The Humanities Institute

Living Writers Student Reading
2025-12-04 17:20 - 18:55 (America/Los_Angeles) | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Wonder as the Source
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.

John O. Jordan - Dickens and Soundscape: The Old Curiosity Shop
2025-12-07 13:00 - 14:30 | Virtual Event
Please join the Dickens Project for the rescheduled Dickens Universe talk by John Jordan, Dickens Project Co-Founder and Co-Director.
Critics have long recognized and commented on the striking visual quality of Dickens’s writing, including the ways in which his novels seem to have anticipated and even influenced the development of certain film techniques. With the exception of studies that focus on speech and voice, relatively little attention has been paid to Dickens’s representation of sound more generally. In this paper, Professor Jordan takes a sound studies approach to Dickens’s writing, focusing on The Old Curiosity Shop and examining the various uses to which sound is put in this exceptionally “noisy” book.

Register for the talk on zoom here.
John O. Jordan is a research professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the Co-Director of the Dickens Project. His primary research interests include Victorian literature and culture, Charles Dickens and narrative theory. John is the author of Supposing Bleak House and co-editor, with Robert Patten and Catherine Waters, of the Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens.

Decolonial AI: Designing Technologies for Generative Justice
2026-01-06 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The extraction of ecological value from nature, labor value from workers, and social value from communities constitutes the root cause of pollution, poverty and social domination. Indigenous traditions, commons-based production and related alternatives offer models in which value is not extracted, but rather circulated back to the human and non-human agencies that generated it. In this talk we will describe how this framework of “generative justice” can be used to design decolonized technologies. In Detroit our experiments develop AI and other applications in a platform for community-based economies. In Africa they are developed for a collective of crafters, artists and other creatives. We find that establishing democratized, regenerative value flows requires “full stack decolonization,” because extraction occurs at every layer from infrastructure to machine learning algorithms. The transition to worker-owned systems, in which they determine where AI will be located across the broad spectrum of human-machine agency possibilities, is a key component in developing pathways for egalitarian and sustainable futures.
Ron Eglash is the Director of the Center for Generative Justice and a former Professor in the School of Information at University of Michigan. Audrey Bennett is a Professor in the Stamps School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan and a University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor.

2026 Santa Cruz Fungus Fair
2026-01-09 - 2026-01-11 | London Nelson Community Center, 301 Center St., Santa Cruz, United States
Did you know that without fungus, we’d have no bread, cheese, beer, or wine? Or that anti-cholesterol medicine was developed from mushrooms? Come to the Santa Cruz Fungus Fair to learn fascinating and fun facts about beautiful and diverse species of mushrooms! This unique Santa Cruz area tradition draws thousands of visitors each January. View remarkable mushroom arts and crafts, taste unusual and exceptionally good fungal fare, and experience FFSC’s overriding mission: “We keep the fun in fungus!”

The Humanities Institute will be present at this event to promote the 2026 Deep Read, which will feature Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change our Minds, and Shape our Futures by British mycologist Merlin Sheldrake. We hope you’ll join us at the Fungus Fair and for this year’s Deep Read!

Saturday Shakespeare - Henry IV, Part 1
2026-01-10 10:15, 2026-01-17 10:15, 2026-01-24 10:15, 2026-01-31 10:15, 2026-02-07 10:15 | Virtual and In Person
Saturday Shakespeare in Santa Cruz Presents Henry IV, Part 1 by William Shakespeare Aptos Library on January 10, 17, 24, 31 & February 7, 2025 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 February 7, the film The Hollow Crown, Henry IV Part 1 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 / Film Presentation

Jan 10: Alexander Brondarbit, A historian who specializes in kingship in late medieval and early modern England; author of two books on The Wars of the Roses. Readings: Act 1 – Act 2, Scene 2
Jan 17: Patty Gallagher, An actor and Professor of Theater Arts at UC Santa Cruz; Artistic Associate at Santa Cruz Shakespeare and the Rogue Theatre in Tucson, Arizona. Readings: Act 2, Scene 3 – Act 3, Scene 2.
Jan 24: Julia Reinhardt Lupton, Distinguished Professor of English at UC Irvine, co-director of the UCI Shakespeare Center. She is the author of six books on Shakespeare. Readings: Act 3, Scene 3 – Act 4.
Jan 31: Abigail Heald is currently teaching the Henriad (Richard II, Henry IV, Parts I and Part II, and Henry V) at Stanford University. Readings: Act 5.
Feb 7: Film Screening: The Hollow Crown, Henry IV Part 1. Jeremy Irons-King Henry/ Tom Hiddleson-Prince Hal/ Simon Russell Beale-Falstaff, directed by Richard Eyre.

Christopher Chen - The Poetics of Racial Boundary Formation
2026-01-14 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This talk examines how National Book Award-winning poet and translator Daniel Borzutzky and poet-essayist Wendy S. Walters explore the relationship between capitalism and racialization through poetics of spatial boundary formation. Mobilizing innovative poetic forms, Borzutzky’s recursive, translational syntax mirrors capitalist processes of abstraction and Walters’ sonnets are mapped onto suburban planning documents. Borzutzky’s poetry offers a sustained meditation on the globalized political economy of border walls, revealing how the US-Mexico boundary, debt walls, and factory enclosures simultaneously divide and connect populations through transnational circuits of capital accumulation and neoliberal state violence. Walters’ Troy, Michigan, a book-length experimental autobiography in sonnets, reads race as a set of bounded conditions of life in the post-Fordist Rust Belt structured by the history of residential segregation, highway and transportation infrastructure, and thwarted class mobility.
Christopher Chen is Associate Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has published articles, poetry, and reviews in boundary 2, Post45 Contemporaries, South Atlantic Quarterly, The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, The Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics, Money and American Literature, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the author of Literature and Race in the Democracy of Goods (2022), a comparative study of contemporary Black and Asian North American experimental poetry.

Winter 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 Winter 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 - Grants and Fellowships
2026-01-14 16:00 - 17:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Grants and Fellowships for Humanities Scholars
Learn how to make your fellowship and grant proposals competitive to a wide range of selection committees. We’ll discuss what does and does not need to be in a research proposal, the proper tone and form, and ways to tease out the larger stakes of individual research projects and avoid the jargon of field-specific descriptions. This session will help you craft a research proposal that appeals to a broad academic audience. It will also be an opportunity for graduate students to learn about The Humanities Institute’s funding resources as well as strategies for acquiring extramural support.
The workshop will be led by Pranav Anand (THI Faculty Director and Professor of Linguistics), Banu Bargu (THI Steering Committee Member and Professor of History of Consciousness), and Saskia Nauenberg Dunkell (THI Research Programs and Communications Director).

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

Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty, and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia
2026-01-15 15:00 - 17:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
How do traditions and peoples grapple with loss, particularly when it is of such magnitude that it defies the possibility of recovery or restoration? Rajbir Singh Judge offers new ways to understand loss and the limits of history by considering Maharaja Duleep Singh and his struggle during the 1880s to reestablish Sikh rule, the lost Khalsa Raj, in Punjab.
Sikh sovereignty in what is today northern India and northeastern Pakistan came to an end in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the British annexed the Sikh kingdom and, eventually, exiled its child maharaja, Duleep Singh, to England. In the 1880s, Singh embarked on an abortive attempt to restore the lost Sikh kingdom. Judge explores not only Singh’s efforts but also the Sikh people’s responses—the dreams, fantasies, and hopes that became attached to the Khalsa Raj. He shows how a community engaged military, political, and psychological loss through theological debate, literary production, bodily discipline, and ethical practice in order to contest colonial politics. This book argues that Sikhs in the final decades of the nineteenth century were not simply looking to recuperate the past but to remake it—and to dwell within loss instead of transcending it—and in so doing opened new possibilities.
Bringing together Sikh tradition, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial thought, Prophetic Maharaja provides bracing insights into concepts of sovereignty and the writing of history.
Rajbir Singh Judge is Associate Professor of History and Associate Member of Asian and Asian American Studies at California State University, Long Beach. He specializes in the intellectual and cultural history of South Asia with a particular emphasis on Punjab and the Sikh tradition. His first book, Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty, and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia was published by Columbia University Press in 2024 and was awarded “Best First Book in the History of Religions” by the American Academy of Religion. He is currently working on his second book, A Critique of Contextual Reason, for which he was awarded membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in the 2024-2025 Academic Year. His publications have appeared in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Modern Asian Studies, Theory & Event, Cultural Critique, the Journal of the History of Sexuality, History & Theory, among others.

Sponsored by Sarbjit Singh Aurora Endowed Chair in Sikh and Punjabi Studies, Department of History, and Center for South Asian Studies.

Moulay Hicham Alaoui - Pacted Democracy in the Middle East: Religion, Politics, and the Struggle for Freedom
2026-01-16 15:00 - 17:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Join us for a book talk by Dr. Hicham Alaoui in which he will deliver insights about the battle for democracy in the Middle East, drawing upon his recent book, Pacted Democracy in the Middle East: Tunisia and Egypt in Comparative Perspective (Palgrave, 2022), also available in French (Le Cherche Midi, 2024) and Arabic (Dar Saqi, 2025). Reflecting an ongoing research agenda, the book provides a novel framework for imagining how democratic politics can emerge from social conflicts waged over religion and Islamism in the public sphere. Contrasting cases like Tunisia, Egypt, and other regional countries, it further illuminates the novel and oft-ignored connections between secular opposition, theological identity, and authoritarian rule in the Arab world. A reception will be held from 5-6pm in Hum 1, Room 202, after the event.
Dr. Hicham Alaoui is a lecturer at Stanford University, where he teaches political science. He also serves on the Advisory Board of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. He is the founder and director of the Hicham Alaoui Foundation, which undertakes innovative social scientific research in the Middle East and North Africa. He is a scholar on the comparative politics of democratization and religion. His latest publications include Pacted Democracy in the Middle East: Tunisia and Egypt in Comparative Perspective (Palgrave, 2022), which has been translated into French and Arabic, as well as various other books, including the most recent co-edited book Political Economy, Power, and Cultural Heritage in the Arab World (Lynne Rienner, 2025) and co-authored book Making Aid Work: Dueling with Dictators and Warlords in the Middle East and North Africa (Lynne Rienner, 2025). He holds an A.B. from Princeton University, M.A. from Stanford University, and D.Phil. from the University of Oxford.

Co-presented by the Center for the Middle East and North Africa and the Politics Department.

Nurturing Difference - Parenting and Disability in a Careless Age
2026-01-20 18:00 | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
We’ll be discussing Danilyn Rutherford’s Beautiful Mystery: Living in a Wordless World (Duke University Press) and Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons – Can a game take care of us? (University of Chicago Press). Joined by Donna Haraway and Megan Moodie, and moderated by THI Faculty Director, Pranav Anand, the panel will discuss caregiving, parenthood, disability, language, meaning, and technology.
In an increasingly careless world where cruelty is celebrated and disability mocked, these two highly-readable scholars remind us that beautiful relationships of compassion, connection, communication, and empathy still exist. Rutherford recounts her experiences raising a high assistance-needs daughter, Millie, describing the importance of a web of caregivers who support and enrich their lives and the potential for human communication beyond words. Wardrip-Fruin writes about parenting in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, exploring how his own need for rest and care in the face of growing disablement reshaped his ideas about masculinity, fatherhood, and video game imaginaries. Both books speak to Wardrip-Fruin’s provocative question posed in the subtitle to Animal Crossing: New Horizons, “Can a game take care of us?” If the “game” is a resource-stripped, social media-driven capitalist competition where everyone must fight for survival, where basic welfare programs are being destroyed, what can we learn from care-centered disability worlds? At a time when we most need it, these scholar-parents give us extraordinary insight into the form of attention in which all our hopes rest: love.

If you have disability-related needs, please contact us at thi@ucsc.edu or call 831-459-1274 by January 13, 2026. ADA parking for this event will be available in lot 170, directly adjacent to the Cowell Ranch Hay Barn. Sign language interpretation will also be available during the event.
About Beautiful Mystery: Living in a Wordless World:
When Danilyn Rutherford and her husband Craig noticed that their six-month-old daughter Millie wasn’t making eye contact, they took her to their pediatrician. And an optometrist. Then a neurologist. Later, to a team of physical and occupational therapists. None of the doctors could give Millie a diagnosis, but it was clear that her brain was not developing at the rate it should. At an age when some children take their first steps, Millie had the cognitive ability and motor skills of a three-month-old. Three years later, Craig died suddenly of a heart attack and Danilyn found herself on the precipice of her anthropology career as a widow and single mother, still trying to solve the puzzle posed by Millie’s inaccessible mind.
Now in her twenties, Millie has never been able to express herself verbally, but she has a thriving social environment rooted in the people around her and in things her companions and family can see, hear, smell, and feel. Life in Millie’s world is far richer than might be immediately evident to those who think and communicate in conventional ways.
Beautiful Mystery explores what it means to be a person in the spaces between what we can and cannot say, and how we can fight to care for those we love when they don’t have the language to fight for themselves. Through her unique lens as a mother and an anthropologist, Rutherford tells the story of arriving in Millie’s world, what she found there, and how Millie showed her that words aren’t always what makes us human. Enlightening and deeply felt, Beautiful Mystery proves that you don’t have to understand someone to love them—a lesson that, if we all learned it, might allow us to live together in a fractured world.
About Animal Crossing: New Horizons: Can a game take care of us?
Animal Crossing: New Horizons was released on March 20, 2020—just as a pandemic kept many from family, work, restaurants, and the rest of their regularly scheduled lives. At its height, the game averaged one million copies sold per day, as players sought comfort, escape, and a virtual means of connection. In this book, game scholar Noah Wardrip-Fruin, isolated with his family by both lockdown and disability, explores the power of this game and the mixed emotions of a player and a parent trying to make it from one day to the next—while his kids’ obsession with Animal Crossing creates conflicts between them and pushback against family rules.
Wardrip-Fruin helps both Animal Crossing fans and newcomers understand the unexpected beneath the game’s surface: like the story of the first Animal Crossing, codesigned by an absent father seeking connection; like the hallmarks of video game manipulation, from “streak” bonuses to game-determined playtimes; like the appeal of endless shopping, in a kind of “safe” capitalism; and, of course, like the character quirks of a raccoon dog, Tom Nook, who provides a world of both safety and strange paternalism.
For many, this blockbuster game offered a comforting world compared to a reality of danger. In this first entry in the Replay series, Wardrip-Fruin offers an absorbing investigation of a game’s role in contemporary social life and a book that belongs on the shelf of anyone who loves or is puzzled by this Nintendo sensation.
Danilyn Rutherford is the president of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and a professor emerita of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Raiding the Land of the Foreigners: The Limits of the Nation on an Indonesian Frontier (Princeton, 2003), Laughing at Leviathan: Sovereignty and Audience in West Papua (Chicago, 2012), Living in the Stone Age: Reflections on the Origins of a Colonial Fantasy (Chicago, 2018), and, most recently, Beautiful Mystery: Living in a Wordless World (Duke, 2025).
Noah Wardrip-Fruin is a Professor of Computational Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He studies and makes video games and electronic literature. Before his most recent book, Noah authored or co-edited six books on games and digital media for the MIT Press, including The New Media Reader (2003). His collaborative art projects have been exhibited by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Krannert Art Museum, and a wide variety of festivals and conferences. Noah holds both a PhD (2006) and an MFA (2003) from Brown University, an MA (2000) from the Gallatin School at New York University, and a BA (1994) from the Johnston Center at the University of Redlands.
Megan Moodie is a Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. She is chair of the Disabled Faculty Networking Group and a core member of the disability studies initiative on campus. meganmoodie.github.io

This event is presented by the Abolition Medicine and Disability Justice Project, a UC Multicampus Research Program and Initiative and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute and is a featured event of THI’s year of Nourishment.

Cinthya Martinez - Toxic Caging!: Abolish ICE & Feminist Resistance
2026-01-21 12:15 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This talk looks at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in California and the grassroots movement to abolish ICE led by formerly detained migrants and local activists. It focuses on the Adelanto Toxic Tours, a community action where survivors and organizers guide people through the areas surrounding the detention center to share stories about environmental harm, toxic exposure, and violence inside detention. Through these tours, activists connect damage to the land with harm to migrant bodies, showing how detention impacts both people and their environments. The presentation highlights how organizing in Adelanto challenges detention and imagines futures beyond cages, surveillance, and border enforcement.
Cinthya Martinez is an Assistant Professor in the Latin American and Latino Studies Department at UC Santa Cruz. She earned her doctorate from the University of California, Riverside in Ethnic Studies. Her teaching and research interests are sexual violence, abolition theory/praxis, and migrant detention. Her research and current book project, ICE on Fire: Incinerating Prison/Border Violence through Feminist Abolition Geographies, investigates sexual violence and reproductive (in)justice in ICE detention facilities, while examining how affected communities, and migrant activists more broadly, are forging geographies of abolition through confronting the connections between bodies in resistance, the carceral, and border regimes.

Winter 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 Winter 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.

Lisa Wedeen - Whose Dialectic? Thinking with Fanon, Žižek, and Al Attar
2026-01-26 13:00 - 15:00 | Humanites 1, Room 320, Humanities and Social Science Facility, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
This talk begins with a question inspired by the work of the anthropologist David Scott, as to whether radical social transformation can remain a credible historical possibility if it is not undergirded by a belief in teleology. Does collectively willed transformation—the kind to which leftist and anticolonial movements have traditionally aspired—become unthinkable absent some degree of confidence in the arc of History bending toward social amelioration on its own? And if not, how do we begin adjudicating what counts as an emancipatory politics today? Put another way, this talk searches for forms that political hope might take in the disappointing and exhausted ruins of our postcolonial and post-socialist present. It approaches answers to these questions by examining a core concept in key narratives of leftist collective transformation, that is, by exploring anew the promise and limitations of “the dialectic.” It puts Frantz Fanon and Slavoj Žižek into conversation with the playwright Mohammad Al Attar, whose play While I Was Waiting not only shows us the dialectic in action, but in so doing offers a compelling approach to political transformation in the present.

This event will be hybrid. Register above to join via zoom.
Lisa Wedeen is a political scientist and the Mary R. Morton Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Known for her influential work on symbolic politics, authoritarianism, and the Middle East—particularly Syria—she combines interpretive methods with grounded ethnographic research. She is the author of Ambiguities of Domination, Peripheral Visions, and numerous widely cited articles that have shaped debates in comparative politics and political theory.

Co-presented by the Center for the Middle East and North Africa and the History of Consciousness Department

Lana Tatour - Race and the Question of Palestine
2026-01-28 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Co-sponsored by The Center for the Middle East and North Africa (CMENA) and The Center for Racial Justice
Join us for conversation with Lana Tatour, in dialogue with Muriam Haleh Davis, on her recently published edited volume Race and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2025, co-edited with Ronit Lentin). This collection argues that the colonization of Palestine is inseparable from the global histories and logics of race, and it places Palestine at the heart of conversations about imperialism, settler colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy.
The event will delve into the rich and often-overlooked tradition of theorizing race within Palestine studies; the entanglements of race and international law; the politics and practice of racialization; and the structures and everyday expressions of anti-Palestinian racism. It will also speak to the urgency of the present moment, addressing how these frameworks help us understand Israel’s ongoing violence in Gaza and the wider global landscape of solidarity, resistance and struggle.
Lana Tatour is a Senior Lecturer in Global Development at the University of New South Wales, and an Associate at the Australian Human Rights Institute. She is a scholar of settler colonialism, indigeneity, race, and citizenship, with a focus on Palestine. Her coedited book, Race and the Question of Palestine was published in 2025 with Stanford University Press. She is currently completing her monograph, Colonized Citizens: Liberalism, Settler Colonialism, and Palestinian resistance. Lana is also a public commentator. She has appeared on ABC News, the BBC, and TRT World, and her publications have appeared in The Guardian, Al-Jazeera, Mondoweiss, Middle East Eye, The Age, Overland, and more.

Winter 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 Winter 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.

The Sheikh's Jews: Muslim-Jewish Relations in Interwar Algeria
2026-01-28 18:00 | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Center for Jewish Studies presents, The Helen Diller Distinguished Lecture in Jewish Studies.
Until the middle of the twentieth century, Algeria hosted an array of Jewish communities—some deeply-rooted, others more recently settled—that played important roles in North African society. French colonial rule, however, brought changes that profoundly reshaped Jews’ relationship to their Muslim neighbors. By the years leading up to the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), these changes had created new lines of solidarity—and new tensions—that cast doubt on Jews’ place in Algeria’s future. In this lecture, Professor Joshua Schreier will explore how the most prominent figure among Algerian Ulema, ͑Abd al-Ḥamīd Ben Bādīs (1889–1940), the undisputed leader of reformist Islam in interwar Algeria and a powerful influence on Algeria’s nascent nationalist movement, understood Jews, their relationship to Muslims, and the escalating conflict in Palestine.

Registration is required for event entry

Joshua Schreier’s research and teaching navigate the intersection of Jewish, Middle Eastern, North African, and French colonial history. His publications explore the ways colonialism in Algeria not only transformed the relationship between Jews and Muslims but also redefined what these identifiers meant. He is the author of Arabs of the Jewish Faith: The Civilizing Mission in Colonial Algeria (Rutgers, 2010), and The Merchants of Oran: A Jewish Port at the Dawn of Empire (Stanford, 2017), which was a National Jewish Book Award Finalist.

This event is a part of The Helen Diller Distinguished Lecture in Jewish Studies.

Geetha Sukumaran - Kanji Before and After Mullivaikkal: Resistance Histories of Jaffna
2026-01-29 10:00 - 11:30 | Virtual Event
Tamils in Northern and Eastern Sri Lanka endured a protracted civil war that ended in 2009 in Mullivaikkal. During the war’s end, hundreds of thousands of Tamils were murdered and several thousand were displaced. In this last phase, kanji (rice gruel) became the sole source of sustenance. Kanji, a versatile traditional Tamil dish that is central to religious festivals, also adapts to circumstances of scarcity. This talk situates Mullivaikkal Kanji within the broader Sri Lankan Tamil culinary tradition and explores how it became a symbol of resistance.

Dr. Geetha Sukumaran is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Feeding City Lab in the Department of Physical and Environmental Sciences.

This event is open to all students, faculty, staff, and members of the public consistent with University policy and state and federal law

Presented by the Center for South Asian Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute.

Fanon in Documentary Film: Algerian Legacies
2026-01-29 17:30 - 21:00 | Communications 150, Studio C
Film Screening: 5:30-7pm, Communications 150, Studio C
Panel Discussion and Audience Q&A: 7-8pm, Communications 150, Studio C
Reception: 8-9pm, Communications 139
Marking the centenary of Frantz Fanon’s birth, the Center for Middle East and North Africa is hosting a film screening of True Chronicles of the Blida Joinville Psychiatric Hospital, the recent film by Algerian director Abdenour Zahzah that focuses on his time in the psychiatric hospital in Blida, Algeria. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with Meryem Belkaïd (Bowdoin College), Isaac Julien (UCSC), and Mark Nash (UCSC) on the representation of Fanon’s work and life in film, from Julien and Nash’s classic 1998 documentary, Black Skin White Masks, to more recent films that focus on how Fanon’s time in Algeria shaped his intellectual and political commitments.
Meryem Belkaïd is the Harriet Sara Walker and Mary Sophia Walker Associate Professor of Humanities at Bowdoin College. Trained in both literature (PhD from La Sorbonne) and political science (Master degree from Science Po, Paris), her research focuses on a decolonial approach of North African cinema and literature. She is the author of From Outlaw to Rebel: Contemporary documentary in Contemporary Algeria (Palgrave 2023). Her works have appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of North African Studies, Fixxion and Expressions maghrébines. She is a regular contributor of the online magazine Orient XXI.
Mark Nash is a distinguished independent curator, film historian, and filmmaker with a specialization in contemporary fine art moving image practices, avant-garde, and world cinema. He holds a PhD from Middlesex University and an MA from Cambridge University. He is a professor in History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, where he founded the Isaac Julien Lab with his partner and long-time collaborator, Isaac Julien. His most recent publication, Curating the Moving Image (Duke UP, 2023), outlines several key concepts that range from exhibition architecture and curating as an affective and artistic practice to post-cold war aesthetics and contemporary Chinese art.

Isaac Julien is a filmmaker and installation artist who has been making films and producing film installations for over forty years. Recent works include All that Changes You. Metamorphosis (2025), Once Again… (Statues Never Die) (2022), Lina Bo Bardi – A Marvellous Entanglement (2019), and Lessons of the Hour – Frederick Douglass (2019). A retrospective of his work, Isaac Julien: I Dream a World, was exhibited at the De Young Museum in 2025. In 2018, Julien joined the faculty at the UC Santa Cruz where he is a Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities and leads the Moving Image Lab together with Mark Nash. Julien is the recipient of The Royal Academy of Arts Charles Wollaston Award in 2017. In 2022, he was awarded a Kaiserring Goslar Award in 2022, and he was granted a knighthood as part of the Queen’s Honours List.
Parking Info:
This is the Communications Building on Google maps, and this is a map with parking information: https://transportation.ucsc.edu/parking/campus-parking-map/#interactive-map. Park Mobile parking spots can be located in lot 139A. Alternative parking options include the Core West parking structure, which is located down the hill from the Communications Building.

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

UC Maghreb Workshop
2026-01-30 09:00 - 17:00 | Virtual and In Person
This workshop will bring together over a dozen scholars from the UC-system who research the Maghreb to share their work and exchange ideas. It is designed as a way of maintaining the rich network of expertise on this region found on the west coast. In addition to thematic panels, Susan Slyomovics (UCLA) will be presenting on her recently published work, Monuments Decolonized: Algeria’s French Colonial Heritage (Stanford University Press, 2024).
The preliminary program can be found here.
This event will be hybrid. Please RSVP at cmenasc@ucsc.edu to receive the zoom link.
Parking Info:
The following parking lots are the closest to the Humanities 1 building: 107, 109, 110. Lot 109 has several park mobile spots as well as A permit spaces. See the link to the campus map: https://maps.ucsc.edu/printable-maps/parking-map-111916.pdf

Susan Slyomovics – Monuments Decolonized: Algeria's French Colonial Heritage
2026-01-30 13:00 - 14:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
In this talk, Susan Slyomovics will discuss her new book, Monuments Decolonized: Algeria’s French Colonial Heritage. “Statuomania” overtook Algeria beginning in the nineteenth century as the French affinity for monuments placed thousands of war memorials across the French colony. But following Algeria’s hard-fought independence in 1962, these monuments took on different meanings and some were “repatriated” to France, legally or clandestinely. Today, in both Algeria and France, people are moving and removing, vandalizing and preserving this contested, yet shared monumental heritage. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interviews in both countries, she analyzes the colonial nostalgia, dissonant heritage, and ongoing decolonization and iconoclasm of these works of art.

This event is both in-person and virtual. Click above for the zoom link.
Susan Slyomovics is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Near Eastern Languages & Cultures at UCLA. She is the author of books and articles on the topics of reparations, anthropology of art, and cultural and material heritage of the Middle East and North Africa. Her recent book, Monuments Decolonized: Algeria’s French Colonial Heritage (Stanford University Press, 2024), received the 2025 Ed Bruner Book Award from the Council on Heritage and the Anthropology of Tourism (CHAT) of the American Anthropological Association.

Gregory O'Malley - The Escapes of David George
2026-02-02 19:00 - 20:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop welcomes prize-winning historian and UC Santa Cruz professor Gregory O’Malley for a discussion about his new book The Escapes of David George: An Odyssey of Slavery, Freedom, and the American Revolution—the dramatic story of a Black man’s relentless search for freedom in Revolutionary America.
This book tells the story of David George who in 1762 at the age of 19 escaped from a plantation in Virginia thus becoming a fugitive enslaved person. Using archival records and David’s own brief account of his life, which is the earliest written testimony by a fugitive enslaved person in North America, the book tells the story of David George’s relentless search for freedom in Revolutionary-era America and presents a unique perspective on our nation’s origins, principles, and contradictions.
Piecing together archival records and David George’s own brief account of his life—the earliest written testimony by a fugitive enslaved person in North America—Gregory O’Malley presents a thrilling narrative and a unique perspective on our nation’s origins, principles, and contradictions.

Gregory E O’Malley is professor of history at UC Santa Cruz and the author of The Escapes of David George: An Odyssey of Slavery, Freedom, and the American Revolution. His first book, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807, won the Forkosch, Rawley, Owsley, and Elsa Goveia awards. He is a key contributor to the SlaveVoyages.org, consulted on The 1619 Project, and lectures widely on the slave trade and related subjects.

Cosponsored by The Humanities Institute

George Saunders - Vigil
2026-02-03 19:00 | Rio Theater, 1205 Soquel Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95062, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes George Saunders, recipient of the 2025 National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, for a discussion about his wise, playful, electric novel Vigil, which takes place at the bedside of an oil company CEO in the twilight hours of his life as he is ferried from this world into the next.

Not for the first time, Jill “Doll” Blaine finds herself hurtling toward earth, reconstituting as she falls, right down to her favorite black pumps. She plummets towards her newest charge, yet another soul she must usher into the afterlife, and lands headfirst in the circular drive of his ornate mansion. She has performed this sacred duty 343 times since her own death. Her charges, as a rule, have been greatly comforted in their final moments. But this charge, she soon discovers, isn’t like the others: the powerful K. J. Boone will not be consoled, because he has nothing to regret. He lived a big, bold life, and the world is better for it. Isn’t it?
Vigil transports us, careening, through the wild final evening of an epic, complicated life. Crowds of people and animals—worldly and otherworldly, alive and dead—arrive, clamoring for a reckoning. Birds swarm the dying man’s room, a black calf grazes on the love seat, a man from a distant, drought-ravaged village materializes, two oil-business cronies from decades past show up with chilling plans for Boone’s postdeath future.
George Saunders is the author of thirteen books, including the novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Man Booker Prize, and five collections of stories, including Tenth of December, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the recent collection Liberation Day (selected by former President Obama as one of his ten favorite books of 2022). Three of Saunders’s books—Pastoralia, Tenth of December, and Lincoln in the Bardo—were chosen for The New York Times’s list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. Saunders hosts the popular Story Club on Substack, which grew out of his book on the Russian short story, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. In 2013, he was named one of the world’s 100 Most Influential People by Time. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.

This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute.

Mike McCarthy - A Theory of Late Populism: Popularism
2026-02-04 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This talk identifies a critical feature of late populism: popularism. Traditional populism operates through articulation: actively constructing “the people” as a political category by linking heterogeneous demands together against an elite or other. Popularism, alternatively, functions through refraction: it seeks maximum resonance with pre-existing popular attitudes and treats “the people” as an already-coherent homogenous group, simultaneously distorting the ones it claims to embody. While these modes of political practice diverge, they are two contradictory sides of the same political phenomena. The talk will explain what popularism is; why left and right populisms have increasingly converged on anti-immigrant and culturally conservative positions, and why popularism commits a fundamental error when it attempts to reflect popular common sense.
Mike McCarthy is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Community Studies here at UC Santa Cruz. At the center of his work is a focus on class and democracy. His first book Dismantling Solidarity: Capitalist Politics and American Pensions since the New Deal was published with Cornell University Press in 2017 and was awarded the Paul Sweezy Book Award as well as an honorable mention for the Labor and Labor Movements Book Award. His most recent book is The Master’s Tools: How Finance Wrecked Democracy (and a Radical Plan to Rebuild It), which was published by Verso Books in 2025. In addition to academic publishing, his work has been featured in Boston Review, The Guardian, Hammer & Hope, Jacobin, The New York Times, The New Left Review, and The Washington Post. He is currently writing about class and political identity.

Winter 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 Winter 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.

A History of Families: Bosses, Bullies, and Dictators in the Modern Philippines
2026-02-05 11:00 - 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Center for Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions (SEACoast) invites you to join them for their winter Slow Seminar, “A History of Families: Bosses, Bullies, and Dictators in the Modern Philippines
Professor Steve McKay (Sociology) will facilitate our conversation drawing on a selection of classic and contemporary scholarship on regional politics in the Philippines. With the present Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. presidency and the International Criminal Court case against former president Rodrigo Duterte in mind, we look forward to a critical discussion of historical and contemporary Southeast Asian politics.

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 or by Zoom. The Zoom link will be sent out at least 1 hour before the event.
New to Slow Seminars? Check out SEACoast’s definition here.

Presented by SEACoast

More-Than-Humanities Lab Early Career Scholars Share Session
2026-02-05 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Please join the More-Than-Human(ities) Lab for our winter “share session.” Two of our early-career lab members will share their current projects and invite your feedback in an informal, interactive conversation.
Our presenters will be:
Pietro Autorino: Searching for ‘contemporary agroecology’ beyond Soilutionism: notes from a small on-farm experimental compost station in Italy

Stephanie Lain: Negotiating a Rainforest’s Ransom – A role play game in development.

Living Writers With Carlo Acevedo
2026-02-05 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Craft Between Worlds
Carlo Acevedo is a Colombian poet who is the author of Day’s Fortune / Fortuna del día, a bilingual collection. His work won the 2018 Arcipreste de Hita prize. Born in Barranquilla, Colombia in 1988, Acevedo holds a master’s degree in Creative Writing in Spanish from the University of Iowa and is currently a Ph.D. student in the Interdisciplinary Humanities program at the University of California, Merced. His poems have appeared in numerous national and international anthologies, and the English translation of Day’s Fortune by Kelsi Vanada won the Sundial Literary Translation Award in 2024.
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.

Kara Cooney - When Women Ruled the World
2026-02-05 17:30 | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Ancient Studies presents the 2026 Carl Deppe Lecture featuring Kara Cooney, who will present her lecture “When Women Ruled the World.”
Who were the women who once ruled the richest and most successful state of the ancient Mediterranean and African Bronze Age? Ancient Egypt’s female kings, including Hatshepsut and Nefertiti, ruled against all odds of the patriarchy in which they lived with real, unadulterated power. Yet many of these female leaders were judged harshly for taking power or erased from the historical record by the men who followed them, leaving them elusive historical figures surrounded by mystery and myth. In this lecture, Prof. Kara Cooney, Egyptologist and author of When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt, will go beyond the myths and shed light on these powerful female kings and their historical legacy.

Kara Cooney is a professor of ancient Egyptian art and architecture and chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. Specializing in social history, gender studies, and economies of the ancient world, she received her PhD in Egyptology from Johns Hopkins University. Her books include The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut’s Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt, When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt, and The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World. Her latest books include Recycling for Death: Coffin Reuse in Ancient Egypt and the Theban Royal Caches, Ancient Egyptian Society: Challenging Assumptions, Exploring Approaches, and Coffin Commerce.

Deep Read at Fungus February First Friday
2026-02-06 17:00 - 20:00 | Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History
Join the Deep Read at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History (SCMNH) for Fungus February First Friday. We will celebrate the opening of Fungus February at the Museum with a night of science, art, and community exploring the vital role of fungi and fungal webs in our world, the subject of our Deep Read book, Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures.
Come learn more about Entangled Life and connect with artists, mycologists, and community partners steeped in the world of fungi. This event will offer hands-on activities, refreshments, and special seasonal items in the Museum Store. Admission is free, all are welcome, and an open bar will be available for guests 21+.
For more information about First Friday, see the Museum website. There will be many other Fungus February events co-sponsored by THI’s Deep Read at the Museum this month. See the SCMNH event calendar for details.

Revolution and Restoration: A Conversation with Massimiliano Tomba, Ariella Patchen, and Shaun Terry
2026-02-09 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
The History of Consciousness department invites you to the next talk in their Winter 2026 Research Colloquium series.
This talk examines Tomba’s Revolution and Restoration as an expression of his philosophy of political time. Tomba argues that modernity consists of dynamic and overlapping temporal layers and that revolutionary change occurs when oppressed groups draw on forgotten or suppressed forms within these layers—commons, councils, sanctuary—to move beyond prevailing institutions. For Tomba, every social form is an open totality, shot through with contradictions and tensions, and therefore subject to radical change from within. The political horizon of revolutionary practice is, then, a form of relative transcendence that activates resources of justice already sedimented in the historical field. Understanding this method as revolutionary stratigraphy illuminates how concepts such as democratic excess and insurgent universality arise from the layered morphology of political life and how the past becomes a source of practical intervention in the present.

This event is both in-person and virtual. Register above to attend virtually.
Massimiliano Tomba is Professor in the Department of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His publications include Marx’s Temporalities (Brill, 2012; Haymarket, 2013), Insurgent Universality: An Alternative Legacy of Modernity (Oxford, 2019; paperback 2021), and Revolution and Restoration: The Politics of Anachronism (Fordham, 2025).

Ariella Patchen is a PhD student in the History of Consciousness Department at UC Santa Cruz. Her work engages primarily with political theology, affect theory, archival research, and histories of the construct of race and ethnicity.

Shaun Terry is a PhD student in History of Consciousness and a communication scholar and political theorist.

Islamophobia in a Global Perspective: A Panel Discussion
2026-02-10 14:00 - 17:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Join the Center for the Middle East and North Africa (CMENA) for a panel discussion that situates Islamophobia in a global context as a form of discrimination that shapes politics and culture in Europe, North Africa, and the United States. While it is largely acknowledged that the concept of Islamophobia refers to the racial discrimination or othering of Muslims, it has been institutionalized and experienced differently in various national and historical contexts. Instead of seeking a single definition of Islamophobia, this panel brings together researchers based in France, the United States, and Tunisia to grapple with how certain iterations of anti-Muslim sentiment, such as the Great Replacement Theory, have circulated across space, while accounting for the major differences between how Islamophobia operates in Muslim majority or formerly colonized countries and those regions that have historical been colonial powers that relied on orientalist or racist tropes to secure their imperial hegemony. It also looks at specific practices, from notions of literacy to carceral regimes, that demonstrate the functioning of Islamophobia as a form of racial governance.
Program:
2pm – 3:15 pm: Textual Transmission and Categories of Analysis
Presenters:
Adrien Thibault (IRMC), “An Alien Concept? Uses and Circulation of “Islamophobia” in Social Scientific Journals on the Maghreb”
Arshad Ali (UCSC), “Reading Islam Otherwise: Islamophobia, The Afterlives of Literacy, Anti-Blackness, and Muslim Ways of Knowing”
Discussant: Thomas Serres (UCSC)
3:30 – 5pm: Islamophobia in France: Discourses and Practices
Presenters:
Iman El Feki (University of Strasbourg), “Anti-Radicalization Politics in French Prisons: A Case Study of Racialized Institutional Islamophobia”
Dorian Bell (UCSC), “Of Nations and Nomads: Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and the Great Replacement Theory”
Discussant: Huzaifa Shahbaz (UCSC)

Participants:
Adrien Thibault
“An Alien Concept? Uses and Circulation of the Concept of Islamophobia in Social Science Journals on the Maghreb”
In order to contribute to the history of the international circulation of the concept of Islamophobia, this paper presents an exhaustive review and qualitative analysis of occurrences of the term (in French, English, and Arabic) in six leading social science journals specializing in the Maghreb: two French journals (L’Année du Maghreb, since 2004, and Maghreb-Machrek, since 2008), two Anglo-American journals (The Journal of North African Studies, since 1996, and The Maghreb Review, since 2009), and two Maghrebi journals (IBLA, Tunisia, since 2000, and Insaniyat, Algeria, since 1997). This review not only documents the relative scarcity of contemporary uses of the concept in relation to the Maghreb, but also situates it geographically and socially by systematically relating the diversity of its uses to the national and academic positions, as well as the social and migratory trajectories, of the authors who mobilize it.
Dr. Adrien Thibault is a French sociologist and political scientist serving as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institut de Recherche sur le Maghreb Contemporain (IRMC) in Tunis. Dr. Thibault’s research focuses on migration, mobilities, and social stratification. He explores questions of circulation, borders, and marginality, conducting sociological analyses of how individuals navigate institutional categories and social hierarchies.

Arshad Ali
“Reading Islam Otherwise: Islamophobia, The Afterlives of Literacy, Anti-Blackness, and Muslim Ways of Knowing”
This paper examines global Islamophobia through the lens of literacy, arguing that contemporary suspicion toward Muslim texts, languages, and reading practices cannot be understood apart from longer histories of racial governance. Drawing on the afterlives of African Muslim literacies in the Atlantic world, the paper shows how Qur’anic pedagogies and manuscript traditions carried by enslaved Muslims disrupted racial regimes that required Black non-literacy, rendering Muslim textuality unintelligible or dangerous. These historical misreadings persist today in securitized responses to Arabic script, Qur’anic recitation, and Muslim study across schools, airports, courts, and digital platforms. Rather than treating these moments as isolated acts of bias, the paper situates them within literacy’s secular and racial architecture. It then turns to Muslim epistemologies as a methodological intervention, foregrounding embodied, ethical, and relational forms of knowing that unsettle dominant definitions of literacy. Reading Islam otherwise, the paper argues, is essential to confronting Islamophobia as an epistemic and racial project, not merely a cultural misunderstanding.
Arshad Imtiaz Ali is an educator, community worker, and scholar who studies youth culture, race, identity, and politics. He is an Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies Education and Civic Education at UC Santa Cruz. He is concerned with questions of educational possibilities, liberatory moments/movements, and social research methodologies. He has written extensively on issues relating to the cultural geography of Muslim student surveillance, citizenship, governmentality, and other issues of coloniality and Muslims in Western spaces. His current project draws upon Muslim and non-Western storywork and ways of knowing to explore how students engage in a science curriculum that appreciates multiple, culturally sustained ways of understanding the world.

Dorian Bell
“Of Nations and Nomads: Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and the Great Replacement Theory”
In today’s far-right warnings about a “Great Replacement” of white populations by immigrants and their “globalist” protectors, the long-entwined histories of antisemitism and Islamophobia are converging again. What’s new, and what’s old, about the latest round of Western demographic anxiety? Drawing examples from France, where the Great Replacement Theory first took shape, this paper traces how elites and immigrants are being consolidated into an imagined race of “nomads”—rich and poor, cosmopolitan and migratory—against which the far right now defends the rights of “sedentary” white peoples. The results demonstrate how right-wing antisemitism and its legacies are shaping contemporary animus toward Muslims—and what this means for Jews themselves.
Dorian Bell is Associate Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His first book, Globalizing Race: Antisemitism and Empire in French and European Culture (2018), traces intersections between antisemitism and imperialism that shaped the emergence of European racial thought. He is at work on a second book exploring how shifting notions of whiteness are driving political change on both sides of the Atlantic.

Iman El Feki
“Public Policies Countering ‘Terrorism’ and ‘Radicalization’ in French Prisons: A Case Study of Racialized Institutional Islamophobia”
The goal of this presentation is to analyze French institutional Islamophobia by examining public policies for countering violent radicalization within the French prison system. To accomplish this, I have organized the presentation into three parts. First, I will analyze the detection devices used in prisons, with a specific focus on grid detection. Second, I will examine how the institutional understanding of radicalization spreads through the extension of suspicion to other prisoners, researchers, and the outside world. Lastly, based on my experience as an object of institutional suspicion, I will discuss the effects of Islamophobic suspicion on individuals.
Iman El Feki is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Strasbourg (France), and a member of the “Societies, stakeholders, governments in Europe” (SAGE) center. Since 2018, her research has focused on French public policies for countering radicalization and terrorism, especially their effects on targeted groups, such as French Muslims. She studies these policies within the prison administration and has conducted three years of ethnography (2019-2021) with a special unit dedicated to radicalization inside this French institution (public policies, critical security studies, prison sociology, sociology of Islamophobia).

Huzaifa Shahbaz
Huzaifa Shahbaz is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Politics at UC Santa Cruz. His research examines the evolution of Muslim American organizing and the political strategies Muslim organizations have adopted in response to Islamophobia and the War on Terror. Prior to joining UCSC, Huzaifa held research roles at the Othering & Belonging Institute, the Institute for Policy Studies, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

Thomas Serres
Thomas Serres is Associate Professor of Politics at UC Santa Cruz. His research spans the field of Middle Eastern studies, critical security studies, and comparative politics, combining an ethnographic approach with a conceptual apparatus inspired by critical theory. He is particularly interested in the effects of protracted and entangled crises (popular uprisings, “war on terror,” refugee crisis, neoliberalization) in North Africa and beyond. His first book, The Suspended Disaster: Governance by Catastrophization in Bouteflika’s Algeria, was published in 2023 with Columbia University Press, expanding on a French edition initially released in 2019. He also co-edited the volume North Africa and the Making of Europe with Bloomsbury Publishing (2018).

Presented by the Center for the Middle East and North Africa and supported by the Villa Albertine

Josen Masangkay Diaz - Population Crisis and the Reproductive Archive
2026-02-11 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This talk focuses on the development of a population science in the decade that preceded the Ferdinand Marcos regime in the Philippines and throughout the Marcos dictatorship. The regime’s management of reproductive health, in particular, illustrates the construction of new technologies of measurement and containment. The talk focuses on readings of “family planning” archives that highlight both family planning as the management of the Philippines labor-surplus economy and the different ways that family planning workers struggled against these impositions.
Josen Masangkay Diaz (she/they) writes and teaches about race, gender, colonialism, and authoritarianism. Her book, Postcolonial Configurations: Dictatorship, the Racial Cold War, and Filipino America (Duke University Press, 2023), analyzes the formation of Filipino American subjectivity through a study of U.S.-Philippine cold war politics.

Winter 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 Winter 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.

Living Writers with Rosie Stockton
2026-02-12 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Craft Between Worlds
Rosie Stockton is a poet and scholar, author of the collections Permanent Volta (Nightboat Books, 2021) and Fuel (Nightboat Books, 2025). In Fuel, Stockton explores how capitalist extraction seeps into intimate life, traversing oil fields, domestic spaces, and painful retractions of love. Stockton is an organizer with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners and directs the Creative Writing Stream of the UC Sentencing Project, where they facilitate a poetry workshop at the California Institution for Women.
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.

Marion Nestle - Sustainable Food in the Trump Era
2026-02-12 18:00 | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
What is the state of sustainable food now, what are the forces affecting food choice, and what can we do about it? Join us for this year’s Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture featuring Marion Nestle — Mark Bittman’s “guiding light” on nutrition and Alice Waters’ “tireless warrior for public health” — for a bracing look at what’s on today’s menu and what’s in store.
Thank you for your interest in this event! The event is now sold out but please join us online via live stream.
Marion Nestle is a consumer advocate, nutritionist, award-winning author, and academic who specializes in the politics of food and dietary choice. Her research examines scientific, economic, and social influences on food choice and health, with an emphasis on the role of food industry marketing. Her books explore how politics affects food production, dietary intake, food safety, and human and planetary health. She is the author of books such as the classic, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety, What to Eat, and many more! Nestle is the emerita Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health and Professor of Sociology at New York University. She also holds an appointment as visiting professor in the Cornell Division of Nutritional Sciences. Her degrees include a Ph.D. in molecular biology and an M.P.H. in public health nutrition, both from the University of California, Berkeley.

The Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture Series is made possible by the Peggy Downes Baskin Humanities Endowment for Interdisciplinary Ethics which enables lively dialogue about ethics related challenges in interdisciplinary settings.

Of Body and Soul: Politics and Eschatology in the Pre-Modern Mediterranean
2026-02-17 - 2026-02-18 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This seminar explores how pre-modern debates over body and soulshaped political and eschatological thought in the Mediterranean. Each panel brings Jewish, Christian, and Islamic voices into dialogue, with Dante Alighieri’s oeuvre as a recurring point of comparison. Our aim is to situate questions of embodiment, psychology, soteriology, and collective destiny in light of their historical contexts and their wider intellectual and political implications.
Panels are organized around four thematic currents — Aristotelianism, Neoplatonism, Mysticism, and Political Eschatology — in order to examine how body-soul anthropology, political theology, and visions of history intersected in the pre-modern Mediterranean (12th–16th centuries).
This event will be live-streamed via a Zoom Webinar for anyone outside of the Santa Cruz who would like to attend. Please register for the live stream here: https://ucsc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_P3yCD6CxRwWY_MO6dJKAMg
Full event schedule here.
The day’s program will feature (Full bios here):
Akash Kumar (University of California, Berkeley)

Alexander Green (University of Florida, The Hamilton School for Classic and Civic Education)
Talk title: “Maimonides on the Duality of Love”

Alison Cornish (New York University)

Andrew LaZella (The University of Scranton)
Talk title: “Averroes and the Aristotelian Left: The Latin Averroists’ Agent Intellect and Dante’s Empire”

Bettina Koch (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University)
Talk title: “The Challenged Souls: How the Abuse of Spiritual Power Threatens the Souls in Marsilius of Padua’s Defensor Pacis”

Elliot Wolfson (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Talk title: “Transposition of the Material into the Angelic Body: Abraham Abulafia’s Polemic with the Christian Dogma of Incarnation”

Ethan H. Shagan (University of California, Berkeley)
Talk title: “The Protestant Emergence of ‘Secular’ Political Theology”

Filippo Gianferrari (University of California, Santa Cruz)

Giacomo Berchi (Stanford University)

Heather Webb (Yale University)
Talk title: “The Forms of Affective Communities: Clare of Assisi, Dante, and Catherine of Siena”

Jason Aleksander (San José State University)
Talk title: “The Enigma of History in Nicholas of Cusa’s De ultimis diebus”

Massimiliano Tomba (University of California, Santa Cruz)

Nathanael Deutsh (University of California, Santa Cruz)

Paola Nasti (Northwestern University)
Talk title: “Humana Universitas: Dante’s Universal Monarchy between Politics and Eschatology”

Paula Pico Estrada (Universidad Nacional de San Martín)
Talk title: “Annihilation and Embodiment: St. Catherine of Genoa’s Doctrine of Purgatory as Political Eschatology”

Peerawat Chiaranunt (The University of Notre Dame)
Talk title: “Two Aspects of Local Motion in the Paradiso: subtilitas and agilitas”

Seyed N. Mousavian (Loyola University, Chicago)
Talk title: “Avicenna on the Human Soul, Body and Eschatology”

Theodore Cachey (The University of Notre Dame)
Talk title: “Mapping the Unmappable: Poetics, Participation, and the Body–Soul Problem in Dante’s Paradiso”

This event is sponsored by Siegfried B. and Elisabeth Mignon Puknat Literary Studies Endowment, Porter College, The Humanities Institute, the Italian Studies and the Literature Department, The Center for Jewish Studies, University of California Regents System Collaboration Funding, and San José State University Division of Research and Innovation.
Tower of Babel mosaic, Monreale Cathedral, Palermo, Sicily (12th c.). Photo © Holger Uwe Schmitt, Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0. Cropped for design.

Martin Rizzo-Martinez - Wounded Lee: the Red Power movement in 1970s Santa Cruz in the wake of Alcatraz
2026-02-18 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 2, Room 259
In the spring of 1975, a 1,500-year-old Indigenous cemetery on Lee Road in Watsonville, California, was threatened by a development project. Members of the local Native American community with ties to this sacred site occupied the construction site in protest of the development. The local Sheriff called upon the newly formed well-armed County SWAT force, leading to an armed confrontation. They were quickly joined by allies, including representatives from the San Jose AIM office, local Vietnam Veterans against the War / Winter Soldiers, and representatives from the Indigenous run Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association from Humboldt County. Fortunately, a compromise was made and violence was averted. This incident is one piece of a larger book project looking at similar grass roots, Indigenous led movements to protect sacred spaces in California in the 1970s and early 80s.
Martin Rizzo-Martinez is an Assistant Professor in the Film & Digital Media department at UCSC. He is a historian and media maker, author of We are not Animals, which explores the history of Indigenous peoples of the Santa Cruz area, as well as co-producer of the podcast Challenging Colonialism. He has worked closely and collaboratively with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, and other local Tribes.

Winter 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 Winter 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 – THI Public Fellowship Information Session
2026-02-18 16:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Curious about becoming a THI Graduate Public Fellow? Not sure how to find the right partner organization? If you’re thinking about applying your expertise in the public sphere or exploring career opportunities beyond academia, then you may be interested in THI’s Public Fellowship program.
Public fellowships provide opportunities for doctoral students in the Humanities to contribute to research, programming, communications, and fundraising at non-profit organizations, cultural institutions, or companies and expand their skills in a non-academic setting while engaged in graduate study.

Please join us for an information session about the 2026 THI Graduate Public Fellows program to learn about Summer 2026 opportunities.
All THI Public Fellow applicants are required to attend an Info Session or talk with THI staff. Please contact Saskia Nauenberg Dunkell, Research Programs and Communications Director, at saskia@ucsc.edu if you are unable to attend the workshop due to a work or class scheduling conflict. Final applications are due on March 30th, 2026.

About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the ninth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by The Humanities Institute. We meet monthly to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grants/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.
RSVP here:
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Living Writers with Nathalie Khankan
2026-02-19 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Craft Between Worlds
Nathalie Khankan is a poet and scholar, author of quiet orient riot (Omnidawn). The collection won Omnidawn’s 2019 1st/2nd Book Prize and received the 2021 California Book Award in Poetry. Fady Joudah calls the book “a flowering wound,” posing subversive questions about the body, motherhood, and settler colonialism while insisting on tenderness. Juliana Spahr calls it “a book about holding tight to the intimacy and love for a child,” whose poems show how to sustain deep loves in difficult times.
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.

Linguistics Colloquium with Ethan Poole
2026-02-20 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Join the Linguistics Department for Ethan Poole’s talk “Syntactic Variables and Semantic Minimality” in collaboration with Zahra Mirrazi.
In this talk, Poole argues that when two syntactic variables are “related” and stand in a c- command relationship at LF, a 3⁄4-pattern emerges: free/free, bound/bound, bound/free, and *free/bound. Several otherwise-disparate puzzles are shown to fall under this pattern: Dahl’s Puzzle, SCO effects, the Nested DP Constraint, exceptional de dicto, de re blocking, and certain restrictions on fake indexicals. Building on Drummond 2014, Poole proposes that these phenomena reflect a minimality-style constraint on variables: (roughly) a variable may not be bound across a related free variable. The notion of “related”, we define in terms of overlap in value and counterparts, an extension of Reinhart’s (2006) covaluation. He argues that this “semantic minimality” does not straightforwardly reduce to the garden-variety syntactic minimality; rather, he suggests that syntactic and semantic minimality are separate, convergent consequences of pressure for shorter dependencies.

This event is in-person with an option to join virtually available.

Latino Role Models Conference
2026-02-21 09:00 - 13:00 | Cabrillo College Crocker Theater, 6500 Soquel Dr., Aptos, CA, 95003, United States
Achieve your dreams for college and career!
A free annual event for Santa Cruz County students, grades 6 to college, and their families, featuring Latino professionals, college students, and resource information. Presented in Spanish with English translation. Attendees eligible for prizes.
For more information: SCSenderos.org

Presented by Cabrillo College, Live Oak School District, Mexican Consulate – San Jose, Pajaro Valley Unified, San Lorenzo Valley Unified, Santa Cruz City Schools, Santa Cruz County Office of Education, Scotts Valley Unified, Senderos, Soquel Union Elementary, UCSC

Hillary Angelo - Climate Change as Large-Scale Social Transformation
2026-02-25 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
It is a common (aspirational) refrain that climate change “changes everything,” and equally common to note that climate-related transitions seem to be changing very little at all. What climate-related changes are happening now? And how might we grasp emergent trajectories while we’re in the midst of these transitions? With a substantive focus on the city-hinterland relationship and the American West, and based on five years of fieldwork related to renewable energy, conservation, and housing development on public lands in Nevada and Utah, this talk gets purchase on these questions by presenting climate change as a form of macro-social change. I draw on classical and contemporary macro-historical sociology and critical geography to show how this framework provides new insights on climate transitions and describe its implications for understanding contemporary climate politics, policy, and visions of a just transition.
Hillary Angelo is an Associate Professor of Sociology, founding Director of UCSC’s Center for Critical Urban and Environmental Studies, and former member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Her work combines historical sociology, critical social theory, and urban political economy and ecology to analyze contemporary urban and environmental culture and politics. She has published widely in leading sociology, geography, and urban studies journals and her first book, How Green Became Good: Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens, was published in 2021 by the University of Chicago Press.

Winter 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 Winter 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.

Work - in - Progress with Geoffrey C. Bowker
2026-02-25 15:00 - 17:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Join SJRC scholars for an open discussion of works-in-progress! This is a wonderful chance to engage with one another’s ideas, and support our own internal work. At this session, we will hear from Geoffrey Bowker, Emeritus Professor in Irvine and Science & Justice Advisor about works-in-progress and ongoing work on the death of infrastructure, AI, and underwater network cables and his collaborative comic book on Actor Network Theory. SJRC members Warren Sack and Dimitris Papadopolous will act as “warm up” discussants.
Contact Colleen Stone (colleen@ucsc.edu) or Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (puig@ucsc.edu) for the readings, including a new comic book on the graveyard of machines!
Geoffrey C. Bowker is Emeritus Professor at the School of Information and Computer Science, University of California at Irvine, where he directed a laboratory for Values in the Design of Information Systems and Technology. Positions included Professor of and Senior Scholar in Cyberscholarship at the University of Pittsburgh School and Executive Director, Center for Science, Technology and Society, Santa Clara. He was awarded the prestigious 4S Bernal Prize in 2024 and his book Memory Practices in the Sciences (MITS Press 2008) won the 2007 Ludwig Fleck Prize and was named “Best Information Science Book” by the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T).

Co-sponsored by Science and Justice Research Center and the earthecologies x technoscience conversations, History of Consciousness

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa - Kyi-dug, Tibetan Welfare Groups: Sharing Ups and Downs
2026-02-26 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
As many as 80,000 Tibetans fled to India and Nepal in 1959 following the Chinese occupation of Tibet. The establishment of a Tibetan government in exile helped foster a sense of belonging, but it was also through mutual aid groups, such as the kyi-dug, that Tibetan refugees took care of one another. The word kyi-dug: kyi for happiness, and dug for sorrow, carries an implicit notion that the kyi-dug is organized with the goal to comfort and support community members in times of crises. In this talk, Dhompa will braid a few different stories–– refugee aid packages in the early 1960s, kyi-dug and children, and ancestral divinities of land and people––to speak about resistance and belonging.

This event is both in-person and on zoom. Click above for the zoom link.
Tsering Wangmo Dhompa is the author of The Politics of Sorrow, an account of early Tibetan exile political life in India published by Columbia University Press (2025). She has several collections of poetry: My Rice Tastes Like the Lake, In the Absent Everyday and Rules of the House (all from Apogee Press, Berkeley), and a non-fiction book, Coming Home to Tibet (Shambhala Publications, 2014)
This event is open to all students, faculty, staff, and members of the public consistent with University policy and state and federal law.

Presented by the Center for South Asian Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute

Living Writers with James Janko
2026-02-26 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Craft Between Worlds
James Janko is an award-winning author of four novels, including Buffalo Boy and Geronimo, The Clubhouse Thief, What We Don’t Talk About, and The Wire-Walker. His work is deeply informed by his experience as a combat medic in the Vietnam War, often probing the intertwined violences of war and environmental destruction. Janko will be introduced by Karen Tei Yamashita.
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.

Kitchen Counterculture: A Conversation About Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead, and the Food that Fueled a Revolution
2026-02-26 19:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz Presents Kitchen Counterculture: A Conversation About Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead, and the Food that Fueled a Revolution,” featuring award-winning food writer Gabi Moskowitz and journalist, teacher, and author Jim Newton. This event is cosponsored by the UC Santa Cruz The Humanities Division, The Humanities Institute, and the UCSC Special Collections & Archives.

Your RSVP helps us plan for your arrival and keep in touch with any changes. Thank you for registering!
Dead in the Kitchen, by Gabi Moskowitz: Kindly calling all Deadheads! Enjoy a variety of vibrant and delicious vegetarian and vegan recipes as you cook your way through Dead in the Kitchen: The Official Grateful Dead Cookbook, available just in time to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the legendary psychedelic rock band.
Welcome to the show! Dead in the Kitchen is the official, authorized Grateful Dead cookbook, a well-crafted extension of the vibrant, communal, free-spirited energy that the band and their legacy have graced us with for decades. Featuring the band’s iconic artwork, logos, and illustrations, this beautifully designed book brings the unmistakable Grateful Dead aesthetic to life on every page, making it a must-have collectible for devoted fans.
You’ll find recipes organized and inspired by not only the band’s timeless music, but also the loyal Deadheads that continue to find kindness and community amongst one another. Delight in dishes like the savory Curried Vegetable Pot Pie, the Meatless Meatball Sandwich, or a sweet bite of Pumpkin Cheesecake. With each recipe crafted to be simple and accessible for all, this is the perfect cookbook for novice cooks and seasoned pros alike. Find your flow in the kitchen as you create each flavorful dish and, if Jerry has taught us anything, don’t be afraid to improvise! This cookbook celebrates the Grateful Dead on each page and encourages more connection through gathering together and enjoying delicious food that’s good for feeding the mind, body, and soul.
Here Beside the Rising Tide: Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead, and an American Awakening, by Jim Newton: In 1965, in Palo Alto, Jerry Garcia opened a dictionary to a fable in which an appreciative soul repays the generosity of a traveler, a “gift of the grateful dead.” After a traumatic car accident that injured him and killed a close friend, Garcia had resolved to build his life around music. He had practiced relentlessly and caromed across the northern California folk and bluegrass scene. He had gathered up some fellow musicians and formed a band. Now they had their name. Following the history of the Grateful Dead means tracking American cultural history through a period of radical reconsideration. The Dead played at the Acid Tests and the Human Be-In and Woodstock, at the occupation of Columbia and the Bail Ball for People’s Park. They performed at the base of the Pyramids during a lunar eclipse, at Madison Square Garden to defend the rainforests, in San Francisco to sound the alarm over AIDS and at Huey Newton’s birthday party. For three decades, the band explored the meaning and limits of freedom. The radical message of the Dead, to reject the mainstream and build a bohemian community, radiated across the world, manifesting itself in art, music, business, and politics. Here Beside the Rising Tide tells the story of those disparate shafts of light, putting Garcia into a broader context while tracing his eventful life. Nearly a century after his birth, Garcia’s influence stretches onward, expressed in guitar licks and a gentle way of life, one of excellence and gratitude, chasing freedom, living moment to moment, guided by song-the gift of the Grateful Dead.
Gabi Moskowitz is the founder of BrokeAssGourmet.com, an award-winning website about inexpensive cooking. She’s written five cookbooks, and produced Freeform’s Young & Hungry, a situation comedy based on her life and writing. She lives in Marin County, California, with her husband and daughters.
Jim Newton is a journalist, teacher, and author of Justice for All, Eisenhower, Worthy Fights, and Man of Tomorrow. He was at the Los Angeles Times for twenty-five years as a reporter, bureau chief, editorial page editor, columnist, and editor at large. He lives in Pasadena, California, and teaches at UCLA, where he founded and edits the award-winning public affairs magazine Blueprint.

Writing Hangout with Tsering Wangmo Dhompa
2026-02-27 09:00 - 11:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
If we take a moment to examine our lives, we can find meaningful, even exciting connections between our mundane moments and the society we live in. In this workshop, we will write together to explore how we can find the words we need to create the communities we would like to be. All are welcome. No prior creative writing experience is required and prompts will be provided. Lunch and informal discussion to follow.
Tsering Wangmo Dhompa is the author of The Politics of Sorrow, an account of early Tibetan exile political life in India published by Columbia University Press (2025). She has several collections of poetry: My Rice Tastes Like the Lake, In the Absent Everyday and Rules of the House (all from Apogee Press, Berkeley), and a non-fiction book, Coming Home to Tibet (Shambhala Publications, 2014)
This event is open to all students, faculty, staff, and members of the public consistent with University policy and state and federal law.

Presented by the Center for South Asian Studies and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute

Restitution Beyond Return - Who names the Objects in Museums?
2026-02-27 13:30 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
The Department of History invites you to join their talk about African Arts, Western Museums, and the debate over restitution.
This lecture examines restitution as an ethical and epistemic process that goes beyond the physical return of objects from Western museums to African institutions. While repatriation often functions as a diplomatic practice, restitution is framed here as historical repair that requires transforming the narratives, classifications, and meanings assigned to museum objects. Drawing on case studies, the lecture analyzes how sacred African objects were historically renamed as “fetishes” through colonial vocabularies. It argues that museums bear an ongoing responsibility to revise these narratives, making restitution a process of reinterpretation, accountability, and public education.
Prof. Vanicleia Silva-Santos is the curator of the African Collection at Penn Museum, University of Pennsylvania. She holds a PhD in History from the University of São Paulo and teaches at the Department of Africana Studies at UPenn.

Timescape of Rings with Stephen David Engel
2026-03-02 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Stephen David Engel will read from an experimental history called “Timescape of Rings.” In it, he meditates on a 2,200-year-old redwood round with markers for historical events affixed to its rings—the birth of Jesus, the invention of gunpowder, the drafting of the Magna Carta, and on. By running his fingers over the rings, he recalls histories not commemorated by these markers, in particular revolts and egalitarian movements. From there, Stephen’s daydreams carry him back deeper in time, all the way back to the first woody trees some 385 million years ago.

This event is in-person and online. Register for the virtual option here.
Stephen David Engel is a transdisciplinary scholar who thinks across big scales of history and time and who writes about them using creative genres. His writing has appeared in Rethinking History, ROAR Magazine, The Anthology of Babel, and other publications. He holds a PhD from the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he received the Hayden White dissertation fellowship for excellence in historical theory. This spring, he will serve as Visiting Professor at Deep Springs College, an alternative liberal arts college in the California desert.

This event is presented by HisCon and part of the 2026 Winter Research Colloquium Series.

More-Than-Humanities Lab Reading Group: Against Purity
2026-03-03 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Please join the More-Than-Human(ities) Lab for our winter book club meeting. We will be discussing Alexis Shotwell’s book Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times, which offers a framework for conceiving of our own complicity in the presence of toxicity, climate change, and other ongoing crises. Event attendees will be expected to have read the book.
Alexis Shotwell will join us on Zoom to answer your questions and discuss the impact of the book: Zoom link

The first 15 registrants will recieve free copies of the book from Professor Hannah Cole. Subsequent registrants can access a digital copy of the book through the UCSC Library.
Please arrive ready to discuss your questions, thoughts, and responses.

Thiago Mota - In Search of Protection: Islam, Crocodiles, and Local Experiences of a Global Religion in Early Modern West Africa
2026-03-04 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This talk proposes a new reading of Early Modern European sources for African history in light of Islamic African written records and oral traditions. It examines how Islam interacted with local religions and cultural practices in order to become meaningful and suitable for West African communities. Focusing on the need for protection against crocodile attacks along major Senegambian rivers, the talk explores how History, Anthropology, and Islamic Studies can be brought into conversation to offer a fuller understanding of Islamization in West Africa.
Dr. Thiago Mota is an Assistant Professor of African History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research focuses on Islam in West Africa, colonial encounters, and the social history of knowledge production across Afro-Atlantic spaces. His next book, Global Islam from Below: Islamic Political Culture in Senegambia and the Atlantic World, 1400–1850, is under contract with Cambridge University Press and examines how ordinary Muslims shaped political and religious life in Senegambia and its Atlantic connections. He has taught widely on African history, including courses on Islamic manuscript cultures, precolonial African history, and debates on the restitution of African cultural heritage.

Winter 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 Winter 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.

Kate Schatz - Where the Girls Were Talk & Reading
2026-03-04 14:30 - 16:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Join UCSC alum Kate Schatz, bestselling author of the Rad Women series, for a reading from her new novel Where the Girls Were and a Q & A on writing, creativity, and growing up amid political and cultural change.
Blending sharp cultural insight with emotional depth, Schatz’s work explores how young women navigate creativity, power, and identity in a world shaped by social movements and personal reckonings. The event will include a reading, followed by a Q & A conversation about her writing process, themes, and career.
Whether you’re interested in creative writing, social justice, or just love a good story, this event is a chance to hear from a working writer about how books actually come into the world.
Free and open to the public.

Presented by the UCSC Creative Writing Program. Want more? Kate Schatz will be speaking later in the evening at Bookshop Santa Cruz.

Kate Schatz - Where The Girls Were
2026-03-04 19:00 - 20:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop welcomes bestselling author Kate Schatz (Do the Work: An Anti-Racist Activity Book) for a discussion about her latest novel Where the Girls Were. Schatz will be in conversation with activist-scholar Bettina Aptheker.

They were sent away to be forgotten. This is their story. Where the Girls Were is a timely unearthing of a little-known moment in American history, when the sexual revolution and feminist movement collided with the limits of reproductive rights—and society’s expectations of women. As Baker finds her strength and her voice, she shows us how to step into your power, even when the world is determined to keep you silent.
Kate Schatz is a feminist author from California. She’s the New York Times bestselling author of Do the Work: An Anti-Racist Activity Book, with W. Kamau Bell, and the “Rad Women” book series (including Rad American Women A-Z, Rad Women Worldwide, and Rad American History A-Z). Her book of fiction, Rid of Me: A Story, was published as part of the cult-favorite 33 1/3 series.
Bettina Aptheker is Distinguished Professor Emerita, Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz where she taught for more than 40 years. An activist-scholar she co-led the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in 1964, and the National Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. She played a leading role in the international movement to Free Angela Davis. She has been part of the LGBT movement since the late 1970s. She has published several books including a memoir, Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became A Feminist Rebel. Her most recent book is called Communists in Closets: Queering the History. She and her wife, Kate Miller, have been together since 1979. They live in Santa Cruz.
More information at: Bookshop Santa Cruz – Kate Schatz

Co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz. Kate will be speaking earlier in the day at UCSC. We encourage the campus community to join her!

Undiscovered Shakespeare: The Two Noble Kinsmen - Episode I
2026-03-04 19:00 - 21:00 | Virtual Event
Shakespeare returns to the characters and themes of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in what may have been the last play he had a hand in writing: The Two Noble Kinsmen. This time, however, the story of Theseus and Hippolyta, the disorienting experience of adolescent sexual desire, and the conflict of duties to sovereigns, parents, friends, and spouses are no laughing matter. They are over-shadowed by the play’s source text — Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, in which chance foils Theseus’s best efforts to create order out of chaos and meaning out of loss — and by Shakespeare’s own experience writing tragedy and tragicomedy.

Thomas Luxon is Professor of English, Emeritus at Dartmouth College, where he was also the inaugural Cheheyl Professor and Director of the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning. His teaching and scholarship focus on literature of the English Renaissance and Reformation, with a particular interest in John Milton, John Bunyan, John Dryden, and 17th-century English religion and politics. In his revelatory book, Single Imperfection: Milton, Marriage, and Friendship (Duquesne UP, 2005), Professor Luxon explores the impact of ancient theories of friendship on Milton’s conception of Reformation marriage, and during the pandemic, he contributed a lecture about the rivalry of friendship and marriage in Two Noble Kinsmen to Ian Doescher’s Shakespeare 2020 Project.
Undiscovered Shakespeare is a public arts and humanities series co-produced by Santa Cruz Shakespeare, UCSC Shakespeare Workshop, and The Humanities Institute. It brings professional actors and scholars together with the public for a staged reading and discussion of works by Shakespeare that are rarely produced.

Planting Oceania & Healing Communities
2026-03-05 13:30 - 15:00 | Namaste Lounge – College 9, Namaste Lounge, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Planting Oceania is a Oceanian/Indigenous Pacific Islander community organization that plants traditional foods in two gardens located at Filoli Historic House and Gardens in Woodside and at the UC Giltract Farms in Albany. Members of Planting Oceania will share stories about growing plants and stewarding the Land as an important cultural practice for building Oceania/Pacific Islander communities in California. Panelists will discuss being good guests and building good relations with Native California tribal leaders and communities–the Indigenous stewards of the Land–protocols they center in their land-based work.
Refreshments will be provided.
Speakers
Windsor Taro– (Belauan)
John Holt (Kanaka Maoli/Native Hawaiian)
Loa Niumeitolu (Tongan)
Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu (Tongan)
Andria Takesy (Belauan and Chuukese)
Leila Tamale (Tongan)
Sitiveni Heimuli (Tongan)
For more info: fniumeit@ucsc.edu

Sponsored by Rachel Carson College, Center for Racial Justice, Critical Race Ethnic Studies, Asian American/ Pacific Islander Resource Center, American Indian Resource Center, People of Color Sustainable Collective, and Mauna Kea Protectors

Traveling Film Southasia - Film Screening Festival Launch
2026-03-05 17:00 - 19:00 | Communications 150, Studio C
Join the Center for South Asian Studies (CSAS) for a celebratory film screening event to launch Travelling Film Southasia, a mobile film festival highlighting 19 exceptional nonfiction productions of the last two years, originally screened at Film Southasia 2024 in Kathmandu. This year’s festival encapsulates a range of experiences on the Subcontinent with films from Nepal, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Myanmar, including CSAS Faculty Director Dolly Kikon’s recent film, Abundance.
Film Southasia (FSA) is a biennial festival that began in 1997 with the goal of popularizing documentary films so that they entertain, inform, and change lives. In addition to the festival that takes place in Kathmandu every two years, FSA organizes screenings, discussions, and workshops to promote Southasian non-fiction within the Subcontinent and around the world. Film Southasia believes that film is a powerful medium that not only helps better represent the region internationally, but also contributes immensely to introspection and to initiatives that bring change at the local level.
For more information: Traveling FSA 2025.
After the March 5 film festival launch event, the festival films will be available for streaming until March 20. Link and instructions for viewing to follow.
This event is open to all students, faculty, staff, and members of the public consistent with University policy and state and federal law.

Presented by the Center for South Asian Studies and co-sponsored by the Department of Film and Digital Media and The Humanities Institute.

Living Writers Student Reading
2026-03-05 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Craft Between Worlds
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.

The Trial of Spock — An Opera Workshop
2026-03-08 16:00 | Music Center Recital Hall
The creators of The Trial of Spock—An Opera In Three Acts present concert performances of five scenes from an opera-in-progress at the UC Santa Cruz Music Center Recital Hall.
Captain Christopher Pike is gravely injured. Lieutenant Spock is behaving strangely. Charged with protecting Pike in his state of extreme need,Vulcan Commodore T’or suspects that Lieutenant Spock—once Captain Pike’s science officer—is up to no good. Spock’s Captain, James T. Kirk, doesn’t see the trouble until far too late, and soon Spock holds all of them prisoner aboard a ship destined for the “forbidden planet” Talos IV. He refuses to say a word about their fate—not until his superiors agree to give him his trial. Under oath, and with strange evidence, Spock tells the story of Captain Pike’s first visit to Talos IV, where illusion and artificial experiences plunge Pike and fellow captive Vina into uncharted dimensions of their memories, and their concepts of self.
Join sopranos Nicole Koh, Sheila Willey, and Emily Sinclair; tenors Alex Boyer and Nicolas Vasquez-Gerst, baritones Joseph Calzada and Michael Kuo, and the Del Sol Quartet, as they distort the myth of Orpheus, in order to re-think our presumed relationships to freedom and reality, and its augmentations.

Music by Ben Leeds Carson; libretto by Perre DiCarlo & Ben Leeds Carson and Lincoln & Lee Taiz; with contributions from John de Lancie, based on teleplays by Gene Roddenberry.
Join us for “Questions that Matter – How to Live Long and Prosper: Lessons from a Star Trek Opera,” a follow up conversation about the opera at Kuumbwa Jazz Center on March 13th.

Elemental Encounters with Cymene Howe
2026-03-09 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Cymene Howe, the final guest of the Winter 2026 HistCon Research Colloquium will be joining us next week to give her talk “Elemental Encounters: how water, ice and fire + earth, spin and chemicals become us”.
From chemical relations to the sweep of stormfronts, the elements render a series of sensory, scientific and semiotic coordinates that reveal material intimacies. The classical forms of western philosophy (earth, air, fire, water) and the periodic table of chemical elements operate as tools of categorization. Eastern elemental philosophies and the many Indigenous elemental entities of world-making, in their multiple capacities, represent forces of encounter, interaction and transformation. In this discussion, I explore the analytic possibilities afforded through an engagement with elemental forms and I offer a preliminary set of coordinates to evaluate socioenvironmental phenomena through ethnographic engagement with elemental dispositions. Drawing from Alaimo and Starosielski’s conviction that the elements represent ‘lively forces that shape culture, politics, and communication,’ I consider how human and nonhuman encounters through (and with) the elements can help us surface both the punctuations and the cadences of our times and how the elements themselves, when heard as ethnographic interlocutors, have much to tell us about our place in the world.

This event is in-person with a virtual option to join available. Register above to join virtually.
Cymene Howe is Professor of Anthropology and Co-Founder of the STS Program at Rice University. Her most recent books include Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene; Anthropocene Unseen; Solarities: Elemental Encounters and Refractions and The Johns Hopkins Guide to Contemporary Theory. She has conducted field research in Nicaragua and Mexico, Iceland and Greenland, the U.S. and South Africa and has been awarded The Berlin Prize for Transatlantic Dialogue in the Arts, Humanities, and Public Policy as well as a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residential Fellowship. Her current research focuses on the social impacts of glacier loss and sea level rise in coastal communities globally and she has co-created many public-facing events and art installations to raise climate awareness including the Okjökull Memorial (Iceland, 2019). She is currently at work on a book entitled The Elemental Turn.

This event is part of the 2026 Winter Research Colloquium Series.

How to Co-Create an AI Policy in Your Classroom
2026-03-10 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
It is well known that students are using AI, that some uses undermine their learning, and that bans are difficult and labor-intensive to enforce. To confront this, Lauren Lyons asked students in her Ethics and Technology course to collaboratively build their own AI policy. In this session, Lyons will describe how she structured the activity, share what she learned (including what she would change), and then open a broader conversation about co-creating AI policies across disciplines, both within and beyond the humanities.
Students ultimately chose a relatively restrictive policy, allowing AI for mechanical editing but not for generating ideas or prose. Several takeaways emerged from the work they submitted for the activity, ensuing discussions, and course evaluations. First, the discussion brought the pedagogically relevant reasons to the fore: students evaluated AI use in terms of its effects on their own learning rather than as a matter of compliance. Second, specificity mattered. Distinguishing among different uses (e.g. brainstorming, outlining, generating text, and editing) was necessary for students to understand the impact of AI on learning and articulate a clear policy. Finally, the activity opened a broader conversation about the ethics of AI in education, one students were eager to have and continued throughout the course.
There are a number of questions Lyons hopes to get into in the discussion portion of this session: How might different learning goals across fields shape what appropriate AI use looks like and so how to set bounds on co-creation? What should we do if a chosen AI policy goes against our own pedagogical judgement? How should we enforce AI policies, and how might co-creation help with enforcement? Could this model apply to graduate courses? How can we co-create policy in large lecture courses?
Lauren Lyons is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She earned her Ph.D. in Philosophy at Rutgers, New Brunswick in 2024. She works in ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy of law, and their intersection. She is especially interested in the ethics of policing and punishment. Lyons recently wrote a paper arguing that we should “unbundle” the police, reallocating powers and responsibilities from police to other institutions and reducing the footprint of policing. She is currently working on papers on prison abolition and crime prevention and the structure of functional critique (i.e. prisons function to maintain hierachies). Methodologically, she aims to put ideas emanating from social movements into conversation with analytic ethics and political philosophy.

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

Anne Fadiman - Frog: And Other Essays
2026-03-10 19:00 - 20:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop welcomes award-wining author Anne Fadiman (The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down) for a discussion about her latest book Frog: And Other Essays, a new collection of evocative personal essays. “Affecting and often humorous . . . Fadiman has a knack for finding the extraordinary in the ordinary, using everyday objects to explore such profound themes as grief, loss, and personal growth . . . Readers will be captivated.” —Publishers Weekly

In Frog, Anne Fadiman returns to her favorite genre, the essay, of which she is one of our most celebrated practitioners. Ranging in subject matter from her deceased frog, to archaic printer technology, to the fraught relationship between Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his son Hartley, these essays unlock a whole world–one overflowing with mundanity and oddity–through sly observation and brilliant wit.
The diverse subjects of Frog are bound together by the quality of Fadiman’s attention, and subtly, they come to form a slantwise portrait of the artist, a writer dedicated to chronicling the world as it changes around her, in ways small and large, as time passes.
Anne Fadiman is the author, most recently, of the essay collection Frog (2026). Her first book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1997), won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Salon Book Award. In 2017, she published The Wine Lover’s Daughter, a memoir about her father. Fadiman has also written two essay collections, Ex Libris and At Large and At Small, and edited Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love. She is Professor in the Practice of English and Francis Writer in Residence at Yale.

Undiscovered Shakespeare: The Two Noble Kinsmen - Episode II
2026-03-11 19:00 - 21:00 | Virtual Event

Latinos, Language, and Change in New Destination Communities of the U.S. South
2026-03-12 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
The Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics is pleased to invite you to a talk with Dr. Stephen Fafulas (University of Mississippi).
The U.S. South has emerged as a major new destination for Latino populations, reshaping local communities in ways that are still not fully understood. In this talk, I draw on over a decade of community-based research to examine language choice and patterns of linguistic variation among Latinos in the U.S. South, highlighting how local social contexts shape bilingual practices.
Dr. Stephen Fafulas is Associate Professor at the University of Mississippi. His research focuses on sociolinguistics, bilingualism, and language variation.

Sponsored by the University of Mississippi Faculty Laureates program.

Living Writers With Mary-Alice Daniel
2026-03-12 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Craft Between Worlds
Mary-Alice Daniel is a Nigerian American poet and cross-genre writer born near the Niger/Nigeria border. Her debut poetry collection, Mass for Shut Ins, was selected by Rae Armantrout as a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. Her memoir A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing (Ecco, 2022) was named one of Kirkus’s best nonfiction books of 2022 and explores religion, migration, myth, and the uncanny across three continents.
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.

On the Canon of the History of Philosophy: Critique & Crisis
2026-03-13 09:45 - 17:15 | Humanities 1, Room 320
Please join us for a day of presentations and conversation featuring:
Silvestre Gristina (University of Padua / UC Santa Cruz)
Silvestre Gristina is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Global Fellow between the University of Padua and the University of California, Santa Cruz. As part of his MSCA project, he will be spending a two-year research period at the History of Consciousness Department at UCSC. Silvestre received his PhD in Philosophy in June 2023 from the University of Padua. He carried out a one- year postdoctoral fellowship at the Italian Institute for Philosophical Studies in Naples, then completed a twenty-month postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Humanities of the University of Ferrara. His research interests include the history of German Classical Philosophy, the philosophies of the Young Hegelians and Marx, the history of twentieth-century Marxism, and the development of twentieth-century French philosophy. He is currently engaged with methodological questions concerning the history of philosophy and the history of political thought. His research project, “Temporalities, Histories, and Methods of Philosophy”, intends to contribute to the studies on the critique of the Western Canon, through specific reflection on the History of Philosophy and its political nature.

Elizabeth Millán Brusslan (DePaul University) presenting “Surprises and Hermeneutical Blindness: Elements of Philosophy’s Imperfect Canon”
Elizabeth Millán Brusslan is Chair and Professor in the Department of Philosophy at DePaul University. She works on aesthetics, German Idealism/Romanticism and Latin American Philosophy. She is the author of Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Romantic Philosophy (SUNY, 2007) and several edited volumes on early German Romanticism and Latin American philosophy. She recently edited with Jimena Solé, Fichte in the Americas, a volume in the Fichte Studien Series (Leiden: Brill, 2023) and is currently working on The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Philosophy, which will be an inter-American collection of essays from scholars in the United States, Canada, and Latin America. She also recently completed an essay, “Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre as Bildung The Tale of a Working Class Hero for Freedom” for Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre: A Critical Guide, edited by Jeffery Kinlaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) and an essay, “Walter Benjamin and Romantic Critique” for The Palgrave Handbook to Walter Benjamin, edited by Nathan Ross (New York: Palgrave, 2025). In 2004-5, she was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for a project on Humboldt’s view of nature, and she has published several articles on that topic especially on Humboldt’s views of America and is finishing a book-length study on Alexander von Humboldt’s view of nature.

Giulia Valpione (École Normale Supérieure / CNRS / DePaul University) presening “The Subversive Canon of Political Ecology. A fragmented History?”
Giulia Valpione is Marie Curie Fellow at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris) and Visiting Scholar at DePaul University (Chicago). She is the author of The Romantic Self. Sovereignty and the Politics of Nature (Cambridge University Press, July 2026). She has published extensively on German Romanticismand Idealism, environmental philosophy, the politics/nature relationship, and the history of women philosophers. She has worked and studied in Italy, Germany, France, Brazil, and the United States. Her texts have been published by, among others: Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, DeGruyter, the British Journal for the History of Philosophy, and the Hegel Bulletin. She served as co-manager of the European Teacher Training Program: “Green Europe: Active Citizenship and the Environment” and is the co-founder and former co-editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal Symphilosophie. International Journal of Philosophical Romanticism.

Banu Bargu (UC Santa Cruz) presenitng “On Sea-Rovers: Althusser’s Montesquieu and the Colonial Unconscious of Materialism”
Banu Bargu is Professor of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a political theorist, whose research also draws upon anthropology, philosophy, global history, and Middle East studies around questions of the body, power, violence, resistance practices, authoritarianism and exceptional regimes, carcerality and democracy. She is the author of two books: Disembodiment: Corporeal Politics of Radical Refusal (Oxford UP, 2024), which is the recipient of the 2025 David Easton Award, and Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons (Columbia UP, 2014), which was the recipient of the 2015 First Book Award, both given by APSA’s Foundations of Political Theory section. Bargu’s curated collections include Turkey’s Necropolitical Laboratory (Edinburgh UP, 2019), “The Political Encounter with Althusser” (2019 special issue of Rethinking Marxism, co-edited with Robyn Marasco), and Feminism, Capitalism, and Critique (Palgrave, 2017, co-edited with Chiara Bottici). Bargu has previously taught at The New School for Social Research, New York City, and SOAS, University of London. Her scholarship has been recognized by a number of fellowships, including the Mercator fellowship, ACLS fellowship, and a residential fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Bargu currently serves as the editor of Political Theory.

Robert Nichols (UC Santa Cruz) presenting “Political Philosophy and /as Reception Theory”
Robert Nichols is Professor of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work in social and political thought takes up questions of power, sovereignty, property, and historical consciousness, especially as they inform and animate struggles at the intersection of anti-capitalism and anti-colonialism. Nichols has published several books and journal articles on these topics, including Theft is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory (2020); The Dispossessed: Karl Marx’s Debates on Wood Theft and the Right of the Poor, ed. and trans., (2021); and The World of Freedom: Heidegger, Foucault, and the Politics of Historical Ontology (2014). Before joining UCSC, Nichols held faculty posts at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities) and the University of Alberta (Canada), and visiting scholar positions at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin (Germany); École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris, France); Columbia University (NYC); and the University of Cambridge (UK). He is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Fulbright, Humboldt, Killiam, McKnight and Trudeau Foundations, as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Massimiliano Tomba (UC Santa Cruz)
Massimiliano Tomba (Ph.D. in Political Philosophy at the University of Pisa) taught Political Philosophy at the University of Padova (Italy). He specialized in German classical philosophy during his stay in Germany (University of Würzburg, Münich, and Hamburg). Since 2012, he has been acting as co-director of an international project whose aim is to rethink the predominant schemes of interpretation of global society to overcome the prevailing Eurocentrism in conceptions of universalism, space, and time. Among his publications is Krise und Kritik bei Bruno Bauer. Kategorien des Politischen im nachhegelschen Denken, Peter Lang, 2005; La vera politica. Kant e Benjamin: la possibilità della giustizia, Quodlibet, 2006; Marx’s Temporalities, Brill, 2013; Attraverso la piccolo porta. Quattro studi su Walter Benjamin, Mimesis, 2017: Insurgent Universality. An Alternative Legacy of Modernity, New York, Oxford University Press, 2019, Co-winner of the 2021 David and Elaine Spitz Prize for the best book in liberal and/or democratic theory published in 2019.

For more information please contact Silvestre Gristina at silvestre.gristina@unipd.it
This event is Organized by University of Padua & UC Santa Cruz and Co-Funded by the European Union. This event is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute and the History of Consciousness Department.

Questions that Matter - How to Live Long and Prosper: Lessons from a Star Trek Opera
2026-03-13 19:00 | Kuumbwa Jazz Center
What do we need to live a fulfilling life? This essential question of the humanities feels especially pressing now, on the precipice of profound changes to our planet, our bodies, and our sense of human exceptionality. Join us for a conversation — and a music-and-drama masterclass — about speculative fiction from the Star Trek world, the myth of Orpheus, and what the operatic form can teach us about intelligence, humanity, and the good life. The evening will feature UC Santa Cruz faculty, Ben Leeds Carson (Professor of Music), Camilla A. Hawthorne (Associate Professor of Sociology), and Pranav Anand (THI Faculty Director and Professor of Linguistics), along with librettist Perre DiCarlo.

Those attending Questions That Matter may be interested in the “The Trial of Spock — An Opera Workshop” on March 8th. This workshop is a rare opportunity for Trekkies and opera lovers to attend a recording of five scenes of an opera-in-progress: The Trial of Spock, with members of the San Francisco and San Jose Opera companies accompanied by San Francisco’s Del Sol Quartet.
Questions That Matter is a public humanities series developed by The Humanities Institute and the community of Santa Cruz. It brings together, in conversation, two or more UC Santa Cruz scholars with community residents and students to explore questions that matter to all of us.

Karen Russell - The Antidote
2026-03-16 19:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes bestselling author Karen Russell (Swamplandia!) for a discussion about her latest novel The Antidote, which will be available in paperback on the night of the event. “The Antidote blends speculative and fantasy elements with rich language and vivid characters in an effort not to escape reality but to comment even more thoughtfully on it. . . . Russell’s lyrical writing dazzles on every page.” —The New York Times

Your RSVP helps us plan for your arrival and keep in touch with any changes. Thank you for registering!
The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a “Prairie Witch,” whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples’ memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate.
Karen Russell is the author of six books of fiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. She has received MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, she now lives in the Bay Area with her husband, son, and daughter. The Antidote, a national bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Award, is her second novel.
This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute.

Undiscovered Shakespeare: The Two Noble Kinsmen - Episode III
2026-03-18 19:00 - 21:00 | Virtual Event

Community Conversation with Author Randy Ribay
2026-03-23 16:30 - 18:00 | Watsonville Civic Plaza, 275 Main Street, Watsonville, CA, 95076, United States
Please join us for a community conversation with Randy Ribay, young adult fiction writer and National Book Award Finalist. During the event, Randy will discuss his recent novel, Everything We Never Had (2024), about four-generations of Filipino American men grappling with identity, masculinity, and father-son relationships. The characters’ stories traverse histories of Filipino America, including those of Watsonville and the Pajaro Valley. Randy conducted archival research using the Watsonville is in the Heart Community Digital Archive and other repositories to create intergenerational narratives of Filipino American migration, labor, and family.
This event is free and open to the public.

It is co-sponsored by Watsonville Public Library, UCSC’s Center for Labor and Community, Watsonville is in the Heart, The Tobera Project, and Pajaro Valley for Ethnic Studies and Justice.

Colm Toibin - The News From Dublin
2026-04-02 19:00 | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz and The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz welcome acclaimed author Colm Tóibín (Long Island, Brooklyn) for a discussion about The News from Dublin, a brilliant collection of nine short stories, many never-before-published, set across Ireland, Spain, and America—about the complexities of family, longing, loss, and love.

Celebrated as “his generation’s most gifted writer of love’s complicated, contradictory power” ( Los Angeles Times), Colm Tóibín is a master of short fiction as well as the novel, able to summon an extraordinary intensity of emotion in a brief tale. The eleven stories transport readers across continents and eras.
In The Journey to Galway, a mother who has learned of the death of her son, a fighter pilot in World War I, travels to Galway to inform his wife and their three now fatherless children. “Sleep,” originally published in The New Yorker, explores the rift between two lovers as one of them cannot reckon with his grief and fear after the death of his brother. Death, again, is a central character in the title story, “The News from Dublin,” as Maurice Webster travels to Dublin to try to save his younger brother who is dying of tuberculosis. Maurice must petition the health minister for access to a new experimental drug, and this is the only hope.
Colm Tóibín is the author of eleven novels, including Long Island, an Oprah’s Book Club Pick; The Magician, winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; and Nora Webster, winner of the Hawthornden Prize, as well as three story collections and several books of criticism. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and was named the 2022–2024 Laureate for Irish Fiction by the Arts Council of Ireland. In 2021, he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature.
More information at: Bookshop Santa Cruz – Colm Tóibín

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

Oceans of Dissent Workshop
2026-04-03 - 2026-04-04 | Humanities 1, Room 202
We gather to forge new vernaculars of the geopolitical, to assemble spatial imaginaries of the “oceanic” that refuse rather than relent to the insistent march of capital and empire. To dissent here is an invitation to think more about the messiness and stuckness of our intellectual labors across histories of slavery, indenture, colonialism and more. This event is open to the campus community.

Register here!
More information: Oceans of Dissent Workshop
Any questions? Email Sadie Lynn at sklynn@ucsc.edu.

Suzanne Simard - When the Forest Breathes
2026-04-04 14:00 - 15:00 | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes bestselling author Suzanne Simard (Finding the Mother Tree), a scientist who pioneered the concept of sophisticated communication between trees. Simard will share her highly anticipated new book When the Forest Breathes, in which she offers a powerful vision for saving our forests based on nature’s deep-rooted cycles of renewal.
“A masterclass on the inner workings of forests. . . . This is science as an act of love for the world.” —Zoë Schlanger, author of The Light Eaters

Raised in a family of loggers committed to sensible forest stewardship, trailblazing ecologist Suzanne Simard has watched as timber companies leave forests at higher risk for wildfires, water crises, and plant and animal extinction. But her research has the potential to chart a new course. The forest, she reveals, is a symphony of finely honed cycles of regeneration—from mushrooms breaking down logs to dying elder trees passing their genetic knowledge to younger ones—that hold the key to protecting our forests. Working closely with local Indigenous communities, whose models of responsible forestry have been largely dismissed, Simard examines how human interventions—particularly destruction of the overstory’s mother trees—endanger new growth and longevity. If we can honor the tools that trees have honed for sharing intergenerational wisdom, she argues, we can protect these sacred places for many years to come.
Dr. Suzanne Simard is the New York Times bestselling author of Finding the Mother Tree. She is a Professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia, where she leads The Mother Tree Project and co-directs the Belowground Ecosystem Group. Dr. Simard has earned a global reputation for pioneering research on tree connectivity and communication and the productivity, health, and biodiversity of forests. Her work has been published widely, with over 170 scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals, including Nature, Ecology, and Global Biology, and she has co-authored the book Climate Change and Variability. Her research has been communicated broadly through three TED Talks, TED Experiences, as well as articles and interviews in The New Yorker, National Geographic, NPR, CNN, and many more. She lives with her family in the mountains around Nelson, British Columbia.
More information at: Bookshop Santa Cruz – Suzanne Simard

This event is cosponsored by the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum & Botanic Garden and The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz

Chris Gray - The Fantasies Shaping Today’s AI
2026-04-07 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
All AI (algorithmic intelligence) companies claim they are pursuing the next logical step in digital—perhaps even human—evolution. But, the development of AI is clearly shaped by a wide range of untethered belief systems from obscure German philosophy to The Lord of the Rings. There is nothing logical about it. It is unreasonable to make AI the dominant industry in terms of investment and valuation when it has produced little profit, great social disruption, and a worsening of most aspects of today’s polycrisis, from climate change to military operations and genocide.
The forces trying to produce general purpose AI and super intelligence are multiple and almost all irrational, even fantastical. The most rational is the hunger for wealth and power, considered sacred by capitalist true believers, for even if AIs never wins a war or produce real value, they will make money and shape societies.
To explain today’s “Tech Lords” more than a simplistic “California Ideology” argument is needed. Accepting we now live under Surveillance Capitalism is only the context. Looking at the psychodynamics of Postmodern War is also helpful, for today’s AI complex shares the same genealogy as contemporary high-tech militaries. A close analysis of key parts of the actual beliefs of AI billionaires, from fantasy novels to fantasy altruism to dreams of immortality and divinity, is also very helpful.
Together, they might help begin to answer the real question—how do we transition from this clearly unsustainable socio-technological society into something better?

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

Nauenberg History of Science Lecture with Jennifer Derr
2026-04-07 17:30 - 19:30 | Music Center Recital Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
World Wounds: The Damming of the Nile River and the Transformation of Medicine
The damming of the Nile River transformed agriculture and human health in twentieth-century Egypt. While dams enabled year-round irrigation and provided hydroelectricity, the prevalence of parasitic disease also skyrocketed. Professor Derr explores the effects of damming the Nile on the health of Egyptians and the impact of large-scale environmental transformation on the knowledge and practice that made medicine during the twentieth century.
April 7, 2026
Reception 5:30 p.m.
Lecture 6 p.m.
Music Recital Hall and Virtual
Free and open to the public

Jennifer Derr is an Associate Professor in the history department at UC Santa Cruz. Her first book, The Lived Nile: Environment, Disease, and Material Colonial Economy in Egypt, won the Middle East Political Economy Book Prize. In 2019, the National Science Foundation awarded Derr a CAREER grant to support her research on the “History of Science at the Interface of Biomedical and Environmental Concerns.” In 2024-2025, she was a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

Nauenberg History of Science Lecture
The Nauenberg History of Science Lecture was established in honor of Michael Nauenberg, a founding faculty member in the Physics Department at UCSC who came to the campus in 1966. During his distinguished academic career, he contributed to a remarkably broad range of fields, including particle physics, condensed matter physics, astrophysics, chaos theory, fluid dynamics, and the history of physics in the 17th-18th centuries.
Amongst Professor Nauenberg’s passions, he deeply believed in the importance of interdisciplinary scholarship connecting the sciences with the humanities. Following his retirement in 1994, he pursued his long-standing interests in the history of science, writing books and articles about Joseph Banks, Robert Hooke, Christiaan Huygens, and Isaac Newton. The Nauenberg History of Science Lecture Series features leading historians of science and highlights the significance of their work across disciplines for faculty, students, and community members.
The Nauenberg History of Science Lecture is presented by the UC Santa Cruz Emeriti Association.

Documentación Lingüística en México
2026-04-08 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Please join us for a presentation on “Children’s role in Language Documentation Efforts in Mexico“.
Cuando realizamos proyectos de documentación lingüística, nos encontramos con niñas y niños que quieren participar en alguna actividad del proceso de documentación, sean o no hablantes o sean hablantes de herencia. Su colaboración es valiosa en los proyectos porque aportan muchos elementos clave para el proceso de registro de la lengua y la cultura que se está documentando. En esta charla platicaremos sobre algunas experiencias con niñas y niños que colaboraron en diferentes etapas del trabajo de campo que se realizó para la documentación de la lengua otomí de Santa Ana Hueytlalpan, en el municipio de Tulancingo de Bravo, en México.
María de Jesús Selene Hernández Gómez Doctora en Estudios Mesoamericanos por la UNAM, Maestra en Lingüística con Línea Terminal en Lingüística Teórica-Descriptiva y Licenciada en Lenguas Modernas en Inglés, ambas por la UAQ. Es profesora de la Facultad de Lenguas y Letras y de la Facultad de Filosofía en la Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro. Es investigadora asociada del Laboratorio de Educación y Mediación Intercultural (LEMI) y es responsable del programa de Prácticas Profesionales “Prácticas Universitarias de Traducción”, que se ofrece en el LEMI. Da clases a nivel licenciatura y posgrado en ambas facultades. Se dedica particularmente a la enseñanza de la historia de la lengua inglesa y sus líneas de investigación son: la documentación y descripción de lenguas originarias mexicanas en peligro de extinción (particularmente el otomí del estado de Hidalgo, México), procesos de traducción de documentos en inglés antiguo y medieval y procesos de traducción en/de lenguas originarias mexicanas. Ha sido becaria del Programa Santander Universities en la Universidad de Surrey y del Programa “Endangered Languages Documentation Programme” (ELDP) en la Universidad de Londres, ambos en el Reino Unido.
This talk will be in Spanish.

New Articulations with James Clifford
2026-04-09 12:00 - 18:00 | Humanities 1
This event engages the theme of articulation and James Clifford’s contributions to cultural studies, anthropology, and literary studies, addressing our current disconcerting cultural, historical, and ecological conjuncture.
With talks by Elizabeth Povinelli (Columbia), James Clifford (UCSC), and Kirin Narayan (ANU), and a panel with Mark Anderson (UCSC), Chris Connery (UCSC), Donna Haraway (UCSC), Gail Hershatter (UCSC), Caren Kaplan (UCD), and Richard Rodriguez (UCR).

Convened by Dimitris Papadopoulos (UCSC) & Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (UCSC) and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute, History of Consciousness, and the Center for Cultural Studies.

Ritual Drinking in the Ancient World
2026-04-15 17:00 - 19:00 | Stockwell Cellars, 1100 Fair Ave, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060
“Drink and make a happy day!” (New Kingdom Theben tomb)
“Wine gladdens the heart of man…” (Psalm 104:15)
At this ‘symposium’ event, three UCSC professors in Classical, Biblical, and Egyptian antiquity will tell stories about how various ancient cultures drank wine to commune with their gods, suspend the normal social rules, and prepare for the end of days.
The Stockwell Cellars tasting room bar will be open for attendees to purchase individual wines-by-the-glass during the event. Come enjoy tasting local Santa Cruz wines while learning about the long history of drinking as a ritual event in the ancient Mediterranean world. A Q&A will follow the short presentations.

Registration required!
Martin Devecka, Associate Professor, Ancient Studies & Literature, “Wine before Liquor”
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, “Drinking like the World is Going to End”
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.
Elaine Sullivan, Associate Professor, Ancient Studies & History, “How to Get Drunk with a Goddess”
An Egyptogist, Sullivan’s field research has included excavation and survey at Karnak’s Mut Temple, the cemetery of Saqqara, and the Greco-Roman city of Karanis, all in Egypt. She is currently authoring a book on the sales of antiquities out of Egypt in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Ripple Effect Arts Festival Opening
2026-04-16 | Santa Cruz County, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
A celebration of Santa Cruz County’s creative community during arts and culture month in California! The arts community of Santa Cruz County is coming together for this exciting new 11-day celebration showcasing the region’s rich artistic landscape.
The festival will feature performances, exhibitions, workshops, and interactive events across venues countywide, inviting audiences of all ages to experience the transformative power of art.
Known for our stunning coastline and redwood forests throughout Santa Cruz County, the Ripple Effect Arts Festival invites visitors to also discover the talent and creativity of our local artists, as well as the hospitality that make this region a world-class destination.
The Ripple Effect Arts Festival was born out of a shared belief that the arts not only enrich our lives but also strengthen our community and economy. At a time when many artists and organizations face mounting challenges, Ripple Effect provides a new opportunity for collaboration, visibility, and collective support. Grassroots and volunteer-driven, the festival is powered by the dedication of local arts organizations and community partners who believe in the unifying force of creativity.
More info and detailed schedule at: https://www.rippleartsfestsantacruz.org/

The Ripple Effect Arts Festival is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute

Santa Cruz Night of Ideas
2026-04-17 17:00 - 21:00 | Institute of the Arts and Sciences, 100 Panetta Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join us for a nocturnal celebration of art, philosophy, and activism!
As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of its independence, the 2026 Santa Cruz Night of Ideas invites us not to celebrate the Enlightenment, but to interrogate it. Long associated with democracy, progress, and universal reason, the Enlightenment’s legacy remains deeply ambivalent – coexisting with enduring forms of exclusion, colonial violence, and economic exploitation. These unresolved tensions, strikingly visible today, demand renewed scrutiny.
Rather than treating the Enlightenment as a closed chapter or shared inheritance, this edition centers young local voices and civil society to ask urgent questions: whose reason matters, whose freedoms are secured, and whose futures are denied?
Through conversations, workshops, performances, and visionary talks, Enlightenment, Now! becomes a space for lived experience and collective experimentation. Featuring contributions from local performers Crista Berryessa and the Beati Quorum, Alex Olwal’s audiovisual collaborations with AL-EK, and Juan Ospina, flautist and composer with Olemano, we will gather with Thomas Sage Pedersen, Ronaldo V. Wilson, Gina Athena Ulysse, and many other guests. The aim is not consensus, but momentum: rethinking progress and imagining new political, ethical, and cultural possibilities under radically changed conditions.
Join us on Friday, April 17 at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences to explore what remains of the Enlightenment, and what it might become!

Night of Ideas, a global event taking place simultaneously in more than 100 countries and 22 cities in the United States, invites thought leaders, activists, performers, authors, and academics to engage the public in discussions around central questions that address major, contemporary global issues.
First introduced in the United States in 2015 by the French Embassy, Night of Ideas is a nationwide phenomenon today, drawing tens of thousands of people to events across the country, for a nocturnal marathon of philosophical debates, performances, readings, and more.

This event is brought to you by the Center for Public Philosophy, with support from the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, The Humanities Institute, the Marc Sanders Foundation, Villa Albertine, and the Institut Français.
By attending this event you hereby consent to having your photo/likeness/recordings posted publicly and on social media.

Aziz Abu Sarah & Maoz Inon - The Future is Peace
2026-04-20 19:00 - 20:00 | Rio Theater, 1205 Soquel Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95062, 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.
More information coming soon.

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.
