The Humanities Institute

Alev Çinar - The Predicament of Islamic Decoloniality in Turkey: Sufi Political Thought and the “Great East” Project of Necip Fazıl Kısakürek
2023-05-02 14:00 - 16:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 420, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
After winning its battle against the occupying colonial powers during The War of Independence in 1919-1922, Turkey set on a secular, Westernizationist path toward modernization under Mustafa Kemal’s leadership. Turkey spent what can be referred to as its postcolonial period under its founding ideology, Kemalism, which launched a West-oriented secular modernization project that framed the Ottoman system and Islam as inferior, backward, and uncivilized. First forms of what I refer to as “Islamic decolonial thought,” or Islamic decoloniality, emerged against this backdrop in the 1950s, which later developed into a collection of diverse intellectual movements constituting the current Islamic intellectual field (IIF) in Turkey. This study examines the Sufi-based political thought of Turkish Muslim poet and writer Necip Fazıl Kısakürek (1904-1983) as one of the pioneers of Islamic decolonial thought in Turkey. Necip Fazıl, who is current President Erdogan’s main ideological inspiration, was the founder and lead writer of the The Great East (Büyük Doğu) journal published in 1943-1978, which is considered to be Turkey’s first Islam-based political journal that was instrumental in inspiring numerous political and intellectual movements currently active in the IIF.
Alev Çınar is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Bilkent University, Turkey. She received her M.A. in Sociology from Bogazici University; Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania, and completed two postdoctoral fellowships at the International Center for Advanced Studies, New York University, and the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

She is the author of Modernity, Islam and Secularism in Turkey: Bodies Places and Time; co-editor of Urban Imaginaries: Locating the Modern City, and of Visualizing Secularism and Religion: Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, India. She also has articles that have appeared in journals such as the Comparative Studies in Society and History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Theory, Culture and Society, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. She is currently serving on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Middle East Studies.
History of Consciousness Spring 23 Speaker Series.
In person and via zoom. Please see the History of Consciousness Speaker Series website for further details.
Talk co-sponsored by CMENA.

Hanna Musiol – Wounded Landscapes and Maps of Hurt: Breaths, Scars, and Tender Story-Sharing
2023-05-03 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This event is co-sponsored by Film and Digital Media
Maps always sense and often cut. Much has been written about their violence, as an overture for the genocidal touch, as a prospecting tool priming landscapes for material and narrative extraction, or as an instrument of attritional social neglect (Lo Presti). Hegemonic cartographies live off of elisions of “disposable bodies” and on demarcation lines which construct architectures of harm (Lambert). This talk focuses instead on scars, gasps of pain, cartographic story-sharing, and maps of hurt. It is thus an homage to marginalized but not marginal bodies, stories and breaths, all demanding oxygen, care, delight, and a “right to co-existence” (Holmes). Drawing on the work of feminist, diasporic, and critical race thinkers, architects, poets, human geographers, and Indigenous Arctic mixmedia practitioners—Katherine McKittrick, Olga Lehmann, Pia Arke, Afaa Weaver, Laura Lo Presti, Johnny Pitts, Eliane Brum, Viktorija Bogdanova, among many others—Musiol will center on site-specific cartographic acts of “tender narration” involving artivists, architects, mappers, students, and literary scholars working together in art galleries, on the page, in our classrooms, and in the streets (Tokarczuk). Specifically, she will meander across several sites and rehearsals of remapping: Afaa Weavers’s and Viktorija Bogdanova’s poetic maps of spaces that “hurt us” and Sissel Bergh’s textual cartographies of South Sámi coast; monumental, yet ephemeral urban-scale poetic storytelling actions taking over the streets, pages, bodies, and facades in Trondheim and Hiedanranta; and, finally, site-specific pedagogies of cartographic story-sharing, which draw on the ambulatory, resuscitative, biosocial oxygen-delivery affordances of poetry (in polylingual urban poetic ensembles and Søstrene Suse’s Radiokino listening seances). The talk will conclude with reflection about the cartographic acts of “repair,” tenderness, and “unlearning” (Azoulay), asking, after Josie Billington and Pia Arke, how we, literary and cultural scholars and students, can attend to the wounded bodies and landscapes “personally,” using our meager disciplinary tools and “enfleshed” cartographies of hurt (Sharpe).
Hanna Musiol (PhD, Northeastern University) is Professor of Modern/Contemporary Literature at NTNU (Norway) and a 2022–2023 Human Rights Fellow at SUNY Binghamton (US). Her research interests include transnational literary studies, site-specific transmedia storytelling and reparative reading practices, and critical theory, with emphasis on migration, environmental humanities / political ecology, and environmental and human rights. She publishes frequently on aesthetics and justice, and her work has appeared in DHQ, ASAP/J, Environment, Space, and Place, Technology of Human Rights Representation, Journal of American Studies, and Writing Beyond the State. Musiol regularly co-organizes city-scale curatorial, public humanities, and civic-engagement initiatives and exhibitions, such as Narrating the City, Of Borders and Travelers, Spectral Landscapes, and Resist as Forest. She is based in Trondheim, where she frequently collaborates with grassroots urban storytelling initiatives such as Literature for Inclusion & Poetry without Borders. She is currently involved in several transborder research projects devoted to spatial storytelling: Narrating Sustainability, One by Walking, Environmental Storytelling, and Environmental Practices Across Borders.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
RSVP by 11 AM on the day of the colloquium, and you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Unsettled Borders: The Militarized Science of Surveillance on Sacred Indigenous Land Book Talk and Celebration
2023-05-03 16:00 - 17:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Unsettled Borders: The Militarized Science of Surveillance on Sacred Indigenous Land, examines the ongoing settler colonial war over the US-Mexico border from the perspective of Apache, Tohono O’odham, and Maya who fight to protect their sacred land. Exploring the logic of borders, Schaeffer turns to Indigenous sacred sciences and ancestral land-based practices that are critical to reversing the ecological and social violence of surveillance, extraction, and occupation.
Felicity Schaeffer is a UCSC Professor of Feminist Studies and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies. She is also the author of Love and Empire: Cybermarriage and Citizenship across the Americas, and co-editor of Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship.
This event is presented by the Feminist Studies Department, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, and The Center for Racial Justice

Labor Hope, Labor Reality: Organizing Unions in 2023 - An Evening with E. Tammy Kim
2023-05-03 17:30 | Namaste Lounge – College 9, Namaste Lounge, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
On Wednesday, May 3, at 5:30pm in the Namaste Lounge (College Nine), New Yorker writer and co-host of the podcast Time to Say Goodbye E. Tammy Kim will be giving a talk on the state of labor activism and organizing, followed by a panel discussion with writer, organizer, and doctoral candidate in Sociology Sarah Mason and Unite Here member and organizer Martha Hernandez. This event is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute and UCSC Library, with support from the Anthropology Department.
E. Tammy Kim is a contributing writer at The New Yorker who covers labor and the workplace, arts and culture, and the Koreas. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and the Nation, among many other publications. With Jay Caspian Kang, she co-hosts the podcast Time to Say Goodbye, which New York Magazine described as “not just about the concept of ‘Asian America,’ but, in many ways, the broader discourse of race in America, which it tries to complicate in provocative, meaningful ways.” A contributing editor at Lux, she has been an Alicia Patterson fellow and a fellow at Type Media Center, and she is the current Writer-in-Residence at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU. She also co-edited Punk Ethnography, a book about contemporary world music.
Sarah Mason is a writer, organizer, and PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her writing has appeared in the New Left Review, Logic Magazine, the Guardian, and New Politics. She is a head steward in UAW 2865.
Martha Hernandez is a member of Unite Here. A union leader in the Dream Inn, where she has worked as a housekeeper for twenty-six years, Hernandez is a Union Shop Steward and member of the Union Negotiating Committee. She was named Union Member of the Year in 2015.

On Salon: Reading Series
2023-05-04 17:30 - 19:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
On Salon: A new reading series featuring UCSC’s incredible writers and poets. Join us for a new quarterly reading series sponsored by the Literature Department featuring graduate and undergraduate creative writers: Angie Sijun Lou, Kristen Nelson, Alicia Gutierrez, Fio Harden, Isla Oyguy, Charissa Zeigler.

The Deep Read: Faculty Salon
2023-05-04 18:00 - 20:00 | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
On May 4, you’ll be able to join the conversation—either in person or online—at a salon-style event where our participating professors will lead a discussion of this year’s Deep Read book, Under a White Sky, with UCSC students and the broader Deep Read community.
Faculty Speakers

Jorge Menna Barreto, Environmental Art
Mike Beck, Marine Sciences, Director of the Center for Coastal Climate Resilience
Jody Biehl, Literature and Science Communication Program
Sikina Jinnah, Environmental Studies

Not in Santa Cruz? Register for Zoom access.
Event Logistics
Bicycling, car pooling, ridesharing, and public transportation are encouraged as parking is limited. If you drive to the event, please plan to park in UCSC Lot #115 or 116. To reach these lots, proceed through the main entrance to campus, continue up the hill from the information kiosk on Coolidge, then turn right at the Ranch View/Carriage House Road stoplight into the Carriage House/Campus Facilities parking lot. The Hay Barn is a 5-minute walk across the street from the parking lot. There will be directional signage to help you get to the correct parking lot and Barn entrances. Overflow parking will be available at lot 122. Download a parking map here.

About The Deep Read
This event is part of The Humanities Institute’s Deep Read Program that invites curious minds to think deeply about literature, art, and the most pressing issues of our day. We read books from a wide range of genres, exploring their implications on our politics, inner lives, and communities.

The 41st West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
2023-05-05 - 2023-05-07 | Stevenson College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL, pronounced /ˈwɪkfəl/) is an annual linguistics conference, held in the spring at a university in western North America. It is a top international venue for researchers in theoretical linguistics, studying any aspect of human language from a formal perspective, including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and their interfaces. The first WCCFL was held in 1982, and it has previously been hosted by UC Santa Cruz four times, most recently in 2012. The 41st West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 41) will take place on May 5-7, 2023 at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Invited speakers:
Luke Adamson, Rutgers University
Dorothy Ahn, Rutgers University
Eva Zimmerman, University of Leipzig
At this time, all talks in both main and special sessions are planned for in person presentation. In addition to one in-person person session, there will be one virtual poster session.
Full conference information can be found at: https://babel.ucsc.edu/wccfl41/

Debjani Bhattarcharyya – Climate Ledgers: Atmospheric Politics, Risk and Liability in the Indian Ocean, 1770-1850
2023-05-05 10:00 - 12:00 | Virtual Event
“Climate Ledgers” is a part of the UC Santa Cruz Center for South Asian Studies 2022-2023 lecture series, Futures.

Speaker:
Professor Debjani Bhattarcharyya, University of Zurich

Encore Papers & Presentations
2023-05-05 11:00 - 14:00 | Namaste Lounge – College 9, Namaste Lounge, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
This crip-friendly event is an opportunity to learn about what your UCSC colleagues are doing in their Disability Studies work. Presenters will present works-in-progress, or re-deliver papers they have given in professional venues (such as conferences, workshops, etc.). Attendees are invited to actively and passively participate, and speakers will provide notes, a script, and/or links to slides for access. The event is presented by the Humanities Institute’s Disability Studies Cluster.
SCHEDULE
Autism Life Writing
Caitlin Flaws, Literature
Autoethnography, Undone: Towards a Crip Critique of Ethnographic Realism
Megan Moodie, Anthropology
Beyond UDL: Improving Accessibility through Asynchronous Activities
Dr. Brenda Sanfilippo, Writing Program
The Mortification of Harvey Leach
Dr. Michael Chemers, Performance, Play & Design
Toward an Access Manifesto for the Food Limited
Dr. Amy Vidali, Writing Program
What Might a History Course on Disabilities in East Asia Look Like?
Dr. Noriko Aso, History
NOTE: This is a scent-free event. If you need a specific accommodation for this event (including professional captioning and/or ASL interpreting), please contact Amy Vidali at avidali@ucsc.edu with what you need. (Disclosing why you need this accommodation is not required.)

Ecological Utopia: From the Victorians to Us with Professor Deanna K. Kreisel
2023-05-06 13:00 - 15:00, 2023-06-10 13:00 - 15:00 | Virtual Event
Please join the Friends of the Dickens Project for our spring Friends Faculty Fellowship talk series by Associate Professor Deanna K. Kreisel (University of Mississippi) who will be discussing “Ecological Utopia: From the Victorians to Us.”
Over the course of three sessions, we will have an opportunity to explore Victorian responses to their changing environment, with a particular focus on William Morris’s utopian novel News from Nowhere.
Virtual Sessions | Zoom Registration

April 8: Research Talk: It’s the End of the World and We Know It: Ecological Grief and the Work of Utopia
May 6: William Morris’ News from Nowhere, Chapters 1-20
June 10: Discussion: News from Nowhere Chapters 21-32, excerpts from Half-Earth Socialism by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass

The first session will consist of a presentation about my current research. I am currently working on a book entitled It’s the End of the World and We Know It: Ecological Grief and the Work of Utopia, which is about ecological mourning and utopian thinking from the Victorian period to the present. The book begins with a discussion of the ‘utopia craze’ of the late 19th century—of which Morris’s novel was a key part—and also discusses the work of John Ruskin and other early environmentalist writers. The latter part of the book explores recent and present-day responses to ecological change, including literary responses, and considers our own “ecological mourning” as a legacy of Victorian thinking. It ends with a discussion of recent on-the-ground ecotopian experiments.
The second and third sessions will consist of an in-depth discussion of News from Nowhere. In Session Two we will discuss the first half of Morris’s novel and contemporary Victorian responses to it; in the final session we will discuss the second half of the novel alongside some short excerpts from recent writers on climate grief and ecotopia.
Deanna Kreisel is Associate Professor of English and co-director of Environmental Studies at the University of Mississippi. She is the author of ‘Economic Woman: Demand, Gender, and Narrative Closure in Eliot and Hardy,’ as well as articles on Victorian literature and culture in PMLA, Representations, ELH, Novel, Mosaic, Victorian Studies, Nineteenth Century Literature, and elsewhere. She is the co-editor, along with Devin Griffiths, of a special Victorian Literature and Culture issue on “Open Ecologies” and the volume ‘After Darwin: Literature, Theory, and Criticism in the Twenty-First Century.’

2023 Helene Moglen Lecture in Feminism and Humanities with Wendy Brown – After Humanism and the Nation State: More Democracy, Democracy that is More, or Democracy No More?
2023-05-09 16:00 - 18:00 | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
In most accounts of dangers to democracy today, the value of the object is assumed. At the same time, we know that the “demos” of Western democracy violently excludes all nonhuman life and much of humanity too. Democracy is no form apart from this content, no principle floating freely above these histories. Democracy also requires certain cultural, educational and economic conditions; certain spatialities and temporalities; and modest access to visible levers of power. Absent these, the vox populi may well become a terrible, and terrifying, screech. This talk reflects on these and other predicaments of democracy today. It asks, without answering, how to approach this imperiled creature now.

In-person attendance
The lecture will begin at 4:00pm, with a Q&A and reception to follow.
Doors will open at 3:30pm

Virtual attendance
Wendy Brown (Crown ’77, Politics and Economics double major) is UPS Foundation Professor in Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and Class of 1936 Chair, Emeritus, at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author, most recently, of In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (2019) and Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber (2023). From 1989-99, Professor Brown taught at UCSC in the Department of Women’s Studies and worked closely with Helene Moglen to build Feminist Studies.
This lecture is presented by the Center for Cultural Studies and made possible by the Helene Moglen Lecture in Feminism and Humanities for the Center for Cultural Studies Endowment, The Humanities Institute, and the Department of Politics.
If you have any questions or concerns, please contact Sadie Lynn at sklynn@ucsc.edu.

Virtual Reality as ‘Virtual Traveling’ for Student & Public Engagement with Historic Sites
2023-05-10 09:15 - 16:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
3D technologies, such as LiDAR and photogrammetry, are being used by archaeologists at sites all over the world, frequently to record the state of preservation of standing architecture or document field excavations. But 3D and Virtual Reality (VR) can also be used to digitally ‘re-imagine’ or visualize aspects of historic places that are no longer accessible due to landscape change, the passage of time, and modern development. Students and the public can ‘virtually travel’ across space and time, experiencing visualizations of historic sites on different continents or centuries in the past. This one-day event, Virtual Reality as ‘Virtual Traveling’ for Public Engagement with Historic Sites, brings together scholars working on the question of Humanities VR and ‘virtual travel’ for presentations and discussion. The workshop will focus on questions of user experience and interaction, educational design, ethics, and the concept of ‘cultural presence’ when virtually traveling (gaming scholar Erik Champion’s theory of ‘being there, then’).

Presenters

Dr. Rita Lucarelli, Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, UC Berkeley
Dr. Eiman Elgewely, School of Design, Virginia Tech
Dr. Matthias Lang, Bonn Center for Digital Humanities, Bonn University
Dr. Vincenzo Lombardo, Department of Informatics, Università degli Studi di Torino
Ph.D. Candidate Maureen McGuire, History of Art and Visual Culture, UCSC
Dr. Cameron Monroe, Anthropology, UCSC
Dr. Martin Rizzo-Martinez, State Park Historian II & Tribal Liaison Santa Cruz District, California State Parks

Organized by Dr. Elaine Sullivan, History, UCSC and sponsored by the Humanities Institute

Kathleen Cruz Guttierrez – Vernaculars of Plant Knowing: Woven Transformations in the Early 20th-Century Davao Gulf
2023-05-10 12:00 - 13:20 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
In this talk, Gutierrez will share from her first book project on the history of colonial botany in the Philippines. The book argues that vernaculars of plant knowing made and unmade botany at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when imperial Anglo-European botanists banded together to steady the philosophical and practical tenets of the science under an internationalist banner. Taking as her case study the contrapuntal story of Bagobo weavers and the acceleration of abacá plantations in the Philippines, Gutierrez demonstrates the disciplinary makings of the science that enabled transformative settler-colonial currents in the Pacific colony’s southern gulf.
Kathleen “Kat” Cruz Gutierrez is Assistant professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2021 and 2022, she completed Mellon-funded postdoctoral and interdisciplinary residencies at the Humanities Institute of the New York Botanical Garden and the Oak Spring Garden Foundation. A specialist of the history of science and the plant humanities, she is the co-editor of the forthcoming special issue “Science and Technology Studies in the Philippines” in Philippine Studies. Since joining UCSC, she has also served as co-PI on the interdivisional campus-community research initiative, Watsonville is in the Heart.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
RSVP by 11 AM on the day of the colloquium, and you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

From Symptom to Story: Understanding an Epidemic of Kidney Disease in Central America
2023-05-10 18:00 - 20:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
What does it mean to construct a “cause” of disease? What is the primary source material we consult as we write the narrative of a new disease? When it comes to public health, how do we fairly and accurately reflect scientific evidence, personal experience, and community knowledge? In this talk, journalist Anna Maria Barry-Jester will use these questions to chart the history of a particular epidemic of chronic kidney disease that, since the early aughts, has been recognized as a leading cause of death in parts of Central America. In the two decades that followed, the global understanding of this condition has expanded to a growing list of communities, including war-torn parts of Sri Lanka, agrarian sectors of India and migrant guest workers from Nepal. Drawing from nearly 20 years of reporting — including interviews, photography, video, and scientific literature — Barry-Jester will explore the shifting narratives of the emergence of a disease and interrogate what becomes evidence and how it informs public understanding of disease and its causes.
Please email Jennifer Derr (jderr@ucsc.edu) if you would like to RSVP for this event.
Anna Barry-Jester is a public health reporter with ProPublica. Previously, she was a senior correspondent covering public health at Kaiser Health News. Her series “Underfunded and Under Threat,” with colleagues at KHN and The Associated Press, investigated how chronically underfunded public health departments buckled under the strain of the coronavirus pandemic. The project won awards from the Online News Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her reporting on harassment and menacing threats endured by public health officials was the basis of an episode of “This American Life,” and PEN America later awarded its PEN/Benenson Courage Award to the officials who she profiled. Barry-Jester has lived and worked in Latin America and Southeast Asia, where she has reported, photographed and filmed stories in more than a dozen countries. She was a writer at FiveThirtyEight and a producer at Univision and ABC News.
This event is part of the “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” Sawyer Seminar series.

Anna Barry-Jester Reading Group – Mellon Sawyer Seminar on “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine”
2023-05-11 12:15 - 13:45 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Mellon Sawyer Seminar on “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” will welcome Anna Barry-Jester, who will lead a reading group exploring explanations of the causes of drug-resistant tuberculosis and the subsequent policy implications. One article looks at the history of TB control policy, and how “cost-effective” strategies bred drug resistance. Two recent commentaries debate the deployment of new TB treatments in absence of sufficient diagnostic capacity. A fourth article examines the legality of a policy framework that gave different treatment protocols for resource-poor and resource-rich countries. Barry-Jester hopes we can draw on past and current policy debates and decisions to discuss the narratives surrounding what causes drug-resistant TB in order to think about policies at scale.
Email Jennifer Derr at jderr@ucsc.edu for a copy of the readings.
Anna Barry-Jester is a public health reporter with ProPublica. Previously, she was a senior correspondent covering public health at Kaiser Health News. Her series “Underfunded and Under Threat,” with colleagues at KHN and The Associated Press, investigated how chronically underfunded public health departments buckled under the strain of the coronavirus pandemic. The project won awards from the Online News Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her reporting on harassment and menacing threats endured by public health officials was the basis of an episode of “This American Life,” and PEN America later awarded its PEN/Benenson Courage Award to the officials who she profiled. Barry-Jester has lived and worked in Latin America and Southeast Asia, where she has reported, photographed and filmed stories in more than a dozen countries. She was a writer at FiveThirtyEight and a producer at Univision and ABC News.
This event is part of the “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” Sawyer Seminar series.

Living Writers - Ryan Eckes
2023-05-11 17:20 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Ryan Eckes is a poet from Philadelphia. He recently finished writing a book called General Motors about labor and the influence of public and private transportation on city life. Other books include Valu-Plus and Old News (Furniture Press 2014, 2011). His poetry can be found in Tripwire, Slow Poetry in America Newsletter, Public Pool, and elsewhere. He won a Pew Fellowship in 2016.

Sponsored by The Puknat Literary Endowment, The Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Laurie Sain Endowment, The Humanities Institute, Bookshop Santa Cruz, and Two Birds Books (where the writers’ books are available for purchase)

Creating Art in/with Community: A Conversation with Josúe Rojas and Professor John Jota Leaños
2023-05-11 19:00 - 20:30 | The Institute of the Arts & Sciences Gallery, 100 Panetta Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Join us for a public conversation at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences between artist Josúe Rojas and Professor John Jota Leaños (Executive Committee of the Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas). Josué Rojas is a Salvadoran-American artist from the Bay Area who has done murals throughout the country. Exploring subjects such as identity, immigration, and culture in his work, Rojas will be discussing his artistic practice in/with community. He is the Huerta Center’s artist-in-residence for Spring quarter, a residency which is being generously cosponsored with the Arts Research Institute’s Arts and Oppression initiative, the Institute for Arts and Sciences, The Humanities Institute, and the UC National Center for Free Speech and Civil Engagement’s VOICE initiative.

This event is free and open to the public.

Future Ancestral Technologies Exhibition Opening
2023-05-12 | Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History
Future Ancestral Technologies is an exhibition by Cannupa Hanska Luger with mixed-media sculpture, regalia, and video, all based in myth, science fiction, and Indigenous futurism.
Science fiction has the power to shape collective thinking and serves as a vehicle to imagine the future on a global scale. Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Future Ancestral Technologies is Indigenous science fiction. It is a methodology, a practice, a way of future dreaming, rooted in a continuum. Future Ancestral Technologies is an approach to making art objects, video, and land based performance with the intent to influence global consciousness. This Indigenous-centered science fiction uses creative storytelling to radically reimagine the future. Moving sci-fi theory into practice, this methodology conjures innovative life-based solutions that promote a thriving Indigeneity.
This Indigenous science fiction is characterized by regalia, tools, shelter, transportation, and technology which invite the viewer to experience multiple points of entry into Luger’s sci-fi narrative and myth telling through multiple symbiotic landscapes. The ongoing narrative developed by installation and land based work articulates future spaces in which Indigenous people harness technology to live nomadically, reclaiming hyper-attunement to land and water. Luger’s Future Ancestral Technologies is a story, a methodology, a practice, a way of futurism, that suggests alternative approaches to recognizing the future with reverence.
Using art practice to adopt science fiction, Future Ancestral Technologies is a context for dismantling time to imagine the distant future and dream of sustainable approaches to the lived experiences of the generations to come. Using traditional craft and the act of making creates futuristic potential, the process imagines, enacts and prototypes experiences and technologies that promote Indigenous cultures to thrive into the future.
Future Ancestral Technologies challenges and empowers humans—from individuals to industries—to visualize an Indigenous future and to practice empathy and resourcefulness in epochs to come.
“Future Ancestral Technologies looks to customs in order to move us forward, advancing new materials and new modes of thinking by utilizing science fiction theory, creative storytelling, Indigenous technology and contemporary materials and the detritus of capitalism to present time bending landscapes of myth. ” –Cannupa Hanska Luger
This exhibition will run from May 12-September 3, 2023 and is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute.
For full exhibition information please visit: https://www.santacruzmah.org/exhibitions/future-ancestral-technologies
Header Image: Future Ancestral Technologies ++ a generation of new myth ++ 3 channel video installation, featuring monster slayer regalia, mirí aráda + awá ahbáaxi. (image still) Cannupa Hanska Luger 2021. Photo by Gabe Fermin.

Transnational Turns and the Future of China Studies
2023-05-12 - 2023-05-13 | Virtual and In Person
What does it mean to do China studies at this global conjuncture? What has “transnational” got to do with it, why now, and why again? What future promises and possibilities can it still bring? This two-day workshop featuring multi-disciplinary scholars of China and Chinese studies, as well as a conversation with Rey Chow, Duke University, on the thirtieth anniversary of her publication Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Indiana University Press, 1993). For full workshop description and program, please click here.
This event will be held in person in Humanities 1, Room 210. For participants who would like to join the workshop virtually, please register here.
Organized by the Transnational China research hub, a seed project at the Humanities Institute, funded by the UCSC Office of Research. Co-sponsored by UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television and the Fudan-UC Center on Contemporary China.

The Miriam Ellis International Playhouse (MEIP XXI)
2023-05-12 - 2023-05-14 | Stevenson Event Center
Cowell College, Stevenson College and the Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics will present the 21st season of the Miriam Ellis international Playhouse (MEIP XXI), May 12, 13, and 14, at 7:00 PM in the Stevenson Event Center at UCSC. The program of fully-staged multilingual performances in French, Japanese, and Spanish, with English supertitles, will be performed by Language students and directed by their instructors.
There is no admission charge; parking in adjacent lots is $5.00.
This year’s presentation in Japanese will consist of a demonstration of a Taiko performance of “Yashiro no Uta (The Song of the Shrine) composed by Ikuyo Conant/ Artistic Director of Watsonville Taiko Group, after a brief explanation of what Taiko is.
French will be represented by Art (Art), a light reflection on the value of art, adapted and directed, from the eponymous play by Yasmina Reza, by Renée Cailloux.
Finally, Spanish will bring us “Rompiendo el hielo” (“Breaking the Ice”), an original contemporary comedy piece, written and performed by students, that follows a grocery store staff on a not so ordinary day.
Over the years, our multilingual theater presentations have attracted loyal audiences, who look forward to experiencing their native or acquired languages in this unusual format, and we cordially invite the community to attend this year’s presentation.
For more information, please contact Renee Cailloux (rcaillou@ucsc.edu) or consult https://cowell.ucsc.edu/academics/cw-related-programs/meip/index.html.

Linguistics Colloquia: Argyro Katsika
2023-05-12 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Argyro Katsika, UC Santa Barbara
Over the course of each year, the Linguistics department hosts colloquia by distinguished faculty from around the world.
For full speaker and event information, please visit: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/colloquia/index.html

Santa Cruz County History Fair
2023-05-13 13:00 - 17:00 | Felton Community Hall, 6191 Highway 9, Felton, CA, 95018, United States
Celebrate Santa Cruz County’s diverse history by connecting with local historical and cultural organizations and groups. Enjoy hands-on activities, artifacts, photographs, publications, and more. Between 20 and 30 local museums, historians, historical societies, and other groups will have displays and activities. Presented by the San Lorenzo Valley History Museum. Co-sponsored by the Felton Community Hall and the Humanities Institute. Free admission.

Crossing Borders - An Evening of Philosophical Discussion
2023-05-13 18:00 - 22:00 | Institute of the Arts and Sciences, 100 Panetta Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Large and small, visible and hidden, borders weave in and out of our lives along varied dimensions. Some we can see, many we cannot. Some we celebrate, others confine us. Some we are aware of, many remain undiscovered. There are political borders and national borders; psychological, social, scientific, and biological borders. What are borders? Can anything be conceived as involving a border? Come think with us on the evening of May 13 at the new Institute of the Arts and Sciences building, designed for vibrant possibility. Choose among rooms with synchronic presentations and performances, led by poets, philosophers, scientists, and artists. Muse with us, ponder with us, and talk with one another, as together each of us travels across, within, and at the borders calling to us on this particular evening.
This event is brought to the public by the Center for Public Philosophy and the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, with support and participation of The Humanities Institute, Cowell College, and the Philosophical Slug Society.
Free and open to the public
To read more about this event see The Institute of the Arts and Sciences website.

Opus Cope: Screening and Dialogue
2023-05-15 13:20 | DARC 108, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Filmmaker Jae Shim screens his award-winning documentary Opus Cope: An Algorithmic Opera which celebrates the groundbreaking work of algorithmic composer David Cope (UCSC emeritus Professor) and the profound ways in which humans and machines (AI) can be creative.
David Cope has been a firm believer that creativity is everywhere, and his work reflects these values of compassion and understanding, where humans and AI are not necessarily at odds with each other. This collaboration between human and machine resulted from his own creative block in the 80’s which led to the first algorithmically composed opera.
Presented by the Music Department and cosponsored by the Arts Research Institute and The Humanities Institute.

Deep Read San Diego Salon
2023-05-15 18:00 - 20:30 | Stone Brewing Liberty Station, 2816 Historic Decatur Rd UNIT 116, San Diego, CA, 92106, United States
Join fellow Deep Readers for a special event at Stone Brewing in Liberty Station on May 15, 2023, to discuss this year’s Deep Read book: Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Elizabeth Kolbert. We’ll learn about the stark changes taking place in the world and explore the efforts to adapt and survive in this era of climate change.

Please RSVP to reserve your spot at this exciting event, as space is limited.
As part of The Deep Read program of The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, this event is designed to invite curious minds like yours to think deeply about literature, art, and the most pressing issues of our day. Even if you haven’t read the book, we encourage you to come and enjoy the discussion and connect with fellow San Diego alumni.
Beer and light bites provided by Steve Wagner (Crown), a UC Santa Cruz alumnus & co-founder of Stone Brewing!
To learn more about The Deep Read, and to sign up for the program, please visit https://thi.ucsc.edu/deep-read/.
Faculty Speaker: Laura Martin (Ph.D. ’08, literature) began working with The Humanities Institute team in 2019 on the Deep Read Initiative, a community reading program that brings together undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, staff, alumni, and members of the community to think deeply about literature, art, and important issues of our time. Laura teaches the undergraduate Deep Read course at Porter College, manages the Deep Read program, and assists with other THI projects. She is a literary scholar, writer, and teacher, and she holds a PhD in Literature from UC Santa Cruz.
About the host: Steve Wagner (Crown) is a co-founder of the national brewing company Stone Brewing and an alumnus of UC Santa Cruz. He is a strong supporter of the university’s Humanities Institute, the Literature Department, and affiliated graduate students. Wagner was transformed by his time as a student at UCSC, where he studied English literature and was inspired by the radical education system and inspiring professors.

Chiara Bottici - Anarchafeminism
2023-05-16 14:00 - 16:30 | Humanities 1, Room 420, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
History of Consciousness Spring 23 Speaker Series.
In person and via zoom.
Please see the History of Consciousness Speaker Series website for further details.

The Maya K. Peterson Explorations in History Seminar Series: Inaugural Lecture by Asif Siddiqi
2023-05-17 14:00 - 16:00 | Cowell Provost House, Cowell Provost House, Cowell Service Rd‎ University of California Santa Cruz, Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
You are invited to attend the inaugural lecture for The Maya K. Peterson Explorations in History Seminar Series, taking place on Wednesday, May 17th, 2023, at 2:00pm at the Cowell Provost House. This event will also be livestreamed and recorded: Maya K. Peterson Explorations in History Seminar Series Inaugural Lecture.
Drawing on insights from Maya Peterson’s work on water management projects in Central Asia, this talk focuses on the design and construction of the infamous White Sea-Baltic Canal in the Soviet north in the early 1930s. Known colloquially as the Belomor Canal, this was the very first infrastructural project to use mass forced labor from the emerging Gulag camp system. Despite the death of some 10,000 laborers in building the canal, the project was advertised internationally as a successful monument to the ability of humans to remake the natural world. In his paper, Professor Siddiqi focuses on the role of scientists and engineers who designed and built the canal, one which came to represent a form of “hydraulic monumentalism” so emblematic of Soviet modernity. As instruments of a form of internal colonization of Soviet space, these scientists and engineers embraced, some under coercion and some freely, the use of mass forced labor as a solution to large-scale engineering projects across the Soviet Union. The outcome was a deeply damaging but enduring relationship between scientific expertise, the natural environment, and the constitution of Soviet empire.
Asif Siddiqi is a professor of history at Fordhamm University, and specializes in the history of science and technology and modern Russian history.

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

Alice Yang in Conversation with Cathy Choy: Author of "Asian American Histories of the United States"
2023-05-18 19:00 - 20:30 | Santa Cruz Public Library – Capitola
In celebration of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we are pleased to present an engaging opportunity to learn about the histories that make up the Asian and Pacific Islander Diaspora in the United States. Join us for light refreshments and a lively discussion with UCSC Professor of History Alice Yang and Cathy Choy.
To register for this event, visit the Santa Cruz Public Library website.
Catherine Ceniza Choy is an award-winning Asian American historian and professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Asian American Histories of the United States (2022) published by Beacon Press in their ReVisioning History book series. The book features the themes of violence, erasure, and resistance in a nearly 200 year history of Asian migration, labor, and community formation in the US. It was awarded a 2022 Kirkus Star from Kirkus Reviews for books of exceptional merit; named a Best of 2022 Nonfiction Book by Kirkus Reviews and Ms. Magazine; and featured in the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s 2023 National Day of Racial Healing book list and the Texas Library Association’s 2023 Texas Topaz Reading List.
Choy’s first book, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History (2003), explored how and why the Philippines became the leading exporter of professional nurses to the United States. Empire of Care received the 2003 American Journal of Nursing History and Public Policy Book Award and the 2005 Association for Asian American Studies History Book Award. Her second book, Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America (2013), unearthed the little-known historical origins of Asian international adoption in the United States beginning with the post-World War II presence of the U.S. military in Asia. A CHOICE book review of Global Families concluded: “A useful corrective to one-dimensional, romantic portraits of adoption that saturate popular culture today. Summing Up: Highly recommended. *** All levels/libraries.” Choy also co-edited the anthology, Gendering the Trans-Pacific World (2017), with Judy Tzu-Chun Wu.
An engaged public scholar, Choy has been interviewed and had her research cited in many media outlets, including ABC 20/20, The Atlantic, CNN, Los Angeles Times, NBC News, New York Times, ProPublica, San Francisco Chronicle, and Vox, on topics such as anti-Asian, coronavirus-related hate and violence, the disproportionate toll of COVID-19 on Filipino nurses in the United States, and racism and misogyny in the March 16, 2021 Atlanta spa shootings.
Choy is Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Belonging, and Justice in UC Berkeley’s Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS). She is a former Department Chair of Ethnic Studies (2012-2015, 2018-2019) and a former Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies Division (2019-2021). Choy received her Ph.D. in History from UCLA and her B.A. in History from Pomona College. The daughter of Filipino immigrants, she was born and raised in New York City. She lives in Berkeley with her husband Greg Choy.
Alice Yang is chair of the History Department at the University of California at Santa Cruz and co-directs the Center for the Study of Pacific War Memories. She is also the oral history co-director of the Okinawan Memories Initiative. Between 2010 and 2020, she served as provost of Stevenson College at UCSC. Alice teaches courses on Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander history, transnational memories of the Pacific War, oral history, and comparative redress and reparations. Her publications include Historical Memories of the Japanese American Internment and the Struggle for Redress, Major Problems in Asian American History (co-editor), and What Did the Internment of Japanese Americans Mean? (editor). She is currently completing a manuscript on historical memories of Japanese American women’s activism between 1941 and 2021. She is also preparing an exhibit on Japanese American women’s history that is being funded by a California Civil Liberties Public Education Fund grant. She has served as a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American History and an advisory board member for the exhibit Then They Came for Me: Japanese American Incarceration during World War II and the Demise of Civil Liberties. Her research has been funded by awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Luce Foundation, and a UCSC Public Humanities, Digital, and Community-Engaged Research Fellowship.

Humanities Division Graduate Student Awards Celebration
2023-05-19 16:30 - 19:00 | Cowell Provost House, Cowell Provost House, Cowell Service Rd‎ University of California Santa Cruz, Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join us on Friday, May 19, 2023 as we acknowledge the achievements of our exceptional graduate students at the inaugural Humanities Division Graduate Student Awards Celebration! This in-person event will take place at the Cowell College Provost House. The program will begin at 4:30 p.m, with a reception to follow the ceremony. Friends and families of awardees are encouraged to celebrate with us. This event will follow the campus-wide Graduate Symposium and Graduate Alumni Brunch.

The Deep Read: Elizabeth Kolbert in Conversation with Ezra Klein
2023-05-21 16:00 - 17:30 | Quarry Amphitheater
Join us for the culminating event of the 2023 Deep Read—a live discussion with Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Elizabeth Kolbert and NY Times columnist and podcast host Ezra Klein. We’ll discuss this year’s Deep Read book, Under a White Sky, which depicts the stark changes and emerging technologies affecting our climate and world.
This event will take place at the UC Santa Cruz Quarry Amphitheater. Students, staff, alumni, and the broader community are invited to join and think deeply with two of the greatest minds working today to explain our complicated world. While this event will not be live streamed, it will be recorded. Deep Read Community members will be the first to receive the video once it goes live following the event.

Schedule
3:00pm – Meet our community partners
4:00pm – Program begins
About the Speakers
Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1999. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, her book about mass extinctions that weaves intellectual and natural history with reporting in the field began as an article in The New Yorker. It won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in the General Nonfiction category and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle awards for the best books of 2014. Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future was a national bestseller and was named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post, Time, Esquire, Smithsonian Magazine, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal.
Ezra Klein is an Opinion columnist and podcast host at the New York Times. His podcast, The Ezra Klein Show, receives more than a half-million downloads per episode and is routinely in the top 25 podcasts on Apple’s charts. Prior to his work at the Times, Klein founded and launched Vox, the popular explanatory news site. As Vox’s editor-in-chief, and then its editor-at-large, he helped create Explained on Netflix. In 2020, Klein published Why We’re Polarized, a bestselling examination of the forces driving polarization and paralyzing politics in the United States. Klein is a UC Santa Cruz alumnus.
Parking
Free parking for this event will be in the East Remote Lot 104. There will be free shuttles taking attendees from the parking lot to the venue.
Deep Read Faculty Salon
On May 4, you’ll be able to join the conversation—either in person or online—at a salon-style event where our participating professors will lead a discussion of the book with UCSC students and the broader Deep Read community. Learn more here.

About The Deep Read
This event is part of The Humanities Institute’s Deep Read Program that invites curious minds to think deeply about literature, art, and the most pressing issues of our day. We read books from a wide range of genres, exploring their implications on our politics, inner lives, and communities.

Hannah Zeavin - Sigmund Freud: Tele-Analyst
2023-05-23 17:00 - 18:30 | Humanities 2, Room 359
In The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy, Hannah Zeavin shows that, far from a recent concern in the COVID-19 pandemic, teletherapy is as old as psychoanalysis itself. It may be well known that Sigmund Freud routinely used media metaphorically in his theories of the psychic apparatus; this talk recovers the early history of Freud’s real use of media in therapies over distance.
Zeavin reads epistolary and postal conventions in Freud’s moment, intertwined with Freud’s own epistolary self-analysis (in correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess) and the unconventional treatment by correspondence of his only child patient, the agoraphobic “Little Hans,” in order to rethink the coincidental origins of psychoanalysis and teletherapy, and to help us think through narratives of loss that attend current uses of technology to mediate therapy.
Free and open to the campus community and the public.
Presented by the Center for World History.

Hannah Zeavin – Hot and Cool Mothers
2023-05-24 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This event is co-sponsored by The Center for World History
From the mid-1940s until the 1960s and beyond, class, race, and maternal function were linked in metaphors of temperature in pediatric psychological studies of Bad Mothers. Newly codified diagnoses of aloof “refrigerator mothers” and overstimulating “hot mothers” were inseparable from midcentury conceptions of stimulation, mediation, domesticity, and race, including Marshall McLuhan’s theory of hot and cool media, as well as maternal absence and (over)presence, echoes of which continue in the present in terms like “helicopter parent.” Whereas autism and autistic states have been extensively elaborated in their relationship to digital media, this talk attends to attributed maternal causes of “emotionally disturbed,” queer, and neurodivergent children. The talk thus elaborates a media theory of mothering and parental “fitness.”
Hannah Zeavin is a scholar, writer, and editor, and works as an Assistant Professor at Indiana University and a Visiting Fellow at the Columbia University Center for The Study of Social Difference. Zeavin is the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (MIT Press, 2021) and at work on her second book, Mother’s Little Helpers: Technology in the American Family (MIT Press, 2024). Articles have appeared in American Imago, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Technology and Culture, Media, Culture, and Society, and elsewhere. Essays and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming from Dissent, The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, n+1, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. In 2021, Zeavin co-founded The Psychosocial Foundation and is the Founding Editor of Parapraxis, a new popular magazine for psychoanalysis on the left, which will be releasing its first issue in Fall 2022.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
RSVP by 11 AM on the day of the colloquium, and you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Benoit Challand – Violence and Representation in the Arab Uprisings
2023-05-25 15:00 - 16:30 | Humanities 1, Room 520, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
This event is sponsored by the THI Research Cluster Vernaculars of Travel in South Asia and the Middle East and Center for the Middle East and North Africa (CMENA) and co-sponsored by the Department of Sociology
Providing a longue durée perspective on the Arab uprisings of 2011, Benoît Challand narrates the transformation of citizenship in the Arab Middle East, from a condition of latent citizenship in the colonial and post-independence era to the revolutionary dynamics that stimulated democratic participation in the region in 2011. Considering the parallel histories of citizenship and marginalization in Yemen and Tunisia, Challand develops innovative theories of violence and representation. He argues that a new collective imaginary, or the collective force of the people, emerged as a force, representing itself as the sovereign power that could decide when violence ought to be used to protect all citizens from corrupt power. Shedding light upon uprisings in Yemen, Tunisia, but also elsewhere in the Middle East, this book offers deeper insights into conceptions of violence, representation, and democracy. It compares the post-2011 efforts to build a decentralized political order in Tunisia with the calls for federalism in Yemen, and the shared demands for democratic accountability over the means of coercion.
Benoit Challand is Associate Professor of Sociology at The New School for Social Research, New York. He is author of the books Violence and Representation in the Arab Uprisings (Cambridge University Press, 2023), and Palestinian Civil Society: Foreign Donors and the Power to Promote and Exclude (Routledge, 2009). His work has been translated into Arabic and he has numerous co-authored publications such as The Arab Uprisings and Foreign Assistance (co-edited with F. Bicchi and S. Heydemann, Routledge 2016), and Imagining Europe: Myth, Memory and Identity, co-authored with Chiara Bottici (Cambridge University Press 2013). He is also interested in democratic theory, Western European Marxism, and settler colonialism.

Living Writers - Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
2023-05-25 17:20 | Virtual Event
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is the author of the National Book Award finalist The Undocumented Americans. Her work, which focuses on race, culture, and immigration, has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Vogue, Elle, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, n+1, The New Inquiry, and Interview magazine. Born in Ecuador, she later became one of the first undocumented students admitted to Harvard University.

Sponsored by The Puknat Literary Endowment, The Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Laurie Sain Endowment, The Humanities Institute, Bookshop Santa Cruz, and Two Birds Books (where the writers’ books are available for purchase)

POSTPONED - Linguistics Colloquia: Julia Swan
2023-05-26 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Julia Swan, SJSU
Over the course of each year, the Linguistics department hosts colloquia by distinguished faculty from around the world.
For full speaker and event information, please visit: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/colloquia/index.html

Dickens and Victorian Psychology: Introspection, First-Person Narration, and the Mind by Tyson Stolte
2023-05-28 13:00 - 15:00 | Virtual Event
Please join the Santa Cruz Dickens Fellowship and the Santa Cruz Pickwick Club for our May Pickwick Club talk by Associate Professor Tyson Stolte (New Mexico State University) who will be discussing Dickens and Victorian Psychology.
Dickens and Victorian Psychology returns Dickens’s fiction to the midst of nineteenth-century debates about the nature of the mind, reading Dickens’s experiments with first-person point of view as part of his larger effort to insist upon a dualist psychology in the face of new physiological theories of consciousness. While psycho-physiology was widely seen by Victorian readers as a materialist threat to belief in our immortality, Dickens’s incorporation into his fiction of the introspection that remained the key methodology for dualist psychologies allowed him to insist upon the irreducibility of consciousness—and the possibility of the mind’s surviving the body. Through a reading of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, however, this talk will also show how psycho-physiologists worked to drain the shared language of Victorian psychology of any meaning beyond the physical, making it ever more difficult to theorize a psychology that transcended the here and now.

Tyson Stolte is an associate professor in the Department of English at New Mexico State University. His book Dickens and Victorian Psychology: Introspection, First-Person Narration, and the Mind was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. He has also published articles on such topics as Dickens, Robert Browning, Edward FitzGerald, Victorian psychology, and nineteenth-century theories of matter and energy.

Sebastián Gil-Riaño – Stolen Evidence: Indigenous Children and Bio-historical narratives of the Western Hemisphere during the Cold War
2023-05-31 12:15 - 13:45 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The talk is sponsored by the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine
This talk examines how anthropologists and human biologists used abducted Indigenous children in South America as sources of evidence for a variety of bio-historical research projects during the Cold War. From 1930 to 1970, human scientists studying the Aché — a traditionally nomadic hunter-gatherer group in Paraguay — used evidence derived from measuring, bleeding, and observing children in the service of research projects concerned with reconstructing global human migrations in the Western hemisphere. Through studies of Aché children and families, scientists like the French naturalist Jehan Albert Vellard, the U.S. human geneticist Carleton Gajdusek, and the French structural anthropologists Pierre and Helen Clastres discerned ancient patterns of migration by considering the diffusion of cultural and linguistic traits, the process of genetic drift in populations, and the immunological effects of European conquest. Yet many of the Aché children used in these studies had been abducted and sold as servants to neighboring ranchers. By highlighting the use of stolen Indigenous children as research objects in Cold War human diversity research, my talk uncovers the enduring and violent colonial structures that made this knowledge possible as well as the ethical and legal protocols and forms of Indigenous resistance that emerged in response.
Sebastián Gil-Riaño is an Assistant Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennyslvania. Born in Colombia and raised in Canada, he is a historian of science who studies transnational scientific conceptions of race, culture, and indigeneity in the twentieth century. His first book, The Remnants of Race Science: UNESCO and Economic Development in the Global South will be published by Columbia University Press on August 31st, 2023.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
RSVP by 11 AM on the day of the colloquium, and you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Roxanne Euben - The Power of Humiliation: Rhetoric, Retaliation and Resistance
2023-05-31 15:30 - 17:00 | Charles E. Merrill Lounge
From Trump to ISIS to the Arab uprisings, invocations of humiliation pervade the political landscape. But what does ‘humiliation’ mean exactly, and how does it work rhetorically? In this lecture on her current research, Professor Roxanne Euben develops an account of humiliation anchored in the way people actually use it in language, with a particular focus on Islamist rhetoric about the ‘humiliation of Islam’ and invocations of humiliation during the 2011 Egyptian Uprising. These cases illustrate broad patterns in how humiliation constructs collective powerlessness, but also how it operates to demand dramatically different responses.
Roxanne L. Euben (University of Pennsylvania) is a political theorist whose research has helped pioneer a new area of inquiry often referred to as “comparative political theory.” This is an understanding of political theory not as coextensive with Euro-American canonical texts ‘from Plato to NATO,’ but rather as inclusive of intellectual traditions and practices of the “non-West” and global South, as well as of indigenous traditions in, but not of, “the West.” Euben’s special area of expertise and research is Muslim and Euro-American political thought, and her scholarship has addressed such topics as Muslim cosmopolitanism; jihad; martyrdom and political action; travel and translation; gender and humiliation; shared perspectives on science and reason; the politics of visual and verbal rhetorics; and digital time. She is the author of Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism (Princeton, 1999), Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge (Princeton, 2006), and Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts and Contexts from Al-Banna to Bin Laden (Princeton, 2009), written and edited in collaboration with Muhammad Qasim Zaman. She has been published across a wide spectrum of scholarly journals, including Perspectives on Politics, Political Theory, The Review of Politics, The Journal of Politics, International Studies Review, and Political Psychology.
This event is presented by the Department of Politics and co-sponsored by the Center for Middle East and North Africa.

Sebastián Gil-Riaño Reading Group – Mellon Sawyer Seminar on “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine”
2023-06-01 12:15 - 13:45 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
“Indigenous Health and Infrastructures of Race” – In the past few decades, biomedical researchers and human biologists have called for more ethical guidelines for conducting fieldwork on Indigenous groups in South America. Included among these proposals is a call for greater “epidemiological surveillance” of remote Indigenous groups with the aim of reducing health disparities. This bioethical concern is driven by an understanding of colonial history, which presumes that without biomedical intervention Indigenous groups inevitably succumb to European diseases upon contact. In this reading group, we will explore how such bioethical narratives are themselves a product of a deep-seated colonial project that Daniel Nemser has called “the Infrastructures of Race.”
Email Jennifer Derr at jderr@ucsc.edu for a copy of the readings.
Sebastián Gil-Riaño is an Assistant Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennyslvania. Born in Colombia and raised in Canada, he is a historian of science who studies transnational scientific conceptions of race, culture, and indigeneity in the twentieth century. His first book, The Remnants of Race Science: UNESCO and Economic Development in the Global South will be published by Columbia University Press on August 31st, 2023.
This event is part of the “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” Sawyer Seminar series.

Celebrating the Humanities Spring Awards
2023-06-01 16:00 - 19:00 | Cowell Provost House, Cowell Provost House, Cowell Service Rd‎ University of California Santa Cruz, Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Please mark your calendars for Thursday, June 1, 2022 as we acknowledge the achievements of our outstanding students and faculty at the annual Celebrating the Humanities Spring Awards event. This year, the hybrid event will take place at the Cowell Provost House with the program beginning at 4 p.m and a reception to follow the ceremony. Friends and families of awardees are encouraged to attend.

Living Writers - Mai Der Vang
2023-06-01 17:20 | Virtual Event
Mai Der Vang is the author of Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press, 2021), winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, an American Book Award, and a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, along with Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the First Book Award from the Academy of American Poets. The recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, her poetry has appeared in Tin House, the American Poetry Review, and Poetry, among other journals and anthologies. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State.

Sponsored by The Puknat Literary Endowment, The Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Laurie Sain Endowment, The Humanities Institute, Bookshop Santa Cruz, and Two Birds Books (where the writers’ books are available for purchase)

Jairus Banaji Reading Group
2023-06-01 17:30 - 19:00 | Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Vernaculars of Travel in South Asia and the Middle East cluster invites you to the final event of their THI working group, which will be a reading group (5:30 – 7) and dinner (7pm – 8:30pm) on Thursday, June 1st. Please RSVP by Friday May 26th with Muriam Davis (muhdavis@ucsc.edu) to receive the readings and event location.
For the reading group, we have decided to read selections from Jairus Banaji’s work on the relationship between theory and history, commercial capitalism, and the global south. We will focus on three pieces: 1) the Appendix of his “A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism” 2) a piece on “Globalising the History of Capital” 3) an article from Historical Materialism on “Putting Theory to Work” and lastly 4) his essay on Islam and the Mediterranean. We’ve also attached 5) a piece on “Opium, Capitalism and Financial Markets.”
We’d also like to mention that Banaji will be giving a talk at UCSC on May 26th at noon (on Zoom). Zoom links will be sent out to reading group participants as soon as it is available.

Futurescapes: Projects from the Coha-Gunderson Collective
2023-06-02 - 2023-06-03 | The Institute of the Arts & Sciences Gallery, 100 Panetta Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Humanities Institute presents “Futurescapes: Projects from the Coha-Gunderson Collective,” a multi-media exhibition by UCSC students and alumni winners of the Coha-Gunderson Prize in Speculative Futures.
13 winners of the Coha-Gunderson prize in Speculative Futures, a prize competition made possible by UCSC alumni Peter Coha (Kresge ’78, Mathematics) and James Gunderson (Rachel Carson ’77, Philosophy, and UCSC Foundation Board Trustee), will exhibit creative work in a variety of media.
Schedule:

Friday, June 2: Opening & Reception 4:00-8:00pm
Saturday, June 3: 12:00-5:00 pm

The exhibition is the culmination of a year-long workshop. All prior winners—undergraduates, graduate students, and alumni from across the campus—chose to participate, and each brings their unique skills and media to the exhibit: VR, visual art, film, digital media, textual materials, and performance art. The thirteen participants met biweekly for ten weeks to dialogue with campus experts, brainstorm their projects, plan the exhibit, and discuss some of the greater existential questions that arose: how can we think of the future without idealism but also without apocalyptic pessimism? What is the purpose of socially or scientifically relevant art, and can it intervene in the precarious present? How might thinking speculatively about the past impact the present and possible futures?
Exhibitors
Aidan Andreasen (“Talos Machine”) is a third-year AGPM major & made this project for you to enjoy; Haoran Chang (“Fair Sai Re Pi VR”) is a multimedia artist and researcher who received an MFA in Digital Art and New Media at UCSC in 2021; Rafael Franco (“Future Farmers of Amerika: Poems from the Year 2054”) is a second-year PhD student in Literature at UCSC studying Gothic literature; Willow Gelphman (“Mr. Marple’s One-Way Ticket to the Great Unknown”) is a writer and visual artist who received BAs in Art and Literature from UCSC in 2021; Mitra Ghaffari (“Bicycle Island [A dónde nos lleva]”) is a second-year Social Documentation MFA student and bike guide; Chisato Hughes (“Treasure Island”) is a filmmaker based in the Bay Area working in nonfiction and hybrid, speculative forms; Ant(onia) Lorenzo (“[Au]xiology: Living Atoms”) is an interdisciplinary artist and organizer committed to practices of decolonization and reciprocity & is finishing their MFA in Environmental Art and Social Practice at UCSC; Aaron Samuel Mulenga (“Tenga Tenga, Can I Help You Carry Your Load?”) is a fourth-year PhD in History of Art and Visual Culture whose work engages with contemporary African art and the reclamation of local African histories; Chloe Rickards (“The Cordyceps Corner”) is a data analyst, visual artist, and cosplayer who received a Master’s in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from UCSC in 2022 and is interested in the more fantastical aspects of speculative futures; Oana Tenter (“Treasure Island”) is a documentary filmmaker from Romania whose work immerses her in histories that bear on the present; Lior Shamriz (“Even a Dog in Babylon is Free”) is a filmmaker and an artist based in Santa Cruz, pursuing a Ph.D. in the Film and Digital Media department at UCSC; Saul Villegas (“Deep-Sea Coral III”) is a first-year MFA candidate in DANM using art to create a revolving system from the mental, physical, and virtual environment and inviting people to participate in the viewer experience through digital mixed-media works; Jingtian Zong (“Don’t Ride Over a Crack You’ll Break Your Mother’s Back”) is an artist and researcher who probes technology and power, public space (on and offline) and collective memories through a feminist perspective, currently a first-year MFA candidate in Environmental Art and Social Practice at UCSC.
Carla Freccero, Project Coordinator, is a professor of Literature & History of Consciousness at UCSC. Hannah Newburn, PhD candidate in Literature, served as THI liaison for the collective.
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Many people contributed to making this exhibition possible.
Carla Freccero wishes to thank the faculty and professional experts who visited the workshop: Christopher Connery, Lindsey Dillon, Anna Friz, Theresa Hice-Fromille, Mark Nash, Laurie Palmer, Sarah Papazoglakis, Jennifer Parker, Micah Perks, Jessica Taft, and Zac Zimmer. She also wishes to thank those who played a critical role within the project itself: Hannah Newburn, GSR for the group; Aaron Samuel Mulenga, resident curator; and Saul Villegas, coordinator of publicity and the virtual exhibit.
A special thanks goes to select members of the cluster: Alex Calderwood, Michael McCarrin, Matt Polzin, and Zac Zimmer.
Staff and Faculty in the Humanities and Arts contributed their expertise, efforts and equipment: at THI (Sharon Kinoshita, interim Faculty Director; Irena Polic, Managing Director; Saskia Nauenberg Dunkell; Jessica Guild; Hannah Newburn); in the Arts (Louise Leong and Colleen Jennings); in the Humanities (Humanities Academic Services and Yuri Cantrell, ITS and Humanities Liaison).
Thank you to the Institute for Arts and Sciences (IAS) at UC Santa Cruz (Rachel Nelson, Director and Chief Curator; Maia Kamehiro-Stockwell, Tam Welch) for the venue and so much more.
Thanks as well to Cari Napoles, Senior Director of Development for the Humanities Division.
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Project Descriptions
*Aidan Andreasen, Talos Machine
Talos Machine is an interactive story set in the year 3142. The reader takes the role of a Ganymede police detective investigating the final homo sapiens’ death. To make sense of this case file, they’ll need to research everything 3142 has to offer using Omnipedia, an encyclopedia of everything. And who knows, this might be about more than a single human’s demise.
Talos Machine is an “open website” experience – readers can visit any page on Omnipedia whenever they’d like, until they’re ready to definitively solve the mystery. This case won’t be cracked by following the exploits of a main character – the reader themselves must think like a detective, as it’s up to them to connect the dots between ideas and put their theories to the test.
Central to the world of 3142 is a superintelligent AI, the Orecomp Intelligence, which possesses powers far exceeding those of any living being. It has sustained a stable solar system society for nearly 1100 years, but stable does not mean familiar. The world of Talos Machine was created from our attempts to answer a deceptively challenging question: what does it mean to be human? What is it about us, right here and right now, that we truly care about and must work to preserve?
Talos Machine was first written in 2021, when it felt like its potentially future-defining topics and questions were largely underdiscussed. A mere two years later, the concept of intelligent AI has gone mainstream. Some of the speculative futures depicted in Talos Machine might not be speculative for much longer. Our actions today will decide the sort of destiny we have before us. Talos Machine is neither a best-case nor worst-case scenario – but hopefully becoming a detective in Ganymede will get readers thinking about what kind of future they want to see.
*Haoran Chang, Fair Sai Re Pi VR
Fair Sai Re Pi VR is a multisensory VR experience that invites audiences to experience a fictional fire therapy based on the one sold by a real Chinese pyramid scheme company named QuanJian that went bankrupt in 2020 after a scandal erupted about the scheme. The experience is a reenactment of the real company, a simulation of a simulation. It performs a critique of the company’s capitalistic logic of exploitation, its solidification of hierarchy, and the values of excessive consumption, and questions the relationship between Western modernity and the philosophy of Chinese Traditional Medicine. The playful and surreal pseudo-therapy brings the contradiction between the philosophy of CTM—emphasizing wholeness—and the pyramid scheme business model with its strict hierarchical order. Fire is very common in CTM, like cupping.
This project, however, is less about the efficacy of CTM and more about how the tradition is displaced and remade in a society dominated by the ideology of technology from the West. Fire, in this VR experience, is a motif existing between “natural” fire, the fire to “cure the diseases” and “cultural” fire, the fire situated in the network of pyramid scheme structures that burns participants financially. This project is also related to a conceptual framework of “Emersive VR” that I proposed in my thesis. Different from the idea of Immersive VR, Emersive VR intends to break the singularity of virtual space. In the original version of this project, participants enter a room and lie down on a custom-made massage bed with physical mechanisms, such as a heat fan, water spray, and heat blanket, connected to the VR program Arduino (in this edited version, audience will only be immersed visually in VR). Rather than being isolated in a singular space rendered by the VR headset, bodies are situated in a liminal space between the virtual and physical, fiction and reality.
*Rafael Franco, Future Farmers of Amerika: Poems From the Year 2054
Future Farmers of Amerika: Poems From the Year 2054 is a collection of poems that gives voice to the unheard narratives of immigrant farmworkers in California’s Central Valley. Written in 2021, the collection features a diverse array of poetic forms, including epistolary, free verse, and diary entries. Audiences can also listen to readings of a selection of these poems using the corresponding QR code. Especially central to these poems is language and translation. Much narrativization of farmwork in the Central Valley gets recounted by third parties, and thus the native Spanish-speaking voices get erased, despite the fact that most Central Valley farm work is by immigrants who speak solely Spanish. This creates a tension between the English-language narratives about farm work and the actual experiences of farm workers. The inability to translate many of the words about farm work labor from Spanish to English mirrors the failure to translate farmworkers’ experiences into the English language, thus foregrounding the incomplete nature of the narratives we read and hear in the media.
The collection serves as a vessel that projects the stories of farmworkers into the future. By evoking a year in the near future, the stories hope to blur the lines between past, present, and future, all while anticipating the future itself. Together, the form, time, and language of this collection incentivize readers and listeners to diversify the perspectives from which they pay attention to the silenced voices of immigrant farm work labor. However, the collection also aims to recognize its own limitations. This exhibition is not a complete account of immigrant farm work in the Central Valley. Rather, it hopes to penetrate dominant narratives of farm work labor and production, creating a space in which to listen to the voices of immigrant farm workers. In promoting attentive listening practices, the exhibit invites viewers to carry these previously lost or forgotten literary voices into the future.
*Willow Gelphman, Mr. Marple’s One-Way Ticket to the Great Unknown
Mr. Marple’s One-Way Ticket to the Great Unknown is the epic tale of one lowly billionaire’s quest to win over an entire small, conservative, majority-straight/white town in the midwest. A mysterious wormhole appears on the outskirts of Midville, and the baffled locals are unsure what to do with it until Mr. Marple arrives with the intent to transform it into a tourist destination. He has a vision, he has a plan, and he has a particular knack for quickly dissolving dissent in whatever form it may arise.
Written in comic form, the reader gets to meet a wide cast of characters who act both individually and as a collective. There is no one main character, but rather a number of faces and storylines that thread together into a whole. While the townspeople have strength in numbers, they are limited by shortsightedness and a disbelief that anyone like Marple would do anything to threaten people like them. Their culture is dominant and their faith in their bootstraps is unwavering. While resembling Marple in all ways except power, the people of Midville are nothing but an obstacle now that they are in his way. “Mr. Marple” imagines a situation where white colonialist values “Ouroboros” themselves.
*Mitra Ghaffari, Bicycle Island [A dónde nos lleva]
In response to the transportation standstill during Cuba’s economic crisis of the 1990s, the government distributed 1.2 million bicycles in public workplaces and schools throughout the island. Havana’s city planning was temporarily organized to accommodate bike infrastructure; however, once foreign oil supply was restored, bicycles faded from view as their parts rusted, broke, and were abandoned. Bicycles became a symbol of the worst of the economic crisis and were associated with hardship and scarcity. Bicycle Island (A dónde nos lleva) offers a contemporary portrait of the bicycle as a re-adopted resource during the pandemic and a critical tool for the future of the island.
An intimate portrait of place, people, and movement, Bicycle Island displays various artistic interpretations of the bicycle, and includes collaborations with muralists, musicians, artisans, and puppeteers. These artistic representations and a mosaic of portraits of bicycle users combine to communicate the city’s history, culture, and projected future, tracing embodied associations to urban space and contrasting the bicycle with other transportation methods. Bicycle Island guides a future orientation for urban mobility on the island, archiving a collective effort to reclaim the bicycle as a central and celebrated tool of Havana’s future.
All songs were performed live by the Ensemble Interactivo de La Habana on August 2nd, 2022.
*Chisato Hughes & Oana Tenter, Treasure Island [see below]
*Ant(onia) Lorenzo, [Au]xiology: Living Atoms
(Au)xiology is a portmanteau of the symbol for the element gold, from the Latin aurum, and axiology, the study of value and valuation. It was originally a pedagogical and art-based collaboration with undergraduate students asking questions about our society’s values, the ways they are shaped, their impacts on material reality, and how art might contribute to shifting them. Within a 10-week course, students used research-based inquiry into gold’s materiality, histories, and effects to collectively analyze notions of value and dominant worldviews. In the months after the course concluded, their research has become part of a work of episodic story-telling narrated by atoms that all find themselves composing a pair of gold earrings in 2023.
This exhibition stages three episodes in the life of these atoms. The first, a decade or so from now, when a mining company scandalizes the speculative market by dusting an ore sample with gold. The second, nearly a half-century later, where the gold atoms are nanoparticles, collecting microplastics in the human bloodstream. And the third, where the atoms drift in a vast region of oceanic waters. Each of the gold’s futures is informed by a reckoning with our contemporary moment, where “gold futures” are both theoretical and traded daily.
*Aaron Samuel Mulenga, Tenga Tenga, Can I Help You Carry Your Load?
In 2021, I created a performance piece entitled Tenga Tenga, Can I Help You Carry Your Load? This performance was created to remember the Tenga Tenga, who were African porters used by the British to carry their soldiers’ equipment in the First World War. The efforts of the Tenga Tenga aided the British and Allied forces in southern Africa to win the war over the German forces. A stone cenotaph was erected in the town of Mbala in northern Zambia to commemorate the Tenga Tenga.
Through my project I aim to use speculative fiction to imagine what our present moment would look like if recognition and acknowledgement were given to the individual Africans who participated in the First World War as carriers. How would this shift the imagination of the War and who was present in it? This project utilizes installation, performance and moving image to provide an avenue for the speculative futures of the Tenga Tenga to be considered.
*Chloe Rickards, The Cordyceps Corner
The Cordyceps Corner is an interactive science station that explores a future where the Cordyceps genus of fungus evolved to infect animals. At the Cordyceps Corner, guests will examine the world from the perspective of a parasite, learn what The Last of Us got wrong, and discover the medicinal applications of a caterpillar-killing species of the fungus.
Central to this project is Cordyceps: An Illustrated Field Guide, a booklet of original watercolors and descriptions from this speculative future. The Illustrated Field Guide takes a closer look at the mechanisms of infection, the life cycle of the fungus, and the manifestation of symptoms in its hosts. The Illustrated Field Guide highlights how infectious diseases operate within an ecology – one that expands beyond humans.
Visitors will also find real samples of cordyceps, medicinal tinctures, and other materials related to the traditional medicinal use of cordyceps. Cordyceps have been a part of human history for hundreds of years. Its fruiting bodies are cultivated from caterpillars to boost the immune system and to treat fatigue and kidney problems.
The Cordyceps Corner invites you to bring a sense of childlike wonder in the face of death, decay, healing, and medicine. Ask questions, get your hands dirty, and immerse yourself in a world of fungi.
*Oana Tenter & Chisato Hughes, Treasure Island
To many in the city, San Francisco’s Treasure Island is out of sight, out of mind. Born from trash in the event of the 1939 World’s Fair, the island became host to the navy and its radiological testing during American wars abroad, and is currently a quiet, ghostly site for Section 8 housing, storage containers, transitional homes, and empty barracks. Simultaneously and urgently, the island is undergoing significant changes: highrises are being erected, transportation fares have increased, and storage buildings converted to event venues and microbreweries for city-dweller getaways. Our project aims to make these various transitions on the island visible and speculate on a future that is malleable.
Treasure Island (working title) is an experimental installation piece drawing from old archival footage from the island’s World’s Fair, naval training videos and propaganda, and recent observational footage taken with residents at Home Free, a transitional home for formerly-incarcerated survivors of domestic violence. The project invokes the island’s past histories–and its contested present as a toxic landscape–asking questions about what might be remediated from the proverbial rubble. What does (or can) healing from violence–structural, imperial, interpersonal–look like? How do we learn from past traumas and hold state bodies accountable in our orientation towards the future? These questions come about in anticipation of the island’s redevelopment into an “Eco-City of the Future,” a plan made for the island by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 2011. The exhibit consists of a three-screened installation with one running soundscape.
*Lior Shamriz, Even a Dog in Babylon is Free
In a letter written in the 7th century BC by the Babylonians to the Assyrian king Esarhaddon, the Babylonians defend the rights of foreigners in their city and call on the Assyrian king to afford them the same privileges they receive as Babylonians. They write that “even a dog, when entering the gates of Babylon, shall be protected.”
The film is constructed as a series of repetitive iterations inspired by the musical “Passacaglia” form, in which continuous variations of a base melody unfold throughout a piece. Each sequence begins with a conversation between Lior Shamriz, the film’s director, and Myriam Ali-Ahmad, a Los Angeles-based Lebanese actor. We learn that Ali-Ahmad was invited by Shamriz to act in a faux documentary as a process of world-building for Shamriz’s future project, a speculative feature film taking place in a West Asia that was never colonized by France or Britain. After the conversation, we see Myriam Ali-Ahmad in character as Souhaila, a fictional artist in the Federal States of West Asia, the entity now encompassing most of what used to be the Ottoman Empire. Souhaila is then shown working on a video poem that utilizes ancient texts. She comments on the letter the Babylonians wrote to Esarhaddon: why did the Babylonians need to denigrate the status of dogs to elevate foreigners in their city? With each iteration, the texts Souhaila is working with and her mode of engagement with them change, as the historical knowledge base in the “world” of the film modulates.
Even a Dog in Babylon is Free is an investigation of how our understanding of the past shapes our interactions with the world and of the relationship between our sense of historical linearity and our political worldview. In one of the iterations, for example, the discovery of an ancient West Asian school of thought that opposed the hierarchy between gods, people, and non-human animals prompts Souhaila to work with a different text. At the same time, the film questions our need to reevaluate the past in order to conceive different futures.
2K Video, Sound, 2023
Performers: Myriam Ali-Ahmad, Su-jin Kim Holmes, Alexandra Panzer, Mitra Ghaffari
Camera: Lior Shamriz, Hannah Jayanti
Recordist: Oana Tenter
*Saul Villegas, Deep-Sea Coral III
Environmental pollution on land shifts into the atmosphere through time and passes along the water and ecologies undersea. Deep Sea Coral III uses archival submersible footage from the Hawaiʻi Undersea Research Lab (HURL) and scientific data culled from ancient denizens of the sea comprising a biological archive for oceanographers of “multi-millennial timescales.” Extracted artifacts, such as deep-sea coral, serve as paleo-recorders of biogeochemical information. Thinking of that microenvironment that accumulates in geological time and looking for a way of seeing these archives through a multi-spatial perspective, I designed an immersive virtual world representing the deep sea.
My process begins by placing authentic artifacts in a virtual environment to re-create the sensation of submersible dives through digital media. Deep-Sea Coral III invites viewers to engage with these altered photographs and video footage through the speculative lens of the underwater world. My goal is to inspire future researchers to find new ways to reimagine deep-sea archives and ways to exhibit such archival materials for those who remain above.
*Jingtian Zong, Don’t Ride Over a Crack, You’ll Break Your Mother’s Back
Don’t Ride Over a Crack, You’ll Break Your Mother’s Back is a two-channel video and installation that investigates cracks in the American road infrastructure from an outsider’s perspective. Channeling the artist’s testimony of a bike accident in Santa Cruz to the history of U.S. highway development, the project tests the speculative ground upon which our contemporary reality is constructed and the twisted relationship between the two.
Its title adapted from a popular rhyme among American children, “Step on a Crack, Break Your Mother’s Back,” the project asks: Which bodies do a failed road infrastructure impact the most? A suspected alternative version of the rhyme, “Step on a Crack, and Your Mother Will Turn Black” (or in some sources, “You Would Marry A Black Person”), indicates a backdrop of how cracks might, in both material and symbolic forms, target certain bodies rather than others. Surrounded by journalistic photos of its socio-geographical context, the crack over which the artist had their bike accident is transplanted into the IAS gallery and invites contemplation at the intersection of social responsibility, mobility, and vulnerability.
Where is the boundary between the private and the public? Taking the U.S. highway system as its test field, the project poses this question that has become increasingly important in the post-pandemic era, and that immigrant narratives often further complicate. In the 2-channel video, images of early Fordism productions and Futurama, the 1939 New York World’s Fair, are juxtaposed with footage of cracked roads in Santa Cruz and on the artist – an Asian woman’s skin, exploring how the private and the public, although often kept separate, are deeply intertwined.

Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC)
2023-06-02 14:00 - 17:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Linguistics Department’s annual Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC) will be held Friday, June 2nd, from 2:00 – 5:00pm in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge & Courtyard. The Distinguished Alumnus speaker will be Caroline Andrews who is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Zurich. We hope you will attend.

Bookshop Santa Cruz Presents: Stacey Abrams, Rogue Justice
2023-06-04 19:00 - 21:00 | Rio Theater, 1205 Soquel Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95062, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz is thrilled to welcome #1 New York Times bestselling author and political leader Stacey Abrams to discuss her new book Rogue Justice and the craft of writing. This event will take place at the Rio Theatre (1205 Soquel Avenue, Santa Cruz) and is cosponsored by NAACP Santa Cruz County, The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, and the Santa Cruz Community Credit Union.

NOTE: Limited tickets available—purchase today! Venue size selected by the author.
ROGUE JUSTICE: The #1 New York Times bestselling author of While Justice Sleeps returns with another riveting and intricately plotted thriller, in which a blackmailed federal judge, a secret court and a brazen murder may lead to an unprecedented national crisis. Drawn from today’s headlines and woven with her unique insider perspective, Stacey Abrams combines twisting plotlines, wry wit, and clever puzzles to create another immensely entertaining suspense novel.
STACEY ABRAMS is a New York Times bestselling author, entrepreneur and political leader. She served as Minority Leader in the Georgia House of Representatives, and she was the first black woman to become gubernatorial nominee for a major party in United States history. Abrams has launched multiple nonprofit organizations devoted to democracy protection, voting rights, and effective public policy. She has also co-founded successful companies, including a financial services firm, an energy and infrastructure consulting firm, and the media company, Sage Works Productions, Inc.

Luis Alberto Urrea - Good Night, Irene
2023-06-06 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz is delighted to welcome bestselling author Luis Alberto Urrea (The House of Broken Angels) back to the store for a reading and signing of his new novel Good Night, Irene, which was inspired by his own family’s history: his mother’s heroism as a Red Cross volunteer during World War II. This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
“Good Night, Irene is a beautiful, heartfelt novel that celebrates the intense power and durability of female friendship while shining a light on one of the fascinating lost women’s stories of World War II.” —Kristin Hannah

What if a friendship forged on the front lines of war defines a life forever? In the tradition of The Nightingale and Transcription, Good Night, Irene is a searing epic based on the magnificent and true story of heroic Red Cross women.
In 1943, Irene Woodward abandons an abusive fiance in New York to enlist with the Red Cross and head to Europe. She makes fast friends in training with Dorothy Dunford, a towering Midwesterner with a ferocious wit. Together they are part of an elite group of women, nicknamed Donut Dollies, who command military vehicles called Clubmobiles at the font line, providing camaraderie and a tast of home that may be the only solace before troops head into battle.
After D-Day, these two intrepid friends join the Allied soldiers streaming into France. Their time in Europe will see them embroiled in danger, from the Battle of the Bulge to the liberation of Buchenwald. Through her friendship with Dororothy and a love affair with a courageous American fighter pilot named Hans, Irene learns to trust again. Her most fervent hope, which becomes more precarious by the day, is for all three of them to survive the war intact.
Taking as inspiration his mother’s own Red Cross service, Luis Alberto Urrea has delivered an overlooked story of women’s heroism in World War II. With its affecting and uplifting portrait of friendship and valor in harrowing circumstances, Good Night, Irene powerfully demonstrates yet again that Urrea’s “gifts as a storyteller are prodigious” (NPR).
A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his landmark work of nonfiction The Devil’s Highway, now in its 30th paperback printing, Luis Alberto Urrea is the author of numerous other works of nonfiction, poetry, and fiction, including the national bestsellers The Hummingbird’s Daughter and The House of Broken Angels, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. A recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, among many other honors, he lives outside Chicago and teachers at the University of Illinois Chicago.

The Deep Read: Community Salon
2023-06-07 18:00 - 20:00 | The Seymour Marine Discovery Center, 100 McAllister Way, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
On June 7, we’ll be hosting a salon—co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute and Lookout Santa Cruz—focused on actions we can all take in the face of climate change. Ecology Action, Elkhorn Slough Foundation, and Regeneración Pajaro Valley will lead the discussion moderated by UCSC Professor of Humanities and Journalism Jody Biehl.

Not in Santa Cruz? Register for Zoom access.

About The Deep Read
This event is part of The Humanities Institute’s Deep Read Program that invites curious minds to think deeply about literature, art, and the most pressing issues of our day. We read books from a wide range of genres, exploring their implications on our politics, inner lives, and communities.

Bookshop Santa Cruz presents: An evening with Ocean Vuong
2023-06-08 19:00 - 20:30 | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
In this deeply intimate second poetry collection (in paperback June 6th), Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother’s death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong contends with personal loss, the meaning of family, and the cost of being the product of an American war in America. At once vivid, brave, and propulsive, Vuong’s poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicenter of the break.
The author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds, winner of the 2016 Whiting Award, the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize, and a 2019 MacArthur fellow, Vuong writes directly to our humanity without losing sight of the current moment. These poems represent a more innovative and daring experimentation with language and form, illuminating how the themes we perennially live in and question are truly inexhaustible. Bold and prescient, and a testament to tenderness in the face of violence, Time Is a Mother is a return and a forging forth all at once. This event is presented by Bookshop Santa Cruz, and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute.

Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds and the New York Times bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. A recipient of the 2019 MacArthur “Genius Grant,” he is also the winner of the Whiting Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize. His writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.
PRAISE:
“Piercing . . . The poems in Time Is a Mother give us a path to examine the complexities of what it means to lose a mother, and what it means to embrace family and the self even when we want to look away. In Vuong’s tender yet unflinching words, we are reminded that only a mother can carry a beating heart within her body.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“Like Orpheus descending into the underworld, Vuong takes us to the white-hot limits of his grief, writing with visionary fervor about love, agony, and time . . . Aesthetically ambitious and ferociously original . . . Here, he breaks open and rebuilds.” —Esquire, “The Best Books of Spring 2022”
“That’s the essence of Vuong’s talent: he alchemizes deeply individual experiences with universal emotions into what is both familiar and new. . . . We need no more proof of Vuong’s importance in the poetic canon.” —Chicago Review of Books

Ottessa Moshfegh, Lapvona
2023-06-21 19:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Presented by Bookshop Santa Cruz, Ottessa Moshfegh (My Year of Rest and Relaxation) will discuss her recent novel Lapvona, available in paperback June 20th. In a village in a medieval fiefdom buffeted by natural disasters, a motherless shepherd boy finds himself the unlikely pivot of a power struggle that puts all manner of faith to a savage test.
Little Marek, the abused and delusional son of the village shepherd, never knew his mother; his father told him she died in childbirth. One of life’s few consolations for Marek is his enduring bond with the blind village midwife, Ina, who suckled him when he was a baby, as she did so many of the village’s children. Ina’s gifts extend beyond childcare: she possesses a unique ability to communicate with the natural world. Her gift often brings her the transmission of sacred knowledge on levels far beyond those available to other villagers, however religious they might be. For some people, Ina’s home in the woods outside of the village is a place to fear and to avoid, a godless place.
Among their number is Father Barnabas, the town priest and lackey for the depraved lord and governor, Villiam, whose hilltop manor contains a secret embarrassment of riches. The people’s desperate need to believe that there are powers that be who have their best interests at heart is put to a cruel test by Villiam and the priest, especially in this year of record drought and famine. But when fate brings Marek into violent proximity to the lord’s family, new and occult forces upset the old order. By year’s end, the veil between blindness and sight, life and death, the natural world and the spirit world, will prove to be very thin indeed.

Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from New England. Eileen, her first novel, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Death in Her Hands, her second and third novels, were New York Times bestsellers. She is also the author of the short story collection Homesick for Another World and a novella, McGlue. She lives in Southern California.
Micah Perks is the author of a memoir, a short story collection, and two novels. Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the New Guard Machigonne 2014 Fiction Prize, residencies at Blue Mountain Center and MacDowell, and the Independent Publisher’s Gold Medal. The Guardian included her last book in the Top Ten Novels about the Apocalypse. She directs the creative writing program at UCSC.
This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

Dickensland: The Curious History of Dickens's London
2023-06-25 13:00 | Virtual Event
Please join the Santa Cruz Dickens Fellowship and the Santa Cruz Pickwick Club for our June Pickwick Club talk by author and historian Lee Jackson who will be discussing Dickens’s London.
Lee Jackson, author of Dickensland (Yale, 2023) will discuss the curious history of London’s Dickensian tourist destinations. Louisa May Alcott, visiting in 1866, was typical of the innumerable American tourists who would arrive in subsequent decades, enraptured by the dream-like quality of the Victorian metropolis seen through a Dickensian lens (‘I felt as if I’d got into a novel’). But did tourists truly encounter ‘Dickens’s London’ or merely a ‘Dickensland’ shaped by the demands of Dickens fandom (dubbed by Victorian newspapers ‘The Dickens Cult’) and canny heritage entrepreneurs?

Lee Jackson is an author and historian, creator of the popular online sourcebook of Victoriana ‘The Dictionary of Victorian London‘ and an academic advisor to the Charles Dickens Museum. His previous non-fiction books include Dirty Old London (Yale, 2014) and Palaces of Pleasure (Yale, 2019).
If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to reach out at dpj@ucsc.edu

Santa Cruz Shakespeare 2023 Season Opening Night
2023-07-13 | The Audrey Stanley Grove in Delaveaga Park, 501 Upper Park Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95065, United States
Tickets are now on sale for Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s 2023 season, featuring The Book of Will and The Taming of the Shrew. Co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute. The season runs from July 13-August 27.

The Book of Will, by Lauren Gunderson – Directed by Laura Gordon
A love letter to William Shakespeare, this moving and joyful comedy tells the story of the two actors, friends of Shakespeare’s, who worked to preserve his plays and legacy seven years after his death. This beat-the-clock race to collect all of Shakespeare’s plays into one book delights audiences with a tale full of color characters, and provides a glimpse into a little known story about how his work survives and thrives to this day. SCS’s production of The Book of Will is part of a year-long celebration honoring the 400th anniversary of the printing of the First Folio and stars out-going Artistic Director Mike Ryan, and in-coming Artistic Director Charles Pasternak.
The Taming of the Shrew, by William Shakespeare – Directed by Robynn Rodriguez
One of Shakespeare’s most raucous comedies, in The Taming of the Shrew characters struggle against the roles they have been prescribed by gender, class, or age. While the results of these struggles provide some of the most hilarious moments in the canon, they also leave us with unsettling questions about the human cost of maintaining the status quo. Thorny, funny, and deeply human, Kate and Petruchio are two of Shakespeare’s most fascinating characters. Out of place because of their honesty in a world of deception, can these two broken people find happiness where they least expect it?

Dickens Universe: A Tale of Two Cities
2023-07-22 - 2023-07-29 | UCSC
The Dickens Universe is a unique cultural event that brings together scholars, teachers, students, and members of the general public for a week of stimulating discussion and festive social activity on the beautiful Santa Cruz campus of the University of California—all focused on one or two Victorian novels, usually (but not always) one by Charles Dickens.
In 2023, the Dickens Universe will feature A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. A historical novel set in London and Paris at the time of the French Revolution, its plot involves many sensational and melodramatic elements: imprisonment in the Bastille and the bloody Reign of Terror; lost children and body doubles; heroism and sacrifice.
Yet contained within this plot are resonances that pull readers beyond England and France, and beyond the temporal frames of one, albeit momentous, historical conflict. Comparison and doubling abound, as the title’s two (European) cities multiply outward, toward Bombay (now Mumbai), Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic), Victoria (Australia), Santiago (Chile). Likewise, the revolution in question is not limited to the Napoleonic Wars, but manifold, involving civil unrest and violent uprisings both domestic (the Chartist movement) and abroad, from Jamaica to the US, South Asia, the Antipodes, and beyond (as in the 1946 propaganda film A Tale of Two Cities about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki).
Now in its 42nd year of operation, the Dickens Universe combines features of a scholarly conference, a festival, a book club, and summer camp. Participants include people of all ages and walks of life—distinguished scholars, graduate students, undergraduates, retirees, young professionals, high school teachers, anyone who loves to read and who enjoys long Victorian novels.

Here are some of the things that make the Universe such a special experience.

The college lifestyle: participants live on campus, eat together in the student dining hall, have time to meet and come to know each other in different ways.
Everyone is reading the same book. We all have this one important thing in common.
The range of activities—formal lectures, small discussion groups, films, daily Victorian teas, performances, and Victorian dancing.
The Universe offers a week of total immersion in the world of Victorian fiction with friendly, like-minded colleagues in a beautiful setting. Whether we’re returning to a Dickens novel that everyone knows and loves, or branching out into a Victorian novel by another author who might be less familiar, during the Universe we build a community out of our passion for reading, talking with one another, and bringing Victorian culture to life.

The Universe offers a week of total immersion in the world of Victorian fiction with friendly, like-minded colleagues in a beautiful setting. Whether we’re returning to a Dickens novel that everyone knows and loves, or branching out into a Victorian novel by another author who might be less familiar, during the Universe we build a community out of our passion for reading, talking with one another, and bringing Victorian culture to life.
The Dickens Project is a Multi-campus Research Unit (MRU) of the University of California. Its research activities have been supported by extramural grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. Department of Education, the California Council for the Humanities, the California Arts Council, the Exxon Education Foundation, dues from member schools, and private gifts. Activities for the general public are supported in part by contributions to a private, non-profit organization, the Friends of the Dickens Project.

The Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music
2023-07-30 - 2023-08-13 | Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, even at a seasoned 60 years old, is all about the new—the here and now of contemporary works for orchestra. To quote Financial Times music critic Allan Ulrich, “…in the surf mecca of Santa Cruz, 75 miles south of San Francisco, the Cabrillo Festival has made the contemporary repertoire sound urgent, indispensable and even sexy.”
The 2023 season runs from July 30-August 13. Please visit https://cabrillomusic.org/ for more info.
In late July and early August each year, audiences are joined by both preeminent and emerging composers, spectacular guest artists, and an orchestra of dedicated professional musicians from across the globe to give voice to works which are rarely more than a year or two old, and sometimes still wet on the page. The opportunity for composers to work with musicians skilled and enthusiastic about bringing these new works to life, in the beautiful, coastal college-town of Santa Cruz, California, makes this an artistic paradise. With a professional training workshop for early career conductors and composers, open rehearsals almost daily, educational programming, and much more, the Cabrillo Festival has dozens of opportunities for meaningful engagement.
In 2017 the Festival embarked on a new era of artistic leadership with the appointment of Music Director and Conductor Cristian Macelaru. Past music directors include Marin Alsop (1992-2016, now Music Director Laureate), John Adams (1991), Dennis Russel Davies (1974-1990), Aaron Copland (1978), Carlos Chavez (1970-1973), Gerhard Samuel (1963-1968). More information on the Festival’s history can be found here.
The 2023 Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music is co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute.

Weekend With Shakespeare
2023-08-04 - 2023-08-05 | UCSC Arboretum
Join Shakespeare scholars and artists for two days of lectures, discussions, and demonstrations about the 2023 Season’s main stage productions, The Taming of the Shrew and King Lear.
The Weekend with Shakespeare Lecture Series is free, however seating is limited! Please email Rebecca Clark, Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s Education Coordinator, at rebecca@santacruzshakespeare.org, to reserve your spot.
Please see schedule for Weekend with Shakespeare below (subject to change). Weekend with Shakespeare is sponsored in partnership with Santa Cruz Shakespeare.
Lecture Series on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew: Friday, August 4

12-12:15 Welcome
12:15-1:15 In conversation with actors from The Taming of the Shrew
1:15-1:30 Break
1:30-2:30 In conversation with Katie O’Hare, dramaturg of The Taming of the Shrew, and Rebecca Clark, Education Programs Manager, Santa Cruz Shakespeare
2:30-3:00 Break with refreshments
3:00-4:00 Presentation on The Taming of the Shrew by Katherine Steele Brokaw, Associate Professor of English and Co-Founding Artistic Director, Shakespeare in Yosemite (UC Merced)

For those who have purchased a ticket to see the evening performance of The Taming of the Shrew:

7:00-7:15 Pre-performance discussion of ‘5 Things to Look Out For’ with Katherine Steele Brokaw
8:00 Performance of The Taming of the Shrew at The Grove.

Lecture Series on Shakespeare’s King Lear: Saturday, August 5

12-12:15 Welcome
12:15-1:15 In conversation with Paul Whitworth about King Lear
1:15-1:30 Break
1:30-2:30 In conversation with Dr. Ariane Helou, dramaturg of King Lear, Dr. Philippa Kelly, Resident Dramaturg for the California Shakespeare Theater and Adjunct Professor of Theater at Mills College and San Jose State University, and Dr. Michael Warren, Emeritus Professor of Literature (UC Santa Cruz) and Textual Consultant, Santa Cruz Shakespeare
2:30-3:00 Break with refreshments
3:00-4:00 Presentation on King Lear by Sean Keilen, Professor of Literature and Director of Shakespeare Workshop (UC Santa Cruz) and Head of Dramaturgy, Santa Cruz Shakespeare

For those who have purchased a ticket to see the evening performance of King Lear:

7-7:15 Pre-performance discussion of ‘5 Things to Look Out For’ with Sean Keilen
8:00 Performance of King Lear at The Grove

* Parking is limited at the UCSC Arboretum. Carpooling is encouraged!
* Light refreshments will be served, but feel free to bring lunch.
Katherine Steele Brokaw is Associate Professor of English at UC Merced. She the author of Staging Harmony: Music and Religious Change in Late Medieval English Drama (2016), which won the David Bevington Award for best new book in early English drama studies. She is also the co-founder of Shakespeare in Yosemite, which produces free Shakespeare in Yosemite National Park every April with a combination of student, professional, and community actors, and of EarthShakes Alliance, which brings together eco-minded theaters from around the world.
Sean Keilen is Professor of Literature and UC Santa Cruz, the founder of Shakespeare Workshop, and Head of Dramaturgy at Santa Cruz Shakespeare.

Susan Casey: The Underworld
2023-08-08 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
FREE IN-STORE EVENT: Bookshop welcomes New York Times bestselling author Susan Casey (The Wave) for a discussion of The Underworld, her awe-inspiring portrait of the mysterious world beneath the waves, and of the men and women who seek to uncover its secrets.
“A fascinating account of the ocean below its twilight zone.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review
This event is cosponsored by Seymour Marine Discovery Center Santa Cruz and The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

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For all of human history, the deep ocean has been a source of wonder and terror, an unknown realm that evoked a singular, compelling question: What’s down there? Unable to answer this for centuries, people believed the deep was a sinister realm of fiendish creatures and deadly peril. But now, cutting-edge technologies allow scientists and explorers to dive miles beneath the surface, and we are beginning to understand this strange and exotic underworld: A place of soaring mountains, smoldering volcanoes, and valleys 7,000 feet deeper than Everest is high, where tectonic plates collide and separate, and extraordinary life forms operate under different rules. Far from a dark void, the deep is a vibrant realm that’s home to pink gelatinous predators and shimmering creatures a hundred feet long and ancient animals with glass skeletons and sharks that live for half a millennium–among countless other marvels.
Susan Casey is our premiere chronicler of the aquatic world. For The Underworld she traversed the globe, joining scientists and explorers on dives to the deepest places on the planet, interviewing the marine geologists, marine biologists, and oceanographers who are searching for knowledge in this vast unseen realm. She takes us on a fascinating journey through the history of deep-sea exploration, from the myths and legends of the ancient world to storied shipwrecks we can now reach on the bottom, to the first intrepid bathysphere pilots, to the scientists who are just beginning to understand the mind-blowing complexity and ecological importance of the quadrillions of creatures who live in realms long thought to be devoid of life.
Throughout this journey, she learned how vital the deep is to the future of the planet, and how urgent it is that we understand it in a time of increasing threats from climate change, industrial fishing, pollution, and the mining companies that are also exploring its depths. The Underworld is Susan Casey’s most beautiful and thrilling book yet, a gorgeous evocation of the natural world and a powerful call to arms.
Susan Casey, author of New York Times bestseller’s Voices in the Ocean, The Wave, and The Devil’s Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America’s Great White Sharks and is the former editor in chief of O, The Oprah Magazine. She is a National Magazine Award-winning journalist whose work has been featured in the Best American Science and Nature Writing, Best American Sports Writing, and Best American Magazine Writing anthologies; and has appeared in Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, and Outside.

Slugs and Steins with Professor Eric Porter: What Can We Learn from the Airport?
2023-08-14 18:30 - 20:00 | Virtual Event
For many people, airports may seem like alienating “nonplaces”—as anthropologist Marc Augé put it—where we rush to make connections and spend long, monotonous hours waiting for delayed flights. But airports are fascinating sites that can tell us a lot about the places where they are situated. Among other things, they are complex infrastructures where people, the built and natural environments, and different kinds of networks come together. Airports are also sites of accumulated power in a given region. Looking at the history of an airport, then, can provide a airport useful lens for examining some of the complex, interconnected forces that have influenced the development of its region over time. Exploring that history can also help us understand how differently positioned people in that place have abided, resisted, and otherwise negotiated the powerful forces that have shaped their lives. In this talk, Eric Porter will discuss San Francisco International Airport (SFO) as a site whose history reveals important perspectives on a wide range of phenomena that have helped to make the Bay Area. Along the way he will read excerpts from his new book, A People’s History of SFO: The Making of the Bay Area and an Airport.

Order A People’s History of SFO: The Making of the Bay Area and an Airport online and save 30%. Use source code SAVE30 at checkout.
Eric Porter is Professor of History, History of Consciousness, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz, where he is also affiliated with the Music and Latin American and Latina/o Studies departments. His research and teaching interests include Black cultural and intellectual history, US cultural and urban history, and jazz and improvisation studies.
Slugs and Steins are free informal lectures served up over Zoom. Brought to you by the UC Santa Cruz Alumni Association, each talk will engage one of our favorite professors in discussion with you, the local community of Silicon Valley, and beyond. We will cover everything from organic artichokes to endangered zebras, self-driving cars to Shakespeare. All are welcome. Audience participation is encouraged.
Questions? Contact the UC Santa Cruz University Events office at specialevents@ucsc.edu.

Leaning Toward Light: An Evening of Poetry with Tess Taylor, Danusha Laméris & Ellen Bass
2023-08-31 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
FREE IN-STORE EVENT: Bookshop welcomes poets Tess Taylor, Danusha Laméris, and Ellen Bass for a reading of their beautiful anthology Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens & the Hands that Tend Them, an inviting selection of poems from a wide range of voices that speak to the collective urge to grow, tend, and heal—an evocative celebration of our connection to the green world.
This event is cosponsored by The Hive Poetry Collective and The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
“This collection brings together many of my favorite writers to celebrate the limitless offerings of nature; wandering through its pages feels like taking a long stroll through a beautiful garden.”
— Alice Waters, chef, author, food activist, and founder of Chez Panisse and the Edible Schoolyard Project
“As Aimee Nezhukamatathil reminds us in the delightful and informative foreword to this bountiful collection, the word anthology means a gathering of flowers. How perfect is this bouquet! Diverse and delightful. At turns, tender and tough. I’m sure I’ll be reading the poems gathered in this anthology for years to come.”
— Camille T. Dungy, author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden

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Much like reading a good poem, caring for plants brings comfort, solace, and joy to many. In this new poetry anthology, Leaning Toward Light, acclaimed poet and avid gardener Tess Taylor brings together a diverse range of contemporary voices to offer poems that celebrate that joyful connection to the natural world. Several of the most well-known contemporary writers, as well as some of poetry’s exciting rising stars, contribute to this collection including Ross Gay, Jericho Brown, Mark Doty, Jane Hirshfield, Ada Limón, Danusha Laméris, Naomi Shihab Nye, Garrett Hongo, Ellen Bass, and James Crews. A foreword by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, reflective pauses and personal recipes from some of the contributing poets, along with original, whimsical illustrations by Melissa Castrillon, and a ribbon bookmark complete this stunning, hardcover gift format.
Tess Taylor, an avid gardener, is the author of five acclaimed collections of poetry including Work & Days, which was named one of the 10 best books of poetry of 2016 by the New York Times. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Times Literary Supplement, CNN, and the New York Times. Taylor has been Distinguished Fulbright US Scholar at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Queen’s University in Northern Ireland, and the Anne Spencer Poet-in-Residence at Randolph College. She has also served as on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered for over a decade. Taylor lives in El Cerrito, California, where she tends to fruit trees and backyard chickens.
Danusha Laméris’ first book, The Moons of August (2014), was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Book Award. Some of her work has been published in: The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Orion, The American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. Her second book, Bonfire Opera, (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pitt Poetry Series), was a finalist for the 2021 Paterson Poetry Award and the winner of the Northern California Book Award in Poetry. A recipient of the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award, and the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, California, she currently co-leads Poetry of Resilience webinars with James Crews, as well as the HearthFire Writing Community, and is on the faculty of Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA program.
Ellen Bass is co-author of the best-selling The Courage to Heal, which has sold more than one million copies and has been translated into nine languages. She has also published several volumes of poetry, including The Human Line and Indigo, and her poems have appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and The New Republic. A Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she lives in Santa Cruz, and teaches in the MFA program at Pacific University.

Nina Simon: Mother - Daughter Murder Night
2023-09-05 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes local author Nina Simon for a launch event to celebrate her captivating new novel, Mother-Daughter Murder Night—a fun, fresh, and twisty debut whodunnit about a grandmother-mother-daughter trio who come together as amateur sleuths to solve a murder in their coastal California town. This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
“A mysterious murder set in the tranquil waters of Elkhorn Slough is not the only tension of local writer Nina Simon’s exquisite debut novel. It is the fraught, but ultimately loving and powerful relationship between three generations of women who work to solve the crime that gives this story the heart to match the suspense. Filled with wit, adventure, emotional insight, and an abundance of nature from our beloved shores, this page-turning mystery is the height of effective storytelling.” —Casey Coonerty Protti, owner Bookshop Santa Cruz
“Nina Simon’s Mother-Daughter Murder Night is the rarest of novels. A lively and tender story of family that Simon deftly transforms into an edge-of-your-seat murder mystery set against the polarizing backdrop of land conservation, no novel has ever made family drama (or murder) this much fun. One part The Maid and one part family drama à la The Nest, Mother-Daughter Murder Night is a resounding and impressive triumph. I fell in love with Tiny, Lana, and Beth immediately, and so will you.” —Katy Hays, New York Times bestselling author of The Cloisters

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Nothing brings an estranged family together like a murder next door. High-powered businesswoman Lana Rubicon has a lot to be proud of: her keen intelligence, impeccable taste, and the L.A. real estate empire she’s built. But when she finds herself trapped 300 miles north of the city, convalescing in a sleepy coastal town with her adult daughter Beth and teenage granddaughter Jack, Lana is stuck counting otters instead of square footage—and hoping that boredom won’t kill her before the cancer does. Then Jack—tiny in stature but fiercely independent—stumbles upon a dead body while kayaking near their bungalow. Jack quickly becomes a suspect in the homicide investigation, and the Rubicon women are thrown into chaos. Beth thinks Lana should focus on recovery, but Lana has a better idea. She’ll pull on her wig, find the true murderer, protect her family, and prove she still has power. With Jack and Beth’s help, Lana uncovers a web of lies, family vendettas, and land disputes lurking beneath the surface of a community populated by folksy conservationists and wealthy ranchers. But as their amateur snooping advances into ever-more dangerous territory, the headstrong Rubicon women must learn do the one thing they’ve always resisted: depend on each other.
Nina Simon has worn many hats: NASA engineer, slam poet, mystery game designer, museum director, and global nonprofit founder. She is an Ashoka fellow and the founder of OF/BY/FOR ALL, a global nonprofit that creates digital tools to help civic and cultural organizations become more inclusive, relevant, and sustainable. Nina is an in-demand writer and speaker about community participation in museums, libraries, parks, and theaters. Her work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, NPR, and on the TEDx stage. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Nina now lives off-the-grid in the Santa Cruz mountains with her husband and daughter. Mother-Daughter Murder Night is her first novel.

Public Philosophy Network Conference
2023-09-08 - 2023-09-10 | UC Santa Cruz
The 7th Public Philosophy Network Conference, on the theme of “Facing Technology: The Role of Public Philosophy,” will be hosted by the Center for Public Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in partnership with the Baskin School of Engineering and the UC Santa Cruz Humanities Division. The conference is co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute.
For the full schedule, conference information, and registration, please visit: https://www.publicphilosophynetwork.net/

Slugs and Steins with Professor Sharon Kinoshita - Rediscovering Marco Polo
2023-09-11 18:30 - 20:00 | Virtual Event
Few medieval figures enjoy greater name recognition than Marco Polo. Today, he is a brand whose name connotes exoticism, adventure, and East-West travel; academic critics sometime see him as the precursor to European explorers who cast a colonizing gaze over non-Western parts of the world. The source of all these images is the book usually known in English translation as “The Travels.” In this talk, Professor Kinoshita returns his work to its original title, The Description of the World (in Old French, Le Devisement du monde). Composed by the Venetian merchant in collaboration with an Arthurian romance writer named Rustichello of Pisa in 1298, The Description comes at the midpoint of a remarkable century when the Mongol conquests of Chinggis Khan and his successors, resulting in the largest contiguous empire in history, had produced a world of unprecedented travel, communication, and interaction. Our Slugs & Steins lecture will explore some of the most interesting, curious, and surprising aspects of that world.

Sharon Kinoshita is Professor of Literature at UCSC, specializing in medieval French literature (including the earliest Arthurian romances of figures like Lancelot and Perceval), Mediterranean Studies, and the Global Middle Ages. Her work on Marco Polo includes an annotated translation of the earliest surviving version of his Description of the World (Hackett, 2016), numerous essays exploring various aspects of his world (the silk trade, multilingualism, animals), and a book forthcoming in Reaktion Press’s new series, “Medieval Lives.” She recently contributed the blogpost “On the Road with Marco Polo” to The Humanities Institute’s 2022-2023 series on Travel.
Slugs and Steins are free informal lectures served up over Zoom. Brought to you by the UC Santa Cruz Alumni Association, each talk will engage one of our favorite professors in discussion with you, the local community of Silicon Valley, and beyond. We will cover everything from organic artichokes to endangered zebras, self-driving cars to Shakespeare. All are welcome. Audience participation is encouraged.
Questions? Contact the UC Santa Cruz University Events office at specialevents@ucsc.edu.

Jane Hirshfield - The Asking: New & Selected Poems
2023-09-18 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes acclaimed poet Jane Hirshfield for a reading and signing of her collection, The Asking: New & Selected Poems. This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
The Asking is the long-awaited new and selected collection by the author of “some of the most important poetry in the world today” (The New York Times Magazine), assaying the ranges of our shared and borrowed lives: our bonds of eros and responsibilities to the planet; the singing dictions and searchlight dimensions of perception; the willing plunge into an existence both perishing and beloved, dazzling “even now, even here.”

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In an era of algorithm, assertion, silo, and induced distraction, Jane Hirshfield’s poems bring a much-needed awakening response, actively countering narrowness. The Asking takes its title from the close of one of its thirty-one new poems: “don’t despair of this falling world, not yet / didn’t it give you the asking.” Interrogating language and life, pondering beauty amid bewilderment and transcendence amid transience, Hirshfield offers a signature investigation of the conditions, contradictions, uncertainties, and astonishments that shape our existence. A leading advocate for the biosphere and the alliance of science and imagination, she brings to both inner and outer quandaries an abiding compass: the choice to embrace what is, to face with courage, curiosity, and a sense of kinship whatever comes.
In poems that consider the smallest ant and the vastness of time, hunger and bounty, physics, war, and love in myriad forms, this collection–drawing from nine previous books and five decades of writing–brings the insights and slant-lights that come to us only through poetry’s arc, delve, and tact; through a vision both close and sweeping; through music-inflected thought and recombinant leap.
With its quietly magnifying brushwork and numinous clarities, The Asking expands our awareness of both breakage’s grief and the possibility for repair.
Jane Hirshfield is the author of ten collections of poetry and two now-classic collections of essays on poetry’s deep workings, and the editor of four co-translated books presenting world poets from the deep past. Hirshfield is one of American poetry’s central spokespersons for concerns about the biosphere and interconnection. Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations and from the Academy of American Poets; the Poetry Center Book Award and the California Book Award; her books have been long- and finalist-listed for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. Her work, translated into seventeen languages, appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and ten editions of The Best American Poetry. A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2019.

James Ellroy - The Enchanters
2023-09-19 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes bestselling author James Ellroy (American Tabloid, LA Confidential, My Dark Places) for a reading and signing of his new book The Enchanters, “A descent into the conspiracy hellhole of Hollywood in the early 1960s.” —Kirkus Reviews. This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
“Ellroy masterfully orchestrates his vast array of subplots to create a tour de force of vibe and atmosphere. That ambience, plus his signature jazzy turns of phrase, will thrill longtime fans. . . . Fascinating … a hell of a ride.” —Publishers Weekly

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James Ellroy—Demon Dog of American Letters—goes straight to the tragic heart of 1962 Hollywood with a wild riff on the Marilyn Monroe death myth in an astonishing, behind-the-headlines crime epic.
Los Angeles, August 4, 1962. The city broils through a midsummer heat wave. Marilyn Monroe ODs. A B-movie starlet is kidnapped. The overhyped LAPD overreacts. Chief Bill Parker’s looking for some getback. The Monroe deal looks like a moneymaker. He calls in Freddy Otash.
The freewheeling Freddy O: tainted ex-cop, defrocked private eye, dope fiend, and freelance extortionist. A man who lives by the maxim “Opportunity is love.” Freddy gets to work. He dimly perceives Marilyn Monroe’s death and the kidnapped starlet to be a poisonous riddle that only he has the guts and the brains to untangle. We are with him as he tears through all those who block his path to the truth. We are with him as he penetrates the faux-sunshine of Jack and Bobby Kennedy and the shuck of Camelot. We are with him as he falters, and grasps for love beyond opportunity. We are with him as he tracks Marilyn Monroe’s horrific last charade through a nightmare L.A. that he served to create — and as he confronts his complicity and his own raging madness.
It’s the Summer of ’62, baby. Freddy O’s got a hot date with history. The savage Sixties are ready to pop. It’s just a shot away.
The Enchanters is a transcendent work of American popular fiction. It is James Ellroy at his most crazed, brilliant, provocative, profanely hilarious, and stop-your-heart tender. It is a luminous psychological drama and an unparalleled thrill ride. It is, resoundingly, the great American crime novel.
James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles. He is the author of the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy: American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood’s a Rover, and the L.A. Quartet novels: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz. He lives in Colorado.

Frequency: A Festival of Light, Sound, & Digital Culture
2023-09-21 - 2023-09-24 | Museum of Art & History, 705 Front Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Frequency is a biennial festival of light, sound, and digital culture hosted in and around the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH). The 4-night event showcases local and global artists and integrates a variety of media-based art into the downtown landscape through illuminated artworks, interactive technologies, and immersive experiences.
From kinetic sculptures and VR screenings to projection mapping and audiovisual performances, Frequency supports the museum’s commitment to producing programs that extend beyond its walls and enhance the cultural vibrancy of Santa Cruz County. Many of the works are participatory or serve as natural draws to public spaces, sparking interpersonal connection through community storytelling and history-sharing.
For the full schedule of events and to purchase tickets, please visit: https://www.santacruzmah.org/frequency
This event is co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute.

C Pam Zhang - Land of Milk and Honey
2023-09-28 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes award-winning author C Pam Zhang (How Much of These Hills Is Gold) for a reading and signing of Land of Milk and Honey, her rapturous and revelatory novel about a young chef whose discovery of pleasure alters her life and, indirectly, the world. Zhang will be in conversation with writer Angie Sijun Lou at this event. This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
“The way Zhang writes about food and desire and human failings is exquisite—sensually detailed, at times visceral. This is a tremendous novel that explores the way people will break when the world itself is broken. Land of Milk and Honey is truly exceptional.” —Roxane Gay

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A smog has spread. Food crops are rapidly disappearing. A chef escapes her dying career in a dreary city to take a job at a decadent mountaintop colony seemingly free of the world’s troubles.
There, the sky is clear again. Rare ingredients abound. Her enigmatic employer and his visionary daughter have built a lush new life for the global elite, one that reawakens the chef to the pleasures of taste, touch, and her own body.
In this atmosphere of hidden wonders and cool, seductive violence, the chef’s boundaries undergo a thrilling erosion. Soon she is pushed to the center of a startling attempt to reshape the world far beyond the plate.
Sensuous and surprising, joyous and bitingly sharp, told in language as alluring as it is original, Land of Milk and Honey lays provocatively bare the ethics of seeking pleasure in a dying world. It is a daringly imaginative exploration of desire and deception, privilege and faith, and the roles we play to survive. Most of all, it is a love letter to food, to wild delight, and to the transformative power of a woman embracing her own appetite.
C Pam Zhang is the author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold, winner of the Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature[CE1], long-listed for the Booker Prize, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and a New York Public Library Cullman Fellow.
Angie Sijun Lou is a Ph.D. Candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at UC Santa Cruz. Her writing has appeared in ZYZZYVA, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Best Small Fictions, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from Kundiman, Bread Loaf, Tin House, California Arts Council, and elsewhere.

Sahana Ghosh – Searching for the "Illegal Migrant": Notes from the India-Bangladesh Borderlands
2023-09-29 10:00 - 11:30 | Virtual Event
Sahana Ghosh is a social anthropologist whose research focuses on the experiences of inequality and injustice at the intersection of mobility, policing, labor, and gender. Her book, A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands (University of California Press, 2023) is forthcoming. She is currently researching the gendered labors of soldiering in postcolonial India.

“Searching for the ‘Illegal Migrant’: Notes from the India-Bangladesh Borderlands” is a part of the UC Santa Cruz Center for South Asian Studies 2023-2024 lecture series, Crossings.

Humanities in the Age of AI Lunch meeting
2023-10-02 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Humanities Institute Research cluster, “Humanities in the Age of AI,” is pleased to invite you to it’s inaugural lunch meeting scheduled for October 2 (Monday) at noon in HUM 210. The research cluster boasts a diverse group of core participants. This includes six esteemed faculty members from various disciplines, graduate students representing politics, history, literature, philosophy, feminist studies, and film and visual studies, and undergraduate scholars from computer science, computational media, and creative writing.
The objective of our forthcoming meeting is dual: to foster social and intellectual connections. We aspire to cultivate a community centered on the humanities and artificial intelligence nexus. In alignment with this vision, each participant must be prepared to introduce themselves to the collective formally. Also, in each meeting, we will highlight a participant to present a project they are currently engaged with. For our inaugural luncheon, Ms. Lucia Vitale from the Department of Politics has consented to share insights from her recent study, “Artificial Intelligence and the Politics of Avoidance in Global Health.”
The Humanities Institute (THI) will graciously cater lunch. Once we have obtained our meals, we will gather and take our seats. 10 minutes has been set aside to elucidate the cluster’s overview. Following this, we will go ahead with individual introductions. After a short five-minute recess, Ms. Vitale will begin her presentation, anticipated to last for approximately 20 minutes. A structured dialogue on the topic will follow.
For those who prefer to schedule in advance, please note the dates for our brown bag meetings throughout the academic year: 10/2 (lunch provided), 11/6, 12/11, 1/8 (lunch provided), 2/12 (featuring Davide Panagia), 3/4, 4/8 (lunch provided), and 5/6. THI will graciously cater on the three specified dates. For the remaining meetings, attendees are cordially invited to bring their lunch. We are honored to have Professor Davide Panagia from UCLA present on 2/12; arrangements are underway to secure another external speaker for a subsequent session.

Climate Justice Leaders: Voices from the Pajaro Valley
2023-10-03 19:10 - 20:30 | Quarry Amphitheater
Dive into the heart of climate justice at the Center for Reimagining Leadership’s inaugural event. Join us for an enlightening panel discussion on October 3rd, 2023, as we illuminate the untold stories of the Pajaro Valley Levee Breach. Explore leadership in emergencies, environmental equity, and community resilience through the eyes of local climate justice leaders. This event goes beyond conversation – we invite you to be a part of the solution, contributing to the healing of the Pajaro Valley community. Brought to you by UCSC Center for Reimagining Leadership and moderated by Ayo Banjo. Don’t miss the chance to engage, learn, and take action for a more just world.
Panelists:
Keisha Browder, CEO United Way Santa Cruz County
Mireya Gomez Contreras, Co-Director Esperanza Community Farms
Maria Elena de la Garza, Executive Director, Community Action Board
Erika Zavaleta, Professor Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, UCSC
Moderator: National Organizer Ayo Banjo
Co-sponsored by Porter College, John R. Lewis College, College Nine, Merrill College, Oakes College, Kresge College, Cowell College, Rachel Carson College, The Humanities Institute, Office of CP/EVC, Vera Rubin Presidential Chair, The Heising-Simons Foundation, and The Center for Coastal Climate Resilience

PhD+ Series – Proactive Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion with Lorato Anderson
2023-10-05 11:30 - 13:00 | Graduate Student Commons, Room 204, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, 95064
Recommended Reading: Ely, Robin J., and Thomas, David A. “Getting Serious About Diversity: Enough Already with the Business Case.” Harvard Business Review, November-December 2020 Magazine Issue.
How do you proactively promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in your role as a graduate student, a researcher, a teaching assistant, a peer and undergraduate mentor? Learn active steps you can take in every role to promote a just and welcoming environment at UCSC in every space.
Lorato Anderson is the Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at UCSC
Lorato Anderson is the Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Graduate Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Her role centers on advancing initiatives for minoritized graduate student support across multiple campus-wide projects, as well as providing direct support to students, staff, faculty, and programs. Lorato graduated with a B.A. in Literature/Writing from UC San Diego and received her M.S. in Higher Education Administration and Policy from Northwestern University, where she researched and developed assessment models for English Language Learners and created multiple DEI programs that are still active today. She has extensive experience in grant writing, teaching, advising, assessment, and creating long-lasting research-backed programs to promote minoritized undergraduate and graduate student success.
Lorato has worked on campus since 2016 and received the 2020 Outstanding Staff Achievement Award in Social Sciences. Her previous roles include Graduate Program Advisor and Coordinator for Latin American and Latino Studies (LALS) and Politics, as well as Undergraduate Advisor for Psychology. She takes pride in incorporating social justice, as well as empathetic advising strategies and teaching pedagogies, in her work in advising, administration, and grant and program development.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2023-2024 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the eighth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted (or co-sponsored) by The Humanities Institute. Our meetings provide the opportunity to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Reimagining Leadership for Climate Science and Justice Virtual Panel
2023-10-05 17:30 - 19:00 | Virtual Event
Addressing the urgent impacts of climate change, particularly on vulnerable communities, requires us to reconsider how we approach science. It requires a new approach to scientific leadership that centers justice and diverse approaches to knowing and being in the world. This event will showcase and celebrate scholars whose scientific leadership in addressing climate change reflects the values at the foundation of the Center for Reimagining Leadership: equitable access, multimodal expertise, responsible stewardship, and accountability. The event will illuminate why the pursuit of science—and by extension scientific excellence—is inseparable from the humans who animate it.

Panel:
Cutcha Risling Baldy, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Native American Studies at California Polytechnic State University, Humboldt. Her research focuses on Indigenous feminisms, California Indians, Environmental Justice, and Decolonization. She received her Ph.D. in Native American Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Feminist Theory and Research from UC Davis and her M.F.A. in Creative Writing & Literary Research from San Diego State University. Risling Baldy is Hupa, Yurok and Karuk and an enrolled member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe in Northern California.
Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, Ph.D. is the Director of Science at the U.S. Department of Energy. She is on leave from UC Merced where she holds the Ted and Jan Falasco Chair in Earth Sciences and Geology, is a Professor of Soil Biogeochemistry, and previously served as Associate Dean for Graduate Education. She is a biogeochemist with research focus on climate change impacts on nutrient budgets in soils. She conducted the TED talk: “A Climate Solution that’s Right Under Our Feet.” Her research focus lies at the intersection of soil science, global change science, and political ecology with an emphasis on how the soil system regulates the earth’s climate and the dynamic two-way relationship between the natural environment and human communities. Berhe’s scholarship and efforts to ensure equity and inclusion of people from all walks of life in the scientific enterprise have received numerous awards and honors.
Maya Carrasquillo, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the PI of the Liberatory Infrastructures Lab (LiL) at UC Berkeley. The mission of LiL is to develop systems of critical infrastructure that support liberation and restorative justice for all. She is also the Faculty Director of the (CEE)² Community-Engaged Education program at UC Berkeley. Carrasquillo’s research focuses on sustainable and equitable urban water infrastructure, food-energy-water systems (FEWs), community engagement and community science in decision-making, and environmental and infrastructural justice. She is a certified Envision Sustainability Professional (ENV SP) and a College of Engineering Huelskamp Faculty Fellow. Carrasquillo is a recipient of the prestigious Georgia Tech Alumni 40 Under 40 award for the Class of 2022.
Alexii Sigona is a fifth year Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management with a research focus on Indigenous resource management. Alexii is involved in his tribal Youth Group and serves as Chair of Lands Committee of the Amah Mutsun Land Trust.
Moderator: Sikina Jinnah, Ph.D. is a Professor of Environmental Studies and Associate Director of the Center for Reimagining Leadership at UC Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on environmental governance in the areas of climate change, climate engineering, and the nexus between international trade and environmental politics. She is the author or editor of six books and over 50 articles and chapters. Her first book, “Post-treaty Politics” (MIT Press) received the 2016 Harold and Margaret Sprout Award for best book in international environmental affairs from the International Studies Association, and her newest book “Teaching Environmental Justice: Practices to Engage Students and Build Community” is forthcoming in fall 2023. She is an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, edits the journal Environmental Politics, and serves on the U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine Committee on Atmospheric Methane Removal. Jinnah has a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in Environmental Science, Policy and Management.

2nd Annual Filipino American History Month Festival - Tobera Project
2023-10-07 12:00 - 17:00 | Watsonville City Plaza, 358 Main St., Watsonville, CA, 95076, United States
Join the Tobera Project’s 2nd annual Filipino American History Month festival on the Watsonville City Plaza from on Saturday Oct. 7th from 12-5pm.
The event will celebrate and honor our proud and rich history here in the Pajaro Valley since the 1920’s. The festival will feature cultural arts and food vendors from the region. Guests can observe traditional music from the Southern Philippines known as kulintang, which a series large and small gongs and bells played in rhythmic patterns. There will also be a traditional marital arts demonstration, poetry by acclaimed writer Shirley Ancheta and a 3-piece instrumental jazz/ groove band called Ripplings.
Join us for this free, fun and festive community event!

This event is presented by The Tobera Project.

Never Again is Now: Japanese American Women Activists and the Legacy of the Mass Incarceration Opening Reception
2023-10-07 15:00 - 18:00 | Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery, Cowell College, Cowell College‎ 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Japanese American women who experienced the World War II mass incarceration have a long history of activism that includes protests within the camps, participation in the social movements of the 1960s, and the successful campaign for a national apology and monetary redress. They, their daughters, granddaughters, and non-binary individuals continue to invoke memories of the World War II injustice to defend the rights of all people of color in their activism and art.
Showing the powerful connection between the past and the present, this exhibit highlights how women’s historical memories helped win redress, challenged racial and gender stereotypes, promoted intergenerational ties, and developed coalitions with other communities fighting discrimination based on race, national origin, religion, immigration status, gender, and sexual orientation.

This exhibit was curated by Associate History Professor Alice Yang and sponsored by The Humanities Institute, The Humanities Division, and the California Civil Liberties Public Education Fund.

Ambassa in America featuring Arivu
2023-10-07 20:00 - 22:00 | Quarry Amphitheater, 1156 High St, Santa Cruz, CA, 95062, United States
ARIVU is a soulful composer, versatile song writer, fierce rapper and an energetic performer all fused into one package. He is best-known for his contributions in the global hit Single Enjoy Enjaami besides his hard-hitting political raps which made him one of the most powerful youth voice coming out of India.
Through his rebellious singles such as Anti-Indian, Kalla Mouni and Sanda Seivom, Arivu came to be known as a prodigal talent with the guts to speak truth to power. His first hip-hop album, THERUKURAL (2019), with Ofro, received widespread appreciation from the audience and rave reviews from critics.

Doors open at 7pm, show starts at 8pm
Presented by the Center for South Asian Studies
Arivu leads the Ambassa band, an experiment in bringing together the western elements of hip-hop, beat boxing and rock with our native sounds of Folk, Gana and Oppari. Ambassa’s mission is to piece together the scattered elements of divided humanity and make it whole again through the celebrative as well as cathartic powers of music. Ambassa is celebration and peace.
Presently, Arivu is crafting his second studio album, Valliyamma Perandi which is scheduled to be out soon. You can find Arivu on Instagram (@therukural) and Twitter (@TherukuralArivu).
Band members: Gana Balachander aka Gana B – Singer; Sarath Kumar aka Sattiyaan – Percussionist; Chris Jason aka Chris Jason – Lead Guitarist; Kevin Jason aka Kevin Jason – Bass Guitarist
Music Video Links:

Enjoy Enjaami Music Video
Kallamouni Music Video
Namma Stories | Netflix
Sagavasi | Coke Studio

Oliver Jeffers: Begin Again
2023-10-08 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes globally renowned artist and internationally bestselling author Oliver Jeffers for an event celebrating his new book BEGIN AGAIN: The Story of How We Got Here and Where We Might Go. Take a visually stunning journey through humankind’s history as Jeffers examines our shared motivations for existence in his first illustrated book aimed at a broad audience. This event, cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, includes a solo presentation by Jeffers, a moderated Q&A, and book signing.
Please visit Bookshop Santa Cruz’s website for info on attending this event:
https://www.bookshopsantacruz.com/oliver-jeffers
In his first illustrated book created specifically with a wider audience in mind, Oliver Jeffers shares a very brief history of humanity, reviews our current position, and shares his dreams for where we go from here. With his bold, iconic art, executed in a simple two-color palette, Oliver Jeffers looks at our shared motivations for existence to follow the human path from the dawn of our species through history, sharing profound, sometimes poignant, commentary on our present, and then offers a challenge: Where do we go from here? How can we create new stories and new systems that allow all of humanity to flourish? How can we journey toward a collective and robust future?
Illustrated in his world-renowned art style, Oliver Jeffers’ reflection on the patterns that have led us to where we are today, the stories we have governed ourselves by, and those we might adopt going forward, is insightful, moving, and powerful. A must-have for anyone who wants the next generation to inherit a world to be proud of.
Oliver Jeffers makes art and tells stories. His books include How to Catch a Star; Lost and Found, which was the recipient of the prestigious Nestle Children’s Book Prize Gold Award in the UK and was later adapted into an award-winning animated film; and the New York Times bestsellers Here We Are, What We’ll Build, Stuck, This Moose Belongs to Me, and Once Upon an Alphabet. He is also, of course, the illustrator of the #1 smash hits The Day the Crayons Quit and The Day the Crayons Came Home, both written by Drew Daywalt. His fine art is world-renowned and his dip-art exhibitions are much sought-after events. Originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, Oliver now splits his time between Belfast and Brooklyn, New York. Follow him @OliverJeffers.

Strawberry Picker Film Screening
2023-10-10 18:00 - 20:00 | Stevenson Event Center
The Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) Initiatives invites you to join a film screening event featuring Strawberry Picker produced by Inspira Studios. This special event has been organized in celebration and recognition of Latinx Heritage Month, and is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
Strawberry Picker is a short documentary depicting the life story of a little boy growing up in labor camps to become a world-class artist! The film provides a look at generations of struggle and resilience in the Chicano Art Community through the experiences of Watsonville-born and raised, Chicano Artist, Juan R. Fuentes.
Our special guests, Juan R. Fuentes and filmmakers, Maria Cano-Bonner and Eugenia Renteria, from Inspira Studios will join us in a panel discussion on the importance of Latinx representation in media and the arts, and the inspiration for their work.
Tuesday, October 10 from 6:00 – 8:00 PM
At Stevenson Event Center
Light refreshments will be provided!
Please RSVP if you plan to attend this event.

Visit the HSI Initiatives event webpage here.

PhD+ Series – Informational Interview with Lorato Anderson
2023-10-11 11:30 - 13:00 | Graduate Student Commons, Room 204, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, 95064
An informational interview is one that you conduct with someone working in a field for an institution or company that you want to consider working in and for. How do you conduct an informational interview? What questions should you ask to get the best information about what it’s like to do that job for that organization? How do you network to locate people to ask for an informational interview?
Lorato Anderson is the Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at UCSC
Lorato Anderson is the Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Graduate Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Her role centers on advancing initiatives for minoritized graduate student support across multiple campus-wide projects, as well as providing direct support to students, staff, faculty, and programs. Lorato graduated with a B.A. in Literature/Writing from UC San Diego and received her M.S. in Higher Education Administration and Policy from Northwestern University, where she researched and developed assessment models for English Language Learners and created multiple DEI programs that are still active today. She has extensive experience in grant writing, teaching, advising, assessment, and creating long-lasting research-backed programs to promote minoritized undergraduate and graduate student success.
Lorato has worked on campus since 2016 and received the 2020 Outstanding Staff Achievement Award in Social Sciences. Her previous roles include Graduate Program Advisor and Coordinator for Latin American and Latino Studies (LALS) and Politics, as well as Undergraduate Advisor for Psychology. She takes pride in incorporating social justice, as well as empathetic advising strategies and teaching pedagogies, in her work in advising, administration, and grant and program development.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2023-2024 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the eighth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted (or co-sponsored) by The Humanities Institute. Our meetings provide the opportunity to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Nick Mitchell – The University in Surplus Perspective, 1945-1968
2023-10-11 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Is it possible to historicize higher education without taking its basic categories for granted? In this talk, I aim to provide a historical and theoretical framework for the emergence of mass higher education in the twentieth century U.S. framed by the problem of surpluses—population, labor, and governance capacity. Faced with the prospect of mass unemployment in the wake of the second world war, U.S. state-making found in the university a means of putting wartime budget surpluses to work in an effort to absorb demobilized population and labor surpluses. The category of the college student emerges in this period as a means of anticipating and managing the potential crises attendant to modern warfare. But as it develops, it does not remain there. The university as a site for the absorption of surplus emerges as a site for the struggle over how and toward what ends surplus time—time free of and freed from the wage—might be used.
Nick Mitchell (she/her) works in the Department of Feminist Studies and the Department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz. As a researcher, Mitchell is principally engaged the status with higher education in the U.S. as a problem for historical and theoretical inquiry. As a writer, Mitchell aims to make better sense of university life-worlds by developing scales, vocabularies, and categories to reframe and rethink its rhythms and textures. These research and writing efforts can be found in essays published in Feminist Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, The New Inquiry, and Spectre, as well as in two forthcoming books: “Discipline and Surplus: Black Studies, Women’s Studies, and the Dawn of Neoliberalism” (under contract with Duke University Press) and “The University, in Theory: Essays on Institutionalized Knowledge.”

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

PhD+ Series – Curating your Digital Reputation with Lisa Nielsen
2023-10-12 11:30 - 13:00 | Graduate Student Commons, Room 204, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, 95064
Your digital reputation refers to your presence on the internet, on social media platforms and on personal and worksite websites. Learn tips on how to distinguish yourself from the crowd and create a lasting impression in an evolving digital communications landscape.
Lisa Nielsen, Senior Director of Marketing and Creative Services, University Relations
Lisa Nielsen has over 25 years of design and marketing experience in the private sector and with non-profits. From working at Apple Computer as an Art Director to running her own firm in San Francisco for 15 years, she knows what it means to be a good communicator and marketer. From startups to fortune 500 clients, her adventures in marketing have added up to a depth of knowledge which she likes to share. Lisa has been with UC Santa Cruz for 12 years as the marketing director and oversees a creative team of writers, videographers, and designers.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2023-2024 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the eighth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted (or co-sponsored) by The Humanities Institute. Our meetings provide the opportunity to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Living Writers – Thais Miller
2023-10-12 17:20 - 19:00 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Thaïs Miller is the author of the novel Our Machinery (2008) and the short story collection The Subconscious Mutiny and Other Stories (2009). She is a PhD Candidate in Literature, pursuing a Creative/Critical Writing Concentration, at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her MA in Creative Writing for Social Activism from New York University in 2011 and her BA magna cum laude with Honors in Literature and a minor in Music Performance from American University in 2009. Her short stories, dramatic writing, poetry, essays on craft, book reviews, and interviews have been published by CRAFT, Nautilus, The Los Angeles Review of Books’s PubLab, Entropy, The Common, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Carolina Academic Press, and appear in many other literary journals and magazines. For more information, visit: https://thaismiller.wordpress.com/
Sponsored by The Puknat Literary Endowment, The Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Laurie Sain Endowment, The Humanities Institute, Bookshop Santa Cruz, and Two Birds Books (where the writers’ books are available for purchase)

Festival of Monsters
2023-10-13 - 2023-10-15 | Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Monsters lurk in our culture. They rise in times of growing prejudice, discrimination and othering. The 2023 Festival of Monsters (Oct. 13-15) — hosted by the UC Santa Cruz Center for Monster Studies — explores the ways monsters and tropes of monstrosity both preserve and conflict with forms of social and cultural injustice.
Held in two locations in beautiful Santa Cruz, Calif, the 2023 Festival includes an academic conference, plus performances, readings, presentations from monster-makers, and an exhibit at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History (MAH) entitled Werewolf Hunters, Jungle Queens, and Space Commandos: The Lost Worlds of Women Comics Artists.
Authors Mallory O’Meara (The Lady from the Black Lagoon) and Jess Zimmerman (Women and Other Monsters) will give the keynote talks. Author Addie Tsai (Unwieldy Creatures) will read and discuss her book, which is a queer, nonbinary, biracial retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
The full schedule of activities, event information, and registration can be found at: https://www.monsterstudies.ucsc.edu/2023festival
Sponsors include the Arts Research Institute of UC Santa Cruz, UC Santa Cruz Arts Division, The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, Porter College, the UC Santa Cruz Foundation Board and private donors. Additional support provided by Bookshop Santa Cruz.

Linguistics Colloquium: Ryan Bennett
2023-10-13 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Ryan Bennett, UC Santa Cruz: “Vowel deletion as grammatically-controlled gestural overlap in Uspanteko”
Uspanteko (Mayan) is spoken by ~5000 people in the central highlands of Guatemala. Unstressed
vowels in Uspanteko often delete, though deletion is variable within and across speakers. Deletion
appears to be phonological, being sensitive to phonotactics, foot structure, vowel quality, and
morphology; and being largely insensitive to speech rate and style. But deletion also appears to be
phonetic in character, reflecting extreme vowel reduction rather than symbolic deletion: it is variable,
gradient, insensitive to certain phonotactics, and opaque with respect to accent placement.
Electroglottography data suggests that even apparently ‘deleted’ vowels may contribute voicing to
[C(V)C] intervals, albeit inaudibly. We thus analyze deletion as grammatically-controlled gestural
overlap, which masks vowels in [CVC] contexts, either in the phonology proper (e.g. Gafos 2002) or
as part of a grammar of phonetic interpretation (e.g. Kingston & Diehl 1994).
Over the course of each year, the Linguistics department hosts colloquia by distinguished faculty from around the world.
For full speaker and event information, please visit: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/colloquia/index.html

PhD+ Series – Plática with the authors of The Latinx Guide to Graduate School
2023-10-13 14:00 - 15:30 | Cervantes and Velasquez Conference Room, Bay Tree Building, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join us for a delightful conversation and book talk with Dr. Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales and Dr. Magdalena Barrera, authors of The Latinx Guide to Graduate School.
Graduate Students are invited to meet with the authors from 2-3:30pm to learn about the unwritten rules for surviving and thriving in graduate school including strategies for writing and finding school/work/life balance.
Join us at the Cervantes and Velasquez Conference Room (on the 3rd Floor of the Bay Tree Building).
There will be 10 copies of the book available for the first 10 students to check in. The book is also available online through McHenry Library.

More about the authors:

Dr. Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales is an interdisciplinary scholar of immigration and education. Her academic, activist and community work focuses on the ways undocumented young people are changing the political and legislative terrain around “illegality” and belonging in this country. Her work lies at the intersection of education, immigration, and social movements. She is the co-author of Encountering Poverty: Thinking and Acting in an Unequal World (2016, University of California Press) and co-editor of We Are Not DREAMers: Undocumented Scholars Theorize Undocumented Life in the United States (2020, Duke University Press).

Dr. Magdalena L. Barrera is the inaugural Vice Provost for Faculty Success. In this role, she provides thought leadership for the division on all aspects of faculty recruitment, onboarding, and professional advancement within a Minority Serving Institution context. Her work is informed by a deep commitment to recruiting and retaining diverse faculty who bring asset-minded pedagogies to the classroom. A former first-generation student, Dr. Barrera holds a bachelor’s degree in English literature and Latin American Studies from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University. She began her faculty career at SJSU in 2008, following a postdoctoral teaching fellowship in Stanford’s Introduction to the Humanities program.

There will also be an Undergraduate Session from 10-11:30am.
This event is presented by GANAS Graduate Program and HSI Initiatives. THI is proud to be co-sponsoring this event.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the eighth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted (or co-sponsored) by The Humanities Institute. Our meetings provide the opportunity to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

micha cárdenas - Atoms Never Touch
2023-10-16 18:30 - 20:00 | Two Birds Books, 881 41st Ave, Santa Cruz, CA, 95062, United States
Join us in celebrating the debut of Atoms Never Touch by micha cárdenas; forward by adrienne maree brown.
Jumping to alternate realities sounds great, if you’re in control. But what if you’re not? What if you’re propelled away from the people and places you love the most in the blink of an eye? And what if these involuntary journeys happen because your neurochemistry is different, and your brain works differently?
Beautiful, compassionate, and resourceful as she is, this is Rea’s problem. A latina trans woman and an academic, she is beloved by a tight circle of friends, who fully accept her without knowing the cause of her disappearances. But she is haunted by the lovers and family that she cannot trace back to, and fears she might be separated from them forever.
Each time she transits into a new time and space, everything shifts—even the films and writing Rea produces readjust their molecules to match her new quantum reality. But Rea, a brilliant lay scientist, is determined to crack the code, and end her quest for lasting connections and home.
Now available for preorder. Order now from AK Press or one of the participating bookstores, and you’ll get a free set of 3 Atoms Never Touch stickers!
Preorder Atoms Never Touch here: https://www.akpress.org/atoms-never-touch.html
Fierce, poignant sci-fi, about hacking, love, and resistance.
Praise for Atoms Never Touch:
“A shockingly powerful, wrenchingly beautiful queer cyberpunk fable from debut novelist and veteran artist micha cárdenas. In this slim yet unforgettably striking story, cárdenas shows us the world we live in through a dark mirror, transforming the language of cybernetics, quantum physics, and neurobiology into haunting metaphors for heartbreak, social struggle, and revolution…Cárdenas fearlessly plumbs the depths of her characters’ terror and trauma as they resist the depredations of fascism and digital surveillance, but also infuses her novel with hope, healing, and possibility.” —Kai Cheng Thom, author of Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir
“I see this book as in the lineage of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, an explicitly quantum exploration of the possibility of ancestral love. I love the characters and the queer questions they raise with their living. And I love the message, which is that love is the code, love is the pass, love is the key, love is all, love is all, love is all.” —Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Undrowned
“What more could we ask for? T4T love and sex, anti-government sabotage, travel through the multiverse! Atoms Never Touchis nourishment for radicals surviving the current apocalypse.” —Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (and the Next)
micha cárdenas is a multidisciplinary artist, poet, and filmmaker. She is Associate Professor of Performance, Play and Design, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
adrienne maree brown is a writer rooted in Detroit who now lives in Durham, NC. She is a student of the works of Octavia E. Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin. Her books include Octavia’s Brood, Emergent Strategy, Grievers, and Maroons. Her visionary fiction has appeared in The Funambulist, Harvard Design Review, and Dark Mountain.

PhD+ Series – Mastodon, Threads, X: Promote Research on Text-Based Social Media Platforms
2023-10-17 11:30 - 13:00 | Graduate Student Commons, Room 204, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, 95064
Ready to promote your research on social media? This seminar will help you learn how! Explore how to promote your research and expertise on the text-based social media platforms Mastodon, Threads, and X (formerly Twitter). We’ll cover how to use each platform, how each works, how to communicate effectively on each platform and how to pick the right platform for you and your goals.
Kayla Isenberg is senior director of digital engagement for UC Santa Cruz, where she runs digital strategy for the main campus social media properties and advises on divisional and other social media accounts across campus. She has over 15 years of experience in digital marketing and social media working for a variety of companies from startups to Fortune 500. She was listed on the Forbes 40 under 40 list for her work at Warner Bros Records. In her work in higher education she has won multiple CASE awards for her work in digital marketing and social media at UC Santa Cruz and been a featured speaker at CASE social media conferences.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2023-2024 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the eighth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted (or co-sponsored) by The Humanities Institute. Our meetings provide the opportunity to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

National Endowment for the Humanities Q&A
2023-10-17 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
Please join us on Tuesday, October 17th from 12:00-1:30 p.m. for a virtual open forum Q&A with Program Officers from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
This event will be guided by faculty questions. If you would like to submit questions for the Program Officers in advance, please fill out this form.
We will be joined by the following NEH Program Officers:

Sheila Brennan, Senior Program Officer, Office of Digital Humanities
Madison Hendron, Program Officer, Division of Research Programs
Hannah Schell, Program Officer, Division of Education Programs

Sheila A. Brennan is a Senior Program Officer in the Office of Digital Humanities and team lead for the Dangers and Opportunities of Technology: Perspectives from the Humanities grant program. She is formerly the Director of Strategic Initiatives at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and Research Associate Professor in the department of history and art history at George Mason University. She has managed more than thirty digital humanities projects and trained many students and professionals in digital methods. She is the author of an open access digital monograph, Stamping American Memory: Collectors, Citizens, and the Post (Michigan 2018). She has a PhD in American and digital history from George Mason.
Madison Hendren is a Program Officer in the Division of Research Programs where she has worked since November 2020. At NEH, she oversees the John W. Kluge Fellowships review and is a member of the Collaborative Research program management team. Prior to joining NEH, she earned a Ph.D. in Italian studies from the University of Chicago (December 2020). Her dissertation considered the function of games and contests in Boccaccio’s Teseida.
Hannah Schell is a Program Officer in the Division of Education Programs. She holds a B.A. in philosophy from Oberlin College and earned her Ph.D. in religion from Princeton University. Prior to joining the NEH in 2022, she worked with the Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education, a program of the Council of Independent Colleges, and served seventeen years on the faculty of Monmouth College in Illinois. Schell is co-author of Christian Thought in America: A Brief History (Fortress Press).

PhD+ Series – Preparing the Teaching Statement and Portfolio
2023-10-18 11:00 - 13:00 | Graduate Student Commons, Room 204, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, 95064
Gain tools and tips for effectively writing a teaching statement, a common document in faculty hiring and review processes and an opportunity to reflect on how your teaching supports student learning. We’ll also review how to select teaching portfolio materials that tell a compelling story of who you are as an educator.
Kendra Dority, left, Director for Graduate Student and Postdoc Professional Development. Roxanna Villalobos, right, Education Specialist for Graduate Student and Postdoc Development.
Kendra Dority, Ph.D., has been an engaged member of the teaching and learning community at UC Santa Cruz since 2009, serving as a Teaching Fellow and Teaching Assistant in the Literature Department and as a Lecturer at Porter College before joining the Teaching and Learning Center (TLC) in 2017. With the TLC, she directs professional development opportunities for graduate students and postdocs in their roles as teachers and mentors, and enjoys uplifting the contributions of these educators to our campus community and beyond. She received her Ph.D. in Literature from UCSC.
Roxanna Villalobos, Ph.D., has been an engaged member of the teaching and learning community at UC Santa Cruz since 2017, serving as a Graduate Student Instructor and Teaching Assistant in the Sociology Department and as a Graduate Student Mentor through various mentoring programs. Roxanna joined the Teaching and Learning Center (TLC) in 2023 as an Educational Specialist after receiving her Ph.D. in Sociology and Latin American and Latino Studies from UC Santa Cruz. In this position, Roxanna develops and facilitates research-based professional development programs, workshops, and resources focused on equity-minded and inclusive teaching for graduate students and postdocs across all disciplines.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2023-2024 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the eighth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted (or co-sponsored) by The Humanities Institute. Our meetings provide the opportunity to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Martina Broner – From Arboreal to Aerial: Seeing the Amazon from Above
2023-10-18 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Can seeing the Amazon from above bring about new perspectives on the forest at a critical time? This talk proposes that the documentary Helena Sarayaku manta (dir. Eriberto Gualinga, 2021) rethinks the aerial view by pushing against its historical associations with omniscience and a desire for mastery and by reframing it instead around the vitality of the forest in a site that resists exploitation: the Indigenous territory of Sarayaku in the Ecuadorian Amazon. As I examine the role of trees in the film’s production, I argue that Helena Sarayaku manta achieves this new aerial grammar through an attunement to the arboreal.
Martina Broner’s research sits at the intersection of Latin American cinema and media studies and the environmental humanities. Her book manuscript, “Forest Formats: Media and Environment in the Amazon,” examines new media formats that emerge from entanglements between human and other living entities in the transnational Amazon rainforest. She is assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Dartmouth.

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

Living Writers – J. Vanessa Lyon
2023-10-19 17:20 - 19:00 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
J. Vanessa Lyon is the author of Lush Lives (an inaugural title of Roxane Gay Books/Grove Atlantic), the Audible Original The Groves, and Meet Me in Madrid, written under the pseudonym Verity Lowell. A James Baldwin fellow at MacDowell and Bread Loaf Contributor in Nonfiction, she received a PhD in the history of art from UC Berkeley and teaches visual culture–with a focus on race, queerness, and gender–at Bennington College in Vermont.
Sponsored by The Puknat Literary Endowment, The Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Laurie Sain Endowment, The Humanities Institute, Bookshop Santa Cruz, and Two Birds Books (where the writers’ books are available for purchase)

The Micro as Macro: Narrating World Histories of Science, Technology, and Environment
2023-10-20 08:30 - 18:00 | Virtual and In Person
The Center for World History presents the fourth Graduate Student Conference: “The Micro as Macro: Narrating World Histories of Science, Technology, and Environment” in Humanities 1, Room 210 (and online), 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.
While world history topics have expanded recently to include diverse areas, the Euro-American experience continues to dominate scholarship and is often treated as the assumed global model. The UCSC Center for World History’s fourth graduate student conference explores non-European places and actors by centering on techno-scientific, environmental, sensorial, and spatial-based themes that reveal how the relationship between “small” subjects like microorganisms have shaped world history in ways that challenge or reimagine conceptions of progress and development. With this in mind, this conference will focus on histories spanning from 1700 to the present that tell global stories through small subjects such as viruses, cotton seeds, and metal alloys. By inviting a wide range of chronological and geographic loci, we hope to expand our definition of world history to one that does not default toward Euro-American experiences.
The program is available here.
Register for online participation here.
Dr. David Fedman, Associate Professor of History at UC Irvine and author of Seeds of Control: Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea, will deliver the keynote address.
This is a hybrid conference. To attend virtually, please register here. If you can join in person, we would love to see you in Humanities 1, room 210.
Conference Organizing Committee: Clara Bergamini, Piper Milton, Alexyss McClellan-Ufugusuku, Jinghong Zhang
Free and open to the campus community and the public.

Santa Cruz Pickwick Club
2023-10-22 13:00 - 15:00 | Virtual Event
Please join the Santa Cruz Dickens Fellowship and the Santa Cruz Pickwick Club for our monthly Pickwick Club meeting. New this year, we will be devoting an entire year to one novel instead of two, and will dive deeply into Great Expectations. Join Dickens enthusiasts and Pickwick Club members for a series of discussions about this book.

Charles Dickens depicts how a gentleman is made, not born, in this novel. Presented as Pip’s confessional autobiography, Great Expectations describes his childhood at the forge, his infatuation with the beautiful Estella, his shame at his working-class origin and his eagerness to be a gentleman, and eventually his life as a young man-about-town with “great expectations” of inheriting a fortune. Recalling these events as an adult, Mr. Pirrip is frank about his mistakes and shortcomings.
Recommended Edition: We recommend the Penguin Classics edition of the novel for its appendices and notes, but other versions are fine. First-time readers should avoid the Introduction if they don’t want spoilers. Download the novel to read at Gutenburg.org or to listen at LibriVox.org.
If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to reach out at dpj@ucsc.edu

Natalia Molina – A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community
2023-10-23 16:00 - 18:00 | Alumni Room, University Center, CA, United States
Natalia Molina, Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and Dean’s Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, will visit our campus and chapter on Oct. 23-24, 2023 as part of the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Program. Since 1956, the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Program has offered undergraduates the opportunity to spend time with some of America’s most distinguished scholars. Professor Molina will meet with UCSC students and faculty in classes and small settings, and she will present a public lecture on A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community, her award-winning book, which chronicles the lives of immigrant workers, including Molina’s grandmother, who became placemakers, nurturing and feeding their communities at restaurants that served as urban anchors.
The public lecture will be held on Monday, October 23 at 4:00 p.m. in the University Center Alumni Room, followed by reception and book signing at 5:00 p.m.
Bio: Professor Natalia Molina, a 2020 MacArthur Fellow, researches and writes about the interconnected histories of race, place, gender, culture, and citizenship. She is the author of three award-winning books: How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts; Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1940; and, most recently, A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community, which the Los Angeles Times includes on its “Ultimate L.A. Bookshelf.”
This event is being presented by the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Program and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute and the Latin American and Latino Studies Department.

PhD+ Series – LinkedIn Profile and Job Search with Eric Curiel
2023-10-24 11:30 - 13:00 | Graduate Student Commons, Room 204, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, 95064
Eric Curiel, Associate Director of Career Engagement
LinkedIn is a powerful tool to network and search for jobs. We will go over tips to update your LinkedIn profile to help recruiters find you. We will also explore ways to identify alumni with similar career paths and interests and show you how to effectively connect with them to expand your network. We will also go over best practices for searching for jobs.
Eric Curiel has worked for over nine years in supporting college students in pursuing successful careers and currently serves as associate director of career engagement at Career Success. He is passionate about supporting students, especially those from underrepresented populations, to be successful. He completed his bachelor’s degree in ecology and evolution from UC Santa Cruz in 2014. Eric enjoys being outdoors, photography, and watching soccer.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2023-2024 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the eighth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted (or co-sponsored) by The Humanities Institute. Our meetings provide the opportunity to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Rosanna Xia: California Against the Sea
2023-10-24 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes environmental journalist Rosanna Xia, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, for a conversation with UCSC professor Gary Griggs about her new book California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline. This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
“Just as the coast defines the liminal world between land and sea, so too does Rosanna Xia’s remarkable book exist in the overlap between development and erosion, between geological forces and human desire, between our ambitious past and our tenuous future. It’s viscerally urgent, thoroughly reported, and compellingly written—a must-read for our uncertain times.” —Ed Yong, author of An Immense World

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Rosanna Xia investigates the impacts of engineered landscapes, the market pressures of development, and the ecological activism and political scrimmages that have carved our contemporary coastline—and foretell even greater changes to our shores. From the beaches of the Mexican border up to the sheer-cliffed North Coast, the voices of Indigenous leaders, community activists, small-town mayors, urban engineers, and tenacious environmental scientists commingle. Together, they chronicle the challenges and urgency of forging a climate-wise future. Xia’s investigation takes us to Imperial Beach, Los Angeles, Pacifica, Marin City, San Francisco, and beyond, weighing the rivaling arguments, agreements, compromises, and visions governing the State of California’s commitment to a coast for all. Through graceful reportage, she charts how the decisions we make today will determine where we go tomorrow: headlong into natural disaster, or toward an equitable refashioning of coastal stewardship.
Rosanna Xia is an environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times, where she specializes in stories about the coast and ocean. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2020 for explanatory reporting, and her work has been anthologized in the Best American Science and Nature Writing series.
Gary Griggs is a Distinguished Professor of Earth & Planetary Sciences at UC Santa Cruz. He is the author of 13 books, including most recently, The Ominous Ocean (2022). The California Coastal Commission and Sunset named him one of California’s Coastal Heroes in 2009, and in 2010 he was elected to the California Academy of Sciences. Gary is also a member of the California Ocean Protection Council’s Science Advisory Team and 2023 Sea-Level Rise Task Force.

PhD+ Series – Disrupting Imposter Phenomenon from the Inside Out with Silvia Austerlic
2023-10-25 11:30 - 13:00 | Graduate Student Commons, Room 204, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, 95064
Silvia Austerlic, Founder, Senti-pensante Connections; Lecturer, Oakes College
Have you ever felt imposter phenomenon? Learn how to cultivate a growth mindset to disrupt it and move toward empowering ways of learning.
Silvia Austerlic is an intercultural educator, facilitator and consultant, and founder of Senti-pensante Connections, whose mission is to bridge inner work and social justice in service of individual transformation, social change, and collective action. A lecturer at UCSC Oakes College, she developed and teaches “Building an inner sanctuary,” that fosters the cultivation of inner/outer resources needed to show up for community-oriented action and social justice; and facilitates campus-wide learning events surrounding critical interculturality, self-leadership, healing justice, and fostering resilience and care in the community.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2023-2024 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the eighth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted (or co-sponsored) by The Humanities Institute. Our meetings provide the opportunity to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

PhD+ Series – Demonstrating Success: Creating an Equitable, Accessible, and Inclusive Academic Environment with Judith Estrada
2023-10-26 11:30 - 13:00 | Graduate Student Commons, Room 204, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, 95064
Judith Estrada, Assistant Vice Chancellor, Office for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (ODEI)
This session will review UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley’s Contributions To Diversity Statement Guidelines, rubrics, and assessment tools. Participants will engage each other in dialogue about their experiences in applying various pedagogical approaches, research frameworks, and community engagement initiatives that contribute to more equitable, accessible, and inclusive academic environments. The participants will leave with an understanding of how two universities evaluate statements of diversity and equity.
Judith Estrada (Ph.D., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) is the assistant vice chancellor for the Office for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at UC Santa Cruz. Estrada publishes and presents nationally on the following themes: bicultural pedagogy, decolonizing methodologies, working across differences, pedagogy of solidarity, and critical bicultural pedagogy. Estrada is the author of Consuming ‘Dora the Explorer’ with a Critical Bicultural Lens (in Darder’s Culture & Power in the Classroom, 2012); Impacts of a Diné Decolonizing Pedagogy on Student Affairs Practitioners (in Davidson, C., & Waterman, S., eds., Indigenous Education Practices in Higher Education); and A Series of Reflections of Diné Elder Larry Emerson and His Indigenizing Impact on Our Participation in the Profession (in NASPA Journal).

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2023-2024 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the eighth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted (or co-sponsored) by The Humanities Institute. Our meetings provide the opportunity to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Living Writers – Deborah Landau
2023-10-26 17:20 - 19:00 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Deborah Landau is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Skeletons (‘23). Her other books include Soft Targets (winner of The Believer Book Award), The Uses of the Body, and The Last Usable Hour, all Lannan Literary Selections from Copper Canyon Press, and Orchidelirium, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the Robert Dana Anhinga Prize for Poetry. In 2016 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
The Uses of the Body was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, and included on “Best of ″ lists by The New Yorker, Vogue, BuzzFeed, and O, The Oprah Magazine, among others. A Spanish edition, Los Usos Del Cuerpo, was published by Valparaiso Ediciones in 2017.
Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, American Poetry Review, Poetry, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, The Yale Review, and The New York Times, and included in anthologies such as The Best American Poetry, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation, Not for Mothers Only, Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now, The Best American Erotic Poems, and Women’s Work: Modern Poets Writing in English.
Landau was educated at Stanford University, Columbia University, and Brown University, where she was a Javits Fellow and received a Ph.D. in English and American Literature. She is a Professor at NYU, where she directs the Creative Writing Program, and she lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Sponsored by The Puknat Literary Endowment, The Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Laurie Sain Endowment, The Humanities Institute, Bookshop Santa Cruz, and Two Birds Books (where the writers’ books are available for purchase)

Project Paradiso: A Gateway to Dante’s Heaven - Episode One – Introduction – A Restless Paradise
2023-10-27 09:00 - 10:30 | Virtual Event
Dante’s Paradiso is the least studied and the least understood of the three parts of the Commedia. Yet it is arguably the most important for the dynamism and originality of the literary, theological, and philosophical inquiries that take place there. It is also a singularly important interpretive guide for a full understanding of the entire Commedia. It is a poem that asks to be tackled by a community of engaged readers: here it’s your opportunity! This year-long series of webinar workshops led by world-renowned scholars will take you on a deep reading of the Paradiso and an unforgettable journey to the heart of Dante’s universe. This virtual series will reward both first-time and expert readers of the Commedia with an opportunity to delve deep into one of the most complex and daring speculative poems ever written. We’ll be meeting online almost every other week from October to May. See the Project Paradiso page for full schedule.

Episode One – Introduction – A Restless Paradise, featuring:
Filippo Gianferrari is originally from Modena, Italy. He has received a BA and MA in Letteratura italiana from the Università degli Studi di Bologna, and a Ph.D. in Medieval Studies from the University of Notre Dame. After completing his Ph.D., he taught at Vassar College and Smith College. He has been part of the Literature Department at UCSC since 2019. He works on Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, lay education, and political theology in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. He is interested in the ways literature and education (particularly literacy) intersect with and inform each other. He has published mostly on the topic of Dante’s intellectual formation and he has completed a monograph titled “Dante’s Education: Latin Schoolbooks and Vernacular Poetics.” The book investigates Dante’s debts to his earliest school readings and his critical stance toward contemporary education. His attention is now devoted to the study of vernacular theories and visions of political charity and eschatology.
Ron Herzman is Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus at the State University of New York, Geneseo. In addition to Geneseo, where he continues to teach Dante, he has taught Dante at Georgetown University, St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New York University, Regis High School, and Attica Correctional Facility. He has directed eighteen Summer Seminars for Schoolteachers through the National Endowment for the Humanities, twelve of which were on Dante in Italy. With his colleague Bill Cook, he teaches the Divine Comedy through a twenty- four-lecture course available through the Great Courses series produced by The Teaching Company. Together with Cook, he was the recipient of the first CARA Award for Excellence in Teaching Medieval Studies from the Medieval Academy of America. He has written over fifty articles and reviews on Dante, with emphasis on Dante and the Franciscans, and on Dante and the visual arts. The Medieval World View (Oxford University Press, with Bill Cook), now in its third edition, has been in print since 1984. With Richard Emmerson, he is the author of The Apocalyptic Tradition in Medieval Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994).
Presented by the Humanities Institute and the Department of Literature Italian Studies. Sponsored by the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Siegfried and Elizabeth Mignon Puknat Literary Studies Endowment, and Porter College

Linguistics Colloquia: Yael Sharvit
2023-10-27 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Yael Sharvit, UCLA
Over the course of each year, the Linguistics department hosts colloquia by distinguished faculty from around the world.
For full speaker and event information, please visit: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/colloquia/index.html

PhD+ Series – Conflict Resolution with De Acker
2023-10-31 11:30 - 13:00 | Graduate Student Commons, Room 204, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, 95064
De Acker, Campus Ombuds, Office of Ombuds
We will explore ways to identify when a conversation is becoming “crucial” before you walk into one. This interactive workshop will help you identify your own styles and how you can address conflict in high-stakes conversations more effectively. The goal is to develop strategies to meet specific challenges that may arise in your academic, work, and personal life.
De Acker comes to UC Santa Cruz with more than three decades of UC experience. She served as director of the UC Santa Barbara Women’s Center for 12 years before joining UC Merced to serve as the assistant dean of the School of Natural Sciences. After founding the campus’s first ombuds office, she went on to establish the UC Merced Office of Campus Climate, which coordinated campus diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. De also served as a staff advisor to the UC Board of Regents from 2014-2016.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2023-2024 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the eighth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted (or co-sponsored) by The Humanities Institute. Our meetings provide the opportunity to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

PhD+ Series – Curriculum Vitae with Veronica Heiskell
2023-11-01 11:30 - 13:00 | Graduate Student Commons, Room 204, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, 95064
Veronia Heiskell, Director of Experiential Learning and Student Employment, Career Success
Applications for academic positions require a CV, and some alternative-academic employers also require them. Learn how a CV differs from a resume, about hybrid CV-resumes, what goes on a CV, and what order to put information depending on type of academic institution you’re applying to and for what type of position.
Veronica Heiskell has worked for over thirteen years in diversity and career centers in a variety of higher education institutions and currently serves as associate director of experiential learning at Career Success. Her goal is to remove as many barriers as possible for all students to pursue meaningful experiential learning opportunities. She completed her bachelor’s degree in psychology with a minor in LGBT studies at UCLA, her master’s degree in counseling and guidance in higher education at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and her doctoral degree in higher education administration at UT Austin. Her dissertation research focused on sense of belonging for exploratory students.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2023-2024 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the eighth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted (or co-sponsored) by The Humanities Institute. Our meetings provide the opportunity to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.
