Bookshop welcomes prize-winning historian and UC Santa Cruz professor Gregory O'Malley for a discussion about his new book The Escapes of David George: An Odyssey of Slavery, Freedom, and the American Revolution—the dramatic story of a Black man's relentless search for freedom in Revolutionary America. This book tells the story of David George who in […]

Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes George Saunders, recipient of the 2025 National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, for a discussion about his wise, playful, electric novel Vigil, which takes place at the bedside of an oil company CEO in the twilight hours of his life as he is ferried from this world […]

This talk identifies a critical feature of late populism: popularism. Traditional populism operates through articulation: actively constructing “the people” as a political category by linking heterogeneous demands together against an elite or other.  Popularism, alternatively, functions through refraction: it seeks maximum resonance with pre-existing popular attitudes and treats “the people” as an already-coherent homogenous group, […]

The Center for Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions (SEACoast) invites you to join them for their winter Slow Seminar, "A History of Families: Bosses, Bullies, and Dictators in the Modern Philippines Professor Steve McKay (Sociology) will facilitate our conversation drawing on a selection of classic and contemporary scholarship on regional politics in the Philippines. With the […]

Craft Between Worlds Carlo Acevedo is a Colombian poet who is the author of Day's Fortune / Fortuna del día, a bilingual collection. His work won the 2018 Arcipreste de Hita prize. Born in Barranquilla, Colombia in 1988, Acevedo holds a master's degree in Creative Writing in Spanish from the University of Iowa and is […]

Saturday Shakespeare in Santa Cruz Presents Henry IV, Part 1 by William Shakespeare Aptos Library on January 10, 17, 24, 31 & February 7, 2025 at 10:15 a.m. in the Aptos Library Betty Leonard Community Room (in person or join by Zoom). The first hour will be a conversation with the scheduled guest speaker followed by a […]

Join the Center for the Middle East and North Africa (CMENA) for a panel discussion that situates Islamophobia in a global context as a form of discrimination that shapes politics and culture in Europe, North Africa, and the United States. While it is largely acknowledged that the concept of Islamophobia refers to the racial discrimination […]

This talk focuses on the development of a population science in the decade that preceded the Ferdinand Marcos regime in the Philippines and throughout the Marcos dictatorship. The regime's management of reproductive health, in particular, illustrates the construction of new technologies of measurement and containment. The talk focuses on readings of "family planning" archives that […]

Craft Between Worlds Rosie Stockton is a poet and scholar, author of the collections Permanent Volta (Nightboat Books, 2021) and Fuel (Nightboat Books, 2025). In Fuel, Stockton explores how capitalist extraction seeps into intimate life, traversing oil fields, domestic spaces, and painful retractions of love. Stockton is an organizer with the California Coalition for Women […]

What is the state of sustainable food now, what are the forces affecting food choice, and what can we do about it? Join us for this year’s Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture featuring Marion Nestle — Mark Bittman's "guiding light" on nutrition and Alice Waters' "tireless warrior for public health” — for a bracing look […]

In the spring of 1975, a 1,500-year-old Indigenous cemetery on Lee Road in Watsonville, California, was threatened by a development project. Members of the local Native American community with ties to this sacred site occupied the construction site in protest of the development. The local Sheriff called upon the newly formed well-armed County SWAT force, […]

Craft Between Worlds Nathalie Khankan is a poet and scholar, author of quiet orient riot (Omnidawn). The collection won Omnidawn's 2019 1st/2nd Book Prize and received the 2021 California Book Award in Poetry. Fady Joudah calls the book “a flowering wound,” posing subversive questions about the body, motherhood, and settler colonialism while insisting on tenderness. […]

It is a common (aspirational) refrain that climate change “changes everything,” and equally common to note that climate-related transitions seem to be changing very little at all. What climate-related changes are happening now? And how might we grasp emergent trajectories while we’re in the midst of these transitions? With a substantive focus on the city-hinterland […]

Craft Between Worlds James Janko is an award-winning author of four novels, including Buffalo Boy and Geronimo, The Clubhouse Thief, What We Don't Talk About, and The Wire-Walker. His work is deeply informed by his experience as a combat medic in the Vietnam War, often probing the intertwined violences of war and environmental destruction. Janko […]

Bookshop Santa Cruz Presents Kitchen Counterculture: A Conversation About Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead, and the Food that Fueled a Revolution," featuring award-winning food writer Gabi Moskowitz and journalist, teacher, and author Jim Newton. This event is cosponsored by the UC Santa Cruz The Humanities Division, The Humanities Institute, and the UCSC Special Collections & […]