The Humanities Institute

Kristina Lyons: “Decomposition as Life Politics: Soils, Shared Bodies, and Stamina Under the Gun of the U.S.-Colombia War on Drugs”
2015-01-27 17:00 - 18:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
UC Santa Cruz Feminist Studies Department Presents: Feminist Science Studies Colloquia
Kalindi Vora, University of California of San Diego
“Life Support: Legacies of Imperial Science and Surrogate Technologies of Racialized Reproduction”
January 6, 5:oo – 6:30pm, Humanities 1 Room 210
Ann Fink, New York University
“Feminist Ethics and the Neurobiology of Memory”
January 13, 5:00 – 6:30pm, Humanities 1 Room 210
Sara Giordano, San Diego State University
“Tinkering with Science: IRB, DIY and Feminist Science Ethics”
January 20, 5:00 – 6:30pm, Humanities 1 Room 210
Kristina Lyons, University of California of Santa Cruz
“Decomposition as Life Politics: Soils, Shared Bodies, and Stamina Under the Gun of the U.S.-Colombia War on Drugs”
January 27, 5:00 – 6:30pm, Humanities 1 Room 210

Questions that Matter: Making The Cosmos Local
2015-01-27 18:00 - 20:30 | Kuumbwa Jazz Center
MAKING THE COSMOS LOCAL
For millennia, people across the globe have searched the sky for answers. They have imagined and reimagined the cosmos, from an infinite and eternal backdrop full of other worlds, to a young Earth encircled by nearby planets and crystal spheres of stars. What is the relation between our lives here on Earth and the wider realm of nearby planets, distant stars, unfathomably faraway galaxies, and a potentially infinite universe—or swarm of universes? Where do we find, or create, meaning in such a picture?
Questions That Matter is a series of public dialogues presented by the Institute for Humanities Research. This series brings together UC Santa Cruz scholars with community residents to explore questions that matter to all of us. We invite you to join us on Jan 27, 2015 for the series launch at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center.
Featuring: Minghui Hu (History) and Anthony Aguirre (Physics). Facilitated by: Nathaniel Deutsch (IHR Director)
Please join us for an evening of conversation and connection as we bring these questions down to earth and make the cosmos local.
Buy Tickets

Tuesday, January 27, 2015
6pm wine and hors d’ oeuvres * 7pm program starts
Kuumbwa Jazz Center
Seating is limited. Tickets are $10 (includes service charges and one complimentary drink).
Questions: ihr@ucsc.edu or 831-459-5655
Background readings available at Bookshop Santa Cruz, including The View from the Center of the Universe by Joel Primack and Nancy Abrams.

Bios:
Anthony Aguirre, Professor of physics at UC Santa Cruz, studies the formation, nature, and evolution of the universe, focusing primarily on the model of eternal inflation—the idea that inflation goes on forever in some regions of universe—and what it may mean for the ultimate beginning of the universe and time. He is the co-founder and associate scientific director of the Foundational Questions Institute, which supports research on questions at the foundations and new frontiers of physics and cosmology. Learn more at www.anthony-aguirre.com.
Minghui Hu is an Associate Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz and his research focuses on the intellectual history of early modern China. His monograph “China’s Transition to Modernity: The Classical Vision of Dai Zhen” will be published by the University of Washington Press in 2015. He has organized an international conference “Cosmopolitanism in China, 1600-1950” at UCSC. The multi-authored book, drawn from this conference, will be published under the same tile by Cambria Press in 2015. He is currently working on a new monograph tentatively called “Becoming a Communist: Qu Qiubai and the Formation of Chinese Communist Party.”

Nathaniel Deutsch is a Professor in the Department of History at UC Santa Cruz, where he is also the Co-Director of the Center for Jewish Studies and the Director of the Institute for Humanities Research.

Sponsors:

UC Santa Cruz Celebrating 50 Years of Being Truly Original. This is a place like no other. It was imagined from the minds of original thinkers—the rebels and visionaries, artists, scientists, and poets who had the courage to strike off on a different path in search of ideas that question norms in hopes of making the world a better place. Let’s celebrate 50 amazing years. Visit 50years.ucsc.edu and see what we are planning.
Questions that Matter is a public humanities series developed by UCSC Institute for Humanities Research (IHR) and the community of Santa Cruz. It will bring together in conversation two or more UC Santa Cruz scholars with community residents and students to explore questions that matter to all of us. The series is a part of a strategic initiative of the IHR to champion the role and value of the humanities in contemporary life. At the University of California Santa Cruz, we understand that the humanities are a crucial element of any first-rate liberal arts education. Indeed, what distinguishes the best universities in the United States is the fact that the humanities are an integral part of their core curriculum, along with the arts and sciences. The series is designed as a lecture and conversation, with plenty of time built in for participant questions and answers. The series will be in partnership with Bookshop Santa Cruz, the Santa Cruz Public Libraries, and the Kuumbwa Jazz Center.

GSC: Non-Academic Interviewing
2015-01-28 10:30 - 12:00 | Graduate Student Commons
This is a professional development event open to all the graduate students at UCSC.
Snacks and beverages will be served. If you plan to attend, please RSVP using the link below by 7pm on Tue, Jan 27th:
http://goo.gl/forms/eKhl1mr3PR [You need to be logged into your UCSC email/google account.]
Presented by Jennifer May, Career Center adviser (http://careers.ucsc.edu/about/staff.html).

Carolyn Dean: "All that Glitters: Incommensurability in Spanish American Visual Culture"
2015-01-28 12:00 - 13:30 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Carolyn Dean is currently working on a co-authored book project entitled Colonial Things, Cosmopolitan Thinking: Locating the Indigenous Art of Spanish America. Recognizing that the humanistic disciplines have often had an uncomfortable relationship with objects created outside Western traditions, this project seeks to illuminate how indigenous things in the colonial past have been used and invested with meaning. She is Professor of History of Art & Visual Culture Department at UC Santa Cruz.

Winter 2015 Colloquium Series
January 14 : Maya Peterson
January 21: Naveeda Khan
January 28: Carolyn Dean
February 4: Madhavi Murty
February 11: Kris Alexanderson
February 18: Jennifer Horne
February 25: Gayle Salamon
March 4: Christopher Chen

Julio Torres: "Individual Differences in Prior Language Experience: The Heritage Language Bilingual"
2015-01-28 17:00 - 18:30 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Individual differences play a key role in explaining variability in learning outcomes among adult second language learners. Researchers have begun examining the additional language learning experiences of learners with different profiles including bilinguals, aging learners and learners with low literacy levels in their first language. In this talk, I will present briefly data from three studies that address the prior language learning experience of adult heritage bilinguals, or speakers who grew up speaking a non-English language (Spanish) at home and in their communities. These studies entertain the following general questions: (1). Are heritage bilinguals the true agents of language change?; (2). Do heritage bilinguals demonstrate an advantage in cognitive control?; and (3). Are task-based pedagogical interventions effective in promoting heritage bilinguals’ (re) learning of the heritage language? The results of these studies imply that the experience of heritage bilinguals lead to various learning and cognitive outcomes.
Julio Torres is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at UC Irvine.

Angela Davis: “Racism, Militarism, Poverty: From Ferguson to Palestine” at the 31st Annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Convocation
2015-01-28 19:00 - 21:00 | Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium
The 2015 Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Convocation will feature Angela Davis, Distinguished Professor Emerita, UC Santa Cruz
Angela Davis: “Racism, Militarism, Poverty: From Ferguson to Palestine”
Date: 7 p.m., Wednesday, January 28th 2015
Location: Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium
The event is free and open to the public
Through her activism and scholarship over the last decades, Angela Davis has been deeply involved in our nation’s quest for social justice. Her work as an educator – both at the university level and in the larger public sphere – has always emphasized the importance of building communities of struggle for economic, racial, and gender equality. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz, and the author of nine books, including her most recent book of essays called The Meaning of Freedom.
In recent years a persistent theme of her work has been the range of social problems associated with incarceration and the generalized criminalization of those communities that are most affected by poverty and racial discrimination. She draws upon her own experiences in the early seventies as a person who spent eighteen months in jail and on trial, after being placed on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted List.”
She is a founding member of Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to the dismantling of the prison industrial complex. Internationally, she is affiliated with Sisters Inside, an abolitionist organization based in Queensland, Australia that works in solidarity with women in prison.
Having helped to popularize the notion of a “prison industrial complex,” she now urges her audiences to think seriously about the future possibility of a world without prisons and to help forge a 21st century abolitionist movement.
Also featuring a performance by: Singer and songwriter, AlexisRose

More Info

UCSC Shuttles
UC Santa Cruz shuttles will be provided to students for transportation to the Civic Auditorium and return to campus after the event.
Beginning at the campus main entrance at 5:30pm and 6:30pm, the shuttle will make all stops along the perimeter route to pickup students, exit the west entrance, and arrive at the Civic at app. 6:00pm and 7:00pm. (With an expectation of a large audience this year, riders are encouraged to consider taking the earlier shuttle to insure securing of the best seats. Doors open at 6:30pm, and a line is anticipated.)
The shuttle will be parked in front of the Civic at the conclusion of the Convocation and depart for campus app. 10 minutes after the Convocation ends. It will make all perimeter route stops on its return trip.

Tony Hill Memorial Award
Members of the Santa Cruz and UCSC community are invited to nominate outstanding individuals for the Tony Hill Memorial Award. The recipient will be recognized at the convocation.
Criteria for nomination: The individual is actively engaged in the needs of the community and seeks to provide tools to work toward a solution. The individual demonstrates hands-on service that results in building connections among diverse groups, promoting equality and justice.
The deadline for the Tony Hill award nomination is January 9th, 2015.

Brown Bag Lunch: Building a Better Online Identity
2015-01-29 12:00 - 13:30 | Graduate Student Commons
Learn how to perfect your online identity and social media presence as an academic. Melissa De Witte (Web Coordinator, Social Sciences) will lead a discussion about how to build your network, develop meaningful connections, and how you could Twitter your way into your next speaking engagement or job interview.
Whether you are a novice or an expert, a technophobe or an early adopter, this interactive talk will discuss the dos and don’ts, tips, strategies and more to making the most out of an online presence. Discover the importance social media plays on your search engine results and learn how elevating your digital profile is as easy as a Tweet and just a “like” away.
The session will also include practical exercises with the hope that you will leave with some digital collateral of your own. Laptops are encouraged but not required.
Melissa De Witte handles the digital and social media for the Division of Social Sciences here at UC Santa Cruz. She is also an editorial contributor to Social Media Club, the world’s largest community of social media professionals. She has an extensive background across the media industry in New York and London. Melissa has an MA in Media, Culture and Communication from New York University. You can Tweet her @melissadewitte
Open to all graduate students, staff, and faculty.
Contact digitalhumanities@ucsc.edu for more details about any of the above events.
Follow @DH_UCSC on Twitter and Digital Humanities at UCSC on Facebook.

Living Writers Series: Korimar Press, Lorenzo Herrera Y Lozano & Maya Chinchilla
2015-01-29 18:00 - 19:45 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The Creative Writing Program presents Korimar Press, Lorenzo Herrera Y Lozano & Maya Chincilla in the Winter 2015 Living Writers Series.
Maya Chinchilla is a Guatemalan, Bay Area-based writer, video artist, and educator. Maya received her MFA in English and Creative Writing from Mills College and her undergraduate degree from University of California, Santa Cruz, where she also founded and co-edited the annual non-exclusive publication, La Revista. Maya writes and performs poetry that explores themes of historical memory, heartbreak, tenderness, sexuality, and alternative futures. Her work —sassy, witty, performative, and self-aware— draws on a tradition of truth-telling and poking fun at the wounds we carry.
Her work has been published in anthologies and journals including: Mujeres de Maíz, Sinister Wisdom, Americas y Latinas: A Stanford Journal of Latin American Studies, Cipactli Journal, and The Lunada Literary Anthology. Maya is a founding member of the performance group Las Manas, a former artist-in-residence at Galería de La Raza in San Francisco, CA, and La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley, CA, and is a VONA Voices and Dos Brujas workshop alum. She is the co-editor of Desde El Epicentro: An anthology of Central American Poetry and Art and is a lecturer at San Francisco State University.

Winter 2015 Living Writers Series:
January 15: Cherrie Moraga, poet/playwright
January 22: Veronica Reyes & Javier Huerta, poets
January 29: Korimar Press, Lorenzo Herrera Y Lozano (publisher) & Maya Chinchilla (poet)
February 5: Rigoberto Gonzalez, poet
February 12: Luis Alfaro, performance artist/playwright
February 19: John Jota Leanos, filmmaker
February 26: Anita Hill, attorney
March 5: Maceo Montoya, fiction writer
March 12: student reading

The Living Writers Series is a free and public event held Thursdays, 6:00-7:45 pm in Humanities Lecture Hall 206. Click here for more information, or email ktyamash@ucsc.edu.

Michael Anderson: "Neural Reuse and Hebbian Learning: Two Kinds of Neuroplasticity in the Brain"
2015-01-29 18:00 - 19:45 | Jack Baskin 152
Guest Lectures for “Introduction to Philosophy” (Phil 11) and “Brain, Mind, and Consciousness” (Cowell 39), co-taught by Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther, UCSC, Winter 2015.
Michael L. Anderson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at F&M, and a Visiting Associate Professor at the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he is also a member of the Graduate Faculty in the Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science. He earned a B.S. with honors in pre-medical studies at the University of Notre Dame, a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University (where he was a Sterling Prize Fellow), and did a post-doc in computer science at the University of Maryland. In 2012 he was selected to be a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, at Stanford University.
Prof. Anderson is author or co-author of over eighty scholarly and scientific publications in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind. His work has appeared in such journals as Artificial Intelligence, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Connection Science, Journal of Logic and Computation, The Neuroscientist, Philosophical Psychology and Synthese.
Winter 2015 Lecture Series Schedule:
Robin Dunkin
Tuesday, January 27, Stevenson 175 @ 6:00
“Building Blocks of the Brain: Neuron and Glia Form & Function”
*****
Michael Anderson
Thursday, January 29, Stevenson 175 @ 6:00
“Neural Reuse and Hebbian Learning: Two Kinds of Neuroplasticity in the Brain”
*****
Nicolas Davidenko
Tuesday, February 3, Stevenson 175 @ 6:00
“The Suggestible Nature of Motion Perception”
*****
Janette Dinishak
Thursday, February 12, Humanities Lecture Hall @ 12:00
“Autism & Neurodiversity”
*****
Ray Gibbs
Thursday, February 12, Stevenson 175 @ 6:00
“Embodied Meaning, Thinking, and Communication”
*****
Craig Schindler
Tuesday, February 17, Stevenson 175 @ 6:00
“Enduring Wisdom, Mindfulness & Emerging Neuroscience”
*****
John Brown Childs
Thursday, February 19, Humanities Lecture Hall @ 12:00
“Transcommunality”
*****
Dada Nabhaniilananda
Thursday, February 19, Stevenson 175 @ 6:00
“Dragon Taming for Smart People”
*****
Natalia Carrillo
Tuesday, February 24, Stevenson 175 @ 6:00
“A History of the Action Potential”
*****
Doc Edge
Tuesday, February 24, Humanities Lecture Hall at 12:00
“Talking About Race: Geneticists, Philosophers, the Media, and the People”
*****
Brian Cantwell Smith
Thursday, February 26, Humanities Lecture Hall @ 12:00
“The Three R’s: Representation, Registration, and Reality”
Thursday, February 26, Stevenson 175 @ 6:00
“The Couch or the Bottle: Levels of Abstraction and the Anxious Mind”
*****
Octavio Valadez
Tuesday, March 3, Humanities Lecture Hall @ 12:00
“Co-Teaching and Revolutionary Teaching”
*****
Fabrizzio McManus Guerrero
Thursday, March 5, Humanities Lecture Hall @ 12:00
“From Queer Theory to Teoria Cuir: Latinamerican appropriations of Gay Identities”
Thursday, March 5, Stevenson 175 @ 6:00
“Neuro-Biological Explanations of Sexual Orientation and Their Counter-explanations”

"Trade and Exchange" Winter MRP Workshop & Ottomanists Workshop
2015-01-30 09:30 - 17:30 | UC Davis
The Mediterranean Seminar/University of California Multi-Campus Research Project (MRP) in Mediterranean Studies announces its Winter 2014 Workshop, to be held at UC Davis on Friday, January 30, to be held in conjunction with the Western Ottomanists Workshop (WOW) on Saturday, January 31.
The Workshop consists of discussion of three pre-circulated papers and a talk by our featured scholar, Molly Greene (History, Princeton University), who will present “Where are the Ottomans in Mediterranean History?”
Please stay tuned for more information.
For the WOW workshop, see https://faculty.unlv.edu/curryj5/WOW/WOWindex.html

Friday Forum for Graduate Research: Aubrey Hobart
2015-01-30 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1, Room 202
Friday Forum For Graduate Research: A weekly interdisciplinary colloquium series for sharing graduate research across the humanities. Join us for light refreshments and weekly presentations by your fellow graduate students. Fridays from 12:00 – 1:30pm in Humanities 1, Room 202.

Winter 2015 Schedule:
January 16th – Jesica Siham Fernández, Social Psychology, “Latina/o Children as Cultural Citizens: Membership, Sense of Belonging, Space and Rights”
January 23rd – Wes Modes, DANM, “A Secret History of American River People”
January 30th – Aubrey Hobart, Visual Studies, “The Queen of Heaven and the Prince of Angels: Saintly Rivalry in Colonial Mexico”
February 6th – Melissa Brzycki, History, “Inventing the Socialist Child, 1945-1976″
February 13th – Delio Vásquez, HISC, “The Criminal Revolutionary and the Revolutionary Criminal: Illegal Black Resistance in the 60s and 70s”
February 20th – Melissa Yinger, Literature, “Ronsard’s Echo-critical Poetic Narcissism: The Elegies for Narcissus and Gâtine”
February 27th – Tracy Perkins, Sociology, “From Protest to Policy: The Political Evolution of California Environmental Justice Activism, 1980s-2010s”
March 6th – Michael Wilson, Politics, “Violent Constructions: Classifying, Explaining, and Misrepresenting Contentious Politics”
March 13th – Jessica Calvanico, Feminist Studies, “On the Politics of Owning a Kara Walker”

This event series is also made possible through the generous support of the departments of Literature, History of Consciousness. Anthropology, Feminist Studies, HAVC, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, Sociology, Institute for Humanities Research, as well as the GSA and GSC.

Michael Frachetti: "Uncovering a Nomadic City Along the Medieval Silk Road"
2015-01-30 17:00 - 19:00 | Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
From at least 200 BC to the 16th century CE, the Eurasian Silk Road formed the most extensive network of trade and commerce the world had ever seen. Its pathways linked populations from Beijing to Jerusalem in one of the first global networks. Much of what we know about the Silk Road is defined by archaeology from lowland oases, but mountainous regions occupied by nomads offer new insights. The newly discovered city of Tashbulak, unearthed in 2011 in the highlands of Uzbekistan, is one of the most recent and exciting discoveries along the Medieval Silk Road. Tashbulak pushes us to question our common understanding of the role of nomads in shaping the history and technology of medieval empires across Central Asia and sparks many questions about political, religious and economic change in the 11th century CE.
Dr. Michael Frachetti is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. His work addresses the ancient nomadic societies of Central and Eastern Eurasia and how these shaped inter-regional networks from as early as 2000 BCE (the Mid-Bronze Age) down to the time of the later Silk Roads. He is the author of Pastoralist Landscapes and Social Interaction in Bronze Age Eurasia (UCPress, 2008). He currently conducts archaeological field research in Eastern Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

EVENT PHOTOS:
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