Events

The following one-line Commodore 64 BASIC program: 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 continually generates a pleasing random maze pattern. In this talk, I argue that this tiny program can serve as a Rosetta Stone to help us understand the interconnected cultural and technical aspects of creative computing, practices of using the computer expressively and […]

In the late nineteenth century, a socialist workers' movement burst onto the scene in New York City's immigrant Jewish "ghetto." Over subsequent decades and in cities around the country, hundreds of thousands of men and women participated in this Jewish labor movement. They recast Jewish culture and community, and made a strong imprint on American […]

Curveship is an interactive fiction (IF) development system that adds support for interactive narrating -- automatic narrative variation that is accomplished through text generation. For 30 years, IF development systems have done very well at allowing us to build and manipulate world models, which are then encountered by players using text-based interfaces. Curveship aims to […]

Professor Cooppan’s in-progress Race, Writing, and the Literary World System combines the economic analysis of world systems theory, world literature models of global literary movement, traditional theory and history of the novel, and psychoanalytic and philosophical studies of political affect. It explores how literary economies have helped to express, translate, shape, and contest the history […]

The customary critique of Mother Teresa reads her image as a compromised mass commodity, the anointed saint who habitually produces the “third world” as her necessary gutter. While it is certainly the case that global icons of her ilk lure consumers into commodity fetishism, isolating them from social relations, we see these recursive images routinely […]

Nick Montfort will read from his recent book, Riddle & Bind (Spineless Books, 2010), which contains poems that relate to his work in digital media. These include riddles (figuratively describing something that is left for the reader to guess) as well as constrained writing à la Oulipo. Then, he'll read some of the output of […]

The The Writing Program’s 2011 Reading Series has been cancelled on 01/12/2011 due to illness. Chuck Atkinson will be reading poetry. Sarah Rabkin will be reading from her forthcoming book, What I Learned at Bug Camp: Essays on Finding a Home in the World. Stephen Sweat will be presenting on the representation of literacy in […]

How did Algerian Jews respond to and appropriate France's newly conceived "civilizing mission" in the mid-nineteenth century? The mission to civilize may have been rooted in French Revolutionary ideals of regeneration, enlightenment, and emancipation, but it developed "on the ground" as a strategic response to the challenges of controlling the diverse and unruly populations of […]

When does it make sense to be uncertain whether it's possible that p? On many accounts of the semantics of epistemic modals, including the one favored by Professor MacFarlane, epistemic modal uncertainty should be appropriate only when one is (a) uncertain about what one knows, or more generally about what is contained in the body […]

As part of the Living Writers Series, Literature and Creative Writing Professor Karen Tei Yamashita will read from her novel, I Hotel; Finalist for the 2010 National Book Award, Fiction. There will also be conversations with: • Allan Kornblum, publisher for Coffee House Press • Sina Grace, illustrator of I Hotel and UCSC Creative Writing […]

Professor Love, author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard, 2007), is at the Stanford Humanities Center this year. She is working on a book on the source materials for Erving Goffman’s Stigma: On the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963). Stigma serves as a methodological case study for thinking through the […]

Would you like an opportunity to become (re)acquainted with some of the library's electronic resources for humanists and also learn about some of the less-known features of these databases?

 Micah Perks is the author of a novel, We Are Gathered Here and a memoir, Pagan Time. She has published short stories in ZYZZYVA, Massachusetts Review, The Best Underground Fiction and many others. Her stories have twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and she has been the recipient of a Saltonstall Foundation for the […]

Dazzling and ambitious, this hip, multi-voiced fusion of prose, playwriting, graphic art, and philosophy spins an epic tale of America’s struggle for civil rights as it played out in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Divided into ten novellas, one for each year, I Hotel begins in 1968, when Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, students […]

Using Mikhail Bakunin’s theorization of authority as a starting point, this talk explores secrecy as a strategy for political enlightenment, and calls attention to earlier conceptions of “propaganda” as education that were lost with the militarization of the term in the twentieth century. Megan C. Thomas is Associate Professor of Politics at UCSC. Sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies with […]

Current wisdom has it that syntactic agreement between one head and multiple dependents (Multiple Agree) is possible and perhaps empirically required. In this talk, I will consider data from West Flemish that bear on this issue and argue that such agreement does not exist. I will then address the question of why grammars forbid such […]

Today, just as during any other period since the end of the eighteenth century, the idea of Heimat (home, homeland) is a central part of German-speaking people’s attempts to make sense of the world they live in. The regressive aspects of the idea are troubling. Any concrete interaction with the idea of Heimat in the […]

Emily Carr’s first book, directions for flying (Furniture Press,) is available through SPD. 13 ways of happily: books 1 & 2, chosen by Cole Swensen as the winner of the 2009 New Measures Poetry Prize, is forthcoming early next year. Until then, you can read Emily’s work in magazines like Prairie Schooner, Caketrain, Fourteen Hills, […]

Donna Haraway, Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at UC Santa Cruz, has shaped an entire generation of scholars and scholarship. Her wit, brilliance, generosity, dedication to her students has had and will continue to have immeasurable consequences. A community of scholars attuned to feminist science studies and multi-species flourishing is but one […]

Eric Porter, Professor and Chair of American Studies, will be reading from his new book The Problem of the Future World: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Race Concept at Midcentury.  The Problem of the Future World is a compelling reassessment of the later writings of the iconic African American activist and intellectual W. E. B. Du […]

Compared with other Jewish Communities in the diaspora, the Argentine Jewish community presents a remarkable paradox: Although it is the largest, most plural and probably the most highly institutionalized Jewish community in Latin America, it has lacked a tradition of academic Jewish studies. Taking this paradox as our point of departure, in this lecture we […]

This talk reports on work that detects the kind of rhetorical structures a person uses when attempting to persuade an audience to believe or act in a certain manner. Professor Anand discusses the collection and annotation of 3000 English and 500 Arabic blogs for a variety of rhetorical structures implicated in persuasion by communication theorists […]

A classic puzzle about CPs is that they distribute differently than nominal arguments. This fact is reflected, among other things, by the order of complements in English (Stowell 1981) and the right-peripheral position of CPs in many OV languages (Hindi, Farsi, German). This distribution has traditionally been seen as a reflex of grammatical function, most […]