Lit Quake
2019-10-15 19:00 - 21:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Funny & Peculiar: Santa Cruz Writers on Keeping it Weird
It’s 2019 and it seems like things couldn’t get any stranger. What better time to mine the oddities of life with noted writers Elizabeth McKenzie, Micah Perks, Peggy Townsend, Liza Monroy and Wallace Baine? Moderated by Dan White and Amy Ettinger. This event is co-presented by Bookshop Santa Cruz.
In honor of Litquake’s 20th anniversary in 2019, the festival is holding 20 events in 20 cities nationwide – including this Santa Cruz event! Read more about Litquake, celebrating it’s 20th Anniversary, here.
About the writers:
Elizabeth McKenzie’s novel The Portable Veblen was longlisted for the National Book Award for fiction and received the California Book Award for fiction. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and others.
Micah Perks is the author of four books, most recently a book of linked short stories, True Love and Other Dreams of Miraculous Escape and the novel What Becomes Us, winner of an Independent Publisher’s Book Award and named one of the Top Ten Books about the Apocalypse by The Guardian. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Epoch, Zyzzyva, Tin House, and The Rumpus, amongst many journals and anthologies. She has won an NEA, five Pushcart Prize nominations, residencies at MacDowell and Blue Mountain Center, and the New Guard Machigonne 2014 Fiction Prize. She received her BA and MFA from Cornell University and now lives with her family in Santa Cruz where she co-directs the creative writing program at UCSC.
Wallace Baine is an award-winning journalist and arts writer who regularly contributes to Santa Cruz Good Times, Metro Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Chronicle. His work has been syndicated in newspapers nationwide and his fiction has appeared in the Catamaran Literary Reader, the Chicago Quarterly Review, and as part of the Santa Cruz Noir collection of short stories. His most recent book is a history of Bookshop Santa Cruz called A Light in the Midst of Darkness.
Peggy Townsend is an award-winning newspaper journalist and author of the bestselling 2018 mystery novel, See Her Run and its follow-up, The Thin Edge, both published by Thomas & Mercer. As a reporter, she has covered serial killers, murder trials and once chased an escaped murderer through a graveyard at midnight. When she isn’t outdoors, she’s either writing magazine profiles for UC Santa Cruz or working on her third novel. She divides her time between Santa Cruz and Lake Tahoe.
Liza Monroy is the author of three books: the novel Mexican High, the memoir The Marriage Act: The Risk I Took To Keep My Best Friend in America and What It Taught Us About Love, and the essay collection Seeing As Your Shoes Are Soon To Be On Fire. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, the LA Times, The Washington Post, O, Marie Claire, Jezebel, Catamaran, and other publications. One of her columns for the New York Times‘ “Modern Love” will appear in this fall’s anthology of the “most popular and unforgettable essays” of the series. She teaches writing at UC Santa Cruz and lives downtown with her husband, two tiny humans, a pug and unruly potbellied pig Señor Bacon. Currently, she is writing her second novel, a dark comedy of technology and obsession.

Cultural Studies Colloquium: Sara Mameni
2019-10-16 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Sara Mameni “On the Terracene”
This talk considers the Anthropocene from the perspective of artists working within areas devastated by the War on Terror. While the popularization of the concept of the Anthropocene dates to the early 2000s–the very moment of the declaration of the War on Terror–the two modes of imagining the geopolitics of the present have yet to be considered together. Mameni coins the term “Terracene” as an entry point into considering the condition of the planet under terror.
If you have trouble viewing above images, you may view this album directly on Flickr.

Sara Mameni is the director of Aesthetics and Politics program and faculty in the school of Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts. She received her PhD in Art History from University of California San Diego in 2015 and was a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz in 2016/2017. Her specialization is contemporary art in the Arab/Muslim world with a focus on queer of color theory. Her current research explores biopolitics, racial discourse in the Anthropocene, post-humanist aesthetics and the geo-ecological age of petroleum.
Free and open to the public.
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.

Imagining Otherwise: Resisting and Queering Racial and Gender Violence
2019-10-17 15:15 - 17:00 | Humanities 2, Room 259
A Philosophy and MAP (Minorities and Philosophy) sponsored Colloquium. Co-sponsored by the Center for Public Philosophy and the Humanities Institute
This talk will explore how gender violence intersects with racist and transphobic violence and how those intersections are erased or distorted in public discourse. Professor Medina will examine the communicative dysfunctions that exist around gender and racial violence and how sexist, transphobic, and racist imaginaries create vulnerabilities that remain unaddressed. He will discuss how we can exercise the imagination in resistant ways and how we can resist those communicative dysfunctions and oppressive imaginaries by imagining otherwise. He will discuss some specific cases of gender and racial violence and the ways in which they were distorted in the media coverage, showing how critically engaged publics can resist those distortions and the forms of activism that we can engage in to fight gender and racial violence.
Professor José Medina is theWalter Dill Scott Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University

PhD+ Workshop – Research Development: Grants and Fellowships
2019-10-18 11:00 - 12:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Learn about locating fellowship opportunities, framing your research for different funding organizations, and acquiring grants with Nathaniel Deutsch, Irena Polić, Suraiya Jetha (The Humanities Institute) and Kelly Anne Brown (Associate Director at University of California Humanities Research Institute). We’ll share advice about different types of awards and strategies for making your proposal stand out. Bring your ideas and questions for an important conversation on securing funding for Humanities research.

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.
Lunch will be served.
Please RSVP below:

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Don Rothman Endowed Award in First-Year Writing
2019-10-18 14:00 - 15:30 | Cowell Provost House, Cowell Provost House, Cowell Service Rd‎ University of California Santa Cruz, Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Please join the Writing Program in celebrating UC Santa Cruz’s tenth annual Don Rothman Endowed Award in First-Year Writing ceremony on Friday, October 18 from 2:00-3:30pm in Cowell Provost House. Chancellor Larive, UCSC VPDUE Richard Hughey, Writing Program Chair Tonya Ritola, and Writing Program faculty members will be attending the ceremony along with this year’s four winners and their families.

We hope to see you at the event as we honor student writing and the legacy of Don Rothman.

Discussion with Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
2019-10-18 15:00 - 17:00 | Humanities 1, Room 620, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join us to discuss excerpts from author Marcelo Hernandez Castillo. Please email Micah Perks at (meperks@ucsc.edu) for the readings and to RSVP for the discussion.
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is a poet, essayist, translator, and immigration advocate. He is the author of Cenzontle (BOA editions, 2018), chosen by Brenda Shaughnessy as the winner of the 2017 A. Poulin Jr. prize and winner of the 2018 Northern California Book Award. Cenzontle maps a parallel between the landscape of the border and the landscape of sexuality through surreal and deeply imagistic poems. Castillo’s ﬁrst chapbook, Dulce (Northwestern University Press, 2018), was chosen by Chris Abani, Ed Roberson, and Matthew Shenoda as the winner of the Drinking Gourd Poetry Prize. His memoir, Children of the Land is forthcoming from Harper Collins in 2020 and explores the ideas of separation from deportation, trauma, and mobility between borders.

The Original Thinkers Series: A Conversation About Oliver Sacks
2019-10-21 19:00 - 21:00 | Music Center Recital Hall
Please note a recent change to our lineup: Peabody Award-wining journalist and producer Nikki Silva (Porter, ’73) and Cowell College Provost Alan Christy will engage Ren Weschler in conversation about Oliver Sacks. Robert Krulwich is unable to join us this evening. Please enjoy this recent Kitchen Sisters episode of The Keepers featuring Ren Weschler.
And How Are You, Dr. Sacks? is a biographical memoir about Oliver Sacks written by Ren Weschler (Cowell ’74). It is the definitive portrait of Sacks as our preeminent romantic scientist, a self-described “clinical ontologist” whose entire practice revolved around the single fundamental question he effectively asked each of his patients: How are you? A question which Ren, with this book, turns back on the good doctor himself.
Monday, October 21, 7:00–9:00 p.m.
Music Center Recital Hall, UC Santa Cruz

Questions?
Contact the Special Events Office at specialevents@ucsc.edu or (831) 459-5003.
SPEAKERS

Lawrence (Ren) Weschler
A graduate of Cowell College (1974), Ren Weschler writes in LitHub about his earliest awareness of Sacks. Ren was a staff writer for more than 20 years (1981–2002) at The New Yorker. The director emeritus of the NY Institute for the Humanities at NYU, Ren is also the author of more than 20 books, including Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder and Vermeer in Bosnia.

Cultural Studies Colloquium: Elizabeth Marcus
2019-10-23 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
“When is a Boycott a Boycott? Lebanon, Palestine and Hollywood, and the Arrest of Ziad Doueiri”
This paper looks at the arrest and court case of Lebanese film director, Ziad Doueiri. Doueiri broke the 1955 Boycott Law by shooting a film in Israel, using Israeli and Palestinian actors. The film was then banned across the all the countries of the Arab League. Marcus argues that his case compelled the law to define the terms around which a cultural object should be subject to a boycott, and she investigates the intersections between old laws, new global movements, and state sovereignty.
If you have trouble viewing above images, you may view this album directly on Flickr.

Elizabeth Marcus is a Mellon Fellow in the Scholars in the Humanities program at Stanford University and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Leeds. 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. Elizabeth has taught in the Core Curriculum at Columbia University and at MIT as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Global Studies and Languages Department. Her research focuses on the literatures as well as the intellectual and cultural history of the Francophone and Arab world with a particular interest in the relationship between language and cultural politics, intellectual networks, and migration in the afterlife of the French Empire. Her current manuscript, Difference and Dissidence: Cultural Politics and the End of Empire in Lebanon, 1943-1975, uncovers the response of local actors to the unique period of transition Lebanon at the end of the French mandate to the beginning of the civil war in 1975. During her time as a British Academy Fellow, she will start her second project, Paris and the Global University: International Students and Cultural Internationalism at the Cité Universitaire, 1945-1975, which looks at how the Cité internationale Universitaire, a residential campus in the Parisian outskirts, became a crucible of left and right-wing transnational political and cultural activism during the Trente Glorieuses (1945-1975).
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.

Riyaaz Qawwali Performance - Sufi Music Ensemble
2019-10-25 19:30 - 21:30 | Music Center Recital Hall
Qawwali is a musical tradition from present-day India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, dating back 700 years. The group Riyaaz Qawwali brings 13th-century Sufi music to life by overcoming cultural and linguistic barriers, translating lyrics to unravel the cultural heritage of South Asian devotional music. Trained in Eastern and Western classical music, the members have been professionally performing qawwali for the past twelve years.
Riyaaz Qawwali represents the diversity and plurality of South Asia: the ensemble’s musicians, who are settled in the United States, hail from India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh and represent multiple religious and spiritual backgrounds. Click here to learn more about the ensemble.

$10 – General Admission
$4 – UCSC Students with ID
Day-of-event ticket window opens at 6:30PM
Doors open at 7:00PM
Parking permit: $5 (cash or credit via attendant in Arts Lot 126)

Presented by the Kamil and Talat Hasan Chair in Classical Indian Music, the Ali Akbar Khan Endowment for Indian Classical Music, and the UC Santa Cruz Music Department. Co-sponsored by the Center for South Asian Studies and The Humanities Institute.

CANCELLED - Glenn Tiffert: Censorship, Digitalization and the Fragility of Our Knowledge Base - Lessons from China
2019-10-28 15:00 - 17:00 | Cowell Provost House, Cowell Provost House, Cowell Service Rd‎ University of California Santa Cruz, Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Technological and economic forces are radically restructuring our ecosystem of knowledge, and opening our information space increasingly to forms of digital disruption and manipulation that are scalable, difficult to detect, and corrosive of the trust upon which vigorous scholarship and liberal democratic practice depend. Using an illustrative case from the people’s republic of china, this talk shows how a determined actor can exploit those vulnerabilities to tamper dynamically with the historical record. It furthermore demonstrates that machine learning models can now accurately reproduce the choices made by human censors, and warns that we are on the cusp of a new, algorithmic paradigm of information control and censorship that poses an existential threat to the foundations of all empirically-grounded disciplines. At a time of ascendant illiberalism around the world, robust, collective safeguards are urgently required to defend the integrity of our source base, and the knowledge we derive from it.
Glenn Tiffert is a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Tiffert earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley. From 2015-2017, he was the Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow in Residence at the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he also held faculty appointments in the History Department and Asian Languages & Cultures Department, and taught undergraduate and graduate courses on modern China. He has taught at Berkeley, Harvard, and UCLA, and currently serves on the Projects and Proposals Committee of the American Society for Legal History.

For further information, contact Minghui Hu: mhu@ucsc.edu

Halloween Lecture "The Vampire in Love" (with costume contest)
2019-10-28 18:15 - 20:00 | Forager, San Jose, 420 S 1st St, San Jose, CA, 95172, United States
Brought to you by the UCSC Prof and a Pint Lecture Series
Oh yeah, there will be a costume contest! And there will be prizes! If you want to compete please gather on the stage at 6:15pm. The lecture will start at 6:30pm as usual.
From the beginning of the earliest English-language vampire narrative in the early nineteenth century, the vampire has been a figure of both fear and desire, often represented through the vampire’s longings and the range of social responses they inspire. This talk considers several different examples of “the vampire in love” in order to explore what the vampire might tell us about our most pressing social, cultural, and political concerns across the twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries.
Kimberly Lau is Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz where she teaches courses on contemporary fiction, vampire narratives, fairy tales, and digital culture in relation to feminist and critical race theories. She has published a number of books and articles on a range of topics, including most recently “Erotic Infidelities: Love and Enchantment in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber” (2015).

Jasmin Young: She Stood There by Him with a Gun - Mabel Williams and the Philosophy of Armed Resistance
2019-10-29 13:00 - 14:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Stevenson Fall Lecture Presented by Jasmin Young:
Mabel Williams practiced armed resistance when white vigilante violence and police repression threatened the lives of activists. This talk interrogates the gendering of armed resistance and reveals the complex set of struggles between Black men and women about Black self-defense.
Jasmin A. Young is a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of African American Studies. She is currently developing her manuscript, Black Women with Guns: Armed Resistance in the Black Freedom Struggle. This work rethinks the history of the Black Freedom Movement by placing Black women’s armed activity at the center of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. The project explores the extensive practice and advocacy of armed resistance by Black women.
Presented by Stevenson College in collaboration with UCSC History Department, CRES, The Humanities Institute, and Feminist Studies departments.

CANCELLED - Elizabeth Strout: Olive, Again
2019-10-29 19:00 - 21:00 | DNA Comedy Lab, 155 S. River St., Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Due to disruptions and concerns about ongoing wildfire and power disruptions across California, Elizabeth Strout’s entire California tour has been cancelled/postponed to a future date. This means our event with Elizabeth Strout on October 29th has been CANCELLED.
If you purchased a ticket to this event, Bookshop Santa Cruz will be in touch with you via email within the next day. Please e-mail info@bookshopsantacruz.com with any questions in the meantime. Thank you.
Cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, Bookshop Santa Cruz presents a very special evening when #1 New York Times bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout. Join us to discuss her highly anticipated new novel, Olive, Again, in which she continues the life of her beloved character Olive Kitteridge. Strout will be in-conversation with writer Elizabeth McKenzie at this ticketed event, also cosponsored by KAZU, which will take place at DNA’s Comedy Lab.
This great night out, perfect for book groups and literature lovers, will also feature a book signing by Elizabeth Strout, raffle prizes and giveaways, plus refreshments (including wine and beer) available for purchase. Literary Soiree attendees will have a chance to win great prizes, including advanced reading copies of fall’s buzz books, Elizabeth Strout’s paperback books, tickets to Bookshop Santa Cruz’s upcoming event with Erin Morgenstern of The Night Circus fame, and more. Each attendee will leave with great book recommendations after they stop by curated book stations in the lobby hosted by Bookshop Santa Cruz Book Group Ambassadors such as “The 5 Best Books My Book Club Have Ever Read” or “Surviving 2020: Books That Will Make You Believe in Humanity.”
Tickets are $32 and include entry for one person to the soiree and one copy of Olive, Again.

Cultural Studies Colloquium: Aishwary Kumar
2019-10-30 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
“What is Political Cruelty? An Archeology of the Liberalism of Fear”
Under what conditions might fear become a saturating phenomenon of liberal democracy and extreme violence cease to be even a moral crime? Is this silent war on the body and idea of the citizen on the constitutional theorist and moral philosopher B. R. Ambedkar’s mind when, in his revolutionary classic Annihilation of Caste (1936), he coins the phrase “armed neutrality?” In this lecture, building on a new constellation of thinkers in political theory, Kumar develops the fundamental insight that Ambedkar, Hannah Arendt, and Judith Shklar, in conceptually different ways and with radically different moral psychological consequences, offer on today’s insoluble democratic impasse: that the most catastrophic effect of social inequality is not merely a betrayal of our constitutional compact to justice but a weaponization of a new form of political cruelty. What is this new cruelty? And what kind of constitutional courage– a re-articulation of dignity– might today be necessary to retrieve our freedom?
If you have trouble viewing above images, you may view this album directly on Flickr.

Aishwary Kumar is an intellectual historian and political theorist with interests in South Asian, European, and American political thought. His work spans a wide spectrum of issues in moral and political philosophy, constitutional theory and political justice, war and ethics, empire and liberalism, and the history of democratic thought and rights. Kumar’s first book, Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy (Stanford, 2015; Delhi, 2019), was listed by The Indian Express among the fifteen most important works on politics, morality, and law to be published anywhere that year. His essays have appeared, among other places, in Modern Intellectual History, Contemporary South Asia, Social History, Indian Economic and Social History Review, and Public Culture. He has also been featured on the radio shows Entitled Opinions and Philosophy Talk. Kumar is currently working on two related book-length studies. The first, titled “The Sovereign Void: Ambedkar’s Critique of Violence,” examines the genealogies of political freedom and war in Southern and Atlantic political thought, and their relation to notions of “force” across epistemological, theological, and secular traditions. The second, titled “The Gravity of Truth: Disenchantment, Disappointment, Democracy,” takes the Obama Presidency as its starting point to explore the place of moral and political judgment in the global constitutional imagination.
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.

Against Orthodoxies: Working with Hayden White
2019-11-01 - 2019-11-02 | Cultural Center at Merrill, Merrill Cultural Center, UC Santa Cruz, Merrill College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Event Photos by Jessica Guild:
If you have trouble viewing above images, you may view this album directly on Flickr.

On Friday and Saturday, November 1 and 2, 2019, UC Santa Cruz will hold a conference to honor the late Hayden White.
The event is conceived as an invitation to extend Hayden White’s thinking in new directions. Inspired by his rigorous, daring, iconoclastic spirit, this will be a time for experiment and dialogue. Confirmed participants are innovative scholars from a wide variety of disciplines.
Program timeline – Full Schedule Here

Pre-Conference Gathering: November 1st @ 10:30am, Hayden White Archive Exhibition at McHenry Library
Day 1: November 1st @ 1pm-5:30pm in the Merrill College Cultural Center, dinner to follow
Day 2: November 2nd @ 9am-5:30pm in the Merrill College Cultural Center, reception to follow

Keynote speakers:
Judith Butler (UC Berkeley)
Carol Mavor (University of Manchester)
Susan Stewart (Princeton University)
Participants:

Karyn Ball (University of Alberta)
Amy Elias (University of Tennessee)
Amir Eshel (Stanford)
Robert Harrison (Stanford)
Ethan Kleinberg (Wesleyan)
Paul Kottman (New School for Social Research)
María Inés la Greca (Universidad de Buenos Aires)
David Palumbo-Liu (Stanford)
Todd Presner (UC Los Angeles)
Jose Rabasa (UC Berkeley)
Veronica Tozzi (Universidad de Buenos Aires)

Organizing committee:
Paul Roth, Professor of Philosophy, UCSC
James Clifford, Professor Emeritus, History of Consciousness, UCSC
Karen Bassi, Professor of Literature and Classics, UCSC
Sponsored by:
The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz. With support from UCSC’s Cowell College, Stanford University’s Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages, and the Neufeld-Levin Chair of Holocaust Studies.

CANCELLED - Roumyana Pancheva: Linguistics Colloquia- Temporal Interpretation Without Tense
2019-11-01 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Languages without overt tense morphemes have typically been analyzed as having semantic tense, either contributed by a phonologically covert lexical item or supplied by a post-syntactic semantic rule. From a neo-Reichenbachian perspective, having semantic tense means having a linguistic device (a lexical item or a rule) dedicated to invoking a reference time in relation to the local evaluation time. The two types of tense accounts have also been offered for the closely related languages Mbya Guaraní and Paraguayan Guaraní (Tonhauser 2011a,b; Thomas 2014). We propose a truly tenseless account of Paraguayan Guaraní. A pronoun at the left edge of the clause, denoting the local evaluation time, directly binds the time variable of viewpoint aspect. In a matrix clause the evaluation time is speech time by default, resulting in present temporal reference, and with the help of a prospective morpheme, in future reference. The evaluation time may shift, as happens in restricted contexts in languages with tense (e.g., the historical present), but here more freely. The mechanism of evaluation time shift underlies past interpretation. The main consequence of this analysis is that tense is not a semantic universal.
Roumyana Pancheva is a professor of Linguistics and Slavic Languages and Literatures at USC, her main areas of research being syntax and semantics. Her research employs formal modeling, cross-linguistic comparison from a synchronic and diachronic perspective, and experimentation.

For more information visit: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/colloquia/index.html

Katharyne Mitchell: Cultural Studies Colloquium - Church Sanctuary and the Spatial Politics of the Sacred
2019-11-06 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Church sanctuary is not legal in any state in Europe, but the cultural and religious sense of church space as sacred, and the collective memory of this practice as an alternative form of justice, still has a powerful legacy. In citing past sanctuary ideals and practices, from medieval asylum law to recent sanctuary movements on behalf of refugees, faith-based actors draw on these memories to reactivate older traditions of insurgent citizenship. In this talk, Mitchell explores the critical role of space, collective memory and non-secular webs of belief in these current challenges to orthodox assumptions of state sovereignty.
If you have trouble viewing above images, you may view this album directly on Flickr.

Katharyne Mitchell is Dean of the Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Current research explores various aspects of migration and religion. Recent books include Making Workers: Radical Geographies of Education (Pluto Press, 2018), and the co-edited Handbook on Critical Geographies of Migration (Edward Elgar, 2019). Mitchell is the author of over 100 articles and book chapters and the recipient of grants from the MacArthur Foundation, Spencer Foundation, and National Science Foundation. The research for this talk was made possible by a Guggenheim Fellowship.

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.

Morton Marcus Poetry Reading: Gary Soto
2019-11-07 19:00 | Music Center Recital Hall
Event Photos by Crystal Birns:
If you have trouble viewing above images, you may view this album directly on Flickr.
Gary Soto has published more than forty books for children, young adults and adults, including Too Many Tamales, Chato’s Kitchen, Baseball in April, Buried Onions and The Elements of San Joaquin. He is the author of In and Out of Shadows, a musical about undocumented youth and, most recently, The Afterlife, a one-act play about teen murder and teen suicide.
Event Program:
Poet Gary Young, will host the program, and the evening will include an announcement of the winner of the Morton Marcus Poetry Contest (recipient receives a $1,000 prize). The reading will conclude with a book signing and reception. RSVP appreciated – seating is first come, first served.

Doors open at 6:30pm
Program begins at 7:00pm
About Morton Marcus:
The Annual Morton Marcus Poetry Reading honors poet, teacher, and film critic Morton Marcus (1936–2009). Marcus, a nationally acclaimed poet, called Santa Cruz his home for more than fifty years. This annual poetry series continues Mort’s tradition of bringing acclaimed poets to Santa Cruz County, continues to acknowledge the significant role poetry has played in our community’s history, and works to maintain poetry’s influence in our county’s culture. For more information visit www.mortonmarcus.com. You can also view the Morton Marcus Archive in Special Collections at UCSC.
This community event is presented by the The Humanities Institute and co-sponsored by:
Bookshop Santa Cruz
Cabrillo College English Department
Cowell College
Living Writers Series
Ow Family Properties
Poetry Santa Cruz
Porter Hitchcock Modern Poetry Fund
Porter College
Santa Cruz Writes
Special Collections & Archives
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 us at thi@ucsc.edu or call 831-459-1274 by November 4th, 2019.

A Literary Masquerade with Erin Morgenstern
2019-11-12 19:00 - 21:00 | DNA Comedy Lab, 155 S. River St., Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
You are cordially invited to Bookshop Santa Cruz’s first-ever Literary Masquerade, celebrating the release of Erin Morgenstern’s highly anticipated new novel, The Starless Sea. Co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
From Erin Morgenstern, the New York Times bestselling author of The Night Circus, a timeless love story set in a secret underground world—a place of pirates, painters, lovers, liars, and ships that sail upon a starless sea.
Join us on Tuesday, November 12th at 6:00 for a literary masquerade, where you and all who attend are invited to disguise yourself as your favorite literary character or figure to enter the world of The Starless Sea. Dancing and activities plucked from Erin Morgenstern’s magical world will precede a 7:00 talk with Erin Morgenstern, followed by a book signing. Erin Morgenstern will be in conversation with Michael Chemers, Professor of Dramatic Literature in the Department of Theater Arts at UC Santa Cruz. This event will take place at DNA’s Comedy Lab (155 S River St., Santa Cruz, CA). Themed refreshments, including beer and wine, will be available to purchase from DNA’s Comedy Lab.
Tickets to this enchanting evening are $37, and include one copy of The Starless Sea, an unassigned seat for Erin Morgenstern’s talk, a number for the signing line, and access to all event activities. Literary costumes encouraged.

Masquerade begins at 6:00
Book talk begins at 7:00
ERIN MORGENSTERN is the author of The Night Circus, a number-one national best seller that has been sold around the world and translated into thirty-seven languages. She has a degree in theater from Smith College and lives in Massachusetts.
“Morgenstern’s new fantasy epic is a puzzlebox of a book, full of meta-narratives and small folkloric tales that will delight readers… Morgenstern uses poetic, honey-like prose to tell a story that plays with the very concept of what we expect and want from our stories… She trusts her readers to follow along and speculate, wonder and make leaps themselves as she dives into tales of pirates, book burnings, and men lost in time, giving the book a mythic quality that will stick with readers long after they put it down.”
⁠—Booklist (starred)
“This love letter to bibliophiles is dreamlike and uncanny, grounded in deeply felt emotion, and absolutely thrilling.”
⁠—Publishers Weekly (starred)

LOCATION CHANGE David Biggs: Archipelagic Vietnam - Rethinking Nationalism From the Shoreline
2019-11-13 12:00 - 13:30 | CA, United States
Please RSVP for the Cultural Studies Colloquium location
Until recent conflicts over islands in the South China Sea, Vietnam’s history was described in terrestrial terms. Vietnam’s nationalist struggles, we were told, involved epic battles with American and other troops in highland jungles and city streets; and the nation’s territorial expansion from Hanoi happened in two directions: southward and uphill. The sea, as so many history books taught, was a nothing space where foreign invasions began. Vietnam’s geo-body was tied to a Westphalian notion of sovereignty reified in so many books and maps. Real sovereignty in Vietnam, however, was and still is relational. Topologies of trade, commerce, migration and communication have for centuries defined where “Vietnam” begins and so many other cultures and ecologies taper off. Rather than assume a closed model, this talk reimagines Vietnam as an archipelago, a more permeable nation-system of nodes linked by flows of energy, food, people and technology moving from the sea to the mountains and spaces beyond. Drawing from his recently published book, Footprints of War: Militarized Landscapes in Vietnam (Washington, 2018), environmental historian David Biggs conducts an archipelagic history tour along Vietnam’s central coast with stops in the ancient, early modern, colonial and post-colonial past.
David Biggs is a Professor of History at the University of California, Riverside, specializing in twentieth century environmental history with an area focus on Vietnam and Southeast Asia. His first book, Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature, won the 2011 George Perkins Marsh Prize in Environmental History; and his essays have appeared in such venues as the Journal of Asian Studies, Technology and Culture and the New York Times. He is currently working on a trans-Pacific history of the mid-twentieth century.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions

LOCATION CHANGE Dean Spade: Solidarity Not Charity - Mutual Aid for Mobilization and Survival
2019-11-13 15:00 - 17:00 | Resource Center for Non Violence
Join the Feminist Studies department as they present their second FMST Colloquium for the 2019 Fall quarter!
Widespread, effective social movements usually include mutual aid strategies that directly address conditions faced by targeted people, such as providing housing, food, healthcare and transportation. Examples include the Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast Program, the Young Lords’ hijacking of New York’s tuberculosis testing mobile unit to high-risk, medically neglected neighborhoods, and feminist organizing to provide underground abortions in the 1970s. This talk will look at why mutual aid is an important part of building participatory movements, and how it intentionally departs from charity frameworks.
Dean Spade is a lawyer, writer, trans activist, and an Associate Professor at Seattle University School of Law, where he teaches Administrative Law, Poverty Law, Gender and Law, Policing and Imprisonment, and Law and Social Movements.

Mikael Wolfe: Extreme Weather and the Mexican Revolution - Historical Reality and Perception
2019-11-14 15:00 - 16:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Speaker, Mikael Wolfe, presents recently published research that combines environmental history and historical climatology to examine the relationship between extreme weather events, especially drought and frost, and the origins of the Mexican Revolution. His findings suggest that inaccurate and misleading weather reporting—what he calls “politico-environmental” coverage—by a variety of newspapers throughout the country was as important as actual climatic variability in exacerbating the economic and political crises that culminated in the 1910-11 armed insurrection. The research not only changes our understanding of the Mexican Revolution; it also helps to historicize the current study of climate change and conflict, such as in the Syrian civil war, which has a number of striking parallels to Mexico’s civil war exactly one century before.
Mikael Wolfe is an environmental historian of water and climate issues in modern Latin America. He is currently Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University and the author of Watering the Revolution: An Environmental and Technological History of Agrarian Reform in Mexico (Duke University Press, 2017), which won the Elinor K. Melville Book Prize for Latin American environmental history and was short-listed for the María Elena Martínez Prize on the history of Mexico in 2018. His second book project is tentatively entitled Revolution in the Air: A Comparative Historical Climatology of the Mexican and Cuban Revolutions.

Join the Center for World History in welcoming Mikael Wolfe to UCSC for their first CWH event of the 2019-2020 academic year!

Extreme Weather and the Mexican Revolution: Historical Reality and Perception
2019-11-14 15:00 - 16:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This talk will present recently published research that combines environmental history and historical climatology to examine the relationship between extreme weather events, especially drought and frost, and the origins of the Mexican Revolution. Wolfe’s findings suggest that inaccurate and misleading weather reporting—what he calls “politico-environmental” coverage—by a variety of newspapers throughout the country was as important as actual climatic variability in exacerbating the economic and political crises that culminated in the 1910-11 armed insurrection. Wolfe’s research not only changes our understanding of the Mexican Revolution; it also helps to historicize the current study of climate change and conflict, such as in the Syrian civil war, which has a number of striking parallels to Mexico’s civil war exactly one century before.
Mikael Wolfe is an environmental historian of water and climate issues in modern Latin America and author of Watering the Revolution: An Environmental and Technological History of Agrarian Reform in Mexico (Duke University Press, 2017).
Presented by the Center for World History, cwh@ucsc.edu

THI Open House
2019-11-14 16:00 - 18:00 | Cowell Provost House, Cowell Provost House, Cowell Service Rd‎ University of California Santa Cruz, Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join us as we kick off the 20th anniversary of The Humanities Institute: a vibrant community at the center of UC Santa Cruz and at the cutting edge of Humanities research, education, and public engagement.
Raise a glass, meet our fellows, and connect with your colleagues. In many ways, The Humanities Institute is a demonstration of where the Humanities is headed and we are stronger when we do this work together.

The Open House is an opportunity to celebrate the community we’ve built over the past 20 years and to acknowledge where we want to be.
Photos by Crystal Birns
If you have trouble viewing above images, you may view this album directly on Flickr.

After the open house celebration, please join us for Living Writers: After Ursula on November 14th at 7pm in the Humanities Lecture Hall. Four renowned writers–Karen Joy Fowler, Molly Gloss, Nisi Shawl and Kim Stanley Robinson–will participate in a conversation centered around sci/fi speculative fiction author Ursula LeGuin, who recently died in 2018.

Living Writers: "After Ursula" with Karen Joy Fowler, Molly Gloss, Nisi Shawl, and Kim Stanley Robinson
2019-11-14 19:10 - 20:30 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
After Ursula: Four renowned Sci Fi/Fantasy Writers all mentored by Ursula K Le Guin read from their work.
Molly Gloss is the author of several novels including The Jump-Off Creek, The Dazzle of Day, Wild Life, The Hearts of Horses and Falling From Horses, as well as the story collection Unforeseen. She writes both realistic fiction and science fiction, and her novels have received, among other honors, a PEN West Fiction Prize, an Oregon Book Award, two Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards, the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, and a Whiting Writers Award.
Karen Joy Fowler is the author of six novels, including Sarah Canary and The Jane Austen Book Club, and three short story collections, including What I Didn’t See. Her most recent novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, was published by Putnam in May 2013 and won the Pen Faulkner award that year. She currently lives in Santa Cruz.
Nisi Shawl wrote the 2016 Nebula finalist Everfair and the 2008 Tiptree Award-winning collection Filter House. In 2005 she co-wrote Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, a standard text on inclusive representation in the imaginative genres. Her stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s SF Magazine, and many other publications. She edited the anthology New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color; and co-edited Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany; Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler. Shawl is a Carl Brandon Society founder and a Clarion West board member. She lives in Seattle near an enticingly large lake.
Kim Stanley Robinson is an American science fiction writer. He is the author of more than twenty books, including the international bestselling Mars trilogy, and more recently Red Moon, New York 2140, Aurora, Shaman, Green Earth, and 2312. He was sent to the Antarctic by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers’ Program in 1995, and returned in their Antarctic media program in 2016. In 2008 he was named a “Hero of the Environment” by Time magazine. He works with the Sierra Nevada Research Institute, the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, and UC San Diego’s Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination. His work has been translated into 25 languages, and won a dozen awards in five countries, including the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy awards. In 2016 asteroid 72432 was named “Kimrobinson.”

This Living Writers event is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute.
Please join us as we kick off the 20th anniversary of The Humanities Institute at our Open House Celebration on November 14th from 4-6pm. Raise a glass, meet our fellows, and connect with your community. In many ways, The Humanities Institute is a demonstration of where the Humanities is headed and we are stronger when we do this work together.

PhD+ Workshop - Demystifying the Publishing Process with UC Press
2019-11-15 11:00 - 12:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Learn about the publishing process, including book proposals, pitches, meeting with editors, and contracts.
University of California Press (UC Press) is one of the most forward-thinking scholarly publishers, committed to influencing public discourse and challenging the status quo. At a time of dramatic change for scholarship and publishing, UC Press collaborates with faculty, librarians, authors, and students to stay ahead of today’s knowledge demands and shape the future of publishing.

Kim Robinson, Editorial Director, received a B.A. in English from UC Santa Barbara. Before joining UC Press in 2009, she spent eight years at Oxford University Press in New York, both as music editor and editorial director of the scholarly reference group. Before stepping into the role of Editorial Director, she was Social Sciences Publisher and regional editor at UC Press. Previous to her career in publishing, Kim spent a decade working for nonprofit organizations and foundations focused on the environment and equal access to information and technology. A few of Kim’s UC Press acquisitions include California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It, A People’s Guide to Los Angeles, and the launch of Boom: A Journal of California.

Since 2010, Eric A. Schmidt, has extended the Classics program beyond Greece and Rome to include the cultural networks in and between Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, particularly in the period of Late Antiquity. In 2017, Eric started acquiring titles on the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, with a focus on books that highlight the passage of people, things, and ideas across the boundaries of land and language. In addition to promoting cutting-edge scholarship, Eric acquires pedagogically sophisticated materials for undergraduate teaching, including annotated translations of important texts, readers of primary source materials, and synthetic treatments of major topics. Recent highlights from his list include Richard Payne’s State of Mixture, Aaron Hahn Tapper’s Judaisms, Barry Powell’s translation of the works of Hesiod, and Joel Blecher’s Said the Prophet of God.
Areas of acquisition: World History (Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern), Religion, and World Literature in Translation

Kate Marshall joined UC Press in 2008 and manages several award-winning lists, including anthropology and our interdisciplinary programs on food and Latin America. In 2013, she launched a new list in Latin American history. Recent highlights from her list include Jason De León’s The Land of Open Graves, Raj Patel and Jason Moore’s A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Joyce Goldstein’s The New Mediterranean Jewish Table, and the 10th anniversary edition of Marion Nestle’s Food Politics. Across fields, Kate is motivated to publish scholarly and general interest titles that address pressing social or environmental problems.
Areas of acquisition: Anthropology, Food Studies, Latin American Studies

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.
Lunch will be served.
Please RSVP below:
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Linguistics Colloquia: Jorge Hankamer
2019-11-15 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Jorge Hankamer (UC Santa Cruz) – CP Complements to D
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

After Ursula Discussion
2019-11-15 15:00 - 17:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Join us to discuss excerpts from authors Karen Joy Fowler, Molly Gloss, Nisi Shawl, and Kim Stanley Robinson. Please email Micah Perks at (meperks@ucsc.edu) for the readings and to RSVP for the discussion.
Kim Stanley Robinson is an American science ﬁction writer. He is the author of more than twenty books, including the international bestselling Mars trilogy, and more recently Red Moon, New York 2140, Aurora, Shaman, Green Earth, and 2312. He was sent to the Antarctic by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers’ Program in 1995, and returned in their Antarctic media program in 2016. In 2008 he was named a “Hero of the Environment” by Time magazine. He works with the Sierra Nevada Research Institute, the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, and UC San Diego’s Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination. His work has been translated into 25 languages, and won a dozen awards in ﬁve countries, including the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy awards. In 2016 asteroid 72432 was named “Kimrobinson.”
Karen Joy Fowler is the author of six novels, including Sarah Canary and The Jane Austen Book Club, and three short story collections, including What I Didn’t See. Her most recent novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, was published by Putnam in May 2013 and won the Pen Faulkner award that year. She currently lives in Santa Cruz.
Molly Gloss is the author of several novels including The Jump-Off Creek, The Dazzle of Day, Wild Life, The Hearts of Horses and Falling From Horses, as well as the story collection Unforeseen. She writes both realistic ﬁction and science ﬁction, and her novels have received, among other honors, a PEN West Fiction Prize, an Oregon Book Award, two Paciﬁc Northwest Booksellers Awards, the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, and a Whiting Writers Award.
Nisi Shawl wrote the 2016 Nebula ﬁnalist Everfair and the 2008 Tiptree Award-winning collection Filter House. In 2005 she co-wrote Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, a standard text on inclusive representation in the imaginative genres. Her stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s SF Magazine, and many other publications. She edited the anthology New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color; and co-edited Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany; Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler. Shawl is a Carl Brandon Society founder and a Clarion West board member. She lives in Seattle near an enticingly large lake.

Nido de Lenguas: Camp
2019-11-16 13:00 - 15:30 | Watsonville Public Library, 275 Main St., Ste 100, Watsonville, CA, 95076, United States
¡Únete a nosotros para un día de aprendizaje de idiomas y desarrollo comunitario! Nuestros maestros compartirán el mixteco de San Martín Peras, un idioma de Oaxaca. Comienza a aprender o desarrolla tus habilidades con juegos y otras actividades grupales.
¡No se necesita experiencia previa!
Gratuito y abierto al público
¡Por favor regístrete en línea!

Join us for a day of language learning and community building! Our language teachers will be sharing San Martín Peras Mixtec, a language of Oaxaca. Start learning or build your skills through games & other group activities.
No prior experience needed!
Free & open to the public
Please sign up online!

Eve Zyzik: Spanish Studies Colloquium
2019-11-19 12:30 - 14:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Spelling is an aspect of literacy that causes significant difficulties for Spanish heritage language learners. The current research study targets one of the most problematic areas of Spanish orthography: substitution of “s” and “c” letters to represent /s/. Participants (n=72) were young adults, heritage speakers of Spanish, who completed a dictation task in addition to a standardized measure of proficiency. The results indicate a main effect for cognates (Spanish/English cognates are spelled more accurately), but no effect for letter. In other words, the data show that “s” is not the default letter for representing /s/, contrary to what had been found in a number of previous studies. These results are discussed in the broader context of pedagogical proposals for targeting orthography among college-aged heritage language learners.

Eve Zyzik (PhD, UC Davis) is currently Professor of Spanish in the Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics at UC Santa Cruz. She has published over twenty-five articles and chapters related to second language acquisition, heritage language development, and language pedagogy. Her articles appear in journals such as Applied Psycholinguistics, Language Learning, Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, and Studies in Second Language Acquisition. She has also published two books: El español y la lingüística aplicada (with Robert Blake) and Authentic Materials Myths: Applying Second Language Research to Classroom Teaching (with Charlene Polio).

Note: Event will be given in Spanish

Anjali Arondekar: What More Remains - Sexuality, Slavery, Historiography
2019-11-20 12:00 - 14:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This talk engages a ‘small’ history of sexuality and slavery in Portuguese India. At stake are three questions: How do we call attention to the displacement of slave pasts within histories of sexuality that are themselves routinely displaced? How do we locate those displacements in itinerant archives of profit and pleasure, than in archives of loss and trauma? How do we open a dialogue between the interdisciplinary fields of area studies and sexuality studies with an eye to understanding how histories of slavery can reshape, even devastate, these very field-formations?
If you have trouble viewing above images, you may view this album directly on Flickr.

Anjali Arondekar is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies, UCSC. Her research engages the poetics and politics of sexuality, colonialism and historiography, with a focus on South Asia. She is the author of For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Duke University Press, 2009, Orient Blackswan, India, 2010), winner of the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award for best book in lesbian, gay, or queer studies in literature and cultural studies, Modern Language Association (MLA), 2010. She is co-editor (with Geeta Patel) of “Area Impossible: The Geopolitics of Queer Studies,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (2016). Her talk is an excerpt from her forthcoming book, Abundance: On Sexuality and Historiography.

FrankenCon 2019
2019-11-21 - 2019-11-23 | UC Santa Cruz
For over two hundred years, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has haunted our days and chilled our dreaming nights. Celebrate and explore the enduring legacy of the world’s first science-fiction horror story with FRANKENCON, a three-day conference of scientists, theorists, and artists on November 21-23, 2019 at UC Santa Cruz.
The conference is in conjunction with the Theater Arts Department production of The Frankenstein Project, a play by Kirsten Brandt.
In the centuries since Mary Shelley first penned the novel, the lore and magic of Frankenstein has molded the modern genre of science fiction. With the explosive proliferation of golems, robots, monsters of artificial intelligence and genetically-engineered dinosaurs, Frankenstein and its cultural progeny have come to dominate cultural discussions about the ethics of science, the problems of modernity, the obligations of parents and children, and the painful act of creation itself.
Free and open to the public
Full information including guest speakers, schedule, and how to attend at:
FRANKENCON.COM
Presented by the UC Santa Cruz Center for Monster Studies, The Humanities Institute and The Division of the Arts. With the support of Porter College, Crown College, The Science & Justice Research Center, The Theater Arts Department, Oakes College, and the Department of Art & Design: Games & Playable Media; and with the generosity of our friends at DNA’s Comedy Lab & Experimental Theatre and Good Times Santa Cruz.

Dylan Riley: Capitalism, Democracy, and Authoritarianism - A Reconsideration
2019-11-21 16:00 - 18:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Dylan Riley is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain, and Romania 1870-1945 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, Verso, 2019). He is also the co-author of a two-volume work with Rebecca Jean Emigh and Patricia Ahmed entitled Antecedents of Censuses: From Medieval to Nation States and Changes in Censuses: From Imperialism to Welfare States (Palgrave 2016). In addition to these books, he has published articles in the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Catalyst, Comparative Sociology, Contemporary Sociology, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Social Science History, The Socio-Economic Review and the New Left Review (of which he is a member of the editorial committee). His work has been translated into German, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Database
2019-11-21 19:10 - 20:45 | Cultural Center at Merrill, Merrill Cultural Center, UC Santa Cruz, Merrill College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Jessica Kolopenuk will talk with Science & Justice and the Crown College about the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women database. For resources, news articles, tool-kits and webinars that frame the issues, refer to the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center‘s page on the special collection. Read or Listen to: Native American Activists Look To Next Steps After Murdered And Missing Indigenous Women Study Bill Passes (3/21/19)
Hosted by the Crown College Core Course (Ethical and Political Implications of Emerging Technologies) and the Science & Justice Research Center, with an introduction from Kim TallBear.

Jessica Kolopenuk (Cree, Peguis First Nation) is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta and Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria. Her doctoral project, The Science of Indigeneity: DNA Beyond Ancestry is a study of how, in Canada, genomic biotechnologies are impacting definitions of Indigeneity in the fields of forensic science, biomedical research, and physical anthropology. She identifies opportunities where Indigenous peoples may intervene to govern the genetic/genome sciences that affect their bodies, territories, and peoples. Over the past two years, with TallBear, she has been involved with co-developing the Indigenous Science, Technology, and Society Research and Training Program at the UofA. Jessica is a co-organizer of the Summer internship for INdigenous peoples in Genomics Canada (SING Canada).

Kim TallBear (UCSC HistCon, SJRC Advisor) Associate Professor, Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta, and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience & Environment. She is building a research hub in Indigenous Science, Technology, and Society (www.IndigenousSTS.com). Follow them at @indigenous_sts. TallBear is author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). Her Indigenous STS work recently turned to also address decolonial and Indigenous sexualities. She founded a University of Alberta arts-based research lab and co-produces the sexy storytelling show, Tipi Confessions, sparked by the popular Austin, Texas show, Bedpost Confessions. Building on lessons learned with geneticists about how race categories get settled, TallBear is working on a book that interrogates settler-colonial commitments to settlement in place, within disciplines, and within monogamous, state-sanctioned marriage. She is a citizen of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate in South Dakota. She tweets @KimTallBear and @CriticalPoly.
Co-sponsored by: the Science & Justice Research Center, Crown College, the Human Paleogenomics Lab, Feminist Studies, the Santa Cruz Institute for Social Transformation, and The Humanities Institute.

Living Writers: Peg Alford Pursell and Sophia Shalmiyev
2019-11-21 19:10 - 21:00 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Peg Alford Pursell is the author of A Girl Goes Into the Forest, (Dzanc Books, July 2019), and of Show Her A Flower, A Bird, A Shadow, the 2017 Indies Book of the Year for Literary Fiction. Her work has been published in many journals and anthologies, including Permafrost, Joyland, and the Los Angeles Review. Most recently, her microfiction, flash fiction, and hybrid prose have been nominated for Best Small Microfictions and Pushcart Prizes. She is the founder and director of WTAW Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary books, and of Why There Are Words, the national literary reading series. She is a member of the SF Writers Grotto. See more at: www.pegalfordpursell.com

Sophia Shalmiyev is an immigrant from the Soviet Union and the author of Mother Winter (2019, S&S), which Kirkus Reviews describes as “a rich tapestry of autobiography and meditations on feminism, motherhood, art, and culture, this book is as intellectually satisfying as it is artistically profound. A sharply intelligent, lyrically provocative memoir.” Shalmiyev has an MFA from Portland State University and a second master’s degree in creative arts therapy from the School of Visual Arts. She lives in Portland with her two children. Her latest work can be found at Lit Hub and Guernica.

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

Discussion with Peg Alford Pursell and Sophia Shalmiyev
2019-11-22 15:00 - 17:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Join us to discuss excerpts from Mother Winter, a memoir by Sophia Shalmiyev and A Girl Goes Into The Forest, a collection of short stories by Peg Alford Pursell. Please email Micah Perks at (meperks@ucsc.edu) for the readings and to RSVP for the discussion.
Peg Alford Pursell is the author of A Girl Goes Into the Forest, (Dzanc Books, July 2019), and of Show Her A Flower, A Bird, A Shadow, the 2017 Indies Book of the Year for Literary Fiction. Her work has been published in many journals and anthologies, including Permafrost, Joyland, and the Los Angeles Review. Most recently, her microfiction, flash fiction, and hybrid prose have been nominated for Best Small Microfictions and Pushcart Prizes. She is the founder and director of WTAW Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary books, and of Why There Are Words, the national literary reading series. She is a member of the SF Writers Grotto. See more at: www.pegalfordpursell.com
Sophia Shalmiyev is an immigrant from the Soviet Union and the author of Mother Winter (2019, S&S), which Kirkus Reviews describes as “a rich tapestry of autobiography and meditations on feminism, motherhood, art, and culture, this book is as intellectually satisfying as it is artistically profound. A sharply intelligent, lyrically provocative memoir.” Shalmiyev has an MFA from Portland State University and a second master’s degree in creative arts therapy from the School of Visual Arts. She lives in Portland with her two children. Her latest work can be found at Lit Hub and Guernica.

Stephen Roddy: Testing Allegiances - Ueda Akinari's Rewriting of an Exemplary Chinese Friendship
2019-11-22 15:00 - 17:00 | Cowell Provost House, Cowell Provost House, Cowell Service Rd‎ University of California Santa Cruz, Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
This talk examines the transcultural implications of Ueda Akinari’s (1734-1809) short story “The Chrysanthemum Pledge” (Kikka no chigiri), a masterpiece considered to have overshadowed the 17th-century Chinese tale of exemplary friendship on which it is closely modeled. Despite the Confucian tenor of both the Chinese and the Japanese versions, I argue that Akinari subtly but unmistakably undermines the moral rectitude of the protagonists recounted in his tale. By reading this and other examples of Akinari’s fiction in juxtaposition with the author’s extensive oeuvre of wagaku and other scholarship, we can more fully appreciate his nuanced position as both connoisseur and skeptic toward cultural products emanating from the Western Lands (which for him mostly meant China and India).
Stephen Roddy is a professor of Modern and Classical Languages, received his PhD in East Asian Studies from Princeton University, and specializes in the fiction and other prose genres of 18th and 19th century China and Japan. His current interests focus on the influences of Chinese fiction on late-Tokugawa writers, and of Meiji-period thinkers on essayists of the late-Qing. He teaches courses in Japanese and Chinese literature, culture, and language.
For further information, Contact Minghui Hu (mhu@ucsc.edu)

Eugene Park: A Genealogy of Dissent - The Progeny of Fallen Royals in Chosŏn Korea
2019-11-25 15:00 - 17:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This lecture makes observations on politics, society, and culture of Korea since 1392 through a story of human interest. Decades after a bloody persecution that virtually exterminated the royal Wangs of the vanquished Koryŏ dynasty (918-1392), the succeeding Chosŏn dynasty (1392-1910) rehabilitated the lucky survivors. Contrary to a popular assumption that the Wangs remained politically marginalized, many fared well. The most privileged among them won the patronage of the court, for which they performed ancestral rites in honor of Koryŏ monarchs; passed government service examinations; attained prestigious offices; commanded armies, and constituted local elite lineages. As members of a revived aristocratic descent group, the Wangs remained committed to a confucian moral universe, at the heart of which was a subject’s loyalty to the ruler — of course, the Chosŏn. At the time, an emerging body of subversive narrative, both written and oral, articulated sympathy toward the Wangs as victims of the tumultuous politics of Koryŏ-Chosŏn dynastic change, although the Wangs wisely steered clear of such a discourse until after Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910. Such forces of modernity as colonialism, urbanization, industrialization, the Cold War, and globalization have transformed the Wangs as members of a distinct descent group to individuals from all walks of life.
Join the East Asian Colloquium in the third talk of their ongoing lecture series!

CANCELLED: Déborah Danowski & Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: Beyond the End of the World Sawyer Seminar Series
2019-12-04 | College Nine and John R. Lewis Multipurpose Room, College Ten, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Due to unforeseen circumstances Déborah Danowski & Eduardo Viveiros de Castro had to regretfully cancel their engagement in Santa Cruz.

Ronaldo Wilson: The Quotidian Lucy and Other Constructions
2019-12-04 12:00 - 14:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
“The Quotidian Lucy and Other Constructions” explores some recent site-specific and studio performances (written/visual/sonic) that serve as interventions between theory and practice. Discussing new works on paper, video, and in performance, Wilson seeks to inhabit and engage with questions of memory, genre, form, and discipline as strategies through which to examine race, sex, and desire in concert with what vocabularies emerge and accrete in rendering multiple drafts of the self through poetic persona, character, and movement.
Ronaldo V. Wilson, PhD is the author of four collections: Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man, Poems of the Black Object, Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose, Other, and Lucy 72. The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Ford Foundation, Kundiman, MacDowell, the National Research Council, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Center for Art and Thought, and Yaddo, Wilson is an interdisciplinary artist, having performed in multiple venues, including the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, UC Riverside’s Artsblock, Louisiana State University’s Digital Media Center Theater, Georgetown’s Lannan Center, Southern Exposure Gallery, and Casa Victoria Ocampo in Buenos Aires. He is Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at U.C. Santa Cruz.

Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures
2019-12-04 16:00 - 18:00 | Engineering 2, Room 599, Engineering 2, 1156 High St‎ University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Co-authors Neda Atanasoski (UCSC Feminist Studies, CRES) and Kalindi Vora (UC Davis Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies) will present on their new book Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (Duke University Press, March 2019), with responses by CRES Director Christine Hong and SJRC Director Jenny Reardon. A dessert reception will follow.
Book Description
In Surrogate Humanity, Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora trace the ways in which robots, artificial intelligence, and other technologies serve as surrogates for human workers within a labor system entrenched in racial capitalism and patriarchy. Analyzing myriad technologies, from sex robots and military drones to sharing economy platforms, Atanasoski and Vora show how liberal structures of antiblackness, settler colonialism, and patriarchy are fundamental to human-machine interactions as well as the very definition of the human. While these new technologies and engineering projects promise a revolutionary new future, they replicate and reinforce racialized and gendered ideas about devalued work, exploitation, dispossession, and capitalist accumulation. Yet, even as engineers design robots to be more perfect versions of the human—more rational killers, more efficient workers, and tireless companions—the potential exists to develop alternative modes of engineering and technological development in ways that refuse the racial and colonial logics that maintain social hierarchies and inequality.

Neda Atanasoski is Professor of Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity.

Kalindi Vora is Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Davis, and author of Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor.

Hosted by the Science & Justice Research Center. Co-Sponsored by Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and The Humanities Institute.

Living Writers: Student Readings
2019-12-04 19:10 - 20:30 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Students will be reading from their own work.

PhD+ Workshop – Where Can I Go From Here? Exploring Careers Beyond Academia
2019-12-06 11:00 - 12:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Curious about careers outside of academia, but not sure where to begin? In this interactive workshop, we’ll begin to explore the many career paths PhDs in the humanities can enter upon graduation. After a brief orientation to ImaginePhD, a career exploration and planning tool designed for PhDs in the Humanities and Social Sciences, we’ll discuss how to learn more about different career paths and organizations you might want to work for. Finally, we’ll talk about next steps – how to move from career exploration to the job search – with a discussion of effective networking techniques and some analysis of the transferrable skills Humanities PhDs develop over the course of their programs.

Erin Brown is the Interim Assistant Director for UCLA’s Graduate Career Services, providing career exploration and professional development programming, as well as individual career coaching, to UCLA graduate students and postdoctoral scholars. Erin earned a PhD in History from UCLA, where she examined the town-building phenomenon in the late 18th and early 20th century American West. An ardent advocate of thinking outside the box and testing limits, Erin enthusiastically supports students who want to use their graduate training in innovative and unexpected ways.

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.
Lunch will be served.
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Linguistics Colloquia: Dave Kush
2019-12-06 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Dave Kush (NTNU-Norway) – Title TBD
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

TEDx Santa Cruz
2019-12-07 | Rio Theater, 1205 Soquel Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95062, United States
TEDxSantaCruz 2019:
The Art of Hope
Features riveting talks and performances from a diverse range of inspired, innovative and renowned speakers and artists.
Join the local conference on December 7, 2019, at the Rio Theatre.
Nine UCSC speakers join TEDx Santa Cruz extravaganza on Dec. 7
For tickets and more information visit www.tedxsantacruz.org

Sean Keilen: Reading Hamlet Now
2019-12-09 18:30 - 20:00 | Forager, San Jose, 420 S 1st St, San Jose, CA, 95172, United States
Shakespeare’s works are rightly famous for their lifelikeness and insights into human affairs. What can they show us about our circumstances now, in a world where truth is inscrutable, social and political institutions are in decline, and we seem to relish conflict more than peace? This lecture will explore that question in the context of Hamlet, looking specifically at the way that Shakespeare presents reading, education, and the theater as resources for self-development and setting the world right. The lecture does not assume any prior knowledge of Shakespeare, but reading or watching Hamlet beforehand will make for a livelier discussion.

If you have trouble viewing above images, you may view this album directly on Flickr.

Sean Keilen is Professor of Literature and Provost of Porter College at UC Santa Cruz, where he directs Shakespeare Workshop, a research center of The Humanities Institute that uses Shakespeare’s writing to bring the campus and the community together in conversation about topics of shared concern. He studies Shakespeare and the history of criticism, and is the author or editor of books and essays about early British literature and the classical tradition in England. He was educated at Williams College, Cambridge, and Stanford University.

Layali Morocco: Jewish Songlines & Soundscapes
2020-01-09 19:00 - 21:30 | Kuumbwa Jazz Center
Event Photos by Jessica Guild:
If you have trouble viewing above images, you may view this album directly on Flickr.

Samuel Torjman Thomas & ASEFA
ASEFA (meaning “gathering”) is led by ethnomusicologist and multi-instrumentalist Samuel Torjman Thomas, Ph.D. Blending vocals, oud, violin, nay, and plenty of percussion, with songs in Hebrew, Arabic, Spanish, and Ladino, this trio ensemble traverses several North African song traditions. Drawing upon a rich intercultural mix of Hebraic and Islamic traditions, audiences feel the heartbeat of the Maghreb. Thomas is an ethnomusicologist and multi-instrumentalist, and as artistic director of the New York Andalus Ensemble and ASEFA, he journeys through a lush Mediterranean garden of songs in Hebrew, Arabic, Ladino, and Spanish, highlighting intercultural exchange in the expressive cultures of North Africa and the Middle East. Dr. Thomas teaches music, interdisciplinary studies, and Sephardic studies at the City University of New York. He is a frequent guest speaker at cultural institutions, universities, and in multi-denominational ecumenical spaces worldwide. His formal talks center on historical and cultural topics related to Sephardi-Mizraḥi Jewry.

Advanced Ticket Price – $26.25
Door Ticket Price – $31.50 (half price for students)
Sponsored by the Neufeld-Levin Chair in Holocaust Studies and the Center for Jewish Studies at UC Santa Cruz.
Directions and Parking:
Kuumbwa Jazz Center located at 320 Cedar St # 2, Santa Cruz, CA 95060. Click here for directions and parking at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center: https://kuumbwajazz.org/about/directions-accommodations/
If you have disability-related needs, please contact the The Humanities Institute at thi@ucsc.edu or call 831-459-1274 by January 3, 2020.

CANCELLED: Stephanie Shih - The Nature of Lexical Categories: Consideration from Sound Symbolism
2020-01-10 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
There are many approaches to modeling lexically-conditioned phonology in current formal theories, including lexically-indexed constraints and cophonologies. Nearly all of these existing approaches assume categorical membership in the lexical classes that condition differential phonotactics or phonological behaviors: for example, a lexical item is either a noun or a verb, or of one gender class or another. In this talk, Stephanie Shih presents evidence from sound symbolic patterns that demonstrates the need for gradient membership in the lexical classes that condition phonological patterns. Case studies include cross-linguistic Pokémon names and English baseball player names and nicknames. From these cases, Shih proposes an implementation of Maximum Entropy Harmonic Grammar with lexically-indexed constraints and gradient symbolic activations over classes that allows us to model differences in phonological patterns over both discrete and gradient class membership. This theoretical implementation is a natural extension of the scales and gradient activations that have been shown to be necessary in recent phonological theory: sound symbolic evidence highlights the necessity for such increased explanatory power in our phonological models. Crucially, we find gradient lexically-conditioned patterns not only in sound symbolism—where they are often most obvious—but also in what is considered “core” language (e.g., morphosyntactic classes), and allowing gradient class structures in our phonological models may ultimately make for cleaner interfaces with other parts of grammar such as morphosyntax.
Presented by the UCSC Department of Linguistics

Savannah Shange - Abolition as Method: Anti-blackness, Anthropology and Ethics
2020-01-15 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This talk draws on Savannah Shange’s recently published book, Progressive Dystopia, in which she argues that San Francisco is a site of social apocalypse for Black communities. Given the momentum ‘abolition’ has as a political critique of prisons and policing, what does it offer us as scholars trying to apprehend the broad set of violences that compose the current moment? Put another way, what does abolition demand of us?
Savannah Shange is an urban anthropologist who works at the intersections of race, place, sexuality, and the state. She is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz with research interests in circulated and lived forms of blackness, ethnographic ethics, Afro-pessimism, and queer of color critique.

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.

Urmi Engineer Willoughby - Cultivating Malaria in the Gulf South, 1718-1860
2020-01-15 16:00 - 17:30 | Humanities 1, Room 520, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Thom Gentle Environmental History Lecture
In this talk, Urmi Willoughby will present her research on agriculture, development, and the growth of endemic fevers in lower Louisiana. She will explore why fevers spread in the borderlands of the Gulf South and lower Mississippi Valley in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and show how economic and agricultural systems associated with white settlement and plantation slavery fostered the spread of malaria and yellow fever. Malaria grew endemic in new settlements and plantations as newcomers cleared forests, drained swamps, and grew rice and maize. Yellow fever caused seasonal epidemics in the built environment of New Orleans, as a result of ecological changes caused by sugar plantations and urban construction. Studying these processes in a global framework, this project considers the Gulf South region as a representation of global patterns of development and ecological change in fostering the growth of malaria and yellow fever in diverse geographical and historical contexts.
Urmi Engineer Willoughby is the current Molina Fellow in the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences at the Huntington Library and the author of Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (LSU Press, 2017). She completed her Ph.D. in History at UCSC.

This lecture is made possible by the generosity of Thom Gentle (Cowell ’69, History), a pioneer class alumnus who established The Thom Gentle Endowment for History to support student awards in environmental history as well as lectures of distinguished speakers with an environmental emphasis.

PhD+ Workshop – Stop #disserhating, Start Writing
2020-01-17 11:00 - 12:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Not sure how to begin your dissertation work? Having a hard time fitting writing in amidst other obligations? Stuck in the middle of your process? Huh, what process? 8th-year PhD candidate struggling to finish? In this interactive workshop, PhD students at all stages will have the opportunity to anonymously submit questions and concerns about the dissertation process, share experiences and strategies, and learn concrete practices (time management, a writing practice, accountability exercises, and self care) for success in completing the PhD. We will frame the dissertation as a professional and personal growth tool for becoming the kind of scholars, writers, thinkers, and people we want to be in the world. Whether you plan to pursue a career in academia or not, you will leave this workshop knowing what you need to do to make dissertating work for the unique circumstances of your life.

Amanda M. Smith is an assistant professor of Latin American literature. Her research focuses on cultural production from and about the Amazonian region of South America, taking up questions of spatiality, ecology, Indigeneity, and extractivism. Using many of the strategies that she will share in this workshop, she writes about 150 pages a year on these topics while also teaching, carrying out university service commitments, doing a lot of hiking in the redwoods, and chasing her twin 4-year-olds around.

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.
Lunch will be served.
Please RSVP below:
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Hong-An Truong: Refugee Returns
2020-01-21 16:30 - 18:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Using photography, video, and sound installation, Hong-An Truong engages questions about history and how knowledge is produced through media forms. Often drawing on her lived experience as the daughter of Vietnamese refugees, her work explores historical and political themes, especially around war, violence, and race.
Truong’s talk will focus on several recent projects that explore how citizenship and notions of belonging are constructed in order to expand our conception of refugees and Asian American identity within a larger global history of anti-colonial struggle and cross-national organizing.
Recipient of a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, Hong-An Truong is an artist who explores immigrant, refugee, and decolonial narratives and subjectivities. She is an Associate Professor of Art and Director of Graduate Studies in the MFA Program at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
Presented by the Center for Racial Justice and co-sponsored by Art+Design Placemaking

Carlos Motta - We The Enemy
2020-01-22 12:00 - 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
In We The Enemy, Carlos Motta will present a series of recent and past works, including those exhibited at the Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery. Motta’s work documents the social conditions and political struggles of sexual, gender, and ethnic minority communities in order to challenge dominant and normative discourses through visibility and self-representation. As a historian of untold narratives and an archivist of repressed histories, Motta is committed to in-depth research on the struggles of post-colonial subjects and societies. His work manifests in a variety of mediums including video, installation, sculpture, drawing, web-based projects, performance, and symposia.
Carlos Motta (b. 1978) was born in Bogotá, Colombia and lives and works in New York City. Motta has been the subject of survey exhibitions including at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, Colombia, Matucana 100, Santiago, Chile, and Röda Sten Konsthall, Göteborg, Sweden. His work is in the permanent collections of the The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Barcelona; and Museo de Arte de Banco de la República, Bogotá, among others. His solo exhibitions include Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo (2019); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2017); Pérez Art Museum, Miami (2016); Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (2016); PinchukArtCentre, Kiev (2015); Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico City (2013); New Museum, New York (2012); MoMA PS1, New York (2009); and Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2009). Motta participated in 32 Bienal de São Paulo (2016); X Gwangju Biennale (2014); and X Lyon Biennale (2010). His films have been screened at the Rotterdam Film Festival (2016, 2010); Toronto International Film Festival (2013); and Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur (2016); among others. Motta has been awarded the Vilcek Foundation’s Prize for Creative Promise (2017); the PinchukArtCentre’s Future Generation Art Prize (2014); and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2008).

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.

SOLD OUT: Chast and Marx - You Can Only Yell at Me for One Thing at a Time: Rules for Couples
2020-01-22 19:00 - 21:00 | DNA Comedy Lab, 155 S. River St., Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes the bestselling team of New Yorker illustrator Roz Chast and New Yorker contributor Patricia Marx for a presentation of their hilarious illustrated guide to love and relationships, You Can Only Yell at Me for One Thing at a Time: Rules for Couples. Everyone knows the tired, clichéd advice for a healthy relationship: Never go to bed angry. The couple that plays together, stays together. Distance makes the heart grow fonder. Sexual favors in exchange for cleaning up the cat vomit is a good and fair trade.
Okay, maybe not that last one.
The authors of Why Don’t You Write My Eulogy Now So I Can Correct It share their fresh, new romance tips that will make you laugh, make you feel seen, and remind you why your relationship is better than everyone else’s.
Ticket packages are $23 and include one copy of You Can Only Yell at Me for One Thing at a Time (publication: January 14th). A companion ticket (event only, no book included) is available for $7 when purchasing a ticket package. Purchase tickets at Bookshop Santa Cruz, or online.

These nuggets of advice include:

If you must breathe, don’t breathe so loudly.
It is easier to stay inside and wait for the snow to melt than to fight about who should shovel.
Queen-sized beds, king-sized blankets.

And many more. You Can Only Yell at Me for One Thing at a Time is the perfect gift for your significant other, your friendly anti-Valentine’s Day crusader, or anyone in your life who wants to laugh about the absurdity of love.

Patricia Marx has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1989. She is a former writer for “Saturday Night Live” and “Rugrats,” and is the author of several books, including Let’s Be Less Stupid, Him Her Him Again The End of Him, and Starting from Happy. Marx was the first woman elected to the Harvard Lampoon. She has taught at Princeton, New York University, and Stonybrook University. She is recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Roz Chast was born in Brooklyn and now lives in Connecticut. Her cartoons have appeared in countless magazines, and she is the author of many books, including The Party, After You Left. She attended Rhode Island School of Design, majoring in Painting because it seemed more artistic. However, soon after graduating, she reverted to type and began drawing cartoons once again.

Cosponsored by The Humanities Institute UC Santa Cruz.

Kenyon Branon: Locality and Anti-Locality - Two Case Studies
2020-01-23 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Much work in syntax suggests that there is a strong preference — given two or more options — for shorter dependencies over longer dependencies, often referred to as a locality condition. Cases where these conditions are apparently violated are therefore a general topic of interest. This talk presents two case studies of apparent violations of locality in A-movement which prove problematic for current approaches to the phenomenon. In both Luganda and Haya [Bantu, Uganda/Tanzania], as well as Tongan [Austronesian, Tonga], A-movement is able to cross no more than one other argument. This pattern proves to be a serious problem for the state-of-the art, which cannot be straightforwardly emended to capture this particular restriction. The analysis developed involves a mechanism of conflict resolution between two conflicting requirements: the aforementioned locality condition, and an “anti-locality” condition, which mitigates against dependencies which are in some sense too short. When these conditions come into conflict, the locality condition may be minimally violated, so that the anti-locality condition may be maximally satisfied.
In this talk, we will see that this analysis straightforwardly delivers the “skip no more than one” pattern observed in both case studies, and discuss how the analysis answers a number of “big picture” questions about the architecture of the grammar.
Kenyon Branon is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English Language and Literature at NUS. He graduated from MIT with a PhD in linguistics and works on syntax and its interface with PF, using data from understudied languages for theory construction.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: Beyond the End of the World Sawyer Seminar Series
2020-01-23 18:00 - 20:00 | Music Center Recital Hall – UCSC, 402 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
If you have trouble viewing above images, you may view this album directly on Flickr.

The Humanities Institute and the Center for Creative Ecologies present the inaugural event in the
Beyond the End of the World series.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an award-winning author on race and inequality as well as Black politics and social movements in the United States. Her books include From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation and How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. She has a forthcoming book titled Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (University of North Carolina Press). Taylor’s writing has been published in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, Paris Review, Guardian, The Nation, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, Jacobin, and beyond. In 2016, she was designated as one of the one hundred most influential African Americans in the United States by The Root. Taylor is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and an Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University.

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. Keynote presentations include: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, award-winning author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation; Amitav Ghosh, award-winning fiction writer and author of The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable; Nick Estes (Lower Brule Sioux), co-founder of Red Nation and author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance; Melanie Yazzie (Bilagáana/Diné), Red Nation member and co-editor of Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society; and artist-activists Amin Husain and Nitasha Dhillon of MTL/Decolonize This Place, an action-oriented movement centering Indigenous struggle, Black liberation, free Palestine, global wage workers and de-gentrification. 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.

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 us at thi@ucsc.edu or (831) 459-5655.

Public Fellowship Info Session
2020-01-27 12:00 - 13:00, 2020-01-28 12:00 - 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 402
Curious about becoming a THI Public Fellow? Not sure how to find the right partner organization? If you’re thinking about applying your expertise in the public sphere or exploring career opportunities beyond academia, then you may be interested in THI’s Public Fellowship program.
Public fellowships provide opportunities for doctoral students in the Humanities to contribute to research, programming, communications, and fundraising at non-profit organizations, cultural institutions, or companies and expand their skills in a non-academic setting while engaged in graduate study.
Please join us for an information session about the Public Fellows program on January 27th or January 28th, 2020 at noon in Humanities 1, Room 402. We will discuss Summer and Year-Long opportunities and describe some new partner organizations.
RSVP here:
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Kate McDonald - The Society of Wheels: Rethinking the History of Technology and Labor in Modern Japan
2020-01-27 16:00 - 17:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Humans power transport. This is obviously true for the early twentieth century. It’s easy to find images of rickshaws on city streets in Tokyo and other major cities in Asia. But it’s equally true for the twenty-first century. Look no further than the parcel delivery workers sprinting up and down apartment-building staircases.
Despite the continuity of human power, explicitly human-powered technologies such as the rickshaw symbolize Japan’s past while the promise of automated transport systems such as parcel distribution and delivery symbolize Japan’s future. Why? This talk will look at how human power came to symbolize the past and how, in contrast, actual transport laborers have struggled throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to claim a place in the present.

Kate McDonald is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan (University of California Press, 2017). Together with David R. Ambaras (NC State), she directs the Bodies and Structures: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History project. This talk comes from her newest book project, The Rickshaw and the Railroad: Human-Powered Transport in the Age of the Machine.

Robert Nichols - Theft is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory
2020-01-29 12:15 - 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
In his recent publication, Theft is Property! (Duke 2020), Robert Nichols reconstructs the concept of dispossession as a means of examining how shifting configurations of law, property, race, and rights have functioned as modes of governance, both historically and in the present. Through close analysis of arguments by Indigenous scholars and activists from the nineteenth century to the present, Nichols argues that dispossession has come to name a unique recursive process whereby systematic theft is the mechanism by which property relations are generated. In so doing, this work also brings long-standing debates in anarchist, Black radical, feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial thought into direct conversation with the frequently overlooked intellectual contributions of Indigenous peoples.
Robert Nichols is an Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities). His areas of research specialization include contemporary European philosophy and political theory (esp. Critical Theory, Marx and Marxism, Foucault); the history of political thought (esp. pertaining to imperialism and colonialism in the 19th century); and the contemporary politics of settler colonialism and indigeneity in the Anglo-American world. Before joining the University of Minnesota, Professor Nichols was Alexander von Humboldt Faculty Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. He has also held academic posts at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (France), the University of Alberta (Canada), University of Cambridge (UK), and Columbia University (USA). He is the recipient of grants and awards from the Fulbright, Humboldt, Killam, McKnight, and Trudeau Foundations, as well as from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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.

Bronwyn Bjorkman: Realizing Syntax
2020-01-30 13:30 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
For more information, please see visit the Linguistics Department Website.

Living Writers: Jess Arndt
2020-01-30 17:30 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Jess Arndt received her MFA at Bard and was a 2013 Graywolf SLS Fellow and 2010 Fiction Fellow at the New York Foundation of the Arts. She has written for Fence, BOMB, Aufgabe, and the art journal Parkett, among others. She is a co-founder of New Herring Press, and lives in Los Angeles.
More information about Jess Arndt is available here

Latinos Modelos Conferencia/Latino Role Models Conference 2020
2020-02-01 09:00 - 13:30 | Cabrillo College Crocker Theater, 6500 Soquel Dr., Aptos, CA, 95003, United States
Oradora Principal: Reyna Grande
La galardonada autora de La Distancia Entre Nosotros
ADMISIÓN GRATUITA para estudiantes (6th grado hasta la universidad) y sus familias
Se ofrece almuerzo
Sorteo
Mesas de información
Esta conferencia será en español con interpretación al inglés

Keynote Speaker: Reyna Grande
Award-winning author of The Distance Between Us
FREE ADMISSION for students and their families (6th grade through college)
Lunch provided
Door prizes
Information tables
The event will be in Spanish with English translation
Reyna Grande is the author of the bestselling memoir, The Distance Between Us, (Atria, 2012) where she writes about her life before and after she arrived in the United States from Mexico as an undocumented child immigrant. The much-anticipated sequel, A Dream Called Home (Atria), was released in 2018. Her other works include the novels, Across a Hundred Mountains, (Atria, 2006) and Dancing with Butterflies (Washington Square Press, 2009) which were published to critical acclaim. The Distance Between Us is also available as a young readers edition from Simon & Schuster’s Children’s Division–Aladdin. Her books have been adopted as the common read selection by schools, colleges and cities across the country.
Reyna has received an American Book Award, the El Premio Aztlán Literary Award, and the International Latino Book Award. In 2012, she was a finalist for the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Awards, and in 2015 she was honored with a Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature. The young reader’s version of The Distance Between Us received a 2017 Honor Book Award for the Américas Award for Children’s and Young Adult Literature and a 2016 Eureka! Honor Awards from the California Reading Association, and an International Literacy Association Children’s Book Award 2017.

Teaching in Tense Times: A Workshop on Academic Freedom, Inclusive Classrooms, and Some Challenges in College Teaching Today
2020-02-03 15:30 - 17:00 | Alumni Room, University Center, CA, United States
The Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning and the Humanities Institute invite you to a workshop on academic freedom in the classroom environment with visiting scholars Andrea Brenner and Lara Schwartz. This hands-on workshop is open to faculty and graduate students from all fields who teach or plan to teach in higher education settings.
Overview: In this workshop, visiting scholars Lara Schwartz and Andrea Brenner will help us think through some of the most urgent ethical, pedagogical, and legal challenges facing college level instructors in the current era:
• How do we balance free speech and sensitive subjects in a classroom inclusive to all students?
• How does academic freedom apply in classroom environments, course learning objectives, and syllabi?
• How do we enable our students to communicate across difference while focusing on strategies for managing hot moments, interrupting bias, handling microaggressions, and facilitating de-escalation?
Please RSVP here to help us plan for event size, accessibility, and catering purposes.
Lara Schwartz, JD teaches at American University School of Public Affairs, where she founded and directs the Project on Civil Discourse. She specializes in civil discourse and campus speech, constitutional law, civil rights, politics, communications, and policy. Drawing on her extensive experience as a legislative lawyer, lobbyist, and communications strategist in leading civil rights organizations, Lara brings an advocate’s-eye view to her work as she emphasizes collaborative learning and universal design in her teaching. She has been honored with a School of Public Affairs teaching award and serves as a Faculty Fellow in the Center for Teaching, Research, and Learning.
Andrea Malkin Brenner, PhD is a sociologist, speaker, and an independent consultant who works with students, faculty, and staff on challenges related to college transitions. She is the creator of the nationally-recognized American University Experience (AUx), the mandatory full year first-year transition course at American University. Previous to that, Dr. Brenner served as a faculty member in the Department of Sociology at American University for 20 years, teaching classes on inequality, social problems, and the life course. Dr. Brenner has received multiple awards for her teaching and program design. She also directed AU’s University College program, the university’s oldest and largest living-learning community for first-year students.
Lara and Andrea are the co-authors of How to College: What to Know Before You Go (and When You’re There) (Macmillan, St. Martin’s Press, 2019) and serve as 2019-2020 fellows at the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement. They are working on their second book about productive discourse in the college classroom.
Co-Sponsored by The Humanities Institute

Questions That Matter: Reporting the Middle East
2020-02-04 18:00 - 21:00 | Kuumbwa Jazz Center
The Humanities Institute and the Center for the Middle East and North Africa present:
Questions That Matter: Reporting the Middle East and the Future of Investigative Journalism
Veteran NPR journalists Hannah Allam & Leila Fadel, in conversation with Jennifer Derr Associate Professor of History at UCSC, discuss their careers in journalism in the Middle East and their current work on culture, diversity, race, and extremism in the United States. This event celebrates the launch of the new Center for the Middle East and North Africa with an evening of consequential conversation about the region.
Join us as we consider these questions and more: What did journalists reporting the Middle East experience during the American invasion of Iraq and the Arab Spring? What is it like to report from the United States when the field of journalism is under attack? How should journalists tackle fragmented and fabricated realities in the future?
Reception 6pm – Event begins 7pm
Tickets $15

A conversation with:
Jennifer Derr
Associate Professor of History, Director of the Center for Middle East and North Africa
Hannah Allam
NPR National Security Correspondent
Leila Fadel
NPR National Correspondent
Directions and Parking:

Kuumbwa Jazz Center located at 320 Cedar St # 2, Santa Cruz, CA 95060. Click here for directions and parking at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center.
If you have disability-related needs, please contact The Humanities Institute at thi@ucsc.edu or call 831-459-1274 by January 31, 2020.
A limited number of free tickets were available to UCSC students, which have already been given out. We hope to be able to provide more opportunities in the future.

Lukas Rieppel - Locating the Central Asiatic Expedition
2020-02-05 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
During the 1920s, researchers from the New York natural history museum led by Roy Chapman Andrews spent nearly a decade exploring the Gobi Desert in Central Asia. But they were expelled from their base of operations in northern China when the Guomindang party created a new state in Nanjing. Whereas Chinese intellectuals accused American paleontologists of plundering their national heritage, Andrews argued that because dinosaur fossils predated the creation of China, they belonged equally to all mankind. Rieppel hopes to use the ensuing controversy to motivate a critical discussion about knowledge production in a global context.
Lukas Rieppel is a historian of science and capitalism at Brown University. He works at the intersection of the history of science and the history of capitalism, focusing especially on the life, earth, and environmental sciences in nineteenth and early twentieth century North America. His recently published book, Assembling the Dinosaur, traces how dinosaurs became a symbol of American economic might and power during the Long Gilded Age and he is starting a new project, tentatively entitled “The Ice Age: A Global History.” Rieppel also co-edited a recent issue of the journal Osiris (with Eugenia Lean & William Deringer) on the theme of “Science & Capitalism: Entangled Histories,” and he has written several essays about fossils, museums, and markets.

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.

Student Meet and Greet with Leila Fadel and Hannah Allam
2020-02-05 15:00 - 16:30 | Humanities 2, Room 259
Join us to meet and talk with the award-winning NPR journalists Leila Fadel and Hannah Allam. The journalists have covered a wide range of questions concerning the Middle East, Islam in America, race, culture, and American extremism. Coffee and light refreshments will be provided.

Leila Fadel is currently a national correspondent for NPR, covering issues of culture, diversity, and race in America. Previously, Fadel worked as a journalist in the Middle East. She covered the Iraq War for nearly five years working for Knight Ridder, McClatchy Newspapers, and later the Washington Post. She also covered the uprisings that comprised the Arab Spring as the Cairo bureau chief for the Washington Post and as an international correspondent for NPR. She has won numerous awards for her reporting, including the Lowell Thomas Award from the Overseas Press Club, a Gracie award, and the George. R. Polk award. In 2016, she was the Council on Foreign Relations Edward R. Murrow fellow.
Hannah Allam is a national security correspondent for NPR, focusing on homegrown extremism. Before joining NPR, she was a national correspondent at BuzzFeed News, covering U.S. Muslims and other issues of race, religion and culture. Allam previously reported for McClatchy, spending a decade overseas as bureau chief in Baghdad during the Iraq war and in Cairo during the Arab Spring rebellions. Her coverage of Islam in the United States won three national religion reporting awards in 2018 and 2019. Allam was part of McClatchy teams that won an Overseas Press Club award for exposing death squads in Iraq and a Polk Award for reporting on the Syrian conflict. She was a 2009 Nieman fellow at Harvard.
Please RSVP here:
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Marc Herbst - "Culture Beside Itself: On Common Sociality and its Relation to More Law-Like Cultural and Governmental Forms"
2020-02-06 13:00 - 14:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Marc Herbst will be presenting a talk titled “Culture Beside Itself: On common sociality and its relation to more law-like cultural and governmental forms,” based on his ongoing research on social movements and eco-social planning and his part in the collective efforts of the 11th issue of the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest.
These efforts are to attune creative activist/artistic attention towards the realm where social reproduction necessarily occurs, in order to strengthen ways in which cosmopolitically progressive thought and production (as culture and law) can better inform common life towards its autonomous ends. The work is grounded in Herbst’s research within the Barcelona based-Plataforma De Afectados por La Hipoteca (the PAH) housing rights movement, his recent eco-social work as a teacher/editor for the Berlin based Nachbarschaftsakademie and his current residency at Oakland’s Pro Art and Commons.
The talk will highlight concepts related to the upcoming Issue 11 of the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, which looks at common sociality outside and beyond formal being (that is, more concretised cultural and governmental forms) in the light of the related challenges of climate change and resurgent fascism. Besides the particular of the project, the conversation engages autonomist Marxist, queer and de-colonial theory/praxis, either as an expression of ongoing praxis and theoretical work.

Marc Herbst is a co-founder of the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, an interdisciplinary journal and weirdo collective founded in Los Angeles in 2001. He recently completed a PhD at Goldsmiths Centre for Cultural Studies in London with a study titled, A cultural policy for the multitude in the time of climate change; with an understanding that the multitude has no policy. Marc’s collective and individual efforts are also interdisciplinary (between engagements with the formal art world, DIY networks and relatively autonomous political projects) and he works between publishing, social practice and illustration. As a publisher/editor, he works with Aesthetics & Protest and also has recently been collaborating with Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, Pluto Press and Canary Press.
With the Aesthetics & Protest editorial collective, he is currently editing an issue working with anti-fascist and avant garde art collectives on situated practice outside of but in awareness of the mediating practices of political and cultural structures. He also helped publish recent books on precarious labor with the UK-based Precarious Workers Brigade, and (related to his PhD) a book on housing rights activism and transversal urban organizing by Ada Colau and Adria Alemany. In addition to other work, he is currently co-editing with Michelle Teran a book based on situated, cosmopolitical and eco-social learning through the coming 99 years of climate based in the Prinzessinnengarten in Berlin.
Issue 11: Culture Beside Itself
Pro-arts and Common Residency
Nachbarschaftsakademie, Growing in the Midst of our Collective Disaster

Presented by: The History of Consciousness Department and the Center for Creative Ecologies

Linguistics Colloquium: Nikos Angelopoulos
2020-02-06 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Please see the Linguistics Department website for more information.

Can We Talk? What Makes Campus Conversations So Tough, And How To Do Better
2020-02-06 17:00 - 18:30 | University Center, Bhojwani Room, CA, United States
In the classroom and other campus spaces, scorn and indignation for people we disagree with are preventing productive discussion on contested issues. On especially hot-button topics, there’s even a growing tendency to remain silent rather than risk rebuke. We’ve got to do better. But how?
Join us for a presentation by and collaborative discussion with Lara Schwartz and Andrea Malkin Brenner, 2019-20 Fellows at the University California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement. In their current research, Brenner and Schwartz develop a paradigm shift favoring robust inquiry on campus that transcends disagreement and debate. “Can we Talk?” is part of the Fellows’ week-long residency at UC Santa Cruz.
In addition to their scholarly work and innovative teaching at AU, together they are authors of the hugely successful book How to College; What to Know Before You Go (and When You’re There). They are currently under contract with Macmillan to produce a new book tentatively titled A Guide to Productive and Inclusive Discourse on Campus, for which they will be conducting research during their weeklong UCSC residency.

Andrea Malkin Brenner, Ph.D. is a sociologist, speaker and an independent consultant who works with students, faculty, and staff on challenges related to college transitions.
Lara Schwartz, J.D. teaches at American University School of Public Affairs in Washington DC, where she founded and directs the Project on Social Discourse.
Sponsored by: The Center for Public Philosophy and The Community Studies Program
For more information and accommodation requests, contact pudup@ucsc.edu

Living Writers: Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint
2020-02-06 17:30 - 19:00 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint was born in Yangon, Myanmar and grew up in Bangkok, Thailand and San José, California. She is the author of the lyric novel The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, a Haven (Noemi Press, 2018) and the family history project Zat Lun, which won the 2018 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and is forthcoming in early 2021. Her work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, TriQuarterly, and Kenyon Review Online, among others, and has been translated into Burmese and Lithuanian. She is the recipient of a Fulbright grant to Spain, residencies at Hedgebrook and Millay Colony, and fellowships from Tin House and Summer Literary Seminars. She holds a B.A. in literary arts from Brown University and an M.F.A. in prose from the University of Notre Dame. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in creative writing at the University of Denver, the associate editor of the Denver Quarterly, and an instructor at Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop.
More information about Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint is available here

Jeffrey Wasserstrom - Hong Kong on the Brink
2020-02-07 12:30 - 14:00 | Humanities 1, Room 520, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
This talk will focus on patterns of protest and the tightening of political controls in Hong Kong during the last few decades, paying particular attention to the 2014 Umbrella Movement and the dramatic events of 2019.
Jeff Wasserstrom, a historian of China who has been visiting Hong Kong regularly since 1987, will draw on his work as a specialist in the history of anti-authoritarian movements in various parts of the world and his work on global cities of Asia. The presentation will showcase ideas in his new short book Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink, which publishes February 11, 2020, in the Columbia Global Reports series. Books will be available ahead of the official publication date.
Details on the book are here
Jeffrey Wasserstrom (UCSC History B.A., 1982) is Chancellor’s Professor of History at UC Irvine.
Sponsored by the History Department and East Asian Studies

Bia Labate: Dilemmas of Ayahuasca Globalization in the 21st Century
2020-02-07 15:00 - 17:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The use of the psychedelic plant brew ayahuasca has expanded significantly during the last 50 years. Once only known to Amazonian communities, ayahuasca is now used in diverse social and cultural contexts across the world. The Brazilian ayahuasca religions, originating with the Santo Daime in Brazil founded in the 1930s, are now internationally recognised and established. An ayahuasca industry servicing Western clientele in search of shamanic healing is booming in the Amazon. A plethora of informal ayahuasca circles, ceremonies and communities have also arisen catering to a huge variety of social groups and needs. Indeed, ayahuasca has apparently become the glorified medicina of spiritual seekers, religious followers, and business entrepreneurs alike. Drawing on long-term fieldwork and first-hand experience participating in ayahuasca communities both in the Global South and the Global North, we ask: what challenges does the globalisation of ayahuasca present? We explore key issues such as: economic implications; legal dilemmas; sustainability problems; safety issues including sexual abuse and fatalities; authenticity and cultural appropriation. We argue that the development of ayahuasca shamanism through cross-cultural relations, involving cultural hybridisation and transculturation is not a perversion of “tradition” but represents continuity with its historical process of formation and original synthesis between different indigenous ethnic traditions and Christian elements. It is no longer possible to consider the local formation of the curanderos apart from their interactions with foreigners, or these articulations between the local and the global.
Presented by the THI Drug Histories and Futures Cluster

Dr. Beatriz Caiuby Labate (Bia Labate) is a queer Brazilian anthropologist who immigrated to the U.S. in 2017. She has a Ph.D. in social anthropology from the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil. Her main areas of interest are the study of plant medicines, drug policy, shamanism, ritual, and religion. She is Executive Director of the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines, an organization that provides public education about psychedelic plant medicines and promotes a bridge between the ceremonial use of sacred plants and psychedelic science. She is Adjunct Faculty at the East-West Psychology Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in San Francisco, and Visiting Professor at the Center for Research and Post Graduate Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS) in Guadalajara. She is also Public Education and Culture Specialist at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). She is co-founder of the Interdisciplinary Group for Psychoactive Studies (NEIP) in Brazil, and editor of NEIP’s website, as well as editor of the Mexican blog Drugs, Politics, and Culture. She is author, co-author, and co-editor of twenty-one books, one special-edition journal, and several peer-reviewed articles.

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Children of the Land
2020-02-11 19:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes award-winning poet Marcelo Hernandez Castillo for a discussion and signing of his new memoir about growing up undocumented in the United States. Children of the Land recounts the sorrows and joys of a family torn apart by draconian policies and chronicles one young man’s attempt to build a future in a nation that denies his existence. Castillo will be in conversation with Nathan Osorio at this event, which is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz. A portion of the sales of Children of the Land will be donated to the Community Action Board of Santa Cruz County’s Immigration Program.
“You were not a ghost even though an entire country was scared of you. No one in this story was a ghost. This was not a story.”
When Marcelo Hernandez Castillo was five years old and his family was preparing to cross the border between Mexico and the United States, he suffered temporary, stress-induced blindness. Castillo regained his vision, but quickly understood that he had to move into a threshold of invisibility before settling in California with his parents and siblings. Thus began a new life of hiding in plain sight and of paying extraordinarily careful attention at all times for fear of being truly seen. Before Castillo was one of the most celebrated poets of a generation, he was a boy who perfected his English in the hopes that he might never seem extraordinary.
With beauty, grace, and honesty, Castillo recounts his and his family’s encounters with a system that treats them as criminals for seeking safe, ordinary lives. He writes of the Sunday afternoon when he opened the door to an ICE officer who had one hand on his holster, of the hours he spent making a fake social security card so that he could work to support his family, of his father’s deportation and the decade that he spent waiting to return to his wife and children only to be denied reentry, and of his mother’s heartbreaking decision to leave her children and grandchildren so that she could be reunited with her estranged husband and retire from a life of hard labor.
Children of the Land distills the trauma of displacement, illuminates the human lives behind the headlines and serves as a stunning meditation on what it means to be a man and a citizen.
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is the author of Cenzontle, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. prize, winner of the 2019 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award in poetry, a finalist for the Norther California Book Award and named a best book of 2018 by NPR and the New York Public Library. As one of the founders of the Undocupoets campaign, he is a recipient of the Barnes and Noble “Writers for Writers” Award. He holds a B.A. from Sacramento State University and was the first undocumented student to graduate from the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan. His work has appeared or is featured in The New York Times, The Paris Review, People Magazine, and PBS Newshour, among others. He lives in Marysville, California where he teaches poetry to incarcerated youth and also teaches at the Ashland University Low-Res MFA program.
Nathan Xavier Osorio is the son of a Mexican grocer and Nicaraguan nurse. His poetry and translations have appeared in BOMB, The Offing, The Grief Diaries, Boston Review, and elsewhere. His reviews and interviews featuring poets such as Juan Felipe Herrera and Rigoberto González have appeared in Columbia Journal, UC Santa Cruz’s The Humanities Institute, Publishers Weekly, and Letras Latinas’ La Bloga. His chapbook, The Last Town Before the Mojave, was recently selected as a finalist for the 2019 Poetry Society of America 30 and Under Chapbook Fellowship by Evie Shockley and was previously selected as a finalist for the 2016 Atlas Review Chapbook Contest. In 2019, he was also selected as a semi-finalist for 92Y’s Discovery Poetry Contest. He is currently a PhD student in Literature and Creative/Critical Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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 February 9th.

What's Your Story? An Evening with Stephanie Foo
2020-02-11 19:30 - 21:00 | 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

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.
