World Wounds: The Damming of the Nile River and the Transformation of Medicine The damming of the Nile River transformed agriculture and human health in twentieth-century Egypt. While dams enabled year-round irrigation and provided hydroelectricity, the prevalence of parasitic disease also skyrocketed. Professor Derr explores the effects of damming the Nile on the health of […]

All AI (algorithmic intelligence) companies claim they are pursuing the next logical step in digital—perhaps even human—evolution. But, the development of AI is clearly shaped by a wide range of untethered belief systems from obscure German philosophy to The Lord of the Rings. There is nothing logical about it. It is unreasonable to make AI […]

On April 6, 2026, the Graduate Training in Southeast Asia (GETSEA) consortium and UCSC’s Center for Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions will host two short films highlighting the challenges to art and expression in Malaysia’s complex political, legal, and societal landscape. Sotong follows four fierce local drag queens who were part of the 2022 Halloween party raided […]

This talk will look at various musical genres in North Africa to explore the history of a region that is at the crossroads of Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. How is music an expression of the cultural diversity of the region? How have musicians played a central political role from the colonial period to […]

Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes bestselling author Suzanne Simard (Finding the Mother Tree), a scientist who pioneered the concept of sophisticated communication between trees. Simard will share her highly anticipated new book When the Forest Breathes, in which she offers a powerful vision for saving our forests based on nature's deep-rooted cycles of renewal. "A masterclass […]

Oceans of Dissent will serve as a feminist gathering to forge new vernaculars of the geopolitical, to assemble spatial imaginaries of the “oceanic” that refuse rather than relent to the insistent march of capital and empire. Our deliberations will foreground inter-linked landscapes across multiple oceanic field-formations, to expand settled narratives of region, historiography, aesthetics and […]

Bookshop Santa Cruz and The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz welcome acclaimed author Colm Tóibín (Long Island, Brooklyn) for a discussion about The News from Dublin, a brilliant collection of nine short stories, many never-before-published, set across Ireland, Spain, and America—about the complexities of family, longing, loss, and love. Celebrated as "his generation's most […]