The Humanities Institute

Madhavi Murty Reading Group - Stories That Bind: Political Economy and Culture in New India
2022-11-04 11:45 - 13:45 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The THI research cluster “Vernaculars of Travel in South Asia and the Middle East” presents a reading group on Madhavi Murty’s new book “Stories That Bind: Political Economy and Culture in New India.” Madhavi Murty will be in conversation with Radhika Prasad.
Stories that Bind: Political Economy and Culture in New India examines the assertion of authoritarian nationalism and neoliberalism; both backed by the authority of the state and argues that contemporary India should be understood as the intersection of the two. More importantly, the book reveals, through its focus on India and its complex media landscape that this intersection has a narrative form, which author, Madhavi Murty labels spectacular realism. The book shows that the intersection of neoliberalism with authoritarian nationalism is strengthened by the circulation of stories about “emergence,” “renewal,” “development,” and “mobility” of the nation and its people. It studies stories told through film, journalism, and popular non-fiction along with the stories narrated by political and corporate leaders to argue that Hindu nationalism and neoliberalism are conjoined in popular culture and that consent for this political economic project is crucially won in the domain of popular culture.
Moving between mediascapes to create an archive of popular culture, Murty advances our understanding of political economy through material that is often seen as inconsequential, namely the popular cultural story. These stories stoke our desires (e.g. for wealth), scaffold our instincts (e.g. for a strong leadership) and shape our values.
Lunch will be provided. Please RSVP by emailing: VernacularsUCSC@gmail.com.
“Vernaculars of Travel in South Asia and the Middle East” is a THI Cluster that focuses on questions of movement (both conceptual and physical) across regions. It seeks to re-imagine the vocabularies, concepts, and history of travel from the Global South, centering south-south relationships and non-European languages as vessels for reflecting on the political ramifications of mobility and fixity. Co-PIs: Muriam Davis and Nidhi Mahajan.
Madhavi Murty is associate professor in the Feminist Studies department and an affiliate of CRES and Digital Arts and New Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research and teaching interests center on popular media, nationalism, globalization, feminism, postcolonial theory, cultural theory, and modalities of difference such as race, caste, and gender.
Radhika Prasad is a PhD candidate in the Literature Department, with a Directed Emphasis in Feminist Studies. Her work analyzes language politics in post-independence India, by exploring the embedment of cultural imaginaries in languages. Her dissertation contextualizes the establishment of Hindi as an official language in India within Indian nation-formation and the India-Pakistan Partition, and examines the incommensurability of the official and literary idioms of the language.

Victorian Necromancies with Professor Renée Fox - Discussion of Dracula (Beginning-Chap. 16)
2022-11-06 14:00 | Virtual Event
Victorian Necromancies with Professor Renée Fox
As part of the series “Victorian Necromancies,” Professor Fox will lead three sessions that offer the Friends an opportunity to explore the Victorian gothic, one of her favorite genres of 19th-century literature.
From Professor Fox: “The first session will be a presentation on my forthcoming book, The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature, and the second two sessions will be discussions of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897). Although I don’t write about Dracula very much in my book, I chose it for these sessions for a few reasons: as an Irishman living in London for much of his adult life, Stoker has always been important to my work on the intersections between Irish and British writing at the end of the 19th century, and Dracula is a deeply weird novel that I think everyone should read and talk about. I’m also really interested in adaptation (I think about it as a form of reanimation), and Dracula offers a fantastic opportunity not just to talk about the text’s many adaptations across the last 125 years, but also to talk about the novel’s own investments in questions of originality and reproduction.”
Renée Fox is an assistant professor in the Literature Department at UC Santa Cruz, where she teaches classes in Victorian Studies, Irish Studies, the gothic, and popular culture. She is the 2022 Autumn Friends of the DickensProject Faculty Fellow.
Virtual Sessions

Book Talk: The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature
October 2, 20222:00 PM PDT

Discussion: Dracula (Beginning to Chapter 16)
November 6, 20222:00 PM PST

Discussion: Dracula (Chapter 17 to End)
December 4, 20222:00 PM PST

More Information: https://dickens.ucsc.edu/programs/friends-faculty-fellows/victorian-necromancies.html
Registration: https://ucsc.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUkf–hpz8rEtTZRTrhuGsHGRsIQJSVlahR

Telling Your Research Story Through Comics
2022-11-07 10:00 - 11:00 | Virtual Event
Join us for “Telling Your Research Story Through Comics” on Nov. 7 at 10 a.m. on Zoom. Featuring: Felicia Lopez (UCM), Carolyn Jennings (UCM), Jordan Collver, and Pino Cao. Register here.

Sawyer Seminar Reading Group with Alberto Ortiz-Díaz
2022-11-07 16:00 - 17:30 | Virtual Event
This reading group is part of the Sawyer Seminar “Race, Empire, and Environments of Biomedicine.” Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

The talk will occur virtually and guests can register to join the Zoom meeting ahead of the event.
Alberto Ortiz Díaz is assistant professor of history at the University of Texas, Arlington, and currently a Larson Fellow at the Kluge Center, Library of Congress. His first book, Raising the Living Dead: Rehabilitative Corrections in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press in March 2023.

Humanizing Technology Launch Event
2022-11-07 16:30 - 18:00 | Crown College Plaza, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Humanizing Technology Certificate Program is a Humanities Division initiative targeted to early career Engineering students but open to all UCSC undergraduates. The program features small class sizes and GE courses that examine the goals and impacts of technology in various ways. To earn the certificate, students take three of the five lower-division Humanities courses listed below. There are no prerequisites, and you can take the courses in any order you choose. Each course fulfills a different GE requirement:
Curious about where to find GE Humanities courses about technology? Come join the Humanizing Technology Certificate Program!
HUMN 15 Ethics and Technology Perspectives on Technology GE, offered Spring and Summer 2023

This course explores ethical, social, and political issues raised by existing and emerging technologies. HUMN 25 Humans and Machines Textual Analysis GE, offered Winter and Summer 2023. This course explores the tension between humans and machines, between people and objects increasingly resembling them.

HUMN 35 Language Technology Cross-Cultural Analysis GE, offered Winter 2023

This course provides a comparative, historical framing of the development of communication technologies and practices, considering a variety of cultures and societies across human history.

HUMN 45 Race and Technology Ethnicity and Race GE, offered Spring and Summer 2023

This course examines how the construction of race connects with constructs in science and technology.

HUMN 55 Technologies of Representation Interpreting Arts and Media GE, offered Spring and Summer 2023

Focusing on technologies of representation like photographs, selfies, and surveillance data, this course explores how viewers and makers derive meaning from images and how power operates in their creation and circulation.

Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities Interested in learning more? See our website for details: humanities.ucsc.edu/academics/hum-tech

Karen Tei Yamashita Fall 2022 Emeriti Lecture - Questions 27 & 28: Loyalty and Japanese American Incarceration
2022-11-08 19:00 - 20:30 | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
In 1942, at the outset of World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the incarceration of all Japanese Americans on the West Coast. The following year, the War Relocation Authority had the task of determining the loyalty of their inmates in order to release them for productive normalized lives outside camp. A loyalty questionnaire was distributed to assess “loyalty.” While many of the questions seemed innocuous, two questions in particular, 27 and 28, about willingness to serve in the US military and forswearing allegiance to the Japanese Emperor, were confusing and divisive within the incarcerated communities. The answering of these two questions created rifts within families and friends, with traumatic divisions that resonate to this day.
Register to attend in person
Register to attend virtually
Complimentary event parking will be available in lots 115/116. Please follow event signage at the base of campus and a parking attendant will help assist you.
Questions? Please contact the University Events Office at specialevents@ucsc.edu.
Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of seven books, including I Hotel, finalist for the National Book Award, and most recently, Sansei and Sensibility, all published by Coffee House Press. Recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature and a U.S. Artists’ Ford Foundation Fellowship, she is professor emerita of literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

PhD+ Workshop - Slide Design Workshop
2022-11-09 11:30 - 13:00 | Virtual and In Person
Have you ever inflicted a boring slide presentation on an audience? Learn tips and techniques for using slides the way they should be used, as visual aids to your spoken-word presentation. Prior to attending this workshop, review this slide design page, including viewing the video by Sonya.
Sonya Newlyn received her M.A. in English literature from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and her B.A. in English literature from Emory University, where she also minored in anthropology. In addition to organizing professional development classes, workshops, panels, and the two certificate programs, she also organizes Grad Slam, the Graduate Symposium, and the Distinguished Graduate Student Alumni Award Ceremony.
Register by November 1st for in-person attendance in Graduate Student Commons, Room 204. The event will also be accessible virtually via Zoom. Complimentary vegan lunch provided to in-person attendees.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2022-2023 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the seventh year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by The Humanities Institute. We meet monthly to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Mark Massoud – The Power of Positionality
2022-11-09 12:15 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
What is the impact on and influence of the researcher in their scholarship? Drawing in part on Mark’s empirical research and professional experience, this talk investigates the benefits and burdens of positionality. Positionality is the disclosure of how an author’s racial, gender, class, or other self-identifications, experiences, and privileges influence research methods. A statement of positionality in a research article can enhance the validity of its empirical data and its theoretical contribution. However, such self-disclosure puts scholars in a vulnerable position, and those most likely to reveal how their positionality shapes their research are women, ethnic minorities, or both. At this stage of the field’s methodological development, the burdens of positionality are being carried unevenly by a tiny minority of researchers. Massoud invites scholars to redress this imbalance by embracing expressions of positionality.
Mark Fathi Massoud is a Politics professor and the director of the Legal Studies Program here at UCSC. He also serves as affiliated faculty with the Center for the Middle East and North Africa. He is the author of two books that address the interplay of law, politics, and religion — and he is currently editing a volume on positionality. Mark’s most recent book is Shari’a, Inshallah (Cambridge University Press 2021). Shari’a, Inshallah received four awards: the Hart-SLSA Book Prize from the Socio-Legal Studies Association, the Distinguished Book Award from the American Sociological Association Section on Religion, the Ralph J. Bunche Award for the best book on ethnic and cultural pluralism from American Political Science Association — and it was a Finalist for the PROSE Award for the best book in government and politics published last year, from the Association of American Publishers. Mark is also the author of Law’s Fragile State (Cambridge University Press 2013), which earned awards from the American Political Science Association and the Law and Society Association. Mark holds an appointment as a Visiting Professor at Oxford University. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2015.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Chih-ming Wang - Retelling Chinese Stories in the Era of Global China: On Ha Jin’s Immigrant Novels
2022-11-09 16:00 - 18:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Examining Ha Jin’s immigrant novels in the crossfires of US-China competition, this talk proposes post/Cold War entanglements as a critical frame for reconsidering Asian American studies today. It argues that attention to Chineseness as a political, rather than cultural, construct is more urgent than ever. Ha Jin’s emphasis on immigration as freedom in his novels offers an opportune occasion for examining how Cold War geopolitics persists in and through Chinese America, and how the Chinese American immigrant subjectivity may be politicized to fuel anti-China politics today, especially in the context of US-China rivalry. His rearticulation of diasporic Chineseness based on the principle of freedom and individualism in the shadow of Global China encourages us to grapple with the poignancy of identity as a form of coercion and to reexamine the Cold War legacy of Asian America.

Chih-ming Wang is associate research fellow at the Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. He was a visiting scholar at the Harvard Yenching Institute (2021-22) and a visiting research fellow at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. He works in both transpacific American literature and inter-Asia cultural studies, concerned with the interplay of literature and geopolitics, and the colonial modernity of knowledge production in East Asia. He is the chief-editor of Router: A Journal of Cultural Studies and the author of two books: Transpacific Articulations: Student Migration and the Remaking of Asian America (UHP, 2013) and Re-Articulation: Trajectories of Foreign Literature Studies in Taiwan (Linking, 2021). He also co-edited with Yu-Fang Cho a special issue on “The Chinese Factor” for American Quarterly (2017). He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled “Multiple Returning: Post/Cold War Entanglements and Asian American Literature.”
Presented by the Transnational China Research Hub.

PhD+ Workshop - Preventing and Mitigating Burnout
2022-11-10 11:30 - 13:00 | Virtual and In Person
A vexing problem for academics is burnout: the experience of exhaustion, cynicism, and ineffectiveness that results from stretching across the gap between the ideals of your academic vocation and the reality of your academic job. Jonathan Malesic left his job as a tenured theology professor at a small liberal arts college after undergoing burnout over the course of several years. Since then, he has published dozens of articles on work and burnout in academic journals and general-interest publications. He has also published a book on this topic, The End of Burnout: Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives (University of California Press, 2022). In this workshop, he will address what burnout is, why academic workers are so vulnerable to it, and how building more compassionate institutions can help prevent and heal academic burnout.
In addition to The End of Burnout, Malesic has written about work and burnout for the New York Times, The New Republic, the Washington Post, The Guardian, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, The Hedgehog Review, and several academic journals. He holds a Ph.D. in religious studies from the University of Virginia and has been the recipient of major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Louisville Institute. His writing has been recognized as notable in Best American Essays (2019, 2020, 2021) and Best American Food Writing (2020) and has received special mention in the Pushcart Prize anthology (2019). He teaches writing at Southern Methodist University and the University of Texas at Dallas.
Register by November 2nd for in-person attendance in Graduate Student Commons, Room 204. The event will also be accessible virtually via Zoom. Complimentary vegan lunch provided to in-person attendees.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2022-2023 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the seventh year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by The Humanities Institute. We meet monthly to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Yoav Di-Capua: Reconsidering the 60s Generation in the Arab World and Beyond
2022-11-10 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This is a talk about a book that is still being written. It begins and ends with a funeral. In between, lies the story of the 60s generation in the Arab world. The funeral was that of Egyptian leader Gamal Abd al-Nasser. His 1970 death was just another reminder of the weighty collective defeat of “the first Arabs”: the eminent generation born after WW I, which had defined itself by its Arab ethnicity rather than religious faith and had fought to decolonize their society. Their dream was a dignified life but their lot ended up being a dehumanizing defeat. With the ultimate aim of offering a humanizing narrative of this generation struggle for life with dignity, in this talk I offer preliminary thoughts on one of the most complex and rich experiments in the modern history of the Middle East.
This event will be held on November 14th from 12:00pm-1:30pm and is presented by the Center for Middle East and North Africa.
Yoav Di-Capua is a Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches modern Arab intellectual history. He is the author of Gatekeepers of the Arab Past: Historians and History Writing in Twentieth-Century Egypt (University of California Press, 2009) and No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean Paul Sartre and Decolonization (University Press of Chicago, 2018). Supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, he is currently at work on The First Arabs: An Intimate History of Their Struggle for Dignity and The Aftermath of Defeat.

Living Writers: Duriel E. Harris, Bakar Wilson, Elizabeth Owuor, and Fahima Ife
2022-11-10 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Duriel E. Harris, Bakar Wilson, Elizabeth Owuor, and Fahima Ife, a reading and conversation to celebrate the launch of “Genre Queer/ Gender Queer Playground,” Obsidian: Litrature and Arts in the African Diaspora, guest edited by Ronaldo V. Wilson (moderator).
Conversations: Power Forged, the Fall Living Writers theme, features poets, novelists, academics, curators, and artists in conversation with one another, in person, across genre and media to open up a space between them, and all of us, within dialogue, collaboration, politics, intimacy and difference which poet and activist Audre Lorde describes as that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged. Between legacies, institutions, families, embodiments and homes; across race, gender, sexuality, and class, guests will explore just how. The Fall 2022 series is co-sponsored by the Center for Racial Justice.
Duriel E. Harris is a writer, performer, artist, and scholar. She is author of three critically acclaimed volumes of poetry, including No Dictionary of a Living Tongue (Nightboat, 2017), Drag (2003), and Amnesiac: Poems (2010). Multi-genre works include the one-woman theatrical performance Thingification, the video collaboration Speleology (2011), and the sound+image project “Blood Labyrinth.” Cofounder of The Black Took Collective, Harris is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Illinois State University and Editor in Chief of the award-winning publishing platform Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora.
Bakar Wilson’s poetry has appeared in The Vanderbilt Review, The Lumberyard Radio Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Flicker and Spark: A Contemporary Queer Anthology, and The Ostrich Review, among others. He has performed his work at the Bowery Poetry Club, Poetry Project, The Studio Museum of Harlem, and the 2022 Whitney Biennial. A native of Memphis, TN, Bakar received his BA in English from Vanderbilt University and his MA in Creative Writing from the City College of New York. He is an Adjunct Lecturer of English and Creative Writing at Borough of Manhattan Community College at CUNY.
Elizabeth Owuor is a writer, vinyl collector, DJ, and freelance journalist who interrogates the archives of Black music history, blending intimate narrative with the collective history of her people. Her nonfiction utilizes rare blues and soul music to examine cultural inheritance, Black creative labor, and the ways in which Blackness is constructed and consumed in the U.S. and Europe. She has spun her sounds of Black resistance on vinyl all around the globe and is co-founder of Black Rhythm Happening, an evening dedicated to unearthing gems from the sonic vaults. A Tin House alumna, her journalism has been published in The San Francisco Chronicle, The Christian Science Monitor, and Germany’s Deutsche Welle. To keep the lights on, she works as a copywriter in Silicon Valley. She pursued her Bachelors in Journalism from Emerson College and received a Master’s in Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh. Her writing has been supported by fellowships from MacDowell, Hedgebrook, and the California Arts Council.
fahima ife (they/she, any or no pronoun) is a poet, professor, and editor based in Northern California and New Orleans. She is associate professor of Black Studies in the department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at University of California Santa Cruz. In her creative/critical work and in the classes she teaches, fahima considers 20th and 21st century experimental black aesthetics, ecological poetry and poetics, performance art, intimacy, and pleasure. fahima mostly produces poems, lyrical essays, and hybrid experimental works. She is author of Maroon Choreography (Duke University Press, 2021), the forthcoming poetry collection, Arrhythmia (press TBA, 2023), and other works. She is at work on poems, a music of our sensing here. She is a contributing editor at Tilted House press, and with Ian U Lockaby, co-edits the forthcoming journal LUCIUS.
Ronaldo V. Wilson, PhD, poet, interdisciplinary artist, and academic, is 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, finalist for a Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry; and Lucy 72. His latest books are Carmelina: Figures and Virgil Kills: Stories. The recipient of numerous fellowships, including Cave Canem, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Ford Foundation, Kundiman, MacDowell, The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and Yaddo, Wilson is Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at U.C. Santa Cruz, serving 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).

CANCELED - PhD+ Workshop - Listening, Mentoring, Coaching, Advising
2022-11-15 11:30 - 13:00 | Virtual and In Person
Listening to understand represents an equally important half of effective oral communication to the other half, delivery of the communication by spoken word. Listening well forms the essential communication base upon which to build the skills of mentoring, coaching, and advising. Listening well also aids your performance on a team and in any professional and personal relationship. Learn how to listen conscientiously and to mentor, coach, and advise with empathy.
Register by November 7th for in-person attendance in Graduate Student Commons, Room 204. The event will also be accessible virtually via Zoom. Complimentary vegan lunch provided to in-person attendees.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2022-2023 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the seventh year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by The Humanities Institute. We meet monthly to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

CANCELED Dale Tomich - Capitalism and Slavery: The Contemporaneity of the Non-Contemporaneous
2022-11-15 12:00 - 14:00 | Virtual and In Person
The History of Consciousness department is pleased present their upcoming speaker series this fall quarter and invites you to join them. These will be hybrid events, hosted in-person in Humanities 1 Room 420 & virtually via Zoom, except for the talk on October 25th which will only be on Zoom. The Zoom link for all talks is the same, and can be accessed by clicking the “Join” button below. The November 15th “Capitalism and Slavery: The Contemporaneity of the Non-Contemporaneous” talk will be given by Dale Tomich from Binghamton University.

CANCELED - Dean Mathiowetz – Luxuriating as a Political Structure of Feeling
2022-11-16 12:15 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This event has been cancelled, please stay tuned for a future date for this event.
According to premodern elites, the luxurious appetites of the poor were not only feminine and exotic but also the greatest threat to social order. Popular demands for better wages, sustenance, more festival days, or any improvement in the conditions of ordinary folk were denounced as “luxury.” But scholarship about this discourse has been misdirected by premodern sumptuary laws, focusing on luxury as a class of things. I focus on the act of luxuriating instead, drawing out its embodied, affective, and tactical dimensions as a “structure of feeling.” I argue that a focus on luxuriating opens our thought to the political potential in the physical, sensory, and lived experience of the poor as they lay claim to enjoyment and abundance.

Dean Mathiowetz is Associate Professor of Politics, currently working on a book manuscript Luxuriating in Democracy, Abundance, and the Enjoyment of Bodies Politic. He is the author of Appeals to Interest: Language and the Shaping of Political Agency and the editor of and contributor to Hanna Fenichel Pitkin: Politics, Justice, and Action. His other writings have appeared in journals including Political Theory, Theory and Event, Political Research Quarterly, The New Political Science, and The Arrow.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Patrick Radden Keefe, Empire of Pain & Rogues
2022-11-16 19:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz presents Bestselling author Patrick Radden Keefe will visit Santa Cruz for a discussion about his most recent books Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (in paperback October 18th) and Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks. Empire of Pain is a grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin. Rogues is a collecton of twelve enthralling stories of skulduggery and intrigue that showcase Keefe’s work of a reporter at the top of his game. This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute.

“A new book by Keefe means drop everything and close the blinds; you’ll be turning pages for hours. Rogues is a collection of Keefe’s New Yorker articles about criminals and con artists and more. It’s highly entertaining, of course, but what shines through most brightly is Keefe’s fascination with what makes us human even when we’re at our most imperfect.” —Los Angeles Times
“I read everything he writes. Every time he writes a book, I read it. Every time he writes an article, I read it … he’s a national treasure.” —Rachel Maddow
PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE is an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker magazine and author of the New York Times bestsellers Empire of Pain, winner of the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize, and Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, was selected as one of the ten best books of 2019 by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and The Wall Street Journal, and was named one of the “10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade” by Entertainment Weekly. He’s also the author of two earlier nonfiction books: The Snakehead and Chatter. His most recent book is Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks.
His work has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. He is also the creator and host of the eight-part podcast Wind of Change, an 8-part podcast series, which investigates the strange convergence of espionage and heavy metal music during the Cold War, and was named the #1 podcast of 2020 by The Guardian.

CANCELED - PhD+ Workshop - California Community Colleges Panel Discussion
2022-11-17 11:30 - 13:00 | Virtual and In Person
Learn how to apply to (first step: register with and upload your CV to the CCC Registry) and what it’s like to work for a California community college by talking to director of the CCC Registry, Beth Au, moderator of the panel, and UCSC graduate student alumni and a former UCSC postdoc, all of whom have recently been hired by, are currently working for, or have recently worked for a CCC.
Register by November 9th for in-person attendance in Graduate Student Commons, Room 204. The event will also be accessible virtually via Zoom. Complimentary vegan lunch provided to in-person attendees.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2022-2023 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the seventh year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by The Humanities Institute. We meet monthly to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

CANCELLED - Living Writers: Terri Witek in conversation with Rachel Nelson
2022-11-17 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Terri Witek in conversation with Rachel Nelson
Conversations: Power Forged, the Fall Living Writers theme, features poets, novelists, academics, curators, and artists in conversation with one another, in person, across genre and media to open up a space between them, and all of us, within dialogue, collaboration, politics, intimacy and difference which poet and activist Audre Lorde describes as that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged. Between legacies, institutions, families, embodiments and homes; across race, gender, sexuality, and class, guests will explore just how. The Fall 2022 series is co-sponsored by the Center for Racial Justice.
Terri Witek is the author of 7 books of poems, most recently The Rattle Egg (2021); Something’s Missing in This Museum is forthcoming in 2023. Recent work has been featured in two international anthologies: JUDITH: Women Making Visual Poetry (2021), and in the WAAVe Global Anthology of Women’s Asemic Writing and Visual Poetry (2021). She has collaborated with Brazilian artist Cyriaco Lopes (cyriacolopes.com) since 2005–their works together include museum and gallery shows, performance and site-specific projects featured internationally in New York, Seoul, Miami, Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, and Valencia. Witek holds the Sullivan Chair in Creative Writing at Stetson University, and with Lopes teaches Poetry in the Expanded Field in Stetson’s low-residency MFA of the Americas. Their collaborative projects are represented by The Liminal, Valencia Spain. terriwitek.com
Rachel Nelson, PhD, is director and chief curator of the Institute of the Arts and Sciences and adjunct professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture at University of California, Santa Cruz. In her curatorial projects and research, Nelson explores the transformative potential of art and culture. She is co-curator of the group exhibition Barring Freedom (2020-21), which looks at how artists engage the racialized histories and presents of the U.S. criminal legal system. Other curatorial projects include Bodies at the Borders with Carlos Motta, Solitary Garden with jackie sumell and Tim Young, and Visualizing Abolition, an ongoing art and education program. Nelson has also has published widely, including in Journal of Curatorial Studies, Brooklyn Rail, NKA, Third Text, Savvy, and African Arts, among others.

Linguistics Colloquia: Kate Stone
2022-11-18 11:20 - 13:00 | Virtual Event
Kate Stone, Univ of Potsdam, Germany
Over the course of each year, the Linguistics department hosts colloquia by distinguished faculty from around the world.
For full speaker and event information, please visit: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/colloquia/index.html

Postponed - Meet the Editors: A Guide to Submitting and Publishing Your Academic Book
2022-11-18 12:00 - 13:00 | Virtual Event
This event is going to be rescheduled.
Meet the Editors: A Guide to Submitting and Publishing Your Academic Book
Faculty and graduate students from all UC campuses are welcome. The discussion will be geared towards those completing their first academic manuscripts. Q&A to follow.

Niels Hooper, Executive Editor, University of California Press
Margo Irvin, Acquisitions Editor, Stanford University Press
Kathleen McDermott, Executive Editor for History, Harvard University Press
Eric Porter, Professor in History, History of Consciousness, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, UC Santa Cruz

Presented by the Institute of Arts and Humanities, UC San Diego

CANCELED - PhD+ Workshop - Academic Publishing
2022-11-22 11:30 - 13:00 | Virtual and In Person
This event has been canceled.
How do you choose a reputable academic journal to publish in? What are your copyrights? What is open access? Where do you find academic publishing support at UCSC beyond your program and department?
As scholarly communication librarian at the UCSC Library, Martha Stuit provides author services, including for theses and dissertations, publishing academic articles and books, open access, and copyright. She also serves as the library’s liaison to the Graduate Division and graduate students. Prior to becoming a librarian, she was a journalist. Martha has an M.S. in information from the University of Michigan.
Erich van Rijn is interim executive director at the University of California Press where he leads the press’s book and journal publishing operations. Erich has been with the University of California Press since 1997 and has held positions in marketing, sales, operations, and finance. Prior to joining the press he held positions in marketing at Oxford University Press and HarperCollins Publishers.
Register by November 14th for in-person attendance in Graduate Student Commons, Room 204. The event will also be accessible virtually via Zoom. Complimentary vegan lunch provided to in-person attendees.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2022-2023 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the seventh year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by The Humanities Institute. We meet monthly to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

C. Nadia Seremetakis – A Journey through Border Spaces of the Everyday
2022-11-23 12:15 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The border is the shared topos of the anthropologist, the historian, the archaeologist, the artist, the musician and the poet, as they all bring into dialogue the past and future with the present, the inside with the outside, the particular with the general. Borders are the meeting points of mind and body, ideas and senses, science and literature. Any discourse therefore on the border is a discourse on dialogue—a dialogue that is meant to decenter.
Under conditions of globalization and trans-national processes, where there is no longer an inside and outside, earlier relationships of communication with the different others, human or nonhuman, present or absent, have changed. We rather exist in a pseudo-culture of sameness, much of which is simulated by the media.
In this lecture she explores border and trauma spaces through a journey of antiphonic witnessing and memory as a way of (re)establishing a self-reflexive relationship with the past that changes the positioning of the present. This has been the focus of my ethnographic work based on 30 years of conscious and unconscious fieldwork, writing, teaching and practicing multimedia public anthropology in various locales of the world. In this process, I reflect on my own antinomic subject position in my discipline as a so called “native,” or “indigenous” ethnographer and also as a diasporic, American-trained, post-Boasian anthropologist.
Professor C. Nadia Seremetakis is best known for her acclaimed books The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity and The Last Word: Women Death & Divination in Inner Mani, based on long term fieldwork in urban and rural Greece. She has written seven books in both English and Greek, including poetry, and several of her articles are translated in other languages. Her recent book Sensing the Everyday is a multi-sited ethnographic exploration of the quotidian in process; it weaves past and new fieldwork experiences as she journeys from Greece to Vienna, Edinburgh, Albania, Ireland, New York and beyond, and captures social crisis as a crisis of borders, cartographic, somatic and psychic.
Born and raised in Greece, she studied in New York where she lived for more than twenty years and taught at NYU, Vassar, and CUNY. In 2008 she joined the University of the Peloponnese where she also founded the first in Greece field-based multimedia Program on Everyday Life and Culture. Her engagement with public/applied anthropology in both continents includes designing/organizing public interdisciplinary multimedia events, publishing in the media, and holding advisory positions at the Hellenic Ministry of Health on matters of mobile populations, at the Regional Office for Europe of the World Health Organization, and at the Unesco National Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Heritage.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Our Mutual Friend Discussion Series: Parts XI-XV
2022-11-27 13:00 - 15:00 | Virtual Event
Join Professor Karen Hattaway (San Jacinto College) for a series of discussions about the book that stunned Conrad and Dostoevsky.
Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
Sept. 25, Oct. 23, Nov. 27, and Jan. 22 at 1:00-3:00 PM (PDT) | Virtual Events
Charles Dickens published Our Mutual Friend in twenty monthly parts from May 1864 to November 1865. It was the fourteenth and final novel in his vast corpus of novels, only to be followed by The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), which remained unfinished at the time of his death.
Murder, Money, Marriage, and Mounds… of dust, of human refuse, of cultural debris, of industrial by-production. These are the grand themes and objects this novel’s world spawns, with such horrible inevitability you will think its Thames river-mud could foster spontaneous generation. For the world of Our Mutual Friend is a dirtied and cynical place. Here, even literacy and education–the “power of knowledge” that give heart and decency to Pip and Biddy in Great Expectations–may become, in the wrong hands, mechanical instruments for self-aggrandizement. And the good may need all the wiles of the bad to manufacture a happy ending.
Reading Schedule

Sep. 25
Book the First: The Cup and the Lip – Chapters 1-17, Parts I-V

Oct. 23
Book the Second: Birds of a Feather – Chapters 1-16, Parts VI-X

Nov. 27
Book the Third: A Long Lane – Chapters 1-17, Parts XI-XV

Jan. 22
Book the Fourth: A Turning – Chapters 1-16, Parts XVI-XX

This series of discussions is presented by the Santa Cruz Pickwick Club / Santa Cruz Dickens Fellowship with support from the Santa Cruz Public Libraries.
More information: https://dickens.ucsc.edu/resources/pickwick-club/index.html
Registration: https://ucsc.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIpf-mppjsuHd3RdY9mqMeH-FloGyFbM-MQ

CANCELED - PhD+ Workshop - Mindfulness
2022-11-29 11:30 - 13:00 | Virtual and In Person
Mindfulness is a particular way of paying attention. It is the mental faculty of purposefully bringing attention to one’s present moment experience. Practicing mindfulness can lead to: improved ability to focus, increased patience and adaptability, greater empathy and compassion, and improved feelings of well-being. In this session we’ll review mindfulness basics and try a couple of short practices that you’ll be able to do on your own.
Meg Corman (she/her) is a certified Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) teacher and has taught MBSR and mindfulness classes since 2012 locally and in the South Bay. She is currently teaching through Dignity Health in Santa Cruz and is also a Community Dharma Facilitator at Insight Santa Cruz, a Buddhist meditation center.
Register by November 21st for in-person attendance in Graduate Student Commons, Room 204. The event will also be accessible virtually via Zoom. Complimentary vegan lunch provided to in-person attendees.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2022-2023 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the seventh year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by The Humanities Institute. We meet monthly to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Patti Smith: Songs & Stories, A Book of Days
2022-11-29 19:00 - 20:30 | Rio Theater, 1205 Soquel Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95062, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz is thrilled to welcome Patti Smith, National Book Award-winning author of Just Kids and M Train, back to town for a celebration of A Book of Days—her deeply moving and idiosyncratic visual book of days featuring more than 365 images and reflections.

Tickets include entry to the event and a copy of A Book of Days.
This special event will take place at The Rio Theatre, 1205 Soquel Avenue, Santa Cruz.
In 2018, without any plan or agenda for what might happen next, Patti Smith posted her first Instagram photo: her hand with the simple message “Hello Everybody!” Known for shooting with her beloved Land Camera 250, Smith started posting images from her phone including portraits of her kids, her radiator, her boots, and her Abyssinian cat, Cairo. Followers felt an immediate affinity with these miniature windows into Smith’s world, photographs of her daily coffee, the books she’s reading, the graves of beloved heroes–William Blake, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Simone Weil, Albert Camus. Over time, a coherent story of a life devoted to art took shape, and more than a million followers responded to Smith’s unique aesthetic in images that chart her passions, devotions, obsessions, and whims. Original to this book are vintage photographs: anniversary pearls, a mother’s keychain, and a husband’s Mosrite guitar. Here, too, are photos from Smith’s archives of life on and off the road, train stations, obscure cafés, a notebook always nearby. In wide-ranging yet intimate daily notations, Smith shares dispatches from her travels around the world.
With over 365 photographs taking you through a single year, A Book of Days is a new way to experience the expansive mind of the visionary poet, writer, and performer. Hopeful, elegiac, playful–and complete with an introduction by Smith that explores her documentary process—A Book of Days is a timeless offering for deeply uncertain times, an inspirational map of an artist’s life.
Patti Smith is the author of the National Book Award winner Just Kids, as well as M Train, Year of the Monkey, and numerous collections of poetry and essays. Her seminal album Horses has been hailed as one of the top 100 albums of all time. In 2005, the French Ministry of Culture awarded Smith the title of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres; she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007, and was awarded the key to New York City in 2021.

CANCELED - PhD+ Workshop - Maintaining Work-Life Balance in Academia
2022-11-30 11:30 - 13:00 | Virtual and In Person
Join Angel Dominguez for an interactive workshop and discussion of what it means to cultivate a healthy work-life balance. The interactive discussion will cover the importance of setting boundaries, time management, how technology can be your friend, and why saying “no” doesn’t make you a bad person!
Angel is a queer, first-generation, Latinx UCSC alumnus dedicated to supporting historically excluded groups of students during their time here in the redwoods as the GANAS graduate services counselor for UCSC. Angel holds an M.F.A. in writing and poetics from Naropa University and is the author of several books of poetry and prose.
Register by November 22nd for in-person attendance in Graduate Student Commons, Room 204. The event will also be accessible virtually via Zoom. Complimentary vegan lunch provided to in-person attendees.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2022-2023 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the seventh year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by The Humanities Institute. We meet monthly to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

CANCELED: Hannah Zeavin – Hot and Cool Mothers
2022-11-30 12:15 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
“Hot and Cool Mothers” moves toward a media theory of mothering and parental “fitness.” The article begins with an investigation into midcentury pediatric psychological studies on Bad Mothers and their impacts on their children. The most famous, if not persistent, of these diagnoses is that of the so-called refrigerator mother. The refrigerator mother is not the only bad model of maternality that midcentury psychiatry discovered, however; overstimulating mothers, called in this study “hot mothers,” were identified as equally problematic. From the mid-1940s until the 1960s and beyond, class, race, and maternal function were linked in metaphors of temperature. Whereas autism and autistic states have been extensively elaborated in their relationship to digital media, this article attends to attributed maternal causes of “emotionally disturbed,” queer, and neurodivergent children. The author argues that these newly codified diagnoses were inseparable from midcentury conceptions of stimulation, mediation, domesticity, and race, including Marshall McLuhan’s theory of hot and cool media, as well as maternal absence and (over)presence, echoes of which continue in the present in terms like “helicopter parent.”
Hannah Zeavin is the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (MIT Press, 2021) and at work on her second book, Mother’s Little Helpers: Technology in the American Family (MIT Press, expected 2023). She teaches in the Departments of History and English at UC Berkeley.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

PhD+ Workshop - Career Pathways for Humanities Graduate Students
2022-11-30 13:00 - 14:30 | Virtual Event
Join us for a virtual workshop with Katina Rogers, “Career Pathways for Humanities Graduate Students,” Nov. 30 at 1 p.m. on Zoom. Register here.
This workshop is presented by the Center for the Humanities at the University of California, Merced and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2022-2023 PhD+ series.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the seventh year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by The Humanities Institute. We meet monthly to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

CANCELED - PhD+ Workshop - Public Speaking
2022-12-01 11:00 - 13:00 | Virtual and In Person
Learn techniques to warm up, deal with nerves, craft your talk, and deliver an engaging oration for any audience. This interactive workshop will take you through Bri’s trademarked W.A.V.E.® methods to get you ready to connect with an audience and keep them engaged.
Bri McWhorter is the founder and CEO of Activate to Captivate, where she teaches communication techniques from an actor’s point of view. She specializes in public speaking, scientific communications, interview skills, and interpersonal communications. She has taught workshops at Fortune 500 companies, privately coached CEOs at nonprofits, and led certificate programs at top universities. She is the creator of W.A.V.E.®, a program where she teaches speakers how to overcome nerves, use body language, and rely on their voice to tell an engaging story. She has coached speakers for academic symposia at various institutions, including UC Office of the President, UC Irvine, UC Santa Barbara, and UC Santa Cruz. She has a Master of Fine Arts in acting from UC Irvine and a bachelor’s degree in theater and performance studies from UC Berkeley.
Register by November 23rd for in-person attendance in Graduate Student Commons, Room 204. The event will also be accessible virtually via Zoom. Complimentary vegan lunch provided to in-person attendees.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2022-2023 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the seventh year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by The Humanities Institute. We meet monthly to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

CANCELED: Hannah Zeavin – Sigmund Freud: Tele-Analyst
2022-12-01 13:30 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
In The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy, Hannah Zeavin shows that, far from a recent concern in the COVID-19 pandemic, teletherapy is as old as psychoanalysis itself. It may be well known that Sigmund Freud routinely used media metaphorically in his theories of the psychic apparatus; this talk recovers the early history of Freud’s real use of media in therapies over distance.
Zeavin reads epistolary and postal conventions in Freud’s moment, intertwined with Freud’s own epistolary self-analysis (in correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess) and the unconventional treatment by correspondence of his only child patient, the agoraphobic “Little Hans,” in order to rethink the coincidental origins of psychoanalysis and teletherapy, and to help us think through narratives of loss that attend current uses of technology to mediate therapy.

Hannah Zeavin is a scholar, writer, and editor whose work centers on the history of human sciences (psychoanalysis, psychology, and psychiatry), the history of technology, feminist STS, and media theory. She is an Assistant Professor at Indiana University in the Luddy School of Informatics. Additionally, she is a visiting fellow at the Columbia University Center for the Study of Social Difference.
Zeavin’s first book, The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy is now out from MIT Press, with a Foreword by John Durham Peters. She is at work on her second book, Mother’s Little Helpers: Technology in the American Family (MIT Press, under contract). Other academic work has appeared in or is forthcoming from differences: A Journal of Feminist Studies, Technology and Culture, American Imago, Media, Culture, & Society, and elsewhere.

Free and open to the campus community and the public. This event is presented by the UCSC Center for World History

Living Writers: Student Reading
2022-12-01 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Conversations: Power Forged, the Fall Living Writers theme, features poets, novelists, academics, curators, and artists in conversation with one another, in person, across genre and media to open up a space between them, and all of us, within dialogue, collaboration, politics, intimacy and difference which poet and activist Audre Lorde describes as that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged. Between legacies, institutions, families, embodiments and homes; across race, gender, sexuality, and class, guests will explore just how.

POSTPONED - Douglas Brinkley: Silent Spring Revolution
2022-12-01 18:00 | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
New York Times bestselling author and acclaimed presidential historian Douglas Brinkley will present his new book Silent Spring Revolution, which chronicles the rise of environmental activism during the Long Sixties (1960-1973), on December 1 at the UC Santa Cruz Cowell Ranch Hay Barn. The book tells the story of an indomitable generation that saved the natural world under the leadership of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon. Brinkley will be joined by State Senator John Laird for a question and answer session, including questions from the audience.

Seating will be first come, first served.
The first 50 students in attendance will receive a free copy of Silent Spring Revolution. Student ID required.
With the detonation of the Trinity explosion in the New Mexico desert in 1945, the United States took control of Earth’s destiny for the first time. After the Truman administration dropped atomic bombs on Japan to end World War II, a grim new epoch had arrived. During the early Cold War years, the federal government routinely detonated nuclear devices in the Nevada desert and the Marshall Islands. Not only was nuclear fallout a public health menace, but entire ecosystems were contaminated with radioactive materials. During the 1950s, an unprecedented postwar economic boom took hold, with America becoming the world’s leading hyperindustrial and military giant. But with this historic prosperity came a heavy cost: oceans began to die, wilderness vanished, the insecticide DDT poisoned ecosystems, wildlife perished, and chronic smog blighted major cities.
In Silent Spring Revolution, Douglas Brinkley pays tribute to those who combated the mauling of the natural world in the Long Sixties: Rachel Carson (a marine biologist and author), David Brower (director of the Sierra Club), Barry Commoner (an environmental justice advocate), Coretta Scott King (an antinuclear activist), Stewart Udall (the secretary of the interior), William O. Douglas (Supreme Court justice), Cesar Chavez (a labor organizer), and other crusaders are profiled with verve and insight.
Carson’s book Silent Spring, published in 1962, depicted how detrimental DDT was to living creatures. The exposé launched an ecological revolution that inspired such landmark legislation as the Wilderness Act (1964), the Clean Air Acts (1963 and 1970), and the Endangered Species Acts (1966, 1969, and 1973). In intimate detail, Brinkley extrapolates on such epic events as the Donora (Pennsylvania) smog incident, JFK’s Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, Great Lakes preservation, the Santa Barbara oil spill, and the first Earth Day.
With the United States grappling with climate change and resource exhaustion, Douglas Brinkley’s meticulously researched and deftly written Silent Spring Revolution reminds us that a new generation of twenty-first-century environmentalists can save the planet from ruin.
Presented by The Humanities Institute and Bookshop Santa Cruz. Co-sponsored by the Institute for Social Transformation.

Douglas Brinkley is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University, presidential historian for the New-York Historical Society, trustee of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. The Chicago Tribune dubbed him “America’s New Past Master.” He is the recipient of such distinguished environmental leadership prizes as the Frances K. Hutchison Medal (Garden Club of America), Robin W. Winks Award for Enhancing Public Understanding of National Parks (National Parks Conservation Association), and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Lifetime Heritage Award. His book The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He was awarded a Grammy for Presidential Suite and is the recipient of seven honorary doctorates in American studies. His two-volume, annotated Nixon Tapes recently won the Arthur S. Link-Warren F. Kuehl Prize. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and three children.
Event logistics: Bicycling, car pooling, ridesharing, and public transportation are encouraged as parking is limited. 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 farm entrances. Overflow parking will be available at lot 122. Download a parking map here.
If you have disability-related needs, please contact us at thi@ucsc.edu or call 831-459-1274 by October 18th, 2022.

CANCELED - Linguistics Colloquia: Argyro Katsika
2022-12-02 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 2, Room 359
Argyro Katsika, UC Santa Barbara
Over the course of each year, the Linguistics department hosts colloquia by distinguished faculty from around the world.
For full speaker and event information, please visit: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/colloquia/index.html

Miriam Ellis Memorial Celebration
2022-12-03 13:00 - 15:00 | Stevenson Event Center
Join us to celebrate the life of Miriam Ellis, lecturer emerita of French, fellow of Cowell College, and founder of the Miriam Ellis International Playhouse (MEIP). The memorial will be held at Stevenson Event Center (SEC), where audiences have long enjoyed and will continue to enjoy performances of the MEIP. Miriam’s irrepressible joy touched the lives of many people at the university, in Santa Cruz, and beyond. The purpose of the Memorial is to bring us all together to reminisce, reflect, and share stories. As Miriam may have said, quoting Moliere, “We die only once, and for such a long time.” If you are inclined to wear your favorite special hat to the event, please do so in homage to our spirited and brilliant friend.
Parking attendants will be in the lower lot of Stevenson. Overflow parking will be at Merrill. Carpooling is encouraged. A shuttle will help guests will mobility challenges climb the hill to SEC. If you have questions or concerns, please contact the event organizer, Faye Crosby, at fjcrosby@ucsc.edu.

Victorian Necromancies with Professor Renée Fox – Discussion of Dracula (Chap. 17-End)
2022-12-04 14:00 | Virtual Event

CANCELED: Faculty and Graduate Student Grants Session with UCHRI
2022-12-05 12:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Interested in faculty & graduate student funding opportunities from the UC Humanities Research Institute and want to know more about the advisory committee selection process? Join UCHRI Interim Director Julia Lupton, Associate Director Kelly Anne Brown, and Research Grants Manager Sara Černe for a grants presentation and Q&A. This year, UCHRI is offering up to $25,000 grants for collaborative research projects, support for projects connected to its theme of Refuge and Its Refusals, and continuing support for the UC-wide Underrepresented Scholars Fellowship.
Prospective PIs who would like to talk through a new or existing project are invited to schedule a separate 20-minute Individual Faculty Consultation with UCHRI. Please email Connie Zheng, THI’s 2022-2023 Research and Development GSR, at conniezheng@ucsc.edu to schedule and appointment

This workshop is sponsored by The Humanities Institute, Arts Research Institute, the Office of Foundation Relations, and the Office of Research Development.

Anthony Trollope Down Under: Travel Writing, Bushfires and Australian Ecology with Professor Grace Moore
2023-01-08 14:00, 2023-02-12 14:00, 2023-03-12 14:00 | Virtual Event
The Friends of the Dickens Project invites you to participate in “Anthony Trollope Down Under: Travel Writing, Bushfires and Australian Ecology with Professor Grace Moore.” The three sessions will offer the Friends a chance to examine Victorian responses to the environment, with a particular emphasis on Australia. The first session will involve a presentation on Professor Moore’s current research, which is on representations of bushfires and wildfires in nineteenth-century settler literature. The project is informed by both the environmental humanities and emotions theory and she will talk a little about these approaches. As part of this session, she will introduce some of the work she has done on Anthony Trollope’s travels (especially his representations of fire and environmental issues). We will also spend some time thinking about how Trollope positioned himself as a successor to Dickens, as both a novelist and travel writer.

1/8/23, 2pm PST – Research Talk:
Representations of bushfires and wildfires in nineteenth-century settler literature
2/12/23, 2pm PST – Discussion: Chapters I-VI Harry Heathcote of Gangoil
3/12/23, 2pm PST – Discussion: Chapters VII-XII Harry Heathcote of Gangoil
The second and third sessions will be discussions of Trollope’s wonderfully melodramatic Christmas story Harry Heathcote of Gangoil (1874). The novella is set in Australia and draws on Trollope’s own experiences down under. It’s a remarkable work for the depth of emotions that it conveys, but also for how it captures the uncanny and threatening qualities that settlers saw in the Australian bush. Professor Moore has chosen Harry Heathcote because it presents an aspect of Trollope’s writing that is often forgotten, but also because it raises a number of fascinating issues including migration, race and climate change, which will, she hopes, lead to some lively discussions.
Grace Moore is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Otago, Aotearoa/New Zealand. She is the author of Dickens and Empire and The Victorian Novel in Context, and her edited works include (with Michelle Smith), Victorian Environments. Grace’s most recent publication is a special issue of the journal Occasion, entitled Fire Stories. She first attended the Dickens Universe as a graduate student in 1998.
This event series is presented by the Dickens Project.

Race, Violence, and Form in Nineteenth-Century Ireland
2023-01-09 09:00 - 17:30 | Dream Inn Santa Cruz, 175 W Cliff Dr, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This symposium will bring together invited speakers from the US and Ireland to examine how recent sea changes in the field of Victorian studies—particularly its embrace of critical race studies, strategic presentism, and new formalism—create space to rethink both Ireland’s place in 19th-century British literary studies and the pressures Irish literature and its contemporary reverberations exert on the field’s forms of expansion. The presentations will all assert the need to resituate Ireland within the networks of aesthetic innovation, economic experimentation, and identity politics that circulated freely between England, Ireland, and America in the 19th century. Yet this re-contextualization necessarily moves in both directions, showing not only how our understanding of Irish literature and culture changes when we consider it as part of a larger constellation of Victorian phenomena, but also how our understanding of Victorian culture changes when we must accommodate Ireland as an integral part of its intellectual networks. In the interest of recent calls to unsettle the geographical, racial, and periodized confines of what constitutes “Victorian,” as well as to unmoor Victorian studies from its long reliance on Anglocentric historicist methodologies, this symposium challenges Ireland’s long history in the colonial margins of the field, arguing instead that it plays an essential role in the expansion and revitalization of Victorian studies in the 21st century.
Full symposium schedule at: https://dickens.ucsc.edu/race-violence-form-in-19c-ireland.html
Many thanks to the UC Santa Cruz Literature Department, the Siegfried B. and Elisabeth Mignon Puknat Literary Studies Endowment, The Humanities Institute at UCSC, and the Dickens Project for sponsoring this event.

Linguistics Colloquia: Uri Mor, UC Berkeley and Ivy Sichel, UC Santa Cruz
2023-01-13 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Uri Mor, UC Berkeley and Ivy Sichel, UC Santa Cruz
Over the course of each year, the Linguistics department hosts colloquia by distinguished faculty from around the world.
For full speaker and event information, please visit: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/colloquia/index.html

Dean Mathiowetz – Luxuriating as a Political Structure of Feeling
2023-01-18 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
According to premodern elites, the luxurious appetites of the poor were not only feminine and exotic but also the greatest threat to social order. Popular demands for better wages, sustenance, more festival days, or any improvement in the conditions of ordinary folk were denounced as “luxury.” But scholarship about this discourse has been misdirected by premodern sumptuary laws, focusing on luxury as a class of things. I focus on the act of luxuriating instead, drawing out its embodied, affective, and tactical dimensions as a “structure of feeling.” I argue that a focus on luxuriating opens our thought to the political potential in the physical, sensory, and lived experience of the poor as they lay claim to enjoyment and abundance.

Dean Mathiowetz is Associate Professor of Politics, currently working on a book manuscript Luxuriating in Democracy, Abundance, and the Enjoyment of Bodies Politic. He is the author of Appeals to Interest: Language and the Shaping of Political Agency and the editor of and contributor to Hanna Fenichel Pitkin: Politics, Justice, and Action. His other writings have appeared in journals including Political Theory, Theory and Event, Political Research Quarterly, The New Political Science, and The Arrow.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Jane Smiley - A Dangerous Business
2023-01-18 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jane Smiley (A Thousand Acres) will visit Bookshop to read and sign copies of her new novel A Dangerous Business—a rollicking murder mystery set in Monterey in the 1850’s, in which two young prostitutes follow a trail of missing girls. Roxane Gay says, “The forthcoming Jane Smiley novel, A Dangerous Business, is so outstanding. Her sentences are sublime.” This event is co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute.

“A remarkable story of the California gold rush and a pair of sex worker sleuths . . . The vivid historical details and vibrant characters bring Smiley’s setting to glorious life. This seductive entertainment is not to be missed.”—Publishers Weekly
Monterey, 1851. Ever since her husband was killed in a bar fight, Eliza Ripple has been working in a brothel. It seems like a better life, at least at first. The madam, Mrs. Parks, is kind, the men are (relatively) well behaved, and Eliza has attained what few women have: financial security. But when the dead bodies of young women start appearing outside of town, a darkness descends that she can’t resist confronting. Side by side with her friend Jean, and inspired by her reading, especially by Edgar Allan Poe’s detective Dupin, Eliza pieces together an array of clues to try to catch the killer, all the while juggling clients who begin to seem more and more suspicious.
Eliza and Jean are determined not just to survive, but to find their way in a lawless town on the fringes of the Wild West–a bewitching combination of beauty and danger–as what will become the Civil War looms on the horizon. As Mrs. Parks says, Everyone knows that this is a dangerous business, but between you and me, being a woman is a dangerous business, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise …
Jane Smiley is the author of numerous novels, including A Thousand Acres, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and the Last Hundred Years Trilogy: Some Luck, Early Warning, and Golden Age. She is the author as well of several works of nonfiction and books for young adults. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she has also received the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature. She lives in Northern California.

Bay of Life: From Wind to Whales Exhibition Opening
2023-01-19 | Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History
Bay of Life: From Wind to Whales is an exhibition by Frans Lanting and Chris Eckstrom that brings land and sea together for a unified view of Monterey Bay and its natural abundance. The Bay of Life is a unique confluence of land and sea, energized by the sun, shaped by the forces of fog and fire, and influenced by the actions of people.
“We know of no other place in the world where land and sea connect in such an extraordinary way.” –Frans Lanting and Chris Eckstrom
Monterey Bay is the hottest hot spot for biodiversity in all of North America, according to The Nature Conservancy. It is a place of giants, from redwood forests on land to forests of kelp offshore. Monterey Bay supports iconic wildlife from secretive mountain lions to majestic blue whales. All survive in a region where far-flung migrants mix with rare local species that live nowhere else in the world.
This exhibition brings land and sea together for a unified view of Monterey Bay and its natural abundance. That richness is due to a unique mix of physical features and microclimates, shaped by the powerful influence of the ocean—and by the actions of people. After the Gold Rush began, a great demand for natural resources stripped the land of trees and depleted the sea of marine mammals and fish. But that ecological collapse has been reversed in our time.
Bay of Life celebrates a remarkable recovery which shows that damaged ecosystems can be restored when people care and take action together. That may offer a model for other places at a time when we need such stories of hope as we face new challenges of resource stewardship, habitat connectivity, and impacts from climate change.
This exhibition will run from January 19–April 30, 2023 and is co-sponsored by Bay Photo Lab and the Humanities Institute.
For full exhibition information please visit: https://www.santacruzmah.org/exhibitions/bay-of-life
Project Core Collaborators: Land Trust of Santa Cruz County, Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, Santa Cruz County Office of Education, Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History, Seymour Marine Discovery Center, Watsonville Wetlands Watch
Header Image: Humpback Whales, Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, photo by Frans Lanting.

Living Writers - Jaime Cortez
2023-01-19 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Jaime Cortez is a writer and visual artist based in Watsonville, California, and the San Francisco Bay Area. His fiction, essays, and drawings have appeared in diverse publications that include “Kindergarde: Experimental Writing For Children” (edited 2013 by Dana Teen Lomax for Black Radish Press), “No Straight Lines,” a 40-year compendium of LGBT comics (edited 2012 by Justin Hall for Fantagraphics Press), “Street Art San Francisco” (edited 2009 by Annice Jacoby for Abrams Press), and “Infinite Cities,” an experimental atlas of San Francisco (edited 2010 by Rebecca Solnit for UC Berkeley Press). He wrote and illustrated the graphic novel “Sexile” for AIDS Project Los Angeles in 2003.
Cortez often combines humor and tragedy to tell stories of resilient survivors who exist on the margins of the economy, the law, and social acceptability. “Gordo” is Jaime’s debut collection of short stories. Black Cat, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Press, is the publisher of the book.
Cortez spent his early years in San Juan Bautista and Watsonville, two California farm towns where the stories are set. He received his B.A. in Communications from the University of Pennsylvania, and his fine art MFA at UC Berkeley. His website is www.jaimecortez.org.
Sponsored by The Puknat Literary Endowment, The Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Laurie Sain Endowment, The Humanities Institute, Bookshop Santa Cruz, and Two Birds Books (where the writers’ books are available for purchase)

Divya Cherian – Caste and Time: Notes from Early Modern India
2023-01-20 10:00 | Virtual Event
“Caste and Time” is a part of the UC Santa Cruz Center for South Asian Studies 2022-2023 lecture series, Futures. Guests can register to attend the virtual event here.
Speaker:
Professor Divya Cherian, Princeton University

POSTPONED - Linguistics Colloquia: Fernanda Ferreira, UC Davis
2023-01-20 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Fernanda Ferreira, UC Davis
Over the course of each year, the Linguistics department hosts colloquia by distinguished faculty from around the world.
For full speaker and event information, please visit: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/colloquia/index.html

Liora R. Halperin - The Oldest Guard: Landowners, Local Memory, and the Making of the Zionist Settler Past
2023-01-20 13:30 - 15:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Professor Halperin will discuss the practice and politics of Zionist memory in and around the private Jewish agricultural colonies (moshavot) that were established in late 19th-century Ottoman Palestine. These colonies emerged prior to the founding of the Zionist movement and the rise to dominance of its Labor Zionist stream, but was later integrated, albeit ambivalently, into the Zionist narrative of settlement as the First Aliyah. Treating the First Aliyah as a symbol created and deployed only in retrospect, and drawing connections to memory practices in other settler societies, she considers how private agriculturalists and their advocates forged the First Aliyah past as a model of private ownership, political moderature, and harmonius relations with hired rural Palestinian labor. In so doing, she sheds light on the politics and erasures of Zionist celebrations of “firstness.”

Liora R. Halperin is Professor of International Studies and History, and Distinguished Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies, at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her recent book is The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Past (Stanford, 2021). She is also the author of Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine 1920-1948 (Yale, 2015).

This event is presented by the Center for Jewish Studies and Center for Middle East and North Africa.

Our Mutual Friend Discussion Series: Parts XVI-XX
2023-01-22 13:00 - 15:00 | Virtual Event

Concrete Utopianism with Gary Wilder
2023-01-24 14:00 - 15:30 | Virtual and In Person
A discussion of excerpts from Wilder’s Concrete Utopianism: The Politics of Temporality and Solidarity. In his book, Wilder insists that we place solidarity and temporality at the center of our political thinking. He develops a critique of Left realism, Left culturalism, and Left pessimism from the standpoint of heterodox Marxism and Black radicalism. Concrete Utopianism makes a bold case for embracing what Wilder calls a politics of the possible-impossible.
Attentive to the non-identical character of places, periods, and subjects, insisting that axes of political alignment and contestation are neither self-evident nor unchanging, reworking Lenin’s call to “transform the imperial war into a civil war,” he invites Left thinkers see beyond inherited distinctions between here and there, now and then, us and them. Guided by the spirit of Marx’s call for revolutionaries to draw their poetry from a future they cannot fathom yet must nevertheless invent, he calls for practices of anticipation that envision and enact, call for and call forth, seemingly impossible ways of being together.
Format: In-person in Hum1 Room 420 & Zoom
Zoom link: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/98082358956?pwd=[REDACTED]
Gary Wilder is Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York. He has a joint degree in Anthropology and History from the University of Chicago and works on the French empire, colonial states, historical anthropology and social/political theory, with a focus on western Africa, the Antilles, and Europe. He is the author of Freedom Time. Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Duke University Press Durham and London 2015).
Presented by the History of Consciousness Department. To download the excerpts in discussion and for information on upcoming lectures, please visit The History of Consciousness website.

Monique Allewaert – Ground Has Eye: Anansi and Animist Multinaturalism
2023-01-25 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Drawing on an archive of nearly three hundred Anansi tales collected between 1814 and 1935, this talk documents the animist multinaturalism at stake in Jamaican Anansi tales. This form of multinaturalism contests colonial conceptions of nature as well as the ideas about language that follow on colonial nature. Using the power of puns, metaphors, rhyme, and performance, Anansi and other insect avatars convert colonial nature into abolition ecologies. More broadly, the constellation of problems and powers associated with West Indian bugs (imperceptibility, smallness, shapeshifting, co-metabolism, environmental change), informs a situated decolonial knowledge inspired by insects’ navigation of their environments.
Monique Allewaert is Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She works at the intersections of eighteenth and nineteenth-century hemispheric American colonialisms, the environmental humanities, literary and cultural studies, and science studies. She is the author of Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics (2013). Her current book project Luminescence follows insect avatars through eighteenth-century Caribbean natural history, story, riddles, song, and poetry to elaborate counter-plantation knowledges and aesthetics.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Jennifer Morton - Moving Up Without Losing Your Way
2023-01-25 16:00 - 18:30 | University Center, Bhojwani Room, CA, United States
Upward mobility through the path of higher education has been an article of faith for generations of working-class, low-income, and immigrant college students. While we know this path usually entails financial sacrifices and hard work, very little attention has been paid to the deep personal compromises such students have to make as they enter worlds vastly different from their own. Measuring the true cost of higher education for those from disadvantaged backgrounds, Jennifer Morton looks at the ethical dilemmas of upward mobility—the broken ties with family and friends, the severed connections with former communities, and the loss of identity—faced by students as they strive to accomplish their educational goals.
This event is presented by The Humanities Institute and the Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning, and will take place at the University Center, Bhojwani Room on Wednesday, January 25, 2023 from 4:00pm to 5:30pm with a reception to follow from 5:30-6:30pm.

In-Person attendance

Virtual attendance
Jennifer Morton is Presidential Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow at the Center for Ethics and Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her areas of research are philosophy of action, moral philosophy, philosophy of education, and political philosophy, and her work has been featured in The Atlantic, Inside Higher Education, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Nation, New York Daily News, Times Higher Education, Princeton Alumni Weekly, Public Books , and Vox. Her book Moving Up Without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility (Princeton University Press, 2020) was awarded the Frederic W. Ness Book Award by the Association of American Colleges, and Universities.
Jody Greene is the founding Director of the Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning (CITL), UCSC’s first Associate Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning, as well as Special Advisor to the CP/EVC for Educational Equity and Academic Success. Their research interests include seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British literature; non-dualist Western philosophy, especially the work of Spivak, Derrida, and Nancy; human rights and international law; queer studies; and the history of literary discourse and literary institutions. They have served as Professor of Literature, Feminist Studies, and the History of Consciousness at UCSC. They are the recipient of the UCSC Humanities Division John Dizikes Teaching Award (2008), the Disability Resource Center Champion of Change Award (2018), and, twice, of the UCSC Academic Senate Excellence in Teaching Award (2001, 2014).

Tobera Project Talk Story: 1930 Anti-Filipino Watsonville Race Riots
2023-01-26 19:00 - 20:30 | Virtual Event
January 19th marks the 93rd Anniversary of the Anti-Filipino Watsonville Race Riots. We invite you to join us for a Talk Story to honor the history of Fermin Tobera and Filipino Farmworkers.
This Talk Story will be facilitated by Professor Steve Mckay and feature Poet Shirley Ancheta and acclaimed author Karen Tei Yamashita.

PhD+ Workshop - Wordpress Website Design
2023-01-27 11:00 - 13:00 | Virtual and In Person
Professional websites can boost your reputation and aid your networking and job search. UCSC provides free access to WordPress (with several design templates) to faculty, postdoctoral scholars, and graduate students. Get design tips from Teresa and get started using WordPress to make a blog or static website to showcase your graduate work!
Teresa Hardy is the founder of New Media-Designs, an online marketing agency specializing in solutions for small and medium technology companies. She has over 30 years of experience in engineering and marketing in high tech companies and has worked as a web developer and multimedia artist since 2005. She holds a B.S. in engineering and a master’s in multimedia arts. Her current work focuses on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, WordPress, and overall online find-ability (SEO and SMM) for clients. Ms. Hardy has taught web design, branding, usability, gaming, and web development at several universities in the San Francisco Bay area and is the current program chair of Web Development Specialization at UCSC Extension Silicon Valley.
Register for in-person attendance in Graduate Student Commons, Room 204. The event will also be accessible virtually via Zoom. Complimentary lunch provided to in-person attendees.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2022-2023 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the seventh year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by The Humanities Institute. We meet monthly to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Kaushik Sunder Rajan Reading Group - Mellon Sawyer Seminar on "Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine"
2023-01-27 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Mellon Sawyer Seminar on “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” will welcome, as a residential scholar, Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences and Co-Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory at the University of Chicago. Professor Rajan’s first two books focused on the global political economy of the life sciences and biomedicine, with an empirical focus on the United States and India. Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life, published by Duke in 2006, is a multi-sited ethnography of genomics and post-genomic drug development marketplaces in the United States and India. His second book, Pharmocracy: Knowledge, Value and Politics in Global Biomedicine (Duke, 2017), elucidates the political economy of global pharmaceuticals as seen from contemporary India.
Professor Rajan will lead a reading group focused on his most recent book, Multisituated: Ethnography as Diasporic Praxis. We’ll be reading the Introduction and Chapter 3. Email Jennifer Derr at jderr@ucsc.edu for a copy of the readings.

Teach English in Spain
2023-01-31 13:30 | Humanities 2, Room 259
The Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics in collaboration with Spanish Studies & Consulate of Spain in San Francisco is pleased to present Enrique Asorey Brey, Spanish Consul in San Francisco, who will be speaking on the North American Language and Culture Program in Spain (NALCAP 2023-2024). Light refreshments will be provided.
Organized by: Spanish Studies, UC Santa Cruz Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics and the Consulado General de España en San Francisco

Linda Garber – The Present in Our Past: Reading Lesbian Historical Fiction
2023-02-01 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Join us for a guided tour of the pleasures and perils of lesbian historical fiction, as Linda Garber (author of Novel Approaches to Lesbian History) introduces the thrilling and heart-wrenching adventures, trenchant theoretical insights, and critical political shortcomings of novels that establish a historical footing for contemporary lesbian identity in the face of a problematic, mostly silent, archive. She’ll cover genres ranging from westerns (Tomboys and Indians) and pirate tales (Unsafe Seas for Women) to the postmodern (Haunting the Archives) and the erotic (Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lesbian Sex), while calling for an intersectional, trans-inclusive lesbian literature and history.
Linda Garber is associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Santa Clara University, where she teaches queer literature and film, and feminist and queer theory. Her book Novel Approaches to Lesbian History was published by Palgrave in 2021 and is now available in paperback. Her earlier books include Identity Poetics: Race, Class, and the Lesbian-Feminist Roots of Queer Theory and the anthology Tilting the Tower: Lesbians / Teaching / Queer Subjects.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Ethnographic Trans-formations: Cases, Life Histories, and Other Entanglements of Emergent Research
2023-02-01 16:00 - 17:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Mellon Sawyer Seminar on “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” will welcome, as a residential scholar, Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences and Co-Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory at the University of Chicago. Professor Rajan’s first two books focused on the global political economy of the life sciences and biomedicine, with an empirical focus on the United States and India. Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life, published by Duke in 2006, is a multi-sited ethnography of genomics and post-genomic drug development marketplaces in the United States and India. His second book, Pharmocracy: Knowledge, Value and Politics in Global Biomedicine (Duke, 2017), elucidates the political economy of global pharmaceuticals as seen from contemporary India.
Professor Rajan will give a talk on his ongoing research project on South Africa, which concerns the ways in which a politics of health in South Africa plays out through the law, consequent to the guarantee of a fundamental right to health in the South African Constitution. This talk is the presentation of an emergent research trajectory. Drawing upon an imaginary of “multisituated” research design and practice, I elaborate the (often contingent and serendipitous) development of my recent work in South Africa, which includes a research project on health and constitutionalism and a teaching- and performance-based collaboration on the politics of breath. I am still wrestling with how to structure both, how they come together and diverge, their different conceptual modalities and political stakes. This includes a consideration of the stakes of legal archival research and life-history interviews in the context of contemporary and emergent research and political situations, as well as of thinking questions of ethnographic form in concert with others who are invested in considerations of literary or musical form. How to think about transformations of research practice in the context of unsettled and unresolved macro-political transformations in uncertain and fragile times? Why might it matter?

Living Writers - K-Ming Chang
2023-02-02 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
K-Ming Chang is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. She is the author of the New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice novel Bestiary (One World/Random House, 2020), which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2021, her chapbook Bone House was published by Bull City Press. Her most recent book is Gods of Want (One World/Random House, 2022). Her next books are a novel titled Organ Meats (One World) and a novella titled Cecilia (Coffee House Press). She loves folklore, vampire literature, and birdwatching in her home state of California.

Sponsored by The Puknat Literary Endowment, The Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Laurie Sain Endowment, The Humanities Institute, Bookshop Santa Cruz, and Two Birds Books (where the writers’ books are available for purchase)

POSTPONED: Linguistics Colloquia: Marc Garellek
2023-02-03 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Marc Garellek, UC San Diego
Over the course of each year, the Linguistics department hosts colloquia by distinguished faculty from around the world.
For full speaker and event information, please visit: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/colloquia/index.html

POSTPONED - Slugs and Steins with Professor Eric Porter: What Can We Learn from the Airport?
2023-02-06 18:30 - 20:00 | Virtual Event
For many people, airports may seem like alienating “nonplaces”—as anthropologist Marc Augé put it—where we rush to make connections and spend long, monotonous hours waiting for delayed flights. But airports are fascinating sites that can tell us a lot about the places where they are situated. Among other things, they are complex infrastructures where people, the built and natural environments, and different kinds of networks come together. Airports are also sites of accumulated power in a given region. Looking at the history of an airport, then, can provide a airport useful lens for examining some of the complex, interconnected forces that have influenced the development of its region over time. Exploring that history can also help us understand how differently positioned people in that place have abided, resisted, and otherwise negotiated the powerful forces that have shaped their lives. In this talk, Eric Porter will discuss San Francisco International Airport (SFO) as a site whose history reveals important perspectives on a wide range of phenomena that have helped to make the Bay Area. Along the way he will read excerpts from his new book, A People’s History of SFO: The Making of the Bay Area and an Airport.

Order A People’s History of SFO: The Making of the Bay Area and an Airport online and save 30%. Use source code SAVE30 at checkout.
Eric Porter is Professor of History, History of Consciousness, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz, where he is also affiliated with the Music and Latin American and Latina/o Studies departments. His research and teaching interests include Black cultural and intellectual history, US cultural and urban history, and jazz and improvisation studies.
Slugs and Steins are free informal lectures served up over Zoom. Brought to you by the UC Santa Cruz Alumni Association, each talk will engage one of our favorite professors in discussion with you, the local community of Silicon Valley, and beyond. We will cover everything from organic artichokes to endangered zebras, self-driving cars to Shakespeare. All are welcome. Audience participation is encouraged.
Questions? Contact the UC Santa Cruz University Events office at specialevents@ucsc.edu.

PhD+ Workshop - Grad Slam Presentation Prep: Public Speaking
2023-02-08 10:00 - 12:00 | Virtual and In Person
This brief workshop provides an overview of strategies and best practices for public speaking, including managing anxiety, key delivery techniques, and composition tips for crafting clearer and more focused speeches, with an emphasis on the parameters of the Grad Slam’s short presentations. It will include some interactive personalized exercises. If you have your grad slam talk and one optional slide ready to practice for a preliminary divisional round, February 13-17, you may practice your talk (with your optional one PowerPoint slide) for feedback from Catherine Carlstroem at either workshop. If attending in person, bring your laptop to join the Zoom meeting to share your slide via screen share, if you have a slide.
UCSC faculty and alum Catherine Carlstroem (PhD American Literature) is a longtime lecturer in Humanities at UCSC (over 30 years) and has enjoyed teaching public speaking for over 10 of these. Along with teaching, she coordinates the Cowell Core Course.
Register for in-person attendance in Graduate Student Commons, Room 204. The event will also be accessible virtually via Zoom. Complimentary lunch provided to in-person attendees. There is an additional session on the same day from 2:00-4:00 PM, accessible in person at the Graduate Commons Fireside Lounge or via Zoom.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2022-2023 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the seventh year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by The Humanities Institute. We meet monthly to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Jarrod Shanahan – Skyscraper Jails
2023-02-08 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
How did a campaign to end the humanitarian catastrophe of New York City’s Rikers Island penal colony culminate in the planned creation of skyscraper jails across the city, with no closure of Rikers in sight? The tragic story of recent jail reform efforts in New York City is at once novel, and indicative of broader trends in “humanitarian” jail reform, growing activism big big philanthropy in the supposed reform of mass incarceration, and the evolution of non-profit organizations promoting the extension of the carceral state — all conducted under the auspices of “social justice.” Tracing the contours of this new moment of carceral boosterism, Dr. Jarrod Shanahan will present on a work in progress, Skyscraper Jails, co-authored with criminal justice scholar Dr. Zhandarka Kurti. This work draws from extensive archival research, years of collaborative scholarship, and participation in the campaign against the new jails.
Jarrod Shanahan is an activist-scholar and assistant professor of criminal justice at Governors State University in University Park, IL. He is the author of Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage (Verso, 2022), co-author with Zhandarka Kurti of States of Incarceration: Rebellion, Reform, and America’s Punishment System (Field Notes/Reaktion, 2022), and an editor of Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity (Verso, 2022), a Noel Ignatiev reader.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Gershom Gorenberg: The Secret War Against the Nazis for the Middle East
2023-02-08 18:00 - 19:30 | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
At the midpoint of World War II, an Axis army under Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was on the brink of conquering the Middle East. Drawing on his latest book, War of Shadows, historian and alumnus Gershom Gorenberg (Kresge ’76, Religious Studies) will reveal the espionage affair that led to the British victory against Rommel at El Alamein – turning the tide of the war and preventing the mass murder of the Jews of Egypt, Palestine and the rest of the Middle East.

Event logistics: Bicycling, car pooling, ridesharing, and public transportation are encouraged as parking is limited. 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 Barn entrances. Overflow parking will be available at lot 122. Download a parking map here.
If you have disability-related needs, please contact us at thi@ucsc.edu or call 831-459-1274 by February 1, 2023.
This event is presented by the Center for Jewish Studies and made possible by the Helen and Sanford Diller Family Endowment for Jewish Studies.

PhD+ Workshop - Carole McGranahan, "Drafting Stages"
2023-02-09 17:30 - 19:00 | Zoom, CA, United States
Join UCSC’s Dr. Gina Athena Ulysse in a series of intimate conversations with speakers working inside and outside of academia and at different points in their careers about writing as an evolving and non-linear process. Focusing on conditions, inspirations, and methods, each speaker will offer personal insight into their processes and the messiness and vulnerabilities of drafting stages.
In conversation with Carole McGranahan, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado and the author of Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War (2010), co-editor of Imperial Formations (2007) and Ethnographers of U.S. Empire (2018), and editor of Writing Anthropology: Essays on Craft and Commitment (2020).
Graduate students from all disciplines are welcome!
Please register here.
This event is presented by GANAS Graduate Pathways and VOCES and is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute.

Elora Shehebuddin – Bangladesh, Third World Solidarity, and the Global Politics of Feminism
2023-02-10 10:00 | Virtual Event
“Bangladesh, Third World Solidarity, and the Global Politics of Feminism” is a part of the UC Santa Cruz Center for South Asian Studies 2022-2023 lecture series, Futures. Guests can register to attend the virtual event here.
Speaker:
Professor Elora Shehebuddin, UC Berkeley

Baskin Ethics Lecture with Joy Connolly - A Connected Planet: Scholarship for the Global Good
2023-02-13 16:00 - 17:30 | University Center, Bhojwani Room, CA, United States
“Serving the public good” is the motto and a strategic goal of many an American research university. In this lecture, Joy asks: what public do humanistic scholars serve, how do we define the public and its good, and how does and how might our study contribute to this project? Thinking critically about the tradition of research on the ancient Mediterranean, Joy’s own field, she makes the case for a planetary frame for humanistic study whose fields of activity are the global and the local. This frame resolves an intractable tension in academia today, where institutions proudly recruit students and faculty from all over the world but retain disciplinary divisions that reflect the national borders and imperial power map of two centuries ago.

In-person attendance
The lecture will begin promptly at 4:00 p.m. and will be followed by a question and answer session and a reception in the Rotunda. Doors will open at 3:30 p.m

Virtual attendance
Joy Connolly began her service as President of the American Council of Learned Societies on July 1, 2019. Previously, she served as provost and interim president of The Graduate Center at the City University of New York, where she was also Distinguished Professor of Classics. She has held faculty appointments at New York University, where she served as Dean for the Humanities from 2012-16, Stanford University, and the University of Washington. Committed to broadening scholars’ impact on the world, as provost at the Graduate Center Joy secured generous support from the Mellon Foundation to foster public-facing scholarship through innovative experiments in doctoral training. She has published two books with Princeton University Press and over seventy articles, reviews, and short essays. Connolly earned a BA from Princeton University in 1991 and a PhD in classical studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997. She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021.
The Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture Series is a lively forum for the discussion and exploration of ethics-related challenges in human endeavors. The Ethics Lecture is made possible by the Peggy Downes Baskin Humanities Endowment for Interdisciplinary Ethics which enables the Humanities Division to promote a dialogue about ethics and ethics related challenges in an interdisciplinary setting. The endowment was established in honor of Peggy Downes Baskin’s longtime interest in ethical issues across the academic spectrum.
This event is presented by the Humanities Division and co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute.

ACLS Workshop with Joy Connolly
2023-02-14 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 2, Room 259
Professor Connolly will present an overview of current American Council of Learned Societies programs in support of humanistic scholarship, including fellowships, grants, and projects accelerating equity and progressive change; She will also discuss recent and emerging scholarly directions, including digital publications, collaborative research, translation, and publicly engaged work.

Joy Connolly began her service as President of the American Council of Learned Societies on July 1, 2019. Previously, she served as provost and interim president of The Graduate Center at the City University of New York, where she was also Distinguished Professor of Classics. She has held faculty appointments at New York University, where she served as Dean for the Humanities from 2012-16, Stanford University, and the University of Washington. Committed to broadening scholars’ impact on the world, as provost at the Graduate Center Joy secured generous support from the Mellon Foundation to foster public-facing scholarship through innovative experiments in doctoral training. She has published two books with Princeton University Press and over seventy articles, reviews, and short essays. Connolly earned a BA from Princeton University in 1991 and a PhD in classical studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997. She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021.
This event is sponsored by The Humanities Institute, the UCSC Arts Research Institute, the UCSC Office of Foundation Relations, and the UCSC Office of Research Development

PhD+ Workshop - Psychology of Writing
2023-02-14 12:00 - 14:00 | Virtual and In Person
Sometimes we can be our severest writing critics and biggest hindrances to writing success. Learn about the VOCES Graduate Student Writing Center (for graduate students only) and how to overcome psychological barriers and start writing!
Andrea Seeger received a bachelor’s degree in literature from UC Santa Cruz, master’s in English literature from the University of Colorado (CU) Boulder, and an all but dissertation in English from UC Berkeley. Andrea has been teaching literature, writing, and social justice for nearly 20 years. She has taught writing and rhetoric in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric at CU Boulder and literature at UC Berkeley. She currently teaches social justice at UCSC’s Oakes College and writing through UCSC’s Writing Program. She is also a lecturer at Cabrillo College, where she teaches English. Andrea is the director of The Writing Center and of its VOCES Graduate Student Writing Center, one of the Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) Initiatives of the Graduating and Advancing New American Scholars (GANAS) Graduate Pathways program (Activity 6). Andrea is deeply committed to student-centered learning and equitable access to a quality education. Andrea’s scholarship focuses on the intersections of racial and gender formation in 20th-century American literature, and her work is deeply invested in social justice.
This event will be held in Graduate Student Commons Room 204 and on Zoom.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2022-2023 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the seventh year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by The Humanities Institute. We meet monthly to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Amelia Glaser - Angry Winds: Jewish Leftists and the Challenge of Palestine, 1929
2023-02-14 13:30 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
In the summer of 1929, a week of violence in Mandate Palestine left hundreds of Jews and Arabs dead and many more wounded. These events, which began with protests in Jerusalem, divided the world-wide Jewish Left into those who sympathized with the Arabs and those who condemned the violence as a new manifestation of the east European anti-Jewish pogrom. In this talk, Amelia Glaser will discuss how these events echoed in the transnational community of Yiddish poets, and will analyze poetry written in support of each side. The Yiddish poetry devoted to the clashes in Palestine a century ago help to illuminate how complex ideologies have long defined identity and community.
Amelia Glaser is Professor of Literature at UC San Diego, where she holds the Endowed Chair in Judaic Studies. She is the author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands (Northwestern U.P., 2012) and Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine (Harvard UP, 2020). She is the editor of Stories of Khmelnytsky: Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising (Stanford U.P., 2015) and, with Steven Lee, Comintern Aesthetics (U. Toronto Press, 2020). She is also a translator from, primarily, Yiddish, Ukrainian, and Russian. She is currently writing about contemporary Ukrainian poetry.

Keya Ganguly – Reason and the Image: On Satyajit Ray’s Shatranj Ke Khilari (The Chess Players)
2023-02-15 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This talk focuses on Satyajit Ray’s cinematic treatment of an episode from India’s late colonial history in Shatranj Ke Khilari (“The Chess Players,” 1977). Through his portrayal of the betrayal of reason under the pretext of law, Ray makes an appeal on behalf of the visual image as a critique of reason rather than its lure.
This event is co-sponsored by the Center for South Asia Studies.
Keya Ganguly is Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of States of Exception: Everyday Life and Postcolonial Identity (2001) and Cinema, Emergence, and the Films of Satyajit Ray (2010). She served as Senior Editor of Cultural Critique from 1998-2010, and her essays have appeared in Cultural Studies, New Formations, Race and Class, South Atlantic Quarterly, and History of the Present. Recent and forthcoming essays have explored Mahasweta Devi’s radical politics, the aesthetics of exile, and world cinema in dialectical perspective. She is currently writing a book on the revolutionary utopianism of the early Indian nationalist, Aurobindo Ghose, entitled Political Metaphysics.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

PhD+ Workshop - Identity, Belonging, and Community
2023-02-15 14:30 - 16:00 | Virtual and In Person
Join the GSC grad peer mentor program for a workshop and discussion on identity, belonging, and community. All grads welcome!
From left to right – Lorato Anderson, Marilia Kaisar, Radhika Prasad
Lorato Anderson is the Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Graduate Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Her role centers on advancing initiatives for minoritized graduate student support across multiple campus-wide projects, as well as providing direct support to students, staff, faculty, and programs. Lorato graduated with a B.A. in Literature/Writing from UC San Diego and received her M.S. in Higher Education Administration and Policy from Northwestern University, where she researched and developed assessment models for English Language Learners and created multiple DEI programs that are still active today. She has extensive experience in grant writing, teaching, advising, assessment, and creating long-lasting research-backed programs to promote minoritized undergraduate and graduate student success. Lorato has worked on campus for six years and received the 2020 Outstanding Staff Achievement Award in Social Sciences; her previous roles include Graduate Program Advisor and Coordinator for Latin American and Latino Studies (LALS) and Politics, as well as Undergraduate Advisor for Psychology. She takes pride in incorporating social justice, as well as empathetic advising strategies and teaching pedagogies, in her work in advising, administration, and grant and program development.
Marilia Kaisar (Lead Mentor – Arts) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz. She holds an MA in Media Studies from Pratt Institute and a Diploma in Architecture Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Her experimental practice uses affect theory and a feminist perspective to explore intersections of media, technology, and desire, using the body as the nexus point. Currently working on her dissertation titled “F*cking with the Virtual”.
Radhika Prasad (Lead Mentor – Humanities) “I’m a sixth year PhD candidate in the Literature department with a Designated Emphasis in Feminist Studies. My academic interests include South Asian literature and history, translation studies, language politics, and feminisms in the Global South. As a sixth year international student and a woman of color, I have found the university to be a space of immense possibility, but also great inequity. Peer mentorship programs are an important step towards bridging the knowledge gap, and making universities, classrooms, graduate programs, and research into more equitable spaces, and I am excited to contribute to this one.”
This workshop is presented by the Graduate Student Commons (GSC) and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2022-2023 PhD+ series. The Graduate Student Commons workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
This event will be held in Graduate Student Commons Room 204 and on Zoom.

About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the seventh year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by The Humanities Institute. We meet monthly to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Aurora Workshop - Gramsci: Southern Questions
2023-02-17 - 2023-02-18 | Virtual and In Person
“The Aurora Workshop – Gramsci: Southern Questions” will take place Friday, February 17th from 3-5pm (PST) and Saturday, February 18th from 9am-3pm (PST). This workshop will be in person in Humanities 2, Room 259 and virtual (Zoom: 99170004783 PW: [REDACTED] Please click here to view the full schedule.
Friday, February 17th from 3:00-5:00pm (PST)
Keynote presentation: Gramsci as a Typical Interwar Communist: The Vernacular and the War Over Language
Timothy Brennan
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature
Saturday, February 18th from 9:00am-3:00 pm (PST)
Gramsci: Southern Questions Workshop
Panels and Roundtable including:
Michael Denning
Colleen Lye
Keya Ganguly
Aditya Bahl
Chris Connery
Massimiliano Tomba
Juned Shaikh
G. S. Sahota

What is Life? Conference
2023-02-18 09:00 - 18:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The conference addresses problems and inconsistencies in modern definitions of life by appealing to explicit and implicit definitions of life offered in ancient texts. This problem is becoming increasingly urgent as astrobiologists come closer to being able to detect biosignatures or signs of life on extrasolar planets, since the forms of life that exist on these planets may not fit within definitions of life generated by biologists for studying life on Earth. We think that ancient answers to this definitional problem may suggest fruitful directions in which contemporary, operating definitions of life could be expanded. Participants include experts on a wide array of ancient cultures whose work addresses concepts of life from a range of theoretical perspectives; we pay particular attention to speakers whose work addresses gendered and racialized views of life in antiquity. We also engage modernist scholars whose work has critiqued contemporary definitions of life. Finally—and most essentially—the conference is coordinated with UCSC’s astrobiology initiative and includes several speakers from scientific fields who can address the role of definitions in the search for extraterrestrial life.
Keynote: Carol Cleland, Philosophy (University of Colorado Boulder)
Also featuring:

Ruth Murray-Clay, Planetary Science (UC Santa Cruz)
Francesca Spiegel, Greek literature/medicine
Martin Devecka, Cultural history/Central Asia (UC Santa Cruz)
Michael Wong, Astrobiology (Carnegie Institution for Science’s Earth & Planets Laboratory)
Amit Shilo, Greek literature and political theory (UC Santa Barbara)
Zac Zimmer, Latin American Literature and speculative fiction (UC Santa Cruz)
Mario Telo, Greek literature (UC Berkeley)
Tejas Aralere, Ancient science/Sanskrit (UC Santa Barbara)
Alex Purves, Greek literature (UCLA)
David Shorter, World Arts/Dance/Anthropology (UCLA)
Laurence Totelin, Ancient science/technology/medicine ( Cardiff University)
Anna Freidin Roman cultural history (University of Michigan)
Gina Konstantopoulos, Assyriology and Cuneiform Studies (UCLA)
James Porter Ancient literature and philosophy (UC Berkeley)
Giulia Maria Chesi Greek literature/history of technology
Mark Csikszentmihalyi, East Asian Languages and Cultures (UC Berkeley)
Karen ni Mheallaigh, Ancient science/fiction (John Hopkins Univeristy)
Colin Webster, Greek medicine (UC Davis)
Natalie Batalha, Astrobiology (UC Santa Cruz)
Maria Gerolemou, Greek Literature/History of technology (University of Exeter)
Stuart Bartlett, OOL and exoplanets (Cal Tech)

Christina Heatherton – Making Internationalism
2023-02-21 14:00 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 420, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Making Internationalism with Christina Heatherton (Trinity College).
This talk is part of the History of Consciousness Winter 2023 Speaker Series and co-sponsored by the History Department at UC Santa Cruz.
This event will be in person in Humanities 1 Room 420 or virtually via zoom.
For full speaker and event information, please visit: https://histcon.ucsc.edu/news-events/news/histcon-winter23-speaker-series.html

Richard Jean So – How #BLM Became a Story: Black Fiction in the Age of Platform Capitalism
2023-02-22 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Event co-sponsored with Kresge College, Media and Society Lecture Series and the Departments of Literature and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies.
New online writing platforms, like Wattpad, are massively popular (100 million registered users upload ~300,000 stories per day), and with their focus on user generated content and open access, promise to democratize contemporary cultural production. This talk explores how such platforms represent and accommodate Blackness, specifically examining the rise of a new genre category of writing: the #BLM story, over the past five years. Using a mixture of critical and computational methods, and drawing from critical race theory and platform studies, I ask: what textual features define this story, how do such features evolve over time, and how does this story differ from previous iterations of racial protest literature? Also: are such stories able to thrive on such platforms – what is their relationship to platform capitalism?
Richard Jean So is associate professor of English and digital humanities at McGill University. He focuses on computational and data-driven approaches to contemporary literature and culture, with a particular interest in race and inequality. His most recent book is Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction, and he is at work on a new project called Fast Culture, Slow Justice: Race and Writing in the Platform Age. He has published in both academic journals like Critical Inquiry and PMLA and popular periodicals, such as The New York Times and The Atlantic.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

PhD+ Workshop - Accessing Campus Resources
2023-02-23 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual and In Person
Join the GSC grad peer mentor program for a presentation and discussion about the many campus resources available to graduate students. Representatives from multiple campus resources including CAPS, Slug Support, Basic Needs, the Restorative Justice Program, and OMBUDS will be there to share information and answer questions. All grads are welcome and encouraged to attend!
Food provided for in-person attendees. Register in advance to declare food preferences and dietary restrictions or to submit questions for resource representatives.
This workshop is presented by the Graduate Student Commons (GSC) and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2022-2023 PhD+ series. The Graduate Student Commons workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
This event will be held in Graduate Student Commons Room 204 and on Zoom.

About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the seventh year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by The Humanities Institute. We meet monthly to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Living Writers - Shruti Swamy
2023-02-23 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Shruti Swamy is the author of the story collection A House Is a Body, which was a finalist for the PEN/Bingham Prize, the LA Times First Fiction Award, and longlisted for the Story Prize. Her novel, The Archer, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and won the California Book Award for fiction. The winner of two O. Henry Awards, her work has appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeny’s, AFAR Magazine, and the New York Times.
She is the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, A Steinbeck Fellowship from San Jose State University, and grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the San Francisco Arts Council, and Vassar College. She is a Kundiman Fiction Fellow, and lives in San Francisco.
Sponsored by The Puknat Literary Endowment, The Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Laurie Sain Endowment, The Humanities Institute, Bookshop Santa Cruz, and Two Birds Books (where the writers’ books are available for purchase)

Geographies of/and the Indigenous: South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa Workshop
2023-02-24 - 2023-02-25 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Participants: Dolly Kikon, Nour Joudan, Aomar Boum, Prita Meier Pasang Sherpa, R. Benedito Ferrao, Maisnam Arnapal, Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh
The Geographies of/and the Indigenous Workshop to take place at UC Santa Cruz from February 24-25, 2023. Please note that this workshop is open to faculty and graduate students only. This workshop is presented by the UCSC Center for South Asian Studies in collaboration with the Center for Middle East and North Africa. Registration required.

Linguistics Colloquia: Junko Ito & Armin Mester
2023-02-24 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 2, Room 259
Junko Ito & Armin Mester, UC Santa Cruz
Over the course of each year, the Linguistics department hosts colloquia by distinguished faculty from around the world.
For full speaker and event information, please visit: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/colloquia/index.html

The Mystery of Edwin Drood Discussion Series
2023-02-26 13:00 - 15:00 | Virtual Event
The Mystery of Edwin Drood Discussion Series
February 26, March 26, and April 30 at 1:00-3:00 PM | Virtual Event
The next three Pickwick Club sessions will focus on Dickens’s last and most enigmatic work, the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood. Considered by many lovers of detective fiction to be the ultimate mystery novel, since its author died without providing a solution, Drood has challenged and intrigued the imaginations of generations of readers.
Join Dickens enthusiast, writer, and Friends of the Dickens Project board member, Carl Wilson for a series of discussions about this book. Wilson notes:
“I first read Drood in 1980 when Leon Garfield published his completion of the novel. I was fascinated then, and still am, by his theory that Dickens would have presented Jasper as a divided self, anticipating Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde by almost twenty years. Although no one will truly know, that theory has stayed with me since, and I would suggest that first-time readers pay close attention to Dickens’s various descriptions of Jasper throughout the five completed and sixth partially completed monthly numbers.”
Reading Schedule
February 26: Chapters 1-9
March 26: Chapters 10-16
April 30: Chapters 17-End
Questions to consider for the first session: The opening chapter reads like almost nothing else that Dickens wrote. What is the purpose of such tortuous writing? What is the result of Dickens choosing to write much of the opening pages in present tense? Wilkie Collins thought that Drood was “the melancholy work of a worn-out brain.” Do you agree?
More Information: https://dickens.ucsc.edu/resources/pickwick-club/2023-02-edwin-drood.html
Registration: https://ucsc.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEkdOmurTgjGdIQ0pyOjIhtspXltHg3huWg
The Santa Cruz Pickwick (Book) Club, a branch of the Dickens Fellowship, is a community of local bookworms, students, and teachers who meet monthly to discuss a nineteenth-century novel. The Santa Cruz Public Libraries provide support for the reading group.

John R. Rickford, Stevenson Distinguished Alumni Lecture
2023-02-28 15:30 - 17:00 | Stevenson College Library, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
John R. Rickford, Stevenson Distinguished Alumni Lecture. Rickford will read the UCSC chapter from his 2022 memoir Speaking my Soul: Race, Life and Language.
This event will take place at the Stevenson College Library on February 28th at 3:30 PM, followed by a reception. Signed copies of the memoir will be available for purchase during the event.
John R. Rickford is a member of the National Academy of Science, member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Fellow, the British Academy.

This event is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute, the Department of Linguistics, and the Stevenson Programs Office.

Tarek El-Ariss - The Fallen Note: A Journey to the Birthplace of the Image
2023-03-01 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Fallen Note: A Journey to the Birthplace of the Image – As I was moving to a new office in October 2020, a note fell off from one of my theory books— Derrida’s Specter of Marx. The note was an old photocopy with the ink somewhat faded. A ghostly shadow is captured in the image, blurring the top part of the page but leaving the paragraph intact. One can surmise that the copy was taken in haste, in a doctor’s office in the late ‘90s, somewhere in Upstate NY. It was a photocopy of a page in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) describing a condition wherein patients experience parasites or insects infesting their surroundings and crawling on their skin. Patients collect what they believe to be evidence of their infestation and bring it to the doctor in search of a cure. Where did this note come from? How did it find its way to that book in particular? And was its revelation during an office move at the height of Covid an accident, a coincidence, or a message from another time and place and experience? In this talk, I investigate the provenance of this note, embarking on a journey that leads me to the birthplace of the image and photocopying technology with companies such as Xerox and Kodak in Upstate NY. It also leads me to confront the ghosts and monsters of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-90) that crawl into suitcases and possess tightly packed books and items of clothing as they cross oceans and go up rivers and canals. In the process, I reflect on hauntology and theory more generally, questioning its potential as a system of meaning that can access the past and reveal the hidden.
Tarek El-Ariss is an author, a scholar, and the James Wright Professor at Dartmouth College where he teaches Middle Eastern Studies and Comparative Literature. Born and raised in Beirut during the Civil War (1975-1990) and trained in philosophy, literary theory, and visual and cultural studies, his work deals with questions of displacement, modernity, and the somatic in literature and culture. He has written about disoriented travelers, outcasts, queers, hackers, and characters with complicated relations to home, tribe, nation, and power. He is the author of Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political (Fordham, 2013) and Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age (Princeton, 2019), and editor of The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda (MLA, 2018). In 2021, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete a forthcoming book entitled, “Homo Belum: An Autobiography of War.”

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.
This event is co-sponsored by the Arabic Colloquium at The Humanities Institute, funded by the UC Humanities Network, and co-sponsored by the Center for Middle East and North Africa.

UCSC Night at the Museum - Resettlement: Chicago Story
2023-03-01 19:00 - 21:00 | Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History
What is it like to be forced to leave your home, deny your heritage, and start over? Join us for the California premiere of Resettlement: Chicago Story, a new short fictional film and educational website, which explores how people of Japanese ancestry remade their lives in the Midwest after their wrongful incarceration during World War II.
The event is part of the annual Night at the Museum hosted by the Humanities Institute and the Humanities Division at UC Santa Cruz. It is also co-sponsored by the Watsonville-Santa Cruz Japanese American Citizens League and will serve as this year’s Day of Remembrance. The evening will commence with a special performance by the Watsonville Taiko Group, followed by a screening of the film, a preview of the larger web experience, and a Q&A discussion with some of the project’s core creators. Marcia Hashimoto will attend and speak to the enduring legacy of her late and much beloved husband Mas Hashimoto. The event’s panel will feature key members of the project, including the film’s director and executive producer, website creators, and UC Santa Cruz’s Dean of Humanities, Jasmine Alinder, who led the research team.

Registration required. Reception to follow. This event is free and open to the public.
If you have disability-related needs, please contact us at thi@ucsc.edu or call 831-459-1274 by February 22, 2023. This event is co-sponsored by the Watsonville-Santa Cruz Japanese American Citizens League, Full Spectrum Features, and the Museum of Art and History.
Panel participants:
Jasmine Alinder is the Dean of Humanities at UC Santa Cruz and a historian of photography, race, and civil rights. Beyond her published work and university service, Dr. Alinder has supported and worked on numerous public history projects, including Full Spectrum Feature’s The Orange Story, which is the prequel for Resettlement: Chicago Story. In the creation of Resettlement: Chicago Story, Dr. Alinder acted as the project’s lead academic advisor.
Clara Bergamini is a PhD candidate at UC Santa Cruz who specializes in the social, political, and environmental history of disaster in modern Japan and East Asia. She worked as one of Resettlement: Chicago Story’s historians and researchers.

Patrick Hall is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and is currently working as a highschool teacher in Kentucky where he teaches U.S. history and social studies. He worked both as a historian and researcher for the Resettlement: Chicago Story project and as an advisor for integrating the project into K-12 curriculum.

Reina Higashitani is a first generation immigrant filmmaker based in NY/LA. She is the film writer and director for Resettlement: Chicago Story and works as an Assistant Professor at the New American Film School at Arizona State University.

Jason Matsumoto is a fourth-generation Japanese American producer and musician from Chicago. He is the executive producer for Resettlement: Chicago Story and works as the executive producer of film and the Co-Executive Director at Full Spectrum Features.

Ashley Cheyemi McNeil is a public humanities scholar who is currently acting as the Director of Education and Research at Full Spectrum Features, a role that she came into after joining the team as an ACLS Leading Edge Fellow. Dr. McNeil is the project manager for Resettlement: Chicago Story.

Katherine Nagasawa is a multimedia journalist who specializes in participatory, place-based storytelling. Before becoming the web producer for Resettlement: Chicago Story, she produced a number of interactive web experiences about Chicago Japanese American history, including Uprooted and Reckoning.

RJ Ramey is the web designer behind Resettlement: Chicago Story and is the founder & Creative Director of Auut Studio (findauut.com). Based in San Francisco, he started the company in 2015 to design more compelling materials for high school history teachers and museum audiences. He is known for breaking some of the rules and stale expectations for digital humanities and now teams up with other scholars to do the same. As a public historian, RJ takes an intersectional approach and centers on stories of people of color.
Celine Parreñas Shimizu is the Dean of the Division of Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a film scholar and filmmaker whose most recent work includes her book The Proximity of Other Skins (2020) and the film 80 Years Later: On Japanese American Racial Inheritance (2022). She previously worked at San Francisco State University as a professor and Director of the School of Cinema and at UC Santa Barbara as chair of the Senior Women’s Council and as a professor teaching in Asian American, Feminist, and Film and Media Studies.

Co-sponsored by the Watsonville-Santa Cruz Japanese American Citizens League, Full Spectrum Features, and the Museum of Art and History.

Invited to Witness: A Book Talk with Prof. Jenny Kelly
2023-03-02 16:30 - 17:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Invited to Witness draws from participant observation of solidarity tours across Palestine and interviews with guides, organizers, community members, and tourists to explore what happens when tourism understands itself as solidarity and solidarity functions through modalities of tourism. Kelly argues that solidarity tourism in Palestine functions as a fraught localized political strategy and an emergent industry, through which Palestinian organizers refashion conventional tourism by extending deliberately truncated invitations to visit Palestine and witness the effects of Israeli state practice on Palestinian land and lives. The book shows how Palestinian organizers, under the constraints of military occupation, and in a context in which they do not control their borders or the historical narrative, wrest both the capacity to invite and, in Edward Said’s words, “the permission to narrate” from Israeli control.
Prof. Jenny Kelly in conversation with Prof. Nick Mitchell and Prof. Sophia Azeb
Jennifer Kelly is an Associate Professor in FMST and CRES. She graduated from UCSC with a double major in FMST and LIT, and received her Ph.D. in American Studies with a Portfolio in Women’s and Gender Studies from University of Texas at Austin.

Presented by Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
Join in person in Humanities 210, or on zoom here.

Living Writers - Sara Freeman
2023-03-02 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Sara Freeman is a Canadian-British writer based in the United States. She graduated from Columbia University with an MFA in fiction in 2013. At Columbia, she won the Henfield Prize for the best piece of short fiction by a graduate student. Her debut novel, Tides, is forthcoming from Grove Atlantic (US), Hamish Hamilton (Canada), and Granta (UK).

Sponsored by The Puknat Literary Endowment, The Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Laurie Sain Endowment, The Humanities Institute, Bookshop Santa Cruz, and Two Birds Books (where the writers’ books are available for purchase)

PhD+ Workshop - VOCES Drafting Stages with Carlos Decena
2023-03-02 17:30 - 19:00 | Zoom, CA, United States
Drafting Stages is a series of intimate conversations with speakers working inside and outside of academia and at different points in their careers about writing as an evolving and non-linear process. Focusing on conditions, inspirations, and methods, each speaker will offer personal insight into their processes and the messiness and vulnerabilities of drafting stages.
The invited speaker for this session is Carlos Ulises Decena, an interdisciplinary scholar, whose work straddles the humanities and social sciences and whose intellectual projects engage and blur the boundaries among critical ethnic, queer, and feminist studies and social justice. His first book, Tacit Subjects: Belonging and Same-Sex Desire among Dominican Immigrant Men, was published by Duke University Press in 2011. His second book, Circuits of the Sacred: A Faggotology in the Black Latinx Caribbean will be published in Spring 2023 by Duke University Press.

The conversation will be facilitated by Dr. Gina Athena Ulysse, Professor in the Feminist Studies Department at UCSC. This event is presented by GANAS Graduate Pathways and VOCES and is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute.

About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the seventh year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by The Humanities Institute. We meet monthly to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

PhD+ Workshop - Going Public: A Workshop on Public Writing for Academics
2023-03-03 11:30 - 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
There’s no such thing as the Ivory Tower. Colleges and universities are not isolated enclaves, and they probably never were. Public engagement is an essential part of the core mission of higher education.
But how do we reach the public? This age of constant media babble and a vast explosion of online and print publications have transformed the traditional pathways of publication, prestige, and engagement. Academics – experts in so many things – need to be part of the conversation. In fact, the variety of media voices has only made expertise and authority more important.
In this workshop, journalist and historian David M. Perry will lead you through the process of getting your voice into the public sphere. He will cover pragmatic topics: the art of the pitch, finding the right venue, managing social media profiles, getting paid, making it count for tenure and promotion, and protecting yourself from trolls and harassment. He will also talk about strategies to simultaneously maintain academic authority and be accessible to the broader public.
Through it all, you’ll be working on your pitches, reading essays that embody important traits, and developing your own ideas.
Over the last five years, David – once a mild-mannered medievalist – has become a columnist for Pacific Standard Magazine, with hundreds of published pieces at venues all over the world, including the New York Times, the Guardian, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Along the way, he’s learned a lot about how to take academic expertise and share it with a much broader audience.
Going public isn’t easy, but neither is getting into graduate school, getting a PhD, or finding an academic job, so you’ve already traveled some pretty difficult paths. This workshop will start you on your way towards the next challenge.
Please come to the workshop with an idea for an essay that you might like to write. Essays could be about your scholarly expertise, personal experience, or anything else that interests you. We will mostly focus on traditional “op-ed” essays as a structure, but will also discuss blogging (iterative essay writing on a site under your control), reported pieces, and narrative/creative non-fiction (memoir, experimental prose, features, etc.). Complimentary lunch provided to attendees.
Please RSVP using your UCSC email address:
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About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the seventh year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by The Humanities Institute. We meet monthly to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Linguistics Colloquia: Rajesh Bhatt
2023-03-03 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Rajesh Bhatt, U Mass
Over the course of each year, the Linguistics department hosts colloquia by distinguished faculty from around the world.
For full speaker and event information, please visit: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/colloquia/index.html

Baptiste Morizot, Ways of Being Alive
2023-03-06 16:00 - 18:30 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Ways of Being Alive: Lecture followed by a conversation with Donna Haraway, Professor Emerita, History of Consciousness.

Baptiste Morizot is a writer and lecturer in philosophy at Aix-Marseille University. His work is devoted to the relationship between human beings and other living creatures, based on practices carried out in the field. He is the author of Ways of Being Alive (Transl. Andrew Brown, Polity Books, 2022), On the Animal Trail (Transl. by Andrew Brown, Polity Books, 2021), and most recently Wild Diplomacy: Cohabiting with Wolves on a New Ontological Map (Transl. by Catherine Porter, SUNY Press, 2022), as well as Rekindling Life: A Common Front (Transl. Catherine Porter, Polity Books, 2022).
Donna Haraway is Distinguished Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Her publications in feminist theory and feminist science studies include Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1989); Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991); Modest_Witness@.FemaleMan©- Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (1997), The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (2003); and Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016).

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies and the History of Consciousness Department, with the support of Villa Albertine San Francisco.

Elena Vasiliou – Queer Pleasure, Resistance and Pain in Ex-Prisoners’ Narratives
2023-03-07 14:00 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 420, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Queer pleasure, resistance and pain in ex-prisoners’ narratives with Elena Vasiliou (UC Berkeley).
This talk is part of the History of Consciousness Winter 2023 Speaker Series.
This event will be in person in Humanities 1 Room 420 or virtually via zoom.
For full speaker and event information, please visit: https://histcon.ucsc.edu/news-events/news/histcon-winter23-speaker-series.html

Fighting for Life: Race and the Limits of Infant Survival
2023-03-07 17:00 - 18:30 | University Center, Bhojwani Room, CA, United States
Join Dr. Wangui Muigai as she charts the history of one of the most enduring health disparities in America, the racial gap in infant survival. Drawing on a trove of historical records and archival materials, this talk follows Black families as they have journeyed from birthing rooms to burial grounds, fighting for the ability to birth and nurture healthy babies. In charting the historical landscapes of Black infant death across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Dr. Muigai will examine the role of cultural practices, medical theories, and communal initiatives to explain and address the causes of Black infant death. The talk considers the legacy of these ideas and efforts in ongoing struggles to preserve Black life.
Wangui Muigai is an Assistant Professor at Brandeis University in the departments of History, African & African American Studies and the Health: Science, Society, and Policy Program. Dr. Muigai was named a 2022 Andrew Carnegie Fellow and selected as a Class of 2025 Fellow in the Greenwall Faculty Scholars Program in Bioethics. Her first book, on the history of infant death in the Black experience, is forthcoming with Harvard University Press.
Parking at the University Center: Please follow the directional signs for “Fighting for Life” from the base of campus to College Nine/John R. Lewis lot 165. Parking attendants will be on site for attendees to buy parking permits. From lot 165, there will be walking directional signs to the University Center, which is above the College Nine/John R. Lewis Dining Hall.
The event is part of the year long Mellon Sawyer Seminar series Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine.

PhD+ Workshop - Personal and Professional Wellness
2023-03-08 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual and In Person
Navigating UC health insurance and counseling services can be complicated for graduate students. Join the Graduate Student Commons for lunch and a panel with experts from our Student Health and Outreach Promotion office, UC SHIP insurance office, and Counseling and Psychological Services. You will leave with a clearer understanding of how to support your wellness in issues like referrals, bills, counseling, and more!
Food provided for in-person attendees. Register in advance to declare food preferences and dietary restrictions or to submit questions for resource representatives.
This workshop is presented by the Graduate Student Commons (GSC) and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2022-2023 PhD+ series. The Graduate Student Commons workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
This event will be held in Graduate Student Commons Room 204 and on Zoom.

About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the seventh year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by The Humanities Institute. We meet monthly to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Zac Zimmer – An Internet Built of Books
2023-03-08 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
On the Internet, the book is a drag: a literal metaphor that pulls us back to the material world. This talk focuses on three examples of the book-object’s material drag on the supposed ephemeral nature of online existence in the digital cloud: 1) Philip Zimmermann and MIT Press’ PGP Source Code and Internals (1995), a printed edition of the source code that forms the basis of all email cryptography; 2) William Gibson’s self-destructing cyberpoem Agrippa (1992), a literary work that uses pseudo-cryptography to subvert print culture and which, by producing an art object consumed (annihilated, even) within its reading, recovers a lyrical past against the drag of the future; and 3) The Wu-Tang Clan’s single-copy album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin (2015), which by subverting the democratic nature of art, works against the drag of a speculative art market. The moral of each of these bookworks resides within the materiality of the object. What makes these three examples illustrative is that they all deal—in one way or another—with cryptography. In other words: the book’s secret, which is, in the end, nothing other than the book’s inescapable materiality, even in the digital era.
Zac Zimmer is Associate Professor of Literature at UCSC. His research focuses on the interdisciplinary study of literature, culture and technology in the hemispheric Americas. In addition to his current research on the infrastructure of technosystems, he co-facilitates the Ethics & Astrobiology reading group, part of UCSC’s Astrobiology Initiative. His book First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas is forthcoming.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Dr. Wangui Muigai Reading Group – Mellon Sawyer Seminar on “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine”
2023-03-08 16:00 - 17:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Dr. Wangui Muigai will be leading a reading group exploring three distinct frameworks (theoretical, methodological, and analytic) for understanding the causes of racial health disparities. Two articles take us back to the 1990s wave of research on “minority health” and ethnic health disparities, revealing how a generation of researchers in the biological, social, and epidemiological sciences sought to elucidate the relationship between racism and health. A more recent article places that era of research, with its attention to the impact of stress on the internal environment of the body, within a longer genealogy of research on race, racism, and health. Among other threads for discussion, Dr. Muigai hopes we can consider the legacies of these concepts on contemporary scientific, medical, and popular discussions of Black health, including the Black maternal and infant health crisis.
Dr. Wangui Muigai is an Assistant Professor at Brandeis University in the departments of History, African & African American Studies and the Health: Science, Society, and Policy Program. Dr. Muigai was named a 2022 Andrew Carnegie Fellow and selected as a Class of 2025 Fellow in the Greenwall Faculty Scholars Program in Bioethics. Her first book, on the history of infant death in the Black experience, is forthcoming with Harvard University Press.
The event is part of the year long Mellon Sawyer Seminar series Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine.

The MARCH Continues, An Evening with Andrew Aydin
2023-03-08 19:30 - 21:00 | University Center, University Center‎ University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The UCSC Arts Division, John R. Lewis College, and The Humanities Institute present: The MARCH Continues, An Evening with Andrew Aydin. Co-Author with John R. Lewis, of the award wining graphic novel series MARCH.
Attendees will receive a free copy of the first book in the MARCH series, and can have it signed by Andrew Aydin after the show! Capacity is limited.

Indigenous Border/lands Symposium
2023-03-09 16:00 - 20:00 | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Peggy and Jack Baskin Presidential Chair of Feminist Studies, in collaboration with the Indigenous Border/lands Collective, present “Indigenous Border/lands,” an exploration of the border/lands from the perspective of Indigenous peoples, scholars and activists across the Americas.
4:00pm
Aa‘a Mat Tipaay Ak’wee, Bringing Her/Voice Back to the Land: Incomplete Repatriations in The Autobiography of Delfina Cuero – Theresa Gregor, Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies, California State University Long Beach. Dr. Gregor is Kumeyaay from the Iipay Nation of Santa Ysabel and also Yoéme. Her research focuses on California American Indian women, sovereignty, literary and cultural repatriation, and tribal cultural resiliency and revitalization.
6:00 pm
Abolish Border Imperialism: Migration, Racial Capitalism and Empire – Harsha Walia, author of Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (2022). Harsha Walia is a migrant justice activist whose work addresses how current migrant and refugee crises are the inevitable outcomes of conquest, capitalist globalization, and climate change, generating mass dispossession worldwide.
This event is free and open to the public.
For anyone who would like to attend the event virtually, please register here.
On Friday, March 10, interdisciplinary scholars from across the country will gather for a day-long, closed-session symposium to consider the concept of borders and the borderlands from the perspective of Indigenous peoples across the Americas. Presentations across several symposium themes will result in publication of an Indigenous Borderlands journal in 2024. Please visit the Feminist Studies Department website for more info on the Friday symposium schedule. If interested in attending any or all of the panels, please contact Lisa Supple (lsupple@ucsc.edu). Seating is limited.

Zakir Hussain: Masters of Percussion at the Rio Theatre
2023-03-12 19:30 - 21:30 | Rio Theater, 1205 Soquel Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95062, United States
Every other year since 1996, Zakir Hussain has served as curator, conductor and producer to bring the very cream of Indian music and world percussion to tour America and Europe with his series, Zakir Hussain and Masters of Percussion. Growing out of his renowned international tabla duet tours with his father, the legendary Ustad Allarakha, Masters of Percussion began as a platform for both popular and rarely heard rhythm traditions from India. While performing and collaborating in India for a few months every year, Hussain has sought and unearthed lesser-known folk and classical traditions which feed into the greater stream of Indian music, playing an educational role in affording them greater visibility, as well as introducing them to audiences in the West. 2023’s tour will also feature Sabir Khan, Tupac Mantilla, Melissa Hié, and Navin Sharma.
Over time, the constantly changing ensemble has expanded to include great drummers and percussionists from many world traditions, including jazz. The 2023 version will be no exception, presenting American audiences with extraordinary, exciting and spontaneous combinations of percussive, as well as melodic, performances. Past years have included master drummers from Central Asia, India, and the U.S.

Doors open at 6:30, performance begins at 7:30
Presented by Kuumbwa Jazz Center. Sponsored by The Center for South Asian Studies and The Humanities Institute at UCSC

Jessica Marglin - The Shamama Case: Contesting Citizenship across the Modern Mediterranean
2023-03-13 12:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
In the winter of 1873, Nissim Shamama, a wealthy Jew from Tunisia, died suddenly in his palazzo in Livorno, Italy. His passing initiated a fierce lawsuit over his large estate. Before Shamama’s riches could be disbursed among his aspiring heirs, Italian courts had to decide which law to apply to his estate—a matter that depended on his nationality. Was he an Italian citizen? A subject of the Bey of Tunis? Had he become stateless? Or was his Jewishness also his nationality? Tracing a decade-long legal battle involving Jews, Muslims, and Christians from both sides of the Mediterranean, The Shamama Case offers a riveting history of citizenship across regional, cultural, and political borders.
Jessica Marglin is Associate Professor of Religion, Law, and History, and the Ruth Ziegler Early Career Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Southern California. She earned her PhD from Princeton and her BA and MA from Harvard. Her research focuses on the history of Jews and Muslims in North Africa and the Mediterranean, with a particular emphasis on law. She is the author of Across Legal Lines: Jews and Muslims in Modern Morocco (Yale University Press, 2016) and the co-editor, with Matthias Lehmann, of Jews and the Mediterranean (Indiana University Press, 2020). Her book The Shamama Case: Contesting Citizenship across the Modern Mediterranean is forthcoming with Princeton University Press.
This event will be held on November 14th from 12:00pm-1:30pm and is presented by the Center for Jewish Studies and co-sponsored by the Center for Middle East and North Africa.

Elizabeth McKenzie, The Dog of the North
2023-03-14 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
FREE IN-PERSON EVENT: Acclaimed local writer Elizabeth McKenzie will be in conversation with Karen Joy Fowler about McKenzie’s highly-anticipated new novel, The Dog of the North. This event is cosponsored by Catamaran Literary Reader and The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
“Even funnier, even more romantic than McKenzie’s wonderful last, The Portable Veblen, this is a screwball comedy worthy of a Preston Sturgis screenplay. You will be surprised, delighted, and grateful to be aboard The Dog of the North with the admirable Penny Rush as she faces every challenge her wild and crazy family can throw at her. A book that lifts the spirits.” —Karen Joy Fowler, author of Booth
Penny Rush has problems. Her marriage is over; she’s quit her job. Her mother and stepfather went missing in the Australian outback five years ago; her mentally unbalanced father provokes her; her grandmother Dr. Pincer keeps experiments in the refrigerator and something worse in the woodshed. But Penny is a virtuoso at what’s possible when all else fails.
Elizabeth McKenzie, beloved novelist of California and its idiosyncrasies, follows Penny on her quest for a fresh start. There will be a road trip in the Dog of the North, an old van with gingham curtains, a piñata, and stiff brakes. There will be injury and peril. There will be a dog named Kweecoats and two brothers who may share a toupee. There will be questions: Why is a detective investigating her grandmother, and what is “the scintillator”? And can Penny recognize a good thing when it finally comes her way?
This slyly humorous, thoroughly winsome novel finds the purpose in life’s curveballs, insisting that even when we are painfully warped by those we love most, we can be brought closer to our truest selves.

Elizabeth McKenzie is the author of the novel The Portable Veblen, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize; a collection, Stop That Girl, shortlisted for The Story Prize; and the novel MacGregor Tells the World, a Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Library Journal Best Book of the Year. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and was recorded for NPR’s Selected Shorts.

Karen Joy Fowler is the New York Times bestselling author of six novels and three short story collections. Her 2004 novel, The Jane Austen Book Club, spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list and was a New York Times Notable Book. Fowler’s previous novel, Sister Noon, was a finalist for the 2001 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. Her debut novel, Sarah Canary, won the Commonwealth medal for best first novel by a Californian, was listed for the Irish Times International Fiction Prize as well as the Bay Area Book Reviewers Prize, and was a New York Times Notable Book. Fowler’s short story collection Black Glass won the World Fantasy Award in 1999, and her collection What I Didn’t See won the World Fantasy Award in 2011. Her most recent novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves won the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction and was short-listed for the 2014 Man Booker Prize. Her new novel Booth published in March 2022. She is the co-founder of the Otherwise Award and the current president of the Clarion Foundation (also known as Clarion San Diego). Fowler and her husband, who have two grown children and seven grandchildren, live in Santa Cruz, California. Fowler also supports a chimp named Caesar who lives at the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Sierra Leone.
