Aziz Abu Sarah & Maoz Inon - The Future is Peace
2026-04-20 19:00 - 20:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Temple Beth El, 3055 Porter Gulch Road, Aptos, CA, 95003, United States
Two lifelong peace activists and guides to Israel/Palestine, both of whom have lost family in the conflict, take readers on a revealing life-changing journey across this holy, bloodstained land and discover the mythic, political, and personal history that divides but also binds them and their peoples.
In The Future Is Peace, Sarah and Inon take readers on a transformative weeklong journey across a sacred and bloodstained land. Facing competing narratives, they explore how compassion and unity can pull humanity back from the precipice of blind hatred. Throughout their travels, they have been constantly asked: In the face of so much loss, how can we ever find hope? Their answer is always the same. One cannot find hope. We must create it.

Aziz Abu Sarah is Co-CEO of InterAct International, a nonprofit dedicated to Middle East Peace. He is a peacebuilder, entrepreneur, National Geographic Explorer, TED Fellow, and renowned speaker and trainer on conflict resolution and responsible travel. Aziz is the co-founder of MEJDI Tours, a travel company on a mission to transform tourism into a global force of citizen diplomacy. He has won numerous awards, including from the United Nations, Institute of International Education, and The Explorers Club. Aziz is consistently named one of the world’s 500 most influential Muslims by the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre in Jordan. He has written opinion pieces for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Al-Quds, and Haaretz.
Maoz Inon is Co-CEO of InterAct International, a nonprofit dedicated to Middle East Peace. He is an Israeli peace activist and entrepreneur. He was honored with the prestigious Franco-German Human Rights Prize and the Shared Living Award from Abraham Initiatives. He has spoken on Capitol Hill, at U.S. universities, and the European Parliament. He has written pieces for The Washington Post, Al Jazeera, Haaretz, and more. He has founded several peace-focused initiatives within Israel and the Middle East, including the Jesus Trail, Fauzi Azar Inn, and Abraham Hostel & Tour brands.
Douglas Abrams is a multiple New York Times-bestselling author, as well as an editor, literary agent, and film producer. He is the founder and president of Idea Architects, a creative book and media agency helping visionaries create a wiser, healthier, and more just world. He co-wrote The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World with the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu which inspired the film MISSION: JOY. Doug served as the interviewer in the film as well as an Executive Producer. As an editor and literary agent, he has also worked with other Nobel Laureates including Nelson Mandela, Jody Williams, and Elizabeth Blackburn and worked with many visionary scientists including Stephen Hawking.

Film Screening with Julie Wyman - The Tallest Dwarf
2026-04-20 19:00 - 21:30 | Communications 150, Studio C
The Tallest Dwarf charts Julie Wyman’s quest to find her place within the little people (LP) community at a moment when dwarf identity is poised to radically change. Wyman’s work engages issues of embodiment, body image, and the possibilities and problematics of media spectatorship—all informed by her experience of living with hypochondroplasia dwarfism. Julie Wyman will be in conversation after the screening with Pooja Rangan (Professor of English and Film and Media Studies at Amherst College and Visiting Scholar of Visualizing Abolition) and Cynthia Ling Lee (Associate Professor of Performance, Play & Design, UC Santa Cruz).
Co-organized/co-sponsored by the Arts Division’s Film & Digital Media Department, “Abolition Medicine and Disability Justice“— a collaborative initiative of five UC campuses, including Riverside, Irvine, Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco, to address health disparities in institutions and policy — and The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz. This event is open to UC Santa Cruz affiliates.
PARKING
– Parking via UCSC permit or ParkMobile
– Core West is the lot closest to the event
ABOUT THE FILM
As Wyman unpacks the rumors of “partial dwarfism” in her family, she finds that hers is the last of a body type she has inherited. She joins forces with a group of dwarf artists to confront the legacy of being fetishized and put on display. Together they create films that reclaim a complicated history and speak back to the echoes of eugenics in the newly emerging pharmaceutical interventions that make little people taller. Through its personal and expanding perspective, the film invites audiences to a new way of seeing.
ABOUT THE FILMMAKER
Julie Forrest Wyman’s 2012 documentary STRONG! premiered at AFI Silverdocs and was broadcast nationally on PBS’s Emmy award-winning series, Independent Lens, where it won the series’ Audience Award. Wyman’s work has been awarded support from Sundance, Sandbox, IDA, SF Film Society, Points North, ITVS, the Creative Capital Foundation, The Princess Grace Foundation, California Humanities, and NEH. She has been a fellow at the UC Davis Feminist Research Institute and a resident of SF Film Society’s Filmhouse, Siena Art Institute, Logan Nonfiction and Points North. Her films, including FatMob (2016), Buoyant (2005), and A Boy Named Sue (2000), have aired on Showtime, MTV’s LOGO-TV, and have been exhibited on five continents. She serves as Associate Professor of Cinema and Digital Media at UC Davis.
Photographer credit: Gabriella Garcia-Pardo; image description: A group of six LP (little people) performers regard their paper body cut outs on the wall.

Film Screening with Dolly Kikon - A Sacred Place
2026-04-21 17:30 - 19:30 | Communications, Studio C, Room 150, Communications Bldg‎ University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Please join us for the American premiere of A Sacred Place (2026), a new film by Professor Dolly Kikon (Anthropology). The film tells the story of stones, spirits, and salt springs in Makhel. The film focuses on intergenerational storytellers and their relationship with the land. It integrates visual ethnography, oral tradition, and geological features of Makhel to center Indigenous pedagogy, community history, and ecology. After the screening, Professor Clementine Bordeaux (HAVC) will provide comments and facilitate a conversation with Kikon and audience member participants.
Please find a trailer for A Sacred Place here.

This screening is a hybrid event. We welcome you to join us in-person in Studio C/Room 150, Communications Building at UCSC or on Zoom. Remote participants will receive a link to the film before the event to watch on their own.

This event is graciously co-sponsored by UCSC’s Center for Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions, Center for South Asian Studies, Indigenous Faculty Network, the Film and Digital Media Department, and The Humanities Institute.

Ashwak Hauter - Physics of Affinity: Violence, Love, & Affinity in the Physician-Patient Relationship
2026-04-22 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This talk recalls the recent phenomena of the murder of physicians in Jordan and Yemen, and the rise in altercations in Saudi Arabia between physicians and patients and their family. Aiming to work on the physics of affinity, the binding and unbinding of ethical relationalities, within the patient-doctor relationship the physicians claim to be prophets and reintroduced alghayb (unknown, God’s knowledge) into the clinic in order to prevent the arrogation of power to them and counter the demand of patients for them to deliver the cure. This talk prompts us to ask what kinds of ethics emerges with Alghayb in view? In dialogue with Abu-Hamid Alghazaly, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sigmund Freud, and Jacque Lacan’s work on affinity, transference, savoir, and alghayb, this paper explores the auto-erotics within ethical relationalities in the clinic. It provokes us to reexamine the anthropological reduction of affinity to a preoccupation with aggression, moving us toward understanding the asymmetries of exchange and relationalities.
Ashwak Sam Hauter is an assistant professor of medical anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of “Fright and the Fraying of Community” published in Cultural Anthropology and “Madness, Pain, & Ikhtilāṭ al-ʿaql: Conceptualizing Ibn Abī Ṣādiq’s Medico-Philosophical Psychology” in Early Science and Medicine. Her manuscript in progress details scenes of Islah (reform) within medicines in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan aimed at securing demands for ‘afiya (holistic well-being), recentering the health of the individual body around the political, economic, and spiritual dimensions of the community (umma). Her current project centers around examining mental health and the work of culture amidst the war in Yemen among Yemeni artists, poets, filmmakers, and psychologists.

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

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

Arts and Ecology Festival
2026-04-22 13:15 - 22:00 | Digital Arts Research Center, 407 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz
The first Arts & Ecology Festival at UC Santa Cruz will bring together talks and panels featuring artists, scientists, and researchers. The April 22 program includes film screenings, live music, artworks, a clothing swap, a poetry slam, a solar powered mobile projection system, and groups like the Norris Center of Natural History, The Fábrica community textile Arts & Salvage Workshop in Santa Cruz, and a mobile podcast booth from UC Davis for participants to respond to climate-focused prompts, capturing creative perspectives on climate change.
This program is part of OpenLab Collaborative Research Center, led by Jennifer Parker, with support from the Art Department and the University of California Climate Action Arts Network (UC CAAN). UC CAAN is a new system wide initiative to support creative research, scholars, students, and community partners to address the climate crisis through the transformative power of the arts. The network is supported by the University of California Office of the President through its Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives (MRPI) grant program.
Learn more at the Arts & Ecology Festival website.
The Humanities Institute’s Deep Read program is co-sponsoring a Compost and Fungi: Interactive Talk at 5 pm on Megafires, Floods and Fungi.
With the rise of catastrophic megafires and flooding, we look to fungi and other microbes as nature’s mediators between fire and water. They sink carbon, retain water, prevent erosion, digest toxins, and establish ecological balance in both pre and post fire ecosystems. As fires enter the human-made environment more regularly, there is a growing concern about post-fire toxic ash, and the consequences of ash-runoff entering the surrounding waterways. Wildfire also provides a unique opportunity to revitalize ecosystems, restore water and maximize nutrient cycling. There is a growing grassroots network with hubs in Colorado, California and Hawaii that seeks to generate fire resilience by allying with fungi and other microbes. CoRenewal’s FENiXS program and the Biome Logs Project are evaluating the efficacy of fungal inoculation, with the aim of producing widely applicable tools and methodologies to facilitate ecological regeneration and recovery in the aftermath of disaster and environmental injustice, while honoring and taking inspiration from indigenous relationships with fire and fungi. In this participatory workshop, we will discuss how to organize and integrate inoculants into land tending practices, as well as how to contribute to community science that supports these efforts.

Bibliography as Biography - Recovering Early-Nineteenth-Century Latinx Figures
2026-04-22 16:00 - 17:30 | Humanities 1, Room 202
The lecture will focus on the history of Spanish-language writing and publishing in the United States with particular attention to a New York publisher in the early nineteenth century.
Carmen E. Lamas is Associate Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She is the author of The Latino Continuum and the Nineteenth-Century Americas: Literature, Translation, and Historiography (Oxford University Press, 2021; 2025 paperback release) which won the MLA Prize in Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies and the Latin American Studies Association Latinx Studies Book Award. She is the co-editor of the critical edition Irene Albar. Novela cubana (1885, 1886) by Eusebio Guiteras (Calambur 2023). Her work has appeared in various journals and edited volumes, and she is a co-founding editor of Pasados: Recovering History, Imagining Latinidad, a new open-access journal published with the University of Pennsylvania Press.

This event is co-sponsored by the Literature Department and the Spanish Studies Major

This is Thirty Exhibition Opening
2026-04-24 | Museum of Art & History, 705 Front Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
In celebration of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History’s 30 year anniversary, this exhibition will highlight some of the artwork and artifacts from the MAH’s permanent collection. In addition, artist Joshua Moreno will create a site specific installation inspired by the MAH’s historical archives.
The exhibition runs from April 24th to August 9th, 2026. Please visit the MAH website for more information.
Image: Sam Jablon, Vicousss, 2023. Oil on linen. Collection of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. Gift of Max Werner

Saturday Shakespeare - Macbeth
2026-04-25 10:15, 2026-05-02 10:15, 2026-05-09 10:15 | Virtual and In Person
Saturday Shakespeare in Santa Cruz Presents Macbeth by William Shakespeare Aptos Library on Aoril 18, 25, May 2, 9 & 16 2026 at 10:15 a.m in the Aptos Library Betty Leonard Community Room (in person or join by Zoom). The first hour will be a conversation with the scheduled guest speaker followed by a volunteer read aloud of the play. On May 16,a video of a live stage production will be shown. This event series is co-sponsored by the UC Santa Cruz Shakespeare Workshop.
For more information, Zoom Link, or to volunteer to be a reader, contact: saturdayshakespeare@gmail.com
Guest Speakers / Video Recording

April 18: Julia Reinhard Lupton, Distinguished Professor Emerita of English & Comparative Literature & Co-Director of the New Swan Shakespeare Center at UC, Irvine. Reading: Act 1
April 25: Charles Pasternak, Acclaimed New York-based theatre director and actor, Paul will direct Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s 2026 production of Macbeth. Reading: Act 2 through Act 3, Scene 3
May 2: Abigail Heald, Lecturer in Literature @ UC Santa Cruz & Stanford. She is writing a book on the relationship between art and emotion in Shakespeare’s work. Reading: Act 3, Scene 4 through Act 4, Scene 2
May 9: Paul Mullins, Actor / Director, Artistic Director of Santa Cruz Shakespeare. Reading: Act 4, Scene 3 through Act 5, Scene 8
May 16: Video recording of a live stage production at the Globe Theatre, directed by Tony Award winning director Eve Best, and starring Joseph Millson (Macbeth) and Samantha Spiro (Lady Macbeth).

Emmaia Gelman - The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State
2026-04-25 15:00 | Resource Center for Non Violence
“The ADL was born of the belief that the best protection from antisemitism was admission into the white racial state and waging a vigorous defense of capitalism, individual rights, and the West against communists and barbarians. And it has never looked back.” –Robin D. G. Kelley
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) once sought to portray itself as a defender of civil rights aligned with racial justice movements in the United States. In a groundbreaking study that Publishers Weekly describes as a “gutsy, razor-sharp demystification of a powerful organization,” Emmaia Gelman exposes the ADL’s alliance with American white supremacy and western empire and its historic investment in Cold War anticommunism. Her definitive account shows how the ADL as a Zionist organization has advanced and supported pro-state policing, a hate-crimes framework that obscures racialized structures of power, and a “War on Terror” that has stoked anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia.

Please register here but on-site registration is possible.
Emmaia Gelman is the founding Director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. She has taught social and cultural analysis at NYU and social sciences at Sarah Lawrence College. Her writing appears in Jewish Currents, Boston Review, The Forward, and elsewhere.
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This event is presented by the Center for Racial Justice and cosponsored by the Resource Center for Nonviolence, Jewish Voice for Peace–South Bay, Santa Cruz Jews for a Free Palestine, Students for Justice in Palestine Santa Cruz, Faculty for Justice in Palestine at UC Santa Cruz, UC Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, the Ethnic Studies Council at the University of California, and the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.

Guelaguetza Cultural Festival
2026-04-26 10:00 - 16:00 | Branciforte Small Schools Campus, 840 N Branciforte Ave, Santa Cruz, CA, 95062, United States
Senderos presents the 21st annual Vive Oaxaca Guelaguetza, a family friendly, Indigenous cultural festival. The Guelaguetza brings together food, music, dance, language, crafts, and community to celebrate the beautiful traditions of Oaxaca, Mexico. Local dancers from Senderos’ own Centeotl Danza y Baile will represent the eight regional traditions of Oaxaca, accompanied by Oaxacan musicians from Los Angeles. Oaxacan food and beverage specialties such as mole, tlayudas, and tejate will be sold along with crafts and souvenirs. Senderos is a partner in the new Ripple Effect Santa Cruz Arts Festival and Guelaguetza will take place on the closing day of the festival.
*Admission is $10; free for children 5 and under. No dogs, alcohol, smoking on school property. Bring blankets and lawn chairs and be transported to the sights and sounds of Oaxaca!
More information at: Vive Oaxaca Guelaguetza | Senderos
Isai Pazos, Senderos Executive Director said, “As we celebrate Guelaguetza in Santa Cruz, we affirm our commitment to passing these cultural traditions to new generations, ensuring that our heritage continues to thrive. Today more than ever this is critical. Together, through culture and solidarity, we continue to build a stronger, more connected community.” The word Guelaguetza is derived from the Oaxacan Indigenous Zapotec language and signifies giving, cooperation, and community. The Guelaguetza is the major fundraising event for Senderos, a nonprofit in Santa Cruz who has been providing free dance and music classes, education support and scholarships for Latino youth since 2001.
Guelaguetza in Santa Cruz was created by Senderos co-founders, Fe Silva and Nereida Robles- Vasquez; starting small in the Civic Auditorium, the festival moved outdoors to Harbor High School, San Lorenzo Park and attracted 2000 attendees last year at current location Branciforte Small Schools. Even during COVID, Senderos presented virtual full-length presentations with video of dancers and musicians in Santa Cruz and in Oaxaca.
This event is co-sponsored by: Santa Cruz City Schools, Arts Council Santa Cruz County, California Arts Council, Chicana Latina Foundation, Community Foundation Santa Cruz County, County of Santa Cruz, DCD Insurance and Financial Services, The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, Kaiser Permanente, La Oaxaqueña, Latino Community Foundation, Mexican Consulate of San Jose, Maverick Mailing, Miller Maxfield, Inc., Monterey Peninsula Foundation, Ow Family Properties, Santa Cruz City Arts, Santa Cruz County Office of Education, West Coast Community Bank, and more.

Linda Zerilli - The Feminist Democratic Imaginary: Actualizing Pasts, Creating Futures
2026-04-27 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The first guest of the History of Consciousness Spring 2026 Research Colloquium will be joining us next Monday, April 27th! This event brings Linda Zerilli to give her talk “The Feminist Democratic Imaginary: Actualizing Pasts, Creating Futures”.
Feminist historians have long challenged the progress narrative — the story in which each wave supersedes the last, the arc bends toward justice, and history moves only one way. Yet despite decades of critique, no compelling alternative relationship to the past has emerged. We are caught in a double bind: premodern exemplarity is unavailable to us, and the modern alternative forecloses the future by making it seem already scripted. This paper develops a third relationship — the feminist democratic imaginary — that returns us to action through history rather than offering an escape from action into it. Drawing on Arendt, Koselleck, Castoriadis, Benjamin, and Hartman, it argues that the past is not a repository of recoverable resources but the site of an encounter — and the encounter is not a transfer across time but a creation. This reorientation has direct political consequences: if the past is an occasion for creation rather than a ground of conditions, then authoritarian backlash is not a contraction of the possible but a new occasion — a moment of danger that makes defeated alternatives newly legible and calls for figures of the thinkable that neither the past nor the present alone could have generated.

Join us in-person on April 27th at 1pm in Hum 1 Rm 210, or register to attend virtually at this link.
Linda M. G. Zerilli is the Charles E. Merriam Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the College. Zerilli is the author of Signifying Woman (Cornell University Press, 1994), Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (University of Chicago Press, 2005), A Democratic Theory of Judgment (University of Chicago Press, 2016), A Democratic Theory of Truth (University of Chicago Press, 2025), and articles on subjects ranging across feminist thought, the politics of language, aesthetics, democratic theory, and Continental philosophy. She has been a Fulbright Fellow, a two-time Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, and a Stanford Humanities Center Fellow, and a Stanford Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences Fellow. She has served on the executive committee of Political Theory and the advisory boards of The American Political Science Review, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Constellations, and Culture, Theory and Critique.

Karen Tei Yamashita - Questions 27 & 28
2026-04-28 19:00 - 20:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes acclaimed author Karen Tei Yamashita (I Hotel) to celebrate the launch of her new novel Questions 27 & 28—a masterful polyvocal history of Japanese Americans before, during, and after World War II. Yamashita will be in conversation with Alice Yang, Professor of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz.
In February 1942, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order authorizing the secretary of war to remove 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes on the West Coast and corral them into inland concentration camps.

Questions 27 & 28 reaches backward and forward from the time of the questionnaire, chronicling the individuals who arrived in the US from Japan at the turn of the century, their children who came of age during war and incarceration, and their descendants who lived in its aftermath. Yamashita mixes fact with fiction and layers genres from James Bond movies to haiku to oral history, transfiguring an enormity of archival research into a chorus of stories. With her signature wit and aplomb, she gives voice to laborers, artists, scholars, informants, and activists who, over three generations, defined an immigrant community.
Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of nine books, including I Hotel, finalist for the National Book Award. Recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 2021 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, she is Professor Emerita of literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2024 Yamashita was inducted as a Literature Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Alice Yang is Professor of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her Ph.D. in history from Stanford University and currently co-directs the Center for the Study of Pacific War Memories. She specializes in memories of the Pacific War, Asian American history, race, gender, oral history, historical memory, and twentieth-century America. Her publications include Historical Memories of the Japanese American Internment and the Struggle for Redress (2007), Major Problems in Asian American History (2003, 2017) and What Did the Internment of Japanese Americans Mean? (2000). Her exhibit, Never Again is Now: Japanese American Women Activists and the Legacy of Mass Incarceration, appeared at UC Santa Cruz, the Watsonville Public Library and the Japanese American Museum of San Jose. She also has served as chair of the UCSC History Department and provost of Stevenson College at UCSC.
More information at: Bookshop Santa Cruz – Karen Tei Yamashita

Co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

Quinn Slobodian - Whither Neoliberalism Studies?
2026-04-29 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Co-sponsored by the Politics Department
The last two decades have seen a flood of research on neoliberalism. Defined in multiple and even conflicting ways, the term nonetheless served as a master category of analysis for scholars from history to geography and communications. Where does the field sit now as trends of authoritarianism and reterritorialization shatter long-standing axioms of rule? This question will be discussed in relation to my own engagement with the subfield of neoliberalism studies over many years.
Quinn Slobodian teaches international history at Boston University. His books include Globalists, Crack-Up Capitalism, and Hayek’s Bastards. Out in April 2026 with Ben Tarnoff is Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed. He is a Guggenheim Fellow for 2025-26.

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

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

Muskism - A Guide For The Perplexed
2026-04-29 15:30 - 17:30 | Cultural Center at Merrill, Merrill Cultural Center, UC Santa Cruz, Merrill College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Everyone’s got an Elon take. He’s a messiah. A menace; a genius; a clown. The verdicts differ, but they share one theme: they treat him as an individual. Muskism argues otherwise. Elon Musk isn’t a glitch in the system—he is the system. His worldview promises sovereignty through technology: plug in, power up, and become self-reliant. But the more you connect, the more he owns you. If Fordism defined the capitalism of the twentieth century, Muskism may define the twenty-first. Fordism helped build the welfare state. Musk undoes it. He thrives on dependence while preaching freedom. His cars run on subsidies; his satellites run the battlefield; his social networks train the AI that trains us. Muskism sells itself as the future but entrenches age-old hierarchies. It offers autonomy for some and exclusion for others. It’s pro- natalist but anti-immigrant, futurist but reactionary. It speaks of humanity but warns against empathy. Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff cut through the hype and the hate to reveal what Musk really represents: a new political economy, where to be “free” means to serve a Techno- King. Muskism isn’t about the man. It’s about the machine that made him—and the world he’s making next.
Quinn Slobodian is professor of international history at Boston University, and the author or editor of seven books translated into ten languages including, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the Far Right, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World without Democracy, and Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism.
Ben Tarnoff is a writer and technologist based in Massachusetts and is the author of Internet for the People and the co-author of Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do—And How They Do It. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, and has also written for the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the New Republic, among other publications.

This event is sponsored by Department of Politics, Institute for Social Transformation, The Humanities Institute, Center for Cultural Studies, and The Department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies.

Sumud Behind Bars: Palestinian Women and the Politics of Everyday Resistance
2026-04-30 14:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Center for Racial Justice is very proud to sponsor the second annual Possibilities of Palestinian Refusal: Against Disciplining Knowledge and Movement series! Please join us for the following talk with Samah Saleh:
This talk examines resistance inside Israeli prisons through the experiences of Palestinian women who practice sumud (steadfastness) as an everyday form of political agency. Rather than an abstract idea, sumud emerges as a lived reality within the prison’s suspended time, where women confront isolation, violence, and attempts at erasure. Through collective organization, shared learning, embroidery, reading, writing, and emotional solidarity, everyday survival becomes a form of resistance. Despite gendered violence such as strip searches and harassment, women reclaim dignity and political identity by supporting one another and creating informal spaces for learning and memory-sharing. Drawing on testimonies of former Palestinian women prisoners, this talk highlights how solidarity itself becomes a powerful strategy for survival, resistance, and the continuation of political struggle.
Samah Saleh is Visiting Professor of Gender Studies at UCLA and Assistant Professor at An-Najah National University in Palestine.

Co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute, Students for Justice in Palestine, People’s University, UCSC Sociology, CSAS, Center for Cultural Studies, Center for Racial Justice, CRES, Feminist Studies, Institute for Social Transformation

Living Writers with Nathan Osorio
2026-04-30 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
In Nourishment, Us.
Living Writers Spring 2026: Our Nourishment, US features poets, writers, critics, visual and performance artists, who demonstrate how writing and art enacts around the idea of freedom and the imaginary in the face of the constant threat of terror and erasure. In the presence of who we all are within marginalized yet expansively powerful fields of racialized and multiply lived complex and diverse identities, please come as we convene in spirit, deep celebration, and resource with one another.
Nathan Xavier Osorio’s debut collection of poetry, Querida (University of Pittsburgh Press), won the 2024 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize selected by Shara McCallum, was a finalist for the California Book Award in Poetry, and was selected by Phillip B. Williams as a finalist for Poetry Society of America’s Norma Faber First Book Award. He was selected as a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Irvine and his work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, BOMB, Gulf Coast, The
Slowdown, and elsewhere. He is the 2025 Dartmouth Poet-in-Residence at The Frost Place and an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Texas Tech University.
About the Living Writers Series
The Living Writers Series (LWS) is a live reading series organized especially for the Creative Writing Program community at UCSC. There is a new series each quarter, and each series features writers with unique voices. The LWS is open to all creative writing students and the public.

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

Film Screening - Environmental Crisis in Gabes: Agriculture and Revolt in Tunisia
2026-04-30 17:30 - 19:00 | Communications 150, Studio C
Film Screening and Discussion: 5:30-7pm, Communications (Studio C)
Reception: 7-8:30pm, Communications 139
Gabes Labess (All is well in Gabes) questions current development models by focusing on the Oasis of Gabes, the only coastal oasis in the world. What was once considered “The Paradise of the World” has been transformed into an economic, social, and ecological catastrophe by the construction, in the 1970s, of an industrial chemical complex that has deprived local farmers of their water, arable land, economic well-being, and personal dignity.
Join us for a screening of this film by Habib Ayeb, followed by a discussion with Jennifer Derr (UCSC) and Hossein Ayazi (UCB) on how models of development influence the lived environment, public health, and political contestation from California to North Africa. As climate change and rising temperatures dramatically alter landscapes around the world, professors Derr and Ayazi will discuss how local populations adapt to these challenges and organize to demand accountability from the state. Reception to follow.
Hossein Ayazi, PhD, is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. His research, teaching, and policy work examine the U.S. and global political economy of agri-food systems and environmental change and their relationship to antiracist, anticolonial, and revolutionary-socialist movements from the twentieth century to the present. He has authored reports and peer-reviewed articles on U.S. and global agri-food and environmental policy, state and corporate power, trade and development, labor and migration, climate impacts and resilience strategies, and food sovereignty and climate reparations. He is currently coordinating lead author on the California Fifth Climate Assessment topical report on Climate-Induced Human Displacement & Migration and has recently advised the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on “Global Recommendations to Prevent Loss of Nationality and Statelessness in the Context of Climate Change.” He holds a PhD in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management from the University of California, Berkeley, and has held resident fellowships and visiting professorships at Tufts University, Williams College, and Santa Clara University.
Jennifer L. Derr is Associate Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz, where she also served as the founding director of the Center for the Middle East and North Africa. Her research explores the intersections among medicine, science, the environment, and capitalism, particularly in the modern Middle East and North Africa. Prof. Derr’s book, The Lived Nile: Environment, Disease, and Material Colonial Economy in Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2019), was awarded the 2020 Middle East Political Economy Book Prize.

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

Dolly Kikon and Raja GuhaThakurta - Shadow Indigenous Worlds
2026-05-04 18:00 | Communications 150, Studio C
Shadow Indigenous Worlds (SIW) is a global initiative that highlights Indigenous worldviews of inquiry. By focusing on researchers, practitioners, and artists at work (in the field, studio, and classroom), it invites the audience to participate and reflect on the meaning of knowledge, theory, pedagogy, and social change. SIW is a student-focused program and highlights the contributions of Indigenous knowledge and scholars across disciplines and practices.

The launch of the SIW initiative will be a 90-minute hybrid event on Monday, May 4 starting at 6:00 PM PDT in Communications 150 (Studio C) on the University of California Santa Cruz campus. This Zoom call will be recorded.
Dolly Kikon (Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for South Asian Studies at UCSC), Raja GuhaThakurta (Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics), and the CREST team will host the launch.

Co-sponsored by CREST, Indigenous Faculty Network (IFN), American Indian Resource Center (AIRC), Center for South Asian Studies (CSAS), Film and Digital Media (FDM) Department

Kuumbwa Jazz Presents - Gregorio Uribe
2026-05-04 19:00 | Kuumbwa Jazz Center
“Colombian artist Gregorio Uribe, whose blend of contemporary cumbia and timeless charisma has marked him as an artist to watch.” – Billboard
Uribe was recognized by the Colombian government as one of “The 100 Most Successful Colombians Abroad”, and has received honors from the city of Boston and the state of Massachusetts for his contribution to Latin music. He is currently recording his fourth studio album, a groundbreaking collection of songs that will take the Colombian accordion to a new level of versatility. This concert date will feature a dynamic combination of solo and band performances.

Gregorio Uribe is a Latin GRAMMY-nominated Colombian singer-songwriter and accordionist. He graduated from Berklee College of Music and has performed his music at NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert, Carnegie Hall, Madison Square Garden, and the New Orleans Jazz Fest, among others. He has collaborated with renowned artists such as Rubén Blades, Carlos Vives, and Paquito D’Rivera, as well as with folklore masters Alfredo Gutiérrez, Carmelo Torres, and Martina Camargo.
For more information: Kuumbwa Jazz – Gregorio Uribe

Presented by the Kuumbwa Jazz Center and Co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

The Current Status of the Torment Nexus, and how are those Stochastic Parrots?
2026-05-05 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Let’s check in on two of our old friends in the critical history of artificial intelligences. What’s the status of the torment nexus today? And how are those stochastic parrots? This talk will provide an update on AI projects that continue to abuse their science fiction namesakes (RIP the Metaverse & Horizon Worlds), and reevaluate the major claims of the 2021 paper “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots”, including what they got wrong (water, parrot intelligence, etc.), what issues are still as relevant as ever (data provenance, data bias, energy usage; limits of scaling), and what they didn’t really address (speculative finance, hyperscaler monopoly).
Zac Zimmer is an associate professor in the literature department at University of California, Santa Cruz. He is an interdisciplinary scholar of literature, culture, and technology in the hemispheric Americas, and teaches classes on Latin American literature, science fiction, ethics, technology, and the poetics of California infrastructure. He is the author of First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas (2025). In addition to his current research on the infrastructure of techno-systems, he co-facilitates the Ethics and Astrobiology reading group, part of the University of California, Santa Cruz’s Astrobiology Initiative. Recent open access publications on artificial intelligence include “Outlier and Collapse: The Enron Corpus and Foundation Model Training Data” and “El ingenio de la inteligencia (The Knowledge Mill)“.

This event is presented by The Humanities Institute’s ± AI Initiative
Banner image from Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic

Protecting Mauna Kea: Hula and Traditional Ecological Knowledge
2026-05-05 16:00 - 18:00 | Theater Arts, A104, 411 Kerr Rd, Santa Cruz, 95064, United States
We warmly invite you to join us for our remaining special series events (May 5 and May 6) on the long struggle of Native Hawaiian people and other kia‘i (“protectors”) in protecting Mauna Kea. One of the most sacred Native Hawaiian sites, Mauna Kea is the piko (umbilical cord) connecting the islands to the heavens, the dwelling place of deities, and a place of worship. This sacred landscape faces ongoing expropriation for the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT)—a project in which UC Santa Cruz is profoundly implicated.
Tuesday, May 5, 3:30-6:30 pm, THEA Dance A104: “Hula and Traditional Ecological Knowledges”
A public workshop facilitated by visiting Mauna Kea protectors, Hāwane Rios and Hopoelehua Pa’a Makakau, as well as Kumu Mehana Thomas and Kūhai Hālau O Mehanakealohakalaua’eikapoli Pā ‘Ōlapa Kahiko from Santa Cruz

Registration for the following events is recommended but not required. On-site registration is also possible. All events are free and open to the public.
The series features visiting Mauna Kea protectors from Hilo, Hawai‘i: Hāwane Rios, an award-winning singer, songwriter and a celebrated haku mele (song and chant composer); Hopoelehua Pa’a Makakau, a Kanaka ‘Ōiwi cultural bearer, aloha ‘āina (land protector), hula practitioner, and skilled multi-disciplinary hana no’eau (cultural) artist. It also will feature Amber Espinosa-Jones, the award-winning producer of the feature film Standing Above the Clouds and respected teachers and members of the Santa Cruz hula community, Kumu Mehana Thomas and Kūhai Hālau O Mehanakealohakalaua’eikapoli Pā ‘Ōlapa Kahiko.

Co-sponsored by Asian American and Pacific Islander Resource Center, Center for Reimagining Leadership, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Film and Digital Media/Social Documentation, Mauna Kea Protectors at UC Santa Cruz, Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Rachel Carson College, Student Union Assembly Office of Diversity and Inclusion

Master Class - Gregorio Uribe: A Journey Through Colombian Music
2026-05-05 19:00 | Kuumbwa Jazz Center
A Journey Through Colombian Music is an interactive presentation through which Uribe will take the audience across the different regions of Colombia and teach a local rhythm from each; as well as share their historical and geographical contexts. This is an interactive class designed for non-musicians and musicians, alike.

Can’t make it in person? You can stream it! Register here for virtual attendance.
Gregorio Uribe is a Latin GRAMMY-nominated Colombian singer-songwriter and accordionist. He graduated from Berklee College of Music and has performed his music at NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert, Carnegie Hall, Madison Square Garden, and the New Orleans Jazz Fest, among others. He has collaborated with renowned artists such as Rubén Blades, Carlos Vives, and Paquito D’Rivera, as well as with folklore masters Alfredo Gutiérrez, Carmelo Torres, and Martina Camargo.

Sanjay Barbora - Territorial Autonomy, States and Politics in the 21st Century: Notes from a Frontier
2026-05-06 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
How can we interpret the increasing centralisation of political authority and decision-making in the 21st century, and can movements for autonomy provide an answer to this question? The concept of territorial autonomy has been a complex issue in modern politics, especially since the emergence of postwar nation-states in the 20th century. While it provided a useful framework for understanding the structure of the modern state and its legal systems, it has also been a convenient tool for governance, where calls for autonomy have often been subject to the shifting nature of power. In this presentation, I will draw on my personal involvement with autonomy movements in the region James Scott, Willem van Schendel, and Sanjib Baruah refer to as “Zomia,” to explore the challenges faced by much of the world today.
Sanjay Barbora studies agrarian change, social movements, wildlife conservation, human migration and urbanisation in the global south, especially in South Asia. Before coming to UCSC, he worked as a media development professional with Panos South Asia and as one of the founding faculty members of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Guwahati Campus. He reads Seamus Heaney’s poems when he is confused, and cook for friends and family when he is able.

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

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

Protecting Mauna Kea: Standing Above the Clouds
2026-05-06 16:00 - 20:00 | College Nine and John R. Lewis Multipurpose Room, College Ten, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
We warmly invite you to join us for our remaining special series events (May 5 and May 6) on the long struggle of Native Hawaiian people and other kia‘i (“protectors”) in protecting Mauna Kea. One of the most sacred Native Hawaiian sites, Mauna Kea is the piko (umbilical cord) connecting the islands to the heavens, the dwelling place of deities, and a place of worship. This sacred landscape faces ongoing expropriation for the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT)—a project in which UC Santa Cruz is profoundly implicated.
Wednesday, May 6, 4-8 pm at College 9/JRL Multipurpose Rm.: Standing Above the Clouds
A public screening of a documentary film that focuses on mothers and daughters from three Native Hawaiian families that have dedicated their lives to protecting Mauna Kea from destruction. A Q & A with visiting Mauna Kea Protectors will be facilitated by Kanaka Maoli/Native Hawaiian professors, Drs. Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar and Nicole Furtado. Food will be served, including vegan options.

Registration for the following events is recommended but not required. On-site registration is also possible. All events are free and open to the public.
The series features visiting Mauna Kea protectors from Hilo, Hawai‘i: Hāwane Rios, an award-winning singer, songwriter and a celebrated haku mele (song and chant composer); Hopoelehua Pa’a Makakau, a Kanaka ‘Ōiwi cultural bearer, aloha ‘āina (land protector), hula practitioner, and skilled multi-disciplinary hana no’eau (cultural) artist. It also will feature Amber Espinosa-Jones, the award-winning producer of the feature film Standing Above the Clouds and respected teachers and members of the Santa Cruz hula community, Kumu Mehana Thomas and Kūhai Hālau O Mehanakealohakalaua’eikapoli Pā ‘Ōlapa Kahiko.

Co-sponsored by Asian American and Pacific Islander Resource Center, Center for Reimagining Leadership, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Film and Digital Media/Social Documentation, Mauna Kea Protectors at UC Santa Cruz, Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Rachel Carson College, Student Union Assembly Office of Diversity and Inclusion

The Deep Read San Diego Salon
2026-05-06 18:30 - 20:30 | Stone Brewing Liberty Station, 2816 Historic Decatur Rd UNIT 116, San Diego, CA, 92106, United States
UC Santa Cruz and The Humanities Institute (THI) invite you to a special event at Stone Brewing in Liberty Station to discuss this year’s Deep Read book, the New York Times bestseller, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change our Minds, and Shape our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake.
As part of The Deep Read program of The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, this event is designed to invite curious minds like yours to think deeply about literature, art, and the most pressing issues of our day. Even if you haven’t read the book, we encourage you to come and enjoy the discussion and connect with fellow San Diego alumni and fellow Deep Readers to discuss the foundational role of fungi and fungal networks in our lives and world.

Beer and light bites provided by Crown College alumnus and co-founder of Stone Brewing, Steve Wagner!
This event is open exclusively to UCSC alumni and San Diego Deep Readers.
Participants:
Laura Martin, Deep Read Faculty Lead
Laura is a Continuing Lecturer for Porter College and the Literature Department at UC Santa Cruz where she earned her PhD. She is the Deep Read Faculty Lead and a Research Program Manager for the Deep Read and other programs at The Humanities Institute.
Christian Schwarz, Educator and Naturalist
Christian is an educator and naturalist from California. A UC Santa Cruz alum, he’s co-authored two field guides — Mushrooms of the Redwood Coast and Mushrooms of Cascadia. He is a research associate of the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden and the Ken Norris Center for Natural History at UCSC, where he has taught undergraduate courses in mycology and community science.
Irena Polić, Deep Read Founding Director
Irena is the Managing Director of The Humanities Institute and the Assistant Dean for Research and Engagement in the Humanities Division. She is a proud UCSC alumna and a passionate advocate for the humanities in the public sphere.
Host:
Steve Wagner is a Crown College alumnus and the co-founder of the national brewing company Stone Brewing. He is a strong supporter of The Humanities Institute, the Literature Department, and affiliated graduate students. Wagner was transformed by his time as a student at UCSC, where he studied English literature and was inspired by the radical education system and inspiring professors.

Gukha Amin — From the Margins: The Lives and Labor of Yemen’s "Undesirable" Subjects
2026-05-07 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Join the Center for the Middle East and North Africa for a presentation by Gukha Amin. Her talk follows the lives of social outcasts and marginalized Black people who lived and moved across Southern Arabia in the first half of the twentieth century using deportation records, petitions, and criminal cases. These include street performers, sex workers, sanitation laborers, and others who colonial officials labeled as “undesirables.” Moving across Somalia, Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Southern Arabia, these subaltern actors reveal the porous contours of an “Oceanic Yemen,” a global space that reincorporates Southern Arabia into its historic oceanic networks and makes legible Yemen’s deep links to the Horn of Africa. The talk centers these individuals’ labor, mobility, and gendered experience to unpack the complex subject and racial formations unfolding in twentieth-century Southern Arabia and the broader region. It asks who were the men and women that made up the social margins of this global space? How does their labor and gendered experience challenge our understanding of gender and sexuality? And what do these internal outsiders teach us about how categories of race, Blackness, and caste overlapped and operated in the twentieth-century Middle East and beyond?
Gukha Amin is a historian of modern Yemen and a current UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Santa Cruz. She is interested in questions of race and racialization in the Middle East and North Africa. Her book project, The Nesting Margins: Identity and Belonging in Oceanic Yemen is a social history of racial and social minorities living and moving across late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Southern Arabia. Gukha is the founder and curator of The Global Yemen Project, an ongoing digital humanities project that narrates the global histories of an “Oceanic Yemen” through the lives of those on the margins of Yemeni society.

Presented by the Center for the Middle East and North Africa. Lunch will be served during the talk.

Rasanblaj as Spirit Turn: Gina Athena Ulysse in Conversation with Jennifer González
2026-05-07 18:00 - 19:30 | Institute of the Arts and Sciences, 100 Panetta Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Please join us for a conversation between Gina Athena Ulysse and Jennifer González, discussing Ulysse’s solo exhibition Redwoods Rasanblaj: Origins & Disentanglements.
The internationally-lauded work of humanities professor Gina Athena Ulysse is on view at the IAS as an inaugural Faculty Spotlight Exhibition. The site-specific installation, produced in community from things collected, found, purchased and donated, centers on the concept developed by the artist of “rasanblaj”, a form of assembly and collage that transcends the formal use of materials to draw together people, spirits, and ideas.
The artist will be joined in conversation by noted art theorist and scholar Jennifer González, professor of history of art and visual culture.

The Annual Maya K. Peterson Memorial Lecture with Matthew Bender
2026-05-08 14:30 - 16:00 | Alumni Room, University Center, CA, United States
“Colonizing Water: Empire, Commodification, and Appropriation in Africa”
In early 2018, the city of Cape Town nearly ran out of water. South Africa’s “Mother City,” renowned for its cosmopolitan population and natural beauty, faced the prospect of a “Day Zero,” when it would be forced to close its taps and force millions to queue for water rations. Across much of the continent, though, water scarcity is an everyday reality, with nearly 1 in 3 people lacking access to sufficient drinking water. How did this become the case? This talk explores the history of water on the African continent, using a historical lens to understand the present-day water crisis. It shows how these resources came to be “colonized” through the mechanisms of imperialism in Africa. European colonial actors in the 19th and 20th centuries attempted to transform the ownership, management, and meaning of water with the aim of harnessing its powers to advance their objectives. In doing so, they created deep seeded inequities and underdevelopment that has persisted in the decades since African colonies gained their independence. This historical analysis shows that many of the present-day obstacles to providing clean, safe water stem from legacies of colonial rule. Yet it also shows the many ways in which everyday Africans proved resilient, finding ways to thrive despite the odds.
Matthew Bender is Professor of History at The College of New Jersey. His research focuses on modern African social and cultural history, with interest in the environment, natural resources, and agriculture. A leading scholar in water history, he has authored numerous articles, essays, and chapters as well as a book entitled Water Brings No Harm: Management Knowledge and the Struggle for the Waters of Kilimanjaro (Ohio University Press, 2019).

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

This event is made possible by the generous support of the Maya K. Peterson Memorial Endowment.

The Strait of Hormuz and War in Iran: Film Screening and Discussion
2026-05-08 18:00 - 20:00 | Resource Center for Non Violence
Join us for a screening of Plate It With Silver and a discussion by Nidhi Mahajan (UCSC) and Stephen Zunes (USF) on the Strait of Hormuz.

Doors open at 5:30 PM. Event begins at 6:00 PM.
For 50 years, the Resource Center for Nonviolence (RCNV) has equipped our community with tools to build a just and peaceful world. We’re proud to collaborate with UCSC’s Center for the Middle East and North Africa to host this film screening and discussion. The Center is dedicated to the project of creating community and promoting education and research about the histories, politics, and cultures of the peoples who live in the Middle East and North Africa. This event is part of our Santa Cruz United in Love initiative cultivating Beloved Community, shared learning, and solidarity. We hope you’ll join us as we continue to deepen our collective integrity and accountability.
Join us for a screening of the film Plate it with Silver and a discussion by Nidhi Mahajan (UCSC) and Stephen Zunes (USF), two prominent experts on the Persian Gulf region. While recent events have highlighted the centrality of the Strait of Hormuz for shipping routes and oil, the film explores the deeper ways that global trade and local religious practices intersect. The screening will be followed by a discussion on the current war in the Persian Gulf, its regional reverberations, and the longer histories of trade in the Indian Ocean.
Stephen Zunes is a professor of Politics and Director of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco. He has written and lectured extensively about Iran and U.S. Middle East policy and has been one of the few American scholars allowed to visit Iran in recent years, meeting with top government officials, leading dissidents, and ordinary Iranians.
Nidhi Mahajan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her first book, Moorings: Voyages of Capital across the Indian Ocean, was published by UC Press in June 2025. She has also published in journals such as Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Monsoon, History of the Present, and Island Studies Journal. In addition to her academic work, Mahajan is a practicing artist, with her projects exhibited at the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, Diriyah Biennale (Saudi Arabia), Macondo Literature Festival (Kenya), Hayy Jameel (Saudi Arabia), Khoj Studios (India), and other international venues.
Everyone is welcome. Sliding scale ticket donations ($0-50) support RCNV’s vital work.

Slow Seminar: More-than-Human Water Engineers
2026-05-11 08:00 - 10:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
The Center for Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions (SEACoast) at University of California, Santa Cruz and Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA) invite you to join us for our Spring Slow Seminar “More-than-Human Water Engineers”
Professor Anna Tsing (Anthropology, UCSC) will facilitate our conversation drawing on a selection of scholarship on more-than-human water engineering in wetland environments. In our reading and discussion, we will consider the following questions: Can nonhumans be ecosystem engineers? Are sago palms “the beavers of Southeast Asia”? What agents shape the salt/freshwater line? How is Southeast Asia relevant to understanding wetlands around the world?
Please register for the Slow Seminar. Registered guests will receive copies of the selected readings via email.

This is a Hybrid event. Participants may join in-person at UCSC or Aarhus or by Zoom. The Zoom link will be sent out at least 1 hour before the event. Registration will close at midnight on May 10, 2026.
New to Slow Seminars? Check out SEACoast’s definition here.

Alexander Ghedi Weheliye - Schwarz-Sein: Elements of Black Life
2026-05-11 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The final guest of the History of Consciousness Spring 2026 Research Colloquium will be joining us next Monday, May 11th. This event brings Alexander Ghedi Weheliye to give their talk “Schwarz-Sein: Elements of Black Life”.
Schwarz-Sein: Elements of Black Life establishes the different ways Blackness operates as the ontological mattering of ungendering. This allows me to conceptualize Blackness as integral to being as such and imagine how its compound manifestations matter and reverberate both through and beyond the category of the human.

Join us in-person or register to attend virtually.
Alexander Ghedi Weheliye is a writer, professor, and curator focusing on Black Studies, critical theory, gender and sexuality studies, social technologies, and popular culture. They are Malcolm S. Forbes Professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media and the Brown Arts Institute at Brown University. They are the author of Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (2005), Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (2014), and Feenin: R&B Music and the Materiality of BlackFem Voices and Technology (2023). Currently, Weheliye is working on two projects. The first, Between Continents, is a critical memoir about their early life in East Germany and Somalia. The second, Schwarz-Sein: Elements of Black Life, reimagines the periodic table of elements from the vantage point of Black queer life. They are co-curator of the group exhibition, Exposure: Black Queer Visual Constellations at Cohen Gallery, Brown University (April-June 2026).

Reyna Grande - Migrant Heart
2026-05-11 19:00 - 20:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes award-winning author Reyna Grande (The Distance Between Us) back to the store to celebrate the release of her newest book Migrant Heart: Essays About Things I Can’t Forget—an ambitious memoir in essays that illuminates the hidden cost of the American Dream and the complex journey of healing that follows survival. Grande will be in conversation with Sylvanna Falcón, Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at UC Santa Cruz.
Migrant Heart is a powerful testament to Grande’s role as a storyteller and cultural witness. It is an essential, moving read that continues to expand what we understand about the United States and the complex people who cross and live within its borders. It is a book for anyone seeking to understand the true price of belonging and the enduring power of finding one’s voice.

Reyna Grande is an award-winning author, motivational speaker, and writing teacher. As a young girl, she crossed the US-Mexico border to join her family in Los Angeles, a harrowing journey chronicled in The Distance Between Us, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Her other books include the novels A Ballad of Love and Glory, Across a Hundred Mountains, and Dancing with Butterflies, the memoirs Migrant Heart, The Distance Between Us: Young Readers Edition, and A Dream Called Home, and the anthology Somewhere We Are Human: Authentic Voices on Migration, Survival, and New Beginnings. She lives in Woodland, California, with her husband and two children. Visit ReynaGrande.com for more information.
Sylvanna Falcón is a Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at UC Santa Cruz. She is the winner of the 2016 Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize from the National Women’s Studies Association and of a teaching award from the Division of Social Sciences at UC Santa Cruz.
More information at: Bookshop Santa Cruz – Reyna Grande

This event is cosponsored by Latin American and Latino Studies and The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

Camilla Hawthorne, Michael Whalen, Christina Zanfagna, and John Gennari - BLACKITALIAN: A Documentary Screening and Discussion
2026-05-13 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
What are the meanings of belonging and cultural identity at a time of resurgent white nationalism, large-scale transnational migration, and the increasingly convulsive dynamics of nation and imperium? We address this question in a screening and robust critical discussion of scenes from a documentary film-in-progress called BLACKITALIAN. A collaboration between cultural geographer Camilla Hawthorne, ethnomusicologist Christina Zanfagna, cultural historian John Gennari, and filmmaker Michael Whalen, BLACKITALIAN interweaves “story walks,” interviews, and media representations to explore cross-racial contact zones of music, foodways, and other forms of expressive culture in the cities of New York, New Orleans, and Milan. What emerges is a dynamic story about the ways social outsiders move to the inside and create new forms of culture and belonging, challenging us to confront our differences and understand our entwined histories.

Camilla Hawthorne is Associate Professor of Sociology and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The bilingual, dual citizen daughter of a Black American father and an Italian mother, Hawthorne has studied the politics of race, citizenship, and Blackness in Italy and the wider Mediterranean region for over a decade. She is the author of the monograph Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press 2022; published in Italian as Razza e cittadinanza. Frontiere contese e contestate nel Mediterraneo nero, Astarte Edizioni 2023) and co-editor of The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders and Citizenship (Palgrave Macmillan 2021) and The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity (Duke University Press, 2023). She also serves as program director and faculty member with the Black Europe Summer School in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. In 2020, Hawthorne was named one of the Corriere della Sera (Italy’s largest national newspaper) Women of the Year for her contributions to the study of the Black diaspora in Italy

Michael Whalen is the Knight Ridder/San Jose Mercury New Endowed Professor at Santa Clara University. A member of the Director’s Guild of America since 1996, Whalen has extensive experience writing one-hour documentaries focusing on humanities scholarship for A&E (a dozen episodes of “Ancient Mysteries” and “Biography”) and the Discovery Channel/TLC (six episodes of “Super Structures”). He has also produced documentaries for The Discovery Channel, NBC, MTV, and The Learning Channel (TLC). As an independent filmmaker, Whalen regularly explores themes of identity and culture with his documentaries. Another First Step (1994, Cine Golden Eagle Award) tells the story of an Irish American father trying to care for his autistic deaf and mute son in the 1950s and 60s. FRESH women (2007, Worldfest Gold Medal) profiles four 40-year-old women leaving the corporate world to launch careers in art. A Christmas in Tent City (2008, multiple Best Short Film awards) recounts the experience of a Mexican immigrant child living in a migrant worker camp. A Question of Habit (PBS, 2011) uncovers how popular culture (think Sister Mary Margarita cocktail napkins and nun porn) has erased the real history of American nuns. The Farmer & The Chef (Australian Public Television, 2014) takes the audience behind the scenes of a working relationship between a world class chef and farmer, and Gringos at the Gate (2012, ESPN) explores US/Mexican relations and national identity through the intense rivalry of the two nations’ soccer teams.

Christina Zanfagna is an Associate Professor of Music and Ethnic Studies at Santa Clara University. An ethnomusicologist and bicoastal Italian-American who grew up on hip hop and basketball, her research explores the intersections of Black popular music, race, and urban space. She is the author of Holy Hip Hop in the City of Angels (University of California Press, 2017), an ethnographic monograph that examines the everyday lives of former gangsta rappers turned gospel rappers in Los Angeles. Zanfagna’s writing has appeared in a variety of publications, including Journal of Popular Music Studies, Black Music Research Journal, Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music and Sound Studies, Cambridge Companion to Hip Hop, Routledge Handbook of Religion and American Culture, and Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, as well as journalistic publications such as The Beat, fRoots, and Stranger’s Guide. She has written on topics ranging from hip hop’s religious history to digital DJing practices, “krump” street dancing in South L.A., the globalization of flamenco, Harlem’s musical and religious diasporas, and the soundscapes of American gentrification. She is also a flamenco dancer, regularly performing throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.

John Gennari is Professor of English and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of Vermont. He is an American Studies-trained U.S. cultural historian with specializations in jazz and popular music, race and ethnicity, Italian American culture, food, sports, and cultural criticism. He is the author of Flavor and Soul: Italian America at Its African American Edge (University of Chicago Press, 2017. His earlier book, Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics (University of Chicago Press, 2006), was awarded the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for Excellence in Music Criticism and the John Cawelti Award for the Best Book in American Culture. Gennari has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, and the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia.

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

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

PhD+ Workshop - CART Archives Reading Group
2026-05-13 13:30 - 14:45 | McHenry Library (3rd Floor), Special Collections
Join the Center for Archival Research and Training (CART) and the Humanities Institute (THI) for the inaugural meeting of the CART Archives Reading Group! We will be discussing the 2021 essay “The House Archives Built” by Dorothy Berry. You’ll be introduced to some basic concepts of archival theory and practice, and be invited to think big about what archives are, and what they could be.
Artists, history buffs, photographers, grad students / post docs / faculty / undergrads … all are welcome to join!

Registration is required.
Please read The House Archives Built before we meet in person – you can download the essay from the up//root zines website.

This event is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of the PhD+ Workshop Series. Learn more about the Center for Archival Research and Training on the CART website.

Bridging Divides in Oral and Written Language Research: Development and Disorders in Bilingual Learners
2026-05-14 14:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Please join the LAAL (Languages & Applied Linguistics) Department for a presentation titled, “Bridging Divides in Oral and Written Language Research: Development and Disorders in Bilingual Learners” by Jiali Wang (Texas A&M University) on Thursday, May 14, at 2:00, in Hum 1, 202.
Although oral and written language tap into many overlapping underlying skills, the investigation of oral and written language has been situated in divided fields, despite the numerous intersections where one may inform the other. From an interdisciplinary research background of Educational Psychology, Communication Sciences and Disorders, and Teaching and Learning, Wang will share two papers in oral and written language research. First, she presents a clinical tutorial on how to use the Bilingual Multidimensional Ability Scale (B-MAS) to improve the identification of developmental language disorder among bilingual children. Second, she presents a paper that examines the language use in the writing of bilingual adolescents. Together, these studies illustrate how an integrated perspective towards oral and written language research can better support the language and literacy development of bilingual learners, including those with developmental language disorder. Wang concludes by outlining future research directions aimed at understanding bilingual children’s language and literacy development, improving language assessment, and translating findings into actionable tools for instructional and clinical practice.
Jiali Wang, PhD, is a postdoctoral research associate at Texas A&M University. Her research focuses on bilingual language and literacy development, with particular emphasis on the assessment and identification of developmental language disorder among Spanish–English bilingual children. She also conducts research on writing development and assessment, using NLP-derived measures to examine language use in students’ writing. Her work explores how linguistic and environmental factors shape language and literacy outcomes of diverse bilingual populations. Her recent projects include creating clinician-friendly tools for identifying language disorder among bilingual learners, examining the writing development and assessment of diverse learners, and investigating the home literacy environment among multilingual families.

Living Writers with Erica Hunt, Tisa Bryant, and Tonya Foster
2026-05-14 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
In Nourishment, Us.
Erica Hunt (St. John’s University), Tisa Bryant (University of Iowa), and Tonya Foster (San Francisco State University), Poets, Critics, Artists
Living Writers Spring 2026: Our Nourishment, US features poets, writers, critics, visual and performance artists, who demonstrate how writing and art enacts around the idea of freedom and the imaginary in the face of the constant threat of terror and erasure. In the presence of who we all are within marginalized yet expansively powerful fields of racialized and multiply lived complex and diverse identities, please come as we convene in spirit, deep celebration, and resource with one another.
About the Living Writers Series
The Living Writers Series (LWS) is a live reading series organized especially for the Creative Writing Program community at UCSC. There is a new series each quarter, and each series features writers with unique voices. The LWS is open to all creative writing students and the public.

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

An Evening with Journalist David Noriega
2026-05-14 19:00 | Namaste Lounge – College 9, Namaste Lounge, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
In partnership with City on a Hill Press and with support from The Humanities Institute and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Kresge’s Media and Society Series presents an evening with award-winning journalist David Noriega.
David Noriega is an award-winning journalist and National Correspondent for NBC News. He has reported from all across the United States and more than a dozen countries on five continents, covering migration, politics, armed conflict, organized crime, labor, the environment, and more. Noriega is the recipient of an Edward R. Murrow Award for his reporting from Mexico, as well as awards from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the New York Press Club, the Los Angeles Press Club, and the French American Foundation. His work has been nominated three times for the News and Documentary Emmy Awards.

CMENA's Annual Concert Featuring Aza
2026-05-15 19:30 | Woodhouse Brewery, 119 Madrone St., Santa Cruz, United States
CMENA is proud to present AZA for our 2026 Spring concert. AZA weaves the rich musical traditions of North Africa’s Tamazight culture with contemporary global influences, creating a unique and captivating sound. Led by Moroccan-born musician Fattah Abbou, AZA blends the intricate melodies and dynamic rhythms of styles like Ahwash, Rwais, and Gnawa. The band celebrates Amazigh heritage through music, art, and education – building bridges between cultures across continents.

Presented by the Center for the Middle East and North Africa

Saturday Shakespeare - Macbeth
2026-05-16 10:15 | Aptos Library, 7695 Soquel Dr, Aptos, 95003, United States

Santa Cruz County History Fair
2026-05-16 12:00 - 16:00 | London Nelson Community Center, 301 Center St., Santa Cruz, United States
Celebrate Santa Cruz County’s diverse history by connecting with over 30 local historical and cultural organizations and groups. Discover stories of neighborhoods and residents and enjoy hands-on activities, artifacts, photographs, publications, and more. Featured guest speakers: Jay Topping, Luna HighJohn-Bey, and Rob Darrow. Click here for more info.
This year’s fair is organized by a committee of people from Santa Cruz Public Libraries, San Lorenzo Valley Museum, City of Santa Cruz Parks & Recreation, Watsonville Public Library, Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, Capitola Historical Museum and Santa Cruz Mission State Historic Park. Co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute.

EarthStory Festival
2026-05-16 13:00 - 18:00 | The Agrihood, 76 N Winchester Blvd, Santa Clara, CA, 95050
You are invited to the EarthStory Festival: Our Regenerative Future, hosted by EarthStory and the Eat•Grow•Learn Community Network at the Agrihood in Santa Clara (76 N. Winchester Boulevard). Join us for an afternoon of storytelling, music, workshops, and booths all celebrating our regenerative future on this planet! Starting at 1:00pm, come experience a marketplace hosted by local regenerative farms and environmental organizations. There will have workshops all day on the amphitheater stage hosted by Cultivating Self, Bioticship, Rising Lotus Reiki, and Indy Rishi-Singh. At 3:00pm there will be storytelling offered by the Santa Clara Open Space Authority and the Eat•Grow•Learn Community Network.

Tickets are free. Donations are welcome.
For more information: EarthStory’s Substack

This event is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute.

Privacy’s Defender: Fight Against Digital Surveillance with Cindy Cohn
2026-05-19 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Cindy Cohn has devoted her life to the fight for digital rights. She’s tangled with federal officials to keep our online conversations secure from the government’s prying eyes, fought to ensure that you are told when your information has been turned over to the government, and argued before judges to protect our right to speak and to share science and knowledge on the internet.
In Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance (MIT Press), Cindy weaves her own personal story with her role as a leading legal voice representing the rights and interests of technology users, innovators, whistleblowers, and researchers during the Crypto Wars of the 1990s, battles over NSA’s dragnet internet spying revealed in the 2000s, and the fight against FBI gag orders.
During this national book tour, Cindy will be at UC Santa Cruz to give a book talk on May 19, 2026 from 12:00-1:30 pm.

Free and open to the public with registration. This event is both in-person and virtual.
Cindy Cohn is the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which works to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice and innovation for all the people of the world. Before becoming Executive Director a decade ago, Cindy was the organization’s Legal Director from 2000-2015, and led the organization’s impact litigation work on bringing balance to copyright law, stopping mass spying and protecting freedom of expression online. She’s won many awards for her work and even more court decisions.

Institute for Social Transformation, The Humanities Institute, Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas, The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society and the Banatao Institute (CITRIS), and the Security Research Lab.

The Deep Read: Faculty Salon on Entangled Life
2026-05-19 18:00 | Virtual and In Person
Join us for a salon-style event at the Hay Barn on campus where our participating Deep Read faculty, Professors Benjamin Breen (History), Gregory Gilbert (Environmental Studies), and Donna Haraway (History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies) will give brief presentations and discuss Entangled Life with the Deep Read community in a Q&A moderated by Deep Read Faculty Co-Lead, Laura Martin. Participants can also attend virtually.

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

Additional Events of Interest:
The Literature and Poetics of Fungi Salon: On May 26, 2026, at 6pm, we will hold a salon at the Hay Barn focused on the literary and poetic influence of fungi and its relation to Entangled Life. The salon will feature Professors Cole, Hillman, Palmer, and Tseng in conversation with moderator Laura Martin and the Deep Read community. Participants can also attend virtually.
Author Event – A Conversation with Merlin Sheldrake: On May 31, 2026, at 4pm, we will welcome Merlin Sheldrake to the Quarry Amphitheater on campus where he will be in conversation with Associate Professor of History, Benjamin Breen. This will be an in-person event, and, as always, it will be free and open to the public.

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

Alyssa Battistoni - Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature
2026-05-20 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Co-sponsored by the Center for Critical Urban and Environmental Studies
Although capitalism is typically treated as a force for relentless commodification, it consistently fails to place value on vital aspects of the nonhuman world, whether carbon emissions or entire ecosystems. Free Gifts argues that to understand contemporary ecological problems from biodiversity collapse to climate change, we have to understand how some things come to have value under capitalism—and how others do not. The book recovers and reinterprets the idea of the free gift of nature used by classical economic thinkers to describe what we gratuitously obtain from the natural world, and builds on Karl Marx’s critique of political economy to show how capitalism fundamentally treats nature as free for the taking. This novel theory of capitalism’s relationship to nature not only helps us understand contemporary ecological breakdown, but also casts capitalism’s own core dynamics in a new light.
Alyssa Battistoni is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Barnard College. She works and teaches on climate and environmental politics, capitalism, Marxism, feminism, and other topics in contemporary social and political thought. Alyssa is the co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso 2019), and Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (Princeton 2025), and her academic work has been published in the American Political Science Review, Political Theory, NOMOS, Perspectives on Politics, Contemporary Political Theory, among other outlets.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Presented by the Center for South Asian Studies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This event is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Co-Sponsored by The Humanities Institute

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday, 8/9 – Macbeth by William Shakespeare

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

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

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