The Humanities Institute

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(1)
Transitive: ERG subject, OBJ object

Caan-nim
paa-‘yaX-n-a
‘inii-ne

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

John found a house.

(2)
Intransitive: NOM subject

Sue
hi-pay-n-a

Sue
3SUBJ-arrive-P-REM.PAST

Sue arrived.

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

(3)
Caseless transitive: NOM subject, NOM object

Caan
hi-‘yaaX-n-a
‘iniit

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

John found a house.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tony Michels: "The Roots of Jewish Socialism: From New York to Russia and Back"
2011-01-11 12:00 - 13:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
In the late nineteenth century, a socialist workers’ movement burst onto the scene in New York City’s immigrant Jewish “ghetto.” Over subsequent decades and in cities around the country, hundreds of thousands of men and women participated in this Jewish labor movement. They recast Jewish culture and community, and made a strong imprint on American politics and social movements. Where did the Jewish labor movement come from? According to an old and widespread misperception, immigrants transplanted radical traditions from Russia onto American soil. In fact, the reverse was true. In the 1880s and 1890s, most immigrants first discovered socialism in New York and other cities. They built the Jewish labor movement from scratch without support from Russia. Indeed, New Yorkers provided crucial assistance to Russian Jewish revolutionaries, enabling to start a workers movement of their own.
Tony Michels is a graduate of UC Santa Cruz (Stevenson, ’89) and is now a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His book, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York, won the Salo Baron Prize from the American Academy for Jewish Research for the best first book in Jewish Studies. Michels is editor of the forthcoming book Jewish Radicals: A Documentary History and co-editor of the Cambridge History of Judaism: The Modern Era, to be published in 2013. He is currently writing a history of Jewish Communists and Anti-Communists in the United States.

Nick Montfort: "Line of Inquiry: Many Authors Explore Creative Computing Through a Short Program"
2011-01-10 15:00 - 17:00 | Engineering 2 Room 506, Engineering 2, 1156 High St‎ University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The following one-line Commodore 64 BASIC program:
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
continually generates a pleasing random maze pattern. In this talk, I argue that this tiny program can serve as a Rosetta Stone to help us understand the interconnected cultural and technical aspects of creative computing, practices of using the computer expressively and recreationally in innovative ways. These began in the late 1950s and include the making of computer games as well as other types of amusing and aesthetic programs. By analyzing this short program from multiple viewpoints, I, along with a group of authors who are collaborating with me on this project, aim to show that there are several specific methods that are useful in reading code deeply and insightfully. In my talk, I will discuss how different printed variants of this program exist, how it is written in a particular programming language with a history, and how it executes on a particular platform with a history. I will describe how writing ports to other platforms and creating other variants of this program has helped us understand which of its qualities are most significant and why. Finally, I will describe how the program engages randomness, iteration, visualization, and other wider topics, such as our changing perception of mazes, helping us to understand computing as it relates to culture.
Nick Montfort writes computational and constrained poetry, develops computer games, and is a critic, theorist, and scholar of computational art and media. He is associate professor of digital media in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is now serving as president of the Electronic Literature Organization. He earned a Ph.D. in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania.
He collaborated on the blog Grand Text Auto, the sticker novel Implementation, and 2002: A Palindrome Story. He writes poems, text generators, and interactive fiction. Montfort has co-edited The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1 (ELO, 2006) and The New Media Reader (MIT Press, 2003) and written Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (MIT Press, 2003), Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, (with Ian Bogost, MIT Press, 2009) and Riddle & Bind (Spineless Books, 2010).

Catherine Fortin: In Defense of LF Copying: Some Whys and Hows
2010-12-03 15:30 - 17:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Abstract: It is well known that the distribution of wh-remnants in sluices, unlike the distribution of wh-phrases in non-elliptical questions, is largely immune to island effects, as illustrated by the contrast below.
(1) Irv and someone were dancing together, but I don’t know who. (Ross 1969)
(2) * Irv and someone were dancing together, but I don’t know whoj [DP Irv and tj] were dancing together.
Within generative syntactic frameworks, the generation of sluicing uncontroversially involves some type of ellipsis, but the exact nature of the ellipsis remains an open question. The two primary approaches to sluicing, ‘PF Deletion’ (Ross 1969, Merchant 2001, inter alia) and ‘LF Copying’ (Chung, Ladusaw, and McCloskey 1995 (CLM), Lobeck 1995, inter alia), differ fundamentally in their account of the above contrast. Under PF Deletion, sluices are derived identically to non-elliptical questions, via wh-movement, and islandhood is a property of PF representations only. Under LF Copying, in contrast, wh-remnants are base-generated clause-peripherally.
In this talk, I have three goals. First, I seek to provide fresh motivation, assuming a standard Minimalist framework (Chomsky 1995, 2008), for LF Copying. Second, I propose the outline of a Minimalist-minded LF Copying approach. Finally, I argue that this approach uniquely accounts for the empirical problem posed by languages which subvert the Preposition Stranding Generalization (Merchant 2001), which predicts that only languages which allow preposition stranding in non-elliptical questions will allow prepositions to be deleted under sluicing.
Presented by the Linguistics Research Center, UCSC. For more information, please contact Debbie Belville at irc@ling.ucsc.edu.

Elaine Sullivan: “The Temple of Amun-Ra at Karnak: 2000 Years of Rituals and Renovations”
2010-12-02 17:00 - 18:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Dr. Sullivan is currently project coordinator for the Project for the Implementation o f an
Undergraduate Humanities Curriculum in Digital Cultural Mapping at UCLA. She has
excavated at the Greco-Roman site of Karanis in the Egyptian Fayoum for the past two
seasons as part of the UCLA project at the site.
Poster availablehere.
For more information, please contact hedrick@ucsc.edu

Ethan Michaeli: The Holocaust and 'The Defender:' Two Generations of Jewish Reporters at a Black Newspaper
2010-12-02 14:00 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 620, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Ethan Michaeli will explore how The Chicago Defender, the nation’s most important African American newspaper for much of the twentieth century, covered the Holocaust. During the 1940s, the newspaper’s multi-racial roster of writers, including a young Jewish editor named Ben Burns, connected the struggle of African Americans for equal rights to Nazi persecution of Jews. Burns worked closely with poet Langston Hughes and others who placed the Holocaust in the top rank of their concerns. But Burns, who had started his journalistic career at the Communist publication The Daily Worker, did not address the Holocaust directly as a Jew. Instead, he subsumed his Jewish identity and re-cast himself as a “black newspaperman, black in my orientation and thinking, in my concerns and outlook, in my friends and associations, black in everything but my skin color.” A half-century later, from 1991-1996, Ethan Michaeli worked as a copy editor and investigative reporter at The Defender, during a period in which the newspaper was still one of three dailies in Chicago. For Michaeli, the child of Holocaust survivors from Hungary, working at The Defender provided a vantage point to re-evaluate American society, as well as his own identity.
Bio: Ethan Michaeli is the author of the forthcoming book, The Defender: How Chicago’s Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America, from the Age of the Pullman Porters to the Age of Obama (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, forthcoming). In 1991, Michaeli began working for The Chicago Defender, the historic African American-owned daily newspaper, where his investigative reporting on the homeless, environmental racism, and police brutality won him awards from the Chicago Association of Black Journalists and the Muhammad Ali Foundation. In 1996, Ethan launched Residents’ Journal, an independent news magazine written for and by tenants of Chicago’s low-income public housing developments. He and the staff of Residents’ Journal have won numerous honors, including the 2006 Studs Terkel Award, and his writing has appeared in The Nation, The Chicago Tribune, In These Times, and The Forward. Michaeli’s social justice work is inspired by his parents, who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp and the Nazi occupation of their native Budapest before emigrating to Israel in 1949 and the United States in 1963.

Anna Brickhouse: “The Writing of Unsettlement”
2010-12-01 12:00 - 14:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
This talk discusses the narrative of Hernando Fontaneda de Escalante, a 16th century former captive and a Creole man born in Cartagena de Indias, who lived for seventeen years among the Calusa Indians of Florida. His account is considered one of the most extensive repositories of information about the Calusa, yet it has received little sustained attention from literary scholars. The presentation explores how his text engages juridically with Spanish conquest, resulting in the emergence of a genre we might call a “narrative of unsettlement.”
Anna Brickhouse is Professor of English at the University of Virginia.
Sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies with staff support provided by the Institute for Humanities Research, UCSC.

Deann Borshay Liem: Film: "IN THE MATTER OF CHA JUNG HEE"
2010-11-22 17:00 - 18:30 | Communications 150, Studio C
The Asian Diasporas Research Cluster at the Institute of Humanities Research is pleased to present the following film screening:
IN THE MATTER OF CHA JUNG HEE (2010)
preceded by a documentary short-in-progress on the Korean War, MEMORY OF THE FORGOTTEN WAR,
and followed by Q & A with filmmaker, Deann Borshay Liem
Poster available here.
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2010, 5 p.m.
COMMUNICATIONS 150/STUDIO C
(building located between Baskin Engineering and College 9/10)
About the film: Her passport said she was Cha Jung Hee. She knew she was not. So began a 40-year deception for a Korean adoptee who came to the US in 1966. Told to keep her true identity a secret from her new American family, this eight-year-old girl quickly forgot she was ever anyone else. But why had her identity been switched? And who was the real Cha Jung Hee? In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee documents the search to find answers. Part mystery, part personal odyssey, the film follows acclaimed filmmaker, Deann Borshay Liem, as she returns to her native Korea to find her “double,” the mysterious girl whose place she took in America. Traversing landscapes of memory, amnesia, and identity, while also uncovering layers of deception in her adoption, Borshay Liem’s moving and provocative film probes the ethics of international adoption and reveals the costs of living a lie.
About the filmmaker: Deann Borshay Liem has over twenty years experience working in development, production, and distribution of independent documentaries. She is producer, director, and writer for the Emmy Award-nominated documentary, First Person Plural (Sundance, 2000), and executive producer for Spencer Nakasako’s Kelly Loves Tony (PBS, 1998) and AKA Don Bonus (PBS, 1996, Emmy Award). She served as co-producer for Special Circumstances (PBS, 2009), which follows Chilean exile, Hector Salgado, as he attempts to reconcile with former interrogators and torturers in Chile. She was the former director of the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) where she supervised the development, distribution, and broadcast of new films for public television and worked with Congress to support minority representation in public media. A Sundance Institute Fellow and a recipient of a Rockefeller Film/Video Fellowship, Borshay Liem is the director, producer, and writer of the new feature-length documentary, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee.
Co-sponsored by Oakes College, the Asian American/Pacific Islander Resource Center, the Department of Film and Digital Media, the Social Documentation Program, the Department of History, and Stevenson College, this event is free and open to the public. For more information, please contact Christine Hong at cjhong@ucsc.edu. For disability-related needs, please contact AA/PIRC at 459-5349 or aapirc@ucsc.edu.

A Conversation with Michael Scherer
2010-11-22 17:00 - 18:00 | Kresge Seminar Room 159, Seminar Room Bldg‎ University of California Santa Cruz, University of California Santa Cruz: Kresge College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
A Conversation with Michael Scherer – White House Correspondent for TIME Magazine and UCSC Literature/Creative Writing Alum.
Questions? Contact: Micah Perks meperks@ucsc.edu
Flyer is available here.

Amy Rose Deal: A-thematic possessor raising, object shift, and the grammar of valencet
2010-11-19 15:30 - 17:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Presented by the Linguistics Research Center, UCSC. For more information, please contact Debbie Belville at irc@ling.ucsc.edu.

Earll Kingston
2010-11-18 18:00 - 19:00 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Earll Kingston, a fourth generation Californian, has performed with many Bay Area Theatres including the Berkeley Rep, The Magic Theatre, The Aurora Theatre, and Anima Mundi. While living in Hawaii he acted in various episodes of “Hawaii 5-0” and “Magnum P.I.”. From 1990 to 1997 Kingston performed “Down The Great Unknown” at the Grand Canyon and at various venues around the U.S. Since 1994 he has assisted his wife, the writer Maxine Hong Kingston, in creating writing and meditation communities for the survivors of war and trauma.
Sponsored by the Asian Diasporas Research Cluster with staff support from the Institute for Humanities Research, UCSC; Sponsorship from the Asian American/Pacific Islander Resource Center, Poets & Writers, Inc. with funding from The James Irvine Foundation, co-sponsorship from the Porter College George Hitchcock Poetry Fund, Literature Department, Laurie Sain Creative Writing Endowment, Kresge College Writing Center, and Cowell College Press, UCSC.

Dean Mathiowetz: “Haptic Hierarchy: Luxury as Political Affect”
2010-11-17 12:00 - 14:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
This talk explores luxury as one way that hierarchy, social distance, and subordination are felt affectively by bodies in consumption-oriented societies. The project seeks to upend a tradition of social thought that interprets luxury consumption as an other-directed, visually-mediated, and easily-subverted “language” of hierarchy and class. Professor Mathiowetz is a political theorist and the author of Appeals to Interest: Language, Contestation, and Political Agency (Penn State, 2011).
Dean Mathiowetz is Associate Professor of Politics at UCSC.
Sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies with staff support provided by the Institute for Humanities Research, UCSC.

The University We Are For
2010-11-05 15:30 - 18:00 | Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley, Townsend Center For Humanitiesmore info‎ 220 Stephens Hall, Berkeley, CA, 94720, United States
Please see full posterfor speaker list and complete announcement!
The academy has been under considerable pressure recently, both fiscally and fueled by new pressures on
knowledge formation, and on pedagogical, and organizational form. The university as such has come into
question, both within and without. This understandably has prompted both anxiety and critical responses
among faculty, students, research and administrative staff. At the same time, there has been much less
focus on the university we might be for, that which we might work together to promote, whether in the
tradition of Bishop Newman’s or Jan Pelikan’s reflections on “the idea of the university” or in Jacques
Derrida’s critical conception of the university without condition. The distinguished panel will lead a
discussion of “the university we are for”. Please join us in the second of a series on what should be a
dynamic discussion of a set of issues crucial to the contemporary academy.
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Mario Garcia: "Rediscovering and Rethinking the Chicano Movement: A Historian's Quest"
2010-11-04 16:00 - 17:30 | Humanities 1, Room 520, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join us for the second talk in the Unfinished Revolutions Lecture Series:
Mario Garcia: “Rediscovering and Rethinking the Chicano Movement: A Historian’s Quest”

Workshop on the Future of the Humanities w/ David Theo Goldberg (UCHRI)
2010-11-04 12:30 - 14:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
At this critical time in the history of our university and the academy, in general, please join us for a workshop on the future of the Humanities led by David Theo Goldberg, Director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI).
Goldberg, a professor at UC-Irvine, is a ground breaking scholar of critical race theory and an award winning film-maker. The UCHRI administers a wide range of programs for scholars, including Multicampus Research Groups, President’s Faculty Research Fellowships, Residential Research Groups, Community Outreach and Teaching Grants, Extramural Explorations, and others.
Panelists include:
Jim Clifford
Professor Emeritus, History of Consciousness
Nathaniel Deutsch
Professor of History and Literature
Director, Institute for Humanities Research
Co-Director, Center for Jewish Studies
Gail Hershatter
Professor and Chair, Department of History
Former Chair, Pacific Rim Research Program Executive Committee
Eric Porter
Professor and Chair, Department of American Studies
UCSC campus representative to UCHRI
Steering committee member, UC Center for New Racial Studies
If you would like to meet with David Theo Goldberg to talk about a specific UCHRI program after the workshop, please contact Irena Polić, ipolic@ucsc.edu
For further information and questions please contact: ihr@ucsc.edu

Joan Judge: "The Courtesan’s Other: Visibility, Sexuality, and the Republican Lady in Early Twentieth Century China"
2010-11-03 16:00 - 17:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
In this richly illustrated lecture, Joan Judge explores the emergence of “Republican Ladies,” a new group of women in early twentieth century China, who were more visible than their talented late imperial forebears and more respectable than their infamously public courtesan contemporaries. She draws upon photographs and texts that appeared in China’s first commercial women’s journal, Funü shibao 婦女時報 (The women’s eastern times, Shanghai 1911-1917), a journal committed to calling the new Republican woman into being. In her talk, Judge probes the links between this self-conscious reconstitution of Chinese womanhood and the constitution of early Republican culture and politics.
Poster available here.
Joan Judge, Associate Professor in the Department of History and Division of Humanities, York University, Toronto

Pacific Rim Research Program 2011-12 Call for Proposals & INFORMATIONAL MEETING
2010-10-29 13:00 - 14:00 | Namaste Lounge – College 9, Namaste Lounge, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Interested faculty and graduate students are welcome to learn more about the Pacific Rim Research Program grants during this informational meeting.
The current Call is now available from the PRRP website at: http://pacrim.ucsc.edu. Here is a snapshot of what is offered this year.
FACULTY GRANTS
Initiative: This is a new thematically focused grant in the range of $30-50,000, which may be expended over a multi-year period. For the 2011-12 grant competition, the PRRP invites Faculty Initiative Grant applications on the topic “Responses to Crisis in the Pacific Rim.” (3-5 grants in this category will be awarded for 2011-12).
Research/planning: Enable investigators to refine a hypothesis or line of inquiry, develop a strategy for implementation, and share or disseminate research findings. The workshop and planning grant program provides up to $25,000 to UC faculty and graduate students for conferences, workshops, and other collaborative research endeavors. (4-6 grants in this category will be awarded for 2011-12).
GRADUATE STUDENT GRANTS
Advanced Graduate Research Fellowship: Research Fellowships support graduate students in a year of dissertation research or its equivalent. Graduate students may apply for a maximum of $20,000 for a year of dissertation or similar advanced research. (10+ grants in this category will be awarded for 2011-12).
The three types of applications above are reviewed and eight are selected by our campus committee (see Call for required documents and procedures). The mandatory UCSC campus review deadline is December 1, 2010. The eight selected to go to the PRRP Executive Committee will be due by February 18, 2011.
For all deadlines and application guidelines, please see the Call for Proposals and Guidelines, available at http://pacrim.ucsc.edu or from your PRRP campus liaison, Lisa Nishioka, pacrim@ucsc.edu or 831/459-2833.

CHRISTOPHER DURT: "Galileo and the Emergence of Modern Philosophy"
2010-10-28 16:00 - 17:00 | Cowell Conference Room, Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Philosophy graduate student Christopher Durt will give the following talk, “Galileo and the Emergence of Modern Philosophy,” as a Work in Progress.
Come join us!

John Mraz: "Photographing the Mexican Revolution: Commitments, Icons, Documents"
2010-10-26 16:00 - 17:30 | Humanities 1, Room 520, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
John Mraz will examine the photography made during the armed struggle, 1910-1920, through a profusely illustrated lecture. He will then place particular emphasis on identifying the commitment of photographers to different groups in Mexico by looking at five Revolutionary icons.
John Mraz is a Research Professor at Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico.
This series is sponsored by: the UC Santa Cruz Chicano/Latino Research Center; UCSC Departments of History; History of Art and Visual Culture; Latin American and Latino Studies; and by Oakes College.

Open Access Day at McHenry Library
2010-10-22 15:00 - 18:00 | McHenry Library (3rd Floor), Special Collections
Open Access Week is an annual international event promoting the idea that scholarly research should be freely and openly available. For Open Access Week 2010, the University Library is sponsoring an afternoon event where about a dozen faculty members representing each of the academic divisions will talk about the ways in which they are making their research, data and teaching resources freely accessible. Please join us, starting at 3:00 pm, for an opportunity to see how UCSC researchers across the disciplines are addressing open access publishing. You are welcome to stay as long as you like. Refreshments will be served.
Schedule of speakers available here.

Ruth Mueller: “Bound to Nothing but Science Itself? Academic Life Science Careers and the Nomadic Disposable Research Scientist”
2010-10-20 17:30 - 19:00 | Humanities 1, Room 420, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Ruth Mueller is a contract researcher at the Department of Social Studies of Science and a lecturer at the Faculty of Life Sciences and the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Vienna.
She will present: “Bound to Nothing but Science Itself? Academic Life Science Careers and the Nomadic Disposable Research Scientist,” at UCSC on Wednesday, October 20, 2010.
Donna Haraway has argued that “the exclusion of the non-independent person” (Haraway 1997) has been constitutive for the social organization of the emerging modern sciences, practically excluding everyone but the bourgeois white man from participating in scientific knowledge production, in part because the multiple others were perceived as socially and emotionally bound, attached and tied. Drawing on recent research work in Austria and the US, this talk will look into how independence, tielessness and detachment are essential features of the scientific self in the contemporary socio-epistemic configurations of the academic life sciences. It look at how the ideal scientific person – especially in fast growing, highly global and increasingly commercialized fields such as the life sciences – is still imagined as being tied to nothing but science itself, happily subordinating other interests in life to the scientific vocation.
Against a backdrop of rising competition for academic positions, it seems that in the life sciences and in academia beyond, increasingly normative ideas are emerging about what a scientist’s life course should look like in order to qualify for a career in science. Central elements of this normative vision include engaging in international mobility and global competition, as well as submitting to ongoing procedures of evaluation, application and selection. Together, these requirements constitute a kind of “blueprint” for measuring the quality of the scientists’ work and the suitability of their lives for careers in research – a blueprint which has become institutionalized in the employment and assessment policies of contemporary academic institutions.
These contemporary career rationales both draw on and rework the notion of the detached, independent, tieless scientists on a number of levels, participating in the shaping of a nomadic, disposable research scientist who is accumulating nothing “but the absence of inhibition, a sort of free energy prepared to invest itself anywhere.” (Latour 1984)
However, at any given moment in time, these scientists are also part of specific local collectives – such as research group, project teams – in which they work and live. This paper will explore how young scientists make sense of these different forms of collectivity in their local research environments, given the current career rationales that emphasise individualism, competition, mobility and tielessness. I will argue that what we are currently witnessing is a trend towards the institutionalization of highly fragile and exploitative social relations in academic settings and of a “devil-may-care” mentality towards colleagues, groups and institutions that young scientists increasingly consider an obligatory trait for making a career in the life sciences today.

Angela Davis: Legacies in the Making
2009-10-31 09:00 - 2009-11-01 13:00 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Recognizing the Academic, Activist and Cultural Interventions of a Contemporary Visionary
For almost four decades, Angela Y. Davis’s scholarship and activism has defined the meaning and practice of being a public intellectual and has radically transformed many sites of knowledge production, including the positioning of the U.S. academy as a site of intervention and social transformation. Few professors have had such a broad impact in their fields of expertise or on the world in their lifetimes. This gathering of her former students, in conversation with scholars nationally, maps the impact of her vision on issues such as democratic theory, philosophy, Marxism, cultural studies/popular culture, social policy, race, class, and feminisms. Professor Davis has also trained students as activist scholars for almost four decades in both university systems in California. We thus convene this conference to examine the poetics and politics of Professor Davis’s pedagogy in California over the past forty years (1969-2009) and to consider how her role as an activist-scholar-teacher bridges the academy/community divide and dismantles the false dichotomy of theory/praxis.
One focus of the event will be to highlight cultural production that has emerged in conversation with the writing and theorizing that Angela Davis has facilitated and inspired. We are inviting Professor Davis’ colleagues, friends, and family to provide video messages recognizing her considerable on-going contributions to academic and activist work; these will be compiled into a montage to be screened at the symposium. The event, as a whole, will be recorded, and we plan to liaise with the California Documentary Fund to translate those records into a multi-media resource for education. There will also be an evening of music and poetry in honor of Professor Davis and her contributions to cultural “legacies in the making.”
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Humanities Lecture Hall
9:00 am – Breakfast
9:15 am – Screening The Fire This Time, a trailer of a film by Blair Doroshwalther
9:45 am – Welcome
10:00 am – Panel 1: Voices of Resistance
Facilitator: Rashad Shabazz, George Washington Henderson Post Doctoral Fellow, Geography, University of Vermont
W. Mark Cobb, Theoretical Transmission and Creative Defiance: Angela Davis and Intergenerational Politics
Che Gossett, Kiyoshi Kuromiya and the Legacy of Queer and Trans Anti-Prison Activism
Jordan T. Camp, The Sound Before the Fury of the Oppressed
Andrea Smith, The Color of Violence: Angela Davis and the Radicalization of the
Anti-Violence Movement
11:30 am – Panel 2: Race, Gender, and Politics
Facilitator: J. Kehaulani Kauanui, American Studies, Anthropology, Wesleyan University
Erik McDuffie , “I was walking a path… already established by my mother”: Black Left
Feminism and the Making of Angela Y. Davis’ Black Feminist Scholarship and Activism
Jack Jackson, Passing Class Notes: How Queer
Maylei Blackwell, Multiple Insurgencies: Women of Color Feminisms, Genealogies of
Resistance
1 pm- 2:30 pm Lunch
Public Secrets: An Interactive Art Installation by Sharon Daniel, Professor, Film & Digital Media, Humanities 210
2:30 pm – Panel 3: Cultural Legacies
Facilitator: Kevin Fellezs, School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts, UC Merced
Sherrie Tucker, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism-in-the-Making: Reflections from the
Women’s Studies Classrooms of Angela Davis in the 1980s and 1990s
Roya Rastegar and Susy Zepeda, To “expand and make more capacious our notion of
freedom”: The Women of Color Research Cluster and Film Festival
Sujatha Moni, When Home becomes a Prison, does Prison become Home? Reflections on
Violent Diasporic Displacement in Jag Mundhra’s film, Provoked
Michelle F. Erai, Civilizing Images: Violence and the Visual Interpellation of Maori women
4-4:15 pm Break
4:15 pm – Panel 4: Are Prisons Obsolete?
Facilitator: Sora Han, Criminology, Law and Society, UC Irvine
Elizabeth Alexander, Reframing the Idea of the Prison-Industrial Complex
Leslie Patrick, “Are Prisons Obsolete?”: If Only It Were So–A Tribute to Angela Davis’ Foresight.
Lizbet Simmons, Angela Davis and the Terrains of Justice: Schools, Prisons, and New Orleans
Cassandra Shaylor, “Lectures on Liberation” to “Lectures on Abolition”: Angela Davis and New Terrains of Struggle
5:45-7 pm – Reception, Humanities 202
7 pm – Introduction: Maylei Blackwell
Screening: Mountains that Take Wing – Angela Davis & Yuri Kochiyama: A Conversation on Life, Struggles & Liberation, a film by C. A. Griffith and H. L. T. Quan (QUAD Productions © 2009)
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Humanities Lecture Hall
9:30 Breakfast
9:45 Welcome
10 am-noon Panel: Legacies in the Making Panel
Facilitator: Bettina Aptheker, Professor of Feminist Studies and History, UC Santa Cruz
Neferti Tadiar, Women’s Studies, Barnard College, “Lifetimes in Becoming Human”
Saidiya Hartman, English, Columbia University, “A Little History of Abolition Dream Book”
Jacqui Alexander, Women’s Studies & Gender Studies, U of Toronto, “Working the Conjunctions: Angela Davis & the Radicalization of Oppositional Praxis”
12-12:15 pm – Break
12:15-12:30 Piano Performance: Anthony Davis (Kevin Fellezs, introduction)
12:30 pm – Screening: Angela Y. Davis and Radical Pedagogy, a film by Angela N Carroll and Eric Stanley
1:00 pm – Closing Remarks: Angela Davis
—–
Photo by John Lee and poster design by Arianne Archer.
Event Sponsored by: University of California Humanities Research Institute Conference Grant, The Siegfried B. and Elisabeth Mignon Puknat Endowment, the UCSC Center for Cultural Studies, the UCSC Institute for Humanities Research, UCSC Faculty Against the War, History of Consciousness Department, UCSC Vice Chancellor for Research, UCSC Arts Division, UCSC Chief Diversity Officer, Community Studies, Feminist Studies, Latin American and Latino Studies, Merrill College, Oakes College, Philosophy, Porter College, Literature, Cowell College, American Studies, Languages, Politics, Psychology, and Stevenson College.
Conference Organizing Committee:
Maylei Blackwell, Christopher Connery, Michelle Erai, Carla Freccero, Irena Polić, Shann Ritchie, Trevor Joy Sangrey, Eric Stanley, Gregory Youmans, with additional assistance from Bettina Aptheker, Kevin Fellezs, Sora Han, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Natalie Purcell, and Rashad Shabazz.
Staff Assistance provided by the UCSC Institute for Humanities Research.

A Reading by Monique Truong
2009-10-07 19:00 - 20:30 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The University of California, Santa Cruz Center for Labor Studies Presents
In Collaboration with UCSC’s Living Writers Reading Series:
A Reading by Internationally Acclaimed Novelist Monique Truong

Monique Truong is the author of the “poetically rendered and literally savory” 2003 novel, The Book of Salt, the fictional story of a gay Vietnamese cook who worked for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Paris during the 1920s and 30s, and his previous life in Vietnam. Truong was born in Saigon in 1968 and moved to the U.S. at the age of six. She graduated from Yale University and Columbia University School of Law. The Book of Salt among other honors received the 2003 Bard Fiction Prize, the Stonewall Book Award-Gittings Literature Award, and the Young Lions Fiction Award, and was given an Award of Excellence from the Vietnamese American Studies Center at San Francisco State University. Truong is also the co-editor of Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose, with Barbara Tran and Luu Truong Khoi, and numerous essays and works of short fiction. Truong’s new book, Bitter in the Mouth, will be published by Random House in 2010.
The UCSC Center for Labor Studies is funded by the Miguel Contreras Labor Fund of the University of California Office of the President, and co-sponsored by the UCSC Division of Humanities.
The UCSC Living Writers Reading Series is hosted by the Creative Writing Program of the Literature Department. In addition to the Miguel Contreras Fund, this event was generously supported by a Diversity Fund Grant from the UCSC Campus Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor, and by Poets & Writers, through a grant from the James Irvine Foundation, and co-sponsored by the Asian American and Pacific Islander Resource Center, the East Asian Studies Studies Program, the Porter College George Hitchcock Poetry Fund and the Laurie Sain Creative Writing Fund.
For more information or accommodations, contact the UCSC Institute for Humanities Research, ihr@ucsc.edu, (831) 459-5655. For maps, maps.ucsc.edu.
Click here to view the event poster as a PDF.
