Nick Montfort: "Curveship: Interactive Narrating for Interactive Fiction"
2011-01-11 16:00 - 18:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Social Sciences 2, Room 75, Social Sciences 2‎ University of California Santa Cruz, College Ten, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Curveship is an interactive fiction (IF) development system that adds support for interactive narrating — automatic narrative variation that is accomplished through text generation. For 30 years, IF development systems have done very well at allowing us to build and manipulate world models, which are then encountered by players using text-based interfaces. Curveship aims to do for the *narrative discourse* what IF has already done for the underlying story world, to allow us to change important things about the narrating as easily as we can move a simulated object from one room to another. The system aims to facilitate research and teaching in AI (and expressive AI particularly), computational creativity, creative NLP, and narrative theory, while also allowing allow author/programmers to create new sorts of games with new literary aspects. In my talk, I will demo the system and, in theoretical and practical terms, discuss:
– Curveship’s representation of actions.
– Writing string-with-slots templates for description and representation.
– Generating text using only high-level narrative parameters.
– Developing different types of “spin” — specifications for narrating.
Curveship has been tested and used in research by a small group; it is
being prepared for a public release early in 2011.
Nick Montfort writes computational and constrained poetry, develops computer games, and is a critic, theorist, and scholar of computational art and media. He is associate professor of digital media in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is now serving as president of the Electronic Literature Organization. He earned a Ph.D. in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania.
He collaborated on the blog Grand Text Auto, the sticker novel Implementation, and 2002: A Palindrome Story. He writes poems, text generators, and interactive fiction. Montfort has co-edited The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1 (ELO, 2006) and The New Media Reader (MIT Press, 2003) and written Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (MIT Press, 2003), Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, (with Ian Bogost, MIT Press, 2009) and Riddle & Bind (Spineless Books, 2010).

Vilashini Cooppan: “Disciplining World Literature: History, Memory, & the Work of Worlding”
2011-01-12 12:15 - 13:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Professor Cooppan’s in-progress Race, Writing, and the Literary World System combines the economic analysis of world systems theory, world literature models of global literary movement, traditional theory and history of the novel, and psychoanalytic and philosophical studies of political affect. It explores how literary economies have helped to express, translate, shape, and contest the history of modern racial power, from slavery and empire to apartheid and the war on terror.
Vilashini Cooppan is Associate Professor of Literature, UCSC.
Sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies with staff support provided by the Institute for Humanities Research, UCSC.

Bishnupriya Ghosh: "The 'Saint of the Gutters': Mother Teresa as Corporeal Aperture"
2011-01-12 16:30 - 18:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The customary critique of Mother Teresa reads her image as a compromised mass commodity, the anointed saint who habitually produces the “third world” as her necessary gutter. While it is certainly the case that global icons of her ilk lure consumers into commodity fetishism, isolating them from social relations, we see these recursive images routinely deployed in challenges to hegemonic institutions all over the world; reassembled culturally familiar icons surface in the new negotiations over global modernity, often making the news when they instigate outbreaks of iconophobia or iconomania. These iconoclashes suggest there is more to the story of mass stupefaction told in the iconoclastic critique. What better way to think beyond this promissory skepticism than to relocate the scholarly gaze to a global region replete with rich cultural histories of icon veneration? Mother Teresa, then, provides an exemplary instance of a general social phenomena: the periodic outbreaks of anger, grief, even riots, around highly visible public figures (a Lady Diana, a Barack Obama, or an Eva Perón) circulating as icons in mass media. Looking closely at her eruption as popular saint in Kolkata, the talk argues for a reconstituted theory of the icon properly attentive to the mass commodity’s sudden volatilization into a magical technology of the popular.
With a doctorate from Northwestern University, Bishnupriya Ghosh is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she teaches postcolonial theory, literature, and global media studies. She has published essays on literature, film and visual culture in several anthologies, as well as journals such as boundary 2, Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Public Culture and Screen; a monograph, When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel (Rutgers UP, 2004); and a co-edited volume, Interventions (Garland, 1997). Her current projects include a second monograph, Global Icons in Public Culture (forthcoming Duke UP) and a web-project on speculative communication in HIV/AIDS prevention media.
This event is presented by the Department of Feminist Studies. It was made possible by generous contributions from the Departments of Film and Digital Media, Literature, History of Art and Visual Culture and Anthropology.

Nick Montfort: Riddle & Bind & Generators
2011-01-12 17:00 - 18:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Nick Montfort will read from his recent book, Riddle & Bind (Spineless Books, 2010), which contains poems that relate to his work in digital media. These include riddles (figuratively describing something that is left for the reader to guess) as well as constrained writing à la Oulipo. Then, he’ll read some of the output of a few of my concise, free text generators, including my just-published collaboration with Stephanie Strickland, Sea and Spar Between. The words in Sea and Spar Between come from Emily Dickinson’s poems and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. The talk will conclude with him taking questions and discussing the poems and systems presented.

CANCELLED: The Writing Program's 2011 Reading Series
2011-01-12 19:00 - 20:30 | Santa Cruz, 95064, United States
The The Writing Program’s 2011 Reading Series has been cancelled on 01/12/2011 due to illness.
Chuck Atkinson will be reading poetry. Sarah Rabkin will be reading from her forthcoming book, What I Learned at Bug Camp: Essays on Finding a Home in the World. Stephen Sweat will be presenting on the representation of literacy in eighteenth-century engravings. It promises to be an evening of tremendous fun and relaxation as the quarter begins. Please join us for a fantastic evening, and see that we all do far more than teach in the classroom.

Joshua Schreier: "Arabs of the Jewish Faith: The Civilizing Mission in Colonial Algeria"
2011-01-13 12:00 - 13:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
How did Algerian Jews respond to and appropriate France’s newly conceived “civilizing mission” in the mid-nineteenth century? The mission to civilize may have been rooted in French Revolutionary ideals of regeneration, enlightenment, and emancipation, but it developed “on the ground” as a strategic response to the challenges of controlling the diverse and unruly populations of Algeria’s cities. This meant weakening the influence of local networks and institutions in Algeria by “uplifting” the supposedly oppressed and corrupt Jews of Algeria and attaching them to the French administration. Central to this gendered, moralizing campaign was an effort to submit Algerian Jews to French marriage and family law. Taken together, civilizing’s various policies were intended to help establish a colonial hierarchy by dividing Jews from their Muslim neighbors. Local Algerian Jews, however, were not passive recipients of this campaign. While energetically adopting the language of civilization, they used it to maintain their own rabbis, synagogues, and schools, and to resist policies intended to reshape their marriage customs, institutional life, and religious faith.
Joshua Schreier is an Associate Professor of History at Vassar College. He was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Baltimore, Maryland. He received is BA from the University of Chicago and his MA and Ph.D. from New York University. He has also studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Middlebury College.
Schreier works at the intersection of Middle Eastern, Algerian, Jewish, and French histories. His research focuses on French colonialism in Algeria, and notably how several deeply-rooted North African Jewish communities responded to French imperial policy in the years before the rise of the “Imperial” (Third) Republic in 1870. He is interested in how French officials deployed the ideology of “civilization” to consolidate colonial rule, but also how local actors co-opted, reformulated, or deflected it. He has also written about how French lawmakers and legal thinkers used Jewish and Muslim religious law, and specifically those concerning the family, to deny or confer citizenship to Algerian Muslims and Jews. His forthcoming book is entitled “‘Arabs of the Jewish Faith:’ The Civilizing Mission in Colonial Algeria.”
Professor Schreier teaches an introductory course on the modern Middle East, as well as intermediate courses on the Israel-Palestine conflict and French colonial cultures.
This event is cosponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies and the UC Mediterranean Studies MRP.

John MacFarlane: "A Puzzle about Modal Necessity"
2011-01-13 16:00 - 18:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
When does it make sense to be uncertain whether it’s possible that p? On many accounts of the semantics of epistemic modals, including the one favored by Professor MacFarlane, epistemic modal uncertainty should be appropriate only when one is (a) uncertain about what one knows, or more generally about what is contained in the body of information relevant to evaluating the modal, or (b) uncertain about whether the complement of the modal is compatible with that body of information. However, there are cases in which epistemic modal uncertainty seems natural even though neither of these conditions is met. Professor MacFarlane will consider what should be said about these cases, and about parallel cases of uncertainty about what ought to be done.
John MacFarlane is Professor of Philosophy and a member of the Group in Logic and the Methodology of Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He grew up in northern New Mexico and attended Harvard University, graduating in 1991 with an A.B. summa cum laude in Philosophy and an honors thesis on Plato’s Protagoras and Gorgias. After a year working on the Navajo reservation in Arizona, he went on to the University of Pittsburgh, earning an M.A. in Classics in 1997 and a Ph.D. in Philosophy in 2000. His dissertation, “What Does It Mean to Say that Logic Is Formal?”, which he wrote under the supervision of Robert Brandom and Nuel D. Belnap, sought to illuminate contemporary debates about the demarcation of logic by looking at the genealogy of some key concepts used in those debates. MacFarlane has been teaching at Berkeley since 2000. While he has continued to work and teach in ancient philosophy and the philosophy of logic, the main focus of his research in the last eight years has been the philosophy of language. He has sought to make intellectually respectable the idea that the contents of our thought and talk can be “assessment-sensitive”–that is, their truth as assessed from a context can depend on features of that context–and put this idea to use in solving philosophical and semantic problems concerning future contingents, epistemic and deontic modals, knowledge attributions, claims of taste, and indicative conditionals. He is currently working on a unified, book-length presentation of this work.

A Celebration of Karen Tei Yamashita's Novel "I Hotel"
2011-01-13 18:00 - 19:45 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
As part of the Living Writers Series, Literature and Creative Writing Professor Karen Tei Yamashita will read from her novel, I Hotel; Finalist for the 2010 National Book Award, Fiction.
There will also be conversations with:
• Allan Kornblum, publisher for Coffee House Press
• Sina Grace, illustrator of I Hotel and UCSC Creative Writing alum.
Copies of I Hotel will be available for purchase at the event, courtesy of Bay Tree Bookstore.
Sponsored by the Humanities Division, Literature Department and the Creative Writing Program.
Read the full article: UC Santa Cruz Literature professor nominated for National Book Award.
This event is sponsored by The Humanities Division, The Literature Department and The Creative Writing Program.

Heather Love: “The Stigma Archive”
2011-01-19 12:15 - 13:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Professor Love, author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard, 2007), is at the Stanford Humanities Center this year. She is working on a book on the source materials for Erving Goffman’s Stigma: On the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963). Stigma serves as a methodological case study for thinking through the challenges and possibilities of comparative studies of social exclusion.
Heather Love is Associate Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania.
Sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies with staff support provided by the Institute for Humanities Research, UCSC

IHR Workshop: "Essential Humanities Research Tools and Hidden Gems"
2011-01-20 12:00 - 13:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
McHenry Library, Photo by Lindsay Winblad
Would you like an opportunity to become (re)acquainted with some of the library’s electronic resources for humanists and also learn about some of the less-known features of these databases? Please join librarians Kerry Scott and Elisabeth Remak-Honnef for an overview of these resources. This session is aimed at faculty, staff and grad students in the humanities. We welcome your questions!

Living Writers Series: Micah Perks and Melissa Sanders-Self
2011-01-20 18:00 - 19:45 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Micah Perks is the author of a novel, We Are Gathered Here and a memoir, Pagan Time. She has published short stories in ZYZZYVA, Massachusetts Review, The Best Underground Fiction and many others. Her stories have twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and she has been the recipient of a Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts Grant, three Blue Mountain Center Residencies and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.

Melissa Sanders-Self has published fiction with New Rivers Press, New Brighton Books, and Doubleday. Her first novel, All That Lives, was published by Warner Books. She is currently working on a new novel and is a lecturer in creative writing at UC Santa Cruz and at Western Connecticut State University’s MFA program.
Co-sponsored by the Creative Writing Program, the Literature Department, and the Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund.

Community Book Group with Karen Tei Yamashita
2011-01-25 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Dazzling and ambitious, this hip, multi-voiced fusion of prose, playwriting, graphic art, and philosophy spins an epic tale of America’s struggle for civil rights as it played out in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Divided into ten novellas, one for each year, I Hotel begins in 1968, when Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, students took to the streets, the Vietnam War raged, and cities burned.
As Karen Yamashita’s motley cast of students, laborers, artists, revolutionaries, and provocateurs make their way through the history of the day, they become caught in a riptide of politics and passion, clashing ideologies and personal turmoil. And by the time the survivors unite to save the International Hotel—epicenter of the Yellow Power Movement—their stories have come to define the very heart of the American experience.
We invite you to read I Hotel, then come to Bookshop Santa Cruz on January 25th for a community discussion of the book facilitated by Julie Minnis. It will be followed by a dialogue with Karen Yamashita.
For more information:
http://news.ucsc.edu/2011/01/yamashita-bookshop-appearance.html
http://www.bookshopsantacruz.com/event/community-book-group-karen-tei-yamashita
http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/education/ci_17008747

Megan C. Thomas: “Secrecy’s Use: Education, Enlightenment, and Propaganda”
2011-01-26 12:15 - 13:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Using Mikhail Bakunin’s theorization of authority as a starting point, this talk explores secrecy as a strategy for political enlightenment, and calls attention to earlier conceptions of “propaganda” as education that were lost with the militarization of the term in the twentieth century.
Megan C. Thomas is Associate Professor of Politics at UCSC.
Sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies with staff support provided by the Institute for Humanities Research, UCSC.

Terje Lohndal: “Domains of Agreement”
2011-01-27 12:00 - 13:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Current wisdom has it that syntactic agreement between one head and multiple dependents (Multiple Agree) is possible and perhaps empirically required. In this talk, I will consider data from West Flemish that bear on this issue and argue that such agreement does not exist. I will then address the question of why grammars forbid such multiple agreement. I will scrutinize two hypotheses, an intervention hypothesis and a cycliclity hypothesis, and argue that the cyclicity hypothesis is the better one.
This lecture is part of the Linguistic Department’s Winter colloquium series as well as their Syntax job search.

Peter Blickle: “New Developments in the Discourse of Heimat”
2011-01-27 16:00 - 17:00 | Humanities 1, Room 520, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Today, just as during any other period since the end of the eighteenth century, the idea of Heimat (home, homeland) is a central part of German-speaking people’s attempts to make sense of the world they live in. The regressive aspects of the idea are troubling. Any concrete interaction with the idea of Heimat in the political realm has, historically speaking, served sooner or later to further exclusions. And all too often the idea of Heimat has assisted in more than mere exclusions.
Starting with definitions from his book Heimat: A Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland (2002), Professor Blickle look at examples of such excluding uses of the traditional idea of Heimat. He then goes on to investigate more recent uses. They show the idea of Heimat in a new light – at home in the margins and including the Other rather than excluding it.
Over the past decade and a half fundamental shifts have occurred in the uses of Heimat. For many, Heimat has become mobile and unpredictable. Heimat surprises. And the fundamental feminization of the traditional Heimat has given way to more open, more ambiguous, more searching, and sometimes even more playful interactions with the world.
Peter Blickle received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1995. He is the author of two scholarly books, one in English, Heimat: A Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland (Camden House 2002), and one in German, Maria Beig und die Kunst der scheinbaren Kunstlosigkeit (Maria Beig and the Art of Appearing Primitive, Edition Isele 1997). His book on Heimat (home, homeland) has established itself as one of the standard works on this German concept. He is also the author of a novel, Blaulicht im Nebel (Ambulance in Fog, Edition Isele 2002), and he translated Rosina Lippi’s novel Homestead into German (Im Schatten der Drei Schwestern, Rowohlt/Wunderlich 2002). Together with Jaimy Gordon, he translated Maria Beig’s novel Lost Weddings into English (Persea Books 1990). For his creative works in German, he received the Irseer Pegasus Award (2004), the Robert L. Kahn Poetry Award (2007), and the Geertje Potash Prose Prize (2009). He is professor of German at Western Michigan University.

Rhacel Parreñas: "Women's Migration as Indentured Mobility: How Gendered Protectionist Laws Leave Filipina Hostesses Dependent on Migrant Brokers and Susceptible to Forced Sexual Labor"
2011-01-27 16:00 - 17:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Parreñas’ talk describes the migration process of Filipina hostesses to Japan. She explains why they are dependent on middleman brokers and how this dependency leaves them susceptible to forced sexual labor. While acknowledging the indenture and vulnerability of Filipina hostesses to abusive labor conditions, she questions universal claims of their human trafficking that has been made by the U.S. Department of State and show how the solutions advocated by the United States to their supposed trafficking actually aggravate their susceptibility to forced sexual labor. As an alternative to the idea of “human trafficking,” Parreñas introduces the concept of indentured mobility.” This concept provides a middle ground between ‘human trafficking’ and ‘independent labor migration.’ This new perspective calls for a different solution to indenture and forced labor from the universal solution of “rescue, rehabilitation, and reintegration” that has been posed by the United States.
Rhacel Salazar Parreñas is Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California. She writes on women’s issues in migration and economic globalization. Her latest book, The Force of Domesticity: Filipina Migrants and Globalization (NYU Press, 2008), examines the constitution of gender in economic globalization. Currently on sabbatical as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, she is writing a book on the labor and migration of Filipina hostesses in Tokyo.

Living Writers Series: Emily Carr, Maureen Foster, Lindsay Knisely, and Ingrid Moody
2011-01-27 18:00 - 19:45 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Emily Carr’s first book, directions for flying (Furniture Press,) is available through SPD. 13 ways of happily: books 1 & 2, chosen by Cole Swensen as the winner of the 2009 New Measures Poetry Prize, is forthcoming early next year. Until then, you can read Emily’s work in magazines like Prairie Schooner, Caketrain, Fourteen Hills, Isotope, The Capilano Review, So To Speak, ISLE, dusie, Versal, and others.
Maureen Foster is the author of two novels, Beginners, and Sparks, and her poetry and short fiction have appeared in The Pacific Review and Word River. She currently teaches writing and film at UC Santa Cruz at both Crown and Merrill Colleges.
Lindsay Knisely attended Oberlin College in Ohio, where she started out as a Neuroscience major and ended up a Creative Writing major with minors in African-American Literature and Psychology. Lindsay received her MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon, and her work has been included in several journals and anthologies, including Not A Muse: A World Poetry Anthology.
Ingrid Browning Moody’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, New South, RHINO, The Texas Review and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Arriving After Dark, won the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize and will be published by Texas Review Press in fall 2011.
Co-sponsored by the Creative Writing Program, the Literature Department, and the Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund.

"Messing with Haraway": A Celebration in Honor of Professor Donna Haraway
2011-01-28 10:00 - 15:00 | College Nine and John R. Lewis Multipurpose Room, College Ten, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Donna Haraway, Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at UC Santa Cruz, has shaped an entire generation of scholars and scholarship. Her wit, brilliance, generosity, dedication to her students has had and will continue to have immeasurable consequences. A community of scholars attuned to feminist science studies and multi-species flourishing is but one part of her unparalleled legacy.
This one day celebration is an opportunity for the UCSC community to express the effect Donna Haraway has had on the way we research, teach, learn with, think with, live with, eat with a variety of multispecies companions. Our event, “Messing with Haraway,” is about eating together, as messmates and intellectual companions, while engaging playfully with Haraway’s scholarship and continuing the game of cat’s cradle that she helped us learn how to play. The UCSC Science Studies Cluster invites you to join us for a day multi-media art, live performances, virtual presences, and a tasty meal, which is sure to be a feast for the thoughtful body, hungry mind, and feminist soul.
Admission is free and open to everyone. But because of limited space, you must RSVP to receive a ticket to this event. Please RSVP to MessingWithHaraway@gmail.com before January 15th, 2010 to ensure your place around our table.
Staff support provided by the Institute for Humanities Research

Eric Porter: Book Reading and Signing
2011-02-01 12:30 - 13:30 | Baytree Bookstore, UCSC, Bay Tree Bookstore 1156 High street, Santa Cruz, CA, 94064, United States
Eric Porter, Professor and Chair of American Studies, will be reading from his new book The Problem of the Future World: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Race Concept at Midcentury.
The Problem of the Future World is a compelling reassessment of the later writings of the iconic African American activist and intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois. As Eric Porter points out, despite the outpouring of scholarship devoted to Du Bois, the broad range of writing he produced during the 1940s and early 1950s has not been thoroughly examined in its historical context, nor has sufficient attention been paid to the theoretical interventions he made during those years. Porter locates Du Bois’s later work in relation to what he calls “the first postracial moment.” He suggests that Du Bois’s midcentury writings are so distinctive and so relevant for contemporary scholarship because they were attuned to the shape-shifting character of modern racism, and in particular to the ways that discredited racial taxonomies remained embedded and in force in existing political-economic arrangements at both the local and global levels. Porter moves the conversation about Du Bois and race forward by building on existing work about the theorist, systematically examining his later writings, and looking at them from new perspectives, partly by drawing on recent scholarship on race, neoliberalism, and empire. The Problem of the Future World shows how Du Bois’s later writings help to address race and racism as protean, global phenomena in the present.

Marcelo Dimentstein & Alejandro Dujovne: "A fragmented tradition: Jewish studies in Argentina"
2011-02-01 16:00 - 17:45 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Compared with other Jewish Communities in the diaspora, the Argentine Jewish community presents a remarkable paradox: Although it is the largest, most plural and probably the most highly institutionalized Jewish community in Latin America, it has lacked a tradition of academic Jewish studies. Taking this paradox as our point of departure, in this lecture we will explore the historical conditions that limited this development. The study of this question will allow us not only to approach the understanding of the current trends of Jewish studies in the country, but also to focus our attention on some cultural aspects of Argentine Jewish history.
Marcelo Dimentstein coordinates the JDC International Centre for Community Development (JDC-ICCD) based in Paris and Oxford. He has a degree in Social Anthropology from the University of Buenos Aires and is currently enrolled in a PhD program in History. He did research on various aspects of the Jewish Community in Argentina including the Jewish labor Bund and the urban history of the Jewish neighborhood in Buenos Aires. His dissertation is about the role of JDC in Europe between 1989 and 1999. Marcelo is a member and co-founder of the “Núcleo de Estudios Judios” (NEJ), a group of young researchers dedicated to Jewish Argentinean History.
Alejandro Dujovne holds a Ph.D. in social sciences (IDES-Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento). He is a member of the research project “Written culture, printed word and intellectual field” at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, and founder and member of the Jewish Studies Area of IDES (NEJ). He is also member of the Board of Directors of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association (LAJSA). His doctoral dissertation examined the production and circulation of books in the Jewish community of Buenos Aires in the frame of a wider transnational geography of production and circulation of “Jewish books” between 1919 and 1979. His current research focuses on the social trajectories of five Jewish publishers who were key figures in the Argentine cultural modernization process between 1946 and 1970.

Pranav Anand: “Detecting Persuasion and Argument Cross-Culturally”
2011-02-02 12:15 - 13:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
This talk reports on work that detects the kind of rhetorical structures a person uses when attempting to persuade an audience to believe or act in a certain manner. Professor Anand discusses the collection and annotation of 3000 English and 500 Arabic blogs for a variety of rhetorical structures implicated in persuasion by communication theorists and a computational system that tries to learn from these annotations.
Pranav Anand is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at UCSC.
Sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies with staff support provided by the Institute for Humanities Research, UCSC.

Keir Moulton: "CPs Don't Saturate - Deriving the Distribution of Clausal Complements"
2011-02-03 12:00 - 13:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
A classic puzzle about CPs is that they distribute differently than nominal arguments. This fact is reflected, among other things, by the order of complements in English (Stowell 1981) and the right-peripheral position of CPs in many OV languages (Hindi, Farsi, German). This distribution has traditionally been seen as a reflex of grammatical function, most famously encoded by Stowell’s case resistance principle (or modern variants, Pesetsky and Torrego 2004).
In this talk I argue that the syntactic distribution of clausal arguments has its source in the semantic type of CPs. I begin by establishing a puzzle: that clause-taking predicates only form non-event nominals. I argue that the explanation for this puzzle requires that CPs are never able to saturate an argument position (cf. Grimshaw 1990). This also prevents CPs from combining as the internal argument of verbs. The only solution, I claim, is to turn the vP into something with the meaning of a one-place, non-verbal predicate, with which the ‘complement CP’ can combine. We then show how this motivates a vP raising analysis of the rightward position of CPs (Larson 1988a,b) as opposed to an anti-symmetry analysis (Zwart 1993, and following)
Keir Moulton (McGill University) will give this job talk as a candidate for the Linguistics department’s Syntax faculty position.

Paul Bowles Centennial Festival
2011-02-04 - 2011-02-06 | Cowell Conference Room, Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Bowles at 100: A Celebration of Multi-Artistry
UCSC’s Paul Bowles Centennial Festival presents an international group of scholars, writers, filmmakers, and performers to celebrate the multi-faceted artistry of Paul Bowles. Festival highlights include: concerts of Bowles’ orchestral and vocal music; an exhibition of images and artifacts from Bowles’ six-decade career; a conference with presentations on Bowles’ activities as a writer, composer, translator, ethnographer, and traveller. The festival provides a unique opportunity to experience the depth and range of the works of this fascinating American master.
Sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, Institute for Humanities Research, Porter College, Cowell College, Office of Research, Division of the Arts, Division of Graduate Studies.
Program
Friday, February 4
CONFERENCE: COWELL CONFERENCE ROOM
9:00–9:15 am   Introductory Remarks
Tyrus Miller and Irene Herrmann
9:15–10:45 am   Paul Bowles as a Modernist: Making Strange, Making it New
Allen Hibbard, “Paul Bowles and Modernism”
Rob Wilson, “Bowles, the Beats, and ‘Fellaheen Orientalism’”
Jimmy Fazzino, “Bowles’ World Beats”
10:45–11:15 am   Coffee Break
11:15–12:45 pm   Paul Bowles in North Africa
Brian Edwards, “Paul Bowles in Moroccan Circulation”
Jeffrey Miller, “Publishing Paul Bowles: Cross-cultural Complexities”
Michael Wolfe, “Layachi, Mrabet, and Bowles: Some Memories & Reflections”
12:45–2:00 pm   Lunch Break
2:00–3:30 pm   Bowles’ Resistant Biographies
Millicent Dillon, “Paul Bowles and the Perils of Biography”
Margaux Cowden, “Seriously Queer: Reflections on the Earnest Intimacies of Jane and Paul Bowles”
Irene Herrmann, “Notes on Musical Friendship”
3:30–4:00 pm   Coffee Break
4:00–5:30 pm   Ten Minutes Walk from Bowles’ Apartment
Keynote presentation by filmmakers Karim Debbagh and Frieder Schlaich
CONCERT: MUSIC RECITAL HALL
6:00-7:30 pm   Manhattan Skyline
Ensemble Parallèle – Nicole Paiement, conductor
Michael McGushin, spoken word
The Dancer (West Coast Premiere)
Romantic Suite (West Coast Premiere)
Three Pastoral Songs (West Coast Premiere)
Selected Songs for Voice and Piano
Saturday, February 5
CONFERENCE: COWELL CONFERENCE ROOM
9:00–9:10 am   Introductory Remarks
Tyrus Miller and Irene Herrmann
9:10–10:40 am   Bowles’s Other Personae
Rodrigo Rey Rosa, “Paul Bowles as Translator”
Timothy Mangan, “Paul Bowles as Music Critic”
Philip Schuyler, “The Composer as Collector”
10:40–11:00 am   Coffee Break
11:00–12:00 pm   Excavating Paul Bowles
Film footage and presentation by Timothy Murray and Francis Poole
12:00–12:30 pm   You are Not I
Film screening with filmmaker Sara Driver
12:30–1:30 pm   Lunch Break
EXHIBITION: ELOISE PICKARD SMITH GALLERY, COWELL COLLEGE
1:30–3:30 pm “Bowles in Black and White,” Exhibition Opening and Reception
KEYNOTE PRESENTATION: HUMANITIES LECTURE HALL
3:30–5:00 pm   The Desert and Fatality: Learning from Paul Bowles
Edumund White
CONCERT: MUSIC RECITAL HALL
5:30–6:30 pm   A Musical Portrait
Brian Staufenbiel, Patrice Maginnis, voice
Michael McGushin, Irene Herrmann, piano
John Dizikes, spoken word
Two-Piano Sonata
Mexican Dances for Two Pianos (West Coast Premiere)
Blue Mountain Ballads
Two Gertrude Stein songs (West Coast Premiere)
Songs with Texts by Jane Bowles, Paul Bowles
Cuatro Canciones de Garcia Lorca
Selected Readings from Paul Bowles texts
Sunday, February 6
CONCERT: MUSIC RECITAL HALL
11:00–12:00 pm   The Unknown Bowles
Dizikes Music Event, cosponsored by Cowell College
Ariose Vocal Ensemble – Michael McGushin, conductor
Rodrigo Rey Rosa, spoken word
Sonata for Oboe and Clarinet
Folk Song Settings (arranged by Irene Herrmann)
Tornado Blues (West Coast Premiere)
Three Choral Settings of Bowles Songs (arranged by Michael McGushin)
Songs from the Sierras
Readings about Paul Bowles by his friends
12:00–1:00 pm   Bowles Festival Closing Remarks
Tyrus Miller and Irene Herrmann
Light reception to follow.

For more information visit: http://bowles.ihr.ucsc.edu/

Paul Lubeck: "The Challenge of Global Islam for American Energy Security: Explaining the Enigma of Radical Islamism in Nigeria"
2011-02-07 03:30 - 17:00 | Social Sciences 1, Room 261, Social Sciences 1‎ University of California Santa Cruz, College Ten, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
CGIRS and College Nine Faculty Research Seminar Series
The CGIRS and College Nine seminar series is an inter-disciplinary venue in which UCSC faculty can present their research to the community of professors and students who are interested in international, comparative, transnational and area studies work. Our goal is to promote dialogue and awareness of the types of research we conduct on our campus. Please join us for our second year on the first Mondays of the month at Social Sciences 1 room 261 from 3:30-5:00 pm.
All are welcome – Refreshments served
February 7th: Paul Lubeck (Sociology) with discussant Terry Burke (History)

Alon Tal: "War, Peace and the Environment in the Middle East"
2011-02-07 19:00 - 20:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The history of the Israeli- Arab wars has had environmental implications which are often overlooked. Some pessimists argue that the next war will in the Middle East will be fought over water resources, especially with climate change so profoundly changing precipitation patterns in the Mediterranean region. As the conflict drags on past its 60th year, we will consider how the environment of Israel and in neighboring lands has been affected. How might the environment provide a bridge to bring the parties together? Did past peace agreements do a good job of ensuring environmental cooperation? President Obama is not the first to propose a “peace park” as one way of breaking the impasse on the Golan Heights. Learn about Naharaim – the existing Israeli- Jordan peace park and consider Israel’s environment in a regional context.
Professor Tal’s career has been a balance between academia and public interest advocacy. He is presently an Associate Professor of Environmental Policy at Ben Gurion University and chairman of Israel’s green party – “the Green Movement”. Tal has held faculty appointments at Tel Aviv and Hebrew Universities in Israel, and was a visiting professor at the University of Otago in New Zealand. Between 1990 and 1998 he was an adjunct faculty member at Harvard University. Dr. Tal was the founding director of Adam Teva V’din, the Israel Union for Environmental Defense from 1990-1997, a leading public interest law group and was chairman of Life and Environment, an umbrella group for eighty environmental organizations in Israel from 1998-2003. In 1996, Dr. Tal founded the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, a graduate studies center in which Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian students join environmentalists from around the world in an advanced interdisciplinary research program. He currently is chairman of the committee for land development that oversees forestry and land reclamation on the international board of the Jewish National Fund (KKL) and represents Israel’s Foreign Ministry at the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification. In 2006 he was awarded the Charles Bronfman humanitarian prize for environmental leadership. In 2008, in honor of Israel’s 60th anniversary the Ministry of Environment granted him a life achievement award at age 48.

Dorian Bell: "A 'Paradise of Parasites': Hannah Arendt, Anti-Semitism, and the Imperial Imagination"
2011-02-09 12:15 - 13:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Professor Bell’s in-progress Frontiers of Hate: Anti-Semitism and Empire in Nineteenth-Century France explores articulations between anti-Semitism and imperialism that shaped the emergence of European racial thought. Arguing that colonial expansion helped French anti-Semitism adopt its modern racializing guise, the book also examines how anti-Semitism participated in the ideological elaboration of the imperial project.
Dorian Bell is Assistant Professor of Literature at UCSC.
Sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies with staff support provided by the Institute for Humanities Research, UCSC.

Matt Wagers: “Grammar on the Trailing Edge of the Conscious Present: What We Can Learn about Memory from Language Processing”
2011-02-09 16:00 - 18:00 | Santa Cruz, 95064, United States
Language comprehension seems fast, effortless and error-free — at least, to the extent that we can introspect about it. Underneath this apparently seamless part of our day-to-day experience lies a complex working memory system. To avoid overwhelming our limited processing capacity, information is constantly being shuffled back and forth between states of accessibility and storage, between attention and inattention. As a consequence, linguistic knowledge, richly detailed and precise, must be adapted to a working memory which is rapid and error-prone. How this adaptation can be achieved is revealing, both about how we remember language and about how we forget it.
Co-sponsored by the Institute for Humanities Research and the Department of Linguistics.

Omer Preminger: "The Nature of Syntactic Computation: Evidence from Agreement"
2011-02-10 12:00 - 13:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
In this talk, I argue for a particular logic by which agreement (in particular, agreement between a verb or tense/aspect/mood-marker and a noun-phrase) is related to grammaticality, and show how this conclusion illuminates certain longstanding questions in the theory of syntax. In particular, I argue that agreement is best captured in terms of an operation. Crucially, while invocation of this operation is obligatory, its successful culmination is not enforced by the grammar. Such a theory contrasts sharply with alternatives that enforce agreement through representational devices such as un/interpretable features (Chomsky 2000, 2001). The argument is based primarily on so-called “omnivorous agreement” effects in the Agent-Focus construction of Kaqchikel and K’ichee’, with supporting evidence from Basque, Icelandic, and Hebrew. I then show how this conclusion leads to: (i) a reexamination of the relations between movement, agreement, and grammaticality; (ii) a particular understanding of what it means for a language to allow, or not allow, quirky subjects; and ultimately, (iii) the conclusion that both agreement and morphological case must be part of the syntactic component proper (contra certain recent proposals in the literature).
Omer Preminger (MIT) will give this job talk as a candidate for the Linguistics department’s Syntax faculty position.

John Jordan: “Voice and Temporality in the Illustrations to Bleak House”
2011-02-16 12:00 - 13:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Drawing on the narratological theories of Genette (“voice”) and Mieke Bal (“focalization”), Professor Jordan’s talk offers a new approach to understanding the illustrations to Dickens’s Bleak House (1852- 53) that emphasizes elements of retrospection, fantasy, and multiple temporality.
John Jordan is Professor of Literature, UCSC.

Enrico Deaglio: "Reporting Italy"
2011-02-16 17:00 - 18:30 | College 8, Room 240, College Eight 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Full of mysteries, theatrical effects, unexpected violence and unexpected compromises, recent Italian history is probably difficult to understand, but surely is not boring. It was 32 years ago when Aldo Moro, the most prominent Italian politician, was killed by the Red Brigades in the center of Rome, after a kidnapping that lasted 55 days. Thirty two years later, if you look for the truth behind that kidnapping/homicide, you won’t find it: that story is suspended, forgotten… Italy is really a country you wouldn’t have imagined.
Enrico Deaglio is a writer who has worked in journalism, television, and publishing for over 30 years. In 1996 he founded the political weekly Diario that he directed until 2008. He has written numerous books including La banalità del bene, Storia di Giorgio Perlasca and Raccolto Rosso. He co-created several investigative films: Quando c’era Silvio (2006), Uccidete la democrazia (2006), Gli imbroglioni (2007), and Fare un golpe e farla franca (2008). His most recent book is Patria (2010), covering Italian politics from 1978-2010.
Hosted by the Language Program and Italian Studies

The Helen Diller Distinguished Lecture in Jewish Studies: Robert Alter
2011-02-16 17:00 - 19:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Every year, we honor Helen Diller, whose generous endowment continues to provide crucial support to Jewish Studies at UC-Santa Cruz, by hosting a public lecture on campus by an internationally recognized scholar. This year’s lecture will be presented by Dr. Robert Alter, and is entitled “Translating the Bible: The Wisdom Books.” The lecture will take place on Wednesday, February 16th from 5-7 pm and will be followed by a reception.
Robert Alter is Class of 1937 Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress, and is past president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He has twice been a Guggenheim Fellow, has been a Senior Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, and Old Dominion Fellow at Princeton University. He has written widely on the European novel from the eighteenth century to the present, on contemporary American fiction, and on modern Hebrew literature. He has also written extensively on literary aspects of the Bible. His twenty-four published books include two prize-winning volumes on biblical narrative and poetry and award-winning translations of Genesis and of the Five Books of Moses. He has devoted book-length studies to Fielding, Stendhal, and the self-reflexive tradition in the novel. Books by him have been translated into eight different languages. Among his publications over the past nineteen years are Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (1991), The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel (1999), Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture (2000), The Five Book of Moses: A Translation with Commentary (2004), Imagined Cites (2005), The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary (2007), Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible (2010), and The Wisdom Books: A Translation with Commentary (2010). In 2009 he received the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for lifetime contribution to American letters.

Amy Rose Deal: "Case and Caselessness in Nez Perce"
2011-02-17 12:00 - 13:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Morphological case systems are frequently described in terms of distinctions related to transitivity. To a first approximation, the case system of Nez Perce nicely fits this bill: one case (ergative) marks transitive subjects, a distinct case (objective) marks transitive objects, and intransitive subjects remain in an unmarked (nominative) form.

(1)
Transitive: ERG subject, OBJ object

Caan-nim
paa-‘yaX-n-a
‘inii-ne

John-ERG
3/3-find-P-REM.PAST
house-OBJ

John found a house.

(2)
Intransitive: NOM subject

Sue
hi-pay-n-a

Sue
3SUBJ-arrive-P-REM.PAST

Sue arrived.

However, Nez Perce also shows us a series of circumstances in which the correlation between transitivity and case-marking breaks down. All transitive verbs allow both the case pattern in (1) (ERG subject, OBJ object) and the “caseless” version in (3) (NOM subject, NOM object). Both versions appear to be semantically and syntactically transitive; yet in the caseless version (3), the characteristic subject and object cases of the transitive pattern have disappeared.

(3)
Caseless transitive: NOM subject, NOM object

Caan
hi-‘yaaX-n-a
‘iniit

John
3SUBJ-find-P-REM.PAST
house

John found a house.

What controls the choice of case in transitive clauses? I argue that the deciding factor lies in the grammar of object agreement: all and only clauses with successful object agreement show the ergative and objective case. This finding calls for a theory of morphological case which accords a crucial role not to transitivity itself but to the syntax and morphology of agreement. I propose a version of this view according to which case-markers are morphological realizations of agreement features. If this sort of view can be maintained, case and agreement systems can be handled by grammatical theories which remain relatively featurally sparse. Language does not include related features for case and agreement; these are the same features appearing in distinct morphological environments.
Amy Rose Deal (Harvard) will give this job talk as a candidate for the Linguistics department’s Syntax faculty position.

Kaija Mortensen:"Thought Experiment Intuitions: Rational or Animal?"
2011-02-17 16:00 - 17:00 | Cowell Conference Room, Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
This talk is presented as part of the Philosophy Graduate Student Works in Progress series.

Cameron McNeil: "The Chocolate Tree and Its History among the Ancient Maya"
2011-02-17 17:00 - 18:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
This presentation will explore the use of the chocolate tree (Theobroma cacao L.) in Mesoamerican communities with a focus on the ancient Maya polity of Copan in Honduras. While the areas where cacao thrived in Mesoamerica were limited, the seeds were easily transportable and became a valued source of stimulants. By 1900 B.C. cacao was used in feasting rituals as evidenced by chemical residue analysis of vessels from Paso de la Amada, Mexico. For the pre-Columbian people T. cacao came to be associated with markers of life passage events (such as birth, marriage, and death), was linked to rulership and power, and was used as a medium of exchange. Where the cacao grew well, it was one of several important tree crops which undoubtedly aided populations in preserving forest cover while providing an esteemed comestible and trade good. Today, traditional cacao consumption and production has been lost in many areas, and where it remains it is on the wane for both positive and negative reasons.

Living Writers Series: Dion Farquhar and Gary Young
2011-02-17 18:00 - 19:45 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Dion Farquhar is a poet and fiction writer with recent poems in The Southeast Review, Shampoo, and/or, Dark Sky Magazine, etc. Her chapbook, Cleaving, won first prize at Poets Corner Press in 2007, and her first poetry book was published in November by Evening Street Press. She works as a Lecturer of literature and creative writing at UC Santa Cruz and teaches writing at San Jose City College.

Gary Young is a poet and artist whose honors include the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of American and a Pushcart Prize. His book of poems, The Dream of a Moral Life, won the James D. Phelan Award. He is the co-editor of The Geography of Home: California’s Poetry of Place, and Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California. Since 1975 he has designed, illustrated, and printed limited edition books and broadsides, which are represented in numerous collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Alberta Museum, and The Getty Center for the Arts.
Co-sponsored by the Creative Writing Program, the Literature Department, and the Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund.

Barbara Thompson: "Curatorial Activism: Exhibiting Arts of the 'Other'"
2011-02-22 14:00 - 16:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
In curatorial practices today, asking the question “What is art?” leads to a clear lack of a singularly “correct” answer. Expand the question to “What is African art?” and the territory becomes even murkier in that both the terms “art” and “Africa” resist definition. The navigation toward mutual understanding becomes an almost impassable quagmire of definitions, territorialism, and exclusionism, especially when expanding these questions to the exhibition of arts from various cultures around the world.
In this presentation, Dr. Barbara Thompson re-examines her use of curatorial activism in exhibitions and experimental interventions curated at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, which not only challenged older museological practices but also fostered open dialogue about the development of new paradigms.
Readings are available from macs@ucsc.edu
For more information, please contact Lucian Gomoll at macs@ucsc.edu or visit the MACS website at http://macs.ucsc.edu/
This event is co-sponsored by the Museum and Curatorial Studies (MACS) Cluster, and the History of Consciousness Department

Sandra Koelle: "Intimate Bureaucracies: Roadkill, Policy, and Fieldwork in the Shoulder"
2011-02-23 12:15 - 13:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Doctor Koelle researches how to develop data visualizations that represent spatial experience as subjective and relational rather than as defined through place. The goal is to map animal and human movements and constraints across the American West at different scales to facilitate an affective and aesthetic experience and provide a way to think about the politics of movement and immobility, from habitat destruction to transit budget cuts.

Sandra Koelle is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Humanities at Stanford University.

Sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies with staff support provided by the Institute for Humanities Research, UCSC.

Sarah Abrevaya Stein: "In Search of a Novel Archive of the Jewish Past"
2011-02-24 12:00 - 13:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
What sources are essential to the study of the Jewish past? Where can they be found? In this talk, Sarah Abrevaya Stein discusses her on-going efforts to stretch the linguistic, geographic, and conceptual boundaries of the Jewish past, offering a scholarly travelogue of novel archives of Jewish history.
Sarah Abrevaya Stein is Professor and Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies at the Department of History at UCLA. Co-winner of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature for 2010, she received her A.B. from Brown University in 1993 and her doctorate from Stanford University in 1999. Her scholarship has ranged across the Yiddish and Ladino speaking diasporas and the European, Russian, American, Ottoman and wider Mediterranean settings, but is always engaged with the reasons for and manifestations of Jewish cultural diversity in the modern period. Stein is the author of Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce (Yale University Press, 2008), winner of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and Making Jews Modern: the Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires (Indiana University Press, hardback 2004, paperback 2006), winner of the Salo Wittmayer Baron Prize for Best First Book in Jewish Studies for 2003 and finalist for the Koret Jewish Book Award in 2004.
Stein is now working on three book projects. With the support of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, she is now writing Misfits: Classifying Jews and the Persistence of Empire, a book that explores Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Jewish encounters with evolving legal systems whose shaping accompanied the dismantling, persistence, and transformation of empires across the globe over the course of the twentieth century. With Julia Phillips Cohen (Vanderbilt University) and the support of a National Endowment for the Humanities Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant, Stein is also co-editing The Sephardic Studies Reader: 1730-1950 (Stanford University Press, forthcoming). This documentary reader will feature over 300 translated, original sources written over the course of two centuries by or about Sephardic Jews in the heartland of modern Judeo-Spanish culture (the Balkans, Palestine, and Turkey under Ottoman and post-Ottoman rule) and in crucial hubs of the Judeo-Spanish diaspora. Finally, with Aron Rodrigue, Stein is co-editing An Ottoman Rebel: Sa’adi Besalel ha-Levi and Jewish Salonica in the Nineteenth Century (Stanford University Press, 2011), which will present an annotated translation of the first known memoir in Ladino.
Sarah Abrevaya Stein’s talk is presented by the Center for Jewish Studies with generous support by the David B. Gold Foundation.

Jill Hoy: "Singular Dualities: Painting from Life, Painting in the Studio"
2011-02-24 16:00 - 17:30 | Santa Cruz, 95064, United States
UCSC Humanities Presents the East Coast Distinguished Visiting Alumni lecture featuring Jill Hoy Cowell ’77. This is the inaugural talk from the East Coast Distinguished Alumni fund. Jill will present “Singular Dualities: Painting from Life, Painting in the Studio.” Reception to follow.

Whose City? Labor and the Right to the City Movements
2011-02-26 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
A one-day conference at the University of California Santa Cruz
Sponsored by the Center for Labor Studies & Urban Studies Research Cluster
The right to the city is…far more than a right of individual access to the resources that the city embodies: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city more after our heart’s desire. It is, moreover, a collective rather than an individual right since changing the city inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power over the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake ourselves and our cities is…one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights. – David Harvey, 2008

Workers, environmentalists, and urban social movements have recently converged under a new banner: “the right to the city.” The phrase refers to the right of city dwellers—now the world’s majority—to democratically control development and resources in the cities in which they live . In today’s global economy, this “right” is profoundly challenged. Social divisions are experienced increasingly in spatial terms—through gentrified housing markets and polarized job markets; unequal access to green space and unequal exposure to environmental risk; new modes of segregation and policing public space. Against this backdrop, the process of urbanization itself has become a site of political contestation, and the fight for the “right to the city” both a critique and call to organize. Bringing together leading scholars, practitioners, and activists from across California and the U.S., “Whose City?” will provide an opportunity to think critically and creatively about these emerging coalitions—from their historic roots to their possible futures, from their major challenges to their major victories, from their local to their global manifestations.
Panels & Speakers
Keynote: Whose City?
David Harvey, Distinguished Professor, City University of New York
I. Cities for People or Profit? Wage, Housing, and Economic Justice Campaigns
Urban development is now a primary engine of economic growth and profit-making across the U.S. and globally. Yet the benefits of this growth are not equally shared. Rather, cities have become centers of extreme inequality. Rents and property values soar in some cities, waves of foreclosure devastate others. Wages, subsidized housing, unionized jobs, and city services are cut across the board. In response, urban social movements and labor groups turn to battles for living wages, community benefits agreements, and housing rights.
Gilda Haas, Founder, Strategic Action for a Just Economy; Co-Founder Right to the City national alliance: “Beyond Campaigns: Inequality, Popular Education, and Transformation”
Nari Rhee, Associate Academic Specialist, UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research & Education: “What Does Labor Bring to the Politics of Place? Unions and the Right to the City movement in Silicon Valley”
Stephanie Luce, Associate Professor of Labor Studies, Murphy Institute, CUNY: “From Just Economics to Economic Justice: Taking Wage Campaigns to the Next Level”
Gretchen Purser, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Syracuse University: “The Spectre and Spectacle of Eviction: Rethinking America’s Housing Crisis”
II. Cities of Nature: From Environmental Justice to Green Jobs
Urban growth transforms nature; the forces of nature reshape the city. Rampant urban development has made this age-old dynamic increasingly unsustainable, contributing to global warming, species extinction, water scarcity, and toxic pollution. Meanwhile, these conditions exacerbate inequalities of race and class, in the US and globally. Through coalitions of labor, urban, and green movements, these conditions have also become the target of campaigns for environmental justice, sustainable development, and green jobs.
Jon Zerolnick, Research Director, Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE): “The Clean and Safe Ports Campaign: False dichotomies and the Underground Economy versus Coalition-building and the Power of Local Government”
Jeff Rickert, National Policy Director, Green For All and former Director, AFL-CIO Center on Green Jobs: “A Brief History of the Green Jobs Movement”
Kevin Danaher, Co-Founder of Global Exchange, Co-Founder and Co-Executive Producer of the Green Festivals: “The Green Economy is the Future”
Melissa Checker, Assistant Professor of Urban Studies, Queens College, City University of New York: “What Do You Mean by Green?’: Green Jobs in a Greed Economy,”
III. Rights to the Global City: Race, Class, Gender and Citizenship across Borders
Immigrant rights, as well as racial, ethnic, and gender equality, have long been central issues of urban justice, and today only more so. From day laborers to low paid service workers, the men and women who sustain the global economy and build our cities are often marginalized by immigration status, language, culture, and identity. This has motivated creative alliances between immigrant rights, human rights, and labor movements, highlighting links between identity, citizenship, and the right to the city.
Faranak Miraftab, Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign: l“Global Restructuring of Social Reproduction and What it Means for the Right to the City Movements:Observations in a Transnational Packing Town in the Midwest.”
Joshua Bloom, PhD Candidate in Sociology, UCLA: “Ally to Win: Black Community Leaders and SEIU’s LA Security Unionization Campaign.“
Gihan Perera, Director, Miami Worker Center, co-founder RTTC national alliance
Gerardo Dominguez, Organizer, United Food and Commercial Workers, Local 5: “Immigrant Mercado Workers’ Struggle to Bring Justice to the Workplace”
For more information: http://urban.ihr.ucsc.edu/events/whose-city/
Staff support provided by the Institute for Humanities Research

Eve Zyzik: "Authentic texts, vocabulary load, and focus-on-form in foreign language teaching"
2011-02-28 17:15 - 18:30 | Humanities 1, Room 320
This talk will present a practical overview of the use of authentic texts for language learning purposes within the context of contemporary second language acquisition (SLA) research. Some of the questions that will be addressed during this talk include:

What are the benefits and potential difficulties of authentic texts vis-à-vis graded readers?
What are the advantages of extensive reading over intensive reading?
How much vocabulary do you need to know in order to read in a foreign language?
How much vocabulary can you “pick up” through reading?
Can authentic texts be used to teach structural features of the language?
How can we get students to enjoy reading in a foreign language?

Eve Zyzik is an Assistant Professor in the Spanish Language Program at UCSC. Her talk is presented as part of the Language Program’s Colloquium Series.

Jael Silliman: "Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames: Women's Narratives from a Diaspora of Hope"
2011-03-01 14:00 - 15:45 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
In the nineteenth and twentieth centures the Baghdadi Jewish diaspora stretched from Basra to Shanghai, with Calcutta acting as an important trading center on that route. During that time Calcutta was home to a thriving Jewish community that played an important role in the City’s mercantile development. After India’s Independence, 1947, the community relocated mostly to the Western world. Dr. Silliman, who is a member of that community, will talk about the material, religious and cultural life of the community, and trace the history of this diaspora community through the lives of four generations of women in her family. She will challenge many conventional notions of what it means to live in diaspora, reframe the role that women played in this traveling community, and highlights the ways in which their fluid identities enabled this economically successfull Jewish community to negotiate both colonialism and nationalism to advance their own interests.
Jael Silliman now resides in Calcutta, India. She is an independent Consultant, serves on the Board of Breakthrough for Human Rights, and the Indian Holdeen Fund. She is writing a book of short stories.
Prior to returning to India, Jael served as the Program Officer for Women’s Rights & Gender Equity in the Human Rights Unit, Peace and Social Justice Program of the Ford Foundation. Immediately before that, she was the Program Officer for Reproductive Rights. Prior to joining the Ford Foundation she had been a tenured Associate Professor in the Women’s Studies Department at the University of Iowa.
Jael is the recipient of the Iowa City Human Rights Commission International Human Rights Award and an Open Society Fellow. She is the author of numerous books and articles. Her most recent co-authored book, Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice, received a 2005 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award in the area of bigotry and human rights. She is also the author of Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames: Women’s Narratives from A Diaspora of Hope, and co-editor of Dangerous Intersections: Feminist Perspectives on Population, Environment and Policing the National Body: Race, Gender and Criminalization.

Maria Frangos: “Queer Morphologies”
2011-03-02 12:15 - 13:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Professor Frangos’s “Queer Morphologies” explores metamorphosis and non-human embodiment in literature from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance as sites of queer possibility and potentiality. The project asks how human/animal metamorphoses surface and resurface to produce and negotiate nonnormative configurations of sexuality, gender, and kinship.
Professor Frangos is Visiting Assistant Professor of Literature at UCSC.
Sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies with staff support provided by the Institute for Humanities Research, UCSC.

Ned Blackhawk: "The Indigenous West of Mark Twain: Samuel Clemens and American Empire, 1861-1866"
2011-03-03 14:00 - 15:30 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Building upon the last sections of his first book, Violence over the Land, in this presentation Ned Blackhawk reevaluates the American West’s most famous if often under-recognized author, Samuel Clemens, whose more famous pseudonym, Mark Twain, was first deployed in 1863 in Virginia City, Nevada’s Territorial Enterprise. This presentation considers the place of indigenous peoples—specifically Goshute Shoshones and Native Hawaiians—in Clemens’ early writings and identifies longstanding uncertainties about the place of non-Anglophone and indigenous peoples in Twain’s authorship.

Julie Drucker: "The Jewish Community in Venezuela: Walking the Tightrope of the New Anti-Semitism?"
2011-03-03 16:00 - 17:45 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
For the first time in its history, the Jewish community in Venezuela has found itself facing a consistent, 10-year barrage of anti-Israel, anti-Jewish statements from President Chavez’s administration and his pro-government media. Recent events in Israel, such as the 2006 war in Lebanon, the 2009 Gaza incursion, and the Flotilla event in 2010, have triggered hostile government-led reactions in Venezuela, keeping the local community on edge. How different is this from Jews’ previous experience in Venezuela? How has the community responded? Is the community under threat?
Drawing from current interviews of community leaders and lay people, we will explore these questions to attempt to understand the unfolding of a top-down, new approach to Jews in Venezuela.
Julie Drucker was born in England and raised in Caracas, Venezuela, where she spent 24 years. She grew up in a trilingual environment, and has earned a BA and Masters degree Summa Cum Laude from UCLA in Latin American Studies, with emphasis on Political Science.
At present, Julie works as a certified simultaneous interpreter for the Criminal Courts in Los Angeles and free-lances as a translator for a variety of institutions and artists in the private and public sectors. Ms. Drucker is a contributing writer to the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles and has been closely monitoring the Jewish community in Venezuela for the past 10 years.
Julie Drucker’s talk is presented by the Center for Jewish Studies with generous support by the David B. Gold Foundation.

Living Writers Series: Sesshu Foster and Rob Wilson
2011-03-03 18:00 - 19:45 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Sesshu Foster taught composition and literature in East L.A. and writing at the University of Iowa, the California Institute for the Arts, and UC Santa Cruz. He has been published in The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Asia and Beyond, and State of the Union: 50 Political Poems. His works, Atomik Aztex and World Ball Notebook won a 2006 Believer Magazine Annual Book Prize and the 2010 American Book Award.

Rob Wilson has published poems in various journals from Tinfish, Taxi, Manoa, and Central Park, to The New Republic, Ploughshares, Partisan Review and Poetry, and in a book called Waking In Seoul. His study Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted: An American Poetics was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2009. A new work Beat Attitudes: On the Roads to Beatitude for Post-Beat Writers, Dharma Bums, and Cultural-Political Activists is just out with New Pacific Press.
Co-sponsored by the Creative Writing Program, the Literature Department, and the Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund.

Miguel Tamen: "Resistance and Interpretation"
2011-03-08 16:00 - 17:30 | Humanites 1, Room 320, Humanities and Social Science Facility, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Miguel Tamen specializes in philosophy and literature and Portuguese literature. His interests include the philosophy of language, interpretation, and moral philosophy, as well as aesthetics. He is Professor of Literary Theory and Chair of the Program in Literary Theory at the University of Lisbon. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago since 2000. His first book won the Portuguese PEN Club Essay Award (1987). He is the author of six books, among which are Friends of Interpretable Objects (2001) and The Matter of the Facts (2000). Two more books are forthcoming. In 2010/11 Tamen is a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at the National Humanities Center.
Professor Tamen’ talk is sponsored by the Department of Literature and co-sponsored by the departments of History of Consciousness and History of Art and Visual Culture.

Noel King Memorial Lecture: Jonathan Brown and Nathaniel Deutsch
2011-03-08 16:00 - 18:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Noel King Memorial Lecture
Speakers: Jonathan Brown (Georgetown) and Nathaniel Deutsch (UCSC)
Title: “Muslims, Jews, and Modernity: Religious, Cultural, and Intellectual Responses”
Reception to Follow

James Young: "Holocaust Memorials and the 9/11 New York Memorial"
2011-03-09 08:00 - 09:10 | Classroom Unit 2, Classroom Unit‎ University of California Santa Cruz, UC Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Professor James Young, Director of Jewish and Holocaust Studies at UMass Amherst, will speak Wednesday March 9 at UCSC. His talk will take place in Classroom Building Unit 2 from 8 -9:10 am as part of a class on the Holocaust and is open to the general public. Professor Young was the Chair of the Berlin Holocaust Commission and is the Chair of the 9/11 Memorial Commission in New York City.
He will be speaking about “Holocaust Memorials and the 9/11 New York Memorial” — Professor Young is an alumnus of UCSC and holds a PhD from the campus. He is the General Editor of the Posen Library of Jewish Civilization, published by Yale University Press, and the author of important books on the Holocaust and Visual Memory, including At Memory’s Edge.

Marcia Ochoa: "'La moda nace en Paris y muere en Caracas': Fashion, Beauty and Consumption on the (Trans) National"
2011-03-09 12:15 - 13:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Professor Ochoa works at the conjuncture of the ethnography of media, modernity in Latin America, and queer/transgender studies. Queen for a Day: Transformistas, Misses and Mass Media in Venezuela (Duke, forthcoming) is a queer diasporic ethnography of femininity, spectacle, and nation in Venezuela.
Marcia Ochoa is Assistant Professor of Community Studies at UCSC.

Sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies with staff support provided by the Institute for Humanities Research, UCSC.

Living Writers Series: Graduate Student Readings
2011-03-10 18:00 - 19:45 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
This week the Living Writers Series offers a selection of readings by UCSC Graduate Students, including Juliana Leslie, Tim Yamamura, Jake Thomas, Andrea Quaid, and Eireene Nealand.
Co-sponsored by the Creative Writing Program, the Literature Department, and the Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund.

The Writing Program’s 2011 Reading Series
2011-03-10 19:00 - 20:30 | Charles E. Merrill Lounge
The Writing Program’s 2011 Reading Series
Please join us in welcoming two new voices to the Faculty Reading Series: Terry Terhaar will be reading non-fiction and Travis Mossetti will be reading poetry. A returning reader, Maureen Foster, will also be reading poetry. As we add new teachers to our faculty, it is a pleasure to add their work to our annual series. Please join us for a fantastic evening, and see that we all do far more than teach in the classroom.

Norvin Richards: "Generalized Contiguity"
2011-03-11 16:00 - 17:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
In Richards (2010) I posited a universal condition on the prosody of wh-questions, which was intended to predict whether a given language would move its wh-phrases or leave them in situ. The condition requires a wh-phrase to be in the same prosodic domain as the interrogative complementizer which Agrees with it. Whether a language has to move its wh-phrases then depends on how its prosody is organized. Some languages can leave wh-phrases in situ and manipulate the prosody of the sentence to satisfy the prosodic requirement; others cannot do this, and must move the wh-phrase to make it sufficiently prosodically close to C.
In this talk I will generalize the prosodic requirement I posited for the relation between C and wh-phrases, applying it to all pairs of syntactic objects that are related either by Agree or by selection. Data handled by the resulting theory include a variety of facts about the placement of adverbs in languages like English and French (traditionally accounted for via claims about the structural height of verbs), the Final-over-Final Constraint of Biberauer et al (2010), and the requirement that clauses with English quotative inversion cannot have auxiliaries.
Norvin Richards, Professor of Linguistics at MIT, will give this talk as part of the CrISP Distinguished Visitors Series.

Food Anxieties: A Symposium on the Question of “What to Eat”
2011-03-14 17:00 - 21:00 | Cellar Door Cafe, 328 Ingalls Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The UC Multi-Campus Research Program on Studies of Food and the Body invite you to the Public Event “Food Anxieties: A Symposium on the Question of ‘What to Eat.’” This event will take place on Monday, March 14th from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. at the Cellar Door Cafe at Bonny Doon Vineyard, located at 328 Ingalls Street in Santa Cruz. The symposium will feature a thought-provoking discussion of food advice, risk, and avoidance with renowned food scholars from across the nation. The symposium will be followed by a reception and wine talk with Randall Grahm of Bonny Doon Vineyard.
The event is free and open to the public, though prior registration is required. For a full list of guest speakers and to register, visit the event website at http://foodandbody.ucdavis.edu/?page_id=234
Food Anxieties is sponsored by the UC Studies of Food and the Body Multicampus Research Program, Bonny Doon Wineries, and the Institute for Humanities Research and the UCSC Department of Anthropology.

Paul Festa: "Apparition of the Eternal Church" and "The Glitter Emergency"
2011-03-17 19:00 - 21:00 | First Congregational Church, 900 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, United States
The UCSC Center for Cultural Studies, departments of History of Art and Visual Culture, History of Consciousness, Literature, Sociology, Film and Digital Media, and the Queer Theory Research Cluster present two films by Paul Festa, with live musical accompaniment.
Apparition of the Eternal Church is winner of Best North American Independent Feature Film – Indianapolis International Film Festival; winner of Best Experimental Film – Rome International Film Festival; winner of Special Director’s Prize – Santa Cruz Film Festival; and winner of Gold Medal for Excellence – Park City Film Festival.
The Glitter Emergency is winner of the Best Experimental Film – Los Angeles Cinema Festival of Hollywood.
Paul Festa is the author of Oh My God: Messiaen in the Ear of the Unbeliever based on his film. For more information about the films please visit apparitionfilm.com and theglitteremergency.com.
Sponsored by the Queer Theory Research Cluster. Staff support provided by the Institute for Humanities Research, UCSC.

Michael Wagner: "The Locality of Allomorph Selection and Production Planning"
2011-03-29 12:00 - 13:30 | Stanford University
CrISP is proud to present:
Michael Wagner (McGill University): “The Locality of Allomorph Selection and Product Planning”
English -ing varies between two phonologically distinct allomorphs, [iŋ] and [in]. Across different varieties of English this variation has been shown to depend on gender, speaking style, and socio-economic factors (Fischer, 1958; Labov, 1972; Trudgill, 1972). Phonological context has also been shown to be relevant (Houston, 1985): the allomorph [in] is more likely when a coronal segment follows. Strictly localist theories of morphology (e.g., Bobaljik, 2000; Embick, 2010) predict that the phonological context should only be able to affect allomorph selection under syntactic locality conditions. Globalist theories (e.g., theories of allomorph choice formulated within standard optimality theory) predict that in principle any information in a linguistic representation could affect allomorph choice. This paper reports on experimental data involving -ing-allomorphy that seems incompatible with both types of theories.
As illustrated in (1) and (2), we crossed the syntactic environment (local vs. non-local) with the phonological environment (a-[ə] vs. the-[ð]), using a syntactic contrast familiar from studies of prosodic phrasing (e.g., Itzak et al. 2010):
(1)
Local:
a. Whenever the boy was browsing a book the game would fall off the table.
b. Whenever the boy was browsing the book the game would fall off the table.
(2)
Non-Local:
a. Whenever the boy was browsing a book would fall off the table.
b. Whenever the boy was browsing the book would fall off the table.
Localist theories predict that the phonological context should be able to affect the choice of allomorph when the word providing the phonological environment is syntactically local as in (1), but not when it is part of the next sentence (2). Globalist theories predict that phonological context should be relevant in both types of cases.
The results show an effect of phonology both in (1) and (2). This is unexpected under the localist account. However, the effect is much smaller in (2), which is unexpected under the globalist account.
The interaction between phonology and syntax suggests that syntactic locality might be relevant after all. However, within the syntactic conditions, there is a quantitative correlation between the strength of the prosodic boundary separating the verb and its complement and the liklihood of a phonological effect of the following word. In other words, whether the phonological form of the following word has an influence on allomorph choice depends gradiently on the strength of the prosodic boundary separating the two words even within the same syntactic condition. Once these quantitative measures of boundary strength are taken into account, the effect of between syntactic conditions vanishes: the difference between (1) and (2) in the size of the phonological effect is completely explicable as a result of the difference in boundary strength between the two structures.
The pattern of phonological conditioning can be accounted for by a model of allomorph selection that is constrained by the locality of production planning. The segmental content of an upcoming word can have an effect on allomorph choice if its phonological form is already available at the time of vocabulary insertion. The strength of a prosodic boundary negatively correlates with the availability of the following word, and can thus serve as a proxy measure for the locality of production planning.
The data suggests that the phonological effect on allomorph choice, at least in this case, can be stated in purely segmental terms. The apparent effect of syntax on the phonologically conditioning of allomorph choice can be explained by its indirect effect on the likelihood that the phonological material of the upcoming word is already planned out at time when allomorph selection happens. This suggests a more modular view of the syntax/morph-phonology interaction across word boundaries than current approaches that assume an interleaving of phonology and syntax.
The account in terms of the locality of production planning provides a potential explanation why individuals in our experiment and the dialects described in the literature only seem to vary in the proportion with which they choose the allomorphs (from almost always [in] to almost always [iŋ]), but none seem to show a complementary distribution according to phonological or syntactic context: the reason is that the conditioning environment is only probabilistically available depending on how much planning is been possible, and this varies depending on the structure of sentence and other factors. In other words, there might be a reason why ing-allomorph selection is consistently a variable process: reliably planning out an entire utterance in all its phonological detail is difficult if not impossible. Other cases of phonologically conditioned allomorphy are considered and their amenability to an account in terms of the locality of production planning is discussed.
Crosslinguistic Investigations in Syntax-Phonology (CrISP) s a collaborative research group within the UC Santa Cruz and Stanford University Linguistics Departments. Generous support has been provided by the UC Humanities Network, the Tanya Honig Fund for Linguistics Graduate Students, and Stanford University Linguistics research funding. Staff support provided by the Institution for Humanities Research.

Colin Koopman: "Pleasure and Parrhesia in Foucault's Self-Transformative Ethics"
2011-03-31 16:00 - 18:00 | Cowell Conference Room, Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Michel Foucault’s late writings on ethics have been subjected to severe scrutiny by a host of critics. I suggest that these criticisms have for the most part been misguided because of a meta-ethical error too often relied upon in interpretations of Foucault. I offer a distinction between ethical ‘orientations’ and ethical ‘commitments’. Rather than offering substantive normative content, I argue, Foucault’s ethics are an attempt to specify a formal mode or style of ethical practice which can gain determinate normative content only in contexts of actual ethical practice. The guiding ethical orientation in Foucault’s late writings is, I argue, self-transformation as a practice of freedom. After defending Foucault along these lines, I discuss how self-transformation helps us understand the relatively more determinate ethical conceptions of pleasure and parrhesia (fearless speech) developed in Foucault’s late writings. I conclude with some sharp questions about the lack of sufficient determinate ethical content in these conceptions, thus opening the possibility for supplementing Foucault’s ethics with the work of other self-transformative moral philosophers, including for
instance William James.
Professor Colin Koopman (BA Evergreen State College 1998, MA Leeds University 1999, PhD McMaster University 2006) will be speaking at 4:00 on Thursday, March 31, 2011 at the Philosophy department colloquium held in the Cowell Conference Room. This event is free and open to the campus community. His area of specialty includes but is not limited to Pragmatism & American Philosophy, Genealogy & Critical Theory, Political & Social Philosophy, etc. Professor Koopman was awarded a Doctoral Fellowship (04-06) and Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (06-08) for his work with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. More recently he received the Robert F. and Evelyn Nelson Wulf Professorship, as well as the Oregon Humanities Center Teaching Fellowship (11-12). He has taught at UC Santa Cruz (08-09) and currently resides as a Assistant Professor at University of Oregon. He has also given courses as a visiting lecture at UC Berkeley’s School of Information (09).

Jodi Magness: “The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls”
2011-03-31 17:00 - 18:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
In 1946-47, Bedouins found the first Dead Sea Scrolls in a cave near the site of Qumran, by the shore of the Dead Sea. Eventually remains of over 900 scrolls were discovered in 11 caves surrounding Qumran. The scrolls, which date to about the time of Jesus, were deposited in the caves by members of a Jewish sect – apparently the Essenes – who lived at Qumran. In this slide-illustrated lecture, we explore the ancient remains at Qumran and discuss the contents and significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Jodi Magness holds a senior endowed chair in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: the Kenan Distinguished Professor for Teaching Excellence in Early Judaism. From 1992-2002, she was Associate/ Assistant Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology in the Departments of Classics and Art History at Tufts University, Medford, MA. She received her B.A. in Archaeology and History from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1977), and her Ph.D. in Classical Archaeology from the University of Pennsylvania (1989). From 1990-92, Magness was Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in Syro- Palestinian Archaeology at the Center for Old World Archaeology and Art at Brown University.
Magness’ book The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002) won the 2003 Biblical Archaeology Society’s Award for Best Popular Book in Archaeology in 2001-2002 and was selected as an “Outstanding Academic Book for 2003” by Choice Magazine. Magness’ book The Archaeology of the Early Islamic Settlement in Palestine (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2003) was awarded the 2006 Irene Levi-Sala Book Prize in the category of non-fiction on the archaeology of Israel.
Snack reception at 4:30, talk begins at 5.
Staff support provided by the Institute for Humanities Research

Guriqbal Singh Sahota: "Resemblances of Pure Content"
2011-04-06 12:15 - 13:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Professor Sahota will join the Literature department as an Assistant Professor in 2011. He is finishing Late Colonial Sublime (UC, 2012). His research addresses conflicts of dogmatic and speculative belief cultures in contemporary global society with a special focus on the postcolonial. He has begun a long-term project on the question of reason in the Sikh tradition from the 16th through the 20th century. The first installment of this project will appear as “Guru Nanak and Rational Civil Theology” in Sikh Formations (2011).
Sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies with staff support provided by the Institute for Humanities Research, UCSC.

Rethinking Capitalism
2011-04-07 - 2011-04-09 | University Center, UCSC, College Nine and College Ten, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Three decades of advances in financial economics have transformed global markets. As a matter of theory, the valuing of options (financial products) became increasingly central to understanding the market in any commodity; as a matter of politics questions about the direction and sustainability of the market system were supplanted by questions about its volatility—how to manage the uncertainty that it creates. The Crisis of 2008 illustrates the need to better understand what is new, and what is not, about conceiving of capitalism as a whole in this way. This conference brings theories of economic value and regulation into conversation with the study of culture, institutions, ethics, history, geography and theology. Its aim is to consider in what ways capitalism is producing a future that is unlike its past. Panel topics include:
1) Eschatology, Visualization and Scenario Planning
2) Market Institutions, Government and Crisis
3) Affective, Spatial and Material Flows of Value
4) Social Risk, Human Capital and Financializing Inequality
5) Critique, Confession and Conversion in the Aftermath of 2008.
Please visit http://rethinkingcapitalism.ucsc.edu for more information.

Living Writers Series: Chang-Rae Lee
2011-04-07 18:00 - 19:45 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Chang-Rae Lee’s first two novels, Native Speaker and A Gesture Life, have between them won a host of literary honors, including the Hemingway/PEN Award for first fiction, QPB’s New Voices Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, the Oregon Book Award, and the Asian-American Literary Award. Lee was recently selected by The New Yorker as one of the Twenty Best Writers Under Forty. His work has appeared in The Best American Essays, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and numerous anthologies.
Each quarter, the Living Writers Reading Series brings visiting authors and poets to UC Santa Cruz to give students an in-depth look into the world of the working writer. Sponsored by Oakes College and the Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund.

Maria Gouskova: "Vug, vg-a: An Experimental Investigation of Russian Yer Deletion"
2011-04-08 15:30 - 17:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Russian has a well-known rule called yer deletion: stem mid vowels are deleted when a vowel-initial suffix follows (as in [rov] `ditch (nom sg)’ vs. [rv-a] (gen sg)). The rule is lexically idiosyncratic: most mid vowels in identical contexts do not alternate (as in [rʲov] `howl (nom sg)’ vs. [rʲov-a] (gen sg)). There are two types of approaches to such alternations. I will advocate a theory in which entire morphemes are labeled in the lexicon as subject to this alternation, and the phonological grammar is responsible for deriving generalizations about where deletion is possible or blocked (Gouskova to appear, cf. Yearley 1995). A much better known alternative theory holds that the alternating vowels must be labeled on a segment-by-segment basis, and that the conditioning environment for deletion is opaque: yers are realized when followed by abstract yers in the UR but delete otherwise (Lightner 1972, Pesetsky 1979, Kenstowicz and Rubach 1987, Halle and Matushansky 2006). These theories make different predictions for how speakers might extend the alternation to novel forms. The goal of this talk is to demonstrate that speakers are aware of the phonological generalizations that govern the alternations.
Even though vowel-zero alternations in Russian are lexically idiosyncratic, the identity of alternating vowels is partially predictable: only mid vowels can alternate, and there are certain phonological contexts where alternations are predictably blocked. This talk reports on two experiments that asked Russian speakers to rate pairs of inflected words in which a vowel was deleted. The results show that the rating strongly correlates with the quality of the vowel: deletion of mid vowels (as in [xel] and [xl-a]) was rated higher than deletion of high and low vowels (e.g., [gil] and [gl-a] or [ʃap] and [ʃp-a]). An experiment also tested context effects: deletion that creates a medial CCC cluster that violates sonority sequencing, deletion of vowels in different stress contexts, and deletion in CVCC stems. These results suggest that speakers have a grammar even for this non-productive and lexically limited alternation.
This talk is presented as part of the Linguistics Colloquium Series.

Cristina Lombardi-Diop: "Spotless Italy: Advertising Culture and the Post-racial Imagination"
2011-04-13 12:15 - 13:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Center for Cultural Studies Colloquium Series Presents:
Cristina Lombardi-Diop, Italian Studies, UC Berkeley
“Spotless Italy: Advertising Culture and the Post-racial Imagination“
Professor Lombardi-Diop has published on gender and Italian colonial literature, African-Italian autobiographies, and the African diaspora in Italy. Her in-progress book is on the memory of Italian colonialism in Italy’s postwar cultural history. The talk explores Italy as a post-racial society and focuses on when the idea of whiteness as a discursive formation infiltrates Italian popular and mass culture.
Cristina Lombardi-Diop is Associate Professor of Italian Studies at The American University of Rome and Visiting Professor of Italian Studies at UC Berkeley.
Staff support provided by the Institute for Humanities Research

Florence Howe
2011-04-13 15:30 - 16:30 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Kresge Writer’s House, Living Writers, & Feminist Studies presents:
Florence Howe, founder of The Feminist Press and author of the memoir, A Life in Motion

Gregg Herken: "Was J. Robert Oppenheimer, 'Father of the Atomic Bomb,' a Soviet Spy?"
2011-04-13 16:00 - 18:00 | Santa Cruz, 95064, United States
One of the great unresolved controversies of the Cold War is whether American physicist Robert Oppenheimer–the “father of the atomic bomb”–was, in fact, a communist and a spy for the Soviet Union. Recently-declassified documents–from U.S. and former Soviet sources–make it possible to finally answer that question.
Gregg Herken (Stevenson College with Honors, History BA with Honors, Government with Highest Honors, 1969) is an Emeritus Professor of History at the University of California, and was a Founding Faculty member at UC Merced. He received a Ph.D. in modern American diplomatic history from Princeton University in 1974, and subsequent taught at Oberlin College, Yale University, and Caltech. From 1988-2003, Herken was a senior Historian and Curator, as well as the chairman of the Department of Space History at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. He is the author of four books, The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War (Knopf, 1981; Princeton, 1988), Counsels of War (Knopf, 1985; Oxford, 1986), Cardinal Choices: Presidential Science Advising from the Atomic Bomb to SDI (Oxford, 1992; Stanford, 1999), and Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller (Henry Holt, 2002; Holt, 2003), which was a finalist for the 2003 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History.
Co-sponsored by The Institute for Humanities Research and The Department of History. Staff support provided by the Institute for Humanities Research.

Karen Sánchez-Eppler: "In the Archives of Childhood"
2011-04-14 14:00 - 15:30 | Humanities 1, Room 520, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Karen Sánchez-Eppler is Professor of American Studies and English at Amherst College. She is the author of Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (California, 1993) and Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago, 2005), and a founding co-editor of The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth. She is spending this year as a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center where she is completing a project on manuscript books entitled The Unpublished Republic: Manuscript Culture of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century United States, and beginning a new one, In the Archives of Childhood, which probes the relations between our different ways of holding the past. Her talk at Santa Cruz draws from the introduction to this new project, examining the intersection of archival practice and childhood studies in an effort to illuminate the attractions and limitations of both.
“Archive Fever” as Jacques Derrida describes it, epitomizes the infectious desire to locate and possess origins. For scholarship in the humanities the “archival turn” proves to have much in common with the study of childhood. Both have been there all along: the repositories of our cultural and personal pasts. In many ways, for each of us, childhood is the archive, a treasure-box of the formative and the forgotten. Yet until the last few decades both our archives and our childhoods have remained largely under-theorized sites of origin. My talk will examine the intersection of archival practice and childhood studies in an effort to illuminate the attractions and limitations of both. Childhood manuscripts and documents demonstrate the potential of archival work for gaining access to children’s voices, experiences, and everyday life. Looking beyond this utility, I hope to suggest how an attention to childhood may help rethink the nature of archival records, organization, and purpose itself. The traces of childhood found in archives tend toward the ephemeral—the scrap and the scribble far more likely than the tome—and thus puts pressure on the claims and nature of preservation and valuation. What constitutes the trivial as trivial? If childhood is ephemeral by nature—a stage to be outgrown—then what can it teach us about the archival tasks of keeping and cataloging? Age is not generally a classificatory category for archival holdings, a fact that exemplifies the expressions of power at stake in the way knowledge is organized. Children tend to appear in archives in two ways, on the fringes of collections of individual or family papers, a residue of domestic life that accompanies the valuable work of adults, for whose prominence these materials have been saved; and in the records of those institutions charged with the protection, punishment, and education of the young. Thus to think about childhood in the archives is to think about the tensions and collaborations between individual and institutional frames, affection and control, fame and loss. This will be a speculative discussion, but one that theorizes from particular childhood stuff.

Hans Sluga: “From Normative Theory to Diagnostic Practice”
2011-04-14 16:00 - 17:30 | Cowell Conference Room, Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
From the Greeks to the present our moral and political philosophizing has been preoccupied with a search for the timeless and the universal: timeless norms of moral action and universal principles of political life. Where this may once have seemed to be a plausible undertaking, it is not obviously so any longer. A clear understanding of the nature of our rapidly changing world should alert us to the need for another form of philosophical thinking – one that pays attention to the condition in which we find ourselves and that seeks to reach practical conclusions, if any,on the basis of a proper diagnosis of the present. In place of the usual normative theorizing we need to foster, what I will call, a diagnostic practice in moral and political philosophy.
Professor Hans Sluga will be speaking at 4:00PM on Thursday, April 14, 2011 at the invitation of the Philosophy Department. This event is free and open to the public.
Hans Sluga studied at Oxford University, where he became familiar with the writings of Wittgenstein. Sluga credits Sir Michael Dumment with influencing his extensive interest in Frege’s contribution to the development of modern logic and philosophy of language. During his time at Oxford he also studied under R.M. Hare and Isaiah Berlin, stirring his interest in questions of ethics and politics.
Professor Sluga’s overall philosophical outlook is radically historical as he believes that “we can understand ourselves only as being with a particular evolution and history”. As such he is drawn to the works of Nietzsche and Foucault. Sluga claims to be “attracted to a realist and naturalistic view of things rather than any sort of formalistic rationalism”.
He has recently taught courses on Political Philosophy, Nietzsche, and Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right”.

Living Writers Series: Andrew Sean Greer
2011-04-14 18:00 - 19:45 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Andrew Sean Greer is the bestselling author of The Story of a Marriage, which The New York Times has called an “inspired, lyrical novel,” and The Confessions of Max Tivoli, which was named a Best Book of 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune. His ﬁrst novel, The Path of Minor Planets, and his story collection, How It Was for Me, were also published to wide acclaim. Greer’s stories have appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, and The New Yorker, and have been anthologized in The Book of Other People and Best American Nonrequired Reading. He is the recipient of the PEN/O’Henry Prize for Short Fiction, the Northern California Book Award, the California Book Award, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award.
Each quarter, the Living Writers Reading Series brings visiting authors and poets to UC Santa Cruz to give students an in-depth look into the world of the working writer. Sponsored by Oakes College and the Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund.

Rajesh Bhatt: "Locating Agreement in Grammar"
2011-04-15 15:30 - 17:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Linguistics Colloquium Series Presents:
Rajesh Bhatt (UMass Amherst)
The location of agreement in the grammar has been the topic of considerable recent discussion. Bobaljik 2008 has argued that agreement is a post-syntactic process, other approaches (Boskovic 2009 and Chomsky 1999) locate it entirely within the syntactic system. More recently the data from agreement with conjoined noun phrases has played an important role in this debate; in this domain we find closest conjunct agreement, a phenomenon whose seeming sensitivity to linear proximity indicates a post-syntactic component to agreement (Marusic et al. 2006). We analyze a novel set of data from Hindi-Urdu that shows that a proper analysis of agreement requires reference to both a pre-spellout syntactic and a post-syntactic component. Hindi-Urdu is a language with both subject and object agreement and we show that while subject agreement is calculated in the pre-spellout syntactic component, the resolution of object agreement takes place in the post-syntactic component.
This presentation represents joint work with Martin Walkow.

Gianfranco Norelli and Surma Kurien: "Pane Amaro"
2011-04-15 15:30 - 18:00 | Cowell, Room 131, Cowell College 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Italian Studies Program, Language Program, American Studies Program and History Department Present a screening of the 2009 documentary film,
Pane Amaro (Bitter Bread)
dir. Gianfranco Norelli
Followed by a conversation with the director and co‐producer Suma Kurien
“The story of migration to the U.S. is a very complex one. “Feel good” narratives about immigrants catapulting from rags to riches or moralizing tales of “pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps” do not begin to capture that complexity. In Pane Amaro, viewers learn of events and people known until now mainly to scholars. This is a rich panorama of images and voices from every corner of the Italian American community. Accessible and challenging, it should be on the list of every ethnic studies course that wants to tackle the difficult process by which European immigrants became white as they became American.”
Donna Gabaccia. Director, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota
For more information contact: gckg@ucsc.edu

Patricia Clough: "War by Other Means: What Difference Do(es) the Graphic(s) Make?"
2011-04-18 12:30 - 14:00 | Rachel Carson College, Room 301, Rachel Carson College 1156 High Stree, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Patricia T. Clough is a Professor of Sociology, Women’s Studies, and Intercultural Studies at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Her books include Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology (Minnesota 2000), Feminist Thought: Desire, Power and Academic Discourse (co-edited with Charles Lemert, J.W. Wiley, 1995) and The End(s) of Ethnography (Peter Lang 1992, revised 1998). Her most recent book, co-edited with Jean Halley, is The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Duke 2007).

Clough on Probabilities, Predictions and Prophecies, Part 2, The New School: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TgMlpa57hU
Patricia Clough on the internet as playground and factory: http://vimeo.com/6797762
Clough and Han: Metronome Beating: http://www.vimeo.com/5400775
Sponsored by the Affect Working Group, the Department of Sociology, and the Center for Cultural Studies. For more information on this event and/or future events of the Affect Working Group please contact Prof. D. Gould (dbgould@ucsc.edu) or Prof. D. Takagi (takagi@ucsc.edu) or Prof. C. Freccero (freccero@ucsc.edu).

Bill Fletcher, Jr.: "Right-Wing Populism and the Crisis of Organized Labor"
2011-04-21 16:00 - 17:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The UCSC Center for Labor Studies presents:
Bill Fletcher, Jr.: “Right-Wing Populism and the Crisis of Organized Labor”
Free and Open to the Public
Right-wing populism is a phenomenon deeply rooted in the US system. It tends to emerge in a virulent form during times of economic distress and crisis. It plays upon fears and prejudices and is integrally connected to matters of race. Bill Fletcher, Jr. will address the importance of understanding right-wing populism and the role that a renewed labor movement can play in combating this irrationalist and divisive force.
Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a longtime labor, racial justice and international activist. He is an Editorial Board member and columnist for BlackCommentator.com and a Senior Scholar for the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. He is the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum and a founder of the Black Radical Congress.
Fletcher is the co-author (with Fernando Gapasin) of Solidarity Divided, The Crisis in Organized Labor and A New Path Toward Social Justice (University of California Press). He was formerly the Vice President for International Trade Union Development Programs for the George Meany Center of the AFL-CIO. Prior to the George Meany Center, Fletcher served as Education Director and later Assistant to the President of the AFL-CIO.
Fletcher got his start in the labor movement as a rank-and-file member of the Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America. Combining labor and community work, he was also involved in ongoing efforts to desegregate the Boston building trades. He later served in leadership and staff positions in District 65-United Auto Workers, the National Postal Mail Handlers Union, and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Fletcher is a graduate of Harvard University and has authored numerous articles and speaks widely on domestic and international topics, racial justice and labor issues.
The UCSC Center for Labor Studies is funded by the Miguel Contreras Labor Fund of the University of California Office of the President, and co-sponsored by the UCSC Division of Humanities. This event is generously co-sponsored by College Ten, Stevenson College, Oakes College CHECK, and the Department of Politics. Staffing provided by the Institute for Humanities Research.
VIDEO: INSIDE GOVERNMENT TV: AFGE Authors’ Night

Joy Harjo: "Red Dreams: A Trail Beyond Tears"
2011-04-21 19:00 - 21:00 | Merrill Event Center, Merrill Event Center, UC Santa Cruz, Merrill College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The American Indian Resource Center will be hosting internationally acclaimed poet/musician/playwright JOY HARJO (Har-joe) on April 21st, 2011, at Merrill College Event Center, from 7-9pm. Harjo will be performing a brand new solo work Red Dreams: A Trail Beyond Tears, blending music, poetry, personal reflection, and cultural histories, accompanied by Grammy-award winning guitarist and producer LARRY MITCHELL.

Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and is a member of the Mvskoke Nation. Her seven books of poetry, which includes such well-known titles as How We Became Human- New and Selected Poems, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, and She Had Some Horses have garnered many awards. These include the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas; and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. For A Girl Becoming, a young adult/coming of age book, was released in 2009 and is Harjo’s most recent publication.
She has released four award-winning CD’s of original music and in 2009 won a Native American Music Award (NAMMY) for Best Female Artist of the Year for Winding Through the Milky Way. Her most recent CD release is a traditional flute album: Red Dreams, A Trail Beyond Tears. She performs nationally and internationally with her band, the Arrow Dynamics. She also performs her one-woman show, Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, which premiered at the Wells Fargo Theater in Los Angeles in 2009 with recent performances at the Public Theater in NYC and La Jolla Playhouse as part of the Native Voices at the Autry. She has received a Rasmusson US Artists Fellowship and is a founding board member of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. Harjo writes a column “Comings and Goings” for her tribal newspaper, the Muscogee Nation News. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
For more information contact the American Indian Resource Center at 831-459-2881.

Harry Berger, Jr.: "Caterpillage: Small-scale Violence in 17th Century Dutch Still-Life Painting"
2011-04-21 19:00 - 21:00 | Merrill Event Center, Merrill Event Center, UC Santa Cruz, Merrill College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
This talk is about the strange accent on disorder in 17th century Dutch paintings of still life. The still-life genre includes pictures of flowers and food in domestic and outdoor settings. Its focus is on the conflict between an emphasis on order, harmony, and formal beauty, and an emphasis on disorder, damage, and death. I’ll view still life through the lens provided by Stephen Colbert’s idea of “truthiness” and devote special attention to the way still life painters delight in depicting the depredations inflicted by such tiny terrorists as snails and caterpillars.

Bettina Aptheker: "The Passion and Pageantry of Shirley Graham {Du Bois}: Composer & Playwright, 1920s-1930s"
2011-04-25 14:00 - 15:30 | Music Center Recital Hall, Music Center, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Shirley Graham {Du Bois} (1896-1977) had a successful early career as composer, performer and playwright that included her formal studies at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Yale University, and the near completion of a Ph D at NYU. In 1932 her opera, “Tom-Tom” for which she wrote the libretto and composed the music, was performed as part of the Cleveland (Ohio) Summer Opera Festival to a capacity audience of 15,000 on opening night; the opera was a sensation. She later won a coveted two-year Young Playwrights Fellowship to Yale, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and became the Director of Negro Theater for the Federal Theater Project in Chicago in the 1930s. This presentation will examine the passion and pageantry of her work, focusing in particular on her operatic/composing career and its historical significance. Unable to pursue her artistic life because she was a single mother with two young children in the midst of the Depression, Graham went onto work in a variety of race-related and increasingly radical political projects, and became the very successful author of young adult biographies of famous Black Americans in the 1940s and 1950s. She married Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois in 1951. In addition to extensive archival work, this presentation is based upon Aptheker’s friendship with the Du Bois’.
This colloquium is presented at the invitation of the Music Department; all are welcome to attend.

The Writing Program's Reading Series
2011-04-25 19:00 - 20:30 | Silverman Conference Room, Stevenson, Stevenson College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Please join us for an evening of poetry and prose with past and present Writing Program faculty:
Chuck Atkinson, Jeff Arnett, Roxi Power Hamilton, Ingrid Moody, Robin Sommers, and Stephen Sweat

Paul Horwich: "Wittgenstein's Meta-Philosophy"
2011-04-26 16:00 - 18:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
My aim will be to describe and assess Wittgenstein’s anti-theoretical view of why philosophy ought not to be in conducted in the traditional way, how it should instead be done, and what can be accomplished by pursuing it properly. I will be especially concerned with the questions: (1) of how this view is related to his conception of ‘meaning’ as use’, (2) of whether it is self-defeatingly ‘theoretical’, (3) of how it evolved from his earlier (Tractatus) position, and (4) of whether his departures from that position were sufficiently radical.
Professor Paul Horwich (BA Oxford 1966, MA Yale 1969, PhD Cornell 1974) will be speaking on Tuesday, April 26, 2011 at the invitation of the Linguistics and Philosophy Group. His talk is co-sponsored by the Institute for Humanities research and the UCSC Philosophy Department. Prof. Horwich’s principle contributions to the field have been a probabilistic account of scientific methodology, a unified explanation of temporally asymmetric phenomena, a deflationary conception of truth, and a naturalistic use-theory of meaning. He has received fellowship support for his work from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has been on the faculties of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (73-95), University College London (95-00), and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (00-05). He has also given courses at UCLA, the CNRS Institute d’Histoire et Philosophie des Sciences et Technique, the University of Sydney, the École Normale Supérieure, and the University of Tokyo. His main present project is a monograph on Wittgenstein’s meta-philosophy.

Afro-Latinos in the Américas
2011-04-27 10:00 - 12:00 | Kresge, Room 159, Kresge College, UC Santa Cruz, Kresge College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
A panel with Juan Flores (NYU), Miriam Jiménez Román (The Schomburg Center), Nancy Raquel Mirabal (SFSU), and Mark Anderson (UCSC).
Lourdes Martínez Echazábal (Literature) will be respondent. Juan Poblete (Literature) will moderate
In celebration of the recent publication of Juan Flores and Miriam Jimenez Roman’s “Afro-Latin@ Reader” (Duke, 2011)
The Afro-Latin@ Reader focuses attention on a large, vibrant, yet oddly invisible community in the United States: people of African descent from Latin America and the Caribbean. The presence of Afro-Latin@s in the United States (and throughout the Americas) belies the notion that Blacks and Latin@s are two distinct categories or cultures. Afro-Latin@s are uniquely situated to bridge the widening social divide between Latin@s and African Americans; at the same time, their experiences reveal pervasive racism among Latin@s and ethnocentrism among African Americans.
Questions? Contact Shannon Mahoney at kresgeprovostassistant@ucsc.edu

Matt O'Hara: “The History of the Future in Mexico”
2011-04-27 12:15 - 13:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Center for Cultural Studies Colloquium Series Presents:
Matt O’Hara, History, UCSC
“The History of the Future in Mexico”
Historians of Latin America have spent much energy studying historical legacies. The notion that “the past weighs heavily on the present” is a standard frame for historical analysis. Stepping outside this paradigm, Professor O’Hara’s book project examines how Mexicans thought about, planned for, and accessed the future from the mid-colonial period into the early republic.
Matthew O’Hara is Associate Professor of History at UCSC
Staff support provided by the Institute for Humanities Research

Jennifer L. Morgan: "Quotidian Erasures: Gender and the Records of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade"
2011-04-27 16:30 - 18:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
“Quotidian Erasures: Gender and the Records of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade” will argue that the emergence of what early modern political theorists described as “political arithmetic”—and what we term demography—is a product of the trade in slaves that bolstered the colonial economies they were at pains to describe. Numeracy, political arithmetic, and the science of demography emerged in the crucible of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and early modern mercantilism. Thus, those of us charting the lives of women and men of African descent in the Atlantic must turn careful attention to the ways in which demography both supports our work and comprises a core part of the legacies of archival violence with which we must grapple. Demography is evidence, but it is also a critical problem of early modern ideology—as is what the gathering of demographic evidence meant to those who were both collecting it and being collected.
How do we move from a world in which the free African man Anthony Johnson can petition for and receive special to one in which English travelers to Africa as early as the sixteenth century routinely glossed men and women as “merchandize?” The power of numerical reckoning is not a new question for scholars of the post-colonial. But a clear disciplinary boundary is drawn in the early modern period, between those working on the political valence demography, and those working on the demographic parameters of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. It is in this juncture between histories of political science and economic studies of the trade that I am interested in staking a embedded in numerical evidence, the development of “political arithmetic,” and the ways in which men and women were and are reduced to and embedded in a system of monetary or commercial value?
Jennifer L. Morgan is Professor in the departments of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University. She is the author of Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in the Making of New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). Her research examines the intersections of gender and race in colonial America. She is currently at work on a project that considers colonial numeracy, racism and the rise of the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade tentatively entitled Accounting for the Women in Slavery.
This event is made possible through generous contributions from the Departments of History, American Studies and Sociology.

Clive Sinclair: "The Belmont Quota"
2011-04-28 12:00 - 13:30 | Kresge, Room 325, Kresge College, UC Santa Cruz, Kresge College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Clive Sinclair has published 14 books of fiction – The Lady and the Laptop received major critical acclaim in England and he is noted for his criticism, including a study of Isaac Bashevis and Isaac Joshua Singer, – a collection of his stories, Bedbugs, was published last year by Syracuse University Press.
Clive Sinclair will speak on English attitudes to Venice, discussing Dreamers of the Ghetto– the stories of Israel Zangwill (1898) – as well as Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.
This talk will take place in Murray Baumgarten’s class “Jewish Writers and the European City.” It is open to the public and will be followed by a discussion.

Alicia Schmidt Camacho: "When Human Beings Become Illegal"
2011-04-28 16:00 - 17:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Drawing on migrant testimony, this talk will discuss the implications of government refusals to recognize and protect the mobility of poor people in their pursuit of economic survival. Migrants routinely experience grave abuses and assault in the course of their travels through the North American migratory circuit at the hands of both state and criminal actors. This violence, Schmidt Camacho argues, arises from transformations in the nature of sovereign power arising from economic restructuring and democratic state failure in the region. The increased use of force in immigration law enforcement is symptomatic of a pronounced rise in state violence during the last decade, roundly legitimated by governments as defending the rule of law.
Alicia Schmidt Camacho is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University. She is the author of Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (NYU, 2008). She is currently at work on a book about state security and social violence along the North American migratory circuit.
Staff support provided by the Institute for Humanities Research.

Living Writers Series: Claudia Rankine
2011-04-28 18:00 - 19:45 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Claudia Rankine was born in Jamaica in 1963. She is the author of four collections of poetry, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, The End of the Alphabet, and Nothing in Nature is Private (1995), which received the Cleveland State Poetry Prize. Rankine is co-editor of American Women Poets in the Twenty-First Century (Wesleyan University Press). Her poetry is also included in several anthologies, including Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, Best American Poetry 2001, Giant Step: African American Writing at the Crossroads of the Century, and The Garden Thrives: Twentieth Century African-American Poetry. She teaches in the writing program at the University of Houston.
Each quarter, the Living Writers Reading Series brings visiting authors and poets to UC Santa Cruz to give students an in-depth look into the world of the working writer. Sponsored by Oakes College and the Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund.

Pasolini's Body: New Directions in Pasolini Scholarship
2011-04-29 - 2011-04-30 | Cowell Conference Room, Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) — poet, film director, screenwriter and theatre critic, playwright, essayist, journalist, graphic artist, and novelist — was one of the great Italian artistic and intellectual figures of the twentieth century. Since his mysterious murder in 1975, Pasolini has been reviled; then sanctified. Our goal is to historicize Pasolini. This conference focuses on configurations of the body and gesture that arise in Pasolini’s performative, visual, and poetic practices with respect to the artist image, the ‘popular body’, the Third World, narrative and choreographic movement, Pasolini’s life, and his conceptions of the political and eroticism as they intersect history, culture, and myth.
Thursday
7:30-10 pm – Film Screening: Arabian Nights
Introduction: Peter Limbrick, UCSC
Location: Studio C, Communications Building
Friday
8:30-9:00 – Coffee
9:00-9:30 – Opening Remarks
David Yager, Dean of the Arts,
Mark Franko, Director of the Center for Visual and Performance Studies
9:30-11:30 – Panel: Corporeal Poetics
Tyrus Miller, UCSC
“Transhumanize and Organize: Pasolini’s Crossing of Philology and Biopolitics”
Armando Maggi, U. Chicago
“Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body and Pasolini’s Calderón”
Colleen Ryan-Scheutz, Indiana U.
“Pasolini’s Final Word(s): From the Divina Mimesis to Petrolio and Salo”
Moderator: Deanna Shemek, UCSC
11:30-1:00 – Lunch
1:00-3:00 – Panel: Visualizing the Body
Gian Maria Annovi, Columbia
“Pasolini’s Cinematographic Body”
Mark Franko, UCSC
“Notes on Pasolini and the ‘Language’ of Dance”
Silvestra Mariniello, U. Montreal
“Myth and the Pace of Life. Pasolini’s Poetics of History”
Moderator: Cathy Soussloff, UBC
3:00-3:30 – Break
3:30-5:30 – Panel: Political Kinesthetics
Staisey Divorski, UCLA
“The Heretical Absence of the Word: Pasolini’s Teorema”
Evan Calder Williams, UCSC
“A Vital Desperation: On Rage and Communist Pessimism”
Wlad Godzich, UCSC
“Body, Narrative, and Politics”
Moderator: Karen Bassi, UCSC
5:30-7:30 – Reception & Film Screening: Notes on an African Orestes
Introduction: Peter Limbrick, UCSC
Location: Studio C, Communications Building
Saturday
10:00-10:30 – Coffee
10:30-1:00 – Panel: Postcolonial Figurations
David Pendleton, Harvard
“Pasolini on the Beach: Semiosis, Erotics and the Politics of the Image”
Derek Duncan, U. Bristol
“Graceless: Pasolini’s Postcolonial Body”
Giovanna Trento, French Center for Ethiopian Studies
“Il corpo popolare according to Pier Paolo Pasolini: body, sexuality, subalternity, reality, resistance, agency and death”
Luca Caminati, Concodria
“Notes on Pasolini’s Third World”
Moderator: Peter Limbrick
Sponsored by UCSC Arts Division, UCSC Arts Research Institute, Istituto Italiano di Cultura di San Francisco, Cowell College, Theater Arts Department, Literature Department, Film and Digital Media Department, History of Art and Visual Culture Department, History of Consciousness Department, Feminist Studies Department, and History Department

Bhanu Kapil: "Performance and Narrative: Writing (not writing) a tragic scene: NOTES: towards the Southall Race Riot of 1979"
2011-04-29 16:00 - 18:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Bhanu Kapil has written four full-length cross-genre works: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works, 2006), humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009), and Schizophrene (forthcoming, Nightboat Books). Recent classes at Naropa have engaged architecture, somatics, biology and memory as ways to approach or navigate contemporary narrative and poetics. An on-going experimental pedagogy and reflection can be found at her blog: “Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi? [A Day in the Life of a Naropa University Writing Professor.]”
Poetry and Politics is a research cluster of the Institute for Humanities Research, which has provided staff support for this event. Sponsored by the UC Humanities Network. Cosponsored by UCSC Porter College Hitchcock Poetry Fund the Center for Cultural Studies, and the Literature Department.
Please contact Andrea Quaid (aquaid@ucsc.edu) or Juliana Leslie (julianaleslie@gmail.com) with any questions.

Poetry Reading: Bhanu Kapil and Sesshu Foster
2011-04-29 19:00 - 21:00 | Felix Kulpa Gallery, 107 Elm Street, Santa Cruz, 95060, United States
Bhanu Kapil has written four full-length cross-genre works: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works, 2006), humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009), and Schizophrene (forthcoming, Nightboat Books). Recent classes at Naropa have engaged architecture, somatics, biology and memory as ways to approach or navigate contemporary narrative and poetics. An on-going experimental pedagogy and reflection can be found at her blog: “Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi? [A Day in the Life of a Naropa University Writing Professor.]”
Sesshu Foster has taught writing in East Los Angeles for 20 years in addition to teaching at the University of Iowa, the California Institute for the Arts, and UC Santa Cruz. He is the author of Atomik Aztex; World Ball Notebook; American Loneliness: Selected Poems; and City Terrace Field Manual, a finalist for the PEN Center West Poetry Prize. He also co-edited Invocation LA: Urban Multicultural Poetry.
Poetry and Politics is a research cluster of the Institute for Humanities Research, which has provided staff support for this event. Sponsored by the UC Humanities Network. Cosponsored by UCSC Porter College Hitchcock Poetry Fund the Center for Cultural Studies, and the Literature Department.
Please contact Andrea Quaid (aquaid@ucsc.edu) or Juliana Leslie (julianaleslie@gmail.com) with any questions.

Day by the Bay
2011-04-30 | UC Santa Cruz
An exciting array of events and activities are planned on campus during UCSC’s upcoming “Day By The Bay” event. The campus’s annual reunion weekend will take place this year from Friday, April 29, through Sunday, May 1.
A complete schedule of events — and all related details — can be found at: http://events.ucsc.edu/daybythebay/
We hope you will join us for as many of the following special events as possible:
Saturday, April 30
Intellectual Forum
11 a.m.–12:30 p.m., Humanities Lecture Hall
“Game Changers: Green Chemistry and Social Change Philanthropy”
Oakes Provost Kimberly Lau will moderate a discussion between UCSC alumni who are creating major paradigm shifts in our collective approach to meeting social, environmental, and economic challenges. Featured speakers are:
Drummond Pike (Stevenson ’70) founder of Tides and cofounder of Working Assets
Michael Wilson (Stevenson ’84) research scientist and pioneer in the emerging field of “green” chemistry
Please register for this free event on the Day by the Bay web site.
Day by the Bay Picnic
12–3 p.m., East Field
Delicious local food, microbrews, and wine. Fun activities for kids (including a bounce house and climbing wall), robotics displays, displays from the colleges, student entertainment, and much, much more.
This year, we have also planned for a “Faculty & Staff Lounge” at the site of the picnic. In the largest tent in the center of the picnic, the “lounge” will be provide another opportunity for alumni to reconnect with favorite professors and staff. There will be comfy lounge furniture and coffee for you to enjoy while you reminisce along with alumni from all eras.
Please register for this free event on the Day by the Bay web site.
All Alumni Wine Reception
Cowell Provost House Lawn, 3–4:30 p.m.
Join us for a toast to celebrate our alumni. Reconnect with old classmates and faculty, meet new friends and share your story about how UCSC has impacted your life.
Please register for this free event on the Day by the Bay web site.

UCSC Class of 1971 40-Year Reunion Dinner
University Center, 6 p.m.
Reconnect with fellow alumni and your favorite faculty and staff for a night of mingling and memories to celebrate the last 40 years.
Tickets to this event cost $45.
Please register for this event by Friday, April 15, on the Day by the Bay web site.
Sunday, May 1
Writers Life: A celebration of writing at UC Santa Cruz
Humanities Lecture Hall and Plaza, 9 a.m.-6 p.m.
Humanities is hosting a selection of alumni writers–novelists, journalists, and screenwriters–coming together for a community event to focus on the joys and challenges of writing as a living, the business of writing, and trends for the future.

A Writer's Life
2011-05-01 10:00 - 16:00 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join us on May 1, 2011, (10am to 4pm) in celebrating writing at UCSC. As part of UCSC’s Day By The Bay celebrations, Humanities is hosting a selection of alumni writers – novelists, journalists, and screenwriters—coming together for a community event to focus on the joys and challenges of writing as a living, the business of writing, and trends for the future.

UCSC students, alumni and Santa Cruz community members are all welcome to this free event. The day begins at 10am with a keynote speech by alumnus David Talbot founder of Salon.com and best-selling author of Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years. Other writers participating in this event are: Susan Blackaby – children’s book author; David Ehrman – screenwriter; Charlie Haas – author; Claire Hoffman – freelance journalist; Robert Irion – freelance magazine journalist; Laurie King – author; Dan Pulcrano – CEO and Executive Editor, Metro Newspapers; Matt Skenazy – freelance journalist; and Gary Young – poet.

The day will conclude with a book faire and reception with the panelists.

For more information, visit http://writerslife.ucsc.edu/. Visit our registration site to RSVP.

Herbie Lee: "Computer Model Emulation"
2011-05-03 12:00 - 13:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Many modern problems involve computer simulations of physical or social processes. The field of statistics provides a range of tools to help with the design, analysis, and use of computer simulators. This talk will give an overview of these problems and the statistical perspective, with applications ranging from rocket science to hydrology to health care policy.
Herbie Lee is Professor of Applied Mathematics and Statistics and Interim Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, UCSC. Dr. Lee’s research focuses on Bayesian statistics, particularly computer models and connections between statistics and machine learning. He has published numerous articles and two books: Multiscale Modeling: A Bayesian Perspective (Springer) and Bayesian Nonparametrics via Neural Networks (SIAM). He is also well known as an outstanding teacher of statistics at all levels.
This talk is present as part of the The Linguistics Research Center Brown Bag Lunch Series.

Jacob Metcalf: "Meet Shmeat: Animal Biotechnologies and the Philosophical Tensions of the New Foods Movements"
2011-05-04 12:15 - 13:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Center for Cultural Studies Colloquium Series Presents:
Jacob Metcalf, Science and Social Justice Postdoctoral Fellow, UCSC
“Meet Shmeat: Animal Biotechnologies and the Philosophical Tensions of the New Foods Movements”
Doctor Metcalf is the Postdoctoral Fellow in an NSF-funded program training graduate students in interdisciplinary inquiry on the co-constitution of ethics and scientific knowledge. His research concerns the construction of ethical inquiry. He proposes new applied ethics methodologies that account for the boundaries drawn within techno-scientific apparatuses, and asks how science and technology might become more responsive to the conditions and consequences of those boundaries.
Staff support provided by the Institute for Humanities Research

Regine Basha: "Tuning Baghdad"
2011-05-05 16:00 - 17:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Regine Basha has been an curator of contemporary art and art writer since the early 1990s. Her exhibition and writing history can be found on bashaprojects.com. Amongst her most recent projects is Tuning Baghdad, an audio-visual forum for chronicling Iraqi-Jewish music scene and their house parties (based on her own background). This ongoing project brings to light the movement of this diasporic community and their displacement from Iraq as evidenced through their love of Arabic music and the Iraqi Maqam. Basha currently sits on the board of the foundation Art Matters (New York), Aurora Picture Show (Houston) and is a Curatorial Host to Cabinet Magazine’s new space in Gowanus, Brooklyn.
Regine Basha will discuss the background of Tuning Baghdad, the decisions behind creating it online and not as a documentary, and the future plans for the site. During the course of the talk, she will show video, play audio collages and present books related to the subject. If all goes according to plan, a surprise guest may be invited to sing over Skype video.
Regine Basha will give this talk in her capacity as visiting scholar at the Center for Jewish Studies.
Staff support provided by the Institute for Humanities Research.

Living Writers Series: Jessica Hagedorn
2011-05-05 18:00 - 19:45 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Jessica Hagedorn received her education at the American Conservatory Theater training program. To further pursue playwriting and music, she moved to New York in 1978. Joseph Papp produced her first play Mango Tango in 1978. Hagedorn’s other productions include Tenement Lover, Holy Food, and Teenytown. Her mixed media style often incorporates song, poetry, images, and spoken dialogue. Hagerdorn is the author of the novel Dogeaters, which illuminates many different aspects of Filipino experience, focusing on the influence of America through radio, television, and movie theaters, and which earned a 1990 National Book Award nomination and an American Book Award.
Each quarter, the Living Writers Reading Series brings visiting authors and poets to UC Santa Cruz to give students an in-depth look into the world of the working writer. Sponsored by Oakes College and the Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund.

Susanne Gahl: "Why So Short? Competing Explanations for Variation"
2011-05-06 15:30 - 17:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Frequent or contextually-predictable words are often phonetically reduced, e.g. shortened or produced with articulatory undershoot. Three common explanations for this phenomenon attribute phonetic reduction, and pronunciation variation generally, to variation in (1) intelligibility, (2) speed of lexical access, and (3) probabilistic properties of whole utterances. In this talk, I discuss recent results (Gahl, Yao & Johnson, under review; Gahl, in prep.) investigating the sources of pronunciation variation. While these results are consistent with speaker-internal approaches to variation, I argue that they are best explained by moving beyond the listener vs. speaker dichotomy: Some perceptually-based effects are speaker-internal; and some production-based effects give rise to structured variation in intelligibility resulting in usable cues for recognition.

Manlio Argueta and Jorge Argueta: Beyond the Volcano
2011-05-10 16:00 - 17:30 | Cervantes & Velasquez Room, Baytree Conference Center, Bay Tree Conference Center, UC Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Latino Literary Cultures Research Cluster presents:
Manlio Argueta is a Salvadoran writer, critic, and novelist born in 1935. Although he considers himself first and foremost a poet, he is known in the English speaking world for his book Un día en la vida, One Day of Life.
Argueta was born in San Miguel, El Salvador, on November 24, 1935. Argueta has stated that his exposure to “poetic sounds” began during his childhood and that his foundation in poetry stemmed from his childhood imagination. Argueta’s interest in literature was strongly influenced by the world literature he read as a teenager. Argueta began his writing career by the age of 13 as a poet. He cites Pablo Neruda and Federico García Lorca as some of his early poetic influences. Although he was relatively unknown at the time, Argueta won a national prize for his poetry around 1956, which gained him some recognition among Salvadoran and Central American poets. As he became more involved with the literary community of El Salvador, Argueta became a member of the “Committed Generation”. Because of his writings criticizing the government, Argueta was exiled to Costa Rica in 1972 and was not able to return to El Salvador until the 1990s. Argueta currently lives in El Salvador where he holds the position of Director of the National Public Library.
Jorge Argueta– Born in El Salvador, Jorge immigrated to San Francisco, California in 1980. He is a prize-winning poet and author of many bilingual children’s books and poetry books. His first book for Children’s Book Press, A Movie in My Pillow / Una película en mi almohada, received numerous awards including the 2002 Américas Book Award for Latin American Literature, the IPPY Award for Multicultural Fiction–Juvenile/Young Adults, and the Skipping Stones Honor Award for Multicultural and International Books. Jorge’s books have been published by pretigious editorial houses in Canada (Groundwood Books), the United States (Children’s Book Press) and Spain (Alfaguara). His books have been beautifully illustrated by well-known Latin- American illustrators.
Jorge makes presentations and holds poetry workshops throughout the United States and Central America – in public and private schools, universities, cultural centers, community centers, museums, festivals, hospitals and youth
guidance centers. In 2009, he was invited to participate in the John F. Kennedy Multicultural Book Festival in Washington, DC. Jorge is active in the cultural life of the city in which he resides and also works with humanitarian organizations to assist families and children in El Salvador. Jorge Argueta is also the Director of “Talleres de Poesia” a literary organization based in the US, that launched and organized the First Annual Children’s Poetry Festival in El Salvador (November 2010).
Staff support provided by the Institute for Humanities Research.

Cécile Alduy: "Obscenity, Obstetrics, and the Origin of the Pornographic Gaze"
2011-05-11 12:15 - 13:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Center for Cultural Studies Colloquium Series Presents:
Cécile Alduy, French and Italian, Stanford University
“Obscenity, Obstetrics, and the Origin of the Pornographic Gaze”
Professor Alduy is chair of Renaissances, an interdisciplinary forum on the present and future of early modern studies, and director of the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Stanford University. One of her current projects is Archaeology of a Close-Up: The “Blasons anatomiques” and the Prehistory of Obscenity, which looks at the intersection between the field of obstetrics, its book market, and the pre-history of obscenity.
Cécile Alduy is Associate Professor of French and Italian at Stanford University.
Staff support provided by the Institute for Humanities Research

Humanities Spring Awards
2011-05-11 16:00 - 17:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join us as we recognize the outstanding accomplishments of our faculty, staff and students who have received awards, honors, grants and/or fellowships over the course of the 2010-11 academic year.

Banu Subramaniam: "Tracking Ghosts: Hauntings from a Eugenic Past"
2011-05-11 16:30 - 18:30 | Engineering 2, Room 599, Engineering 2, 1156 High St‎ University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
What do morning glory flowers or exotic plant and animal species have to do with the history of race or eugenics? In this talk, I trace the genealogies of ecology and evolutionary biology to explore how histories of gender and race shape contemporary biological theories and what lessons we can learn about the relationships between natures and cultures.
Banu Subramaniam is associate professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is coeditor of Feminist Science Studies: A New Generation (Routledge, 2001) and Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). Trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, she seeks to engage the social and cultural studies of science in the practice of science. Spanning the humanities, social sciences, and the biological sciences, her research is located at the intersections of biology, women’s studies, ethnic studies and postcolonial studies. Her current work focuses on the genealogies of variation in evolutionary biology, the xenophobia and nativism that accompany frameworks on invasive plant species, and the relationship of science and religious nationalism in India.
This event is co-sponsored by the Feminist Studies Department and the Science and Justice Working Group.

Kuan-Hsing Chen: "Asia as Method"
2011-05-12 16:00 - 17:30 | Cowell Conference Room, Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Kuan-Hsing Chen is Professor in the Graduate Institute for Social Research and Cultural Studies; coordinator of the Center for Asia-Pacific/Cultural Studies at National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan; and co-executive editor of the journal, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Movements. His most recent book is Asia as Method: Towards Deimperialiazation (Duke, 2010).
Readings available at: http://ccs.ihr.ucsc.edu/files/2011/03/Asia_as_Method.pdf
Presented by the Center for Cultural Studies with co-sponsorship by the Asian Diasporas Research Cluster of the IHR, Film and Digital Media Department, and the Nee Fund of the Dept of History, UCSC. Staff support provided by the Institute for Humanities Research, UCSC.

Sarah Nelson: "Korea and the Silk Road"
2011-05-12 17:00 - 18:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
UCSC Society of the Archeological Institute of America and the President’s Chair in Ancient Studies present a lecture in an ongoing series on “Archaeology and the Ancient World”

Professor Sarah Milledge Nelson: “Korea and the Silk Road”
Thursday, May 12 at 5 pm (refreshments at 4:30)
Humanities 1, Room 210

The Korean peninsula was almost the Asian end of the “Silk Road,” yet exotic objects from the Mediterranean world are found in Korean burials beginning in the first century B.C. In studying how these objects came to be deposited in Korean burials, it becomes clear that objects arrived in Korea by at least three different routes. Professor Nelson will discuss the Steppe Route north of the Altai Mountains, the Silk Road through Xinjinag, and a Sea Route, along with the objects that arrived in Korea from as far away as the Mediterranean world.

Sarah Milledge Nelson is the John Evans Distinguished Professor with the University of Denver’s Department of Anthropology. She received her degrees from Wellesley College, and the University of Michigan (M.A. and Ph.D.), and her areas of specialization are East Asia, particularly Korea and northeast China, gender issues, religion in archaeology, leadership, and ethnicity. Professor Nelson has conducted fieldwork in China and South Korea, as well as several sites in the southwest U.S. Her recent main publications include Shamanism and the Origin of States, Spirit, Power and Gender in East Asia (2008, Left Coast Press), and the edited volume Gender in Archaeology (2006, Alta Mira Press).
Free parking for lecture in Cowell-Stevenson parking lots. For more information on the lecture or the AIA, please contact hedrick@ucsc.edu.
Staff support provided by the Institute for Humanities Research.

Living Writers Series: Aimee Bender
2011-05-12 18:00 - 19:45 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Aimee Bender is the author of four books: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998), which was a NY Times Notable Book; An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000), an L.A. Times pick of the year; Willful Creatures (2005), which was nominated by The Believer as one of the best books of the year; and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010), which recently won the SCIBA award for best fiction, and an Alex Award. Her short fiction has been published in Granta, GQ, Harper’s, Tin House, McSweeney’s, and The Paris Review, as well as heard on PRI’s This American Life and Selected Shorts. She has received two Pushcart prizes, and was nominated for the TipTree award in 2005, and the Shirley Jackson short story award in 2010.
Each quarter, the Living Writers Reading Series brings visiting authors and poets to UC Santa Cruz to give students an in-depth look into the world of the working writer. Sponsored by Oakes College and the Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund.
