The Cultural Studies Colloquium Series Presents: Catherine Jones History, UCSC Excluded from favored liberal remedies for realizing new freedoms in postemancipation Virginia, children nevertheless shaped broad Reconstruction contests over the meaning of freedom. This paper focuses on children in order to consider whether liberal assumptions embedded in the idea of agency have excessively narrowed historians' […]

The Cultural Studies Colloquium Series Presents: Loren Goldman Assistant Professor, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities, Townsend Fellow at UCB Professor Goldman is a political theorist whose work concerns the intersection of utopian thought and political agency. He is currently completing a book manuscript on the concept of political hope in the modern period from Kant to Dewey. Co-sponsored by […]

The Cultural Studies Colloquium Series Presents: Kate Brown History Associate Professor, University of Maryland, Baltimore Modern utopias and nuclear wastelands come together in Professor Brown's "Plutopia" about the first two cities in the world to produce plutonium--Richland, Washington and Ozersk, Russia. New postwar communities of high-risk affluence alongside plutonium disasters and public health catastrophes were […]

The Cultural Studies Colloquium Series Presents: Anjali Arondekar Associate Professor, Feminist Studies, UCSC Histories of sexuality routinely mediate geopolitical difference(s) through the narrative forms of marginality, disenfranchisement and loss. What happens if we shift our attention from the reading of sexuality as marginality to understanding it as a site of vitalized abundance--even futurity?

The Cultural Studies Colloquium Series Presents: Michael Ursell Literature, UCSC While critics have dismissed an image of the Renaissance humanist Petrarch as a nature-lover, this talk reconsiders a poetics of the living in his work. Professor Ursell looks at how Petrarch's "life writing" and "life reading" have been understood in relation to global ecology and […]