The Humanities Institute

Jairus Banaji Reading Group
2023-06-01 17:30 - 19:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Vernaculars of Travel in South Asia and the Middle East cluster invites you to the final event of their THI working group, which will be a reading group (5:30 – 7) and dinner (7pm – 8:30pm) on Thursday, June 1st. Please RSVP by Friday May 26th with Muriam Davis (muhdavis@ucsc.edu) to receive the readings and event location.
For the reading group, we have decided to read selections from Jairus Banaji’s work on the relationship between theory and history, commercial capitalism, and the global south. We will focus on three pieces: 1) the Appendix of his “A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism” 2) a piece on “Globalising the History of Capital” 3) an article from Historical Materialism on “Putting Theory to Work” and lastly 4) his essay on Islam and the Mediterranean. We’ve also attached 5) a piece on “Opium, Capitalism and Financial Markets.”
We’d also like to mention that Banaji will be giving a talk at UCSC on May 26th at noon (on Zoom). Zoom links will be sent out to reading group participants as soon as it is available.

Futurescapes: Projects from the Coha-Gunderson Collective
2023-06-02 - 2023-06-03 | The Institute of the Arts & Sciences Gallery, 100 Panetta Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Humanities Institute presents “Futurescapes: Projects from the Coha-Gunderson Collective,” a multi-media exhibition by UCSC students and alumni winners of the Coha-Gunderson Prize in Speculative Futures.
13 winners of the Coha-Gunderson prize in Speculative Futures, a prize competition made possible by UCSC alumni Peter Coha (Kresge ’78, Mathematics) and James Gunderson (Rachel Carson ’77, Philosophy, and UCSC Foundation Board Trustee), will exhibit creative work in a variety of media.
Schedule:

Friday, June 2: Opening & Reception 4:00-8:00pm
Saturday, June 3: 12:00-5:00 pm

The exhibition is the culmination of a year-long workshop. All prior winners—undergraduates, graduate students, and alumni from across the campus—chose to participate, and each brings their unique skills and media to the exhibit: VR, visual art, film, digital media, textual materials, and performance art. The thirteen participants met biweekly for ten weeks to dialogue with campus experts, brainstorm their projects, plan the exhibit, and discuss some of the greater existential questions that arose: how can we think of the future without idealism but also without apocalyptic pessimism? What is the purpose of socially or scientifically relevant art, and can it intervene in the precarious present? How might thinking speculatively about the past impact the present and possible futures?
Exhibitors
Aidan Andreasen (“Talos Machine”) is a third-year AGPM major & made this project for you to enjoy; Haoran Chang (“Fair Sai Re Pi VR”) is a multimedia artist and researcher who received an MFA in Digital Art and New Media at UCSC in 2021; Rafael Franco (“Future Farmers of Amerika: Poems from the Year 2054”) is a second-year PhD student in Literature at UCSC studying Gothic literature; Willow Gelphman (“Mr. Marple’s One-Way Ticket to the Great Unknown”) is a writer and visual artist who received BAs in Art and Literature from UCSC in 2021; Mitra Ghaffari (“Bicycle Island [A dónde nos lleva]”) is a second-year Social Documentation MFA student and bike guide; Chisato Hughes (“Treasure Island”) is a filmmaker based in the Bay Area working in nonfiction and hybrid, speculative forms; Ant(onia) Lorenzo (“[Au]xiology: Living Atoms”) is an interdisciplinary artist and organizer committed to practices of decolonization and reciprocity & is finishing their MFA in Environmental Art and Social Practice at UCSC; Aaron Samuel Mulenga (“Tenga Tenga, Can I Help You Carry Your Load?”) is a fourth-year PhD in History of Art and Visual Culture whose work engages with contemporary African art and the reclamation of local African histories; Chloe Rickards (“The Cordyceps Corner”) is a data analyst, visual artist, and cosplayer who received a Master’s in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from UCSC in 2022 and is interested in the more fantastical aspects of speculative futures; Oana Tenter (“Treasure Island”) is a documentary filmmaker from Romania whose work immerses her in histories that bear on the present; Lior Shamriz (“Even a Dog in Babylon is Free”) is a filmmaker and an artist based in Santa Cruz, pursuing a Ph.D. in the Film and Digital Media department at UCSC; Saul Villegas (“Deep-Sea Coral III”) is a first-year MFA candidate in DANM using art to create a revolving system from the mental, physical, and virtual environment and inviting people to participate in the viewer experience through digital mixed-media works; Jingtian Zong (“Don’t Ride Over a Crack You’ll Break Your Mother’s Back”) is an artist and researcher who probes technology and power, public space (on and offline) and collective memories through a feminist perspective, currently a first-year MFA candidate in Environmental Art and Social Practice at UCSC.
Carla Freccero, Project Coordinator, is a professor of Literature & History of Consciousness at UCSC. Hannah Newburn, PhD candidate in Literature, served as THI liaison for the collective.
* * *
Many people contributed to making this exhibition possible.
Carla Freccero wishes to thank the faculty and professional experts who visited the workshop: Christopher Connery, Lindsey Dillon, Anna Friz, Theresa Hice-Fromille, Mark Nash, Laurie Palmer, Sarah Papazoglakis, Jennifer Parker, Micah Perks, Jessica Taft, and Zac Zimmer. She also wishes to thank those who played a critical role within the project itself: Hannah Newburn, GSR for the group; Aaron Samuel Mulenga, resident curator; and Saul Villegas, coordinator of publicity and the virtual exhibit.
A special thanks goes to select members of the cluster: Alex Calderwood, Michael McCarrin, Matt Polzin, and Zac Zimmer.
Staff and Faculty in the Humanities and Arts contributed their expertise, efforts and equipment: at THI (Sharon Kinoshita, interim Faculty Director; Irena Polic, Managing Director; Saskia Nauenberg Dunkell; Jessica Guild; Hannah Newburn); in the Arts (Louise Leong and Colleen Jennings); in the Humanities (Humanities Academic Services and Yuri Cantrell, ITS and Humanities Liaison).
Thank you to the Institute for Arts and Sciences (IAS) at UC Santa Cruz (Rachel Nelson, Director and Chief Curator; Maia Kamehiro-Stockwell, Tam Welch) for the venue and so much more.
Thanks as well to Cari Napoles, Senior Director of Development for the Humanities Division.
* * *
Project Descriptions
*Aidan Andreasen, Talos Machine
Talos Machine is an interactive story set in the year 3142. The reader takes the role of a Ganymede police detective investigating the final homo sapiens’ death. To make sense of this case file, they’ll need to research everything 3142 has to offer using Omnipedia, an encyclopedia of everything. And who knows, this might be about more than a single human’s demise.
Talos Machine is an “open website” experience – readers can visit any page on Omnipedia whenever they’d like, until they’re ready to definitively solve the mystery. This case won’t be cracked by following the exploits of a main character – the reader themselves must think like a detective, as it’s up to them to connect the dots between ideas and put their theories to the test.
Central to the world of 3142 is a superintelligent AI, the Orecomp Intelligence, which possesses powers far exceeding those of any living being. It has sustained a stable solar system society for nearly 1100 years, but stable does not mean familiar. The world of Talos Machine was created from our attempts to answer a deceptively challenging question: what does it mean to be human? What is it about us, right here and right now, that we truly care about and must work to preserve?
Talos Machine was first written in 2021, when it felt like its potentially future-defining topics and questions were largely underdiscussed. A mere two years later, the concept of intelligent AI has gone mainstream. Some of the speculative futures depicted in Talos Machine might not be speculative for much longer. Our actions today will decide the sort of destiny we have before us. Talos Machine is neither a best-case nor worst-case scenario – but hopefully becoming a detective in Ganymede will get readers thinking about what kind of future they want to see.
*Haoran Chang, Fair Sai Re Pi VR
Fair Sai Re Pi VR is a multisensory VR experience that invites audiences to experience a fictional fire therapy based on the one sold by a real Chinese pyramid scheme company named QuanJian that went bankrupt in 2020 after a scandal erupted about the scheme. The experience is a reenactment of the real company, a simulation of a simulation. It performs a critique of the company’s capitalistic logic of exploitation, its solidification of hierarchy, and the values of excessive consumption, and questions the relationship between Western modernity and the philosophy of Chinese Traditional Medicine. The playful and surreal pseudo-therapy brings the contradiction between the philosophy of CTM—emphasizing wholeness—and the pyramid scheme business model with its strict hierarchical order. Fire is very common in CTM, like cupping.
This project, however, is less about the efficacy of CTM and more about how the tradition is displaced and remade in a society dominated by the ideology of technology from the West. Fire, in this VR experience, is a motif existing between “natural” fire, the fire to “cure the diseases” and “cultural” fire, the fire situated in the network of pyramid scheme structures that burns participants financially. This project is also related to a conceptual framework of “Emersive VR” that I proposed in my thesis. Different from the idea of Immersive VR, Emersive VR intends to break the singularity of virtual space. In the original version of this project, participants enter a room and lie down on a custom-made massage bed with physical mechanisms, such as a heat fan, water spray, and heat blanket, connected to the VR program Arduino (in this edited version, audience will only be immersed visually in VR). Rather than being isolated in a singular space rendered by the VR headset, bodies are situated in a liminal space between the virtual and physical, fiction and reality.
*Rafael Franco, Future Farmers of Amerika: Poems From the Year 2054
Future Farmers of Amerika: Poems From the Year 2054 is a collection of poems that gives voice to the unheard narratives of immigrant farmworkers in California’s Central Valley. Written in 2021, the collection features a diverse array of poetic forms, including epistolary, free verse, and diary entries. Audiences can also listen to readings of a selection of these poems using the corresponding QR code. Especially central to these poems is language and translation. Much narrativization of farmwork in the Central Valley gets recounted by third parties, and thus the native Spanish-speaking voices get erased, despite the fact that most Central Valley farm work is by immigrants who speak solely Spanish. This creates a tension between the English-language narratives about farm work and the actual experiences of farm workers. The inability to translate many of the words about farm work labor from Spanish to English mirrors the failure to translate farmworkers’ experiences into the English language, thus foregrounding the incomplete nature of the narratives we read and hear in the media.
The collection serves as a vessel that projects the stories of farmworkers into the future. By evoking a year in the near future, the stories hope to blur the lines between past, present, and future, all while anticipating the future itself. Together, the form, time, and language of this collection incentivize readers and listeners to diversify the perspectives from which they pay attention to the silenced voices of immigrant farm work labor. However, the collection also aims to recognize its own limitations. This exhibition is not a complete account of immigrant farm work in the Central Valley. Rather, it hopes to penetrate dominant narratives of farm work labor and production, creating a space in which to listen to the voices of immigrant farm workers. In promoting attentive listening practices, the exhibit invites viewers to carry these previously lost or forgotten literary voices into the future.
*Willow Gelphman, Mr. Marple’s One-Way Ticket to the Great Unknown
Mr. Marple’s One-Way Ticket to the Great Unknown is the epic tale of one lowly billionaire’s quest to win over an entire small, conservative, majority-straight/white town in the midwest. A mysterious wormhole appears on the outskirts of Midville, and the baffled locals are unsure what to do with it until Mr. Marple arrives with the intent to transform it into a tourist destination. He has a vision, he has a plan, and he has a particular knack for quickly dissolving dissent in whatever form it may arise.
Written in comic form, the reader gets to meet a wide cast of characters who act both individually and as a collective. There is no one main character, but rather a number of faces and storylines that thread together into a whole. While the townspeople have strength in numbers, they are limited by shortsightedness and a disbelief that anyone like Marple would do anything to threaten people like them. Their culture is dominant and their faith in their bootstraps is unwavering. While resembling Marple in all ways except power, the people of Midville are nothing but an obstacle now that they are in his way. “Mr. Marple” imagines a situation where white colonialist values “Ouroboros” themselves.
*Mitra Ghaffari, Bicycle Island [A dónde nos lleva]
In response to the transportation standstill during Cuba’s economic crisis of the 1990s, the government distributed 1.2 million bicycles in public workplaces and schools throughout the island. Havana’s city planning was temporarily organized to accommodate bike infrastructure; however, once foreign oil supply was restored, bicycles faded from view as their parts rusted, broke, and were abandoned. Bicycles became a symbol of the worst of the economic crisis and were associated with hardship and scarcity. Bicycle Island (A dónde nos lleva) offers a contemporary portrait of the bicycle as a re-adopted resource during the pandemic and a critical tool for the future of the island.
An intimate portrait of place, people, and movement, Bicycle Island displays various artistic interpretations of the bicycle, and includes collaborations with muralists, musicians, artisans, and puppeteers. These artistic representations and a mosaic of portraits of bicycle users combine to communicate the city’s history, culture, and projected future, tracing embodied associations to urban space and contrasting the bicycle with other transportation methods. Bicycle Island guides a future orientation for urban mobility on the island, archiving a collective effort to reclaim the bicycle as a central and celebrated tool of Havana’s future.
All songs were performed live by the Ensemble Interactivo de La Habana on August 2nd, 2022.
*Chisato Hughes & Oana Tenter, Treasure Island [see below]
*Ant(onia) Lorenzo, [Au]xiology: Living Atoms
(Au)xiology is a portmanteau of the symbol for the element gold, from the Latin aurum, and axiology, the study of value and valuation. It was originally a pedagogical and art-based collaboration with undergraduate students asking questions about our society’s values, the ways they are shaped, their impacts on material reality, and how art might contribute to shifting them. Within a 10-week course, students used research-based inquiry into gold’s materiality, histories, and effects to collectively analyze notions of value and dominant worldviews. In the months after the course concluded, their research has become part of a work of episodic story-telling narrated by atoms that all find themselves composing a pair of gold earrings in 2023.
This exhibition stages three episodes in the life of these atoms. The first, a decade or so from now, when a mining company scandalizes the speculative market by dusting an ore sample with gold. The second, nearly a half-century later, where the gold atoms are nanoparticles, collecting microplastics in the human bloodstream. And the third, where the atoms drift in a vast region of oceanic waters. Each of the gold’s futures is informed by a reckoning with our contemporary moment, where “gold futures” are both theoretical and traded daily.
*Aaron Samuel Mulenga, Tenga Tenga, Can I Help You Carry Your Load?
In 2021, I created a performance piece entitled Tenga Tenga, Can I Help You Carry Your Load? This performance was created to remember the Tenga Tenga, who were African porters used by the British to carry their soldiers’ equipment in the First World War. The efforts of the Tenga Tenga aided the British and Allied forces in southern Africa to win the war over the German forces. A stone cenotaph was erected in the town of Mbala in northern Zambia to commemorate the Tenga Tenga.
Through my project I aim to use speculative fiction to imagine what our present moment would look like if recognition and acknowledgement were given to the individual Africans who participated in the First World War as carriers. How would this shift the imagination of the War and who was present in it? This project utilizes installation, performance and moving image to provide an avenue for the speculative futures of the Tenga Tenga to be considered.
*Chloe Rickards, The Cordyceps Corner
The Cordyceps Corner is an interactive science station that explores a future where the Cordyceps genus of fungus evolved to infect animals. At the Cordyceps Corner, guests will examine the world from the perspective of a parasite, learn what The Last of Us got wrong, and discover the medicinal applications of a caterpillar-killing species of the fungus.
Central to this project is Cordyceps: An Illustrated Field Guide, a booklet of original watercolors and descriptions from this speculative future. The Illustrated Field Guide takes a closer look at the mechanisms of infection, the life cycle of the fungus, and the manifestation of symptoms in its hosts. The Illustrated Field Guide highlights how infectious diseases operate within an ecology – one that expands beyond humans.
Visitors will also find real samples of cordyceps, medicinal tinctures, and other materials related to the traditional medicinal use of cordyceps. Cordyceps have been a part of human history for hundreds of years. Its fruiting bodies are cultivated from caterpillars to boost the immune system and to treat fatigue and kidney problems.
The Cordyceps Corner invites you to bring a sense of childlike wonder in the face of death, decay, healing, and medicine. Ask questions, get your hands dirty, and immerse yourself in a world of fungi.
*Oana Tenter & Chisato Hughes, Treasure Island
To many in the city, San Francisco’s Treasure Island is out of sight, out of mind. Born from trash in the event of the 1939 World’s Fair, the island became host to the navy and its radiological testing during American wars abroad, and is currently a quiet, ghostly site for Section 8 housing, storage containers, transitional homes, and empty barracks. Simultaneously and urgently, the island is undergoing significant changes: highrises are being erected, transportation fares have increased, and storage buildings converted to event venues and microbreweries for city-dweller getaways. Our project aims to make these various transitions on the island visible and speculate on a future that is malleable.
Treasure Island (working title) is an experimental installation piece drawing from old archival footage from the island’s World’s Fair, naval training videos and propaganda, and recent observational footage taken with residents at Home Free, a transitional home for formerly-incarcerated survivors of domestic violence. The project invokes the island’s past histories–and its contested present as a toxic landscape–asking questions about what might be remediated from the proverbial rubble. What does (or can) healing from violence–structural, imperial, interpersonal–look like? How do we learn from past traumas and hold state bodies accountable in our orientation towards the future? These questions come about in anticipation of the island’s redevelopment into an “Eco-City of the Future,” a plan made for the island by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 2011. The exhibit consists of a three-screened installation with one running soundscape.
*Lior Shamriz, Even a Dog in Babylon is Free
In a letter written in the 7th century BC by the Babylonians to the Assyrian king Esarhaddon, the Babylonians defend the rights of foreigners in their city and call on the Assyrian king to afford them the same privileges they receive as Babylonians. They write that “even a dog, when entering the gates of Babylon, shall be protected.”
The film is constructed as a series of repetitive iterations inspired by the musical “Passacaglia” form, in which continuous variations of a base melody unfold throughout a piece. Each sequence begins with a conversation between Lior Shamriz, the film’s director, and Myriam Ali-Ahmad, a Los Angeles-based Lebanese actor. We learn that Ali-Ahmad was invited by Shamriz to act in a faux documentary as a process of world-building for Shamriz’s future project, a speculative feature film taking place in a West Asia that was never colonized by France or Britain. After the conversation, we see Myriam Ali-Ahmad in character as Souhaila, a fictional artist in the Federal States of West Asia, the entity now encompassing most of what used to be the Ottoman Empire. Souhaila is then shown working on a video poem that utilizes ancient texts. She comments on the letter the Babylonians wrote to Esarhaddon: why did the Babylonians need to denigrate the status of dogs to elevate foreigners in their city? With each iteration, the texts Souhaila is working with and her mode of engagement with them change, as the historical knowledge base in the “world” of the film modulates.
Even a Dog in Babylon is Free is an investigation of how our understanding of the past shapes our interactions with the world and of the relationship between our sense of historical linearity and our political worldview. In one of the iterations, for example, the discovery of an ancient West Asian school of thought that opposed the hierarchy between gods, people, and non-human animals prompts Souhaila to work with a different text. At the same time, the film questions our need to reevaluate the past in order to conceive different futures.
2K Video, Sound, 2023
Performers: Myriam Ali-Ahmad, Su-jin Kim Holmes, Alexandra Panzer, Mitra Ghaffari
Camera: Lior Shamriz, Hannah Jayanti
Recordist: Oana Tenter
*Saul Villegas, Deep-Sea Coral III
Environmental pollution on land shifts into the atmosphere through time and passes along the water and ecologies undersea. Deep Sea Coral III uses archival submersible footage from the Hawaiʻi Undersea Research Lab (HURL) and scientific data culled from ancient denizens of the sea comprising a biological archive for oceanographers of “multi-millennial timescales.” Extracted artifacts, such as deep-sea coral, serve as paleo-recorders of biogeochemical information. Thinking of that microenvironment that accumulates in geological time and looking for a way of seeing these archives through a multi-spatial perspective, I designed an immersive virtual world representing the deep sea.
My process begins by placing authentic artifacts in a virtual environment to re-create the sensation of submersible dives through digital media. Deep-Sea Coral III invites viewers to engage with these altered photographs and video footage through the speculative lens of the underwater world. My goal is to inspire future researchers to find new ways to reimagine deep-sea archives and ways to exhibit such archival materials for those who remain above.
*Jingtian Zong, Don’t Ride Over a Crack, You’ll Break Your Mother’s Back
Don’t Ride Over a Crack, You’ll Break Your Mother’s Back is a two-channel video and installation that investigates cracks in the American road infrastructure from an outsider’s perspective. Channeling the artist’s testimony of a bike accident in Santa Cruz to the history of U.S. highway development, the project tests the speculative ground upon which our contemporary reality is constructed and the twisted relationship between the two.
Its title adapted from a popular rhyme among American children, “Step on a Crack, Break Your Mother’s Back,” the project asks: Which bodies do a failed road infrastructure impact the most? A suspected alternative version of the rhyme, “Step on a Crack, and Your Mother Will Turn Black” (or in some sources, “You Would Marry A Black Person”), indicates a backdrop of how cracks might, in both material and symbolic forms, target certain bodies rather than others. Surrounded by journalistic photos of its socio-geographical context, the crack over which the artist had their bike accident is transplanted into the IAS gallery and invites contemplation at the intersection of social responsibility, mobility, and vulnerability.
Where is the boundary between the private and the public? Taking the U.S. highway system as its test field, the project poses this question that has become increasingly important in the post-pandemic era, and that immigrant narratives often further complicate. In the 2-channel video, images of early Fordism productions and Futurama, the 1939 New York World’s Fair, are juxtaposed with footage of cracked roads in Santa Cruz and on the artist – an Asian woman’s skin, exploring how the private and the public, although often kept separate, are deeply intertwined.

Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC)
2023-06-02 14:00 - 17:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Linguistics Department’s annual Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC) will be held Friday, June 2nd, from 2:00 – 5:00pm in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge & Courtyard. The Distinguished Alumnus speaker will be Caroline Andrews who is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Zurich. We hope you will attend.

Bookshop Santa Cruz Presents: Stacey Abrams, Rogue Justice
2023-06-04 19:00 - 21:00 | Rio Theater, 1205 Soquel Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95062, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz is thrilled to welcome #1 New York Times bestselling author and political leader Stacey Abrams to discuss her new book Rogue Justice and the craft of writing. This event will take place at the Rio Theatre (1205 Soquel Avenue, Santa Cruz) and is cosponsored by NAACP Santa Cruz County, The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, and the Santa Cruz Community Credit Union.

NOTE: Limited tickets available—purchase today! Venue size selected by the author.
ROGUE JUSTICE: The #1 New York Times bestselling author of While Justice Sleeps returns with another riveting and intricately plotted thriller, in which a blackmailed federal judge, a secret court and a brazen murder may lead to an unprecedented national crisis. Drawn from today’s headlines and woven with her unique insider perspective, Stacey Abrams combines twisting plotlines, wry wit, and clever puzzles to create another immensely entertaining suspense novel.
STACEY ABRAMS is a New York Times bestselling author, entrepreneur and political leader. She served as Minority Leader in the Georgia House of Representatives, and she was the first black woman to become gubernatorial nominee for a major party in United States history. Abrams has launched multiple nonprofit organizations devoted to democracy protection, voting rights, and effective public policy. She has also co-founded successful companies, including a financial services firm, an energy and infrastructure consulting firm, and the media company, Sage Works Productions, Inc.

Luis Alberto Urrea - Good Night, Irene
2023-06-06 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz is delighted to welcome bestselling author Luis Alberto Urrea (The House of Broken Angels) back to the store for a reading and signing of his new novel Good Night, Irene, which was inspired by his own family’s history: his mother’s heroism as a Red Cross volunteer during World War II. This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
“Good Night, Irene is a beautiful, heartfelt novel that celebrates the intense power and durability of female friendship while shining a light on one of the fascinating lost women’s stories of World War II.” —Kristin Hannah

What if a friendship forged on the front lines of war defines a life forever? In the tradition of The Nightingale and Transcription, Good Night, Irene is a searing epic based on the magnificent and true story of heroic Red Cross women.
In 1943, Irene Woodward abandons an abusive fiance in New York to enlist with the Red Cross and head to Europe. She makes fast friends in training with Dorothy Dunford, a towering Midwesterner with a ferocious wit. Together they are part of an elite group of women, nicknamed Donut Dollies, who command military vehicles called Clubmobiles at the font line, providing camaraderie and a tast of home that may be the only solace before troops head into battle.
After D-Day, these two intrepid friends join the Allied soldiers streaming into France. Their time in Europe will see them embroiled in danger, from the Battle of the Bulge to the liberation of Buchenwald. Through her friendship with Dororothy and a love affair with a courageous American fighter pilot named Hans, Irene learns to trust again. Her most fervent hope, which becomes more precarious by the day, is for all three of them to survive the war intact.
Taking as inspiration his mother’s own Red Cross service, Luis Alberto Urrea has delivered an overlooked story of women’s heroism in World War II. With its affecting and uplifting portrait of friendship and valor in harrowing circumstances, Good Night, Irene powerfully demonstrates yet again that Urrea’s “gifts as a storyteller are prodigious” (NPR).
A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his landmark work of nonfiction The Devil’s Highway, now in its 30th paperback printing, Luis Alberto Urrea is the author of numerous other works of nonfiction, poetry, and fiction, including the national bestsellers The Hummingbird’s Daughter and The House of Broken Angels, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. A recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, among many other honors, he lives outside Chicago and teachers at the University of Illinois Chicago.

The Deep Read: Community Salon
2023-06-07 18:00 - 20:00 | The Seymour Marine Discovery Center, 100 McAllister Way, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
On June 7, we’ll be hosting a salon—co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute and Lookout Santa Cruz—focused on actions we can all take in the face of climate change. Ecology Action, Elkhorn Slough Foundation, and Regeneración Pajaro Valley will lead the discussion moderated by UCSC Professor of Humanities and Journalism Jody Biehl.

Not in Santa Cruz? Register for Zoom access.

About The Deep Read
This event is part of The Humanities Institute’s Deep Read Program that invites curious minds to think deeply about literature, art, and the most pressing issues of our day. We read books from a wide range of genres, exploring their implications on our politics, inner lives, and communities.

Bookshop Santa Cruz presents: An evening with Ocean Vuong
2023-06-08 19:00 - 20:30 | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
In this deeply intimate second poetry collection (in paperback June 6th), Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother’s death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong contends with personal loss, the meaning of family, and the cost of being the product of an American war in America. At once vivid, brave, and propulsive, Vuong’s poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicenter of the break.
The author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds, winner of the 2016 Whiting Award, the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize, and a 2019 MacArthur fellow, Vuong writes directly to our humanity without losing sight of the current moment. These poems represent a more innovative and daring experimentation with language and form, illuminating how the themes we perennially live in and question are truly inexhaustible. Bold and prescient, and a testament to tenderness in the face of violence, Time Is a Mother is a return and a forging forth all at once. This event is presented by Bookshop Santa Cruz, and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute.

Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds and the New York Times bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. A recipient of the 2019 MacArthur “Genius Grant,” he is also the winner of the Whiting Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize. His writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.
PRAISE:
“Piercing . . . The poems in Time Is a Mother give us a path to examine the complexities of what it means to lose a mother, and what it means to embrace family and the self even when we want to look away. In Vuong’s tender yet unflinching words, we are reminded that only a mother can carry a beating heart within her body.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“Like Orpheus descending into the underworld, Vuong takes us to the white-hot limits of his grief, writing with visionary fervor about love, agony, and time . . . Aesthetically ambitious and ferociously original . . . Here, he breaks open and rebuilds.” —Esquire, “The Best Books of Spring 2022”
“That’s the essence of Vuong’s talent: he alchemizes deeply individual experiences with universal emotions into what is both familiar and new. . . . We need no more proof of Vuong’s importance in the poetic canon.” —Chicago Review of Books

Ecological Utopia: From the Victorians to Us with Professor Deanna K. Kreisel
2023-06-10 13:00 - 15:00 | Virtual Event
Please join the Friends of the Dickens Project for our spring Friends Faculty Fellowship talk series by Associate Professor Deanna K. Kreisel (University of Mississippi) who will be discussing “Ecological Utopia: From the Victorians to Us.”
Over the course of three sessions, we will have an opportunity to explore Victorian responses to their changing environment, with a particular focus on William Morris’s utopian novel News from Nowhere.
Virtual Sessions | Zoom Registration

April 8: Research Talk: It’s the End of the World and We Know It: Ecological Grief and the Work of Utopia
May 6: William Morris’ News from Nowhere, Chapters 1-20
June 10: Discussion: News from Nowhere Chapters 21-32, excerpts from Half-Earth Socialism by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass

The first session will consist of a presentation about my current research. I am currently working on a book entitled It’s the End of the World and We Know It: Ecological Grief and the Work of Utopia, which is about ecological mourning and utopian thinking from the Victorian period to the present. The book begins with a discussion of the ‘utopia craze’ of the late 19th century—of which Morris’s novel was a key part—and also discusses the work of John Ruskin and other early environmentalist writers. The latter part of the book explores recent and present-day responses to ecological change, including literary responses, and considers our own “ecological mourning” as a legacy of Victorian thinking. It ends with a discussion of recent on-the-ground ecotopian experiments.
The second and third sessions will consist of an in-depth discussion of News from Nowhere. In Session Two we will discuss the first half of Morris’s novel and contemporary Victorian responses to it; in the final session we will discuss the second half of the novel alongside some short excerpts from recent writers on climate grief and ecotopia.
Deanna Kreisel is Associate Professor of English and co-director of Environmental Studies at the University of Mississippi. She is the author of ‘Economic Woman: Demand, Gender, and Narrative Closure in Eliot and Hardy,’ as well as articles on Victorian literature and culture in PMLA, Representations, ELH, Novel, Mosaic, Victorian Studies, Nineteenth Century Literature, and elsewhere. She is the co-editor, along with Devin Griffiths, of a special Victorian Literature and Culture issue on “Open Ecologies” and the volume ‘After Darwin: Literature, Theory, and Criticism in the Twenty-First Century.’

Ottessa Moshfegh, Lapvona
2023-06-21 19:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Presented by Bookshop Santa Cruz, Ottessa Moshfegh (My Year of Rest and Relaxation) will discuss her recent novel Lapvona, available in paperback June 20th. In a village in a medieval fiefdom buffeted by natural disasters, a motherless shepherd boy finds himself the unlikely pivot of a power struggle that puts all manner of faith to a savage test.
Little Marek, the abused and delusional son of the village shepherd, never knew his mother; his father told him she died in childbirth. One of life’s few consolations for Marek is his enduring bond with the blind village midwife, Ina, who suckled him when he was a baby, as she did so many of the village’s children. Ina’s gifts extend beyond childcare: she possesses a unique ability to communicate with the natural world. Her gift often brings her the transmission of sacred knowledge on levels far beyond those available to other villagers, however religious they might be. For some people, Ina’s home in the woods outside of the village is a place to fear and to avoid, a godless place.
Among their number is Father Barnabas, the town priest and lackey for the depraved lord and governor, Villiam, whose hilltop manor contains a secret embarrassment of riches. The people’s desperate need to believe that there are powers that be who have their best interests at heart is put to a cruel test by Villiam and the priest, especially in this year of record drought and famine. But when fate brings Marek into violent proximity to the lord’s family, new and occult forces upset the old order. By year’s end, the veil between blindness and sight, life and death, the natural world and the spirit world, will prove to be very thin indeed.

Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from New England. Eileen, her first novel, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Death in Her Hands, her second and third novels, were New York Times bestsellers. She is also the author of the short story collection Homesick for Another World and a novella, McGlue. She lives in Southern California.
Micah Perks is the author of a memoir, a short story collection, and two novels. Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the New Guard Machigonne 2014 Fiction Prize, residencies at Blue Mountain Center and MacDowell, and the Independent Publisher’s Gold Medal. The Guardian included her last book in the Top Ten Novels about the Apocalypse. She directs the creative writing program at UCSC.
This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

Dickensland: The Curious History of Dickens's London
2023-06-25 13:00 | Virtual Event
Please join the Santa Cruz Dickens Fellowship and the Santa Cruz Pickwick Club for our June Pickwick Club talk by author and historian Lee Jackson who will be discussing Dickens’s London.
Lee Jackson, author of Dickensland (Yale, 2023) will discuss the curious history of London’s Dickensian tourist destinations. Louisa May Alcott, visiting in 1866, was typical of the innumerable American tourists who would arrive in subsequent decades, enraptured by the dream-like quality of the Victorian metropolis seen through a Dickensian lens (‘I felt as if I’d got into a novel’). But did tourists truly encounter ‘Dickens’s London’ or merely a ‘Dickensland’ shaped by the demands of Dickens fandom (dubbed by Victorian newspapers ‘The Dickens Cult’) and canny heritage entrepreneurs?

Lee Jackson is an author and historian, creator of the popular online sourcebook of Victoriana ‘The Dictionary of Victorian London‘ and an academic advisor to the Charles Dickens Museum. His previous non-fiction books include Dirty Old London (Yale, 2014) and Palaces of Pleasure (Yale, 2019).
If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to reach out at dpj@ucsc.edu

Santa Cruz Shakespeare 2023 Season Opening Night
2023-07-13 | 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 2023 season, featuring The Book of Will and The Taming of the Shrew. Co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute. The season runs from July 13-August 27.

The Book of Will, by Lauren Gunderson – Directed by Laura Gordon
A love letter to William Shakespeare, this moving and joyful comedy tells the story of the two actors, friends of Shakespeare’s, who worked to preserve his plays and legacy seven years after his death. This beat-the-clock race to collect all of Shakespeare’s plays into one book delights audiences with a tale full of color characters, and provides a glimpse into a little known story about how his work survives and thrives to this day. SCS’s production of The Book of Will is part of a year-long celebration honoring the 400th anniversary of the printing of the First Folio and stars out-going Artistic Director Mike Ryan, and in-coming Artistic Director Charles Pasternak.
The Taming of the Shrew, by William Shakespeare – Directed by Robynn Rodriguez
One of Shakespeare’s most raucous comedies, in The Taming of the Shrew characters struggle against the roles they have been prescribed by gender, class, or age. While the results of these struggles provide some of the most hilarious moments in the canon, they also leave us with unsettling questions about the human cost of maintaining the status quo. Thorny, funny, and deeply human, Kate and Petruchio are two of Shakespeare’s most fascinating characters. Out of place because of their honesty in a world of deception, can these two broken people find happiness where they least expect it?

Dickens Universe: A Tale of Two Cities
2023-07-22 - 2023-07-29 | UCSC
The Dickens Universe is a unique cultural event that brings together scholars, teachers, students, and members of the general public for a week of stimulating discussion and festive social activity on the beautiful Santa Cruz campus of the University of California—all focused on one or two Victorian novels, usually (but not always) one by Charles Dickens.
In 2023, the Dickens Universe will feature A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. A historical novel set in London and Paris at the time of the French Revolution, its plot involves many sensational and melodramatic elements: imprisonment in the Bastille and the bloody Reign of Terror; lost children and body doubles; heroism and sacrifice.
Yet contained within this plot are resonances that pull readers beyond England and France, and beyond the temporal frames of one, albeit momentous, historical conflict. Comparison and doubling abound, as the title’s two (European) cities multiply outward, toward Bombay (now Mumbai), Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic), Victoria (Australia), Santiago (Chile). Likewise, the revolution in question is not limited to the Napoleonic Wars, but manifold, involving civil unrest and violent uprisings both domestic (the Chartist movement) and abroad, from Jamaica to the US, South Asia, the Antipodes, and beyond (as in the 1946 propaganda film A Tale of Two Cities about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki).
Now in its 42nd year of operation, the Dickens Universe combines features of a scholarly conference, a festival, a book club, and summer camp. Participants include people of all ages and walks of life—distinguished scholars, graduate students, undergraduates, retirees, young professionals, high school teachers, anyone who loves to read and who enjoys long Victorian novels.

Here are some of the things that make the Universe such a special experience.

The college lifestyle: participants live on campus, eat together in the student dining hall, have time to meet and come to know each other in different ways.
Everyone is reading the same book. We all have this one important thing in common.
The range of activities—formal lectures, small discussion groups, films, daily Victorian teas, performances, and Victorian dancing.
The Universe offers a week of total immersion in the world of Victorian fiction with friendly, like-minded colleagues in a beautiful setting. Whether we’re returning to a Dickens novel that everyone knows and loves, or branching out into a Victorian novel by another author who might be less familiar, during the Universe we build a community out of our passion for reading, talking with one another, and bringing Victorian culture to life.

The Universe offers a week of total immersion in the world of Victorian fiction with friendly, like-minded colleagues in a beautiful setting. Whether we’re returning to a Dickens novel that everyone knows and loves, or branching out into a Victorian novel by another author who might be less familiar, during the Universe we build a community out of our passion for reading, talking with one another, and bringing Victorian culture to life.
The Dickens Project is a Multi-campus Research Unit (MRU) of the University of California. Its research activities have been supported by extramural grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. Department of Education, the California Council for the Humanities, the California Arts Council, the Exxon Education Foundation, dues from member schools, and private gifts. Activities for the general public are supported in part by contributions to a private, non-profit organization, the Friends of the Dickens Project.

The Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music
2023-07-30 - 2023-08-13 | Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, even at a seasoned 60 years old, is all about the new—the here and now of contemporary works for orchestra. To quote Financial Times music critic Allan Ulrich, “…in the surf mecca of Santa Cruz, 75 miles south of San Francisco, the Cabrillo Festival has made the contemporary repertoire sound urgent, indispensable and even sexy.”
The 2023 season runs from July 30-August 13. Please visit https://cabrillomusic.org/ for more info.
In late July and early August each year, audiences are joined by both preeminent and emerging composers, spectacular guest artists, and an orchestra of dedicated professional musicians from across the globe to give voice to works which are rarely more than a year or two old, and sometimes still wet on the page. The opportunity for composers to work with musicians skilled and enthusiastic about bringing these new works to life, in the beautiful, coastal college-town of Santa Cruz, California, makes this an artistic paradise. With a professional training workshop for early career conductors and composers, open rehearsals almost daily, educational programming, and much more, the Cabrillo Festival has dozens of opportunities for meaningful engagement.
In 2017 the Festival embarked on a new era of artistic leadership with the appointment of Music Director and Conductor Cristian Macelaru. Past music directors include Marin Alsop (1992-2016, now Music Director Laureate), John Adams (1991), Dennis Russel Davies (1974-1990), Aaron Copland (1978), Carlos Chavez (1970-1973), Gerhard Samuel (1963-1968). More information on the Festival’s history can be found here.
The 2023 Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music is co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute.

Weekend With Shakespeare
2023-08-04 - 2023-08-05 | UCSC Arboretum
Join Shakespeare scholars and artists for two days of lectures, discussions, and demonstrations about the 2023 Season’s main stage productions, The Taming of the Shrew and King Lear.
The Weekend with Shakespeare Lecture Series is free, however seating is limited! Please email Rebecca Clark, Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s Education Coordinator, at rebecca@santacruzshakespeare.org, to reserve your spot.
Please see schedule for Weekend with Shakespeare below (subject to change). Weekend with Shakespeare is sponsored in partnership with Santa Cruz Shakespeare.
Lecture Series on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew: Friday, August 4

12-12:15 Welcome
12:15-1:15 In conversation with actors from The Taming of the Shrew
1:15-1:30 Break
1:30-2:30 In conversation with Katie O’Hare, dramaturg of The Taming of the Shrew, and Rebecca Clark, Education Programs Manager, Santa Cruz Shakespeare
2:30-3:00 Break with refreshments
3:00-4:00 Presentation on The Taming of the Shrew by Katherine Steele Brokaw, Associate Professor of English and Co-Founding Artistic Director, Shakespeare in Yosemite (UC Merced)

For those who have purchased a ticket to see the evening performance of The Taming of the Shrew:

7:00-7:15 Pre-performance discussion of ‘5 Things to Look Out For’ with Katherine Steele Brokaw
8:00 Performance of The Taming of the Shrew at The Grove.

Lecture Series on Shakespeare’s King Lear: Saturday, August 5

12-12:15 Welcome
12:15-1:15 In conversation with Paul Whitworth about King Lear
1:15-1:30 Break
1:30-2:30 In conversation with Dr. Ariane Helou, dramaturg of King Lear, Dr. Philippa Kelly, Resident Dramaturg for the California Shakespeare Theater and Adjunct Professor of Theater at Mills College and San Jose State University, and Dr. Michael Warren, Emeritus Professor of Literature (UC Santa Cruz) and Textual Consultant, Santa Cruz Shakespeare
2:30-3:00 Break with refreshments
3:00-4:00 Presentation on King Lear by Sean Keilen, Professor of Literature and Director of Shakespeare Workshop (UC Santa Cruz) and Head of Dramaturgy, Santa Cruz Shakespeare

For those who have purchased a ticket to see the evening performance of King Lear:

7-7:15 Pre-performance discussion of ‘5 Things to Look Out For’ with Sean Keilen
8:00 Performance of King Lear at The Grove

* Parking is limited at the UCSC Arboretum. Carpooling is encouraged!
* Light refreshments will be served, but feel free to bring lunch.
Katherine Steele Brokaw is Associate Professor of English at UC Merced. She the author of Staging Harmony: Music and Religious Change in Late Medieval English Drama (2016), which won the David Bevington Award for best new book in early English drama studies. She is also the co-founder of Shakespeare in Yosemite, which produces free Shakespeare in Yosemite National Park every April with a combination of student, professional, and community actors, and of EarthShakes Alliance, which brings together eco-minded theaters from around the world.
Sean Keilen is Professor of Literature and UC Santa Cruz, the founder of Shakespeare Workshop, and Head of Dramaturgy at Santa Cruz Shakespeare.

Susan Casey: The Underworld
2023-08-08 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
FREE IN-STORE EVENT: Bookshop welcomes New York Times bestselling author Susan Casey (The Wave) for a discussion of The Underworld, her awe-inspiring portrait of the mysterious world beneath the waves, and of the men and women who seek to uncover its secrets.
“A fascinating account of the ocean below its twilight zone.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review
This event is cosponsored by Seymour Marine Discovery Center Santa Cruz and The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

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For all of human history, the deep ocean has been a source of wonder and terror, an unknown realm that evoked a singular, compelling question: What’s down there? Unable to answer this for centuries, people believed the deep was a sinister realm of fiendish creatures and deadly peril. But now, cutting-edge technologies allow scientists and explorers to dive miles beneath the surface, and we are beginning to understand this strange and exotic underworld: A place of soaring mountains, smoldering volcanoes, and valleys 7,000 feet deeper than Everest is high, where tectonic plates collide and separate, and extraordinary life forms operate under different rules. Far from a dark void, the deep is a vibrant realm that’s home to pink gelatinous predators and shimmering creatures a hundred feet long and ancient animals with glass skeletons and sharks that live for half a millennium–among countless other marvels.
Susan Casey is our premiere chronicler of the aquatic world. For The Underworld she traversed the globe, joining scientists and explorers on dives to the deepest places on the planet, interviewing the marine geologists, marine biologists, and oceanographers who are searching for knowledge in this vast unseen realm. She takes us on a fascinating journey through the history of deep-sea exploration, from the myths and legends of the ancient world to storied shipwrecks we can now reach on the bottom, to the first intrepid bathysphere pilots, to the scientists who are just beginning to understand the mind-blowing complexity and ecological importance of the quadrillions of creatures who live in realms long thought to be devoid of life.
Throughout this journey, she learned how vital the deep is to the future of the planet, and how urgent it is that we understand it in a time of increasing threats from climate change, industrial fishing, pollution, and the mining companies that are also exploring its depths. The Underworld is Susan Casey’s most beautiful and thrilling book yet, a gorgeous evocation of the natural world and a powerful call to arms.
Susan Casey, author of New York Times bestseller’s Voices in the Ocean, The Wave, and The Devil’s Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America’s Great White Sharks and is the former editor in chief of O, The Oprah Magazine. She is a National Magazine Award-winning journalist whose work has been featured in the Best American Science and Nature Writing, Best American Sports Writing, and Best American Magazine Writing anthologies; and has appeared in Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, and Outside.

Slugs and Steins with Professor Eric Porter: What Can We Learn from the Airport?
2023-08-14 18:30 - 20:00 | Virtual Event
For many people, airports may seem like alienating “nonplaces”—as anthropologist Marc Augé put it—where we rush to make connections and spend long, monotonous hours waiting for delayed flights. But airports are fascinating sites that can tell us a lot about the places where they are situated. Among other things, they are complex infrastructures where people, the built and natural environments, and different kinds of networks come together. Airports are also sites of accumulated power in a given region. Looking at the history of an airport, then, can provide a airport useful lens for examining some of the complex, interconnected forces that have influenced the development of its region over time. Exploring that history can also help us understand how differently positioned people in that place have abided, resisted, and otherwise negotiated the powerful forces that have shaped their lives. In this talk, Eric Porter will discuss San Francisco International Airport (SFO) as a site whose history reveals important perspectives on a wide range of phenomena that have helped to make the Bay Area. Along the way he will read excerpts from his new book, A People’s History of SFO: The Making of the Bay Area and an Airport.

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

Leaning Toward Light: An Evening of Poetry with Tess Taylor, Danusha Laméris & Ellen Bass
2023-08-31 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
FREE IN-STORE EVENT: Bookshop welcomes poets Tess Taylor, Danusha Laméris, and Ellen Bass for a reading of their beautiful anthology Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens & the Hands that Tend Them, an inviting selection of poems from a wide range of voices that speak to the collective urge to grow, tend, and heal—an evocative celebration of our connection to the green world.
This event is cosponsored by The Hive Poetry Collective and The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
“This collection brings together many of my favorite writers to celebrate the limitless offerings of nature; wandering through its pages feels like taking a long stroll through a beautiful garden.”
— Alice Waters, chef, author, food activist, and founder of Chez Panisse and the Edible Schoolyard Project
“As Aimee Nezhukamatathil reminds us in the delightful and informative foreword to this bountiful collection, the word anthology means a gathering of flowers. How perfect is this bouquet! Diverse and delightful. At turns, tender and tough. I’m sure I’ll be reading the poems gathered in this anthology for years to come.”
— Camille T. Dungy, author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden

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Much like reading a good poem, caring for plants brings comfort, solace, and joy to many. In this new poetry anthology, Leaning Toward Light, acclaimed poet and avid gardener Tess Taylor brings together a diverse range of contemporary voices to offer poems that celebrate that joyful connection to the natural world. Several of the most well-known contemporary writers, as well as some of poetry’s exciting rising stars, contribute to this collection including Ross Gay, Jericho Brown, Mark Doty, Jane Hirshfield, Ada Limón, Danusha Laméris, Naomi Shihab Nye, Garrett Hongo, Ellen Bass, and James Crews. A foreword by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, reflective pauses and personal recipes from some of the contributing poets, along with original, whimsical illustrations by Melissa Castrillon, and a ribbon bookmark complete this stunning, hardcover gift format.
Tess Taylor, an avid gardener, is the author of five acclaimed collections of poetry including Work & Days, which was named one of the 10 best books of poetry of 2016 by the New York Times. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Times Literary Supplement, CNN, and the New York Times. Taylor has been Distinguished Fulbright US Scholar at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Queen’s University in Northern Ireland, and the Anne Spencer Poet-in-Residence at Randolph College. She has also served as on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered for over a decade. Taylor lives in El Cerrito, California, where she tends to fruit trees and backyard chickens.
Danusha Laméris’ first book, The Moons of August (2014), was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Book Award. Some of her work has been published in: The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Orion, The American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. Her second book, Bonfire Opera, (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pitt Poetry Series), was a finalist for the 2021 Paterson Poetry Award and the winner of the Northern California Book Award in Poetry. A recipient of the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award, and the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, California, she currently co-leads Poetry of Resilience webinars with James Crews, as well as the HearthFire Writing Community, and is on the faculty of Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA program.
Ellen Bass is co-author of the best-selling The Courage to Heal, which has sold more than one million copies and has been translated into nine languages. She has also published several volumes of poetry, including The Human Line and Indigo, and her poems have appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and The New Republic. A Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she lives in Santa Cruz, and teaches in the MFA program at Pacific University.

Nina Simon: Mother - Daughter Murder Night
2023-09-05 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes local author Nina Simon for a launch event to celebrate her captivating new novel, Mother-Daughter Murder Night—a fun, fresh, and twisty debut whodunnit about a grandmother-mother-daughter trio who come together as amateur sleuths to solve a murder in their coastal California town. This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
“A mysterious murder set in the tranquil waters of Elkhorn Slough is not the only tension of local writer Nina Simon’s exquisite debut novel. It is the fraught, but ultimately loving and powerful relationship between three generations of women who work to solve the crime that gives this story the heart to match the suspense. Filled with wit, adventure, emotional insight, and an abundance of nature from our beloved shores, this page-turning mystery is the height of effective storytelling.” —Casey Coonerty Protti, owner Bookshop Santa Cruz
“Nina Simon’s Mother-Daughter Murder Night is the rarest of novels. A lively and tender story of family that Simon deftly transforms into an edge-of-your-seat murder mystery set against the polarizing backdrop of land conservation, no novel has ever made family drama (or murder) this much fun. One part The Maid and one part family drama à la The Nest, Mother-Daughter Murder Night is a resounding and impressive triumph. I fell in love with Tiny, Lana, and Beth immediately, and so will you.” —Katy Hays, New York Times bestselling author of The Cloisters

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Thank you for registering!
Nothing brings an estranged family together like a murder next door. High-powered businesswoman Lana Rubicon has a lot to be proud of: her keen intelligence, impeccable taste, and the L.A. real estate empire she’s built. But when she finds herself trapped 300 miles north of the city, convalescing in a sleepy coastal town with her adult daughter Beth and teenage granddaughter Jack, Lana is stuck counting otters instead of square footage—and hoping that boredom won’t kill her before the cancer does. Then Jack—tiny in stature but fiercely independent—stumbles upon a dead body while kayaking near their bungalow. Jack quickly becomes a suspect in the homicide investigation, and the Rubicon women are thrown into chaos. Beth thinks Lana should focus on recovery, but Lana has a better idea. She’ll pull on her wig, find the true murderer, protect her family, and prove she still has power. With Jack and Beth’s help, Lana uncovers a web of lies, family vendettas, and land disputes lurking beneath the surface of a community populated by folksy conservationists and wealthy ranchers. But as their amateur snooping advances into ever-more dangerous territory, the headstrong Rubicon women must learn do the one thing they’ve always resisted: depend on each other.
Nina Simon has worn many hats: NASA engineer, slam poet, mystery game designer, museum director, and global nonprofit founder. She is an Ashoka fellow and the founder of OF/BY/FOR ALL, a global nonprofit that creates digital tools to help civic and cultural organizations become more inclusive, relevant, and sustainable. Nina is an in-demand writer and speaker about community participation in museums, libraries, parks, and theaters. Her work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, NPR, and on the TEDx stage. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Nina now lives off-the-grid in the Santa Cruz mountains with her husband and daughter. Mother-Daughter Murder Night is her first novel.

Public Philosophy Network Conference
2023-09-08 - 2023-09-10 | UC Santa Cruz
The 7th Public Philosophy Network Conference, on the theme of “Facing Technology: The Role of Public Philosophy,” will be hosted by the Center for Public Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in partnership with the Baskin School of Engineering and the UC Santa Cruz Humanities Division. The conference is co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute.
For the full schedule, conference information, and registration, please visit: https://www.publicphilosophynetwork.net/

Slugs and Steins with Professor Sharon Kinoshita - Rediscovering Marco Polo
2023-09-11 18:30 - 20:00 | Virtual Event
Few medieval figures enjoy greater name recognition than Marco Polo. Today, he is a brand whose name connotes exoticism, adventure, and East-West travel; academic critics sometime see him as the precursor to European explorers who cast a colonizing gaze over non-Western parts of the world. The source of all these images is the book usually known in English translation as “The Travels.” In this talk, Professor Kinoshita returns his work to its original title, The Description of the World (in Old French, Le Devisement du monde). Composed by the Venetian merchant in collaboration with an Arthurian romance writer named Rustichello of Pisa in 1298, The Description comes at the midpoint of a remarkable century when the Mongol conquests of Chinggis Khan and his successors, resulting in the largest contiguous empire in history, had produced a world of unprecedented travel, communication, and interaction. Our Slugs & Steins lecture will explore some of the most interesting, curious, and surprising aspects of that world.

Sharon Kinoshita is Professor of Literature at UCSC, specializing in medieval French literature (including the earliest Arthurian romances of figures like Lancelot and Perceval), Mediterranean Studies, and the Global Middle Ages. Her work on Marco Polo includes an annotated translation of the earliest surviving version of his Description of the World (Hackett, 2016), numerous essays exploring various aspects of his world (the silk trade, multilingualism, animals), and a book forthcoming in Reaktion Press’s new series, “Medieval Lives.” She recently contributed the blogpost “On the Road with Marco Polo” to The Humanities Institute’s 2022-2023 series on Travel.
Slugs and Steins are free informal lectures served up over Zoom. Brought to you by the UC Santa Cruz Alumni Association, each talk will engage one of our favorite professors in discussion with you, the local community of Silicon Valley, and beyond. We will cover everything from organic artichokes to endangered zebras, self-driving cars to Shakespeare. All are welcome. Audience participation is encouraged.
Questions? Contact the UC Santa Cruz University Events office at specialevents@ucsc.edu.

Jane Hirshfield - The Asking: New & Selected Poems
2023-09-18 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes acclaimed poet Jane Hirshfield for a reading and signing of her collection, The Asking: New & Selected Poems. This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
The Asking is the long-awaited new and selected collection by the author of “some of the most important poetry in the world today” (The New York Times Magazine), assaying the ranges of our shared and borrowed lives: our bonds of eros and responsibilities to the planet; the singing dictions and searchlight dimensions of perception; the willing plunge into an existence both perishing and beloved, dazzling “even now, even here.”

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Thank you for registering!
In an era of algorithm, assertion, silo, and induced distraction, Jane Hirshfield’s poems bring a much-needed awakening response, actively countering narrowness. The Asking takes its title from the close of one of its thirty-one new poems: “don’t despair of this falling world, not yet / didn’t it give you the asking.” Interrogating language and life, pondering beauty amid bewilderment and transcendence amid transience, Hirshfield offers a signature investigation of the conditions, contradictions, uncertainties, and astonishments that shape our existence. A leading advocate for the biosphere and the alliance of science and imagination, she brings to both inner and outer quandaries an abiding compass: the choice to embrace what is, to face with courage, curiosity, and a sense of kinship whatever comes.
In poems that consider the smallest ant and the vastness of time, hunger and bounty, physics, war, and love in myriad forms, this collection–drawing from nine previous books and five decades of writing–brings the insights and slant-lights that come to us only through poetry’s arc, delve, and tact; through a vision both close and sweeping; through music-inflected thought and recombinant leap.
With its quietly magnifying brushwork and numinous clarities, The Asking expands our awareness of both breakage’s grief and the possibility for repair.
Jane Hirshfield is the author of ten collections of poetry and two now-classic collections of essays on poetry’s deep workings, and the editor of four co-translated books presenting world poets from the deep past. Hirshfield is one of American poetry’s central spokespersons for concerns about the biosphere and interconnection. Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations and from the Academy of American Poets; the Poetry Center Book Award and the California Book Award; her books have been long- and finalist-listed for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. Her work, translated into seventeen languages, appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and ten editions of The Best American Poetry. A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2019.

James Ellroy - The Enchanters
2023-09-19 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes bestselling author James Ellroy (American Tabloid, LA Confidential, My Dark Places) for a reading and signing of his new book The Enchanters, “A descent into the conspiracy hellhole of Hollywood in the early 1960s.” —Kirkus Reviews. This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
“Ellroy masterfully orchestrates his vast array of subplots to create a tour de force of vibe and atmosphere. That ambience, plus his signature jazzy turns of phrase, will thrill longtime fans. . . . Fascinating … a hell of a ride.” —Publishers Weekly

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James Ellroy—Demon Dog of American Letters—goes straight to the tragic heart of 1962 Hollywood with a wild riff on the Marilyn Monroe death myth in an astonishing, behind-the-headlines crime epic.
Los Angeles, August 4, 1962. The city broils through a midsummer heat wave. Marilyn Monroe ODs. A B-movie starlet is kidnapped. The overhyped LAPD overreacts. Chief Bill Parker’s looking for some getback. The Monroe deal looks like a moneymaker. He calls in Freddy Otash.
The freewheeling Freddy O: tainted ex-cop, defrocked private eye, dope fiend, and freelance extortionist. A man who lives by the maxim “Opportunity is love.” Freddy gets to work. He dimly perceives Marilyn Monroe’s death and the kidnapped starlet to be a poisonous riddle that only he has the guts and the brains to untangle. We are with him as he tears through all those who block his path to the truth. We are with him as he penetrates the faux-sunshine of Jack and Bobby Kennedy and the shuck of Camelot. We are with him as he falters, and grasps for love beyond opportunity. We are with him as he tracks Marilyn Monroe’s horrific last charade through a nightmare L.A. that he served to create — and as he confronts his complicity and his own raging madness.
It’s the Summer of ’62, baby. Freddy O’s got a hot date with history. The savage Sixties are ready to pop. It’s just a shot away.
The Enchanters is a transcendent work of American popular fiction. It is James Ellroy at his most crazed, brilliant, provocative, profanely hilarious, and stop-your-heart tender. It is a luminous psychological drama and an unparalleled thrill ride. It is, resoundingly, the great American crime novel.
James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles. He is the author of the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy: American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood’s a Rover, and the L.A. Quartet novels: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz. He lives in Colorado.

Frequency: A Festival of Light, Sound, & Digital Culture
2023-09-21 - 2023-09-24 | Museum of Art & History, 705 Front Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Frequency is a biennial festival of light, sound, and digital culture hosted in and around the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH). The 4-night event showcases local and global artists and integrates a variety of media-based art into the downtown landscape through illuminated artworks, interactive technologies, and immersive experiences.
From kinetic sculptures and VR screenings to projection mapping and audiovisual performances, Frequency supports the museum’s commitment to producing programs that extend beyond its walls and enhance the cultural vibrancy of Santa Cruz County. Many of the works are participatory or serve as natural draws to public spaces, sparking interpersonal connection through community storytelling and history-sharing.
For the full schedule of events and to purchase tickets, please visit: https://www.santacruzmah.org/frequency
This event is co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute.

C Pam Zhang - Land of Milk and Honey
2023-09-28 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes award-winning author C Pam Zhang (How Much of These Hills Is Gold) for a reading and signing of Land of Milk and Honey, her rapturous and revelatory novel about a young chef whose discovery of pleasure alters her life and, indirectly, the world. Zhang will be in conversation with writer Angie Sijun Lou at this event. This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
“The way Zhang writes about food and desire and human failings is exquisite—sensually detailed, at times visceral. This is a tremendous novel that explores the way people will break when the world itself is broken. Land of Milk and Honey is truly exceptional.” —Roxane Gay

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A smog has spread. Food crops are rapidly disappearing. A chef escapes her dying career in a dreary city to take a job at a decadent mountaintop colony seemingly free of the world’s troubles.
There, the sky is clear again. Rare ingredients abound. Her enigmatic employer and his visionary daughter have built a lush new life for the global elite, one that reawakens the chef to the pleasures of taste, touch, and her own body.
In this atmosphere of hidden wonders and cool, seductive violence, the chef’s boundaries undergo a thrilling erosion. Soon she is pushed to the center of a startling attempt to reshape the world far beyond the plate.
Sensuous and surprising, joyous and bitingly sharp, told in language as alluring as it is original, Land of Milk and Honey lays provocatively bare the ethics of seeking pleasure in a dying world. It is a daringly imaginative exploration of desire and deception, privilege and faith, and the roles we play to survive. Most of all, it is a love letter to food, to wild delight, and to the transformative power of a woman embracing her own appetite.
C Pam Zhang is the author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold, winner of the Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature[CE1], long-listed for the Booker Prize, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and a New York Public Library Cullman Fellow.
Angie Sijun Lou is a Ph.D. Candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at UC Santa Cruz. Her writing has appeared in ZYZZYVA, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Best Small Fictions, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from Kundiman, Bread Loaf, Tin House, California Arts Council, and elsewhere.

Sahana Ghosh – Searching for the "Illegal Migrant": Notes from the India-Bangladesh Borderlands
2023-09-29 10:00 - 11:30 | Virtual Event
Sahana Ghosh is a social anthropologist whose research focuses on the experiences of inequality and injustice at the intersection of mobility, policing, labor, and gender. Her book, A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands (University of California Press, 2023) is forthcoming. She is currently researching the gendered labors of soldiering in postcolonial India.

“Searching for the ‘Illegal Migrant’: Notes from the India-Bangladesh Borderlands” is a part of the UC Santa Cruz Center for South Asian Studies 2023-2024 lecture series, Crossings.

Humanities in the Age of AI Lunch meeting
2023-10-02 12:00 - 13:30 | 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 it’s inaugural lunch meeting scheduled for October 2 (Monday) at noon in HUM 210. The research cluster boasts a diverse group of core participants. This includes six esteemed faculty members from various disciplines, graduate students representing politics, history, literature, philosophy, feminist studies, and film and visual studies, and undergraduate scholars from computer science, computational media, and creative writing.
The objective of our forthcoming meeting is dual: to foster social and intellectual connections. We aspire to cultivate a community centered on the humanities and artificial intelligence nexus. In alignment with this vision, each participant must be prepared to introduce themselves to the collective formally. Also, in each meeting, we will highlight a participant to present a project they are currently engaged with. For our inaugural luncheon, Ms. Lucia Vitale from the Department of Politics has consented to share insights from her recent study, “Artificial Intelligence and the Politics of Avoidance in Global Health.”
The Humanities Institute (THI) will graciously cater lunch. Once we have obtained our meals, we will gather and take our seats. 10 minutes has been set aside to elucidate the cluster’s overview. Following this, we will go ahead with individual introductions. After a short five-minute recess, Ms. Vitale will begin her presentation, anticipated to last for approximately 20 minutes. A structured dialogue on the topic will follow.
For those who prefer to schedule in advance, please note the dates for our brown bag meetings throughout the academic year: 10/2 (lunch provided), 11/6, 12/11, 1/8 (lunch provided), 2/12 (featuring Davide Panagia), 3/4, 4/8 (lunch provided), and 5/6. THI will graciously cater on the three specified dates. For the remaining meetings, attendees are cordially invited to bring their lunch. We are honored to have Professor Davide Panagia from UCLA present on 2/12; arrangements are underway to secure another external speaker for a subsequent session.

Climate Justice Leaders: Voices from the Pajaro Valley
2023-10-03 19:10 - 20:30 | Quarry Amphitheater
Dive into the heart of climate justice at the Center for Reimagining Leadership’s inaugural event. Join us for an enlightening panel discussion on October 3rd, 2023, as we illuminate the untold stories of the Pajaro Valley Levee Breach. Explore leadership in emergencies, environmental equity, and community resilience through the eyes of local climate justice leaders. This event goes beyond conversation – we invite you to be a part of the solution, contributing to the healing of the Pajaro Valley community. Brought to you by UCSC Center for Reimagining Leadership and moderated by Ayo Banjo. Don’t miss the chance to engage, learn, and take action for a more just world.
Panelists:
Keisha Browder, CEO United Way Santa Cruz County
Mireya Gomez Contreras, Co-Director Esperanza Community Farms
Maria Elena de la Garza, Executive Director, Community Action Board
Erika Zavaleta, Professor Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, UCSC
Moderator: National Organizer Ayo Banjo
Co-sponsored by Porter College, John R. Lewis College, College Nine, Merrill College, Oakes College, Kresge College, Cowell College, Rachel Carson College, The Humanities Institute, Office of CP/EVC, Vera Rubin Presidential Chair, The Heising-Simons Foundation, and The Center for Coastal Climate Resilience

PhD+ Series – Proactive Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion with Lorato Anderson
2023-10-05 11:30 - 13:00 | Graduate Student Commons, Room 204, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, 95064
Recommended Reading: Ely, Robin J., and Thomas, David A. “Getting Serious About Diversity: Enough Already with the Business Case.” Harvard Business Review, November-December 2020 Magazine Issue.
How do you proactively promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in your role as a graduate student, a researcher, a teaching assistant, a peer and undergraduate mentor? Learn active steps you can take in every role to promote a just and welcoming environment at UCSC in every space.
Lorato Anderson is the Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at UCSC
Lorato Anderson is the Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Graduate Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Her role centers on advancing initiatives for minoritized graduate student support across multiple campus-wide projects, as well as providing direct support to students, staff, faculty, and programs. Lorato graduated with a B.A. in Literature/Writing from UC San Diego and received her M.S. in Higher Education Administration and Policy from Northwestern University, where she researched and developed assessment models for English Language Learners and created multiple DEI programs that are still active today. She has extensive experience in grant writing, teaching, advising, assessment, and creating long-lasting research-backed programs to promote minoritized undergraduate and graduate student success.
Lorato has worked on campus since 2016 and received the 2020 Outstanding Staff Achievement Award in Social Sciences. Her previous roles include Graduate Program Advisor and Coordinator for Latin American and Latino Studies (LALS) and Politics, as well as Undergraduate Advisor for Psychology. She takes pride in incorporating social justice, as well as empathetic advising strategies and teaching pedagogies, in her work in advising, administration, and grant and program development.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2023-2024 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the eighth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted (or co-sponsored) by The Humanities Institute. Our meetings provide the opportunity to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Reimagining Leadership for Climate Science and Justice Virtual Panel
2023-10-05 17:30 - 19:00 | Virtual Event
Addressing the urgent impacts of climate change, particularly on vulnerable communities, requires us to reconsider how we approach science. It requires a new approach to scientific leadership that centers justice and diverse approaches to knowing and being in the world. This event will showcase and celebrate scholars whose scientific leadership in addressing climate change reflects the values at the foundation of the Center for Reimagining Leadership: equitable access, multimodal expertise, responsible stewardship, and accountability. The event will illuminate why the pursuit of science—and by extension scientific excellence—is inseparable from the humans who animate it.

Panel:
Cutcha Risling Baldy, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Native American Studies at California Polytechnic State University, Humboldt. Her research focuses on Indigenous feminisms, California Indians, Environmental Justice, and Decolonization. She received her Ph.D. in Native American Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Feminist Theory and Research from UC Davis and her M.F.A. in Creative Writing & Literary Research from San Diego State University. Risling Baldy is Hupa, Yurok and Karuk and an enrolled member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe in Northern California.
Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, Ph.D. is the Director of Science at the U.S. Department of Energy. She is on leave from UC Merced where she holds the Ted and Jan Falasco Chair in Earth Sciences and Geology, is a Professor of Soil Biogeochemistry, and previously served as Associate Dean for Graduate Education. She is a biogeochemist with research focus on climate change impacts on nutrient budgets in soils. She conducted the TED talk: “A Climate Solution that’s Right Under Our Feet.” Her research focus lies at the intersection of soil science, global change science, and political ecology with an emphasis on how the soil system regulates the earth’s climate and the dynamic two-way relationship between the natural environment and human communities. Berhe’s scholarship and efforts to ensure equity and inclusion of people from all walks of life in the scientific enterprise have received numerous awards and honors.
Maya Carrasquillo, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the PI of the Liberatory Infrastructures Lab (LiL) at UC Berkeley. The mission of LiL is to develop systems of critical infrastructure that support liberation and restorative justice for all. She is also the Faculty Director of the (CEE)² Community-Engaged Education program at UC Berkeley. Carrasquillo’s research focuses on sustainable and equitable urban water infrastructure, food-energy-water systems (FEWs), community engagement and community science in decision-making, and environmental and infrastructural justice. She is a certified Envision Sustainability Professional (ENV SP) and a College of Engineering Huelskamp Faculty Fellow. Carrasquillo is a recipient of the prestigious Georgia Tech Alumni 40 Under 40 award for the Class of 2022.
Alexii Sigona is a fifth year Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management with a research focus on Indigenous resource management. Alexii is involved in his tribal Youth Group and serves as Chair of Lands Committee of the Amah Mutsun Land Trust.
Moderator: Sikina Jinnah, Ph.D. is a Professor of Environmental Studies and Associate Director of the Center for Reimagining Leadership at UC Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on environmental governance in the areas of climate change, climate engineering, and the nexus between international trade and environmental politics. She is the author or editor of six books and over 50 articles and chapters. Her first book, “Post-treaty Politics” (MIT Press) received the 2016 Harold and Margaret Sprout Award for best book in international environmental affairs from the International Studies Association, and her newest book “Teaching Environmental Justice: Practices to Engage Students and Build Community” is forthcoming in fall 2023. She is an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, edits the journal Environmental Politics, and serves on the U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine Committee on Atmospheric Methane Removal. Jinnah has a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in Environmental Science, Policy and Management.

2nd Annual Filipino American History Month Festival - Tobera Project
2023-10-07 12:00 - 17:00 | Watsonville City Plaza, 358 Main St., Watsonville, CA, 95076, United States
Join the Tobera Project’s 2nd annual Filipino American History Month festival on the Watsonville City Plaza from on Saturday Oct. 7th from 12-5pm.
The event will celebrate and honor our proud and rich history here in the Pajaro Valley since the 1920’s. The festival will feature cultural arts and food vendors from the region. Guests can observe traditional music from the Southern Philippines known as kulintang, which a series large and small gongs and bells played in rhythmic patterns. There will also be a traditional marital arts demonstration, poetry by acclaimed writer Shirley Ancheta and a 3-piece instrumental jazz/ groove band called Ripplings.
Join us for this free, fun and festive community event!

This event is presented by The Tobera Project.

Never Again is Now: Japanese American Women Activists and the Legacy of the Mass Incarceration Opening Reception
2023-10-07 15:00 - 18:00 | Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery, Cowell College, Cowell College‎ 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Japanese American women who experienced the World War II mass incarceration have a long history of activism that includes protests within the camps, participation in the social movements of the 1960s, and the successful campaign for a national apology and monetary redress. They, their daughters, granddaughters, and non-binary individuals continue to invoke memories of the World War II injustice to defend the rights of all people of color in their activism and art.
Showing the powerful connection between the past and the present, this exhibit highlights how women’s historical memories helped win redress, challenged racial and gender stereotypes, promoted intergenerational ties, and developed coalitions with other communities fighting discrimination based on race, national origin, religion, immigration status, gender, and sexual orientation.

This exhibit was curated by Associate History Professor Alice Yang and sponsored by The Humanities Institute, The Humanities Division, and the California Civil Liberties Public Education Fund.

Ambassa in America featuring Arivu
2023-10-07 20:00 - 22:00 | Quarry Amphitheater, 1156 High St, Santa Cruz, CA, 95062, United States
ARIVU is a soulful composer, versatile song writer, fierce rapper and an energetic performer all fused into one package. He is best-known for his contributions in the global hit Single Enjoy Enjaami besides his hard-hitting political raps which made him one of the most powerful youth voice coming out of India.
Through his rebellious singles such as Anti-Indian, Kalla Mouni and Sanda Seivom, Arivu came to be known as a prodigal talent with the guts to speak truth to power. His first hip-hop album, THERUKURAL (2019), with Ofro, received widespread appreciation from the audience and rave reviews from critics.

Doors open at 7pm, show starts at 8pm
Presented by the Center for South Asian Studies
Arivu leads the Ambassa band, an experiment in bringing together the western elements of hip-hop, beat boxing and rock with our native sounds of Folk, Gana and Oppari. Ambassa’s mission is to piece together the scattered elements of divided humanity and make it whole again through the celebrative as well as cathartic powers of music. Ambassa is celebration and peace.
Presently, Arivu is crafting his second studio album, Valliyamma Perandi which is scheduled to be out soon. You can find Arivu on Instagram (@therukural) and Twitter (@TherukuralArivu).
Band members: Gana Balachander aka Gana B – Singer; Sarath Kumar aka Sattiyaan – Percussionist; Chris Jason aka Chris Jason – Lead Guitarist; Kevin Jason aka Kevin Jason – Bass Guitarist
Music Video Links:

Enjoy Enjaami Music Video
Kallamouni Music Video
Namma Stories | Netflix
Sagavasi | Coke Studio

Oliver Jeffers: Begin Again
2023-10-08 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes globally renowned artist and internationally bestselling author Oliver Jeffers for an event celebrating his new book BEGIN AGAIN: The Story of How We Got Here and Where We Might Go. Take a visually stunning journey through humankind’s history as Jeffers examines our shared motivations for existence in his first illustrated book aimed at a broad audience. This event, cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, includes a solo presentation by Jeffers, a moderated Q&A, and book signing.
Please visit Bookshop Santa Cruz’s website for info on attending this event:
https://www.bookshopsantacruz.com/oliver-jeffers
In his first illustrated book created specifically with a wider audience in mind, Oliver Jeffers shares a very brief history of humanity, reviews our current position, and shares his dreams for where we go from here. With his bold, iconic art, executed in a simple two-color palette, Oliver Jeffers looks at our shared motivations for existence to follow the human path from the dawn of our species through history, sharing profound, sometimes poignant, commentary on our present, and then offers a challenge: Where do we go from here? How can we create new stories and new systems that allow all of humanity to flourish? How can we journey toward a collective and robust future?
Illustrated in his world-renowned art style, Oliver Jeffers’ reflection on the patterns that have led us to where we are today, the stories we have governed ourselves by, and those we might adopt going forward, is insightful, moving, and powerful. A must-have for anyone who wants the next generation to inherit a world to be proud of.
Oliver Jeffers makes art and tells stories. His books include How to Catch a Star; Lost and Found, which was the recipient of the prestigious Nestle Children’s Book Prize Gold Award in the UK and was later adapted into an award-winning animated film; and the New York Times bestsellers Here We Are, What We’ll Build, Stuck, This Moose Belongs to Me, and Once Upon an Alphabet. He is also, of course, the illustrator of the #1 smash hits The Day the Crayons Quit and The Day the Crayons Came Home, both written by Drew Daywalt. His fine art is world-renowned and his dip-art exhibitions are much sought-after events. Originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, Oliver now splits his time between Belfast and Brooklyn, New York. Follow him @OliverJeffers.

Strawberry Picker Film Screening
2023-10-10 18:00 - 20:00 | Stevenson Event Center
The Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) Initiatives invites you to join a film screening event featuring Strawberry Picker produced by Inspira Studios. This special event has been organized in celebration and recognition of Latinx Heritage Month, and is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
Strawberry Picker is a short documentary depicting the life story of a little boy growing up in labor camps to become a world-class artist! The film provides a look at generations of struggle and resilience in the Chicano Art Community through the experiences of Watsonville-born and raised, Chicano Artist, Juan R. Fuentes.
Our special guests, Juan R. Fuentes and filmmakers, Maria Cano-Bonner and Eugenia Renteria, from Inspira Studios will join us in a panel discussion on the importance of Latinx representation in media and the arts, and the inspiration for their work.
Tuesday, October 10 from 6:00 – 8:00 PM
At Stevenson Event Center
Light refreshments will be provided!
Please RSVP if you plan to attend this event.

Visit the HSI Initiatives event webpage here.

PhD+ Series – Informational Interview with Lorato Anderson
2023-10-11 11:30 - 13:00 | Graduate Student Commons, Room 204, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, 95064
An informational interview is one that you conduct with someone working in a field for an institution or company that you want to consider working in and for. How do you conduct an informational interview? What questions should you ask to get the best information about what it’s like to do that job for that organization? How do you network to locate people to ask for an informational interview?
Lorato Anderson is the Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at UCSC
Lorato Anderson is the Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Graduate Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Her role centers on advancing initiatives for minoritized graduate student support across multiple campus-wide projects, as well as providing direct support to students, staff, faculty, and programs. Lorato graduated with a B.A. in Literature/Writing from UC San Diego and received her M.S. in Higher Education Administration and Policy from Northwestern University, where she researched and developed assessment models for English Language Learners and created multiple DEI programs that are still active today. She has extensive experience in grant writing, teaching, advising, assessment, and creating long-lasting research-backed programs to promote minoritized undergraduate and graduate student success.
Lorato has worked on campus since 2016 and received the 2020 Outstanding Staff Achievement Award in Social Sciences. Her previous roles include Graduate Program Advisor and Coordinator for Latin American and Latino Studies (LALS) and Politics, as well as Undergraduate Advisor for Psychology. She takes pride in incorporating social justice, as well as empathetic advising strategies and teaching pedagogies, in her work in advising, administration, and grant and program development.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2023-2024 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the eighth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted (or co-sponsored) by The Humanities Institute. Our meetings provide the opportunity to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Nick Mitchell – The University in Surplus Perspective, 1945-1968
2023-10-11 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Is it possible to historicize higher education without taking its basic categories for granted? In this talk, I aim to provide a historical and theoretical framework for the emergence of mass higher education in the twentieth century U.S. framed by the problem of surpluses—population, labor, and governance capacity. Faced with the prospect of mass unemployment in the wake of the second world war, U.S. state-making found in the university a means of putting wartime budget surpluses to work in an effort to absorb demobilized population and labor surpluses. The category of the college student emerges in this period as a means of anticipating and managing the potential crises attendant to modern warfare. But as it develops, it does not remain there. The university as a site for the absorption of surplus emerges as a site for the struggle over how and toward what ends surplus time—time free of and freed from the wage—might be used.
Nick Mitchell (she/her) works in the Department of Feminist Studies and the Department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz. As a researcher, Mitchell is principally engaged the status with higher education in the U.S. as a problem for historical and theoretical inquiry. As a writer, Mitchell aims to make better sense of university life-worlds by developing scales, vocabularies, and categories to reframe and rethink its rhythms and textures. These research and writing efforts can be found in essays published in Feminist Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, The New Inquiry, and Spectre, as well as in two forthcoming books: “Discipline and Surplus: Black Studies, Women’s Studies, and the Dawn of Neoliberalism” (under contract with Duke University Press) and “The University, in Theory: Essays on Institutionalized Knowledge.”

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

PhD+ Series – Curating your Digital Reputation with Lisa Nielsen
2023-10-12 11:30 - 13:00 | Graduate Student Commons, Room 204, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, 95064
Your digital reputation refers to your presence on the internet, on social media platforms and on personal and worksite websites. Learn tips on how to distinguish yourself from the crowd and create a lasting impression in an evolving digital communications landscape.
Lisa Nielsen, Senior Director of Marketing and Creative Services, University Relations
Lisa Nielsen has over 25 years of design and marketing experience in the private sector and with non-profits. From working at Apple Computer as an Art Director to running her own firm in San Francisco for 15 years, she knows what it means to be a good communicator and marketer. From startups to fortune 500 clients, her adventures in marketing have added up to a depth of knowledge which she likes to share. Lisa has been with UC Santa Cruz for 12 years as the marketing director and oversees a creative team of writers, videographers, and designers.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2023-2024 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the eighth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted (or co-sponsored) by The Humanities Institute. Our meetings provide the opportunity to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Living Writers – Thais Miller
2023-10-12 17:20 - 19:00 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Thaïs Miller is the author of the novel Our Machinery (2008) and the short story collection The Subconscious Mutiny and Other Stories (2009). She is a PhD Candidate in Literature, pursuing a Creative/Critical Writing Concentration, at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her MA in Creative Writing for Social Activism from New York University in 2011 and her BA magna cum laude with Honors in Literature and a minor in Music Performance from American University in 2009. Her short stories, dramatic writing, poetry, essays on craft, book reviews, and interviews have been published by CRAFT, Nautilus, The Los Angeles Review of Books’s PubLab, Entropy, The Common, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Carolina Academic Press, and appear in many other literary journals and magazines. For more information, visit: https://thaismiller.wordpress.com/
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)

Festival of Monsters
2023-10-13 - 2023-10-15 | Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Monsters lurk in our culture. They rise in times of growing prejudice, discrimination and othering. The 2023 Festival of Monsters (Oct. 13-15) — hosted by the UC Santa Cruz Center for Monster Studies — explores the ways monsters and tropes of monstrosity both preserve and conflict with forms of social and cultural injustice.
Held in two locations in beautiful Santa Cruz, Calif, the 2023 Festival includes an academic conference, plus performances, readings, presentations from monster-makers, and an exhibit at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History (MAH) entitled Werewolf Hunters, Jungle Queens, and Space Commandos: The Lost Worlds of Women Comics Artists.
Authors Mallory O’Meara (The Lady from the Black Lagoon) and Jess Zimmerman (Women and Other Monsters) will give the keynote talks. Author Addie Tsai (Unwieldy Creatures) will read and discuss her book, which is a queer, nonbinary, biracial retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
The full schedule of activities, event information, and registration can be found at: https://www.monsterstudies.ucsc.edu/2023festival
Sponsors include the Arts Research Institute of UC Santa Cruz, UC Santa Cruz Arts Division, The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, Porter College, the UC Santa Cruz Foundation Board and private donors. Additional support provided by Bookshop Santa Cruz.

Linguistics Colloquium: Ryan Bennett
2023-10-13 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Ryan Bennett, UC Santa Cruz: “Vowel deletion as grammatically-controlled gestural overlap in Uspanteko”
Uspanteko (Mayan) is spoken by ~5000 people in the central highlands of Guatemala. Unstressed
vowels in Uspanteko often delete, though deletion is variable within and across speakers. Deletion
appears to be phonological, being sensitive to phonotactics, foot structure, vowel quality, and
morphology; and being largely insensitive to speech rate and style. But deletion also appears to be
phonetic in character, reflecting extreme vowel reduction rather than symbolic deletion: it is variable,
gradient, insensitive to certain phonotactics, and opaque with respect to accent placement.
Electroglottography data suggests that even apparently ‘deleted’ vowels may contribute voicing to
[C(V)C] intervals, albeit inaudibly. We thus analyze deletion as grammatically-controlled gestural
overlap, which masks vowels in [CVC] contexts, either in the phonology proper (e.g. Gafos 2002) or
as part of a grammar of phonetic interpretation (e.g. Kingston & Diehl 1994).
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

PhD+ Series – Plática with the authors of The Latinx Guide to Graduate School
2023-10-13 14:00 - 15:30 | Cervantes and Velasquez Conference Room, Bay Tree Building, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join us for a delightful conversation and book talk with Dr. Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales and Dr. Magdalena Barrera, authors of The Latinx Guide to Graduate School.
Graduate Students are invited to meet with the authors from 2-3:30pm to learn about the unwritten rules for surviving and thriving in graduate school including strategies for writing and finding school/work/life balance.
Join us at the Cervantes and Velasquez Conference Room (on the 3rd Floor of the Bay Tree Building).
There will be 10 copies of the book available for the first 10 students to check in. The book is also available online through McHenry Library.

More about the authors:

Dr. Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales is an interdisciplinary scholar of immigration and education. Her academic, activist and community work focuses on the ways undocumented young people are changing the political and legislative terrain around “illegality” and belonging in this country. Her work lies at the intersection of education, immigration, and social movements. She is the co-author of Encountering Poverty: Thinking and Acting in an Unequal World (2016, University of California Press) and co-editor of We Are Not DREAMers: Undocumented Scholars Theorize Undocumented Life in the United States (2020, Duke University Press).

Dr. Magdalena L. Barrera is the inaugural Vice Provost for Faculty Success. In this role, she provides thought leadership for the division on all aspects of faculty recruitment, onboarding, and professional advancement within a Minority Serving Institution context. Her work is informed by a deep commitment to recruiting and retaining diverse faculty who bring asset-minded pedagogies to the classroom. A former first-generation student, Dr. Barrera holds a bachelor’s degree in English literature and Latin American Studies from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University. She began her faculty career at SJSU in 2008, following a postdoctoral teaching fellowship in Stanford’s Introduction to the Humanities program.

There will also be an Undergraduate Session from 10-11:30am.
This event is presented by GANAS Graduate Program and HSI Initiatives. THI is proud to be co-sponsoring this event.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the eighth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted (or co-sponsored) by The Humanities Institute. Our meetings provide the opportunity to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

micha cárdenas - Atoms Never Touch
2023-10-16 18:30 - 20:00 | Two Birds Books, 881 41st Ave, Santa Cruz, CA, 95062, United States
Join us in celebrating the debut of Atoms Never Touch by micha cárdenas; forward by adrienne maree brown.
Jumping to alternate realities sounds great, if you’re in control. But what if you’re not? What if you’re propelled away from the people and places you love the most in the blink of an eye? And what if these involuntary journeys happen because your neurochemistry is different, and your brain works differently?
Beautiful, compassionate, and resourceful as she is, this is Rea’s problem. A latina trans woman and an academic, she is beloved by a tight circle of friends, who fully accept her without knowing the cause of her disappearances. But she is haunted by the lovers and family that she cannot trace back to, and fears she might be separated from them forever.
Each time she transits into a new time and space, everything shifts—even the films and writing Rea produces readjust their molecules to match her new quantum reality. But Rea, a brilliant lay scientist, is determined to crack the code, and end her quest for lasting connections and home.
Now available for preorder. Order now from AK Press or one of the participating bookstores, and you’ll get a free set of 3 Atoms Never Touch stickers!
Preorder Atoms Never Touch here: https://www.akpress.org/atoms-never-touch.html
Fierce, poignant sci-fi, about hacking, love, and resistance.
Praise for Atoms Never Touch:
“A shockingly powerful, wrenchingly beautiful queer cyberpunk fable from debut novelist and veteran artist micha cárdenas. In this slim yet unforgettably striking story, cárdenas shows us the world we live in through a dark mirror, transforming the language of cybernetics, quantum physics, and neurobiology into haunting metaphors for heartbreak, social struggle, and revolution…Cárdenas fearlessly plumbs the depths of her characters’ terror and trauma as they resist the depredations of fascism and digital surveillance, but also infuses her novel with hope, healing, and possibility.” —Kai Cheng Thom, author of Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir
“I see this book as in the lineage of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, an explicitly quantum exploration of the possibility of ancestral love. I love the characters and the queer questions they raise with their living. And I love the message, which is that love is the code, love is the pass, love is the key, love is all, love is all, love is all.” —Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Undrowned
“What more could we ask for? T4T love and sex, anti-government sabotage, travel through the multiverse! Atoms Never Touchis nourishment for radicals surviving the current apocalypse.” —Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (and the Next)
micha cárdenas is a multidisciplinary artist, poet, and filmmaker. She is Associate Professor of Performance, Play and Design, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
adrienne maree brown is a writer rooted in Detroit who now lives in Durham, NC. She is a student of the works of Octavia E. Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin. Her books include Octavia’s Brood, Emergent Strategy, Grievers, and Maroons. Her visionary fiction has appeared in The Funambulist, Harvard Design Review, and Dark Mountain.

PhD+ Series – Mastodon, Threads, X: Promote Research on Text-Based Social Media Platforms
2023-10-17 11:30 - 13:00 | Graduate Student Commons, Room 204, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, 95064
Ready to promote your research on social media? This seminar will help you learn how! Explore how to promote your research and expertise on the text-based social media platforms Mastodon, Threads, and X (formerly Twitter). We’ll cover how to use each platform, how each works, how to communicate effectively on each platform and how to pick the right platform for you and your goals.
Kayla Isenberg is senior director of digital engagement for UC Santa Cruz, where she runs digital strategy for the main campus social media properties and advises on divisional and other social media accounts across campus. She has over 15 years of experience in digital marketing and social media working for a variety of companies from startups to Fortune 500. She was listed on the Forbes 40 under 40 list for her work at Warner Bros Records. In her work in higher education she has won multiple CASE awards for her work in digital marketing and social media at UC Santa Cruz and been a featured speaker at CASE social media conferences.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2023-2024 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the eighth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted (or co-sponsored) by The Humanities Institute. Our meetings provide the opportunity to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

National Endowment for the Humanities Q&A
2023-10-17 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
Please join us on Tuesday, October 17th from 12:00-1:30 p.m. for a virtual open forum Q&A with Program Officers from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
This event will be guided by faculty questions. If you would like to submit questions for the Program Officers in advance, please fill out this form.
We will be joined by the following NEH Program Officers:

Sheila Brennan, Senior Program Officer, Office of Digital Humanities
Madison Hendron, Program Officer, Division of Research Programs
Hannah Schell, Program Officer, Division of Education Programs

Sheila A. Brennan is a Senior Program Officer in the Office of Digital Humanities and team lead for the Dangers and Opportunities of Technology: Perspectives from the Humanities grant program. She is formerly the Director of Strategic Initiatives at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and Research Associate Professor in the department of history and art history at George Mason University. She has managed more than thirty digital humanities projects and trained many students and professionals in digital methods. She is the author of an open access digital monograph, Stamping American Memory: Collectors, Citizens, and the Post (Michigan 2018). She has a PhD in American and digital history from George Mason.
Madison Hendren is a Program Officer in the Division of Research Programs where she has worked since November 2020. At NEH, she oversees the John W. Kluge Fellowships review and is a member of the Collaborative Research program management team. Prior to joining NEH, she earned a Ph.D. in Italian studies from the University of Chicago (December 2020). Her dissertation considered the function of games and contests in Boccaccio’s Teseida.
Hannah Schell is a Program Officer in the Division of Education Programs. She holds a B.A. in philosophy from Oberlin College and earned her Ph.D. in religion from Princeton University. Prior to joining the NEH in 2022, she worked with the Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education, a program of the Council of Independent Colleges, and served seventeen years on the faculty of Monmouth College in Illinois. Schell is co-author of Christian Thought in America: A Brief History (Fortress Press).

PhD+ Series – Preparing the Teaching Statement and Portfolio
2023-10-18 11:00 - 13:00 | Graduate Student Commons, Room 204, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, 95064
Gain tools and tips for effectively writing a teaching statement, a common document in faculty hiring and review processes and an opportunity to reflect on how your teaching supports student learning. We’ll also review how to select teaching portfolio materials that tell a compelling story of who you are as an educator.
Kendra Dority, left, Director for Graduate Student and Postdoc Professional Development. Roxanna Villalobos, right, Education Specialist for Graduate Student and Postdoc Development.
Kendra Dority, Ph.D., has been an engaged member of the teaching and learning community at UC Santa Cruz since 2009, serving as a Teaching Fellow and Teaching Assistant in the Literature Department and as a Lecturer at Porter College before joining the Teaching and Learning Center (TLC) in 2017. With the TLC, she directs professional development opportunities for graduate students and postdocs in their roles as teachers and mentors, and enjoys uplifting the contributions of these educators to our campus community and beyond. She received her Ph.D. in Literature from UCSC.
Roxanna Villalobos, Ph.D., has been an engaged member of the teaching and learning community at UC Santa Cruz since 2017, serving as a Graduate Student Instructor and Teaching Assistant in the Sociology Department and as a Graduate Student Mentor through various mentoring programs. Roxanna joined the Teaching and Learning Center (TLC) in 2023 as an Educational Specialist after receiving her Ph.D. in Sociology and Latin American and Latino Studies from UC Santa Cruz. In this position, Roxanna develops and facilitates research-based professional development programs, workshops, and resources focused on equity-minded and inclusive teaching for graduate students and postdocs across all disciplines.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2023-2024 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the eighth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted (or co-sponsored) by The Humanities Institute. Our meetings provide the opportunity to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Martina Broner – From Arboreal to Aerial: Seeing the Amazon from Above
2023-10-18 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Can seeing the Amazon from above bring about new perspectives on the forest at a critical time? This talk proposes that the documentary Helena Sarayaku manta (dir. Eriberto Gualinga, 2021) rethinks the aerial view by pushing against its historical associations with omniscience and a desire for mastery and by reframing it instead around the vitality of the forest in a site that resists exploitation: the Indigenous territory of Sarayaku in the Ecuadorian Amazon. As I examine the role of trees in the film’s production, I argue that Helena Sarayaku manta achieves this new aerial grammar through an attunement to the arboreal.
Martina Broner’s research sits at the intersection of Latin American cinema and media studies and the environmental humanities. Her book manuscript, “Forest Formats: Media and Environment in the Amazon,” examines new media formats that emerge from entanglements between human and other living entities in the transnational Amazon rainforest. She is assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Dartmouth.

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

Living Writers – J. Vanessa Lyon
2023-10-19 17:20 - 19:00 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
J. Vanessa Lyon is the author of Lush Lives (an inaugural title of Roxane Gay Books/Grove Atlantic), the Audible Original The Groves, and Meet Me in Madrid, written under the pseudonym Verity Lowell. A James Baldwin fellow at MacDowell and Bread Loaf Contributor in Nonfiction, she received a PhD in the history of art from UC Berkeley and teaches visual culture–with a focus on race, queerness, and gender–at Bennington College in Vermont.
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)

The Micro as Macro: Narrating World Histories of Science, Technology, and Environment
2023-10-20 08:30 - 18:00 | Virtual and In Person
The Center for World History presents the fourth Graduate Student Conference: “The Micro as Macro: Narrating World Histories of Science, Technology, and Environment” in Humanities 1, Room 210 (and online), 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.
While world history topics have expanded recently to include diverse areas, the Euro-American experience continues to dominate scholarship and is often treated as the assumed global model. The UCSC Center for World History’s fourth graduate student conference explores non-European places and actors by centering on techno-scientific, environmental, sensorial, and spatial-based themes that reveal how the relationship between “small” subjects like microorganisms have shaped world history in ways that challenge or reimagine conceptions of progress and development. With this in mind, this conference will focus on histories spanning from 1700 to the present that tell global stories through small subjects such as viruses, cotton seeds, and metal alloys. By inviting a wide range of chronological and geographic loci, we hope to expand our definition of world history to one that does not default toward Euro-American experiences.
The program is available here.
Register for online participation here.
Dr. David Fedman, Associate Professor of History at UC Irvine and author of Seeds of Control: Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea, will deliver the keynote address.
This is a hybrid conference. To attend virtually, please register here. If you can join in person, we would love to see you in Humanities 1, room 210.
Conference Organizing Committee: Clara Bergamini, Piper Milton, Alexyss McClellan-Ufugusuku, Jinghong Zhang
Free and open to the campus community and the public.

Santa Cruz Pickwick Club
2023-10-22 13:00 - 15:00, 2023-11-26 13:00 - 15:00 | Virtual Event
Please join the Santa Cruz Dickens Fellowship and the Santa Cruz Pickwick Club for our monthly Pickwick Club meeting. New this year, we will be devoting an entire year to one novel instead of two, and will dive deeply into Great Expectations. Join Dickens enthusiasts and Pickwick Club members for a series of discussions about this book.

Charles Dickens depicts how a gentleman is made, not born, in this novel. Presented as Pip’s confessional autobiography, Great Expectations describes his childhood at the forge, his infatuation with the beautiful Estella, his shame at his working-class origin and his eagerness to be a gentleman, and eventually his life as a young man-about-town with “great expectations” of inheriting a fortune. Recalling these events as an adult, Mr. Pirrip is frank about his mistakes and shortcomings.
Recommended Edition: We recommend the Penguin Classics edition of the novel for its appendices and notes, but other versions are fine. First-time readers should avoid the Introduction if they don’t want spoilers. Download the novel to read at Gutenburg.org or to listen at LibriVox.org.
If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to reach out at dpj@ucsc.edu

Natalia Molina – A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community
2023-10-23 16:00 - 18:00 | Alumni Room, University Center, CA, United States
Natalia Molina, Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and Dean’s Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, will visit our campus and chapter on Oct. 23-24, 2023 as part of the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Program. Since 1956, the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Program has offered undergraduates the opportunity to spend time with some of America’s most distinguished scholars. Professor Molina will meet with UCSC students and faculty in classes and small settings, and she will present a public lecture on A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community, her award-winning book, which chronicles the lives of immigrant workers, including Molina’s grandmother, who became placemakers, nurturing and feeding their communities at restaurants that served as urban anchors.
The public lecture will be held on Monday, October 23 at 4:00 p.m. in the University Center Alumni Room, followed by reception and book signing at 5:00 p.m.
Bio: Professor Natalia Molina, a 2020 MacArthur Fellow, researches and writes about the interconnected histories of race, place, gender, culture, and citizenship. She is the author of three award-winning books: How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts; Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1940; and, most recently, A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community, which the Los Angeles Times includes on its “Ultimate L.A. Bookshelf.”
This event is being presented by the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Program and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute and the Latin American and Latino Studies Department.

PhD+ Series – LinkedIn Profile and Job Search with Eric Curiel
2023-10-24 11:30 - 13:00 | Graduate Student Commons, Room 204, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, 95064
Eric Curiel, Associate Director of Career Engagement
LinkedIn is a powerful tool to network and search for jobs. We will go over tips to update your LinkedIn profile to help recruiters find you. We will also explore ways to identify alumni with similar career paths and interests and show you how to effectively connect with them to expand your network. We will also go over best practices for searching for jobs.
Eric Curiel has worked for over nine years in supporting college students in pursuing successful careers and currently serves as associate director of career engagement at Career Success. He is passionate about supporting students, especially those from underrepresented populations, to be successful. He completed his bachelor’s degree in ecology and evolution from UC Santa Cruz in 2014. Eric enjoys being outdoors, photography, and watching soccer.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2023-2024 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the eighth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted (or co-sponsored) by The Humanities Institute. Our meetings provide the opportunity to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Rosanna Xia: California Against the Sea
2023-10-24 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes environmental journalist Rosanna Xia, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, for a conversation with UCSC professor Gary Griggs about her new book California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline. This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
“Just as the coast defines the liminal world between land and sea, so too does Rosanna Xia’s remarkable book exist in the overlap between development and erosion, between geological forces and human desire, between our ambitious past and our tenuous future. It’s viscerally urgent, thoroughly reported, and compellingly written—a must-read for our uncertain times.” —Ed Yong, author of An Immense World

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Rosanna Xia investigates the impacts of engineered landscapes, the market pressures of development, and the ecological activism and political scrimmages that have carved our contemporary coastline—and foretell even greater changes to our shores. From the beaches of the Mexican border up to the sheer-cliffed North Coast, the voices of Indigenous leaders, community activists, small-town mayors, urban engineers, and tenacious environmental scientists commingle. Together, they chronicle the challenges and urgency of forging a climate-wise future. Xia’s investigation takes us to Imperial Beach, Los Angeles, Pacifica, Marin City, San Francisco, and beyond, weighing the rivaling arguments, agreements, compromises, and visions governing the State of California’s commitment to a coast for all. Through graceful reportage, she charts how the decisions we make today will determine where we go tomorrow: headlong into natural disaster, or toward an equitable refashioning of coastal stewardship.
Rosanna Xia is an environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times, where she specializes in stories about the coast and ocean. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2020 for explanatory reporting, and her work has been anthologized in the Best American Science and Nature Writing series.
Gary Griggs is a Distinguished Professor of Earth & Planetary Sciences at UC Santa Cruz. He is the author of 13 books, including most recently, The Ominous Ocean (2022). The California Coastal Commission and Sunset named him one of California’s Coastal Heroes in 2009, and in 2010 he was elected to the California Academy of Sciences. Gary is also a member of the California Ocean Protection Council’s Science Advisory Team and 2023 Sea-Level Rise Task Force.

PhD+ Series – Disrupting Imposter Phenomenon from the Inside Out with Silvia Austerlic
2023-10-25 11:30 - 13:00 | Graduate Student Commons, Room 204, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, 95064
Silvia Austerlic, Founder, Senti-pensante Connections; Lecturer, Oakes College
Have you ever felt imposter phenomenon? Learn how to cultivate a growth mindset to disrupt it and move toward empowering ways of learning.
Silvia Austerlic is an intercultural educator, facilitator and consultant, and founder of Senti-pensante Connections, whose mission is to bridge inner work and social justice in service of individual transformation, social change, and collective action. A lecturer at UCSC Oakes College, she developed and teaches “Building an inner sanctuary,” that fosters the cultivation of inner/outer resources needed to show up for community-oriented action and social justice; and facilitates campus-wide learning events surrounding critical interculturality, self-leadership, healing justice, and fostering resilience and care in the community.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2023-2024 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the eighth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted (or co-sponsored) by The Humanities Institute. Our meetings provide the opportunity to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

PhD+ Series – Demonstrating Success: Creating an Equitable, Accessible, and Inclusive Academic Environment with Judith Estrada
2023-10-26 11:30 - 13:00 | Graduate Student Commons, Room 204, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, 95064
Judith Estrada, Assistant Vice Chancellor, Office for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (ODEI)
This session will review UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley’s Contributions To Diversity Statement Guidelines, rubrics, and assessment tools. Participants will engage each other in dialogue about their experiences in applying various pedagogical approaches, research frameworks, and community engagement initiatives that contribute to more equitable, accessible, and inclusive academic environments. The participants will leave with an understanding of how two universities evaluate statements of diversity and equity.
Judith Estrada (Ph.D., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) is the assistant vice chancellor for the Office for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at UC Santa Cruz. Estrada publishes and presents nationally on the following themes: bicultural pedagogy, decolonizing methodologies, working across differences, pedagogy of solidarity, and critical bicultural pedagogy. Estrada is the author of Consuming ‘Dora the Explorer’ with a Critical Bicultural Lens (in Darder’s Culture & Power in the Classroom, 2012); Impacts of a Diné Decolonizing Pedagogy on Student Affairs Practitioners (in Davidson, C., & Waterman, S., eds., Indigenous Education Practices in Higher Education); and A Series of Reflections of Diné Elder Larry Emerson and His Indigenizing Impact on Our Participation in the Profession (in NASPA Journal).

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2023-2024 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the eighth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted (or co-sponsored) by The Humanities Institute. Our meetings provide the opportunity to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Living Writers – Deborah Landau
2023-10-26 17:20 - 19:00 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Deborah Landau is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Skeletons (‘23). Her other books include Soft Targets (winner of The Believer Book Award), The Uses of the Body, and The Last Usable Hour, all Lannan Literary Selections from Copper Canyon Press, and Orchidelirium, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the Robert Dana Anhinga Prize for Poetry. In 2016 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
The Uses of the Body was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, and included on “Best of ″ lists by The New Yorker, Vogue, BuzzFeed, and O, The Oprah Magazine, among others. A Spanish edition, Los Usos Del Cuerpo, was published by Valparaiso Ediciones in 2017.
Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, American Poetry Review, Poetry, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, The Yale Review, and The New York Times, and included in anthologies such as The Best American Poetry, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation, Not for Mothers Only, Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now, The Best American Erotic Poems, and Women’s Work: Modern Poets Writing in English.
Landau was educated at Stanford University, Columbia University, and Brown University, where she was a Javits Fellow and received a Ph.D. in English and American Literature. She is a Professor at NYU, where she directs the Creative Writing Program, and she lives in Brooklyn with her family.
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)

Project Paradiso: A Gateway to Dante’s Heaven - Episode One – Introduction – A Restless Paradise
2023-10-27 09:00 - 10:30 | Virtual Event
Dante’s Paradiso is the least studied and the least understood of the three parts of the Commedia. Yet it is arguably the most important for the dynamism and originality of the literary, theological, and philosophical inquiries that take place there. It is also a singularly important interpretive guide for a full understanding of the entire Commedia. It is a poem that asks to be tackled by a community of engaged readers: here it’s your opportunity! This year-long series of webinar workshops led by world-renowned scholars will take you on a deep reading of the Paradiso and an unforgettable journey to the heart of Dante’s universe. This virtual series will reward both first-time and expert readers of the Commedia with an opportunity to delve deep into one of the most complex and daring speculative poems ever written. We’ll be meeting online almost every other week from October to May. See the Project Paradiso page for full schedule.

Episode One – Introduction – A Restless Paradise, featuring:
Filippo Gianferrari is originally from Modena, Italy. He has received a BA and MA in Letteratura italiana from the Università degli Studi di Bologna, and a Ph.D. in Medieval Studies from the University of Notre Dame. After completing his Ph.D., he taught at Vassar College and Smith College. He has been part of the Literature Department at UCSC since 2019. He works on Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, lay education, and political theology in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. He is interested in the ways literature and education (particularly literacy) intersect with and inform each other. He has published mostly on the topic of Dante’s intellectual formation and he has completed a monograph titled “Dante’s Education: Latin Schoolbooks and Vernacular Poetics.” The book investigates Dante’s debts to his earliest school readings and his critical stance toward contemporary education. His attention is now devoted to the study of vernacular theories and visions of political charity and eschatology.
Ron Herzman is Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus at the State University of New York, Geneseo. In addition to Geneseo, where he continues to teach Dante, he has taught Dante at Georgetown University, St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New York University, Regis High School, and Attica Correctional Facility. He has directed eighteen Summer Seminars for Schoolteachers through the National Endowment for the Humanities, twelve of which were on Dante in Italy. With his colleague Bill Cook, he teaches the Divine Comedy through a twenty- four-lecture course available through the Great Courses series produced by The Teaching Company. Together with Cook, he was the recipient of the first CARA Award for Excellence in Teaching Medieval Studies from the Medieval Academy of America. He has written over fifty articles and reviews on Dante, with emphasis on Dante and the Franciscans, and on Dante and the visual arts. The Medieval World View (Oxford University Press, with Bill Cook), now in its third edition, has been in print since 1984. With Richard Emmerson, he is the author of The Apocalyptic Tradition in Medieval Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994).
Presented by the Humanities Institute and the Department of Literature Italian Studies. Sponsored by the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Siegfried and Elizabeth Mignon Puknat Literary Studies Endowment, and Porter College

Linguistics Colloquia: Yael Sharvit
2023-10-27 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Yael Sharvit, UCLA
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

PhD+ Series – Conflict Resolution with De Acker
2023-10-31 11:30 - 13:00 | Graduate Student Commons, Room 204, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, 95064
De Acker, Campus Ombuds, Office of Ombuds
We will explore ways to identify when a conversation is becoming “crucial” before you walk into one. This interactive workshop will help you identify your own styles and how you can address conflict in high-stakes conversations more effectively. The goal is to develop strategies to meet specific challenges that may arise in your academic, work, and personal life.
De Acker comes to UC Santa Cruz with more than three decades of UC experience. She served as director of the UC Santa Barbara Women’s Center for 12 years before joining UC Merced to serve as the assistant dean of the School of Natural Sciences. After founding the campus’s first ombuds office, she went on to establish the UC Merced Office of Campus Climate, which coordinated campus diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. De also served as a staff advisor to the UC Board of Regents from 2014-2016.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2023-2024 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the eighth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted (or co-sponsored) by The Humanities Institute. Our meetings provide the opportunity to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

PhD+ Series – Curriculum Vitae with Veronica Heiskell
2023-11-01 11:30 - 13:00 | Graduate Student Commons, Room 204, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, 95064
Veronia Heiskell, Director of Experiential Learning and Student Employment, Career Success
Applications for academic positions require a CV, and some alternative-academic employers also require them. Learn how a CV differs from a resume, about hybrid CV-resumes, what goes on a CV, and what order to put information depending on type of academic institution you’re applying to and for what type of position.
Veronica Heiskell has worked for over thirteen years in diversity and career centers in a variety of higher education institutions and currently serves as associate director of experiential learning at Career Success. Her goal is to remove as many barriers as possible for all students to pursue meaningful experiential learning opportunities. She completed her bachelor’s degree in psychology with a minor in LGBT studies at UCLA, her master’s degree in counseling and guidance in higher education at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and her doctoral degree in higher education administration at UT Austin. Her dissertation research focused on sense of belonging for exploratory students.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2023-2024 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the eighth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted (or co-sponsored) by The Humanities Institute. Our meetings provide the opportunity to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Jennifer Mogannam – Gendering Revolution: Palestinian Praxis, Labor, and Decolonization
2023-11-01 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
As a population of exile – transnational, stateless refugees struggling to return to their lands and rebuild their communities lost since 1948 – the Palestinian people built a grassroots trajectory of decolonization that peaked in the 1970s. Through oral histories and cultural text, this presentation analyzes gendered labor, value, and the intersections of national and popular struggles in the Palestinian liberation movement at the time. It juxtaposes the use of iconography with women’s narratives of participatory quotidian resistance to illuminate what is absent from masculinist histories and to interrogate the significance of pride for women and gendered labor in revolution. Lastly, this talk offers possibilities for alternative views of gendered labor, the consumption of femininity in revolution, and prospects for more sustainable and equitable revolutionary praxis.
Jennifer Mogannam is an Assistant Professor of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies and an affiliate of the Center for the Middle East & North Africa at UC Santa Cruz. Prior to UC Santa Cruz, she was a UC President’s postdoctoral fellow at UC Davis and, through the program, was selected as a 2023-24 Mellon Foundation/UC-HSI Humanities Initiative Faculty Fellow. She earned her PhD in Ethnic Studies from UC San Diego and her MA in Arab and Middle Eastern Studies from the American University of Beirut. Her scholarship is cross-disciplinary – centering oral history, ethnography, archives, and cultural criticism – and broadly examines 20th and 21st century Palestinian and Arab transnational movements and third world solidarities, with an eye for analyzing movement praxis for liberated futures. Her work intervenes in the critical study of refugees, borders, colonialism and imperialism, global scales of race and indigeneity, and resistance. Her current book project frames and analyzes the coalitional relationship forged between Palestinian and Lebanese revolutionary fronts during Civil War Lebanon.

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

PhD+ Series – Speaking Up to Bias with De Acker
2023-11-02 11:30 - 13:00 | Graduate Student Commons, Room 204, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, 95064
De Acker, Campus Ombuds, Office of Ombuds
This workshop will explore how to address bias when it is directed at you or someone else. We’ll review what bias is, how it shows up, and the impact it can have. We’ll discuss and practice ways to respond directly or as a bystander, and how to offer support. Participants will leave with a set of options for response, support, and resources to address incidents of bias.
De Acker comes to UC Santa Cruz with more than three decades of UC experience. She served as director of the UC Santa Barbara Women’s Center for 12 years before joining UC Merced to serve as the assistant dean of the School of Natural Sciences. After founding the campus’s first ombuds office, she went on to establish the UC Merced Office of Campus Climate, which coordinated campus diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. De also served as a staff advisor to the UC Board of Regents from 2014-2016.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2023-2024 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the eighth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted (or co-sponsored) by The Humanities Institute. Our meetings provide the opportunity to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

PhD+ Series – California Community Colleges Panel Discussion
2023-11-02 16:00 - 17:30 | Graduate Student Commons, Room 204, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, 95064
Learn how to apply to (first step: register with and upload your CV to the CCC Registry) and what it’s like to work for a California community college by talking to director of the CCC Registry, Beth Au, moderator of the panel, and a panel of UCSC graduate student alumni and a former UCSC postdoc, all of whom currently work for a CCC.
Beth Au has a master’s degree in Asian American Studies from UCLA. She has been director of the California Community Colleges (CCC) Registry since 2002. As director, she oversees and manages cccregistry.org and hosts annual job fairs for the college system every January.
The CCC Registry is the state chancellor’s job board for faculty, management and staff opportunities at all 73 districts and 116 colleges across California. The CCCs are the largest higher education employer in the world with over 60,000 faculty, administrators and staff across the state.
In her role as a recruiter, she frequently works with UC graduate students and postdocs through UC Career Centers and Graduate Divisions to host CCC interest panels. During Covid, she pivoted the informational panels and 1:1 sessions with job seekers to a virtual format and has continued recruitment in the online environment. She has counseled over 400 job seekers in Zoom sessions since May 2020 and continues to use Zoom to maintain outreach and recruitment. Several of the job seekers she has coached have been offered full-time, tenure track positions at a CCC since 2022.
Beth is available for 1:1 Zoom sessions on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. to offer CCC application and career advice. Reach out to her directly at aub@yosemite.edu to schedule a session.

Lisa Beebe, Professor of Music, Cosumnes River College, Sacramento
Lisa Beebe is a professor of music at Cosumnes River College (CRC), where she teaches music history and ethnomusicology. She completed a Ph.D. in cultural musicology at UCSC in 2017 with a dissertation about the Vietnamese đàn bầu monochord and served as the UCSC Music Department’s graduate coordinator from 2017 to 2019. At CRC, she is the current chair of the Curriculum Committee, a member of the Professional Standards Committee, and has also served on several hiring committees. Along with teaching, she has presented research at conferences of the American Musical Instrument Society and the Society for Ethnomusicology. She was awarded tenure and full professorship at CRC in summer 2023!

Francesca “Chesa” Caparas, Instructor, English, Women’s Studies, and Asian American Studies, De Anza College, Cupertino
Chesa Caparas (she/they) has a B.A. and M.A. in modern literature from UC Santa Cruz. She is faculty in English, Women’s Studies, and Asian American Studies at De Anza College. In her classes she explores literature and pop culture, the intersections of technology with race and gender, and the ethical applications of artificial intelligence. In 2022, she was a Fulbright Scholar to the Philippines where she researched media and information literacy. She is currently pursuing a master’s in Information and Knowledge Strategy at Columbia University.

Jasmeet Dhaliwal, Ph.D., Instructor, Geology, Earth and Environmental Sciences, Chabot College, Hayward
Jasmeet Dhaliwal received her Ph.D. in earth science from UC San Diego and held a postdoctoral researcher position at UC Santa Cruz until accepting a position as a geology and earth and environmental sciences instructor at Chabot College. She worked with Beth Au to prepare the application to Chabot.

Sarah Gerhardt, Ph.D., Chemistry Department Chair and Instructor, Cabrillo College
Sarah started teaching immediately after receiving her Ph.D. in physical chemistry from UCSC. She started as a lecturer at Santa Clara University teaching general and physical chemistry and moved to Cabrillo College to teach general, introductory, and biological chemistry, the last for allied health sciences. She also participated in the ACCESS program at UCSC as a community college liaison for several summers. After having two children (teaching while pregnant and at night while her children were young) and several years as a lecturer, Sarah did a postdoctorate in molecular, cell, and developmental biology under Professor Harry Noller at UCSC. She returned to teaching general and introductory chemistry full-time at Monterey Peninsula College 2011 to 2017. Since August 2017, she has taught general chemistry full-time at Cabrillo College and is currently chair of Cabrillo’s Chemistry Department.

Brian Malone, Ph.D., Professor of English, De Anza, Cupertino
Brian Malone (he/him) is a tenured professor of English at De Anza College in Cupertino. He teaches classes in composition and English literature, in addition to serving on the leadership team for Guided Pathways and as project director for a Title III: Strengthening Institutions Program grant. He previously served as tenure review coordinator for the college. He holds an A.B. from Harvard University and an M.A. from the University of Virginia. He received a Ph.D. in literature from UC Santa Cruz in 2014, with a dissertation focusing on the nineteenth-century novel in England and France.

Melissa-Ann Nievera-Lozano, Ph.D., Ethnic Studies Professor, Evergreen Valley College, San José
Melissa-Ann Nievera-Lozano is a full-time ethnic studies professor at Evergreen Valley College in San Jose. She obtained her A.A. in sociology from Southwestern College, B.A. in sociology from UC San Diego, M.A. in Asian American studies from San Francisco State University, and both an M.A. and Ph.D. in education from UC Santa Cruz. She is co-editor of the Pilipinx Radical Imagination Reader (2018), and a contributing author to the anthologies Fight the Tower: Asian American Women Scholars’ Resistance and Renewal in the Academy (2019), the SAGE Encyclopedia of Filipina/x/o American Studies (2022), as well as Closer to Liberation: Pin[a/x]y Activism in Theory and Practice (2023). Her work draws from women-of-color radical thought to address how intersectional struggles of racism, classism, cisheteropatriarchy, and body terrorism impact us every day.

Andrea Seeger, A.B.D., Lecturer, Social Justice, Literature, Writing Oakes College, UCSC; Faculty, English Department, Cabrillo College, Aptos
Andrea Seeger, a Santa Cruz native, returned a few years ago to her hometown after academic wandering. She received her undergraduate education at UCSC, first studying mathematics, then completing her B.A. in literature. She has an M.A. in English literature from the University of Colorado Boulder and is A.B.D. in English at UC Berkeley. Andrea has been teaching literature, writing, and social justice for nearly 20 years. She has taught writing and rhetoric in The Program for Writing and Rhetoric at CU Boulder and literature at UC Berkeley. She currently teaches social justice at Oakes College and writing through the UCSC Writing Program. She also lectures in English at Cabrillo College. Andrea recently served as the director of the UCSC Writing Center and its VOCES Graduate Student Writing Center, an HSI Initiative. Andrea is deeply committed to student-centered learning and equitable access to a deep, quality education.

Randy Villegas, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Political Science, College of the Sequoias, Visalia
A product of public education institutions, Randy Villegas is an associate professor of political science at College of the Sequoias and a trustee for the Visalia Unified School District Board of Education. Before beginning graduate school, Villegas worked as a journalist and an organizer in Bakersfield, CA. He has been a recipient of numerous awards, including the 2020 CARE-UC Innovation Fellowship and the American Political Science Association (APSA) Fund for Latino Scholarship. He is currently featured in the Unity Exhibit of the California State Capitol Museum for his work around social justice issues in the Central Valley. After being appointed to the Visalia Board of Trustees in December 2021, he was elected by the voters of area 6 to continue serving in November 2022. Randy is honored to serve our students, families, and community.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2023-2024 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the eighth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted (or co-sponsored) by The Humanities Institute. Our meetings provide the opportunity to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Dr. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni – Morton Marcus Poetry Reading
2023-11-02 18:00 - 19:30 | Cultural Center at Merrill, Merrill Cultural Center, UC Santa Cruz, Merrill College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Please join us for the 14th annual Morton Marcus Poetry Reading, featuring honored guest Dr. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. Poet Gary Young will host the program, and the evening will include an announcement of the winner of the Morton Marcus Poetry Contest (recipient receives a $1,000 prize).

Seating will be first come, first served. Registration required.
Dr. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an award-winning author, poet, activist and professor. She is the author of 20 books including Mistress of Spices, Sister of My Heart, Oleander Girl, Before We Visit the Goddess and Palace of Illusions. Her latest novels are The Forest of Enchantments, a feminist retelling of the epic The Ramayana in the voice of Sita, and The Last Queen, the story of Maharani Jindan, the indomitable queen regent of Punjab who fought the British in many ingenious ways. Divakaruni often writes about contemporary life in America and India, women’s experiences, immigration, history, magical realism and mythology.
Gary Young is the author of several collections of poetry. His most recent books are That’s What I Thought, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award from Persea Books, and Precious Mirror, translations from the Japanese. His other books include Even So: New and Selected Poems; Pleasure; No Other Life, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award; Braver Deeds, winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize; Days; The Dream of a Moral Life, which won the James D. Phelan Award; and Hands. He has received a Pushcart Prize, and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and the Vogelstein Foundation, among others. In 2009 he received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Young was the first Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, and in 2012 he was named Santa Cruz County Artist of the Year. Since 1975 he has designed, illustrated, and printed limited edition letterpress books and broadsides at his Greenhouse Review Press. His fine print work is represented in numerous collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, The Getty Museum, and special collection libraries throughout the U.S. and Europe. He teaches creative writing and directs the Cowell Press at UC Santa Cruz.
This event is a part of the Fall UCSC Living Writers course, which features poets, novelists, academics, curators, and artists in conversation with one another, in person, across genre and media.
Parking information: The Merrill Cultural Center is located in Merrill College, in the northeast corner of the campus core. Those walking or arriving by Metro bus or campus shuttle can take the steep path heading northeast from the Crown/Merrill bus stop.
For those driving from the Main Entrance, stay on Coolidge Drive. Shortly after Coolidge turns left and becomes McLaughlin Drive, turn right at the sign for Merrill College. At the top of the hill, veer right. There are ParkMobile parking spaces along the left side of the lot, and parking for “A,” “B,” and “C” permits along the right. There are two accessible parking spaces if you turn left at the top of the hill and two more if you turn right. Parking attendants will be on site to sell parking permits to event attendees.
Purchase both poets works at: www.bookshopsantacruz.com
The Morton Marcus Poetry Reading honors poet, teacher, and film critic Morton Marcus (1936–2009). Marcus was the 1999 Santa Cruz County Artist of the Year and a recipient of the 2007 Gail Rich Award. Among his published works are eleven volumes of poetry, including The Santa Cruz Mountain Poems, Pages from a Scrapbook of Immigrants, Moments Without Names, Shouting Down the Silence, Pursuing the Dream Bone and The Dark Figure In The Doorway; a novel, The Brezhnev Memo; and a literary memoir, Striking Through the Masks. He taught English and Film at Cabrillo College for thirty years, was the co-host of the radio program, The Poetry Show, and was the co-host of the television film review show, Cinema Scene. Learn more at: www.mortonmarcus.com
The Morton Marcus Poetry Archive can be found at UCSC Special Collections. Mort’s personal papers, manuscripts, and recordings reflect his legacy as a poet and educator, and his collection of poetry books, broadsides, literary magazines and correspondence with other poets and writers illuminate his deep involvement in, and passion for, the literary art of poetry.
Organizing Committee: Danusha Laméris, Donna Mekis, Mark Ong, Maggie Paul, Catherine Segurson, David Sullivan, Irena Polić, Teresa Mora, and Gary Young.
The Morton Marcus Poetry Contest: phren-Z, an online literary magazine, whose mission is to celebrate the Santa Cruz literary community, has established a national poetry contest, The Morton Marcus Poetry Prize, in honor of Morton Marcus, “whose life and work inspired the writing of many students, friends, and emerging poets.” This years contest will be judged by Maggie Paul. For more information visit: http://phren-z.org/poetry_contest.html
Support Poetry in Santa Cruz: The Annual Morton Marcus Poetry Reading is made possible due to campus and community co-sponsorships and generous contributions from members of our community, like you. To ensure we can continue to offer this poetry reading free and open to the public in honor and memory of Morton Marcus, and to have our lives deeply enriched by exceptional poetry, please consider making a gift to The Morton Marcus Poetry Reading Fund: thi.ucsc.edu/projects/morton-marcus-poetry-reading.
This community event is presented by the The Humanities Institute and co-sponsored by:
Bookshop Santa Cruz
Cabrillo College English Department
Cowell College
Donna F. Mekis
Center for South Asian Studies.
Living Writers Series
Ow Family Properties
Merrill College
Poetry Santa Cruz
Porter Hitchcock Modern Poetry Fund
Porter College
Santa Cruz Writes
Side By Side Press
Special Collections & Archives
If you have disability-related needs, please contact us at thi@ucsc.edu or call 831-459-1274 by October 26th, 2023.

Mediterranean Studies, Present & Future: The “California School” Twenty Years On
2023-11-03 - 2023-11-04 | TBD, CA, United States
From its inception at UC Santa Cruz in 2003, the “California School” of Mediterranean Studies has promoted the Mediterranean not (pace Braudel) as a predefined place of the olive and the vine, but as a heuristic rubric useful for disrupting or reconfiguring existing categories of analysis (especially those defined by nation-states, continents, or religious cultures)—in the process generating new questions and bringing new objects, case studies, or perspectives into focus. Now, two decades on, the Fall 2023 Mediterranean Seminar Workshop will return to UCSC on the 20th anniversary of the foundation of the UCSC Mediterranean Studies Reading Group, the precursor to the Mediterranean Seminar, to take stock of the field and suggest new avenues of research and methodologies.
“Mediterranean Studies, Present & Future: The ‘California School’ Twenty Years On,” the Mediterranean Seminar Fall 2023 Workshop, is is organized by Sharon Kinoshita and Brian A. Catlos, and is hosted by the University of California, Santa Cruz, sponsored by the Literature Department and the Humanities Division with generous support from the Siegfried B. and Elisabeth Mignon Puknat Endowment for Literary Studies, The Humanities Institute, and the Center for the Middle East and North Africa at UCSC, together with the CU Mediterranean Studies Group and the Mediterranean Seminar.
For more information, please contact: mailbox@mediterraneanseminar.org.

Critical Theory Roundtable Comes to UC Santa Cruz
2023-11-03 - 2023-11-04 | Humanities 2, Room 259
Next month the 30th annual Critical Theory Roundtable will take place on UC Santa Cruz’s campus in Humanities 2 Room 259 hosted by HistCon professors Banu Bargu & Massimiliano Tomba. The events will take place on November 3rd & 4th. Find the program below.
The Critical Theory Roundtable is a small, high caliber conference that represents the best of the diverse streams of critical theory in philosophy and the social sciences. In the past it has been hosted at Yale University, Northwestern, Dartmouth, the University of Toronto, and other venues across the country. It draws participants from across the US and often Europe. The conference now represents a new generation of critical theorists who are focused on diversifying the perspectives and problems in the field. This includes challenges of neoliberalism, globalization, and nationalism, and fostering creative new critical modalities in the social sciences, humanities, and arts.
This event is sponsored by the History of Consciousness Department, the Humanities Division, and The Humanities Institute.
Explore more about the Roundtable here
View the full program here.

Nathan Hill– Wellness
2023-11-06 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop welcomes Nathan Hill, best-selling author of The Nix, for a reading and signing of Wellness—a poignant and witty novel about marriage, the often baffling pursuit of health and happiness, and the stories that bind us together. From the gritty ’90s Chicago art scene to a suburbia of detox diets and home-renovation hysteria, Wellness reimagines the love story with a healthy dose of insight, irony, and heart.

“A hilarious and moving exploration of a modern marriage that astounds in its breadth and intimacy.” —Brit Bennett, author of The Vanishing Half
When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the ’90s, the two quickly join forces and hold on tight, each eager to claim a place in Chicago’s thriving underground art scene with an appreciative kindred spirit. Fast-forward twenty years to married life, and alongside the challenges of parenting, they encounter cults disguised as mindfulness support groups, polyamorous would-be suitors, Facebook wars, and something called Love Potion Number Nine.
For the first time, Jack and Elizabeth struggle to recognize each other, and the no-longer-youthful dreamers are forced to face their demons, from unfulfilled career ambitions to painful childhood memories of their own dysfunctional families. In the process, Jack and Elizabeth must undertake separate, personal excavations, or risk losing the best thing in their lives: each other.
Nathan Hill’s best-selling debut novel, The Nix, was named the number one book of 2016 by Entertainment Weekly and one of the year’s best books by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Slate, and many others. It was the winner of the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction from the Los Angeles Times and was published worldwide in more than two dozen languages. A native Iowan, Hill lives with his wife in Naples, Florida.

PhD+ Series – WordPress Website Design with Jason Chafin
2023-11-07 11:30 | Graduate Student Commons
Professional websites can boost your reputation and aid your networking and job search. UCSC provides free access to WordPress (with several design templates) to faculty, postdoctoral scholars, and graduate students. Get design tips from Jason and get started using WordPress to make a blog or static website to showcase your graduate or postdoctoral work!

Jason Chafin graduated from UC Santa Cruz in 1993 with a bachelor’s in environmental studies. He earned his master of environmental studies from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, and spent over a decade as an environmental planner. He switched gears in 2010 and became a web developer, working primarily with WordPress. He’s been with University Relations as the senior web developer in the Communications and Marketing Department since 2017.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2023-2024 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the eighth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted (or co-sponsored) by The Humanities Institute. Our meetings provide the opportunity to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Giving Day
2023-11-08 | Virtual Event
Please consider partnering with the Humanities Division on Wednesday, November 8, by supporting one or more of our exciting Giving Day projects. This annual 24-hour fundraising drive is full of challenges and matches that can double or even triple your dollars. We believe in the power of the humanities to transform lives and society for the better. And we believe that with your support, our students can lead impactful lives that transform our world.
In the Humanities at UC Santa Cruz, we prepare students not just for jobs and careers, but for lifelong learning, happiness, and meaningful engagement in the world. These five Giving Day projects will provide incredible opportunities for our students to engage beyond the classroom.
Humanities Student Success Fund
Through our Humanities Student Success Fund, we provide access to experiential learning that enhances academic curriculum and prepares students for rewarding and impactful careers. With your support, we will increase access to things like paid internships, service learning, and research support for undergraduate, transfer, and graduate students studying the Humanities.
Center for Public Philosophy
The Center for Public Philosophy aims to empower the general public with the tools and insights of philosophy and critical thought. Through community programming, events, and media, the center helps foster more thoughtful and engaged thinkers, doers, and change makers. Your donation will go towards the annual High School Ethics Bowl as well as our new programs such as the Night of Ideas, a free event that brings art, music, and interesting speakers to the public. Help the Center for Public Philosophy share the power, practice, and joy of philosophy far
beyond university walls.
Classics Alive!
Classics Alive! helps students learn about the language, literature, art, and history of Ancient Greece, Rome, and beyond. Your generous gift will help us purchase Greek and Latin textbooks for students with financial need, provide support to the Classics Library in Cowell College, fund awards to recognize student achievement, organize class excursions to the Getty Villa and other regional museums, and sponsor students on archaeological digs and other summer programs.
Minorities and Philosophy
Minorities and Philosophy (MAP) is an organization of 180 local MAP Chapters dedicated to addressing structural injustices in academic philosophy and removing barriers that impeded participation for members of marginalized groups. Your gift to UCSC’s local chapter provides support for mentorship opportunities, speaker events, panel discussions, reading groups, and conferences.
Okinawa Memories Initiative
The Okinawa Memories Initiative (OMI) is a dynamic international public history project with a big impact. For nearly a decade, OMI has been a campus leader in connecting undergraduate students to career-building experiential learning opportunities. From innovative exhibits and oral history interviews to community partnerships, undergraduate members develop vital professional and academic skills through hands-on public humanities research.
Philosophical Slug Society
The Philosophical Slug Society is a student-run undergraduate club where students meet to discuss ancient and contemporary philosophy and apply their education outside of the classroom. Help philosophy students attend workshops, conferences, and other academic events that greatly enhance their academic experience.
Look for another email in the coming days to learn more about our impact in and beyond the classroom!
Give Now!

PhD+ Series – Slide Design with Sonya Newlyn
2023-11-08 11:30 - 13:00 | Graduate Student Commons
Have you ever inflicted a boring slide presentation on an audience? Learn tips and techniques for using slides the way they should be used, as visual aids to your spoken-word presentation. Prior to attending this workshop, review this slide design page.
Sonya Newlyn received her M.A. in English literature from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and her B.A. in English literature from Emory University, where she also minored in anthropology. In addition to organizing professional development classes, workshops, panels, and the two certificate programs, she also organizes Grad Slam, the Graduate Symposium, and the Distinguished Graduate Student Alumni Award Ceremony.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2023-2024 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the eighth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted (or co-sponsored) by The Humanities Institute. Our meetings provide the opportunity to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Hafsa Kanjwal – Colonizing Kashmir: State-building Under Indian Occupation
2023-11-08 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Cosponsored by the Center for South Asian Studies
In this talk, Dr. Hafsa Kanjwal discusses her new book Colonizing Kashmir: State-Building Under Indian Occupation. The book interrogates how Kashmir was made “integral” to India through a study of the decade long rule (1953-1963) of Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, the second Prime Minister of the State of Jammu and Kashmir. Drawing upon a wide array of bureaucratic documents, propaganda materials, memoirs, literary sources, and oral interviews in English, Urdu, and Kashmiri, Kanjwal examines the intentions, tensions, and unintended consequences of Bakshi’s state-building policies in the context of India’s colonial occupation. She reveals how the Kashmir government tailored its policies to integrate Kashmir’s Muslims while also showing how these policies were marked by inter-religious tension, corruption, and political repression. Challenging the binaries of colonial and postcolonial, Kanjwal historicizes India’s occupation of Kashmir through processes of emotional integration, development, normalization, and empowerment to highlight the new hierarchies of power and domination that emerged in the aftermath of decolonization. In doing so, she urges us to question triumphalist narratives of India’s state-formation, as well as the sovereignty claims of the modern nation-state.
Hafsa Kanjwal is an assistant professor of South Asian History in the Department of History at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses on the history of the modern world, South Asian history, and Islam in the Modern World. As a historian of modern Kashmir, she is the author of Colonizing Kashmir: State-building Under Indian Occupation (Stanford University Press, 2023), which examines how the Indian and Kashmir governments utilized state-building to entrench India’s colonial occupation of Kashmir in the aftermath of Partition.
Hafsa has written and spoken on her research for a variety of news outlets including The Washington Post, Al Jazeera English, and the BBC. She received her Ph.D. in History and Women’s Studies from the University of Michigan and a Bachelors in Regional Studies of the Muslim World from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.
Zoom Registration Link: https://bit.ly/45QVLw0

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

The First Folio at 400 Exhibit Opening
2023-11-08 16:00 - 18:00 | McHenry Library (3rd Floor), Special Collections
Special Collections and Archives at UCSC invites you to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio.
Working together, Sean Keilen, Katie O’Hare and Peggy Gotthold and Lawrence Van Velzer present an exhibition that explores this landmark event in the history of printing and the transmission of Shakespeare’s works. The First Folio at 400 considers texts drawn from Shakespeare’s wide and eclectic reading; the folio and quarto formats in which his plays were published in early modern England; the eighteen plays the First Folio rescued from oblivion by printing them; and actors, theaters, and productions that have brought those plays to life. Please join us for the opening of The First Folio at 400 on Wednesday, November 8, from 4:00 until 6:00pm in the Special Collections & Archives Reading Room at McHenry Library.
About the Curators:
Sean Keilen is Professor of Literature and Founding Director of Shakespeare Workshop at UC Santa Cruz and Head of Dramaturgy at Santa Cruz Shakespeare.
Katie O’Hare is a doctoral student in the Literature Department at UC Santa Cruz. She is writing a dissertation about Shakespeare’s Henriad and has worked with Santa Cruz Shakespeare as a dramaturg and community educator.
Peggy Gotthold and Lawrence Van Velzer, the proprietors of Foolscap Press, are responsible for the Shakespeare Garden at Santa Cruz Shakespeare.

PhD+ Series – Psychology of Writing with Andrea Seeger
2023-11-09 11:30 - 13:00 | Graduate Student Commons
Sometimes we can be our severest writing critics and biggest hindrances to writing success. Learn how to overcome psychological barriers and start writing and about the VOCES Graduate Student Writing Center (for graduate students only)!

Andrea Seeger received a bachelor’s degree in literature from UC Santa Cruz, master’s in English literature from the University of Colorado (CU) Boulder, and an all but dissertation in English from UC Berkeley. Andrea has been teaching literature, writing, and social justice for nearly 20 years. She has taught writing and rhetoric in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric at CU Boulder and literature at UC Berkeley. She currently teaches social justice at UCSC’s Oakes College and writing through UCSC’s Writing Program. She is also a lecturer at Cabrillo College, where she teaches English. Andrea is the director of The Writing Center and of its VOCES Graduate Student Writing Center, one of the Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) Initiatives of the Graduating and Advancing New American Scholars (GANAS) Graduate Pathways program (Activity 6). Andrea is deeply committed to student-centered learning and equitable access to a quality education. Andrea’s scholarship focuses on the intersections of racial and gender formation in 20th-century American literature, and her work is deeply invested in social justice.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2023-2024 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the eighth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted (or co-sponsored) by The Humanities Institute. Our meetings provide the opportunity to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Cancelled - Dr. Joy Buolamwini: Unmasking AI
2023-11-13 19:00 - 20:30 | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz and The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz present Dr. Joy Buolamwini, “The conscience of the AI revolution” (Fortune), who will discuss her new book, Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines. Buolamwini explains how we’ve arrived at an era of AI harms and oppression, and what we can do to avoid its pitfalls.
This event will take place at the Cowell Ranch Hay Barn and is cosponsored by NAACP Santa Cruz County Branch.
“If you’re going to read only one book about AI, this should be it.”—Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation

$10 for event access, $33 includes event entry and a hardcover copy of UNMASKING AI.
25 free tickets are available to UCSC students. Please email thi@ucsc.edu to reserve a student ticket. Free tickets are first come, first served.
“This revelatory book exposes the myriad, deeply ingrained biases encoded into facial recognition and other ‘trusted’ AI systems, pushing us to confront our blind trust in the machines that are taking over our lives. In describing how she conquered her own demons along her path towards justice for all, Dr. Joy Buolamwini’s offers a deeply felt, stirring call to action for ethical AI—a must-read for those who want a world in which technology serves humanity.” —Maria Ressa, Nobel Peace Prize winner, CEO and president of Rappler
To most of us, it seems like recent developments in artificial intelligence emerged out of nowhere to pose unprecedented threats to humankind. But to Dr. Joy Buolamwini, who has been at the forefront of AI research, this moment has been a long time in the making.
After tinkering with robotics as a high school student in Memphis and then developing mobile apps in Zambia as a Fulbright fellow, Dr. Buolamwini followed her lifelong passion for computer science, engineering, and art to MIT in 2015. As a graduate student at the “Future Factory,” she did groundbreaking research that exposed widespread racial and gender bias in AI services from tech giants across the world.
Unmasking AI goes beyond the headlines about existential risks produced by Big Tech. It is the remarkable story of how Dr. Buolamwini uncovered what she calls “the coded gaze”—the evidence of encoded discrimination and exclusion in tech products—and how she galvanized the movement to prevent AI harms by founding the Algorithmic Justice League. Applying an intersectional lens to both the tech industry and the research sector, she shows how racism, sexism, colorism, and ableism can overlap and render broad swaths of humanity “excoded” and therefore vulnerable in a world rapidly adopting AI tools. Computers, she reminds us, are reflections of both the aspirations and the limitations of the people who create them.
Encouraging experts and non-experts alike to join this fight, Buolamwini writes, “The rising frontier for civil rights will require algorithmic justice. AI should be for the people and by the people, not just the privileged few.”
Dr. Joy Buolamwini is the founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, a groundbreaking researcher, and a renowned speaker. Her writing has been featured in publications such as Time, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and The Atlantic. As the Poet of Code, she creates art to illuminate the impact of artificial intelligence on society and advises world leaders on preventing AI harms. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Rhodes Scholarship, the inaugural Morals & Machines Prize, and the Technological Innovation Award from the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change. Her MIT research on facial recognition technologies is featured in the Emmy-nominated documentary Coded Bias. Born in Canada to Ghanaian immigrants, Buolamwini lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

THI Coffee Hour
2023-11-15 11:00 - 12:00, 2023-11-29 11:00 - 12:00, 2023-12-06 11:00 - 12:00, 2023-12-13 11:00 - 12:00 | Humanities 1, Room 515, 1156 High St, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Humanities Institute is excited to welcome students, faculty, staff, and friends for a weekly Coffee Hour on Wednesdays, 11am to noon.
We invite you to visit our team, meet our new Faculty Director, Pranav Anand, and talk with us about your academic interests as well as upcoming THI events and programs. Learn about how THI supports Faculty, Graduate Students, and Undergraduate Students, including fellowship and grant opportunities, and hear more about our ongoing research initiatives and partnerships. Enjoy a free cup of coffee, pick up a THI sticker, and be a part of our humanities community.
Come say hi to us at the THI Suite, on the 5th floor of the Humanities 1 building. We look forward to seeing you!

PhD+ Series – Interviewing and Negotiating the Job Offer with Veronica Heiskell
2023-11-15 11:30 - 13:00 | Graduate Student Commons
Learn interviewing strategies to land the job offer. Then learn how to negotiate the best salary and benefits package when you receive the job offer. This class offers strategies that apply to both academic and alternative-to-academic job applications and negotiations. The negotiation strategies also apply to asking for raises, job reclassifications, and title and responsibilities changes.
Veronica Heiskell has worked for over twelve years in diversity and career centers in a variety of higher education institutions and currently serves as associate director of experiential learning at Career Success. Her goal is to remove as many barriers as possible for all students to pursue meaningful experiential learning opportunities. She completed her bachelor’s degree in psychology with a minor in LGBT studies at UCLA, her master’s degree in counseling and guidance in higher education at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and her doctoral degree in higher education administration at UT Austin. Her dissertation research focused on sense of belonging for exploratory students.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2023-2024 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the eighth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted (or co-sponsored) by The Humanities Institute. Our meetings provide the opportunity to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Ya Zuo – Feeling the Universe: Phenomenology of Emotion in Premodern China
2023-11-15 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
What is an emotion? Are your feelings inside you, or somewhere out there in the world? In this talk, Ya Zuo introduces the phenomenology of emotion in premodern China. The Chinese theories offer an interesting understanding of affectivity which places emotions beyond the subject. Emotion is simultaneously a deep cosmic order exceeding the mundane world and a fact anchored in the human body. A feeling, therefore, is constantly universal and personal at the same time.
Ya Zuo is an associate professor of History at University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a cultural historian of middle and late imperial China. She is the author of Shen Gua’s Empiricism (Harvard University Press, 2018) and a range of articles on subjects such as theory of knowledge, sensory history, medical history, and the history of emotions.

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

Israel/Palestine: Learn-In
2023-11-15 14:00 - 15:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Deeply concerned about Israel/Palestine? Grappling with Hamas’ attack on October 7 and Israel’s current bombardment and invasion of Gaza, as well as the broader historical context for both? Wonder how we got here and how we might imagine a better future together? Come with questions and a desire to learn with and from others. All members of the Santa Cruz community are welcome.
Conveners: Nathaniel Deutsch, Professor of History and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies, and Alma Heckman, Professor of History and Jewish Studies
This event is presented by the Center for Jewish Studies.

PhD+ Series – Academic Publishing with Martha Stuit and Erich van Rijn
2023-11-16 11:30 - 13:00 | Graduate Student Commons
How do you choose a reputable academic journal to publish in? What are your copyrights? What is open access? Where do you find academic publishing support at UCSC beyond your program and department?
As scholarly communication librarian at the UCSC University Library, Martha Stuit provides author services, which covers theses and dissertations, publishing academic articles and books, open access, and copyright. She also serves as the library’s liaison to the Division of Graduate Studies. Prior to becoming a librarian, she was a journalist. Martha has an M.S. in information from the University of Michigan.

Erich van Rijn is executive director at the University of California Press where he leads the press’s book and journal publishing operations. Erich has been with the University of California Press since 1997 and has held positions in marketing, sales, operations, and finance. Prior to joining the press he held positions in marketing at Oxford University Press and HarperCollins Publishers.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2023-2024 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the eighth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted (or co-sponsored) by The Humanities Institute. Our meetings provide the opportunity to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Living Writers - Chia Chia Lin
2023-11-16 17:20 - 19:00 | Merrill Academics 102
Chia-Chia Lin is the author of The Unpassing (FSG 2019), which was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s’ Choice and won the 2020 Clark Fiction Prize. She graduated with an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Her short stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, NewYorker.com, The New York Times, Zyzzyva, and more. She currently lives in Northern California.
Sponsors: 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)

Project Paradiso: A Gateway to Dante’s Heaven - Episode Two – The Structure of Dante’s Paradiso: or How to Tell a Story beyond Time, Space, and Individuality
2023-11-17 09:00 - 10:30 | Virtual Event
Dante’s Paradiso is the least studied and the least understood of the three parts of the Commedia. Yet it is arguably the most important for the dynamism and originality of the literary, theological, and philosophical inquiries that take place there. It is also a singularly important interpretive guide for a full understanding of the entire Commedia. It is a poem that asks to be tackled by a community of engaged readers: here it’s your opportunity! This year-long series of webinar workshops led by world-renowned scholars will take you on a deep reading of the Paradiso and an unforgettable journey to the heart of Dante’s universe. This virtual series will reward both first-time and expert readers of the Commedia with an opportunity to delve deep into one of the most complex and daring speculative poems ever written. We’ll be meeting online almost every other week from October to May. See the Project Paradiso page for full schedule.

Episode Two – The Structure of Dante’s Paradiso: or How to Tell a Story beyond Time, Space, and Individuality featuring:
Alejandro Cuadrado is a Lecturer in the Department of Italian Studies. He received his PhD in Italian and Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 2023, where he was also a Core Preceptor and Provost Diversity Fellow. He has an undergraduate degree in French & Italian from Princeton University. His research focuses on medieval Italian literature at the intersection of history and religion. He is currently writing his first book, Dante, Historian of Religious Institutions, which argues that Dante embeds parallel histories of the papacy, monasticism, and the mendicant fraternal orders into the Commedia. His other research has considered medieval exemplarity, travel and pilgrimage narratives, Boccaccio, Petrarch, lyric poetry, Mediterranean Studies, and Cervantes. With Akash Kumar, he is the co-editor of the Dante Simile Project, which brings together a wide range of scholars to historicize and contextualize Dante’s narrative similes. He is an Assistant Editor of Digital Dante, an online resource dedicated to original research and ideas on Dante, including Teodolinda Barolini’s commentary to the Divine Comedy.
Presented by the Humanities Institute and the Department of Literature Italian Studies. Sponsored by the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Siegfried and Elizabeth Mignon Puknat Literary Studies Endowment, and Porter College

The Japanese American Mass Incarceration, Art, Activism, and Multiracial Solidarity
2023-11-17 15:00 - 18:00 | Page Smith Library
Join us for a panel discussion with Karen Tei Yamashita and traci kato-kiriyama. The panel discussion will be moderated by Alice Yang.
Karen Tei Yamashita, UCSC Literature Professor Emerita, acclaimed author of Letters to Memory, and a 2021 recipient of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, will read from her work, discuss her research, the creation of the Yamashita family archive, and the legacy of the mass incarceration and a loyalty questionnaire for her family and the Japanese American community.
traci kato-kiriyama will read from Navigating With(out) Instruments – a collage of poetry and reflections of intersectional identity & memory – and discuss legacies of silence and collective noise in relation to World War II mass incarceration of Japanese Americans, friendship & solidarity in movement building, and how we can (must) use our voices for collective self-determination and transformation today.
Reception to follow. Please help us order enough manjus by RSVP-ing here.
Directions and Parking: The Page Smith Library is located in the Cowell College Courtyard. The closest parking lots are 107, 109, 110, and 108. Slightly farther parking can be found at 103A and 119. Here is a map of the parking lots at UCSC.

Il Moro: Film Screening and Director Q&A
2023-11-17 17:30 - 19:00 | DARC 108, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join The Humanities Institute and the Departments of Literature, Film and Digital Media, and History of Art & Visual Culture for a screening of the award-winning, Oscar-qualifying short film Il Moro (Italian, with subtitles). Il Moro is a period drama based on true events in the life of Alessandro de’ Medici, the illegitimate son of a woman of African descent and Pope Clement VII who eventually became the first Black head of state in modern Western Europe. After the screening, Profs. Camilla Hawthorne and Consuelo Endrigo-Williams will moderate a Q&A with Daphne Di Cinto, the writer, director, and producer of Il Moro. About the Speaker: Daphne Di Cinto is a Black Italian screenwriter, director, actor, and producer. She began her film and theater studies in Rome, where she focused on acting at Scuola di Cinema, while earning a degree in Communication Science from Roma Tre University. She attended the faculty of cinema at Sorbonne University in Paris before moving to New York for her master’s in fine arts at the Actors Studio Drama School. Currently based in London, Daphne is writer, director, and producer of the award-winning short film Il Moro/The Moor, her directorial debut. As an actor, she played the Duchess of Hastings in the Netflix series Bridgerton.
To register for the virtual event, please click here
This event will be presented both in person and virtually. The in person location is DARC 108.
This event is co-sponsored by Italian Studies at UCSC, The Humanities Institute, the History of Art and Visual Culture Department, and the Film and Digital Media Department

Broadsides – Pairing Artworks with Poetry from the Morton Marcus Community of Poets
2023-11-18 16:00 - 19:00 | m.k. contemporary art, 703 Front Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Please join us for an artists’ reception and poetry reading to celebrate the opening of Broadsides, an exhibition presented by m.k. contemporary art, which brings together diverse voices from the local poetry scene and pairs their writings with highly accomplished local and regional visual artists. The event will be hosted by Santa Cruz treasure Wallace Baine.
This unique collaboration offers visitors a chance to explore the profound connections between art and poetry. The exhibition was thoughtfully curated by local talents Donna Mekis and Rose Sellery, with the elegant broadside design crafted by Gary Young, Director of the Cowell Press at UC Santa Cruz. The art and poetry worlds collide in this unique exhibition which showcases our community’s extraordinary creativity. Donna Mekis, co-curator, remarked, “the magic of pairing art and poetry is seeing how the two art forms enrich and complement each other. The visual images provide a new perspective and depth to the words, and create an entirely new experience for the viewer/listener.” Rose Sellery, co-curator, added, “the Broadsides exhibition is a testament to the beauty of collaboration. It demonstrates how two distinct art forms can merge to create something greater than the sum of their parts. We invite everyone to come and be inspired by this remarkable fusion of art and poetry.”
Featuring
Visual Artists: Tamera Avery, Ric Ambrose, Gale Antokal, Adon Valenziano, Marti Somers, Robin McCloskey, Harry Clewans, Jay Mercado, Rose Sellery
Poems By: Farnaz Fatemi, Danusha Laméris, Morton Marcus, Deng Ming-Dao, Maggie Paul, Joseph Stroud, David Sullivan, Jeff Tagami, Gary Young
Broadsides is made possible through the generous support of The Humanities Institute (THI) and Special Collections & Archives at UC Santa Cruz, Mark Ong and Side By Side Studios, and Santa Cruz based Community Printers.
About m.k. contemporary art (formerly Curated by the Sea Gallery): m.k. contemporary art has become a prominent hub for contemporary art in downtown Santa Cruz, dedicated to showcasing the work of talented local and regional artists. It serves as a platform for artistic expression and fosters creative connections within the community.
More info at: https://www.mkcontemporary.art/broadsides2023

Humanities in the Age of AI Lunch meeting
2023-11-20 12:00 - 13:30 | 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 their second lunch meeting scheduled for November 6th (Monday) at noon in HUM 210. The research cluster boasts a diverse group of core participants. This includes six esteemed faculty members from various disciplines, graduate students representing politics, history, literature, philosophy, feminist studies, and film and visual studies, and undergraduate scholars from computer science, computational media, and creative writing.
From the Department of Politics, Professor Matt Sparke will be guiding a conversation on the intersection of AI-driven developments in global and community health, in conjunction with teaching collaborations here at UC Santa Cruz. In a similar vein, Jack Fox Keen, a 1st Year Ph.D candidate in Computer Science and Engineering, will be presenting their research on explainable AI, health care and natural language processing in application to suicide prevention.
We encourage you to bring your own lunch to this meeting as this is an uncatered event. Until then, please continue to check our website for more updates on the cluster’s upcoming projects and presenters.
For those who prefer to schedule in advance, please note the dates for our brown bag meetings throughout the academic year: 10/2 (lunch provided), 11/6, 12/11, 1/8 (lunch provided), 2/12 (featuring Davide Panagia), 3/4, 4/8 (lunch provided), and 5/6. THI will graciously cater on the three specified dates. For the remaining meetings, attendees are cordially invited to bring their lunch. We are honored to have Professor Davide Panagia from UCLA present on 2/12; arrangements are underway to secure another external speaker for a subsequent session.

PhD+ Series – Listening, Mentoring, Coaching, Advising with Andrea Cohen
2023-11-28 11:30 - 13:00 | Graduate Student Commons
Listening to understand represents an equally important half of effective oral communication to the other half, delivery of the communication by spoken word. Listening well forms the essential communication base upon which to build the skills of mentoring, coaching, and advising. Listening well also aids your performance on a team and in any professional and personal relationship. Learn how to listen conscientiously and to mentor, coach, and advise with empathy.
Andrea Cohen serves as director of strategy and chief of staff in the Division of Academic Affairs at UC Santa Cruz where she engages with strategic initiatives; manages recruitments, supports personnel, and guides employee development; centers DEIA goals; and conducts research and strategizes on divisional and campuswide projects. A trusted adviser to colleagues at all levels, Andrea develops project and implementation plans, facilitates groups through projects and change processes, offers workshops and training, participates on several boards, and was the founding chair of UCSC’s Campus Advisory Committee on the Status of Womxn (CACSW). Andrea earned a master’s in public administration (M.P.A.) from Villanova University in Philadelphia and a bachelor’s in geography from the University of Colorado Boulder.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2023-2024 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the eighth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted (or co-sponsored) by The Humanities Institute. Our meetings provide the opportunity to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

PhD+ Series – Maintaining Work-Life Balance with Angel Dominguez
2023-11-29 11:30 - 13:00 | Graduate Student Commons
Join Angel Dominguez for an interactive workshop and discussion of what it means to cultivate a healthy work-life balance. The interactive discussion will cover the importance of setting boundaries, time management, how technology can be your friend, and why saying “no” doesn’t make you a bad person!
Angel is a queer, first-generation, Latinx UCSC alumnus dedicated to supporting historically excluded groups of students during their time here in the redwoods as the GANAS graduate services counselor for UCSC. Angel holds an M.F.A. in writing and poetics from Naropa University and is the author of several books of poetry and prose.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2023-2024 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the eighth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted (or co-sponsored) by The Humanities Institute. Our meetings provide the opportunity to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Robert Nichols – The Indian Wars Have Never Ended
2023-11-29 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
In the 1960s and 70s, Red Power intellectuals and activists engaged in a remarkably ambitious wholesale rewriting of American Indian history. New works of popular and academic history challenged standard narratives of U.S. territorial expansion, with particular emphasis paid to major events of the nineteenth century ‘Indian Wars’, such as Sand Creek, Wounded Knee, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. This presentation seeks to understand Red Power Historiography as more than just retrospective revision and, instead, as a distinct mode of contemporaneous political critique. Particular attention is paid to the way that Red Power Historiography helped to reframe popular interpretations of Cold War conflict, especially, the spectre of the guerilla, the partisan, and the revolutionary insurgent. Work from this period serves as a model then for how we might bind disparate struggles together, across great time and space.
Robert Nichols is Professor of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work in social and political theory has been published in several books and journal articles, including Theft is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory (Duke, 2020); The Dispossessed: Karl Marx’s Debates on Wood Theft and the Right of the Poor, ed. and trans., (Minnesota, 2021); and The World of Freedom: Heidegger, Foucault, and the Politics of Historical Ontology (Stanford, 2014).

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

Netta Avineri - Language and Social Justice: What Is, What Has Been, and What Could Be?
2023-11-29 17:30 - 18:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics is pleased to present Netta Avineri, Ph.D. (Middlebury Institute of International Studies) “Language and Social Justice: What Is, What Has Been, and What Could Be.” Refreshments will be served.
How are language and social justice interconnected? How can one cultivate a language and social justice praxis, integrating reflection, dialogue, and action for language-related social change? In this presentation, I will discuss the applied linguistic anthropological (ALA) framework, a multi scaled, temporally-shaped critical engagement with socially-situated language issues, balancing contextual knowledge, relationship-building, and aspirations for action (Avineri & Baquedano-López, forthcoming). The ALA framework explores what is, what has been, and what could be through the following steps: centering language, reflection, noticing, observation, narrative, positionalities and commitments, critique, relationships, aspirations, and actions for social change. Through exploring language and social justice issues, critical reflections, and hand-on activities, we will demonstrate the ways that individual, interpersonal, and collective engagement are fundamental for systemic social change.
Dr. Netta Avineri is a Language Teacher Education Professor and Intercultural Competence Committee Chair at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. She serves as the Kathryn Wasserman Davis Collaborative in Conflict Transformation Graduate Education Pillar Lead. Netta teaches Critical ServiceLearning and Teacher Education courses at California State University, Monterey Bay. She is co-editor of Language and Social Justice in Practice, author of Research Methods for Language Teaching: Inquiry, Process, and Synthesis, co-editor of Metalinguistic Communities: Case Studies of Agency, Ideology, and Symbolic Uses of Language, and Series Editor for Critical Approaches in Applied Linguistics. Her co-authored forthcoming textbook is An Introduction to Language and Social Justice: What Is, What Has Been, and What Could Be. She has served as the American Association for Applied Linguistics Public Affairs and Engagement Committee Chair and is the Secretary/Treasurer of the Society of Linguistic Anthropology. Netta’s research interests include language and social justice, critical interculturality, heritage language socialization, and ethical community partnerships.

PhD+ Series – Public Speaking with Bri McWhorter
2023-11-30 11:30 - 13:00 | Graduate Student Commons
Every presentation is an opportunity to share your ideas and connect with your audience. In this interactive workshop, Bri will lead you through her program, W.A.V.E.®, where she will show you techniques to overcome nerves, use your voice effectively, and bring your content to life. Whether you are sharing a pitch about your work, speaking at a conference, or giving a job talk, she will share tools that you can use to impress and captivate your audience.
Bri McWhorter is the founder and CEO of Activate to Captivate, where she teaches communication techniques from an actor’s point of view. She specializes in public speaking, scientific communications, interview skills, and interpersonal communications. She has taught workshops at Fortune 500 companies, privately coached CEOs at nonprofits, and led certificate programs at top universities. She is the creator of W.A.V.E.®, a program where she teaches speakers how to overcome nerves, use body language, and rely on their voice to tell an engaging story. She has coached speakers for academic symposia at various institutions, including UC Office of the President, UC Irvine, UC Santa Barbara, and UC Santa Cruz. She has a Master of Fine Arts in acting from UC Irvine and a bachelor’s degree in theater and performance studies from UC Berkeley.

This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2023-2024 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the eighth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted (or co-sponsored) by The Humanities Institute. Our meetings provide the opportunity to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Living Writers - Justin Torres
2023-11-30 17:20 - 19:00 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Justin Torres is the author of the novel Blackouts. His debut novel, We the Animals, won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, was translated into fifteen languages, and was adapted into a feature film. He was named a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35,” a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library. His short fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Tin House, The Washington Post, LA Times Image Magazine, and Best American Essays. He lives in Los Angeles, and teaches at UCLA.
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)

Project Paradiso: A Gateway to Dante’s Heaven – Episode Three – The Subject of Violence (Paradiso 3–5 & 14–18)
2023-12-01 09:00 - 10:30 | Virtual Event
Dante’s Paradiso is the least studied and the least understood of the three parts of the Commedia. Yet it is arguably the most important for the dynamism and originality of the literary, theological, and philosophical inquiries that take place there. It is also a singularly important interpretive guide for a full understanding of the entire Commedia. It is a poem that asks to be tackled by a community of engaged readers: here it’s your opportunity! This year-long series of webinar workshops led by world-renowned scholars will take you on a deep reading of the Paradiso and an unforgettable journey to the heart of Dante’s universe. This virtual series will reward both first-time and expert readers of the Commedia with an opportunity to delve deep into one of the most complex and daring speculative poems ever written. We’ll be meeting online almost every other week from October to May. See the Project Paradiso page for full schedule.

Brenda Deen Schildgen is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, emerita at UC Davis. Among her books are the most recent, Dante and Violence: Domestic, Civic, Cosmic (2021); Divine Providence, A History: Bible, Virgil, Orosius, Augustine, and Dante (2012); Other Renaissances: A New Approach to World Literature (2006); Heritage or Heresy: Destruction and Preservation of Art and Architecture in Europe (2008); Dante and the Orient (2002), translated into Italian (2016) and Arabic (2009).

PhD+ Series – Burnout: Recognizing, Preventing, Mitigating with Audrey Kim, Ph.D., and Nicolette Severson, LCSW
2023-12-05 11:30 - 13:00 | Graduate Student Commons
Burnout is a state of exhaustion that can impact our work, personal lives, health and overall sense of well being and purpose. Join us to discuss common causes and symptoms, and learn strategies to recognize, prevent, and manage burnout.
Prior to joining UCSC CAPS in 2001, Audrey Kim, Ph.D., worked in the corporate and nonprofit sectors and understands how burnout can be different and yet similar across various settings. Kim likes helping students gain insight into their problems and learn practical strategies for overcoming them. She especially enjoys working with graduate students and facilitating the Graduate Women’s Group at UCSC.

Nicolette “Niki” Severson, LCSW, has been on the team at CAPS since January 2021. She came to her work as a therapist by way of a background in academia, education, and research in public health and social work. Previous to UCSC, Severson worked with underserved populations in community mental health. She has firsthand experience with burnout from a variety of demanding work environments and is excited to talk about this critical topic.
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This workshop is presented by the Division of Graduate Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2023-2024 PhD+ series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the eighth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted (or co-sponsored) by The Humanities Institute. Our meetings provide the opportunity to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grant/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Cláudio Bueno – what we couldn’t (…) alone
2023-12-06 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The talk will reflect on ways of (thinking/caring/moving/fighting/feeling/imagining…) together. It will address our ability to invent forms of collective engagement and debate on complex socio-environmental issues. Conversations will be triggered by the artistic practices and public programs carried out by the artist and professor Cláudio Bueno, working collectively with social, ecological, and land-based movements, cultural and educational institutions, networks, territories, platforms, and groups.
Cláudio Bueno is an artist and curator from Sao Paulo, Brazil. He is an Assistant Professor in Social Design at the UCSC Art Department, teaching at the Environmental Art and Social Practice MFA. Bueno is also an affiliated professor of Visualizing Abolition Studies. He has engaged in several collaborative practices committed to social and environmental justice, featuring in many international exhibitions, artistic residencies, awards, and talks. More at: https://art.ucsc.edu/people/claudio-bueno

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

Humanities in the Age of AI Lunch meeting
2023-12-11 12:00 - 13:30 | 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 their third lunch meeting scheduled for December 11th (Monday) at noon in HUM 210. The research cluster boasts a diverse group of core participants. This includes six esteemed faculty members from various disciplines, graduate students representing politics, history, literature, philosophy, feminist studies, and film and visual studies, and undergraduate scholars from computer science, computational media, and creative writing.
We are elated to announce that Philosophy Ph.D candidate, Dustin Gray, will be speaking on AI consciousness at our next meeting on December 11th. Using the work of linguist and cognitive scientist, Dr. Noam Chomsky, as a framework, Gray will walk us through his analysis of AI and human intelligence in his upcoming paper.
In addition, we will use half of our December meeting for people to present work they are doing in a bit more detail through a series of 2 minute lightning talks. If you are interested in sharing your ideas/work in progress briefly, please fill out a slide in this presentation before Friday, December 8th.
As the principal investigator, Professor Minghui Hu, will be abroad for a conference in Taiwan and China, this meeting will be hosted by Professor Pranav Anand from the Linguistics Department and faculty Director for the Humanities Institute. In the meantime, to be notified of upcoming speakers and presentations, you can subscribe to the Google Calendar embedded in the events tab on our website (please hit the plus sign in the bottom right corner of the calendar screen to do so).
We encourage you to bring your own lunch to this meeting as this is an uncatered event. Until then, please continue to check our website for more updates on the cluster’s upcoming projects and presenters.
For those who prefer to schedule in advance, please note the dates for our brown bag meetings throughout the academic year: 10/2 (lunch provided), 11/6, 12/11, 1/8 (lunch provided), 2/12 (featuring Davide Panagia), 3/4, 4/8 (lunch provided), and 5/6. THI will graciously cater on the three specified dates. For the remaining meetings, attendees are cordially invited to bring their lunch. We are honored to have Professor Davide Panagia from UCLA present on 2/12; arrangements are underway to secure another external speaker for a subsequent session.

Project Paradiso: A Gateway to Dante’s Heaven – Episode Four – Beatrice’s Authority
2023-12-15 09:00 - 10:30 | Virtual Event
Dante’s Paradiso is the least studied and the least understood of the three parts of the Commedia. Yet it is arguably the most important for the dynamism and originality of the literary, theological, and philosophical inquiries that take place there. It is also a singularly important interpretive guide for a full understanding of the entire Commedia. It is a poem that asks to be tackled by a community of engaged readers: here it’s your opportunity! This year-long series of webinar workshops led by world-renowned scholars will take you on a deep reading of the Paradiso and an unforgettable journey to the heart of Dante’s universe. This virtual series will reward both first-time and expert readers of the Commedia with an opportunity to delve deep into one of the most complex and daring speculative poems ever written. We’ll be meeting online almost every other week from October to May. See the Project Paradiso page for full schedule.

Elena Lombardi is Professor of Italian Literature at Oxford, and the Paget Toynbee Fellow and Tutor in Medieval Studies at Balliol College. She is the author of five books: The Syntax of Desire. Language and Love in Augustine, the Modistae, Dante (Toronto UP, 2007), The Wings of the Doves. Love and Desire in Dante and Medieval Culture (McGill UP, 2012), Imagining the Woman Reader in the Age of Dante (Oxford UP, 2018), Beatrice e le altre. Dante e l’universo femminile (Roma-LaRepubblica, 2021), and Dante’s Ulisse and Other Stories (Forthcoming: 2023). She has written several articles on medieval and early modern topics and is one of the editors of the Oxford Handbook of Dante (Oxford UP, 2021).

Project Paradiso: A Gateway to Dante’s Heaven – Episode Five – The Sun (Paradiso 10–13) and The Body of Knowledge (Paradiso 14)
2023-12-22 09:00 - 10:30 | Virtual Event
Dante’s Paradiso is the least studied and the least understood of the three parts of the Commedia. Yet it is arguably the most important for the dynamism and originality of the literary, theological, and philosophical inquiries that take place there. It is also a singularly important interpretive guide for a full understanding of the entire Commedia. It is a poem that asks to be tackled by a community of engaged readers: here it’s your opportunity! This year-long series of webinar workshops led by world-renowned scholars will take you on a deep reading of the Paradiso and an unforgettable journey to the heart of Dante’s universe. This virtual series will reward both first-time and expert readers of the Commedia with an opportunity to delve deep into one of the most complex and daring speculative poems ever written. We’ll be meeting online almost every other week from October to May. See the Project Paradiso page for full schedule.

Filippo Gianferrari is originally from Modena, Italy. He has received a BA and MA in Letteratura italiana from the Università degli Studi di Bologna, and a Ph.D. in Medieval Studies from the University of Notre Dame. After completing his Ph.D., he taught at Vassar College and Smith College. He has been part of the Literature Department at UCSC since 2019. He works on Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, lay education, and political theology in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. He is interested in the ways literature and education (particularly literacy) intersect with and inform each other. He has published mostly on the topic of Dante’s intellectual formation and he has completed a monograph titled “Dante’s Education: Latin Schoolbooks and Vernacular Poetics.” The book investigates Dante’s debts to his earliest school readings and his critical stance toward contemporary education. His attention is now devoted to the study of vernacular theories and visions of political charity and eschatology.

Ron Herzman is Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus at the State University of New York, Geneseo. In addition to Geneseo, where he continues to teach Dante, he has taught Dante at Georgetown University, St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New York University, Regis High School, and Attica Correctional Facility. He has directed eighteen Summer Seminars for Schoolteachers through the National Endowment for the Humanities, twelve of which were on Dante in Italy. With his colleague Bill Cook, he teaches the Divine Comedy through a twenty- four-lecture course available through the Great Courses series produced by The Teaching Company. Together with Cook, he was the recipient of the first CARA Award for Excellence in Teaching Medieval Studies from the Medieval Academy of America. He has written over fifty articles and reviews on Dante, with emphasis on Dante and the Franciscans, and on Dante and the visual arts. The Medieval World View (Oxford University Press, with Bill Cook), now in its third edition, has been in print since 1984. With Richard Emmerson, he is the author of The Apocalyptic Tradition in Medieval Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994)
