The Humanities Institute

The Living Writers Reading Series: George Estreich
2013-05-30 18:00 - 19:45 (America/Los_Angeles) | Unnamed Venue, Humanities and Social Sciences Facility, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
George Estreich is a poet and the author of the memoir, The Shape of The Eye, winner of the Oregon Book Award. “The Shape of the Eye is a memoir of a father’s love for his daughter, his struggle to understand her disability, and his journey toward embracing her power and depth. Estreich is raw and honest and draws us each into a new view of what it means to be ‘human’ and what it means to be ‘different’. This book is beautifully written, poetically insightful, and personally transformative. To read it is to rethink everything and to be happy because of the journey.” –Timothy P. Shriver, Ph.D., Chairman & CEO of Special Olympics

Humanities Undergraduate Research Award (HUGRA) Presentations
2013-05-30 16:00 - 17:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Stay tuned for more information.

Celebrating the Humanities Spring Awards
2013-05-30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Event Photos:

Center for Cultural Studies Colloquium - Eng-Beng Lim: "The Rice Queen's Brown Boy Dream: On Pedophilic Modernity, Performance and Queer Asia"
2013-05-29 12:15 - 14:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
“The Rice Queen’s Brown Boy Dream: On Pedophilic Modernity, Performance and Queer Asia”
Eng-Beng Lim works on transnational, Asian and queer issues through the lens of performance. His current work is on cultural pedagogies of neoliberal Asia that are produced on the one hand by large-scale transnational theatrical productions and on the other hand by global satellite campuses of U.S. universities in Singapore, Shanghai, Abu Dhabi.
Eng-Beng Lim is Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University.

The Living Writers Reading Series: Lauren Shufran, Tsering Wangmo, and Juliana Leslie
2013-05-23 18:00 - 19:45 | Unnamed Venue, Humanities and Social Sciences Facility, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Lauren Shufran is the winner of The Motherwell Prize. Her poetry collection Inter Arma will be published be Fence Books in Spring, 2013.
Tsering Wangmo’s first book of poems, Rules of the House, was published by Apogee Press in 2002 was a finalist for the Asian American Literary Awards in 2003. Other publications include My Rice Tastes Like the Lake (Apogee Press 2011) and In the Absent Everyday (also from Apogee Press). A book of creative non-fiction will soon be published in India from Penguin.
Juliana Leslie’s first book, More Radiant Signal, came out in 2010 from Letter Machine Editions. Her second book of poetry, Green Is For World, winner of the National Poetry Series, will be published this year by Coffee House Press.

Neil Sinhababu: "Desire's Explanations"
2013-05-23 16:00 - 17:30 | Humanities 1, Room 320
I defend a Humean theory of motivation on which desire motivates all action and drives all practical reasoning. I respond to objections from Christine Korsgaard, David Velleman, and others suggesting that this view leaves no room for the self in action. I argue that all the agent’s desires are part of the self, and that their effects include the self’s decision and action.
Neil Sinhababu is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at National University of Singapore. He works on Ethics and Metaethics.

Anthony Barbieri-Low: "Imagining the Tomb of the First Emperor of China"
2013-05-23 04:30 - 20:30 | Cowell Conference Room, Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The UCSC Society of the Archaeological Institute of America and the President’s Chair in Ancient Studies present a lecture in an ongoing series on “Archaeology and the Ancient World”
The tomb complex of the First Emperor of China is arguably the most important archaeological site in the world. Since the tomb will not be excavated in our lifetime, if ever, imagination will always play a major role in trying to understand what is in the tomb. Ever since the Emperor was first interred, authors, artists, and archaeologists have tried to reconstruct and imagine what lies in his tomb. Such reconstructions allow the imaginer to project his fears, hopes, and expectations on the site, and can tell us even more about the imaginers than it does about the world they imagine. This talk will explore how historians, poets, artists, archaeologists, movie directors, and video-game designers have imagined the First Emperor’s underground realm.
Talk begins at 5:00 pm, refreshments served at 4:30 pm, with a reception following lecture.
Anthony Barbieri-Low is Associate Professor of Early Chinese History at UC Santa Barbara. He graduated from UCSC in 1994 with a degree in History, and went on to receive his M.A from Harvard and Ph.D. from Princeton. He has wide-ranging research interests in many aspects of Early China, including technology, organization of production, labor history, gender and social relations, legal process, material culture, and state formation. In 2007, he published the book Artisans in Early Imperial China, which went on to receive four major international book prizes in ancient history, art history, and Chinese studies. He has just completed a book-length translation and study of ancient Chinese legal texts and is preparing another book on interpretations of the First Emperor of China.
Free parking for lecture in Cowell-Stevenson parking lots. For more information on the lecture or the AIA, please contact hedrick@ucsc.edu.

Center for Cultural Studies Colloquium - Michael Nauenberg: "Teaching Natural Philosophy in the Age of Enlightenment"
2013-05-22 12:15 - 14:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
“Teaching Natural Philosophy in the Age of Enlightenment”
Michael Nauenberg has published on the foundations of quantum mechanics and has written extensively on the development of calculus in the seventeenth century with particular reference to the work of Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and John Barrow. His current work is on Newton’s development of celestial mechanics and gravitation.
Michael Nauenberg is Research Professor of Physics at UCSC.

U.S. Fulbright IIE Information Session
2013-05-22 10:00 - 11:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
The Graduate Division cordially invites undergraduate and graduate students to an information session on the U.S. Fulbright IIE fellowship program.
If you are interested in applying for a 2014-2015 Fulbright U. S. Student Program Grant or English Teaching Assistantship plan to attend this information session.
Link to the competition: http://www.iie.org/fulbright
Presenters will include:
Past successful Fulbright IIE applicants
Marlene Robinson, UCSC Fulbright Advisor
Dr. Tyrus Miller, UCSC Graduate Division Dean and Past Fulbright Awardee
Please RSVP to Irena Polić, at ipolic@ucsc.edu, by May 17th.
Press Release: Fulbright U.S. Student Program Competition Opens: International Study or Research Grants and English Teaching Assistantship Now Available

Lisa Lowe: "Sugar, Tea, Opium, and Coolies: The Intimacies of Four Continents"
2013-05-20 16:00 - 17:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Lisa Lowe
This lecture examines the fetishism of colonial commodities as a mediation of often obscured connections between the transatlantic African slave trade to the Americas, settler colonialism, the import of Asian indentured labor, the East Indies and China trades, and the emergence of European liberal ideas of citizenship, wage labor, and free trade in the late-18th and early-19th centuries.
Lisa Lowe is a professor of English and American Studies at Tufts University and a scholar in the fields of comparative literature, and the cultural politics of colonialism and migration. Before joining Tufts, she taught in the Literature Department at UC San Diego for over two decades. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the UC Humanities Research Institute, the American Council of Learned Societies, the School of Advanced Study – University of London, and the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. Lowe is the author of Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Cornell UP), Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Politics (Duke UP), and coauthor of The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Duke UP). Her current project, The Intimacies of Four Continents, is a study of the global conditions for liberal economy, knowledge, culture, and politics.
Seminar with Lisa Lowe:
Tuesday, May 21, 2013 • 11:00 AM • Humanities 1 Building, Room 210
To receive the seminar readings, please contact Courtney Mahaney at cmahaney@ucsc.edu.

This event is organized and sponsored by the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Program. Cosponsored by the University of California Center for New Racial Studies, the Division of Humanities at UCSC, the UC Presidential Chair in Feminist Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Oakes College, and Stevenson College.

International Playhouse XIII
2013-05-19 20:00 - 22:00 | Stevenson Event Center
The Language Program, Cowell College, and Stevenson College cordially invite you and your students to attend a performance of The Miriam Ellis International Playhouse XIII (IP), an annual multilingual program of fully-staged short theater pieces, now in its 13th season. Four public performances will be held on May 16, 17, 18, 19, at 8:00 PM at the Stevenson Event Center and will feature works in French, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish, with English super-titles. The program will be directed by Language lecturers, working with their students. There is no admission charge; however, evening parking permits are required for the Thursday and Friday performances. Parking permits will be available by attendant in the Cowell/Stevenson lower parking lots (#109/110) for $4.00. Those already in possession of a valid “A”, “B”, or “C” permit do not need to purchase an additional permit to park during evening hours.
This year’s works include excerpts from (French) LE MALADE IMAGINAIRE (The Hypochondriac) by Molière, directed by Miriam Ellis; (Italian) NATIVITÀ (Nativity) by La Smorfia, directed by Giulia Centineo; (Japanese) THE VAMPIRE CABBIE by Murakami, directed by Sakae Fujita; (Spanish) LAS LUCIÉRNAGAS DEL CARIBE (Caribbean Fireflies) by Carballido, directed by Marta Navarro.

Grant McGuire: "Separating voice prototypicality and stereotypicality"
2013-05-17 16:00 - 17:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Current theories of speech perception emphasize the demonstrated role of direct experience in voice processing where greater experience with a voice or voice type results in various processing advantages. This talk describes early results from a project examining the role of stereotypes, or more abstracted representations not necessarily based in direct experience, in the processing of voices. Specifically, we will detail the role various voice types play in phonetic accommodation, the phenomenon where a talker adapts properties of another talker’s voice.
Grant McGuire is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at UC Santa Cruz and recipient of an IHR Faculty Fellowship (2012-13). His primary research interest is in speech perception. He received his PhD in Linguistics from Ohio State University (Phonetic Category Learning, 2007) and has published research articles on perceptual learning in adults and infants, audio-visual speech perception, and gender effects on speech perception.

Ad Neeleman: "Person: Inventory and Realization"
2013-05-16 16:00 - 17:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
“Person: Inventory and Realization” is a joint work with Peter Ackema, of the University of Edinburgh.
In this presentation Dr. Neeleman will develop a theory in which person features are more abstract than usually assumed: they do not refer to speaker or addressee, but are rather used to navigate a ‘person space’ . The theory is confronted with two typological problems.
(i) Why is the inventory of persons so limited? Why aren’t there 30 persons? (In this context 30 is not a random number, but represents the number of potential persons.)
(ii) What explains the typological observation that syncretism between first and third person is much rarer than syncretism between either first and second, or second and third person (Baerman et al. 2005, Baerman and Brown 2011)?
If time allows, he will discuss also Dutch as a case study. In this language there are two person endings that arrange themselves in such a way that there is a 2-3 syncretism in the regular case, a 1-2 syncretism under subject-verb inversion, and an optional 1-3 syncretism with a particular lexical class of verbs (modals).
Ad Neeleman is Professor of Linguistics at University College London. His research focuses on syntactic theory and the interaction between the syntax and syntax-external systems. He received his PhD from Utrecht University (Complex Predicates, 1994) and is the author of some forty research papers and two books (Flexible Syntax, 1999, with Fred Weerman, and Beyond Morphology, 2004, with Peter Ackema). His current research deals with linear asymmetries in syntax, the grammar of person and the linguistic representation of causation.
This event is presented by he Crosslinguistic Investigations in Syntax-Phonology Research Cluster, and sponsored by the UC Humanities Network. Staff support provided by the Institute for Humanities Research. For more information, including disabled access, please contact: Shann Ritchie, (831) 459-5655, sritchie@ucsc.edu. Maps: maps.ucsc.edu.

Richard Miskolci: "Undisciplined studies & the (geo)politics of knowledge"
2013-05-15 17:00 - 19:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Challenges for a North-South dialogue
Why does knowledge continue to travel only from North to South? To understand the powerful continuity in this exchange, this presentation will start with a historical reconstitution of its creation and functioning. Even in an increasingly decentered world we still witness the hegemony of academic exchange in which North produces theories and South is seen as a space for collecting data or applying Northern theories to particular cases. Knowledges are created under institutional frames that connect them to power interests. During the end of 19th century, for example, evolutionism created a kind of alliance between intellectual and ruling classes in different parts of the world. Later, after World War II, this same alliance was recreated with a new objective: spreading a modernization ideal based on the assumption that West – the US in particular – was the model for the Rest (of the world). Beginning with the 1960s, with the historical event Foucault called “the insurgence of subalternized knowledges”, we saw the rise of a set of studies connected to once overlooked inequalities inside the so called West. These studies challenged the old ways of creating knowledge and connected their work to the interest of subalternized groups like women, people of color, gays, lesbians, colonized peoples, and, more recently, queer persons. Unfortunately, this important historical inflection that created specific fields like feminist, post-colonial and queer studies has not changed the flux of knowledge production from North to the South.
What are the reasons behind this continuity even in fields committed to subalternized people and experiences? Why are feminist, post-colonial, racial/ethnic, and queer studies made in the South not seen as interlocutors in the North? Why isn’t Southern intellectual production circulated or taken into account in Northern genealogies of the so-called “studies”? Have “studies” been dragged into the academic battles inside US and Europe to conquer their internal institutional space while overlooking their possible allies in the South? Why – in a decentered world – do “studies” keep the global South in the position of a silent interlocutor that appears in generalized assumptions of contemporary production subsumed under expressions like international, transnational and global? Finally, what are the challenges to create a North-South dialogue? This presentation will try to address these questions and present some hypotheses, but its main objective is not to give any final answer or present a solution. The idea is to promote the discussion about how knowledge committed to subalternized people and social change can reproduce – and even reinforce – unfair power relations outside the borders in which it is created.
Richard Miskolci is Professor of Sociology at the Federal University of São Carlos in São Paulo state, Brazil, and Researcher at Núcleo de Estudos de Gênero Pagu, UNICAMP. A key figure in the debate on queer theory in Brazil, Miskolci has authored several books, including Thomas Mann, the Mestizo Artist (2003), O desejo da nação: masculinidade e branquitude no Brasil de fins do XIX (2012) and is the editor of Dissident Sexualities (2007), the first Brazilian Queer Studies anthology. Dr. Miskolci is a Visiting Scholar in Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz this year.
Additional Reading: “Undisciplined studies & the (geo)politics of knowledge”
Miskolci Event Flyer

Center for Cultural Studies Colloquium - Blake Wentworth: "Bhakti Demands Biography: Crafting the Life of a Tamil Saint"
2013-05-15 12:15 - 13:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
“Bhakti Demands Biography: Crafting the Life of a Tamil Saint”
Blake Wentworth’s current work revolves around a central feature of south Indian political life in premodernity, the mapping of sexuality onto the political domain such that lordly power is beautiful. By tracing the genealogy of this trope, he explores the interplay between ancient Tamil poetics and the wider Sanskrit world.
Blake Wentworth is Assistant Professor of South and South EastAsian Studies at UC- Berkley.

Noel Q. King Annual Lecture: “Higher Mysteries: Faith and Theology in Crime Fiction”
2013-05-14 19:00 - 20:30 | Santa Cruz Public Library – Downtown Branch, 224 Church Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The King Lecture Series, preserving the work of UCSC History and Comparative Religion professor Noel Q. King, promotes and explores the dialogue between faiths. This year’s lecture also incorporates the interests of his wife, crime writer Laurie R. King, in conversation with three other award-winning crime writers, for an event called:
Higher Mysteries: Faith and Theology in Crime Fiction

Zoë Ferraris moved to Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the first Gulf War, living in a conservative Muslim community with her then-husband and his family, a group of Saudi-Palestinians. Zoë has an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University. Her novels are published in over thirty countries.

Sharan Newman is a Medieval historian with an MA in Medieval Literature and a PhD in Medieval Studies,specializing in twelfth-century France. She has been writing fiction since1980, with ten books in her award-winning series about Catherine LeVendeur, once a student under the abbess Heloise. Her books explore Medieval ideas of religion as well as Christian/Jewish relations.

Julia Spencer-Fleming, a bestselling author with an armful of awards, spent most of her childhood on the move as an army brat, then studied acting and history at Ithaca College, receiving a J.D. from the University of Maine School of Law. She writes a crime series about Army helicopter pilot-turned-Episcopal priest Clare Fergusson set in her native upstate New York.

Moderator Laurie R. King, who did her BA in Comparative Religion at UCSC and her MA in Old Testament Theology at the Graduate Theological Union, turned to crime (fiction) when she wrote a tale in which young theology student Mary Russell meets the famous skeptic Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and finds herself apprenticed to him. Many of Laurie’s books have theological and religious themes.

Higher Mysteries is sponsored by UCSC’s Noel Q. King Memorial and the Santa Cruz Public Libraries. Books will be sold at the event by Bookshop Santa Cruz, and refreshments served thanks to the Friends of the Public Library.
For background reading to the discussion:
Zoë Ferraris: Finding Nouf & City of Veils
Laurie R. King: A Monstrous Regiment of Women & A Darker Place
Sharan Newman: The Outcast Dove & Strong as Death
Julia Spencer-Fleming: In the Bleak Midwinter & Out of the Deep I Cry
Please RSVP to info@laurieking.com will help the Friends with the chair setup.
For more information, write to info@laurieking.com

9th Annual Graduate Student Research Symposium
2013-05-10 13:30 - 16:30 | McHenry Library (3rd Floor), Special Collections
Grad students share their research by presenting either oral, media or posters with an awards ceremony immediately following along with a reception.

Free and open to the public.

Main floor conference rooms for orals and media presentations, hallways for poster presentations.

Carol Lynn McKibben: "Gender and Italian Immigration in California: A Monterey Case Study"
2013-05-10 12:30 - 14:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Regional context is of critical importance in understanding processes of migration. As well, gender analysis complicates group migration experiences. Dr. McKibben’s talk will focus both on the economic and social environment of California and on the role of women in families that made for a migration experience for Sicilians that counters the usual narratives of Italian migration in the Eastern and Midwestern United State in the twentieth century. Unlike the East and Midwest, Sicilians in California created ethnic communities that were persistent, replenished over time with new migrations, especially in the post-1965 era.
Carol Lynn McKibben began teaching courses in public history at Stanford in 2006. She received her Ph.D. in American History from the University of California, Berkeley in 1999. Her book, Beyond Cannery Row: Sicilian Women, Immigration, and Community in Monterey, California, 1915-1999 (University of Illinois Press, February, 2006) examines the migration and settlement of Sicilian fishing people to the Monterey Peninsula, with an emphasis on women’s roles in the process. She taught history and policy studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies from 1992-2001, and is currently Public Historian for the City of Seaside, California and the Director of the Seaside History Project. She is the author of Seaside (forthcoming, Arcadia Press, April, 2009), and completing work on the narrative history of Seaside, which focuses on race relations and the influence of the military (Fort Ord) on the city, The Making of a Multi-Cultural Military Town, Seaside, California, 1890-2006.
This lecture is presented by Italian Studies, the Language Program, and Italian Program at UC Santa Cruz.

The Living Writers Reading Series: Elizabeth Graver
2013-05-09 18:00 - 19:45 | Unnamed Venue, Humanities and Social Sciences Facility, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Elizabeth Graver’s new novel, The End of the Point, set in a summer community on Buzzard’s Bay from 1942 to 1999, is forthcoming from HarperCollins in Spring, 2013. She is the author of three other novels: Awake, The Honey Thief, and Unravelling. Her short story collection, Have You Seen Me?, won the 1991 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories (1991, 2001); Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards (1994, 1996, 2001), The Pushcart Prize Anthology (2001), and Best American Essays (1998).

Dana Frank: "A Human Rights Disaster in Honduras: Why is the U.S. Supporting a Repressive Regime?"
2013-05-08 16:00 - 17:30 | Santa Cruz, 95064, United States
What’s driving this murderous U.S. policy in Honduras? And how are the Hondurans still rising up in resistance?
Since the June 2009 military coup that deposed democratically-elected President Manuel Zeleya, the U.S. has been supporting a repressive regime that continues to commit massive human rights violations. Honduras now has the highest murder rate in the world, and near-complete impunity reigns, including over 300 documented killings by state security forces. Yet the U.S. continues to pour police and military funds into a regime widely known to be riddled with drug traffickers and organized crime – Congress protests more and more loudly.
Dana Frank is Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz.
Dinner reception immediately follows at the Stevenson Provost House.
This event is presented by the Stevenson College Distinguished Alumni Lecture Series. Cosponsored by the Departments of History and Latin American and Latino Studies, and the Institute for Humanities Research.

Helen Diller Family Endowment Lecture with Ari Kelman: "Learning to be Jewish"
2013-05-08 16:00 - 17:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
For most Americans, the phrase “Jewish education” summons images of Hebrew School. But, Hebrew School, or even what we might call “formal Jewish education” amounts to only a very small percentage of where and how people learn to be Jewish. The landscape of Jewish learning might include those sites, but it certainly includes a much broader spectrum of settings like worship, film festivals, popular music, literature, home-based rituals (like Passover seders), technology, and encounters with the news. By focusing on the places where and how people learn to be Jewish, a dramatically different image of Jewish education comes into focus. Building on cutting edge research into educational cultures, we will explore the variety of ways in which people learn to be Jewish in the 21st century and ask how this new understanding might inform how we understand what it means to be Jewish.
An alumnus of UC Santa Cruz (Stevenson, 1994) Ari Y. Kelman is the inaugural Jim Joseph Professor of Education and Jewish Studies in the Stanford University Graduate School of Education, where he also serves as an affiliate of the Jewish Studies Program, the Center for Comparative Race and Ethnicity, the American Studies Program, and, by courtesy, a professor of Religious Studies. He is the author of Station Identification: A Cultural History of Yiddish Radio, (University of California Press, 2009) and the editor of a volume of the work of cartoonist Milt Gross (NYU Press, 2009). He is also the co-author of Sacred Strategies (Alban Institute Press, 2010), a study of synagogue transformation efforts in the United States and winner of the 2010 National Jewish Book Award in the category of Jewish Education and Identity. In collaboration with Steven M. Cohen, Ari has authored a number of studies of contemporary American Jewish culture addressing issues from Israel to the internet. Ari recently finished a book entitled Shout to the Lord: Worship and Music in Evangelical America, and is currently writing about Fiddler on the Roof, the Jewish Catalog, Jewish cultural festivals and other extra-scholastic loci in which people learn to be Jewish.

Center for Cultural Studies Colloquium - Ken Selden: "'Goldfinger' and the Decline of the Classical Hollywood Narrative"
2013-05-08 12:15 - 13:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
“Goldfinger” and the Decline of the Classical Hollywood Narrative
The 1964 film Goldfinger, released right after the break-up of the Hollywood studio system, presented a new kind of narrative that did not conform to the classical Hollywood three-act model. In this talk, I will examine how Goldfinger differed dramaturgically from the classical Hollywood style and why, fifty years later, the film’s artistic and financial success remains such a strong influence on almost all Hollywood production.
Ken Selden is a film and television writer/director.

23rd Annual Semantics and Linguistics Theory Conference (SALT)
2013-05-03 - 2013-05-05 | Unnamed Venue
Please stay tuned for more information.

The Living Writers Reading Series: Karen Joy Fowler
2013-05-02 18:00 - 19:45 | Unnamed Venue, Humanities and Social Sciences Facility, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Karen Joy Fowler, author of six novels and three short story collections. The Jane Austen Book Club spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list and was a New York Times Notable Book. Fowler’s previous novel, Sister Noon, was a finalist for the 2001 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. Her debut novel, Sarah Canary, was a New York Times Notable Book, as was her second novel, The Sweetheart Season. In addition, Sarah Canary won the Commonwealth medal for best first novel by a Californian, and was short-listed for the Irish Times International Fiction Prize as well as the Bay Area Book Reviewers Prize. Fowler’s short story collection Black Glass won the World Fantasy Award in 1999, and her collection What I Didn’t See won the World Fantasy Award in 2011.

Sea Changes: Mediterranean and Maritime Perspectives on History and Culture
2013-05-02 - 2013-05-04 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Mediterranean Seminar/UCMRP in Mediterranean Studies present:
An International Symposium/Workshop to be held at UC Santa Cruz, 2-4 May, 2013
A maritime perspective provides scholars with a fresh approach to the study of society and culture, including the development of art, literature, and institutions. In the mid-twentieth century, Fernand Braudel first reformulated the history of Early Modern Europe and the Islamic world by taking the sea between them not as a barrier but as an analytical starting point. Taking geography as its point of departure, this history focused not on the supposedly inherent qualities that separated them, but on the connections that bound the people of the coasts and their continental hinterlands to various trans-Mediterranean others. Emphasizing the importance of movement, trade, and communication, it invited the interrogation of categories that had come to seem self-evident (especially the nation), challenged the foundations of dominant historical metanarratives, and called new attention to the significance of peoples and places long regarded as mere intermediaries.
This gathering invites scholars of the humanities and social science engaged in the study of maritime environments–in particular, the application of Oceanic models (pertaining to the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, Pacific, or Indian Oceans, etc.) to the study of the history of human society and culture. Rather than pure research presentations or case studies, Papers (20 minutes) should engage explicitly and directly with the Mediterranean and/or Oceanic Studies as methodological frames or emerging disciplines. Themes include:
– “In the sea” or “of the sea? The practica of maritime methodologies; geographical determinism and/or human adaptations;
– Revelations and Revisions: What the sea brings to scholarship.
– The historiography and reception of the sea in scholarship
This conference will be held in conjunction with the Mediterranean Studies UCMRP Spring workshop.
Symposium and Workshop Program (PDF)

Scott Lauria Morgensen: "Idle No More, Indigenous Feminism & Allied Critiques of Settler Colonialism"
2013-05-01 17:00 - 19:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Revisiting Indigenous critiques of the sexualization and racialization of colonial rule, Morgensen highlights how such power is challenged by the Indigenous movement Idle No More. Indigenous feminist and Two Spirit critiques explain that heteropatriarchy and white supremacy produce settler colonization and settler state governance.
As explained by participants, the leadership of Idle No More by Indigenous women as founders and spokespersons exposes heteropatriarchy in Indigenous communities for change by challenging racial and sexual legacies of Canadian colonization. These legacies include the Indian Act, which preferentially exiled over four generations of Indigenous women and their descendants from their nations and lands; and in the everyday landscapes of gender and sexual violence faced by Indigenous women and Two-Spirit people.
Morgensen interprets these effects of Idle No More by writing as an allied critic in Canada who answers calls to support Indigenous leadership in transforming colonial rule. Feminist, queer, and trans critiques of racialization, sexualization, and colonization can resonate with Idle No More as it pursues indigenist and decolonial transformation on behalf of all Indigenous people in Canada.
Scott Lauria Morgensen is an ethnographer and historian of social movements. He is Associate Professor in Gender Studies and the Graduate Program in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. His work examines how politicalcommunities struggle over differences, challenge or reproduce oppressions, and confront solidarity and alliance. His past and present research examines how racism and settler colonialism shape queer / trans communities in North America. An interdisciplinary scholar trained in Feminist Studies (PhD 2001 Anthropology [Women’s Studies], University of California, Santa Cruz), Morgensen engages the theories and methods of Indigenous, women of color, and transnational feminisms in his work. His first book, Spaces between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2011, and won the 2012 Ruth Benedict Book Prize “Honorable Mention” from the Association for Queer Anthropology. He is co-editor of the collection Queer Indigenous Studies, and of “Karangatia: Calling Out Gender and Sexuality in Settler Societies,” a special issue of Settler Colonial Studies. He is co-editor of Journal of Critical Race Inquiry and a proud UCSC Feminist Studies alum.
Additional Reading: Dr. Morgensen will present work in dialogue with a recent blog on jadaliyya.com:
http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/11016/settler-colonialism-and-alliance_comparative-chall

Conflicting Commitments: The Politics of Enforcing Immigrant WorkerRights in San Jose and Houston
2013-05-01 15:00 - 16:30 | Santa Cruz, 95064, United States
In Conflicting Commitments, Dr. Shannon Gleeson goes beyond the debate over federal immigration policy to examine the complicated terrain of immigrant worker rights. Federal law requires that basic labor standards apply to all workers, yet this principle clashes with increasingly restrictive immigration laws and creates a confusing bureaucratic terrain for local policymakers and labor advocates. Gleeson examines this issue in two of the largest immigrant gateways in the country: San Jose, California, and Houston, Texas.

Center for Cultural Studies Colloquium - Soraya Murray: "The Rubble and the Ruin: Spec Ops:The Line as Anti-War Game"
2013-05-01 12:15 - 14:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
“The Rubble and the Ruin: Spec Ops:The Line as Anti-War Game”
Soraya Murray is an interdisciplinary scholar of contemporary visual culture, with particular interest in new media and globalization in the arts. In her analysis of photography, film and digital media, Murray seeks to illuminate these technological expressions in their cultural contexts.
Soraya Murray is Assistant Professor of Film and Digital Media and Digital Arts and New Media MFA Program at UCSC.

Leviathan: Celebrating 40 Years of Jewish Journalism at UCSC
2013-04-28 15:00 - 16:30 | Santa Cruz, 95064, United States
Please join former and current staff members of Leviathan in a celebration of the student publication’s 40th anniversary. Leviathan is one of the longest-running university student publications devoted to Jewish themes in the United States. Over the years, its articles and artwork have explored contemporary questions of Jewish identity, the role of Israel, local Jewish issues, and a wide range of cultural and historical topics. Many of it editors, writers, and artists have gone on to distinguished careers in publishing, journalism, education, and other fields.
The event, to be held in the Fireside Lounge of Stevenson College at 3 p.m. on Sunday, April 28, will include a panel discussion with former and current Leviathan staff members, the official launch of the newly created digital archive of past issues of the publication going back to the 1970s, and a festive reception with food and beverages.
Co-sponsored by Leviathan, the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Stevenson College. Administrative support provided by the Institute for Humanities Research.

Brenda Shaughnessy: "Feminism & Poetry, Empowerment & Passion"
2013-04-27 14:00 - 18:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Please join Women’s Studies / Feminist Studies alumni, classmates, and faculty for an intriguing afternoon.
2:00-3:00 PM: Reception
3:00-4:30 PM: Brenda Shaughnessy will present a talk entitled: “Feminism & Poetry, Empowerment & Passion”
4:30-6:00 PM: Feminist Studies Faculty Panel will discuss “The Vibrant State of the Feminist Studies Department” to discuss the launching of the Feminist Studies graduate program, the UC Presidential Chair in Feminist Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, current curriculum, faculty research, and more.
Brenda Shaughnessy is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Our Andromeda (Copper Canyon Press, September 2012.) Her other books are Human Dark with Sugar, which was a finalist for the 2008 NBCC Award and winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Interior with Sudden Joy, finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Harpers, McSweeney’s, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Yale Review and elsewhere. She is currently Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rutgers University at Newark. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband, son, and daughter.
The series of events is organized and sponsored by the UC Presidential Chair in Feminist Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and the Feminist Studies Department. Cosponsored by the Creative Writing Program and the Living Writers Reading Series.
Staff support provided by the Institute for Humanities Research. For further information, including disabled access, please contact Shann Ritchie, sritchie@ucsc.edu, (831) 459-5655. Maps: http://maps.ucsc.edu.

Víctor Fuentes: "Literatura memorialista de la inmigración"
2013-04-26 17:00 - 19:00 | Humanities 1, Room 408
Víctor Fuentes is the author of a memoir, Memorias del segundo exilio español (2011) and fourteen books, among them, La marcha al pueblo en las letras españolas (1917-1936), El cántico material y espiritual de César Vallejo, Buñuel, cine y literatura, Antología de la poesía bohemia española, Antología del cuento bohemio español.
He is Professor Emeritus of the University of California, Santa Barbara; Full Member of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language and Co-editor of the literary magazine Ventana abierta.

￼Profesor Emérito de la Universidad de California, Santa Bárbara. Miembro Numerario de la Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española. Coeditor de Ventana abierta.
Es autor de numerosas publicaciones, entre las que se cuentan 14 libros de ensayo, dos novelas y un libro de memorias. Entre ellos destacan: La marcha al pueblo en las letras españolas (1917- 1936), El cántico material y espiritual de César Vallejo, Buñuel, cine y literatura (Premio “Letras de Oro”, 1988), Antología de la poesía bohemia española, Antología del cuento bohemio español, Morir en Isla Vista (1999); Memorias del segundo exilio español (2011).

This event is sponsored by the UCSC Language Program.

Giovanna Di Chiro: “Embodied Ecologies: Connecting Sustainability and Environmental Justice”
2013-04-26 16:00 - 18:00 | Santa Cruz, 95064, United States
Dr. Giovanna Di Chiro’s research bridges academic and community action domains and integrates the fields of environment, sustainability, and social justice. She teaches interdisciplinary courses in environmental studies and women’s & gender studies, and incorporates a community-based, action research emphasis (currently as the Lang Professor for Issues of Social Change at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania). Di Chiro has published widely on the intersections of race, class, gender, and environmental justice with a focus on activism and policy change addressing environmental health disparities in lower income communities. She collaborates with environmental justice and community development organizations to conduct participatory action research on environmental health concerns and on developing culturally relevant “sustainability” initiatives in diverse communities.
Di Chiro is co-editor of the volume Appropriating Technology: Vernacular Science and Social Power and is completing a book titled Embodied Ecologies: Science, Politics, and Environmental Justice. Embodied Ecologies focuses on what she calls “embodied” or “situated” environmental science and community-based environmental justice activism. The central argument interrogates conventional environmental science and policy approaches, which tend to concentrate on global, cosmopolitan, and macro-level frameworks of organized power: states, markets, global institutions, global environmental sciences, and international environmental organizations. That selective attention to the macro scale tends to dismiss or simply disregard community/local/situated practices and approaches to environmental science and policy as overly micro level and parochial (i.e., not relevant or up to the task of addressing the big environmental problems of the moment, like global climate change). Using the conceptual framework of “embodiment” and drawing on the feminist political economic theory of social reproduction (the maintenance and sustainability of bodies/families/communities and everyday life), Embodied Ecologies examines the harm done to (human and non-human) bodies, communities, and local environments, which has been eclipsed by dominant discourses emphasizing the global scale. The book highlights the innovative and diverse eco-cosmo-politics generated by grassroots activists to build sustainable, just, and resilient communities in the face of broad-scale environmental problems like global warming and climate change.
Di Chiro has a background in Biology (B.A. with honors from UCSC), a Master of Science in Environmental Studies from the University of Michigan, and a Ph.D. in History of Consciousness (Interdisciplinary Studies focusing on Environment, Health, and Development) from UC Santa Cruz, which integrates her interdisciplinary background in biology, environmental studies, and socio-cultural theory. Di Chiro has over 20 years teaching experience, and has taught in Environmental Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies at Deakin University (Australia), University of California (Santa Cruz), Allegheny College, Mount Holyoke College, and Swarthmore College. She has received numerous research fellowships and grants, including from the Rockefeller Foundation, the University of California Humanities Research Institute, the American Association of University Women, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, and the US Environmental Protection Agency.
This colloquium was established to honor the memory and research of Jessica Roy, a UC Santa Cruz graduate student in sociology whose life was abruptly cut short while doing her dissertation fieldwork in Kenya. Her research in rural Africa was designed to illuminate the problem of access to safe water resources and the influence of gender relations on this access. Her approach was interdisciplinary, including environmental, feminist, and sociological perspectives.
Cosponsored by the Urban Studies Research Cluster.

Feminist Poetry with Brenda Shaughnessy
2013-04-25 17:00 - 19:30 | Unnamed Venue, Humanities and Social Sciences Facility, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Reception: 5:00-6:00 PM • Humanities Building 1, Room 210
Reading: 6:00-7:30 PM • Humanities Lecture Hall
Brenda Shaughnessy is a prize-winning poet and UCSC alumni (Women’s Studies, Literature, 1993) whose latest book of poetry, Our Andromeda received a rave review in the New York TImes Book Review (February 3, 2013). Reviewer Victoria Redel wrote, “This book addresses urgent questions [with] no shortage of invention . . . Shaughnessy conjures our better selves, lovers, kinder gods, sisters . . . Love is the fierce engine of this beautiful and necessary book. Love is the high stakes, the whip of its power and grief and possibility for repair . . . The result is a book whose song will endure.” We are thrilled to bring Brenda back to UCSC for a reading that is sure to enrich our lives and our world. Now an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rutgers, University, Newark, this public reading inaugurates a series of events that will feature Brenda during UCSC’s Alumni Weekend.
Brenda Shaughnessy is the author of the poetry collections, Our Andromeda (2012), Human Dark with Sugar (2008), which was a finalist for the 2008 NBCC Award, and Interior with Sudden Joy (1999). Her poems have appeared in Harpers, McSweeney’s, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Slate.com and elsewhere. She is Poetry Editor-At-Large at Tin House Magazine, and is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rutgers-Newark. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, son, and daughter.
The series of events is organized and sponsored by the UC Presidential Chair in Feminist Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and the Feminist Studies Department. Cosponsored by the Creative Writing Program and the Living Writers Reading Series.
Staff support provided by the Institute for Humanities Research. For further information, including disabled access, please contact Shann Ritchie, sritchie@ucsc.edu, (831) 459-5655. Maps: http://maps.ucsc.edu.

Center for Cultural Studies Colloquium - William Marotti: "Timely and Untimely Politics: Art and Protest in Early 1960s Japan"
2013-04-24 12:15 - 13:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
“Timely and Untimely Politics: Art and Protest in Early 1960s Japan”
William Marotti explores politics and timeliness by examining the advent of a critical art of the everyday in Japan in the 1960s and its links to political action. Out of sync with eventful mass activism, artists sought to create eventfulness against a state-promoted, depoliticized daily life in the high growth economy.
William Marotti is Associate Professor of History and Chair, East Asian Studies MA Interdepartmental Program at UCLA.

The Living Writers Reading Series: Patrick DeWitt
2013-04-18 18:00 - 19:45 | Unnamed Venue, Humanities and Social Sciences Facility, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Patrick DeWitt, author of The Sisters Brothers, finalist for the Man Booker Prize, “If Cormac McCarthy had a sense of humor, he might have concocted a story like Patrick DeWitt’s bloody, darkly funny western.” The Los Angeles Times.

25th Anniversary of the UC Humanities Initiative & 2013 Society of Fellows Event
2013-04-18 - 2013-04-19 | University of California, Los Angeles, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
Please save the date. Check back for more information.

Radical Reading Practices, A Symposium
2013-04-18 - 2013-04-19 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Radical Reading Practices, A Symposium, April 18-19, 2013
Presented by UCSC’s Poetry and Politics Research Cluster. Sponsored by the Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund and the UC Humanities Network, with staff support provided by the Institute for Humanities Research.
This symposium attends to the work that readers perform when reading and reconstructing poetry. We focus on the particular ways poetry makes historically and politically significant demands on readers. We hope to foster a conversation about assumptions that structure the way we approach poetry and the larger aesthetic, historical and theoretical categories that are implicated by our approach. Is poetry, for example, a more radical category than prose? Is there a revolutionary way to read it? Is close reading necessary when reading poetry? Is close reading a more radical mode of engaging with texts than other practices? What might those other practices look like?
Symposium Schedule:
Thursday, April 18th, at the Felix Kulpa Gallery (107 Elm Street, Santa Cruz)
5:30-7:00pm An evening of poetry with readings:
Christopher Nealon
Joshua Anderson
Emily Carr
David de La Rocha
Grace Emilie
David Lau
Eireene Nealand
Rob Wilson
Stephanie Young
Friday, April 19th at UC Santa Cruz (Humanities 1, room 210)
8:30-9:00am Light Breakfast
9:00-9:30am Opening remarks
with Keegan Finberg and Juliana Leslie
9:30-10:45am Radical Reading Practices: An Undergraduate Roundtable
Matthew Strebe, “‘Boots Shining and Gleaming’: Poetry and State Violence”
Grace Emilie, “The Unknown Heart Speaks: Embodied Reading Practices and You”
Annie Hill, “Faust Ubersetzt”
Michael Moreno, “Technology and Me: A Look at the Effects of Integrating Technology with Poetry”
Grace Williams, “Reproduction through Interpretation: Exploring Critical Reading”
Moderator and respondent: Tim Willcutts
11:00-12:30pm Panel One: Commons, Collectivity, Community: From Ancient to Contemporary
Stephanie Young, “Precarious Reading”
Emily Carr, “A,B,C: Reading Cultural Jams in Contemporary Poetry”
Kendra Dority, “Figuring Letters: A Politics of Comparative Reading in Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae”
Moderator and respondent: Christopher Nealon
12:30-1:30pm Lunch—bring your own or eat on campus restaurants
1:30-3:00pm Panel Two: Historicizing Revolutionary Reading Practices
Daniel Benjamin, “Searching for the Human and Searching for the Ghost in George Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous”
David de la Rocha, “Nicaraguan Poetry and Reading Revolution”
David Lau, “Poetry as Superstructure: Comments on Chris Nealon’s The Matter of Capital”
Moderator and respondent: Dion Farquhar
3:15-4:45pm Panel Three: Models of Reception/Questions of Audience
Whitney De Vos, “Artificial Memory & the Fate of Crystallized Intelligence: Reading Poetry as a Means of Retrieval”
Eireene Nealand, “Why Should We Listen to Criminals?: The Death of the Reader and the Rise of the Trace”
Joshua Anderson, “Implications of the Surface: A Critique of Surface Reading”
Moderator and respondent: Chris Chen
5:00-6:00pm Keynote by Christopher Nealon, “Poetry without Modernity”
6:00pm Reception at the Cowell Provost’s House

Center for Cultural Studies Colloquium - Christine Hong: "'War Is the Force That Gives Us Meaning': Militarized Queerness, Lieutenant Dan Choi, and Korean War Mascotry"
2013-04-17 12:15 - 14:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
“‘War Is the Force That Gives Us Meaning’: Militarized Queerness, Lieutenant Dan Choi, and Korean War Mascotry”
Offering a historically layered examination of the rights-based battle waged by former Lt. Dan Choi, son of a war orphan, against the now-defunct policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” this talk inquires into the homology between queer masking in the U.S. military and the Korean War practice of child mascotry.
Christine Hong is Assistant Professor of Literature at UCSC.

Adriana M. Brodsky: "Becoming Jewish-Argentines: Marriage choice, and the construction of a Jewish Argentine Identity (1920-1960)"
2013-04-16 14:00 - 15:45 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The presentation explores the marriage patterns of the Sephardi Jewish communities, paying special attention to when Sephardim began marrying Ashkenazi Jews, thereby giving birth to a new type of Jewish identity, neither fully Ashkenazi nor fully Sephardi, but Argentine. Although initially Sephardim respected the boundaries of their communities of origin, and usually married ‘within’, as the twentieth century progressed and new spaces for interaction of Jews from different origins became available choosing a marriage partner outside of the ‘group’ became more common. The presentation will suggest that loyalties to communities of origin slowly evolved into a stronger sense of belonging to the Argentine nation.
Adriana M. Brodsky, Associate Professor of Latin American History at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, obtained her PhD from Duke University in 2004. She is currently finishing a manuscript entitled Becoming Argentine Jews: Sephardim and the Construction of Ethnic and National Identities, 1880-1960, which focuses on the Sephardic communities that settled in Argentina from the end of the 19th century to mid-20th century, and has co-edited with Raanan Rein (Tel Aviv University) a book titled The New Jewish Argentina (Brill, 2012). She has published on Sephardi schools in Argentina, and on Jewish Beauty Contests. Her new project explores the experiences of Argentine Sephardi youth in the 1960s-1970s, which has received support from the Hadassah- Brandeis Institute.

Simon Goldhill: "First Words, Dying Moments: Starting and Ending in Sophocles and Euipides"
2013-04-12 16:00 - 18:00 | Cowell Provost House, Cowell Provost House, Cowell Service Rd‎ University of California Santa Cruz, Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The UCSC Classical Studies Program and the President’s Chair in Ancient Studies present the annual Carl Deppe Lecture
How does tragedy start and stop –
and what does it tell us about the ends of man?
Simon Goldhill is Professor of Greek at Cambridge where he also runs the university’s interdisciplinary research center. He has lectured all over the world and appeared on TV and radio and in the theatre in America, Australia, Canada as well as regularly in Britain and Europe. His is a leading expert on Greek tragedy and Greek culture.
For more information, please contact jklynn@ucsc.edu.

The Living Writers Reading Series: Justin Torres
2013-04-11 18:00 - 19:45 | Unnamed Venue, Humanities and Social Sciences Facility, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Justin Torres, author of We The Animals, was a finalist for the 2012 Indies Choice Book Awards, winner of a National Book Award for 5 under 35, and named one of Salon’s “Sexiest Men of 2011.” His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, Glimmer Train, and other publications. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is a recipient of the Rolón United States Artist Fellowship in Literature, and is now a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. Vanity Fair writes that We The Animals is “A gorgeous, howling coming-of-age novel that will devour your heart.”

Stevenson College Faculty Lecture Series: Adrian Brasoveanu
2013-04-10 16:30 - 18:00 | Santa Cruz, 95064, United States
NEGATION IS A PERVASIVE FEATURE of natural language and for the most part, the linguistic and psycholinguistic literature takes it ￼to be a categorical, binary notion: the sentence “Sue left” is positive, while the sentence “Sue didn’t leave” is negative because of the sentential negation “didn’t.”
At the same time, sentences like “Anna answered none of/few of my letters” have been taken to involve some form of negativity despite the fact that they do not contain sentential negations–-but their negativity has not been explicitly quantified.
The first part of the talk presents a new test for detecting and quantifying the negativity of a sentence based on the observation that negative sentences license the particle “no” in agreeing responses, e.g., (1) below, while positive sentences do not license “no” in agreeing responses, indicated by the star in (2) below.
(1)
A: Anna didn’t answer my letter.
B: No, she didn’t.
￼
(2)
A: Anna answered
B: *No, she did.
After providing experimental evidence that backs up this novel test, the talk discusses an experiment that uses the test to quantify the negativity of sentences like “Anna answered none of/few of my letters.” The results support the view that sentence negativity is a matter of degree and it is influenced by interacting semantic and syntactic factors.

Dinner Reception follows at the Stevenson Provost House
Adrian Brasoveanu is Associate Professor of Linguistics at UC Santa Cruz.
Cosponsored by the Institute for Humanities Research and the Department of Linguistics.

Center for Cultural Studies Colloquium - Kimberly Lau: "Camping Masculinity"
2013-04-10 12:15 - 14:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Kimberly Lau’s work explores some of the ways that World of Warcraft engages masculinity in play through the convergence of player practices, game designers, and the ongoing interaction between the two. Reading invocations of hypermasculinity, Lau investigates how everyday “camp” practices might open up alternative spaces and forms of masculine sociality.
Kimberly Lau is Professor of Literature at UCSC.

Bruce Lawrence: "Minor Matters - Asian/African, Muslim/Christian"
2013-04-09 16:00 - 17:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
How do Muslims and Christians together meet the challenge of majority-minority identity politics in the 21st century? I will assess the status of minority citizenship in places of Africa and Asia that have mixed communities where Muslims are the majority, Christians the minority. Though these communities might be religiously marked as Muslim and Christian, they also have other cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and locational markings that are consequential. More than minority identity, I will argue that the litmus test for good will, comity and collective benefit in each case is citizenship rights as well as access to public space. How are these rights negotiated and maintained, monitored and modified in diverse settings with disparate resources? I will pay special attention to the circumstances and options for Copts in Egypt, Kristens and Katolics in Indonesia, while at the same time linking them to other communities in both Africa and Asia where a similar Muslim-Christian proportionality prevails.
Bruce Lawrence earned his PhD. from Yale University in the History of Religions: Islam and Hinduism. His research ranges from institutional Islam to Indo-Persian Sufism and also encompasses the comparative study of religious movements. He is Professor Emeritus of Islamic Studies at Duke University. His recent books have included On Violence – A Reader (with Aisha Karim); Messages to the World, The Statements of Osama Bin Laden; The Quran, A Biography; and, with his spouse, Dr. Miriam Cooke, Muslim Networks from Hajj to Hip Hop.
Cosponsored by UCSC Departments of Anthropology, History, and Literature.
MORNING WORKSHOP – 10:00am to Noon – Humanities 1, Room 210
Professor Lawrence will also be doing a workshop on Tuesday morning which will revolve around Irfan Ahmad’s article, “Immanent Critique and Islam: Anthropological Reflections” and Lawrence’s attempt to apply Ahmad’s most salient lessons to his current work-in-progress, Who is Allah?
Download the articles here: Irfan Ahmad’s Immanent Critique and Who is Allah (work in progress)

The Living Writers Reading Series: Tupelo Hassman
2013-04-04 18:00 - 19:45 | Unnamed Venue, Humanities and Social Sciences Facility, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Tupelo Hassman, author of the novel Girlchild (FSG 2012) “It takes real talent to make something beautiful out of a trailer park. Girlchild, Tupelo Hassman’s lacerating debut novel, is the story of Rory Dawn Hendrix, a young girl growing up in the Calle, a cluster of mobile homes on a plot of dust outside Reno, Nev. Ms. Hassman is such a poised storyteller that her prose practically struts. Her words are as elegant as they are fierce.” –The New York Times

A Feminist Studies Legal Luncheon: Practicing Domestic Violence Law
2013-04-04 12:00 - 14:00 | Unnamed Venue
The Department of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz Presents:
A Feminist Studies Legal Luncheon
PRACTICING DOMESTIC VIOLENCE LAW
Featuring distinguished UC Santa Cruz Women’s Studies Alumna
NANCY K.D. LEMON (Berkeley Law, Boalt School of Law)
With an introduction by
Prof. D. Kelly Weisberg, Hastings College of Law
Nancy Lemon was a student founder of UCSC’s Women’s Studies Program and graduated from the Program in 1975. She subsequently graduated from Boalt Hall School of Law, U.C. Berkeley, in June 1980 and was admitted to the California Bar in December 1980. Prof. Lemon, who is a Lecturer in Domestic Violence Law and Director of the Domestic Violence Practicum at Boalt, introduced and has now taught Domestic Violence Law continuously for 25 years at the school. She authored Domestic Violence Law, the first U.S. textbook on this topic, which Austin & Winfield Publishers published in 1996 and for which West Group has published four additional editions, the most recent in 2009. She has also co-authored Child Custody and Domestic Violence: A Call for Safety (Sage Publications, 2003) and Working Together to End Domestic Violence (Mancorp Publishing, 1996) as well as authoring dozens of amicus briefs, law review articles, affidavits and books chapters about domestic violence issues. Since 1983, she has worked on numerous pieces of California state legislation and has conducted hundreds of trainings on domestic violence topics for many different professional groups. Since 1995, working as an expert witness, Prof. Lemon has consulted on hundreds of family law, tort, asylum and other cases and testified in sixty. She is a Co-founder and Legal Director of the Berkeley Family Violence Appellate Project.
Seating is limited – please email fmst@ucsc.edu or call (831) 459-2461 to reserve a space at the luncheon.
Feminist Studies wishes to make this event accessible to all. Please contact (831) 459-2461 for accommodations. This event is free and open to the public, but reservations are required.
Generously sponsored by Cowell College, The Presidential Chair in Feminist Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, and the Department of Feminist Studies.

"(Re-)Building Punjab: Political Economy, Society and Values" Conference
2013-03-29 - 2013-03-30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Punjab is a state in the nation of India, but also a state of mind. The larger geographic region of Punjab was the birthplace of the Sikh religion. The Indian state of Punjab, within that larger region, is the homeland of the Sikhs, the nation’s granary, and a major recipient of diaspora remittances. But within an economically resurgent India, Punjab is in relative decline, apparently beset by societal and environmental problems. This multi- and inter-disciplinary conference will explore the complex relations between the Sikh community and its real and imagined homeland. Individual sessions will be on the historical roots of Punjab’s contemporary society, the state of its politics and political culture, possibilities of economic improvement, challenges of environmental degradation, the role of diaspora philanthropy, and ways in which Punjab’s situation is expressed in and shaped by music and film as forms of cultural production.

The conference and dinner are free and open to the public. Conference sessions will take place in the Humanities Building 1, Room 210 each day.
Dinner space is limited and attendees should register by March 20th, by emailing Courtney Mahaney. Register Now!   Conference Details

Friday, March 29
8:15-8:45 AM – Breakfast
8:45-9:00 AM – Welcome
9:00-10:30 AM – Session 1: Sikh Values and Punjab Society in Historical Perspective
Presenter: Prof. Pashaura Singh, Religious Studies, UC Riverside
Discussant: Dr. Harpreet Singh, South Asian Studies, Harvard University
Session Chair: Prof. Nathaniel Deutsch, History, UC Santa Cruz
10:30-10:45 AM – Break
10:45 AM – 12:15 PM – Session 2: A Case Study of Sikh Diaspora Philanthropy in Punjab
Presenter: Prof. Verne A. Dusenbery, Anthropology, Hamline University
Discussant: Prof. Supreet Kaur, Economics, Columbia University
Session Chair: Prof. James Clifford, History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz
12:15-1:45 PM – Lunch
1:45-3:15 PM – Session 3: Punjab Politics and Society
Presenter: Prof. Pritam Singh, Accounting, Finance and Economics, Oxford Brookes University
Discussant: Prof. Jugdep S. Chima, Political Science, Hiram College
Session Chair: Prof. Ronnie D. Lipschutz, Politics, UC Santa Cruz
3:15-3:30 PM – Break
3:30-5:00 PM – Session 4: The Punjab Economy: Problems and Prospects
Presenter: Prof. Lakhwinder Singh, Economics, Punjabi University
Discussant: Prof. Nirvikar Singh, Economics, UC Santa Cruz
Session Chair: Prof. Helen Shapiro, Sociology, UC Santa Cruz
6:30-9:00 PM – Dinner & Lecture: Reflections on the Columbia/UC Santa Barbara Punjab Summer Program
Presenter: Prof. Gurinder Mann, Religious Studies, UC Santa Barbara
Saturday, March 30
8:30-9:00 AM – Breakfast
9:00-10:30 AM – Session 5: Groundwater in Punjab: Environmental Challenges
Presenter: Prof. Rajinder Singh Sidhu, Punjab Agricultural University
Discussant: Prof. Upmanu Lall, Engineering, Columbia University
Session Chair: Prof. Ben Crow, Sociology, UC Santa Cruz
10:30-10:45 AM – Break
10:45 AM – 12:15 PM – Session 6: Punjab’s Ethical Soundscapes: From Asa ki Var to Dhadi Var and Hip Hop
Presenter: Dr. Inderjit Kaur, Music, UC Santa Cruz
Discussion and demonstration: Mr. Mandeep S. Sethi, Rapper
Session Chair: Prof. Linda Burman-Hall, Music, UC Santa Cruz
12:15-2:30 PM – Session 7: Lunch Panel: Punjab’s Future – What’s to be Done?
Panelist: Dr. Narinder Kapany, Sikh Foundation
Panelist: Dr. Ajit Singh, Artiman Ventures and Stanford University
Panelist: Mr. Michael Singh, Filmmaker
Panel Chair: Dr. Inder Mohan Singh, LynuxWorks and Chardi Kalaa Foundation
Sponsored by the UCSC Punjab Studies Endowment and Sarbjit Singh Aurora Chair in Sikh and Punjabi Studies

Book Reading and Conversation with Saru Jayaraman: Behind the Kitchen Door
2013-03-21 19:00 - 21:00 | Santa Cruz, 95064, United States
Behind the Kitchen DoorHow do restaurant workers live on some of the lowest wages in America? And how do poor working conditions—discriminatory labor practices, exploitation, and unsanitary kitchens— affect the meals that arrive at our restaurant tables? Saru Jayaraman, who launched the national restaurant workers’ organization, Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, sets out to answer these questions by following the lives of restaurant workers in New York City, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, Miami, Detroit, and New Orleans.
Blending personal narrative and investigative journalism, Jayaraman shows us that the quality of the food that arrives at our restaurant tables depends not only on the sourcing of the ingredients. Our meals benefit from the attention and skill of the people who chop, grill, sauté, and serve. Behind the Kitchen Door is a groundbreaking exploration of the political, economic, and moral implications of dining out. Jayaraman focuses on the stories of individuals, like Daniel, who grew up on a farm in Ecuador and sought to improve the conditions for employees at Del Posto; the treatment of workers behind the scenes belied the high-toned Slow Food ethic on display in the front of the house.
Increasingly, Americans are choosing to dine at restaurants that offer organic, fair-trade, and free-range ingredients for reasons of both health and ethics. Yet few of these diners are aware of the working conditions at the restaurants themselves. But whether you eat haute cuisine or fast food, the well-being of restaurant workers is a pressing concern, affecting our health and safety, local economies, and the life of our communities. Highlighting the roles of the 10 million people, many immigrants, many people of color, who bring their passion, tenacity, and vision to the American dining experience, Jayaraman sets out a bold agenda to raise the living standards of the nation’s second-largest private sector workforce—and ensure that dining out is a positive experience on both sides of the kitchen door.
Saru JayaramanSaru Jayaraman is cofounder and codirector of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United and director of the Food Labor Research Center at University of California, Berkeley.
For more information, please contact smckay@ucsc.edu.
This event is co-sponsored by CASFS (Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems), UCSC Center for Labor Studies, Slow Food, and ROC (Restaurants Opportunities Centers).

The Living Writers Reading Series: Xochiquetzal Candelaria
2013-03-14 18:00 | Unnamed Venue, Humanities and Social Sciences Facility, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Xochiquetzal Candelaria is the author of Empire (University of Arizona Press, 2011). Her work has appeared in The Nation, New England Review, Gulf Coast, Seneca Review and other magazines. Her essay, “On the Teaching of Phil Levine” will be published in Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine (University of Iowa Press, May 2013). Ms. Candelaria was recently awarded an individual literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Daniel Guevara: "Has Traditional Ethical Theory Been Made Defunct by Kahneman and Tversky's Prospect Theory?"
2013-03-14 16:00 - 17:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Work-in-Progress: Daniel Guevara, Associate Professor of Philosophy, UC Santa Cruz
This talk is based on a paper by Sandra Dreisbach (PhD, Philosophy, UC Santa Cruz 2012) and Daniel Guevara. It is a critical assessment of Kahneman and Tversky’s Nobel Prize winning Prospect Theory – especially their so-called Asian Disease Problem – and its bearing on certain important issues in traditional ethical theory.

“Peer Gynt in a Digital Age” Conference
2013-03-09 10:30 - 17:00 | Santa Cruz, 95064, United States
This international conference brings together scholars, designers, and dramaturgs from Norway, Tel Aviv, Seattle, and California for the second weekend of the performance. The event is held with the support of the Norwegian Consulate, UCSC, and the Norway House Foundation.
Speakers will discuss staging and design histories, what it’s like to perform Ibsen, and the international relevance of Ibsen’s most globally-produced work.
The “Peer Gynt in a Digital Age” conference will include Brian Johnston, translator and Professor (retired) Carnegie Mellon University; Sverre Mørkhagen, Norwegian author and Peer Gynt scholar; Sarah Bryant Bertail, Associate Professor Emerita, University of Washington; Freddie Rokem, Emanuel Herzikowitz Professor of Theatre Studies, Tel Aviv University; Michael Chemers, Associate Professor of Theater Arts, UCSC.
The afternoon portion of the conference will include Kimberly Jannarone, Professor of Theater Arts, UCSC; Brandin Barón-Nusbaum, Associate Professor of Theater Arts, UCSC; Danny Scheie, Professor of Theater Arts, UCSC and Nancy Carlin, Guest Artist; Ben Carson, Associate Professor of Music, UCSC; Jessica Hayden Molla and Chris Molla, soundscape artists and UCSC DANM MFA alumni.
Visit the Gynt Conference website for detailed information on conference and speakers.

Linguistics at Santa Cruz (LASC)
2013-03-09 08:15 - 19:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Every year towards the end of the Winter Quarter, the Linguistics at Santa Cruz conference showcases the research of second and third year graduate students. This conference coincides with a visit to campus of prospective graduate students, and it always features as an invited speaker a Ph.D. alum of the department. This year’s invited speaker is Andy Wedel of the University of Arizona.
Linguistics at Santa Cruz Program

Åse Vigdis Ystad: "Ibsen as Playwright: Between Dramaturgy and Ethics"
2013-03-08 15:00 - 16:00 | Santa Cruz, 95064, United States
Special guest Dr. Åse Vigdis Ystad gives a talk as part of this year’s Arts Divison Lecture Series, ”Engaging the Mind”, presenting work obtained through a lifetime of research on Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (Peer Gynt, A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler).
Dr. Ystad is visiting UC Santa Cruz as part of The Gynt Project and the associated conference “Peer Gynt in a Digital Age.” Her visit is sponsored by UCSC’s Cowell College and the Gary D. Licker Memorial Chair.
The lecture: From the start of his writing career, Ibsen focuses on the human personality as his main theme, but his subsequent attempts to represent love, passion, quest, human morality and ethics as central motives in his work result in dramaturgical problems. This difficulty characterizes Ibsen’s plays from 1850–58 and is not overcome until he suffers a combined personal and poetic crisis around 1860. After the crisis, he stands out as a mature playwright, creating masterpieces like The Pretenders (1864), Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867). The lecture will also examine Ibsen’s great epic poem ”Terje Vigen” (1862) and give short comments on some of his later prose plays.
Dr. Åse Vigdis Ystad is a fixture of Norwegian arts and letters, and is one of the world’s leading experts on the playwright Henrik Ibsen. Her lifelong service to Norwegian literature and culture earned her Knighthood in the Order of St Olaf by the King of Norway in 2012. After receiving her PhD in Philospohy at the University of Oslo, she has been a Professor of Scandinavian literature there since 1973. She is an member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters; the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala; the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities; the Norwegian Academy of Language and Literature; the Society of Norwegian Language and Literature; and the Society of Danish Language and Literature. Ystad has presented lectures in Denmark, Sweden, Germany, the Czech Republic, Italy, England, Scotland, China, South Korea, and the United States.
This lecture is free and open to the public.
Parking $4.
Visit the Gynt Conference website for detailed information on conference and speakers.

James Young: “Stages of Memory: In Berlin & New York”
2013-03-08 09:30 - 10:40 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Reception following lecture.
James E. Young is Professor of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he has taught since 1988, and currently Chair of the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies. He has also taught at New York University as a Dorot Professor of English and Hebrew/Judaic Studies (1984-88), at Bryn Mawr College in the History of Religion, and at the University of Washington, Harvard University, and Princeton University as a visiting professor. He received his B.A. in 1973 from the University of California, Santa Cruz, his M.A. in 1976 from the University of California, Berkeley, and his Ph.D. from the University of California in 1983.
Professor Young is the author of At Memory’s Edge: After-images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (Yale University Press, 2000), The Texture of Memory (Yale University Press, 1993), which won the National Jewish Book Award in 1994, and Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 1988), which won a Choice Outstanding Book Award for 1988. He was also the Guest Curator of an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York City, entitled “The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History” (March – August 1994, with venues in Berlin and Munich, September 1994 – June 1995) and was the editor of The Art of Memory (Prestel Verlag, 1994), the exhibition catalogue for this show.
In 1997, Professor Young was appointed by the Berlin Senate to the five-member Findungskommission for Germany’s national “Memorial to Europe’s Murdered Jews,” dedicated in 2005. He has also consulted with Argentina’s government on its memorial to the desaparacidos, as well as with numerous city agencies on their memorials and museums. Most recently, he was appointed by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation to the jury for the World Trade Center Site Memorial competition, now under construction.
His articles and reviews have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Representations, New Literary History, Partisan Review, The Yale Journal of Criticism, Annales, SAQ, History and Theory, Harvard Design Magazine, Jewish Social Studies, Contemporary Literature, History and Memory, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Forward, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Prooftexts, The Jewish Quarterly, Tikkun, The New York Times Magazine and Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Slate, among dozens of other journals and collected volumes. His books and articles have been published in German, French, Hebrew, Japanese, and Swedish.
Professor Young is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, ACLS Fellowship, NEH Exhibition planning, implementation, and research grants, Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture Grants, an American Philosophical Society Grant, and a Yad Hanadiv Fellowship at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, among others.
In 2000, he was appointed as Editor-in-Chief of the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, a ten-volume anthology of primary sources, documents, texts, and images, forthcoming with Yale University Press. He is also currently completing an insider’s account of the World Trade Center Memorial process, entitled The Stages of Memory at Ground Zero: A Juror’s Report on the World Trade Center Memorial Process.

Critical Nutrition Symposium
2013-03-08 09:00 - 17:30 | Unnamed Venue, Social Sciences 1‎ University of California Santa Cruz, College Ten, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Advice about what to eat for health and well being is pervasive in the modern world, and such advice is delivered as if it were uncontroversial, universally applicable, welcome, and effective. When it appears not to work, rather than reflection on the scientific, cultural, and sociological underpinnings of the endeavor, the response has been for more informative food labels and more emphasis on food education. What’s wrong or missing in conventional nutritional practice? What are its effects in terms of human health and social justice? What other approaches might work better? This symposium will bring together six leading scholars of nutrition, public health, and food science to discuss and debate the place of nutrition science in public health policies and cultural politics today. Representing such disciplines as geography, public health, sociology, and communication, invited guests include Charlotte Biltekoff (American Studies and Food Science, UC Davis), Jessica Hayes-Conroy (Women’s Studies, Hobart and William Smith Colleges), Adele Hite (Public Health, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill), Aya H. Kimura (Women’s Studies, University of Hawai’i-Manoa), Hannah Landecker (Sociology and Center for Society and Genetics, UCLA), and Jessica Mudry (Center for Engineering in Society, Concordia University). UCSC food scholars Julie Guthman, Melissa Caldwell, Nancy Chen, and Jake Metcalf will provide commentary. The format of the symposium is designed to open up and stimulate discussion and debate among all participants: presenters, discussants, and attendees.
This event is sponsored by the Multi-campus Research Program on Food and the Body and the “Knowing Food” Research Cluster of the Center for Global, International, and Regional Studies. Additional support has been provided by the Community Studies Program, the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, the Science & Justice Research Center, the Departments of Anthropology, Environmental Studies, and Sociology.
The event will be held March 8 from 9-5:30 in 261 Social Sciences I and is open to the public. Please RSVP to Lisa Nishioka (global@ucsc.edu) if you plan to attend.
For questions regarding the program contact Julie Guthman (jguthman@ucsc.edu)

Karen D. Thompson: "Love is a Dangerous Promise
2013-03-07 19:00 - 20:30 | 2nd Stage, Theater Arts, Performing Arts, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Karen Thompson gained national recognition following the November 13, 1983 car accident of her partner Sharon Kowalski, who sustained a traumatic brain injury after a drunk driver hit her car. After the accident, Sharon’s biological family refused to acknowledge or accept Sharon’s relationship with Karen and kept them apart for more than 3 1/2 years. After an 8-year battle, Karen was awarded legal custody of Sharon.
Karen now speaks across the country to raise awareness for human rights issues, including the legal protection of LGBTQIA relationships.
UCSC presents Karen Thompson in a lecture titled “Love is a Dangerous Promise” on Thursday, March 7, at 7 p.m., in the Second Stage Theater in the Performing Arts Center on the UCSC campus. Admission is free, and the public is invited. Free tickets to the lecture are available at santacruztickets.com. For more information, call (831) 459-2698.
This event is sponsored by the UC Santa Cruz Humanities Division, the UC Santa Cruz Feminist Studies Department, the Women Lawyers of Santa Cruz County, the UC Presidential Chair in Feminist Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, and UCSC’s Cantu Center.

Living Writers Reading Series: Student Reading
2013-03-07 18:00 - 19:30 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Please join us for our quarterly student reading.

Celine Parreñas Shimizu: "Straitjacket Sexualities: Mapping Asian American Manhoods"
2013-03-06 12:15 - 14:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Going beyond the assessment that Asian American men in the movies embody asexuality/effeminacy/queerness, or a manhood that falls short of the norms, Celine Shimizu’s Straitjacket Sexualities (Stanford, 2012), explores how Asian/American men in US film history sought to formulate masculinities in, through, and beyond constricting notions of their identities.

C.D.C. Reeve: Beginning and Ending with Happiness in Aristotle's Ethics
2013-03-05 16:00 - 17:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
C.D.C. Reeve is the Delta Kappa Epsilon Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He works primarily in ancient Greek philosophy, especially Plato and Aristotle. His books include, Philosopher-Kings (Princeton 1988; reissued 2006), Socrates in the Apology (Hackett 1989), Practices of Reason(Oxford, 1992) Substantial Knowledge (Hackett 2000), Love’s Confusions (Harvard 2005), andAction, Contemplation, and Happiness: An Essay on Aristotle (Harvard 2012). He has translated Plato’s Cratylus (1997), Euthyphro, Apology, Crito (2002), Republic (2004), and Meno (2006) as well as Aristotle’s Politics (1998).
This event is free and open to the public.

American Indian Writers Series: Kim Shuck
2013-03-04 16:00 - 18:00 | Santa Cruz, 95064, United States
Kim Shuck (Cherokee/Sac & Fox) is a poet, weaver, educator, doer of piles of laundry, planter of seeds, traveler and child wrangler. Kim is the recipient of the Native Writers of the America’s First Book Award for her 2005 book Smuggling Cherokee. She has an MFA in weaving from SFSU, and was a member of the board of directors for Califorinia Poets in the Schools.
This project is co-sponsored by the American Indian Resource Center, Care Council, The Departments of American Studies, Literature, and the UC Presidential Chair in Feminist Critical Race and Ethnic Studies.

The People’s Pacific: Trans-Pacific Solidarity and Alliances in the Age of Obama’s Pivot
2013-03-04 08:00 - 17:00 | Santa Cruz, 95064, United States
In his landmark essay, “The American Century” (1941), in which he argued against the foolishness of “isolationist sterility” given the rise of the United States as “the most powerful and most vital nation in the world,” Henry Luce, the China-born son of American missionaries, predicted that “in the decades to come,” Asia would “be worth to us four, five, ten billions of dollars a year.” In order to harness precisely this potential, Luce advised, ”we have to decide whether or not we shall have for ourselves and our friends freedom of the seas—the right to go with our ships and our ocean-going airplanes where we wish, when we wish, and as we wish.” Echoes of Luce’s hegemonic blueprint for U.S. twentieth-century power projection in Asia would reverberate—several decades later—in then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s October 2011 policy plan, “America’s Pacific Century,” which identified the Asia-Pacific region as the most critical sphere of twenty-first century U.S. influence. Addressing a war-weary American public, Clinton pledged that the United States would remain a key “Pacific power.” Not only would the United States refuse to draw down its military commitments in Asia and the Pacific but also it would “pivot” (from the Middle East) and concentrate its military resources in the region.
Against hegemonic U.S. designs that map the region as an “empire of bases” (Chalmers Johnson) aimed at containing China, this year’s Pacific Seminar undertakes as its focus critical contemporary counter-imaginaries that chart the power of the region from below—as a “people’s Pacific” (Walden Bello), a “sea of islands” (Epeli Hau’ofa), and an oceanic commons. Focusing on the urgency of trans-Pacific solidarity and alliances between and among site-specific struggles, the Pacific Seminar this year brings together three public intellectuals and activist-scholars who will present on their work and with whom we will engage in collective conversation: Kuan-Hsing Chen (National Chiao Tung University), the founder of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and the driving force behind the Modern Asian Thought project; Keith Camacho (UCLA), a Chamorro scholar from the Marianas Islands and a key theorist of U.S. militarism in the Pacific; and Koohan Paik (International Forum Group), a grassroots anti-base activist and a founder of Moana Nui whose political work has focused on Hawai’i, Guam, and Korea.

As in past years, this year’s Pacific Seminar will be run as a workshop and the following readings will be circulated in advance:

• Kuan-Hsing Chen, “De-Imperialization: Club 51 and the Imperialist Assumption of Democracy” (2010)
• Keith Camacho, “After 9/11: Militarized Borders and Social Movements in the Mariana Islands” (2012)
• Koohan Paik and Jerry Mander, “Blowback in the Pacific” (2012)
• Walden Bello, “From American Lake to a People’s Pacific in the Twenty-First Century” (2010)

Please contact Christine Hong (cjhong@ucsc.edu) for readings and with any questions. This event is sponsored by the Institute for Humanities Research (UC Santa Cruz) and the Townsend Working Group on Asian Cultural Studies (UC Berkeley).

"Occupation Affect: On Political Emotion" Conference
2013-03-02 09:00 - 17:30 | Santa Cruz, 95064, United States
“Occupation Affect” seeks to take the emotional pulse of the current moment. Staging a day of public talks and a roundtable discussion, followed by a half-day meeting, we will gather a group of scholars to investigate the feelings that permeate both this era of economic collapse and the modes of adaptation as well as rebellion that have arisen in its midst. We want to explore the affective dimensions of the Great Recession and jobless “recovery,” of bail-outs and sell-outs, of tea parties and coffee klatches, of magnificent inequality and vanishing public services, of the growing concentration of wealth and the emergence of autonomous, decentralized social movements, of hopes dashed and hopes raised, of diminishing faith in government and expanding political imaginaries, of economic freefall and resurgent activist energy. We will, in short, investigate the current conjuncture through the lens of political emotion.
In this moment of economic restructuring toward an uncertain future and growing rebellion against the neoliberal global order, we are curious about ordinary and extraordinary affects: their circulation and effects, how we feel them and what we do with them, what they signal and what they obscure, how they use us and how we might use them. We want to better understand the conditions of possibility for political hope and despair; the sources and effects of apocalyptic feelings; and how senses of impossibility sometimes fade and new horizons suddenly emerge. What do we all do to stay afloat, what new subjectivities are arising amid ongoing crises, what new social relations, new ways of thinking, feeling, and doing, are being generated in the current conjuncture?
Feelings, emotion, and affect have continued for over a decade now to fascinate scholars across the disciplines. The terrain is slippery, taking as its object of research viscerality, nonrationality, the sensed, that which is bodily, inchoate, ineffable, and to the side of consciousness. We wish to investigate the theoretical, philosophical, and political trajectories the affective turn opens up for making sense of, and figuring out how to intervene in, the contemporary moment.
The Affect Working Group draws together faculty and graduate students from across the University—American Studies, Anthropology, Art, Computer Science, Feminist Studies, Film and Digital Media, History of Art and Visual Culture, History of Consciousness, Latin American and Latino Studies, Literature, Politics, and Sociology—who are interested in the felt dimensions of social life. With this conference, we hope to advance our discussions with one another and contribute to a larger discussion among similar research/art/activist collaboratives around the country, including Feel Tank Chicago and Public Feelings groups in Austin, Texas and New York City.

Conference Schedule, Saturday, Humanities 210
9:00 a.m. – Breakfast
9:30 a.m. – Introduction
10 – 11:30 a.m.
Panel 1: Political Emotion and Activist Affect: Occupy and other Social Movements
Moderator: Dean Mathiowetz (Politics, UCSC)
Elizabeth Freeman (English, UCD)
Debbie Gould (Sociology, UCSC)
Lyn Hejinian (English, UCB)
Rei Terada (Comparative Literature, UCI)
11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m.
Panel 2: Affective Technologies and New Media
Moderator: Sharon Daniel (Film & Digital Media, UCSC)
Herman Gray (Sociology, UCSC)
Kim Lau (Literature, UCSC)
Soraya Murray (Film & Digital Media, UCSC)
Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Compute Science, SOE, UCSC)
1 – 2:15 p.m. – Lunch
2:30 – 4 p.m.
Panel 3: The Politics of Ordinary Affect
Moderator: Carla Freccero (Literature, History of Consciousness, Feminist Studies, UCSC)
Mel Chen (Gender & Women’s Studies, UCB)
Arlie Hochschild (Sociology, UCB)
Jerry Neu (Humanities, UCSC)
Sianne Ngai (English, Stanford)
4 – 4:15 p.m. – Coffee break
4:15 – 5:30 p.m.
Concluding Roundtable
Karen Barad (Feminist Studies, UCSC)
Vilashini Cooppan (Literature, UCSC)
Sharon Daniel (Film & Digital Media, UCSC)
Dee Hibbert-Jones (Art, UCSC)
Dean Mathiowetz (Politics, UCSC)
Vanita Seth (Politics, UCSC)
Anna Tsing (Anthropology, UCSC)

Sponsored by the UC Humanities Network, a UCHRI Conference Grant, the Social Sciences Division. Staff support provided by the IHR. For more information, including disabled access, please contact Shann Ritchie, sritchie@ucsc.edu. 831-459-5655.

Emerging Worlds Lecture Series: "Shifting Worlds"
2013-02-28 19:00 - 21:00
The Anthropology Department presents:
Emerging Worlds Lecture Series: “Shifting Worlds”
Marilyn Strathern
Dame Marilyn Strathern was the William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University from 1994 to 2008. She has written about new reproductive technologies and intellectual property law and her most recent work focuses on the complexities of transparency, accountability, and audit, especially within the academy. She is the author many of books, among which the most influential are The Gender of the Gift (University of Calfornia Press, 1988), Partial Connections (Altamira Press2004 [1991]); Kinship, Law and the Unexpected: Relatives are Often a Surprise (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Donna Haraway
Donna Haraway is Professor of History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research interests include feminist theory, cultural and historical studies of science and technology, relation of life and human sciences, and human-animal relations. In her refusal of human-exceptionalism, Haraway explores multi-species entanglements and is a leading thinker in the post-humanities. She is author of many books including, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge, 1991), which has become an authoritative text in theorizing the politics of the post-human, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (Routledge, 1997), and her most recent book, When Species Meet: Encounters in Dogland (University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
Megan Moodie
Megan Moodie is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she studies the sociality engendered by legal and economic projects for uplift and empowerment, including affirmative action, microfinance, and gender-based rights assertions. She is currently working on a book manuscript based on ethnographic fieldwork with an urban tribal community in Jaipur, India. Recent publications include “Microfinance and the Gender of Risk: The Case of Kiva.org” in the current issue of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.

The Living Writers Reading Series: Geoffrey G. O'Brien
2013-02-28 18:00 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Geoffrey G. O’Brien is the author of Metropole (2011), Green and Gray (2007), and The Guns and Flags Project (2002), all from The University of California Press. His next book, People on Sunday (Wave Books), Fall 2013; his chapbooks include Hesiod (Song Cave, 2010), and Poem with No Good Lines (Hand Held Editions, 2010). He is the coauthor (with John Ashbery and Timothy Donnelly) of Three Poets: Ashbery, Donnelly, O’Brien (Minus A Press, 2012), and in collaboration with the poet Jeff Clark is the author of 2A (Quemadura, 2006).

Film Screening: Dante's Inferno directed by Sandow Birk
2013-02-27 19:00 - 21:00 | Stevenson, Room 150
Free and open to the public (English dialogue)
Melding the seemingly disparate traditions of apocalyptic live-action graphic novel and charming Victorian-era toy theater, Dante’s Inferno is a subversive, darkly satirical update of the original 14th-century literary classic, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. Retold with the use of intricately hand-drawn paper puppets and miniature sets, and without the use of CGI effects, this brilliant film takes viewers on a tour of Hell.
Sporting a hoodie and a hangover from the previous night’s debauchery, Dante wakes to find he is lost — literally and metaphorically — in a strange part of town. He asks the first guy he sees for some help, who turns out to be the ancient Roman poet Virgil, author of the Aeneid.
The pair descends into the underworld, where Virgil shows Dante the underbelly of the Inferno. Oddly enough, it closely resembles the decayed landscape of modern urban life: used car lots, strip malls, airport security checks, and the U.S. Capitol

Marc Matera: "Modernism in the Art & Criticism on Ronald Moody"
2013-02-27 12:15 - 14:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Marc Matera is finishing a book, London and the Black International, on the wider Atlantic and imperial horizons of black activism, intellectual work, and cultural production in London between the world wars. His most recent work examines the Jamaican visual artist Ronald Moody’s agonistic relationship to modernism.
Marc Matera is Assistant Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz.

Claire Farago: "Seeing the Unmodern in the Modern: Leonardo and the Legibility of Religion"
2013-02-26 15:00 - 16:15 | Porter C-118
Written in an era before modern distinctions among art, science, and religion existed, Leonardo da Vinci’s treatise on painting is regarded today as a canonical text in the history of western art for its scientific approach to problems of representation. New evidence suggests that prior to publication this text was appropriated in a Catholic Reformation effort designed to promote a legible style of painting suitable for sacred subjects. Today, we do not usually think of it as ideologically freighted by the concerns of Christianity with the ontology of images. What does bringing together historical and contemporary theoretical approaches to questions of artifice–especially to the fantasy of a transparent, indexical way of imitating nature that avoids artifice–offer contemporary visual studies?
Claire Farago is Professor of Renaissance Art, Theory, and Criticism at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Her publications include Leonardo da Vinci’s Paragone: A Critical Interpretation (1992) and most recently, Art Is Not What You Think It Is (2012), co-authored with Donald Preziosi, as well as edited volumes and other collaborative projects including Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America 1450 to 1650 (1995), Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum (2004), Transforming Images: New Mexican Santos in-between Worlds (2006), and Re-Reading Leonardo: The Treatise on Painting across Europe 1550-1900 (2009). She has been a Distinguished Visiting Professor at UCLA, the Wiley Visiting Professor of Renaissance Art at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, MacGeorge Fellow Visiting Professor at the University of Melbourne, and the inaugural Fulbright-York Scholar at the University of York, UK. Working with an international team of scholars, currently she is preparing a modern critical edition of Leonardo da Vinci’s abridged Treatise on Painting first published in 1651.
For information or to accommodate a disability: History of Art and Visual Culture, 459-4564, havc@ucsc.edu

“Mendelsohn’s Incessant Visions” Screening and Q&A with Director Duki Dror
2013-02-25 19:30 - 21:30 | Media Theater, M110
Free and Open to the Public
General Admission Seating, first come, first served
Parking available in Performing Arts Lot ($4)
Synopsis: This film is a cinematic mediation about the untold story of Erich Mendelsohn, whose life and career were as enigmatic and tragic as the path of the century. He drew sketches on tiny pieces of paper and sent them from the trenches to a young cellist, who was waiting for him in Berlin. She thought he was a genius and after WWI, she helped him become the busiest architect in Germany. When she planned to leave him for a communist poet, he built a perfect house for her, entirely planned by him from the lakeview living room, to the silverware and her evening gowns. When the Nazis came to power, they abandoned the house and left Germany forever. Erich and Louise Mendelsohn have wandered between continents, between world wars, between success and failure. The buildings that Erich built around the world, scattered as a trail of their journey, have changed the history of architecture.
Award-winning filmmaker and current Schusterman Visiting Artist, Duki Dror (The Journey of Vaan Nguyen, Raging Dove) has created a spectacular interpretation based on Erich and Louise’s relationship, for one of the most captivating chapters in the development of modern art.
Watch the Trailer
Presented by The Arts Division and Film and Digital Media. Co-Sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies, Arts Dean’s Arts Excellence Fund, and Santa Cruz Jewish Film Festival.

David Myers: "A Hasidic Town in New York? As American as Apple Pie?"
2013-02-25 17:00 - 18:45 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
David Myers is professor of Jewish history and chair of the UCLA History Department. He is currently at work with Nomi Stolzenberg (USC) on a book on the Satmar Hasidic community of Kiryas Joel, New York. This project represents a significant departure from his work in the fields of German-Jewish intellectual history, the history of Jewish historiography, and the history of Zionism. In his current work, he is combining historical, ethnographic, and legal approaches to examine the rise to prominence of a self-contained and legally recognized municipality in the State of New York that consists entirely of Hasidic Jews. His research shows that the creation of such a homogeneous shtetl has had few parallels in Jewish history, though it is not nearly so unusual in American history, which has an identifiable tradition of permitting strong forms of religious sub-communities to take root.
Reception to follow talk.
This event is presented by the Center for Jewish Studies with generous support from the David B. Gold Foundation.

Tanya Maria Golash-Boza: "Mass Deportation and the Neoliberal Cycle"
2013-02-25 12:30 - 14:00 | College 8, Room 301, College Eight Rd‎, University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The United States is deporting more people than ever before – nearly 400,000 each year since 2006. Many deportees have close ties to the United States: in 2011, 100,000 deportees had U.S. citizen children. The vast majority of deportees are men of color. How do we explain this devastating policy shift? I argue that neoliberalism and, by extension, global capitalism, make the mass deportation of men of color possible in the current context. Mass deportation is a U.S. policy response designed to relocate surplus labor to the periphery and to keep labor in the United States compliant. The U.S. public accepts this policy response because it targets men of color – people perceived to be expendable in the current economy.
Tanya Golash-Boza is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Merced. She is the author of three books: 1) Due Process Denied (2012), which describes how and why non-citizens in the United States have been detained and deported for minor crimes, without regard for constitutional limits on disproportionate punishment; 2) Immigration Nation (2012), which provides a critical analysis of the impact that U.S. immigration policy has on human rights; and 3) Yo Soy Negro: Blackness in Peru (2011), the first book in English to address what it means to be black in Peru. She has also published many articles in peer-reviewed journals on deportations, racial identity, human rights, U.S. Latinos/as and Latin America, in addition to essays and chapters in edited volumes and online venues. Her innovative scholarship was awarded the Distinguished Early Career Award from the Racial and Ethnic Minorities Studies Section of the American Sociological Association in 2010.
Event presented by the UCSC Sociology Colloquium Series and the Center for Labor Studies. For Information about access, please contact Barbara Laurence at balauren@ucsc.edu

Living Writers Reading by Amaranth Borsuk
2013-02-21 18:00 - 19:30 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Amaranth Borsuk is the author of Handiwork (Slope, 2012), selected by Paul Hoover for the 2011 Slope Books Prize, and, together with programmer Brad Bouse, of Between Page and Screen (Siglio, 2012), a book of augmented-reality poems. In 2010, her chapbook-length erasure, Tonal Saw, was published by The Song Cave. Her poems, essays, translations and reviews have appeared widely in print and online, and pieces have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Chicago Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, American Letters & Commentary, and The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare. Her intermedia project Abra, a hybrid book-performance collaboration with Kate Durbin, Zach Kleyn, and Ian Hatcher, recently received an Expanded Artists’ Books grant from the Center for Book and Paper Arts in Chicago and will be issued as an artist’s book and iOS app in fall of 2013. She teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington, Bothell.

"Asian America: Triangulations about a Semisphere"
2013-02-21 16:00 - 18:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The UC Presidential Chair in Feminist Critical Race and Ethnic Studies presents:
Asian America: Triangulations about a Semisphere
A creative presentation, Karen Tei Yamashita will read excerpts from her novel, I Hotel, forthcoming book of performances, Anime Wong, and the essay “Borges & I,” as an opportunity think about the past 45 years of Asian American and Ethnic Studies with respect to our present and future. This will be followed by an informal conversation with Aimee Bahng and Alondra Nelson.

Karen Tei Yamashita (photo by Carolyn Lagattuta)
Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Brazil-Maru, Tropic of Orange, Circle K Cycles, and I Hotel, all published by Coffee House Press. I Hotel was selected as a finalist for the National Book Award and awarded the California Book Award, the American Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association Award, and the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award. She is currently a US Artists Ford Foundation Fellow and Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Aimee Bahng
Aimee Bahng is an assistant professor of English at Dartmouth College with affiliations in Women’s and Gender Studies, Asian American Studies, and Asian & Middle Eastern Studies. Her work on postcolonial science fiction has appeared in MELUS and Critical Studies. Her current book manuscript on speculation examines competing narratives of futurity in contemporary fiction, film, and finance.

Alondra Nelson
Alondra Nelson is Associate Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at Columbia University. An interdisciplinary social scientist, she writes about the intersections of science, technology, medicine, and inequality. Her first book, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination, was recognized with several professional prizes, including the Letitia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians. She is also an editor of Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History; Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life; and “Afrofuturism” a special issue of Social Text. Her next book, The Social Life of DNA, will be published by Beacon Press.
This event is organized and sponsored by the UC Presidential Chair in Feminist Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. Staff support provided by the Institute of Humanities Research. For further information, including disabled access, please contact Shann Ritchie, sritchie@ucsc.edu, (831) 459-5655. Maps: http://maps.ucsc.edu.

Joseph Sabbagh: "Specificity and Objecthood in Tagalog"
2013-02-21 12:00 - 14:00 | Santa Cruz, 95064, United States
LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM
Joseph Sabbagh (UT Arlington)
Current analyses of the syntax of transitive constructions in Tagalog (Austronesian, Philippines) are constructed around the claim that the theme argument of a transitive verb, if it is semantically specific, must be realized as the subject of a ‘theme-subject’ clause. In reality, a specific theme may be realized in one of three different ways: (i) as the subject of a ‘theme-subject’ clause; (ii) as an oblique-marked direct object of an `actor-subject’ clause; or (iii) as an “ordinary” (genitive marked) direct object of an ‘actor-subject’ clause. Which of these options is available depends on the type of theme involved: Option(iii) is not available for pronouns or proper nouns, but is available for other specific and non-specific themes; options (i) and (ii) are unavailable for non-specific themes; and all three are available for all other types of specific theme.
Underlying these different morpho-syntactic options, I argue, is a clause structure in which there are at least three distinct syntactic positions available for theme arguments. Pronoun and proper noun themes obligatorily occur in the highest of these three positions (a position that is above the external argument), while non-specific themes occupy the lowest of these positions (the base/theta-position of the theme). Otherspecific themes occupy an intermediate position within vP (below the external argument, but above the base/theta-position of the theme). Much of the talk is devoted to motivating these three syntactic positions. This particular distribution of syntactic positions provides positive evidence for proposals that postulate a direct,formally coded, correspondence between syntactic prominence and the semantic/pragmatic prominence relations posited by relational/markedness hierarchies—in particular, the Definiteness Scale (Pronoun > Proper noun > Definite > Specific (indefinite)).

American Indian Writers Series: Rain Gomez
2013-02-20 16:00 - 18:00 | Ethnic Resource Lounge, Bay Tree Conference Center, Bay Tree Conference Center, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Rain Gomez won the 2009 First Book Award in poetry for Smoked Mullet Cornbread Crawdad Memory (Mongrel Empire Press, Fall 2012). A self described “TriRacially Fluffy and Fabulous” Louisiana Méstiza,poet, academic and musician.Her critical work, “Brackish Bayou Blood: Weaving Mixed Blood Indian Creole Identity Outside the Written Record,” appears in American Indian Culture and Research Journal.
This project is co-sponsored by the American Indian Resource Center, Care Council, The Departments of American Studies, Literature, and the UC Presidential Chair in Feminist Critical Race and Ethnic Studies.

Creative Writing Reading by Amaranth Borsuk
2013-02-20 15:30 - 17:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States

Janette Dinishak: "Autism & Neurodiversity"
2013-02-20 12:15 - 14:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Janette Dinishak’s work explores how Wittgenstein’s concept “noticing an aspect” can provide a frame for capturing and understanding commonly neglected phenomena that are characteristic of autistic experience. She also traces the inter-relations between scientific, cultural, and first-person perspectives on autism and how these perspectives interact in shaping our understanding of autism.
Janette Dinishak is Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at UC Santa Cruz.

American Indian Writers Series: Rain Archambeau-Marshall
2013-02-20 12:00 - 14:00 | Cervantes & Velasquez Room, Baytree Conference Center, Bay Tree Conference Center, UC Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Rain L. Archambeau Marshall (Yankton/Choctaw) is an attorney and professor in Native American Environmental Studies at Humboldt State University. Formerly Attorney General for the Rosebud Sioux tribe, Rain is a American Civil Liberties Union Ira Glasser Racial Justice Fellow. She will speak on civil rights in education.
This project is co-sponsored by the American Indian Resource Center, Care Council, The Departments of American Studies, Literature, and the UC Presidential Chair in Feminist Critical Race and Ethnic Studies.

Living Writers Reading by Ronaldo Wilson
2013-02-14 18:00 - 19:30 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Ronaldo V. Wilson is the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (University of Pittsburgh, 2008), winner of the 2007 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem Books, 2009), winner of the Thom Gunn Award and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry in 2010. His latest book, Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose, Other, is forthcoming from Counterpath Press in 2013. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in the journals Callaloo, Interim, Bombay Gin, Spoon River Poetry Review, 1913, and The Volta, as well as in the anthologies Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry (Norton, 2013); The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare (Nightboat Books, 2012); and Among Friends Engendering the Social Site of Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 2013). He holds a PhD in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, a MA in Poetry from New York University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program, and an AB in English from the University of California, Berkeley. Co-founder of the Black Took Collective, Wilson is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Poetry, Fiction and Literature in the Literature Department of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

David Blank: "Volumina Herculanensia: the Library of the Villa of the Papyri and its books"
2013-02-14 16:30 - 18:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Between 1752 and 1754 the only library to survive from the Roman world complete with its books was discovered in a grand villa in the seaside town of Herculaneum. The talk will serve as an introduction to this remarkable discovery and the treatment of its books, from the 18th to the 20th centuries.
David Blank is a student of ancient philosophy, from the Presocratics to the later Platonists. He has worked especially on philosophy of language and philology in antiquity. He has also worked extensively on the Herculaneum Papyri and is editing several papyri of Philodemus’ On Rhetoric. He is Professor and Chair of the Department of Classics at UCLA.

Creative Writing Reading by Ronaldo Wilson
2013-02-13 15:30 - 17:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States

Sharon Kinoshita: "Re-Orientations: The Worlding of Marco Polo"
2013-02-13 12:15 - 14:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
In her new translation of Marco Polo’s Travels, Sharon Kinoshita reorients a text typically read as a western narrative of first contact, by returning it to its original context, the midpoint of the century chronicled in Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony, and to its original title, The Description of the World.
Sharon Kinoshita is Professor of Literature, and Co-Director of the Center for Mediterranean Studies at UC Santa Cruz.

Dora Sorell: “Tell the Children”
2013-02-13 09:30 - 10:40 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Reception following lecture.
Dora Sorell grew up in the small town of Sighet in Northern Romania between the two World Wars. In May 1944 she was deported to Auschwitz along with most of the town’s 10,000 Jewish inhabitants. She survived the ordeal, but her parents, two of her brothers, and some 40 members of her extended family perished in the gas chambers. Dora returned to Sighet, married her high school sweetheart, and built a career and raised a family before emigrating to the West to be with her surviving brothers. More information about her autobiography, Tell the Children, Letters to Miriam, is can be found on her website: http://www.letterstomygrandchildren.com/index.html

Gail Hershatter: "Rural Women, Memory, and China’s Collective Past"
2013-02-12 19:00 - 20:30 | Music Center Recital Hall, Music Center, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The 47th Annual Faculty Research Lecture will be given by Distinguished Professor of History, Gail Hershatter, on Tuesday February 12th, 2013 at 7pm at the Music Recital hall in the Performing Arts Complex. A reception in the lobby will immediately follow the lecture. Doors open at 6:30pm. This event is free and open to the public. Parking $4. Doors open at 6:30pm
What can we learn about the Chinese revolution by placing a doubly marginalized group—rural women—at the center of the inquiry? In this talk, Gail Hershatter explores changes in the lives of women in rural Shaanxi province during the early decades of state socialism, the 1950s and 1960s. She suggests that we think of gender not as a structure, but rather as a fractured, unpredictable, and expansive terrain. Beginning with the memories of a former child daughter-in-law turned village activist, she asks whether rural Chinese women had a revolution, and if so, when and what sort of revolution it was. Such questions encourage us to consider others that preoccupy historians: when is gender a useful category of historical analysis? How is the historical record shaped in interactions with the present moment? What counts as an event? Who gets to decide?

Philosophy of Social Science Roundtable XV
2013-02-12 09:00 - 12:00 | Cowell Conference Room, Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-SANTA CRUZ: MARCH 22-24, 2013
Session V (9 a.m.-Noon)
Chair: Paul Roth, UCSC
Analytical sociology and rhetoric: Large scale social phenomena arguably triggered by innocuous rhetorical devices
Alban Bouvier, Jean Nicod Institute, Paris
The Idea of Philosophy and its Relation to Social Science
Mark Theunissen, The New School
The Concept of a ‘Process’ in Norbert Elias’s Figurational Sociology
Philip Walsh, York University
The Philosophy of Social Science Roundtable thanks the following units at UCSC for their financial support of this conference: Institute for Humanities Research; Department of Philosophy; Department of Economics

Michael Thaler: “Role of Bio-Science and Medicine in Nazi Radical Policies and the Holocaust”
2013-02-11 09:30 - 10:40 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Reception to follow lecture.
Michael Thaler is a Professor Emeritus of Pediatric Medicine, UC San Francisco, and a Lecturer in History, UC Santa Cruz.

Jonathan Kaplan: "Turning social categories into biological realities: 'Race' made biological"
2013-02-07 16:00 - 17:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Biological facts can neither determine nor justify the racial categories identified in our ordinary social discourse. Claims to the contrary confuse our ability to find biological correlates to populations with our social reasons for picking out and maintaining those categories over time. Using recent arguments surrounding “race” and medicine as an example, I argue that rejecting misguided claims regarding the biological nature of “race” remains important if we are to respond appropriately to the injustices inherent in the fundamental importance that socially ascribed racial categories continue to have in determining people’s life-prospects
Dr. Jonathan Kaplan‘s main research interests lie in the Philosophy of Biology and in Social and Political Philosophy. His recent publications include work on human behavior genetics, on the conceptual foundations of evolutionary biology, on issues surrounding the roles that race plays in medicine and in housing, and on the discourses surrounding race and human biology more generally. He is currently an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Oregon State University.
Article of interest:
Prisoners of Abstraction? The Theory and Measure of Genetic Variation, and the Very Concept of “Race”
by Jonathan Michael Kaplan & Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther

Maziar Toosarvandani: "Gapping is VP Ellipsis "
2013-02-07 12:00 - 13:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Where does the gap in gapping — e.g. Some had ordered mussels, and others swordfish — come from? The traditional answer is deletion (Ross 1970, Hankamer 1979, among others). Johnson (2009) presents a formidable challenge to this view. He argues that gapping cannot arise through deletion because gapping has several unique properties that distinguish it from more familiar deletion operations, such as VP-ellipsis. Instead, Johnson proposes that the gap in gapping arises through ‘low coordination’ — coordination of vPs — and across-the-board movement.
First, I argue that across-the-board movement cannot be a general account of gapping, since it is not able to derive the gap in coordination structures with corrective but (Vicente 2010, Toosarvandani, to appear). Then, I revive a version of the deletion account, in which gapping is VP-ellipsis in a low-coordination structure. This correctly generates gapping in corrective but sentences. Moreover, once the information-structural properties of low coordinations are taken into consideration — low coordinates must have parallel focus structures — it also accounts for the unique properties of gapping.
References
Ross, John Robert. 1970. Gapping and the order of constituents. In Progress in linguistics, eds. Manfred Bierwisch and Karl Erich Heidolph, 249-259. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter.
Hankamer, Jorge. 1979. Deletion in coordinate structures. New York: Garland Publishing.
Johnson, Kyle. 2009. Gapping is not (VP-)ellipsis. Linguistic Inquiry 40:289-328.
Toosarvandani, Maziar. To appear. Corrective but coordinates clauses not always but sometimes. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory.
Vicente, Luis. 2010. On the syntax of adversative coordination. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 28:381-415.

Living Writers Reading by Josie Sigler Sibara
2013-02-07 06:00 - 19:30 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States

Poetry Reading with Lyn Hejinian, Keegan Finberg and Michael Dhyne
2013-02-06 17:30 - 19:00 | Felix Kulpa Gallery, 107 Elm Street, Santa Cruz, 95060, United States
Lyn Hejinian
Lyn Hejinian is professor of English at UC Berkeley. She is a poet and critic. She works on modernist and postmodern literature, American postwar experimental literature, Gertrude Stein, the Objectivists, Language Writing, Soviet Russian poetry, translation, small press publishing, and questions of aesthetics and ethics.
Her work includes the following books of poetry: Saga / Circus (Omnidawn Books, 2008) Situations, Sings (written with Jack Collom; Adventures in Poetry, 2008) The Lake (with Emilie Clark; Granary Books, 2004) My Life in the Nineties (Shark Books, 2003) The Fatalist (Omnidawn Books, 2003) Slowly (Tuumba Press, 2002) A Border Comedy (Granary Books, 2001) The Beginner (Spectacular Books, 2000; Tuumba Press, 2002) Happily (Post-Apollo Press, 2000) Sight (written with Leslie Scalapino; Edge Books, 1999) Oxota: A Short Russian Novel (The Figures, 1991), and My Life (second version; Sun & Moon Press, 1987).
Her non-fiction work includes The Language of Inquiry (University of California Press, 2000) Leningrad, written with Michael Davidson, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten (Mercury House, 1991). She has also published two translations: Description, poems by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko (Sun & Moon Press, 1990) and Xenia, poems by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko (Sun & Moon Press, 1994).
Keegan Cook Finberg
Keegan Cook Finberg is a PhD candidate in Literature at University of California, Santa Cruz. She works on twentieth and twenty-first-century poetry in English and French, especially avant-garde and experimental works. Her approach includes particular attention to poetry’s relation to media, architectural space, and affect. She also co-directs the Poetry and Politics Research Cluster and Reading Series at UCSC. Her poetry has been published in Bone Bouquet (2012) and The Little Jackie Paper (2006). She is currently finishing up a poetry manuscript about bed bugs.
Michael Dhyne
Michael Dhyne is from Burlingame, CA and is currently an undergraduate student at UCSC studying Creative Writing.

Creative Writing Reading by Josie Sigler Sibara
2013-02-06 15:30 - 17:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States

Lyn Hejinian: "The Avant-Garde in Progress"
2013-02-06 12:15 - 14:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Lynn Hejinian is currently at work on a book-length essay, tentatively titled The Positions of the Sun, and exploring practical as well as conceptual possibilities for avant-garde and quotidian practices under conditions of late (or perhaps, now, triumphant) capitalism.
Lyn Hejinian is professor of English at UC Berkeley. She is a poet and critic. She works on modernist and postmodern literature, American postwar experimental literature, Gertrude Stein, the Objectivists, Language Writing, Soviet Russian poetry, translation, small press publishing, and questions of aesthetics and ethics.
Her work includes the following books of poetry: Saga / Circus (Omnidawn Books, 2008) Situations, Sings (written with Jack Collom; Adventures in Poetry, 2008) The Lake (with Emilie Clark; Granary Books, 2004) My Life in the Nineties (Shark Books, 2003) The Fatalist (Omnidawn Books, 2003) Slowly (Tuumba Press, 2002) A Border Comedy (Granary Books, 2001) The Beginner (Spectacular Books, 2000; Tuumba Press, 2002) Happily (Post-Apollo Press, 2000) Sight (written with Leslie Scalapino; Edge Books, 1999) Oxota: A Short Russian Novel (The Figures, 1991), and My Life (second version; Sun & Moon Press, 1987).
Her non-fiction work includes The Language of Inquiry (University of California Press, 2000) Leningrad, written with Michael Davidson, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten (Mercury House, 1991). She has also published two translations: Description, poems by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko (Sun & Moon Press, 1990) and Xenia, poems by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko (Sun & Moon Press, 1994).

Mediterranean Studies MRP Workshop - UCLA
2013-02-02 09:30 - 17:00 | University of California, Los Angeles, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
The Mediterranean Seminar/University of California Multi-Campus Research Project (MRP) in Mediterranean Studies announces its Winter 2013 Workshop, to be held at UCLA on Saturday, 2 February 2013. This is part of a three-day event which also includes the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CMRS) Ahmanson Conference, “Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean,” to be held on January 31-February 1.
The Workshop consists of discussion of three pre-circulated papers and a talk by our featured scholar, Michael Herzfeld (Anthropology, Harvard University).
Carol Lansing, Professor of History, UC Santa Barbara
“Captive Women in the Eastern Mediterranean in the Later Middle Ages”
Erith Jaffe-Berg, Associate Professor of Theater, UC Riverside
“Mediterranean Cartographies of Sixteenth-Century Commedia dell’ Arte Actresses”
Lucia Carminati, Graduate Student, Middle Eastern and North African Studies, University of Arizona
“Egypt 1919: Working-class Cosmopolitanism and Shifting Boundaries of Belonging”
Michael Herzfeld, Ernest E. Monrad Professor of the Social Sciences, Harvard University
“Gender, Geography, and the Imagining of the Mediterranean”
Space is limited, so please register now. Registration opens for UC faculty and graduate students and those at institutions affiliated with the Mediterranean Consortium today. Registration for all others will begin on Dec. 26 (registration requests may be sent in at any time; early applications will be queued in the order they are received).
Travel assistance (max $350) will be provided to attendees coming from outside the LA area. UC graduate students and faculty are guaranteed this support; others can apply, and it will be awarded on the basis of availability.
Registration requests and other inquiries should be directed to Courtney Mahaney (cmahaney@ucsc.edu) at the UC Santa Cruz Institute for Humanities Research.
Attendees are encouraged to register for the Ahmanson Conference. This is done through UCLA’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies; see http://www.cmrs.ucla.edu/programs/calendar_jan13.html#1-30.

2013 California Regional High School Ethics Bowl Competition
2013-02-02 08:45 - 17:00 | Multiple Venues, College 9 & College 10, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
An Ethics Bowl is a collaborative yet competitive event, more nuanced than debate, in which teams are presented with a series of wide-ranging ethical dilemmas and are asked to analyze them; they are then judged on the basis of their analyses. An exciting tournament, it is also a way for students to gain valuable insight into ethical and philosophical issues.
Location:
College Nine: Social Science 1, Rooms 110 and 161
College Ten: Social Sciences 2, Rooms 71, 75 and 179
Schedule:
8:00 Judges Training: Social Science 2, Room 141
8:45 Welcome
9:00 Round 1
10:10 Round 2
11:20 Round 3
12:30 Lunch
1:30 Round 4
3:00 Final Round with reception ending at 5:00
For more information, please visit: http://philosophy.ucsc.edu/news-events/ethicsbowl/highschoolethicsbowl.html

Living Writers Reading by Carmen Gimenez Smith
2013-01-31 18:00 - 19:30 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States

Jan Boxill: "Using Sports as a Public Forum for Ethics"
2013-01-31 16:00 - 17:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Dr. Jan Boxill is Director of the Parr Center for Ethics, Chair of the Faculty, and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
The Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture is a lively forum for the discussion and exploration of ethics-related challenges in human endeavors. Presented annually by the Philosophy Department, the Ethics Lecture is made possible by the Peggy Downes Baskin Humanities Endowment for Interdisciplinary Ethics, a fund created in honor of Peggy Downes’s longtime interest in ethical issues across the academic spectrum.

Marilyn Westerkamp: "Gracious Invaders and Frightened Magistrates: Gender, Charisma, and the Limits of Political Power in 17th Century New England"
2013-01-30 16:00 - 17:30 | Silverman Conference Room, Stevenson, Stevenson College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Marilyn Westerkamp is Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz.
Dinner reception follows at the Stevenson Provost House.
This event is cosponsored by the Institute for Humanities Research and the History Department.

Creative Writing Reading by Carmen Gimenez Smith
2013-01-30 15:30 - 17:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States

UCSC Educational Technology Trade Show: Faculty Helping Faculty
2013-01-30 15:00 - 17:00 | Stevenson Event Center
Come learn from faculty and instructional support staff about educational technologies that can charm and engage students. No matter whether you use Mac, PC, iOS, or Linux, we will have examples of educational technologies that work on each of these platforms. Presentations from faculty in each academic division, Learning Technologies, and UCSC Extension. Although the event runs from 3-5:00 p.m., dropping by for just 20 minutes would allow you to visit a couple of tables and be inspired.

Christopher Connery: "Is China Socialist (And Why Are We Asking this Question)?"
2013-01-30 12:15 - 14:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Christopher Connery’s recent work has centered on the global 1960s and its aftermaths, Chinese urbanism, and Shanghai studies. He is currently working on a psychogeographical study of Shanghai. His talk is part of a series of reflections on left and anti-capitalist critical discourse on contemporary China, in China and internationally.
Christopher Connery is Professor of World Literature and Cultural Studies at UC Santa Cruz.

Clive Sinclair: “Zion Down Under, or Israel through the Looking Glass”
2013-01-28 12:30 - 13:45 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Photo of Melech Ravitch with a young Aboriginal woman in the outback. Photo courtesy of Monash University.
Dr. Sinclair will tell us how Melech Ravitch – poet, traveller, and (until 1934) Executive Secretary of the Fareyn fun Yidishe Literatn un Zhurnalistn in Varshe – got wind of the approaching catastrophe of the Holocaust, and scanned the globe for a place of refuge. With this in mind he set out for Australia in 1933, and upon arrival mounted an expedition to the Kimberleys in the Northern Territory.
His account of the journey – written in Yiddish – and his numerous photographs, display a remarkable and unusual sympathy for the aboriginal people. Indeed, he saw in them a reflection of the suffering of his own people he had left behind in Europe.
Ravitch is an engaging companion. And if it weren’t for the historic tragedies that befell both Jews and Aborigines his journey would be the stuff of comedy.
In the 1980s his journey and experience was recreated on canvas by his famous son, Yosl Bergner. Still only seventeen, Bergner had followed his father to Australia, where he soon established himself as the conscience of Australian art. Like his father he felt a kinship for the Aborigines, magnified by the awareness of what exactly had befallen European Jewry. In 1950 Yosl Bergner arrived in Israel, where he eventually became one of the country’s most distinguished artists. Just as his father saw Australia as a sort of double-exposure – Europe over-laid upon Australasia – so Bergner juxtaposes Israel and Australia, producing a looking-glass image of the Promised Land. In short, the father presents a version of What-Might-Have-Been, while the son offers a portrait of a dreamer disappointed.
Clive Sinclair has published 13 books of fiction, travel, and autobiography, some of which have been given prizes. Early in his career he was selected as one of the twenty Best of Young British Novelists. His most acclaimed collection of stories – The Lady and the Laptop – won both the PEN Silver pen for fiction, and the Jewish Quarterly award for fiction. An earlier collection, Bedbugs, was recently republished by Syracuse University Press in its Library of Modern Jewish Literature. In 2008 he published Clive Sinclair’s True Tales of the Wild West, an exercise in Dodgy Realism. He also leads a double-life as an academic and critic: he has published a study of Isaac Bashevis and Israel Joshua Singer – The Brothers Singer – and writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement. His association with UCSC began in 1969, when he arrived from England as a graduate student; it continued in 1980-81, when he returned as a Visiting Lecturer, as he did again in 2003.
