The Humanities Institute

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 (America/Los_Angeles) | 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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
Join us as the creators of The Trial of Spock — An Opera present five scenes from an opera-in-progress by Ben Leeds Carson, Perre DiCarlo, and Lincoln and Lee Taiz. With co-authors John de Lancie, Camilla Hawthorne, and Michael Chemers.
Starring sopranos Nicole Koh, Sheila Willey, and Emily Sinclair; tenor Alex Boyer; baritones Joseph Calzada and Michael Kuo; and the Del Sol Quartet.
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.

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

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.

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. Featuring UC Santa Cruz Faculty: Ben Leeds Carson (Professor of Music), Camilla A. Hawthorne (Associate Professor of Sociology), Perre DiCarlo, and Pranav Anand (THI Faculty Director and Professor of Linguistics).

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

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.

The Deep Read - A Conversation with Merlin Sheldrake
2026-05-31 | 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.
