The Humanities Institute

What's Your Story? An Evening with Stephanie Foo
2020-02-11 19:30 - 21:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | DNA Comedy Lab, 155 S. River St., Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Between Instagram, Facebook and TV, we’re presented with more media and more stories than ever before. But how many of them really stick with us at the end of the day? Former This American Life producer and Emmy-winning journalist Stephanie Foo (Stevenson ’08, modern literature) gives a talk about how to find important stories that tug on heartstrings, build empathy, and ultimately, make a real impact.

Stephanie Foo is a writer and radio producer. She spent several years as a producer for This American Life, where she produced dozens of radio stories and an Emmy-winning video short. Before that, she helped create Snap Judgment. Her work has also aired on shows like 99% Invisible and Reply All.
She is an advocate for diversity in media. She wrote a viral piece for Transom about increasing racial and economic diversity in workplaces, and created an audio hackathon to diversify the way people can access and share audio. She then led the development of Shortcut, a revolutionary app for sharing podcast audio, and was a Tow and Knight Fellow.
Stephanie is currently writing an investigative memoir on Complex PTSD.
Read more about Stephanie Foo in her alumni profile
Questions about the event? Contact the UC Santa Cruz Special Events Office at specialevents@ucsc.edu or (831) 459-5003.

“Free Men” Film Screening
2020-02-12 18:30 - 21:00 | The Nickelodeon Theatre, 210 Lincoln St, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Free Men (French: Les hommes libres) is a 2011 French film written and directed by Ismaël Ferroukhi, which recounts the largely untold story about the role that Algerian and other North African Muslims in Paris played in the French resistance and as rescuers of Jews during the German occupation (1940–1944). It features two historic figures: Si Kaddour Benghabrit, rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris, and Salim Halali, an Algerian Jewish singer. The film stars Tahar Rahim playing a fictional young Algerian and Michael Lonsdale as the rector.
Free and open to the public – RSVP appreciated. Seating is first come, first served.
Doors open at 6:30, film begins at 7:00pm

After the film there will be a Q & A with Chris Silver, Assistant Professor in Jewish History and Culture (McGill University) and Esther Lassman (Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania), moderated by Alma Heckman, Assistant Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz.

Chris Silver serves as Segal Family Assistant Professor in Jewish History and Culture in the Department of Jewish Studies at McGill University. He earned his PhD in History from UCLA. Recipient of awards from the Posen Foundation, the American Academy of Jewish Research, and the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, Silver’s scholarship on Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia has appeared in Hespéris-Tamuda, History Today, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia. He is currently completing a book manuscript on the subject of Jews, Muslims, and music in twentieth century North Africa.
Etty Lassman-Hileli is a sabra – born and raised in Israel. In 1978, she graduated from the Interior Decorating & Construction Drawing program at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. For the last three decades, Etty has been a research assistant to the visiting fellows at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. The ongoing work with hundreds of fellows from all around the world – has enabled her to broaden and deepen her knowledge in many fields in Jewish Studies. Etty uses her graphic design skills to enhance and transform abstract concepts originated in the research material into clear presentations. During her years at the University of Pennsylvania she has worked toward the completion of her degree in Art History. Photography is her hobby, and she is the in-house photographer for all the Katz Center activities.
During the academic year 2018-2019 whose theme was Jewish Life in Modern Islamic Contexts, a group of participating fellows encouraged Etty to present her own research about her father’s brother – the singer Salim Halali. Etty’s presentation will include her personal stories along with research she has conducted about her uncle and his unique contribution to world music.

Sponsored by the UCSC Neufeld-Levin Chair of Holocaust Studies
Directions and Parking:
The Nickelodeon Theatre is located at 210 Lincoln St, Santa Cruz, CA 95060. Click here for directions and parking at the Nickelodeon Theatre.
If you have disability-related needs, please contact the The Humanities Institute at thi@ucsc.edu or call 831-459-1274 by February 7, 2020. Information about the Nick’s accessibility equipment can be found here.

Linguistics Colloquium: Isabelle Charnavel
2020-02-13 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Please see the Linguistics Department website for more information.

NEW LOCATION "Shusenjo: The Main Battleground of the Comfort Women Issue" Film Screening
2020-02-13 17:00 - 20:00 | Resource Center for Non Violence
The “comfort women” issue is perhaps Japan’s most contentious present-day diplomatic quandary. Inside Japan, the issue is dividing the country across clear ideological lines. Supporters and detractors of “comfort women” are caught in a relentless battle over empirical evidence, the validity of oral testimony, the number of victims, the meaning of sexual slavery and the definition of coercive recruitment. Credibility, legitimacy and influence serve as the rallying cry for all those involved in the battle. In addition, this largely domestic battleground has been shifted to the international arena, commanding the participation of various state and non-state actors and institutions from all over the world.
This film delves deep into the most contentious debates and uncovers the hidden intentions of the supporters and detractors of comfort women. Most importantly it finds answers to some of the biggest questions for Japanese and Koreans: Were comfort women prostitutes or sex slaves? Were they coercively recruited? And, does Japan have a legal responsibility to apologize to the former comfort women?
Followed by a conversation with filmmaker Miki Dezaki, Noriko Aso (History) and Christine Hong (CRES)

Miki Dezaki is a graduate of the Graduate Program in Global Studies at Sophia University in Tokyo. He worked for the Japan Exchange Teaching Program for five years in Yamanashi and Okinawa before becoming a Buddhist monk in Thailand for one year. He is also known as “Medamasensei” on Youtube, where he has made comedy videos and videos on social issues in Japan. His most notable video is “Racism in Japan,” which led to numerous online attacks by Japanese neo-nationalists who attempted to deny the existence of racism and discrimination against Zainichi Koreans (Koreans with permanent residency in Japan) and Burakumin (historical outcasts still discriminated today). “Shusenjo” is his directorial debut.
Presented by: The UCSC Center for Racial Justice

Living Writers: Juan Martinez
2020-02-13 17:30 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States

CANCELLED: Elizabeth Povinelli - The Axioms of Catastrophe: Coming and Ancestral Tactics
2020-02-19 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This talk examines four axioms of existence that have emerged and expanded in recent years across a large segment of critical theory; the stakes of understanding the historical conditions of these axioms; and their power to provide a foundation for remolding political concepts in the wake of geontopower. From one perspective the emergence of these axioms can be correlated to the current catastrophe of climatic and environmental collapse and industrial toxicity. This talks ask what sorts of catastrophes are foregrounded or occluded depending on how one understands the order and sources of these axioms and if one understands them as a coming catastrophe (l’catastrophe à venir) or as an ancestral one (l’catastrophe ancestral/histoire)?
Elizabeth A. Povinelli is an anthropologist and filmmaker. She is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, New York; Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Academy for the Humanities; and one of the founding members of the Karrabing Film Collective. Povinelli’s writing has focused on developing a critical theory of late liberalism that would support an anthropology of the otherwise. This potential theory has unfolded primarily from within a sustained relationship with Indigenous colleagues in north Australia and across five books, numerous essays, and six films with the Karrabing Film Collective. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism was the 2017 recipient of the Lionel Trilling Book Award. Karrabing films were awarded the 2015 Visible Award and the 2015 Cinema Nova Award Best Short Fiction Film, Melbourne International Film Festival and have shown internationally including in the Berlinale, Sydney Biennale; MIFF, the Tate Modern, documenta-14, the Contour Biennale; MoMA-PS and numerous others.

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.

UPDATE: "Unrest" Film Screening
2020-02-19 19:00 - 21:00 | Del Mar Theatre
2/19/2020: Please note that due to unfortunate health issues, Jennifer Brea will no longer be in attendance at the event. The screening is still taking place and Professor Moodie will still be in attendance for the introduction.
Jennifer Brea’s Sundance award-winning documentary, Unrest, is a personal journey from patient to advocate to storyteller. Jennifer is twenty-eight years-old, working on her PhD at Harvard, and months away from marrying the love of her life when a mysterious fever leaves her bedridden. When doctors tell her it’s “all in her head,” she picks up her camera as an act of defiance and brings us into a hidden world of millions that medicine abandoned.
In this story of love and loss, newlyweds Jennifer and Omar search for answers as they face unexpected obstacles with great heart. Often confined by her illness to the private space of her bed, Jennifer connects with others around the globe. Like a modern-day Odysseus, she travels by Skype into a forgotten community, crafting intimate portraits of four other families suffering similarly. Jennifer Brea’s wonderfully honest and humane portrayal asks us to rethink the stigma around an illness that affects millions. Unrest is a vulnerable and eloquent personal documentary that is sure to hit closer to home than many could imagine.
Free and open to the public – RSVP appreciated. Seating is first come, first served.
Doors open at 6:30, film begins at 7:00pm

Jennifer Brea is an independent documentary filmmaker based in Los Angeles. She has an AB from Princeton University and was a PhD student at Harvard until sudden illness left her bedridden. In the aftermath, she rediscovered her first love, film. Her Sundance award-winning feature documentary, Unrest, has screened in over 30 countries and had its US national broadcast on PBS’s Independent Lens. She is also co-creator of Unrest VR, winner of the Sheffield Doc/Fest Alternate Realities Award. An activist for people with disabilities and chronic illness, she co-founded a global advocacy network, #MEAction and is a TED Talker.
Unrest, her film debut, was awarded a Special Jury Prize at the Paley Center for Media’s DocPitch competition and is supported by the Harnisch Foundation, Chicken & Egg Pictures, BRITDOC’s Good Pitch, the Tribeca Film Institute, the Fledgling Fund and the Sundance Institute. You can read more about her at jenbrea.com or @jenbrea on twitter
Megan Moodie, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California,Santa Cruz, is a cultural anthropologist, writer, performer, and film critic who works at the intersection of arts, humanities, and social sciences. Trained as a specialist in feminist political and legal anthropology, her early work explored the intersection of gender and indigeneity in South Asia. More recently, she has been investigating how anthropologists can use embodied and arts-based ethnographic methods, such as performance and film, to illuminate non-normative experiences of the body, such as chronic pain and illness, in the service of greater disability and medical justice. Megan regularly communicates with broad audiences in and beyond anthropology; her writing on topics such as disability, genetic illness, motherhood, film, art, and daily strategies for survival has appeared in MUTHA Magazine, Film Quarterly, SAPIENS, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others, and her 2018 essay “Birthright” (Chicago Quarterly Review (26)) was named a “Notable Essay of the Year” by Best American Essays 2019.

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

Directions and Parking:
The Del Mar Theater is located at 1124 Pacific Ave #4415, Santa Cruz, CA 95060. Click here for directions and parking at the Del Mar Theater.
If you have disability-related needs, please contact the The Humanities Institute at thi@ucsc.edu or call 831-459-1274 by February 14, 2020. Information about the Del Mar’s accessibility equipment can be found here.

Living Writers: Jennifer Tseng
2020-02-20 17:30 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Poet and fiction writer Jennifer Tseng was born in Indiana and raised in California by a first generation Chinese engineer and a third generation German American microbiologist. Her flash fiction collection, The Passion of Woo & Isolde (Rose Metal Press 2017), was a Firecracker Award finalist and winner of an Eric Hoffer Book Award; and her novel, Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness (Europa Editions 2015), was shortlisted for the PEN American Center’s Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the New England Book Award; it’s available in English, Italian, and Danish. She’s also the author of three award-winning books of poetry, The Man With My Face (AAWW 2005); the bilingual Red Flower, White Flower (Marick Press 2013) featuring Chinese translations by Mengying Han and Aaron Crippen; and Not so dear Jenny (Bateau Press 2017), poems made with her Chinese father’s English letters.
More information about Jennifer Tseng is available here

Mania Akbari: A Moon For My Father
2020-02-24 19:00 | Communications 150, Studio C
Mania Akbari collaborates with British sculptor Douglas White to coin a tender fusion of language, where a meeting of cinema and sculpture investigates the processes of physical and psychological destruction and renewal. Begun a matter of weeks after first meeting, the film charts a deepening artistic and personal relationship exploring the nature of skin, family, death, water, desire and, throughout, a powerful will to form. Akbari looks into the connection between her body and the political history of Iran, investigating the relationship between her own physical traumas and the collective political memory of her birthplace. As she undergoes surgeries on a body decimated by cancer, remembrance and reconstruction provide a framework for investigating how bodies are traumatized, censored and politicized, and yet ultimately remain a site of possibility. We are lucky to be the first US venue to host Mania Akbari and to present her new film.
“A Moon for my Father is a deeply intimate, personal and moving work from Mania Akbari (whose movies have often been meditations on beauty and body image), a form of digressive-poetic cinema, connecting images and ideas in a dream-associative logic. Calmly, almost miraculously, it avoids the tones of tension or trauma or ostentatiously courageous humor.” – The Guardian
Mania Akbari (b. Tehran, 1974) is an internationally acclaimed artist and filmmaker. Her provocative, revolutionary and radical films were recently the subject of retrospectives at the BFI, London (2013), the DFI, Denmark (2014), Oldenburg International Film Festival, Germany (2014), Cyprus Film Festival (2014) and Nottingham Contemporary UK (2018). Her films have screened at festivals around the world and have received numerous awards including German Independence Honorary Award, Oldenberg (2014), Best Film, Digital Section, Venice Film Festival (2004), Nantes Special Public Award Best Film (2007) and Best Director and Best film at Kerala Film Festival (2007), Best Film and Best Actress, Barcelona Film Festival (2007). Akbari was exiled from Iran and currently lives and works in London, a theme addressed in ‘Life May Be’ (2014), co-directed with Mark Cousins. This film was released at Karlovy Vary Film Festival and was nominated for Best Documentary at Edinburgh International Film Festival (2014) and Asia Pacific Film Festival (2014). Akbari’s latest film ‘A Moon For My Father’, made in collaboration with British artist Douglas White, premiered at CPH:DOX where it won the NEW:VISION Award 2019. The film also received a FIPRESCI International Critics Award at the Flying Broom Festival, Ankara. She is currently working on a new project ‘Libido’ with her son Amin Maher.
Co-sponsored by Porter College, Film + Digital Media, The Humanities Institute’s Body, (Anti)Narrative, and Corporeal Creative Practices Research Cluster, and The UCSC Center for the Middle East and North Africa
Screening is free and open to the public.

CANCELLED: Dee Hibbert-Jones - Run With It
2020-02-26 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Dee Hibbert-Jones’ colloquium talk has been cancelled. We will try to reschedule for Spring or Fall 2020.
Hibbert-Jones will discuss the challenges, politics and aesthetics in making her upcoming film Run With It, a feature documentary that is entirely animated. Made in collaboration with Nomi Talisman, the film tells the story of De’Jaun Correia, a young man on the Dean’s list at Morehouse college, who grew up mentored by his uncle Troy Davis, on death row.
Professor Dee Hibbert-Jones is an Academy Award nominated, Emmy award winning filmmaker and visual artist who examines critical social issues through her animated documentary and fine art installations. In 2016 she was awarded a United States Congressional Black Caucus Veterans Braintrust Award in recognition for their outstanding national commitment to civil rights and social justice; and a California Public Defenders Association Gideon Award by the California Public Defenders Association. Dee teaches art at UC Santa Cruz and is affiliate faculty in film, digital art new media and legal studies.

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.

Living Writers: Gretchen Primack
2020-02-27 17:30 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Gretchen Primack is a poet and educator living in New York’s Hudson Valley. She has taught and/or administrated with prison education programs (mostly college) since 2005. She’s the author of three poetry collections: Visiting Days (Willow Books), Kind (Post Traumatic Press), and Doris’ Red Spaces (Mayapple Press), and a chapbook, The Slow Creaking of Planets (Finishing Line 2007). She co-wrote The Lucky Ones: My Passionate Fight for Farm Animals with Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary co-founder Jenny Brown (Penguin Avery 2012). Her poetry publication credits include The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, FIELD, Poet Lore, The Massachusetts Review, The Antioch Review, New Orleans Review, Rhino, Tampa Review, and many others journals and anthologies.
More information about Gretchen Primack is available here

Amitav Ghosh: "Unmuting the Brutes: Human and Non-human After the Collapse of ‘Civilization’"
2020-02-27 19:00 | Music Center Recital Hall
CREDITLINE PHOTO: Ivo van der Bent. 22-01-2019 Amitav Ghosh in Amsterdam.
The Humanities Institute and the Center for Creative Ecologies present Beyond the End of the World Lecture Series
AMITAV GHOSH
Thursday, February 27, 2020 @ 7 PM
Music Recital Hall, UC Santa Cruz
Free & open to the public with registration
Book signing after the talk, hosted by Bookshop Santa Cruz

The idea of the ‘human’ dates back to the founding of modernity, now hurtling towards collapse. As this process intensifies it may bring about a fundamental reconsideration of modern ideas regarding which entities possess such attributes as agency, speech, and reason. If so what kinds of narratives and knowledge traditions can we turn to for guidance about what might lie ahead?
Amitav Ghosh is an award-winning writer, who was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He is the author of two books of non-fiction, including The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), a collection of essays, and ten novels. In 2018 he became the first English-language writer to receive India’s highest literary honor, the Jnanpith Award. His most recent publication is Gun Island, a novel.
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. 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
Presented in partnership with the Sidhartha Maitra Memorial Lecture. The Maitra lecture series, established in 2001, seeks to enrich the intellectual life of UC Santa Cruz and the Santa Cruz community.
Co-sponsored by the Center for South Asian Studies at UC Santa Cruz.
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 the The Humanities Institute at thi@ucsc.edu or call 831-459-5655.

Klaus Mühlhahn: China’s Rise in Historical Perspective
2020-02-28 16:00 - 18:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The East Asian Colloquium Presents:
Klaus Mühlhahn: China’s Rise in Historical Perspective
Many commentators claim that China’s ongoing global rise reflects a restoration of its earlier international prominence, while others highlight that China’s emergence reflects distinctive characteristics of the country’s current political leadership. In his new book, Making China Modern, Klaus Mühlhahn of the Free University of Berlin provides a panoramic survey of China’s rise and resilience through war and rebellion, disease and famine. At this event Professor Mühlhahn will focus on the lessons from history that provide insight into China’s evolving international position and how the United States and others should respond.
Co-sponsored by the Humanities Division and The Humanities Institute

Linguistics at Santa Cruz (LASC) 2020
2020-02-29 14:00 - 17:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Every year towards the end of the winter quarter, the Linguistics at Santa Cruz (LASC) conference showcases the research of second and third year graduate students. This conference coincides with a visit to campus of prospective graduate students, and it always features as an invited speaker, a PhD alumna or alumnus of the department. This year’s invited speaker is Aaron Kaplan (PhD, 2008), Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Utah.
More information available here.

Speculative Futures of Labor: New Feminist and Critical Race Approaches Symposium
2020-03-02 - 2020-03-03 | Dream Inn Santa Cruz, 175 W Cliff Dr, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This symposium features emergent approaches to labor in light of the surge of interest in technological socioeconomic transformations (including robotics, AI, and app-based on demand services).This symposium, held on March 2-3, is part of the UC Speculative Futures Collective (UCSD, UCR, UCI, UCSC) that over a period of two years will feature events which will bring together scholars and others in the field of Speculative Futures to envision more sustainable worlds and futures.
View the full program schedule by clicking here.
Participants include:
Curtis Marez (UCSD); Jennifer Rhee (VCU); Xiao Liu (McGill); Erin McElroy (NYU); Heather Berg (Wustl); Julietta Hua (SDSU); Kasturi Ray (SDSU)
With Responses from:
Felicity Schaeffer; Savannah Shange; Neel Ahuja; Nick Mitchell; and Carla Freccero

Jennifer Rhee is an associate professor of new media in the Department of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. She’s written about robotics and artificial intelligence in technology, visual and performance art, literature, and film in her book The Robotic Imaginary: The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). Her work can also be found in journals including Camera Obscura, Conigurations,ASAP/Journal, and Science Fiction Studies. Supported by an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, she’s currently working on her next book on counting technologies and race, from nineteenth-century statistics to contemporary big data.

Heather Berg is assistant professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Her first book, Porn Work, is forthcoming from UNC press (2021). Her writing on sex work and political economy appears in Signs, WSQ, Feminist Studies, and Porn Studies, among others.

Julietta Hua has a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies and is the author of Trafficking Women’s Rights (2011), which examines U.S. anti-trafficking laws and policies, has also published research on chimpanzee sanctuaries, and the “limits of rights” framework. Dr. Hua, in conjunction with Dr. Kasturi Ray, is researching political organizing around intimate labors. WGS courses taught include immigration, human rights, and law and politics.

Kasturi Ray works on issues of gendered labor, secularism, marxism, and colonialism. She has published on plantation labor, domestic labor, and service labor. She is currently at work on a book with Julietta Hua entitled Taxi Drivers in the Age of Uber.

Xiao Liu is the author of the book Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China (University of Minnesota Press, 2019). The book provides a hitherto unheard prehistory of China’s involvement in the global circulation of information technologies and discourses in the post-Mao 1980s, and reveals the historical and ideological entanglement between the global rise of futurist fantasies of a coming information society and the advent of postsocialist politics. Her essays on digital culture, socialist and postsocialist culture, and information technology have appeared in journals such as Grey Room, Social Identities, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. She is currently a McGill University Fellow at the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution of the World Economic Forum.

Erin McElroy is a postdoctoral researcher at New York University’s interdisciplinary AI Now Institute, researching the intersections of property, technology, dispossession, and race. Erin is also cofounder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, a data visualization, critical cartography, and multi-media collective documenting dispossession and resistance struggles upon gentrifying landscapes. Erin earned a doctoral degree in Feminist Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a focus on the politics of space, race, and technology in Romania and Silicon Valley.

Full program schedule coming soon.
Presented by the UC Speculative Futures Collective, co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute, the Center for Racial Justice, and the Peggy & Jack Baskin Foundation Presidential Chair in Feminist Studies.

Dávila Santiago and Robles Gutiérrez - Puerto Rico: Filming Resistance and Survival
2020-03-03 19:00 - 21:30 | DNA Comedy Lab, 155 S. River St., Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
For the last four years, Puerto Ricans have experienced challenges that will leave an indelible mark on their collective memory and history. In 2016, the U.S. government started to implement extreme austerity measures on the island and in 2017, the island experienced one of the most devastating hurricanes from the past 100 years. In 2019, weeks of massive street protests resulted in the successful ouster of former governor Ricardo Rosselló, the first governor to ever resign in Puerto Rico’s history. Over the course of this period, filmmaker Juan C. Dávila has been traveling back-and-forth to Puerto Rico to film these historic moments in Puerto Rican history. This event will showcase his most important work from this time.
As part of the program, we will screen a short film as well as a work-in-progress about his new upcoming long-form film project, which follows the resistance movement #SeAcabaronLasPromesas (The Promises Are Over), a movement that was born in 2016 in opposition to the new colonial measures imposed by the U.S. Congress over Puerto Rico. Dávila explores the organization of the movement as they occupy the streets, and engage in the necessary community work that is part of any social movement uprising. The films capture the voices of the young and unemployed, the elderly without pensions, the peasants without land, the communities without schools, and the survivors of over 500 years of colonialism.
Post-screening Q&A facilitated by Prof. B. Ruby Rich with film director Juan C. Dávila and activist Marisel Robles Gutierrez.
Event is free and open to the public with advance registration required.
Co-Sponsored by the Research Center for the Americas and The Humanities Institute, Colleges Nine and Ten, Environmental Studies Pepper-Giberson Endowed Chair, Film and Digital Media Department, Kresge College, Latin American and Latino Studies Department, Oakes College, Politics Department, Sociology Department, and The Institute for Social Transformation.

Juan C. Dávila Santiago is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, multi-media journalist, and PhD student of Latin American and Latinx Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Dávila Santiago has directed two feature documentary films: Compañeros de lucha (2012) and Vieques: una batalla inconclusa (2016). Dávila Santiago currently works as a correspondent for Democracy Now! and his work has also been featured in TeleSur, the Huffington Post, and The Washington Post. He holds a Bachelor in Arts of Communication from Universidad del Sagrado Corazón in Puerto Rico (2011) and a Master of Arts in Social Documentation from UC Santa Cruz (2015). Currently, he is the artist in residence of Agitarte, a cultural organization of working-class artists based in Puerto Rico, whose work focuses on supporting grassroots social movements, and agitating for liberation.

Marisel Robles Gutiérrez is an activist and organizer from the movement “Jornada se acabaron las promesas.” She was born and raised in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico. During her undergraduate studies at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez, she actively participatied in the student strike of 2010. Robles Gutiérrez began her radical political formation with the International Socialist Organization (OSI in Spanish), and became a central figure in developing “Jornada Se Acabaron Las Promesas,” which became the main force of opposition to a Fiscal Control Board instituted by the US Congress to push austerity measures in Puerto Rico. She currently works as a coordinator in the Mutual Aid Center “Olla Común” and supports the project of “Comedores Sociales de Puerto Rico.”

Joseph Blankholm - The Rituals of Secular Purification: Four Ways to Purify Religious Pollution
2020-03-04 12:15 - 13:30 | CA, United States
Being secular means not being religious, but it also means participating in a religion-like tradition. This paradox shapes the everyday lives of secular people, as well as institutions that depend on categories like secular, spiritual, religious, and superstitious. Relying on years of ethnographic research among very secular people, this lecture describes four ways of producing the secular by purifying it of religious pollution. This approach shows how secular people become less religious and how religion and spirituality can be transformed and enabled to circulate in spaces that would otherwise prohibit them.
Joseph Blankholm is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His teaching and interdisciplinary research focus primarily on American religion, secularism, and secular people. Most recently, he has published on Karl Marx’s forgotten secularism, Saba Mahmood’s contribution to the study of religion, and the contradictory ways in which American law understands nonbelievers. He is currently finishing a manuscript on secular people’s religious ambivalence.

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.

Radical Futurisms Film Series: Part I
2020-03-04 19:00 - 21:00 | Del Mar Theatre
How are artists envisioning radical futures? This free film series assembles a diverse group of visionaries whose films offer points of light in a dark world. Get Tickets Here >>
Featuring films by Black Audio Film Collective, Kahlil Joseph, Black Quantum Futurism, Danis Goulet, and Woodbine Collective.
For more information on the Beyond the World’s End exhibition and to see what films will be shown each day visit the MAH’s website.

Wednesday, March 4th | View the Films >>
Wednesday, March 11th | View the Films >>
Wednesday, March 18th | View the Films >>

This film series is part of, Beyond the End of the World, 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. 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.

CANCELLED - Living Writers: Konrad Steiner
2020-03-05 17:30 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Please note that this Thursday’s Living Writers reader, Konrad Steiner, wanted to respect the graduate student strike and not cross the picket lines. His reading/performance will be rescheduled for next year.
Konrad Steiner is a San Francisco based experimental filmmaker. He has been making 16mm films since 1981, and since 2004 has been working with musicians and poets on live cinema. From 2004-2006 he was a curator at SF Cinematheque and from 2007-2009 co-produced the Kino21 film series which specialized in documentary and performative cinema. From 1999 to 2012 he made a collaborative film with Leslie Scalapino, creating a feature length film cycle from her reading her book-length poem, “way,” which was the soundtrack. Between 2003 thru 2017 he worked with writers to produce a series of events in SF, Oakland, Santa Cruz, LA, NY, Chicago, Detroit, Seattle, and Providence RI around the practice of live film narration, or “neobenshi” or “the new talkies” or “cinema cabaret.” This is a practice exemplified by the Japanese tradition of the benshi, or live-narrator to silent films. He will discuss the many braids of this tradition moving off in different forms, and demonstrate a live method of taking over modern films with the sound turned off using only language.
More information about Konrad Steiner is available here

Beyond the World’s End Exhibition at Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History
2020-03-06 | Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History
In our current moment, apocalyptic narratives are all around us. They tempt us with their catastrophic fatalism and seemingly inescapable dystopias. Against that danger, it’s crucial to ask how we might imagine a more socially just and ecologically sustainable future?
But is the disaster ahead of us or behind us? Many people around the world–including Indigenous peoples and African-Americans surviving colonialism, genocides, and the transatlantic slave trade—consider themselves to be already living in a post-apocalyptic present.
Addressing this complexity of connecting past, present, and future, this exhibition features art and ideas from the end of the world. It invites us to reflect on the injustices that have brought us to our current moment and asks us to consider options for how to proceed.
From a proposal for a Cross-Border Environmental Commons and time machines to queer indigenous hauntings and Afrofuturist montages, the artworks in this exhibition draw out the intersectional roots of our crisis and seek to think through and visualize, struggle against and overcome the social and environmental injustices we face.
This exhibition and its associated programming addresses competing urgencies and future threats that are a result of past and present injustices. It brings into focus various proposals for imagining emancipatory futures informed by cultivating worlds of justice and equality.
The exhibition is part of Beyond the End of the World which 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. 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.

Considering Matthew Shepard
2020-03-06 19:30 | Cabrillo College Crocker Theater, 6500 Soquel Dr., Aptos, CA, 95003, United States
Matthew Shepard was a young gay man, beaten, tied to a fence, and left to die in the Wyoming countryside, 22 years ago. His death catalyzed a generation of poets, musicians and playwrights to change our attitudes about being different, and to embrace “the other.” This beautiful masterpiece has been called the first important major musical work of the 21st century. It is based on Matthew’s life, the hate crime of his death, and the national outpouring of compassion which followed. It is an emotionally powerful and uplifting work and speaks with a fresh and bold voice. It ultimately calls each of us to live with kindness, compassion, and love. Experiencing this fully staged major choral work is a journey that transcends tragedy to lead us toward beauty and forgiveness. It will move and inspire you.
Free tickets available for UCSC staff, faculty and students. Email thi@ucsc.edu for more information.

Caribbean Shores: Networks and Materalities, From Slavery to Freedom
2020-03-07 09:00 - 17:30 | Santa Cruz Veterans Hall Post Room, 846 Front St, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The past few decades have witnessed the rapid growth in interest by both historians and archaeologists, in the everyday lives of enslaved Africans in Caribbean colonial settings. At the same time, however, scholars in these closely related fields find few opportunities to interact and learn from one another. In light of this emerging demand for intellectual cross fertilization, we are hosting a one-day conference to bring scholars of Slavery and the African Diaspora from the UC Campus and beyond into dialogue with one another. A joint collaboration between UCSC’s Center for World History and Archaeological Research Center, Caribbean Shores will invite scholars in archaeology, history, and other related fields to explore the interrelated concepts of networks and materiality, resistance and marronage, and sovereignty after slavery, to understand the lived experience of enslaved peoples in the Caribbean and its broader littoral.
View the full program schedule by clicking here.
Organized by Greg O’Malley and J. Cameron Monroe, and co-sponsored by The UC Humanities Research Institute, the Center for World History, the Archaeological Research Center, and The Humanities Institute

Keynote Speakers
Vincent Brown: “The Path to Rebel’s Barricade: Tacky’s Revolt and the Martial Geography of Atlantic Slavery”
Vincent Brown is Charles Warren Professor of American History, Professor of African and African-American Studies, and Founding Director of the History Design Studio at Harvard University. His research, writing, teaching, and other creative endeavors are focused on the political dimensions of cultural practice in the African Diaspora, with a particular emphasis on the early modern Atlantic world. Brown is the author of numerous articles and reviews in scholarly journals, he is Principal Investigator and Curator for the animated thematic map Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761: A Cartographic Narrative (2013), and he was Producer and Director of Research for the award-wining television documentary Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness (2009), broadcast nationally on season 11 of the PBS series Independent Lens. His first book, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (2008), was co-winner of the 2009 Merle Curti Award and received the 2009 James A. Rawley Prize and the 2008-09 Louis Gottschalk Prize. His most recent book is Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, published by Belknap Press in January 2020.

Theresa Singleton: “The Current State of African Diaspora Archaeology”
Theresa Singleton’s areas of interest include historical archaeology, African Diasporas, Museums, North America, and the Caribbean. Throughout her career as an archaeologist, she has combined her research interests with developing museum collections, exhibitions, lectures, workshops, and publications geared toward general audiences. She is particularly interested in comparative studies of slave societies in the Americas. She began her study of slavery in coastal Georgia where African-Americans descended from the former slave population are known as the Gullah-Geechee. (Gullah refers to both the creole language they speak as well as to the people themselves). Since that time, she has conducted research, contributed to exhibitions, and published on various aspects of African-American life in United States. More recently, she has undertaken archeological research on slavery in Cuba, and in 2015, she published, Slavery Behind The Wall: An Archaeology of a Cuban Coffee Plantation (University Press of Florida, Gainesville). She is also working on another book publication focusing on comparing plantation life in the Caribbean and the United States.

Prof and a Pint: Death on the Nile - A 3D Visit to Egypt's Most Enduring Cemetery
2020-03-09 18:30 - 20:00 | Forager, San Jose, 420 S 1st St, San Jose, CA, 95172, United States
The ancient Egyptian necropolis of Saqqara was the burial place of kings, queens, priests, and elite officials for 2500 years (3000-332 BCE), and boasts some of the most spectacular architecture and art from the Pharoanic Period. In this talk, we’ll make a virtual visit to the site, using a 3D model that digitally ‘reconstructs’ the original appearance of the ancient monuments, and explore how royal and elite Egyptians created a special landscape to guarantee their eternal life and power.

Elaine Sullivan (M.A. and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University) is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Sullivan is an Egyptologist and a Digital Humanist whose work focuses on applying new technologies to ancient cultural materials. Her archaeological work in Egypt includes five seasons of excavation with Johns Hopkins University at the temple of the goddess Mut (Luxor), as well as four seasons in the field with a joint UCLA-Rijksuniversiteit Groningen project in the Egyptian Fayum, at the Greco-Roman town of Karanis.
Her upcoming born-digital publication, Constructing the Sacred (Stanford University Press), utilizes a geo-temporal 3D model of the necropolis of Saqqara (near modern Cairo) to investigate questions of ritual landscape at the site. In 2007-2008, she served as project coordinator for the Digital Karnak Project, creating a multi-phased 3D virtual reality model of the famous ancient Egyptian temple complex of Karnak. Sullivan has published extensively on the use of digital technologies for research and scholarship, including recent articles in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, and the Bulletin for the Institute of Classical Studies.
In October 2020, Professor Sullivan will lead a 12 day small-group expedition to some of her favorite research sites in Egypt. For more information, visit the UC Santa Cruz Inspired Expeditions page.
Questions? Contact Kara Snider at klea@ucsc.edu

The Deep Read Santa Cruz Salon
2020-03-10 17:00 - 19:30 | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Focusing on Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments the Santa Cruz Salon will be an opportunity to discuss the book with UCSC professors and your fellow community members.
Speakers

David Draper, Statistics, Director of the College Scholars Program
Marcia Ochoa, Feminist Studies
Andrew S. Mathews, Anthropology
Moderator: Laura Martin, Porter College

Details
5:00 pm – 7:30 pm Cowell Ranch Hay Barn94 Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA 95064Parking is available in lot 116, where hourly parking is available for purchase. Parking is free after 5pm.

RSVP
The Deep Read

This Salon is part of the broader Deep Read program by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz. Join other curious minds to think deeply about literature, art, and the most pressing issues of our day.
This event is free and open to the public. UCSC Students, Faculty, staff, and members of the Santa Cruz community are all welcome.

CANCELLED Michael Allan - World Pictures/Global Visions
2020-03-11 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Alongside discussions of worldliness, globalization, and planetarity, the talk will focus on a global network of camera operators working on behalf of the Lumière Brothers film company from 1896-1903. This microhistory of the transnational origins of early cinema will lead to questions about what it means to apprehend the world through the eyes of a camera.
Michael Allan is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon, where he is also program faculty in Cinema Studies, Arabic, and Middle East Studies. He is the author of In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton, 2016) and serves as editor of Comparative Literature. Michael holds his Ph.D. from the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked under the direction of Judith Butler and Karl Britto. Before joining the faculty at the University of Oregon, he was a member of the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University (2008-9).
His research focuses on debates in world literature, postcolonial studies, literary theory, as well as film and visual culture, primarily in Africa and the Middle East. In both his research and teaching, he bridges textual analysis with social theory, and draws from methods in anthropology, religion, queer theory and area studies. He is the author of In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton 2016, Co-Winner of the MLA Prize for a First Book) and of articles in venues such as PMLA, Modernism/Modernity, Comparative Literature Studies, Early Popular Visual Culture, The International Journal of Middle East Studies, and the Journal of Arabic Literature. He is also a guest editor of a special issue of Comparative Literature (“Reading Secularism: Religion, Literature, Aesthetics”), and with Elisabetta Benigni, an issue of Philological Encounters (“Lingua Franca: Toward a Philology of the Sea”). He is at work on a second book, Picturing the World: The Global Routes of Early Cinema, 1896-1903, which traces the transnational history of camera operators working for the Lumière Brothers film company.

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.

CANCELLED: Kresge Reads The Testaments
2020-03-11 16:00 - 19:00 | Kresge Provost House, Programs Annex, 510 Porter-Kresge Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, United States
Due to the new campus policy regarding events and the coronavirus, this event is cancelled.
Get in the Deep Read spirit with a community of readers. Every Wednesday from 4:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m. (through April 1), students, staff, and faculty are welcome to join Kresge Provost Ben Leeds Carson at the Kresge Provost House to read aloud and discuss The Testaments.
To find the location, follow Google Maps to “Kresge Provost House,” and park in lot 143. The house is through a marked door in a stucco wall across the street from the lot.
Open to students, faculty and staff.

POSTPONED: Jason Martel - Stories to Not Begin By: A Spanish Teacher Candidate’s Identity Deconstruction
2020-03-11 17:30 - 19:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This colloquium will be rescheduled at a later date.
The DEPARTMENT OF LANGUAGES AND APPLIED LINGUISTICS presents:
Jason Martel (Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey) – “Stories to Not Begin By: A Spanish Teacher Candidate’s Identity Deconstruction”
Within the robust research literature on teacher identity, there is a growing interest in “stories to leave by”––that is, reasons for which language teachers experience weakenings in their role identities and ultimately exit the profession (Schaefer, Downey, & Clandinin, 2014). As it turns out, the majority of these studies involve in- service language teachers, meaning that we do not yet have a sufficient understanding as to why pre-service teachers may experience similar weakenings in their role identities and thus choose to not enter the profession. Using a positioning theory lens (Davies & Harré, 1999; Kayi-Adar, 2018), the present study examined the identity construction of a Spanish teacher candidate who began her program strongly identifying with Spanish teaching and left it not seeing herself entering the profession, citing several uncomfortable experiences. The study’s findings bring into focus important considerations for designers of language teacher preparation programs, such as incorporating language development courses, helping candidates cultivate identities as innovative change makers, and structuring curricula in ways that serve candidates’ needs in a timely fashion.

Radical Futurisms Film Series: Part II
2020-03-11 19:00 - 21:00 | Del Mar Theatre
How are artists envisioning radical futures? This free film series assembles a diverse group of visionaries whose films offer points of light in a dark world. Get Tickets Here >>
Featuring films by Karrabing Film Collective, Sky Hopinka, Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), Antonio Paucar, and Nanobah Becker.
For more information on the Beyond the World’s End exhibition and to see what films will be shown each day visit the MAH’s website.

Wednesday, March 4th | View the Films >>
Wednesday, March 11th | View the Films >>
Wednesday, March 18th | View the Films >>

This film series is part of, Beyond the End of the World, 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. 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.

CANCELLED: Writing for Living: A Conference in Honor of Helene Moglen (1936-2018)
2020-03-13 - 2020-03-14 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
With deep sadness, we have to announce that this weekend’s conference in honor of Helene Moglen, Writing for Life, March 13-14, with the first memorial Helene Moglen Lecture in Feminism and the Humanities and many other wonderful talks and events, plus some amazing food, is canceled because of the evil Covid 19 virus. Following CDC advice, UCSC has mandated that all such events must be canceled. We will try to reschedule at a later date. After all, everyone has written their papers, including Brenda Shaughnessy’s new poetry written especially for Helene. Please spread the word about the cancellation to everyone you know who might have been considering coming.

Please save the date for a conference in honor of Professor Helene Moglen and the first Helene Moglen Lecture in Feminism and the Humanities. Colleagues and former students will speak about themes close to Helene’s heart. The written word, with its poetics and practices of production, social engagements, and sites of conflict will serve as the focus for this two-day event.
View the full program schedule here.
Keynote speakers:
Myra Jehlen , “Unreadable Writing”
Myra Jehlen, Board of Governors Emerita Professor of English at Rutgers, will deliver the first Helene Moglen Lecture in Feminism and the Humanities. The author of American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, and the Continent (1989), Readings at the Edge of Literature (2002), and Five Fictions in Search of Truth (2009), Jehlen is currently completing a new book of essays on literary form, and she will craft her keynote lecture from a paper for that book titled “The Great American Novel, by Gertrude Stein.”

Leslie Bow, “Writing In Absence”
Leslie Bow, Professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison and Helene’s former graduate student (PhD 1993), will speak on race fetishism and psychoanalysis. Her books include Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, and Asian American Literature (Princeton UP, 2001), ‘Partly Colored’: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South (New York UP, 2010), and she will draw her talk from current work on “Racist Love: Asian Americans and the Fantasy of Race.”

Susan Derwin, “Writing with Veterans”
Susan Derwin, Director, Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and Professor, German, Slavic, and Semitic Studies at UC Santa Barbara will speak about the essence of Helene’s relationship to writing as a practice that makes living possible. Derwin is founding director of the University of California Veterans Summer Writing Workshop and of Foundations in the Humanities, a correspondence program for incarcerated individuals operating in multiple California prisons. She is the author of The Ambivalence of Form: Lukács, Freud, and the Novel (1992), Rage Is the Subtext: Readings in Holocaust Literature and Film (2012), and essays on trauma, psychoanalytic theory and literature, moral injury, and narrative healing.
Brenda Shaughnessy, Poet
Brenda Shaughnessy will read from her poetry at the opening and closing of the conference. An Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University, Shaughnessy was a double major in Literature and Women’s Studies and Helene Moglen’s undergraduate student in the early 1990s. A finalist for the prestigious international Griffin Poetry Prize and recipient of a Guggenheim award, Shaughnessy has published poems in major literary magazines and several books, including Human Dark with Sugar, Interior with Sudden Joy, and Our Andromeda. Her most recent book of poetry is titled The Octopus Museum.
Sponsored by the Siegfried B. and Elisabeth M. Puknat Literary Studies Endowment, the Literature Department, the Humanities Division, and the Office of the Chancellor.

CANCELLED: PhD+ Workshop – Equity-Minded Humanities Teaching
2020-03-13 11:00 - 12:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
In this interactive PhD+ session, we will explore what current research in teaching and learning can bring to the Humanities, and what Humanities values, contexts, and ways of thinking can bring to our conceptions of teaching and learning. First, we’ll define what equity means to us, both within our specific disciplines and within Humanities teaching and learning more generally. Focusing in particular on structure (the “how” of our teaching), we will then explore several key “intervention” areas known in research on teaching and learning to promote more equitable learning: uncovering tacit knowledge, addressing power and positionality in collaborative group work, and surfacing the values that are communicated by our teaching and assessment methods. The goal will be to share, discuss, and develop equity-minded practices and structures specifically designed for educators and learners in the Humanities.
Kendra Dority has been an engaged member of the teaching and learning community at UC Santa Cruz since 2009, serving as a Teaching Fellow and Teaching Assistant in the Literature Department and as a Lecturer at Porter College before joining the Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning (CITL) in 2017. With CITL, she develops programs that build communities of practice, support equity-minded teaching, and promote active learning, and she leads up the Center’s professional development opportunities for graduate students. Both within and outside of the university, she champions public humanities and arts education. As a school museum guide at SFMOMA, she encourages hands-on, inquiry-focused learning for Bay Area students in grades 3–8. She received her Ph.D. in Literature from UCSC, with research on literacy, reading practices, language politics, and ethics in ancient Greek and contemporary U.S. Latinx literatures.

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.
Canceled RSVP:
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Postponed: Online Humanities Funding Workshop - Pivot
2020-03-17 14:00 - 15:00 | Zoom, CA, United States
The Research Development Office is holding an online workshop for Humanities faculty and graduate students to learn how to use Pivot to find funding opportunities. Pivot is a grant search engine that exists to connect researchers to private and federal funding.
In this session, you will learn how to:
1. Effectively tailor funding opportunity searches
2. Receive new opportunity alerts in your email inbox
3. Use your Pivot profile to identify collaborators
4. Track specific funding opportunities
Please sign-up for Pivot at pivot.proquest.com before you arrive using this 3 minute video tutorial and connect on your laptop. Read the Session Agenda and contact the Research Development Office at resdev@ucsc.edu with any questions.

This event has been postponed.

CANCELLED: The Deep Read: Kresge Reads The Testaments
2020-03-18 16:00 - 19:00, 2020-03-25 16:00 - 19:00, 2020-04-01 16:00 - 19:00 | Kresge Provost House, Programs Annex, 510 Porter-Kresge Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, United States
Get in the Deep Read spirit with a community of readers. Every Wednesday from 4:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m. (through April 1), students, staff, and faculty are welcome to join Kresge Provost Ben Leeds Carson at the Kresge Provost House to read aloud and discuss The Testaments.
To find the location, follow Google Maps to “Kresge Provost House,” and park in lot 143. The house is through a marked door in a stucco wall across the street from the lot.
Open to students, faculty and staff.

Radical Futurisms Film Series: Part III
2020-03-18 19:00 - 21:00 | Del Mar Theatre
How are artists envisioning radical futures? This free film series assembles a diverse
group of visionaries whose films offer points of light in a dark world. Get Tickets Here >>
Featuring films by Isabelle Carbonel, Cauleen Smith, The Otolith Group,
Allora and Calzadilla, John Jota Leaños, Thirza Jean Cuthand, and Woodbine.
For more information on the Beyond the World’s End exhibition and to see what films will be shown each day visit the MAH’s website.

Wednesday, March 4th | View the Films >>
Wednesday, March 11th | View the Films >>
Wednesday, March 18th | View the Films >>

This film series is part of, Beyond the End of the World, 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. 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.

CANCELLED: The Future of Jewish Food
2020-03-19 18:30 - 20:00 | Contemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA, 94103, United States
The leadership of this event has decided that it is in the community’s best interest to cancel this event. We will do our best to reschedule this event for a future date. Thank you for understanding.

The UC Santa Cruz Humanities Institute presents:
The Future of Jewish Food at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco
What might the future of Jewish food look like in the age of lab grown kebab, cricket-flour babka and algae bagels? How will the rules of kashrut apply to foods that the rabbis never imagined? Professor Nathaniel Deutsch, Faculty Director of The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz moderates a conversation between professor Rachel B. Gross, the John and Marcia Goldman Professor of American Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University and Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft author of Meat Planet: Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food, exploring how we might approach our new food technologies. A selection of kosher food bites are available before the program and included in the ticket price. This is the annual The Helen Diller Distinguished Lecture in Jewish Studies and the event is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the UC Santa Cruz Center for Jewish Studies Annual Diller Lecture.

Nathaniel Deutsch is professor of history and the Director of The Humanities Institute and the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he holds the Baumgarten Chair in Jewish Studies. Deutsch has written award winning books on Gnosticism, Jewish mysticism, African American Islam and eugenics, and a Hasidic holy woman known as the Maiden of Ludmir. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship for The Jewish Dark Continent: Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement. His forthcoming book (with Michael Casper), A Fortress in Brooklyn: Hasidic Williamsburg from White Flight to Gentrification, will be published by Yale University Press.

Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft is a writer and historian, and currently Visiting Assistant Professor of History and Social Studies at Wesleyan University. His books include Thinking in Public: Strauss, Levinas, Arendt, and the recently published Meat Planet: Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food. Trained as an intellectual historian of modern Europe, Wurgaft has also written about food for magazines and newspapers since the early 2000s, and he is keenly interested in the ways food raises important philosophical, anthropological, and political questions.

Rachel B. Gross is Assistant Professor and John and Marcia Goldman Chair in American Jewish Studies in the Department of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University. She is a scholar of religious studies whose work focuses on the lives, spaces, and objects of twentieth-century and contemporary American Jews. Her book, Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice is forthcoming from New York University Press in January 2021.

If you have disability-related needs, please contact the The Humanities Institute at thi@ucsc.edu or call 831-459-1274 by March 14, 2020.

POSTPONED: The Dickens Project: Day of Writing
2020-03-20 08:00 - 14:00 | UC Santa Cruz
Due to the coronavirus outbreak, this event has been postponed to a TBD later date.
This program brings high school juniors and seniors to UCSC for an essay writing competition at UCSC. The grand prize winner will receive a scholarship worth 5 UC credits to study nineteenth-century literature at the Dickens Universe summer conference.

CANCELLED - Fly Higher: Charlie Parker @ 100 – Co-Musical Directors - Rudresh Mahanthappa & Terri Lyne Carrington
2020-03-30 19:00 - 21:00 | Kuumbwa Jazz Center
March 12, 2020
Recognizing the mandate from the Governor of California, Kuumbwa Jazz is cancelling/postponing all concerts through at least March 30th. Ticketholders will be contacted directly, on or by Monday, March 16th, regarding ticket refunds and other ticketing options. We will be working on rescheduling as many concert dates as possible and will provide updates as they become available. We appreciate your understanding and we will continue to follow the direction and guidance provided by official agencies, as the wellbeing of our patrons and community remains our top priority.
Kuumbwa Jazz presents acclaimed co-musical directors Rudresh Mahanthappa (alto saxophone) and Terri Lyne Carrington (drums) celebrating one of the most innovative and influential artists in modern musical history and examine his impact in pop, hip-hop, rap, rock, and jazz. Joined by a superb lineup including Charenée Wade (vocals), Adam O’Farrill (trumpet), Kris Davis (piano), Larry Grenadier (bass) and Kassa Overall (DJ), Mahanthappa and Carrington will honor Charlie Parker’s centennial year by showcasing “Bird’s” uncompromising musical joy, humor, and beauty by mining his deep repertoire and showcasing new, modern compositions. “In a time where the words ‘innovation’ and ‘genius’ are overused, we are excited to celebrate a man who truly embodied both,” says Mahanthappa, “and the best way one shows admiration is not to age their work but to show their influence and how their work resonates in a modern age.” Rather than imitating the original, Fly Higher strives to forward the artform by developing new perspectives on tradition. That is the true substance of contemporary expression and, as Mahanthappa says, “we firmly believe that Bird would have wanted his legacy to resonate in this fashion.” After all, the only way to address the present is to place one foot in the past and one foot in the future.

(5% City of Santa Cruz Admission Tax included, service charge not included)
Sponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz
“Bird Lives” painting by Vel Verrept based on a photograph by Herman Leonard, © Herman Leonard Photography, LLC

CANCELLED: California Humanities Listening Session - Santa Cruz
2020-04-01 13:30 - 15:30 | Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History
California Humanities wants to hear from you.
We are embarking on a listening tour throughout California over the next few months to find out who is producing humanities content and programming in our regions and across California.
Our goal is to sit down and talk with organizations and individuals focused on telling California stories through the humanities, and consider how we might all work together to learn from each other and amplify our voices.
At the listening session, you will:

Share your knowledge about humanities and cultural programming in and around Santa Cruz
Provide feedback and ideas on improving the collaboration of humanities and cultural programs locally and across the state
Limited seating; registration required.

Please note that the listening sessions are not workshops to learn more about our grant programs. Grants Workshops are scheduled throughout the year and you can find more information on our grants and workshops on our webpage.
To learn more, visit calhum.org. With questions, write to Outreach & Advocacy Manager John Nguyen-Yap at jnguyenyap@calhum.org

Postponed - We Are Not Aliens: Arthur Jafa, Martine Syms, and Afro-Futurism 2.0 Exhibition at the Sesnon Gallery
2020-04-02 17:00 - 19:00 | Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery
We Are Not Aliens: Arthur Jafa, Martine Syms, and Afro-Futurism 2.0 assembles select artistic projects that investigate emancipatory futures of justice opposed to historical and contemporary racism, socioeconomic inequality, and state violence. It centers around Arthur Jafa’s startling and moving video “Love is the Message, the Message is Death,” which offers a short account of anti-black police brutality as well as speculative visions of African-American emancipation, collective resistance, and poetic love. The piece includes a short passage of artist Martine Syms delivering her “Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto” in which she states “We are not aliens”—critically distancing herself from earlier formulations of Afro-futurism and making a powerful case for its contemporary reinvention. The show will reproduce her text as an artistic wall painting and also include an hour-long KCET video that explores the inspirational ideas behind the Manifesto, which lays out visions of African-American creativity dedicated to the radical imagination of a coming world of liberation.
The exhibition forms part of Beyond the End of the World, which 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. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Culture, and administered by UCSC’s Humanities Institute. For more information visit BEYOND.UCSC.EDU

CANCELLED - 16th Annual Graduate Research Symposium
2020-04-03 13:00 - 15:30 | McHenry Library, UCSC
The UC Santa Cruz Graduate Research Symposium offers graduate students from every division the opportunity to discuss their research with colleagues on campus and with the public.
McHenry Library
Information Commons South and Adjoining Classrooms
April 3, 2020
1:15 p.m. Kickoff
1:30–3:30 p.m. Judging
3:30–5:30 p.m. Award Reception, south terrace and lawn
For more information visit: graddiv.ucsc.edu/events/symposium

CANCELLED - Linguistics Colloquia: Kathryn Davidson
2020-04-03 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 2, Room 259
Kathryn Davidson (Harvard) – Title TBD
Kathryn Davidson is an assistant professor in Linguistics at Harvard University where her research investigates the unique capacity that we have to understand an infinite number of sentences that we’ve never encountered before (semantics), how we incorporate contextual information into these meanings (pragmatics), and how we ever learn to do this (development). In her lab they make balanced use of theory for hypothesis creation with psycholinguistic experimental methods for gathering and analyzing behavioral data based on a wide variety of spoken and signed languages. Davidson’s academic background is in math and theoretical linguistics, and her sign language background began while learning ASL as a student at UCSD and postdoc at UConn.
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

CANCELLED - Alumni Weekend 2020
2020-04-04 - 2020-04-05 | CA, United States
Save the date for UCSC’s Alumni Weekend! The 2020 event is on the way, and this year’s gathering will be held Saturday, April 4 and Sunday, April 5, 2020. Alumni Weekend is a signature campus event at which we honor our ever-growing network of 115,000+ fellow Banana Slugs by inviting them to come back to campus to reconnect and engage.

CANCELLED - Seeds of Something Different: An Oral History of the University of California, Santa Cruz
2020-04-04 12:00 - 14:00 | Cultural Center at Merrill, Merrill Cultural Center, UC Santa Cruz, Merrill College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Celebrate the publication of a uniquely compelling book and the shared history it brings to life. Illustrated with rarely-seen archival images, Seeds of Something Different—debuting this weekend after years in the making—chronicles UC Santa Cruz history in the voices of more than two hundred students, community members, staff, faculty, and campus leaders who have contributed their oral histories to the Library’s Regional History Project since 1963. Distinguished Professor of Feminist Studies Bettina Aptheker will facilitate this national launch event, with insights from the editors, a reading and Q&A, and a slideshow. Schmooze with fellow alumni and purchase your signed copy of this collector’s item. Light refreshments will be served.
Bettina Aptheker is a distinguished Professor in the Humanities Department at UC Santa Cruz and holds a Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness. Aptheker’s broad areas of focus are in Feminist Studies including critical race, queer theory, sexual violence, reproductive freedom, African American feminist history, Jewish women’s culture, African American and women’s history late 19th century through 20th century. Her current research is called “Queering the History of the American Left: 1940s-1980s” Based on extensive archival research, especially in the files of the Communist Party, and interviews. Her most recent books are, Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech and Became A Feminist Rebel (2006. Other book(s): The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis (1976; second edition, 1999), Tapestries of Life: Women’s Work, Women’s Consciousness and the Meaning of Daily Life (1989).

Postponed - The Deep Read: Margaret Atwood
2020-04-05 17:00 | Quarry Amphitheater
3/16/2020: If you have been following the news, you’re aware that many gatherings across the country have been canceled in an effort to slow the spread of COVID-19 (coronavirus).
Following guidance from local health experts, UC Santa Cruz will postpone the Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture featuring Margaret Atwood, originally scheduled for April 5. We hope to share a new date for this event soon.
Refunds on ticket purchases will be processed soon, and you will receive a notification confirming the refund directly from the ticketing system.
One way to stay connected virtually is to participate in The Humanities Institute’s new program, The Deep Read, which invites curious minds to think deeply and engage virtually about literature and art. Our first Deep Read is Atwood’s The Testaments. You can sign up to receive weeks of digital programming and prepare for Margaret Atwood’s future visit to UC Santa Cruz.
Our priority is to ensure the health and safety of our alumni, community, guest speakers, students, and staff. We appreciate your patience as UCSC strives to sustain its mission of teaching, research, public service, and community engagement during these unprecedented times.
Below were the April event details. This will be updated once there is more info on the new date.
Join us as we welcome writer Margaret Atwood to the UC Santa Cruz campus to discuss her award winning books, and the ways in which her fiction reflects our cultural and political realities. Atwood will be in conversation with author Kate Schatz (Stevenson ‘01, Creative Writing), the New York Times-bestselling author of Rad American Women A-Z.
Tickets
Admission is $30.
Where
Quarry Amphitheater, UC Santa Cruz
When
Sunday April 5 at 5pm
The Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture & Alumni Weekend Keynote
This event is part of The Deep Read, a new program by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz that invites curious minds to think deeply about literature, art, and the most pressing issues of our day. We’ll read books from a wide range of genres, exploring their implications on our politics, inner lives, and communities.
Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her most recent, record-breaking novel, The Testaments—sequel to her 1985 classic The Handmaid’s Tale—won the 2019 Booker Prize. Her other work includes the Giller and Booker Prize-shortlisted Oryx and Crake, as well as Alias Grace, The Robber Bride, Cat’s Eye, and Booker winner The Blind Assassin.

CANCELLED - Numbered Lives: Quantum Mediations of Life in Early Anglo-America
2020-04-08 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Jacqueline Wernimont is an antiracist, feminist scholar working toward greater justice in digital cultures. She writes about long histories of media and technology—particularly those that count and commemorate—and entanglements with archives and historiographic ways of knowing. Her book, Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media, is out with MIT Press. She is a network weaver across humanities, arts, and sciences. This work includes codirecting HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory) and serving as the Inaugural Chair of Digital Humanities and Social Engagement at Dartmouth College.

Additional Events: Jacqueline Wernimont will be at UC Santa Cruz from April 8th-10th, 2020 as THI’s Scholar-in-Residence. On April 8th, she will present “Quantified Education: Unpacking What We’re Tracking” at CITL’s Annual Convocation. On April 10th, she will lead a workshop on “Feminist in the Academy” for THI’s PhD+ series.

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.

CANCELLED - Jacque Wernimont "Quantified Education: Unpacking What We're Tracking"
2020-04-08 17:00 - 19:00 | University Center, Bhojwani Room, CA, United States
The same hopes that have landed FitBits on millions of wrists, Rings on thousands of doors, and Echoes in so many homes have brought us the latest in educational technologies. These hopes include better support of ourselves, our goals, and our dreams for success, health, and safety. As universities and colleges increasingly buy into smart systems for grading, tracking attendance, monitoring student and employee wellness, and more, we also need to reckon with the costs – human, fiscal, and environmental – of these innovations in education. We‘ve got the Quantified Self, the Quantified Home, even the Smart/Quantified City — what does it mean that we now have Quantified Education?

Jacqueline Wernimont is an antiracist, feminist scholar working toward greater justice in digital cultures. She writes about long histories of media and technology—particularly those that count and commemorate—and entanglements with archives and historiographic ways of knowing. Her book, Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media, is out with MIT Press. She is a network weaver across humanities, arts, and sciences. This work includes codirecting HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory) and serving as the Inaugural Chair of Digital Humanities and Social Engagement at Dartmouth College.

Presented by: The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz and the Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning.

Additional Events: Jacqueline Wernimont will be at UC Santa Cruz from April 8th-10th, 2020 as THI’s Scholar-in-Residence. On April 8th, she will discuss “Numbered Lives: Quantum Mediations of Life in Early Anglo-America” at the Cultural Studies Colloquium. On April 10th, she will lead a workshop on “Feminist in the Academy” for THI’s PhD+ series.

CANCELLED: PhD+ Workshop - Feminist in the Academy
2020-04-10 11:00 - 12:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Jacqueline Wernimont is an antiracist, feminist scholar working toward greater justice in digital cultures. She writes about long histories of media and technology—particularly those that count and commemorate—and entanglements with archives and historiographic ways of knowing. Her book, Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media, is out with MIT Press. She is a network weaver across humanities, arts, and sciences. This work includes codirecting HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory) and serving as the Inaugural Chair of Digital Humanities and Social Engagement at Dartmouth College.
Jacqueline Wernimont will be at UC Santa Cruz from April 8th-10th, 2020 as THI’s Scholar-in-Residence.

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.

CANCELLED - Cultural Studies Colloquium: Christiana Giordana
2020-04-15 12:15 - 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
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.

CANCELLED - Nick Estes and Melanie Yazzie: Beyond the End of the World Sawyer Seminar Series
2020-04-15 17:00 - 20:00 | TBD, CA, United States
The Humanities Institute and the Center for Creative Ecologies present Beyond the End of the World Lecture Series
Nick Estes is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He is an Assistant Professor in the American Studies Department at the University of New Mexico. In 2014, he co-founded The Red Nation, an Indigenous resistance organization. For 2017-2018, Estes was the American Democracy Fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. His research engages colonialism and global Indigenous histories, with a focus on decolonization, oral history, U.S. imperialism, environmental justice, anti-capitalism, and the Oceti Sakowin. Estes is the author of the book Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso, 2019), which places into historical context the Indigenous-led movement to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. He edited with Jaskiran Dhillon the volume Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement (University of Minnesota, 2019), which draws together more than thirty contributors, including leaders, scholars, and activists of the Standing Rock movement.
Melanie K. Yazzie (Bilagáana/Diné) holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of New Mexico, and is is Assistant Professor in the Department of Native American Studies and the Department of American Studies, University of New Mexico. She specializes in violence, biopolitics, water, Navajo/American Indian history; (neo)liberalism; settler colonialism; Indigenous feminisms; Native American studies; social movements; urban Native experience; political ecology; queer Indigenous studies; Marxist theories of history, knowledge, and power; and theories of policing and the state. Her first book, Life in The Age of Extraction: Diné History in A Biopolitical Register, shows how biopolitical calculations of Navajo life that accompanied the introduction of extractive economies in the 1930s have become a full-scale biopolitical epoch defined by violent relations of extraction. With Nick Estes, she guest-edited a special issue of Wicazo Sa Review (June 2016) on the legacy of Dakota scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, one of the founders of Native American studies, and co-edited a special issue of Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society with Cutcha Risling-Baldy on Indigenous water politics (2018).
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. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Culture. For more information visit BEYOND.UCSC.EDU
If you have disability-related needs, please contact the The Humanities Institute at thi@ucsc.edu or call 831-459-5655.

MAH Film Night: Radical Futurisms (Part I Rescreen)
2020-04-15 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
Gather ’round your home screen and watch films from a diverse group of visionaries on topics and themes related to our current exhibition, Beyond the World’s End.

Join curator TJ Demos for a virtual introduction and (re)screening of films originally shown last month at the Del Mar Theater that seek to offer points of light in a dark world.
How are visual artists imagining radical futures? How can the traditions of oppressed peoples become the foundation of the future? How can social justice and ecosystems flourish going forward? How can we escape our current climate of catastrophe and anxiety and instead transform the present into a radical future by asking what is “not-yet”?
Shown in conjunction with our exhibition Beyond the World’s End, this three-part film series is part of a year-long research and exhibition project and public lecture series. Directed by T. J. Demos of the Center for Creative Ecologies, and including the collaboration of UCSC PhD Mellon fellows Isabelle Carbonell and Chessa Adsit-Morris, it brings 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. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Culture. For more information visit BEYOND.UCSC.EDU

Schedule
6:50pm – Screening opens. Space is limited to the first 100 people to sign into the Zoom meeting.
7:00pm – Welcome from MAH Staff, followed by an introduction from guest curator TJ Demos.
7:15pm – Film program will begin, followed by a 20 min open conversation on zoom.
The Zoom link will be sent out at 2pm & 6:40pm on event day to all that RSVP’d via Eventbrite. If you have any questions please email info@santacruzmah.org.

CANCELLED - Linguistics Colloquia: Kevin Ryan
2020-04-17 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 2, Room 259
Kevin Ryan (Harvard) – Title TBD
Kevin M. Ryan is a phonologist whose research focuses on prosodic systems and the constituents of speech, especially stress, weight, meter, and phrasal phonology. This work draws on the statistical analysis of speech/text corpora, experiments, and studies of particular languages (often Indic or Dravidian).
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

VIRTUAL - PhD+ Workshop: Social Media and Scholarly Practice
2020-04-22 11:00 - 12:30 | Zoom, CA, United States
The field of higher ed is struggling to define its relationship to social media. We have all read high profile stories of offers and tenure denied because of online posts. At the same time, there is clear motivation for scholars to engage with public audiences and grow their reputations through social media. What are the risks, rewards, and ways to begin being an extremely (or selectively) online academic?
Join Rachel Deblinger to discuss the many uses of social media across the academy, ranging from institutional accounts to the benefits of self-promotion to the possible consequences of political speech. As the public health crisis has moved most of our communications online, this session will also give participants an opportunity to reflect on our complex relationships with social media as both a source of anxiety and space to alleviate feelings of isolation.

Rachel Deblinger is the Director of the Modern Endangered Archives Program at the UCLA Library. This new granting program funds the digitization and preservation of at-risk cultural heritage materials from around the world and makes all material openly accessible online. Deblinger was previously the Research Program Manager at The Humanities Institute and is the Founding Director of the UC Santa Cruz Digital Scholarship Commons.
Deblinger completed her doctorate in History at UCLA in 2014 and is currently writing a book manuscript titled, “Saving Our Survivors: How American Jews learned about the Holocaust.” Her research focuses on early postwar Holocaust narratives, media technology, and the efforts of Jewish communal organizations to aid survivors in Europe.

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.
Please RSVP for the Zoom link:
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CANCELLED - Cultural Studies Colloquium: Matthew Engelke
2020-04-22 12:15 - 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States

POSTPONED - Lisa Wolpe: Shakespeare and the Alchemy of Gender
2020-04-23 18:00 - 20:00 | Santa Cruz Veterans Hall Auditorium
Shakespeare and the Alchemy of Gender is a solo show, written and performed by Lisa Wolpe. It is an hour long, with no intermission. Lisa is an expert on gender-flipping Shakespeare as well as an actress, director, teacher, writer, traveler, and distinguished scholar. Her one-women show explores her experiences as an activist for inclusion, diversity, equity, access, and promoting women’s rights and racial equality. It features stories about her family, focusing on her father, Hans Wolpe, a hero in WWII, as well as pieces of Shakespeare, including Shylock, Hamlet, Richard III, and more, elucidating life lessons learned through playing male characters in the Shakespeare Canon.

POSTPONED - The Challenge of Diversity: A Conference on Global Minorities
2020-04-24 | Humanities 2, Room 259
The 3rd Annual Center for World History Grad Student Conference.
Please stay tuned for more information.

CANCELLED: Cultural Studies Colloquium
2020-04-29 12:15 - 13:00, 2020-05-06 12:15 - 13:00, 2020-05-13 12:15 - 13:00, 2020-05-20 12:15 - 13:00, 2020-05-27 12:15 - 13:00, 2020-06-03 12:15 - 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States

POSTPONED - Nitasha Dhillon and Amin Husain, of MTL / Decolonize This Place: Beyond the End of the World Sawyer Seminar Series
2020-04-29 17:00 - 20:00 | CA, United States
The Humanities Institute and the Center for Creative Ecologies present Beyond the End of the World Lecture Series
Natasha Dhillon and Amin Husain, are MTL, a collaboration that joins research, aesthetics, organizing and action in practice. Nitasha Dhillon and Amin Husain are co-founders of Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy, the movement-generated theory magazine; Global Ultra Luxury Faction, known as the direct action wing of Gulf Labor Coalition; Direct Action Front for Palestine; and, most recently, Decolonize This Place. MTL has published in Alternet, Creative Time Reports, eflux, Hyperallergic, Jadaliyya, and October Magazine. Currently they are directing and producing an experimental documentary film about land, life and liberation in occupied Palestine titled, On This Land.
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. 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.
If you have disability-related needs, please contact the The Humanities Institute at thi@ucsc.edu or call 831-459-5655.

MAH Film Night: Radical Futurisms (Part II Rescreen)
2020-04-29 19:00 - 21:00 | CA

CANCELLED: Nancy Luxon - Switch Points of Power: Psychodynamics of state legitimation and neoauthoritarianism
2020-05-04 16:00 - 18:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Recent political trends not just in the United States but globally have led to speculation about the resurgence of authoritarianism and an “authoritarian personality.” As the usual orientations of Left and Right held in place by a liberal status quo begin to falter, social science looks for new frameworks through which to describe these political phenomena and to analyze the kind of challenge they pose to existing liberal or neoliberal institutions. With this paper, I argue that these contemporary political currents revive older debates about state legitimation and the terms on which to construe “the people.” In the wake of a neoliberalism has reduced political and moral vocabularies to a financial language of risk and exposure, politics seeks new sources of psycho-social investment that would reframe classic relations of care and obligation. To think through this political conjuncture, I draw on Michel Foucault and the relational school of psychoanalysis. I argue that these contemporary political trends direct us towards those “switch points of power” in which relations of power have become unstable and thus capable of being redirected. These switch points potentially open up for revision those authorial practices that sustain or undo the status quo.

Nancy Luxon is an associate professor in Political Science at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her work in contemporary political and social theory concentrates on questions of power, subjectivity, and truth-telling. She came to these themes from a preoccupation with those practices that organize the interstices of political spaces – namely, the spaces between personal and political practices, between political conditions of possibility and psychic interiority, and between past and future. Her first book, Crisis of Authority (2013), considers political authority as a political and psychological process in which individuals come to author themselves, and so to act within and against relations of hierarchy. More recently, she has edited a translation of Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault’s Disorderly Families (2017), along with a companion scholarly volume, Archives of Infamy (2019), and Foucault’s lectures at Berkeley, Discourse and Truth (2019). Her current work is on Fanon and désaliénation.

POSTPONED - Ottessa Moshfegh: Death in Her Hands
2020-05-04 19:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This is an advanced event listing. Please check back for updated information at: https://www.bookshopsantacruz.com/ottessamoshfegh2020
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 email info@bookshopsantacruz.com by May 2nd.
Death in Her Hands comes from one of our most ceaselessly provocative literary talents, a novel of haunting metaphysical suspense about an elderly widow whose life is upturned when she finds a cryptic note on a walk in the woods that ultimately makes her question everything about her new home.
While on her normal daily walk with her dog in the nearby forest woods, our protagonist comes across a note, handwritten and carefully pinned to the ground with a frame of stones. Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body. Our narrator is deeply shaken; she has no idea what to make of this. She is new to this area, having moved here from her longtime home after the death of her husband, and she knows very few people. And she’s a little shaky even on her best days. Her brooding about this note quickly grows into a full-blown obsession, and she begins to devote herself to exploring the possibilities of her conjectures about who this woman was and how she met her fate. Her suppositions begin to find echoes in the real world, and with mounting excitement and dread, the fog of mystery starts to form into a concrete and menacing shape. But as we follow her in her investigation, strange dissonances start to accrue, and our faith in her grip on reality weakens, until finally, just as she seems to be facing some of the darkness in her own past with her late husband, we are forced to face the prospect that there is either a more innocent explanation for all this or a much more sinister one–one that strikes closer to home.
A triumphant blend of horror, suspense, and pitch-black comedy, Death in Her Hands asks us to consider how the stories we tell ourselves both guide us closer to the truth and keep us at bay from it. Once again, we are in the hands of a narrator whose unreliability is well earned, only this time the stakes have never been higher.
Ottessa Moshfegh is the author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a New York Times bestseller; Homesick for Another World, a New York Times Book Review notable book of the year; Eileen, which was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction; and McGlue, which won the Fence Modern Prize in Prose and the Believer Book Award. Her stories have earned her a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award, the Plimpton Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Department of Defense/DARPA Discussion and Faculty Panel Session
2020-05-06 12:00 - 16:00 | CA
The UCSC Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research is hosting a discussion and faculty panel session on best practices and strategies for pursuing Department of Defense (DoD) funding. Opportunities offered through DoD are a less understood, and often under-accessed, source of research funding. This event will be an opportunity to hear from an external Washington DC-based expert and UCSC faculty with various levels of DoD experience. These experts will share their advice and insight on positioning your research programs for long-term DoD support. Join us for this introduction where you will have an opportunity to engage in Q&A sessions and learn more about engaging the DoD, identifying opportunities, and successfully executing DoD funded projects.

Agenda
12:00 – 12:10:
Introductions from UC Santa Cruz, Office of Research, Vice Chancellor of Research, Scott Brandt
12:15 – 01:45:
Kristen Jordan Ph.D. Independent Consultant, MBO Partners.
“DOD Opportunities and Engagement”
Dr. Jordan is a former program officer for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) and currently serves as an advisor to acting DARPA Director, Peter Highnam.
12:45 – 01:00:
Break
2:00 – 04:00:
Faculty Panelists: Personal experience, suggestions, and lessons learned
Marco Rolandi, Professor and Department Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Baskin School of Engineering (BSOE)
Dan Costa, Distinguished Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, PBSci, and Director of the Institute of Marine Sciences (IMS)
Daniele Venturi, Associate Professor of Applied Mathematics, BSOE
Terrie M. Williams, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in PBSci and Director of the Center for Marine Mammal Research and Conservation at UCSC
Ricardo Sanfelice, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, BSOE and Director of the Cyber-Physical Systems Research Center
Shiva Abbaszadeh, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, BSOE
Rajarshi Guhaniyogi, Assistant Professor of Statistics, BSOE

VIRTUAL - Thinking the Pandemic: Part I
2020-05-06 12:15 - 13:30 | CA
A number of scholars have recently written about the current pandemic, taking up questions of sovereignty and biopolitics in different ways. We will read and discuss some short pieces by Alain Badiou, Bifo Berardi, Byung-Chul Han, and Bruno Latour. Chris Connery and Max Tomba will start the conversation off with presentations on some of the readings. Please do the readings beforehand. RSVP below by 4pm Tuesday, May 5 to receive Zoom link and password.
Readings:
“On the Epidemic Situation” by Alain Badiou
“Beyond the Breakdown” by Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi
“We cannot surrender reason to the virus” by Byung-Chul Han
“What protective measures can you think of so we don’t go back to the pre-crisis production model?” by Bruno Latour

Important information about this event: These informal sessions will be on Zoom and will start at 12:15pm. For security reasons, you will need to RSVP to register for each session; you will then receive a Zoom link and password for that session. We will have a “waiting room” for the session; the waiting room will open at noon, so please join between noon and 12:15pm (event moderators will let you into the session from the waiting room). Entry to the session will close at 12:30pm, so please don’t be late to join a session.
We will begin these Special Sessions with a two-part series on “Thinking the Pandemic.” The first part will be Wednesday, May 6 and the second on Wednesday, May 12. Stay tuned for more special sessions, including a speculative film called “A World Without Clouds,” for later in May.

Teaching Credential Workshop for Humanities PhDs
2020-05-07 10:00 | CA
The humanities are alive and well in K12 education. Can you thrive there?
Join Kip Téllez in this workshop to learn more about simultaneously pursuing a teaching credential and master’s degree in education while completing your doctoral degree in the humanities! Explore the possibilities of public school teaching in California for a union-backed career. Ethnic studies students, learn about how you would be positioned to roll out ethnic studies in the public high school curriculum statewide!
Please email Jane Komori or Ka-eul Yoo for Zoom information.

Kip Téllez is Professor and former Chair in the Education Department at UC Santa Cruz. After teaching elementary and high school students in east Los Angeles county and earning his PhD from the Claremont Graduate University, his research has focused on the intersection of language teaching and teacher education. He has published in journals such as the Journal of Teacher Education, Bilingual Research Journal, Teaching and Teacher Education, and Review of Research in Education. He served as the editor of Teacher Education Quarterly from 2013 to 2016, as well as serving on several editorial boards. His most recent book is titled The Teaching Instinct: Explorations Into What Makes Us Human.
This event is sponsored by Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES).

CANCELLED: Ramon Rising Film Screening
2020-05-08 | CA
Stay tuned for more information.

CANCELLED - Linguistics Colloquia: Jesse Harris
2020-05-08 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 2, Room 259
Jesse Harris (UCLA) – Title TBD
Jesse Harris is an assistant professor at UCLA in the Department of Linguistics, and director of the UCLA Language Processing Lab. His research investigates how language users develop a sufficiently rich linguistic meaning during online comprehension, concentrating in particular on three related areas: (a) the formal semantics of context sensitive expressions, (b) the semantic processing of contextually dependent terms, and (c) the pragmatic and processing defaults engaged when generating a semantic or discourse representation for an utterance or phrase.
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

Graduate Research Symposium
2020-05-08 16:00 - 17:30 | CA
Join us via Zoom for the announcement of the symposium winners!
•Best overall, $1000
•Best of the Arts Division, $250
•Best of the Baskin School of Engineering, $250
•Best of the Humanities Division, $250
•Best of the Physical and Biological Sciences Division, $250
•Best of the Social Sciences Division, $250
Find out who won in this year’s online Graduate Research Symposium! Enjoy watching the Zoom presentations of the winners!
The Division of Graduate Studies will upload all recorded symposium Zoom presentations to our YouTube channel.

PIT-UN Network Challenge Funding Info Session
2020-05-12 15:00 - 16:00 | CA
As we announced at our recent Public Interest Technology University Network (PIT-UN) kickoff event, the annual Network Challenge funding program is open for submissions.
To answer questions, and to discuss ideas and collaborations, we will hold a Zoom Info Session next Tuesday, May 12th from 3:00 – 4:00 PM. RSVP here.
Applications are open to all PIs on UCSC Campus. One year project funding is available in three tranches: up to $45,000, up to $90,000 and up to $180,000. An initial campus limited submission process will select up to three projects that will be submitted to the network committee.
The Network Challenge seeks to encourage new ideas, foster collaborations, and incentivize resource- and information-sharing among network members. The broad goal is to fund projects that help train a new generation of graduates who have both technological literacy and a rigorous foundation to navigate the societal, ethical, legal, policy, and equity implications of technology by offering a systematic way of studying technology as a tool for addressing social problems in the world.
Applications can be submitted here.

VIRTUAL - Thinking the Pandemic: Part II
2020-05-13 12:15 - 13:30 | CA
We will continue to think about the current pandemic in relation to epidemic histories, states of uncertainty, and authoritarian power, with readings by Bishnupriya Ghosh, Carlo Caduff, and Siddharth Varadarajan. Anjali Arondekar and Mayanthi Fernando will start the conversation off with presentations on the readings. Email cult@ucsc.edu for the Ghosh and Caduff readings.
Readings:
“The Costs of Living: Reflections on Global Health Crises” by Bishnupriya Ghosh
“In India, a Pandemic of Prejudice and Repression” by Siddharth Varadarajan
“What Went Wrong? Rebuilding the World after Corona” by Carlo Caduff

Important information about this event: These informal sessions will be on Zoom and will start at 12:15pm. For security reasons, you will need to RSVP to register for each session; you will then receive a Zoom link and password for that session. We will have a “waiting room” for the session; the waiting room will open at noon, so please join between noon and 12:15pm (event moderators will let you into the session from the waiting room). Entry to the session will close at 12:30pm, so please don’t be late to join a session.
We will begin these Special Sessions with a two-part series on “Thinking the Pandemic.” The first part will be Wednesday, May 6 and the second on Wednesday, May 12. Stay tuned for more special sessions, including a speculative film called “A World Without Clouds,” for later in May.

VIRTUAL: Humanities Happy Hour - Freedom & Race in the Time of Pandemic
2020-05-14 17:30 | CA
Join us for our first virtual Humanities Happy Hour exploring Questions That Matter in the Time of Pandemic. This week will focus on “Freedom & Race” and feature Humanities Dean Tyler Stovall in conversation with associate professors Alice Yang, Christine Hong, and Noriko Aso.

What does it mean to be free in a nation on house arrest? Recent demonstrations against shelter-in-place orders have been overwhelmingly white as groups alleging an assault on liberty have trafficked in racist symbols, including swastikas and Confederate flags. Some have reacted to the current pandemic by blaming certain racial or ethnic groups. To what extent is this repeating a long history of scapegoating in times of pandemic? Meanwhile, the coronavirus is taking a disproportionate toll on black and brown communities in America in terms of infections and death. How has the public health crisis both highlighted and exacerbated racial inequalities?
The COVID-19 pandemic is illustrating critical issues surrounding freedom and race in the United States. This week’s conversation will consider rampant anti-Asian racism and discrimination, glaring inequities in health outcomes for African-American and Latinx communities, and other issues of race and freedom highlighted, and, in many ways, intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Questions That Matter in the Time of Pandemic is a public humanities series that brings UC Santa Cruz faculty in conversation with the campus and community to discuss topics of importance to us all during the COVID-19 health crisis. The conversations build on themes that The Humanities Institute (THI) has explored as part of Questions That Matter annual events. For additional discussion, we encourage you to watch the video of THI’s event on Questions That Matter: Freedom and Race, in which Jennifer Gonzalez and Tyler Stovall discuss the idea that racism—and the exclusion of racial groups from society—is essential to understanding freedom in America. You can also read Dean Tyler Stovall’s 2020 Questions that Matter in the Time of Pandemic written reflection as well as his 2018 interview on freedom and race.
Questions? Contact Special Events

VIRTUAL - PhD+ Workshop: Coping with Social Isolation and Anxiety in a Crisis
2020-05-15 12:00 - 13:00 | Zoom, CA, United States
These are extraordinary times. In a matter of days, we have had to learn new ways of navigating our educational and occupational needs to meet our goals. This can be stressful. Our go-to coping strategy is often gathering with our social group and offering a shoulder to lean on, or accepting one. The world has been turned upside down. Spend an hour with Richard Enriquez, Ph.D. discussing ways to cope with stress and maintain social connection in this time of physical distancing due to COVID-19.

Richard Enriquez completed his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Palo Alto University with an emphasis in Diversity and Community Mental Health (DCMH). He is a long-time slug, having earned his bachelor’s degree in psychology and completing his postdoctoral fellowship here at UCSC. He currently works as a CAPS counseling psychologist with a focus in working with the Graduate Student community.
Dr. Enriquez’ clinical interests include alcohol and other drug use, religion and spirituality, mood disorders, and anxiety disorders. He values working with ethnically diverse populations, LGBTQ-identified clients, and college students. Richard believes in working collaboratively with students, helping them identify their personal goals and supporting them in their journey.

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.
Please RSVP to receive the Zoom link:
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VIRTUAL Akemi Johnson - Night in the American Village: Women in the Shadow of the US Military Bases
2020-05-15 16:00 - 17:00 | CA
Akemi Johnson is an author and journalist who’s work centers on Okinawan history and identity, she has contributed to NPR’s All Things Considered and Code Switch, and has written for The Guardian and The Nation. Now, Akemi Johnson joins us to discuss her 2019 book Night in the American Village: Women in the Shadow of the US Military Bases in Okinawa, which explores the nuanced relationship between Okinawan women and the servicemen who live on the U.S. military bases on the island.

Registration required. A Zoom link will be emailed to all registrants on May 14th.

POSTPONED - Kuumbwa Jazz & Indexical Present: Moor Mother & Las Sucias
2020-05-15 19:30 | Kuumbwa Jazz Center
Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother) is a nationally- and internationally-touring musician, poet, visual artist, and workshop facilitator, and has performed at numerous festivals, colleges, galleries, and museums around the world, sharing the stage with King Britt, Roscoe Mitchell, Claudia Rankine, bell hooks, and more. Her most recent album, Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes, is the culmination of all of her earthly experiences merged with all of her cosmic ones. On Analog Fluids, haunting slave narratives are presented as dystopian allegory and negro spirituals are flipped, remixed, and recaptured, only to be digitized into a symbiotic bio-morph program for the post-thumb drive age. It’s a record rich with the noise and chaos that affirm Moor Mother’s punk roots, yet it is also anchored in earthiness via the constant injection of Black ritual, poetry, and drums programmed to vibrate through the listener’s mitochondria.
Las Sucias is a duo formed by Danishta Rivero and Alexandra Buschman, mixing anti-patriarchal riotgrrrl lyrics, Afro-Caribbean rhythms, brujería noise and possessed vocals. Each performance is a ritual that combines all of the senses and elevates into a higher realm, inspiring the listener to dance, speak in tongues, laugh hysterically, and get possessed by the spirits awoken.
TICKETS & MORE INFO
The event will start with a discussion with Ayewa about Black Quantum Futurism, her collaborative Afrofuturist project with author Rasheedah Phillips of Afrofuturist Affair.
Moor Mother Website
Las Sucias Website
Indexical Website
Supported in part by the Humanities Institute, the Institute for Arts and Sciences, the Center for Creative Ecologies, and the Beyond the End of the World symposium at UC Santa Cruz.

VIRTUAL: Special Session - World Without Clouds
2020-05-20 12:15 - 13:30 | CA
World Without Clouds: an experimental work by Steven Gonzalez (MIT), Jia Hui Lee (MIT), Luísa Reis-Castro (MIT), Gabrielle Robbins (MIT), and Julianne Yip (Independent Scholar).
World Without Clouds is an experimental, multi-modal piece of speculative fiction filmed only with smartphone cameras. The story revolves around five anthropologists in the years 2045-50 who are trying to save clouds from going extinct. As climate change and authoritarian governments take over the Earth, these “salvage nephologists” invent an Ontology Machine to communicate with the last remaining clouds, hoping the clouds will “speak back” and offer a cloud-centered way to save clouds from dying out. The story draws inspiration from science fiction’s ability to experiment and make us aware of our epistemic limitations. The creators blend storytelling and academic scholarship in a way that refuses easy categorization into individual-authored research. They ask what kinds of new (cloud) formations might appear in the future. And they flirt—critically—with possible anthropological logics that are rooted in century-long practices of ethnographic documentation and salvation.
We will start on Zoom, then watch the 30-minute film synchronously on a separate site, and then reconvene on Zoom with the creators for a discussion. Donna Haraway will kick off the conversation.
RSVP below by 10 AM on Wednesday, May 20th to receive Zoom link and password.

VIRTUAL: Death on the Nile - A 3D Visit to Egypt's Most Enduring Cemetery
2020-05-20 17:30 - 18:15 | CA
Join us for a one-of-a-kind virtual experience to explore Saqqara, Egypt’s most enduring cemetery. UC Santa Cruz Associate Professor of History Elaine Sullivan will take us on a virtual visit to the site of Saqqara—the ancient Egyptian necropolis that was the burial place of kings, queens, priests, and elite officials for 2,500 years (3000-332 BCE). Using a 3D model that digitally ‘reconstructs’ the original appearance of the ancient monuments, Sullivan will focus on the architecture and art from the Pharaonic Period and discuss how royal and elite Egyptians created a special landscape to guarantee their eternal life and power.

Elaine Sullivan (M.A. and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University) is an associate professor of history, Egyptologist, and a digital humanist whose work focuses on applying new technologies to ancient cultural materials. Her upcoming born-digital publication, Constructing the Sacred (Stanford University Press), utilizes a geo-temporal 3D model of the necropolis of Saqqara to investigate questions of ritual landscape at the site.
We hope you will join us for what we know will be a fascinating conversation.
Questions? Contact the UC Santa Cruz Special Events Office at specialevents@ucsc.edu.

VIRTUAL: Humanities Happy Hour – Teaching and Learning in the Time of Pandemic
2020-05-21 17:30 - 19:00 | CA
What has the shift to remote, online instruction nationwide revealed about teaching and learning in higher education? How can we use this crisis as an opportunity to reimagine not only the role but the practice of teaching and learning? What is at stake for the future of higher education at UC Santa Cruz and around the world, and how can we harness the Humanities to think boldly and creatively in response? In this week’s Humanities Happy Hour Jody Greene, UC Santa Cruz Associate Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning, and Lois Kazakoff (Cowell, ‘76) will tackle these questions and more. Join us as we think through the role that the Humanities can play in imagining the future of higher education in, and beyond, a time of pandemic.

Registration required.
Jody Greene is Associate Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning and Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is also the Founding Director of UCSC’s Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning. In 2005, she published, The Trouble with Ownership: Intellectual Property and Authorial Liability in England, 1660-1730 (University of Pennsylvania Press). A new volume, Human Rights after Corporate Personhood, co-edited with Sharif Youssef, is forthcoming from the University of Toronto Press in Fall 2020. Greene has edited special issues of GLQ and Eighteenth-Century Studies, and has published articles in journals such as PMLA, Critical Inquiry, and The Eighteenth Century. Her most recent writing has appeared in Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Lois Kazakoff served as deputy editorial page editor of the San Francisco Chronicle for 18 years before retiring in 2019. She worked with presidents, politicians, professors and publicly-minded community members to help them craft compelling and persuasive commentary and bring their voices into the public forum. She has a bachelor’s degree in French from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She earned a master’s of science of journalism degree from Northwestern University. Lois currently serves on the UC Santa Cruz Humanities Dean’s Advisory Council.

Questions That Matter in the Time of Pandemic is a public humanities series that brings UC Santa Cruz faculty in conversation with the campus and community to discuss topics of importance to us all during the COVID-19 health crisis. The conversations build on themes that The Humanities Institute (THI) has explored as part of Questions That Matter and other signature events. For additional discussion, we encourage you to watch the video of “Cathy Davidson: The New Education”. This event was presented by THI and UCSC’s Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning (CITL) for its 2018 Annual Convocation, and features Cathy Davidson discussing her book The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux. Davidson’s work explores how we can revolutionize our universities to help students be leaders of change, not simply subject to it. THI’s interview with Cathy Davidson provides further insight into Davidson’s progressive vision for the future of education.
Questions? Contact Special Events

POSTPONED - What Time Is It? HisCon Colloqium
2020-05-22 | CA

VIRTUAL: MAH Beyond the World’s End - Meet the Artists
2020-05-22 10:00 - 12:00 | CA
Join Beyond the World’s End exhibiting artists Laurie Palmer, Amy Balkin, Krista Franklin, Newton Harrison, Super Futures Haunt Qollective, and the Rasquache Collective for a group discussion and Q&A.
In the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History’s current exhibition, Beyond the World’s End, visionary artists reflect on the social and environmental injustices happening around the world and envision radical ways to move forward.
As a special virtual offering, join the panel of exhibiting artists for a group discussion facilitated by guest curator TJ Demos from UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Creative Ecologies. Dive deeper into the content found within the exhibition, their projects, and their visions of the future. They will also touch on how these themes connect to our current unfolding pandemic. After the discussion, stay for a Q&A with the artists facilitated by TJ Demos and the MAH’s Exhibition Catalyst, Whitney Ford-Terry.

This event is part of Beyond the End of the World, a year-long project directed by T. J. Demos of the Center for Creative Ecologies and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Culture. For more information visit BEYOND.UCSC.EDU

VIRTUAL - Special Session: Thinking Through Television in a Pandemic
2020-05-27 12:15 - 13:30 | CA
In this time of the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more people are tuning into television (across streaming platforms, web series, and of course also pay, cable, and network TV) for news and information, comfort and company, narrative pleasure and imaginative stimulation—though also often getting misinformation, alienation, or discouragement. How is TV working, producing ways of seeing, knowing, living, and feeling during this pandemic, and what are the implications of that? How are we thinking through television in these unthinkable times? Lynne Joyrich will take up these questions with some opening remarks, then open up to a group discussion.

RSVP by 10 AM on Wednesday, May 27th to receive Zoom link and password.

ZOOM TEACH IN: Anti-Asian Xenophobia in an Age of Covid-19
2020-05-29 14:00 - 15:30 | CA
Anti-Chinese xenophobia inaugurated the United States as a gatekeeping nation in the late nineteenth century. Figured as dangerous to the public health, the Chinese—and successive Asian migrants—were likened to an invasive disease and subjected not only to exclusion laws but also to white vigilante violence. In this era of pandemic, a moment conditioned by phobia about China’s global rise, xenophobic conspiracy theories about the “Chinese virus” abound. China has been placed in the crosshairs of the media and politicians, and Asians and people of Asian descent have been targeted on social media and subjected to acts of violence. From mid-March to mid-April of this year, the Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center received almost 1,500 reports of anti-Asian coronavirus discrimination in the United States against people of Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, Filipino, Hmong, Thai, Lao, and Cambodian ethnicity.

This teach-in will be led by two founders of the Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center. Russell Jeung, chair of Asian American Studies at SF State, will offer a long historical view of anti-Asian racism and brutality, and Cynthia Choi, co-executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action, will address the data the reporting center has gathered in the past two months. In a moment in which we are witness to the slide between anti-Asian rhetoric and anti-Asian brutality, how should hate speech be understood? Given the necessity of social distancing, what kinds of community process around racial harm can we envision and bring into being?
Russell Jeung is Professor of Asian American Studies at SF State University. A scholar of race and religion, he’s written At Home in Exile: Finding Jesus Among Ancestors and Family Sacrifices: The Worldviews and Ethics of Chinese Americans. With Chinese for Affirmative Action and the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council, he helped to establish the Stop AAPI Hate center.
Cynthia Choi is Co-Executive Director of Chinese for Affirmative Action, a community-based civil rights organization based in San Francisco. CAA partnered to establish Stop AAPI Hate, an online reporting center dedicated to documenting hate incidents and developing community-based solutions. She has led local, state, and national community-based organizations working on a range of issues from reproductive justice, gender-based violence, immigrant/refugee rights, and environmental justice issues in both the nonprofit sector and in philanthropy.
Presented by The Center for Racial Justice. Co-sponsored by the SUA Office of Diversity and Inclusion, the Asian American/Pacific Islander Resource Center, and the Office of Diversity Equity and Inclusion.
Resources: You can find Stop AAPI Hate’s latest report here and the quick guides, “Five Things to Consider When You’re Experiencing Hate” and “Five Things to Do When You’re Witnessing Hate,” here.
For more information, please contact Christine Hong at cjhong@ucsc.edu.

VIRTUAL: Special Session - The Pandemic and the University to Come - A Collective Action
2020-06-03 12:15 - 13:30 | CA
Following on this quarter’s series of conversations about the historical space opened by the current pandemic, we will come together in a collective, active exercise of imagining the university to come. Prior to the meeting, please respond to five questions (click below) about the future university you would like to participate in post-pandemic; the questions are versions of those from Bruno Latour’s essay discussed in early May. Each of you will suggest one practice you think should cease, one you think should continue, and one new practice that you would like to be part of the university of the future, as well as how to enable the kind of capacities needed to transition to these new activities. We will spend the colloquium working together to see where we agree and where we disagree, and to come up with something to hope for that might help and even guide us in the time to come.

Please respond to the questions by 10AM on Wednesday, June 3.
Please also RSVP by 10AM on Wednesday, June 3 to receive Zoom link and password for the session.

VIRTUAL: Celebrating the Humanities - Spring Awards
2020-06-05 16:00 - 17:00 | CA, United States
We hope you will join us for our annual celebration recognizing student and faculty academic achievement in the Humanities Division at UC Santa Cruz. Friends and family are welcome. Even though we are not able to celebrate together in person as we usually do, we can still come together online to honor the outstanding accomplishments of our students and faculty.
Our online program will include a special live message from Chancellor Larive congratulating our scholars. We will then share a pre-recorded video of award presentations and return to a live format to congratulate all of our scholars with a group toast.
Be sure to come with a glass to raise!

You will be sent a link to the Zoom meeting request on June 5th at 10:00 a.m.
Program:
Welcome from Humanities Dean Tyler Stovall
Congratulatory remarks from Chancellor Cynthia Larive
Video Awards Presentation of the following awards:

The Dean’s and Chancellor Awards
The inaugural Bettina Aptheker Award for Research on Sexual, Gendered, and Racial Violence
The inaugural Coha / Gunderson Prize in Speculative Futures
The Idstrom Family Prize in Creative Writing
The Sol and Esther Draznin Memorial Scholarship in Classical Studies
The Kenneth Andrew Gram Memorial Scholarship
The David A. Kadish Humanities Scholarship
The Raihan Kadri Memorial Scholarship
The inaugural Siobhan O’Neill Scholarship
The Dizikes Teaching Award & The Gary Young Scholarship
The Humanities Institute Undergraduate Research Awards
Conclusion: a toast to our students!

For questions, please contact Rafferty Lincoln via rlincoln@ucsc.edu
Congratulations to our accomplished awardees!

VIRTUAL EVENT: Laurie R. King, Riviera Gold
2020-06-09 19:00 | CA
Local, bestselling author Laurie R. King, will will celebrate the publication of her newest Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes mystery, Riviera Gold! The Riviera in 1925 is a playground for the rich built on corruption and greed. It is a place where treasure can be false, where love can destroy, and where life, as Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes will discover, can be cheap—even when it is made of solid gold.

Laurie R. King is the award-winning, bestselling author of sixteen Mary Russell mysteries, five contemporary novels featuring Kate Martinelli, the Stuyvesant & Grey novels Touchstone and The Bones of Paris, and acclaimed standalone novels Folly and Lockdown. She lives in Northern California, where she is at work on her next Mary Russell mystery.

VIRTUAL EVENT: Pico Iyer in conversation with Alan Christy
2020-06-15 18:00 | CA
Bookshop Santa Cruz invites you to join us for an online event with bestselling author Pico Iyer who will be in-conversation with Alan Christy about his new book, Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells—a far-reaching exploration of Japanese history and culture and a moving meditation on impermanence, mortality, and grief—and A Beginner’s Guide to Japan, now in paperback.

AUTUMN LIGHT: SEASON OF FIRE AND FAREWELLS:
Returning to his longtime home in Japan after his father-in-law’s sudden death, Pico Iyer picks up the steadying patterns of his everyday rites: going to the post office and engaging in furious games of ping-pong every evening. But in a country whose calendar is marked with occasions honoring the dead, he comes to reflect on changelessness in ways that anyone can relate to: parents age, children scatter, and Iyer and his wife turn to whatever can sustain them as everything falls away. As the maple leaves begin to turn and the heat begins to soften, Iyer shows us a Japan we have seldom seen before, where the transparent and the mysterious are held in a delicate balance, and where autumn reminds us to take nothing for granted.
A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO JAPAN:
“Arguably the greatest living travel writer” (Outside magazine), Pico Iyer has called Japan home for more than three decades. But, as he is the first to admit, the country remains an enigma even to its long-term residents. In A Beginner’s Guide to Japan, Iyer draws on his years of experience—his travels, conversations, readings, and reflections—to craft a playful and profound book of surprising, brief, incisive glimpses into Japanese culture. He recounts his adventures and observations as he travels from a meditation hall to a love hotel, from West Point to Kyoto Station, and from dinner with Meryl Streep to an ill-fated call to the Apple service center in a series of provocations guaranteed to pique the interest and curiosity of those who don’t know Japan—and to remind those who do of its myriad fascinations.
PICO IYER is the author of eight works of nonfiction and two novels. A writer for Time since 1982, he is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, and many other magazines and newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific. He splits his time between Nara, Japan, and the United States.
ALAN CHRISTY got his PhD in History at the University of Chicago in 1996. He has been with the History Department at UC Santa Cruz since 1995, with a two-year stint as a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo from 2004-2006. He studies the history of Japan, especially historical memory, historical consciousness and the legacies of war and empire. He is the Director of the Okinawa Memories Initiative, a transnational public history project that explores the postwar Okinawan-American relationship in Okinawa and throughout the Pacific region. He is also the Provost of Cowell College.

VIRTUAL EVENT: Laila Lalami, The Other Americans
2020-06-17 19:00 | CA
Pulitzer Prize shortlisted author Laila Lalami presents her timely, powerful new novel about the suspicious death of a Moroccan immigrant, shortlisted for the National Book Award: The Other Americans is at once a family saga, a murder mystery, and a love story informed by the treacherous fault lines of American culture.

Laila Lalami is the author of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, Secret Son, and The Moor’s Account, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and which won the American Book Award, the Arab American Book Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, Harper’s Magazine, and The Guardian. In 2019, she was awarded the Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize for her body of work. A professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside, she lives in Los Angeles.

VIRTUAL EVENT: California Humanities Virtual Listening Session
2020-06-22 13:00 - 14:00, 2020-06-29 08:00 - 17:00 | CA
California Humanities wants to hear from you.
Our listening tour throughout California is continuing! Through small videoconferences, we are engaging in our Listening Sessions to explore the status and future of the humanities field in California.
Our online Listening Sessions are smaller by design to make sure participants are seen and heard. That is why we are conducting multiple sessions per city and region. You have two options below, and we are open to adding more sessions when needed.

Our goal is to sit down and talk with organizations and individuals focused on telling California stories through the humanities, and consider how we might all work together to learn from each other and amplify our voices.
At the listening session, you will:
Share your knowledge about humanities and cultural programming in and around Santa Cruz
Provide feedback and ideas on improving the collaboration of humanities and cultural programs locally and across the state. Explore the impact of COVID-19 on your local network and share ideas on moving forward together
to provide for adequate speaking time for all participants in the dialogue, we are limiting each session to 10 participants. You have two dates to choose from:
Monday, June 22, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm
Monday, June 29, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm
Please note that the listening sessions are not workshops to learn more about our grant programs. Grants Workshops are scheduled throughout the year and you can find more information on our grants and workshops on our webpage.
The Santa Cruz Listening Sessions are in partnership with The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
To learn more, visit calhum.org. With questions, write to Outreach & Advocacy Manager John Nguyen-Yap at jnguyenyap@calhum.org

VIRTUAL EVENT: C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills is Gold
2020-06-23 19:00 | CA
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes debut novelist C Pam Zhang for an online event about her new book, How Much of These Hills Is Gold. Zhang will be in conversation with fellow debut novelist Kawai Strong Washburn (Sharks in the Time of Saviors). In Zhang’s electric debut novel set against the twilight of the American gold rush, two siblings are on the run in an unforgiving landscape—trying not just to survive but to find a home.

Born in Beijing but mostly an artifact of the United States, C Pam Zhang has lived in thirteen cities across four countries and is still looking for home. She’s been awarded support from Tin House, Bread Loaf, Aspen Words and elsewhere, and currently lives in San Francisco.
Kawai Strong Washburn was born and raised on the Hamakua coast of the Big Island of Hawai‘i. His work has appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, McSweeney’s, and Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, among other outlets. He was a 2015 Tin House Summer Scholar and 2015 Bread Loaf work-study scholar. Today, he lives with his wife and daughters in Minneapolis. Sharks in the Time of Saviors is his first novel.

VIRTUAL: Santa Cruz Pickwick Club presents Waverley
2020-06-28 14:00 - 17:00 | CA
Santa Cruz Pickwick Club presents Waverley by Sir Walter Scott. Join Dickens Project Director, John O. Jordan, and Friends of the Dickens Project Board Member, David Brownell for a series of virtual discussions about how one of the first historical novels may have inspired Charles Dickens.
RSVP for a Zoom link and password for the series:

Jun 28: General Preface & Chapters 1-23
Jul 26: Chapters 24-47
Aug 23: Chapters 48-End

Fourth Sundays of the month at 2pm Pacific Time.

VIRTUAL - Undiscovered Shakespeare: The Wars of the Roses - Henry VI, Part 1
2020-07-01 18:30 - 20:00, 2020-07-08 18:30 - 20:00, 2020-07-15 18:30 - 20:00 | CA
Join actors, scholars, and friends for ten live readings and discussions focused on the plays about a divided society and a civil war that made Shakespeare famous in the London theater.

Undiscovered Shakespeare: The Wars of the Roses is a public arts and humanities series co-produced by Santa Cruz Shakespeare, UCSC Shakespeare Workshop, and The Humanities Institute. It brings professional actors and scholars together with the public for a staged reading and discussion of the works that made Shakespeare famous in the London theater. As a young writer at the start of his career, Shakespeare explored ambitions, rivalries, and passions that swept away the dynasty that had reigned in England for more than four centuries. Over the course of ten sessions, we will immerse ourselves in these rarely performed plays—in Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3 and Richard III—and reflect on them both as points of departure for Shakespeare’s career and as a mirror for the times in which we live.
Schedule: The first nine sessions will last approximately ninety minutes (including an intermission) and will begin at 6:30pm PST. The final session of Richard III will last approximately two and a half hours.
Sessions are free to the public, and participants are not obligated to attend every meeting of the program.
*Participants reading along should expect for the first meeting about each play to cover acts one and two; the second meeting to cover acts three and four; and the third meeting to cover act five. The session focussing on Richard III will be a live reading of the entire play.
July 1, 8, and 15: Henry VI, Part 1 – click to view play synopsis
with scholars Adam Zucker (UMass, Amherst) and Ariane Helou (UCLA)
July 22, 29, and Aug 5: Henry VI, Part 2 – click to view play synopsis
with scholars Sean Keilen (UCSC) and Maria Frangos (SCS)
August 12, 19, 26: Henry VI, Part 3 – click to view play synopsis
with scholars Claire McEachern (UCLA) and Ashley Herum (UC Santa Cruz)
September 2: Richard III – click to view play synopsis — live reading of the full play (apx. 2.5 hours)
with scholar Amani Liggett (UC Santa Cruz)
Texts available from Folger Shakespeare Library at: https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/
Play synopses available from Shakespeare 2020 Project at: https://iandoescher.com/shakespeare/
Henry VI, Full Play Synopsis: In the wake of King Henry V’s death, the French rebel against English rule. Joan la Pucelle (Joan of Arc) is made general of the French forces. Meanwhile, in England, a quarrel between two powerful lords, the Duke of Somerset and Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, consumes the court when they demand that fellow nobles pick a side by wearing either a red rose (Somerset and the house of Lancaster) or a white rose (the Duke and the house of York). The mounting tensions in the court distract the English from their goals in France, and young King Henry VI concludes an uneasy peace. He is persuaded to marry a captured French princess, Margaret of Anjou, whom he has never met.

VIRTUAL EVENT: Photographic Memory
2020-07-10 17:00 - 18:30 | CA
On the heels of a very successful Zoom chat with writer Akemi Johnson, the team at the Okinawa Memories Initiative is excited to kick off a monthly Community Conversation Series.
Next up is a talk that cuts to the core of our organization: Photographic Memory. Sparked by a collection of photos taken in Okinawa in 1953 by an American Army Captain, Dr. Charles Eugene Gail, the Okinawa Memories Initiative is committed to exploring how photography frames historical memory.
What is the relationship between a photographic image and historical memory? How might community dialogue and engagement with historical photographs deepen our understanding of the past?
Click the button to sign up for our Zoom conversation exploring the people, places, communities, and hidden memories Gail’s photos reveal.

SPEAKERS
Geri Gail, Photographer and Daughter of Charles Gail
Laura Gail, Photographer and Granddaughter of Charles Gail
Shelby Graham, Director of the UCSC Sesnon Gallery, Mixed-Media Artist
Tosh Tanaka, OMI Media Director, Photographer
Wyatt Young, OMI Exhibition Team Leader
Nirupama Chandrasekhar, OMI Scholar
Owen Raymond, OMI Scholar

VIRTUAL - Undiscovered Shakespeare: The Wars of the Roses - Henry VI, Part 2
2020-07-22 18:30 - 20:00 | CA

The Virtual Dickens Universe
2020-07-26 - 2020-07-31 | UC Santa Cruz
While the originally planned program focusing on David Copperfield and Iola Leroy will still take place in 2021, this week of online programming will feature a range of conversations that discuss the occasion of the pair and the insights that bringing them together can offer. Over the week, scholars from Victorian studies and early African American studies will discuss linkages between their fields, approaches for addressing race and racism in the classroom, and productive ways to engage with Black studies in the nineteenth century and its transatlantic contexts. We hope that this will generate excitement to read these two novels over the next year and to join us in Santa Cruz for the full Dickens Universe conference.

We hope that this week will provide some useful context for these two novels, as we read them together over the next year. In addition to providing some critical background for France E. W. Harper’s career and Iola Leroy, it will also help place her alongside Dickens as one of the most important and prolific writers of the nineteenth century. Like Dickens, Harper was a virtuoso writer of many literary genres (including fiction, prose, and poetry), was deeply involved in nineteenth-century print and periodical cultures. She was a powerful public speaker and an activist in the anti-slavery, suffrage, temperance, and post-emancipation racial justice movements.
Questions? Call (831) 459-2103 or email cmahaney@ucsc.edu for assistance.
