The Humanities Institute

2026 Helene Moglen Lecture in Feminism and Humanities with Donna Haraway – Staying with the Trouble for Still Possible Times
2026-05-20 17:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Cultural Center at Merrill, Merrill Cultural Center, UC Santa Cruz, Merrill College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The sky has not fallen – yet. In troubled times, this lecture joins human and more-than-human companion species to ask how to think, really think, without either the apocalyptic violence or salvific comfort of human exceptionalism. Revisiting themes, images, arguments, and collaborations from a lifetime of feminist work and play in science studies, biology, cultural studies, and arts, Haraway asks how to tell evidence-laden, effective stories for earthly flourishing in exterminationist times. Is it still possible to make powerful oddkin in opposition to techbro anti-immigrant pronatalism and extraterrestrial settler nationalism in order to partially heal devastated worlds together? If oddkin hold up the sky, we have a chance.

This event is both in-person and virtual.
Doors will open at 5:00pm with refreshments from 5:00 – 5:30.
The lecture with a Q&A will begin at 5:30pm with a reception to follow.

Donna Haraway is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California Santa Cruz. She writes and speaks in science and technology studies, feminist theory, and multispecies studies. She is an active participant in the Science and Justice Research Center and Center for Cultural Studies. Attending to the intersections of biology with culture and politics, Haraway’s work explores the string figures composed by science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, science and technology studies, and more-than-human worlding. Haraway’s renowned essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985) is considered a foundational text in multiple scholarly fields. Some of her books include Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016); When Species Meet (2008); The Companion Species Manifesto (2003); Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium (1997, 2nd ed 2018); Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991); Primate Visions (1989); and Crystals , Fabrics, and Fields (1976, 2004).

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crowdsourcing Research on Language Variation and Change in Hong Kong
2026-05-22 10:30 - 12:00 | Namaste Lounge – College 9, Namaste Lounge, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
In this talk, Dr. Yu will present a collaborative research project examining large-scale variation and change in Cantonese in Hong Kong. Using crowdsourcing methodologies, the project collects speech data and survey responses from a broad participant base, alongside systematically designed metalinguistic judgment tasks. By integrating these data sources, the project aims to provide a comprehensive account of contemporary linguistic variation and the mechanisms underlying language change.
Dr. Alan Yu is Chancellor’s Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he directs the UC Berkeley PhonLab. His research focuses on speech processing and production, and how they both shape and are shaped by the phonological systems of languages. He is also broadly interested in understanding how language variation arises and how sound change emerges over time. His work often focuses on Cantonese and Washo, an endangered language of Northern California and Nevada. He is the
author of A Natural History of Infixation (Oxford University Press) and has (co-)edited several volumes, including The Handbook of Phonological Theory (2nd edition, Wiley-Blackwell), Origins of Sound Change: Approaches to Phonologization (Oxford University Press), and The Life Cycle of Language: Past, Present, and Future (Oxford University Press). He also serves as co-General Editor of the journal Laboratory Phonology.

This event is sponsored by the Peter Rushton and Jacqueline Ku Endowed Memorial Fund for Chinese Languages and The Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics.

Vivien Sansour - To Eat Alone is to Die Alone
2026-05-22 17:30 - 19:00 | Institute of the Arts and Sciences, 100 Panetta Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Seeds of Resurgence cluster presents an artist talk with Vivien Sansour, founder of the Palestinian Heirloom Seed Library. Oftentimes when Palestinian farmers put seeds in the ground, they mutter a quiet prayer, “may we eat and may we feed others”. This and many other linguistically profound sayings provide a lens into a cultural design based on the idea that our survival as individuals is connected to the well-being and survival of our community. In this time together we will be invited to let go of our commitments to and preconceptions with “reality” in order to allow ourselves to imagine alternative universes that are inspired by nature and her daring imagination. From the real to the fantastical, we will engage in a hybrid and intimate activity of being physically present with other living beings, while channeling this co-presence into a writing activity that will bring us deeper clarities about who we have been, who we are, and whom we would like to be.
Vivien Sansour is the Founder and Executive Director of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library. As an artist, researcher, and writer, she uses installations, images, sketches, film, soil, seeds, and plants to enliven old cultural tales in contemporary presentations and to advocate for seed conservation and the protection of agrobiodiversity as a cultural/political act.
Vivien founded the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library in 2014, where she works with farmers in Palestine and around the world. As an extension of this project she created The Traveling Kitchen, a social engagement project aimed at bringing to the forefront conversations about climate crisis, food politics, and the imagining of new worlds.
This event is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute, the History of Art and Visual Culture Department, and the Arts Research Institute
Abu Samra wheat, grown last year at Pie Ranch — sprung from seeds first collected by the Palestinian Heirloom Seed Library.

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

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

Additional Events of Interest:
Entangled Life Faculty Salon: On May 19, 2026, at 6pm, we will hold a salon-style event at the Hay Barn on campus where a group of Deep Read faculty—Professors Breen, Gilbert, and Haraway —will give brief presentations and discuss Entangled Life with moderator Laura Martin and the Deep Read community. Participants can also attend virtually.
Author Event – A Conversation with Merlin Sheldrake: On May 31, 2026, at 4pm, we will welcome Merlin Sheldrake to the Quarry Amphitheater on campus where he will be in conversation with Associate Professor of History, Benjamin Breen. This will be an in-person event, and, as always, it will be free and open to the public.

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

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

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

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

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

Performing Shakespeare in Santa Cruz
2026-05-28 16:00 - 17:00 | McHenry Library (3rd Floor), Special Collections
Santa Cruz Shakespeare and the UC Santa Cruz Shakespeare Workshop present an exhibit of materials from past productions of Much Ado about Nothing and Macbeth, curated by student interns at Shakespeare Workshop from the Santa Cruz Shakespeare archive. The event will include opening remarks by Charles Pasternak & Paul Whitworth and light refreshments.
Tickets are now on sale for Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s 2026 Season, featuring Much Ado About Nothing and Macbeth. Co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute.
The 2026 season runs from July 16 – August 30.
Much Ado About Nothing is one of Shakespeare’s wittiest and most beloved comedies. Of all the couples in Shakespeare, perhaps none is more widely loved than Beatrice and Benedick. Their battle of wits, their antagonism turned to eroticism, their history. Before the play begins, they already seem to define each other. The audience, like the other characters in the play, wait with excitement as their wits clash, and eventually, as their love blossoms.
Dark, bloody, brutal, and magnificent, William Shakespeare’s Macbeth is one of the greatest plays ever written. Its central couple, ironically, is one of Shakespeare’s happiest. At least at the beginning. Macbeth explores what we become when our second half is ripped away. A powerful unit, wildly in love with each other, the Macbeths follow the insinuations of the witches – the famous weird sisters – and commit murder in the name of their shared ambition: the throne of Scotland. But even with their goal achieved, Macbeth’s paranoia and guilt lead him further down the road of blood. The central unit tears apart under the shadow of its deeds. Who are these two without each other? Slowly and surely, the play shows us society’s ruin in the form of its leading pair. Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s production of Macbeth stars Dan Donohue in the title role and Paige Lindsey White as Lady Macbeth.

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

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

Presented by the Center for South Asian Studies.

Amy Zhou - Unequal Worlds of Care: The Politics of Global Health in Malawi
2026-05-29 13:00 | BioMed 200
Unequal Worlds of Care examines how policymakers, providers, and patients in Malawi navigate a healthcare system transformed unevenly by foreign aid. Whether through engaging in political resistance, refusing treatment, or leveraging the opportunities available to them, people contend with global health programs that only partially recognize their healthcare realities. Ultimately, overlooking fundamental aspects of healthcare limits even the best-intentioned efforts to improve people’s health and well-being.

Amy Zhou is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she researches health inequalities, development and humanitarianism, and emergent technologies. Her book, Unequal Worlds of Care: The Politics of Global Health in Malawi, follows policymakers, providers, and patients as they respond to global health programs that target certain issues but not others. Her research has also examined how race is understood and operationalized in health service delivery. She also works with interdisciplinary groups to examine the societal impact of new technologies, like gene drives and precision medicine.
This event is presented by the Global & Community Health Program and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute.

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

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

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

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

This event is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute.

UCSC French and Japanese Student Performance Evening
2026-05-30 18:00 | Stevenson Event Center
FREE – ALL WELCOME
In the spirit of the Miriam Ellis International Playhouse, students from the French and Japanese programs at UCSC will present an evening of theater and music performances.
French: Dur dur la torture (Pure Torture), written by the students, directed by Renée Cailloux.
Japanese: “きぼうのうた” (Song of Hope), directed by Naoko Yamamoto.
This informal end-of-quarter performance celebrates the creativity, dedication, and collaborative work of UCSC language students
For more information, contact Renée Cailloux at meip@ucsc.edu

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

Additional Events of Interest:
Entangled Life Faculty Salon: On May 19, 2026, at 6pm, we will hold a salon-style event at the Hay Barn on campus where a group of Deep Read faculty—Professors Breen, Gilbert, and Haraway —will give brief presentations and discuss Entangled Life with moderator Laura Martin and the Deep Read community. Participants can also attend virtually.
The Literature and Poetics of Fungi Salon: On May 26, 2026, at 6pm, we will hold a salon at the Hay Barn focused on the literary and poetic influence of fungi and its relation to Entangled Life. The salon will feature Professors Cole, Hillman, Palmer, and Tseng in conversation with moderator Laura Martin and the Deep Read community. Participants can also attend virtually.

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

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

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

Critical Play with Large Language Models
2026-06-02 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The idea of keeping the “human in the loop” is offered as a way to make AI “human-centered” and to safeguard against AI mischief, but how does being in a loop with AI shape our communication with each other? Over the last 20 years, Allen Riley created dozens of interactive artworks that explore mediated communication with youth and adults in venues including performance spaces, museums, festivals, and schools. He discusses three recent projects that explore how large language models affect interpersonal communication.
The first project is an imaginative storytelling game called Popcorn Movie in which players are constantly interrupted by LLM summaries as they attempt to co-create a story together. Next, he adapts the game into a satirical live performance titled Human Feedback in which an LLM facilitates a panel discussion among people who do not know what they are talking about. In a third iteration titled The Last Chat, Riley reimagines the LLM as a social operating system.
Language models are not grounded in the practical circumstances in which we use them. As a result, they drift and hallucinate. When players hear an AI summary, its semantic noise becomes part of their shared reality, and the story spirals in on itself. Players navigate changing and often humorous conditions of coherence and confusion. He argues that this is an essential literacy for critical engagement with LLMs. Allen Riley proposes an alternative way of thinking and playing with AI as a feedback channel for socially interactive creative projects that critically play with AI.
Allen Riley is an artist and curator who specializes in socially interactive media. He designs hands-on learning pedagogy at Beam Center and builds arcade games as a form of public art with Arcade Commons. Riley’s artwork has been presented at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Slamdance Film Festival, and the Museum of the Moving Image. He received an MFA in Electronic Integrated Arts from the New York State College of Ceramics and is a PhD candidate in Film & Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz.

This event is presented by The Humanities Institute’s ± AI Initiative

Law For a More-Than-Human World: A Conversation with Jacqueline Gallant
2026-06-02 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Jackie Gallant will join the More-Than-Human(ities) Lab to discuss her work with the More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) Program, an interdisciplinary initiative dedicated to the advancement of rights and well-being for humans, nonhumans, and the web of life that sustains us all. The Program has two primary goals. First, using the tools of the law, MOTH offers answers to key questions raised by a host of disciplines concerning human relationships—institutional, political, legal, and cultural—with the natural world, including in the context of pressing ecological challenges. These questions include:
How can the sciences—from mycology to botany and ecology to marine biology—be translated into and transform the law to better protect life on Earth? How can Indigenous and Western sciences join forces to create and transform legal protections for the more-than-human world?
How can we strengthen the implementation of the growing number of rights of nature rulings and laws to ensure they have material impact?
How do we give back to nature for its contributions to human activities and endeavors?
How can we bridge concern for humans and nonhumans as we ratchet up decisive actions to address the climate and biodiversity emergencies? How can a holistic approach to these and other ecological challenges contribute to reducing societal polarization as well as individual and species loneliness?
How can we best use technology – and guard against its excesses – to better understand and relate to nonhumans and nature more generally?
The answers—developed through MOTH actions—aim to protect the living world and its many beings while achieving more-than-human rights in practice.
Second, MOTH nurtures and consolidates the field of practice and inquiry dedicated to more-than-human rights and related topics. In particular, MOTH builds bridges between disciplines and nurtures intercultural and interdisciplinary collaboration and ideation.
The MOTH Program is an initiative of Earth Rights Research and Action (TERRA), a program based at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU School of Law.
Jackie Gallant is a lawyer and the Director of Programs at the NYU MOTH Program. At MOTH, she leads legal actions and programs which address major ecological challenges, like climate change, and pressing questions concerning legal, political, and cultural relationships with the more-than-human world.

2026 Graduate Research Symposium
2026-06-03 13:00 - 16:00 | UCSC
This event celebrates and highlights the work of UCSC graduate students in all academic divisions. Any enrolled graduate student is welcome to present either a poster, talk, or mixed media presentation. (Recipients of qualifying fellowships, ARCS, PPPF, Dissertation Quarter, etc. are required to participate.) The event is free and open to the public.

Presenting at the symposium is excellent preparation for the job market. It offers a chance to practice communicating your research clearly and concisely to a broad audience, refine how you “pitch” your work, and build confidence for future conferences, interviews, and professional opportunities. The week prior to the symposium will include many professional development events, including CV workshops, head shot photo booths, networking events, and alumni career panels.
Starting in Academic Year 2026–27, the Graduate Research Symposium will move to Fall quarter (November, Week 6). This new timing better aligns with graduate students’ job market preparation and conference presentations, and will continue to be preceded by a week of workshops to help students refine research presentations for both the symposium and Grad Slam. The Fall Symposium will also serve as an introduction to the breadth and excellence of research across campus for incoming graduate students, job and internship opportunities, and it’s a great opportunity to connect with and recruit undergraduate researchers.
For more information and to see past winners: 2026 Graduate Research Symposium

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

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

Ruth Ozeki - The Typing Lady
2026-06-10 19:00 - 20:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop welcomes Booker Prize finalist Ruth Ozeki (A Tale for the Time Being), who will share her spellbinding story collection The Typing Lady: And Other Fictions about the lives we almost lived, the people we can’t quite forget, and the stories that shape us long after the last page is turned. Ozeki will be in conversation with Karen Joy Fowler at this event.
In this spirited and emotionally resonant collection, award-winning novelist Ruth Ozeki turns her singular gaze to the short story, exploring childhood ambition, youthful desire, midlife reinvention, and the unsparing clarity of old age. With her distinctive blend of wit, warmth, and deep humanity, she brings us eleven richly imagined stories of characters standing at life’s thresholds—grappling with faded ideals, evolving identities, and the inevitable compromises that shape a life.

Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest. She is the bestselling author of four novels: The Book of Form and Emptiness, winner of the UK’s 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction; My Year of Meats; All Over Creation; and A Tale for the Time Being, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a finalist for the 2013 Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her nonfiction work includes a memoir, The Face: A Time Code, and the documentary film Halving the Bones. A longtime Buddhist practitioner, Ruth is affiliated with the Brooklyn Zen Center and the Everyday Zen Foundation. She is a professor emerita of English language and literature at Smith College, where she was the Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities.
More information at: Bookshop Santa Cruz – Ruth Ozeki
Co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

Homer's The Odyssey Reading Group
2026-06-24 18:00 | Virtual Event
Homer’s Odyssey is about to turn into a major motion picture. Whether you like to see movies or not, that’s a great excuse to re-read this millennia-old story about a wet, salty man trying to find his way home. This June, join THI for a series of online reading groups with UCSC Ancient Studies faculty Anne Kreps and Martin Devecka where we’ll discuss the wild world of Odysseus and what it can teach us about the enduring value of things like being nice to strangers, lying, and picking a good disguise.

Please register above to attend one or more of the webinars!
Martin Devecka, Associate Professor, Ancient Studies & Literature
As a cultural historian, Devecka writes on topics in ancient literature and society that range from robots to ruins. He is currently finishing a book manuscript on animal citizenship in the Roman Empire.
Anne Kreps, Associate Professor, Ancient Studies & History
As a historian of the ancient Near East, Kreps studies heresies, Gnosticism, and the politics of sacred texts. Her current work examines the Dead Sea Scrolls within New Religious Movements in the United States.

Homer’s The Odyssey Reading Group
2026-07-01 18:00 | Virtual Event

Santa Cruz Shakespeare Opening Night
2026-07-16 20:00 | The Audrey Stanley Grove in Delaveaga Park, 501 Upper Park Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95065, United States
Tickets are now on sale for Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s 2026 Season, featuring Much Ado About Nothing and Macbeth. Co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute.
The 2026 season runs from July 16 – August 30.
Much Ado About Nothing is one of Shakespeare’s wittiest and most beloved comedies. Of all the couples in Shakespeare, perhaps none is more widely loved than Beatrice and Benedick. Their battle of wits, their antagonism turned to eroticism, their history. Before the play begins, they already seem to define each other. The audience, like the other characters in the play, wait with excitement as their wits clash, and eventually, as their love blossoms.

Macbeth by William Shakespeare’s is one of the greatest plays ever written. Its central couple, ironically, is one of Shakespeare’s happiest. At least at the beginning. Macbeth explores what we become when our second half is ripped away. A powerful unit, wildly in love with each other, the Macbeths follow the insinuations of the witches – the famous weird sisters – and commit murder in the name of their shared ambition: the throne of Scotland. But even with their goal achieved, Macbeth’s paranoia and guilt lead him further down the road of blood. The central unit tears apart under the shadow of its deeds. Who are these two without each other? Slowly and surely, the play shows us society’s ruin in the form of its leading pair.
Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s production of Macbeth stars Dan Donohue in the title role and Paige Lindsey White as Lady Macbeth.

Macbeth - Opening Night
2026-07-17 20:00 | The Audrey Stanley Grove in Delaveaga Park, 501 Upper Park Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95065, United States
Dark, bloody, brutal, and magnificent, William Shakespeare’s Macbeth is one of the greatest plays ever written. Its central couple, ironically, is one of Shakespeare’s happiest. At least at the beginning. Macbeth explores what we become when our second half is ripped away. A powerful unit, wildly in love with each other, the Macbeths follow the insinuations of the witches – the famous weird sisters – and commit murder in the name of their shared ambition: the throne of Scotland. But even with their goal achieved, Macbeth’s paranoia and guilt lead him further down the road of blood. The central unit tears apart under the shadow of its deeds. Who are these two without each other? Slowly and surely, the play shows us society’s ruin in the form of its leading pair.
Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s production of Macbeth stars Dan Donohue in the title role and Paige Lindsey White as Lady Macbeth.

Each showing has a 2 and 1/2 hour runtime with one 20- minute intermission.
For more information, and to see other times/dates: Macbeth

Ocean Vuong - The Emperor of Gladness
2026-07-21 19:00 - 20:00 | Rio Theater, 1205 Soquel Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95062, United States
The hardest thing in the world is to live only once…
Bookshop Santa Cruz and The Humanities Institute are pleased to welcome critically acclaimed author and staff favorite Ocean Vuong (Time Is a Mother, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous) for an event celebrating the paperback release of The Emperor of Gladness, Vuong’s bighearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive. Vuong will be in conversation with UC Santa Cruz Professor Ronaldo V. Wilson.

Following the cycles of history, memory, and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which love, labor, and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul. Hallmarks of Ocean Vuong’s writing—formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness—are on full display in this story of loss, hope, and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: a second chance.
Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collections Night Sky with Exit Wounds and Time Is a Mother, as well as the New York Times bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the American Book Award, he was born in Saigon, Vietnam, and currently splits his time between western Massachusetts and New York City. The Emperor of Gladness is his latest novel.
More information at: Bookshop Santa Cruz – Ocean Vuong

Co-Sponsored by The Humanities Institute

Cabrillo Festival 2026 - Opening Night
2026-07-26 | Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
“We the Dreamers is both an invitation and a responsibility”; says Music Director Cristian Măcelaru. “At this historic moment, we are asking how music can help us imagine a more expansive ‘we’—one that listens deeply, embraces complexity, and dares to hope. These works remind us that dreaming is essential to shaping a more just and connected future.”
The Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music presents its 64th season, We the Dreamers, running July 26 through August 9, 2026. Framed by the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, this transformative season asks one of the most resonant civic questions of our time: Who is the “we” of America—and who are “we” still becoming? The answers unfold across four world premiere Festival Commissions, eight West Coast premieres, and two U.S. premieres, brought to life by a dynamic global roster of over 20 composers and an extraordinary array of guest artists.
Highlights include the second-ever performance and West Coast premiere of Philip Glass’s Symphony No. 15 Lincoln, which draws on Lincoln’s urgent reverence for the Constitution and his prescient warnings against internal division, alongside an appearance by Former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove and new works by Clarice Assad, Vivian Fung, Sarah Hennies, and Pedro Emanuel Pereira—together offering a compelling portrait of our contemporary moment through the lens of history, civic reckoning, and global perspective.
For more information: Cabrillo Festival 2026

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

Weekend with Shakespeare
2026-08-08, 2026-08-09 | UCSC Arboretum
Dig deeply into this season’s Shakespeare productions with a special weekend of lectures, discussions and hands-on activities. In partnership with UCSC’s Shakespeare Workshop and The Humanities Institute, this is a wonderful opportunity to learn more about each play during the day and then enjoy the production that same evening.
This year, Weekend with Shakespeare will be held at the Audrey Stanley Grove in DeLaveaga Park on August 8th (Much Ado About Nothing) and August 9th (Macbeth).
Admission is free to all, but seating is limited. Please register below to reserve your seats.

Schedule for Weekend with Shakespeare
Saturday, 8/8 – Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare

11:00 a.m. – Welcome (Sean Keilen, UCSC)
11:15 a.m. – Actor Panel (Charles Pasternak and members of the company, SCS)
12:15 p.m. – Boxed lunch (courtesy of Shakespeare Workshop)
1:00 p.m. – Visiting Scholar (Eli Simon, UC Irvine)
2:00 – End of program

Sunday, 8/9 – Macbeth by William Shakespeare

1:00 a.m. – Welcome (Sean Keilen, UCSC)
11:15 a.m. – Actor Panel (Charles Pasternak and members of the company, SCS)
12:15 p.m. – Boxed lunch (courtesy of Shakespeare Workshop)
1:00 p.m. – Visiting Scholar (Eli Simon, UC Irvine)
2:00 – End of program

Sean Keilen is Professor of Literature and UC Santa Cruz, the founder of Shakespeare Workshop, and Head of Dramaturgy at Santa Cruz Shakespeare.

Charles Pasternak is Artistic Director at Santa Cruz Shakespeare, before which served as Artistic Director of The Porters of Hellsgate Theatre Co in Los Angeles for over fifteen years. He has had a wide-ranging career as an actor and director at theatres across this country including American Players Theatre, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, The Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles, three seasons with The Shakespeare Festival of St. Louis and four with Shakespeare Santa Cruz.
Eli Simon is a Chancellor’s Professor of Drama at UC Irvine, where he has served as chair and head of acting. He is the founding artistic director and managing producer of the New Swan Shakespeare Festival, UCI’s professional summer theater in residence, which presents two of Shakespeare’s plays in rotating repertory each summer. Designed and built on campus, the intimate 135-seat New Swan Theater has become a celebrated Orange County cultural destination, winning acclaim from audiences, critics and the community. In 2017, the Los Angeles Times/Daily Pilot named New Swan the premier theater company in Orange County. Simon also co-directs the New Swan Shakespeare Center, a UCI research initiative supporting scholarly and public engagement with Shakespeare.
