monsters of childhood, Chicanix Nuclear Gothic and more. David Livingstone Smith, Kim Lau and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen will give this year’s keynote talks.
The main conference will take place on the UC Santa Cruz campus on Oct. 16-17, with a reception and opening talk Oct. 15 at the Museum of Art and History and a day of public events in downtown Santa Cruz on Oct. 18.
The registration fee includes a welcome reception the evening of Oct. 15, breakfast and lunch on Oct. 16 and 17, a closing Monsters Ball on the evening of Oct. 17, and all conference events. All conference presenters and attendees should register for the conference by Monday, Sept. 15, 2025.
The conference costs $275 for tenure track faculty and $225 for graduate students, contingent faculty and independent scholars. Current UC Santa Cruz students, staff and faculty may attend the conference for free. The free registration DOES NOT include food.

Please visit: https://www.monsterstudies.ucsc.edu/2025fest for registration and logistical information
Sponsors for the 2025 Festival of Monsters include Porter College; The Arts Research Institute; The Humanities Institute; the Sigfried and Elizabeth Mignon Puknat Endowment; the UC Santa Cruz Department of Literature; the UC Santa Cruz Department of Performance, Play and Design; Bookshop Santa Cruz; Atlantis Fantasyworld; Game Santa Cruz; and James Gunderson.

Navyug Gill - Labor History and the Accumulation of Difference in Colonial Panjab
2025-10-15 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Within the British empire, Panjab has long been regarded as the quintessential agrarian province inhabited by a diligent, prosperous and “martial race” of peasants. Against such essentialist depictions, I explore the landowning peasant and landless laborer as novel subjects forged in the encounter between colonialism and struggles over culture and capital within Panjabi society. Company officials and ascendant Panjabis together disrupted existing forms of identity and activity to generate a new kind of hierarchy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through an interrogation of a disparate archive – settlement reports and legal judgments to labor contracts, vernacular poetry and family budgets – I challenge the givenness of the peasant by explicating the ideological and material divisions that transformed the equation of rural power, and thus reconfigured global capitalism. Weaving together economic logic with cultural difference, this presentation offers a way to re-think comparative political economy alongside alternative possibilities for emancipatory futures.

Navyug Gill is a historian of modern South Asia and global history. He is Associate Professor in the Department of History, Philosophy and Liberal Studies at William Paterson University. His research explores questions of agrarian change, labor politics, caste hierarchy, postcolonial critique and histories of capitalism. His first book, Labors of Division: Global Capitalism and the Emergence of the Peasant in Colonial Panjab, was published by Stanford University Press in 2024. A South Asia edition was released by Navayana in 2025. The book won the “Henry A. Wallace Award” for the best book on agricultural history outside the US from the AgriculturalHistory Society. Gill’s scholarly and public writings have appeared in venues such as Past and Present, the Journal of Asian Studies, Economic and Political Weekly, Al Jazeera, the Law and Political Economy Project and Trolley Times.

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

PhD+ Workshop - Archives 101 for Graduate Students
2025-10-16 13:00 - 14:00 | McHenry Library (3rd Floor), Special Collections
Feeling the archival impulse? Come get some hands-on experiences with McHenry Library’s Special Collections, chat about archives with your fellow grad students, and get your questions answered about archival research at UCSC and beyond.

Curious undergrads are welcome, too! Space is limited.

This event is presented by the Center for Archival Research & Training (CART) in Special Collections & Archives and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the 10th 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 Cindy Juyoung Ok
2025-10-16 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Wonder as the Source
Cindy Juyoung Ok is the author of Ward Toward and the translator of The Hell of That Star by Kim Hyesoon. She was a finalist for a 2022 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, has served as a Poetry Foundation Library Forms & Features visiting teaching artist, and was a reviewer for Harriet Books in 2022-2023. Ok, formerly a high school physics teacher, now works as an assistant English professor. You can find Ok’s published work in The Nation, The Yale Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere.
About the Living Writers Series
The Living Writers Series (LWS) is a live reading series organized especially for the Creative Writing Program community at UCSC. There is a new series each quarter, and each series features writers with unique voices. The LWS is open to all creative writing students and the public.

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

John Freeman - California Rewritten
2025-10-16 19:00 - 20:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes author, editor, and poet John Freeman for a conversation with Karen Tei Yamashita about his new book California Rewritten: A Journey Through the Golden State’s New Literature. This event is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute.
“In Freeman’s hands, California is a literary mecca, and each essay a revelation.” —Ingrid Rojas Contreras, author of The Man Who Could Move Clouds

Your RSVP helps us plan for your arrival and keep in touch with any changes. Thank you for registering!
Dive into the revelatory worlds of California’s most exciting writers, and discover how their books uncover our history and can help us imagine our shared future. Percival Everett, Rebecca Solnit, Tommy Orange, Michael Connelly, Julie Otsuka: As John Freeman writes in California Rewritten, “Literature of so many kinds and so many genres from so many different types of people—at the highest level—has been coming out of California and from Californians for decades now.” Freeman, one of the sharpest editors working today, has followed the evolution of California’s literary life since his teenage years in Sacramento. In over fifty essays inspired by his hosting of Alta Journal’s popular California Book Club, he offers an essential road map to California literature now. He shows us how the state’s most exciting writers can unlock our understanding of the past, and how they can deepen our imaginations as we confront the most pressing issues that face our society: labor and inequality, migration and citizenship, technology and its limits, changing landscapes and climate catastrophe. Incisive and compulsively readable, California Rewritten will be a source of empowering discovery for any book lover who cares about the Golden State.
John Freeman has hosted Alta’s California Book Club since its founding in 2020. He is an executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf, and he edited Freeman’s (2015-2023), a literary annual of new writing. His books include How to Read a Novelist and Dictionary of the Undoing, as well as the anthologies Tales of Two Americas, Tales of Two Planets, The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, and Sacramento Noir. He is also the author of three poetry collections, Maps, The Park, and Wind, Trees. His work is translated into more than twenty languages, and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Times. The former editor of Granta, he lives in New York.
Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of seven books (including I Hotel, finalist for the National Book Award, and most recently Sansei and Sensibility), all published by Coffee House Press. Recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, and a United States Artists’ Ford Foundation Fellowship, she is professor emerita of literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
