Questions That Matter: Disability in Medicine and Memoir
2025-04-06 18:00 - 19:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Kuumbwa Jazz Center
What does it mean to talk and write about the experiences of our bodies? How do the stories told about us mediate the narratives we construct? What are the stakes for disabled writers sharing their first-person perspectives with the world? In this dialogue with two scholars and memoirists of disability, we will explore how intellectual and aesthetic engagement with non-normative embodied life speaks to questions that matter — now more than ever.
Featuring: Pranav Anand (UC Santa Cruz), Jan Grue (University of Oslo), Megan Moodie (UC Santa Cruz).
Doors open 5:30pm – Event begins 6:00pm
Tickets: $15

Free student tickets are available. Please email thi@ucsc.edu to reserve a student spot.
A ucsc.edu email and student ID number will be required.
Jan Grue is the author of a wide-ranging body of work in fiction, nonfiction, children’s books, and academic literature, and a professor at the University of Oslo. I Live a Life Like Yours was published in 2018 in Norway, where it won the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature and was nominated to the Nordic Council Literature Prize, the first Norwegian nonfiction book to be so honored in fifty years.

Pranav Anand is Professor of Linguistics and Faculty Director of The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz. His research investigates how context mediates the interpretation of language, and has explored the interpretation of subjectivity, persuasive tactics, bias, evidence, belief, time, and narrative structure.

Megan Moodie is a cultural anthropologist, writer, performer, and disability studies scholar whose work spans multiple genres. As a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, she specializes in teaching experimental research methods that bring together social sciences and the arts. Her work on disability, motherhood, and artistic practice has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Catamaran, Hip Mama, MUTHA Magazine, and Sapiens. In 2019, her essay “Birthright,” which appeared in the Chicago Quarterly Review (Volume 26), was named a Notable Essay of the Year by Best American Essays.
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.

Night of Ideas
2025-04-04 17:00 - 21:00 | Institute of the Arts and Sciences, 100 Panetta Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Future We Share: Activism, Creativity, and Collective Imagination
Join us on April 4, 2025 for the Night of Ideas in Santa Cruz, a nocturnal celebration of art, philosophy, and activism! From solar energy and housing justice to communal music and movement, Night of Ideas – Santa Cruz invites you to explore interactive sessions on democracy, environmental solutions, and housing rights, as well as immersive experiences fostering embodied connection. With a Capoeira opening, sculptural performances, and live piano meditations, come create, move, and reflect on our shared future! The 2025 Program is below.
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.
Taking place from March 27 through April 6, Night of Ideas returns this year with nocturnal arts and culture marathons in cities across the U.S. Events will feature late-night discussions addressing major global issues, plus live music, screenings, performances, and more, all centered this year’s theme, “common ground.” Exploring the expression’s literal and metaphorical interpretations, Night of Ideas will prompt participants to consider how we can commit to and protect what we have in common. How can we foster authentic interpersonal connection in an increasingly digital world? In a polarized political landscape, where are our opportunities for dialogue? As extreme weather threatens our planet, how can we preserve the land beneath our feet? Learn more and sign up for updates at nightofideas.org.
This event is brought to the public by the Center for Public Philosophy, with support from the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, The Humanities Institute, Cowell College, Humanities West, The Marc Sanders Foundation, Villa Albertine, and Institut français.

This event is free and open to the public. RSVP is required.

Night of Ideas 2025 Program
MAIN HALL
5pm: Brazilian Cultural Art of Capoeira
5:30pm: Welcome – Opening Remarks (J. Proust)
6:30pm: IAS Exhibition Walkthrough with Curator R. Nelson
7:30pm: Activating the EDELO exhibition (C. Duarte and YELO)
8pm: Piano Meditation/Sound Healing (E. Shanken)
8:30pm: What if We Moved as One? (B-Moving, B. Wittmer, with E. Shanken)
CONFERENCE ROOM (Room 1)
6 – 6:25pm: The Common Ground That Creates an Uncommon Good (G. Hammond)
7 – 7:25pm: Mind, Body and Tiktok Problem (J. Candray)
8 – 8:25pm: Common Ground, No Ground: Housing, Rights, and the Refusal to Disappear (J.Schendledecker)
WEST ROOM (Room 2)
6 – 6:25pm: Post-nonmonogamy and Poly-river-amory (K. TallBear)
7 – 7:25pm: Empowering the Solar Commons through Community Energy (R. Lipschutz, K. Milun, R. Stayton)
8 – 8:25pm: Understanding Through Play (Liminal Space Collective)
ONGOING
“Ask a Philosopher” booth (M. Mattinson, R. Kusyuniati, J. Read) & TEQ project
Melodies of Hope (El Sistema – I. Tuncer)

Speakers and Performers
This event will feature Kim TallBear, Caleb Duarte, Joy Schendledecker, Dr. Kathryn Milun, Dr. Ronnie D. Lipschutz, Robert Stayton, Liminal Space Collective, Juliet Candray, George Hammond, Brigitte Wittmer, Edhi Shanken, El Sistema Santa Cruz/Pajaro Valley, Raízes do Brasil Capoeira and Brazilian Cultural Arts Center, Dr. Jeanne Proust, Rachel Nelson.
For more information about all guest speakers and performers visit: Night of Ideas 2025 — Institute of the Arts and Sciences

Center for South Asian Studies Meet and Greet
2025-04-03 17:00 - 19:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Join us for a Center for South Asian Studies Meet and Greet! Come have some food and refreshments with the CSAS community and tell us about your research and interests related to South Asia and the Center.
Grab a bite, get a drink, and tell us about your research!

Ariella Azoulay – Crafting a Jewish Muslim World
2025-04-02 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Crafting a potential history of the Jewish Muslim World means taking seriously the fact that we – Muslim Jews – are the living ruins of worlds that imperialism is committed to make disappear. Asking ‘who am I?’ / ‘who are we?’ means breaking apart the cohesiveness and solidity of the identities assigned by settler colonial states to children born within their borders. Azoulay will present her new book The Jewelers of the Ummah – A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World and will focus on her methodological choices of inhabiting the ruins of this world with kin and elected kin, and of engaging with jewelry making as part of this journey.
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay teaches at Brown political theory from an anti-colonial perspective, using photography and material culture. Her latest books: The Jewelers of the ummah – Potential History of The Jewish Muslim World (Verso, 2024), Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso Books, 2019), Civil Imagination – A Political Ontology of photography (revised & augmented edition, 2024, Verso) and From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947–1950 (Pluto Press, 2011); She recently published her first children book Golden Threads (Ayin Press, 2024). Her latest films include the trilogy Unlearning Imperial Plunder: One Thousand and One Jewels (2025), The world like a jewel in the hand (2023), Un-documented (2019); her latest exhibitions: Errata (Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 2019; HKW, Berlin, 2020), and The Natural History of Rape (Berlin Biennale, 2022).

Spring 2025 COLLOQUIUM SERIES
THE CENTER FOR CULTURAL STUDIES hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work-in-progress by faculty & visitors. We are pleased to announce our Spring 2025 Series. Sessions begin promptly at 12:15 PM and end at 1:30 PM (PST) in Humanities Building 1, Room 210.
This event is presented by CCS with the Center for the Middle East and North Africa (CMENA) and the Visual Media and Culture Colloquium Series (VMCC). Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Story & Pictures By : A Benefit Film Screening for Santa Cruz County Public School Libraries
2025-03-30 15:00 - 17:00 | Santa Cruz High School Auditorium, 415 Walnut Avenue, Santa Cruz, 95060
With book bans skyrocketing across the country, let’s celebrate the value of children’s books by supporting our local public school libraries together.
Children’s books are often one of the first moments that allow children to dive deep into their imaginations. Come celebrate the impact of children’s books with a benefit screening of a new documentary “Story & Pictures By” followed by a discussion with filmmaker Joanna Rudnick.
100% of the proceeds of every ticket will be used to buy children’s books from Bookshop for Santa Cruz County public school libraries.

This event will feature a film screening (Run Time: 1 hour, 24 minutes) + 20-minute conversation with filmmaker.
ABOUT “STORY & PICTURES BY”
“Story & Pictures By” is the first feature documentary to take audiences behind the scenes to meet the authors and artists who create children’s books. Following bestselling authors Christian Robinson (Last Stop on Market Street), Yuyi Morales (Dreamers), and Mac Barnett (Sam & Dave Dig a Hole), as well as highlighting perennial favorites such as Goodnight Moon, Snowy Day and Where the Wild Things Are, the film shows how children’s books reflect the mysteries of childhood, champion the marginalized, and provide children with windows and mirrors into their own lives.
Film Trailer: https://vimeo.com/925152924
ABOUT FILMMAKER JOANNA RUDNICK
After earning a master’s degree in journalism from NYU, Joanna worked for the American Master’s series WNET/PBS New York where she co-produced the film Robert Capa in Love and War, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was the presenting film for the 2003 Emmy award Outstanding Nonfiction Series. She then spent a decade working for Kartemquin Films producing several titles for national public television before she made her directorial debut with In the Family, an Emmy nominated and deeply personal story about coming to terms with having a mutation in one of the breast cancer genes which is still currently used in teaching courses on medical ethics and genetic counseling today.

This event co-sponsored by Bookshop Santa Cruz, The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, and The Santa Cruz County Office of Education.

Rick Steves: On the Hippie Trail
2025-03-16 16:00 - 17:30 | Rio Theater, 1205 Soquel Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95062, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz presents bestselling travel writer Rick Steves , who will join us for a special event at The Rio Theatre to discuss his new memoir On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer.
Stow away with Rick Steves for a glimpse into the unforgettable moments, misadventures, and memories of his 1978 journey on the legendary Hippie Trail.

In the 1970s, the ultimate trip for any backpacker was the storied “Hippie Trail” from Istanbul to Kathmandu. A 23-year old Rick Steves made the trek, and like a travel writer in training, he documented everything along the way: jumping off a moving train, making friends in Tehran, getting lost in Lahore, getting high for the first time in Herat, battling leeches in Pokhara, and much more. The experience ignited his love of travel and forever broadened his perspective on the world.
This book contains edited selections from Rick’s journal and travel photos with a 45-years-later preface and postscript reflecting on how the journey changed his life. Stow away with Rick Steves on the adventure of a lifetime through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal.
You know Rick Steves. Now discover the adventure that made him the travel writer he is today.
Since 1973, Rick Steves has spent about four months a year exploring Europe. His mission: to empower Americans to have European trips that are fun, affordable, and culturally broadening. Rick produces a best-selling guidebook series, a public television series, and a public radio show, and organizes small-group tours that take over 30,000 travelers to Europe annually. He does all of this with the help of more than 100 well-traveled staff members at Rick Steves’ Europe in Edmonds, WA (near Seattle). When not on the road, Rick is active in his church and with advocacy groups focused on economic and social justice, drug policy reform, and ending hunger. To recharge, Rick plays piano, relaxes at his family cabin in the Cascade Mountains, and spends time with his son Andy, daughter Jackie, and his grandson…baby Atlas. Find out more about Rick at www.ricksteves.com and on Facebook.
More information at: Rick Steves, On the Hippie Trail | Bookshop Santa Cruz
This event is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

2025 Sidhartha Maitra Memorial Lecture featuring Raghuram Rajan
2025-03-13 17:30 - 21:00 | UC Santa Cruz Silicon Valley Campus
UC Santa Cruz Chancellor Cynthia Larive and Foundation Board Trustee Anuradha Luther Maitra invite you to the Sidhartha Maitra Memorial Lecture: “How can India (and developing countries) grow? Navigating an automating and protectionist world” featuring Raghuram Rajan.
The schedule for Thursday, March 13, includes a reception from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m., followed by the program from 6:30 to 8:15 p.m., and concluding with tea and dessert from 8:15 to 9:00 p.m.

India is at a crossroads today. Its economic growth rate, while respectable relative to other large countries, is too low for the jobs its youth need. The East Asian path of manufacturing-led exports no longer seems feasible—aside from increasing automation in manufacturing, the world isn’t prepared or right for another export-driven economy like China. India broke away from the standard development path—from agriculture to low-skilled manufacturing, then high-skilled manufacturing and, finally, services—a long time back by leapfrogging the intermediate steps.
Instead of now trying to regress to development paths that may no longer be feasible, Dr. Rajan will lay out an alternative path to accelerate economic development and make India a ferment of ideas and creativity. By breaking from the past and looking to the future, India can craft a truly Indian way, a path that could be emulated by other developing countries.
Raghuram Rajan is the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago’s Booth School. He was the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India between 2013 and 2016, Vice-Chairman of the Board of the Bank for International Settlements (2015-16) and Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund (2003-2006).
Dr. Rajan’s book Fault Lines (2010) won the Financial Times prize for best business book and his book The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Hold the Community Behind (2019) was a finalist for the award. His most recent book (December 2023) is Breaking the Mold: India’s Untraveled Path to Prosperity, with Rohit Lamba.
Dr. Rajan received AFA’s inaugural Fischer Black Prize in 2003, the Deutsche Bank Prize for financial economics in 2013, Euromoney magazine’s Central Banker of the Year award in 2014, and The Banker magazine’s Global Central Banker award in 2016.
Anuradha Luther Maitra received her Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University, and has served UC Santa Cruz in many capacities: Professor of Economics, Special Advisor to the Chancellor on International Initiatives, UC Santa Cruz Foundation Trustee and President, and founder of the Sidhartha Maitra Lecture Series on Humanism, Reason, and Tolerance.

This premier campus event series seeks to enrich the intellectual life of the campus and the community, and is made possible thanks to the Sidhartha Maitra Memorial Lecture endowment.
This event is co-sponsored by the India House Foundation, the Center for South Asian Studies at UCSC, and The Humanities Institute at UCSC.

Living Writers Student Reading
2025-03-13 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Living Writers Series – Winter 2025
Grief Sequence
Not to suppress mourning (suffering)…but to change it, transform it…after Prageeta Sharma & Roland Barthes

Sponsored by The Puknat Literary Endowment, The Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Laurie Sain Endowment, The Humanities Institute, Bookshop Santa Cruz, and Two Birds Books (where the writers’ books are available for purchase).

PhD+ Workshop - Alt-Ac in the Archives: Archives and Rare Books Career Pathways
2025-03-13 15:00 - 16:00 | Virtual Event
Ever thought about pursuing a career in archives and libraries? Wondered about what other paths you can pursue with your degree – PhD or otherwise? Come to this panel discussion with four professional librarians and archivists, all from the UC Santa Cruz Special Collections & Archives in McHenry Library. We’ll have a conversation on the diverse and diverging paths we took to get to our current positions in the library, share some advice, and answer questions you have about pursuing these kinds of careers.
It’s also a great chance to meet your local librarians who can assist you in your research and connect you to all kinds of resources at UC Santa Cruz and beyond!
This event is presented by Special Collections and Archives at the University Library and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute. See the event page here.
Everyone is welcome to attend this session. The Zoom webinar will not be recorded.
Details:
March 13th, 3-4pm PST
Registration for this webinar is required. Register here via Zoom.

Panelist bios:
Alix Norton is the Archivist for the Center for Archival Research and Training (CART) in Special Collections & Archives at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In her primary role, she trains and mentors graduate students in archival processing and exhibition curation. Alix has worked in Special Collections & Archives at four universities, including at the University of California, Irvine, and previously worked in a neuroscience lab at the University of Washington. She earned a BS in Psychology from the University of Washington before obtaining her MSI from the University of Michigan School of information.
Sam Regal is the Instruction and Exhibitions Librarian in Special Collections and Archives at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she oversees experiential learning programs, exhibitions, programming, public services, and bibliographic collection development. She holds an MLIS with a specialization in rare books and visual culture from UCLA, an MFA in poetry from Hunter College, and a BA in English and American literature from NYU; she also completed coursework toward a PhD in English with a creative writing concentration at the University of Georgia. She is editor of the American Printing History Association (APHA)’s Printing History journal, and her writing has most recently appeared in Parenthesis, RBM, and East of Borneo. She previously served as a librarian at the California Institute of the Arts and as project manager of California Rare Book School.
Rebecca Hernandez earned a PhD in American Studies, specializing in American Indian art and material culture. Her academic work examines inherent complexities in the public representation of culture(s) – particularly how describing and defining Native American objects affects the understanding of Amerindian identity. She is currently the Community Archivist at the UC Santa Cruz University Library, where her role involves assisting with preserving and documenting the history and cultural heritage of Santa Cruz County. Through partnerships with community members, these materials can (if desired) be made accessible to the public, helping to educate and inspire future generations about the rich history of Santa Cruz County.
Kate Dundon is the Supervisory Archivist for Special Collections & Archives at University of California Santa Cruz where she oversees archival processing, accessioning, collection management, and born-digital stewardship programs. Prior to this, she held positions at Occidental College Library, New York University Law Library, and the New York Public Library. She earned an MA in Archives and Public History from New York University and an MLIS from Long Island University.

Humanities Campus to Career: Job Talk with Tammy Tolgo, Amazon Talent Acquisition
2025-03-12 14:00 - 14:45 | Virtual Event
Considering careers in recruiting, human resources, or business? Join this informative job talk and Q&A to learn about talent acquisition from a UCSC Humanities alumna who is a leader in the field!
Tammy will offer insights about her journey as a first generation college student from graduation through various talent acquisition roles in multiple industries, and about how her Humanities degree set her up for success along the way.

Tammy Tolgo is a proud alumnus of UC Santa Cruz and CSU Northridge. As a first-generation college student, she credits her experiences at these institutions for providing a strong foundation for both work and life. After starting her career in higher education, Tammy joined an Executive Search Firm, launching her career in Talent Acquisition. Over the last 20 years, Tammy has built and led Talent Acquisition teams across industries, focused on global organizational build outs. She has become a proven leader in diversity recruiting, executive search, and transformational leadership. Tammy currently leads Talent Acquisition for Amazon Advertising’s Emerging Businesses.
This event is presented by the Employing Humanities.

PhD+ Workshop - THI Public Fellowship Information Session
2025-03-11 15:00 - 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 2025 THI Graduate Public Fellows program to learn about Summer 2025 opportunities.
All THI Public Fellow applicants are required to attend an Info Session. Please contact Saskia Nauenberg Dunkell, Research Programs and Communications Director, at saskia@ucsc.edu before the workshop if you are unable to attend due to a work or class scheduling conflict. Final applications are due on April 4th, 2025.

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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Critical Imagination in Crisis Times
2025-03-11 14:00 - 18:30 | Cultural Center at Merrill, Merrill Cultural Center, UC Santa Cruz, Merrill College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join us for a one-day conference, “Critical Imagination in Crisis Times,” featuring presentations by:

Iain Chambers, Former Professor of the Sociology of Cultural Processes, Oriental University, Naples
Paul Gilroy, Emeritus Professor of Humanities, University College, London
Vron Ware, Visiting Professor at the Gender Institute of the London School of Economics and Political Science

UC Santa Cruz faculty participants include: Jim Clifford (Emeritus Professor, History of Consciousness) Chris Connery (Professor, Literature), Vilashini Cooppan (Professor, Literature and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies), Isaac Julien (Distinguished Professor, Arts and History of Consciousness), Mark Nash (Professor, Arts and History of Consciousness), María Puig de la Bellacasa (Professor, History of Consciousness).

Conference Program:
2:00-2:15 pm Conference Introduction: Isaac Julien and Mark Nash
2:15-3:15 pm Iain Chambers, “From Kassel to Gaza: Art and Critical Testimony” (Moderator, Chris Connery)
3:30-4:30 pm Vron Ware, “Letting the Land Speak” (Moderator, María Puig de la Bellacasa)
4:45-5:45 pm Paul Gilroy, “Political Eschatologies of Mismanaged Decline” (Moderator, Jim Clifford)
5:45-6:30 pm Plenary Discussion: Moderators, Isaac Julien and Mark Nash
Light refreshments will be served throughout the afternoon. The conference will also be live-streamed. Follow this link to join online. Conference presented by Moving Image Lab, The Humanities Institute, and the Center for Cultural Studies. Co-sponsored by the History of Consciousness Department.

Iain Chambers has taught cultural, postcolonial, and Mediterranean studies for many years at the University of Naples, Orientale, and is now an independent researcher. Amongst his recent publications are Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorised Modernities (2017), and, with Marta Cariello, The Mediterranean Question (2025). In 2022, he was a member of the artistic collective Jimmie Durham & A Stick in the Forest by the Side of the Road at documenta 15. He writes regularly for the Italian daily il Manifesto.
Paul Gilroy was born in the East End of London in 1956. He is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at University College London where he was founding director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the study of racism and racialisation. Gilroy was previously Professor of American and English at King’s College London, Giddens Professor of Social Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science (2005-2012), Charlotte Marian Saden Professor of African American Studies and Sociology at Yale (1999-2005) and Professor of Cultural Studies and Sociology at Goldsmiths College London (1995-1999). He holds honorary doctorates from Goldsmiths College, Sussex University, the University of Liege, the University of Copenhagen, Oxford University and the University of St. Andrews. He is an honorary Fellow of Sussex University and of King’s College, London. In 2014, he was made a Fellow of the British Academy and in 2018 of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded Norway’s Holberg Prize in 2019. He writes widely on Art, Music, Literature and Politics. His publications include: Darker than Blue: On The Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Cultures (2010), Black Britain: A Pictorial History (2007), After Empire:Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (2005).
Vron Ware is a London-based writer and photographer, having previously taught geography, sociology and gender studies at universities in the UK and the US. She has written several books on the politics of gender and race, colonial history, national identity, ecological thought and the cultural heritage of war. She gave her first book talk for Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History at UC Santa Cruz in 1992. More recently she has published Return of a Native: Learning from the Land (2022) and co-authored England’s Military Heartland: Preparing for War on Salisbury Plain (2025).

Image Credit: Isaac Julien, Western Union Series no. 1 (Cast No Shadow), 2007, Duratrans image in lightbox, Courtesy the artist.

Matthew L. Jones - Great Exploitations: Hacking, Machine Learning and the NSA in the Golden Age of Signals Intelligence
2025-03-11 12:00 | Virtual and In Person
The Humanities Institute Research cluster, “Humanities in the Age of AI,” is pleased to invite you to a series of meetings this winter quarter. This meeting is scheduled for March 11th (Tuesday) at noon in HUM 210 with guest speaker, Matthew L. Jones speaking on Great Exploitations: Hacking, Machine Learning and the NSA in the Golden Age of Signals Intelligence.
According to the US National Security Agency, we’re living in the “golden age” of signals intelligence—the spying on worldwide communications of all kinds. The Snowden documents, now in the public eye for about a decade, revealed a surveillance apparatus of extraordinary breadth and depth. Yet, for all their lurid fascination, their confirmation of some tinfoil hat theories, their illustration of compliance regimes, the documents reveal little about how we came to build this apparatus. They tell little of the surprisingly broad bipartisan consensus, from the mid-1990s onward, supporting the vast expansion of domestic and international surveillance and dramatic alterations in the law around wiretapping and hacking, in the US as well as its close partners.
9/11 accelerated these shifts. It did not cause them. From the war on drugs of the 1980s, to beginnings of the focus on terrorism as the new primary enemy from the mid 1990s, electronic surveillance came to appear ever more essential and licit to spies, presidents, legislators and judges. This talk will trace the technological and legal developments, as well as the radical rethinking of the security of the “homeland,” making this all possible. In the wake of 9/11, these contested developments were made to appear at once technologically determined and essential for security in an asymmetric age.
This event will be in person at Humanities 1, Room 210. You may also join via Zoom here.
Matthew L. Jones is the Smith Family Professor of History at Princeton University. In 2023, Norton published his How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms, written with Chris Wiggins. He is completing a book, Great Exploitations on state surveillance of communications and information warfare. He has published two books previously, Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage and The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz and the Cultivation of Virtue (both with Chicago). The Mellon Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Science Foundation have funded his research and teaching.

"Zone of Flux: The Mutable Geographies, Interrupted Histories, and Multiple Languages of the Mediterranean" – Iain Chambers in Conversation with Camilla Hawthorne and Mediterranean Studies Roundtable
2025-03-10 16:30 - 19:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Join us for a Mediterranean Studies talk and roundtable featuring Iain Chambers, former Professor of the Sociology of Cultural Processes, Oriental University, Naples.
4:30-5:30 | “Mediterranean Blues: Colonial Spacetime and Other Archives,” Iain Chambers
Introducer and Respondent: Camilla Hawthorne (Associate Professor of Sociology and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, UCSC)
5:45-7:00 | “Mediterranean as Materiality, Method, and Geolinguistic Movements”
A Roundtable with Chris Connery (chair and moderator), with Sharon Kinoshita, Susan Gillman, and Camilo Gomez-Rivas (Professors of Literature, UCSC). Four lightning talks followed by plenary discussion and Q&A with Iain Chambers and Camilla Hawthorne.
Iain Chambers has taught cultural, postcolonial, and Mediterranean studies for many years at the University of Naples, Orientale, and is now an independent researcher. Amongst his recent publications are Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorised Modernities (2017), and, with Marta Cariello, The Mediterranean Question (2025). In 2022, he was a member of the artistic collective Jimmie Durham & A Stick in the Forest by the Side of the Road at documenta 15. He writes regularly for the Italian daily il Manifesto.

Linguistics Colloquia: Jessica Rett
2025-03-07 13:20 - 15:00 | Humanities 2, Room 259
The Department of Linguistics is pleased to present, Jessica Rett (UC Los Angeles) speaking on Ambidirectionality and apparently expletive negation.
This is an in-person event. You can also join virtually via Zoom.
Some constructions in some languages involve expletive negation (EN): negation that seems to not affect the truth conditions of the sentence. For example, the Italian A è più alto di quanto (non) sia B (“A is taller than B (isn’t)”). I follow others (Greco 2018, Halm and Huszár 2021) in assuming there are two kinds of EN. For me, this amounts to the fact that there are two different ways a negation can fail to affect truth conditions: 1) high EN involves negation that targets non-truth-conditional content, and 2) low EN involves negation that targets clauses that display what I call ambidirectionality: the property of being ambiguous between a proposition and its negation. In this talk, I focus on the latter, arguing that ambidirectionality answers two urgent questions in the context of expletive negation: it explains why we only get (low) EN in scalar constructions (cf. Cépeda 2018); and it explains several subtle semantic differences between a given construction and its (expletive-) negated counterpart.
Over the course of each year, the Linguistics department hosts colloquia by distinguished faculty from around the world. For full speaker and event information, please visit: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/colloquia/index.html

Activating Community Engagement with Imagining America at UC Santa Cruz
2025-03-07 12:00 - 13:30 | Cowell Conference Room, Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
*Note that this event has a new date and location: It will take place in person on March 7 from 12:00 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. at the Cowell Conference Room (132) (map).

Please join us for a special workshop with Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life (IA). Learn about the member benefits, such as fellowships, conferences, research, and resources, available to UCSC faculty, students, and staff. IA will share a toolkit and creative engagement tools to help organize the people, projects, and partners on our campus doing community-engaged work. This discussion will offer strategies for energizing your campus community to engage with community members and uplift public scholarship.
Lunch will be provided, register here:

Presenters: Stephanie Maroney, Managing Director of Imagining America, and Anuj Vaidya, Communications Director of Imagining America.
Public Scholar Tools Offered by Imagining America
Inspired by a three-year action research project, the IA public scholar tools are designed to spark conversation about the joys, contributions, and struggles of public scholars and artists. The Conversation Cards aim to break the silence surrounding elite academic cultures that value a limited range of understandings of what kinds of knowledge matters and to nurture supportive relationships and environments for public scholars to thrive. The Public Scholar Imagination Guide provides a variety of reflection and action tools for anyone trying to improve their own practice and for those interested in making the university a more hospitable, caring, and creative place to nurture public, engaged, and activist scholarship, artmaking, and design.
About Imagining America
The Imagining America consortium (IA) brings together scholars, artists, designers, humanists, and organizers to imagine, study, and enact a more just and liberatory ‘America’ and world. Working across institutional, disciplinary, and community divides, IA strengthens and promotes public scholarship, cultural organizing, and campus change that inspires collective imagination, knowledge-making, and civic action on pressing public issues. Imagining America is guided by 7 values and committed to bringing people together as our full selves in critical yet hopeful spaces to imagine better ways of living, learning and working together.
This event is brought to you by the Art Research Institute, Campus + Community, Humanities Institute, and the Institute for Social Transformation (IST).

Living Writers with Prageeta Sharma
2025-03-06 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Living Writers Series – Winter 2025
Grief Sequence
Not to suppress mourning (suffering)…but to change it, transform it…after Prageeta Sharma & Roland Barthes
Prageeta Sharma is the author of five poetry collections, including Grief Sequence (Wave Books, 2019) and The Opening Question (2004), which won the 2004 Fence Modern Poets Prize. In 2010, she received the Howard Foundation Award. Over the years, she has taught at the New School, Goddard College, and the University of Montana-Missoula. She currently teaches at Pomona College and is the founder of the conference Thinking Its Presence: Race, Creative Writing, Literary Studies, and Art. Her hometown is Framingham, Massachusetts.
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 Puknat Literary Endowment, The Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Laurie Sain Endowment, The Humanities Institute, Bookshop Santa Cruz, and Two Birds Books (where the writers’ books are available for purchase).

Eman Ghanayem - For the Love of Genocide
2025-03-06 16:00 - 18:00 | Cervantes and Velasquez Conference Room, Bay Tree Building, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Center for Racial Justice is proud to present For the Love of Genocide with Eman Ghanayem, Assistant Professor of English at the University of San Diego.
This presentation unravels love in its colonial manifestation as a rationale for genocidal violence. It centers in its analysis the discourse currently used by those supporting and perpetuating genocide in Gaza. Love expressed in contexts of Zionist loyalties and its brand of settler nationalism, originally and across its transit, gives us insight into the feelings that animate acts of violence. In response to it, Palestinian expression, particularly in relation to atrocity and apocalyptical dread, reveals what precedes in fundamental form and must conquer genocide. How must we bear love in the face of annihilation? What ideas of it must we confront? Whose love must we learn?
Sponsored by: The UCSC Center for Racial Justice | Department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies | Department of Feminist Studies | Department of Sociology | The Center for South Asian Studies | The Center for Cultural Studies | FJP | SJP | Institute for Social Transformation.
Part of the Possibilities of Palestinian Refusal: Against Disciplining Knowledge and Movement Speaking Series. For more information, visit the CRJ website: https://crjucsc.com/.

Omer Aijazi - Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir
2025-03-06 10:00 | Virtual Event
The Center for South Asian Studies presents Omer Aijazi speaking on “Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir.”

Omer Aijazi takes us to remote mountainous valleys in the portion of Kashmir under Pakistan’s control, where life has been shaped by recurring environmental disasters and by the violence of the contested India/Pakistan border. In conversation with a radical humanist anthropology and affect theory, held accountable to Black and Indigenous studies, Aijazi offers a decolonial approach to disaster studies centering not on trauma and rupture but rather on repair—the social labor of creating and maintaining viable life, even amidst constant diminishment and world-annihilation.
Omer Aijazi is a critical disaster studies scholar and decolonial ethnographer of borderland South Asia. He teaches at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at the University of Manchester.
This event is a part of the 2024 – 25 Ecologies of Care Lecture Series.

Intimacies of Relation: The Autotheoretical Turn
2025-03-06 - 2025-03-08 | UCSC
Autotheory’s genre-bending form blends critical theory with life writing. Through performances, readings, papers, and embodied writing exercises, this transdisciplinary conference explores where and how autotheory emerged, the range of its practices, and the ways in which its forms recast the relationships between subjects and the worlds that make them. Panels explore autotheory in relationship to language, image, film, visual, and performance art; the autotheoretical subject in dialogue with the psychoanalytic subject and its scenes of desire; autotheory’s encounter with racialized, trans, queer, and differently abled bodies, and autotheoretical practices of decolonial love.
This conference will take place from March 6–8, 2025, at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences (March 6, 2–7 pm) and Humanities 1, Room 210 (March 7 & 8).
See the full program here.

Featuring: Kazim Ali, Alex Brostoff, La Marr Jurelle Bruce, Vilashini Cooppan, Iliana Cuellar, Nadia Ellis, Carla Freccero, rl Goldberg, Che Gossett, Jan Grue, Eva Hayward, Grace Lavery, Summer Kim Lee, Megan Moodie, Micah Perks, Elda María Román, Simone Stirner, Susan Stryker, Kim TallBear, Ronaldo V. Wilson, Arianne Zwartjes

Sponsored by: The University of California Humanities Research Institute, The Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory at UCHRI, The Humanities Institute at UCSC, and The Center for Cultural Studies at UCSC.
Image credit: Ronaldo V. Wilson. Donald and Carmelina’s Heart 2. 2021. Monoprint.

More-Than-Human(ities) Lab Early Career Scholars Share Session
2025-03-05 16:00 - 17:30 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Please join the More-Than-Human(ities) Lab for our first ever “Share Session.” Three of our early-career lab members will share their current projects and invite your feedback in an informal, interactive conversation. Snacks will be served!
About Our Presenters:
Joan Chia-en Chiang – “‘I Won’t Fight For You’: Amis Soldiers in the Japanese Empire during WWII”

Ania Mah Gricuk – “Diasporic Medicine: A Modern History of Chinese Herbal Tea, 1880s-present”

Tracy Liu – “Reimagining the Technological Frontier: Posthuman Entanglements across China, Peru, and Mexico”

This event is presented by the THI More-Than-Human(ities) Laboratory Research Cluster.

Alex Brostoff – The Task of the Trans Translator: Paradoxes of Visibility, Autotheories of Opacity
2025-03-05 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
What is the task of the trans translator? How have paradoxes of visibility bound translation and trans studies in uncanny inversions of each other? And what might autotheoretical methodologies contribute to decolonizing the transgender imaginary in translation? This talk probes how form—from the grammatical to the material and from the social to the structural—shapes and is shaped by the ways in which trans and translation interface with regimes of readability. It argues that the task of the trans translator is to renew trans life with an opacity that thwarts traps of visibility while elucidating the anti-colonial interventions and intertextual solidarities of translation itself. To navigate these counter currents is to surface what I call, following Glissant, a trans poetics of relation.
Alex Brostoff is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College and a 2025 Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Edinburgh. An interdisciplinary scholar and translator, they are currently completing their first book, Unruly Relations: A Critical Reframing of Autotheory (Columbia University Press, under advance contract), which recasts autotheory’s transnational and transdisciplinary place in the political history of trans and queer literature of the Américas. They are the co-editor of two volumes: Autotheories (The MIT Press, 2025) and Reassignments: Trans and Sex from the Clinical to the Critical (Fordham University Press, under advance contract), as well as the co-translator of Indigenous leader Ailton Krenak’s Life Is Not Useful (Polity Press, 2023) and Ancestral Future (Polity Press, 2024). Their scholarship and translations have appeared in ASAP/Journal, Critical Times, Synthesis, Dibur, and South Atlantic Quarterly, as well as at the Museum of Modern Art, and elsewhere.

WINTER 2025 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 2025 Series.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

Jennifer Finney Boylan - Amelia Earhart, Saved from Drowning
2025-03-04 18:00 - 19:30 | Music Center Recital Hall – UCSC, 402 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join us for this year’s Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture featuring Jennifer Finney Boylan, who will deliver her talk titled Amelia Earhart, Saved from Drowning. In this collage of story and song, Jennifer Finney Boylan speculates on the life of Amelia Earhart after the crash. Using that event as a springboard, she considers how our social and political structures constrain human liberty, and the price that women and queer people must pay for freedom.

Doors open at 5:30 pm. The lecture will begin at 6:00 pm and will be followed by a Q&A session at 7:00 pm.
Jennifer Finney Boylan is the author of 19 books including the bestsellers She’s Not There and Mad Honey (with Jodi Picoult). Professor, trans advocate, reality TV star, and former New York Times opinion columnist, Jenny is currently President of PEN America. From 2014-2018, she was National Co-chair of GLAAD.

The Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture Series is a lively forum for the discussion and exploration of ethics-related challenges in human endeavors. The Ethics Lecture is made possible by the Peggy Downes Baskin Humanities Endowment for Interdisciplinary Ethics which enables the Humanities Division to promote a dialogue about ethics and ethics related challenges in an interdisciplinary setting. The endowment was established in honor of Peggy Downes Baskin’s longtime interest in ethical issues across the academic spectrum.

Jennifer Finney Boylan is THI’s 2025 Scholar-in-Residence and this signature event is part of THI’s 25th anniversary.

Benjamin Breen - AI Legibility, Physical Archives, and the Future of Research
2025-03-04 12:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Humanities Institute Research cluster, “Humanities in the Age of AI,” is pleased to invite you to a series of meetings this winter quarter. This meeting is scheduled for March 4th (Tuesday) at noon in HUM 210 with guest speaker, Benjamin Breen speaking on “AI legibility, physical archives, and the future of research.”
As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly adept in fields amenable to reinforcement learning (like mathematics, translation, and coding), forms of research that depend on undigitized archives, tacit or embodied knowledge, and social relationships become more valuable, not less. Through case studies of how current LLMs perform historical analysis, translation, and transcription, I argue that the future of historical research lies not in resistance to AI tools, but in understanding how they complement rather than replace the more intuitive, social, and embodied aspects of research, such as physically visiting archives, conducting interviews, and gathering holistic knowledge of a place, culture, or milieu through physical presence. I will also discuss some related experiments in interactive historical simulations enabled by LLMs which approach the well-known “hallucination problem” as a feature, not a bug.
Benjamin Breen is an associate professor of history at UC Santa Cruz, where he teaches classes on early modern Europe, environmental history, and the history of science, technology, and medicine. From July 2015 to January 2017, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University and a lecturer in Columbia’s history department. He received his PhD in history from the University of Texas at Austin in 2015. His first book, The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2019. His second book, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science, appeared in 2024. He lives in Santa Cruz, California, with his partner Roya Pakzad and their two daughters.

Book Conversation: Kevin Pham - The Architects of Dignity
2025-03-03 15:00 - 17:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Professor Kevin Pham (University of Amsterdam) will be speaking about his 2024 book The Architects of Dignity: Vietnamese Visions of Decolonization on Monday March 3, at 3pm in Humanities 1 room 210.
To attend virtually, join via Zoom here.
In his new book, The Architects of Dignity: Vietnamese Visions of Decolonization (Oxford University Press, 2024), Kevin Pham traces an intergenerational debate among six influential figures in colonial Vietnam. These visionaries debated how to respond to French colonialism, the role of tradition amidst Western influence, and how to transform national shame into dignity. Kevin will also share his personal motivations as a Vietnamese American for writing this book, and how he addresses gaps in representation of Vietnamese political thought and challenges Western-centric perspectives in political theory.
Kevin Pham is an Assistant Professor of Political Theory at the University of Amsterdam. His research introduces Vietnamese political thought to the academic field of political theory, demonstrating its relevance to global discussions on key political concepts. His works are published in esteemed journals, and he co-hosts two podcasts: Nam Phong Dialogues and Viet History Makers. The Architects of Dignity is his first book. More information is available on his website: www.kevindoanpham.com.
Please note: We will read the Introduction and Chapter 1 of the book and discuss it with Kevin following his remarks. But you are also welcome to lurk in the audience if you do not have a chance to read it or do not want to join the conversation. If you want to receive the readings, please email ekeser@ucsc.edu.

This event is presented by the Global Political Thought Working Group.

Banu Bargu with Key MacFarlane & Anna Yegorova – Disembodiment: A Conversation
2025-03-03 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 420, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The History of Consciousness department is pleased to announce the final talk in the Winter 25 session of the HisCon Speaker Series. HistCon Professor Banu Bargu, in discussion with HistCon Grads Key MacFarlane & Anna Yegrovoa will present “Disembodiment: A Conversation” on Monday, March 3, at 1pm in Hum 1 Rm 420 with a virtual attendance option.
Please register here in advance for virtual access.
About “Disembodiment: A Conversation”
Join us for an engaging conversation on Disembodiment: Corporeal Politics of Radical Refusal, Banu Bargu’s recent book, which examines bodily agency with a focus on forms of self-destruction and self-injury. The conversation will offer an overview of the main philosophical problems Disembodiment addresses and explore the book’s central conceptual apparatus and interpretative moves. What does it mean to do global critical theory in our present? How should it relate to the dominant “canon” of Western philosophy and political thought? Discussing these and related questions, the conversation will explore how a materialist approach, which takes the suffering body as its normative compass, may make visible subterranean historical lineages as well as contemporary practices to expand our understanding of agency, dignity, and globality alike.
Banu Bargu is Professor of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons (Columbia University Press, 2014), which received the Foundations of Political Theory First Book Prize given by the American Political Science Association and was named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice. Her new book, Disembodiment: Corporeal Politics of Radical Refusal (Oxford University Press, 2024), examines self-destruction, self-injury, and radical self-endangerment as unconventional performances of resistance and refusal. Her edited collections include Turkey’s Necropolitical Laboratory: Democracy, Violence, and Resistance (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), The Political Encounter with Althusser (special issue of Rethinking Marxism, 2019, co-edited with Robyn Marasco) and Feminism, Capitalism, and Critique: Essays in Honor of Nancy Fraser (Palgrave, 2017, co-edited with Chiara Bottici). Banu Bargu currently serves as the editor of Political Theory.
Key MacFarlane is a PhD Candidate in the History of Consciousness department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research focuses on the relationship between phenomenology and Marxism, and its contributions to a political theory of experience. He is co-editing a special issue in Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space on the problem of space in Frankfurt School critical theory, and has articles published or forthcoming on the political geography of waste, the spatial politics of memory, and Henri Lefebvre’s theory of moments.
Anna Yegorova is a second-year PhD student in the History of Consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz. Her articles on the critique of the linear conception of history, multitemporality, class, and identity have been published in Russian-language journals, including Logos, Neprikosnovenny Zapas, and Sociologia Vlasti. She is also a member of the Posle.media editorial collective, where she has published two articles: “Did Lenin Create Ukraine? On the Right of Nations to Self-Determination and Marxism” and “Adorno in the Kremlin.” Her current research draws on, and seeks to contribute to, political and social philosophy, Marxism, anti-, de-, and post-colonial theory, the history of anticolonial struggles, empires and imperialism, nationalism, federalism, and secularization.

Evgeny Morozov - AI and its Others: Cold War Legacies, Neoliberal Futures, and the Fight for Ecological Reason
2025-02-28 16:30 - 18:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Evgeny Morozov will be on campus Friday afternoon, February 28 to talk about his recent Boston Review article “The AI We Deserve.”
Evgeny Morozov holds a PhD in History of Science from Harvard University. He is the founder of “The Syllabus” and author of The Net Delusion (2011) and To Save Everything, Click Here (2013).

An Evening with Colin Winnette
2025-02-27 19:00 | Kresge Collge – A Lounge
As part of Kresge’s Writers House Reading Series, Kresge’s Media and Society presents an evening with novelist and short-story writer Colin Winnette, who will be giving a reading followed by Q&A.
The event will start at 7pm in the Kresge A Lounge (the first-floor lounge in one of the new residence halls).
Colin Winnette is the author of several books, including Coyote, Haints Stay, The Job of the Wasp, and most recently Users, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Winnette’s writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Believer, and The Paris Review Daily, among many others.

Living Writers with Hannah Sanghee Park
2025-02-27 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Living Writers Series – Winter 2025
Grief Sequence
Not to suppress mourning (suffering)…but to change it, transform it…after Prageeta Sharma & Roland Barthes
Hannah Sanghee Park is the author of two poetry collections. a chapbook, Ode Days Ode (2011) and The Same-Different (2015), which won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. In 2013, she was awarded the Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Her hometown is Federal Way, Washington, and she currently resides in Los Angeles, California.
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 Puknat Literary Endowment, The Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Laurie Sain Endowment, The Humanities Institute, Bookshop Santa Cruz, and Two Birds Books (where the writers’ books are available for purchase).

Bookshop Santa Cruz Presents: Jennifer Finney Boylan | CLEAVAGE: MEN, WOMEN, AND THE SPACE BETWEEN US
2025-02-26 19:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
What is the difference between men and women? In her new book Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us, Jennifer Finney Boylan, bestselling author of She’s Not There and co-author of Mad Honey with Jodi Picoult, examines the divisions—as well as the common ground—between the genders, and reflects on her own experiences, both difficult and joyful, as a transgender American.

Jennifer Finney Boylan is the author of nineteen books, including Mad Honey, coauthored with Jodi Picoult. Her memoir, She’s Not There, was the first bestselling work by a transgender American. Since 2014, she has been the inaugural Anna Quindlen Writer in Residence at Barnard College of Columbia University; she is also on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference of Middlebury College and the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy. She is the President of PEN America, and from 2011 to 2018 she was a member of the Board of Directors of GLAAD, including four years as national cochair. In 2022-23 she was a Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She graduated from Wesleyan University and Johns Hopkins, and she holds doctorates honoris causafrom Sarah Lawrence College, the New School, and Wesleyan University. For many years she was a contributing opinion writer for the opinion section of the New York Times. Her work has also appeared in the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, Literary Hub, Down East, and many other publications. She lives in Maine and New York with her wife, Deirdre. They have two children: a daughter, Zai, and a son, Sean.
More information at: Bookshop Santa Cruz – Jennifer Finney Boylan
Co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

Undiscovered Shakespeare: Timon of Athens - Episode 3
2025-02-26 19:00 | Virtual Event
Join us for this year’s, Undiscovered Shakespeare featuring Timon of Athens (1606), a late play focusing on the corrosive effects of prodigality and ingratitude in an apparently democratic society. Gretchen Minton, Professor of English at the University of Montana, Bozeman and the editor of the most recent Arden edition of the play, will be the production’s visiting scholar.

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.
Gretchen Minton is a Shakespeare scholar and Professor of English at Montana State University. She is the editor and author of several works, including the award-winning Shakespeare in Montana, and she works frequently as a dramaturg, script adaptor, and director.

POSTPONED - Humanities Campus to Career: Law Panel
2025-02-26 16:00 - 18:00 | Merrill Provost House, Provost's Residence, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Please stay tuned for a new date!

Are you interested in a career in the legal field? Come learn about careers in law from current and former attorneys with Humanities backgrounds.
Appetizers and light refreshments will be served.

Sarah Cunniff (she/her) attended Stevenson College at UC Santa Cruz, where she majored in French Literature. After law school, she worked in large and small law firms and in-house at Levi Strauss. Most recently she spent a dozen years at the Career Development Office at Berkeley Law school, where she supported students in their job searches, with a special affinity for students with humanities backgrounds.
Chris Khasho (he/him) graduated from UC Santa Cruz in 2013 with a B.A. in Philosophy and is now a successful young attorney in Los Angeles. Chris represents clients in a broad array of business litigation matters and counsels them in corporate and transactional matters at Cypress LLP, a premier business litigation firm in Century City. Chris is passionate about giving back to his community and helping clients resolve their legal issues.
Ritu Goswamy (they/them) is a Staff Attorney with the UC Immigrant Legal Services Center and serves UC Santa Cruz. They are a graduate from Barnard College, Columbia University and Boston College (Joint J.D./M.S.W. degrees). Prior to joining the Center, Ritu worked as a child welfare worker in Oakland, and as an attorney with the Legal Aid Society – Employment Law Center (now Legal Aid at Work) and Legal Advocates for Children & Youth (part of the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley).
Jalyn Mitchell (she/her) is a proud UCSC College Ten Alum and majored in English Language Literature with a minor in Legal Studies. She graduated from Law School from Loyola University in Chicago and went to work in San Jose at the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley where she represented people on long term psychiatric holds with their due process right to a hearing to leave the hospital. Currently and for the last 2.5 years, she has represented young people on a variety of issues including restraining orders, traffic tickets, education law, and guardianships.
Learn more about the panelists here.
This event is presented by the Employing Humanities.

CANCELLED - Nora Khan – Discernment: Unruly Images, Synthetic Media, and Evolving Critical Impulse
2025-02-26 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
What can criticism offer us in a world of unruly generative images and synthetic media? What precise language might we use for machine learning’s impact, or the wake of an algorithm? How must our practices of discernment and the critical impulse evolve in response to computational developments, to perhaps be more resilient and responsive?
This talk invites one to consider how our language might move with ‘intelligent’ systems and beings that simulate liveness and likeness. To navigate a present and future dominated by synthetic media, and created by predictive systems, we take up a practice of seeing through systems. This talk first explores the craft of developing a hybrid, strategic, collective and dissident criticism of technology. It second reviews cases of baffling, seemingly inarticulable experiences from early software experiments and artists’ interventions, into AI/ML. Third, it explores the evolution of language in response to material and symbolic systems that dramatically shape our creative approaches and cognition. Throughout, the talk explores evolving critical methods that help us better situate ourselves to identify a vast range of hidden fictions and beliefs about what technology is meant to do and be.

WINTER 2025 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 2025 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
2025-02-25 11:30 - 12:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Grants and Fellowships for Scholars in the Humanities
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. This workshop will 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 (Faculty Director at The Humanities Institute and Professor of Linguistics) Alma Heckman (Steering Committee Member at The Humanities Institute and Associate Professor of History & Jewish Studies), and Saskia Nauenberg Dunkell (Research Programs and Communications Director at The Humanities Institute).

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

Mediterranean Slavery Since the 18th Century and the Historical Study of Race: M’hamed Oualdi in Conversation with Shreya Parikh
2025-02-24 10:00 | Virtual Event
From ancient times through abolition, scholars have often described slavery in the Mediterranean region as being relatively unaffected by the history of racial thought. Instead, many historians have focused on the decisive role played by religion. At the same time, however, it is undeniable that dark-skinned enslaved people occupied a more subordinate position in comparison with other dominated groups. Presented by the Center for the Middle East and North Africa, this talk investigates whether theories of race and racism can elucidate the social, political, and economic dimensions of slavery in the Mediterranean, while also asking how studying slavery in the Mediterranean might provide a different understanding of racialization during the early modern period.

M’hamed Oualdi is a Professor at the European University Institute, Florence. Before joining the EUI, he taught at Sciences Po-Paris and Princeton University. He is supervising a European Research Council-funded project about the demise of slavery in the Mediterranean from the mid-18th century to the 1930s. He is the author of Esclaves et maîtres. Les mamelouks au service des beys de Tunis du XVIIe siècle aux années 1880 (Publications de la Sorbonne, 2011) and A Slave between Empires (Columbia University Press, 2020).
Shreya Parikh is a lecturer and affiliated researcher at Sciences Po Paris. She received a Dual Ph.D. in Political Science and in Sociology from Sciences Po and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2024. Her dissertation, Mirages of Race: Blackness, Racialization, and the Black Movement in Tunisia, examines the intersections of race, migration, and citizenship in the production of Blackness in contemporary Tunisia. She is currently working on adapting her dissertation manuscript into a book.

Winter 2025 Aurora Lecture: G. S. Sahota
2025-02-20 15:30 - 17:00 | Virtual and In Person
Join us as we welcome G.S. Sahota—Aurora Chair in Sikh and Punjabi Studies and Associate Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz for a conversation on Equality of the Minor: Ambedkar’s Critical Legacy Today. This engaging discussion will take place on February 20, 2025 at 3:30 PM in Humanities 1, Room 202. You can also join us virtually via Zoom:

This event is a part of the Winter 2025 Aurora Lecture series.

Undiscovered Shakespeare: Timon of Athens - Episode 2
2025-02-19 19:00 | Virtual Event

Ajay Skaria – The Part of the Indigenous: Adivasis and the Subaltern Intimation of Freedom
2025-02-19 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This talk attends to what the Subaltern Studies tradition begins to think and gives to our own times to think. The emergence of Subaltern Studies was part of the increasing prominence of the “New Social Movements,” new because they were focused more on oppression than exploitation. Recognizing this allows us to discern that the Subaltern Studies project is driven by a subaltern intimation of freedom—a freedom that recognizes that domination takes the form of not only exploitation but oppression, and a freedom that, even as it exits subalternity, seeks not to make a new group subaltern in either way. Revisiting my 1999 book, Hybrid Histories, I explore this subaltern intimation of freedom by focusing on 1) how it played a role in the turn away from a focus on subaltern autonomy; 2) how the community constituted by it differs from those constituted by claims to oppression such as those made by Hindu nationalists or white nationalists; and 3) how it allows us to read differently the claim to indigeneity involved in the identity “Adivasi.”
Ajay Skaria studied Political Science and History at Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara, during which he also worked as a journalist for Indian Express. He teaches at the University of Minnesota. A member of the Subaltern Studies editorial collective from 1995 till its dissolution, he is one of the co-editors of Subaltern Studies Vol. XII, and the author of Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers and Wildness in Western India (1999) and Unconditional Equality: Gandhi’s Religion of Resistance (2016). He is currently completing a collection of essays, Thinking With Gandhi and Ambedkar, and is also working on another book, Ambedkar’s Buddhism.

WINTER 2025 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 2025 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.

Valentin Lopez – Amah Mutsun Tribal History & Importance of Traditional Land Stewardship
2025-02-19 09:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Join us as we welcome Valentin Lopez, Chairman of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band for his talk “Amah Mutsun Tribal History & Importance of Traditional Land Stewardship.”
Valentin Lopez is the Chairman of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, one of three historic tribes that are recognized as Ohlone. The Amah Mutsun are comprised of the indigenous descendants forcibly taken to Missions San Juan Bautista and Santa Cruz. Chairman Lopez is also the President of the Amah Mutsun Land Trust which was established in 2012. He is a Native American Advisor to the University of California, Office of the President. He is also a Native American Adviser to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). The Amah Mutsun are currently working to restore their traditional indigenous knowledge regarding land stewardship and ensuring that truthful history is taught. Consequently, the Amah Mutsun are very active in conservation and protection efforts within their traditional tribal territory. Chairman Lopez is working to restore the Mutsun Language and is a traditional Mutsun singer and dancer.
This event is presented by the THI More-Than-Human(ities) Laboratory Research Cluster.

A Conversation with Bay Area Journalist Joe Eskenazi
2025-02-18 19:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
In partnership with City on a Hill Press and with support from The Humanities Institute and The Alumni Association, Kresge’s Media and Society Series presents an evening with acclaimed journalist Joe Eskenazi, who will speak to the nuts and bolts of regionally rooted reporting, and survey several of his most impactful stories.
Joe Eskenazi is the managing editor of Mission Local, and has written for the Guardian, San Francisco Public Press, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner, and SF Weekly, where he was a regular columnist from 2007 to 2015. He has also served as a senior editor at San Francisco Magazine.

Katie Shilton - Trust, Trustworthiness and Participation: Findings From a Survey of Global Projects Navigating Participatory Forms of AI
2025-02-18 12:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This meeting is scheduled for February 18th (Tuesday) at noon in HUM 210 with guest speaker, Katie Shilton speaking on “Trust, Trustworthiness and Participation: Findings From a Survey of Global Projects Navigating Participatory Forms of AI.”
As the discourse on responsible and trustworthy AI intensifies, Participatory AI (PAI) presents a compelling approach to the democratic development of automated technologies. But how should we think about how and whether participatory methods increase trust in, and the trustworthiness of, AI systems? This talk will report on a systematic examination of the landscape of methods and theoretical lenses used in global participatory AI projects, and connect those methods and lenses to trust building. The talk will explore differences in theoretical frameworks, participation methods, and the details of shared tasks within the AI lifecycle across sectors and geographies. Our findings reveal an evolving definition of PAI, with actors implementing diverse methods and shared tasks. Focusing on shared tasks also provides a lens for analyzing how participation can build trust in, and trustworthiness of, AI systems. Our analysis reveals that participation alone is not necessarily a straightforward approach to building public trust in AI technologies, but that the promise of participation lies in trustworthiness by increasing the diversity of expertise engaged in alignment and decision-making within AI technologies.
Katie Shilton is a professor in the College of Information at the University of Maryland, College Park, and is currently visiting faculty in Computational Media at UCSC. Her research focuses on technology and data ethics. She is a co-PI of the NSF Institute for Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence in Law & Society (TRAILS) and a co-PI of the UMD Values-Centered Artificial Intelligence (VCAI) initiative. She was also recently the PI of the PERVADE project, a multi-campus collaboration focused on big data research ethics. Other projects include improving online content moderation with human-in-the-loop machine learning techniques and designing experiential data ethics education. Katie received a B.A. from Oberlin College, a Master of Library and Information Science from UCLA and a Ph.D. in Information Studies from UCLA.

The Humanities Institute Research cluster, “Humanities in the Age of AI,” is pleased to invite you to a series of meetings this winter quarter. The research cluster boasts a diverse group of core participants. This includes esteemed faculty members from various disciplines, graduate students representing politics, history, literature, philosophy, feminist studies, and film and visual studies, and undergraduate scholars from computer science, computational media, and creative writing.

Thomas Haigh--Artificial Intelligence: The Brand That Wouldn't Die
2025-02-13 18:00 | Cultural Center at Merrill, Merrill Cultural Center, UC Santa Cruz, Merrill College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join us for this undergraduate-facing event at the Merrill Cultural Center featuring leading historian of computing, Thomas Haigh. He will contextualize the current Artificial Intelligence hype in the longer history of boom and bust for for the AI brand, critiquing claims made for large language models. Pizza will be served and all are welcome. Presented by Merrill College/Ming Ong Tech Cluster and co-sponsored by Humanizing Technology and the Humanities Division.
Thomas Haigh is lead author of A New History of Modern Computing (MIT Press, 2022) and ENIAC In Action: Making & Remaking the Modern Computer (MIT Press, 2016) and a regular contributor to Communications of the ACM.

Derek Penslar - Is Israel a Settler-Colonial State?
2025-02-13 18:00 | Virtual Event
Due to the atmospheric river event effecting Santa Cruz County, this event will now take place via Zoom. Everyone who has RSVP’d for the event will receive a Zoom link. Anyone interested in attending the virtual event can register below using the “register” button.

The Center for Jewish Studies Presents The Helen Diller Distinguished Lecture in Jewish Studies featuring Derek Penslar. Derek Penslar will be presenting his talk titled Is Israel a Settler-Colonial State?

Since the 1960s, referencing Israel as settler-colonial has been a common polemical practice, a means of delegitimization of the state of Israel and those who believe in its right to exist. But over this same period, scholars have done serious work on the relationship between Zionism, Israel, and settler-colonialism. This talk will separate the analytical from the polemic threads in the discourse on Israel and settler-colonialism. It will propose a new vocabulary, both more flexible and precise, to describe Israel and that can be more conducive to a just resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle.
Derek Penslar Harvard University
Derek Penslar is the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History and the Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. He has published a dozen books, most recently Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader (2020; German ed. 2022); and Zionism: An Emotional State (2023). He is currently writing a book titled The War for Palestine, 1947-1949: A Global History. He is a past president of the American Academy for Jewish Research, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and an Honorary Fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford.

Every year, the Jewish Studies Department honors Helen Diller, whose generous endowment continues to provide crucial support to Jewish Studies at UC Santa Cruz, by hosting a public lecture on campus by an internationally recognized scholar. See a full list of previous Diller lectures here.
This event is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute.

Undiscovered Shakespeare: Timon of Athens - Episode 1
2025-02-12 19:00 - 20:30 | Virtual Event

Career Workshop: Using LinkedIn to Accelerate Your Career
2025-02-12 13:30 - 14:30 | Humanities 2, Room 259
LinkedIn can be a powerful tool to leverage in your career journey. Join us for a fast-paced and practical workshop where you’ll learn how to create a professional and dynamic LinkedIn profile, as well as how to use various LinkedIn resources to improve your networking and job search skills!

This event is presented by the Employing Humanities.

La Marr Jurelle Bruce – COME OUTSIDE: Black Love, Open Sky
2025-02-12 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
This presentation is culled from The Afromantic: Black Love Out Yonder, a book-length cultural history, critical theory, aesthetic expression, and existential assertion of B/black love outside. The project will follow black love to cookouts, carnivals, rooftops, rallies, jazz funerals, cruising spots, garden plots, hush harbors, distant stars, and forest clearings—emphasizing ways of loving that escape and exceed normative enclosures of Western modernity. In a public sphere overrun with spectacles of black death outside, I plan to compile a counter-archive and counter-narrative of B/black love that can breathe under open sky, in the open air.
La Marr Jurelle Bruce is a philosopher, fever dreamer, interdisciplinary humanities scholar, first-generation college graduate, and Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Much of his scholarship explores and activates B/black, queer, and mad expressive cultures—spanning literature, music, film, theatre, and the art and aesthetics of quotidian life. Dr. Bruce’s writing is featured or forthcoming in African American Review, American Quarterly, The Black Scholar, GLQ, Social Text, TDR, and several anthologies. His debut book, How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity (2021), earned the Modern Language Association’s First Book Prize.

WINTER 2025 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 2025 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.

Deep Read Salon: Revisiting Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
2025-02-11 18:00 - 19:30 | Virtual Event
Join us for a Deep Read salon on Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn featuring UC Santa Cruz Professor of Literature and Twain scholar, Susan Gillman. Prof. Gillman will discuss Twain’s novel in the context of 19th-century popular literature and political history and explore its broader cultural influence and reach as our American idol and target. She’ll help lay the groundwork for understanding this year’s Deep Read book, Percival Everett’s James, a rewriting of Huckleberry Finn that engages with both Twain’s novel and legacy. After delivering a brief lecture, Prof. Gillman will be in conversation with Vilashini Cooppan (UCSC Professor of Literature, Deep Read Faculty Co-Lead) and Laura Martin (UCSC Lecturer, Deep Read Faculty Co-Lead).

The Deep Read is an annual program of The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz. We invite curious minds to think deeply about books and the most pressing issues of our contemporary moment.

Armen Khatchatourov - Truths and Rewards of Algorithmic Governmentality: A Heuristic Approach to Normativity at Play in AI Systems
2025-02-11 12:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Join us for a thought-provoking talk with Armen Khatchatourov on “Truths and Rewards of Algorithmic Governmentality: A Heuristic Approach to Normativity at Play in AI Systems.”
If you are unable to make it in person, you can attend virtually via Zoom.
The rapid proliferation of AI-based systems has transformed how we understand and relate to normativity. Drawing on Foucault’s insights, Armen Khatchatourov will explore how social norms are translated into dynamic, adaptable AI systems and how these technologies redefine our relationship with normativity through their opacity and adjustability. This talk will present a heuristic approach to unpacking the ways normative concepts operate within AI technologies and their implications for society and governance.
Armen Khatchatourov is an Associate Professor of Information and Communication Sciences at the DICEN-IdF Lab, University Gustave Eiffel, Paris, France. With a dual background in engineering and the philosophy of technology, Armen has held research positions at leading institutions such as Institut Mines-Télécom and Sony Computer Science Lab Paris. His work spans digital identities, privacy, smart cities, and the societal impacts of Big Data and AI. He is the author of Digital Identities in Tension: Between Autonomy and Control (ISTE/Wiley, 2019) and Corps Connectés. Figures, Fragments, Discours (Presses des Mines, 2022), and serves as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Études Digitales.

The Humanities Institute Research cluster, “Humanities in the Age of AI,” is pleased to invite you to a series of meetings this winter quarter. The research cluster boasts a diverse group of core participants. This includes esteemed faculty members from various disciplines, graduate students representing politics, history, literature, philosophy, feminist studies, and film and visual studies, and undergraduate scholars from computer science, computational media, and creative writing.

Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Lecture: "Primary Wonder: Spirituality, Art, and Nature" with Douglas E. Christie
2025-02-10 16:00 - 17:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Join us for the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Lecture: “Primary Wonder: Spirituality, Art, and Nature” with Douglas E. Christie, Professor Emeritus in the Theological Studies Department at Loyola Marymount University.
“Primary wonder.” Poet Denise Levertov describes this as the feeling that sometimes arises within us when we encounter “the mystery/that there is anything, anything at all/let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,/rather than void.” It is an idea resonant with spiritual meaning, but sometimes more accessible to us through art, poetry and nature than through traditional religious practice. This lecture will consider the role art and poetry can play in helping us recover a spirituality of primary wonder–beyond traditional religious practice–especially in relation to the natural world.
Professor Christie is the author of The Word in The Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism (Oxford, 1993), The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Note for a Contemplative Ecology (Oxford, 2013), and The Insurmountable Darkness of Love: Mysticism, Loss and the Common Life (Oxford, 2022). He has been awarded fellowships from the Luce Foundation, the Lilly Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. From 2013-2015 he served as Co-director of the Casa de la Mateada study abroad program in Córdoba, Argentina, a program rooted in the Jesuit vision of education for solidarity. He lives with his family in Los Angeles. He is currently working on a book on the desert as spiritual landscape.
This event is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute and the Council of Provosts.

Riccardo Bellofiore & Giovanna Vertova – Nature, Women, and Capital: A Critical Reconsideration
2025-02-10 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 420, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join us as we continue the Winter 25 session of the HistCon Speaker Series next week! Riccardo Bellofiore & Giovanna Vertova, University of Bergamo (the class[y] economists) will give their talk “Nature, Women, and Capital: A Critical Reconsideration” on Monday, February 10, at 1pm in Hum 1 Rm 420.
If you are unable to make it in person, you can register to attend virtually via the Zoom at this link.
About Nature, Women, and Capital: A Critical Reconsideration:
In the last decades there has been a large debate of what may be referred to as the “gender question” and the “nature question”. Large parts of feminism and ecologism have been critical of the Marxian approach, while Marxists have never really engaged in a debate, either seen the encounter as unproblematical or dismissing it altogether. Discussing also aspects of the Italian debate, we argue that feminism and ecologism need finally to meet Marx, at least the Marx where the centrality of the working condition in capitalism is at the same time a criticism of the overwhelming centrality of production. Common misconceptions of what is the meaning of the “primacy of labour” point of view, as well as about domestic labour and social reproduction, need to be clarified and dispelled.
Riccardo Bellofiore, formerly Professor of Political Economy at the University of Bergamo (Italy), is interested in the Marxian theory of value and crisis, the development and crisis of capitalism, the endogenous theories of money, the history of economic thought and economic philosophy. He has published ‘The Adventures of Vergesellschaftung’ (in Consecutio Rerum, 2018) and, with Giovanna Vertova, The Great Recession and the Contradiction of Contemporary Capitalism (Edward Elgar, 2014). He has recently co-edited, in English with Tommaso Redolfi Riva, Marx: Key Concepts ((Edward Elgar, 2024) and, with Stefano Breda, the Italian translation of Michael Heinrich’s Die Wissenschaft vom Wert [Science of Value] (Pgreco, 2024). With Giovanna Vertova he runs the facebook page Economisti di Classe.
Giovanna Vertova, Assistant Professor of Political Economy at the University of Bergamo (Italy), is interested in the spatial dimension of economics, with a focus on the globalization debate; the economics of innovation, especially in reference to national innovation systems; gender and feminist economics, especially in relation to the labor market. With Riccardo Bellofiore she has published The Great Recession and the Contradiction of Contemporary Capitalism (Edward Elgar, 2014). She has recently published chapters for Spinger’s and Elgar’s collective volumes and articles in scientific journals, on the themes of the permanent catastrophe of capitalism, gender mainstreaming, and the so-called Great Resignation. With Riccardo Bellofiore she runs the facebook page Economisti di Classe.

Bookshop Santa Cruz Presents: Neko Case | THE HARDER I FIGHT THE MORE I LOVE YOU
2025-02-07 19:00 - 20:30 | Rio Theater, 1205 Soquel Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95062, United States
Beloved Grammy-nominated musician Neko Case will share her new book, THE HARDER I FIGHT THE MORE I LOVE YOU — a “heartbreaking and funny” memoir of a poverty-stricken childhood, obsessive desires, and indispensable friendships that reflects on the way art and music and a deep connection to nature guided her journey towards stardom (Maggie Smith, NYT bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful).

Singer, songwriter, music producer, visual artist, and writer Neko Case has built a career with her distinctive style and musical versatility. In addition to her numerous critically-acclaimed and Grammy-nominated solo records, Case is a founding member of The New Pornographers and has recorded a collaborative album with k.d. lang and Laura Veirs. She currently authors the popular bi-weekly Substack newsletter “Entering the Lung” and is writing the music for a high-profile Broadway production.
Neko Case has long been revered as one of music’s most influential artists, whose authenticity, lyrical storytelling, and sly wit have endeared her to a legion of critics, musicians, and lifelong fans. In THE HARDER I FIGHT THE MORE I LOVE YOU, Case brings her trademark candor and precision to a memoir that traces her evolution from an invisible girl “raised by two dogs and a space heater” in rural Washington state to her improbable emergence as an internationally-acclaimed talent.
In luminous, sharp-edged prose, Case shows readers what it’s like to be left alone for hours and hours as a child, to take refuge in the woods around her home, and to channel the monotony and loneliness and joy that comes from music, camaraderie, and shared experience into art.
THE HARDER I FIGHT THE MORE I LOVE YOU is a rebellious meditation on identity and corruption, and a manifesto on how to make space for ourselves in this world, despite the obstacles we face.
More information at: Bookshop Santa Cruz – Neko Case
Co-sponsored by Streetlight Records and The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

Dixita Deka--After Insurgency: Farming Journeys and Rehabilitation in Northeast India
2025-02-06 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Since India’s independence in 1947, militarization, the extractive regime, and capital have significantly transformed the agrarian landscape in Northeast India. This talk is based on ongoing ethnographic work in Assam among the former insurgents of the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) who have taken up farming. Reclaiming the fields and the commons has been a mammoth task for communities and surrendered insurgents alike. In the absence of a state rehabilitation program, grassroots farming initiatives started by former ULFA insurgents in rural Assam allow them to reconnect with the community, earn a livelihood, and work with dignity. In doing so, insurgents and communities are paving the path for a sustainable ecosystem in the aftermath of insurgency.
Dixita Deka is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Program in Agrarian Studies at MacMillan Center, Yale University, New Haven, CT. Her research interests include insurgency in Northeast India, gender studies, and food cultures in the Eastern Himalayas.

This talk will be in person and online. To attend on Zoom, register here. Presented by the Center for South Asian Studies (CSAS), this event is part of the Ecologies of Care Lecture Series. Learn more about the series here: https://csas.ucsc.edu/2024-25-events/

Radhika Govindrajan — “It’s Not Love, It’s Deception”: The Affective Politics of Law and Majoritarianism in Himalayan India
2025-02-05 15:30 | Social Sciences 1, Room 261, Social Sciences 1‎ University of California Santa Cruz, College Ten, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Winter 2025 Anthropology Colloquium Series, “It’s Not Love, It’s Deception”: The Affective Politics of Law and Majoritarianism in Himalayan India with Radhika Govindrajan.
This talk draws on ethnographic research in Himalayan India to explore how majoritarian feeling creeps into the legal domain by exploring the contingent production of sentiment among state officials who legislate inter-religious relationships.
Radhika Govindrajan is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. She is the author of Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018. She is currently working on a book manuscript that explores how the question of the village in contemporary India is tangled up with the political economy of sex and sexuality.
This talk is co-sponsored by the Center for South Asian Studies.

Humanities at Work: Informational Interviewing
2025-02-05 13:30 - 14:30 | Humanities 2, Room 259
Wondering about your career options? Your curiosity is one of your greatest assets for discovering career possibilities, for building your network, and for creating a fulfilling professional life. Join this interactive workshop to learn about exploring your career options and growing your network with the practice of informational interviewing.

Free copies of Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans for all those who register by Friday 1/31 and attend the event.
This event is presented by the Employing Humanities.

Paul North & Paul Reitter – Notes on Translating Marx’s Capital
2025-02-05 12:15 - 13:30 | Virtual and In Person
This presentation will discuss the history of Anglophone translations of Capital (Vol. 1) Karl Marx’s magnus opus, paying particular attention to the different circumstances that have shaped important translation decisions. It will also identify some of the major translation challenges the text poses and ask how the meaning of the Capital varies according to how we respond to those challenges.
This event will be held in Humanities 1 Room 210, as well as via Zoom. Register here for the Zoom link.
Paul Reitter teaches in the German department at Ohio State University. He is the author, most recently, of Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age (cowritten with Chad Wellmon). His articles and essays have appeared in venues ranging from Representations to The New York Review of Books.

Paul North is Maurice Natanson Professor of German at Yale University. He teaches and writes critical theory. His books include The Problem of Distraction (Stanford University Press, 2011), The Yield: Kafka’s Atheological Reformation (Stanford University Press, 2015), Bizarre-Privileged Items in the Universe: The Logic of Likeness (Princeton University Press, 2021), and a new translation and critical reading edition of Marx’s Capital, Volume 1 (Princeton University Press, 2024).
This talk is hosted in collaboration with History of Consciousness and is co-sponsored by the UC’s Interdisciplinary Marxism Working Group (IMWG), the Marxist Institute for Research (MIR), UC Berkeley’s Department of German Languages and Literatures, UC Berkeley’s Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley’s Department of English and Program in Critical Theory.

WINTER 2025 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 2025 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 Dawn is Too Far: Stories of Iranian-American Life – Film Screening and Discussion with Co-Director/Executive Producer, Dr. Persis Karim
2025-02-03 17:20 - 19:00 | Communications 150, Studio C
Join us for a screening of the film, The Dawn is Too Far: Stories of Iranian-American Life, and a discussion with the film’s Co-Director and Executive Producer, Persis Karim, who will be in conversation with UCSC PhD candidate, Shirin Towfiq. The film shares a multi-generational perspective of those who came to the U.S. as students, refugees, and exiles in the context of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The film charts the longer history of Iranian Americans in the San Francisco Bay area and the ways they have been impacted by and contributed to the region. The event is presented by the Center for Middle East and North Africa and the Department of Film and Digital Media.
Persis Karim is the director of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University where she also teaches in the Department of Humanities and Comparative and World Literature. She is the editor of three anthologies of Iranian diasporic literature, and she has published numerous articles about Iranian diasporic literature and culture for academic journals as well as poetry and essays in non-academic publications. The Dawn is Too Far: Stories of Iranian-American Life is her first film and reflects her interest in documenting and sharing the larger history and personal stories of those who are part of the global Iranian diaspora. She co-directed and co-produced the film with Soumyaa Behrens. Karim received her Master’s degree in Middle East Studies and her PhD in Comparative Literature from UT Austin. She is also a poet.

Zhongmin Chen — "Re-evaluating the Development of the Chinese Language"
2025-02-03 13:20 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The Fusional Linguistics Initiative presents, Zhongmin Chen (Fudan University) speaking on “Re-evaluating the Development of the Chinese Language: the ‘One-center Multi-Layer’ Development Hypothesis.” This talk will take place Monday, February 3 at 1:20pm in Humanities 1 – Room 210.
Language is humanity’s most vital tool for communication, making the study of its evolution inherently linked to the dynamics of human activity, society, history, and other influencing factors. Based on the historical and cultural contexts of language development, the evolution of language can be broadly categorized into three models:
1. The Family Tree Model – exemplified by Indo-European languages.
2. The Polycentric Mixed Model – observed in regions such as Australia, Papua New Guinea, and the Balkans.
3. The One-Center Multi-Layer Model – characteristic of East and Southeast Asian languages, including Chinese.
This presentation delves into the historical and social contexts underlying these evolutionary models and highlights their defining characteristics. It also demonstrates the methodology used to analyze historical linguistic layers, with examples drawn from the lexical, syntactic, and phonetic features of various Chinese dialects and East Asian languages.
Zhongmin Chen (陈忠敏) is Professor of Chinese Linguistics at Fudan University (Shanghai). He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from University of California, Berkeley. He works on experimental phonetics, historical linguistics, and Chinese dialectology.

American Patchwork Quartet
2025-01-31 19:00 | Kuumbwa Jazz Center
The Humanities Institute and Kuumbwa Jazz is pleased to present American Patchwork Quartet (APQ) on Friday, January 31, 2025 at 7:00PM!
Join the live concert and support American Patchwork Quartet’s mission to reclaim the immigrant soul of American Roots Music as APQ weaves modern immigrant dreams into songs.

American Patchwork Quartet (APQ), led by multi-Grammy award-winning guitarist/vocalist Clay Ross, binds timeless American folk songs with jazz sophistication, country twang, West African hypnotics, and East Asian ornamentation. APQ’s sound is a masterful confluence of tradition and innovation, transcending culture, politics, and ideology.
A southern-born roots music aficionado, Ross is also the founder of the world-renowned Gullah group Ranky Tanky. In APQ, Ross intertwines with other Grammy-winning artists: Falguni Shah, an eleventh-generation Hindustani classical vocalist, Yasushi Nakamura, an internationally acclaimed Issei jazz bassist, and Clarence Penn, a drumming protégée of Ellis Marsalis whose fibers were honed by African American church traditions.
APQ resonates as a potent symbol of unity in diversity. It stands testament to the notion that, from a collage of varied backgrounds, a coherent and beautiful whole can be fashioned. Mirroring America’s cultural mosaic, APQ stitches together a story that’s both intricate and resilient. The fabric of their music is genuine—it neither feigns tolerance nor presents an overly-embellished image of unity. Instead, each carefully chosen piece dives deep into America’s patchwork soul and shares the joys, sorrows, and unwavering hope of a nation crafted by shared dreams and diverse histories.
Far from being a haphazard collection of musical scraps, APQ is a deliberately designed homage to America’s past and a showcase of its dynamic present. It beckons listeners to meditate upon our shared identity and relish in the musical threads that bind us. Just as an intricately designed quilt becomes a cherished family heirloom, when the distinct patterns of APQ’s music align in perfect harmony, the result is both a blanket of warmth and a timeless treasure.
Sponsored by The Humanities Institute at UCSC.

Geographies of Dissent: A Trans/Feminist Dialogue
2025-01-31 11:00 - 15:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Feminist Studies presents Geographies of Dissent — a dialogue centering trans/feminist vernaculars of the geopolitical, and how current histories of occupation and authoritarianism have impacted feminist projects of dissent.

The first 20 students who register for the full day will receive
their choice of one of the speakers’ books.

11am | Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World
Asli Zengin – Assistant Professor, Rutgers University
In Violent Intimacies, Asli Zengin traces how trans people in Turkey creatively negotiate and resist everyday cisheteronormative violence. Drawing on the ethnographic history of trans communal life in Istanbul, Zengin develops an understanding cisheteronormative violence that expands beyond sex, gender and sexuality.
12:30 | Lunch provided
1:30pm | Defiant Disrobing and Double Dissent in Feminist Thought
Naminata Diabate – Associate Professor, Cornell University
Naminata Diabate is a scholar of sexuality, race, biopolitics, and postcoloniality, whose research explores African, African American, Caribbean, and Afro-Hispanic literatures, cultures, cinema, and new media. Her book, Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa, won the African Studies Association Best Book Award in 2021 and the African Literature First Book Prize in 2022.

Francesca Orsini — East of Delhi: Multilingual Literary Culture and World Literature
2025-01-31 10:00 | Virtual Event
Join us Friday, January 31st at 10am PST for a discussion with Francesca Orsini on East of Delhi: Multilingual Literary Culture and World Literature, in conversation with G.S. Sahota and Rahul Parson. This event is part of the Winter 2025 Aurora Lecture Series.

Francesca Orsini is Professor Emerita of Hindi and South Asian Literature, School of Oriental and African Studies – University of London
Rahul Parson is Assistant Professor of Hindi Literature and Culture, South & Southeast Asian Studies – University of California, Berkeley
G.S. Sahota is Aurora Chair in Sikh and Punjabi Studies, Associate Professsor of Literature – University of California, Santa Cruz

Sophia Azeb – Mapping the “Arab” in Pan-African Political Culture
2025-01-29 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Amid the US-backed Israeli genocide in Palestine and the UAE-backed genocide in Sudan, the constellation of transnational and multiracial movement solidarities forged throughout the myriad capitalist and colonialist crises of the 21st century continue to reckon with the precarity of their uneven legibility across various regional, continental, and global contexts. Expanding on the titular catalogue essay composed alongside The Art Institute of Chicago’s current exhibition, Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, this talk navigates a genealogy of similarly unsettled anticolonial solidarities throughout Africa and its diaspora during the Non-Aligned era. By narrowing in on the contentious relationship between “North” and “Sub-Saharan” African artistic production in this period – particularly during the 1969 “First” Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers – I explore how varying articulations and mis/translations of Blackness, Arabness, and Africanness in the political and cultural realm ultimately elude a stable and coherent Pan-African sensibility. However, I also contend that the necessarily fleeting nature of these cultural encounters did still chart routes towards an African diasporic relation of difference that strives towards the most emancipatory possibilities of a transnational and anticolonial practice of solidarity.
Sophia Azeb (she/they) is an assistant professor of Black Studies in the Department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Sophia’s current book project, Another Country: Translational Blackness and the Afro-Arab, explores the currents of transnational and translational blackness charted by African American, Afro-Caribbean, African, and Afro-Arab peoples across 20th century North Africa and Europe. Prior to joining the faculty at UC Santa Cruz, Sophia was a member of the faculty collective that founded the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. Sophia is a frequent contributor to The Funambulist magazine.

WINTER 2025 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 2025 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.

Dan Zimmer - From Left/Right to Up/Down: Technological Transcendence, Ecological Collapse, and a New Polarity in Politics
2025-01-27 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
The first guest of the Winter ’25 lineup of the HistCon Speaker Series will be joining us next week! Dan Zimmer will give his talk “From Left/Right to Up/Down: Technological Transcendence, Ecological Collapse, and a New Polarity in Politics” on Monday, January 27th, at 1pm in Hum 1 Rm 210.
If you are unable to make it in person, you can register to attend virtually via the Zoom at this link.
About From Left/Right to Up/Down:
Recent years have seen a growing number renounce the anthropocentrism of the modern Left/Right political spectrum to champion nothing less than the cause of Life itself. This talk charts how the totality of Life became a source of political concern and maps the consequences. It traces the beginning of these developments back to mid-20th century cybernetics before proceeding to show how the environmental crises of the 1970s split the servants of Life into competing camps: one wing striving to ensure that human beings do not overstep Life’s planetary boundaries and the other seeking to use artificial intelligence to free Life from all earthly limits to growth. The talk introduces an Up/Down dichotomy as a heuristic tool to help observers better parse this growing opposition. It concludes by warning that the growing struggle between Life’s partisans may come to resemble less the human-scale conflicts of Western political modernity than a new war of religion.
Dan Zimmer is a political theorist who studies the planet-scale application of human power, with a transdisciplinary focus on nuclear weapons, global warming, and artificial intelligence (AI). He received a doctorate in political science from the Government Department of Cornell University and has since studied contemporary issues in climate science and AI with STS scholar Paul Edwards as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. He now works as a lecturer in the Stanford Civic, Liberal, and Global Education Program and is currently completing a book manuscript that traces the emergence of the human species as a political object from Aristotle to the atom bomb to the Anthropocene.
This talk is co-sponsored by Humanities in the Age of Artificial Intelligence & The Humanities Institute.

We Are the Middle of Forever: A More-Than-Human(ities) Lab Book Club Discussion with Stan Rushworth
2025-01-24 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Please join us for a conversation with Stan Rushworth, who will be discussing his latest book We Are the Middle of Forever, which places Indigenous voices at the center of conversations about today’s environmental crisis. Event attendees will be expected to have read the book, which will be provided free of charge to anyone who would like to participate.

Please sign up here for a free copy of the book. If you would like a copy to read over the winter break, please sign up by December 2nd. Registrations received after December 2nd will receive their books in January.
Professor Amanda Smith will email all the registrants with a time to pick up their book.
An American Library Association Notable Book, We Are the Middle of Forever draws on interviews with people from different North American Indigenous cultures and communities, generations, and geographic regions, who share their knowledge and experience, their questions, their observations, and their dreams of maintaining the best relationship possible to all of life. A welcome antidote to the despair arising from the climate crisis, We Are the Middle of Forever will be an indispensable aid to those looking for new and different ideas and responses to the challenges we face.
This event is presented by the THI More-Than-Human(ities) Laboratory Research Cluster.
Stan Rushworth is a teacher of Native American literature and the author of Sam Woods: American Healing, Going to Water: The Journal of Beginning Rain, Diaspora’s Children, and (with Dahr Jamail) We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth (The New Press). He lives in Northern California.

Winter 2025 Aurora Lecture Series: Francesca Orsini — Varieties of Realism
2025-01-24 10:00 | Virtual Event
Join us Friday, January 24th at 10am PST for Varieties of Realism, a lecture by Francesca Orsini with discussants: G.S. Sahota and Rahul Parson.

Francesca Orsini is Professor Emerita of Hindi and South Asian Literature, School of Oriental and African Studies – University of London
Rahul Parson is Assistant Professor of Hindi Literature and Culture, South & Southeast Asian Studies – University of California, Berkeley
G.S. Sahota is Aurora Chair in Sikh and Punjabi Studies, Associate Professsor of Literature – University of California, Santa Cruz

Accidentally Wes Anderson: Adventures in Santa Cruz
2025-01-24 | Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, 705 Front St., Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
With support from Santa Cruz County and The Humanities Institute, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History (MAH) is proud to present Accidentally Wes Anderson: Adventures in Santa Cruz—an exhibition that pays tribute to the world of travel photography, community, and adventure, where architecture, design, and aesthetics converge in stunning symmetry reminiscent of the iconic filmmaker’s visual style.
The exhibit will run from January 24th – May 18th.
This is an adventure. Join us to discover the most interesting places on Earth, both near and far, inspired by the eponymous director’s cinematic vision. Produced in collaboration with brand and social media community Accidentally Wes Anderson (AWA), this exhibition takes guests on a visual journey to the most beautiful, idiosyncratic locations around the globe—including Santa Cruz County—all seemingly plucked from the whimsical world of filmmaker Wes Anderson.
From impossibly grand hotels and chateaus to idyllic lighthouses, cable cars, and train carriages, AWA explores the filmmaker’s distinct aesthetic, whether a perfectly symmetrical landscape or a European city brimming with technicolor structures. The MAH exhibition, which will include a selection of community-sourced images of quirky places and locales in Central Coast California, is also presented as homage to the centennial celebration of the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk’s Giant Dipper roller coaster, an Anderson-esque vintage wooden coaster that debuted in 1924.
Born off the back of a viral online phenomenon and community of the same name, AWA celebrates the undeniable visual vernacular of one of cinema’s greatest filmmakers. Each of the locations highlighted in the exhibition boasts the recognizable singular aesthetic that is oh-so typical of film master Wes Anderson. Bright, vivid, and often slightly jarring to reality, AWA collects the world’s most Anderson-like sites in all their faded grandeur and pop-pastel colors, telling the story behind each stranger-than-fiction location. Authorized by Anderson himself, the exhibition and its companion books celebrate much of the weird and wonderful architecture that exists in our unique world, paying tribute to travel, photography, community, and adventure.
AWA photo contributors have been called “adventurers” who range from travelers, architects, history buffs, artists, editors, photographers, to teachers, students, and all walks of life intrigued by the wonders of the world and civilization.

Banner Image: Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, photo by Ludwig Favre, @ludwigfavre.

Living Writers with Venita Blackburn
2025-01-23 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Living Writers Series – Winter 2025
Grief Sequence
Not to suppress mourning (suffering)…but to change it, transform it…after Prageeta Sharma & Roland Barthes
Works by Venita Blackburn have appeared in The New Yorker, NY Times, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Story Magazine, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Paris Review, and others. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship in 2014 and several Pushcart prize nominations. She received the Prairie Schooner book prize for fiction, which resulted in the publication of her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, in 2017 and earned a place as a finalist for the NYPL Young Lions award among other honors. Blackburn’s second collection of stories is How to Wrestle a Girl, 2021, finalist for a Lambda Literary Prize and was a NY Times editor’s choice. Her debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, is about the mania of grief, all of human history and a lesbian assassin at the end of the world and was selected as one of the NYTimes and NPR’s best books of 2024. She is the founder and president of Live, Write, an organization devoted to offering free creative writing workshops for communities of color. Her hometown is Compton, California, and she is an Associate Professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.
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 Puknat Literary Endowment, The Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Laurie Sain Endowment, The Humanities Institute, Bookshop Santa Cruz, and Two Birds Books (where the writers’ books are available for purchase).

Ambika Aiyadurai - Caring for Humans and Nonhumans: Challenges in India’s Wildlife Conservation
2025-01-23 10:00 | Virtual Event
Organized by the Center for South Asian Studies, this talk examines different meanings of care in India’s wildlife conservation. Drawing on fieldwork and case studies from across the country, Professor Aiyadurai will discuss various forms of care in protecting endangered species and preventing extinction. Addressing the role of wildlife conservationists and Indigenous people, the talk asks how and in what ways the notions of care for humans and nonhumans among these groups vary, overlap, and sometimes compete against each other. How do we reconcile the conflicts emerging through the hierarchical nature of the ethics of care in wildlife conservation?

Ambika Aiyadurai is Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar. Her research interests include human-animal relations and community-based wildlife conservation.
This talk is a part of the Center for South Asian Studies Ecologies of Care 2024-25 Lecture Series.

Marc Matera - Race After Empire: Racial Capitalism in Southern Africa and “Race Relations” in Britain
2025-01-22 12:15 - 13:00 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
“Race relations” became synonymous with various obstacles to the “integration” of Commonwealth migrants in postwar Britain and, ultimately, shorthand for social and political issues perceived to be related to racial differences in general. However, interest in race relations did not center initially on Caribbean, South Asian, and African migrants to metropolitan Britain. Before the mid-1960s, race relations served as a means of conceptualizing and grappling with “problems of the end of Empire,” and efforts to study and manage them focused on centers of extractive industries in British settler colonies in Africa.
This talk demonstrates how white liberals and business leaders in colonial Africa provided institutional models and much of the personnel and start-up capital for a race relations industry in Britain that depoliticized racism and delegitimated anticolonial and Black Power politics by attributing them to racial identification. Studies of and policies targeting race relations in 1960s Britain emerged alongside and in connection with efforts to manage, co-opt, or divert the transformative potential of decolonization and to shape postcolonial futures with neoliberal solutions. From this perspective, when it comes to liberal politics of race, as the South African artist William Kentridge suggests (“Art in a State of Siege (100 Years of Easy Living),” 1988), “London is a suburb of Johannesburg”.
Marc Matera is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century (University of California Press, 2015). He coauthored The Global 1930s: The International Decade (Routledge, 2017) with Susan Kingsley Kent and The Women’s War of 1929: Gender and Violence in Colonial Nigeria (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) with Misty L. Bastian and Susan Kingsley Kent. He recently contributed to and coauthored introductory and concluding essays for a thematic issue of Modern British History, “Marking Race in Twentieth Century Britain”. The research for Professor Matera’s talk was supported in part by a research fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.

WINTER 2025 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 2025 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 Andrea Cohen
2025-01-16 17:20 - 18:55 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Living Writers Series – Winter 2025
Grief Sequence
Not to suppress mourning (suffering)…but to change it, transform it…after Prageeta Sharma & Roland Barthes
Andrea Cohen is the author of eight poetry collections; her latest is The Sorrow Apartments (2024). You can also find her writing in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Threepenny Review, and The New York Review of Books, etc. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and residencies at MacDowell. Over the years, she has taught at The University of Iowa, Emerson College, UMASS-Boston, The Fine Arts Work Center, and Merrimack College; starting this spring, she will teach at Boston University. She also directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series. Her hometown is Atlanta, Georgia.
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 Puknat Literary Endowment, The Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Laurie Sain Endowment, The Humanities Institute, Bookshop Santa Cruz, and Two Birds Books (where the writers’ books are available for purchase).

Kim Tallbear – Settler Love Is Breaking My Heart: Sex, Kin, and Country
2025-01-15 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Settler sexuality, family, and “love” are key to sustaining settler property relations in the US and Canada. In this in-process book chapter (a shorter version was previously published in a 2024 edited volume), I draw on the work of historians, anthropologists, and science and technology studies (STS) scholars who have investigated the history of state- sanctioned marriage and monogamy in the US, Hawai’i, Canada, and Europe. I also build on popular and academic polyamory literatures, Native American and Indigenous Studies and critical race theory. In addition, (auto)ethnographic examination of eco-erotic, polyamorous, and other more-than-monogamous relating inform alternative concepts of anticolonial relating after the unsettling of settler sex and family. Finally, I center the role of country—both music and place—to think through and beyond unsustainable settler- colonial practices of making relations with human loves and more-than-human loves. Decolonization is more sustainable with music.
Kim TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate) is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience, and Society, Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta. She is the author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. In addition to studying genome science disruptions to Indigenous self-definitions, Dr. TallBear studies colonial disruptions to Indigenous sexual relations. She is a regular panelist on the Media Indigena podcast. She is also a regular media commentator on topics including Indigenous peoples, science, and technology; and Indigenous sexualities. You can also follow her Substack newsletter, Unsettle: Indigenous affairs, cultural politics & (de)colonization at https://kimtallbear.substack.com.

WINTER 2025 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 2025 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.

Zionism: Past, Present, Future?
2025-01-13 18:00 - 19:30 | Music Center Recital Hall
Zionism is one of the most fraught terms in contemporary politics. But what exactly is Zionism, what is its history, and what have been (and are today) its many meanings to diverse groups? Why have so many embraced different versions of Zionism, and, on the flip side, why and how has Zionism been critiqued, both among its proponents as well as its detractors? What is the future of Zionism, particularly in the wake of Israel’s devastating assaults on Gaza and Lebanon following the Hamas organized massacres of Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023? Please join the UCSC Center for Jewish Studies in a panel conversation featuring, Liora Halperin (University of Washington), Shaul Magid (Dartmouth), and Dov Waxman (UCLA); prominent scholars of the history of Zionism, who will address these questions and many more.

Registration required for event entry. Seating will be first come, first served.
Prof. Halperin is Professor of International Studies and History, and Distinguished Endowed Chair of Jewish Studies, at the University of Washington. She is an historian of Israel/Palestine with particular interests in nationalism and collective memory, Jewish cultural and social history, language ideology and policy, and the politics of colonization and settlement. She is the author of The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Past (Stanford, 2021), a study of the European Jewish agricultural colonies established in late nineteenth-century Ottoman Palestine and the politics of their twentieth-century commemoration and Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948 (Yale, 2015), which was awarded the Shapiro Prize from the Association for Israel Studies for the best book in Israel Studies. She is currently working on a book about the diverse urban Jewish communities of late 19th/early 20th century Ottoman Palestine and the way a wide range of later groups and political movements, both Zionist and anti-Zionist, have commemorated and promoted narratives about this history.
Shaul Magid is a rabbi, Visiting Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at Harvard Divinity School, and Distinguished Fellow in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. He teaches Modern Judaism at Harvard Divinity School and is a senior research fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard. He has written extensively on Zionism, anti-Zionism, Diasporism, and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. He is the author of many books and essays, most recently Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (2021) and The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance (2023). His present book project is The Political Theology of Yoel Teitelbaum of Satmar – Zionism as Anti-Messianism.
Dov Waxman is the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Professor of Israel Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He is the author of four books: The Pursuit of Peace and The Crisis of Israeli Identity: Defending / Defining the Nation (2006), Israel’s Palestinians: The Conflict Within (2011), Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict over Israel (2016), and The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: What Everyone Needs to Know (2019). His writing has also been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Time, Slate, and many other publications.

This event is presented by the Center for Jewish Studies and co-sponsored by Porter College.

Global Soccer Culture: How Immigrants Created the World's Game
2025-01-06 18:00 | Cultural Center at Merrill, Merrill Cultural Center, UC Santa Cruz, Merrill College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Global Soccer Culture
How Immigrants Created the World’s Game
Prof. Laurent Dubois (U. of Virginia) in Conversation with Dr. Anju Reejhsinghani
Monday, January 6, 2025
6 pm || Cultural Center @ Merrill

Kick off your winter quarter with this inspiring conversation between renowned global soccer historian Dr. Laurent Dubois and Dr. Anju Reejhsinghani, Vice Chancellor of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
How have immigrants and immigration created a culture of soccer that spans the globe? What is at stake in current struggles over immigration for the future of soccer as “the world’s game”?
Laurent Dubois is John L. Nau III Bicentennial Professor in the History and Principles of Democracy at the University of Virginia. He is the author of seven books, including Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France (2010) and The Language of the Game: How to Understand Soccer (2018).
Anju Reejhsinghani is Inaugural Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer, UC Santa Cruz. A former tenured history professor in the University of Wisconsin System, Dr. Reejhsinghani is a scholar of race, gender, sport, and diaspora in the Americas.

This event is co-sponsored by Merrill College, the UCSC Office for Diversity and Inclusion, the History department, The Center for World History, the Council of Provosts, and the Merrill Programs and Leadership Office.

Humanities Division Graduate Awards Make-up
2024-12-12 16:00 - 18:00 | Merrill Provost House, Provost's Residence, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Dean Jasmine Alinder will recognize Kimberly Tallbear (Ph.D. ’05, History of Consciousness) with the 2023-2024 Distinguished Humanities Graduate Alumni award. Professor Tallbear will give remarks, and we will recognize graduate student awards from last year, with a reception following.
The event will take place at the Merrill Provost House from 4 – 6 pm. We also plan to display graduate student publications and other research projects completed since 2021. Information about how to display work is included in the RSVP form below.

Please RSVP by Tuesday December 3rd to attend. We are looking forward to seeing you there!

Slugs and Steins with Professor Renee Fox and Professor Elaine Sullivan - The Curse of the Mummy
2024-12-09 18:30 - 20:00 | Virtual Event
This talk focuses on a new UCSC Humanities course called “The Curse of the Mummy,” co-taught by Associate Professor of Literature Renée Fox and Associate Professor Elaine Sullivan. Combining analysis of 19th-century Egyptology’s transformation of ancient Egypt into a European fantasy with study of ancient Egyptian culture itself, the course relies on the collaborative expertise of an Egyptologist and a Victorian studies scholar to discover how and why the ancient past can become integral to contemporary identity, society, and aesthetics.
The talk will focus on the genesis of the course, some of the bizarre mummy literature it covers, the ways it relates to Professor Fox’s and Professor Sullivan’s current (and very different) research, and why mummies are a perfect subject to think about the intersections and divergences between different Humanities disciplines.

Renee Fox is Associate Professor of Literature, the Jordan-Stern Presidential Chair for Dickens and Nineteenth-Century Studies, Co-Director of the Dickens Project, and Co-Director of the Center for Monster Studies at UC Santa Cruz. She is the author of The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature (The Ohio State University Press, 2023), co-editor of the Routledge International Handbook of Irish Studies (Routledge, 2021), and co-editor of the forthcoming Race, Violence, and Form: Reframing Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Liverpool University Press, 2025). Her other publications include essays and articles on topics ranging from Victorian acrobats to Dracula’s gothic realism to epitaphic form in Irish poetry, and she’s currently at work on a new book entitled Violent Reading: 19th-Century Ireland and the Politics of Genre.
Elaine Sullivan (M.A. and Ph.D. in Egyptian Art and Archaeology at Johns Hopkins University) is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Sullivan is an Egyptologist and a Digital Humanist whose work focuses on applying new technologies to ancient cultural materials. Her born-digital publication, Constructing the Sacred (Stanford University Press, 2020, awarded prizes by the American Historical Association and the Archaeological Institute of America), utilizes a geo-temporal 3D model of the necropolis of Saqqara (near modern Cairo) to investigate questions of ritual landscape at the site. She was the project coordinator of the Digital Karnak Project, a multi-phased 3D virtual reality model of the famous ancient Egyptian temple complex of Karnak.
Slugs and Steins are free informal lectures served up over Zoom. Brought to you by the UC Santa Cruz Alumni Association, each talk will engage one of our favorite professors in discussion with you, the local community of Silicon Valley, and beyond. We will cover everything from organic artichokes to endangered zebras, self-driving cars to Shakespeare. All are welcome. Audience participation is encouraged.
Watch past Slugs and Steins events here.
Questions? Contact the UC Santa Cruz University Events office at specialevents@ucsc.edu.

American Analects: Book Launch and Poetry Reading
2024-12-08 15:00 - 17:00 | m.k. contemporary art, 703 Front Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Please join us for the release of American Analects, poems by Gary Young and Feasting on the World, an exhibition at MK Contemporary Art Gallery, paintings by Gene Holton paired with poems by Gary Young. Gary Young will be reading from his new book inspired by his friend and mentor Gene Holton.
Presented by MK Contemporary Art Gallery and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute, UC Santa Cruz: Special Collection Archives, UC Santa Cruz: The Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History; Bookshop Santa Cruz; The Hive Poetry Collective; and Santa Cruz Public Libraries.
More info at: www.mkcontemporary.art.
American Analects uses the Analects of Confucius as an inspiration to mediate upon the life, death, and the subsequent loss of the poet’s influential, beloved mentor—the painter Gene Holtan. These poems are juxtaposed with poems about other losses—of parents, of friends and friends of friends. Still, this is not a dour book. Many poems celebrate our ability to inspire, to comfort, and to nurture one another. In the end, American Analects is about resiliency, about moving on from personal loss, from the pandemic, and from catastrophic fires, to rejoice in what remains.
Gary Young is the author of several collections of poetry. His most recent books are That’s What I Thought, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award from Persea Books, and Precious Mirror, translations from the Japanese. His other books include Even So: New and Selected Poems; Pleasure; No Other Life, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award; Braver Deeds, winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize; Days; The Dream of a Moral Life, which won the James D. Phelan Award; and Hands. He has received a Pushcart Prize, and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and the Vogelstein Foundation, among others. In 2009 he received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Young was the first Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, and in 2012 he was named Santa Cruz County Artist of the Year. Since 1975 he has designed, illustrated, and printed limited edition letterpress books and broadsides at his Greenhouse Review Press. His fine print work is represented in numerous collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, The Getty Museum, and special collection libraries throughout the U.S. and Europe. He teaches creative writing and directs the Cowell Press at UC Santa Cruz.

Slug Book Club Holiday Party with the Deep Read
2024-12-05 20:00 | Cowell Conference Room, Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join us for an undergraduate holiday party with the Slug Book Club and the Deep Read. Come for pizza and drinks as well as holiday crafts and a literary white elephant exchange ($10-$15 budget). We’ll be handing out copies of this year’s Deep Read book, James by Percival Everett, and discussing opportunities to participate in the Deep Read program.

Casting the Dice: A Dialogue on Migration Through Music
2024-12-05 18:00 - 19:30 | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join us for a special event with composer Iván Enrique Rodríguez and UC Santa Cruz scholar Amy Argenal to discuss the complex experiences of migrants, the many challenges of seeking asylum and refuge in the United States, and the power of music as a tool for social change.
Presented by The Humanities Institute and the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, the event features “Casting the Dice,” an orchestral work narrated and composed by Rodríguez and based on stories collected from migrants around the world. The piece, which premiered at the Cabrillo Festival in Summer 2024, examines the lived experiences of people who have been displaced, delving into the connections of immigrants and refugees with their homelands, and their personal journeys as they navigate rebuilding their lives in a new country.
Rodríguez will discuss his process composing this orchestral piece with Argenal, a scholar of migration, human rights educator, and active collaborator with local immigrant and refugee rights organizations. Alongside the conversation, attendees will get a chance to connect with groups that offer resources to migrants in Santa Cruz County and advocate for just immigration policies, providing an opportunity to learn about ways to support local efforts in our community.
This event is free and open to the public but we ask that you please register.

Dr. Iván Enrique Rodríguez, a Puerto Rican composer, is acclaimed for his gripping, dramatic music rooted in social justice and Puerto Rican heritage. His notable works include A Metaphor for Power, addressing Latinx and equality issues, and Casting the Dice, about refugees and immigration, commissioned by the Cabrillo Festival. His music has been performed in major venues like Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, as well as in refugee camps across Europe. Rodríguez received the 2019 ASCAP Leonard Bernstein Award and the 2023 ASCAP Rudolf Nissim Prize. He earned his doctorate from The Juilliard School.
Dr. Amy Argenal is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Community-Engaged Research and Learning in the Sociology Department. She completed her doctorate in International and Multicultural Education at the University of San Francisco, where she also received her Master’s in the same area of study. She received her second Masters in Human Rights from Mahidol University in Thailand. Her current research focuses on the root causes of migration from Central America and explores methodologies that bring the narratives of migrant communities to the forefront.
Event Logistics
Parking is available in UCSC Lot #115 or 116 but we also encourage bicycling, car pooling, ridesharing, and public transportation. To reach the UCSC lots, proceed through the main entrance to campus, continue up the hill from the information kiosk on Coolidge, then turn right at the Ranch View/Carriage House Road stoplight into the Carriage House/Campus Facilities parking lot. The Hay Barn is a 5-minute walk across the street from the parking lot. Overflow parking is available at lot 122. Download a parking map here.

Co-sponsored by the UC Santa Cruz Department of Sociology, Department of Latin American and Latino Studies, Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas, the Arts Research Institute, the Institute for Social Transformation, and the Santa Cruz Welcoming Network.

Living Writers Student Reading
2024-12-05 17:20 - 18:50 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Living Writers Series – Fall 2024
Growing Things
~ gardens, poems, emotions, relationships, stories, our artistic practices, carefully tended, beautifully ordered, rewilded and wild ~

Sponsored by The Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Laurie Sain Endowment, The Humanities Institute, Bookshop Santa Cruz, and Two Birds Books, which provides books for purchase at the readings.

A Discussion of Mike Wilson’s book, What Side Are You On?, with Professor Felicity Amaya Schaeffer
2024-12-04 16:00 - 18:00 | Merrill Provost House, Provost's Residence, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join us for a discussion of Mike Wilson’s book What Side Are You On? with Professor Felicity Amaya Schaeffer on Wednesday, December 4th, from 4:00-6:00pm at Merrill Provost’s House, Public Living Room. Light refreshments will be provided.
Mike Wilson is a dedicated humanitarian and co-author of What Side Are You On? with Dr. Jose Antonio Lucero. His work addresses the intersections of poverty, racism, and colonialism, with a focus on migrant rights and humanitarian aid along the border. Known for establishing water stations for migrants on tribal lands, Mike’s advocacy often places him at odds with both the U.S. government and his own Indigenous community. His recent book offers a profound examination of these critical issues.
Felicity Amaya Schaeffer is Professor of the Feminist Studies Department and the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department, as well as an Affiliate Faculty in Latin American and Latinx Studies at UC Santa Cruz.

Co-sponsored by the UCSC History Department, the Feminist Studies Department, the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department, the Latin American and Latino Studies Department, the Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas, the Peggy And Jack Baskin Foundation, Cowell College, Merrill College, Porter College, Rachel Carson College, Stevenson College, and the Council of Provosts.

Laliv Melamed – On Intimacy and Other Sovereignties
2024-12-04 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
How can we explain decades of Israeli civil society’s consensus around a regime of oppression and impunity? What mediated attachments and disavowals mandate settler colonial violence? This talk follows what the private media complex in order to articulate the intimate channels through which state sovereignty is distributed, structured and internalized. A prerequisite to the current genocidal moment, this research analyzes the seamless paths of mundane violence in the post-Oslo Jewish-Israeli public sphere.
Laliv Melamed is a Professor of Digital Film Cultures at the Goethe University, Frankfurt. Her work focuses on media and forms of governance in Israel-Palestine. Melamed is the author of Sovereign Intimacy: Private Media and the Traces of Colonial Violence (University of California Press, 2023).

Co-sponsored with the Film and Digital Media Department and the Institute of Arts and Sciences.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.

An Evening with Marilynne Robinson: Noel Q King Memorial Lecture
2024-12-03 18:30 - 20:00 | Rio Theater, 1205 Soquel Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95062, United States
Marilynne Robinson, a prolific novelist and essayist, is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a National Humanities Medal. President Barack Obama applauded “her grace and intelligence in writing.” Her most recent book, Reading Genesis, is a meditation on the origins of humankind and the meaning of God’s enduring faith in humanity.
This year, Marilynne Robinson will deliver the Noel Q. King Memorial Lecture to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Humanities Institute and explore the Institute’s annual theme: Humanity. The Noel Q. King Memorial Lecture honors the life and work of Noel King, a founding faculty member of Merrill College and advocate for the comparative study of world religions.

Marilynne Robinson is the recipient of a 2012 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama, for “her grace and intelligence in writing.” She is the author of Gilead, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Home, winner of the Orange Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Lila, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her first novel, Housekeeping, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. In 2021, all four Gilead novels were selected for Oprah’s Book Club. Robinson’s nonfiction books include Reading Genesis, What Are We Doing Here?;The Givenness of Things, When I Was a Child I Read Books, Absence of Mind, The Death of Adam, and Mother Country.
This event is presented by The Humanities Institute and Porter College and co-sponsored by Merrill College, Bookshop Santa Cruz, and Shakespeare Workshop.
Noel Q. King came to UCSC in the late Sixties as a “founding father” of Merrill College. Born in India and educated in England, he spent 14 years in Africa heading departments of religious studies before being hired to do the same at Santa Cruz. Professor King was a prominent and beloved figure here on the hill. After he died in 2009, the Noel Q. King Memorial Lecture Series was started as a way to keep religious studies, and Noel King’s idiosyncratic spirit, alive at UCSC. This year, Marilynne Robinson will deliver the Noel Q. King Memorial Lecture.

Interviewing and Negotiating the Job Offer with Veronica Heiskell
2024-12-03 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
Learn interviewing strategies to land a job offer. Then, learn how to negotiate the best salary and benefits package when you receive the job offer.
This class offers strategies that apply to both academic and alternative-to-academic job applications and negotiations. The negotiation strategies also apply to asking for raises, job reclassifications, and title and responsibility changes.
This event is on Tue, Dec 3, 12:00 – 1:30 p.m. via Zoom. Register below to attend the session.

Veronica Heiskell has worked for over thirteen years in diversity and career centers in a variety of higher education institutions and currently serves as director of experiential learning at Career Success. Her goal is to remove as many barriers as possible for all students to pursue meaningful experiential learning opportunities. She completed her bachelor’s degree in psychology with a minor in LGBT studies at UCLA, her master’s degree in counseling and guidance in higher education at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and her doctorate in higher education administration at UT Austin. Her dissertation research focused on sense of belonging for exploratory students.

This event is a Graduate Division Professional Development Event co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our PhD+ workshop series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the ninth year of PhD+ Workshops at The Humanities Institute. This series covers a range of topics including possible career paths for humanities PhDs, securing grants and fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Slide Design with Sonya Newlyn
2024-11-25 14:00 - 15:30 | Graduate Student Commons, Room 204, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, 95064
Have you ever inflicted a boring slide presentation on an audience? Learn tips and techniques for using slides the way they should be used, as visual aids to your spoken-word presentation.
Prior to attending this workshop, review this slide design page.
This event is on Mon, Nov 25, 2:00 – 3:30 p.m. in Graduate Student Commons, Study Lounge 204. Register below to attend the session.

Sonya Newlyn provides professional development programming for graduate students and postdoctoral scholars for the Graduate Division. In addition to the Professional Communication Certificate Program, she organizes the winter quarter Graduate Student Leadership Certificate Program and schedules individual professional development events available to all graduate students and postdoctoral scholars. She also organizes the annual Grad Slam and the Graduate Symposium. She received her master’s degree in English literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her bachelor’s degree in English literature from Emory University, where she also minored in anthropology.

This event is a Graduate Division Professional Development Event co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our PhD+ workshop series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the ninth year of PhD+ Workshops at The Humanities Institute. This series covers a range of topics including possible career paths for humanities PhDs, securing grants and fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Kunal Purohit - H-Pop, The Secretive World of Hindutva Popstars
2024-11-22 12:30 - 13:45 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Can a song trigger a murder?
Can a poem spark a riot?
Can a book divide a people?
Away from the gaze of mainstream urban media, across India’s dusty, sleepy towns, a brand of popular culture is quietly seizing the imagination of millions, on the internet and off it. From catchy songs with acerbic lyrics to poetry recited in public gatherings to social media influencers shaping opinions with their brand of “breaking news” to books rescripting historical events, “Hindutva Pop,” or H-Pop, is steadily creating societal acceptability for Hindutva’s core beliefs. Award-winning, independent journalist Kunal Purohit travels through India, profiling some of H-Pop’s most prolific and popular creators, inquiring whether they are driven by ideology or commerce and asking what motivates the audience to consume its daily dose of bigotry.
Kunal Purohit is an award-winning, independent journalist, documentary film-maker, and podcast creator. Over the past two decades, Kunal has written on issues of development, politics, and inequality. More recently, his work has focused on hate crimes and the rise of Hindu nationalism. He is the recipient of the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Civic Journalism (2012), the Statesman Award for Rural Reporting (2014), and the UNFPA-Laadli Media Award for Gender Sensitive Reporting (2014 and 2019).

Presented by the Center for South Asian Studies (CSAS) and co-sponsored by the Music Department, the Kamil and Talat Hasan Endowed Chair for Classical Indian Music, the Ali Akbar Khan Endowment for Classical Indian Music, and The Humanities Institute.

Chris Benner & Manuel Pastor - Charging Forward
2024-11-21 19:00 - 20:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes Chris Brenner and Manuel Pastor for a reading and signing of their new book Charging Forward: Lithium Valley, Electric Vehicles, and a Just Future—a clarion call for justice in the quest for clean energy.
“Charging Forward brilliantly uses the Valley to illustrate what’s at stake as we move to a clean energy world. Clear-eyed that we cannot change the way we deliver power until we change who wields power, Benner and Pastor offer both hard-headed analysis and hope for a just future.” —Van Jones

Chris Benner is the director of the Institute for Social Transformation and the Everett Program for Technology and Social Change at UC Santa Cruz, where he is also the Dorothy E. Everett Chair in Global Information and Social Entrepreneurship, and a professor of environmental studies and sociology. He has co-authored five books with Manuel Pastor, including Equity, Growth and Community: What the Nation Can Learn From America’s Metro Areas, and Solidarity Economics: Why Mutuality and Movements Matter. He lives in Santa Cruz, California.
Manuel Pastor is the director of the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California where he is also a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and American Studies and Ethnicity and the inaugural holder of the Turpanjian Chair in Civil Society and Social Change. He has co-authored five books with Chris Benner, including Equity, Growth and Community: What the Nation Can Learn From America’s Metro Areas, Solidarity Economics: Why Mutuality and Movements Matter, and Charging Forward: Lithium Valley, Electric Vehicles, and a Just Future (The New Press). Pastor is also the author of State of Resistance: What California’s Dizzying Descent and Remarkable Resurgence Mean for America’s Future (The New Press). He lives in Los Angeles.
This event is cosponsored by the Institute for Social Transformation at UC Santa Cruz and The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

Christmas Carol Dramaturgy Talk with Santa Cruz Shakespeare
2024-11-21 17:30 - 18:30 | Santa Cruz Public Library – Downtown Branch, 224 Church Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, United States
Join Santa Cruz Shakespeare for a presentation and talk by their brilliant Christmas Carol dramaturgs Dr. Renee Fox (UC Santa Cruz), Dr. Michael Chemers (UC Santa Cruz), and Charles Pasternak (SCS Artistic Director). Renee and Michael will discourse on Dickens and his marvelous novella. Q&A to follow. Expertise breeds love; don’t be a Scrooge; join SCS in nerding out over this beautiful story!

CANCELLED - California Community Colleges Panel Discussion
2024-11-21 14:00 - 16:00 | Graduate Student Commons, Room 204, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, 95064
Learn how to apply to (first step: register with and upload your CV to the CCC Registry) and what it’s like to work for a California community college by talking to director of the CCC Registry, Beth Au, moderator of the panel, and a panel of UCSC graduate student alumni and a former UCSC postdoc, all of whom currently work for a CCC.
This event is on Thu, Nov 21, 2:00 – 4:00 p.m. in Graduate Student Commons, Study Lounge 204. Register below to attend the session.

Moderator
Beth Au
Director, California Community Colleges Registry
Beth Au has a master’s degree in Asian American Studies from UCLA. She has been director of the California Community Colleges (CCC) Registry since 2002. As director, she oversees and manages cccregistry.org and hosts annual job fairs for the college system every January.
The CCC Registry is the state chancellor’s job board for faculty, management and staff opportunities at all 73 districts and 116 colleges across California. The CCCs are the largest higher education employer in the world with over 60,000 faculty, administrators and staff across the state.
In her role as a recruiter, she frequently works with UC graduate students and postdocs through UC Career Centers and Graduate Divisions to host CCC interest panels. During Covid, she pivoted the informational panels and 1:1 sessions with job seekers to a virtual format and has continued recruitment in the online environment. She has counseled over 400 job seekers in Zoom sessions since May 2020 and continues to use Zoom to maintain outreach and recruitment. Several of the job seekers she has coached have been offered full-time, tenure track positions at a CCC since 2022.
Beth is available for 1:1 Zoom sessions on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. to offer CCC application and career advice. Reach out to her directly at aub@yosemite.edu to schedule a session.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This event is a Graduate Division Professional Development Event co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our PhD+ workshop series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the ninth year of PhD+ Workshops at The Humanities Institute. This series covers a range of topics including possible career paths for humanities PhDs, securing grants and fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

POSTPONED: Lara Sheehi - "The Imperative to Refuse Psychic Intrusion in Palestine-Lebanon Solidarities"
2024-11-20 16:00 | Cervantes and Velasquez Conference Room, Bay Tree Building, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
This talk will discuss the ways psychic intrusions are central features of settler colonial logics and how they are used with specific intent to disrupt solidarities. Palestine-Lebanon solidarities will be used as a “case study” to read the psycho-politico-affective forces that demobilize.
About the Speaker
Lara Sheehi (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar, and a Research Fellow at the University of South Africa’s Institute for Social and Health Sciences. She is the founding faculty director of the Psychoanalysis and the Arab World Lab. Prof. Sheehi’s work takes up decolonial and anti-oppressive approaches to psychoanalysis, with a focus on liberation struggles in the Global South. She is co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022), which won the Middle East Monitor’s 2022 Palestine Book Award for Best Academic Book. Prof. Sheehi is the President of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA, Division 39), co-editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality, co-editor of Counterspace in Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, and an advisory board member for the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network and the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. She is currently working on a new book, From the Clinic to the Street: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures (Pluto Press).

This talk is presented by the Center for Racial Justice (CRJ) at UC Santa Cruz and co-sponsored by Feminist Studies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department, Students for Justice in Palestine, Faculty for Justice in Palestine, Center for South Asian Studies (CSAS), Anthropology Department, Sociology Department, Politics Department, Center for Cultural Studies, People’s University, and Institute for Social Transformation.
This talk is a part of the year-long speaker series, “Possibilities of Palestinian Refusal: Against Disciplining Knowledge and Movement.” For more information , please visit the CRJ website: https://crjucsc.com/

Giving Day 2024
2024-11-20 | Virtual Event
Mark your calendar for Wednesday, November 20 and join us for UC Santa Cruz’s annual Giving Day—a 24-hour online fundraising event dedicated to supporting projects that enrich the UCSC student experience.
Giving Day is an opportunity to unite the entire UCSC community—students, alumni, faculty, and friends—to create a lasting, positive impact on our students, the community, and the world. Let’s show our Banana Slug pride and rally together to support the next generation of changemakers.
Whether supporting student success, funding cutting-edge research in the sciences or technology, or advancing humanities and the arts, your gift on November 20 will help fuel programs and initiatives that make UCSC a unique place. You can make an impact in a way that resonates with you.
Our mission to provide high quality educational and research experiences for our students, regardless of their backgrounds and financial circumstances is more important than ever. Your support is crucial to ensuring we deliver on that mission.
Learn more at give.ucsc.edu/giving-day-2024

Public Film Screening and Filmmaker Q&A: A Feeling Greater than Love with Mary Jirmanus Saba
2024-11-19 19:00 | Communications 150, Studio C
In her directorial debut, Mary Jirmanus Saba deals with a forgotten revolution, saving from oblivion bloodily suppressed strikes at Lebanese tobacco and chocolate factories. These events from the 1970s, which held the promise of a popular revolution and, with it, of women’s emancipation were erased from collective memory by the country’s civil wars. Rich in archival footage from Lebanon’s militant cinema tradition, the film reconstructs the spirit of that revolt, asking of the past how we might transform the present. FIPRESCI International Critics Prize Winner at the 2017 Berlinale Forum.
– Malgorzata Sadowska
Mary Jirmanus Saba is a geographer who uses film and other media to explore labor movement histories, connections among unstable landscapes and legacies of colonialism in the Arab World, Latin America and Turtle Island and the ever-present resilience of everyday life. Her debut feature film A Feeling Greater Than Love (2017) premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival Forum where it received the FIPRESCI International Critics Prize, making several “Best of 2017” lists. From 2006-2008, she produced the community broadcast television program, Via Comunidad with art collective Vientos del Sur in Ibarra, Ecuador. A avid producer of anonymous and collective agitprop, her latest film Mahdi Amel in Gaza (2024) is screening in community spaces, protest sites, and sometimes festivals. Saba is a member of UAW Labor for Palestine, the People’s CDC and a UC Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Santa Cruz in Film and Digital Media.
Preceded by a workshop: Mon. November 18, 4 – 7 PM, Comm. 139
In this workshop filmmaker and scholar Mary Jirmanus Saba will discuss her recent work on films made in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, exploring the emergence of the “character driven resilience documentary.” Using her own work as an example, Saba will facilitate a discussion about the political economy of arts funding and social movements.
To join the workshop, RSVP to ilusztig@ucsc.edu.

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

Contributions to Diversity Statement with Judith Estrada
2024-11-19 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual and In Person
Judith Estrada, Ph.D.
Assistant Vice Chancellor
Office for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (ODEI)
This event has two sessions: Nov 19, 12:00 – 1:30 p.m. via Zoom, or Nov 20, 1:30 – 3:00 p.m. in Graduate Student Commons, Study Lounge 204. Register below to attend either session.

This event is a Graduate Division Professional Development Event co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our PhD+ workshop series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the ninth year of PhD+ Workshops at The Humanities Institute. This series covers a range of topics including possible career paths for humanities PhDs, securing grants and fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

LinkedIn with Eric Curiel
2024-11-18 15:00 - 16:30 | Virtual Event
LinkedIn is a powerful tool to network and search for jobs. We will go over tips to update your LinkedIn profile to help recruiters find you, explore ways to identify alumni with similar career paths and interests on LinkedIn, and show you how to connect effectively with them to expand your network. We will also go over best practices for searching for jobs.
This event is on Mon, Nov 18, 3:00 – 4:30 p.m. via Zoom. Register below to attend the session.

Eric Curiel has worked for over ten years in supporting college students in pursuing successful careers and currently serves as associate director of career engagement in Career Success. He is passionate about supporting students, especially those from underrepresented populations, to be successful. He completed his bachelor’s degree in ecology and evolution from UC Santa Cruz in 2014. Eric enjoys being outdoors, photography, and watching soccer.

This event is a Graduate Division Professional Development Event co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our PhD+ workshop series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the ninth year of PhD+ Workshops at The Humanities Institute. This series covers a range of topics including possible career paths for humanities PhDs, securing grants and fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Wenyi Shang - Moving Beyond the Streetlight: How Computational Methods Can Open Up New Directions in Humanities Research
2024-11-18 12:00 | Virtual and In Person
Join us for an engaging talk by Wenyi Shang, titled Moving Beyond the Streetlight: How Computational Methods Can Open Up New Directions in Humanities Research.
The “streetlight effect” describes an observational bias relevant to the humanities and social sciences, where researchers tend to focus on the questions limited by the scales of materials they can directly comprehend. The application of computational methods in the humanities research has the potential to transform this landscape, providing interpretative tools to offer new insights into the macroscopic trends that studies at the individual and microscopic scale often fail to reveal. This talk presents two case studies to demonstrate how computational methods can open up new directions in humanities research. The first uses machine learning models to classify English poetry by lexicon and prosody, shedding new light on the distinction between “genre” and “form.” The second applies social network analysis to explore the structural characteristics of political networks in Northern Song (960–1127 C.E.) China, revealing changes in political culture during the period.
Please join us in person in Humanities 1, Room 210 or via Zoom
Wenyi Shang is an Assistant Professor at the School of Information Science & Learning Technologies at the University of Missouri. He earned his Ph.D. from the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and his bachelor’s degree from Peking University, China. His research focuses on digital humanities, addressing scholarly inquiries in history and literature through computational methods. He has employed network analysis to investigate social structures and transformations in political culture in premodern Chinese societies, and used text mining to study literature, uncovering novel perspectives on cultural changes reflected in literary texts. Both methods frequently intersect with machine learning models.

Jasbir Puar - Field Notes: Colonial Power at the Thresholds of Gender Studies
2024-11-14 16:00 | Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Feminist Studies Department at UC Santa Cruz is pleased to host Jasbir Puar, Distinguished Faculty of Arts Professor, Global Race Studies at the University of British Columbia, presenting Field Notes: Colonial Power at the Thresholds of Gender Studies.
Jasbir Puar’s research focuses on how the liberal state, sexuality, and bio-politics bear on our understanding of disability. In her most recent book, The Right to Maim, Prof. Puar uses the concept of “debility”— bodily injury and social exclusion brought on by economic and political factors — to disrupt the category of disability, and shows how debility, disability, and capacity constitute an assemblage that states use to control populations. Interrogating Israel’s policies toward Palestine, she outlines how Israel brings Palestinians into biopolitical being by designating them available for injury.
Jasbir Puar is a Distinguished Faculty of Arts Professor of Global Race Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her most recent book, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017, Duke University Press) explores how the liberal state, sexuality, and biopolitics bear on our understanding of disability, culminating in an interrogation of Israel’s policies toward Palestine.

Archives in Action
2024-11-14 14:00 - 17:00 | Humanities 1, Room 202
2 PM | “Getting Into the Archive: Tales from Inside”
Paul Erickson, Director of the Clements Library, University of Michigan
This presentation will seek to demystify the process of applying for support for humanities research from libraries and archives by explaining it from the inside. It will offer suggestions for how to increase your chances of receiving fellowship support for your work.
Paul Erickson is the Randolph G. Adams Director of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan, a leading collection of early Americana. In 1993 Paul got his first experience administering fellowship programs for scholars from the humanities and social sciences, and that is work that he has done for most of the past 20 years.
3 PM | “Gloria Anzaldua and her Spectral Archives”
Brenda Lara, UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, UC Santa Cruz
4 PM | “Archives in Dos Hemisferios: Reading Nineteenth-Century Spanish-Language Newspapers in Havana, New York, and Paris”
Davis Luis-Brown, Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and English, Claremont Graduate University

This event is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute and the Director of Hispanic-Serving Research Initiatives. It is organized in conjunction with the Literature Department’s graduate course, “Print Culture and Archives.”
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the ninth year of PhD+ Workshops at The Humanities Institute. This series covers a range of topics including possible career paths for humanities PhDs, securing grants and fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Crafting the CV with Veronica Heiskell
2024-11-14 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
Applications for academic positions require a CV, and some industry, government, and nonprofit employers also require them. Learn how a CV differs from a resume, about hybrid CV-resumes, what goes on a CV, and what order to put information depending on the type of academic institution you’re applying to and for what type of position.
This event is on Thu, Nov 14, 12:00 – 1:30 p.m. via Zoom. Register below to attend the session.

Veronica Heiskell has worked for over fourteen years in diversity and career centers in a variety of higher education institutions and currently serves as director of experiential learning at Career Success. Her goal is to remove as many barriers as possible for all students to pursue meaningful experiential learning opportunities. She completed her bachelor’s degree in psychology with a minor in LGBT studies at UCLA, her master’s degree in counseling and guidance in higher education at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and her doctorate in higher education administration at UT Austin. Her dissertation research focused on sense of belonging for exploratory students.

This event is a Graduate Division Professional Development Event co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our PhD+ workshop series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the ninth year of PhD+ Workshops at The Humanities Institute. This series covers a range of topics including possible career paths for humanities PhDs, securing grants and fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Project Paradiso - Episode Sixteen – The Futures of Dante's Paradiso: Reading Forward
2024-11-14 09:50 - 11:25 | Virtual and In Person
Join us for a conversation with Prof. Alison Cornish (New York University) and Prof. Arielle Saiber (Johns Hopkins University), about the challenges and opportunities of reading Dante’s Paradiso today, particularly in, but not limited to, the academic context. They will explore innovative future directions to take this poem to as many readers and diverse audiences as possible, and also why this should be done, especially in view of the textbook that will be complied as a result of this year-long webinar series.

This event will be will be in person at Oakes Acad 105 and via Zoom (registration required).
Dante’s Paradiso is the least studied and the least understood of the three parts of the Commedia. Yet it is arguably the most important for the dynamism and originality of the literary, theological, and philosophical inquiries that take place there. It is also a singularly important interpretive guide for a full understanding of the entire Commedia. It is a poem that asks to be tackled by a community of engaged readers. This year-long series of webinar workshops led by world-renowned scholars took readers on a deep reading of the Paradiso and an unforgettable journey to the heart of Dante’s universe. See the Project Paradiso page for full schedule.
Featuring:
Alison Cornish, Professor of Italian Studies at New York University and President of the Dante Society of America. She is the author of Reading Dante’s Stars (Yale, 2000), Vernacular Translation in Dante’s Italy: Illiterate Literature (Cambridge, 2011) a commentary on Dante’s Paradiso, translated by Stanley Lombardo (Hackett, 2017), and Believing in Dante: Truth in Fiction (Cambridge, 2022); as well as a number of essays on Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. During the seventh centenary of the poet’s death, she organized a crowd-sourced series of video conversations between members of the Dante Society of America, entitled “Canto per Canto: Conversations with Dante in Our Time.”
Arielle Saiber, Charles S. Singleton Professor of Italian Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. Saiber’s books include Images of Quattrocento Florence: Writings on Literature, History and Art co-edited with Stefano U. Baldassarri (Yale, 2000); Giordano Bruno and the Geometry of Language (Ashgate/Routledge, 2005); and Measured Words: Computation and Writing in Renaissance Italy (University of Toronto Press, 2017).
Saiber publishes primarily on Dante, on the intersections between premodern Italian literature and mathematics/science, and visual interpretations of Dante’s Commedia. She has also published on early print history, science fiction, and experimental electronic music. Her current research is on “altered states of consciousness” in medieval and Renaissance Italian literature.
She has co-edited a number of special issues of academic journals: for Configurations, “Mathematics and the Imagination” (2009) with Henry S. Turner; for Dante Studies, “Longfellow and Dante” (2010) with Giuseppe Mazzotta; for California Italian Studies, “Sound” (2014) with Deanna Shemek; and for Science Fiction Studies, “Italian Science Fiction” (2015) with Salvatore Proietti and Umberto Rossi. She is currently co-editing with Proietti an anthology of Italian science fiction in English for Wesleyan University Press’s Early Classics of Science Fiction series.
Her doctoral dissertation on Giordano Bruno won Yale’s Field Prize (2000), and in 2004 she received the Karofsky Prize for teaching at Bowdoin. She has been a fellow at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici in Naples, Italy (1998-1999), the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2003-2004), and Villa I Tatti – Harvard’s Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy (2008-2009). She also received an NEH Fellowship (2008-2009), the MLA’s Scaglione Publication Award (2016), the Newberry Library’s Weiss-Brown Publication Award (2017), the American Initiative for Italian Culture’s Bridge Book Award (2018), and the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts’ Kendrick Book Prize (2019) for her book Measured Words.
In 2006 she built the web-based archive, Dante Today: Sightings and Citings of Dante’s Work in Contemporary Culture, which she now co-edits with Beth Coggeshall.
She co-edits the new book series Proximities: Experiments in Nearness with David Cecchetto for the University of Minnesota Press.

Presented by the Humanities Institute and the Department of Literature Italian Studies. Sponsored by the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Siegfried and Elizabeth Mignon Puknat Literary Studies Endowment, and Porter College.

Public Speaking with Catherine Carlstroem
2024-11-13 14:00 - 16:00 | Graduate Student Commons, Room 204, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, 95064
These interactive in-person workshops provide an overview of strategies and best practices for public speaking, including managing anxiety, key delivery techniques, and composition tips for crafting clearer and more focused speeches, with an emphasis on the parameters of the Grad Slam’s short presentations.
This event has two sessions: Nov 13, 2:00 – 4:00 p.m. in Graduate Student Commons, Study Lounge 204, or Nov 19, 2:00 – 4:00 p.m. in Graduate Student Commons, Study Lounge 204. Register below to attend either session.

UCSC faculty and alum Catherine Carlstroem (PhD American Literature) is a longtime lecturer in Humanities at UCSC (over 30 years) and has enjoyed teaching public speaking for over 10 of these. Along with teaching, she coordinates the Cowell Core Course.

This event is a Graduate Division Professional Development Event co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our PhD+ workshop series. The Division of Graduate Studies’ workshops are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the ninth year of PhD+ Workshops at The Humanities Institute. This series covers a range of topics including possible career paths for humanities PhDs, securing grants and fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Dr. Christian Alvarado - "The Storm in Kenya": The Mau Mau Uprising and pan-Africanist Thought in the mid-20th Century
2024-11-13 13:30 - 15:00 | Virtual and In Person
The History Department invites you to an upcoming talk by Dr. Christian Alvarado entitled “The Storm in Kenya:” The Mau Mau Uprising and pan-Africanist Thought in the mid-20th Century.
Join us in person from 1:30 – 3:00 pm (PT) in Humanities 1, Room 202 or join via Zoom here.
Historical work on the event most commonly known as the “Mau Mau Uprising”—which roiled late-colonial Kenya in the 1950s and captivated audiences the world over—has long been preoccupied with examining the political and economic origins of anticolonial resistance in the colony, the operations of British counter-insurgency efforts, and the legacy of each of these for post-independence Kenyan society. In distinction to these orthodox approaches to the study of Mau Mau, Alvarado’s current book project considers how this event impacted the political, economic, and cultural history of other parts of the African continent, as well as Europe and the Americas. This talk presents an account of the role “myths of Mau Mau” played in pan-Africanist thought both within and far beyond the borders of the colony during this period. Across the globe, understandings of this event served as a key touchstone in the attempt to forge international solidarities among communities both in support of colonial rule and those who sought to bring about its end. This talk focuses in particular on debates about Mau Mau as they arose in two important contexts in the contemporary pan-Africanist movement. First, an array of conferences, forums, and political meetings held on the continent during the late 1950s and early 1960s; second, in contemporary Garveyite political thought both in Africa and abroad. Considered together, these visions of what George Padmore called “the Storm in Kenya” illuminate new dimensions in the transnational history of not only Mau Mau, but African decolonization more broadly.
Dr. Christian Alvarado received his PhD in History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz and is President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in African American and African Studies at the University of California, Davis. His wide-ranging research situates the event most commonly known as the Mau Mau Uprising in late-colonial Kenya within the broader history of decolonization in 20th century Africa. By tracing how understandings of this event circulated across transnational networks and cultural formations, this work aims to show how the frameworks to which Mau Mau is put illuminate novel insights into global dimensions in the history of African decolonization. These frameworks include, but are not limited to, the history of the social sciences, notions of African ‘race relations,’ pan-Africanism, diverse memory communities, and conspiracist discourses. Across these seemingly disparate realms, Alvarado argues that Mau Mau serves as a way of probing contemporary and current debates regarding the ethics of (anti)colonial violence, the relationship between tradition and modernity, and the nature of decolonization. A historian by training, Dr. Alvarado’s interdisciplinary work is also in conversation with the fields of cultural studies, comparative literature, and political theory.

Dolly Kikon – Abundance: Living with a Forest
2024-11-13 12:15 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 210, 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, 95060, United States
We welcome Dolly Kikon for a screening of her film Abundance: Living with a Forest and a talk about her work on Indigenous ecology in the Eastern Himalayan region.
Abundance: Living with a Forest (2024) is a filmic biography of foraging, forest, and jhum cultivation in Nagaland, a hill state in Northeast India where approximately 60% of the population depend on jhum cultivation. Jhum cultivation and foraging have been recognized as community practices of indigenous knowledge. However, both these practices and the forest to which they are intrinsically linked have been threatened by the plantation, monocropping, and infrastructure activities that have surged with the ongoing ceasefire between Naga armed groups and the government.
Abundance: Living with a Forest follows Zareno, a Lotha forager in the forest of Khumtsü, and traces the foraged edible plants as they make their way to the market in Wokha town. The film gestures to an impending loss that Indigenous communities encounter across the world.
Watch the trailer here:

Listen to the Title Song from the documentary:

Dolly Kikon is Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz and director of the Center for South Asian Studies. She is the author of Experiences of Naga Women in Armed Conflict: Narratives from a Militarized Society (2004); Life and Dignity: Women’s Testimonies of Sexual Violence in Dimapur (2015); Living with Oil and Coal: Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India (2019); with Bengt G. Karlsson, Leaving the Land: Indigenous Migration and Affective Labour in India (2019); with Duncan McDuie-Ram, Ceasefire City: Militarism, Capitalism, and Urbanism in Dimapur (2021); with Dixita Deka, Joel Rodrigues, Bengt G. Karlsson, Sanjay Barbora, and Meenal Tula, Seeds and Sovereignty: Eastern Himalayan Experiences (2023).

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