From the Roots - Favianna Rodriguez Artist Talk
2024-02-07 16:00 - 18:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Stevenson Event Center
The Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition Favianna Rodriguez: Power From The Roots opening January 9 and running through March 9, 2024.
Favianna Rodriguez is an Oakland based activist and artist beloved for her work tied to social justice movements, such as her iconic image of a butterfly with the text “Migration is Beautiful” mobilized in support of migrant justice. In recent years, Rodriguez has focused on figurative work related to plants, animals and climate justice. This exhibition asks: how do portraits of species relate to an ecology of social movements? The show is organized around local species impacted by climate change including coastal redwoods, mountain lions, coho salmon and butterflies, among others. These portraits of species are in dialogue with activist posters, demonstrating how social issues are fundamentally intertwined with environmental justice. For example, a collaged portrait of coho salmon, a keystone species that the Ohlone people relied on for food, will be surrounded by posters about decolonization and food justice. Viewers will explore activism from the roots- both in terms of systemic issues impacting our world today and the actual roots of the trees that inhabit our shared local ecosystem.
Join us for a talk with the artist on February 7th at Stevenson Event Center.
Presented by Cowell College. Co-Sponsored by the Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas, the UC Santa Cruz Institute of Arts and Sciences, The Humanities Institute, and UCSC HSI Initiatives.

Nicole Starosielski – Socializing the Network
2024-02-07 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Co-sponsored by Film + Digital Media
This talk is a story about the ways that global digital infrastructure, especially the data centers and subsea cable networks that form the backbone of the internet, are produced out of tight-knit relationships that can weather geopolitical transitions, economic competition, and corporate tensions. I describe the process of “socializing” an infrastructure project, an essential part of the ongoing construction of a global digital network. Building a more sustainable internet, I show, is not only a process of technical coordination, of describing metrics, and of setting standards, but working within a globally-distributed and yet intimately connected geography.
Nicole Starosielski, Professor of Film and Media at the University of California-Berkeley, conducts research on global internet and media distribution, communications infrastructures ranging from data centers to undersea cables, and media’s environmental and elemental dimensions. Starosielski is author or co-editor of over thirty articles and five books on media, infrastructure, and environments, including: The Undersea Network (2015), Media Hot and Cold (2021), Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructure (2015), Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment (2016), Assembly Codes: The Logistics of Media (2021), as well as co-editor of the “Elements” book series at Duke University Press.

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.

THI Coffee Hour
2024-02-07 11:00 - 12:00, 2024-01-31 11:00 - 12:00, 2024-01-24 11:00 - 12:00, 2024-01-17 11:00 - 12:00, 2024-01-10 11:00 - 12:00, 2023-12-13 11:00 - 12:00, 2023-12-06 11:00 - 12:00, 2023-11-29 11:00 - 12:00 and 1 more date | 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!

Linguistics Colloquia: Drew McLaughlin
2024-02-06 11:40 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Department of Linguistics is pleased to present, Drew McLaughlin (Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language).
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

Before Justice: Meister's Legacies of Critique
2024-02-02 14:00 - 20:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The History of Consciousness Department is delighted to invite you for an upcoming celebration of Professor Robert Meister, who has been teaching at UC Santa Cruz for 50 years!
Please join us on Friday, February 2nd for an afternoon of discussion reflecting on Professor Meister’s research and teaching contributions, to be followed by a reception at the Cowell Provost House.
Discussion will run from 2 to 5:30 pm and reception begins at 6:00 pm.

What Actually Happened in 1619: The Origins of Slavery in North America
2024-02-01 18:30 - 20:00 | Music Center Recital Hall
The New York Times’s The 1619 Project sparked controversy and conversation across the United States about the history and legacies of slavery. The project drew its name from a date, 1619, connected to the origins of American slavery, and its publication coincided with the four-hundredth anniversary of that event.
But what actually happened in 1619? The essays collected in The 1619 Project and the important public conversations that followed only touch on the events of that year, or even on the slave trade more generally. The 1619 Project focuses crucial attention on “arguing that slavery and its legacy have profoundly shaped modern American life,” with essays on slavery’s long-term impacts on American democracy, capitalism, incarceration, and even modern transportation.
Exploring these modern legacies is crucial, but many people still have only hazy notions of why 1619 was a key turning point.
This public event brings three historians of slavery together—one focused on the importance of slavery to colonial empires, one focused on captive experiences and health in the slave trade, and one focused on the introduction of African maritime culture (and surfing!) into the Americas—to wrestle with the question: What actually happened in 1619?
Join Professors Elise Mitchell (Princeton), Kevin Dawson (UC Merced), and Greg O’Malley (UC Santa Cruz) as we explore this issue in a free public forum.

Event Parking:
– A valid UCSC permit -OR- ParkMobile payment is required to park in all parking spaces on campus.
– If parking lot attendants are on site, guests can obtain a free permit to parking in lot 126. Attendants are scheduled to be on site from 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM for this event. Otherwise, purchase a permit using the ParkMobile app.
This event is presented by the Humanities Institutes and funded by a UC-MRPI Grant.

Living Writers with Undergraduate debut novelists Chiara Barzini & Rebecca Rukeyser
2024-02-01 17:20 - 19:00 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Living Writers – Winter 2024 – Return of the Beloved: An Alumni Series
Chiara Barzini is a screen, fiction, and journalism writer who was born in Rome and raised as a teenager in Los Angeles, where she became obsessed with canyons, quartz, and the Grateful Dead. When she moved to New York she steered her fascinations towards the discovery that a huge slab of granite beneath the city of Manhattan is the reason why nobody there is able to walk or think slowly. The absence of a mineral subterranean life and psychedelia in the city of Rome, made her return to the homeland a bit harsh, but opened her up to new interests including: abandoned castles and the nightlife of cattle.
She lives in Rome with her partner Luca, their children Sebastiano and Anita, two cats, and one dog.
Rebecca Rukeyser is the author of the novel The Seaplane on Final Approach (2022; Doubleday USA/ Granta Books UK). Her work has appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Believer, Granta, The Guardian, and Zyzzyva, among others, and was awarded the Berlin Senate Endowment for Non-German Literature. She’s a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Originally from Davis, California, Rebecca has lived and worked in South Korea, Japan, Turkey and China.
She currently lives in Germany, where she teaches creative writing at Bard College Berlin.

Zhiying Qian - “Verb Bias and Plausibility in Native and Non-native Sentence Processing”
2024-02-01 17:00 - 18:30 | Humanities 1, Room 202
The Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics is pleased to present:
“Verb Bias and Plausibility in Native and Non-native Sentence Processing”
with Zhiying Qian, Ph.D.
Florida State University

Abstract
The influence of the properties of a first language (Mandarin, Korean) on the comprehension of sentences in a second language (English) was investigated in a series of self-paced reading experiments.
Experiment 1 compared advanced native Mandarin- and Korean-speaking learners of English with native English speakers on how they resolved a temporary ambiguity (e.g., The referees warned [that] the spectators would probably get too rowdy.). The temporary ambiguity concerned whether the noun (the spectator) following the verb (warned) was the direct object or the subject of an embedded clause. Results showed that both higher and lower proficiency L1-Mandarin learners could use verb bias cues, but only higher proficiency L1-Korean learners could do so, indicating that L1 word order (Mandarin SVO; Korean SOV) influences how quickly L2 learners learn word-order-dependent cues about L2 structures.
Experiment 2 added plausibility manipulation, and the results showed that neither native speakers nor L2 learners used plausibility cues, challenging the claim that L2 learners rely primarily on lexical-semantic cues during real-time sentence processing.
Experiment 3 examined how native Mandarin speakers process this type of sentence in Mandarin and showed that Mandarin speakers were sensitive to verb bias but not to plausibility, contrasting claims that Mandarin speakers rely heavily on plausibility.

Linguistics Colloquia: Cynthia Yoonjeong Lee
2024-02-01 11:40 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Department of Linguistics is pleased to present:
“Articulating linguistic prosody: representation and choreography”
with Cynthia Yoonjeong Lee
University of Michigan

Abstract
During a communicative act, language users adeptly control and coordinate intricate movements of vocal tract organs, including the lips, tongue, and larynx, to craft linguistic messages. The spatiotemporal patterning of these vocal tract actions is systematically governed by how words are grouped into phrases and how important (prominent) words within phrases are highlighted in the language being spoken.
In this talk, Cynthia Yoonjeong Lee will share insights from a series of experimental studies that leverage quantitative approaches to investigate 1) the articulatory co-expression of phrasal and segmental tone, 2) prosodic structure in multiple modalities, and 3) articulatory and prosodic accommodation observed in dyadic interaction.
Findings shed light on the seamless integration of linguistic prosodic structure into multimodal speech production processes, with broader implications for typological generalization and variation, thereby enriching phonetic and linguistic theory.

Join us for this in-person talk on Thursday, February 1st at 11:40 am.
We look forward to seeing you at the talk!

Donna Haraway – Making Kin: Lynn Margulis in Sympoiesis with Sibling Scientists
2024-01-31 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Co-sponsored by History of Consciousness: GeoEcologies + TechnoScience Conversations
Sympoiesis is a simple word; it means “making with.” We live in a profoundly sympoietic world. This talk begins with Lynn Margulis (1938-2011), a multi-faceted biologist who co-founded the view of Earth as Gaia, a planet with wildly improbable gas ratios and with sustained, unlikely equilibria that only living beings could account for. Margulis thought that if bacteria had not already accomplished something, it was hardly worth doing. Indebted to Margulis, I explore the work of three contemporary biologists who together demonstrate the crucial game-changing ideas and research practices essential to partial healing on a damaged planet. The talk concludes by moving more deeply to naturecultures in the sympoiesis of the living and the dead and the vital practices of strong mourning.
Donna Haraway is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California Santa Cruz. She earned her PhD in Biology at Yale in 1972 and writes and teaches in science and technology studies, feminist theory, and multispecies studies. She has served as thesis adviser for over 60 doctoral students in several disciplinary and interdisciplinary areas. At UCSC, she is an active participant in the Science and Justice Research Center and Center for Cultural Studies.
Attending to the intersection of biology with culture and politics, Haraway’s work explores the string figures composed by science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, science and technology studies, and multispecies worlding. Her books include Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016); Manifestly Haraway (2016); When Species Meet (2008); The Companion Species Manifesto (2003); The Haraway Reader (2004); Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium (1997, 2nd ed 2018); Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991); Primate Visions (1989); and Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields (1976, 2004). Her books and articles are translated into many languages. Fabrizio Terravova made a feature-length film, titled Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival, ( 2016), and Diana Toucedo made Camille & Ulysse with Haraway and Vinciane Despret. With Adele Clarke she co-edited Making Kin Not Population (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018), which addresses questions of human numbers, feminist anti-racist reproductive and environmental justice, and multispecies flourishing.

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.

An Evening with Ross Gay & Chris Mattingly
2024-01-30 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
FREE IN-STORE EVENT: Bookshop Santa Cruz is delighted to welcome bestselling author Ross Gay (The Book of Delights, Inciting Joy) and local poet Chris Mattingly for an evening of poetry, plus a Q&A and a book signing.
Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His first collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller. His new collection of essays, Inciting Joy, was released by Algonquin in October of 2022.

Chris Mattingly is a poet in Santa Cruz. He is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, Scuffletown (Typecast, 2013) and The Catalyst (Pickpocket, 2018) as well as over two dozen limited-run chapbooks and artist’ books. His poetry and non-fiction have appeared in The Greensboro Review, Louisville Review, Trigger, Lumberyard, Still, Some Call it Ballin’, and Forklift, OHIO. Chris is co-founding editor of alla testa, a kitchen press devoted to producing far out field recordings, hand-made artist’ books, and letter press chapbooks. Some of his work is on display at thepoetchrismattingly.com.

Ariel Chan - "Bilingualism in Context: The Role of Language Experience and Cultural Identity in Language Processing"
2024-01-30 10:00 - 11:30 | Humanities 2, Room 259
The Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics is pleased to present:
“Bilingualism in Context: The Role of Language Experience and Cultural Identity in Language Processing”
with Ariel Chan, Ph.D.
Stanford University

Abstract
Bilingualism is inherently a social phenomenon with variation. Sociolinguistic research (e.g., Chen, 2008; Lo, 1999; Milroy & Wei, 1995) has demonstrated that bilinguals employ code-switching for identity construction. Meanwhile, recent psycholinguistic research (e.g., Beatty-Martinez et al., 2020; Kaan et al., 2020; Treffers-Daller et al., 2020) has emerged to consider individual differences within interactional contexts and social networks.
How do sociocultural factors, such as language experience and cultural identity, impact bilinguals’ cognitive and language processing?
What insights about language processing can we gain from cross-disciplinary psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic research?
In this talk, Ariel Chan will explore these two questions by examining code-switching among three groups of Cantonese-English bilinguals with diverse language experience and cultural identity from an integrated psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic perspective. To begin, she will present behavioral data from three experiments, examining how language experience and cultural identity modulate code-switching comprehension and production within a controlled laboratory context. In the second part of the talk, Chan will focus on naturalistic code-switching data in conversations. Using data from a map task, she will demonstrate how variation in language experience and cultural identity is reflected in the bilinguals’ code-switching patterns. The synthesis of experimental and qualitative data highlights the significant roles of both language experience and cultural identity in shaping cognitive and linguistic processes, underscoring the importance of incorporating sociocultural contexts into bilingualism research.

Santa Cruz Pickwick Club
2024-01-28 13:00 - 15:00, 2023-11-26 13:00 - 15:00, 2023-10-22 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

Project Paradiso: A Gateway to Dante’s Heaven - Episode Seven – Justice for All (Paradiso 19–21)
2024-01-26 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.

Akash Kumar is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on medieval Italian literature through the lens of Mediterranean and global culture, from the history of science to the origins of popular phenomena such as the game of chess. Recent work on a global Dante has appeared in the volume Migrants Shaping Europe, Past and Present (Manchester UP, 2022), MLN (2022), and the Blackwell Companion to World Literature (2020). Akash also serves as Editor of Dante Notes, the digital publication of the Dante Society of America.

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

Reza Aslan - An American Martyr in Persia
2024-01-25 18:00 - 19:30 | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
In 1907, educator and American missionary Howard Baskerville traveled to Iran in the midst of a democratic revolution led by a group of brilliant young firebrands committed to transforming their country. The Persian students Baskerville educated inspired him to join them in their fight. Reza Aslan speaks with Jennifer Derr about Baskerville’s story and what it might teach us about our own ideals of constitutional democracy and whose freedom we support.

This event is free and open to the public.
Reza Aslan is a renowned writer, commentator, professor, Emmy- and Peabody-nominated producer, and scholar of religions. A recipient of the prestigious James Joyce award, Aslan is the author of three internationally best-selling books, including the #1 New York Times Bestseller, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. His producing credits include the acclaimed HBO series The Leftovers and the hit CBS comedy United States of Al. He is the host and Executive Producer of CNN’s Believer and Rough Draft with Reza Aslan, as well as co-host along with Rainn Wilson of the podcast Metaphysical Milkshake. Read Reza’s full bio here.
Presented by the Center for Middle East and North Africa, and co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute and Bookshop Santa Cruz.
Event logistics: Bicycling, car pooling, ridesharing, and public transportation are encouraged as parking is limited. If you drive to the event, please plan to park in UCSC Lot #115 or 116. To reach these lots, proceed through the main entrance to campus, continue up the hill from the information kiosk on Coolidge, then turn right at the Ranch View/Carriage House Road stoplight into the Carriage House/Campus Facilities parking lot. The Hay Barn is a 5-minute walk across the street from the parking lot. There will be directional signage to help you get to the correct parking lot and Barn entrances. Overflow parking will be available at lot 122. Download a parking map here.
If you have disability-related needs, please contact us at thi@ucsc.edu or call 831-459-1274 by January 18, 2024.

Living Writers with Undergraduate Alumna Sina Grace
2024-01-25 17:20 - 19:00 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Living Writers – Winter 2024 – Return of the Beloved: An Alumni Series
Sina Grace is the author and illustrator of the autobiographical Self-Obsessed, and Not My Bag, which recounts a story of retail hell. He acts as the artist for Shaun Steven Struble’s cult hit, The Li’l Depressed Boy, and handles art chores along with co-writing the Image Comics hit series, Burn the Orphanage.
Grace has also done illustrations for all-ages readers, including Among the Ghosts, written by Amber Benson, and Penny Dora & the Wishing Box, written by Michael Stock. His previous works include the slice-of-life Books with Pictures, and the neo-noir urban fantasy, Cedric Hollows in Dial M for Magic. For a time, he acted as Editorial Director for Robert Kirkman’s Skybound imprint at Image Comics. To date, he’s worked for Marvel Comics, IDW, Boom, Dynamite, Valiant and more. His essays have appeared on several websites, most notably Thought Catalog.
He lives in Los Angeles, where he can be found in coffee shops working on whatever the next thing may be.

January 24 – Mengyang (Zoe) Zhao – Verify You Are Human: How Video Game Automation Intensifies Extraction of Platform Game Work
2024-01-24 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Part of a broader book project on the rise of platform video game work in China, this study examines the impact of automation fears on escalating labor extraction from gaming service workers. It reveals that platform workers are compelled to demonstrate their “pure manual” services, amidst concerns over automated tools infiltrating the industry. Such pressures lead to practices like live streaming and performing slowness as human labor validation, inadvertently increasing hidden labor and the risk of harassment. This study advocates for recognizing validation labor in explicating automation and labor control in the platform economy, and underscores evolving human-machine dynamics in the global data work landscape.
Zoe Zhao is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz. Their interdisciplinary research centers on digital labor, platformization, and social movements, with a particular focus on new forms of work, technology, diaspora and labor activism under platform and venture capitalism. Their art practice leverages gamification to reimagine ways of commoning and queering the care infrastructure.

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.

Benjamin Breen - Tripping on Utopia
2024-01-23 19:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes Benjamin Breen, associate professor of history at UC Santa Cruz, for a discussion and signing of his new book, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science.
Benjamin Breen is the author of The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade, winner of the 2021 William H. Welch Medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine. He is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. He lives in Santa Cruz, California.
This free event is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz. Please register below so we can plan for your arrival and keep in touch with any changes. Thank you!

Far from the repressed traditionalists they are often painted as, the generation that survived the second World War emerged with a profoundly ambitious sense of social experimentation. In the ’40s and ’50s, transformative drugs rapidly entered mainstream culture, where they were not only legal, but openly celebrated. American physician John C. Lilly infamously dosed dolphins (and himself) with LSD in a NASA-funded effort to teach dolphins to talk. A tripping Cary Grant mumbled into a Dictaphone about Hegel as astronaut John Glenn returned to Earth.
At the center of this revolution were the pioneering anthropologists—and star-crossed lovers—Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Convinced the world was headed toward certain disaster, Mead and Bateson made it their life’s mission to reshape humanity through a new science of consciousness expansion, but soon found themselves at odds with the government bodies who funded their work, whose intentions were less than pure. Mead and Bateson’s partnership unlocks an untold chapter in the history of the twentieth century, linking drug researchers with CIA agents, outsider sexologists, and the founders of the Information Age.
As we follow Mead and Bateson’s fractured love affair from the malarial jungles of New Guinea to the temples of Bali, from the espionage of WWII to the scientific revolutions of the Cold War, a new origin story for psychedelic science emerges.
You can purchase your own copy of Tripping On Utopia at Bookshop Santa Cruz.

Stefan Tanaka: What Do Pasts Do? Toward Potential History
2024-01-22 14:00 | Humanities 1, Room 420, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The History of Consciousness department is delighted to present: What Do Pasts Do? Toward Potential History with Stefan Tanaka.
This talk is a part of the HISC Winter 2024 Speaker Series. It builds from recent work on time and history that question whether the history understood and practiced over the past two centuries is still apposite for understanding our world today.
An increasing number of writings argue that “time is out of joint,” we are “fatally confused,” in “times of unprecedented change,” or more troubling, “in times of collapse.” My subtitle–drawing from Ariella Azoulay’s book–points to the need for other modes of historical understanding. In this essay, I question a foundational ideas of modern history, the separation of past from present, and argue for pasts rather than “the past.” With this rather simple (but difficult) distinction time and space shift from absolutes within which we exist to modes by which we think; other histories become possible.
My goal is to explore what history (and histories) might become, the potential of history released from the restrictions of chronology. Multiple pasts recognize variability, situatedness, and perspectives; history expands (or returns) to a mode of communication; and pasts require greater articulation of purpose and awareness of responsibility.

Stefan Tanaka is Professor Emeritus of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. Throughout his career he has inquired into the uses of pasts and time in the writing of history, especially in Japan. Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (1993), examines the reconfiguration of Japan’s past as foundational to the redefinition of Japan’s relations with Asia during the early twentieth century. New Times in Modern Japan (2004) is an examination of the social constitution of time in Meiji (1868-1912) Japan. His current research examines the challenge that our digital age presents for history itself. This activity ranges from the philosophical to the practical. His recent book, History without Chronology (2019, Open Access), brings out the historicity of the linear and homogenizing structure of history itself. He has also written several essays on historical narrative and digital media (for example, “The Old and New of Digital History” 2022) and worked (especially with the Force11 community) to foster new, more open modes of scholarly communication.
The event will take place in-person in Humanities 1, Room 420 at 2:00pm PST. Guests are also welcome to visit the HISC website to join virtually via Zoom. We look forward to seeing you there!

CruzHacks 2024 Hackathon
2024-01-19 - 2024-01-21 | Stevenson Event Center
CruzHacks is the largest hackathon in Santa Cruz! Each year, hundreds of students are invited to develop solutions to real-world problems, pursue inclusion in tech, and kindle the spirit of innovation.
CruzHacks was founded in 2013 as Hack UCSC by Mark Adams, Brent Haddad, and Doug Erickson. In 2018, Hack UCSC was rebranded as CruzHacks, and became a student-led non-profit hackathon. Throughout the years, CruzHacks/Hack UCSC has sparked innovation and creativity from attendees and has even been the source of a few start-up companies.
CruzHacks 2024 is a three-day event where you can work with others on new software and/or hardware projects. You’ll be able to build your ideas, network, and show off your talent. There are hundreds of students, mentors, sponsors, and judges that can help push your vision forward. The event also includes workshops geared towards students of all levels to learn and improve their technical skills. CruzHacks 2024 starts Friday night and ends Sunday afternoon. This year, it will take place on January 19 – 21 at Stevenson Event Center, UCSC.
For more information about the event and FAQ’s visit CruzHacks.
This event is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute, UCSC Humanities, Baskin Engineering, Cruz Foam, UCSC Division of Student Affairs and Success, and many more.

Living Writers with Graduate Alumni: Emma Wood, Jared Harvey, Eric Sneathen, Connor Bassett, Jose Antonio Villará
2024-01-18 17:20 - 19:00 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Living Writers – Winter 2024 – Return of the Beloved: An Alumni Series

C Dylan Bassett‘s first novel, Gad’s Book, was published in 2023. His writing has appeared in Chicago Review, Quarterly West, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. He is an assistant professor of English at Xavier University in Cincinnati.

Jared Joseph’s most recent writing has been published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Iowa Review, and Action. His A Book About Myself Called Hell was published by Kernpunkt Press in 2022, and his novel Danny the Ambulance was published by Outpost 19 in 2023. Jared Joseph teaches at Los Angeles City College and lives in Los Angeles where he writes, plays music, and drinks coffee like it’s a hot dog eating contest.

Eric Sneathen is the author of the poetry collections Don’t Leave Me This Way (Nightboat 2023) and Snail Poems (Krupskaya 2016), as well as a number of chapbooks, including Minor Work (MO(0)ON/IO 2022). With Daniel Benjamin, he organized Communal Presence: New Narrative Writing Today and co-edited the companion volume, The Bigness of Things: New Narrative and Visual Culture (Wolfman Books 2017). He also co-edited, with Lauren Levin, Honey Mine (Nightboat 2021), the collected fictions of Camille Roy. His reviews have been featured at the Poetry Foundation and SF MoMA’s Open Space, and his dissertation—”The Future Unites Us: A Gay Poetics of San Francisco, 1944-2019″—is being revised for publication. He lives in Alameda, CA and works for UCSC as the Graduate Program Coordinator for Latin American and Latino Studies.

Jose Antonio Villarán has bilingual fluency (English – Spanish) as a writer, scholar, translator and instructor. He is the author of two books of poetry: la distancia es siempre la misma (2006) & el cerrajero (2012); one book of translation, Album of Fences (2018); and creator of the AMLT project (http://amlt-elcomienzo.blogspot.pe), an exploration of hypertext literature and collective authorship. His third book, titled open pit, was published by AUB in 2022 and was nominated for a Northern California Book Award.

Originally from New York City, Emma Winsor Wood holds a BA from Harvard in Russian History & Literature and an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she taught literature and poetry writing. Her recent work appears in Fence, ZYZZVA, jubilat, and DIAGRAM, and her first book, A Failed Performance: Short Plays and Scenes by Daniil Kharms, a collaborative translation with the poet C Dylan Bassett, was recently published by Plays Inverse Press. Her poetry manuscript, Preferred Internal Landscape, has been named a finalist in the CSU, BOAAT, Switchback Books, Noemi Press, Zone 3, and the University of Wisconsin book contests. She currently lives, with her husband and their two dogs, in the Santa Cruz mountains, where she also works as an editor for Stone Soup Magazine.

Dr. D. B. Maroon - Black Lives, American Love: Essays on Race and Resilience
2024-01-17 15:30 - 17:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Our own UCSC alumna, Dr. D. B. Maroon (PhD Anthropology, 2006) will talk about her newly released book, Black Lives, American Love: Essays on Race and Resilience. This talk will take place in the Humanities Building, Room 210 on January 17th from 3:30 pm to 5:00 pm.
D. B. Maroon is an author, anthropologist, and speaker. Recognized for evoking the literary and ethnographic grace of Zora Neale Hurston with a bold fusion of cultural observation and sun-woven truth-telling, D.B. Maroon writes critical essays, poetry, and fiction. Her work has been published in Spirit and Flame: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry; Spirited: Affirming the Soul and Black Gay Lesbian Identity; and Publics, Politics, and Participation.
D.B. Maroon’s, Black Lives, American Love delivers relentless truth-telling and timely discussions that will provoke and inspire you. This book is a hard-hitting personal biography of America, Blackness, and racial politics. From an opening essay on the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement to debates on the 1619 project and the rippling impact of resurgent white nationalism, the golden thread of each essay is a call to greater truth as the first step toward reconciliation.
Please contact Megan Moodie (mmoodie@ucsc.edu) for an excerpt of the book.
There will also be a limited-space, in-person workshop the following day, January 18th, where DB Maroon will share her insights on writing and publishing beyond the academic world. This workshop is open to faculty and graduate students, sponsored by THI, the Abolition Medicine and Disability Justice MRPI, and Anthropology. Graduate students and faculty can register for free via Eventbrite.

Muriam Haleh Davis – The Absent Preface: Algerian Readings of Frantz Fanon after Independence
2024-01-17 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
In 1959, Ferhat Abbas, the President of the GPRA (Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic), refused Frantz Fanon’s request to write a preface for L’An V de la révolution algérienne. This never-written preface is emblematic of a larger silence regarding the lively Algerian debates on Fanon’s writings after independence. By foregrounding North African interpretations of Fanon’s work, this talk asks a series of questions about the capture of revolutionary thought, the role of national frameworks in global intellectual history, and the possibilities of epistemological “delinking.”
Muriam Haleh Davis is an Associate Professor of History at UCSC. Her first book, Markets of Civilization: Islam and Racial Capitalism in Algeria, was published by Duke University Press in 2022. She has also co-edited North Africa and the Making of Europe: Governance, Institutions, and Culture, which was published by Bloomsbury Press in 2018. Her academic writing has been published by the Journal of Modern Intellectual History, Middle East Critique, the Journal of Contemporary History, Lateral, and 20 et 21: Revue d’histoire. She has also authored pieces for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Al Jazeera English, Public Books, and Truth Out. She is co-chair of the editorial committee for MERIP (Middle East Research and Information Project) and is co-editor of the Maghreb Page for Jadaliyya.

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.

Project Paradiso: A Gateway to Dante’s Heaven - Episode Six – Politics and Prophecy: Past, Present, and Future (Paradiso 15–18)
2024-01-12 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.

The Rev’d Dr Claire Honess is an ordained priest in the Church of England and a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Leeds (UK), where she was until 2021 Professor of Italian Studies. Her research focuses on the intersections between Dante’s political thought, his theological understanding, and his poetic innovation: themes that come together in particularly interesting ways in the canti of Cacciaguida in Paradiso. She is the author of From Florence to the Heavenly City: The Poetry of Citizenship in Dante (Legenda, 2006) and the translator of four of Dante’s political letters (MHRA, 2007) and of numerous articles on related themes. Before her ordination, she taught at the Universities of London, Reading and Leeds, and served as Head of the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies and Dean of the Doctoral College at the latter. She served as Senior Editor of the journal The Italianist, Chair of the Society for Italian Studies, and was a co-founder and co-director of the Leeds Centre for Dante Studies.
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

PhD+ Workshop – Using Generative AI for Research in the Humanities
2024-01-11 14:00 - 15:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This informal, practical workshop will survey how generative AI tools like GPT-4 and Claude can be used in humanistic research. Large Language Models (LLMs) such as these have a well-documented tendency to “hallucinate” information when prompted in certain ways. But if employed thoughtfully and with an awareness of their limitations, they represent a significant new tool for researchers in the humanities. For instance, GPT-4 is able to translate and summarize text far more accurately than the previous state of the art — and crucially, it can do so even when presented with imperfect, archaic, or flawed transcriptions, such as in the case of text pulled from photographs of archival documents or digitized premodern books. GPT-4 is also able to turn spreadsheets or other forms of quantitative data into visualizations and perform surprisingly sophisticated analysis of visual sources, not to mention basic transcription of handwritten texts. Finally, new AI speech recognition tools like Whisper now allow for rapid transcription of oral history interviews and other recordings. We will cover the specific use cases of translation, summarization, transcription, and image analysis with an eye toward the specific ways that AI can contribute to the research goals of participants.
Please come with an internet-connected device, preferably a laptop, and sign up for both ChatGPT and Claude before the workshop (both are free). Suggested reading: https://resobscura.substack.com/p/generative-ai-for-historical-research.

Benjamin Breen is an associate professor of history at UC Santa Cruz interested in the history of globalization, science, drugs, and the long-term impacts of technological change. My book The Age of Intoxication (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) explores how drug users and sellers in the British and Portuguese empires helped to shape imperialism, global trade, and scientific practice in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It won the 2021 William H. Welch Medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine and is available in hardcover, paperback, and ebook formats. Trained as a historian of the early modern era, I am currently working on two book projects (one a cultural and intellectual history of experimental drug researchers during the Cold War, another on the entanglements between colonialism, climate change, and the concept of magic between 1600 and 1900).

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

This event will be held in-person in Humanities 1, Room 210.
Please RSVP using your UCSC email address:
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UCHRI Grants Workshop
2024-01-10 14:00 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Please join us on January 10, 2024 from 2:00-3:00 p.m. for information about and a chance to workshop proposal ideas for UCHRI grants. The session will be led by Research Development Specialist for the Humanities, Caitlin Charos and Sara Černe, Research Grants Manager for the UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI).
Sara will give a brief introduction to UCHRI, and Caitlin will provide an overview of UCHRI-specific best practices. Saskia Nauenberg Dunkell, THI Research Programs and Communications Manager, will provide information on how THI can support a successful proposal.
Introductory remarks will be followed by faculty questions and a brief workshopping of ideas.

We hope to see you there!
Please register in advance here:

*UCHRI proposals do not need to go through OSP, but we encourage you to reach out to Caitlin for assistance in developing your application. Proposals to the following programs are due to UCHRI on January 31, 2024:

PROGRAM NAME
ELIGIBILITY
DEADLINE

Supplemental Multicampus Faculty Working Group Care & Repair Funding, 2024-25
UC Ladder Rank Faculty
Jan 31, 2024

Multicampus Faculty Working Groups, 2024-25
UC Ladder Rank Faculty
Jan 31, 2024

Jr. Faculty Manuscript Workshop, 2024-25
UC junior faculty (tenure track but not yet tenured) in the humanities or humanistic social sciences who are currently completing their first book project
Jan 31, 2024

Graduate Student Dissertation Support, 2024-25
UC humanities and humanistic social science PhD students in good standing who have advanced to candidacy and completed at least one chapter of their dissertation
Jan 31, 2024

Faculty Summer Research Funding, 2024
UC Ladder Rank Faculty in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences
Jan 31, 2024

Engaging Humanities Grant, 2024–25
UC Ladder Rank Faculty
Jan 31, 2024

Conference Grant, 2024-25
UC Ladder Rank Faculty
Jan 31, 2024

UC Underrepresented Scholars Fellowship, 2024-25
UC Ladder Rank Faculty
Jan 31, 2024

Supplemental Multicampus Faculty Working Group Graduate Student Funding, 2024-25
UC Ladder Rank Faculty
Jan 31, 2024

Short-Term Collaborative Research Residency, 2024–25
UC Ladder Rank Faculty
Jan 31, 2024

Multicampus Graduate Student Working Groups, 2024-25
UC humanities PhD students in good standing throughout the 2024-25 academic year, in conjunction with a faculty member who has agreed in advance to serve in the role of Principal Investigator (PI)
Jan 31, 2024

Medicine & Humanities: The Andrew Vincent White and Florence Wales White Graduate Student Scholarship, 2024–25
UC PhD students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences in good standing working on a medicine-focused dissertation project
Jan 31, 2024

Climate Action Training and Summer Dissertation Fellowship, 2024-25
UC humanities and humanistic social science PhD students in good standing who have advanced to candidacy
Jan 31, 2024

Experimental Critical Theory Seminar, Spring 2024
UC humanities and humanistic social science PhD students in good standing
Jan 31, 2024

Humanities in the Age of AI Lunch meeting
2024-01-08 12:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Humanities Institute Research cluster, “Humanities in the Age of AI,” is pleased to invite you to their first lunch meeting of the quarter scheduled for January 8th (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 Humanities Institute (THI) will graciously cater lunch. Once we have obtained our meals, we will gather and take our seats. 10 minutes have been set aside to elucidate the cluster’s overview. Following this, we will go ahead with individual introductions. After a short five-minute recess, Magy Seif El-Nasr and Mark Howard will begin their presentations, anticipated to last for approximately 20 minutes. A structured dialogue on the topic will follow.
Magy Seif El-Nasr is a professor and department chair of computational media at the Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She directs the Game User Interaction and Intelligence (GUII) Lab. Dr. Seif El-Nasr earned her Ph.D. from Northwestern University in Computer Science in 2003. Her research focuses on two goals (a) developing automated tools and techniques for authoring, adapting, and personalizing virtual environments (e.g., interactive narrative, believable agents, and games), and (b) developing evidence-based methodologies to measure the effectiveness of game environments through the development of novel process mining and visual analytics systems. During her tenure, she worked in AI, data science, and HCI. She has explored the impact of AI technologies and their designs from a humanistic and social science perspective toward understanding how to design better AI systems that can be useful for users.
Mark Howard is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Politics and History of Consciousness departments at UC Santa Cruz. He previously studied philosophy at Macquarie University and International Relations Theory at the LSE, and prior to that worked as a technology management consultant in the financial services industry. Disciplinary interests include political economy, political and social theory, critical theory, and continental philosophy. His dissertation is a critical study of venture capital as a means, mode, practice and process of social reproduction and renewal. His primary concern with AI stems from current attempts (backed by venture capital) to win market dominance and monopoly over the AI space, and how commercial tools are being framing as a part of a socially necessary future. Also of interest is how proponents of AI tools are promoting complementary facilities to deal with social dislocation, such as a cryptocurrency-based Universal Basic Income to soften the blow of AI-induced “post-employment.”
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 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)

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).

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.

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.

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.

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).

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 – 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 – 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.

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.

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

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

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)

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.

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.

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 – 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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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 – 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.

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 – 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.

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

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.

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)

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.

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 – 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.

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.

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.

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
