Coloquio de Spanish Studies: Shadi Rohana
2019-05-22 16:00 - 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Shadi Rohana is a Mexico City-based literary translator, translating between Arabic, Spanish and English. He has introduced and translated a number of Latin American authors from Spanish to Arabic, as well as speeches and declarations from the EZLN in Chiapas. He pursued Latin American Studies in the United States (Swarthmore College) and Mexico (UNAM), and is currently a full-time faculty member at the Center for Asian and African Studies at El Colegio de México, where he teaches Arabic language and literature. The Arabic translation of José Emilio Pacheco’s Las batallas en el desierto (Palestine, 2016) was his first novel-length work.

My Own Words: The Law & Legacy of RBG
2019-05-22 19:00 - 21:00 | DNA Comedy Lab, 155 S. River St., Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
In anticipation of Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music’s upcoming premiere of a major new work inspired by the life of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg- When There Are Nine by composer Kristin Kuster The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, Cabrillo Festival, and Bookshop Santa Cruz have come together to present a panel discussion and Community Read kickoff event.
UC Santa Cruz Distinguished Professor and feminist activist Bettina Aptheker will moderate a conversation with Judge Syda Cogliati, Attorney Anna M. Penrose-Levig, and Attorney Jessica Delgado about the significant cases and opinions Justice Ginsburg has championed over the course of her career and the impact she has had on women’s equality, civil liberties, and racial justice under the law.
Read the Santa Cruz Good Times Coverage if this event here.
Bettina Aptheker: A scholar of history with a national reputation for her talents as an instructor, Bettina Aptheker taught one of the country’s largest and most influential introductory feminist studies courses for nearly three decades at UC Santa Cruz. Starting out in 1980 as the sole lecturer in the Women’s Studies Department, she became the department’s first ladder-rank faculty member in 1987, and was honored with the Alumni Association’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2001. Aptheker’s 2006 book, Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech and Became A Feminist Rebel, tells the fascinating story of her life. Described by the Chronicle of Higher Education as a “stunning memoir,” it traces her role in major historical and political events ranging from her co-leadership of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, the movement against the war in Vietnam, and the trial of Angela Davis, to the building of the Women’s Studies Department at UC Santa Cruz.
Judge Syda Cogliati graduated from UC Santa Cruz and UC Hastings College of the Law and has been a member of the State Bar of California since 1994. She served as a senior appellate research attorney at the Sixth District Court of Appeal before being elected to the Santa Cruz Superior Court bench in 2018.

Anna M. Penrose-Levig is an associate attorney at the law firm of Penrose Chun & Gorman LLP in Santa Cruz. Ms. Penrose-Levig has been practicing law since 2003, is admitted to practice in California and Nevada, and is currently serving on the Board of the Women Lawyers of Santa Cruz County.

Jessica Delgado graduated from UCSC (Merrill, Politics) and Berkeley Law. She is a career public defender currently assigned to the Homicide Division at the Santa Clara County Alternate Defender where she specializes in capital litigation.

Read more about the panelists: https://www.bookshopsantacruz.com/RBG
This event is sponsored by Bookshop Santa Cruz, The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, and the Cabrillo Festival. With co-sponsorships from The Peggy and Jack Baskin Foundation for Feminist Studies, Women Lawyers of Santa Cruz County, and UC Presidential Chair Craig Haney.

The Twentieth Annual Literature Undergraduate Colloquium
2019-05-23 09:30 - 16:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
THE TWENTIETH ANNUAL LITERATURE UNDERGRADUATE COLLOQUIUM
Friends and family are welcome. Come for any part or all of the day.
Opening Remarks 9:30 a.m.
Professor Sean Keilen Director, Literature Undergraduate Program
Panel One: Creative Writing
9:45 – 10:45 a.m.
Moderator: Professor Micah Perks
Mary Miki Arlen, La chanson de Lancelot (et Roland)
Rosa Scupine, How should I remember my grandfather?
Tomas Tedsesco, You ask, “who lives in you?”
Amanda Vong, Body of Water
Holly Voorsanger, Speculative Memoir: Love or Drug?
Panel Two: Literature and Empire
11:00 a.m. – 12:00 noon
Moderator: Professor Martin Devecka
Aspen Adams, Inescapable Pasts: Screen Memories and Sublimation in the Nuclear Age
Ryan McElroy, Nuclear Savage’s Questionable Heart: Replicated Genocidal Imagery in a White Savior Narrative
Jessica Parra Moya, Reclamando y Desmantelando La Figura De La Malinche Con Las Herramientas Del Patrón
LITERATURE UNDERGRADUATE PRIZES-12:00 – 12:45 p.m.
Professor Carla Freccero Chair, Literature Department
* FREE * LUNCH BUFFET
Panel Three: Literature and Other Arts
12:45 – 1:45 p.m.
Moderator: Professor H. Marshall Leicester, Jr.
Emily Caballero, Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner: Guttered White Violence in the Shadows of Death
Zoe Hildebrand, Theory of The Influencer
Daniel Sachs, Rules of the Boys’ Club: Postmodern Horror Films and the Allegory of the Female Director
Panel Four: Encounters with the Novel
2:00 – 3:00 p.m.
Moderator: Professor Chris Connery
Luan Gondim de Alencastro, Complacency in the Absurd: A Study of Metatextuality in As Memorias Postumas de Bras Cubas
Maxwell Shukuya, Emptiness and the Contemporary Novel Under Neoliberalism
Emanuel Trujillo, Finding Adan
Panel Five: Shakespeare’s Late Plays
3:15 – 4:00 p.m.
Moderator: Professor Sean Keilen
Stephanie Bolduc, Forgiveness and Control in The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest
Cynthia Gonzalez, Anger and Forgiveness in The Tempest and Cymbeline
Concluding Remarks 4:00 p.m.

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. ALL ARE INVITED!
For more information: literature.ucsc.edu | (831) 459-4778 | litdept@ucsc.edu

Veda Popovici-History Does (Not) Repeat Itself: Speculative Histories of Post-Revolutionary Romania
2019-05-23 17:00 - 18:30 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Veda Popovici’s work explores the limits of political imagination. In this talk, she presents her latest political art project: a mapping of collective dreams and desires of revolutionary events in the context of post-1989 Romania. Laying out seven radical future pasts, these are stories that could have been, but never happened…feminist unions, Eastern European migrants antifascist organizing, anticapitalist campaigns, solidarity movements between students and coal miners.
Based in Bucharest, Veda Popovici holds a PhD in Art History and Theory from the National University of Art.

Living Writers: Student Readings
2019-05-23 17:30 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Students will be reading from their own work.
Please stay tuned for more information.
Co-sponsors: The Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry Reading, The Laurie Sain Creative Writing Endowment, Siegfried B. and Elizabeth Mignon Puknat Literary Studies Endowment, The Bay Tree Bookstore, The Humanities Institute, The American Indian Resource Center, The Asian American/Pacific Islander Resource Center, and the African American Resource and Cultural Center.

Friday Forum for Graduate Research: Katie Ligmond
2019-05-24 12:30 - 13:45 | Humanities 1, Room 420, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Outcrop of Blue Rocks: Andean Animacy as Illustrated by Guaman Poma
Andeanists have cultivated an obsession with the illustrations and writing of Guaman Poma, and with good reason. There are only three truly illuminated manuscript to come out of Colonial Peru, a scat account in comparison with the plethora from Mexico. Guaman Poma is one of very few Indigenous Peruvian voices that exist in the literary record, and as we have pored over his words and line drawings, very few of us have focused on color. This paper analyzes the use of the color blue in the Galvin Murúa, as it diplicts the rocks as animate, similarly to water, and exists as a hidden code to Indigenous readers of this work.
Katie Ligmond is a second year PhD student in the History of Art and Visual Culture. Her work focuses on the empires of the Andes, including the Warm. Inka, and Spanish imperial forces with a focus on their gendered dynamics and the maintenance of ethic identities.
Friday Forum for Graduate Research is supported by the Graduate Student Association, the Humanities Institute, and the following departments HAVC, Literature, History of Consciousness, Psychology, and Education. It is a weekly interdisciplinary colloquium series for sharing graduate research across the humanities.
For questions email: fridayforum.ucsc@gmail.com

Ashwini Tambe: "Tropical Exceptions: Racial Logics in Twentieth Century Intergovernmental Age of Consent Debates"
2019-05-29 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Legal age standards for sexual maturity are challenging enough to devise at the state or national level, but they are especially contentious at the intergovernmental level. Efforts at setting common standards have often been marked by imperial logics on the part of those proposing common standards and misgivings on the part of those most affected. My talk traces how intergovernmental efforts at setting common age standards for sexual consent and marriage occasioned elaborate posturing and coding of racial difference. In the two cases I discuss —League of Nations conventions on trafficking in the 1920s and United Nations conventions on marriage in the 1950s— I show how the proceedings staged contests between competing imperialisms and foregrounded moral differences between parts of the world. In effect, seemingly neutral age categories became a means to express geopolitical hierarchies and undercut formal liberal relationships of equivalence.
If you have trouble viewing above images, you may view this album directly on Flickr.

Ashwini Tambe studies how societies regulate sexual practices. Ashwini Tambe is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland-College Park and affiliate faculty in the History department and Asian American Studies program. She is also the editorial director of Feminist Studies, the oldest US journal of feminist interdisciplinary scholarship. Her interests include transnational feminist theory, modern South Asian history, and sexuality studies. Her previous books are Codes of Misconduct:Regulating Prostitution in Late Colonial Bombay (2009, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press/New Delhi: Zubaan) and The Limits of Colonial Control in South Asia: Spaces of Disorder in the Indian Ocean (2008, London: Routledge) coedited with Harald Fischer-Tiné. Her recent articles have spanned topics such as population and age of marriage (Women’s Studies International Forum 2014), climatology in scientific racism (Theory, Culture and Society, 2011), interdisciplinary approaches to feminist state theory (Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2010), economic liberalization and sexual liberalism in contemporary India (Economic and Political Weekly, 2010), and the long record of transnational approaches in feminist scholarship (New Global Studies, 2010). Her current work, supported by SSHRC and NEH grants, examines the legal paradoxes in age standards for sexual consent in India; her forthcoming book on the subject is Defining Girlhood in India: A Transnational History of Sexual Maturity Laws (2019, University of Illinois Press). She is also co-editing a volume on the history and future of transnational feminist theory with Millie Thayer titled Transnational Feminist Itineraries.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. The sessions consist of a 40-45 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center provides coffee, tea, and cookies.
All Center for Cultural Studies events are free and open to the public. Staff assistance is provided by the Humanities Institute.

Feminist Science Studies Conference: Indigeneity and Climate Justice Day 1
2019-05-30 09:30 - 15:30 | UCSC Arboretum
Organized by Karen Barad and Felicity Amaya Schaeffer.
The 2019 UCSC Feminist Science Studies conference takes as its focus the theme of “Indigeneity and Climate Justice.” Climate Justice, as opposed to the more narrow framings of “environmental justice,” marks the consideration of the entanglement of ecological, cultural, social, political, geological, biological and other forces, understood as simultaneous and mutually constitutive. A shared concern among our esteemed keynote speakers is the question of how to respond to the challenges of collaborative engagements between Indigenous and non-Indigenous approaches to caring for the Earth. We invite them to engage in conversation with each other and students, faculty, staff, and other conference participants about these pressing questions of multiple ontologies, epistemologies, and uneven responsibilities.
Métis Scholar of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University, Canada
Visiting Professor of History, Yale University
Key Note Speakers:
Zoe Todd
This talk explores Alberta, Canada as a site of intense western knowledge production about topics that are currently ‘hot’ in euro-western academe, such as: extinction, the Anthropocene, environmental degradation, climate change, and energy studies. Challenging the tendency for scholars to literally or figuratively drop into Alberta to mine it for data and information, Todd explores what it means to re-situate studies of earth violence in the Alberta petro-state as ones that require deep relationality and reciprocity.
Valentin Lopez
Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow of Anthropology and Geography
Deakin University, Australia
For some, it seems, the concept of the Anthropocene has delivered a welcome dose of universalism. We must put aside the differences which previously proscribed the very existence of a ‘we’ – the ethics which outlawed such pronouns as a presumptuous act of capture – and see that beings on this planet are unified by their inevitable geological materiality; the dark anthropogenic end of their stony fate. In this presentation, Neale offers a critique of these universalist and redemptive manoeuvres by exploring the temporality, offered by several Indigenous interlocutors, of ‘upside down Country.’ What practices and horizons are meaningful in a place where Country – or, the emplaced and providential order of things – has bee churned and flipped?
Timothy Neale
Timothy Neale is a pakeha (settler) researcher and teacher from Aotearoa New Zealand but currently lives in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia, where he holds an appointment as Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Geography at Deakin University. His research focuses on environmental governance, settler-Indigenous relations, technoscience, and the intersections of those three topics. He is the author of Wild Articulations: Indigeneity and Environmentalism in Northern Australia (University of Hawaii Press, 2017).
Kyle Powys Whyte
Timnick Chair in the Humanities. Associate Proefssor of Philosophy and Community Sustainability. Michigan State University
Climate change activism and scientific assessments often emphasize that humans must grasp the urgency of taking swift and decisive actions to address an environmental crisis. Yet many such conceptions of urgency obscure the factors that Indigenous peoples have called out as the most pressing concerns about climate justice. This obfuscation explains, in part, why climate change advocacy remains largely unrelated to Indigenous efforts to achieve justice and engage in decolonial actions. Whyte shows why a politics of urgency can be based in assumptions about the relationship among time (temporality) and environmental change that are antithetical to allyship with Indigneous peoples and, ultimately, climate justice.
Kyle Whyte is a professor in the departments of Philosophy and Community Sustainability and holds the Timnick Chair in the Humanities at Michigan State University. His work focuses on environmental justice, especially climate change issues that Indigenous peoples face in planning, policy, science, and activism. He is a Potawatomi and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.
Arboretum Tour with Rick Flores, who is the curator of the California Native Plant Collection and the associate of the Amah Mutsun Land Trust.
Program Day 1:
9:30am – Mingling and continental breakfast
10:00am – Conference Welcome
10:15am – Valentin Lopez
15 minute break
11:15am – Zoe Todd
12:45pm – Lunch
2:00pm – Kyle Powys Whyte
3:30pm – Conclusion
Program Day 2

For more information including directions and parking please visit:
https://feministstudies.ucsc.edu/news-events/department-news/science-conference/index.html

*ROOM CHANGE* NOW IN 420 - Thi Nguyen: "The Gamification of Public Discourse"
2019-05-30 15:15 - 17:00 | Humanities 1, Room 420, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The pleasures of games include, among other things, the experience of a fantasy of value clarity. In games, our goals and values are clear, quantified, and easy to apply and rank. This provides us with a particular existential balm – a momentary liberation from the ambiguities and difficult pluralities of moral life. Games instrumentalize our ends, for the sake of the pleasure of the experience of play. This is morally acceptable in games, because the ends in games are temporary and disposable. Instrumentalizing our enduring epistemic ends, on the other hand, invites bad faith reasoning. Social media encourages the instrumentalization of our epistemic ends, by offering highly salient quantified targets: Facebook Likes and Twitter Likes and Retweet numbers. It invites us to shift the ends of public discourse from some more subtle value towards, say, maximizing retweet numbers. We would thereby increase the pleasures of value clarity from engaging in discourse. Importantly, among those pleasures are: the pleasures of the simplified experience of moral outrage, and the pleasures of being part of a united epistemic community. But changing one’s epistemic aims for the sake of these pleasures is bad faith reasoning. And the form of the pleasures may help us to understand the relationship between social media and the formation of echo chambers.
The gamification of public discourse is an example of what I call “value capture”. Value capture occurs when: 1.) our values are naturally rich and subtle; 2.) we are placed in a social or institutional setting with simple, explicit, typically quantified representations of those values; 3.) we internalize those simple representations of our values; and 4.) things get worse. Some other examples include being value captured by FitBit’s step counts, academic citation rates, and GPA’s. The gamification of public discourse helps us see how we can understand the problem of value capture: it’s the inappropriate instrumentalizatio of an end.

Feminist Science Studies Conference: Indigeneity and Climate Justice Day 2
2019-05-31 09:30 - 15:30 | UCSC Arboretum
Organized by Karen Barad and Felicity Amaya Schaeffer.
The 2019 UCSC Feminist Science Studies conference takes as its focus the theme of “Indigeneity and Climate Justice.” Climate Justice, as opposed to the more narrow framings of “environmental justice,” marks the consideration of the entanglement of ecological, cultural, social, political, geological, biological and other forces, understood as simultaneous and mutually constitutive. A shared concern among our esteemed keynote speakers is the question of how to respond to the challenges of collaborative engagements between Indigenous and non-Indigenous approaches to caring for the Earth. We invite them to engage in conversation with each other and students, faculty, staff, and other conference participants about these pressing questions of multiple ontologies, epistemologies, and uneven responsibilities.
Métis Scholar of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University, Canada
Visiting Professor of History, Yale University
Key Note Speakers:
Zoe Todd
This talk explores Alberta, Canada as a site of intense western knowledge production about topics that are currently ‘hot’ in euro-western academe, such as: extinction, the Anthropocene, environmental degradation, climate change, and energy studies. Challenging the tendency for scholars to literally or figuratively drop into Alberta to mine it for data and information, Todd explores what it means to re-situate studies of earth violence in the Alberta petro-state as ones that require deep relationality and reciprocity.
Valentin Lopez
Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow of Anthropology and Geography
Deakin University, Australia
For some, it seems, the concept of the Anthropocene has delivered a welcome dose of universalism. We must put aside the differences which previously proscribed the very existence of a ‘we’ – the ethics which outlawed such pronouns as a presumptuous act of capture – and see that beings on this planet are unified by their inevitable geological materiality; the dark anthropogenic end of their stony fate. In this presentation, Neale offers a critique of these universalist and redemptive manoeuvres by exploring the temporality, offered by several Indigenous interlocutors, of ‘upside down Country.’ What practices and horizons are meaningful in a place where Country – or, the emplaced and providential order of things – has bee churned and flipped?
Timothy Neale
Timothy Neale is a pakeha (settler) researcher and teacher from Aotearoa New Zealand but currently lives in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia, where he holds an appointment as Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Geography at Deakin University. His research focuses on environmental governance, settler-Indigenous relations, technoscience, and the intersections of those three topics. He is the author of Wild Articulations: Indigeneity and Environmentalism in Northern Australia (University of Hawaii Press, 2017).
Kyle Powys Whyte
Timnick Chair in the Humanities. Associate Proefssor of Philosophy and Community Sustainability. Michigan State University
Climate change activism and scientific assessments often emphasize that humans must grasp the urgency of taking swift and decisive actions to address an environmental crisis. Yet many such conceptions of urgency obscure the factors that Indigenous peoples have called out as the most pressing concerns about climate justice. This obfuscation explains, in part, why climate change advocacy remains largely unrelated to Indigenous efforts to achieve justice and engage in decolonial actions. Whyte shows why a politics of urgency can be based in assumptions about the relationship among time (temporality) and environmental change that are antithetical to allyship with Indigneous peoples and, ultimately, climate justice.
Kyle Whyte is a professor in the departments of Philosophy and Community Sustainability and holds the Timnick Chair in the Humanities at Michigan State University. His work focuses on environmental justice, especially climate change issues that Indigenous peoples face in planning, policy, science, and activism. He is a Potawatomi and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.
Arboretum Tour with Rick Flores, who is the curator of the California Native Plant Collection and the associate of the Amah Mutsun Land Trust.
Program Day 1
Program Day 2:
9:30am – Mingling and continental breakfast
10:00am – Conference Welcome
10:15am – Timothy Neale
15 minute break
12:00pm – Arboretum Tour with Rick Flores
1:00pm – Lunch
2:00pm – Final Roundtable with keynotes and grad students
3:30pm – Conclusion

For more information including directions and parking please visit:
https://feministstudies.ucsc.edu/news-events/department-news/science-conference/index.html

Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC)
2019-05-31 13:00 - 16:15 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Program:
1:00 PM- Refreshments
1:15 PM- Opening remarks: Amanda Rysling
Session 1: Session Chair: Jennifer Bellik
1:20 PM- Madeleine King and Koy Ruguma: “Recency and Semantic Difference: Effects on Verbatim Memory”
1:45 PM- Max Tarlov: “Trans-derivational Correspondence beyond the Word Level”
2:10 PM- BREAK
Session 2: Session Chair: Steven Foley
2:20 PM- Melanie Gounas: “The Syntactic Representation of Constituent Negation”
2:45 PM- Jared Crawford-Levis: “Subject Bridging: Exploring a New Construction”
3:10 PM- Distinguished Alumnus Address: Introduction by Margaret Kroll Marcin Morzycki
4:05 PM- Closing remarks: Amanda Rysling

Hindustani Music and Performance of Modernity: A talk and film screening by Tejaswini Niranjana
2019-06-03 13:20 - 17:00 | Music Center Room 131, 1156 HIGH STREET, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Hindustani Music and Performance of Modernity
A documentary film and talk on Hindustani music in Mumbai, based on the forthcoming book, Musicophila in Mumbai: Performing Subjects and the Metropolitan Unconscious.
1:20PM – 3:00PM Talk
3:00PM – 5:00PM Screening
Refreshments will be provided.
Seating is limited.

Humanities Spring Awards
2019-06-05 16:00 - 19:00 | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Annual Humanities Spring Awards Celebration at the Cowell Ranch Hay Barn on Wednesday, June 5th, starting at 4:00 pm. The event includes the Spring Awards ceremony for undergraduate achievements, the Humanities Undergraduate Research Fellows poster session, and a celebration of faculty milestones.
The Humanities Spring Awards Celebration is a wonderful opportunity for staff, faculty, alumni, students and their families to all come together to recognize and honor excellence and outstanding achievement across the division.
Wednesday, June 5, 2019
UCSC Cowell Ranch Hay Barn
Friends and family welcome to attend
4:00-5:00 pm
Spring Awards Ceremony
Opening remarks by Acting Humanities Dean Karen Bassi and EVC Tromp
5:00-5:30 pm
Undergraduate Research Fellowship Poster Session
5:30-7:00 pm
Faculty Milestone Celebration
ADA parking will be available at Cowell Ranch Hay Barn.
General parking will be across Coolidge Drive in Parking Lot 116.
For questions, please contact Rafferty Lincoln at rlincoln@ucsc.edu.

Keith A. Spencer Book Talk
2019-06-05 18:00 - 19:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
“A People’s History of Silicon Valley: How the Tech Industry Exploits Workers, Erodes Privacy and Undermines Democracy” with author Keith A. Spencer
Keith A Spencer is an editor at salon.com where he writes about science and technology, the politics of space colonization, the social and cultural ramifications of the tech industry. http://keithspencer.org/
Light refreshments provided with good and brinks at Lupulo after
Co-sponored by UAW 2865 and the Humanities Institute

Living Writers: Diana Khoi Nguyen
2019-06-06 17:30 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Diana Khoi Nguyen is a multimedia artist and award-winning poet whose work has appeared widely in literary journals such as Poetry, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, PEN America, and The Iowa Review, among others. She recently won the 92Y’s Discovery / Boston Review2017 Poetry Contest and the Omnidawn Open Book Contest. She has also received awards, scholarships, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, Key West Literary Seminars, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, and Bucknell University. Currently, she lives in Denver where she is a doctoral candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Denver. She teaches at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop and in the Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver.
Co-sponsors: The Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry Reading, The Laurie Sain Creative Writing Endowment, Siegfried B. and Elizabeth Mignon Puknat Literary Studies Endowment, The Bay Tree Bookstore, The Humanities Institute, The American Indian Resource Center, The Asian American/Pacific Islander Resource Center, and the African American Resource and Cultural Center.

Nido de Lenguas: Clases
2019-06-06 17:30 - 19:00 | Branciforte Small Schools Campus, 840 N Branciforte Ave, Santa Cruz, CA, 95062, United States
Nido de Lenguas: Clases will offer regular classes turning native speakers into language teachers to share their linguistic heritage with dedicated community members.

Neal Stephenson: Fall, or Dodge in Hell
2019-06-06 19:00 - 21:00 | Santa Cruz Veterans Hall Auditorium
Bookshop Santa Cruz is thrilled to welcome bestselling author Neal Stephenson for a reading and signing of his highly-anticipated new book, Fall, or Dodge in Hell. This offsite and ticketed event will take place at the Santa Cruz County Veterans Memorial Building, 846 Front Street, Santa Cruz. Cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz. Tickets for this event are available through Brown Paper Tickets.
Two ticket packages are available:
General Admission Ticket + 1 Book ($39) = Admission for one person plus one copy of the book
Double Admission Ticket + 1 Book ($46) = Admission for two people plus one copy of the book.

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Snowcrash, Seveneves, Anathem, Reamde, and Cryptonomicon returns with a wildly inventive and entertaining science fiction thriller—Paradise Lost by way of Philip K. Dick—that unfolds in the near future, in parallel worlds.
In his youth, Richard “Dodge” Forthrast founded Corporation 9592, a gaming company that made him a multibillionarie. Now in his middle years, Dodge appreciates his comfortable, unencumbered life, managing his myriad business interests, and spending time with beloved niece Zula and her young daughter, Sophia.
One beautiful autumn day, while he undergoes a routine medical procedure, something goes irrevocably wrong. Dodge is pronounced brain dead and put on life support, leaving his stunned family and close friends with difficult decisions. Long ago, when a much younger Dodge drew up his will, he directed that his body be given to a cryonics company now owned by enigmatic tech entrepreneur Elmo Shepherd. Legally bound to follow the directive despite their misgivings, Dodge’s family has his brain scanned and its data structures uploaded and stored in the cloud, until it can eventually be revived.
In the coming years, technology allows Dodge’s brain to be turned back on. It is an achievement that is nothing less than the disruption of death itself. An eternal afterlife—the Bitworld—is created, in which humans continue to exist as digital souls.
But this brave new immortal world is not the Utopia it might first seem…
Fall, or Dodge in Hell is pure, unadulterated fun: a grand drama of analog and digital, man and machine, angels and demons, gods and followers, the finite and the eternal. In this exhilarating epic, Neal Stephenson raises profound existential questions and touches on the revolutionary breakthroughs that are transforming our future. Combining the technological, philosophical, and spiritual in one grand myth, he delivers a mind-blowing speculative literary saga for the modern age.
Neal Stephenson is the bestselling author of the novels Reamde, Anathem, The System of the World, The Confusion, Quicksilver, Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Zodiac, and the groundbreaking nonfiction work In the Beginning…Was the Command Line. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

Graduate Friday Forum with Aaron Franklin
2019-06-07 12:30 - 13:45 | Humanities 1, Room 408
Transcendental Sentimentalism – An Introduction
Broadly construed, moral sentimentalism is the position that human emotions or sentiments play a crucial role in our best normative or descriptive accounts of moral value or judgements thereof. With this presentation, Aaron introduces and sketches a defense of a novel form of more sentimentalism he calls “Transcendental Sentimentalism.” According to transcendental sentimentalism, being in an emotional state about an object is a necessary condition of the possibility of a subject counting as having non-inferential evaluative knowledge about that object. In unpacking each component of this position, he argues that it is both distinct from and more explanatorily attractive than the other approaches to explaining the relationship between emotion and moral thought.
Aaron Franklin is a PhD candidate in philosophy. His research concerns the metaphysics of norms and the relationship between emotion and evaluative thought. In addition to writing his dissertation, Aaron works with the Center for Public Philosophy on a project examining the role that motivated reasoning plays in our public discourse.
Friday Forum is a weekly interdisciplinary colloquium series for sharing graduate research across the humanities. Join us for light refreshments and weekly presentations by your fellow graduate students. For questions, email fridayforum.ucsc@gmail.com.
Friday Forum is supported by the Graduate Student Association, the Humanities Institute, and the following departments: HAVC, Literature, History of Consciousness, Psychology, and Education

Prof and A Pint- The 1930s: The Past of Our Present?
2019-06-10 18:30 - 20:00 | Forager, San Jose, 420 S 1st St, San Jose, CA, 95172, United States
Marc Matera challenges this image of the decade and draws different lessons for our time by considering the 1930s through examples in which global connections and international organization reached new levels on many fronts, from struggles for colonial and racial freedom to the spread of populist authoritarianism.
Comparisons between 1930s and our contemporary moment are everywhere. These comparisons rely on a view of the 1930s as a period of retrenchment behind the security of national borders and economic protectionism and a retreat to xenophobic nationalism following decades of globalization and internationalism.
Marc Matera is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director in History at UCSC. His numerous publications include three books: “The Global 1930s: The International Decade,” “Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the 20th Century,” and ‘The Women’s War of 1929: Gender and Violence in Colonial Nigeria.” Professor Matera received his B.A. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, his M.A from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and his Ph.D., from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ.

A Prof and A Pint, a monthly series of informal discussions, served over dinner and drinks, at Forager Tasting Room and Eatery. Brought to you by UC Santa Cruz Alumni, and helping to celebrate 2018 as the Year of Alumni, each talk will engage a UC Santa Cruz faculty member or grad student in discussion with you, the local community of Silicon Valley. Talks are held on the 2nd Monday of each month. Topics include everything from organic artichokes to endangered zebras. Self-driving cars to Shakespeare. Audience participation is encouraged. Enjoy a great meal and learn something while you eat!
Entry is free, but please consider ordering some food and drinks to support *Forager, our host. Current students and alumni, we encourage you to invite your friends, whether they are Banana Slugs or not, to be a part of the discussion.

Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel
2019-06-17 19:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
We welcome award winning author Ocean Vuong (Night Sky with Exit Wounds) for a reading of his highly acclaimed debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, named a best book of summer by The Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, Vulture, Thrillist, Entertainment Weekly, Elle, and more.
“In this achingly beautiful novel, a young Vietnamese American writes a letter to his abusive mother about his struggle to find love and a sense of identity. In the process, he comes to appreciate the struggles of her life, too.” —The Washington Post
Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, winner of the Whiting Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize. His writings have also been featured in The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is his first novel.
Ocean Vuong’s poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, marked the arrival of an incomparable talent. His searing, intimate poems, infused with his love of language, grappled with memories of war and displacement, coming of age as a young gay man, and daily life in Vietnam and America. Named a best book of 2016 by dozens of outlets from The New York Times to NPR to The San Francisco Chronicle, the collection was also the recipient of the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry and the Whiting Award. Readers and critics alike fell in love with Vuong’s lyricism and the deep humanity that runs through all his work.
This free event will take place at Bookshop Santa Cruz. Chairs for open seating are usually set up about an hour before the event begins. If you have any ADA accommodation requests, please e-mail info@bookshopsantacruz.com by June 15th.

39th Annual Dickens Universe
2019-07-13 - 2019-07-20 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Dickens Universe is a unique cultural event that brings together scholars, teachers, students, and members of the general public for a week of stimulating discussion and festive social activity on the beautiful Santa Cruz campus of the University of California—all focused on one or two Victorian novels, usually (but not always) one by Charles Dickens. In 2019, the Universe will feature Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens.
Full event info and registration: https://dickens.ucsc.edu/universe/index.html
In this early and seldom studied historical novel, Dickens tells a powerful story of public violence and private horror. Set in 18th-century London, the novel is full of mystery and melodrama. Sons struggle against fathers, servants against masters. Religious controversy erupts into riots. Vivid characters enact their passions in a world deeply divided against itself, and a pet raven issues oracular statements that none can forget–or understand.
Now in its 39th year of operation, the Dickens Universe combines features of a scholarly conference, a festival, a book club, and summer camp. Participants include people of all ages and walks of life—distinguished scholars, graduate students, undergraduates, retirees, young professionals, high school teachers, anyone who loves to read and who enjoys long Victorian novels.
Here are some of the things that make the Universe such a special experience.
The college lifestyle: participants live on campus, eat together in the student dining hall, have time to meet and come to know each other in different ways.
Everyone is reading the same book. We all have this one important thing in common. The range of activities—formal lectures, small discussion groups, films, daily Victorian teas, performances, and Victorian dancing. The Universe offers a week of total immersion in the world of Victorian fiction with friendly, like-minded colleagues in a beautiful setting. Whether we’re returning to a Dickens novel that everyone knows and loves, or branching out into a Victorian novel by another author who might be less familiar, during the Universe we build a community out of our passion for reading, talking with one another, and bringing Victorian culture to life.

Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music - Community Night
2019-08-08 19:00 - 21:00 | Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium
Community Night is back by popular demand! Last season Cabrillo Festival and Music Director Cristi Măcelaru opened their doors in a whole new way and attracted capacity crowds and wild enthusiasm! This year Cristi and members of the Festival Orchestra have designed another captivating concert of new or recent chamber works showcasing these extraordinary musicians as soloists and in small ensembles. This is an invitation for long time Festival-goers and first-timers alike to get a more intimate perspective on the talented artists who come from across the globe to be a part of this phenomenal orchestra. Bring your neighbors! Bring your friends! All seating is general admission. Tickets are required, but pricing is on a pay-what-you-can basis to ensure access for all. It’s going to be another high-spirited evening of live music—complete with special surprises.
THI is pleased to partner with the Cabrillo Festival to offer a limited number of free tickets to Community Night. Use the code: 2019THI (maximum six per order).
MEETUP! Stay after the show to sip wine and chat with these remarkable performers!
Co-sponsored by: The Humanities Institute, Santa Cruz County Bank, Eric Hanson CFP

Weekend with Shakespeare
2019-08-17 - 2019-08-18 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Event Photos by Crystal Birns:
If you have trouble viewing above images, you may view this album directly on Flickr.

Join Shakespeare scholars and artists for two days of lectures, discussions, and demonstrations about the 2019 Season’s main stage productions, Winter’s Tale and Comedy of Errors.
Weekend with Shakespeare Lecture Series: This year, the Weekend With Shakespeare Lecture Series is free! However, we suggest interested participants RSVP through The Santa Cruz Shakespeare website.

Weekend with Shakespeare is sponsored in partnership with Santa Cruz Shakespeare.
Lecture Series on Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale: Saturday, August 17
12-12:15PM Intro by Dr. Sean Keilen, Provost, Porter College, UC Santa Cruz.
12:15-1:15PM Q&A with actors from The Winter’s Tale, moderated by Artistic Director Mike Ryan.
1:15-1:30PM Break.
1:30-2:30PM In conversation with Ariane Helou, dramaturg of The Winter’s Tale.
2:30-3PM Break with refreshments.
3-4PM Conversation with Professor Sandra Logan and SCS actor Tommy Gomez.
For those who have purchased a ticket to see the evening performance of The Winter’s Tale:
7-7:15PM Pre-performance discussion of ‘5 Things to Look Out For’ with Ariane Helou.
8PM Performance of The Winter’s Tale at The Grove.
Lecture Series on Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors: Sunday, August 18
12-12:15PM Intro by Dr. Sean Keilen, Provost, Porter College, UC Santa Cruz.
12:15-1:15PM In conversation with Professor Gina Bloom.
1:15-1:30PM Break.
1:30-2:30PM In conversation with Ashley Herum, dramaturg of The Comedy of Errors, and Dr. Michael Warren, Head of Dramaturgy at Santa Cruz Shakespeare.
2:30-3PM Break with refreshments.
3-4PM Presentation with Mike Ryan and The Comedy of Errors director Kirsten Brandt on “The opportunities and challenges using one actor to represent twins.”
For those who have purchased a ticket to see the evening performance of The Comedy of Errors:
6-6:15PM Pre-performance discussion of ‘5 Things to Look Out For’ with Professor Gina Bloom.
7PM Performance of The Comedy of Errors at The Grove.
Featuring guest speakers Gina Bloom (UC Davis) and Ariane Helou (UCLA).
Gina Bloom is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. Her research and teaching focus on Shakespeare, gender, theater history and performance, digital arts/humanities, and education. In addition to numerous articles, she has published two books. Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007) won the award for best book of the year from The Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater (University of Michigan Press, 2018) was named Runner Up for Outstanding Book Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) and is available open access. With colleagues in the ModLab at UC Davis, Bloom created the mixed reality Shakespeare game Play the Knave, which has been exhibited in theaters, cultural institutions, libraries and classrooms around the world. Bloom serves on the Executive Committeefor the Shakespeare Forum of the Modern Language Association and has just completed a term as a Trustee for the Shakespeare Association if America.

Ariane Helou teaches in the Department of French & Francophone Studies at UCLA. Her research focuses on drama, music, and poetry in early modern Italy, England, and France. She has held fellowships from the Mellon Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies; the Huntington Library; UCLA’s William Andrews Clark Memorial Library and Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies, among others. Ariane is the co-editor (with Julia R. Lupton) of Romeo and Juliet in Diaspora: Shakespeare Among the Arts and in Translation, forthcoming from The Arden Shakespeare. In addition to publishing scholarship on Shakespeare studies and early modern Italian drama, Ariane is also a translator; a dramaturg; and a performing artist whose background spans early music, theater, and opera. Ariane has been a company member of the Santa Cruz Shakespeare festival since 2012 and is a dramaturg and producing partner of the Los Angeles-based theater company Collaborative Artists Bloc.

Téa Obreht - Inland: A Novel
2019-08-23 19:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz is delighted to welcome Téa Obreht, National Book Award finalist and bestselling author of The Tiger’s Wife, back to the store for a reading and signing of her new novel, INLAND—an epic journey across an unforgettable landscape, a stunning tale of perseverance and family, and a love letter to the complicated and glorious American West. This event is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
In the lawless, drought-ridden lands of the Arizona Territory in 1893, two extraordinary lives collide. Nora is an unflinching frontierswoman awaiting the return of the men in her life—her husband, a newspaperman who has gone in search of water for the parched household, and her elder sons, who have vanished after an explosive argument. Nora is biding her time (and enduring her thirst) with her youngest son, who is convinced that a mysterious beast is stalking the land around their home, and her husband’s seventeen-year-old cousin, who communes with spirits.
Lurie is an immigrant—a man born under Ottoman rule who comes to America as a child—and a former outlaw who is haunted by ghosts. He sees lost souls who want something from him, and he finds reprieve from their longing in an unexpected companion who inspires a momentous expedition across the West. The way in which Nora’s and Lurie’s stories intertwine is the surprise and suspense of this brilliant novel.
Téa Obreht is the author of The Tiger’s Wife, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction. An international bestseller, it has sold over a million copies worldwide, with rights sold in 37 countries. Obreht was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and was named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty. She was the 2013 Rona Jaffe Foundation fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers and was a recipient of the 2016 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. She was born in Belgrade, in the former Yugoslavia, in 1985 and has lived in the United States since the age of twelve. She currently lives in New York City and teaches at Hunter College.
This free event will take place at Bookshop Santa Cruz. Chairs for open seating are usually set up about an hour before the event begins. If you have any ADA accommodation requests, please e-mail info@bookshopsantacruz.com by August 21st.

Colson Whitehead Reading: The Nickel Boys
2019-09-19 19:00 | Peace United Church, 900 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Event Photos by Crystal Birns:
If you have trouble viewing above images, you may view this album directly on Flickr.
Bookshop Santa Cruz presents Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author Colson Whitehead for a reading of The Nickel Boys, his highly anticipated followup and companion to The Underground Railroad. This special ticketed event will take place at Peace United Church and is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
TICKET PACKAGES: Ticket packages are $30 and include ONE ticket to the event and ONE copy of The Nickel Boys. Purchase ticket packages at Bookshop Santa Cruz or online, while supplies last.

Free entry and a book will be given out to the first 50 UCSC students to attend
(student ID required at the door)
In his speech accepting the 2016 National Book Award for The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead summarized the responsibility of writers in our difficult times: Be Kind. Make Art. Fight the Power. With his astonishing new novel, it’s clear he’s taken his own counsel to heart.
A perfect follow-up and companion to The Underground Railroad, in The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead recreates the horrors of segregation and the struggles of the Civil Rights movement as the backdrop for an emotionally charged and compulsively readable novel populated with deeply empathetic characters.
In the early 1960s, as the Civil Rights movement begins to reach segregated Tallahassee, Florida, one innocent mistake is all it takes for Elwood Curtis to become sentenced to the Nickel Academy — a grotesque chamber of horrors where sadistic staff abuse the students, corrupt officials steal food and supplies, and any boy who resists is likely to disappear “out back.” Elwood takes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King to heart. “Throw us in jail and will still love you.” His friend Turner thinks Elwood is worse than naïve — that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble. The tension between Elwood’s ideals and Turner’s skepticism leads to a decision with repercussions that will echo for decades.
Highlighting a story that hasn’t been widely shared before about one of our country’s secret tragedies, in The Nickel Boys, not only does Colson Whitehead bring to life vividly the evils of Jim Crow America — he also brings to life the heartbreaking story of two boys and their impossible choices. Elwood and Turner will become known to readers as two of the most indelible characters in modern fiction thanks to Colson Whitehead’s prodigious talent and boundless compassion.

Ahead of the event, read THI’s interview with Tyler Stovall, who will be introducing Whitehead on the night.

SOLD OUT: An Evening with Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers
2019-09-21 19:00 - 21:00 | San Mateo Performing Arts Center, 600 N Delaware St, San Mateo, CA, 94401, United States
Event Photos by Crystal Birns:
If you have trouble viewing above images, you may view this album directly on Flickr.
The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, in partnership with Bookshop Santa Cruz, are delighted to present an evening with Malcolm Gladwell for the hardcover tour of Talking to Strangers. Join us at San Mateo Performing Arts Center on Saturday, September 21st at 7:00 p.m. for this very special evening!
This event is now sold out.
About the book: In his first new book in six years, TALKING TO STRANGERS: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know, Gladwell offers an incisive and powerful examination of our interactions with strangers—and why they often go so terribly wrong. Probing the headlines around Bernie Madoff, Amanda Knox, Sylvia Plath, Jerry Sandusky, Sandra Bland and Neville Chamberlain’s interactions with Hitler, he throws into doubt our conception of these stories and makes the case that something is very wrong with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don’t know. With the brilliantly engaging storytelling and razor-sharp observations we’ve come to expect from him, Malcolm Gladwell has written a gripping guidebook that helps make sense of our troubled times.
About the Author: Malcolm Gladwell is the author of five international bestsellers: The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, and David and Goliath. He is the host of the podcast Revisionist History, co-host of the music podcast Broken Record, and a staff writer at The New Yorker. He was named one of the 100 most influential people by Time magazine.

Jacqueline Woodson: Red at the Bone
2019-09-25 19:00 - 21:00 | Peace United Church, 900 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz is delighted to present an evening with acclaimed author Jacqueline Woodson to celebrate the release of her newest book, Red at the Bone. This special book talk, Q+A, and book signing is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

Ticket options:
Single Entry: $30.00 Admission for 1 person. Includes 1 ticket and 1 copy of Red at the Bone
Double Entry: $38.00 Admission for 2 people. Includes 2 tickets and 1 copy of Red at the Bone
(Red at the Bone publishes September 17th and is $26 retail.)
An extraordinary new novel about the influence of history on a contemporary family, from the New York Times-bestselling and National Book Award-winning author of Another Brooklyn and Brown Girl Dreaming.  Two families from different social classes are joined together by an unexpected pregnancy and the child that it produces. Moving forward and backward in time, with the power of poetry and the emotional richness of a narrative ten times its length, Jacqueline Woodson’s new novel uncovers the role that history and community have played in the experiences, decisions, and relationships of these families, and in the life of this child.
“[A] beautifully imagined novel…Woodson’s nuanced voice evokes the complexities of race, class, religion, and sexuality in fluid prose and a series of telling details. This is a wise, powerful, and compassionate novel.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
Jacqueline Woodson is the bestselling author of more than two dozen award-winning books including the 2016 New York Times-bestselling National Book Award finalist for adult fiction, Another Brooklyn. Among her many accolades, Woodson is a four-time National Book Award finalist, a four-time Newbery Honor winner, a two-time NAACP Image Award Winner, and a two-time Coretta Scott King Award Winner. Her New York Times-bestselling memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming, received the National Book Award in 2014. Woodson is also the 2018-2019 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature and recipient of the 2018 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award and the 2018 Children’s Literature Legacy Award. In 2015, she was named the Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. She lives with her family in New York.

Paul Gootenberg: From Teonanácatl to Miami Vice - Latin America’s Contribution to World Drug Culture
2019-10-03 15:00 - 17:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Long before today’s entanglements with coke, meth, and weed, the Americas were a proving ground of global drug cultures. This millennium of shamanistic and Aztec psychedelics, colonial and Atlantic stimulants such as coffee and tobacco, national drug goods like tequila and coca, preceded the menacing 20th-century explosion of illicit drug trafficking, and shed light on our changing relationships to mind drugs and their commerce.

Paul Gootenberg, SUNY Distinguished Professor of History & Sociology at Stony Brook University, and Chair of History, is a Latin Americanist and commodity studies specialist and leader in the field of global drug history. He trained at the University of Chicago and Oxford. His books include Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug (UNC, 2008) and with Liliana M. Dávalos, The Origins of Cocaine: Peasant Colonization and Failed Development in the Amazon Andes (Routledge, 2018). He is General Editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Global Drug History and President-elect of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society (ADHS).

Co-sponsored by the Center for World History

Living Writers: R. Zamora Linmark
2019-10-03 19:10 - 20:30 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
R. Zamora Linmark is the author of The Importance of Being Wilde at Heart, his first novel for young adults from Delacorte/Random House. He has also published two novels, Rolling the R’s (Kaya Press) which he’d adapted for the stage, and Leche (Coffee House Press), as well as four poetry collections, most recently, Pop Vérité, all from Hanging Loose Press. He divides his time between Honolulu, Hawaii, and Baguio, Philippines.

Eli Yassif: Before Seinfeld - The Early Modern Roots of Jewish Humor
2019-10-07 17:30 - 19:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Please join us for Eli Yassif’s lecture “Before Seinfeld – The Early Modern Roots of Jewish Humor”
Jewish humor has been described as one of the most outstanding characteristics of the Jewish People, and its history dates back to Biblical times. But is there really “Jewish Humor”, and if so, what are its major characteristics? This talk will explore the earliest collections of Jewish jokes, from early in the 19th century, and strive to understand, by analyzing some exemplary jokes, the place and impact Jewish humor has had in and on Early Modern history and culture.
If you have trouble viewing above images, you may view this album directly on Flickr.

Eli Yassif is the Berger Professor of Jewish Folk-Culture in the School of Jewish Studies at Tel-Aviv University. He studies the history of Jewish folklore and the Hebrew Literature of the Middle Ages, and published over 100 studies – books and scholarly articles in these fields.
His book: The Hebrew Folktale: History, Genre, Meaning was published in 1999 by Indiana University Press, and was elected as the best Jewish scholarly book for that year. It is used as the basic textbook in Israel and in the US in teaching this field.
His latest book was published just this year: The Legend of Safed: Life and Fantasy in the City of Kabbalah (Wayne State University Press, 2019).
Prof. Yassif served as a visiting professor at UCLA and UC Berkeley, Oxford University, University of Michigan, University of Chicago, Yale University and Stanford.

Cultural Studies Colloquium: Anjali Arondekar
2019-10-09 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
“What More Remains: Sexuality, Slavery, Historiography”
This talk engages a ‘small’ history of sexuality and slavery in Portuguese India. At stake are three questions: How do we call attention to the displacement of slave pasts within histories of sexuality that are themselves routinely displaced? How do we locate those displacements in itinerant archives of profit and pleasure, than in archives of loss and trauma? How do we open a dialogue between the interdisciplinary fields of area studies and sexuality studies with an eye to understanding how histories of slavery can reshape, even devastate, these very field-formations?
Anjali Arondekar is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies, UCSC. Her research engages the poetics and politics of sexuality, colonialism and historiography, with a focus on South Asia. She is the author of For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Duke University Press, 2009, Orient Blackswan, India, 2010), winner of the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award for best book in lesbian, gay, or queer studies in literature and cultural studies, Modern Language Association (MLA), 2010. She is co-editor (with Geeta Patel) of “Area Impossible: The Geopolitics of Queer Studies,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (2016). Her talk is an excerpt from her forthcoming book, Abundance: On Sexuality and Historiography.

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

Democratic Interpellations Conference (NOT CANCELLED)
2019-10-10 13:00 - 18:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Please note: this is a two-day event.

Kresge's Media and Society: Teju Cole (LOCATION/TIME CHANGED)
2019-10-10 15:00 - 16:00 | Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join Kresege for the first Media and Society lecture of Fall 2019 with Teju Cole, a photographer, novelist, art historian, and the New York Times Magazine photography critic. He has recently co-authored a book on refugees and displaced people, titled Human Archipelago, and several of his recent pieces for the New York Times focus on the visual depiction of human suffering and its purpose (“A Crime Scene at the Border” and “When the Camera was a Weapon of Imperialism (and still is)“). Co-sponsored by Kresge College, the University Library, the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, The Humanities Institute, EOP, the office of Student Achievement & Equity Innovation, Porter, Merrill, and Cowell Colleges, the African American Resource and Cultural Center, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, HAVC, and SOMeCA.
Click here for more information and to Register for the event

RESCHEDULED Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: Beyond the End of the World Sawyer Seminar Series
2019-10-10 17:30 - 19:00 | Music Center Recital Hall – UCSC, 402 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Humanities Institute and the Center for Creative Ecologies present the inaugural event in the
Beyond the End of the World series.

Due to unforeseen circumstances Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor had to reschedule her engagement in Santa Cruz for January 23, 2020. Click here for updated event information.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an award-winning author on race and inequality as well as Black politics and social movements in the United States. Her books include From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation and How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. She has a forthcoming book titled Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (University of North Carolina Press). Taylor’s writing has been published in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, Paris Review, Guardian, The Nation, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, Jacobin, and beyond. In 2016, she was designated as one of the one hundred most influential African Americans in the United States by the The Root. Taylor is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and an Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University.
Beyond the End of the World comprises a year-long research and exhibition project and public lecture series, directed by T. J. Demos of the Center for Creative Ecologies, bringing leading international thinkers and cultural practitioners to UC Santa Cruz to discuss what lies beyond dystopian catastrophism, and how we can cultivate radical futures of social justice and ecological flourishing. Keynote presentations include: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, award-winning author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation; Déborah Danowski, co-author of the speculative analysis of our dystopian present, The Ends of the World; Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Brazilian anthropologist and author of Cannibal Metaphysics; Amitav Ghosh, award-winning fiction writer and author of The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable; Nick Estes (Lower Brule Sioux), co-founder of Red Nation and author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance; Melanie Yazzie (Bilagáana/Diné), Red Nation member and co-editor of Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society; and artist-activists Amin Husain and Nitasha Dhillon of MTL/Decolonize This Place, an action-oriented movement centering Indigenous struggle, Black liberation, free Palestine, global wage workers and de-gentrification.
For more information visit BEYOND.UCSC.EDU. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Culture and administered by The Humanities Institute.

CANCELLED Living Writers: Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
2019-10-10 19:10 - 20:30 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is a poet, essayist, translator, and immigration advocate. He is the author of Cenzontle (BOA editions, 2018), chosen by Brenda Shaughnessy as the winner of the 2017 A. Poulin Jr. prize and winner of the 2018 Northern California Book Award. Cenzontle maps a parallel between the landscape of the border and the landscape of sexuality through surreal and deeply imagistic poems. Castillo’s first chapbook, Dulce (Northwestern University Press, 2018), was chosen by Chris Abani, Ed Roberson, and Matthew Shenoda as the winner of the Drinking Gourd Poetry Prize. His memoir, Children of the Land is forthcoming from Harper Collins in 2020 and explores the ideas of separation from deportation, trauma, and mobility between borders.

Democratic Interpellations Conference (NOT CANCELLED)
2019-10-11 09:30 - 17:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States

Santa Cruz Film Festival: General Magic
2019-10-11 19:00 - 21:00 | Colligan Theater at The Tannery Arts Center (View), 1010 River St., Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Humanities Institute is pleased to sponsor Santa Cruz Film Festival‘s showing of General Magic. The multi-award winning documentary, is a tale of how a great vision, a grave betrayal and an epic failure changed the world. Spun out from Apple in 1990 to create the next big thing, General Magic shipped the first handheld wireless personal communicator in 1994. From the first smartphones to social media, e-commerce and even emoji, the ideas that now dominate the tech industry and our day-to-day lives were born at General Magic.
Combining rare archive footage with contemporary stories of the Magicians today, this documentary tracks the progress of anytime, anywhere communication from a thing of sci-fi fiction in 1994 to a reality in our pockets today. This is the story of one of history’s most talented teams and what happens when those who dream big fail, fail again, fail better and ultimately succeed.

Blacklisted Jews Like Us: Gerda & Carl Lerner - Intersectionality, Experience as Deviants, and the Film "Black Like Me"
2019-10-15 11:30 - 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Speaker: Visiting FMST Scholar Vera Kallenberg
Vera will discuss her research on the life of Gerda Lerner (1920-2013), a pioneer of women’s history who co-wrote the 1964 film Black Like Me with husband and film director Carl Lerner. The film is based on the highly controversial book by John Howard Griffin, a white writer who in 1959 darkened his skin and traveled through the Jim Crow-era “deep South” to expose the everyday realities of racism. The film reflects the Lerners’ experience as participants in the civil rights movement and their own experiences of repression as communists in Cold War America and Gerda’s persecution as a Jew in Nazi Europe
Lunch will be provided.

David Eng: Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation - On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans
2019-10-15 16:00 - 18:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Please join David L. Eng for a discussion of his new book, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans (Duke University Press, 2019), co-authored with Shinhee Han. The book draws on case histories from the mid-1990s to the present to explore the social and psychic predicaments of Asian American young adults from Generation X to Generation Y. Combining critical race theory with several strands of psychoanalytic thought and clinical practice, Eng and Han develop the concepts of racial melancholia and racial dissociation to investigate changing processes of loss associated with immigration, displacement, diaspora, and assimilation. These case studies of first- and second-generation Asian Americans deal with a range of difficulties, from depression, suicide, and the politics of coming out to broader issues of the model minority stereotype, transnational adoption, parachute children, colorblind discourses in the United States, and the rise of Asia under globalization. Throughout, Eng and Han link psychoanalysis to larger structural and historical phenomena, illuminating how the study of psychic processes of individuals can inform investigations of race, sexuality, and immigration while creating a more sustained conversation about the social lives of Asian Americans and Asians in the diaspora.
David L. Eng is Richard L. Fisher Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also Professor in the Program in Asian American Studies, the Program in Comparative Literature & Literary Theory, and the Program in Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies. After receiving his B.A. in English from Columbia University and his Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California at Berkeley, he taught at Columbia and Rutgers before joining Penn in 2007. Eng has held visiting professorships at the University of Bergen (Norway), King’s College London, Harvard University, and the University of Hong Kong. He is the recipient of research fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, and the Mellon Foundation, among others. In 2016, Eng was elected an honorary member of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) in New York City. His areas of specialization include American literature, Asian American studies, Asian diaspora, critical race theory, psychoanalysis, queer studies, gender studies, and visual culture.
Eng is author with Shinhee Han of Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans (Duke, 2019), The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (Duke, 2010), and Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Duke, 2001). He is co-editor with David Kazanjian of Loss: The Politics of Mourning (California, 2003) and with Alice Y. Hom of Q & A: Queer in Asian America (Temple, 1998, winner of a Lambda Literary Award and Association of Asian American Studies Book Award). In addition, he is co-editor of two special issues of the journal Social Text: with Teemu Ruskola and Shuang Shen, “China and the Human” (2011/2012), and with Jack Halberstam and José Esteban Muñoz, “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?” (2005).
Currently, he is co-editing with Jasbir Puar a third special issue of Social Text, “Left of Queer” as well as completing a monograph, “Reparations and the Human,” which investigates the relationship between political and psychic genealogies of reparation in Cold War Asia.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies, Literature, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, History of Consciousness, and Feminist Studies departments.

Lit Quake
2019-10-15 19:00 - 21:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Funny & Peculiar: Santa Cruz Writers on Keeping it Weird
It’s 2019 and it seems like things couldn’t get any stranger. What better time to mine the oddities of life with noted writers Elizabeth McKenzie, Micah Perks, Peggy Townsend, Liza Monroy and Wallace Baine? Moderated by Dan White and Amy Ettinger. This event is co-presented by Bookshop Santa Cruz.
In honor of Litquake’s 20th anniversary in 2019, the festival is holding 20 events in 20 cities nationwide – including this Santa Cruz event! Read more about Litquake, celebrating it’s 20th Anniversary, here.
About the writers:
Elizabeth McKenzie’s novel The Portable Veblen was longlisted for the National Book Award for fiction and received the California Book Award for fiction. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and others.
Micah Perks is the author of four books, most recently a book of linked short stories, True Love and Other Dreams of Miraculous Escape and the novel What Becomes Us, winner of an Independent Publisher’s Book Award and named one of the Top Ten Books about the Apocalypse by The Guardian. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Epoch, Zyzzyva, Tin House, and The Rumpus, amongst many journals and anthologies. She has won an NEA, five Pushcart Prize nominations, residencies at MacDowell and Blue Mountain Center, and the New Guard Machigonne 2014 Fiction Prize. She received her BA and MFA from Cornell University and now lives with her family in Santa Cruz where she co-directs the creative writing program at UCSC.
Wallace Baine is an award-winning journalist and arts writer who regularly contributes to Santa Cruz Good Times, Metro Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Chronicle. His work has been syndicated in newspapers nationwide and his fiction has appeared in the Catamaran Literary Reader, the Chicago Quarterly Review, and as part of the Santa Cruz Noir collection of short stories. His most recent book is a history of Bookshop Santa Cruz called A Light in the Midst of Darkness.
Peggy Townsend is an award-winning newspaper journalist and author of the bestselling 2018 mystery novel, See Her Run and its follow-up, The Thin Edge, both published by Thomas & Mercer. As a reporter, she has covered serial killers, murder trials and once chased an escaped murderer through a graveyard at midnight. When she isn’t outdoors, she’s either writing magazine profiles for UC Santa Cruz or working on her third novel. She divides her time between Santa Cruz and Lake Tahoe.
Liza Monroy is the author of three books: the novel Mexican High, the memoir The Marriage Act: The Risk I Took To Keep My Best Friend in America and What It Taught Us About Love, and the essay collection Seeing As Your Shoes Are Soon To Be On Fire. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, the LA Times, The Washington Post, O, Marie Claire, Jezebel, Catamaran, and other publications. One of her columns for the New York Times‘ “Modern Love” will appear in this fall’s anthology of the “most popular and unforgettable essays” of the series. She teaches writing at UC Santa Cruz and lives downtown with her husband, two tiny humans, a pug and unruly potbellied pig Señor Bacon. Currently, she is writing her second novel, a dark comedy of technology and obsession.

Cultural Studies Colloquium: Sara Mameni
2019-10-16 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Sara Mameni “On the Terracene”
This talk considers the Anthropocene from the perspective of artists working within areas devastated by the War on Terror. While the popularization of the concept of the Anthropocene dates to the early 2000s–the very moment of the declaration of the War on Terror–the two modes of imagining the geopolitics of the present have yet to be considered together. Mameni coins the term “Terracene” as an entry point into considering the condition of the planet under terror.
If you have trouble viewing above images, you may view this album directly on Flickr.

Sara Mameni is the director of Aesthetics and Politics program and faculty in the school of Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts. She received her PhD in Art History from University of California San Diego in 2015 and was a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz in 2016/2017. Her specialization is contemporary art in the Arab/Muslim world with a focus on queer of color theory. Her current research explores biopolitics, racial discourse in the Anthropocene, post-humanist aesthetics and the geo-ecological age of petroleum.
Free and open to the public.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. The sessions consist of a 40-45 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center provides coffee, tea, and cookies.
All Center for Cultural Studies events are free and open to the public. Staff assistance is provided by the Humanities Institute.

Imagining Otherwise: Resisting and Queering Racial and Gender Violence
2019-10-17 15:15 - 17:00 | Humanities 2, Room 259
A Philosophy and MAP (Minorities and Philosophy) sponsored Colloquium. Co-sponsored by the Center for Public Philosophy and the Humanities Institute
This talk will explore how gender violence intersects with racist and transphobic violence and how those intersections are erased or distorted in public discourse. Professor Medina will examine the communicative dysfunctions that exist around gender and racial violence and how sexist, transphobic, and racist imaginaries create vulnerabilities that remain unaddressed. He will discuss how we can exercise the imagination in resistant ways and how we can resist those communicative dysfunctions and oppressive imaginaries by imagining otherwise. He will discuss some specific cases of gender and racial violence and the ways in which they were distorted in the media coverage, showing how critically engaged publics can resist those distortions and the forms of activism that we can engage in to fight gender and racial violence.
Professor José Medina is theWalter Dill Scott Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University

PhD+ Workshop – Research Development: Grants and Fellowships
2019-10-18 11:00 - 12:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Learn about locating fellowship opportunities, framing your research for different funding organizations, and acquiring grants with Nathaniel Deutsch, Irena Polić, Suraiya Jetha (The Humanities Institute) and Kelly Anne Brown (Associate Director at University of California Humanities Research Institute). We’ll share advice about different types of awards and strategies for making your proposal stand out. Bring your ideas and questions for an important conversation on securing funding for Humanities research.

About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Please join us for the fourth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by The Humanities Institute. We meet monthly, over lunch, to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grants/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.
Lunch will be served.
Please RSVP below:

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Don Rothman Endowed Award in First-Year Writing
2019-10-18 14:00 - 15:30 | Cowell Provost House, Cowell Provost House, Cowell Service Rd‎ University of California Santa Cruz, Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Please join the Writing Program in celebrating UC Santa Cruz’s tenth annual Don Rothman Endowed Award in First-Year Writing ceremony on Friday, October 18 from 2:00-3:30pm in Cowell Provost House. Chancellor Larive, UCSC VPDUE Richard Hughey, Writing Program Chair Tonya Ritola, and Writing Program faculty members will be attending the ceremony along with this year’s four winners and their families.

We hope to see you at the event as we honor student writing and the legacy of Don Rothman.

Discussion with Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
2019-10-18 15:00 - 17:00 | Humanities 1, Room 620, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join us to discuss excerpts from author Marcelo Hernandez Castillo. Please email Micah Perks at (meperks@ucsc.edu) for the readings and to RSVP for the discussion.
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is a poet, essayist, translator, and immigration advocate. He is the author of Cenzontle (BOA editions, 2018), chosen by Brenda Shaughnessy as the winner of the 2017 A. Poulin Jr. prize and winner of the 2018 Northern California Book Award. Cenzontle maps a parallel between the landscape of the border and the landscape of sexuality through surreal and deeply imagistic poems. Castillo’s ﬁrst chapbook, Dulce (Northwestern University Press, 2018), was chosen by Chris Abani, Ed Roberson, and Matthew Shenoda as the winner of the Drinking Gourd Poetry Prize. His memoir, Children of the Land is forthcoming from Harper Collins in 2020 and explores the ideas of separation from deportation, trauma, and mobility between borders.

The Original Thinkers Series: A Conversation About Oliver Sacks
2019-10-21 19:00 - 21:00 | Music Center Recital Hall
Please note a recent change to our lineup: Peabody Award-wining journalist and producer Nikki Silva (Porter, ’73) and Cowell College Provost Alan Christy will engage Ren Weschler in conversation about Oliver Sacks. Robert Krulwich is unable to join us this evening. Please enjoy this recent Kitchen Sisters episode of The Keepers featuring Ren Weschler.
And How Are You, Dr. Sacks? is a biographical memoir about Oliver Sacks written by Ren Weschler (Cowell ’74). It is the definitive portrait of Sacks as our preeminent romantic scientist, a self-described “clinical ontologist” whose entire practice revolved around the single fundamental question he effectively asked each of his patients: How are you? A question which Ren, with this book, turns back on the good doctor himself.
Monday, October 21, 7:00–9:00 p.m.
Music Center Recital Hall, UC Santa Cruz

Questions?
Contact the Special Events Office at specialevents@ucsc.edu or (831) 459-5003.
SPEAKERS

Lawrence (Ren) Weschler
A graduate of Cowell College (1974), Ren Weschler writes in LitHub about his earliest awareness of Sacks. Ren was a staff writer for more than 20 years (1981–2002) at The New Yorker. The director emeritus of the NY Institute for the Humanities at NYU, Ren is also the author of more than 20 books, including Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder and Vermeer in Bosnia.

Cultural Studies Colloquium: Elizabeth Marcus
2019-10-23 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
“When is a Boycott a Boycott? Lebanon, Palestine and Hollywood, and the Arrest of Ziad Doueiri”
This paper looks at the arrest and court case of Lebanese film director, Ziad Doueiri. Doueiri broke the 1955 Boycott Law by shooting a film in Israel, using Israeli and Palestinian actors. The film was then banned across the all the countries of the Arab League. Marcus argues that his case compelled the law to define the terms around which a cultural object should be subject to a boycott, and she investigates the intersections between old laws, new global movements, and state sovereignty.
If you have trouble viewing above images, you may view this album directly on Flickr.

Elizabeth Marcus is a Mellon Fellow in the Scholars in the Humanities program at Stanford University and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Leeds. She received her BA from the University of Oxford in Modern History and French, and completed her PhD in French and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in 2017. Elizabeth has taught in the Core Curriculum at Columbia University and at MIT as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Global Studies and Languages Department. Her research focuses on the literatures as well as the intellectual and cultural history of the Francophone and Arab world with a particular interest in the relationship between language and cultural politics, intellectual networks, and migration in the afterlife of the French Empire. Her current manuscript, Difference and Dissidence: Cultural Politics and the End of Empire in Lebanon, 1943-1975, uncovers the response of local actors to the unique period of transition Lebanon at the end of the French mandate to the beginning of the civil war in 1975. During her time as a British Academy Fellow, she will start her second project, Paris and the Global University: International Students and Cultural Internationalism at the Cité Universitaire, 1945-1975, which looks at how the Cité internationale Universitaire, a residential campus in the Parisian outskirts, became a crucible of left and right-wing transnational political and cultural activism during the Trente Glorieuses (1945-1975).
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. The sessions consist of a 40-45 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center provides coffee, tea, and cookies.
All Center for Cultural Studies events are free and open to the public. Staff assistance is provided by the Humanities Institute.

Riyaaz Qawwali Performance - Sufi Music Ensemble
2019-10-25 19:30 - 21:30 | Music Center Recital Hall
Qawwali is a musical tradition from present-day India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, dating back 700 years. The group Riyaaz Qawwali brings 13th-century Sufi music to life by overcoming cultural and linguistic barriers, translating lyrics to unravel the cultural heritage of South Asian devotional music. Trained in Eastern and Western classical music, the members have been professionally performing qawwali for the past twelve years.
Riyaaz Qawwali represents the diversity and plurality of South Asia: the ensemble’s musicians, who are settled in the United States, hail from India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh and represent multiple religious and spiritual backgrounds. Click here to learn more about the ensemble.

$10 – General Admission
$4 – UCSC Students with ID
Day-of-event ticket window opens at 6:30PM
Doors open at 7:00PM
Parking permit: $5 (cash or credit via attendant in Arts Lot 126)

Presented by the Kamil and Talat Hasan Chair in Classical Indian Music, the Ali Akbar Khan Endowment for Indian Classical Music, and the UC Santa Cruz Music Department. Co-sponsored by the Center for South Asian Studies and The Humanities Institute.

CANCELLED - Glenn Tiffert: Censorship, Digitalization and the Fragility of Our Knowledge Base - Lessons from China
2019-10-28 15:00 - 17:00 | Cowell Provost House, Cowell Provost House, Cowell Service Rd‎ University of California Santa Cruz, Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Technological and economic forces are radically restructuring our ecosystem of knowledge, and opening our information space increasingly to forms of digital disruption and manipulation that are scalable, difficult to detect, and corrosive of the trust upon which vigorous scholarship and liberal democratic practice depend. Using an illustrative case from the people’s republic of china, this talk shows how a determined actor can exploit those vulnerabilities to tamper dynamically with the historical record. It furthermore demonstrates that machine learning models can now accurately reproduce the choices made by human censors, and warns that we are on the cusp of a new, algorithmic paradigm of information control and censorship that poses an existential threat to the foundations of all empirically-grounded disciplines. At a time of ascendant illiberalism around the world, robust, collective safeguards are urgently required to defend the integrity of our source base, and the knowledge we derive from it.
Glenn Tiffert is a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Tiffert earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley. From 2015-2017, he was the Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow in Residence at the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he also held faculty appointments in the History Department and Asian Languages & Cultures Department, and taught undergraduate and graduate courses on modern China. He has taught at Berkeley, Harvard, and UCLA, and currently serves on the Projects and Proposals Committee of the American Society for Legal History.

For further information, contact Minghui Hu: mhu@ucsc.edu

Halloween Lecture "The Vampire in Love" (with costume contest)
2019-10-28 18:15 - 20:00 | Forager, San Jose, 420 S 1st St, San Jose, CA, 95172, United States
Brought to you by the UCSC Prof and a Pint Lecture Series
Oh yeah, there will be a costume contest! And there will be prizes! If you want to compete please gather on the stage at 6:15pm. The lecture will start at 6:30pm as usual.
From the beginning of the earliest English-language vampire narrative in the early nineteenth century, the vampire has been a figure of both fear and desire, often represented through the vampire’s longings and the range of social responses they inspire. This talk considers several different examples of “the vampire in love” in order to explore what the vampire might tell us about our most pressing social, cultural, and political concerns across the twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries.
Kimberly Lau is Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz where she teaches courses on contemporary fiction, vampire narratives, fairy tales, and digital culture in relation to feminist and critical race theories. She has published a number of books and articles on a range of topics, including most recently “Erotic Infidelities: Love and Enchantment in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber” (2015).

Jasmin Young: She Stood There by Him with a Gun - Mabel Williams and the Philosophy of Armed Resistance
2019-10-29 13:00 - 14:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Stevenson Fall Lecture Presented by Jasmin Young:
Mabel Williams practiced armed resistance when white vigilante violence and police repression threatened the lives of activists. This talk interrogates the gendering of armed resistance and reveals the complex set of struggles between Black men and women about Black self-defense.
Jasmin A. Young is a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of African American Studies. She is currently developing her manuscript, Black Women with Guns: Armed Resistance in the Black Freedom Struggle. This work rethinks the history of the Black Freedom Movement by placing Black women’s armed activity at the center of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. The project explores the extensive practice and advocacy of armed resistance by Black women.
Presented by Stevenson College in collaboration with UCSC History Department, CRES, The Humanities Institute, and Feminist Studies departments.

CANCELLED - Elizabeth Strout: Olive, Again
2019-10-29 19:00 - 21:00 | DNA Comedy Lab, 155 S. River St., Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Due to disruptions and concerns about ongoing wildfire and power disruptions across California, Elizabeth Strout’s entire California tour has been cancelled/postponed to a future date. This means our event with Elizabeth Strout on October 29th has been CANCELLED.
If you purchased a ticket to this event, Bookshop Santa Cruz will be in touch with you via email within the next day. Please e-mail info@bookshopsantacruz.com with any questions in the meantime. Thank you.
Cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, Bookshop Santa Cruz presents a very special evening when #1 New York Times bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout. Join us to discuss her highly anticipated new novel, Olive, Again, in which she continues the life of her beloved character Olive Kitteridge. Strout will be in-conversation with writer Elizabeth McKenzie at this ticketed event, also cosponsored by KAZU, which will take place at DNA’s Comedy Lab.
This great night out, perfect for book groups and literature lovers, will also feature a book signing by Elizabeth Strout, raffle prizes and giveaways, plus refreshments (including wine and beer) available for purchase. Literary Soiree attendees will have a chance to win great prizes, including advanced reading copies of fall’s buzz books, Elizabeth Strout’s paperback books, tickets to Bookshop Santa Cruz’s upcoming event with Erin Morgenstern of The Night Circus fame, and more. Each attendee will leave with great book recommendations after they stop by curated book stations in the lobby hosted by Bookshop Santa Cruz Book Group Ambassadors such as “The 5 Best Books My Book Club Have Ever Read” or “Surviving 2020: Books That Will Make You Believe in Humanity.”
Tickets are $32 and include entry for one person to the soiree and one copy of Olive, Again.

Cultural Studies Colloquium: Aishwary Kumar
2019-10-30 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
“What is Political Cruelty? An Archeology of the Liberalism of Fear”
Under what conditions might fear become a saturating phenomenon of liberal democracy and extreme violence cease to be even a moral crime? Is this silent war on the body and idea of the citizen on the constitutional theorist and moral philosopher B. R. Ambedkar’s mind when, in his revolutionary classic Annihilation of Caste (1936), he coins the phrase “armed neutrality?” In this lecture, building on a new constellation of thinkers in political theory, Kumar develops the fundamental insight that Ambedkar, Hannah Arendt, and Judith Shklar, in conceptually different ways and with radically different moral psychological consequences, offer on today’s insoluble democratic impasse: that the most catastrophic effect of social inequality is not merely a betrayal of our constitutional compact to justice but a weaponization of a new form of political cruelty. What is this new cruelty? And what kind of constitutional courage– a re-articulation of dignity– might today be necessary to retrieve our freedom?
If you have trouble viewing above images, you may view this album directly on Flickr.

Aishwary Kumar is an intellectual historian and political theorist with interests in South Asian, European, and American political thought. His work spans a wide spectrum of issues in moral and political philosophy, constitutional theory and political justice, war and ethics, empire and liberalism, and the history of democratic thought and rights. Kumar’s first book, Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy (Stanford, 2015; Delhi, 2019), was listed by The Indian Express among the fifteen most important works on politics, morality, and law to be published anywhere that year. His essays have appeared, among other places, in Modern Intellectual History, Contemporary South Asia, Social History, Indian Economic and Social History Review, and Public Culture. He has also been featured on the radio shows Entitled Opinions and Philosophy Talk. Kumar is currently working on two related book-length studies. The first, titled “The Sovereign Void: Ambedkar’s Critique of Violence,” examines the genealogies of political freedom and war in Southern and Atlantic political thought, and their relation to notions of “force” across epistemological, theological, and secular traditions. The second, titled “The Gravity of Truth: Disenchantment, Disappointment, Democracy,” takes the Obama Presidency as its starting point to explore the place of moral and political judgment in the global constitutional imagination.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. The sessions consist of a 40-45 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center provides coffee, tea, and cookies.
All Center for Cultural Studies events are free and open to the public. Staff assistance is provided by the Humanities Institute.

Against Orthodoxies: Working with Hayden White
2019-11-01 - 2019-11-02 | Cultural Center at Merrill, Merrill Cultural Center, UC Santa Cruz, Merrill College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Event Photos by Jessica Guild:
If you have trouble viewing above images, you may view this album directly on Flickr.

On Friday and Saturday, November 1 and 2, 2019, UC Santa Cruz will hold a conference to honor the late Hayden White.
The event is conceived as an invitation to extend Hayden White’s thinking in new directions. Inspired by his rigorous, daring, iconoclastic spirit, this will be a time for experiment and dialogue. Confirmed participants are innovative scholars from a wide variety of disciplines.
Program timeline – Full Schedule Here

Pre-Conference Gathering: November 1st @ 10:30am, Hayden White Archive Exhibition at McHenry Library
Day 1: November 1st @ 1pm-5:30pm in the Merrill College Cultural Center, dinner to follow
Day 2: November 2nd @ 9am-5:30pm in the Merrill College Cultural Center, reception to follow

Keynote speakers:
Judith Butler (UC Berkeley)
Carol Mavor (University of Manchester)
Susan Stewart (Princeton University)
Participants:

Karyn Ball (University of Alberta)
Amy Elias (University of Tennessee)
Amir Eshel (Stanford)
Robert Harrison (Stanford)
Ethan Kleinberg (Wesleyan)
Paul Kottman (New School for Social Research)
María Inés la Greca (Universidad de Buenos Aires)
David Palumbo-Liu (Stanford)
Todd Presner (UC Los Angeles)
Jose Rabasa (UC Berkeley)
Veronica Tozzi (Universidad de Buenos Aires)

Organizing committee:
Paul Roth, Professor of Philosophy, UCSC
James Clifford, Professor Emeritus, History of Consciousness, UCSC
Karen Bassi, Professor of Literature and Classics, UCSC
Sponsored by:
The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz. With support from UCSC’s Cowell College, Stanford University’s Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages, and the Neufeld-Levin Chair of Holocaust Studies.

CANCELLED - Roumyana Pancheva: Linguistics Colloquia- Temporal Interpretation Without Tense
2019-11-01 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Languages without overt tense morphemes have typically been analyzed as having semantic tense, either contributed by a phonologically covert lexical item or supplied by a post-syntactic semantic rule. From a neo-Reichenbachian perspective, having semantic tense means having a linguistic device (a lexical item or a rule) dedicated to invoking a reference time in relation to the local evaluation time. The two types of tense accounts have also been offered for the closely related languages Mbya Guaraní and Paraguayan Guaraní (Tonhauser 2011a,b; Thomas 2014). We propose a truly tenseless account of Paraguayan Guaraní. A pronoun at the left edge of the clause, denoting the local evaluation time, directly binds the time variable of viewpoint aspect. In a matrix clause the evaluation time is speech time by default, resulting in present temporal reference, and with the help of a prospective morpheme, in future reference. The evaluation time may shift, as happens in restricted contexts in languages with tense (e.g., the historical present), but here more freely. The mechanism of evaluation time shift underlies past interpretation. The main consequence of this analysis is that tense is not a semantic universal.
Roumyana Pancheva is a professor of Linguistics and Slavic Languages and Literatures at USC, her main areas of research being syntax and semantics. Her research employs formal modeling, cross-linguistic comparison from a synchronic and diachronic perspective, and experimentation.

For more information visit: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/colloquia/index.html

Katharyne Mitchell: Cultural Studies Colloquium - Church Sanctuary and the Spatial Politics of the Sacred
2019-11-06 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Church sanctuary is not legal in any state in Europe, but the cultural and religious sense of church space as sacred, and the collective memory of this practice as an alternative form of justice, still has a powerful legacy. In citing past sanctuary ideals and practices, from medieval asylum law to recent sanctuary movements on behalf of refugees, faith-based actors draw on these memories to reactivate older traditions of insurgent citizenship. In this talk, Mitchell explores the critical role of space, collective memory and non-secular webs of belief in these current challenges to orthodox assumptions of state sovereignty.
If you have trouble viewing above images, you may view this album directly on Flickr.

Katharyne Mitchell is Dean of the Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Current research explores various aspects of migration and religion. Recent books include Making Workers: Radical Geographies of Education (Pluto Press, 2018), and the co-edited Handbook on Critical Geographies of Migration (Edward Elgar, 2019). Mitchell is the author of over 100 articles and book chapters and the recipient of grants from the MacArthur Foundation, Spencer Foundation, and National Science Foundation. The research for this talk was made possible by a Guggenheim Fellowship.

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

Morton Marcus Poetry Reading: Gary Soto
2019-11-07 19:00 | Music Center Recital Hall
Event Photos by Crystal Birns:
If you have trouble viewing above images, you may view this album directly on Flickr.
Gary Soto has published more than forty books for children, young adults and adults, including Too Many Tamales, Chato’s Kitchen, Baseball in April, Buried Onions and The Elements of San Joaquin. He is the author of In and Out of Shadows, a musical about undocumented youth and, most recently, The Afterlife, a one-act play about teen murder and teen suicide.
Event Program:
Poet Gary Young, will host the program, and the evening will include an announcement of the winner of the Morton Marcus Poetry Contest (recipient receives a $1,000 prize). The reading will conclude with a book signing and reception. RSVP appreciated – seating is first come, first served.

Doors open at 6:30pm
Program begins at 7:00pm
About Morton Marcus:
The Annual Morton Marcus Poetry Reading honors poet, teacher, and film critic Morton Marcus (1936–2009). Marcus, a nationally acclaimed poet, called Santa Cruz his home for more than fifty years. This annual poetry series continues Mort’s tradition of bringing acclaimed poets to Santa Cruz County, continues to acknowledge the significant role poetry has played in our community’s history, and works to maintain poetry’s influence in our county’s culture. For more information visit www.mortonmarcus.com. You can also view the Morton Marcus Archive in Special Collections at UCSC.
This community event is presented by the The Humanities Institute and co-sponsored by:
Bookshop Santa Cruz
Cabrillo College English Department
Cowell College
Living Writers Series
Ow Family Properties
Poetry Santa Cruz
Porter Hitchcock Modern Poetry Fund
Porter College
Santa Cruz Writes
Special Collections & Archives
Directions and Parking:
The UCSC Music Recital Hall is located at 402 McHenry Rd, Santa Cruz, CA 95064
Parking lot attendants will be on site to sell permits and direct guests to available parking in the Performing Arts parking lot #126. The cost for parking is $5.
If you have disability-related needs, please contact us at thi@ucsc.edu or call 831-459-1274 by November 4th, 2019.

A Literary Masquerade with Erin Morgenstern
2019-11-12 19:00 - 21:00 | DNA Comedy Lab, 155 S. River St., Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
You are cordially invited to Bookshop Santa Cruz’s first-ever Literary Masquerade, celebrating the release of Erin Morgenstern’s highly anticipated new novel, The Starless Sea. Co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
From Erin Morgenstern, the New York Times bestselling author of The Night Circus, a timeless love story set in a secret underground world—a place of pirates, painters, lovers, liars, and ships that sail upon a starless sea.
Join us on Tuesday, November 12th at 6:00 for a literary masquerade, where you and all who attend are invited to disguise yourself as your favorite literary character or figure to enter the world of The Starless Sea. Dancing and activities plucked from Erin Morgenstern’s magical world will precede a 7:00 talk with Erin Morgenstern, followed by a book signing. Erin Morgenstern will be in conversation with Michael Chemers, Professor of Dramatic Literature in the Department of Theater Arts at UC Santa Cruz. This event will take place at DNA’s Comedy Lab (155 S River St., Santa Cruz, CA). Themed refreshments, including beer and wine, will be available to purchase from DNA’s Comedy Lab.
Tickets to this enchanting evening are $37, and include one copy of The Starless Sea, an unassigned seat for Erin Morgenstern’s talk, a number for the signing line, and access to all event activities. Literary costumes encouraged.

Masquerade begins at 6:00
Book talk begins at 7:00
ERIN MORGENSTERN is the author of The Night Circus, a number-one national best seller that has been sold around the world and translated into thirty-seven languages. She has a degree in theater from Smith College and lives in Massachusetts.
“Morgenstern’s new fantasy epic is a puzzlebox of a book, full of meta-narratives and small folkloric tales that will delight readers… Morgenstern uses poetic, honey-like prose to tell a story that plays with the very concept of what we expect and want from our stories… She trusts her readers to follow along and speculate, wonder and make leaps themselves as she dives into tales of pirates, book burnings, and men lost in time, giving the book a mythic quality that will stick with readers long after they put it down.”
⁠—Booklist (starred)
“This love letter to bibliophiles is dreamlike and uncanny, grounded in deeply felt emotion, and absolutely thrilling.”
⁠—Publishers Weekly (starred)

LOCATION CHANGE David Biggs: Archipelagic Vietnam - Rethinking Nationalism From the Shoreline
2019-11-13 12:00 - 13:30 | CA, United States
Please RSVP for the Cultural Studies Colloquium location
Until recent conflicts over islands in the South China Sea, Vietnam’s history was described in terrestrial terms. Vietnam’s nationalist struggles, we were told, involved epic battles with American and other troops in highland jungles and city streets; and the nation’s territorial expansion from Hanoi happened in two directions: southward and uphill. The sea, as so many history books taught, was a nothing space where foreign invasions began. Vietnam’s geo-body was tied to a Westphalian notion of sovereignty reified in so many books and maps. Real sovereignty in Vietnam, however, was and still is relational. Topologies of trade, commerce, migration and communication have for centuries defined where “Vietnam” begins and so many other cultures and ecologies taper off. Rather than assume a closed model, this talk reimagines Vietnam as an archipelago, a more permeable nation-system of nodes linked by flows of energy, food, people and technology moving from the sea to the mountains and spaces beyond. Drawing from his recently published book, Footprints of War: Militarized Landscapes in Vietnam (Washington, 2018), environmental historian David Biggs conducts an archipelagic history tour along Vietnam’s central coast with stops in the ancient, early modern, colonial and post-colonial past.
David Biggs is a Professor of History at the University of California, Riverside, specializing in twentieth century environmental history with an area focus on Vietnam and Southeast Asia. His first book, Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature, won the 2011 George Perkins Marsh Prize in Environmental History; and his essays have appeared in such venues as the Journal of Asian Studies, Technology and Culture and the New York Times. He is currently working on a trans-Pacific history of the mid-twentieth century.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions

LOCATION CHANGE Dean Spade: Solidarity Not Charity - Mutual Aid for Mobilization and Survival
2019-11-13 15:00 - 17:00 | Resource Center for Non Violence
Join the Feminist Studies department as they present their second FMST Colloquium for the 2019 Fall quarter!
Widespread, effective social movements usually include mutual aid strategies that directly address conditions faced by targeted people, such as providing housing, food, healthcare and transportation. Examples include the Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast Program, the Young Lords’ hijacking of New York’s tuberculosis testing mobile unit to high-risk, medically neglected neighborhoods, and feminist organizing to provide underground abortions in the 1970s. This talk will look at why mutual aid is an important part of building participatory movements, and how it intentionally departs from charity frameworks.
Dean Spade is a lawyer, writer, trans activist, and an Associate Professor at Seattle University School of Law, where he teaches Administrative Law, Poverty Law, Gender and Law, Policing and Imprisonment, and Law and Social Movements.

Mikael Wolfe: Extreme Weather and the Mexican Revolution - Historical Reality and Perception
2019-11-14 15:00 - 16:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Speaker, Mikael Wolfe, presents recently published research that combines environmental history and historical climatology to examine the relationship between extreme weather events, especially drought and frost, and the origins of the Mexican Revolution. His findings suggest that inaccurate and misleading weather reporting—what he calls “politico-environmental” coverage—by a variety of newspapers throughout the country was as important as actual climatic variability in exacerbating the economic and political crises that culminated in the 1910-11 armed insurrection. The research not only changes our understanding of the Mexican Revolution; it also helps to historicize the current study of climate change and conflict, such as in the Syrian civil war, which has a number of striking parallels to Mexico’s civil war exactly one century before.
Mikael Wolfe is an environmental historian of water and climate issues in modern Latin America. He is currently Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University and the author of Watering the Revolution: An Environmental and Technological History of Agrarian Reform in Mexico (Duke University Press, 2017), which won the Elinor K. Melville Book Prize for Latin American environmental history and was short-listed for the María Elena Martínez Prize on the history of Mexico in 2018. His second book project is tentatively entitled Revolution in the Air: A Comparative Historical Climatology of the Mexican and Cuban Revolutions.

Join the Center for World History in welcoming Mikael Wolfe to UCSC for their first CWH event of the 2019-2020 academic year!

Extreme Weather and the Mexican Revolution: Historical Reality and Perception
2019-11-14 15:00 - 16:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This talk will present recently published research that combines environmental history and historical climatology to examine the relationship between extreme weather events, especially drought and frost, and the origins of the Mexican Revolution. Wolfe’s findings suggest that inaccurate and misleading weather reporting—what he calls “politico-environmental” coverage—by a variety of newspapers throughout the country was as important as actual climatic variability in exacerbating the economic and political crises that culminated in the 1910-11 armed insurrection. Wolfe’s research not only changes our understanding of the Mexican Revolution; it also helps to historicize the current study of climate change and conflict, such as in the Syrian civil war, which has a number of striking parallels to Mexico’s civil war exactly one century before.
Mikael Wolfe is an environmental historian of water and climate issues in modern Latin America and author of Watering the Revolution: An Environmental and Technological History of Agrarian Reform in Mexico (Duke University Press, 2017).
Presented by the Center for World History, cwh@ucsc.edu

THI Open House
2019-11-14 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
Join us as we kick off the 20th anniversary of The Humanities Institute: a vibrant community at the center of UC Santa Cruz and at the cutting edge of Humanities research, education, and public engagement.
Raise a glass, meet our fellows, and connect with your colleagues. In many ways, The Humanities Institute is a demonstration of where the Humanities is headed and we are stronger when we do this work together.

The Open House is an opportunity to celebrate the community we’ve built over the past 20 years and to acknowledge where we want to be.
Photos by Crystal Birns
If you have trouble viewing above images, you may view this album directly on Flickr.

After the open house celebration, please join us for Living Writers: After Ursula on November 14th at 7pm in the Humanities Lecture Hall. Four renowned writers–Karen Joy Fowler, Molly Gloss, Nisi Shawl and Kim Stanley Robinson–will participate in a conversation centered around sci/fi speculative fiction author Ursula LeGuin, who recently died in 2018.

Living Writers: "After Ursula" with Karen Joy Fowler, Molly Gloss, Nisi Shawl, and Kim Stanley Robinson
2019-11-14 19:10 - 20:30 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
After Ursula: Four renowned Sci Fi/Fantasy Writers all mentored by Ursula K Le Guin read from their work.
Molly Gloss is the author of several novels including The Jump-Off Creek, The Dazzle of Day, Wild Life, The Hearts of Horses and Falling From Horses, as well as the story collection Unforeseen. She writes both realistic fiction and science fiction, and her novels have received, among other honors, a PEN West Fiction Prize, an Oregon Book Award, two Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards, the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, and a Whiting Writers Award.
Karen Joy Fowler is the author of six novels, including Sarah Canary and The Jane Austen Book Club, and three short story collections, including What I Didn’t See. Her most recent novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, was published by Putnam in May 2013 and won the Pen Faulkner award that year. She currently lives in Santa Cruz.
Nisi Shawl wrote the 2016 Nebula finalist Everfair and the 2008 Tiptree Award-winning collection Filter House. In 2005 she co-wrote Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, a standard text on inclusive representation in the imaginative genres. Her stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s SF Magazine, and many other publications. She edited the anthology New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color; and co-edited Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany; Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler. Shawl is a Carl Brandon Society founder and a Clarion West board member. She lives in Seattle near an enticingly large lake.
Kim Stanley Robinson is an American science fiction writer. He is the author of more than twenty books, including the international bestselling Mars trilogy, and more recently Red Moon, New York 2140, Aurora, Shaman, Green Earth, and 2312. He was sent to the Antarctic by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers’ Program in 1995, and returned in their Antarctic media program in 2016. In 2008 he was named a “Hero of the Environment” by Time magazine. He works with the Sierra Nevada Research Institute, the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, and UC San Diego’s Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination. His work has been translated into 25 languages, and won a dozen awards in five countries, including the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy awards. In 2016 asteroid 72432 was named “Kimrobinson.”

This Living Writers event is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute.
Please join us as we kick off the 20th anniversary of The Humanities Institute at our Open House Celebration on November 14th from 4-6pm. Raise a glass, meet our fellows, and connect with your community. In many ways, The Humanities Institute is a demonstration of where the Humanities is headed and we are stronger when we do this work together.

PhD+ Workshop - Demystifying the Publishing Process with UC Press
2019-11-15 11:00 - 12:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Learn about the publishing process, including book proposals, pitches, meeting with editors, and contracts.
University of California Press (UC Press) is one of the most forward-thinking scholarly publishers, committed to influencing public discourse and challenging the status quo. At a time of dramatic change for scholarship and publishing, UC Press collaborates with faculty, librarians, authors, and students to stay ahead of today’s knowledge demands and shape the future of publishing.

Kim Robinson, Editorial Director, received a B.A. in English from UC Santa Barbara. Before joining UC Press in 2009, she spent eight years at Oxford University Press in New York, both as music editor and editorial director of the scholarly reference group. Before stepping into the role of Editorial Director, she was Social Sciences Publisher and regional editor at UC Press. Previous to her career in publishing, Kim spent a decade working for nonprofit organizations and foundations focused on the environment and equal access to information and technology. A few of Kim’s UC Press acquisitions include California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It, A People’s Guide to Los Angeles, and the launch of Boom: A Journal of California.

Since 2010, Eric A. Schmidt, has extended the Classics program beyond Greece and Rome to include the cultural networks in and between Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, particularly in the period of Late Antiquity. In 2017, Eric started acquiring titles on the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, with a focus on books that highlight the passage of people, things, and ideas across the boundaries of land and language. In addition to promoting cutting-edge scholarship, Eric acquires pedagogically sophisticated materials for undergraduate teaching, including annotated translations of important texts, readers of primary source materials, and synthetic treatments of major topics. Recent highlights from his list include Richard Payne’s State of Mixture, Aaron Hahn Tapper’s Judaisms, Barry Powell’s translation of the works of Hesiod, and Joel Blecher’s Said the Prophet of God.
Areas of acquisition: World History (Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern), Religion, and World Literature in Translation

Kate Marshall joined UC Press in 2008 and manages several award-winning lists, including anthropology and our interdisciplinary programs on food and Latin America. In 2013, she launched a new list in Latin American history. Recent highlights from her list include Jason De León’s The Land of Open Graves, Raj Patel and Jason Moore’s A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Joyce Goldstein’s The New Mediterranean Jewish Table, and the 10th anniversary edition of Marion Nestle’s Food Politics. Across fields, Kate is motivated to publish scholarly and general interest titles that address pressing social or environmental problems.
Areas of acquisition: Anthropology, Food Studies, Latin American Studies

About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Please join us for the fourth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by the Humanities Institute. We meet monthly, over lunch, to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grants/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.
Lunch will be served.
Please RSVP below:
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Linguistics Colloquia: Jorge Hankamer
2019-11-15 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Jorge Hankamer (UC Santa Cruz) – CP Complements to D
About eight times each year, the Linguistics department hosts colloquia by distinguished faculty from around the world.
For full information visit: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/colloquia/index.html

After Ursula Discussion
2019-11-15 15:00 - 17:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Join us to discuss excerpts from authors Karen Joy Fowler, Molly Gloss, Nisi Shawl, and Kim Stanley Robinson. Please email Micah Perks at (meperks@ucsc.edu) for the readings and to RSVP for the discussion.
Kim Stanley Robinson is an American science ﬁction writer. He is the author of more than twenty books, including the international bestselling Mars trilogy, and more recently Red Moon, New York 2140, Aurora, Shaman, Green Earth, and 2312. He was sent to the Antarctic by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers’ Program in 1995, and returned in their Antarctic media program in 2016. In 2008 he was named a “Hero of the Environment” by Time magazine. He works with the Sierra Nevada Research Institute, the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, and UC San Diego’s Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination. His work has been translated into 25 languages, and won a dozen awards in ﬁve countries, including the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy awards. In 2016 asteroid 72432 was named “Kimrobinson.”
Karen Joy Fowler is the author of six novels, including Sarah Canary and The Jane Austen Book Club, and three short story collections, including What I Didn’t See. Her most recent novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, was published by Putnam in May 2013 and won the Pen Faulkner award that year. She currently lives in Santa Cruz.
Molly Gloss is the author of several novels including The Jump-Off Creek, The Dazzle of Day, Wild Life, The Hearts of Horses and Falling From Horses, as well as the story collection Unforeseen. She writes both realistic ﬁction and science ﬁction, and her novels have received, among other honors, a PEN West Fiction Prize, an Oregon Book Award, two Paciﬁc Northwest Booksellers Awards, the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, and a Whiting Writers Award.
Nisi Shawl wrote the 2016 Nebula ﬁnalist Everfair and the 2008 Tiptree Award-winning collection Filter House. In 2005 she co-wrote Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, a standard text on inclusive representation in the imaginative genres. Her stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s SF Magazine, and many other publications. She edited the anthology New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color; and co-edited Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany; Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler. Shawl is a Carl Brandon Society founder and a Clarion West board member. She lives in Seattle near an enticingly large lake.

Nido de Lenguas: Camp
2019-11-16 13:00 - 15:30 | Watsonville Public Library, 275 Main St., Ste 100, Watsonville, CA, 95076, United States
¡Únete a nosotros para un día de aprendizaje de idiomas y desarrollo comunitario! Nuestros maestros compartirán el mixteco de San Martín Peras, un idioma de Oaxaca. Comienza a aprender o desarrolla tus habilidades con juegos y otras actividades grupales.
¡No se necesita experiencia previa!
Gratuito y abierto al público
¡Por favor regístrete en línea!

Join us for a day of language learning and community building! Our language teachers will be sharing San Martín Peras Mixtec, a language of Oaxaca. Start learning or build your skills through games & other group activities.
No prior experience needed!
Free & open to the public
Please sign up online!

Eve Zyzik: Spanish Studies Colloquium
2019-11-19 12:30 - 14:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Spelling is an aspect of literacy that causes significant difficulties for Spanish heritage language learners. The current research study targets one of the most problematic areas of Spanish orthography: substitution of “s” and “c” letters to represent /s/. Participants (n=72) were young adults, heritage speakers of Spanish, who completed a dictation task in addition to a standardized measure of proficiency. The results indicate a main effect for cognates (Spanish/English cognates are spelled more accurately), but no effect for letter. In other words, the data show that “s” is not the default letter for representing /s/, contrary to what had been found in a number of previous studies. These results are discussed in the broader context of pedagogical proposals for targeting orthography among college-aged heritage language learners.

Eve Zyzik (PhD, UC Davis) is currently Professor of Spanish in the Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics at UC Santa Cruz. She has published over twenty-five articles and chapters related to second language acquisition, heritage language development, and language pedagogy. Her articles appear in journals such as Applied Psycholinguistics, Language Learning, Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, and Studies in Second Language Acquisition. She has also published two books: El español y la lingüística aplicada (with Robert Blake) and Authentic Materials Myths: Applying Second Language Research to Classroom Teaching (with Charlene Polio).

Note: Event will be given in Spanish

Anjali Arondekar: What More Remains - Sexuality, Slavery, Historiography
2019-11-20 12:00 - 14:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This talk engages a ‘small’ history of sexuality and slavery in Portuguese India. At stake are three questions: How do we call attention to the displacement of slave pasts within histories of sexuality that are themselves routinely displaced? How do we locate those displacements in itinerant archives of profit and pleasure, than in archives of loss and trauma? How do we open a dialogue between the interdisciplinary fields of area studies and sexuality studies with an eye to understanding how histories of slavery can reshape, even devastate, these very field-formations?
If you have trouble viewing above images, you may view this album directly on Flickr.

Anjali Arondekar is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies, UCSC. Her research engages the poetics and politics of sexuality, colonialism and historiography, with a focus on South Asia. She is the author of For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Duke University Press, 2009, Orient Blackswan, India, 2010), winner of the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award for best book in lesbian, gay, or queer studies in literature and cultural studies, Modern Language Association (MLA), 2010. She is co-editor (with Geeta Patel) of “Area Impossible: The Geopolitics of Queer Studies,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (2016). Her talk is an excerpt from her forthcoming book, Abundance: On Sexuality and Historiography.

FrankenCon 2019
2019-11-21 - 2019-11-23 | UC Santa Cruz
For over two hundred years, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has haunted our days and chilled our dreaming nights. Celebrate and explore the enduring legacy of the world’s first science-fiction horror story with FRANKENCON, a three-day conference of scientists, theorists, and artists on November 21-23, 2019 at UC Santa Cruz.
The conference is in conjunction with the Theater Arts Department production of The Frankenstein Project, a play by Kirsten Brandt.
In the centuries since Mary Shelley first penned the novel, the lore and magic of Frankenstein has molded the modern genre of science fiction. With the explosive proliferation of golems, robots, monsters of artificial intelligence and genetically-engineered dinosaurs, Frankenstein and its cultural progeny have come to dominate cultural discussions about the ethics of science, the problems of modernity, the obligations of parents and children, and the painful act of creation itself.
Free and open to the public
Full information including guest speakers, schedule, and how to attend at:
FRANKENCON.COM
Presented by the UC Santa Cruz Center for Monster Studies, The Humanities Institute and The Division of the Arts. With the support of Porter College, Crown College, The Science & Justice Research Center, The Theater Arts Department, Oakes College, and the Department of Art & Design: Games & Playable Media; and with the generosity of our friends at DNA’s Comedy Lab & Experimental Theatre and Good Times Santa Cruz.

Dylan Riley: Capitalism, Democracy, and Authoritarianism - A Reconsideration
2019-11-21 16:00 - 18:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Dylan Riley is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain, and Romania 1870-1945 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, Verso, 2019). He is also the co-author of a two-volume work with Rebecca Jean Emigh and Patricia Ahmed entitled Antecedents of Censuses: From Medieval to Nation States and Changes in Censuses: From Imperialism to Welfare States (Palgrave 2016). In addition to these books, he has published articles in the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Catalyst, Comparative Sociology, Contemporary Sociology, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Social Science History, The Socio-Economic Review and the New Left Review (of which he is a member of the editorial committee). His work has been translated into German, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Database
2019-11-21 19:10 - 20:45 | Cultural Center at Merrill, Merrill Cultural Center, UC Santa Cruz, Merrill College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Jessica Kolopenuk will talk with Science & Justice and the Crown College about the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women database. For resources, news articles, tool-kits and webinars that frame the issues, refer to the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center‘s page on the special collection. Read or Listen to: Native American Activists Look To Next Steps After Murdered And Missing Indigenous Women Study Bill Passes (3/21/19)
Hosted by the Crown College Core Course (Ethical and Political Implications of Emerging Technologies) and the Science & Justice Research Center, with an introduction from Kim TallBear.

Jessica Kolopenuk (Cree, Peguis First Nation) is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta and Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria. Her doctoral project, The Science of Indigeneity: DNA Beyond Ancestry is a study of how, in Canada, genomic biotechnologies are impacting definitions of Indigeneity in the fields of forensic science, biomedical research, and physical anthropology. She identifies opportunities where Indigenous peoples may intervene to govern the genetic/genome sciences that affect their bodies, territories, and peoples. Over the past two years, with TallBear, she has been involved with co-developing the Indigenous Science, Technology, and Society Research and Training Program at the UofA. Jessica is a co-organizer of the Summer internship for INdigenous peoples in Genomics Canada (SING Canada).

Kim TallBear (UCSC HistCon, SJRC Advisor) Associate Professor, Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta, and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience & Environment. She is building a research hub in Indigenous Science, Technology, and Society (www.IndigenousSTS.com). Follow them at @indigenous_sts. TallBear is author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). Her Indigenous STS work recently turned to also address decolonial and Indigenous sexualities. She founded a University of Alberta arts-based research lab and co-produces the sexy storytelling show, Tipi Confessions, sparked by the popular Austin, Texas show, Bedpost Confessions. Building on lessons learned with geneticists about how race categories get settled, TallBear is working on a book that interrogates settler-colonial commitments to settlement in place, within disciplines, and within monogamous, state-sanctioned marriage. She is a citizen of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate in South Dakota. She tweets @KimTallBear and @CriticalPoly.
Co-sponsored by: the Science & Justice Research Center, Crown College, the Human Paleogenomics Lab, Feminist Studies, the Santa Cruz Institute for Social Transformation, and The Humanities Institute.

Living Writers: Peg Alford Pursell and Sophia Shalmiyev
2019-11-21 19:10 - 21:00 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Peg Alford Pursell is the author of A Girl Goes Into the Forest, (Dzanc Books, July 2019), and of Show Her A Flower, A Bird, A Shadow, the 2017 Indies Book of the Year for Literary Fiction. Her work has been published in many journals and anthologies, including Permafrost, Joyland, and the Los Angeles Review. Most recently, her microfiction, flash fiction, and hybrid prose have been nominated for Best Small Microfictions and Pushcart Prizes. She is the founder and director of WTAW Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary books, and of Why There Are Words, the national literary reading series. She is a member of the SF Writers Grotto. See more at: www.pegalfordpursell.com

Sophia Shalmiyev is an immigrant from the Soviet Union and the author of Mother Winter (2019, S&S), which Kirkus Reviews describes as “a rich tapestry of autobiography and meditations on feminism, motherhood, art, and culture, this book is as intellectually satisfying as it is artistically profound. A sharply intelligent, lyrically provocative memoir.” Shalmiyev has an MFA from Portland State University and a second master’s degree in creative arts therapy from the School of Visual Arts. She lives in Portland with her two children. Her latest work can be found at Lit Hub and Guernica.

Presented with support from the Humanities Institute’s Body, (Anti)Narrative, and Corporeal Creative Practices Research Cluster

Discussion with Peg Alford Pursell and Sophia Shalmiyev
2019-11-22 15:00 - 17:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Join us to discuss excerpts from Mother Winter, a memoir by Sophia Shalmiyev and A Girl Goes Into The Forest, a collection of short stories by Peg Alford Pursell. Please email Micah Perks at (meperks@ucsc.edu) for the readings and to RSVP for the discussion.
Peg Alford Pursell is the author of A Girl Goes Into the Forest, (Dzanc Books, July 2019), and of Show Her A Flower, A Bird, A Shadow, the 2017 Indies Book of the Year for Literary Fiction. Her work has been published in many journals and anthologies, including Permafrost, Joyland, and the Los Angeles Review. Most recently, her microfiction, flash fiction, and hybrid prose have been nominated for Best Small Microfictions and Pushcart Prizes. She is the founder and director of WTAW Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary books, and of Why There Are Words, the national literary reading series. She is a member of the SF Writers Grotto. See more at: www.pegalfordpursell.com
Sophia Shalmiyev is an immigrant from the Soviet Union and the author of Mother Winter (2019, S&S), which Kirkus Reviews describes as “a rich tapestry of autobiography and meditations on feminism, motherhood, art, and culture, this book is as intellectually satisfying as it is artistically profound. A sharply intelligent, lyrically provocative memoir.” Shalmiyev has an MFA from Portland State University and a second master’s degree in creative arts therapy from the School of Visual Arts. She lives in Portland with her two children. Her latest work can be found at Lit Hub and Guernica.

Stephen Roddy: Testing Allegiances - Ueda Akinari's Rewriting of an Exemplary Chinese Friendship
2019-11-22 15:00 - 17:00 | Cowell Provost House, Cowell Provost House, Cowell Service Rd‎ University of California Santa Cruz, Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
This talk examines the transcultural implications of Ueda Akinari’s (1734-1809) short story “The Chrysanthemum Pledge” (Kikka no chigiri), a masterpiece considered to have overshadowed the 17th-century Chinese tale of exemplary friendship on which it is closely modeled. Despite the Confucian tenor of both the Chinese and the Japanese versions, I argue that Akinari subtly but unmistakably undermines the moral rectitude of the protagonists recounted in his tale. By reading this and other examples of Akinari’s fiction in juxtaposition with the author’s extensive oeuvre of wagaku and other scholarship, we can more fully appreciate his nuanced position as both connoisseur and skeptic toward cultural products emanating from the Western Lands (which for him mostly meant China and India).
Stephen Roddy is a professor of Modern and Classical Languages, received his PhD in East Asian Studies from Princeton University, and specializes in the fiction and other prose genres of 18th and 19th century China and Japan. His current interests focus on the influences of Chinese fiction on late-Tokugawa writers, and of Meiji-period thinkers on essayists of the late-Qing. He teaches courses in Japanese and Chinese literature, culture, and language.
For further information, Contact Minghui Hu (mhu@ucsc.edu)

Eugene Park: A Genealogy of Dissent - The Progeny of Fallen Royals in Chosŏn Korea
2019-11-25 15:00 - 17:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This lecture makes observations on politics, society, and culture of Korea since 1392 through a story of human interest. Decades after a bloody persecution that virtually exterminated the royal Wangs of the vanquished Koryŏ dynasty (918-1392), the succeeding Chosŏn dynasty (1392-1910) rehabilitated the lucky survivors. Contrary to a popular assumption that the Wangs remained politically marginalized, many fared well. The most privileged among them won the patronage of the court, for which they performed ancestral rites in honor of Koryŏ monarchs; passed government service examinations; attained prestigious offices; commanded armies, and constituted local elite lineages. As members of a revived aristocratic descent group, the Wangs remained committed to a confucian moral universe, at the heart of which was a subject’s loyalty to the ruler — of course, the Chosŏn. At the time, an emerging body of subversive narrative, both written and oral, articulated sympathy toward the Wangs as victims of the tumultuous politics of Koryŏ-Chosŏn dynastic change, although the Wangs wisely steered clear of such a discourse until after Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910. Such forces of modernity as colonialism, urbanization, industrialization, the Cold War, and globalization have transformed the Wangs as members of a distinct descent group to individuals from all walks of life.
Join the East Asian Colloquium in the third talk of their ongoing lecture series!

CANCELLED: Déborah Danowski & Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: Beyond the End of the World Sawyer Seminar Series
2019-12-04 | College Nine and John R. Lewis Multipurpose Room, College Ten, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Due to unforeseen circumstances Déborah Danowski & Eduardo Viveiros de Castro had to regretfully cancel their engagement in Santa Cruz.

Ronaldo Wilson: The Quotidian Lucy and Other Constructions
2019-12-04 12:00 - 14:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
“The Quotidian Lucy and Other Constructions” explores some recent site-specific and studio performances (written/visual/sonic) that serve as interventions between theory and practice. Discussing new works on paper, video, and in performance, Wilson seeks to inhabit and engage with questions of memory, genre, form, and discipline as strategies through which to examine race, sex, and desire in concert with what vocabularies emerge and accrete in rendering multiple drafts of the self through poetic persona, character, and movement.
Ronaldo V. Wilson, PhD is the author of four collections: Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man, Poems of the Black Object, Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose, Other, and Lucy 72. The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Ford Foundation, Kundiman, MacDowell, the National Research Council, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Center for Art and Thought, and Yaddo, Wilson is an interdisciplinary artist, having performed in multiple venues, including the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, UC Riverside’s Artsblock, Louisiana State University’s Digital Media Center Theater, Georgetown’s Lannan Center, Southern Exposure Gallery, and Casa Victoria Ocampo in Buenos Aires. He is Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at U.C. Santa Cruz.

Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures
2019-12-04 16:00 - 18:00 | Engineering 2, Room 599, Engineering 2, 1156 High St‎ University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Co-authors Neda Atanasoski (UCSC Feminist Studies, CRES) and Kalindi Vora (UC Davis Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies) will present on their new book Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (Duke University Press, March 2019), with responses by CRES Director Christine Hong and SJRC Director Jenny Reardon. A dessert reception will follow.
Book Description
In Surrogate Humanity, Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora trace the ways in which robots, artificial intelligence, and other technologies serve as surrogates for human workers within a labor system entrenched in racial capitalism and patriarchy. Analyzing myriad technologies, from sex robots and military drones to sharing economy platforms, Atanasoski and Vora show how liberal structures of antiblackness, settler colonialism, and patriarchy are fundamental to human-machine interactions as well as the very definition of the human. While these new technologies and engineering projects promise a revolutionary new future, they replicate and reinforce racialized and gendered ideas about devalued work, exploitation, dispossession, and capitalist accumulation. Yet, even as engineers design robots to be more perfect versions of the human—more rational killers, more efficient workers, and tireless companions—the potential exists to develop alternative modes of engineering and technological development in ways that refuse the racial and colonial logics that maintain social hierarchies and inequality.

Neda Atanasoski is Professor of Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity.

Kalindi Vora is Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Davis, and author of Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor.

Hosted by the Science & Justice Research Center. Co-Sponsored by Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and The Humanities Institute.

Living Writers: Student Readings
2019-12-04 19:10 - 20:30 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Students will be reading from their own work.

PhD+ Workshop – Where Can I Go From Here? Exploring Careers Beyond Academia
2019-12-06 11:00 - 12:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Curious about careers outside of academia, but not sure where to begin? In this interactive workshop, we’ll begin to explore the many career paths PhDs in the humanities can enter upon graduation. After a brief orientation to ImaginePhD, a career exploration and planning tool designed for PhDs in the Humanities and Social Sciences, we’ll discuss how to learn more about different career paths and organizations you might want to work for. Finally, we’ll talk about next steps – how to move from career exploration to the job search – with a discussion of effective networking techniques and some analysis of the transferrable skills Humanities PhDs develop over the course of their programs.

Erin Brown is the Interim Assistant Director for UCLA’s Graduate Career Services, providing career exploration and professional development programming, as well as individual career coaching, to UCLA graduate students and postdoctoral scholars. Erin earned a PhD in History from UCLA, where she examined the town-building phenomenon in the late 18th and early 20th century American West. An ardent advocate of thinking outside the box and testing limits, Erin enthusiastically supports students who want to use their graduate training in innovative and unexpected ways.

About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Please join us for the fourth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by the Humanities Institute. We meet monthly, over lunch, to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grants/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.
Lunch will be served.
Please RSVP below: Loading…

Linguistics Colloquia: Dave Kush
2019-12-06 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Dave Kush (NTNU-Norway) – Title TBD
About eight times each year, the Linguistics department hosts colloquia by distinguished faculty from around the world.
For full information visit: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/colloquia/index.html

TEDx Santa Cruz
2019-12-07 | Rio Theater, 1205 Soquel Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95062, United States
TEDxSantaCruz 2019:
The Art of Hope
Features riveting talks and performances from a diverse range of inspired, innovative and renowned speakers and artists.
Join the local conference on December 7, 2019, at the Rio Theatre.
Nine UCSC speakers join TEDx Santa Cruz extravaganza on Dec. 7
For tickets and more information visit www.tedxsantacruz.org

Sean Keilen: Reading Hamlet Now
2019-12-09 18:30 - 20:00 | Forager, San Jose, 420 S 1st St, San Jose, CA, 95172, United States
Shakespeare’s works are rightly famous for their lifelikeness and insights into human affairs. What can they show us about our circumstances now, in a world where truth is inscrutable, social and political institutions are in decline, and we seem to relish conflict more than peace? This lecture will explore that question in the context of Hamlet, looking specifically at the way that Shakespeare presents reading, education, and the theater as resources for self-development and setting the world right. The lecture does not assume any prior knowledge of Shakespeare, but reading or watching Hamlet beforehand will make for a livelier discussion.

If you have trouble viewing above images, you may view this album directly on Flickr.

Sean Keilen is Professor of Literature and Provost of Porter College at UC Santa Cruz, where he directs Shakespeare Workshop, a research center of The Humanities Institute that uses Shakespeare’s writing to bring the campus and the community together in conversation about topics of shared concern. He studies Shakespeare and the history of criticism, and is the author or editor of books and essays about early British literature and the classical tradition in England. He was educated at Williams College, Cambridge, and Stanford University.

Layali Morocco: Jewish Songlines & Soundscapes
2020-01-09 19:00 - 21:30 | Kuumbwa Jazz Center
Event Photos by Jessica Guild:
If you have trouble viewing above images, you may view this album directly on Flickr.

Samuel Torjman Thomas & ASEFA
ASEFA (meaning “gathering”) is led by ethnomusicologist and multi-instrumentalist Samuel Torjman Thomas, Ph.D. Blending vocals, oud, violin, nay, and plenty of percussion, with songs in Hebrew, Arabic, Spanish, and Ladino, this trio ensemble traverses several North African song traditions. Drawing upon a rich intercultural mix of Hebraic and Islamic traditions, audiences feel the heartbeat of the Maghreb. Thomas is an ethnomusicologist and multi-instrumentalist, and as artistic director of the New York Andalus Ensemble and ASEFA, he journeys through a lush Mediterranean garden of songs in Hebrew, Arabic, Ladino, and Spanish, highlighting intercultural exchange in the expressive cultures of North Africa and the Middle East. Dr. Thomas teaches music, interdisciplinary studies, and Sephardic studies at the City University of New York. He is a frequent guest speaker at cultural institutions, universities, and in multi-denominational ecumenical spaces worldwide. His formal talks center on historical and cultural topics related to Sephardi-Mizraḥi Jewry.

Advanced Ticket Price – $26.25
Door Ticket Price – $31.50 (half price for students)
Sponsored by the Neufeld-Levin Chair in Holocaust Studies and the Center for Jewish Studies at UC Santa Cruz.
Directions and Parking:
Kuumbwa Jazz Center located at 320 Cedar St # 2, Santa Cruz, CA 95060. Click here for directions and parking at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center: https://kuumbwajazz.org/about/directions-accommodations/
If you have disability-related needs, please contact the The Humanities Institute at thi@ucsc.edu or call 831-459-1274 by January 3, 2020.

CANCELLED: Stephanie Shih - The Nature of Lexical Categories: Consideration from Sound Symbolism
2020-01-10 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
There are many approaches to modeling lexically-conditioned phonology in current formal theories, including lexically-indexed constraints and cophonologies. Nearly all of these existing approaches assume categorical membership in the lexical classes that condition differential phonotactics or phonological behaviors: for example, a lexical item is either a noun or a verb, or of one gender class or another. In this talk, Stephanie Shih presents evidence from sound symbolic patterns that demonstrates the need for gradient membership in the lexical classes that condition phonological patterns. Case studies include cross-linguistic Pokémon names and English baseball player names and nicknames. From these cases, Shih proposes an implementation of Maximum Entropy Harmonic Grammar with lexically-indexed constraints and gradient symbolic activations over classes that allows us to model differences in phonological patterns over both discrete and gradient class membership. This theoretical implementation is a natural extension of the scales and gradient activations that have been shown to be necessary in recent phonological theory: sound symbolic evidence highlights the necessity for such increased explanatory power in our phonological models. Crucially, we find gradient lexically-conditioned patterns not only in sound symbolism—where they are often most obvious—but also in what is considered “core” language (e.g., morphosyntactic classes), and allowing gradient class structures in our phonological models may ultimately make for cleaner interfaces with other parts of grammar such as morphosyntax.
Presented by the UCSC Department of Linguistics

Savannah Shange - Abolition as Method: Anti-blackness, Anthropology and Ethics
2020-01-15 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This talk draws on Savannah Shange’s recently published book, Progressive Dystopia, in which she argues that San Francisco is a site of social apocalypse for Black communities. Given the momentum ‘abolition’ has as a political critique of prisons and policing, what does it offer us as scholars trying to apprehend the broad set of violences that compose the current moment? Put another way, what does abolition demand of us?
Savannah Shange is an urban anthropologist who works at the intersections of race, place, sexuality, and the state. She is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz with research interests in circulated and lived forms of blackness, ethnographic ethics, Afro-pessimism, and queer of color critique.

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

Urmi Engineer Willoughby - Cultivating Malaria in the Gulf South, 1718-1860
2020-01-15 16:00 - 17:30 | Humanities 1, Room 520, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Thom Gentle Environmental History Lecture
In this talk, Urmi Willoughby will present her research on agriculture, development, and the growth of endemic fevers in lower Louisiana. She will explore why fevers spread in the borderlands of the Gulf South and lower Mississippi Valley in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and show how economic and agricultural systems associated with white settlement and plantation slavery fostered the spread of malaria and yellow fever. Malaria grew endemic in new settlements and plantations as newcomers cleared forests, drained swamps, and grew rice and maize. Yellow fever caused seasonal epidemics in the built environment of New Orleans, as a result of ecological changes caused by sugar plantations and urban construction. Studying these processes in a global framework, this project considers the Gulf South region as a representation of global patterns of development and ecological change in fostering the growth of malaria and yellow fever in diverse geographical and historical contexts.
Urmi Engineer Willoughby is the current Molina Fellow in the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences at the Huntington Library and the author of Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (LSU Press, 2017). She completed her Ph.D. in History at UCSC.

This lecture is made possible by the generosity of Thom Gentle (Cowell ’69, History), a pioneer class alumnus who established The Thom Gentle Endowment for History to support student awards in environmental history as well as lectures of distinguished speakers with an environmental emphasis.

PhD+ Workshop – Stop #disserhating, Start Writing
2020-01-17 11:00 - 12:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Not sure how to begin your dissertation work? Having a hard time fitting writing in amidst other obligations? Stuck in the middle of your process? Huh, what process? 8th-year PhD candidate struggling to finish? In this interactive workshop, PhD students at all stages will have the opportunity to anonymously submit questions and concerns about the dissertation process, share experiences and strategies, and learn concrete practices (time management, a writing practice, accountability exercises, and self care) for success in completing the PhD. We will frame the dissertation as a professional and personal growth tool for becoming the kind of scholars, writers, thinkers, and people we want to be in the world. Whether you plan to pursue a career in academia or not, you will leave this workshop knowing what you need to do to make dissertating work for the unique circumstances of your life.

Amanda M. Smith is an assistant professor of Latin American literature. Her research focuses on cultural production from and about the Amazonian region of South America, taking up questions of spatiality, ecology, Indigeneity, and extractivism. Using many of the strategies that she will share in this workshop, she writes about 150 pages a year on these topics while also teaching, carrying out university service commitments, doing a lot of hiking in the redwoods, and chasing her twin 4-year-olds around.

About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Please join us for the fourth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by the Humanities Institute. We meet monthly, over lunch, to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grants/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.
Lunch will be served.
Please RSVP below:
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Hong-An Truong: Refugee Returns
2020-01-21 16:30 - 18:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Using photography, video, and sound installation, Hong-An Truong engages questions about history and how knowledge is produced through media forms. Often drawing on her lived experience as the daughter of Vietnamese refugees, her work explores historical and political themes, especially around war, violence, and race.
Truong’s talk will focus on several recent projects that explore how citizenship and notions of belonging are constructed in order to expand our conception of refugees and Asian American identity within a larger global history of anti-colonial struggle and cross-national organizing.
Recipient of a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, Hong-An Truong is an artist who explores immigrant, refugee, and decolonial narratives and subjectivities. She is an Associate Professor of Art and Director of Graduate Studies in the MFA Program at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
Presented by the Center for Racial Justice and co-sponsored by Art+Design Placemaking

Carlos Motta - We The Enemy
2020-01-22 12:00 - 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
In We The Enemy, Carlos Motta will present a series of recent and past works, including those exhibited at the Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery. Motta’s work documents the social conditions and political struggles of sexual, gender, and ethnic minority communities in order to challenge dominant and normative discourses through visibility and self-representation. As a historian of untold narratives and an archivist of repressed histories, Motta is committed to in-depth research on the struggles of post-colonial subjects and societies. His work manifests in a variety of mediums including video, installation, sculpture, drawing, web-based projects, performance, and symposia.
Carlos Motta (b. 1978) was born in Bogotá, Colombia and lives and works in New York City. Motta has been the subject of survey exhibitions including at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, Colombia, Matucana 100, Santiago, Chile, and Röda Sten Konsthall, Göteborg, Sweden. His work is in the permanent collections of the The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Barcelona; and Museo de Arte de Banco de la República, Bogotá, among others. His solo exhibitions include Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo (2019); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2017); Pérez Art Museum, Miami (2016); Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (2016); PinchukArtCentre, Kiev (2015); Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico City (2013); New Museum, New York (2012); MoMA PS1, New York (2009); and Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2009). Motta participated in 32 Bienal de São Paulo (2016); X Gwangju Biennale (2014); and X Lyon Biennale (2010). His films have been screened at the Rotterdam Film Festival (2016, 2010); Toronto International Film Festival (2013); and Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur (2016); among others. Motta has been awarded the Vilcek Foundation’s Prize for Creative Promise (2017); the PinchukArtCentre’s Future Generation Art Prize (2014); and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2008).

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

SOLD OUT: Chast and Marx - You Can Only Yell at Me for One Thing at a Time: Rules for Couples
2020-01-22 19:00 - 21:00 | DNA Comedy Lab, 155 S. River St., Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes the bestselling team of New Yorker illustrator Roz Chast and New Yorker contributor Patricia Marx for a presentation of their hilarious illustrated guide to love and relationships, You Can Only Yell at Me for One Thing at a Time: Rules for Couples. Everyone knows the tired, clichéd advice for a healthy relationship: Never go to bed angry. The couple that plays together, stays together. Distance makes the heart grow fonder. Sexual favors in exchange for cleaning up the cat vomit is a good and fair trade.
Okay, maybe not that last one.
The authors of Why Don’t You Write My Eulogy Now So I Can Correct It share their fresh, new romance tips that will make you laugh, make you feel seen, and remind you why your relationship is better than everyone else’s.
Ticket packages are $23 and include one copy of You Can Only Yell at Me for One Thing at a Time (publication: January 14th). A companion ticket (event only, no book included) is available for $7 when purchasing a ticket package. Purchase tickets at Bookshop Santa Cruz, or online.

These nuggets of advice include:

If you must breathe, don’t breathe so loudly.
It is easier to stay inside and wait for the snow to melt than to fight about who should shovel.
Queen-sized beds, king-sized blankets.

And many more. You Can Only Yell at Me for One Thing at a Time is the perfect gift for your significant other, your friendly anti-Valentine’s Day crusader, or anyone in your life who wants to laugh about the absurdity of love.

Patricia Marx has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1989. She is a former writer for “Saturday Night Live” and “Rugrats,” and is the author of several books, including Let’s Be Less Stupid, Him Her Him Again The End of Him, and Starting from Happy. Marx was the first woman elected to the Harvard Lampoon. She has taught at Princeton, New York University, and Stonybrook University. She is recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Roz Chast was born in Brooklyn and now lives in Connecticut. Her cartoons have appeared in countless magazines, and she is the author of many books, including The Party, After You Left. She attended Rhode Island School of Design, majoring in Painting because it seemed more artistic. However, soon after graduating, she reverted to type and began drawing cartoons once again.

Cosponsored by The Humanities Institute UC Santa Cruz.

Kenyon Branon: Locality and Anti-Locality - Two Case Studies
2020-01-23 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Much work in syntax suggests that there is a strong preference — given two or more options — for shorter dependencies over longer dependencies, often referred to as a locality condition. Cases where these conditions are apparently violated are therefore a general topic of interest. This talk presents two case studies of apparent violations of locality in A-movement which prove problematic for current approaches to the phenomenon. In both Luganda and Haya [Bantu, Uganda/Tanzania], as well as Tongan [Austronesian, Tonga], A-movement is able to cross no more than one other argument. This pattern proves to be a serious problem for the state-of-the art, which cannot be straightforwardly emended to capture this particular restriction. The analysis developed involves a mechanism of conflict resolution between two conflicting requirements: the aforementioned locality condition, and an “anti-locality” condition, which mitigates against dependencies which are in some sense too short. When these conditions come into conflict, the locality condition may be minimally violated, so that the anti-locality condition may be maximally satisfied.
In this talk, we will see that this analysis straightforwardly delivers the “skip no more than one” pattern observed in both case studies, and discuss how the analysis answers a number of “big picture” questions about the architecture of the grammar.
Kenyon Branon is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English Language and Literature at NUS. He graduated from MIT with a PhD in linguistics and works on syntax and its interface with PF, using data from understudied languages for theory construction.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: Beyond the End of the World Sawyer Seminar Series
2020-01-23 18:00 - 20:00 | Music Center Recital Hall – UCSC, 402 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
If you have trouble viewing above images, you may view this album directly on Flickr.

The Humanities Institute and the Center for Creative Ecologies present the inaugural event in the
Beyond the End of the World series.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an award-winning author on race and inequality as well as Black politics and social movements in the United States. Her books include From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation and How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. She has a forthcoming book titled Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (University of North Carolina Press). Taylor’s writing has been published in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, Paris Review, Guardian, The Nation, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, Jacobin, and beyond. In 2016, she was designated as one of the one hundred most influential African Americans in the United States by The Root. Taylor is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and an Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University.

Beyond the End of the World comprises a year-long research and exhibition project and public lecture series, directed by T. J. Demos of UCSC’s Center for Creative Ecologies. The project brings leading international thinkers and cultural practitioners to UC Santa Cruz to discuss what lies beyond dystopian catastrophism, and asks how we can cultivate radical futures of social justice and ecological flourishing. Keynote presentations include: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, award-winning author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation; Amitav Ghosh, award-winning fiction writer and author of The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable; Nick Estes (Lower Brule Sioux), co-founder of Red Nation and author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance; Melanie Yazzie (Bilagáana/Diné), Red Nation member and co-editor of Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society; and artist-activists Amin Husain and Nitasha Dhillon of MTL/Decolonize This Place, an action-oriented movement centering Indigenous struggle, Black liberation, free Palestine, global wage workers and de-gentrification. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Culture and administered by The Humanities Institute. For more information visit BEYOND.UCSC.EDU.

Directions and Parking:
The UCSC Music Recital Hall is located at 402 McHenry Rd, Santa Cruz, CA 95064
Parking lot attendants will be on site to sell permits and direct guests to available parking in the Performing Arts parking lot #126. The cost for parking is $5.
If you have disability-related needs, please contact us at thi@ucsc.edu or (831) 459-5655.

Public Fellowship Info Session
2020-01-27 12:00 - 13:00, 2020-01-28 12:00 - 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 402
Curious about becoming a THI Public Fellow? Not sure how to find the right partner organization? If you’re thinking about applying your expertise in the public sphere or exploring career opportunities beyond academia, then you may be interested in THI’s Public Fellowship program.
Public fellowships provide opportunities for doctoral students in the Humanities to contribute to research, programming, communications, and fundraising at non-profit organizations, cultural institutions, or companies and expand their skills in a non-academic setting while engaged in graduate study.
Please join us for an information session about the Public Fellows program on January 27th or January 28th, 2020 at noon in Humanities 1, Room 402. We will discuss Summer and Year-Long opportunities and describe some new partner organizations.
RSVP here:
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Kate McDonald - The Society of Wheels: Rethinking the History of Technology and Labor in Modern Japan
2020-01-27 16:00 - 17:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Humans power transport. This is obviously true for the early twentieth century. It’s easy to find images of rickshaws on city streets in Tokyo and other major cities in Asia. But it’s equally true for the twenty-first century. Look no further than the parcel delivery workers sprinting up and down apartment-building staircases.
Despite the continuity of human power, explicitly human-powered technologies such as the rickshaw symbolize Japan’s past while the promise of automated transport systems such as parcel distribution and delivery symbolize Japan’s future. Why? This talk will look at how human power came to symbolize the past and how, in contrast, actual transport laborers have struggled throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to claim a place in the present.

Kate McDonald is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan (University of California Press, 2017). Together with David R. Ambaras (NC State), she directs the Bodies and Structures: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History project. This talk comes from her newest book project, The Rickshaw and the Railroad: Human-Powered Transport in the Age of the Machine.

Robert Nichols - Theft is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory
2020-01-29 12:15 - 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
In his recent publication, Theft is Property! (Duke 2020), Robert Nichols reconstructs the concept of dispossession as a means of examining how shifting configurations of law, property, race, and rights have functioned as modes of governance, both historically and in the present. Through close analysis of arguments by Indigenous scholars and activists from the nineteenth century to the present, Nichols argues that dispossession has come to name a unique recursive process whereby systematic theft is the mechanism by which property relations are generated. In so doing, this work also brings long-standing debates in anarchist, Black radical, feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial thought into direct conversation with the frequently overlooked intellectual contributions of Indigenous peoples.
Robert Nichols is an Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities). His areas of research specialization include contemporary European philosophy and political theory (esp. Critical Theory, Marx and Marxism, Foucault); the history of political thought (esp. pertaining to imperialism and colonialism in the 19th century); and the contemporary politics of settler colonialism and indigeneity in the Anglo-American world. Before joining the University of Minnesota, Professor Nichols was Alexander von Humboldt Faculty Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. He has also held academic posts at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (France), the University of Alberta (Canada), University of Cambridge (UK), and Columbia University (USA). He is the recipient of grants and awards from the Fulbright, Humboldt, Killam, McKnight, and Trudeau Foundations, as well as from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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

Bronwyn Bjorkman: Realizing Syntax
2020-01-30 13:30 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
For more information, please see visit the Linguistics Department Website.
