Winter 2025 Aurora Lecture: G. S. Sahota
2025-02-20 15:30 - 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Virtual and In Person
Join us as we welcome G.S. Sahota—Aurora Chair in Sikh and Punjabi Studies and Associate Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz for a conversation on Equality of the Minor: Ambedkar’s Critical Legacy Today. This engaging discussion will take place on February 20, 2025 at 3:30 PM in Humanities 1, Room 202. You can also join us virtually via Zoom:

This event is a part of the Winter 2025 Aurora Lecture series.

Mediterranean Slavery Since the 18th Century and the Historical Study of Race: M’hamed Oualdi in Conversation with Shreya Parikh
2025-02-24 10:00 | Virtual Event
From ancient times through abolition, scholars have often described slavery in the Mediterranean region as being relatively unaffected by the history of racial thought. Instead, many historians have focused on the decisive role played by religion. At the same time, however, it is undeniable that dark-skinned enslaved people occupied a more subordinate position in comparison with other dominated groups. Presented by the Center for the Middle East and North Africa, this talk investigates whether theories of race and racism can elucidate the social, political, and economic dimensions of slavery in the Mediterranean, while also asking how studying slavery in the Mediterranean might provide a different understanding of racialization during the early modern period.

M’hamed Oualdi is a Professor at the European University Institute, Florence. Before joining the EUI, he taught at Sciences Po-Paris and Princeton University. He is supervising a European Research Council-funded project about the demise of slavery in the Mediterranean from the mid-18th century to the 1930s. He is the author of Esclaves et maîtres. Les mamelouks au service des beys de Tunis du XVIIe siècle aux années 1880 (Publications de la Sorbonne, 2011) and A Slave between Empires (Columbia University Press, 2020).
Shreya Parikh is a lecturer and affiliated researcher at Sciences Po Paris. She received a Dual Ph.D. in Political Science and in Sociology from Sciences Po and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2024. Her dissertation, Mirages of Race: Blackness, Racialization, and the Black Movement in Tunisia, examines the intersections of race, migration, and citizenship in the production of Blackness in contemporary Tunisia. She is currently working on adapting her dissertation manuscript into a book.

PhD+ Workshop - Grants and Fellowships
2025-02-25 11:30 - 12:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Grants and Fellowships for Scholars in the Humanities
Learn how to make your fellowship and grant proposals competitive to a wide range of selection committees. We’ll discuss what does and does not need to be in a research proposal, the proper tone and form, and ways to tease out the larger stakes of individual research projects and avoid the jargon of field-specific descriptions. This session will help you craft a research proposal that appeals to a broad academic audience. This workshop will be an opportunity for graduate students to learn about The Humanities Institute’s funding resources as well as strategies for acquiring extramural support.
The workshop will be led by Pranav Anand (Faculty Director at The Humanities Institute and Professor of Linguistics) Alma Heckman (Steering Committee Member at The Humanities Institute and Associate Professor of History & Jewish Studies), and Saskia Nauenberg Dunkell (Research Programs and Communications Director at The Humanities Institute).

Please RSVP using your UCSC email address:
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About the PhD+ Workshop Series

CANCELLED - Nora Khan – Discernment: Unruly Images, Synthetic Media, and Evolving Critical Impulse
2025-02-26 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
What can criticism offer us in a world of unruly generative images and synthetic media? What precise language might we use for machine learning’s impact, or the wake of an algorithm? How must our practices of discernment and the critical impulse evolve in response to computational developments, to perhaps be more resilient and responsive?
This talk invites one to consider how our language might move with ‘intelligent’ systems and beings that simulate liveness and likeness. To navigate a present and future dominated by synthetic media, and created by predictive systems, we take up a practice of seeing through systems. This talk first explores the craft of developing a hybrid, strategic, collective and dissident criticism of technology. It second reviews cases of baffling, seemingly inarticulable experiences from early software experiments and artists’ interventions, into AI/ML. Third, it explores the evolution of language in response to material and symbolic systems that dramatically shape our creative approaches and cognition. Throughout, the talk explores evolving critical methods that help us better situate ourselves to identify a vast range of hidden fictions and beliefs about what technology is meant to do and be.

WINTER 2025 COLLOQUIUM SERIES
THE CENTER FOR CULTURAL STUDIES hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work-in-progress by faculty & visitors. We are pleased to announce our Winter 2025 Series. Sessions begin promptly at 12:15 PM and end at 1:30 PM (PST) in Humanities Building 1, Room 210.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

POSTPONED - Humanities Campus to Career: Law Panel
2025-02-26 16:00 - 18:00 | Merrill Provost House, Provost's Residence, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Please stay tuned for a new date!

Are you interested in a career in the legal field? Come learn about careers in law from current and former attorneys with Humanities backgrounds.
Appetizers and light refreshments will be served.

Sarah Cunniff (she/her) attended Stevenson College at UC Santa Cruz, where she majored in French Literature. After law school, she worked in large and small law firms and in-house at Levi Strauss. Most recently she spent a dozen years at the Career Development Office at Berkeley Law school, where she supported students in their job searches, with a special affinity for students with humanities backgrounds.
Chris Khasho (he/him) graduated from UC Santa Cruz in 2013 with a B.A. in Philosophy and is now a successful young attorney in Los Angeles. Chris represents clients in a broad array of business litigation matters and counsels them in corporate and transactional matters at Cypress LLP, a premier business litigation firm in Century City. Chris is passionate about giving back to his community and helping clients resolve their legal issues.
Ritu Goswamy (they/them) is a Staff Attorney with the UC Immigrant Legal Services Center and serves UC Santa Cruz. They are a graduate from Barnard College, Columbia University and Boston College (Joint J.D./M.S.W. degrees). Prior to joining the Center, Ritu worked as a child welfare worker in Oakland, and as an attorney with the Legal Aid Society – Employment Law Center (now Legal Aid at Work) and Legal Advocates for Children & Youth (part of the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley).
Jalyn Mitchell (she/her) is a proud UCSC College Ten Alum and majored in English Language Literature with a minor in Legal Studies. She graduated from Law School from Loyola University in Chicago and went to work in San Jose at the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley where she represented people on long term psychiatric holds with their due process right to a hearing to leave the hospital. Currently and for the last 2.5 years, she has represented young people on a variety of issues including restraining orders, traffic tickets, education law, and guardianships.
Learn more about the panelists here.
This event is presented by the Employing Humanities.

Undiscovered Shakespeare: Timon of Athens - Episode 3
2025-02-26 19:00 | Virtual Event
Join us for this year’s, Undiscovered Shakespeare featuring Timon of Athens (1606), a late play focusing on the corrosive effects of prodigality and ingratitude in an apparently democratic society. Gretchen Minton, Professor of English at the University of Montana, Bozeman and the editor of the most recent Arden edition of the play, will be the production’s visiting scholar.

Undiscovered Shakespeare is a public arts and humanities series co-produced by Santa Cruz Shakespeare, UCSC Shakespeare Workshop, and The Humanities Institute. It brings professional actors and scholars together with the public for a staged reading and discussion of works by Shakespeare that are rarely produced.
Gretchen Minton is a Shakespeare scholar and Professor of English at Montana State University. She is the editor and author of several works, including the award-winning Shakespeare in Montana, and she works frequently as a dramaturg, script adaptor, and director.

Bookshop Santa Cruz Presents: Jennifer Finney Boylan | CLEAVAGE: MEN, WOMEN, AND THE SPACE BETWEEN US
2025-02-26 19:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
What is the difference between men and women? In her new book Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us, Jennifer Finney Boylan, bestselling author of She’s Not There and co-author of Mad Honey with Jodi Picoult, examines the divisions—as well as the common ground—between the genders, and reflects on her own experiences, both difficult and joyful, as a transgender American.

Jennifer Finney Boylan is the author of nineteen books, including Mad Honey, coauthored with Jodi Picoult. Her memoir, She’s Not There, was the first bestselling work by a transgender American. Since 2014, she has been the inaugural Anna Quindlen Writer in Residence at Barnard College of Columbia University; she is also on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference of Middlebury College and the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy. She is the President of PEN America, and from 2011 to 2018 she was a member of the Board of Directors of GLAAD, including four years as national cochair. In 2022-23 she was a Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She graduated from Wesleyan University and Johns Hopkins, and she holds doctorates honoris causafrom Sarah Lawrence College, the New School, and Wesleyan University. For many years she was a contributing opinion writer for the opinion section of the New York Times. Her work has also appeared in the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, Literary Hub, Down East, and many other publications. She lives in Maine and New York with her wife, Deirdre. They have two children: a daughter, Zai, and a son, Sean.
More information at: Bookshop Santa Cruz – Jennifer Finney Boylan
Co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

Living Writers with Hannah Sanghee Park
2025-02-27 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Living Writers Series – Winter 2025
Grief Sequence
Not to suppress mourning (suffering)…but to change it, transform it…after Prageeta Sharma & Roland Barthes
Hannah Sanghee Park is the author of two poetry collections. a chapbook, Ode Days Ode (2011) and The Same-Different (2015), which won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. In 2013, she was awarded the Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Her hometown is Federal Way, Washington, and she currently resides in Los Angeles, California.
About the Living Writers Series
The Living Writers Series (LWS) is a live reading series organized especially for the Creative Writing Program community at UCSC. There is a new series each quarter, and each series features writers with unique voices. The LWS is open to all creative writing students and the public.

Sponsored by The 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).

An Evening with Colin Winnette
2025-02-27 19:00 | Kresge Collge – A Lounge
As part of Kresge’s Writers House Reading Series, Kresge’s Media and Society presents an evening with novelist and short-story writer Colin Winnette, who will be giving a reading followed by Q&A.
The event will start at 7pm in the Kresge A Lounge (the first-floor lounge in one of the new residence halls).
Colin Winnette is the author of several books, including Coyote, Haints Stay, The Job of the Wasp, and most recently Users, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Winnette’s writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Believer, and The Paris Review Daily, among many others.

Evgeny Morozov - AI and its Others: Cold War Legacies, Neoliberal Futures, and the Fight for Ecological Reason
2025-02-28 16:30 - 18:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Evgeny Morozov will be on campus Friday afternoon, February 28 to talk about his recent Boston Review article “The AI We Deserve.”
Evgeny Morozov holds a PhD in History of Science from Harvard University. He is the founder of “The Syllabus” and author of The Net Delusion (2011) and To Save Everything, Click Here (2013).

Banu Bargu with Key MacFarlane & Anna Yegorova – Disembodiment: A Conversation
2025-03-03 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 420, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The History of Consciousness department is pleased to announce the final talk in the Winter 25 session of the HisCon Speaker Series. HistCon Professor Banu Bargu, in discussion with HistCon Grads Key MacFarlane & Anna Yegrovoa will present “Disembodiment: A Conversation” on Monday, March 3, at 1pm in Hum 1 Rm 420 with a virtual attendance option.
Please register here in advance for virtual access.
About “Disembodiment: A Conversation”
Join us for an engaging conversation on Disembodiment: Corporeal Politics of Radical Refusal, Banu Bargu’s recent book, which examines bodily agency with a focus on forms of self-destruction and self-injury. The conversation will offer an overview of the main philosophical problems Disembodiment addresses and explore the book’s central conceptual apparatus and interpretative moves. What does it mean to do global critical theory in our present? How should it relate to the dominant “canon” of Western philosophy and political thought? Discussing these and related questions, the conversation will explore how a materialist approach, which takes the suffering body as its normative compass, may make visible subterranean historical lineages as well as contemporary practices to expand our understanding of agency, dignity, and globality alike.
Banu Bargu is Professor of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons (Columbia University Press, 2014), which received the Foundations of Political Theory First Book Prize given by the American Political Science Association and was named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice. Her new book, Disembodiment: Corporeal Politics of Radical Refusal (Oxford University Press, 2024), examines self-destruction, self-injury, and radical self-endangerment as unconventional performances of resistance and refusal. Her edited collections include Turkey’s Necropolitical Laboratory: Democracy, Violence, and Resistance (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), The Political Encounter with Althusser (special issue of Rethinking Marxism, 2019, co-edited with Robyn Marasco) and Feminism, Capitalism, and Critique: Essays in Honor of Nancy Fraser (Palgrave, 2017, co-edited with Chiara Bottici). Banu Bargu currently serves as the editor of Political Theory.
Key MacFarlane is a PhD Candidate in the History of Consciousness department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research focuses on the relationship between phenomenology and Marxism, and its contributions to a political theory of experience. He is co-editing a special issue in Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space on the problem of space in Frankfurt School critical theory, and has articles published or forthcoming on the political geography of waste, the spatial politics of memory, and Henri Lefebvre’s theory of moments.
Anna Yegorova is a second-year PhD student in the History of Consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz. Her articles on the critique of the linear conception of history, multitemporality, class, and identity have been published in Russian-language journals, including Logos, Neprikosnovenny Zapas, and Sociologia Vlasti. She is also a member of the Posle.media editorial collective, where she has published two articles: “Did Lenin Create Ukraine? On the Right of Nations to Self-Determination and Marxism” and “Adorno in the Kremlin.” Her current research draws on, and seeks to contribute to, political and social philosophy, Marxism, anti-, de-, and post-colonial theory, the history of anticolonial struggles, empires and imperialism, nationalism, federalism, and secularization.

Book Conversation: Kevin Pham - The Architects of Dignity
2025-03-03 15:00 - 17:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Professor Kevin Pham (University of Amsterdam) will be speaking about his 2024 book The Architects of Dignity: Vietnamese Visions of Decolonization on Monday March 3, at 3pm in Humanities 1 room 210.
To attend virtually, join via Zoom here.
In his new book, The Architects of Dignity: Vietnamese Visions of Decolonization (Oxford University Press, 2024), Kevin Pham traces an intergenerational debate among six influential figures in colonial Vietnam. These visionaries debated how to respond to French colonialism, the role of tradition amidst Western influence, and how to transform national shame into dignity. Kevin will also share his personal motivations as a Vietnamese American for writing this book, and how he addresses gaps in representation of Vietnamese political thought and challenges Western-centric perspectives in political theory.
Kevin Pham is an Assistant Professor of Political Theory at the University of Amsterdam. His research introduces Vietnamese political thought to the academic field of political theory, demonstrating its relevance to global discussions on key political concepts. His works are published in esteemed journals, and he co-hosts two podcasts: Nam Phong Dialogues and Viet History Makers. The Architects of Dignity is his first book. More information is available on his website: www.kevindoanpham.com.
Please note: We will read the Introduction and Chapter 1 of the book and discuss it with Kevin following his remarks. But you are also welcome to lurk in the audience if you do not have a chance to read it or do not want to join the conversation. If you want to receive the readings, please email ekeser@ucsc.edu.

This event is presented by the Global Political Thought Working Group.

Benjamin Breen - AI Legibility, Physical Archives, and the Future of Research
2025-03-04 12:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Humanities Institute Research cluster, “Humanities in the Age of AI,” is pleased to invite you to a series of meetings this winter quarter. This meeting is scheduled for March 4th (Tuesday) at noon in HUM 210 with guest speaker, Benjamin Breen speaking on “AI legibility, physical archives, and the future of research.”
As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly adept in fields amenable to reinforcement learning (like mathematics, translation, and coding), forms of research that depend on undigitized archives, tacit or embodied knowledge, and social relationships become more valuable, not less. Through case studies of how current LLMs perform historical analysis, translation, and transcription, I argue that the future of historical research lies not in resistance to AI tools, but in understanding how they complement rather than replace the more intuitive, social, and embodied aspects of research, such as physically visiting archives, conducting interviews, and gathering holistic knowledge of a place, culture, or milieu through physical presence. I will also discuss some related experiments in interactive historical simulations enabled by LLMs which approach the well-known “hallucination problem” as a feature, not a bug.
Benjamin Breen is an associate professor of history at UC Santa Cruz, where he teaches classes on early modern Europe, environmental history, and the history of science, technology, and medicine. From July 2015 to January 2017, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University and a lecturer in Columbia’s history department. He received his PhD in history from the University of Texas at Austin in 2015. His first book, The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2019. His second book, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science, appeared in 2024. He lives in Santa Cruz, California, with his partner Roya Pakzad and their two daughters.

Jennifer Finney Boylan - Amelia Earhart, Saved from Drowning
2025-03-04 18:00 - 19:30 | Music Center Recital Hall – UCSC, 402 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join us for this year’s Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture featuring Jennifer Finney Boylan, who will deliver her talk titled Amelia Earhart, Saved from Drowning. In this collage of story and song, Jennifer Finney Boylan speculates on the life of Amelia Earhart after the crash. Using that event as a springboard, she considers how our social and political structures constrain human liberty, and the price that women and queer people must pay for freedom.

Doors open at 5:30 pm. The lecture will begin at 6:00 pm and will be followed by a Q&A session at 7:00 pm.
Jennifer Finney Boylan is the author of 19 books including the bestsellers She’s Not There and Mad Honey (with Jodi Picoult). Professor, trans advocate, reality TV star, and former New York Times opinion columnist, Jenny is currently President of PEN America. From 2014-2018, she was National Co-chair of GLAAD.

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.

Jennifer Finney Boylan is THI’s 2025 Scholar-in-Residence and this signature event is part of THI’s 25th anniversary.

Alex Brostoff – The Task of the Trans Translator: Paradoxes of Visibility, Autotheories of Opacity
2025-03-05 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
What is the task of the trans translator? How have paradoxes of visibility bound translation and trans studies in uncanny inversions of each other? And what might autotheoretical methodologies contribute to decolonizing the transgender imaginary in translation? This talk probes how form—from the grammatical to the material and from the social to the structural—shapes and is shaped by the ways in which trans and translation interface with regimes of readability. It argues that the task of the trans translator is to renew trans life with an opacity that thwarts traps of visibility while elucidating the anti-colonial interventions and intertextual solidarities of translation itself. To navigate these counter currents is to surface what I call, following Glissant, a trans poetics of relation.
Alex Brostoff is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College and a 2025 Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Edinburgh. An interdisciplinary scholar and translator, they are currently completing their first book, Unruly Relations: A Critical Reframing of Autotheory (Columbia University Press, under advance contract), which recasts autotheory’s transnational and transdisciplinary place in the political history of trans and queer literature of the Américas. They are the co-editor of two volumes: Autotheories (The MIT Press, 2025) and Reassignments: Trans and Sex from the Clinical to the Critical (Fordham University Press, under advance contract), as well as the co-translator of Indigenous leader Ailton Krenak’s Life Is Not Useful (Polity Press, 2023) and Ancestral Future (Polity Press, 2024). Their scholarship and translations have appeared in ASAP/Journal, Critical Times, Synthesis, Dibur, and South Atlantic Quarterly, as well as at the Museum of Modern Art, and elsewhere.

WINTER 2025 COLLOQUIUM SERIES
THE CENTER FOR CULTURAL STUDIES hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work-in-progress by faculty & visitors. We are pleased to announce our Winter 2025 Series.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

More-Than-Human(ities) Lab Early Career Scholars Share Session
2025-03-05 16:00 - 17:30 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Please join the More-Than-Human(ities) Lab for our first ever “Share Session.” Three of our early-career lab members will share their current projects and invite your feedback in an informal, interactive conversation. Snacks will be served!
About Our Presenters:
Joan Chia-en Chiang – “‘I Won’t Fight For You’: Amis Soldiers in the Japanese Empire during WWII”

Ania Mah Gricuk – “Diasporic Medicine: A Modern History of Chinese Herbal Tea, 1880s-present”

Tracy Liu – “Reimagining the Technological Frontier: Posthuman Entanglements across China, Peru, and Mexico”

This event is presented by the THI More-Than-Human(ities) Laboratory Research Cluster.

Intimacies of Relation: The Autotheoretical Turn
2025-03-06 - 2025-03-08 | UCSC
Autotheory’s genre-bending form blends critical theory with life writing. Through performances, readings, papers, and embodied writing exercises, this transdisciplinary conference explores where and how autotheory emerged, the range of its practices, and the ways in which its forms recast the relationships between subjects and the worlds that make them. Panels explore autotheory in relationship to language, image, film, visual, and performance art; the autotheoretical subject in dialogue with the psychoanalytic subject and its scenes of desire; autotheory’s encounter with racialized, trans, queer, and differently abled bodies, and autotheoretical practices of decolonial love.
This conference will take place from March 6–8, 2025, at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences (March 6, 2–7 pm) and Humanities 1, Room 210 (March 7 & 8).
See the full program here.

Featuring: Kazim Ali, Alex Brostoff, La Marr Jurelle Bruce, Vilashini Cooppan, Iliana Cuellar, Nadia Ellis, Carla Freccero, rl Goldberg, Che Gossett, Jan Grue, Eva Hayward, Grace Lavery, Summer Kim Lee, Megan Moodie, Micah Perks, Elda María Román, Simone Stirner, Susan Stryker, Kim TallBear, Ronaldo V. Wilson, Arianne Zwartjes

Sponsored by: The University of California Humanities Research Institute, The Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory at UCHRI, The Humanities Institute at UCSC, and The Center for Cultural Studies at UCSC.
Image credit: Ronaldo V. Wilson. Donald and Carmelina’s Heart 2. 2021. Monoprint.

Omer Aijazi - Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir
2025-03-06 10:00 | Virtual Event
The Center for South Asian Studies presents Omer Aijazi speaking on “Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir.”

Omer Aijazi takes us to remote mountainous valleys in the portion of Kashmir under Pakistan’s control, where life has been shaped by recurring environmental disasters and by the violence of the contested India/Pakistan border. In conversation with a radical humanist anthropology and affect theory, held accountable to Black and Indigenous studies, Aijazi offers a decolonial approach to disaster studies centering not on trauma and rupture but rather on repair—the social labor of creating and maintaining viable life, even amidst constant diminishment and world-annihilation.
Omer Aijazi is a critical disaster studies scholar and decolonial ethnographer of borderland South Asia. He teaches at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at the University of Manchester.
This event is a part of the 2024 – 25 Ecologies of Care Lecture Series.

Eman Ghanayem - For the Love of Genocide
2025-03-06 16:00 - 18:00 | Cervantes and Velasquez Conference Room, Bay Tree Building, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Center for Racial Justice is proud to present For the Love of Genocide with Eman Ghanayem, Assistant Professor of English at the University of San Diego.
This presentation unravels love in its colonial manifestation as a rationale for genocidal violence. It centers in its analysis the discourse currently used by those supporting and perpetuating genocide in Gaza. Love expressed in contexts of Zionist loyalties and its brand of settler nationalism, originally and across its transit, gives us insight into the feelings that animate acts of violence. In response to it, Palestinian expression, particularly in relation to atrocity and apocalyptical dread, reveals what precedes in fundamental form and must conquer genocide. How must we bear love in the face of annihilation? What ideas of it must we confront? Whose love must we learn?
Sponsored by: The UCSC Center for Racial Justice | Department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies | Department of Feminist Studies | Department of Sociology | The Center for South Asian Studies | The Center for Cultural Studies | FJP | SJP | Institute for Social Transformation.
Part of the Possibilities of Palestinian Refusal: Against Disciplining Knowledge and Movement Speaking Series. For more information, visit the CRJ website: https://crjucsc.com/.

Living Writers with Prageeta Sharma
2025-03-06 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Living Writers Series – Winter 2025
Grief Sequence
Not to suppress mourning (suffering)…but to change it, transform it…after Prageeta Sharma & Roland Barthes
Prageeta Sharma is the author of five poetry collections, including Grief Sequence (Wave Books, 2019) and The Opening Question (2004), which won the 2004 Fence Modern Poets Prize. In 2010, she received the Howard Foundation Award. Over the years, she has taught at the New School, Goddard College, and the University of Montana-Missoula. She currently teaches at Pomona College and is the founder of the conference Thinking Its Presence: Race, Creative Writing, Literary Studies, and Art. Her hometown is Framingham, Massachusetts.
About the Living Writers Series
The Living Writers Series (LWS) is a live reading series organized especially for the Creative Writing Program community at UCSC. There is a new series each quarter, and each series features writers with unique voices. The LWS is open to all creative writing students and the public.

Sponsored by The 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).

Activating Community Engagement with Imagining America at UC Santa Cruz
2025-03-07 12:00 - 13:30 | Cowell Conference Room, Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
*Note that this event has a new date and location: It will take place in person on March 7 from 12:00 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. at the Cowell Conference Room (132) (map).

Please join us for a special workshop with Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life (IA). Learn about the member benefits, such as fellowships, conferences, research, and resources, available to UCSC faculty, students, and staff. IA will share a toolkit and creative engagement tools to help organize the people, projects, and partners on our campus doing community-engaged work. This discussion will offer strategies for energizing your campus community to engage with community members and uplift public scholarship.
Lunch will be provided, register here:

Presenters: Stephanie Maroney, Managing Director of Imagining America, and Anuj Vaidya, Communications Director of Imagining America.
Public Scholar Tools Offered by Imagining America
Inspired by a three-year action research project, the IA public scholar tools are designed to spark conversation about the joys, contributions, and struggles of public scholars and artists. The Conversation Cards aim to break the silence surrounding elite academic cultures that value a limited range of understandings of what kinds of knowledge matters and to nurture supportive relationships and environments for public scholars to thrive. The Public Scholar Imagination Guide provides a variety of reflection and action tools for anyone trying to improve their own practice and for those interested in making the university a more hospitable, caring, and creative place to nurture public, engaged, and activist scholarship, artmaking, and design.
About Imagining America
The Imagining America consortium (IA) brings together scholars, artists, designers, humanists, and organizers to imagine, study, and enact a more just and liberatory ‘America’ and world. Working across institutional, disciplinary, and community divides, IA strengthens and promotes public scholarship, cultural organizing, and campus change that inspires collective imagination, knowledge-making, and civic action on pressing public issues. Imagining America is guided by 7 values and committed to bringing people together as our full selves in critical yet hopeful spaces to imagine better ways of living, learning and working together.
This event is brought to you by the Art Research Institute, Campus + Community, Humanities Institute, and the Institute for Social Transformation (IST).

Linguistics Colloquia: Jessica Rett
2025-03-07 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 2, Room 259
The Department of Linguistics is pleased to present, Jessica Rett (UC Los Angeles) speaking on Ambidirectionality and apparently expletive negation.
This is an in-person event. You can also join virtually via Zoom.
Some constructions in some languages involve expletive negation (EN): negation that seems to not affect the truth conditions of the sentence. For example, the Italian A è più alto di quanto (non) sia B (“A is taller than B (isn’t)”). I follow others (Greco 2018, Halm and Huszár 2021) in assuming there are two kinds of EN. For me, this amounts to the fact that there are two different ways a negation can fail to affect truth conditions: 1) high EN involves negation that targets non-truth-conditional content, and 2) low EN involves negation that targets clauses that display what I call ambidirectionality: the property of being ambiguous between a proposition and its negation. In this talk, I focus on the latter, arguing that ambidirectionality answers two urgent questions in the context of expletive negation: it explains why we only get (low) EN in scalar constructions (cf. Cépeda 2018); and it explains several subtle semantic differences between a given construction and its (expletive-) negated counterpart.
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

"Zone of Flux: The Mutable Geographies, Interrupted Histories, and Multiple Languages of the Mediterranean" – Iain Chambers in Conversation with Camilla Hawthorne and Mediterranean Studies Roundtable
2025-03-10 16:30 - 19:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Join us for a Mediterranean Studies talk and roundtable featuring Iain Chambers, former Professor of the Sociology of Cultural Processes, Oriental University, Naples.
4:30-5:30 | “Mediterranean Blues: Colonial Spacetime and Other Archives,” Iain Chambers
Introducer and Respondent: Camilla Hawthorne (Associate Professor of Sociology and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, UCSC)
5:45-7:00 | “Mediterranean as Materiality, Method, and Geolinguistic Movements”
A Roundtable with Chris Connery (chair and moderator), with Sharon Kinoshita, Susan Gillman, and Camilo Gomez-Rivas (Professors of Literature, UCSC). Four lightning talks followed by plenary discussion and Q&A with Iain Chambers and Camilla Hawthorne.
Iain Chambers has taught cultural, postcolonial, and Mediterranean studies for many years at the University of Naples, Orientale, and is now an independent researcher. Amongst his recent publications are Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorised Modernities (2017), and, with Marta Cariello, The Mediterranean Question (2025). In 2022, he was a member of the artistic collective Jimmie Durham & A Stick in the Forest by the Side of the Road at documenta 15. He writes regularly for the Italian daily il Manifesto.

Matthew L. Jones - Great Exploitations: Hacking, Machine Learning and the NSA in the Golden Age of Signals Intelligence
2025-03-11 12:00 | Virtual and In Person
The Humanities Institute Research cluster, “Humanities in the Age of AI,” is pleased to invite you to a series of meetings this winter quarter. This meeting is scheduled for March 11th (Tuesday) at noon in HUM 210 with guest speaker, Matthew L. Jones speaking on Great Exploitations: Hacking, Machine Learning and the NSA in the Golden Age of Signals Intelligence.
According to the US National Security Agency, we’re living in the “golden age” of signals intelligence—the spying on worldwide communications of all kinds. The Snowden documents, now in the public eye for about a decade, revealed a surveillance apparatus of extraordinary breadth and depth. Yet, for all their lurid fascination, their confirmation of some tinfoil hat theories, their illustration of compliance regimes, the documents reveal little about how we came to build this apparatus. They tell little of the surprisingly broad bipartisan consensus, from the mid-1990s onward, supporting the vast expansion of domestic and international surveillance and dramatic alterations in the law around wiretapping and hacking, in the US as well as its close partners.
9/11 accelerated these shifts. It did not cause them. From the war on drugs of the 1980s, to beginnings of the focus on terrorism as the new primary enemy from the mid 1990s, electronic surveillance came to appear ever more essential and licit to spies, presidents, legislators and judges. This talk will trace the technological and legal developments, as well as the radical rethinking of the security of the “homeland,” making this all possible. In the wake of 9/11, these contested developments were made to appear at once technologically determined and essential for security in an asymmetric age.
This event will be in person at Humanities 1, Room 210. You may also join via Zoom here.
Matthew L. Jones is the Smith Family Professor of History at Princeton University. In 2023, Norton published his How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms, written with Chris Wiggins. He is completing a book, Great Exploitations on state surveillance of communications and information warfare. He has published two books previously, Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage and The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz and the Cultivation of Virtue (both with Chicago). The Mellon Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Science Foundation have funded his research and teaching.

Critical Imagination in Crisis Times
2025-03-11 14:00 - 18:30 | Cultural Center at Merrill, Merrill Cultural Center, UC Santa Cruz, Merrill College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join us for a one-day conference, “Critical Imagination in Crisis Times,” featuring presentations by:

Iain Chambers, Former Professor of the Sociology of Cultural Processes, Oriental University, Naples
Paul Gilroy, Emeritus Professor of Humanities, University College, London
Vron Ware, Visiting Professor at the Gender Institute of the London School of Economics and Political Science

UC Santa Cruz faculty participants include: Jim Clifford (Emeritus Professor, History of Consciousness) Chris Connery (Professor, Literature), Vilashini Cooppan (Professor, Literature and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies), Isaac Julien (Distinguished Professor, Arts and History of Consciousness), Mark Nash (Professor, Arts and History of Consciousness), María Puig de la Bellacasa (Professor, History of Consciousness).

Conference Program:
2:00-2:15 pm Conference Introduction: Isaac Julien and Mark Nash
2:15-3:15 pm Iain Chambers, “From Kassel to Gaza: Art and Critical Testimony” (Moderator, Chris Connery)
3:30-4:30 pm Vron Ware, “Letting the Land Speak” (Moderator, María Puig de la Bellacasa)
4:45-5:45 pm Paul Gilroy, “Political Eschatologies of Mismanaged Decline” (Moderator, Jim Clifford)
5:45-6:30 pm Plenary Discussion: Moderators, Isaac Julien and Mark Nash
Light refreshments will be served throughout the afternoon. The conference will also be live-streamed. Follow this link to join online. Conference presented by Moving Image Lab, The Humanities Institute, and the Center for Cultural Studies. Co-sponsored by the History of Consciousness Department.

Iain Chambers has taught cultural, postcolonial, and Mediterranean studies for many years at the University of Naples, Orientale, and is now an independent researcher. Amongst his recent publications are Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorised Modernities (2017), and, with Marta Cariello, The Mediterranean Question (2025). In 2022, he was a member of the artistic collective Jimmie Durham & A Stick in the Forest by the Side of the Road at documenta 15. He writes regularly for the Italian daily il Manifesto.
Paul Gilroy was born in the East End of London in 1956. He is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at University College London where he was founding director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the study of racism and racialisation. Gilroy was previously Professor of American and English at King’s College London, Giddens Professor of Social Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science (2005-2012), Charlotte Marian Saden Professor of African American Studies and Sociology at Yale (1999-2005) and Professor of Cultural Studies and Sociology at Goldsmiths College London (1995-1999). He holds honorary doctorates from Goldsmiths College, Sussex University, the University of Liege, the University of Copenhagen, Oxford University and the University of St. Andrews. He is an honorary Fellow of Sussex University and of King’s College, London. In 2014, he was made a Fellow of the British Academy and in 2018 of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded Norway’s Holberg Prize in 2019. He writes widely on Art, Music, Literature and Politics. His publications include: Darker than Blue: On The Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Cultures (2010), Black Britain: A Pictorial History (2007), After Empire:Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (2005).
Vron Ware is a London-based writer and photographer, having previously taught geography, sociology and gender studies at universities in the UK and the US. She has written several books on the politics of gender and race, colonial history, national identity, ecological thought and the cultural heritage of war. She gave her first book talk for Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History at UC Santa Cruz in 1992. More recently she has published Return of a Native: Learning from the Land (2022) and co-authored England’s Military Heartland: Preparing for War on Salisbury Plain (2025).

Image Credit: Isaac Julien, Western Union Series no. 1 (Cast No Shadow), 2007, Duratrans image in lightbox, Courtesy the artist.

PhD+ Workshop - THI Public Fellowship Information Session
2025-03-11 15:00 - 16:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Curious about becoming a THI Graduate Public Fellow? Not sure how to find the right partner organization? If you’re thinking about applying your expertise in the public sphere or exploring career opportunities beyond academia, then you may be interested in THI’s Public Fellowship program.
Public fellowships provide opportunities for doctoral students in the Humanities to contribute to research, programming, communications, and fundraising at non-profit organizations, cultural institutions, or companies and expand their skills in a non-academic setting while engaged in graduate study.

Please join us for an information session about the 2025 THI Graduate Public Fellows program to learn about Summer 2025 opportunities.
All THI Public Fellow applicants are required to attend an Info Session. Please contact Saskia Nauenberg Dunkell, Research Programs and Communications Director, at saskia@ucsc.edu before the workshop if you are unable to attend due to a work or class scheduling conflict. Final applications are due on April 4th, 2025.

About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the ninth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by The Humanities Institute. We meet monthly to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grants/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.
RSVP here:
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Humanities Campus to Career: Job Talk with Tammy Tolgo, Amazon Talent Acquisition
2025-03-12 14:00 - 14:45 | Virtual Event
Considering careers in recruiting, human resources, or business? Join this informative job talk and Q&A to learn about talent acquisition from a UCSC Humanities alumna who is a leader in the field!
Tammy will offer insights about her journey as a first generation college student from graduation through various talent acquisition roles in multiple industries, and about how her Humanities degree set her up for success along the way.

Tammy Tolgo is a proud alumnus of UC Santa Cruz and CSU Northridge. As a first-generation college student, she credits her experiences at these institutions for providing a strong foundation for both work and life. After starting her career in higher education, Tammy joined an Executive Search Firm, launching her career in Talent Acquisition. Over the last 20 years, Tammy has built and led Talent Acquisition teams across industries, focused on global organizational build outs. She has become a proven leader in diversity recruiting, executive search, and transformational leadership. Tammy currently leads Talent Acquisition for Amazon Advertising’s Emerging Businesses.
This event is presented by the Employing Humanities.

PhD+ Workshop - Alt-Ac in the Archives: Archives and Rare Books Career Pathways
2025-03-13 15:00 - 16:00 | Virtual Event
Ever thought about pursuing a career in archives and libraries? Wondered about what other paths you can pursue with your degree – PhD or otherwise? Come to this panel discussion with four professional librarians and archivists, all from the UC Santa Cruz Special Collections & Archives in McHenry Library. We’ll have a conversation on the diverse and diverging paths we took to get to our current positions in the library, share some advice, and answer questions you have about pursuing these kinds of careers.
It’s also a great chance to meet your local librarians who can assist you in your research and connect you to all kinds of resources at UC Santa Cruz and beyond!
This event is presented by Special Collections and Archives at the University Library and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute. See the event page here.
Everyone is welcome to attend this session. The Zoom webinar will not be recorded.
Details:
March 13th, 3-4pm PST
Registration for this webinar is required. Register here via Zoom.

Panelist bios:
Alix Norton is the Archivist for the Center for Archival Research and Training (CART) in Special Collections & Archives at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In her primary role, she trains and mentors graduate students in archival processing and exhibition curation. Alix has worked in Special Collections & Archives at four universities, including at the University of California, Irvine, and previously worked in a neuroscience lab at the University of Washington. She earned a BS in Psychology from the University of Washington before obtaining her MSI from the University of Michigan School of information.
Sam Regal is the Instruction and Exhibitions Librarian in Special Collections and Archives at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she oversees experiential learning programs, exhibitions, programming, public services, and bibliographic collection development. She holds an MLIS with a specialization in rare books and visual culture from UCLA, an MFA in poetry from Hunter College, and a BA in English and American literature from NYU; she also completed coursework toward a PhD in English with a creative writing concentration at the University of Georgia. She is editor of the American Printing History Association (APHA)’s Printing History journal, and her writing has most recently appeared in Parenthesis, RBM, and East of Borneo. She previously served as a librarian at the California Institute of the Arts and as project manager of California Rare Book School.
Rebecca Hernandez earned a PhD in American Studies, specializing in American Indian art and material culture. Her academic work examines inherent complexities in the public representation of culture(s) – particularly how describing and defining Native American objects affects the understanding of Amerindian identity. She is currently the Community Archivist at the UC Santa Cruz University Library, where her role involves assisting with preserving and documenting the history and cultural heritage of Santa Cruz County. Through partnerships with community members, these materials can (if desired) be made accessible to the public, helping to educate and inspire future generations about the rich history of Santa Cruz County.
Kate Dundon is the Supervisory Archivist for Special Collections & Archives at University of California Santa Cruz where she oversees archival processing, accessioning, collection management, and born-digital stewardship programs. Prior to this, she held positions at Occidental College Library, New York University Law Library, and the New York Public Library. She earned an MA in Archives and Public History from New York University and an MLIS from Long Island University.

Living Writers Student Reading
2025-03-13 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Living Writers Series – Winter 2025
Grief Sequence
Not to suppress mourning (suffering)…but to change it, transform it…after Prageeta Sharma & Roland Barthes

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).

2025 Sidhartha Maitra Memorial Lecture featuring Raghuram Rajan
2025-03-13 17:30 - 21:00 | UC Santa Cruz Silicon Valley Campus
UC Santa Cruz Chancellor Cynthia Larive and Foundation Board Trustee Anuradha Luther Maitra invite you to the Sidhartha Maitra Memorial Lecture: “How can India (and developing countries) grow? Navigating an automating and protectionist world” featuring Raghuram Rajan.
The schedule for Thursday, March 13, includes a reception from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m., followed by the program from 6:30 to 8:15 p.m., and concluding with tea and dessert from 8:15 to 9:00 p.m.

India is at a crossroads today. Its economic growth rate, while respectable relative to other large countries, is too low for the jobs its youth need. The East Asian path of manufacturing-led exports no longer seems feasible—aside from increasing automation in manufacturing, the world isn’t prepared or right for another export-driven economy like China. India broke away from the standard development path—from agriculture to low-skilled manufacturing, then high-skilled manufacturing and, finally, services—a long time back by leapfrogging the intermediate steps.
Instead of now trying to regress to development paths that may no longer be feasible, Dr. Rajan will lay out an alternative path to accelerate economic development and make India a ferment of ideas and creativity. By breaking from the past and looking to the future, India can craft a truly Indian way, a path that could be emulated by other developing countries.
Raghuram Rajan is the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago’s Booth School. He was the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India between 2013 and 2016, Vice-Chairman of the Board of the Bank for International Settlements (2015-16) and Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund (2003-2006).
Dr. Rajan’s book Fault Lines (2010) won the Financial Times prize for best business book and his book The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Hold the Community Behind (2019) was a finalist for the award. His most recent book (December 2023) is Breaking the Mold: India’s Untraveled Path to Prosperity, with Rohit Lamba.
Dr. Rajan received AFA’s inaugural Fischer Black Prize in 2003, the Deutsche Bank Prize for financial economics in 2013, Euromoney magazine’s Central Banker of the Year award in 2014, and The Banker magazine’s Global Central Banker award in 2016.
Anuradha Luther Maitra received her Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University, and has served UC Santa Cruz in many capacities: Professor of Economics, Special Advisor to the Chancellor on International Initiatives, UC Santa Cruz Foundation Trustee and President, and founder of the Sidhartha Maitra Lecture Series on Humanism, Reason, and Tolerance.

This premier campus event series seeks to enrich the intellectual life of the campus and the community, and is made possible thanks to the Sidhartha Maitra Memorial Lecture endowment.
This event is co-sponsored by the India House Foundation, the Center for South Asian Studies at UCSC, and The Humanities Institute at UCSC.

Rick Steves: On the Hippie Trail
2025-03-16 16:00 - 17:30 | Rio Theater, 1205 Soquel Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95062, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz presents bestselling travel writer Rick Steves , who will join us for a special event at The Rio Theatre to discuss his new memoir On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer.
Stow away with Rick Steves for a glimpse into the unforgettable moments, misadventures, and memories of his 1978 journey on the legendary Hippie Trail.

In the 1970s, the ultimate trip for any backpacker was the storied “Hippie Trail” from Istanbul to Kathmandu. A 23-year old Rick Steves made the trek, and like a travel writer in training, he documented everything along the way: jumping off a moving train, making friends in Tehran, getting lost in Lahore, getting high for the first time in Herat, battling leeches in Pokhara, and much more. The experience ignited his love of travel and forever broadened his perspective on the world.
This book contains edited selections from Rick’s journal and travel photos with a 45-years-later preface and postscript reflecting on how the journey changed his life. Stow away with Rick Steves on the adventure of a lifetime through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal.
You know Rick Steves. Now discover the adventure that made him the travel writer he is today.
Since 1973, Rick Steves has spent about four months a year exploring Europe. His mission: to empower Americans to have European trips that are fun, affordable, and culturally broadening. Rick produces a best-selling guidebook series, a public television series, and a public radio show, and organizes small-group tours that take over 30,000 travelers to Europe annually. He does all of this with the help of more than 100 well-traveled staff members at Rick Steves’ Europe in Edmonds, WA (near Seattle). When not on the road, Rick is active in his church and with advocacy groups focused on economic and social justice, drug policy reform, and ending hunger. To recharge, Rick plays piano, relaxes at his family cabin in the Cascade Mountains, and spends time with his son Andy, daughter Jackie, and his grandson…baby Atlas. Find out more about Rick at www.ricksteves.com and on Facebook.
More information at: Rick Steves, On the Hippie Trail | Bookshop Santa Cruz
This event is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

Story & Pictures By : A Benefit Film Screening for Santa Cruz County Public School Libraries
2025-03-30 15:00 - 17:00 | Santa Cruz High School Auditorium, 415 Walnut Avenue, Santa Cruz, 95060
With book bans skyrocketing across the country, let’s celebrate the value of children’s books by supporting our local public school libraries together.
Children’s books are often one of the first moments that allow children to dive deep into their imaginations. Come celebrate the impact of children’s books with a benefit screening of a new documentary “Story & Pictures By” followed by a discussion with filmmaker Joanna Rudnick.
100% of the proceeds of every ticket will be used to buy children’s books from Bookshop for Santa Cruz County public school libraries.

This event will feature a film screening (Run Time: 1 hour, 24 minutes) + 20-minute conversation with filmmaker.
ABOUT “STORY & PICTURES BY”
“Story & Pictures By” is the first feature documentary to take audiences behind the scenes to meet the authors and artists who create children’s books. Following bestselling authors Christian Robinson (Last Stop on Market Street), Yuyi Morales (Dreamers), and Mac Barnett (Sam & Dave Dig a Hole), as well as highlighting perennial favorites such as Goodnight Moon, Snowy Day and Where the Wild Things Are, the film shows how children’s books reflect the mysteries of childhood, champion the marginalized, and provide children with windows and mirrors into their own lives.
Film Trailer: https://vimeo.com/925152924
ABOUT FILMMAKER JOANNA RUDNICK
After earning a master’s degree in journalism from NYU, Joanna worked for the American Master’s series WNET/PBS New York where she co-produced the film Robert Capa in Love and War, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was the presenting film for the 2003 Emmy award Outstanding Nonfiction Series. She then spent a decade working for Kartemquin Films producing several titles for national public television before she made her directorial debut with In the Family, an Emmy nominated and deeply personal story about coming to terms with having a mutation in one of the breast cancer genes which is still currently used in teaching courses on medical ethics and genetic counseling today.

This event co-sponsored by Bookshop Santa Cruz, The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, and The Santa Cruz County Office of Education.

Ariella Azoulay – Crafting a Jewish Muslim World
2025-04-02 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Crafting a potential history of the Jewish Muslim World means taking seriously the fact that we – Muslim Jews – are the living ruins of worlds that imperialism is committed to make disappear. Asking ‘who am I?’ / ‘who are we?’ means breaking apart the cohesiveness and solidity of the identities assigned by settler colonial states to children born within their borders. Azoulay will present her new book The Jewelers of the Ummah – A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World and will focus on her methodological choices of inhabiting the ruins of this world with kin and elected kin, and of engaging with jewelry making as part of this journey.
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay teaches at Brown political theory from an anti-colonial perspective, using photography and material culture. Her latest books: The Jewelers of the ummah – Potential History of The Jewish Muslim World (Verso, 2024), Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso Books, 2019), Civil Imagination – A Political Ontology of photography (revised & augmented edition, 2024, Verso) and From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947–1950 (Pluto Press, 2011); She recently published her first children book Golden Threads (Ayin Press, 2024). Her latest films include the trilogy Unlearning Imperial Plunder: One Thousand and One Jewels (2025), The world like a jewel in the hand (2023), Un-documented (2019); her latest exhibitions: Errata (Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 2019; HKW, Berlin, 2020), and The Natural History of Rape (Berlin Biennale, 2022).

Spring 2025 COLLOQUIUM SERIES
THE CENTER FOR CULTURAL STUDIES hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work-in-progress by faculty & visitors. We are pleased to announce our Spring 2025 Series. Sessions begin promptly at 12:15 PM and end at 1:30 PM (PST) in Humanities Building 1, Room 210.
This event is presented by CCS with the Center for the Middle East and North Africa (CMENA) and the Visual Media and Culture Colloquium Series (VMCC). Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Center for South Asian Studies Meet and Greet
2025-04-03 17:00 - 19:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Join us for a Center for South Asian Studies Meet and Greet! Come have some food and refreshments with the CSAS community and tell us about your research and interests related to South Asia and the Center.
Grab a bite, get a drink, and tell us about your research!

Night of Ideas
2025-04-04 17:00 - 21:00 | Institute of the Arts and Sciences, 100 Panetta Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Future We Share: Activism, Creativity, and Collective Imagination
Join us on April 4, 2025 for the Night of Ideas in Santa Cruz, a nocturnal celebration of art, philosophy, and activism! From solar energy and housing justice to communal music and movement, Night of Ideas – Santa Cruz invites you to explore interactive sessions on democracy, environmental solutions, and housing rights, as well as immersive experiences fostering embodied connection. With a Capoeira opening, sculptural performances, and live piano meditations, come create, move, and reflect on our shared future! The 2025 Program is below.
Night of Ideas, a global event taking place simultaneously in more than 100 countries and 22 cities in the United States, invites thought leaders, activists, performers, authors, and academics to engage the public in discussions around central questions that address major, contemporary global issues.
Taking place from March 27 through April 6, Night of Ideas returns this year with nocturnal arts and culture marathons in cities across the U.S. Events will feature late-night discussions addressing major global issues, plus live music, screenings, performances, and more, all centered this year’s theme, “common ground.” Exploring the expression’s literal and metaphorical interpretations, Night of Ideas will prompt participants to consider how we can commit to and protect what we have in common. How can we foster authentic interpersonal connection in an increasingly digital world? In a polarized political landscape, where are our opportunities for dialogue? As extreme weather threatens our planet, how can we preserve the land beneath our feet? Learn more and sign up for updates at nightofideas.org.
This event is brought to the public by the Center for Public Philosophy, with support from the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, The Humanities Institute, Cowell College, Humanities West, The Marc Sanders Foundation, Villa Albertine, and Institut français.

This event is free and open to the public. RSVP is required.

Night of Ideas 2025 Program
MAIN HALL
5pm: Brazilian Cultural Art of Capoeira
5:30pm: Welcome – Opening Remarks (J. Proust)
6:30pm: IAS Exhibition Walkthrough with Curator R. Nelson
7:30pm: Activating the EDELO exhibition (C. Duarte and YELO)
8pm: Piano Meditation/Sound Healing (E. Shanken)
8:30pm: What if We Moved as One? (B-Moving, B. Wittmer, with E. Shanken)
CONFERENCE ROOM (Room 1)
6 – 6:25pm: The Common Ground That Creates an Uncommon Good (G. Hammond)
7 – 7:25pm: Mind, Body and Tiktok Problem (J. Candray)
8 – 8:25pm: Common Ground, No Ground: Housing, Rights, and the Refusal to Disappear (J.Schendledecker)
WEST ROOM (Room 2)
6 – 6:25pm: Post-nonmonogamy and Poly-river-amory (K. TallBear)
7 – 7:25pm: Empowering the Solar Commons through Community Energy (R. Lipschutz, K. Milun, R. Stayton)
8 – 8:25pm: Understanding Through Play (Liminal Space Collective)
ONGOING
“Ask a Philosopher” booth (M. Mattinson, R. Kusyuniati, J. Read) & TEQ project
Melodies of Hope (El Sistema – I. Tuncer)

Speakers and Performers
This event will feature Kim TallBear, Caleb Duarte, Joy Schendledecker, Dr. Kathryn Milun, Dr. Ronnie D. Lipschutz, Robert Stayton, Liminal Space Collective, Juliet Candray, George Hammond, Brigitte Wittmer, Edhi Shanken, El Sistema Santa Cruz/Pajaro Valley, Raízes do Brasil Capoeira and Brazilian Cultural Arts Center, Dr. Jeanne Proust, Rachel Nelson.
For more information about all guest speakers and performers visit: Night of Ideas 2025 — Institute of the Arts and Sciences

Questions That Matter: Disability in Medicine and Memoir
2025-04-06 18:00 - 19:30 | Kuumbwa Jazz Center
What does it mean to talk and write about the experiences of our bodies? How do the stories told about us mediate the narratives we construct? What are the stakes for disabled writers sharing their first-person perspectives with the world? In this dialogue with two scholars and memoirists of disability, we will explore how intellectual and aesthetic engagement with non-normative embodied life speaks to questions that matter — now more than ever.
Featuring: Pranav Anand (UC Santa Cruz), Jan Grue (University of Oslo), Megan Moodie (UC Santa Cruz).
Doors open 5:30pm – Event begins 6:00pm
Tickets: $15

Free student tickets are available. Please email thi@ucsc.edu to reserve a student spot.
A ucsc.edu email and student ID number will be required.
Jan Grue is the author of a wide-ranging body of work in fiction, nonfiction, children’s books, and academic literature, and a professor at the University of Oslo. I Live a Life Like Yours was published in 2018 in Norway, where it won the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature and was nominated to the Nordic Council Literature Prize, the first Norwegian nonfiction book to be so honored in fifty years.

Pranav Anand is Professor of Linguistics and Faculty Director of The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz. His research investigates how context mediates the interpretation of language, and has explored the interpretation of subjectivity, persuasive tactics, bias, evidence, belief, time, and narrative structure.

Megan Moodie is a cultural anthropologist, writer, performer, and disability studies scholar whose work spans multiple genres. As a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, she specializes in teaching experimental research methods that bring together social sciences and the arts. Her work on disability, motherhood, and artistic practice has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Catamaran, Hip Mama, MUTHA Magazine, and Sapiens. In 2019, her essay “Birthright,” which appeared in the Chicago Quarterly Review (Volume 26), was named a Notable Essay of the Year by Best American Essays.
Questions That Matter is a public humanities series developed by The Humanities Institute and the community of Santa Cruz. It brings together, in conversation, two or more UC Santa Cruz scholars with community residents and students to explore questions that matter to all of us.

Cat Bohannon - Eve
2025-04-07 19:00 - 20:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz presents author Cat Bohannon who will be in-conversation with Vicky Oelze about Bohannon’s book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution—a myth-busting, eye-opening landmark account of how humans evolved, offering a paradigm shift in our thinking about what the female body is, how it came to be, and how this evolution still shapes all our lives today. Now in paperback, Eve is also available in an edition adapted for young adults.
“A smart, funny, scientific deep-dive into the power of a woman’s body, Eve surprises, educates, and emboldens.” — Bonnie Garmus, bestselling author of Lessons in Chemistry

How did the female body drive 200 million years of human evolution? • Why do women live longer than men? • Why are women more likely to get Alzheimer’s? • Why do girls score better at every academic subject than boys until puberty, when suddenly their scores plummet? • Is sexism useful for evolution? • And why, seriously why, do women have to sweat through our sheets every night when we hit menopause?
These questions are producing some truly exciting science – and in Eve, with boundless curiosity and sharp wit, Cat Bohannon covers the past 200 million years to explain the specific science behind the development of the female sex: “We need a kind of user’s manual for the female mammal.
Cat Bohannon is a researcher and author with a Ph.D. from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her essays and poems have appeared in Scientific American, Mind, Science Magazine, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Georgia Review, The Story Collider, and Poets Against the War. She lives with her family in Seattle.
Vicky Oelze is an associate professor in anthropology at UC Santa Cruz, where she teaches subjects including human evolution, archeological science and primatology. Dr. Oelze joined UCSC after completing her PhD in Archeological Science at Leiden University in the Netherlands and almost a decade of research at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. Her archeological work spans five continents and ranges from the first farmers in prehistoric Europe to the history of the transatlantic slave trade. Her primatological research focuses on the dietary ecology of African great apes and how maternal investment in terms of breastfeeding varies between species and populations.
More information at: Cat Bohannon, Eve | Bookshop Santa Cruz
Co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

How Fairy Tales Became White: A Conversation with Professors Kimberly Lau and Micah Perks
2025-04-08 18:30 - 19:30 | Santa Cruz Public Library – Downtown Branch, 224 Church Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Please join Professors Micah Perks and Kimberly Lau for a conversation about fairy tales, fantasy, and the ways that historically and culturally specific ideas about race contribute to the making and maintenance of their white worlds.
This is an after-hours event at Downtown Library. Refreshments will be served.
Kimberly Lau is Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she teaches courses on fairy tales, monster studies, popular culture, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century women’s fiction, all within the context feminist theory, critical race studies, and gender and sexuality studies. She is the author of Specters of the Marvelous: Race and the Development of the European Fairy Tale (2024)
Micah Perks is the author of a short story collection, a memoir and two novels. Her novel, What Becomes Us, won an Independent Publisher’s Gold Medal and was named one of the Top Ten Books about the Apocalypse by The Guardian.
For more information, visit this link.

Gary Young: A Retrospective - Exhibition Opening
2025-04-09 12:00 - 14:00 | McHenry Library (3rd Floor), Special Collections
Join us on April 9th from 12-2 p.m. for the opening of Gary Young: A Retrospective Books, Broadsides, Prints & Ephemera at UCSC Special Collections and Archives. Gary will treat us to an artist talk and a tour of the exhibition. Light refreshments will be provided.
Gary Young is a poet and artist whose honors include grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Vogelstein Foundation, the California Arts Council, and two fellowship grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has received a Pushcart Prize, and his latest book of poems, That’s What I Thought, won the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award from Persea Books. His book The Dream of a Moral Life, won the James D. Phelan Award. Since 1975 he has designed, illustrated, and printed limited edition books and broadsides at his Greenhouse Review Press. His print work is represented in numerous collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, The Getty Center for the Arts, and special collection libraries throughout the country. He was Santa Cruz County’s first Poet Laureate, and he is Santa Cruz County’s 2012 Artist of the Year. He teaches Creative Writing and directs the Cowell Press at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Evyn Le Espiritu Gandhi – Southern Constellations: South Korea, South Vietnam, and the US South
2025-04-09 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This talk proposes southern constellations as a method and political concept. To constellate is to bring together seemingly disparate spaces or objects into the same conceptual orbit, probing the new meanings and structures that emerge in the resultant constellation. To illustrate, this talk constellates three spaces often considered outside the purview of Global South studies: South Korea, South Vietnam, and the US South. Both South Korea and South Vietnam aligned with the US during the Cold War and therefore seemingly diverged from a Global South politics defined by socialist revolution and the Third World Liberation movement. To constellate South Korea and South Vietnam with the US South, a region in the Global North, is to then ask: how and why do some South Vietnamese and South Korean refugees and migrants to the US gravitate towards the iconography and vernacular of the US South to make legible their own “southern politics” à la Gramsci?
Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi is an associate professor of Asian American Studies at UCLA (Tovaangar). She currently serves as an External Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. She is the author of Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine (University of California Press, 2022) and co-editor with Vinh Nguyen of The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives (Routledge, 2023). Dr. Gandhi is the lead curator of a public history exhibit, “Remembering Saigon: Journeys through and from Guam,” which is on view at UC Irvine’s Orange County and Southeast Asian Archive Center. She is currently working on a second book project which revisits Gramsci’s “southern question” by constellating the southern spaces of South Korea, South Vietnam, and the US South.

Spring 2025 COLLOQUIUM SERIES
THE CENTER FOR CULTURAL STUDIES hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work-in-progress by faculty & visitors. We are pleased to announce our Spring 2025 Series. Sessions begin promptly at 12:15 PM and end at 1:30 PM (PST) in Humanities Building 1, Room 210.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

The Hayden V. White Distinguished Annual Lecture – Fred Moten: Theory and Practice of Contradiction
2025-04-09 18:00 - 19:30 | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Humanities Division and The Humanities Institute invite you to join us for the Hayden V. White Distinguished Annual Lecture, featuring Fred Moten. Doors open at 5:30 p.m. and the lecture will begin at 6:00 p.m.
This talk will consider some theoretical and historical issues that come more fully to light when we meditate on a phrase and variation that Cedric Robinson sometimes used: We must deepen or, alternatively, we must heighten the contradiction. What is contradiction, what are the implications of refusing its resolution, and how do we propel its movement from (speech) act to practice?

The lecture will also be live-streamed via Zoom. Register here to attend virtually.
Fred Moten studies the social practice of poetry/criticism. He lives in New York and teaches at New York University. His most recent work, in collaboration with Brandon López, is Revision (TAO Forms Records, 2024).

The Hayden V. White Distinguished Annual Lecture Series is made possible by the support of the Thomas H. and Josephine Baird Memorial Fund, an endowment that supports yearly lectures relevant to historical and cultural theory, and to ensure that Hayden White’s legacy and intellectual spirit is honored and sustained.

Living Writers with Julie Ezelle-Patton
2025-04-10 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Living Writers Series – Spring 2025
Insight, Writings: Third World and Other Imaginaries

Poet, visual artist, Julie Ezelle-Patton’s most recent title is The Flower Poem (Tender Buttons, 2024). J Walking thru the Alphabet, an edited selection of Patton’s concrete, visual, and textual poetics from the 1970s to the near present, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books, Fall, 2025. The recently released Chicago Review (Vol. 67), ARKiTEXT, focuses on Let It Bee, her “poetic conceit” of transforming a 1913 Rustbelt brownstone into a living archive of work created by Depression-era artists Russell Atkins, Clifton Clay, Virgie Patton, Theresa Ramey and others, whom Patton has advocated for and collected since the mid-aughts, is a unique collaboration featuring housing, assemblages and installations of locally resourced detritus, For the Birds, an edible forest for wildlife, a coal room theater, writing and meditation spaces, herb gardens and a Cat Cafe. Patton’s “in-the-moment” sound and performance work bridging musical and literary collaborations with artists as diverse as instrumentalists Nasheet Waits, Ken Filiano, Melanie Dyer, Janice Lowe, Jay Rodriguez, and others, has captivated audiences at the Stone, Torn Page, Jazz Standard, Arts for Arts, Festival Internacional de Poesía in Medellín, Colombia, and at a host of international venues. A recipient of an Acker Award, Denniston Hill Residency, a Doan Brook Watershed Hero Award, and a Foundation for Contemporary Art Poetry Award, Patton currently divides her time between New York City & the rest of the US. Her noted Womb Room Tomb Installation was featured in the 2018 Front International Triennial to great acclaim.
About the Living Writers Series
The Living Writers Series (LWS) is a live reading series organized especially for the Creative Writing Program community at UCSC. There is a new series each quarter, and each series features writers with unique voices. The LWS is open to all creative writing students and the public.

Sponsored by the Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, the Laurie Sain Endowment, the Humanities Institute, The Literature Department, Creative Writing Program, and the Center for Racial Justice.

Queer Aɸ (Queer Analytic Philosophy) Conference
2025-04-12 - 2025-04-13 | UCSC
The UC Santa Cruz Philosophy Department is delighted to announce the Queer Aɸ (Queer Analytic Philosophy) Conference which will take place at UC Santa Cruz on April 12-13, 2025.

The conference will foreground philosophical work in the analytic tradition (broadly conceived) that is informed by queer experience, community, and theorizing. Keynote speaker will be the renowned trans philosopher Talia Mae Bettcher (Cal State LA).
Talks will cover topics such as gender euphoria, trans sex talk, BDSM and social class, informed consent, and the social construction of butchness. In addition to talks, the conference will include a workshop on LGBTQIA+ activism and philosophy, a party (of course), and other glam surprises.
View the Full Conference Schedule here.
For more information, visit this link.

Frances Malino - Rediscovering Mazaltob: A Century-Old Feminist Sephardi Novel
2025-04-15 09:50 | Virtual Event
Prof. Frances Malino (Emerita, Wellesley College) will discuss Blanche Bendahan’s Mazaltob: A Novel, Edited by Yaëlle Azagury & Frances Malino (Brandeis University Press, 2024).
Raised in the juderia or Jewish quarter of Tetouan, Morocco at the turn of the 20th century, sixteen-year-old Mazaltob finds herself betrothed to José a man from her own community who has returned from Argentina to seek a wife. In this award-winning poetic novel, Algerian-born Blanche Bendahan evokes the two compelling forces tearing Mazaltob apart in her body and soul: her loyalty to the juderia and her powerful desire to follow her own voice and find true love.
To join this event, please email Alma Heckman (aheckman@ucsc.edu) for the Zoom link.

The Deep Read: San Diego Alumni Salon
2025-04-15 18:30 - 20:30 | Stone Brewing Liberty Station, 2816 Historic Decatur Rd UNIT 116, San Diego, CA, 92106, United States
The Deep Read is coming back to San Diego!
The Humanities Institute invites San Diego alumni and Deep Readers to a special event at Stone Brewing in Liberty Station to discuss this year’s Deep Read book, the 2024 National Book Award-winning novel James by Percival Everett. The event is designed to invite curious minds to think deeply about literature, art, and the most pressing issues of our day. Even if you haven’t read the book, we encourage you to come and enjoy the discussion and connect with fellow San Diego alumni and Deep Readers. Refreshments provided by Crown College alumnus and co-founder of Stone Brewing, Steve Wagner.

Event Participants: Jasmine Alinder (Humanities Dean), Irena Polić (Deep Read Co/Founder, THI Managing Director), Vilashini Cooppan (Deep Read Faculty Co-Lead, Professor of Literature), Laura Martin (Deep Read Faculty Co-Lead, THI Research Program Manager, Lecturer)

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

Elspeth Iralu – Indigenous Epistemologies for the Time Being
2025-04-16 12:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Center for Cultural Studies presents Elspeth Iralu speaking on “Indigenous Epistemologies for the Time Being.”
In this talk, Professor Iralu examines Naga modes of storytelling as anticolonial epistemologies that enact Naga sovereignty in the here and now. Reflecting on the capacity of storytelling to facilitate movement between past, present, and future, she will highlight moments of visual and aural attention that shape the Indigenous present.
To register and for more information visit: CSAS | Indigenous Epistemologies for the Time Being
Elspeth Iralu (Angami Naga) is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Planning at the University of New Mexico, where her research and teaching focus on Indigenous methodologies, Indigenous space, place, and mapping, and violence and visual culture. Her scholarly writing has appeared in numerous scholarly journals, including Antipode: A Journal of Radical Geography, Political Geography, and American Quarterly.
Co-sponsored by The Center for South Asian Studies. This event is a part of the 2024 – 25 Ecologies of Care Lecture Series and the Spring 2025 Colloquium Series.

Asaf Elia-Shalev - Israel’s Black Panthers: How a Left-Wing Uprising Helped Pave the Way to Israel's Right-Wing “Revolution”
2025-04-17 13:30 | Virtual Event
In Zionism’s early decades, Mizrahim, or Jews from Arab and Muslim-majority countries, were largely an afterthought for the movement. Soon after Israel’s founding, however, they became the majority of the new country’s Jewish population—both essential and marginalized by an elite intent on preserving Israel’s European identity. This virtual lecture explores how the Mizrahim, led by the Black Panthers, challenged the secondary role imposed on them and reshaped the nation, leading to contradictory and, in some ways, unintended outcomes.
To join this event, please email Alma Heckman (aheckman@ucsc.edu) for the Zoom link.
Asaf Elia-Shalev is an Israeli-American investigative journalist based in Los Angeles. He is a senior reporter with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA News), where he covers philanthropy, Jewish institutions, antisemitism, Christian nationalism, and other topics for a global audience. His articles for JTA are syndicated by dozens of outlets in multiple languages worldwide. His byline has appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, Haaretz, The Forward, and many other publications. He led the archival and historical research for the 2022 re-release of The Israeli Black Panthers Haggadah, with Jewish Currents Press. In 2024, he published his first book, Israel Black Panthers: The Radicals Who Punctured a Nation’s Founding Myth, with UC Press. He holds an undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University.

Sir Isaac Julien - Inspire: Leading Ideas from UC Santa Cruz
2025-04-17 18:30 - 22:00 | de Young Museum, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Dr, San Francisco, 94118, United States
When was the last time you felt inspired? Learned something new? Pushed boundaries? Let’s do that—again.
Experience an exclusive UC Santa Cruz evening with complimentary wine and hors d’oeuvres as we celebrate with world renowned artist, and UCSC faculty member, Sir Isaac Julien whose retrospective exhibit Isaac Julien: I Dream a World is opening at the de Young Museum.
Reconnect with UC Santa Cruz alumni, parents, and friends at this special event in San Francisco. Enjoy the chance to network, engage with your vibrant UCSC community, and participate in a thought-provoking discussion led by our brilliant faculty.

Sir Isaac Julien, Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities
Julien, a filmmaker and installation artist, blends film, dance, photography, music, theatre, and sculpture into powerful multi-screen narratives. A Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at UC Santa Cruz, he co-leads the Moving Image Lab and teaches in the History of Consciousness Department. His honors include the 2017 Royal Academy Charles Wollaston Award, the 2022 Kaiserring Goslar Award, a knighthood, and a 2024 British Academy Fellowship.
“Isaac Julien: I Dream a World” will be at the de Young Museum April 12-July 13 and will feature 10 major video installations by the British artist, a genre he has pioneered.
Jennifer González, Professor of the History of Art and Visual Culture
González writes about contemporary art with an emphasis on installation art, digital art and activist art. She is interested in understanding the strategic use of space by contemporary artists and by cultural institutions such as museums. More specifically, she has focused on the representation of the human body and its relation to discourses of race and gender.
Hosted by, Chancellor Cynthia Larive
As the 11th chancellor of the University of California at Santa Cruz, Cynthia Larive leads an institution known worldwide for its interdisciplinary approach to high impact research, for seeking solutions to the world’s greatest challenges and for its commitment to social and environmental justice. UC Santa Cruz joined the Association of American Universities in 2019 and the Association of Pacific Rim Universities in 2020, remarkable achievements that underscore the impact and quality of the university’s research and teaching across the five academic divisions of Arts, Baskin Engineering, Humanities, Physical and Biological Science, and Social Science. Under her leadership, in 2022 UC Santa Cruz was ranked No. 1 in the nation among top research universities for racial and gender diversity in leadership.
Learn more about the INSPIRE series events here. The INSPIRE series has something for all UCSC alumni, parents, and friends.

Giuseppe Longo - From the Alphabet to AI: Discretizing the World
2025-04-21 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The History of Consciousness department, in collaboration with the Humanities in the Age of AI Cluster, is pleased to present “From the Alphabet to AI: Discretizing the World” delivered by Giuseppe Longo. The talk will take place April 21st at 1pm in Humanities 1 Room 210, with a virtual attendance option available. To attend virtually, join here.
The invention of the alphabet marked a fundamental shift in our epistemic relation to the world. In particular, the Greek alphabet played a crucial role in shaping our cultures, leading up to today’s “term re-writing machines” that are transforming our lives. The vision of a world that can be fully described in elementary and simple components lies at the foundation of two techno-sciences of great interest and power. We informally compare the perspectives developed in cognitive and natural sciences through the lens of differing mathematical tools, e.g. continuous vs discrete mathematics. Both historical and contemporary scientific alternatives will be briefly discussed.
Giuseppe Longo is a Research Director CNRS (Emeritus), Cavaillès interdisciplinary center of Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris (ENS), formely in the Dept. of Mathematics and Computer Science, at ENS (1990-2012). He has been Professor of Mathematics for Informatics, University of Pisa (1981-1990) and adjunct professor, School of Medicine, Tufts U., Boston (2013-19). He spent three years in the USA (Berkeley, M.I.T., Carnegie Mellon) as researcher and visiting professor, and frequent visitor in Oxford (GB) and Utrecht (NL). Founder and editor-in-chief (1990-2015) of Mathematical Structures in Computer Science, Camdridge U.P.., he is (co-)author of more than 100 papers and six books. In the last 20 years, he extended his research interests and work to the epistemology of mathematics and theoretical biology.

Deep Read Salon: The Craft of James
2025-04-22 18:00 - 19:30 | Virtual Event
Join us for a virtual Deep Read salon on Percival Everett’s James featuring UC Santa Cruz Professors of Literature and Creative Writing, Micah Perks and Karen Tei Yamashita. Professors Perks and Yamashita will discuss the writing craft and techniques of the novel, offering insights on the book from their perspective as novelists and memoirists. Their presentations will be followed by an audience Q&A period, which will be moderated by Professor of Literature and Deep Read Faculty Co-Lead, Vilashini Cooppan.

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

TechnoScience Improv
2025-04-23 12:15 - 14:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This roundtable improv (12.15-2.00pm) brings together ten UCSC scholars working on social, historical, and cultural studies of science, technology and medicine. The event will be structured around eight open, improvised conversations, each beginning with a question from a different panelist exploring emerging practices, speculative transformations, and critical imaginings of technoscience, health and ecology.
Participants include:
Karen Barad, Distinguished Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness.
James Doucet-Battle, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Co-Director of the Science & Justice Research Center.
Kat Gutierrez, Assistant Professor in the History Department.
Dimitris Papadopoulos, Professor of History of Consciousness in the Department of History of Consciousness.
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Professor of History of Consciousness in the Department of History of Consciousness.
Jenny Reardon, Professor of Sociology and the Founding Director of the Science & Justice Research Center.
Warren Sack, Professor of the Software Arts in the Film + Digital Media Department.
Kriti Sharma, Assistant Professor of Critical Race Science and Technology Studies in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies.
Matt Sparke, Professor of Politics in the Politics Department and Co-Director of Global and Community Health.
Zac Zimmer, Associate Professor of Literature in the Literature Department.

Co-sponsored by History of Consciousness: earth ecologies x technoscience conversations, Center for Cultural Studies, Global and Community Health, and the Science & Justice Research Center.

Debbie Millman - Love Letter to a Garden
2025-04-23 19:00 - 20:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz presents Debbie Millman, award-winning artist, designer, and the host of the podcast Design Matters, will discuss her beautiful new book Love Letter to a Garden, a visual story of falling in love with gardening—and the philosophies that work conjures.

Debbie Millman always thought of herself as a bad gardener. Nevertheless, she kept trying. Over the years she came to realize that no one is a bad gardener—a garden is a journey that develops over time, through space, and evolves along with our hearts. In Love Letter to a Garden, Debbie Millman shares her journey to make and grow a garden—and the plants she has collected along the way—a process that started with handed-down houseplants from beloved friends and a lone peony.
Debbie Millman has been named “one of the most creative people in business” by Fast Company, and “one of the most influential designers working today” by GDUSA. Millman is an illustrator, author, educator, and host of the podcast Design Matters. Broadcasting for 19 years, Design Matters is one of the first and longest running podcasts in the world. The show won a Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in 2011, and Apple has named it one of their “All Time Favorites” three times. In 2023 the show won two Webby’s, three Communicator Awards, a Signal Award, three awards from The Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts, and earned an Ambie nomination.
More information at: Debbie Millman, Love Letter to a Garden | Bookshop Santa Cruz
Co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

Connections to land with Mercedes Dorame, joined by Aspen Mays, Unseen California
2025-04-24 15:00 - 16:30 | Digital Arts Research Center #108
Mercedes Dorame uses her artistic process to examine and rebuild her relationship with the land. This talk will explore personal, social, and institutional connections to home, site, and land. These concepts intersect within her work as an Indigenous artist as she addresses both the taught and erased histories the land holds, as well as its broader identity in relation to ideas of landscape photography. Centering on Indigenous relationships, reciprocity, and kinship with the land, her work interrogates tangible, centered, and embodied experiences within lens-based practice.
Dorame will speak about her work and multi-year engagement with Unseen California. She will then be joined by Karolina Karlic, Director and Founder of Unseen California and artist Aspen Mays, part of the project’s first cohort for a round table discussion about the project and their publication, Language Has No Weather: Field Notes from Unseen California. Copies will be available for sale.
Sponsored by: Art Department Environmental Art + Social Practice MFA Program, American Indian Resource Center, Unseen California, Arts Research Institute, The Humanities Institute.

Amanda Batarseh - Rooted Movements: The Radical Poetics of Palestinian Space
2025-04-24 16:00 - 18:00 | Virtual Event
The Center for Racial Justice (CRJ) is proud to present Rooted Movements: The Radical Poetics of Palestinian Space with Amanda Batarseh, Assistant Professor of Literature at UC San Diego.
Analyses of Palestinian poetics often expose the violent structure of ongoing-Nakba — the Zionist settler-colonial uprooting and removal of Palestinians (both physically from the land and physiologically from life) since 1948. Thinking beyond colonial epistemology, however, is not merely a task of refuting settler-colonial narratives but of dismantling the very ways of knowing that produce them. This talk re-centers a Palestinian analytic through the lens of “radicality,” which encompasses both Palestinian rootedness and revolutionary movement. This radicality both predates and regenerates in contravention of settler colonialism’s violent uprootings/removals, unsettling colonial-national constructs of spatial belonging, and cohering the decolonization of literary analysis to then decolonization of our physical geographies. Palestinian writers navigate the dynamic tensions between rootedness and movement to forge liberatory pathways, opening up alternative horizons of political and creative possibility.

Amanda Batarseh (بطارسة / bah–taar–say) is Assistant Professor of Literature at UC San Diego. Her teaching and research focuses on Palestinian literature, Arabic literature, Arab American and Arab diaspora literature, Indigenous studies, Mediterranean studies and comparative literature. Her research has been supported by the UC Humanities Research Institute, Hellman Fellowship, Faculty Career Development Program and the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program.
Co-sponsored by Feminist Studies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES), Students for Justice in Palestine, Faculty for Justice in Palestine, Center for Cultural Studies, Center for South Asian Studies (CSAS), Center for the Middle East and North Africa (CMENA), Anthropology Department, Sociology Department, Institute for Social Transformation, and People’s University.
Part of the year-long speaker series, Possibilities of Palestinian Refusal: Against Disciplining Knowledge and Movement. For more information, visit the CRJ website: https://crjucsc.com/.

Dr. Siva Vaidhyanathan - The High Cost of Outsourcing Thought: On the Ideology of Artificial Intelligence
2025-04-24 17:00 - 20:00 | Cultural Center at Merrill, Merrill Cultural Center, UC Santa Cruz, Merrill College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Each year, the TLC hosts a convocation to bring together educators across the campus and from the local community to explore significant topics in teaching and learning in higher education. Each year’s keynote address is free and open to the public.
This year’s Convocation speaker will be Dr. Siva Vaidhyanathan, who will present his talk, The High Cost of Outsourcing Thought: On the Ideology of Artificial Intelligence.
His talk will examine the ideas that have motivated the rush to deploy both generative artificial intelligence and predictive artificial intelligence into our computer systems and our lives. It will consider the effects on our collective intelligence and our habits of creativity and collaboration. What problem do we hope to solve with this suite of technologies? What do we gain? What do we lose? And how should those questions shape how educators and students interface with these technologies?
Afterwards, Dr. Vaidhyanathan will be joined in conversation by THI Faculty Director and Linguistics Professor Pranav Anand.

Dr. Siva Vaidhyanathan is the Robertson Professor of Media Studies and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2018), Intellectual Property: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2017), and The Googlization of Everything — and Why We Should Worry (University of California Press, 2011). After five years as a professional journalist, he earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He is a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities and a Faculty Associate of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. He was born and raised in Buffalo, New York, and resides in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Pranav Anand is Professor of Linguistics and Faculty Director of The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz. His research investigates how context mediates the interpretation of language, and has explored the interpretation of subjectivity, persuasive tactics, bias, evidence, belief, time, and narrative structure.

To view past convocations visit: TLC | About Convocation

Linguistics Colloquia: Matt Wagers - Setting Healthy (mnemonic) Boundaries
2025-04-25 13:20 | Humanities 1, Room 202
The Department of Linguistics is pleased to present Matt Wagers, speaking on Setting Healthy (mnemonic) Boundaries.
This is an in-person event. You can also join virtually via Zoom.
Nearly 20 years ago, Lewis & Vasishth (2005) applied the ACT-R modeling framework to language processing by creating an English parser fragment embedded in an associative memory. McElree (2000) and McElree, Foraker & Dyer (2003) informed this development by providing earlier arguments in favor of such a content-addressable memory. This proved to be hugely influential because it offered a general theory of dependency resolution which could be made precise by reference to any particular theory of linguistic features. Both strands of thought reoriented thinking in the field away from models of working memory that required serial search procedures and, generally, the discovery of widespread interference effects has vindicated that shift.
Much recent research has made progress in delineating what the representations are (Yadav et al. 2023, Keshev et al. 2025) and how they can be learned in an unsupervised manner (Ryu & Lewis, 2021). Relatively unexplored is how to characterize the information that can be attended to simultaneously, sometimes called the “focus of attention” (Oberauer & Hein, 2012). This is an important commitment of models like ACT-R and provides an attractive point of articulation to theories of locality or linguistic domains. In this talk, I will survey what we know (and don’t know) about the focus of attention in language processing (Wagers & McElree, 2013, 2022) and relate it to recent thinking about the dynamics of context encoding (Healey, Long & Kahana, 2019; Balachandran, Wagers & Rich, 2025).
Over the course of each year, the Linguistics department hosts colloquia by distinguished faculty from around the world. For more information: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/colloquia/index.html

Saturday Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream
2025-04-26 10:00 | Aptos Library, 7695 Soquel Dr, Aptos, 95003, United States
Saturday Shakespeare in Santa Cruz Presents A Midsummer Night’s Dream, featuring a series of readings and conversations held Saturday mornings from April 26 to May 24, 2025. The 1st hour will be spent in conversation with a guest speaker, and during the 2nd hour volunteers will read aloud part of the play. During the final session, on May 24th, a film will be presented. Meetings will take place in the Aptos Library Community Room (in person) and over Zoom (virtual).
For more information, Zoom link, or to be a reader, contact: saturdayshakespeare@gmail.com
The guest speaker on April 26 is Michael Warren, Emeritus Professor of Literature, UC Santa Cruz, former dramaturg for Santa Cruz Shakespeare. Readings: Act 1, Scenes 1 & 2
All Scheduled Meetings

April 26: Michael Warren
May 3: Julia Lupton
May 10: Charles Pasternak
May 17: Sean Keilen
May 24 (Film Screening)

Vive Oaxaca Guelaguetza
2025-04-27 10:00 - 16:00 | Branciforte Small Schools Campus, 840 N Branciforte Ave, Santa Cruz, CA, 95062, United States
The Vive Oaxaca Guelaguetza is an authentic cultural festival with food, dance, music, and crafts presented each spring by Senderos. This local festival is like the traditional fiestas celebrated each summer in Oaxaca, Mexico. Guelaguetza is a Zapotec word that means “a commitment of sharing and cooperation.” Guelaguetza is a celebration that honors the gods for sufficient rainfall and a bountiful harvest.
The festival is located on a field, feel free to bring blankets and low chairs. Admission is $10.00 per person; children under 5 admitted free.
More information at: Vive Oaxaca Guelaguetza | Senderos

Carolyn Fornoff – Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change
2025-04-28 12:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
In this talk, Carolyn Fornoff will discuss her recent book, Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change (Vanderbilt Press, 2024). Her book assesses contemporary trends in the representation of environmental crisis in order to suggest that there has been a shift away from evidentiary modes focused on proving the existence of environmental harms, to more “subjunctive” modes that imagine the world as it could be or should be.
Carolyn Fornoff is assistant professor of Latin American studies at Cornell University. Her work examines how Mexican and Central American cultural production responds to environmental crisis. Her first monograph, Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change, was published in 2024 with Vanderbilt University Press. She is also the co-editor of two volumes in the environmental humanities: Timescales: Thinking Across Ecological Temporalities (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema (SUNY Press, 2021). Fornoff currently cochairs the Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession for the Modern Language Association.
This event is presented by the THI More-Than-Human(ities) Laboratory Research Cluster.

The Deep Read: Faculty Salon on James
2025-04-29 18:00 - 19:30 | Virtual and In Person
Join us for a salon-style event at the Hay Barn on campus where our participating Deep Read faculty, Professors Susan Gillman (Literature), akua naru (Music), and Greg O’Malley (History), will give brief presentations and discuss James with the Deep Read community in a Q&A moderated by Deep Read Faculty Co-Lead, Laura Martin. Participants can also attend virtually.

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

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

Tricia Rose - Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives - And How We Break Free
2025-04-30 11:00 - 12:30 | Humanities 1, Room 202
UCSC Feminist Studies and the UCSC Music Department proudly present Tricia Rose—an internationally respected speaker, award-winning writer, and leading scholar of African American culture, racial inequality, and gender—for a conversation about her book Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives – And How We Break Free.
On May 2nd, UCSC Feminist Studies and the UCSC Music Department will also host Lifting As We Rhyme: 50 Years of Black Feminist Sonic World Making – a roundtable discussion with Tricia Rose, UCSC Humanities Professor Gina Dent, and UCSC Music Professor and hip hop artist akua naru. More information available here.

Tricia Rose is the Director of the Systemic Racism Project at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study, and Chancellor’s Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University. Rose is the author of Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994), Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk About Sexuality and Intimacy (2003) and The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop and Why It Matters (2008). Her most recent book, Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives-And How We Break Free (2024), is part of a larger public engagement and learning project featuring the How Systemic Racism Works interactive website (release in 2025).

M. Ty – It Is Time to Say to the Water, “Disobey”: Reflections with the Art of Jumana Emil Abboud
2025-04-30 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Perhaps water is a mouth that runs toward unwritten histories. This possibility comes closer to the senses in the work of Jumana Emil Abboud, an artist whose practice is grounded in Palestinian landscapes—and the refusal to cede them to their brutal equation with narratives of damage that colonial occupation programmatically inflicts. For some time, Abboud has attended thoughtfully to the waterscapes surrounding Galilee and Jerusalem—reanimating the folktales that they harbor, bringing them into the color of a fresh image, and taking the time to search for what has been said to have disappeared irrevocably. Keeping company with Abboud’s art, this talk reflects on what water can hold and how the connection to its reservoirs of memory might be sustained—in defiance of state violence and settler agribusiness, which together sever Palestinians from the life-giving waterways with which their ancestral knowledge is interspersed. Come see how ecological sensitivity and counter-colonial remembrance course together in Abboud’s art; and how she practices literacy in invisibility, all while refreshing the sense—without which history devolves into propaganda—that the erasure of evidence does not mean that nothing is there.
M. Ty is an ember of a diaspora. They are an Assistant Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Spring 2025 COLLOQUIUM SERIES
THE CENTER FOR CULTURAL STUDIES hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work-in-progress by faculty & visitors. We are pleased to announce our Spring 2025 Series. Sessions begin promptly at 12:15 PM and end at 1:30 PM (PST) in Humanities Building 1, Room 210. Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

The Deep Read: East Bay Alumni Salon
2025-04-30 19:00 - 20:30 | Orinda, Private Home
The Deep Read is coming back to the East Bay!
The Humanities Institute invites East Bay alumni and Deep Readers to a special event at the home of UC Santa Cruz alumna and Foundation Trustee SB Master (Cowell ’75) to discuss this year’s Deep Read book, the 2024 National Book Award-winning novel James by Percival Everett. The event is designed to invite curious minds to think deeply about literature, art, and the most pressing issues of our day. Even if you haven’t read the book, we encourage you to come and enjoy the discussion and connect with fellow East Bay alumni and Deep Readers. Refreshments provided by our host, SB Master. Please register by April 23, as space is limited.

Event Participants: Jasmine Alinder (Humanities Dean), Irena Polić (Deep Read Co/Founder, THI Managing Director), Vilashini Cooppan (Deep Read Faculty Co-Lead, Professor of Literature), Laura Martin (Deep Read Faculty Co-Lead, THI Research Program Manager, Lecturer)

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

Lifting As We Rhyme: 50 Years of Black Feminist Sonic World Making with Tricia Rose, Gina Dent, and akua naru
2025-05-02 15:00 | Cultural Center at Merrill, Merrill Cultural Center, UC Santa Cruz, Merrill College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
UCSC Feminist Studies and the UCSC Music Department proudly present Lifting As We Rhyme: 50 Years of Black Feminist Sonic World Making—a roundtable discussion featuring Tricia Rose, internationally respected speaker, award-winning writer, and leading scholar of African American culture, racial inequality, and gender. Rose will be joined by Humanities professor Gina Dent and Music professor and hip hop artist akua naru. Join these dynamic artists/scholars for a spirited discussion on how black feminist artists have had a transformative impact on black cultural movements in hip hop.
On April 30th, UCSC Feminist Studies and the UCSC Music Department will also host a book talk with Tricia Rose, who will discuss her most recent book, Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives – And How We Break Free. More information available here.

Tricia Rose is the Director of the Systemic Racism Project at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study, and Chancellor’s Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University. Rose is the author of Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994), Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk About Sexuality and Intimacy (2003) and The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop and Why It Matters (2008). Her most recent book, Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives-And How We Break Free (2024), is part of a larger public engagement and learning project featuring the How Systemic Racism Works interactive website (release in 2025).
Gina Dent is Professor of Humanities and Faculty Research Director at the Institute of the Arts & Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Currently, she serves as Principal Investigator and Co-Director for Visualizing Abolition.
akua naru is a hip hop artist, poet, producer, performer, and Assistant Professor of Hip Hop, at University of California, Santa Cruz.

Saturday Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream
2025-05-03 10:00 | Aptos Library, 7695 Soquel Dr, Aptos, 95003, United States
Saturday Shakespeare in Santa Cruz Presents A Midsummer Night’s Dream, featuring a series of readings and conversations held Saturday mornings from April 26 to May 24, 2025. The 1st hour will be spent in conversation with a guest speaker, and during the 2nd hour volunteers will read aloud part of the play. During the final session, on May 24th, a film will be presented. Meetings will take place in the Aptos Library Community Room (in person) and over Zoom (virtual).
For more information, Zoom link, or to be a reader, contact: saturdayshakespeare@gmail.com
The guest speaker on May 3 is Julia Lupton, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UC Irvine, dramaturg for UCI’s New Swan Summer Festival. Readings: Act 2, Scenes 1 & 2; Act 3, Scene 1
All Scheduled Meetings

April 26: Michael Warren
May 3: Julia Lupton
May 10: Charles Pasternak
May 17: Sean Keilen
May 24 (Film Screening)

The Deep Read: A Conversation with Percival Everett
2025-05-04 16:00 - 17:30 | Quarry Amphitheater
Join us for a free, public conversation with author, Percival Everett, at UC Santa Cruz’s Quarry Amphitheater on May 4 at 4pm. He’ll discuss his National Book Award-winning novel James with Deep Read Faculty Co-Lead, Professor of Literature Vilashini Cooppan. We’ll consider how Everett depicts the possibility of humanity in this novel about the brutality of slavery, the performance of race, and the value of language and literacy. Doors open at 3pm, and we’ll be entertained before the author event from 3-4pm by The Cedar Street Jazz Duo featuring cellist Dr. Renata Bratt and guitarist Brian Fitzgerald.

Event Logistics: All guest parking will take place at the East Remote Parking Lot (Lot 104). Parking will be free on Sunday. We encourage sustainable transport such as carpooling, biking, or utilizing METRO transit services whenever possible. Enter campus through UCSC’s main entrance located at the intersection of Bay and High St. There will be signs directing you to the “Quarry Event.” Shuttle services will be provided. If guests are planning to walk from the lot, please make time for a 15- 20 walk to the Quarry Amphitheater gates. ADA parking will be located at the Bay Tree Bookstore Parking Lot 102. Each vehicle must display a valid, DMV-issued ADA placard or plate to be able to park in this area. For these and any further ADA accessibility accommodations please email Quarry@ucsc.edu.

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

Dmitri Nikulin - Bartleby, the Inscrutable Scrivener: On the Negative Constitution of Action
2025-05-05 13:00 | Virtual and In Person
The History of Consciousness department is pleased to announce the first speaker in their Spring 2025 Speaker Series, Dmitri Nikulin, who will be joining them next Monday May 5th to give his talk “Bartleby, the Inscrutable Scrivener: On the Negative Constitution of Action”. The talk will be held in Hum 1 Rm 420 at 1pm with a virtual attendance option.
Please register here in advance for virtual access.
In Melville’s celebrated story Bartleby the Scrivener, everything is put in the negative. The inscrutability and seeming incomprehensibility of the main character’s actions and the challenge presented by his famous “speech-act” of “I prefer not to” makes it particularly challenging to narrate the story and make sense of it. Bartleby comes in negative relief, elusive in his seeming ordinariness. For this reason, one has to use uncommon philosophical and literary means, including apophatic accounts and alliteration, in order to describe the indescribable, pointing toward unutterable strangeness and barely explainable human goodness. Bartleby’s acting is inscribed into his mode of being. He writes but does not read and almost does not speak beyond “I would prefer not to.” Not exercising self-reflection, he does not display any interiority. His apparent non-thinking is translated into an action bound by negativity, which eventually halts and evaporates. In “preferring not to,” Bartleby wills nothing. Yet, since nothing is nothing, it cannot be willed. Such a will is not a rational will that claims itself for itself as moral and establishes itself in an act of autonomous volition. It is the will that does not will itself and thus wills to stop willing. It is the will that negates and suppresses but does not destroy itself. In this way, the act of willing nothing does not annihilate the will altogether but rather suspends itself. This establishes a logic of preference that does not prefer anything and hence prefers nothing. The action defined by Bartleby’s silent and motionless being is therefore the action of non-preference.
Dmitri Nikulin is Professor of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York. His interests range from ancient and early modern philosophy to philosophy of literature and of history. He is the author of a number of books including Matter, Imagination and Geometry (Ashgate, 2002), On Dialogue (Lexington, 2006), Dialectic and Dialogue (Stanford University Press, 2010), Comedy, Seriously (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), The Concept of History (Bloomsbury, 2017), Neoplatonism in Late Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2019), Critique of Bored Reason (Columbia University Press, 2022), and Non-Being in Ancient Thought (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

Sandy Rodriguez - Mapping Conflicts across the Californias: The Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón
2025-05-06 17:30 - 18:45 | UCSC Science and Engineering Library, Room 206, 580 Red Hill Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join celebrated Los Angeles-based Chicana artist and researcher Sandy Rodriguez for a conversation about her ongoing series Codex Rodriguez-Mondragon with UCSC Professors Jennifer Gonzalez (HAVC) and Kirsten Silva Gruesz (Literature). Sandy Rodriguez’s works are strongly influenced by both the 16th-century colonial and present-day incidents along the US-Mexico border, her works map resistance to the ongoing cycles of violence on communities of color by blending historical and recent events. The artist uses painstakingly hand-processed color from native plant- and earth-based materials according to Mexican treatises on painting that forge connections to land, bridging past and present.
Sandy Rodriguez (b. 1975, National City, CA) is a Los Angeles-based artist and researcher, and first generation Chicana raised on the US-Mexico border. Her Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón is made up of a collection of maps and paintings about the intersections of history, social memory, contemporary politics, and cultural production. Rodriguez earned her BFA from California Institute of Arts.
Rodriguez’s works can be found in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Amon Carter Museum, the Denver Art Museum, the Mellon Art Collection and others. She has been honored with multiple fellowships and awards, including most recently the 2025-2026 Kully Distinguished Fellowship in American Art from The Huntington Library Art Museum & Botanical Garden, a 2024 US Latinx Art Fellowship, the 2023 Jacob Lawrence Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the 2023 Hermitage Greenfield Prize.
Sponsored by The Humanities Institute’s Knowing California Research Cluster and the Patricia and Rowland Rebele Fund for the History of Art and Visual Culture.

Banner Image: Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón, Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA, November 4,2018 – Jan 27, 2019. Image courtesy of and © Studio Sandy Rodriguez.

A Conversation with Journalist Jazmine Hughes
2025-05-06 19:00 | Namaste Lounge – College 9, Namaste Lounge, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Interested in Journalism? Come for a conversation with writer and editor Jazmine Hughes.
Jazmine Hughes is a writer and editor, and the recipient of two National Magazine Awards. Hughes was a longtime member of the editorial staff at the New York Times, where she penned profiles of cultural figures including Lil Nas X, Whoopi Goldberg, Danny DeVito, Viola Davis, and Judge Judy.

This event is presented by Kresge’s Media and Society Series and City on a Hill Press, with support from The Humanities Institute, The Alumni Association, The Council of Provosts, and the department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies.

Deirdre de la Cruz – “It’s Your Curse,” and Other Lessons in Repairing Historical Harm
2025-05-07 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The University of Michigan possesses extensive archival, photographic, archaeological and natural history collections from the Philippines, many of which were built during the American colonial period from objects, images, and ancestors taken without the consent of local source communities. This talk introduces a multi-year, collaborative effort by Michigan faculty, curators, collection managers, students, and community partners to develop and enact reparative approaches to these collections. It reflects on how the historical and contemporary specificities of the Philippines and its diaspora both contribute to and complicate on-going conversations around museums, repatriation, and historical justice.
Deirdre de la Cruz is a historian and anthropologist whose work examines global formations and global relations from the historical and cultural vantage point of the Philippines. Her first and second books trace the discursive, material and performative processes through which the Philippine emerges as a major spiritual and religious center over the long twentieth century. For the last several years, de la Cruz has also served as co-PI of ReConnect/ReCollect: Reparative Connections to Philippine Collections at the University of Michigan, a collaborative project of public scholarship that seeks to repair historical harm by creating models for more ethical and equitable Philippine collections. De la Cruz is Associate Professor of History and Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan and currently serves as Director of the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History. She is also an award-winning teacher, and with U-M undergraduates has been building The Philippines and the University of Michigan, an online exhibit of student-led original research and writing on the history of the relationship between the Philippines and the University of Michigan.
Sponsored by the Center for Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions.

Spring 2025 COLLOQUIUM SERIES
THE CENTER FOR CULTURAL STUDIES hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work-in-progress by faculty & visitors. We are pleased to announce our Spring 2025 Series. Sessions begin promptly at 12:15 PM and end at 1:30 PM (PST) in Humanities Building 1, Room 210. Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Jaco de Swart - Dark Matter, Dirty Xenon, and the Limits of Laboratory Experiments
2025-05-07 15:00 - 16:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The History of Consciousness earthecologies x technoscience conversations and the Science and Justice Research Center are pleased to invite you to the following talk entitled Dark Matter, Dirty Xenon, and the Limits of Laboratory Experiments with Jaco de Swart (MIT, Visiting Scholar at Science and Justice Research Center). This event will take place May 7th at 3pm in Humanities Building 1, Room 210.
Laboratory sciences crucially depend on experiments being clean. But what is clean? In this talk, I open up versions of clean relating to different ontological registers, and trace the material practices of cleaning as they are attuned to experimental specificities. My case is the XENONnT experiment in the Gran Sasso Mountains of Italy which is meant to detect dark matter in the form the hypothetical WIMP – the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle. This experiment is clean when it is ‘free from signals that mimic dark matter’. In practice, such cleanliness has been difficult to achieve – soaps may be radioactive, steel may spread electronegativity, and humans are altogether dangerously filthy. And because, at least thus far, dark matter remains elusive, it is impossible to tell whether the meticulously cleaned detector is adequately clean. Additional cleaning efforts will make the detector sensitive to neutrino particles: a background that cannot be cleaned away. As the experimenters dread the possibility that this means their experiment will end in limbo, other physicists are now trying to detect other hypothetical dark matter particles with other kinds of experiments, requiring other kinds of cleanliness. The XENONnT experiment itself, meanwhile, has had to ensure that it does not interfere with environmental cleanliness, as per the demands of the surrounding society.
This work is done in collaboration with Annemarie Mol (University of Amsterdam).
Jaco de Swart is an AIP Helleman Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT’s Program in STS and Department of Physics, and a Visiting Scholar at the UCSC’s Science and Justice Research Center. He received his PhD at the Institute of Physics at the University of Amsterdam, was a postdoctoral researcher at the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research and has held visiting positions at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study. His research focuses on historical and anthropological studies of open problems in cosmology, and he is currently writing a book on the history of dark matter under contract with MIT Press. De Swart is also a member of several physics collaborations to help develop social and environmentally responsible research practices. He has a passion for science communication—appearing in PBS NOVA’s Decoding the Universe—and is bassist in the band X Raiders.

Living Writers with Tsering Wangmo Dhompa
2025-05-08 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Living Writers Series – Spring 2025
Insight, Writings: Third World and Other Imaginaries
Tsering Wangmo Dhompa‘s most recent work is The Politics of Sorrow (Columbia University Press). Other works include the chapbook Revolute (Albion Books, 2021) three collections of poetry: My Rice Tastes Like the Lake, In the Absent Everyday and Rules of the House (all from Apogee Press, Berkeley). Dhompa’s first non-fiction book, A Home to Tibet was published by Penguin India. Dhompa is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Villanova University.
About the Living Writers Series
The Living Writers Series (LWS) is a live reading series organized especially for the Creative Writing Program community at UCSC. There is a new series each quarter, and each series features writers with unique voices. The LWS is open to all creative writing students and the public.

Sponsored by the Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, the Laurie Sain Endowment, the Humanities Institute, The Literature Department, Creative Writing Program, and the Center for Racial Justice.

Nauenberg History of Science Lecture with Jessica Riskin
2025-05-08 17:30 | The Seymour Marine Discovery Center, 100 McAllister Way, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Professor of Insects and Worms: Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and his Life-Made World
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) was the Professor of Insects and Worms at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Living through the storms of the French Revolution and Napoleonic period, he founded biology, coining the term to name a new science devoted to all and only living things, and authored the first theory of evolution. Lamarck’s science was foundational to modern biology, yet its radicalism – he usurped God’s monopoly on Creation and re-assigned it to mortal, living beings – brought him and his ideas plenty of trouble. During Lamarck’s lifetime, Napoleon and his scientific inner circle hated him and did what they could to undermine him. Charles Darwin then adopted central elements of Lamarck’s theory, but after Darwin’s death, his most influential followers re-interpreted his theory to eradicate all traces of Lamarckism, rendering organisms once again the passive objects of outside forces, allowing room for an omnipotent God working behind the scenes. This conception of living organisms as passive in the evolutionary process has remained dominant since the turn of the twentieth century. In contrast, in Lamarck’s theory, living beings were active, creative, self-making and world-making. Elements of this very different conception of living organisms have recently, gradually been returning to mainstream biology in fields such as niche construction and epigenetic inheritance. The lecture will present Lamarck’s radical, embattled, and perhaps re-emerging approach to living things, their evolutionary and ecological agency, and the science that studies them.
May 8, 2025
Reception 5 p.m.
Lecture 5:30 p.m.
La Feliz Room, Seymour Marine Discover Center and Virtual
Free and open to the public

Jessica Riskin is Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University where she teaches modern European history and the history of science. Her work examines the changing nature of scientific explanation, the relations of science, culture and politics, and the history of theories of life and mind. Her books include The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick (2016), which was awarded the 2021 Patrick Suppes Prize in the History of Science from the American Philosophical Society, and Science in the Age of Sensibility (2002), which received the American Historical Association’s J. Russell Major prize for best book in French history. She is a regular contributor to various publications including Aeon, the Los Angeles Review of Books and the New York Review of Books.

Nauenberg History of Science Lecture
The Nauenberg History of Science Lecture was established in honor of Michael Nauenberg, a founding faculty member in the Physics Department at UCSC who came to the campus in 1966. During his distinguished academic career, he contributed to a remarkably broad range of fields, including particle physics, condensed matter physics, astrophysics, chaos theory, fluid dynamics, and the history of physics in the 17th-18th centuries.
Amongst Professor Nauenberg’s passions, he deeply believed in the importance of interdisciplinary scholarship connecting the sciences with the humanities. Following his retirement in 1994, he pursued his long-standing interests in the history of science, writing books and articles about Joseph Banks, Robert Hooke, Christiaan Huygens, and Isaac Newton. The Nauenberg History of Science Lecture series aims to bring the best historians of science to UCSC to share the importance of this interdisciplinary work with faculty, students, and interested community members. You can support the series by contributing here.
The Nauenberg History of Science Lecture is presented by the UC Santa Cruz Emeriti Association and co-sponsored by the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department, History Department, and Science and Justice Research Center.

PhD+ Workshop - Academic Book Publishing with the University of Minnesota Press
2025-05-09 11:00 - 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Join Jason Weidemann, an Editorial Director at the University of Minnesota Press, for a “publishing bootcamp” workshop, geared toward graduate students, post docs, and early career scholars working on their first books. Together we’ll discuss information on the editorial process – how to talk to editors, revising the dissertation, and proposals.
Time will be left for sharing current works and what presses attendees might look into. Jason’s itinerary allows for additional one-on-one consultations to practice pitching works, etc. To schedule a time, contact: colleen@ucsc.edu.

Jason Weidemann is an Editorial Director at the University of Minnesota Press. Jason Weidemann seeks manuscripts that make field-defining interventions in their core disciplines, contribute to interdisciplinary conversations, and communicate to readers beyond the academy, including activists, policymakers, community members, and general readers. His broad interests in Native and indigenous studies includes literary studies, the social sciences, legal studies, and education. He also acquires works in cultural and human geography, science and technology studies, anthropology, and sociology. Special interests include environmental politics, multispecies ethnography, urban studies, global flows of labor and capital, and Asian studies. Of specific interest are manuscripts that examine the social and racial dimensions of medicine and science. Proposals for translations from Japanese are welcomed, specifically science fiction and critical theory. He is also interested in manuscripts on the social aspects of video games and digital communication. Subject areas: anthropology, Asian studies, media studies, geography, Native and Indigenous studies, sociology, science and technology
For more information: https://scijust.ucsc.edu/2025/04/15/may09-uminnpress/
Co-hosted by the UCSC Science & Justice Research Center, The Humanities Institute, and the Division of Graduate Studies.

BayPhon 2025 at UCSC
2025-05-10 09:30 - 18:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
UCSC Linguistics is hosting BayPhon, a workshop on Phonetics and Phonology, on Saturday, May 10, 2025. BayPhon brings together faculty and students from linguistics departments in the region, including Stanford, UC Berkeley, San José State, and UCSC.
BayPhon is part of a tradition known as “Phrend” (and before that, “Trend”), where linguistics departments in the broader Bay Area (San José State, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz) come together at one of our institutions to stay in touch about research and provide opportunities for students and faculty to present their work on phonetics and phonology.
Please see this website for the program and more information.

Saturday Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream
2025-05-10 10:00 | Aptos Library, 7695 Soquel Dr, Aptos, 95003, United States
Saturday Shakespeare in Santa Cruz Presents A Midsummer Night’s Dream, featuring a series of readings and conversations held Saturday mornings from April 26 to May 24, 2025. The 1st hour will be spent in conversation with a guest speaker, and during the 2nd hour volunteers will read aloud part of the play. During the final session, on May 24th, a film will be presented. Meetings will take place in the Aptos Library Community Room (in person) and over Zoom (virtual).
For more information, Zoom link, or to be a reader, contact: saturdayshakespeare@gmail.com
The guest speaker on May 10 is Charles Pasternak, actor, director, Artistic Director of Santa Cruz Shakespeare. Readings: Act 3, Scene 2; Act 4, Scene 1
All Scheduled Meetings

April 26: Michael Warren
May 3: Julia Lupton
May 10: Charles Pasternak
May 17: Sean Keilen
May 24 (Film Screening)

SOLD OUT: Isabel Allende - My Name Is Emilia del Valle
2025-05-11 16:00 - 17:30 | Rio Theater, 1205 Soquel Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95062, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz presents New York Times bestselling author Isabel Allende (A Long Petal of the Sea and The House of the Spirits) who will join us to celebrate the release of My Name Is Emilia del Valle, a spellbinding historical novel in which a young writer journeys to South America to uncover the truth about her father—and herself.
Event experience includes author talk, audience Q&A, and a hardcover copy of My Name Is Emilia del Valle.
This event is now sold out. Please visit Bookshop Santa Cruz to join the waitlist.
A riveting tale of self-discovery and love from one of the most masterful storytellers of our time, My Name Is Emilia del Valle introduces a character who will never let hold of your heart.
Born in Peru and raised in Chile, Isabel Allende is the author of a number of bestselling and critically acclaimed books, including The Wind Knows My Name, Violeta, A Long Petal of the Sea, The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, Eva Luna, and Paula. Her books have been translated into more than forty-two languages and have sold more than eighty million copies worldwide. She lives in California.
More information at: Isabel Allende, My Name Is Emilia del Valle | Bookshop Santa Cruz
Co-sponsored by the Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas and The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

Sophia Azeb - Black Anticolonialism and Radical Relation
2025-05-12 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 420, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The History of Consciousness department is pleased to announce the next speaker in their Spring 2025 Speaker Series, Sophia Azeb, who will deliver her talk entitled “Black Anticolonialism and Radical Relation” on Monday, May 12th at 1pm in Humanities Building 1, Room 420.
This talk explores the radical anticolonial subjectivities forged across what Richard Iton suggests as “diasporic breathing room,” or – in my own interpretation – the ungeographic sensibilities that Black study offers transnational and translational theories of decolonisation. Focusing on the productive tensions emergent from 20th century Black anticolonial practice – particularly the unmapping tendencies of Frantz Fanon – this talk attends to the cultural, political, and affective matrix of anticolonial possibilities and limits emergent from across the African diaspora. This emphasis on how Black anticolonial practice draws upon the unsettled spatial orientation of the diaspora, which informs Black anticolonial epistemologies, does not presume that racial identity itself is fixed, or that meanings made from identity and experience constitute an anticolonial politic in and of itself. Rather, the ever shifting, “undecidable blackness” that instructs and shapes particular anticolonial pursuits towards the horizon of decolonisation make legible a set of radical subjectivities that embolden anticolonial sociality beyond the “authenticating geography” of the nation-state.
Sophia Azeb is an assistant professor of Black studies in the Department of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies at UCSC. Her book, tentatively titled “Another Country: Translational Blackness and the Afro-Arab,” follows the circuits of transnational and translational blackness charted by African American, Afro-Caribbean, African, and Afro-Arab peoples across 20th century North and West Africa and Europe.

A Multidisciplinary Perspective on Italy and Its Culture
2025-05-12 16:30 - 19:00 | Humanities 2, Room 359
The Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics and the Italian Language Program cordially invite you to a multidisciplinary event on Italy and its culture. Well-renowned UCSC professors from a variety of disciplines ranging from literature to history, from science to engineering and computer science will offer a multidisciplinary perspective on Italy and its culture. Participants will explore the nexus between language and culture The event will be in English and open to all majors.
Featuring Filippo Gianferrari, Stefania Gori, Roberto Manduchi, Stefano Profumo, and Massimiliano Tomba.

Filippo Gianferrari is an Assistant Professor of the Literature Department
Stefania Gori is a Professor of the Physics Department
Roberto Manduchi is a Professor of the Computer Science and Engineering Department
Stefano Profumo is a Professor of the Physics Department
Massimiliano Tomba is a Professor of the History of Consciousness Department

Program:
4:30Pm – 4:45PM | Opening remarks with Gabriella Notarianni Burk, PhD
4:45Pm – 5:30Pm | Italy and Science with Prof. Stefania Gori, Prof. Stefano Profumo, and Prof. Roberto Manduchi
Break (10 minutes)
5:45Pm – 6:30Pm | Italy and Humanities with Prof. Massimiliano Tomba and Prof. Filippo Gianferrari
Refreshments (6:30Pm – 7:00Pm)

Slugs and Steins with Associate Professor Muriam Davis - What Does it Mean to "Decolonize" Knowledge?
2025-05-12 18:30 - 20:00 | Virtual Event
The country of Algeria, located in North Africa, experienced one of the most violent struggles for independence of the twentieth century. The war against France, which lasted from 1954–62 has become a paradigmatic case study of the historical process known as decolonization and inspired classic films such as the Battle of Algiers, as well as texts such as Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. This talk will explore how Algerian intellectuals sought to break away from Eurocentric models of knowledge production and nation-building in the decades following independence. Their reflections focused on language and the need to increase the reach of higher education. They also reflected on the ways in which disciplinary boundaries—between sociology and anthropology, or between philosophy and sociology—were rooted in colonization. By focusing on historical actors that sought to find new ways to organize higher learning, it will explore how the university was—and continues to be—an institution shaped by political struggles and emancipatory hopes.

Muriam Haleh Davis is an Associate Professor of History and the Director of the Center for the Middle East and North Africa at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her first book, Markets of Civilization: Islam and Racial Capitalism in Algeria, was published by Duke University Press in 2022. She also co-edited North Africa and the Making of Europe: Governance, Institutions, and Culture, which was published by Bloomsbury Press in 2018. She is co-chair of the editorial committee for MERIP (Middle East Research and Information Project) and is co-editor of the Maghreb Page for Jadaliyya. She has previously held fellowships at the European University Institute in Florence, the IMéRA in Marseille and the The Merian Center for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb (MECAM) in Tunis. Her public-facing writing and commentary has appeared in the LA Review of Books, Al Jazeera English, MERIP and Jadaliyya as well as on France 24 and NPR.
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.
Watch past Slugs and Steins events here.
Questions? Please contact University Events at specialevents@ucsc.edu.

Akum Longchari – Reimagining Humanization, Just Peace, and Healing through an Indigenous Lens
2025-05-13 13:30 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Join the Center for South Asian Studies for a presentation by Aküm Longchari, the Center’s Scholar in Residence.
From an Indigenous perspective, peace processes in the first quarter of the 21st century have been focused on State-building, where questions of justice and peace remained a matter of privilege and power rather than a right of all peoples. State-led processes tend to focus on ending physical violence in armed conflict, without addressing the violence of unjust political, social, economic, and cultural structures, which led to the conflict in the first place. This dialogue seeks to “Reimagine Humanization, Just Peace, and Healing through an Indigenous Lens,” as an emancipatory bottom-up framework, applying intercultural and interdisciplinary approaches which amplifies the values of a shared humanity.
Aküm Longchari is an educator in peacebuilding, co-founder and publisher of The Morung Express (2005), an independent English-language newspaper based in Nagaland. Aküm holds an LLB, MA in Conflict Transformation, and a PhD which focused on Self Determination as a Resource for JustPeace.
Presented by the Center for South Asian Studies. Co-Sponsored by the UC Santa Cruz Indigenous Faculty Network and The Humanities Institute.

Keith David Watenpaugh - Who Has the Human Right to Charge Genocide?
2025-05-13 15:20 - 16:55 | Porter 144, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, 95064, United States
Keith David Watenpaugh will deliver the first talk in the CMENA Student Choice Speaker Series, titled “Who Has the Human Right to Charge Genocide?: Reclaiming Genocide as a Powerful Justice Tool Requires Moving Beyond the 1948 Genocide Convention.”
The 1948 Genocide Convention doesn’t work – at least not for peoples seeking justice for mass atrocity. It does work to protect most states that have destroyed a people, in whole or in part, from ever being held responsible for committing the “crime of crimes.” As the public and academic understanding of genocide has been shaped by the narrow and legalistic interpretation of the genocide idea in the Convention, that understanding has been used to deny the right of victims of historical and contemporary mass atrocity to argue that they have faced genocide. The putative failure to meet the international legal standard not only reenacts the colonial and racist origins of the statute itself but has also been a way to negate and deny the legitimacy or veracity of broader justice claims by communities of victims. Once denied, these communities are no longer eligible for the kinds of restorative justice and global attention that the charge of genocide carries. Denial and its afterlives has shape the right of indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere and Australasia, descendants of enslaved Africans in diaspora, Armenians, Assyrians, Kurds, and most recently Palestinians to charge genocide.
In this talk, historian and theorist of human rights, Prof. Keith David Watenpaugh, argues that historians, international lawyers, humanities scholars and those in law and public policy should stop using the Convention’s terms to define genocide. Rather he asks us to embrace an understanding of genocide closer to Raphael Lemkin’s original proposal and as outlined in his Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation – Analysis of Government – Proposals for Redress, (1944) to reclaim the genocide idea as both a powerful human rights tool of analysis and justice, and a basis for making violence and mass atrocity more visible, actionable and preventable.
Keith David Watenpaugh is professor and founding director of Human Rights Studies at the University of California, Davis. He is author and editor of several books, including the multiple-award winning Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism (University of California Press, 2015.) His articles appear in the American Historical Review, Perspectives on History, Social History, Journal of Human Rights, Humanity, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Education, and Newsweek; his work has been translated into French, German, Armenian, Arabic, Turkish and Persian. He has lived and worked in Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, Armenia, Iraq, and Egypt. In addition to awards from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in 2019 he received the Institute of International Education Centennial Medal and in 2021 for defending the right to education, and in 2021 the Edmund O’Brien Award for Individual Achievement in Human Rights Education by Human Rights Educators-USA.

Contesting Techno Fascisms Now!
2025-05-13 15:30 - 17:00 | Namaste Lounge – College 9, Namaste Lounge, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
This panel explores ways that fascism today manifests in unexpected sites and imaginaries, including visions of techno-utopia, nationalist movements for animal rights and calls to colonize outer space.
The panelist assembled here will each take a keyword of the emergent fascist trends and think through ways to contest fascisms now.
Panel Participants:

Neda Atanasoski; Professor and Chair, Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies, University of Maryland. Keyword: Eugenic Fascism

Felicity Amaya Schaeffer; Chair, CRES and Professor FMST, UCSC. Keyword: Eugenic Fascism

Neel Ahuja; Professor, Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies, University of Maryland. Keyword: Environmental Fascism

Erin McElroy; Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Washington. Keyword: Techno-Feudalism

Ying Jin - Nurturing Hearts and Minds: Implementing Social Emotional Learning Principles in World Language Classrooms
2025-05-14 13:30 - 15:00 | Humanities 2, Room 259
Join the Department of Applied Linguistics for a professional development workshop featuring Ying Jin, the 2018 ACTFL National Teacher of the Year, who will present her talk titled “Nurturing Hearts and Minds: Implementing Social Emotional Learning Principles in World Language Classrooms.” Refreshments will be provided.

This event is funded by the Peter Rushton and Jacqueline Ku Endowed Memorial Fund. For questions email etu6@ucsc.edu.

The Maya K. Peterson Explorations in History Seminar Series: Andy Bruno - An Environmental History of the Tunguska Mystery
2025-05-15 12:30 - 14:00 | Cowell Provost House, Cowell Provost House, Cowell Service Rd‎ University of California Santa Cruz, Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The third annual Maya K. Peterson Explorations in History Seminar Series will take place on Thursday, May 15th, 2025, at 12:30pm at the Cowell Provost House. This event will be livestreamed and recorded (link to be provided soon).
This year’s guest speaker is Andy Bruno, Stephen F. Cohen Chair of Russian History and Professor, Indiana University Bloomington. Professor Bruno’s lecture is titled “An Environmental History of the Tunguska Mystery.”
In 1908, the Tunguska explosion in Siberia knocked down an area of forest larger than London. While most scientists now believe that an airburst from an asteroid caused the blast, unmistakable remnants of a space rock have never been found. Over the last century, the mysterious nature of the event has prompted a wide array of speculation and investigation, including from science fiction writers and voluntary researchers. Some have even explained Tunguska as a nuclear explosion triggered by aliens. This presentation will recount the intriguing history of the Tunguska event and the investigations into it. Foregrounding the significance of mystery in environmental and Soviet history, it will show how efforts to understand the explosion have shaped the treatment of the landscape, how uncertainty allowed alternative forms of knowledge to enter scientific conversations, and how cosmic disasters have influenced the past and might affect the future.
Andy Bruno works as a professor in the Department of History at Indiana University Bloomington, where he holds the Stephen F. Cohen Chair of Russian History. A specialist in the environmental history of the Soviet Union, he is the author of The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History (2016) and Tunguska: A Siberian Mystery and its Environmental Legacy (2022), which recently appeared in paperback.
This event is made possible by The Maya K. Peterson Memorial Endowment and is co-sponsored by the UCSC History Department.

The Maya K. Peterson Explorations in History Seminar Series at UCSC honors the life and spirit of a brilliant scholar, teacher, and mentor whose career was cut short by her untimely death in 2021. A specialist in Russian, Central Asian and environmental history, Maya was a valued member of UCSC’s faculty in the History Department and the Humanities Division. The Explorations in History Seminar Series celebrates Maya’s passions for the study of history, for dialogue between the humanities and the sciences, and for innovative scholarship across disciplines—passions that she shared generously with students, colleagues, and communities around the globe.

Anita Say Chan - Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future
2025-05-15 13:00 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Join us for a talk by Anita Say Chan, author of Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future (UC Press, 2025). This event will take place May 15th at 1pm in Humanities 1, Room 210. To attend the event via Zoom, join using the link below.

Living Writers with Maria Elena Ramirez
2025-05-15 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Living Writers Series – Spring 2025
Insight, Writings: Third World and Other Imaginaries
Maria E. Ramirez is a woman of Chicana, Puerto Rican, and Apache ancestry. She was actively involved in the student movement in the late sixties, where students, along with their parents, marched and demanded that their community be part of all the higher education systems, which at the time were overwhelmingly white. She became deeply involved with the Los Siete organization in San Francisco due to the awareness she gained in the Vacaville prison project at UCB. She left UCB to devote herself full-time to be in solidarity with all the diverse communities in San Francisco. In 1972, she became one of the first Chicanas to visit the People’s Republic of China through the Chinese Friendship Association. Eventually, returning to her home in Union City, still guided by social and Earth Justice movements, she went on to get her master’s and has now served as a community college counselor for over 25 years and developed her own one-woman storytelling show, Chicana Herstory. She continues to be involved in her community against gentrification and environmental pollution and is co-founder of Families United for Equity, which advocates for the developmental disabled community.
About the Living Writers Series
The Living Writers Series (LWS) is a live reading series organized especially for the Creative Writing Program community at UCSC. There is a new series each quarter, and each series features writers with unique voices. The LWS is open to all creative writing students and the public.

Sponsored by the Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, the Laurie Sain Endowment, the Humanities Institute, The Literature Department, Creative Writing Program, and the Center for Racial Justice.

Graduate Research Symposium
2025-05-16 13:00 - 16:00 | McHenry Library, Information Commons
The 2025 Graduate Research Symposium will be held on Friday, May 16, 1-4 p.m. (Pacific) at McHenry Library, Information Commons (South on the Main Floor).
The Graduate Division hosts the Graduate Symposium annually in the spring. All graduate students are eligible to participate and may do so in person or virtually via Zoom. (Recipients of qualifying fellowships are required to participate.) The event is free and open to the public. Judges representing UCSC staff, postdoctoral scholars, graduate student alumni, UCSC Foundation trustees, and community members determine an overall best presentation and five academic division best presentations.
– Prizes –
Best Overall Presentation of the Symposium: $1000
Best Presentation of the Arts Division: $250
Best Presentation of Baskin Engineering: $250
Best Presentation of the Humanities Division: $250
Best Presentation of the Physical and Biological Sciences Division: $250
Best Presentation of the Social Sciences Division: $250
More information here. See the 2025 presentation schedule here.

The Deppe Memorial Lecture with Professor Dan-El Padilla Peralta
2025-05-16 16:00 | Cowell Provost House, Cowell Provost House, Cowell Service Rd‎ University of California Santa Cruz, Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The UCSC Classical Studies Program presents The Deppe Memorial Lecture, taking place Friday, May 16th at the Cowell Provost house at 4:00pm (reception to follow).
Professor Dan-El Padilla Peralta (Princeton University) will be giving a talk titled “The Bringer of Fire: Prometheus in Santo Domingo.”
This lecture will examine the Prometeo of the Dominican poet, playwright, and novelist Héctor Incháustegui Cabral (1912-1979). Published together with adaptations of Sophocles’s Philotectes and Euripides’s Hippolytus in 1964, Cabral’s take on Aeschylus is an underappreciated turning-point in Dominican and Caribbean experiments with Greek tragedy — and an effective springboard for critical reflection on the cross-hatching of race, politics, and classical reception in the 20th- and 21st-century Black Aegean.
All are welcome to attend this event. We hope to see you there!

Saturday Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream
2025-05-17 10:00 | Aptos Library, 7695 Soquel Dr, Aptos, 95003, United States
Saturday Shakespeare in Santa Cruz Presents A Midsummer Night’s Dream, featuring a series of readings and conversations held Saturday mornings from April 26 to May 24, 2025. The 1st hour will be spent in conversation with a guest speaker, and during the 2nd hour volunteers will read aloud part of the play. During the final session, on May 24th, a film will be presented. Meetings will take place in the Aptos Library Community Room (in person) and over Zoom (virtual).
For more information, Zoom link, or to be a reader, contact: saturdayshakespeare@gmail.com
The guest speaker on May 17 is Sean Keilen, Professor of Literature, UC Santa Cruz; founding Director of Shakespeare Workshop, Santa Cruz Shakespeare dramaturg. Readings: Act 4, Scene 2; Act 5, Scene 1
All Scheduled Meetings

April 26: Michael Warren
May 3: Julia Lupton
May 10: Charles Pasternak
May 17: Sean Keilen
May 24 (Film Screening)

Nick Kawa and Alisa Keesey – Microbes at Work: The Vital Role of Bacteria and other Microbial Life in Sanitation Systems in the US and Uganda
2025-05-19 15:30 - 17:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Wastewater treatment operators in the American Midwest wryly describe their job as “bacteria farming,” but they also insist that microbes are the ones who “do all the work” at treatment plants. Meanwhile, slum activists in Uganda suggest that they “work with microbes” to provide essential sanitation services where the state has failed to provide safe toilets. In this talk, we delve deeper into these observations about microbial laboring and human laboring with microbes in these two distinct contexts. First, we examine insights from wastewater treatment workers and soil scientists in Columbus, Ohio, to explore how microbes serve as key mediators that not only metabolize urban residents’ bodily excesses in wastewater treatment processing but also constitute the bulk of wastewater solids, which are increasingly used as a soil amendment applied on agricultural lands. Second, we turn attention to slum activists, waste scientists, and entrepreneurs in Kampala, Uganda, who are working to capture “anal resources” and advance container-based sanitation and community-scale composting. The diversion of human waste away from Lake Victoria is especially urgent as nutrients-out-of-place are driving eutrophication and the extinction of indigenous fish species. Through these two case studies, we show how the disruption of socio-ecological systems brought on by industrial capitalism—known in some scholarly circles as the “metabolic rift”—is not strictly characterized by a break in the cycling of nutrients back to the land but also a derangement of social relations with microbial life that requires remediation.
Nick Kawa is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Ohio State University. His research relies primarily on qualitative approaches to understanding human cultural relationships to soils, plants, and bodily waste. He is the author of the forthcoming book After the Flush: Rethinking the Future of Human Waste (University of California Press), based on nearly a decade of research on the modern sanitation system in the U.S. as well as the growing call for alternative models that can enact more sustainable futures.
Alisa Keesey is a PhD candidate in the Dept. of Anthropology at UCSC. Her research explores the global sanitation crisis, the water pollution crisis impacting Lake Victoria’s fishing communities, “nutrients-out-of-place,” and soil politics. As the director of GiveLove, a WASH sector (water, sanitation and hygiene) non-profit, she has worked in eight countries with a wide range of diverse stakeholders and environmental activists to promote composting, sustainable land use, food security, and local resiliency in the context of climate change. Alisa also worked for over a decade with women farming groups to lead on-farm biodiversity initiatives in Uganda aimed at protecting shea trees and establishing the first fair trade shea cooperative. Alisa holds a B.A. in International Relations from San Francisco State University, a M.S. in International Agricultural Development from University of California, Davis, and a M.A. in Cultural Anthropology from UCSC.
This event is presented by the THI More-Than-Human(ities) Laboratory Research Cluster.

CANCELLED - When Human-Centered AI Encountered Digital Humanities: A Dialogue between Magy Seif El-Nasr and Minghui Hu
2025-05-20 12:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Humanities Institute Research cluster, Humanities in the Age of AI, presents “When Human-Centered AI Encountered Digital Humanities: A Dialogue between Magy Seif El-Nasr and Minghui Hu.”
What happens when the ethical and interpretive frameworks of the humanities meet the algorithmic and interactive architectures of artificial intelligence? This dialogue brings together two leading voices from distinct yet converging fields: Magy Seif El-Nasr, a pioneer in human-centered AI, game analytics, and interactive narrative design, and Minghui Hu, a historian and digital humanist, explores the cultural, religious, and intellectual history of China through computational and interpretive lenses.
Together, they will explore shared concerns—from narrative design and agency to ethical modeling and epistemological boundaries—charting new possibilities at the intersection of technology and the humanities. This conversation is not only a meeting of disciplines, but a reimagining of the collaborative future of AI and humanistic inquiry.

Soraya Murray – Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination
2025-05-21 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Soraya Murray’s forthcoming Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination (MIT, 2026) is the first dedicated examination of popular movies classified as “thrillers” that channel societal anxiety or dread about advanced technologies like supercomputers, robotics, AI, biotech, military weaponry, and digital surveillance. Technothriller is about the changing imagination of technology within an American context and its role in engineering some of the most profound ideologies of modern life. Murray considers beloved but often underrated films from the 1970s to the present, like The Andromeda Strain (1971), Westworld (1973), Rollerball (1975), Demon Seed (1977), WarGames (1983), The Hunt for Red October (1990), Jurassic Park (1993), Clear and Present Danger (1994), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), the Mission:Impossible franchise (1996- ), Ex Machina (2014), Tenet (2020), M3GAN (2022), and The Creator (2023) to think through deeply embedded popular beliefs about technology, innovation, and their imaginaries—in other words, the mechanics of power within our technological lives. In short, Technothriller is about the troubled, sometimes catastrophic relationships between humans and their innovations.
Soraya Murray (PhD Cornell) studies contemporary visual culture, especially film and video games. She is an Associate Professor in the Film + Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Murray’s first book, On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space (I.B. Tauris, 2018, paperback Bloomsbury 2021), considers video games from a visual culture perspective and how they both mirror and are constitutive of larger societal fears, dreams, hopes and even complex struggles for recognition. Murray is currently co-editing an anthology with media and games scholar TreaAndrea Russworm on antiracist futures in games and play, and will soon publish her second single-author book, Technothriller.

Spring 2025 COLLOQUIUM SERIES
THE CENTER FOR CULTURAL STUDIES hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work-in-progress by faculty & visitors. We are pleased to announce our Spring 2025 Series. Sessions begin promptly at 12:15 PM and end at 1:30 PM (PST) in Humanities Building 1, Room 210.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Chris Jadallah - What Could Be More Innocent Than Planting Trees? Land-Based Pedagogies as a Site of Contestation
2025-05-22 16:00 - 18:00 | Cervantes & Velasquez Room, Baytree Conference Center, Bay Tree Conference Center, UC Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Center for Racial Justice is proud to present What Could Be More Innocent Than Planting Trees? Land-Based Pedagogies as a Site of Contestation with Chris Jadallah, Assistant Professor of Environmental Justice and Education at UC Los Angeles.
Land education, as both theory and pedagogy, works to unsettle the colonial dynamics that often remain quietly buried within land relations and learning environments. In this talk, Chris Jadallah will think with the geographies of Palestine to engage in a critical reading of two landscapes – pine forests and olive groves – to confront the ways in which settler colonial inheritances manifest across ecologies. From this reading, he will discuss how pedagogical experiences and curricular designs rooted in land, for example, tree planting activities that are pervasive environmental education, can serve to either reinscribe colonial dynamics or, alternatively, can be designed in ways that build transnational solidarities and prefigure decolonial futures.
Co-sponsored by Feminist Studies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES), Students for Justice in Palestine, Faculty for Justice in Palestine, Center for Cultural Studies, Center for South Asian Studies (CSAS), Anthropology Department, Sociology Department, Institute for Social Transformation, and People’s University.
Part of the year-long speaker series, Possibilities of Palestinian Refusal: Against Disciplining Knowledge and Movement. For more information, visit the CRJ website: https://crjucsc.com/.

Living Writers with Angel Dominguez
2025-05-22 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Living Writers Series – Spring 2025
Insight, Writings: Third World and Other Imaginaries
Angel Dominguez is a Latiné poet of Yucatec Maya descent born in Hollywood and raised in Van Nuys, CA, by their immigrant family. They now live amongst the redwoods of Bonny Doon, CA. They’re the author of several books of poetry and prose, including Desgraciado (Nightboat Books, 2022) and, most recently, the 10-year anniversary edition of their debut work, Black Lavender Milk (Noemi Press, 2024). They were the 2023 Poet in Residence at the University of Arizona’s Poetry Center in Tucson and the 2021 Mazza writer in residence for San Francisco State University. They currently serve as managing editor for Lilac Press. You can find Angel’s work online and in print in various publications, including BOMB Magazine, The Berkeley Poetry Review, FENCE, SFMOMA Open Space, and elsewhere. You can find Angel in the redwoods or ocean.
About the Living Writers Series
The Living Writers Series (LWS) is a live reading series organized especially for the Creative Writing Program community at UCSC. There is a new series each quarter, and each series features writers with unique voices. The LWS is open to all creative writing students and the public.

Sponsored by the Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, the Laurie Sain Endowment, the Humanities Institute, The Literature Department, Creative Writing Program, and the Center for Racial Justice.

Linguistics Colloquia: Elena Anagnostopoulou - Rethinking Clitics: A View From Greek
2025-05-23 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
The Department of Linguistics is pleased to present Elena Anagnostopoulou (University of Crete and IMS-FORTH), speaking on Rethinking Clitics: A View From Greek.
This is an in-person event. You can also join virtually via Zoom.
In this talk, Elena Anagnostopoulou will revisit the relationship between clitic doubling and object agreement in connection to the syntax of clitics, via an assessment of three recent proposals on Greek clitic doubling. She will offer novel evidence based on co-ordination resolution supporting the view that clitic doubling involves a dependency between a clitic with iφ and a DP with iφ. Finally, she will highlight arguments that, in her view, are crucial to decide between different versions of movement analyses.
Over the course of each year, the Linguistics department hosts colloquia by distinguished faculty from around the world. For more information: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/colloquia/index.html

Raï Concert: Fella Oudane
2025-05-23 18:00 | Woodhouse Brewery, 119 Madrone St., Santa Cruz, United States
Please join the Center for the Middle East and North Africa (CMENA) for a Raï concert at Woodhouse Brewery on Friday, May 23rd at 6pm. Raï is a popular genre of music that achieved global prominence with artists like Khaled and Cheb Mami, and it has come to embody Algeria’s rebellious spirit. CMENA Faculty Director Muriam Haleh Davis has put together this Spotify playlist if you would like to learn more!
Fella Oudane, an LA-based vocalist and percussionist, will be performing alongside the North African band, Terga. The concert is free and open to all ages.

CANCELLED - The Center for the Middle East and North Africa & Kuumbwa Jazz Present: Cheb Nasro
2025-05-23 19:00 | Kuumbwa Jazz Center
The Cheb Nasro concert scheduled for Friday, May 23 has been CANCELLED due to unforeseen circumstances. We apologize for any inconvenience and appreciate your understanding.

Nasreddine Souidi, known as Cheb Nasro, is a singer, composer, and songwriter who is best known for his Romantic Rai music. He is one of the most famous Romantic Rai singers in the Arabic speaking world. He has released more than 130 albums with popular hits such as “Libini W Binha” and “Ndirak Amour.”
Cheb Nasro was born on November 30, 1969, in the city of Ain Temouchent, Algeria. When he was eleven months old he and his family moved to the city of Oran where he grew up. Cheb Nasro began singing at a young age and in 1987 at age eighteen released his first album, which sold millions of copies. Cheb Nasro works with a number of music labels in Algeria including Disco Maghreb, Santana, Redson, and Sunhouse, as well as Mondo Melodia in the USA.

Presented by the Center for the Middle East and North Africa at UC Santa Cruz and the Kuumbwa Jazz Center. Co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute.

Saturday Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream
2025-05-24 10:00 | Aptos Library, 7695 Soquel Dr, Aptos, 95003, United States
Saturday Shakespeare in Santa Cruz Presents A Midsummer Night’s Dream, featuring a series of readings and conversations held Saturday mornings from April 26 to May 24, 2025. The 1st hour will be spent in conversation with a guest speaker, and during the 2nd hour volunteers will read aloud part of the play. During the final session, on May 24th, a film will be presented. Meetings will take place in the Aptos Library Community Room (in person) and over Zoom (virtual).
For more information, Zoom link, or to be a reader, contact: saturdayshakespeare@gmail.com
The final session on May 17 features a film presentation. Directed by Michael Hoffman & starring Christian Bale, Rupert Everett, Calista Flockhart, Kevin Kline, Michelle Pfeiffer & Stanley Tucci (120 minutes).
All Scheduled Meetings

April 26: Michael Warren
May 3: Julia Lupton
May 10: Charles Pasternak
May 17: Sean Keilen
May 24 (Film Screening)

Anneeth Hundle - Insecurities of Expulsion: Afro- Asian Entanglements in Transcontinental Uganda
2025-05-28 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
As part of the Spring 2025 Aurora Lecture Series and the Cultural Studies Colloquium, we welcome Anneeth Kaur Hundle, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Presidential Chair in Social Sciences to Advance Sikh Studies at the University of California, Irvine, for her lecture entitled “Insecurities of Expulsion: Afro- Asian Entanglements in Transcontinental Uganda.”
In 1972, Ugandan president Idi Amin expelled close to 80,000 South Asians of Ugandan heritage from the country by dictatorial decree. This talk revisits this weighty historical event, arguing that it is neither an exceptional nor a parochial event, neither a result of primordial Afro-South Asian racial conflict, nor an opening into a redemptive search for Afro-South Asian interracial solidarities. The talk explores the aftermaths and continuous nature of the expulsion event, examining its effects and affects; the images, representations, and differentiated experiences and memories of the event; and the tense and ambivalent practices of citizenship, sovereignty, and governance that have emerged in the decades following the expulsion. It describes Afro-Asian entanglements in transcontinental Uganda through the lenses of race, ethnicity, class, caste, religion, gender, and sexuality, arguing for stronger attention to knowledge production on global Afro-South Asian connections and the continued dynamics of community, citizenship, and identity on the African Continent as central to envisioning Black African self-determinism, racial reconciliation, and interracial pluralisms during shifting imperial, postcolonial, nationalist, and geopolitical times. Finally, the talk examines the significance of global anthropologies of expulsion in relation to the ongoing contemporary mass expulsions under the Trump regime in the US.citizenship, and identity on the African Continent as central to envisioning contemporary Black African self-determinism, racial reconciliation, and interracial pluralisms.
Anneeth Kaur Hundle is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Presidential Chair in Social Sciences to Advance Sikh Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She trained in anthropology and gender studies at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and has previously held appointments at UC Berkeley, UC Merced, and Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. Hundle has recently published Insecurities of Expulsion: Afro-Asian Entanglements in Transcontinental Uganda (Duke University Press, 2025), an anthropological examination of citizenship and the ambivalent politics and processes of racial nonreconciliation in post-Asian expulsion Uganda and the study of scholarly and epistemological expulsions from the contemporary university. She has also published in several peer-reviewed journals, including American Anthropologist, Public Culture, and Critical Ethnic Studies, and is currently working on a book project on Sikh and Punjabi and Black and Afro-Diasporic encounters that engages with her interests in Sikhism and global South Asian and African diasporas, critical religious and secularism studies; race, religion, caste, labor-capital relations, gender and sexuality; feminist anthropology and critical university studies. At UCI Anthropology, she has led Sikh Studies and Punjabi language program-building and many other initiatives, including the Sikh feminisms working group from 2020-2022. She currently serves as Associate Editor of the journal Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory.
Co-sponsored with the Aurora Endowment for Sikh Studies.

Spring 2025 COLLOQUIUM SERIES
THE CENTER FOR CULTURAL STUDIES hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work-in-progress by faculty & visitors. We are pleased to announce our Spring 2025 Series. Sessions begin promptly at 12:15 PM and end at 1:30 PM (PST) in Humanities Building 1, Room 210. Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.
