The Humanities Institute

CANCELLED - Linguistics Colloquia: Jesse Harris
2020-05-08 13:20 - 15:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 2, Room 259
Jesse Harris (UCLA) – Title TBD
Jesse Harris is an assistant professor at UCLA in the Department of Linguistics, and director of the UCLA Language Processing Lab. His research investigates how language users develop a sufficiently rich linguistic meaning during online comprehension, concentrating in particular on three related areas: (a) the formal semantics of context sensitive expressions, (b) the semantic processing of contextually dependent terms, and (c) the pragmatic and processing defaults engaged when generating a semantic or discourse representation for an utterance or phrase.
About eight times each year, the Linguistics department hosts colloquia by distinguished faculty from around the world.
For full information visit: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/colloquia/index.html

Graduate Research Symposium
2020-05-08 16:00 - 17:30 | CA
Join us via Zoom for the announcement of the symposium winners!
•Best overall, $1000
•Best of the Arts Division, $250
•Best of the Baskin School of Engineering, $250
•Best of the Humanities Division, $250
•Best of the Physical and Biological Sciences Division, $250
•Best of the Social Sciences Division, $250
Find out who won in this year’s online Graduate Research Symposium! Enjoy watching the Zoom presentations of the winners!
The Division of Graduate Studies will upload all recorded symposium Zoom presentations to our YouTube channel.

PIT-UN Network Challenge Funding Info Session
2020-05-12 15:00 - 16:00 | CA
As we announced at our recent Public Interest Technology University Network (PIT-UN) kickoff event, the annual Network Challenge funding program is open for submissions.
To answer questions, and to discuss ideas and collaborations, we will hold a Zoom Info Session next Tuesday, May 12th from 3:00 – 4:00 PM. RSVP here.
Applications are open to all PIs on UCSC Campus. One year project funding is available in three tranches: up to $45,000, up to $90,000 and up to $180,000. An initial campus limited submission process will select up to three projects that will be submitted to the network committee.
The Network Challenge seeks to encourage new ideas, foster collaborations, and incentivize resource- and information-sharing among network members. The broad goal is to fund projects that help train a new generation of graduates who have both technological literacy and a rigorous foundation to navigate the societal, ethical, legal, policy, and equity implications of technology by offering a systematic way of studying technology as a tool for addressing social problems in the world.
Applications can be submitted here.

CANCELLED: Cultural Studies Colloquium
2020-05-13 12:15 - 13:00, 2020-05-20 12:15 - 13:00, 2020-05-27 12:15 - 13:00, 2020-06-03 12:15 - 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. The sessions consist of a 40-45 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center provides coffee, tea, and cookies.
All Center for Cultural Studies events are free and open to the public. Staff assistance is provided by the Humanities Institute.

VIRTUAL - Thinking the Pandemic: Part II
2020-05-13 12:15 - 13:30 | CA
We will continue to think about the current pandemic in relation to epidemic histories, states of uncertainty, and authoritarian power, with readings by Bishnupriya Ghosh, Carlo Caduff, and Siddharth Varadarajan. Anjali Arondekar and Mayanthi Fernando will start the conversation off with presentations on the readings. Email cult@ucsc.edu for the Ghosh and Caduff readings.
Readings:
“The Costs of Living: Reflections on Global Health Crises” by Bishnupriya Ghosh
“In India, a Pandemic of Prejudice and Repression” by Siddharth Varadarajan
“What Went Wrong? Rebuilding the World after Corona” by Carlo Caduff

Important information about this event: These informal sessions will be on Zoom and will start at 12:15pm. For security reasons, you will need to RSVP to register for each session; you will then receive a Zoom link and password for that session. We will have a “waiting room” for the session; the waiting room will open at noon, so please join between noon and 12:15pm (event moderators will let you into the session from the waiting room). Entry to the session will close at 12:30pm, so please don’t be late to join a session.
We will begin these Special Sessions with a two-part series on “Thinking the Pandemic.” The first part will be Wednesday, May 6 and the second on Wednesday, May 12. Stay tuned for more special sessions, including a speculative film called “A World Without Clouds,” for later in May.

VIRTUAL: Humanities Happy Hour - Freedom & Race in the Time of Pandemic
2020-05-14 17:30 | CA
Join us for our first virtual Humanities Happy Hour exploring Questions That Matter in the Time of Pandemic. This week will focus on “Freedom & Race” and feature Humanities Dean Tyler Stovall in conversation with associate professors Alice Yang, Christine Hong, and Noriko Aso.

What does it mean to be free in a nation on house arrest? Recent demonstrations against shelter-in-place orders have been overwhelmingly white as groups alleging an assault on liberty have trafficked in racist symbols, including swastikas and Confederate flags. Some have reacted to the current pandemic by blaming certain racial or ethnic groups. To what extent is this repeating a long history of scapegoating in times of pandemic? Meanwhile, the coronavirus is taking a disproportionate toll on black and brown communities in America in terms of infections and death. How has the public health crisis both highlighted and exacerbated racial inequalities?
The COVID-19 pandemic is illustrating critical issues surrounding freedom and race in the United States. This week’s conversation will consider rampant anti-Asian racism and discrimination, glaring inequities in health outcomes for African-American and Latinx communities, and other issues of race and freedom highlighted, and, in many ways, intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Questions That Matter in the Time of Pandemic is a public humanities series that brings UC Santa Cruz faculty in conversation with the campus and community to discuss topics of importance to us all during the COVID-19 health crisis. The conversations build on themes that The Humanities Institute (THI) has explored as part of Questions That Matter annual events. For additional discussion, we encourage you to watch the video of THI’s event on Questions That Matter: Freedom and Race, in which Jennifer Gonzalez and Tyler Stovall discuss the idea that racism—and the exclusion of racial groups from society—is essential to understanding freedom in America. You can also read Dean Tyler Stovall’s 2020 Questions that Matter in the Time of Pandemic written reflection as well as his 2018 interview on freedom and race.
Questions? Contact Special Events

VIRTUAL - PhD+ Workshop: Coping with Social Isolation and Anxiety in a Crisis
2020-05-15 12:00 - 13:00 | Zoom, CA, United States
These are extraordinary times. In a matter of days, we have had to learn new ways of navigating our educational and occupational needs to meet our goals. This can be stressful. Our go-to coping strategy is often gathering with our social group and offering a shoulder to lean on, or accepting one. The world has been turned upside down. Spend an hour with Richard Enriquez, Ph.D. discussing ways to cope with stress and maintain social connection in this time of physical distancing due to COVID-19.

Richard Enriquez completed his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Palo Alto University with an emphasis in Diversity and Community Mental Health (DCMH). He is a long-time slug, having earned his bachelor’s degree in psychology and completing his postdoctoral fellowship here at UCSC. He currently works as a CAPS counseling psychologist with a focus in working with the Graduate Student community.
Dr. Enriquez’ clinical interests include alcohol and other drug use, religion and spirituality, mood disorders, and anxiety disorders. He values working with ethnically diverse populations, LGBTQ-identified clients, and college students. Richard believes in working collaboratively with students, helping them identify their personal goals and supporting them in their journey.

About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Please join us for the fourth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by the Humanities Institute. We meet monthly, over lunch, to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grants/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.
Please RSVP to receive the Zoom link:
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VIRTUAL Akemi Johnson - Night in the American Village: Women in the Shadow of the US Military Bases
2020-05-15 16:00 - 17:00 | CA
Akemi Johnson is an author and journalist who’s work centers on Okinawan history and identity, she has contributed to NPR’s All Things Considered and Code Switch, and has written for The Guardian and The Nation. Now, Akemi Johnson joins us to discuss her 2019 book Night in the American Village: Women in the Shadow of the US Military Bases in Okinawa, which explores the nuanced relationship between Okinawan women and the servicemen who live on the U.S. military bases on the island.

Registration required. A Zoom link will be emailed to all registrants on May 14th.

POSTPONED - Kuumbwa Jazz & Indexical Present: Moor Mother & Las Sucias
2020-05-15 19:30 | Kuumbwa Jazz Center
Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother) is a nationally- and internationally-touring musician, poet, visual artist, and workshop facilitator, and has performed at numerous festivals, colleges, galleries, and museums around the world, sharing the stage with King Britt, Roscoe Mitchell, Claudia Rankine, bell hooks, and more. Her most recent album, Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes, is the culmination of all of her earthly experiences merged with all of her cosmic ones. On Analog Fluids, haunting slave narratives are presented as dystopian allegory and negro spirituals are flipped, remixed, and recaptured, only to be digitized into a symbiotic bio-morph program for the post-thumb drive age. It’s a record rich with the noise and chaos that affirm Moor Mother’s punk roots, yet it is also anchored in earthiness via the constant injection of Black ritual, poetry, and drums programmed to vibrate through the listener’s mitochondria.
Las Sucias is a duo formed by Danishta Rivero and Alexandra Buschman, mixing anti-patriarchal riotgrrrl lyrics, Afro-Caribbean rhythms, brujería noise and possessed vocals. Each performance is a ritual that combines all of the senses and elevates into a higher realm, inspiring the listener to dance, speak in tongues, laugh hysterically, and get possessed by the spirits awoken.
TICKETS & MORE INFO
The event will start with a discussion with Ayewa about Black Quantum Futurism, her collaborative Afrofuturist project with author Rasheedah Phillips of Afrofuturist Affair.
Moor Mother Website
Las Sucias Website
Indexical Website
Supported in part by the Humanities Institute, the Institute for Arts and Sciences, the Center for Creative Ecologies, and the Beyond the End of the World symposium at UC Santa Cruz.

VIRTUAL: Special Session - World Without Clouds
2020-05-20 12:15 - 13:30 | CA
World Without Clouds: an experimental work by Steven Gonzalez (MIT), Jia Hui Lee (MIT), Luísa Reis-Castro (MIT), Gabrielle Robbins (MIT), and Julianne Yip (Independent Scholar).
World Without Clouds is an experimental, multi-modal piece of speculative fiction filmed only with smartphone cameras. The story revolves around five anthropologists in the years 2045-50 who are trying to save clouds from going extinct. As climate change and authoritarian governments take over the Earth, these “salvage nephologists” invent an Ontology Machine to communicate with the last remaining clouds, hoping the clouds will “speak back” and offer a cloud-centered way to save clouds from dying out. The story draws inspiration from science fiction’s ability to experiment and make us aware of our epistemic limitations. The creators blend storytelling and academic scholarship in a way that refuses easy categorization into individual-authored research. They ask what kinds of new (cloud) formations might appear in the future. And they flirt—critically—with possible anthropological logics that are rooted in century-long practices of ethnographic documentation and salvation.
We will start on Zoom, then watch the 30-minute film synchronously on a separate site, and then reconvene on Zoom with the creators for a discussion. Donna Haraway will kick off the conversation.
RSVP below by 10 AM on Wednesday, May 20th to receive Zoom link and password.

VIRTUAL: Death on the Nile - A 3D Visit to Egypt's Most Enduring Cemetery
2020-05-20 17:30 - 18:15 | CA
Join us for a one-of-a-kind virtual experience to explore Saqqara, Egypt’s most enduring cemetery. UC Santa Cruz Associate Professor of History Elaine Sullivan will take us on a virtual visit to the site of Saqqara—the ancient Egyptian necropolis that was the burial place of kings, queens, priests, and elite officials for 2,500 years (3000-332 BCE). Using a 3D model that digitally ‘reconstructs’ the original appearance of the ancient monuments, Sullivan will focus on the architecture and art from the Pharaonic Period and discuss how royal and elite Egyptians created a special landscape to guarantee their eternal life and power.

Elaine Sullivan (M.A. and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University) is an associate professor of history, Egyptologist, and a digital humanist whose work focuses on applying new technologies to ancient cultural materials. Her upcoming born-digital publication, Constructing the Sacred (Stanford University Press), utilizes a geo-temporal 3D model of the necropolis of Saqqara to investigate questions of ritual landscape at the site.
We hope you will join us for what we know will be a fascinating conversation.
Questions? Contact the UC Santa Cruz Special Events Office at specialevents@ucsc.edu.

VIRTUAL: Humanities Happy Hour – Teaching and Learning in the Time of Pandemic
2020-05-21 17:30 - 19:00 | CA
What has the shift to remote, online instruction nationwide revealed about teaching and learning in higher education? How can we use this crisis as an opportunity to reimagine not only the role but the practice of teaching and learning? What is at stake for the future of higher education at UC Santa Cruz and around the world, and how can we harness the Humanities to think boldly and creatively in response? In this week’s Humanities Happy Hour Jody Greene, UC Santa Cruz Associate Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning, and Lois Kazakoff (Cowell, ‘76) will tackle these questions and more. Join us as we think through the role that the Humanities can play in imagining the future of higher education in, and beyond, a time of pandemic.

Registration required.
Jody Greene is Associate Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning and Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is also the Founding Director of UCSC’s Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning. In 2005, she published, The Trouble with Ownership: Intellectual Property and Authorial Liability in England, 1660-1730 (University of Pennsylvania Press). A new volume, Human Rights after Corporate Personhood, co-edited with Sharif Youssef, is forthcoming from the University of Toronto Press in Fall 2020. Greene has edited special issues of GLQ and Eighteenth-Century Studies, and has published articles in journals such as PMLA, Critical Inquiry, and The Eighteenth Century. Her most recent writing has appeared in Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Lois Kazakoff served as deputy editorial page editor of the San Francisco Chronicle for 18 years before retiring in 2019. She worked with presidents, politicians, professors and publicly-minded community members to help them craft compelling and persuasive commentary and bring their voices into the public forum. She has a bachelor’s degree in French from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She earned a master’s of science of journalism degree from Northwestern University. Lois currently serves on the UC Santa Cruz Humanities Dean’s Advisory Council.

Questions That Matter in the Time of Pandemic is a public humanities series that brings UC Santa Cruz faculty in conversation with the campus and community to discuss topics of importance to us all during the COVID-19 health crisis. The conversations build on themes that The Humanities Institute (THI) has explored as part of Questions That Matter and other signature events. For additional discussion, we encourage you to watch the video of “Cathy Davidson: The New Education”. This event was presented by THI and UCSC’s Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning (CITL) for its 2018 Annual Convocation, and features Cathy Davidson discussing her book The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux. Davidson’s work explores how we can revolutionize our universities to help students be leaders of change, not simply subject to it. THI’s interview with Cathy Davidson provides further insight into Davidson’s progressive vision for the future of education.
Questions? Contact Special Events

POSTPONED - What Time Is It? HisCon Colloqium
2020-05-22 | CA
Stay tuned for more information.

VIRTUAL: MAH Beyond the World’s End - Meet the Artists
2020-05-22 10:00 - 12:00 | CA
Join Beyond the World’s End exhibiting artists Laurie Palmer, Amy Balkin, Krista Franklin, Newton Harrison, Super Futures Haunt Qollective, and the Rasquache Collective for a group discussion and Q&A.
In the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History’s current exhibition, Beyond the World’s End, visionary artists reflect on the social and environmental injustices happening around the world and envision radical ways to move forward.
As a special virtual offering, join the panel of exhibiting artists for a group discussion facilitated by guest curator TJ Demos from UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Creative Ecologies. Dive deeper into the content found within the exhibition, their projects, and their visions of the future. They will also touch on how these themes connect to our current unfolding pandemic. After the discussion, stay for a Q&A with the artists facilitated by TJ Demos and the MAH’s Exhibition Catalyst, Whitney Ford-Terry.

This event is part of Beyond the End of the World, a year-long project directed by T. J. Demos of the Center for Creative Ecologies and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Culture. For more information visit BEYOND.UCSC.EDU

VIRTUAL - Special Session: Thinking Through Television in a Pandemic
2020-05-27 12:15 - 13:30 | CA
In this time of the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more people are tuning into television (across streaming platforms, web series, and of course also pay, cable, and network TV) for news and information, comfort and company, narrative pleasure and imaginative stimulation—though also often getting misinformation, alienation, or discouragement. How is TV working, producing ways of seeing, knowing, living, and feeling during this pandemic, and what are the implications of that? How are we thinking through television in these unthinkable times? Lynne Joyrich will take up these questions with some opening remarks, then open up to a group discussion.

RSVP by 10 AM on Wednesday, May 27th to receive Zoom link and password.

ZOOM TEACH IN: Anti-Asian Xenophobia in an Age of Covid-19
2020-05-29 14:00 - 15:30 | CA
Anti-Chinese xenophobia inaugurated the United States as a gatekeeping nation in the late nineteenth century. Figured as dangerous to the public health, the Chinese—and successive Asian migrants—were likened to an invasive disease and subjected not only to exclusion laws but also to white vigilante violence. In this era of pandemic, a moment conditioned by phobia about China’s global rise, xenophobic conspiracy theories about the “Chinese virus” abound. China has been placed in the crosshairs of the media and politicians, and Asians and people of Asian descent have been targeted on social media and subjected to acts of violence. From mid-March to mid-April of this year, the Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center received almost 1,500 reports of anti-Asian coronavirus discrimination in the United States against people of Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, Filipino, Hmong, Thai, Lao, and Cambodian ethnicity.

This teach-in will be led by two founders of the Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center. Russell Jeung, chair of Asian American Studies at SF State, will offer a long historical view of anti-Asian racism and brutality, and Cynthia Choi, co-executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action, will address the data the reporting center has gathered in the past two months. In a moment in which we are witness to the slide between anti-Asian rhetoric and anti-Asian brutality, how should hate speech be understood? Given the necessity of social distancing, what kinds of community process around racial harm can we envision and bring into being?
Russell Jeung is Professor of Asian American Studies at SF State University. A scholar of race and religion, he’s written At Home in Exile: Finding Jesus Among Ancestors and Family Sacrifices: The Worldviews and Ethics of Chinese Americans. With Chinese for Affirmative Action and the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council, he helped to establish the Stop AAPI Hate center.
Cynthia Choi is Co-Executive Director of Chinese for Affirmative Action, a community-based civil rights organization based in San Francisco. CAA partnered to establish Stop AAPI Hate, an online reporting center dedicated to documenting hate incidents and developing community-based solutions. She has led local, state, and national community-based organizations working on a range of issues from reproductive justice, gender-based violence, immigrant/refugee rights, and environmental justice issues in both the nonprofit sector and in philanthropy.
Presented by The Center for Racial Justice. Co-sponsored by the SUA Office of Diversity and Inclusion, the Asian American/Pacific Islander Resource Center, and the Office of Diversity Equity and Inclusion.
Resources: You can find Stop AAPI Hate’s latest report here and the quick guides, “Five Things to Consider When You’re Experiencing Hate” and “Five Things to Do When You’re Witnessing Hate,” here.
For more information, please contact Christine Hong at cjhong@ucsc.edu.

VIRTUAL: Special Session - The Pandemic and the University to Come - A Collective Action
2020-06-03 12:15 - 13:30 | CA
Following on this quarter’s series of conversations about the historical space opened by the current pandemic, we will come together in a collective, active exercise of imagining the university to come. Prior to the meeting, please respond to five questions (click below) about the future university you would like to participate in post-pandemic; the questions are versions of those from Bruno Latour’s essay discussed in early May. Each of you will suggest one practice you think should cease, one you think should continue, and one new practice that you would like to be part of the university of the future, as well as how to enable the kind of capacities needed to transition to these new activities. We will spend the colloquium working together to see where we agree and where we disagree, and to come up with something to hope for that might help and even guide us in the time to come.

Please respond to the questions by 10AM on Wednesday, June 3.
Please also RSVP by 10AM on Wednesday, June 3 to receive Zoom link and password for the session.

VIRTUAL: Celebrating the Humanities - Spring Awards
2020-06-05 16:00 - 17:00 | CA, United States
We hope you will join us for our annual celebration recognizing student and faculty academic achievement in the Humanities Division at UC Santa Cruz. Friends and family are welcome. Even though we are not able to celebrate together in person as we usually do, we can still come together online to honor the outstanding accomplishments of our students and faculty.
Our online program will include a special live message from Chancellor Larive congratulating our scholars. We will then share a pre-recorded video of award presentations and return to a live format to congratulate all of our scholars with a group toast.
Be sure to come with a glass to raise!

You will be sent a link to the Zoom meeting request on June 5th at 10:00 a.m.
Program:
Welcome from Humanities Dean Tyler Stovall
Congratulatory remarks from Chancellor Cynthia Larive
Video Awards Presentation of the following awards:

The Dean’s and Chancellor Awards
The inaugural Bettina Aptheker Award for Research on Sexual, Gendered, and Racial Violence
The inaugural Coha / Gunderson Prize in Speculative Futures
The Idstrom Family Prize in Creative Writing
The Sol and Esther Draznin Memorial Scholarship in Classical Studies
The Kenneth Andrew Gram Memorial Scholarship
The David A. Kadish Humanities Scholarship
The Raihan Kadri Memorial Scholarship
The inaugural Siobhan O’Neill Scholarship
The Dizikes Teaching Award & The Gary Young Scholarship
The Humanities Institute Undergraduate Research Awards
Conclusion: a toast to our students!

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

VIRTUAL EVENT: Laurie R. King, Riviera Gold
2020-06-09 19:00 | CA
Local, bestselling author Laurie R. King, will will celebrate the publication of her newest Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes mystery, Riviera Gold! The Riviera in 1925 is a playground for the rich built on corruption and greed. It is a place where treasure can be false, where love can destroy, and where life, as Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes will discover, can be cheap—even when it is made of solid gold.

Laurie R. King is the award-winning, bestselling author of sixteen Mary Russell mysteries, five contemporary novels featuring Kate Martinelli, the Stuyvesant & Grey novels Touchstone and The Bones of Paris, and acclaimed standalone novels Folly and Lockdown. She lives in Northern California, where she is at work on her next Mary Russell mystery.

VIRTUAL EVENT: Pico Iyer in conversation with Alan Christy
2020-06-15 18:00 | CA
Bookshop Santa Cruz invites you to join us for an online event with bestselling author Pico Iyer who will be in-conversation with Alan Christy about his new book, Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells—a far-reaching exploration of Japanese history and culture and a moving meditation on impermanence, mortality, and grief—and A Beginner’s Guide to Japan, now in paperback.

AUTUMN LIGHT: SEASON OF FIRE AND FAREWELLS:
Returning to his longtime home in Japan after his father-in-law’s sudden death, Pico Iyer picks up the steadying patterns of his everyday rites: going to the post office and engaging in furious games of ping-pong every evening. But in a country whose calendar is marked with occasions honoring the dead, he comes to reflect on changelessness in ways that anyone can relate to: parents age, children scatter, and Iyer and his wife turn to whatever can sustain them as everything falls away. As the maple leaves begin to turn and the heat begins to soften, Iyer shows us a Japan we have seldom seen before, where the transparent and the mysterious are held in a delicate balance, and where autumn reminds us to take nothing for granted.
A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO JAPAN:
“Arguably the greatest living travel writer” (Outside magazine), Pico Iyer has called Japan home for more than three decades. But, as he is the first to admit, the country remains an enigma even to its long-term residents. In A Beginner’s Guide to Japan, Iyer draws on his years of experience—his travels, conversations, readings, and reflections—to craft a playful and profound book of surprising, brief, incisive glimpses into Japanese culture. He recounts his adventures and observations as he travels from a meditation hall to a love hotel, from West Point to Kyoto Station, and from dinner with Meryl Streep to an ill-fated call to the Apple service center in a series of provocations guaranteed to pique the interest and curiosity of those who don’t know Japan—and to remind those who do of its myriad fascinations.
PICO IYER is the author of eight works of nonfiction and two novels. A writer for Time since 1982, he is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, and many other magazines and newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific. He splits his time between Nara, Japan, and the United States.
ALAN CHRISTY got his PhD in History at the University of Chicago in 1996. He has been with the History Department at UC Santa Cruz since 1995, with a two-year stint as a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo from 2004-2006. He studies the history of Japan, especially historical memory, historical consciousness and the legacies of war and empire. He is the Director of the Okinawa Memories Initiative, a transnational public history project that explores the postwar Okinawan-American relationship in Okinawa and throughout the Pacific region. He is also the Provost of Cowell College.

VIRTUAL EVENT: Laila Lalami, The Other Americans
2020-06-17 19:00 | CA
Pulitzer Prize shortlisted author Laila Lalami presents her timely, powerful new novel about the suspicious death of a Moroccan immigrant, shortlisted for the National Book Award: The Other Americans is at once a family saga, a murder mystery, and a love story informed by the treacherous fault lines of American culture.

Laila Lalami is the author of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, Secret Son, and The Moor’s Account, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and which won the American Book Award, the Arab American Book Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, Harper’s Magazine, and The Guardian. In 2019, she was awarded the Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize for her body of work. A professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside, she lives in Los Angeles.

VIRTUAL EVENT: California Humanities Virtual Listening Session
2020-06-22 13:00 - 14:00, 2020-06-29 08:00 - 17:00 | CA
California Humanities wants to hear from you.
Our listening tour throughout California is continuing! Through small videoconferences, we are engaging in our Listening Sessions to explore the status and future of the humanities field in California.
Our online Listening Sessions are smaller by design to make sure participants are seen and heard. That is why we are conducting multiple sessions per city and region. You have two options below, and we are open to adding more sessions when needed.

Our goal is to sit down and talk with organizations and individuals focused on telling California stories through the humanities, and consider how we might all work together to learn from each other and amplify our voices.
At the listening session, you will:
Share your knowledge about humanities and cultural programming in and around Santa Cruz
Provide feedback and ideas on improving the collaboration of humanities and cultural programs locally and across the state. Explore the impact of COVID-19 on your local network and share ideas on moving forward together
to provide for adequate speaking time for all participants in the dialogue, we are limiting each session to 10 participants. You have two dates to choose from:
Monday, June 22, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm
Monday, June 29, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm
Please note that the listening sessions are not workshops to learn more about our grant programs. Grants Workshops are scheduled throughout the year and you can find more information on our grants and workshops on our webpage.
The Santa Cruz Listening Sessions are in partnership with The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
To learn more, visit calhum.org. With questions, write to Outreach & Advocacy Manager John Nguyen-Yap at jnguyenyap@calhum.org

VIRTUAL EVENT: C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills is Gold
2020-06-23 19:00 | CA
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes debut novelist C Pam Zhang for an online event about her new book, How Much of These Hills Is Gold. Zhang will be in conversation with fellow debut novelist Kawai Strong Washburn (Sharks in the Time of Saviors). In Zhang’s electric debut novel set against the twilight of the American gold rush, two siblings are on the run in an unforgiving landscape—trying not just to survive but to find a home.

Born in Beijing but mostly an artifact of the United States, C Pam Zhang has lived in thirteen cities across four countries and is still looking for home. She’s been awarded support from Tin House, Bread Loaf, Aspen Words and elsewhere, and currently lives in San Francisco.
Kawai Strong Washburn was born and raised on the Hamakua coast of the Big Island of Hawai‘i. His work has appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, McSweeney’s, and Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, among other outlets. He was a 2015 Tin House Summer Scholar and 2015 Bread Loaf work-study scholar. Today, he lives with his wife and daughters in Minneapolis. Sharks in the Time of Saviors is his first novel.

VIRTUAL: Santa Cruz Pickwick Club presents Waverley
2020-06-28 14:00 - 17:00, 2020-07-26 14:00 - 17:00 | CA
Santa Cruz Pickwick Club presents Waverley by Sir Walter Scott. Join Dickens Project Director, John O. Jordan, and Friends of the Dickens Project Board Member, David Brownell for a series of virtual discussions about how one of the first historical novels may have inspired Charles Dickens.
RSVP for a Zoom link and password for the series:

Jun 28: General Preface & Chapters 1-23
Jul 26: Chapters 24-47
Aug 23: Chapters 48-End

Fourth Sundays of the month at 2pm Pacific Time.

VIRTUAL - Undiscovered Shakespeare: The Wars of the Roses - Henry VI, Part 1
2020-07-01 18:30 - 20:00, 2020-07-08 18:30 - 20:00, 2020-07-15 18:30 - 20:00 | CA
Join actors, scholars, and friends for ten live readings and discussions focused on the plays about a divided society and a civil war that made Shakespeare famous in the London theater.

Undiscovered Shakespeare: The Wars of the Roses is a public arts and humanities series co-produced by Santa Cruz Shakespeare, UCSC Shakespeare Workshop, and The Humanities Institute. It brings professional actors and scholars together with the public for a staged reading and discussion of the works that made Shakespeare famous in the London theater. As a young writer at the start of his career, Shakespeare explored ambitions, rivalries, and passions that swept away the dynasty that had reigned in England for more than four centuries. Over the course of ten sessions, we will immerse ourselves in these rarely performed plays—in Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3 and Richard III—and reflect on them both as points of departure for Shakespeare’s career and as a mirror for the times in which we live.
Schedule: The first nine sessions will last approximately ninety minutes (including an intermission) and will begin at 6:30pm PST. The final session of Richard III will last approximately two and a half hours.
Sessions are free to the public, and participants are not obligated to attend every meeting of the program.
*Participants reading along should expect for the first meeting about each play to cover acts one and two; the second meeting to cover acts three and four; and the third meeting to cover act five. The session focussing on Richard III will be a live reading of the entire play.
July 1, 8, and 15: Henry VI, Part 1 – click to view play synopsis
with scholars Adam Zucker (UMass, Amherst) and Ariane Helou (UCLA)
July 22, 29, and Aug 5: Henry VI, Part 2 – click to view play synopsis
with scholars Sean Keilen (UCSC) and Maria Frangos (SCS)
August 12, 19, 26: Henry VI, Part 3 – click to view play synopsis
with scholars Claire McEachern (UCLA) and Ashley Herum (UC Santa Cruz)
September 2: Richard III – click to view play synopsis — live reading of the full play (apx. 2.5 hours)
with scholar Amani Liggett (UC Santa Cruz)
Texts available from Folger Shakespeare Library at: https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/
Play synopses available from Shakespeare 2020 Project at: https://iandoescher.com/shakespeare/
Henry VI, Full Play Synopsis: In the wake of King Henry V’s death, the French rebel against English rule. Joan la Pucelle (Joan of Arc) is made general of the French forces. Meanwhile, in England, a quarrel between two powerful lords, the Duke of Somerset and Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, consumes the court when they demand that fellow nobles pick a side by wearing either a red rose (Somerset and the house of Lancaster) or a white rose (the Duke and the house of York). The mounting tensions in the court distract the English from their goals in France, and young King Henry VI concludes an uneasy peace. He is persuaded to marry a captured French princess, Margaret of Anjou, whom he has never met.

VIRTUAL EVENT: Photographic Memory
2020-07-10 17:00 - 18:30 | CA
On the heels of a very successful Zoom chat with writer Akemi Johnson, the team at the Okinawa Memories Initiative is excited to kick off a monthly Community Conversation Series.
Next up is a talk that cuts to the core of our organization: Photographic Memory. Sparked by a collection of photos taken in Okinawa in 1953 by an American Army Captain, Dr. Charles Eugene Gail, the Okinawa Memories Initiative is committed to exploring how photography frames historical memory.
What is the relationship between a photographic image and historical memory? How might community dialogue and engagement with historical photographs deepen our understanding of the past?
Click the button to sign up for our Zoom conversation exploring the people, places, communities, and hidden memories Gail’s photos reveal.

SPEAKERS
Geri Gail, Photographer and Daughter of Charles Gail
Laura Gail, Photographer and Granddaughter of Charles Gail
Shelby Graham, Director of the UCSC Sesnon Gallery, Mixed-Media Artist
Tosh Tanaka, OMI Media Director, Photographer
Wyatt Young, OMI Exhibition Team Leader
Nirupama Chandrasekhar, OMI Scholar
Owen Raymond, OMI Scholar

VIRTUAL - Undiscovered Shakespeare: The Wars of the Roses - Henry VI, Part 2
2020-07-22 18:30 - 20:00, 2020-07-29 18:30 - 20:00, 2020-08-05 18:30 - 20:00 | CA

The Virtual Dickens Universe
2020-07-26 - 2020-07-31 | UC Santa Cruz
While the originally planned program focusing on David Copperfield and Iola Leroy will still take place in 2021, this week of online programming will feature a range of conversations that discuss the occasion of the pair and the insights that bringing them together can offer. Over the week, scholars from Victorian studies and early African American studies will discuss linkages between their fields, approaches for addressing race and racism in the classroom, and productive ways to engage with Black studies in the nineteenth century and its transatlantic contexts. We hope that this will generate excitement to read these two novels over the next year and to join us in Santa Cruz for the full Dickens Universe conference.

We hope that this week will provide some useful context for these two novels, as we read them together over the next year. In addition to providing some critical background for France E. W. Harper’s career and Iola Leroy, it will also help place her alongside Dickens as one of the most important and prolific writers of the nineteenth century. Like Dickens, Harper was a virtuoso writer of many literary genres (including fiction, prose, and poetry), was deeply involved in nineteenth-century print and periodical cultures. She was a powerful public speaker and an activist in the anti-slavery, suffrage, temperance, and post-emancipation racial justice movements.
Questions? Call (831) 459-2103 or email cmahaney@ucsc.edu for assistance.

VIRTUAL - Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music Presents: Suffrage + the Struggle for Voting Rights
2020-08-09 11:00 - 14:00 | CA
As we approach the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment and stand at the threshold of a presidential election, “Celebrating Woman Suffrage + the Struggle for Voting Rights” is a panel discussion examining the complex history of enfranchisement in the United States and its relevance to the ongoing anti-racist struggle against voter suppression. A dynamic group of speakers includes Gail Pellerin, Santa Cruz County Clerk/Registrar of Voters, as our moderator; with presentations by Judge Marla Anderson, Judge of the Superior Court of California, Monterey County; Bettina Aptheker, scholar-activist and Distinguished Professor Emerita of the Feminist Studies Department at UC Santa Cruz; and Aida Hurtado, the Luis Leal Endowed Chair, Associate Dean, and Professor in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at UC Santa Barbara. The event will be followed by a live Q&A, and precedes an evening concert featuring the orchestral world premiere of The Battle for the Ballot by composer Stacy Garrop, inspired by the centenary of the 19th amendment and pivotal figures in the Woman Suffrage movement.

You may view this event and participate in the live Q&A directly via the Festival’s website here. The countdown clock will apprise you when the event is about to begin. No registration necessary.
Read Professor Aptheker’s article on “Suffrage and Suffering” in the Voices of the Monterey Bay publication.
This event is sponsored by: Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, The Peggy and Jack Baskin Foundation Presidential Chair in Feminist Studies, and Bookshop Santa Cruz
Co-Sponsors: NAACP, Temple Beth El, and Women Lawyers of Santa Cruz County

Slugs & Steins - Beyond the Middle Passage: Slave Trading within the Americas, 1619-1807
2020-08-10 18:30 - 20:00 | CA
More than 12 million enslaved African people endured the infamous Middle Passage across the Atlantic in the slave trade, but for many, the forced migration was not yet over when they reached an American port. Demand for enslaved labor was so rampant in the Americas, that speculators purchased many arriving people only to ship them from colony to colony for resale, often smuggling across imperial borders. This additional phase of the slave trade within the Americas was important not only for the danger it added to enslaved people’s traumatic journeys, but also for what it reveals about the centrality of slavery to early American life. The routes of the intra-American slave trade spread the institution to virtually every colonial outpost, and traders used the trafficking in highly valuable human beings to build their networks and establish themselves as traders of goods, as well as people.

Greg O’Malley is associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His first book, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, received four awards: The Forkosch Prize (American Historical Association—British History); the Rawley Prize (American Historical Association—Atlantic World); The Owsley Award (Southern Historical Association); and the Goveia Prize (Association of Caribbean Historians). The project examines a complex network for distributing enslaved Africans throughout North America and the Caribbean after their survival of the Atlantic crossing. O’Malley is also co-editor (with Alex Borucki) for the Intra-American Slave Trade Database, an online research tool that documents more than 11,500 slave trading voyages from one port in the Americas to another. He is also conducting research for a new book, The Escapes of David George: One Man’s Struggle with Slavery and Freedom in the Revolutionary Era, a biography of a man, born enslaved in colonial Virginia, whose attempts to escape bondage led him on a remarkable odyssey.
About the Slugs and Steins Lecture Series: Join us for a series of free informal lectures, brought to you by the UC Santa Cruz Alumni Association. Each talk will engage one of our favorite Professors in discussion with you, the local community of Silicon Valley. We will cover everything from organic artichokes to endangered zebras, self-driving cars to Shakespeare. All are welcome. Audience participation is encouraged.

VIRTUAL - Undiscovered Shakespeare: The Wars of the Roses - Henry VI, Part 3
2020-08-12 18:30 - 20:00, 2020-08-19 18:30 - 20:00 | CA

VIRTUAL - Karen Tei Yamashita: Sansei and Sensibility
2020-08-13 19:00 - 20:00 | CA
Bookshop Santa Cruz and The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz invite you to join us for a free online event with Karen Tei Yamashita who will celebrate her newest book, Sansei and Sensibility. Generations of Japanese Americans merge with Jane Austen’s characters in these lively stories, pairing uniquely American histories with reimagined classics.

This is a free event. Please consider purchasing the book through Bookshop Santa Cruz or make a donation to help support Bookshop Santa Cruz. Thank you!
“An elegantly written, wryly affectionate mashup of Jane Austen and the Japanese immigrant experience. . . . Yamashita’s reimagining of Austen is sympathetic and funny—and as on target as the movie Clueless.” —Kirkus, starred review
“Karen Tei Yamashita contends with the Western canon in this astute, pitch-perfect, and wryly funny short story collection. . . . A genuine pleasure to read.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“This hilarious new collection of stories and essays will make you chuckle, though underneath the humor is deft critique. Marie Kondo’s tidying up is juxtaposed with a tour of World War II internment camps. Sexist techno-orientalism and the meaning of Godzilla are reexamined. Local treasure, UCSC professor emerita, and acclaimed novelist Karen Tei Yamashita has written a book about the Japanese American experience both entertaining and vital in this era of anti-immigration politics.” —Jason, Bookshop Santa Cruz bookseller
Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of seven books, including I Hotel, finalist for the National Book Award, and most recently, Letters to Memory, all published by Coffee House Press. Recipient of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature and a US Artists Ford Foundation Fellowship, she is Professor Emerita of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

VIRTUAL - Santa Cruz Pickwick Club presents Waverley
2020-08-23 14:00 - 17:00 | CA

POSTPONED - Undiscovered Shakespeare: The Wars of the Roses - Henry VI, Part 3
2020-08-26 18:30 - 20:00 | CA
This event has been postponed to September 2, 2020
Join actors, scholars, and friends for ten live readings and discussions focused on the plays about a divided society and a civil war that made Shakespeare famous in the London theater.

Undiscovered Shakespeare: The Wars of the Roses is a public arts and humanities series co-produced by Santa Cruz Shakespeare, UCSC Shakespeare Workshop, and The Humanities Institute. It brings professional actors and scholars together with the public for a staged reading and discussion of the works that made Shakespeare famous in the London theater. As a young writer at the start of his career, Shakespeare explored ambitions, rivalries, and passions that swept away the dynasty that had reigned in England for more than four centuries. Over the course of ten sessions, we will immerse ourselves in these rarely performed plays—in Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3 and Richard III—and reflect on them both as points of departure for Shakespeare’s career and as a mirror for the times in which we live.
Schedule: The first nine sessions will last approximately ninety minutes (including an intermission) and will begin at 6:30pm PST. The final session of Richard III will last approximately two and a half hours.
Sessions are free to the public, and participants are not obligated to attend every meeting of the program.
*Participants reading along should expect for the first meeting about each play to cover acts one and two; the second meeting to cover acts three and four; and the third meeting to cover act five. The session focussing on Richard III will be a live reading of the entire play.
July 1, 8, and 15: Henry VI, Part 1 – click to view play synopsis
with scholars Adam Zucker (UMass, Amherst) and Ariane Helou (UCLA)
July 22, 29, and Aug 5: Henry VI, Part 2 – click to view play synopsis
with scholars Sean Keilen (UCSC) and Maria Frangos (SCS)
August 12, 19, 26: Henry VI, Part 3 – click to view play synopsis
with scholars Claire McEachern (UCLA) and Ashley Herum (UC Santa Cruz)
September 2: Richard III – click to view play synopsis — live reading of the full play (apx. 2.5 hours)
with scholar Amani Liggett (UC Santa Cruz)
Texts available from Folger Shakespeare Library at: https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/
Play synopses available from Shakespeare 2020 Project at: https://iandoescher.com/shakespeare/
Henry VI, Full Play Synopsis: In the wake of King Henry V’s death, the French rebel against English rule. Joan la Pucelle (Joan of Arc) is made general of the French forces. Meanwhile, in England, a quarrel between two powerful lords, the Duke of Somerset and Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, consumes the court when they demand that fellow nobles pick a side by wearing either a red rose (Somerset and the house of Lancaster) or a white rose (the Duke and the house of York). The mounting tensions in the court distract the English from their goals in France, and young King Henry VI concludes an uneasy peace. He is persuaded to marry a captured French princess, Margaret of Anjou, whom he has never met.

Undiscovered Shakespeare: The Wars of the Roses - Henry VI, Part 3
2020-09-02 18:30 - 20:00 | Virtual Event

Undiscovered Shakespeare: The Wars of the Roses - Richard III
2020-09-09 18:30 - 20:00 | Virtual Event
Join actors, scholars, and friends for ten live readings and discussions focused on the plays about a divided society and a civil war that made Shakespeare famous in the London theater.

Undiscovered Shakespeare: The Wars of the Roses is a public arts and humanities series co-produced by Santa Cruz Shakespeare, UCSC Shakespeare Workshop, and The Humanities Institute. It brings professional actors and scholars together with the public for a staged reading and discussion of the works that made Shakespeare famous in the London theater. As a young writer at the start of his career, Shakespeare explored ambitions, rivalries, and passions that swept away the dynasty that had reigned in England for more than four centuries. Over the course of ten sessions, we will immerse ourselves in these rarely performed plays—in Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3 and Richard III—and reflect on them both as points of departure for Shakespeare’s career and as a mirror for the times in which we live.
Schedule: The first nine sessions will last approximately ninety minutes (including an intermission) and will begin at 6:30pm PST. The final session of Richard III will last approximately two and a half hours.
Sessions are free to the public, and participants are not obligated to attend every meeting of the program.
*Participants reading along should expect for the first meeting about each play to cover acts one and two; the second meeting to cover acts three and four; and the third meeting to cover act five. The session focussing on Richard III will be a live reading of the entire play.
July 1, 8, and 15: Henry VI, Part 1 – click to view play synopsis
with scholars Adam Zucker (UMass, Amherst) and Ariane Helou (UCLA)
July 22, 29, and Aug 5: Henry VI, Part 2 – click to view play synopsis
with scholars Sean Keilen (UCSC) and Maria Frangos (SCS)
August 12, 19, 26: Henry VI, Part 3 – click to view play synopsis
with scholars Claire McEachern (UCLA) and Ashley Herum (UC Santa Cruz)
September 2: Richard III – click to view play synopsis — live reading of the full play (apx. 2.5 hours)
with scholar Amani Liggett (UC Santa Cruz)
Texts available from Folger Shakespeare Library at: https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/
Play synopses available from Shakespeare 2020 Project at: https://iandoescher.com/shakespeare/

Zoom Forward! Micah Perks & Karen Tei Yamashita
2020-09-11 17:00 | Virtual Event
VIRTUAL EVENT: Please join us for an online reading with Micah Perks and Karen Tei Yamashita, part of the Zoom Forward Reading Series, hosted by poet, fiction writer, and essayist Jory Post. Presented by phren-Z, The Hive Poetry Collective, and Bookshop Santa Cruz to showcase writers, keep our cultural spirits high, and support Bookshop Santa Cruz.
The Zoom room will be open by 4:30, so come early in case you have technical difficulties. If you need assistance, send an email to jory@cruzio.com or hannah@santacruzwrites.org. Join the Santa Cruz Writes/phren-Z email list by subscribing here. Weekly Zoom links, including for this event, will be emailed to you.

The Deep Read | Margaret Atwood Live
2020-09-22 16:30 - 18:00 | Virtual Event
Margaret Atwood will join the UC Santa Cruz community for a free, live, virtual event on Tuesday September 22 at 4:30 PM PT. Part of The Humanities Institute’s Deep Read Program, this event culminates months of in-depth programming and community engagement focused on Atwood’s latest Booker Prize-winning novel, The Testaments, a sequel to her 1985 classic The Handmaid’s Tale.
RSVP TODAY

The 2020 Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture will feature Atwood in conversation with Kate Schatz (Stevenson ‘01, Creative Writing), the New York Times-bestselling author of Rad American Women A-Z .

William “Bro” Adams (Ph.D. History of Consciousness ’82), Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 2014 to 2017, will be the event MC.
Read Up
Bookshop Santa Cruz, our Community Partner, has put together a web shop of books by Margaret Atwood and Kate Schatz. Buy copies here to support a local business committed to culture and community in Santa Cruz.
You can also catch up on our 4-week exploration of Atwood’s The Testaments from earlier in the year:
Week 1: Welcome to Gilead
Week 2: Feminist Intersections
Week 3: Toxic Bodies
Week 4: Atwood Answers

About The Deep Read
The Deep Read is a program led by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz. We invite curious minds to think deeply about literature, art, and the most pressing issues of our day.
Deep Read Partners
UC Santa Cruz
The Humanities Institute
College Scholars Program
Council of Provosts
Division of Student Success
Porter College
University Library
University Relations
Community
Bookshop Santa Cruz

The 2020 Deep Read Program is made possible through the generous support of the Helen and Will Webster Foundation.

The Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture is made possible through the generous support of the Peggy Downes Baskin Humanities Endowment for Interdisciplinary Studies in Ethics.
If you have disability-related needs, please contact us at thi@ucsc.edu or call 831-459-1274 by September 15th, 2020.

David Eagleman, Livewired
2020-09-24 19:00 | Virtual Event
Bestselling author and neuroscientist David Eagleman will discuss his new book, Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain, during a free online event on the Crowdcast platform. “Eagleman delivers an intellectually exhilarating look at neuroplasticity. In his view, the brain’s ability to reconfigure connections between its different areas in response to feedback is ‘quite possibly the most gorgeous phenomenon in biology,’ and also holds exciting practical applications. Eagleman’s skill as a teacher, bold vision, and command of current research will make this superb work a curious reader’s delight.” —Publishers Weekly

This is a free event. The book may be purchased here at Bookshop Santa Cruz’s website.
In Livewired, Eagleman reveals the many ways in which the brain absorbs experience: developing, redeploying, organizing, and arranging the data it receives from external stimuli, which enables us to gain the skills, facilities, and practices that make us who we are. Eagleman covers decades of the most important research into the functioning of the brain and also presents new discoveries from his own research: about synesthesia, dreaming, and wearable devices that are revolutionizing how we think about the five human senses. As only Eagleman can, along the way we learn why people in the 1980s (and only in the 1980s) saw book pages as slightly pink; why the world’s best archer is armless; why we dream each night, and what that has to do with the rotation of the planet; what drug withdrawal has in common with a broken heart; how a blind person can learn to see with her tongue or a deaf person can learn to hear with his skin; and how we might someday be able to read the rough details of someone’s life from the microscopic structure etched in their forest of brain cells.
DAVID EAGLEMAN, PhD, teaches brain plasticity at Stanford University, was the writer and host of the Emmy-nominated television series The Brain, and is the CEO of NeoSensory, a company that builds brain/machine interfaces. He is the author of seven previous books, including the international best sellers Incognito and Sum. He lives in Palo Alto, California.

Christopher Nelson: Eisa - Drumming, Dancing and Memory
2020-09-25 17:00 - 18:00 | Virtual Event
With the beginning of the 2020 – 2021 school term on the near horizon the OMI team is delighted to announce their next program!
Professor Chris Nelson (UNC Chapel Hill) will be joining OMI to discuss Eisa, Obon, dancing and cultural memory in contemporary Okinawa. Professor Nelson is an anthropologist who published a study of Eisa called Dancing with the Dead: Memory, Performance and Everyday Life in Post-War Okinawa (Duke University Press, 2008).
OMI Director Alan Christy will lead the conversation with Professor Nelson, exploring his study and discussing one of Okinawa’s key cultural traditions.

Christopher T Nelson is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina. The central theme of his research has been the transformational possibilities of everyday life. His recent book Dancing with the Dead: Memory, Performance, and Everyday Life in Postwar Okinawa takes up this question, building on several years of fieldwork that he carried out in Okinawa, Japan. Through ethnographic and archival research, he explored traditional forms of social organization and genres of ritual and performance. He studied the work of ethnographic comedians, whose performances weave Okinawan folk humor, Japanese traditional monologues and improvisational storytelling into sophisticated critiques of everyday life. He also worked with the youth group from which these performers emerged. In particular, he examined their eisaa—dance for the dead—and its mediation of social relationships. His book provides close readings of these performances, focusing on modalities of mourning, memoration and creative action.
His current research project is focused on creative actors who were able to struggle against the constraints of the modern world in order to carve out a moment for meaningful activity. While he remains committed to the possibilities of daily life, he feels it is also important to consider those for whom the burden of the everyday becomes unbearable. His new project Listening to the Bones: The Rhythms of Life and Death in Contemporary Japan takes up this problem. It involves the study of early Okinawan ethnologists such as Iha Fuyû; an ethnography of efforts to recover the remains of the Japanese war dead; as well as a critical exploration of Okinawan photography and experimental film. He is interested in the ways in which people negotiate the vortex of local knowledge, Japanese nativist ethnology, western anthropology and discourses of the state.

Kelly Gillespie, Asher Gamedze & Rasigan Maharajh — Re/Distribute: Three Radical Economists on (Post)Apartheid (film screening + discussion)
2020-10-07 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
Two radical collectives in South Africa working inside and outside the academy to agitate against ongoing histories of dispossession consider what redistribution means in the most unequal national context on earth. This 50-minute film looks at how the promises of redistribution in the anti-apartheid liberation movement were foreclosed during the transition out of apartheid in South Africa. The film features three left economists who were active in the anti-apartheid movement but have lived through a transition in which the promise and idea of redistribution was abandoned as South Africa inserted a post-apartheid project into global processes of financialization and neoliberalization.
We will screen the film and then discuss it with filmmakers Asher Gamedze and Kelly Gillespie and featured economist Rasigan Maharajh.
RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, October 7th to receive Zoom link and password.

Kelly Gillespie is a political and legal anthropologist and cultural worker with a research focus on criminal justice and abolition in South Africa. She works at the department of Anthropology at the University of the Western Cape. She writes and teaches about urbanism, violence, sexualities, race, and the praxis of social justice. In 2008 she co-founded the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (JWTC).
Asher Gamedze is a cultural worker based in Cape Town, South Africa, working mainly as a musician, student, and writer. He is also involved, as an organiser and an educator, with various cultural and political collectives such as Fulan Fulan, The Interim, and Radical Education Network. His debut album, dialectic soul, was released in July 2020.
Rasigan Maharajh is an activist scholar whose research focuses on the political economy of innovation and development, including the changing world of work, democratic governance, and ecological reconstruction. He is the founding Chief Director of the Institute for Economic Research on Innovation based at the Tshwane University of Technology and Professor Extraordinary of the Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology at Stellenbosch University.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. The sessions consist of a 40-45 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center provides coffee, tea, and cookies.*
All Center for Cultural Studies events are free and open to the public. Staff assistance is provided by the Humanities Institute.
*2020-2021 colloquia will be held virtually until further notice. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own coffee, tea, and cookies to the session.

Nir Shafir: How to Read in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire
2020-10-08 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
The Ottoman Empire (and the Islamic world at large) was a manuscript culture until the late nineteenth century. That is, many Ottoman subjects continued to copy books by hand even though they had been aware of printing in European lands for centuries. In recent years, there has been a new wave of scholarship exploring how Ottoman manuscript culture functioned in practice rather than dismissing it as a “lack” of print. Historians have been particularly interested in demonstrating that even a manuscript culture could support a large number of readers, even if many of them only possessed a “partially literacy.”
In this talk, Professor Shafir first introduces his larger book project on “manuscript pamphlets,” which he argues to be one of the new developments in the manuscript culture of the Ottoman Empire. Manuscript pamphlets were short and polemical texts that circulated across to the empire addressing many of the controversial social and religious issues of the time. They also were often aimed at semi-educated or partially literate readers. To understand pamphlets’ significance, however, one has to explore first how Ottoman subjects read and were educated. He argues that although the notion of partial literacy has been quite helpful, it continues to hold an unexamined ideology of reading, in which all acts of reading in the Ottoman Empire are ultimately replicable and uniform. In the early modern Ottoman Empire however the process of reading differed drastically depending on a reader’s intellectual formation and schooling, the genre, and the language in which they read and wrote. The “partially literate” did not just read slowly or poorly, they read texts in an actively different way than the educated. This was especially true in regard to the auxiliary sciences of language—that is, grammar, rhetoric, logic, and disputation—that madrasa-trained scholars had made a central part of a scholar’s training. Pamphlets lay at the intersection of these different types of reading and readers.

Nir Shafir is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, San Diego. His research explores the cultural and intellectual life of the Ottoman Empire between 1400-1800. He is currently preparing his first monograph, Pamphleteering Islam in the Ottoman Empire: Politics and Polemics in a Manuscript Culture, which examines the social effects of manuscript “pamphlets” on the religious life of the Ottoman Empire. He is a member of the editorial team of the Ottoman History Podcast, the most popular podcast on Middle Eastern and Islamic history, and served as editor-in-chief of the podcast in 2018.

This talk is presented by the Humanities Institute and the Center for Middle East and North Africa as part of the UC Junior Faculty Exchange Series, sponsored by the UC Humanities Network and UC Humanities Research Institute.

Samia Khatun — Race, Gender & New Epistemic Grounds: Cross-Cultural Encounters in Desert Australia
2020-10-14 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
At the forefront of white nationalist border regimes, the Australian nation-state has long operated as an Anglo imperial outpost in the Indian Ocean world. If we look at Aboriginal language archives about South Asians, however, we see alternative epistemic grounds and spatial imaginations on which we can situate historical storytelling about race, gender, and migration. This presentation will follow two Muslim men into Australian deserts, where they encountered two Aboriginal sisters waiting for a train at a lonely railway station c.1897.
RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, October 14th to receive Zoom link and password.

Samia Khatun became a feminist historian because she once lost her way to a mathematics lecture at the University of Sydney. Since then, Khatun has chased truths about the past in Sydney, Antigua, Kolkata, Istanbul, Berlin, New York, Dunedin, Melbourne, London, and Dhaka. She researches the life-worlds of people colonised by the British Empire and her documentaries have screened on ABC and SBS-TV in Australia. She is the new Chair for the Centre for Gender Studies at SOAS, London.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. The sessions consist of a 40-45 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center provides coffee, tea, and cookies.*
All Center for Cultural Studies events are free and open to the public. Staff assistance is provided by the Humanities Institute.
*2020-2021 colloquia will be held virtually until further notice. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own coffee, tea, and cookies to the session.

Hispanic-Serving Institution Equity Talk with Gina Garcia
2020-10-15 13:00 - 14:30 | Virtual Event
Join us for an online discussion with Dr. Gina Garcia, moderated by Dr. Rebecca Covarrubias and Dr. Jennifer Baszile, on how the UC Santa Cruz HSI Initiatives continue advancing student success and equity practices towards becoming a racially-just HSI.

Dr. Gina Garcia is editor of Hispanic-Serving Institutions(HSIs) in Practice: Defining “Servingness” at HSIs(2020), to which the UC Santa Cruz HSI Initiatives Team contributed five chapters.
To learn more about Dr. Garcia’s work, please visit her website: www.ginaanngarcia.com

Living Writers: Anne Waldman
2020-10-15 19:00 | Virtual Event
Anne Waldman: Poet, performer, professor, literary curator, cultural activist has been a prolific poet and performer for many years, creating radical new hybrid forms for the long poem, both serial and narrative, as with Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, and Manatee/Humanity, and Gossamurmur, all published by Penguin Poets. She is also the author of the magnum opus The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press 2011), which won the PEN Center 2012 Award for Poetry. She was one of the founders of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery, and The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University with Allen Ginsberg and Diana di Prima in 1974. She continues to work with the Kerouac School as a Distinguished Professor of Poetics and Artistic Director of its Summer Writing Program. Her forthcoming books are Bard, Kinetic (Coffee House, 2021) and Mesopotopia (Penguin, 2022).

LIVING WRITERS FALL 2020: SEEING RED—RAGE, WRITING, ART features contemporary poets, cultural critics, performance and visual artists interrogating rage, its call and possibilities, rendered across an array of works (text, installation, and performance) exploring rage’s circumstances, effects, and configurations through poetry, prose, and interdisciplinary modes.

Stories from the Epicenter (Podcast Launch Event)
2020-10-16 17:30 - 18:30 | Virtual Event
You’re invited to join us for the launch of our ten-part documentary podcast, Stories from the Epicenter, which explores the experience and memory of the Loma Prieta Earthquake in Santa Cruz County through oral history records and interviews with current residents of Santa Cruz and Watsonville. The event will include a moderated discussion with the podcast producers followed by a Q&A with the audience. Clips from the podcast will be integrated into the discussion. The first two episodes will be pre-released on October 14th, and a trailer is available now. We encourage you to listen prior to the event. The full series will be available to stream on October 17th, 2020.

Panelists:
Daniel Story, Digital Scholarship Librarian, UCSC | series producer
Thomas Sawano, Digital Scholarship Student Assistant, UCSC | producer and contributor
Madeline Carpou, UCSC Alum | producer and contributor
Marla Novo, Director of Exhibitions and Programs, Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History | contributor
Jennifer Hooker, Librarian II, Santa Cruz Public Libraries | contributor
Kathleen Aston, On-Call Librarian at SCPL, Collections Manager at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History | contributor
Moderator:
Kristy Golubiewski-Davis, Director, Digital Scholarship Department, University Library, UCSC

Stories from the Epicenter is a production of the University Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in partnership with the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, and Santa Cruz Public Libraries. For more information, visit library.ucsc.edu/StoriesFromTheEpicenter

Visualizing Abolition: A Conversation with Angela Y. Davis and Gina Dent
2020-10-20 16:00 - 17:30 | Virtual Event
Join Angela Y. Davis and Gina Dent, noted antiprison activists, scholars, and educators, for an online conversation about critical issues in the arts, visual culture, and abolition. This is the first in a series of events that questions what it means to think of abolitionism as a vision—one that challenges the social, economic, and political worldviews that prisons promote.

Angela Y. Davis, Distinguished Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies, UCSC, is a renowned activist and scholar. For decades, Dr. Davis has been at the forefront in our nation’s quest for economic, racial, and gender equality and social justice. She is the author of nine books, including her most recent book of essays called The Meaning of Freedom.
Gina Dent, Associate Professor of Feminist Studies, History of Consciousness, and Legal Studies, UCSC is a committed activist, scholar, and educator, Dent’s current book project, Prison as a Border and Other Essays, grows out of her work as an advocate for human rights and prison abolition. She is the editor of Black Popular Culture, and author of numerous articles on race, feminism, popular culture, and visual art.
This event is part of The Humanities Institute’s yearlong series on Memory.
For the 2020/21 academic year, UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences, in collaboration with Professor Dent, feminist studies, has organized a year-long series of online events featuring artists, activists, scholars, and others united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition.
The events of Visualizing Abolition accompany Barring Freedom, a bi-coastal exhibition of art featuring Sonya Clark, American Artist, Dread Scott, Deana Lawson, Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun, Sharon Daniel, Sanford Biggers, and other artists whose practices creatively confront the failure of many to see the racist biases within the criminal justice system or to comprehend the economic and social problems that the system serves to obscure. Barring Freedom will be on view at San José Museum of Art late October 2020-March 21, 2021.
Visualizing Abolition is organized by UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences in collaboration with San José Museum of Art and Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery. The series has been generously funded by the Nion McEvoy Family Trust, Ford Foundation, Future Justice Fund, Wanda Kownacki, Peter Coha, James L. Gunderson, Rowland and Pat Rebele, Porter College, UCSC Foundation, and annual donors to the Institute of the Arts and Sciences.
Partners include: Howard University School of Law, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Jessica Silverman Gallery, Indexical, The Humanities Institute, University Library, University Relations, Institute for Social Transformation, Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery, Porter College, the Center for Cultural Studies, the Center for Creative Ecologies, and Media and Society, Kresge College.

Gerald Casel - Not About Race Dance
2020-10-21 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
During this “talk,” the artists/collaborators and Gerald Casel will share their recent recent choreographic explorations during COVID-19 based on their latest work, Not About Race Dance.
Not About Race Dance is a collaborative, choreographic response to the homoraciality that haunts US American postmodern dance. The work’s title reflects its primary impetus, Neil Greenberg’s Not About AIDS Dance (1994), which discursively refused the project’s central focus to underscore its appeal for public acknowledgment of the lived experiences and losses of the AIDS crisis. Not About Race Dance employs this central paradox to call attention to how whiteness historically formed the structures, experiences, and experiments of postmodern choreographers; whiteness is the “not race” that Not About Race Dance exposes as a durable history and dominant social structure perpetuated through modern and contemporary dance practices.
Not About Race Dance further contests the structural endurance of white postmodernity by disidentifying with the white cube activated by Trisha Brown’s Locus (1975). The dance’s adaptations of Greenberg and Brown’s choreographic devices are intended to raise questions around the racial politics of mimesis, or what Homi Bhabha refers to as “colonial mimicry.” Moving beyond the politics of representation, Not About Race Dance thus poses a common conundrum faced by artists of color whose work is often positioned in opposition to or on the margins of the dominant through a false binary that simultaneously reclaims the sanctity of the center. By deliberately occupying a space that has historically been defined by white artists, this dance asks if and how difference can be made visible through choreographic structures and processes that do not necessarily make space for brown and black bodies.
RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, October 21st to receive Zoom link and password.

Gerald Casel is a dance artist, performance maker, cultural activator, and educator. As a queer, immigrant, artist of color, he is proud to be a first-generation college graduate. He serves as the Provost of Porter College and is an Associate Professor of Dance at UC Santa Cruz. Casel is the artistic director of GERALDCASELDANCE. His choreographic research and social practice converge to complicate and provoke questions surrounding colonialism, collective cultural amnesia, whiteness and privilege, and the tensions between the invisible/perceived/obvious structures of power. He and his collaborators imagine alternative futures beyond the one that is being determined by our current economy and social structures of inequity. A graduate of The Juilliard School with an MFA from UW-Milwaukee, Casel received a Bessie award for dancing in the companies of Michael Clark, Stephen Petronio, Zvi Gotheiner, and Stanley Love. His choreography has been presented by Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, Dance Theater Workshop, The Yard, ODC Theater, YBCA, Dancebase Edinburgh, Kuan Du Arts Festival Taiwan, and has been developed in residencies at The Bogliasco Foundation, The National Center for Choreography-Akron, ODC Theater, and CHIME. Dancing Around Race, a community engagement process that interrogates racial inequity in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond continues to grow under his leadership. Casel’s Not About Race Dance has been awarded a National Dance Project grant, which will be in residence at the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography and will premiere at CounterPulse in 2021 with a forthcoming tour. www.geraldcasel.com
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. The sessions consist of a 40-45 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center provides coffee, tea, and cookies.*
All Center for Cultural Studies events are free and open to the public. Staff assistance is provided by the Humanities Institute.
*2020-2021 colloquia will be held virtually until further notice. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own coffee, tea, and cookies to the session.

PhD+ Workshop – Public Speaking
2020-10-22 15:30 - 17:00 | Virtual Event
Learn about warmups, crafting your talk, audience engagement, and presenting online using Zoom with the owner and coach of Activate to Captivate, Bri McWhorter. The Division of Graduate Studies’ professional communication workshop on “Public Speaking” is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2020-2021 PhD+ series. Workshops presented by the Division of Graduate Studies are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.

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

Living Writers: Frances Richard
2020-10-22 19:00 | Virtual Event
Frances Richard is the author of Gordon Matta-Clark: Physical Poetics (University of California Press, 2019), and co-author, with Jeffrey Kastner and Sina Najafi, of Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Fake Estates” (Cabinet Books, 2005); she is the editor of I Stand in My Place With My Own Day Here: Site-Specific Art at The New School (The New School/Duke University Press, 2019), and Joan Jonas is on our mind, a volume of essays on the artist (Wattis Institute, 2017). Her books of poems include Anarch. (Futurepoem, 2012), The Phonemes (Les Figues Press, 2012) and See Through (Four Way Books, 2003). She is senior editor at Places journal and lives in Oakland CA.

LIVING WRITERS FALL 2020: SEEING RED—RAGE, WRITING, ART features contemporary poets, cultural critics, performance and visual artists interrogating rage, its call and possibilities, rendered across an array of works (text, installation, and performance) exploring rage’s circumstances, effects, and configurations through poetry, prose, and interdisciplinary modes.

PhD+ Workshop – Grants and Fellowships
2020-10-23 11:00 - 12:30 | Virtual Event
Learn about locating fellowship opportunities, framing your research for different funding organizations, and acquiring grants with Nathaniel Deutsch, Irena Polić, Saskia Nauenberg Dunkell (The Humanities Institute), Holly Unruh (Arts Research Institute), and Matthew Tedford. We’ll share advice about different types of awards and strategies for making your proposal stand out. Bring your ideas and questions for an important conversation on securing funding for humanities and arts research and projects.

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

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Lily Balloffet, Argentina in the Global Middle East
2020-10-23 12:00 - 13:00 | Virtual Event
Lily Pearl Balloffet (Latin American and Latino Studies, UC Santa Cruz) will discuss her recent book, Argentina in the Global Middle East, in conversation with Devi Mays (University of Michigan).
Argentina in the Global Middle East connects modern Latin American and Middle Eastern history through their shared links to global migration systems. By following the mobile lives of individuals with roots in the Levantine Middle East, Lily Pearl Balloffet sheds light on the intersections of ethnicity, migrant–homeland ties, and international relations

Lily Pearl Balloffet is a scholar of migration, mobility, and inter-American relations in historical context. Her current book project, American Venom: Snakes & Our Interconnected Hemisphere bridges environmental, medical, and labor histories of moving people and animals in the Caribbean Basin. She has also published articles in the Journal of Latin American Studies, Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of North African & Middle East Migration Studies, Latin American Studies Association Forum, and The Latin Americanist. Other research and teaching interests include contemporary Latin American hip hop, and social revolutions.
Devi Mays is Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. (PhD, History and Jewish Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington). Dr. Mays researches transnational Jewish networks in the Mediterranean and global contexts, with a focus on Sephardic Jews. She is the author of Forging Ties, Forging Passports: Migration and the Modern Sephardi Diaspora (Stanford University Press, 2020) – a history of migration and nation-building from the vantage point of those who lived between states.
Co-sponsored by the Latin American and Latino Studies Department.

Visualizing Abolition: Bryan Stevenson - Memory and Justice
2020-10-27 16:00 - 17:30 | Virtual Event
Founder/executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) Bryan Stevenson is the featured speaker for the second event in Visualizing Abolition, joining Gina Dent for a conversation about art, culture, and activism.

Bryan Stevenson is a widely acclaimed public interest lawyer who has, over the last two decades, tirelessly worked to challenge the racial and economic injustices of mass incarceration in the United States. Stevenson has also been at the forefront of the creation of two cultural sites, The Legacy Museum and The National Memorial for Peace and Justice. For Visualizing Abolition, Stevenson will discuss how those institutions relate to his legal social justice initiatives. The wide-ranging conversation with Professor Dent will focus on the role images, art, and culture can have in how people see and understand the legacies of history, as well as how re-envisioning history can enliven contemporary struggles against racial inequality and the criminal justice system.
This event is part of The Humanities Institute’s yearlong series on Memory.
For the 2020/21 academic year, UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences, in collaboration with Professor Dent, feminist studies, has organized a year-long series of online events featuring artists, activists, scholars, and others united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition.
The events of Visualizing Abolition accompany Barring Freedom, a bi-coastal exhibition of art featuring Sonya Clark, American Artist, Dread Scott, Deana Lawson, Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun, Sharon Daniel, Sanford Biggers, and other artists whose practices creatively confront the failure of many to see the racist biases within the criminal justice system or to comprehend the economic and social problems that the system serves to obscure. Barring Freedom will be on view at San José Museum of Art late October 2020-March 21, 2021.
Visualizing Abolition is organized by UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences in collaboration with San José Museum of Art and Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery. The series has been generously funded by the Nion McEvoy Family Trust, Ford Foundation, Future Justice Fund, Wanda Kownacki, Peter Coha, James L. Gunderson, Rowland and Pat Rebele, Porter College, UCSC Foundation, and annual donors to the Institute of the Arts and Sciences.
Partners include: Howard University School of Law, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Jessica Silverman Gallery, Indexical, The Humanities Institute, University Library, University Relations, Institute for Social Transformation, Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery, Porter College, the Center for Cultural Studies, the Center for Creative Ecologies, and Media and Society, Kresge College.

Anna Tsing - Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene
2020-10-28 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
A collection of maps, a game, an archive, an analysis, a meditation on life on Earth: Feral Atlas is the cumulation of a five-year curatorial project involving more than a hundred scientists, humanists, poets, and artists. Stretching the concept of the map, the atlas shows how imperial and industrial infrastructures have had world-ripping effects on the ways humans and nonhumans live together. A diversity of observers, from Indigenous elders to research scientists, bring us beyond transcendent terror and hope into the present.
RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, October 28th to receive Zoom link and password.

Anna Tsing is Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. She is the author of The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2005), and In the Realm of the Diamond Queen (1994). Tsing is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Niels Bohr Professorship for a multi-year project on the Anthropocene. She is interested in multi-species anthropology; social landscapes and forest ethnoecologies; globalization; feminist theory; and multi-sited ethnography.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. The sessions consist of a 40-45 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center provides coffee, tea, and cookies.*
All Center for Cultural Studies events are free and open to the public. Staff assistance is provided by the Humanities Institute.
*2020-2021 colloquia will be held virtually until further notice. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own coffee, tea, and cookies to the session.

Fascism and Organized Violence Symposium
2020-10-28 14:00 - 16:00 | Virtual Event
This symposium asks what the analytic of fascism offers for understanding the present authoritarian convergence. Panelists address the question of fascism as a geopolitically and historically diverse series of entanglements with (neo) liberalism, white supremacy, racial capitalism, imperialism, heteropatriarchy, and settler colonialism, and focus on the variety of antifascist collective organizing undertaken by Black, Indigenous, and other racialized subjects across the planet.

Speakers

Johanna Fernández, Associate Professor, History, Baruch College/City University of New York
Allan E. S. Lumba, Assistant Professor, History, Virginia Tech University
Anne Spice, Acting Assistant Professor, Geography & Environmental Studies, Ryerson University

Moderators

Alyosha Goldstein, Professor, American Studies, University of New Mexico
Simón Ventura Trujillo, Assistant Professor, Latinx Studies, English Department, New York University

Presented by UCSC Center for Racial Justice and the Critical Ethnic Studies Journal

PhD+ Workshop – Publishing Scholarly Works, Copyright
2020-10-29 15:30 - 17:00 | Virtual Event
Learn how to publish scholarly work, from finding and evaluating a publisher to negotiating the publication contract and navigating copyright with Martha Stuit (Scholarly Communication Librarian, UC Santa Cruz Library). The Division of Graduate Studies’ professional communication workshop on “Publishing Scholarly Works, Copyright” is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2020-2021 PhD+ series. Workshops presented by the Division of Graduate Studies are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.

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

Usha Iyer: Folded Corporeal Histories of the Hindi Film Dancer Actress in the 1950s and 1960s
2020-10-29 16:00 - 18:00 | Virtual Event
Usha Iyer, Assistant Professor, Film and Media Studies, Stanford University, is the author of Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2020), which examines constructions of gender, stardom, sexuality, and spectacle in Hindi cinema through women’s labor, collaborative networks, and gestural genealogies to produce a corporeal history of South Asian cultural modernities. Her essays have appeared and are forthcoming in Camera Obscura, South Asian Popular Culture, Figurations in Indian Film, The Oxford Handbook of Film Theory, and the Women Film Pioneers Project, among others.
Part of the 2020-21 Center For South Asian Studies Lecture Series.

Living Writers: Khary Polk
2020-10-29 19:00 | Virtual Event
Khary Oronde Polk is the author of Contagions of Empire: Scientific Racism, Sexuality, and Black Military Workers Abroad, 1898-1948 (UNC Press, 2020). A child of an African American military family, his new book examines how the movement of Black soldiers and nurses around the world in the early-to-mid twentieth century challenged U.S. military ideals of race, nation, sexuality, and honor. Polk has written for the Studio Museum of Harlem, The Journal of Negro History, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Gawker, and the journal Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly. His work has also appeared in a number of queer and queer of color anthologies, including If We Have To Take Tomorrow, Corpus, Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?, and Think Again. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he teaches courses on race & the American imagination, military history, Black sexuality, and queer theory.

LIVING WRITERS FALL 2020: SEEING RED—RAGE, WRITING, ART features contemporary poets, cultural critics, performance and visual artists interrogating rage, its call and possibilities, rendered across an array of works (text, installation, and performance) exploring rage’s circumstances, effects, and configurations through poetry, prose, and interdisciplinary modes.

Gina Dent, Debbie Gould & Savannah Shange - The Morning After: A (Post)Election Conversation
2020-11-04 12:15 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
The U.S. presidential election is on Nov 3. We will gather as a community the morning after to process the preceding night (and preceding years) and to think together about the weeks, months, and years to come. Gina Dent, Debbie Gould, and Savannah Shange will start off the conversation. And if it makes more sense to take to the streets on this Wednesday, then that’s what we’ll do.
RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, November 4th to receive Zoom link and password.
From Fair Fight: for voters who plan to vote by mail, you should request your ballot now so that you have plenty of time to receive and return it, by going to www.vote.org. If your state offers ballot tracking, you will be able to track your application and ballot from vote.org. You can find information on how to return your ballot, including drop boxes and other methods, on vote.org.
If you plan to vote in person, Fair Fight strongly recommends that you vote early if your state offers early voting. To make your early vote plan, visit https://www.vote.org/early-voting-calendar/. If your state does not offer early voting, visit https://www.vote.org/polling-place-locator/ to find your Election Day polling location.

Gina Dent is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies, History of Consciousness, and Legal Studies at UC Santa Cruz. She writes and teaches on race, feminism, popular culture, and visual art, and her current book project — Prison as a Border and Other Essays, on popular culture and the conditions of knowledge — grows out of her work as an advocate for human rights and prison abolition.
Debbie Gould is Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz. She is the author of Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against Aids (2009), and works on political emotion and affect, social movements and contentious politics, and feminist and queer theory. She was involved in ACT UP/Chicago for many years and was a founding member of the research/art/activist collaborative group, Feel Tank Chicago, most famous for its International Parades of the Politically Depressed.
Savannah Shange is an urban anthropologist who works at the intersections of race, place, sexuality, and the state. She is author of Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, AntiBlackness, and Schooling in San Francisco (2019) and is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz, with research interests in circulated and lived forms of blackness, ethnographic ethics, Afro-pessimism, and queer of color critique.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. The sessions consist of a 40-45 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center provides coffee, tea, and cookies.*
All Center for Cultural Studies events are free and open to the public. Staff assistance is provided by the Humanities Institute.
*2020-2021 colloquia will be held virtually until further notice. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own coffee, tea, and cookies to the session.

Fascism and Regimes of Knowledge
2020-11-04 14:00 - 16:00 | Virtual Event
This symposium asks what the analytic of fascism offers for understanding the present authoritarian convergence. Panelists address the question of fascism as a geopolitically and historically diverse series of entanglements with (neo) liberalism, white supremacy, racial capitalism, imperialism, heteropatriarchy, and settler colonialism, and focus on the variety of antifascist collective organizing undertaken by Black, Indigenous, and other racialized subjects across the planet.

Speakers

Nadia Abu El-Haj, Professor, Anthropology, Columbia University
Denise Ferreira da Silva, Professor & Director, Social Justice Institute, University of British Columbia
Macarena Gómez-Barris, Professor & Chair, Social Science & Cultural Studies, Pratt Institute and Director, Global South Center
Cynthia A. Young, Associate Professor, African American Studies and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Penn State University

Moderators

Alyosha Goldstein, Professor, American Studies, University of New Mexico
Simón Ventura Trujillo, Assistant Professor, Latinx Studies, English Department, New York University

Presented by UCSC Center for Racial Justice and the Critical Ethnic Studies Journal

Living Writers: sidony o'neal
2020-11-05 19:00 | Virtual Event
sidony o’neal (b. 1988) is an artist and writer based in Portland, OR. Recent exhibitions include Sculpture Center, Fourteen30 Contemporary, and the Institute for New Connotative Action. Performances as a part of non-band DEAD THOROUGHBRED have been presented at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Kunstverein Düsseldorf, Volksbühne Berlin, Performance Space New York, and If I Can’t Dance (Amsterdam). O’neal’s writing has been published at Arts.Black and the journal of Women & Performance. A chapbook, LYFE IN A BOTTLE TREE BOTTLE, is forthcoming from House House Press. O’neal is the recipient of the Oregon Art Commission’s 2020 Joan Shipley Award and is represented by Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland.

LIVING WRITERS FALL 2020: SEEING RED—RAGE, WRITING, ART features contemporary poets, cultural critics, performance and visual artists interrogating rage, its call and possibilities, rendered across an array of works (text, installation, and performance) exploring rage’s circumstances, effects, and configurations through poetry, prose, and interdisciplinary modes.

Victorian Kitchens & Cocktails
2020-11-09 16:00, 2020-11-23 16:00 | Virtual Event
Dust off your copies of What Shall We Have for Dinner? by Lady Clutterbuck and Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management and join us for three interactive sessions exploring Victorian kitchens and cocktails. Dickens Project alumna Liz Pollock explores food and drink preparation in the Victorian kitchen on November 9th. In subsequent lessons, she will demonstrate how to make delicious beverages from the Victorian era.

Liz Pollock first came to Santa Cruz in 1975 to visit some friends at the UC Santa Cruz campus for the “Valentine’s Day Waltz” at Cowell College. As soon as she could, she transferred from Cal State LA to UCSC and majored in comparative literature. She met her husband at Adolph’s Italian Family Restaurant, where she bartended for five years. Liz has owned and operated the Cook’s Bookcase since 2007 and lives with her family in a restored 1914 California Craftsman bungalow in beautiful Santa Cruz.

Slugs and Steins with Sylvanna M. Falcón: The Evolving Practice of Human Rights Accountability
2020-11-09 18:30 | Virtual Event
Sylvanna M. Falcón, founder of UC Santa Cruz’s Human Rights Investigations Lab for the Americas, will explain how human rights accountability has shifted in the digital realm and the ways in which a new generation of human rights activists are needed with critical digital literacy skills in search for the truth.
Dr. Falcón founded Human Rights Investigations Lab for the Americas in September 2019. The Lab’s social justice mission is to track and monitor ongoing humanitarian, environmental and socio-political crises throughout the Americas by using open source investigative methods to promote justice and achieve accountability for communities adversely affected by human rights violations. The lab offers digital verification support to non-governmental organizations, news outlets, and other advocacy partners.

Sylvanna M. Falcón, Associate Professor, Latin American and Latino Studies (LALS) at UC Santa Cruz.
As Associate Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies (LALS) at the University of California, Santa Cruz, her research and teaching interests are in human rights, transnational and decolonial feminism, racism and antiracism, open source investigations, and transitional justice in Peru. She is a former United Nations consultant to the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women. Dr. Falcón authored the award-winning book Power Interrupted: Antiracist and Feminist Activists inside the United Nations, [University of Washington Press, 2016 – awarded the National Women’s Studies Association Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Award] and the co-editor of Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship [under contract with Rutgers University Press] and New Directions in Feminism and Human Rights [Routledge, 2011]. Her work has been published in several peer-reviewed journals, including International Journal of Transitional Justice, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, Feminism.

Book talk and conversation: Peter Limbrick, Arab Modernism as World Cinema
2020-11-10 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
Peter Limbrick (Film and Digital Media, UC Santa Cruz) will discuss his new book Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi in conversation with Professor Tarek El-Ariss (Dartmouth College).
Arab Modernism as World Cinema (University of California Press, 2020) explores the radically beautiful films of Moroccan filmmaker Moumen Smihi, demonstrating the importance of Moroccan and Arab film cultures in histories of world cinema. Examining Smihi’s oeuvre, which enacts an exchange of images and ideas between Arab and non-Arab cultures, Limbrick rethinks the relation of Arab cinema to modernism and further engages debates about the use of modernist forms by filmmakers in the Global South.

Peter Limbrick is Professor of Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz. In addition to Arab Modernism as World Cinema, he is the author of Making Settler Cinemas: Film and Colonial Encounters in the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand (Palgrave, 2010) and articles on postcolonial and transnational cinemas.

Tarek El-Ariss is Professor and Chair of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political (2013) and Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age (2019), and editor of The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda (2018).

Organized by the Center for the Middle East and North Africa

PhD+ Workshop – Using Twitter Professionally
2020-11-12 15:30 - 17:00 | Virtual Event
Learn how to promote your research and create a virtual community of Tweeple in Twitter! Learn the basics, including how to set up your page, use hashtags, use best practices, and more with Kayla Isenberg (Senior Director, Digital Engagement, University Relations at UC Santa Cruz). The Division of Graduate Studies’ professional communication workshop on “Using Twitter Professionally” is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2020-2021 PhD+ series. Workshops presented by the Division of Graduate Studies are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.

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

Manan Ahmed: The Loss of Hindustan
2020-11-12 16:00 - 18:00 | Virtual Event
Manan Ahmed is Associate Professor for History of South Asia at Columbia University. He specializes in the littoral western Indian Ocean world from 1000-1800 CE. He is the author of A Book of Conquest (2016) and The Loss of Hindustan (2020)
Part of the 2020-21 Center For South Asian Studies Lecture Series.
Organized by The Center for South Asian Studies

Morgan Parker - Morton Marcus Poetry Reading
2020-11-12 19:00 - 21:00 | Virtual Event
Please join us for the 11th annual Morton Marcus Poetry Reading, featuring honored guest Morgan Parker. Poet Gary Young will host the program, and the evening will include an announcement of the winner of the Morton Marcus Poetry Contest (recipient receives a $1,000 prize).

Gary Young is the author of many volumes of poems and translations, and has edited several anthologies and poetry textbooks, including Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California and The Geography of Home: California’s Poetry of Place. His most recent books are Precious Mirror, translations from the Japanese published by White Pine Press (2018), and That’s What I Thought, which won the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award from Persea Books (2018). His book No Other Life won the William Carlos Williams Award, and in 2009 he received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Young teaches creative writing and directs the Cowell Press at the UC Santa Cruz.
Morgan Parker is a poet, essayist, and novelist. She is the author of the young adult novel Who Put This Song On?; and the poetry collections Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and Magical Negro, which won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award. Parker’s debut book of nonfiction is forthcoming from One World. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a Pushcart Prize, and has been hailed by The New York Times as “a dynamic craftsperson” of “considerable consequence to American poetry.” Parker received her Bachelors in Anthropology and Creative Writing from Columbia University and her MFA in Poetry from NYU. She is a Cave Canem graduate fellow, and creator and host of the live talk show Reparations, Live! at the Ace Hotel. She co-curates the Poets With Attitude (PWA) reading series with Tommy Pico. With Angel Nafis, she is The Other Black Girl Collective. She lives in Los Angeles.
View and purchase Morgan Parker’s books at: https://www.bookshopsantacruz.com/morganparker
The Morton Marcus Poetry Reading honors poet, teacher, and film critic Morton Marcus (1936–2009). Marcus was the 1999 Santa Cruz County Artist of the Year and a recipient of the 2007 Gail Rich Award. Among his published works are eleven volumes of poetry, including The Santa Cruz Mountain Poems, Pages from a Scrapbook of Immigrants, Moments Without Names, Shouting Down the Silence, Pursuing the Dream Bone and The Dark Figure In The Doorway; a novel, The Brezhnev Memo; and a literary memoir, Striking Through the Masks. He taught English and Film at Cabrillo College for thirty years, was the co-host of the radio program, The Poetry Show, and was the co-host of the television film review show, Cinema Scene. Learn more at: www.mortonmarcus.com
The Morton Marcus Poetry Archive can be found at UCSC Special Collections. Mort’s personal papers, manuscripts, and recordings reflect his legacy as a poet and educator, and his collection of poetry books, broadsides, literary magazines and correspondence with other poets and writers illuminate his deep involvement in, and passion for, the literary art of poetry.
Organizing Committee
Len Anderson, Danusha Laméris, Donna Mekis, Mark Ong, Maggie Paul, Irena Polić, Jory Post, Teresa Mora, Joseph Stroud, and Gary Young.
The Morton Marcus Poetry Contest
phren-Z, an online literary magazine, whose mission is to celebrate the Santa Cruz literary community, has established a national poetry contest, The Morton Marcus Poetry Prize, in honor of Morton Marcus, “whose life and work inspired the writing of many students, friends, and emerging poets.” For more information visit: http://phren-z.org/poetry_contest.html
Dennis Maloney, editor and publisher of White Pine Press has honored phren-Z by serving as the judge for this year’s contest.
Support Poetry in Santa Cruz
The Annual Morton Marcus Poetry Reading continues to be offered free to the public. Please consider donating to the Morton Marcus Poetry Reading at thi.ucsc.edu/projects/morton-marcus-poetry-reading as well as to Poetry Santa Cruz at: http://www.baymoon.com/~poetrysantacruz/
Mort was a donating member of Poetry Santa Cruz from its inception in 2001.
This community event is presented by the The Humanities Institute and co-sponsored by:
Bookshop Santa Cruz
Cabrillo College English Department
Cowell College
Living Writers Series
Ow Family Properties
Poetry Santa Cruz
Porter Hitchcock Modern Poetry Fund
Porter College
Santa Cruz Writes
Special Collections & Archives
If you have disability-related needs, please contact us at thi@ucsc.edu or call 831-459-1274 by November 5th, 2020.

Idan Landau: A Selectional Criterion for Adjunct Control
2020-11-13 09:00 | Virtual Event
The Department of Linguistics is pleased to present Idan Landau, from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev – Israel, speaking on A Selectional Criterion for Adjunct Control.
Zoom Information will be emailed on Thursday, November 12, 2020

Nonfinite adjuncts display a non-uniform control distribution: While all adjuncts accept control by the local matrix subject (Obligatory Control, OC), only some accept other controllers (non-obligatory control, NOC). For example, the rationale clause in (1a) allows NOC by the stimulus clause in (1b) does not.
1a). Mary has made up her mind. Bill would present the speakers [in order PRO to give him the opportunity to practice their names].
1b).Mary giggled. Bill smiled [PRO to see her/him in underwear].
The question which adjuncts fall in which category, and why, has rarely been addressed (see Green 2-18, 2019 for an exception).
Following Landeau 2015, I propose that control operates via prediction (a property-denoting clause) or logophoric anchoring (a propositional cause). The (possibly null) prepositional head of Strict OC adjuncts (as in (1b)) s-selects a property, while that of alternating OC/NOC adjuncts (as in (1a)) s-selects either a property or proposition. This selectional distinction is independently detectable by testing whether the adjunct accepts a lexical subject, providing us with a reliable predictor of its control behavior. In this talk, I will examine 10 different types of adjuncts in English ad demonstrate how this system derives their control patterns. It is further shown that purely configurational theories, that posit complementarity between OC and NOC, are empirically inadequate. Finally, I address the question of why the predictive variant of nonfinite adjuncts is available by default (within and across languages), whereas the propositional variant is not. The explanation hinges on the principle of Economy of Projection, which favors the smaller, predictive variant over the propositional one. The dual analysis of adjunct control offers insights into puzzling language-internal facts as well as typological generalizations, so far unrelated in the theory of control.
Organized by the Department of Linguistics

PhD+ Workshop – Impassioned Online Teaching: Empathy, Embodiment and Radical Pedagogy in Practice
2020-11-13 11:00 - 12:30 | Virtual Event
How do we, as educators, create virtual experiences that are inclusive, engaging, and impactful for our students? How can we make remote conditions more intimate, accessibility more equitable, and our classrooms more collaborative? What do design strategies grounded in compassion and creativity look like? From decolonizing the syllabus to somatic abolitionism and interactive storytelling, this workshop will offer practical techniques for learning and liberation. Please join us as we reimagine the possibilities of a mindfulness-based approach to teaching in the digital age.
This workshop is co-presented by The Humanities Institute (THI) and the Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning (CITL) at UC Santa Cruz and open to University of California faculty, staff, and students.
Panel led by UC Santa Cruz’s 2020 National Humanities Center GSSR Fellows:

Kristen Laciste (History of Art & Visual Culture)
Alexyss McClellan-Ufugusuku (History)
Alexandra Moore (History of Art & Visual Culture)
Francesca Romeo (Film and Digital Media)
Meleia Simon-Reynolds (History)
Matthew Tedford (History of Art & Visual Culture)
Kirstin Wagner (Literature)

Left to right and top to bottom: Meleia Simon-Reynolds, Kirstin Wagner, Francesca Romeo, Alexyss McClellan-Ufugusuku, Matthew Tedford, Kristen Laciste, Alexandra Moore

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

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Moor Mother + Rasheedah Phillips: Black Quantum Futurism
2020-11-13 16:00 - 17:30 | Virtual Event
The exhibition is Moor Mother—a Philadelphia artist praised as part of “a new generation of visionary black storytellers” (The New York Times—premieres a new video followed by a discussion of Black Quantum Futurism theory and practice with her collaborator Rasheedah Phillips. Weaving through haunting slave narratives as dystopian allegory, negro spirituals, and Black ritual, Moor Mother’s work points to a liberated future through Black Quantum Futurism, a project in partnership with author Rasheedah Phillips. Through a time of ecological and social disaster, she says, “I’m not saying, this is the end, we’re all doomed,” but rather that “I believe there is another way. So it’s about trying to get the audience to understand another way of digesting the truth.”

The events are co-organized with T.J. Demos of the Center for Creative Ecologies at UC Santa Cruz as part of the UCSC Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar’s Beyond the End of the World research project, Indexical, and the Institute of the Arts and Sciences with the collaboration of The Humanities Institute and Kuumbwa Jazz Center.
Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother) is a nationally- and internationally-touring musician, poet, visual artist, and workshop facilitator, and has performed at numerous festivals, colleges, galleries, and museums around the world, sharing the stage with King Britt, Roscoe Mitchell, Claudia Rankine, bell hooks, and more. Her most recent album, Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes, is the culmination of all of her earthly experiences merged with all of her cosmic ones. On Analog Fluids, haunting slave narratives are presented as dystopian allegory and negro spirituals are flipped, remixed, and recaptured, only to be digitized into a symbiotic bio-morph program for the post-thumb drive age. It’s a record rich with the noise and chaos that affirm Moor Mother’s punk roots, yet it is also anchored in earthiness via the constant injection of Black ritual, poetry, and drums programmed to vibrate through the listener’s mitochondria.
Black Quantum Futurism Collective is a multidisciplinary collaboration between Camae Ayewa (Rockers!; Moor Mother) and Rasheedah Phillips (The AfroFuturist Affair; Metropolarity) exploring the intersections of futurism, creative media, DIY-aesthetics, and activism in marginalized communities through an alternative temporal lens. BQF Collective has created a number of community-based events, experimental music projects, performances, exhibitions, zines, and anthologies of experimental essays on space-time consciousness. BQF Collective is a 2016 A Blade of Grass Fellow, 2015 artist-in-residence at West Philadelphia Neighborhood Time Exchange, and had their experimental short, Black Bodies as Conductors of Gravity, premiere at the 2015 Afrofuturism Now! Festival in Rotterdam. BQF Collective frequently collaborates with other Black Futurists, Joy KMT, Irreversible Entanglements, Thomas Stanley, Ras Mashramani, Alex Smith to produce literature, present workshops, lectures, and performances.

Victorian Kitchens & Cocktails
2020-11-16 16:00 | Virtual Event
Dust off your copies of What Shall We Have for Dinner? by Lady Clutterbuck and Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management and join us for three interactive sessions exploring Victorian kitchens and cocktails. Dickens Project alumna Liz Pollock explores food and drink preparation in the Victorian kitchen. In subsequent lessons, she will demonstrate how to make delicious beverages from the Victorian era.

Liz Pollock first came to Santa Cruz in 1975 to visit some friends at the UC Santa Cruz campus for the “Valentine’s Day Waltz” at Cowell College. As soon as she could, she transferred from Cal State LA to UCSC and majored in comparative literature. She met her husband at Adolph’s Italian Family Restaurant, where she bartended for five years. Liz has owned and operated the Cook’s Bookcase since 2007 and lives with her family in a restored 1914 California Craftsman bungalow in beautiful Santa Cruz.

PhD+ Workshop – Getting Hired at a California Community College
2020-11-17 14:00 - 15:30 | Virtual Event
A panel discussion with current and recent instructors at California Community Colleges, who are all UC Santa Cruz graduate student alumni, including:
Beth Au, Moderator
Director
California Community Colleges Registry
Francesca Caparas, Panelist
M.A. Literature
English Professor and Faculty Coordinator, Jean Miller Resource Room for Women, Genders, and Sexuality
De Anza College
Sarah Gerhardt, Panelist
Ph.D. Chemistry
Chemistry Instructor
Cabrillo College
Elizabeth Gonzalez, Panelist
Ph.D. Psychology
Interim Director, Metas Center
San José City College
Brian Malone, Panelist
Ph.D. Literature
English Professor
De Anza College
Melissa-Ann Nievera-Lozano, Panelist
Ph.D. Education
Ethnic Studies Professor
Evergreen Valley College
Nicholas Vasallo, Panelist
D.M.A.
Director, Music Industry Studies, AV Technology, and Music Composition
Diablo Valley College
The Division of Graduate Studies’ professional communication workshop on “Getting Hired at a California Community College” is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2020-2021 PhD+ series. Workshops presented by the Division of Graduate Studies are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.

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

Visualizing Abolition: Visuality and Carceral Formations - Nicole Fleetwood, Herman Gray, and Nicholas Mirzoeff
2020-11-17 16:00 - 17:30 | Virtual Event
The third event in the Visualizing Abolition series brings together visual and cultural theorists Nicole Fleetwood, Herman Gray, and Nicholas Mirzoeff to consider the roles of visual culture in normalizing mass incarceration and the racist brutalities of policing within the social landscape and political vision of America. Questions of visuality and formations moves beyond critiques of film, television, advertisements, and other media to ask how dominant visions of the world—and the visual regimes that regulate what people see and what remains hidden from view—are materialized in the prison industrial complex.

This event is part of The Humanities Institute’s yearlong series on Memory.
For the 2020/21 academic year, UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences, in collaboration with Professor Dent, feminist studies, has organized a year-long series of online events featuring artists, activists, scholars, and others united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition.
The events of Visualizing Abolition accompany Barring Freedom, a bi-coastal exhibition of art featuring Sonya Clark, American Artist, Dread Scott, Deana Lawson, Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun, Sharon Daniel, Sanford Biggers, and other artists whose practices creatively confront the failure of many to see the racist biases within the criminal justice system or to comprehend the economic and social problems that the system serves to obscure. Barring Freedom will be on view at San José Museum of Art late October 2020-March 21, 2021.
Visualizing Abolition is organized by UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences in collaboration with San José Museum of Art and Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery. The series has been generously funded by the Nion McEvoy Family Trust, Ford Foundation, Future Justice Fund, Wanda Kownacki, Peter Coha, James L. Gunderson, Rowland and Pat Rebele, Porter College, UCSC Foundation, and annual donors to the Institute of the Arts and Sciences.
Partners include: Howard University School of Law, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Jessica Silverman Gallery, Indexical, The Humanities Institute, University Library, University Relations, Institute for Social Transformation, Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery, Porter College, the Center for Cultural Studies, the Center for Creative Ecologies, and Media and Society, Kresge College.

Vicente Rafael & Jorgge Menna Barreto - Authoritarianism in the Philippines and Brazil
2020-11-18 12:15 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
This dialogic colloquium enjoins us to learn about and reflect on authoritarianism in Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines and Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil. In each of these democracies, what histories and dynamics have contributed to these figures’ rise, and how is their appeal connected to the place of each country in global economies of material and cultural capital? How should we understand their contemporaneity and connection? How have they approached the pandemic’s necropolitical possibilities and challenges? The session will begin with brief opening remarks from Vicente Rafael on Duterte’s Philippines and Jorgge Menna Barreto on Bolsonaro’s Brazil. We will then open to a broader conversation among participants.

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, November 18th to receive Zoom link and password.
Please Note: colloquium participants will be expected to have completed brief readings by Vicente Rafael and Jorgge Menna Barreto before the event.

Vicente L. Rafael is Professor of History at the University of Washington in Seattle. He works mainly on the cultural politics of the Philippines and occasionally on the United States, focusing on such topics as colonialism, nationalism and postcoloniality; language and religion; translation and technology; and race and empire. His books include Motherless Tongues (2016); The Promise of the Foreign (2005); White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (2000); and Contracting Colonialism (1988).
Jorgge Menna Barreto is a Brazilian artist and educator who works at the intersection of art and agroecology, focusing on agroforestry. Since 2015, Menna Barreto has been a professor at UERJ, Rio de Janeiro, and he is presently on postdoctoral leave in Europe. In January 2021, he will begin as Assistant Professor in Environmental Art at UC Santa Cruz. He is also the translator of Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World into Brazilian Portuguese, to be launched next year.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. The sessions consist of a 40-45 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center provides coffee, tea, and cookies.*
All Center for Cultural Studies events are free and open to the public. Staff assistance is provided by the Humanities Institute.
This session is co-sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies and the Center for Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions (SEACoast).
*2020-2021 colloquia will be held virtually until further notice. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own coffee, tea, and cookies to the session.

Pascha Bueno-Hansen: Dissident Genders and Sexualities in the Andes - Transitional Justice Otherwise
2020-11-19 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
Co-presented with Research Center for the Americas, Dr. Pascha Bueno-Hansen will provide a lunch time webinar lecture on the modalities of resistance of people of non-normative genders and sexualities to armed conflict, political repression, and authoritarian regimes in Peru, Ecuador and Colombia. Dr. Bueno-Hansen is an Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Delaware and earned her PhD in Politics at UC Santa Cruz. She is the author of Feminist and Human Rights Struggles in Peru: Decolonizing Transitional Justice. This event is co-sponsored by The Institute for Social Transformation and is free and open to the public; advance registration is required to access the Zoom link.

Pascha Bueno-Hansen is an Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Delaware. Her first book Feminist and Human Rights Struggles in Peru: Decolonizing Transitional Justice was just published in Spanish Derechos Feministas y Humanos en el Perú: Decolonizando la Justicia Transicional by the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. She has various articles and book chapters on gender-based violence, sexuality, race, human rights, transitional justice, and social movements. Her current book project Dissident Genders and Sexualities in the Andes examines the modalities of resistance of people of non-normative genders and sexualities to armed conflict, political repression, and authoritarian regimes in Peru, Ecuador and Colombia.
This event is part of The Humanities Institute’s yearlong series on Memory.
The RCA is collaborating with campus partners, specifically The Humanities Institute and the Institute for Social Transformation, to offer webinar programming on the theme of “Memory Studies in the Americas” to inspire sustained cross-border dialogues that tie the region.

Living Writers: Dawn Lundy Martin
2020-11-19 19:00 | Virtual Event
Dawn Lundy Martin is an American poet and essayist. She is the author of four books of poems: Good Stock Strange Blood, winner of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry; Life in a Box is a Pretty Life, which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; DISCIPLINE, A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering, and three limited edition chapbooks. Her nonfiction can be found in n+1, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Believer, and Best American Essays 2019. Martin is the Toi Derricotte Endowed Chair in English at the University of Pittsburgh and Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics.

LIVING WRITERS FALL 2020: SEEING RED—RAGE, WRITING, ART features contemporary poets, cultural critics, performance and visual artists interrogating rage, its call and possibilities, rendered across an array of works (text, installation, and performance) exploring rage’s circumstances, effects, and configurations through poetry, prose, and interdisciplinary modes.

Beyond the End of the World: Manifesta 13 Artist Talk
2020-11-20 10:00 - 12:00 | Virtual Event
War ecologies call forth not just mutuality but collapse, survival within violence. Conflict involves corporate extraction and militarised assaults on environments and environmentalists, while multispecies life and coexistence fall under grave threat. In its curatorial presentation, the Center for Creative Ecologies offers two artistic case studies asking what kind of pluriverse is possible in the face of different kinds of socioecological violence? The first study addresses the criminalisation of nonhuman life in Putumayo, southern Colombia by Hannah Meszaros Martin; the other considers sci-fi surrealism and extinction in Mar Menor, a saltwater lagoon in southeastern Spain, by Isabelle Carbonell. These comprise part of the Center’s ongoing research project Beyond the End of the World, which seeks out spaces of hope emerging from geographies of despair. War ecologies identify not only neoliberal enterprises using climate breakdown to introduce authoritarian politics, but also struggles – human and more-than-human – for ways to transcend the forces of socio-economic inequality and politico-environmental calamity.
Please join us for a panel discussion and Q&A with the Center for Creative Ecologies artist and curatorial team Isabelle Carbonell, Hannah Meszaros Martin, and T.J. Demos. The team will be discussing their latest exhibition at Manifesta 13 Marseille the European Nomadic Biennial.

Hannah Meszaros Martin is an artist, writer, and recent PhD graduate of the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London. She is a researcher in Forensic Architecture, a European Research Council funded project, which she has been a member of since 2012. With Forensic Architecture, she has exhibited at the House of World Cultures (Berlin), MACBA (Barcelona) and MUAC (Mexico City), and contributed to the book FORENSIS (Sternberg, 2014). She has exhibited solo work in Medellín, London, and documenta(13). She has published with Open Democracy, Third Text and Different Skies, a publication that she co-founded in 2012.
Isabelle Carbonell is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and a PhD Candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz in Film and Digital Media, thinking through a cinema of the anthropocene, and how we think on multiple possible futures in this time of ecological crisis. Her work lies at the intersection of expanded documentary, environmental justice, invasive species, eco-disasters, and experimental ethnography. Her scholarship has been published in the Internet Policy Review, Conexión Journal, and the Cultural Anthropology Journal. Recent completed film works include: The River Runs Red (2018), The Blessed Assurance (2018) and, The Camel Race (2019).
This event is part of the Beyond the End of the World symposium through the Center for Creative Ecologies in collaboration with The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

Donka Farkas: Canonical and non-canonical speech acts
2020-11-20 13:20 | Virtual Event
The Department of Linguistics is pleased to present Donka Farkas speaking on Canonical and non-canonical speech acts.
Zoom Information will be emailed on Thursday, November 19, 2020.

Abstract
The general issue addressed in this talk is how best to characterize canonical and non-canonical speech acts. The framework I will use is rooted in Farkas and Bruce (2010) and Farkas and Roelofsen (2017). The speech acts I concentrate on are assertions and questions.
The first part of the talk focuses on canonical assertions and questions. Pretheoretically, canonical, or typical, assertions are informing speech acts whereby a knowledgeable speaker informs her addressee of the truth of the proposition she expresses. Canonical, or typical, questions request information, i.e., an ignorant speaker requests her addressee to resolve the issue she raises. The question addressed in this part of the talk is why should canonical assertions and questions have these properties? I will attempt to answer it by showing that these properties follow from a context structure view based on Farkas and Bruce (2010) and the basic conventional discourse effects (CDE) declaratives and interrogatives are assigned in Farkas and Roelofsen (2017). CDE are defined as functions from the denotation of sentences and input context structures to output context structures. These functions affect the discourse commitments of the speaker, the conversational table and the future states of the conversation the move projects.
The second part of the talk considers ways in which assertions and questions can be non-canonical, i.e., ways in which declaratives and interrogatives can be used in contexts that override the canonical default assumptions discussed in the first part. It will be argued that such non-default cases can be either unmarked (as in the case of `quiz’ questions in English) or marked for various types of particular deviations from the canonical case, such as markers of bias in questions, which signal a departure from the speaker neutrality assumption in questions, or markers of non-categorical commitment, which signal departures from speaker knowledgeability in assertions. It will be argued that a promising way of treating
some of the linguistic means used in non-canonical speech acts is to treat them as force modifiers, i.e. as contributing special CDE, treated formally as functions from contexts C to contexts C’, where C is the result of applying the basic CDE of the sentence to its input context (see Faller, 2002; Murray, 2010).
For questions please email Maria Zimmer.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Special post-election conversation
2020-11-20 18:00 - 19:30 | Virtual Event
We’re thrilled to welcome Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of our country’s best thinkers and writers, for a virtual conversation about the state of our country post-election, truth telling, and the idea that stories and mythology can persuade and change attitudes when facts alone cannot. Coates’ novel, The Water Dancer, will serve as a starting off point for his conversation with Adam Serwer, staff writer at The Atlantic.
Hosted by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, in partnership with Bookshop Santa Cruz and Marcus Bookstores in Oakland.
We’re excited to offer free event access and copies of Coates’ novel to the first 500 UCSC students who register.
Ticketing Information
All tickets include one paperback copy of THE WATER DANCER plus entry to the event.

In-store pickup: $22 (plus Eventbrite fees)
Shipped-to-You: $27 (plus Eventbrite fees)
Free book and event access available to the first 500 current UCSC students who register. Sponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz. Student ID required at registration (Thank you, students! Free tickets have now sold out. General admission tickets are still available for purchase).

“What if memory had the power to transport enslaved people to freedom?’ . . . The most moving part of The Water Dancer [is] the possibility it offers of an alternate history. . . . The book’s most poignant and painful gift is the temporary fantasy that all the people who leaped off slave ships and into the Atlantic were not drowning themselves in terror and anguish, but going home.”—NPR

The Humanities Institute is exploring the theme of Memory this year, and this event is sure to provide substantive insight at a moment when we’re interrogating the past and trying to move forward as a country. We encourage everyone—current students, alumni, staff and community members—to join us for what will be an insightful and timely event.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of The Beautiful Struggle, We Were Eight Years in Power, and Between the World and Me, which won the National Book Award in 2015. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.
Adam Serwer is a staff writer at The Atlantic and is the author of the forthcoming essay collection, The Cruelty Is the Point: Essays on Trump’s America, which can be pre-ordered through Bookshop Santa Cruz here.

Visualizing Abolition: Film Screening "Lessons of the Hour"
2020-11-30 | Virtual Event
In collaboration with McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, we are pleased to present a limited online screening of Isaac Julien Lessons of the Hour as a part of the Visualizing Abolition series. The ten-screen immersive film installation exploring the life of Frederick Douglass is on view at McEvoy Arts Oct 14, 2020–Mar 13, 2021.

A link to the screening will be sent out November 30 at 4 pm to everyone who is registered for the event with Isaac Julien and Robin Kelley. To register for the event (and receive the link), please click the button above.
Lessons of the Hour, a ten-screen film installation by British filmmaker and installation artist Isaac Julien, is on view at the McEvoy Foundation of the Arts October 2020-March 2021. A limited online version of the immersive exploration of the life of the visionary African American writer, abolitionist, statesman, and freed slave Frederick Douglass will be available for a limited online viewing. Incorporating excerpts from Douglass’ speeches and dramatizations of his private and public milieus, the film offers a contemplative, poetic journey into Douglass’ zeitgeist and a forceful suggestion that the lessons of the abolitionist’s hour have yet to be learned.
This event is part of The Humanities Institute’s yearlong series on Memory.
For the 2020/21 academic year, UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences, in collaboration with Professor Dent, feminist studies, has organized a year-long series of online events featuring artists, activists, scholars, and others united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition.
The events of Visualizing Abolition accompany Barring Freedom, a bi-coastal exhibition of art featuring Sonya Clark, American Artist, Dread Scott, Deana Lawson, Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun, Sharon Daniel, Sanford Biggers, and other artists whose practices creatively confront the failure of many to see the racist biases within the criminal justice system or to comprehend the economic and social problems that the system serves to obscure. Barring Freedom will be on view at San José Museum of Art late October 2020-March 21, 2021.
Visualizing Abolition is organized by UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences in collaboration with San José Museum of Art and Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery. The series has been generously funded by the Nion McEvoy Family Trust, Ford Foundation, Future Justice Fund, Wanda Kownacki, Peter Coha, James L. Gunderson, Rowland and Pat Rebele, Porter College, UCSC Foundation, and annual donors to the Institute of the Arts and Sciences.
Partners include: Howard University School of Law, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Jessica Silverman Gallery, Indexical, The Humanities Institute, University Library, University Relations, Institute for Social Transformation, Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery, Porter College, the Center for Cultural Studies, the Center for Creative Ecologies, and Media and Society, Kresge College.

Visualizing Abolition: Abolition Then and Now w/ Isaac Julien and Robin D.G. Kelley
2020-12-01 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
Abolition Then & Now with historian and cultural theorist Robin D. G. Kelley and artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien, co-presented with McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, is the next event in Visualizing Abolition.

Abolition Then & Now features Robin Kelley and Isaac Julien in conversation about the anti-slavery movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and current abolitionist uprisings against racist police brutality and the prison industrial complex. This event coincides with the presentation of Julien’s Lessons of the Hour, 2019, a ten-screen film installation that explores the legacy of Frederick Douglass and his vision for abolition in relationship to contemporaneity, at McEvoy Foundation for the Arts in San Francisco. A composite version of that moving and monumental artwork will be screened for 24-hours online prior to the event.
This event is part of The Humanities Institute’s yearlong series on Memory.
For the 2020/21 academic year, UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences, in collaboration with Professor Gina Dent, feminist studies, has organized a year-long series of online events featuring artists, activists, scholars, and others united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition.
The events of Visualizing Abolition accompany Barring Freedom, a bi-coastal exhibition of art featuring Sonya Clark, American Artist, Dread Scott, Deana Lawson, Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun, Sharon Daniel, Sanford Biggers, and other artists whose practices creatively confront the failure of many to see the racist biases within the criminal justice system or to comprehend the economic and social problems that the system serves to obscure. Barring Freedom will be on view at San José Museum of Art late October 2020-March 21, 2021.
Visualizing Abolition is organized by UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences in collaboration with San José Museum of Art and Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery. The series has been generously funded by the Nion McEvoy Family Trust, Ford Foundation, Future Justice Fund, Wanda Kownacki, Peter Coha, James L. Gunderson, Rowland and Pat Rebele, Porter College, UCSC Foundation, and annual donors to the Institute of the Arts and Sciences.
Partners include: Howard University School of Law, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Jessica Silverman Gallery, Indexical, The Humanities Institute, University Library, University Relations, Institute for Social Transformation, Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery, Porter College, the Center for Cultural Studies, the Center for Creative Ecologies, and Media and Society, Kresge College.

In Vitro: Film Screening and Conversation
2020-12-02 12:00 - 14:00 | Virtual Event
IN VITRO | Larissa Sansour & Søren Lind, 2019 (TRAILER) from Spike Island – Productions on Vimeo.
Join the Center for Cultural Studies Colloquium for a special screening of the film, In Vitro, after which Peter Limbrick (UCSC professor of Film and Digital Media) will moderate a discussion with filmmakers Larissa Sansour and Soren Lind.
In Vitro is a 2-channel Arabic-language sci-fi film filmed in black and white. It is set in the aftermath of an eco-disaster. An abandoned nuclear reactor under the biblical town of Bethlehem has been converted into an enormous orchard. Using heirloom seeds collected in the final days before the apocalypse, a group of scientists are preparing to replant the soil above.
In the hospital wing of the underground compound, the orchard’s ailing founder, 70-year-old Alia, played by Hiam Abbass, is lying in her deathbed, as 30-year-old Alia, played by Maisa Abd Elhadi, comes to visit her. Alia is born underground as part of a comprehensive cloning program and has never seen the town she’s destined to rebuild.
The talk between the two scientists soon evolves into an intimate dialogue about memory, exile and nostalgia. Central to their discussion is the intricate relationship between past, present and future, with the Bethlehem setting providing a narratively, politically and symbolically charged backdrop.
RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, December 2nd to receive Zoom link and password.

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Larissa Sansour was born in 1973 in East Jerusalem, Palestine, and studied fine arts in London, New York and Copenhagen. Central to her work is the dialectics between myth and historical narrative. In her recent works, she uses science fiction to address social and political issues. Working mainly with film, Sansour also produces installations, photos and sculptures.
Sansour’s work is shown in film festivals and museums worldwide. In 2019, she represented Denmark at the 58th Venice Biennial. She has shown her work at Tate Modern, MoMA, Centre Pompidou and the Istanbul Biennial. Recent solo exhibitions include Copenhagen Contemporary in Denmark, Bluecoat in Liverpool, Bildmuseet in Umeå and Dar El-Nimer in Beirut. Sansour currently lives and works in London, UK.
Soren Lind (b. 1970) is a Danish author, artist, director and scriptwriter. With a background in philosophy, Lind wrote books on mind, language and understanding before turning to art, film and fiction. He has published novels, shorts story collections and several children’s books.
Lind screens and exhibits his films at museums, galleries and film festivals worldwide. His work was shown at the Danish Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennial. Other recent venues and festivals include Copenhagen Contemporary (DK), MoMA (US), Barbican (UK), Nikolaj Kunsthal (DK), Berlinale (D), International Film Festival Rotterdam (NL) and BFI London Film Festival (UK). He lives and works in London.
This event is part of The Humanities Institute’s yearlong series on Memory.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. The sessions consist of a 40-45 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center provides coffee, tea, and cookies.*
All Center for Cultural Studies events are free and open to the public. Staff assistance is provided by the Humanities Institute.
*2020-2021 colloquia will be held virtually until further notice. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own coffee, tea, and cookies to the session.

Living Writers: Student Reading
2020-12-03 19:00 | Virtual Event
LIVING WRITERS FALL 2020: SEEING RED—RAGE, WRITING, ART features contemporary poets, cultural critics, performance and visual artists interrogating rage, its call and possibilities, rendered across an array of works (text, installation, and performance) exploring rage’s circumstances, effects, and configurations through poetry, prose, and interdisciplinary modes.

Adrian Staub - Word frequency and predictability effects in reading: Some outstanding puzzles
2020-12-04 13:20 | Virtual Event
The Department of Linguistics is pleased to present Adrian Staub of the University of Massachusetts speaking on word frequency and predictability effects in reading: some outstanding puzzles
Abstract:
A word’s context-independent frequency and its context-dependent predictability both influence eye fixation durations in reading. In this talk I’ll discuss recent work investigating some questions about relationship between these two effects. One question is why manipulations of the two variables demonstrate strictly additive effects on fixation duration measures. A possibility is that they influence separate processing stages; predictability may facilitate early visual and orthographic processing, while frequency influences a later stage of lexical retrieval. If so, the two effects should show different patterns of interaction with effects of stimulus degradation, e.g., visual contrast. However, two large experiments show that frequency and predictability demonstrate similar patterns of near additivity with effects of visual contrast and font difficulty, providing no support for the two-stage hypothesis. A second question is whether there is a correlation, at the level of individual readers, between the size of frequency and predictability effects. Evaluating correlations between by-subject slopes in Bayesian mixed-effects models reveals that the answer is scale-dependent: Effects of the two variables on raw gaze duration show a positive correlation, but effects on log gaze duration do not. This is probably because the correlation is due primarily to a relationship between reading speed and effect size, which is neutralized by the log transformation. I’ll discuss how these results constrain our understanding of how the two variables influence lexical processing.

Adrian Staub works in psycholinguistics, which focuses on the cognitive processes involved in language comprehension and production. He is interested in how we analyze the grammatical structure of sentences in the course of language comprehension, how we recognize words, and how these processes work together. In many of his experiments, participants’ eye movements are monitored as they read sentences in which syntactic structure has been manipulated; he directs the UMass Eyetracking Laboratory. His personal web page, including a list of publications, is here.
Zoom information will be emailed on Thursday, December 3, 2020.

Ezra Klein and Will Davies: Living in a Frayed Democracy
2020-12-05 10:00 - 11:15 | Virtual Event
The Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture – Ezra Klein and Will Davies: Living in Frayed Democracy
We’re all impacted by this deeply polarized moment. How do we navigate life while political and cultural divisions are dangerously amplified and the world’s oldest democracies are under threat?
The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz is honored to announce a trans-Atlantic political dialogue for this year’s Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture. We’ve invited two of our top cultural and political thinkers—Ezra Klein and William Davies—to help us grapple with how we got here, why we live in such fraught times, ways the US and UK are analogues in this fractious moment, and where we might go from here.
Register

Zoom link provided upon registration

Ezra Klein is the editor-at-large and founder of Vox, the host of the award-winning podcast, The Ezra Klein Show, and the author of the best-selling book, Why We’re Polarized. Before that, he was columnist and editor at the Washington Post, a policy analyst at MSNBC, and a contributor to Bloomberg. He’s written for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and (most importantly) is a UC Santa Cruz alumnus.
William Davies is Professor of Political Economy at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is author of several books, most recently This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain and Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and The Guardian, and has also written for The New York Times, New Republic and The Atlantic.
The Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture is made possible through the generous support of the Peggy Downes Baskin Humanities Endowment for Interdisciplinary Studies in Ethics.

Rebecca Tollan: Competing Argument Privileges in Niuean
2020-12-11 13:20 | Virtual Event
The Department of Linguistics is pleased to present Rebecca Tollan from the University of Delaware speaking on competing argument privileges in Niuean.
Abstract:
Grammatical “subjects” have long been shown to have a privileged linguistic status, as compared
with other arguments, in the processing of long-distance dependencies (e.g., Holmes & O’Regan,
1981), in the resolution of ambiguous anaphoric pronouns (Gordon et al., 1993; Grosz et al.,
1995, a.o.) and in formal syntactic operations (cf. Keenan & Comrie, 1977). In this talk, I unpack
“subjecthood” into two components: semantic agentivity (connected with structural superiority in
the thematic domain of the syntax) and case unmarkedness (defined as the case with the widest
syntactic distribution), and show how these two factors can independently influence the outcome of syntactic and pragmatic operations. This focus is on two experimental studies of the ergative-
absolutive Polynesian language Niuean. The goal of these studies is to investigate operations in which the “subject” of a sentence has previously been shown to be privileged, based upon
findings from nominative-accusative languages in which agentivity and unmarkedness align:
first, the “subject advantage” in the processing of long-distance dependencies and second, the
preference for subject antecedents in the interpretation of anaphoric pronouns. Niuean reveals
that, in the formation of long-distance dependencies – where the task is to link a filler with a gap
site and form the relevant dependency – syntactic information about argument distribution (i.e.,
unmarkedness) is most crucial because it maximizes chances of correctly locating the gap site.
Meanwhile, in the resolution of ambiguous anaphoric pronouns, agentivity plays a more
prominent role: the more agentive argument of a preceding clause is preferred as the referent of a
pronoun as compared with a less agentive one. These studies demonstrate the underlying factors
which often cluster together to derive the grammatical function of “subject”.
Zoom Information: Will be emailed on Thursday, December 10, 2020

Christmas with Dickens
2020-12-13 16:00 - 17:15 | Virtual Event
Join us on Sunday, December 13th at 4 pm for a performance you won’t want to miss!
Charles Dickens just wants to talk about his book, A Christmas Carol, but what happens when spirits begin to show up? Is Dickens being guilt-tripped by his estranged wife, Catherine; haunted by the Ghost of Christmas Present; regretting his portrayal of Ebenezer Scrooge? And what is Queen Victoria doing there? It’s full of chaos, confusion, conflict, and complaints, just like a typical holiday gathering.

The UCSC Dickens Project presents, via Zoom, an original readers’ theater piece written by JoAnna Rottke and directed by Karen Schamberg. Readers will be Andrew Davids, Frank Widman, Martha Rabin, Sarah Kauffman Michael, Chris Rich, and Mark Messersmith. A Q&A session will follow the performance.

JoAnna Rottke spent her best years as Assistant Director of the Dickens Project, a research program at UCSC devoted to the life and works of Charles Dickens. She knows more about Dickens than she’d like to admit. JoAnna now works as an Adoption Counselor for the Santa Cruz SPCA and is a huge fan of tiny dogs.

Slugs and Steins: Reading Dickens Today with Professor John Jordan
2020-12-14 18:30 | Virtual Event
These days, 150 years after his death in 1870, it is nearly impossible for a week to go by without coming across some reference to Dickens in a news article, movie review, magazine essay, or crossword puzzle clue. The adjective “Dickensian” has entered common parlance throughout the English-speaking world as a way of characterizing certain kinds of people, places, and social problems. Film, television, and theatrical versions of Dickens’s novels continue to appear with surprising frequency, most recently the 2019 film adaptation of David Copperfield, directed by Armando Ianucci and featuring a multi-racial cast. Dickens, it seems, is still very much alive in 2020. In his UCSC Alumni Association talk, Professor John Jordan speculates about the reasons for Dickens’s enduring afterlife and explores some of the ways in which Dickens remains important and relevant for 21 st -century audiences.

John Jordan is a Research Professor of Literature at UCSC and Director of the Dickens Project, an international multi-campus research consortium headquartered at Santa Cruz. He has edited or co-edited several books on Dickens and is the author of Supposing Bleak House (2010).

Demystifying the Book Publishing Process & Connecting with UC Colleagues
2020-12-15 11:30 - 13:00 | Virtual Event
UC Press editors will offer insight into the academic book publishing process. The presentation will include: choosing the right publisher; preparing a book proposal; how the peer review and Editorial Committee process works; revising your manuscript; and working with publishers to promote your book.
The session is intended to be interactive and questions are welcome.
Following the presentation, we will host breakout rooms with editors based on field interests. This is also an opportunity to connect with faculty and graduate students who share similar intellectual interests. When you sign up, please select a breakout room. If your area is not represented in the breakout session, please let us know your specialization.

Presenters:
Raina Polivka, Editor
Kate Marshall, Editor
Archna Patel, Associate Editor
Beth Digeser, Professor of History (UCSB) and Chair of UC Press Editorial Committee
Breakout Sessions:
Raina Polivka (Music, Cinema, Media Studies)
Niels Hooper (History, American Studies, Middle East Studies)
Kate Marshall (Anthropology, Food Studies, Latin American Studies)
Archna Patel (Art History)
Reed Malcolm (Asian Studies, Open Access)
Don’t see your field? Let us know about your interests: https://bit.ly/UCPublishingMentoring
Co-Sponsors:
UC Press
UC Berkeley Townsend Center for the Humanities,
UC Davis Humanities Institute
UC Irvine Humanities Center
UC Los Angeles Humanities
UC Merced Center for the Humanities
UC Riverside Center for Ideas and Society
UC Santa Barbara Interdisciplinary Humanities Center
UC Santa Cruz The Humanities Institute
UC San Diego Institute of Arts and Humanities
