The Humanities Institute

Saturday Shakespeare - Macbeth
2026-05-16 10:15 (America/Los_Angeles) | Aptos Library, 7695 Soquel Dr, Aptos, 95003, United States
Saturday Shakespeare in Santa Cruz Presents Macbeth by William Shakespeare Aptos Library on Aoril 18, 25, May 2, 9 & 16 2026 at 10:15 a.m in the Aptos Library Betty Leonard Community Room (in person or join by Zoom). The first hour will be a conversation with the scheduled guest speaker followed by a volunteer read aloud of the play. On May 16,a video of a live stage production will be shown. This event series is co-sponsored by the UC Santa Cruz Shakespeare Workshop.
For more information, Zoom Link, or to volunteer to be a reader, contact: saturdayshakespeare@gmail.com
Guest Speakers / Video Recording

April 18: Julia Reinhard Lupton, Distinguished Professor Emerita of English & Comparative Literature & Co-Director of the New Swan Shakespeare Center at UC, Irvine. Reading: Act 1
April 25: Charles Pasternak, Acclaimed New York-based theatre director and actor, Paul will direct Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s 2026 production of Macbeth. Reading: Act 2 through Act 3, Scene 3
May 2: Abigail Heald, Lecturer in Literature @ UC Santa Cruz & Stanford. She is writing a book on the relationship between art and emotion in Shakespeare’s work. Reading: Act 3, Scene 4 through Act 4, Scene 2
May 9: Paul Mullins, Actor / Director, Artistic Director of Santa Cruz Shakespeare. Reading: Act 4, Scene 3 through Act 5, Scene 8
May 16: Video recording of a live stage production at the Globe Theatre, directed by Tony Award winning director Eve Best, and starring Joseph Millson (Macbeth) and Samantha Spiro (Lady Macbeth).

EarthStory Festival
2026-05-16 13:00 - 18:00 | The Agrihood, 76 N Winchester Blvd, Santa Clara, CA, 95050
You are invited to the EarthStory Festival: Our Regenerative Future, hosted by EarthStory and the Eat•Grow•Learn Community Network at the Agrihood in Santa Clara (76 N. Winchester Boulevard). Join us for an afternoon of storytelling, music, workshops, and booths all celebrating our regenerative future on this planet! Starting at 1:00pm, come experience a marketplace hosted by local regenerative farms and environmental organizations. There will have workshops all day on the amphitheater stage hosted by Cultivating Self, Bioticship, Rising Lotus Reiki, and Indy Rishi-Singh. At 3:00pm there will be storytelling offered by the Santa Clara Open Space Authority and the Eat•Grow•Learn Community Network.

Tickets are free. Donations are welcome.
For more information: EarthStory’s Substack

This event is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute.

Privacy’s Defender: Fight Against Digital Surveillance with Cindy Cohn
2026-05-19 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Cindy Cohn has devoted her life to the fight for digital rights. She’s tangled with federal officials to keep our online conversations secure from the government’s prying eyes, fought to ensure that you are told when your information has been turned over to the government, and argued before judges to protect our right to speak and to share science and knowledge on the internet.
In Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance (MIT Press), Cindy weaves her own personal story with her role as a leading legal voice representing the rights and interests of technology users, innovators, whistleblowers, and researchers during the Crypto Wars of the 1990s, battles over NSA’s dragnet internet spying revealed in the 2000s, and the fight against FBI gag orders.
During this national book tour, Cindy will be at UC Santa Cruz to give a book talk on May 19, 2026 from 12:00-1:30 pm.

Free and open to the public with registration. This event is both in-person and virtual.
Cindy Cohn is the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which works to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice and innovation for all the people of the world. Before becoming Executive Director a decade ago, Cindy was the organization’s Legal Director from 2000-2015, and led the organization’s impact litigation work on bringing balance to copyright law, stopping mass spying and protecting freedom of expression online. She’s won many awards for her work and even more court decisions.

Institute for Social Transformation, The Humanities Institute, Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas, The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society and the Banatao Institute (CITRIS), and the Security Research Lab.

The Deep Read: Faculty Salon on Entangled Life
2026-05-19 18:00 | Virtual and In Person
Join us for a salon-style event at the Hay Barn on campus where our participating Deep Read faculty, Professors Benjamin Breen (History), Gregory Gilbert (Environmental Studies), and Donna Haraway (History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies) will give brief presentations and discuss Entangled Life with the Deep Read community in a Q&A moderated by Deep Read Faculty Co-Lead, Laura Martin. Participants can also attend virtually.

In person at the Cowell Ranch Hay Barn. Doors open at 5:30pm.
Event Logistics: Bicycling, carpooling, ridesharing, and public transportation are encouraged as parking is limited on campus. If you drive to the event, please plan to park in UCSC Lot #115 or #116. To reach these lots, proceed through the main entrance to campus, continue up the hill from the information kiosk on Coolidge, then turn right at the Ranch View/Carriage House Road stoplight into the Carriage House/Campus Facilities parking lot. The Hay Barn is a 5-minute walk across the street from the parking lot. There will be directional signage to help you get to the correct parking lot and the Hay Barn entrance. Overflow parking will be available in lot #122. View the campus parking map here.

The Deep Read is an annual program of The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz made possible through the generous support of the Helen and Will Webster Foundation. We invite curious minds to think deeply about books and the most pressing issues of our contemporary moment.

Alyssa Battistoni - Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature
2026-05-20 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Co-sponsored by the Center for Critical Urban and Environmental Studies
Although capitalism is typically treated as a force for relentless commodification, it consistently fails to place value on vital aspects of the nonhuman world, whether carbon emissions or entire ecosystems. Free Gifts argues that to understand contemporary ecological problems from biodiversity collapse to climate change, we have to understand how some things come to have value under capitalism—and how others do not. The book recovers and reinterprets the idea of the free gift of nature used by classical economic thinkers to describe what we gratuitously obtain from the natural world, and builds on Karl Marx’s critique of political economy to show how capitalism fundamentally treats nature as free for the taking. This novel theory of capitalism’s relationship to nature not only helps us understand contemporary ecological breakdown, but also casts capitalism’s own core dynamics in a new light.
Alyssa Battistoni is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Barnard College. She works and teaches on climate and environmental politics, capitalism, Marxism, feminism, and other topics in contemporary social and political thought. Alyssa is the co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso 2019), and Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (Princeton 2025), and her academic work has been published in the American Political Science Review, Political Theory, NOMOS, Perspectives on Politics, Contemporary Political Theory, among other outlets.

Presented by the Center for Cultural Studies and co-sponsored by the Center for South Asian Studies and the Department of Anthropology Colloquium. This event is open to all students, faculty, staff, and members of the public consistent with University policy and state and federal law.

Spring 2026 COLLOQUIUM SERIES
THE CENTER FOR CULTURAL STUDIES hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work-in-progress by faculty & visitors. We are pleased to announce our Spring 2026 Series. Sessions begin promptly at 12:15 PM and end at 1:30 PM (PST) in Humanities Building 1, Room 210.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

2026 Helene Moglen Lecture in Feminism and Humanities with Donna Haraway – Staying with the Trouble for Still Possible Times
2026-05-20 17:30 | Cultural Center at Merrill, Merrill Cultural Center, UC Santa Cruz, Merrill College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
There will be refreshments from 5:00 – 5:30, the talk at 5:30 – 7:00, and a reception at the very end.
The sky has not fallen – yet. In troubled times, this lecture joins human and more-than-human companion species to ask how to think, really think, without either the apocalyptic violence or salvific comfort of human exceptionalism. Revisiting themes, images, arguments, and collaborations from a lifetime of feminist work and play in science studies, biology, cultural studies, and arts, Haraway asks how to tell evidence-laden, effective stories for earthly flourishing in exterminationist times. Is it still possible to make powerful oddkin in opposition to techbro anti-immigrant pronatalism and extraterrestrial settler nationalism in order to partially heal devastated worlds together? If oddkin hold up the sky, we have a chance.
Donna Haraway is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California Santa Cruz. She earned her PhD in Biology at Yale in 1972 and writes and speaks in science and technology studies, feminist theory, and multispecies studies. She has served as thesis adviser for over 60 doctoral students in several disciplinary and interdisciplinary areas. At UCSC, she is an active participant in the Science and Justice Research Center and Center for Cultural Studies. She came to UCSC from the History of Science Department at Johns Hopkins in 1980. From the beginning, Helene Moglen, then Dean of Humanities, became a friend, colleague, and critical builder of feminist work of all kinds.

This lecture is presented by the Center for Cultural Studies and made possible by the Helene Moglen Lecture in Feminism and Humanities for the Center for Cultural Studies Endowment, The Humanities Institute, and the Department of Politics.

Film Screening with Raed Rafei - "Tripoli: A Tale of Three Cities"
2026-05-20 19:00 - 20:30 | Communications 150, Studio C
Pre-Screening Reception: 5:30-7pm, Communications 139
Film Screening: 7-8:30, Communications, Studio C
While living abroad, a filmmaker returns to Tripoli, Lebanon, to confront a hometown that once rejected him as a queer child. With a microphone in hand, he walks around coffee shops, public squares, and a park to ask the city’s inhabitants about their cultural and social beliefs and their embrace of new ideas. Gradually, he meets a group of marginalized individuals whose eccentric life choices contradict the general lifestyle in this religiously and socially conservative city. Through intimate conversations with a communist activist, a queer music producer, and other unconventional characters, Tripoli: A Tale of Three Cities explores the complicated relations one forms with a hometown in crisis. This contemplative urban symphony paints a picture of a city trapped in a self-spun web, paralyzed by a deep economic crisis, a faltering revolution, and a looming doomsday.
Join us for a screening of the film followed by a discussion between UC Santa Cruz alum, Raed Rafei, and Professor of Film and Digital Media, Peter Limbrick.
Raed (El) Rafei is a filmmaker, scholar, and multimedia journalist who has directed award-winning documentaries and experimental films. As a journalist, he has worked for international publications like the Los Angeles Times and news outlets like CNN and Al-Jazeera Documentary Channel. Rafei holds a PhD in Film and Digital Media from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an MA in Journalism from the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism. He is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and his research focuses on queer cinema in the Arab region and its diasporas. His films, which include Tripoli: A Tale of Three Cities, 74 (The Reconstitution of a Struggle) and Al-Atlal (The Ruins), have screened at international film festivals and venues like IDFA, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Doc Lisboa, Visions du Réel, and the Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley.

Presented by the Center for the Middle East and North Africa and co-sponsored by Film and Digital Media

Laura Van Broekhoven - Indigenous-Led Regenerative Partnerships: Reframing Museum Ethics for Reconciliation and Societal Healing
2026-05-21 11:00 - 13:00 | Social Sciences 1, Room 261, Social Sciences 1‎ University of California Santa Cruz, College Ten, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
For over a decade, the Pitt Rivers Museum has engaged in sustained, collaborative work with Indigenous peoples whose cultural belongings, acquired through histories of dispossession and colonial violence, are now held in Oxford. Part of the work has helped reposition the museum as a site of cultural care rather than a repository of extracted, well-preserved “assets.” Drawing on four recent projects that have prioritised listening and collaboration grounded in Indigenous self-determination—including “Maasai: Living Cultures,” “Naga: A Path Home,” “Shuar: Proyecto Tsantsa,” and “Evenki: Wandering in Other Worlds”—Prof. Van Broekhoven explores how Indigenous-led partnerships can enable transformational change through shifting power dynamics on an institutional and societal level.
This lecture examines how Indigenous-led partnerships challenge entrenched academic norms that privilege written documentation over Indigenous knowledge systems. In some contexts, communities have chosen not repatriation but cultural care, reconciliation, and processes of peace-building through reparative justice, using collaboration as a catalyst to renew and strengthen their own governance structures and to address internal inequities shaped by colonial histories. In others, existing peace-making frameworks have been reactivated to collectively confront the enduring impact of colonialism and to imagine pathways for recovery and decolonising the present. Across these contexts, regenerative partnerships can support peace, healing, and structural repair, even as such shifts may be experienced as loss by those long accustomed to institutional advantage.
Laura Van Broekhoven is the Director of the Pitt Rivers Museum and Professor of Museum Studies, Ethics, and Material Culture at the University of Oxford. As a member of the Colonial Collections Committee, she advises the Dutch Ministry of Culture on repatriation. She is an international authority on museum ethics and the development of new praxis in the field of ethnographic museums, especially with regards to redress and repatriation, always working through partnership. At the 2022 European Museum of the Year Awards, Laura was awarded the Kenneth Hudson Award for Institutional Courage and Professional Integrity by the European Museum Forum as recognition of four museum directors for their ‘”personal courage and professional integrity in their continuous contributions to developing a new global ethics for museums, addressing the urgent and contentious issues of decolonization, restitution, reparation, and repatriation.” In May 2025, Laura won the “Making a difference globally” VC award and the Museum+Heritage ‘Partnership of the Year’ award for the groundbreaking Maasai Living Cultures project.

Living Writers with Terri Witek
2026-05-21 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
In Nourishment, Us.
Terri Witek (Stetson University Emeritus). Poet/Visual Artist
Living Writers Spring 2026: Our Nourishment, US features poets, writers, critics, visual and performance artists, who demonstrate how writing and art enacts around the idea of freedom and the imaginary in the face of the constant threat of terror and erasure. In the presence of who we all are within marginalized yet expansively powerful fields of racialized and multiply lived complex and diverse identities, please come as we convene in spirit, deep celebration, and resource with one another.
About the Living Writers Series
The Living Writers Series (LWS) is a live reading series organized especially for the Creative Writing Program community at UCSC. There is a new series each quarter, and each series features writers with unique voices. The LWS is open to all creative writing students and the public.

Sponsored by the Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Humanities Institute, The Laurie Sain Endowment, and the Bay Tree Bookstore.

The Deep Read: The Literature and Poetics of Fungi Salon
2026-05-26 18:00 | Virtual and In Person
Join us for a salon-style event at the Hay Barn on campus where we will hold a salon focused on the literary and poetic influence of fungi and its relation to Entangled Life. The salon will feature Professors Hannah Cole (Assistant Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz), Brenda Hillman (Professor Emerita of Poetry at Saint Mary’s College), A. Laurie Palmer (Professor Emerita of Art at UC Santa Cruz), and Jennifer Tseng (Associate Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at UC Santa Cruz) in conversation with moderator Laura Martin and the Deep Read community. Participants can also attend virtually.

In person at the Cowell Ranch Hay Barn. Doors open at 5:30pm.
Event Logistics: Bicycling, carpooling, ridesharing, and public transportation are encouraged as parking is limited on campus. If you drive to the event, please plan to park in UCSC Lot #115 or #116. To reach these lots, proceed through the main entrance to campus, continue up the hill from the information kiosk on Coolidge, then turn right at the Ranch View/Carriage House Road stoplight into the Carriage House/Campus Facilities parking lot. The Hay Barn is a 5-minute walk across the street from the parking lot. There will be directional signage to help you get to the correct parking lot and the Hay Barn entrance. Overflow parking will be available in lot #122. View the campus parking map here.

The Deep Read is an annual program of The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz made possible through the generous support of the Helen and Will Webster Foundation. We invite curious minds to think deeply about books and the most pressing issues of our contemporary moment.

Murad Idris – Against Hate: On the Politics of a False Diagnosis
2026-05-27 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Co-sponsored by the Global Political Thought Working Group
The idea that “hate” names a fundamental problem of our time has engulfed Anglophone public discourse. Republicans and Democrats, university presidents and doxxing campaigns, advocacy organizations and journalists, scholarly experts and “hate glossaries” criticize what they oppose as hate, demand standing against hate, and seem to treat hate as a diagnosis—one that comes with its own institutional prescriptions. In recent years, Gaza has put the pervasiveness and power of this discourse on full display. What is the long history of this way of diagnosing politics and the world? Who hates, what counts as hating, who is hated, and what broader philosophical structures and shifts underlie the subject for whom hate is a cipher or a code for understanding the world? The presentation offers a genealogy of “hate” through the question of Palestine over the last six decades, its transformations, and its intersections with anti-Muslim racism.

Murad Idris is Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan and is currently a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. His award-winning book, War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought (Oxford, 2019), examines how philosophers fantasize about peace in order to promote hierarchy, war, and repression. He co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory (Oxford, 2020), with Leigh Jenco and Megan Thomas, and co-authored Political Theory: A Global and Comparative Introduction (SAGE, 2025), with Leigh Jenco and Paulina Ochoa Espejo. He is completing projects about Sayyid Qutb’s global and critical thought, the genealogies of racializing Islam, and the politics of hate. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania with specializations in Political Theory and Middle East Politics.

Presented by the Center for Cultural Studies and co-sponsored by the Center for South Asian Studies and the Department of Anthropology Colloquium. This event is open to all students, faculty, staff, and members of the public consistent with University policy and state and federal law.

Spring 2026 COLLOQUIUM SERIES
THE CENTER FOR CULTURAL STUDIES hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work-in-progress by faculty & visitors. We are pleased to announce our Spring 2026 Series. Sessions begin promptly at 12:15 PM and end at 1:30 PM (PST) in Humanities Building 1, Room 210.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Jean Drèze - "Yummy: School Meals in India"
2026-05-29 10:00 - 11:30 | Virtual Event
Join the Center for South Asian Studies for a virtual talk by Jean Drèze, “Yummy: School Meals in India.” School meals have been a legal entitlement of Indian children since 2001. It took some years for this legal entitlement to translate into functional schemes, but from then onwards school meals have made important contributions to child nutrition, school attendance, and social equity. From time to time, they faced some resistance from the biscuit industry, finance ministries, upper-caste parents, and other parties. School meals are alive and well today, yet much scope remains to expand their nutritional, educational, and social benefit

This event is virtual. Register above.
Jean Drèze is a development economist based in Ranchi (Eastern India). His work focuses on various aspects of social policy, from employment guarantee to school meals. He is also active in various campaigns for economic and social rights.

Presented by the Center for South Asian Studies.

UCSC Free Performance Miriam Ellis International Playhouse
2026-05-29 19:00, 2026-05-30 19:00, 2026-05-31 19:00 | Stevenson Event Center
FREE STAGE PERFORMANCES IN FRENCH, JAPANESE, AND SPANISH WITH ENGLISH TITLES FROM STUDENTS OF UCSC!
For its 23rd season, the Miriam Ellis International Playhouse will present fully-staged performances in French, Japanese, and Spanish, with English super-titles projected above the stage. The program will be directed by Language lecturers and performed by Language students.
French: Dur dur la torture (Pure Torture), written by the students, directed by Renée Cailloux.
Japanese: “きぼうのうた” (Song of Hope), directed by Naoko Yamamoto.
Spanish: “Noble campaña” (A Lofty Cause), Based on a short story by Gregorio López y Fuentes and directed by Carolina Castillo-Trelles and Sandra Malone.
For more information, contact Renée Cailloux at meip@ucsc.edu

Office Hours Under the Sea
2026-05-30 12:00 - 17:00 | Institute of the Arts and Sciences, 100 Panetta Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join Ronaldo Wilson and special guests for a site-specific, endurance performance as part of there are no words, but melodies. The exhibition emerges at the intersections of Black poetics, performance, and visual art to shuttle between verbal and non-verbal forms of language, rendering the boundaries of identity and meaning slippery.
Drop in and visit Wilson’s office hours any time between 12pm and 5pm.
Ronaldo V. Wilson is a poet, interdisciplinary artist, academic, and the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man, winner of the Cave Canem Prize; Poems of the Black Object, winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry; Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose, Other, and Lucy 72. His latest books are Carmelina: Figures and Virgil Kills: Stories. He is the editor of three special issues of hybrid and experimental work in Interim: A Journal of Poetry and Poetics; and Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. He has shown work and performed most recently at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, and The Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard. The recipient of numerous fellowships, including Cave Canem, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MacDowell, and The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Wilson is Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at U.C. Santa Cruz, where he directs the Creative Writing Program, and serves on the core faculty of the Creative Critical PhD Program; principal faculty member of CRES (Critical Race and Ethnic Studies); and affiliate faculty member of DANM (Digital Arts and New Media).

The Roadmap Home - Affordable Housing Month Panel Discussion
2026-05-30 14:00 - 16:30 | Temple Beth El, 3055 Porter Gulch Road, Aptos, CA, 95003, United States
Join Housing Santa Cruz County for Affordable Housing Month Keynote & 6th Anniversary Celebration, an afternoon that brings together the big-picture vision and the on-the-ground reality of housing in California.

The Roadmap Home will explore a comprehensive, solutions-driven framework for ending the housing crisis. New Affordable Housing Pipeline data will confront a stark truth: nearly 40,000 affordable homes are ready to be built across California but without the funding to move forward. What does this mean for Santa Cruz County? And what will it take to ensure our community is ready to lead? Join leaders, advocates, and community members as we align around the next steps to move from possibility to production. Please join us for this educational and inspiring Affordable Housing Month Keynote event—which will also celebrates Housing Santa Cruz County’s 6th anniversary!
Speakers:
Chione Lucina Muñoz Flegal is CEO of Housing California, a prominent nonprofit advocacy group and policy institute focused on addressing housing scarcity and homelessness across the state, and that published Roadmap Home. Roadmap Home is a comprehensive policy framework and advocacy campaign intended to end homelessness, create 1.2 million new affordable homes, protect 1 million renters, and close racial equity gaps by 2030, throughout California.
Heather Hood is Vice President and Northern California Market Leader of Enterprise Community Partners, a national nonprofit that provides solutions, capital, and community development to address the U.S.’s shortage of affordable rental homes, and that published the 2026 California Affordable Housing Production Pipeline. The 2026 California Affordable Housing Production Pipeline is a report that illustrates the progress cities, counties, and the state have made to encourage affordable housing in California—and also underscores that without necessary public funding, these developments will not be built.
Elaine Johnson, J.D., Executive Director of Housing Santa Cruz County, the organization that will lead local action to implement the Roadmap Home and Affordable Housing Pipeline data in order to continue supporting the creation of the housing that Santa Cruz County and all its residents need to thrive. Housing Santa Cruz County’s work is a vital component of housing development in our county, through its public advocacy, support of democratic accountability, and community education.

ABOUT HOUSING SANTA CRUZ COUNTY: Housing Santa Cruz County, launched in 2020, is a coalition of stakeholders across a wide array of sectors, working collaboratively to align the political and community will necessary to create the housing that Santa Cruz County and all its residents need to thrive.

This event is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute.

The Deep Read - A Conversation with Merlin Sheldrake
2026-05-31 16:00 | Quarry Amphitheater
Join us for a free, public conversation with British mycologist and author, Merlin Sheldrake, at UC Santa Cruz’s Quarry Amphitheater on May 31, 2026. He’ll discuss his New York Times bestseller, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change our Minds, and Shape our Futures with Associate Professor of History Benjamin Breen and the Deep Read community. Together, we’ll explore the dependence of all life—human, plant, animal, and beyond—on fungal networks and how the resulting interconnections provoke us to reconsider our understanding of existence, identity, intelligence, and more.

The Deep Read is an annual program of The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz made possible through the generous support of the Helen and Will Webster Foundation. We invite curious minds to think deeply about books and the most pressing issues of our contemporary moment.

CMENA Student Choice Lecture: Razan Ghazzawi -Carceral Geographies to Racialized Borders: A Queer Feminist Ethnography
2026-06-01 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Join us for the annual student choice lecture presented by the Center for the Middle East and North Africa: Razan Ghazzawi, “Carceral Geographies to Racialized Borders: A Queer Feminist Ethnography.” From a positionality of an exiled protestor in Europe and a former political prisoner in Syria, this project traces the journeys of eight self-identified Syrian and Palestinian LGBTQ artists, workers, performers, and refugees from their temporary exile locations in Lebanon to their refugee destinations in Europe. It explores the interlocutors’ temporal encounters with geographies of checkpoints and prisons in Syria and Lebanon, on one side, and racialized borders of Europe, on the other. This project investigates narratives of what Rima Hammami calls “carceral geographies” as well as surviving checkpoints, prisons, and asylum journeys from Syria and Lebanon to Europe. The talk will focus on one of the book’s chapters, which examines stories of navigating and surviving racialized borders as LGBTQ refugees of color, and how this experience is securitized and militarized; it will also explore emotional labor and care as affective forms of protest within the context of military carceral states in Syria and Lebanon as well as Europe’s “refugee crisis.”
Dr. Razan Ghazzawi (they/them/هيهن) is an award-winning human rights defender, former political prisoner, and recovering blogger. They are an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Oregon State University. A MESA Global Academy Fellow for 2024–2025, Ghazzawi’s work has appeared in ARTE, Al Jazeera English, The Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, and Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research. They are currently developing their first book monograph, an ethnographic study of sexuality politics in Syria and Lebanon that examines revolution, the “war on terror,” and the “refugee crisis” from south–south perspectives.

Co-presented by the Center for the Middle East and North Africa and the Arab Students Union. Lunch will be served during the talk.

Living Writers Student Reading
2026-06-04 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
In Nourishment, Us.
Living Writers Spring 2026: Our Nourishment, US features poets, writers, critics, visual and performance artists, who demonstrate how writing and art enacts around the idea of freedom and the imaginary in the face of the constant threat of terror and erasure. In the presence of who we all are within marginalized yet expansively powerful fields of racialized and multiply lived complex and diverse identities, please come as we convene in spirit, deep celebration, and resource with one another.
About the Living Writers Series
The Living Writers Series (LWS) is a live reading series organized especially for the Creative Writing Program community at UCSC. There is a new series each quarter, and each series features writers with unique voices. The LWS is open to all creative writing students and the public.

Sponsored by the Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Humanities Institute, The Laurie Sain Endowment, and the Bay Tree Bookstore.

2026 Dickens Universe
2026-07-26 - 2026-08-01 | UC Santa Cruz
The Dickens Project at UC Santa Cruz invites the community to the 2026 Dickens Universe, held July 26–August 1, a weeklong scholarly gathering devoted to Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. The Universe brings together scholars, students, teachers, and lifelong learners for lectures, discussion groups, film screenings, Victorian tea, festive dance, and a variety of other immersive experiences—all set among the redwoods on the UCSC campus. This retreat celebrates the power of literature to build community, spark conversation, and connect readers across generations.
For more information please visit: 2026 Dickens Universe
