It's easy to create a victim. One of the more insightful recent examples of French extreme cinema and “torture porn,” Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs is a singularly divisive horror film experience. After police officers rescue her following over a year of repeated exposure to torture and torment, Lucie build up her strength in an orphanage and […]

This conference explores the contemporary legacies of the sent-down youth movement that accompanied the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-76), during which approximately 15 million urban youth were sent to live in rural villages and state farms for up to ten years. This is a timely moment for such a workshop, as an increasing number of scholars […]

Cécile Whiting is a Chancellor's Professor of Art History and Professor of Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Professor Whiting examines mid-twentieth century American art and has published three books on this subject Antifacism in American Art, A Taste For Pop: Pop Art, Gender, and Consumer Culture, and Pop L.A.: Art and the […]

Morten Axel Pedersen Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Copenhagen Morten Axel Pedersen has conducted fieldwork in Mongolia, the Russian Far East, and Western China on topics as diverse as shamanism, political cosmology, post-socialist transition, infrastructure, social networks, and hope. He is currently completing a comparative ethnography of Chinese resource-extraction projects in Mongolia and Mozambique.

Dalip Singh Saund: His Life, His Legacy tells the inspiring story of an ethical and passionate man who rose above prejudice and racism to serve as the first Asian, the first Indian, and the first Sikh elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Presented by the Heritage Series, LLC. In association with the U.S. Capital […]

Abstract: In this talk I will look again at one kind of counterfactual conditionals, which I will call Negative Conditionals (NCs), from a cross-linguistic perspective. NCs have properties that set them aside from standard would conditionals: (i) they contain a negative element in the antecedent clause or in the complementizer domain; (ii) they are obligatorily […]

They're not the enemy. The film that put Shion Sono on the international art house horror map, Suicide Club opens with the bizarre and eerie sight of 54 uniformed teenage schoolgirls queued up beside a subway platform where they hold hands, begin to sing, and then all at once hurl themselves into the path of […]

Elisabeth L. Cameron holds the Patricia & Rowland Rebele Endowed Chair in the History of Art and Visual Culture. Her research is concentrated primarily in two regions: Zambia, where she has observed, studied, and documented womenʼs visual culture, including initiation rites, art, power and hierarchy, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where she has […]

Tacitus' Germania, a brief ethnography of the peoples the Romans called Germani, exerted a profound impact on the European History of ideas. By no fault of its author, it ended up as an ideological cornerstone of the National Socialist regime. This talk will trace the influence of the Germania and reflect more generally on what […]

UCSC's Institute of the Arts and Sciences invites you to the final LASER of the academic year Tuesday, May 6! Leonardo Art/Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) is a national program of evening gatherings that bring artists, scientists, and scholars together for informal presentations and conversations. Please join us in the Digital Arts Research Center (DARC) 108 […]

This talk is located in a shattered, yet intelligible zone defined by being in life without wanting the world--a state traversing misery and detachment that, the talk claims, is well-known to historically structurally subordinated people (people of color, of non-normative sexuality, proletarianized laborers . . .). Reading with Claudia Rankine (Don’t Let Me Be Lonely), […]

Sex, or the Unbearable (Duke University Press, 2013) is a dialogue between Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, two leading theorists of sexuality, politics and culture. In juxtaposing sex and the unbearable they don't propose that sex is unbearable, but that it unleashes unbearable contradictions, which we nonetheless struggle to bear. Through interpretations of works of […]

Anthropocene: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet Video Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the most-loved writers of our time. Her work includes science fiction, novels, essays, and children's books. Donna Haraway the author of When Species Meet. James Clifford is the author of Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century. Tickets Required • […]

Join us at 1:30 pm on Friday, May 9th, for the 10th Annual Graduate Research Symposium. This event offers graduate students an opportunity to share their research with faculty, staff, friends, colleagues and the local community in the form of poster, oral, live or multimedia presentations. This year’s event will take place in the "Information […]

Spontaneous communication, both verbal and written, includes a wide variety of phenomena generally not found in prepared communication. These include restarted ideas, ums and uhs, words like you know and like, and prosodic phenomena such as uptalk. Spontaneous communication also includes other behaviors whose productions might vary across spontaneous and rehearsed settings, such as facial […]

During the 1980s, over 70% of American adults believed in the existence of abusive satanic cults. A typically low key and intelligent horror film from Ti West, perhaps the most critically lauded of America’s rising generation of horror movie auteurs, The House of the Devil is a moody and evocative spin on the satanic cult […]

Plato wrote four dialogues dramatizing the last days and death of Socrates: Euthyphro, The Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. “Dyng Angry” will focus on Socrates’s behavior and performance —and weirdness—in Phaedo. Harry Berger Jr. came to Cowell College and UCSC from Yale in 1965 when our campus opened. He was the first appointment in English Literature, […]

What are the proposed uses of biometrics in health care and the ethics and politics of body data in the digital age? As security and surveillance become the order of the day, biometric technologies have become a ubiquitous and naturalized part of most aspects of everyday life. Operating from the premise that “bodies don’t lie,” […]

Martin Holbraad Professor Social Anthropology, University College London and Co-Director of Cosmology, Religion, Ontology and Culture Research Group (CROC) Martin Holbraad's main field research is in Cuba, where he focuses on Afro-Cuban religions and revolutionary politics. Author of Truth in Motion: the Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination (Chicago, 2012). Holbraad currently directs a major comparative […]

This year marks the 10th anniversary of Gloria Anzaldúa's passing. In honor of the legacy left by Gloria Anzaldúa, The Chicano Latino Resource Center will be hosting a celebration of her life through a formal program with speakers, an art exhibit from local artists, an altar, refreshments, and an open mic. Gloria Anzaldúa was a […]

Mathematical knowledge has traditionally been taken to be absolutely objective, i.e. completely independent of contingent facts about the agents who discover the results. Today, this absolutistic view of mathematics has been challenged by a number of different theories. Most noticeably, social constructivists such as David Bloor and Donald MacKenzie have stress the influence social factors […]

Noted film and cultural studies critic Meaghan Morris will give a seminar on the theme of "parochial blockbusters". The seminar will center on a discussion of her essay, "Transnational Glamour, National Allure: Community, Change and Cliché in Baz Luhrmann’s Australia", which is available for downloading at http://ihr.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Morris-Transnational-Glamour-final.pdf, and which should be read before the seminar. […]

Pulse (2001) Would you like to meet a ghost? About as bleak a depiction of apocalypse as you’re ever likely to come across, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse is a J-Horror film in which short episodic vignettes slowly disclose a world where ghosts outnumber people and people have been reduced to black ashy stains on the wall. […]

Migrant Teachers investigates an overlooked trend in U.S. public schools today: the growing dependence on overseas trained teachers, as federal mandates require K-12 schools to employ qualified teachers or risk funding cuts. A narrowly technocratic view of teachers as subject specialists has led districts to look abroad, Lora Bartlett argues, resulting in transient teaching professionals […]

Helen, the Spartan queen whose abduction by Paris the prince of Troy ignited the ten-year-long Trojan War, may be regarded as the femme fatale par excellence. The prominence of Helen’s images in the Greek tradition is as notable as their complexity and ambiguity. Alongside commonplace condemnations of Helen as the cause of a devastating war, […]

Stories – narratives of the past – are necessary in all collectivities that seek to constitute and maintain themselves.  In modern times, competitive states have sought to mobilize all resources and bio-power in their territory by adopting singular, linear histories of the state, nation and civilization.  But, ironically, just as these singular stories were becoming […]

All graduate students are welcome but an RSVP is required by May 19th. Contact ihr@ucsc.edu to RSVP and request seminar readings. Despina Kakoudaki’s work focuses on literature, film, visual and cultural studies, and the history of technology. Her forthcoming book, Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural Work of Artificial People, traces our […]

The Fifteenth Annual Literature Undergraduate Colloquium 9:00-9:10 AM - Opening Remarks Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Director, Literature Undergraduate Program 9:10-10:15 AM - Panel One: Borderlands: Creative Writers Read Moderator, Micah Perks James Williams: Impertinent Youth Marine Ashnalikyan: "In the Living Room" and other Poems Narine Ashnalikyan: "After Dinner" and other Poems Stephen Richter: A Southern Tradition […]

You never want to do anything interesting anymore. If you’ve ever found yourself wondering what a mumblecore slasher film might be like, then look no further than You’re Next. Directed by Adam wingard (who also helmed 2010’s elliptically grim A Horrible Way to Die and this year’s John-Carpenter-meets-The-Terminator homage The Guest) and featuring a number […]

Gopal Balakrishan Professor, History of Consciousness, UCSC Offering an intellectual history of the phases of Marx's thought from his dissertation on Greek philosophy to The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Gopal Balakrishnan seeks to explain why the emergent syntheses of this early Marx broke down in the aftermath of the failures of the revolutions of […]