Elizabeth Marcus is a Mellon Fellow in the Scholars in the Humanities program for 2017-2019. She received her BA from the University of Oxford in Modern History and French, and completed her PhD in French and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in 2017. Her research and teaching focus on the francophone and Arab worlds, with a […]

At different stages of the criminal justice system, from policing, bail hearings, and sentencing, computerized algorithms are replacing human decision-making in determining where to police, who to arrest, who goes to jail, and who goes free. This talk will introduce people to how these algorithms work, the under-appreciated moral problems with their implementation, and how […]

The rise of nativist or nationalist movements in many countries and the closing of borders to migrants seeking refuge from persecution, war, and violence calls into question the world historical context of migration, borders, and political belonging. This conference queries citizenship and borders across time and region to make sense of their implications for citizens, […]

Sandy Chung, UC Santa Cruz, is committed to the idea that lesser-studied languages have as much to contribute to syntactic theory as do languages like English, French, and Italian. These interests have shaped her research on syntactic theory and Austronesian languages. Chung began doing fieldwork on Maori, Tongan, and Samoan (all languages of the South […]

An informal conversation and open Q & A with Barry Lam about his work as a public scholar, launching a podcast, and his advice about getting started in public scholarship.

  This talk explores the emergence of modern offshore tax havens as a way to reopen the history of the decades ca. 1920s-1980s. During these decades an archipelago of distinct legal spaces appeared in a world otherwise increasingly dominated by more sizable nation-states. Tax havens were particularly important among these spaces, reaching from the Channel […]

  Discourses of urban knowledge professionals (architects, PR professionals, etc.) on the Arab Gulf city have framed this city as an “laboratory,” a “sci-fi” space, and generally have disconnected the space from its social and historical contexts. In this paper I argue that a Marxist or class struggle perspective can best highlight how such discourses […]

Laura McPherson, is an Assistant Professor in the Linguistics program at Dartmouth College. McPherson finished her Ph.D. at UCLA in 2014, with the dissertation Replacive grammatical tone in the Dogon languages. Her primary research interests lie in phonology, morphology, and fieldwork/language documentation. She published her first reference grammar, A Grammar of Tommo So, in 2013 based […]

Come celebrate the announcement of the winners of this year's Graduate Research Symposium. Live music, light refreshments. Free and open to the public

11:30am-12:50pm Annual award luncheon for five distinguished graduate student alumni, one from each academic division. This year's luncheon will include a panel discussion with the five distinguished graduate student alumni honorees about their career trajectories after receiving their graduate-level degree from UCSC to their current positions of distinction, for the benefit of audience members of current […]

This event will review the bold and radical educational vision of UC Santa Cruz since its inception, while introducing alumni to the innovative 21st-century approaches we are taking to ensure all students can thrive at UC Santa Cruz and leave with the tools to make change in society. We will emphasize the university's history of […]

  Sailing vessels or dhows have long connected different parts of the western Indian Ocean, transporting goods, and people across South Asia, the Middle East and East Africa. These dhows now function as an economy of arbitrage, servicing minor ports in times of conflict. This talk focuses on the contemporary dhow trade, centered in port […]

Carl Deppe was a charismatic young man and a promising student. In 1985 he was a sophomore at UCSC, studying Greek and ancient philosophy. While returning from a rock concert, he was killed by a drunk driver on Highway 17. His parents, George and Patricia Deppe, along with his friends, established this annual lecture series […]