Faculty Profile: Laura Martin

Laura Martin is a Continuing Lecturer with Porter College and the Research Program Manager with The Humanities Institute. Martin helps lead the Deep Read, which reaches thousands of participants in Santa Cruz and Beyond. We were excited to catch up and learn more about Martin’s work in greater detail.

Hi Laura, thank you for taking some time to talk to us today. To get us started, could you share a bit about your role at THI and your trajectory to that position?

Of course!  I’m happy to talk.  Yes, for sure. 

I got my foot in the door at THI when I was brought on to teach the first Deep Read course on Margaret Atwood in 2020 (which seems like a lifetime ago, now!). My area of research is the fiction and history of the 18th-century British Atlantic, but I studied with Jerry Rosenberg for a time at Miami University; he’s a well-known Atwood scholar, so I had read and written about a lot of Atwood’s works. But, to get back to your question, in that first year, I slowly started taking on more duties as the program went on–interviewing faculty for the email series with our communications consultant, Adam Jacobson; editing and writing copy for the Deep Read emails and other communications; meeting regularly with the Deep Read team; assisting with event planning; meeting with the Deep Read committee to plan for the next book; etc. 

I became a program manager kind of by slow accretion, and I started taking on other projects as the months and years went on, like Humanizing Technology, and I began helping with other THI priorities, like undergraduate and graduate fellowship work.  Now, I manage the Moving Image Lab fellowship program as well as two centers at THI, the Center for Middle East and North Africa and the Center for South Asian Studies. It’s been an interesting and fun ride!

The Deep Read is an incredible program that has reached thousands of people connected to the UC Santa Cruz community. What is the history of how it got started and the motivation behind it?

It really is an incredible program, and it’s been amazing being part of its growth. When we started, I think we had 700 participants or so; now, we have over 10,000 Deep Readers. It is definitely rooted in the UC Santa Cruz community, but it extends well beyond it, too. The program involves UC Santa Cruz students, staff, faculty, and alumni, but it also includes area high school and community college students, local community members, and readers across the nation and world. It’s not an overstatement to say that it has become a nation-wide public reading program (and potentially an international one, too, as we have readers tuning in from all over the world). 

In terms of its history, the Deep Read is the brain-child of Sean Keilen (Prof of Literature; Associate Dean & Chair, Council of Provosts) and Irena Polić (Managing Director of THI). Sean was the Porter Provost at the time the Deep Read began, and he and Irena were dreaming about ways to bring various communities and people together around reading books and discussing important contemporary issues; they made their dream a reality by fundraising, laying the institutional framework, integrating staffing, and promoting the program both on and off campus. I had been working with Sean at Porter for some time, teaching courses there and helping with curriculum development, so he brought me on to teach and, ultimately, to help manage the program. 

It’s so meaningful to be a part of a program that not only bridges town and gown, but also promotes public engagement, community reading, and careful thinking.

The motivation for the program is at once simple and ambitious (and perhaps even more ambitious given our current climate)–to bring diverse groups of people together around a common goal, which is to think carefully about a book and its various issues and contexts. It’s really an attempt to revivify the public square in some ways, and it’s amazing to see this in action, to see, for instance, undergraduate students mingling with faculty mingling with lifelong learners from the community, all talking together about subjects ranging from novelistic form to the merits of geo-engineering. It’s so meaningful to be a part of a program that not only bridges town and gown, but also promotes public engagement, community reading, and careful thinking. I think we need these things more than ever right now.

The Deep Read involves multiple events that people can attend, can you walk us through what some of those are and how people can get involved?

Yes, I’d be happy to. It is true that there are a lot of moving parts to the program. 

First, anyone can sign up to be a part of the program on our website. Once you do that, you are a part of the community and will receive communications about all of our events as well as receive the 4-part email series that guides readers through the Deep Read book. 

We typically announce the book in October, launch the program with the event and program schedule in March, and begin events and the email series in April. This year, we added an early event in mid-February focused on Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which this year’s book, Percival Everett’s James is reimagining and adapting. Susan Gillman, Professor of Literature and Twain scholar, gave a really interesting talk on Twain that helped lay the groundwork for James and how Everett is engaging with Twain and his novel. If anyone missed that event, the video is up on our website. 

In addition to the author event each year, we typically have two salons that help us think through the book together in preparation for the author’s visit. This year, on April 22, we are hosting a virtual Craft Salon on the writing of James led by Professors of Literature and Creative Writing, Micah Perks and Karen Tei Yamashita. We are also hosting a faculty salon on April 29 at the Hay Barn and online where our Deep Read faculty for the year will talk about their perspectives on the novel and how their own research and interests intersect with the book; this year’s faculty are Professors Susan Gillman (Literature), akua naru (Music), and Greg O’Malley (History). The author event this year will be on May 4 at the Quarry Amphitheater, and it will feature Deep Read Faculty co-lead and Professor of Literature, Vilashini Cooppan, in conversation with Percival Everett. All of these events are free and open to the public, and all are welcome! 

What are some of the meaningful moments from your involvement in the Deep Read?

I have so many. I’m not being disingenuous when I say it’s hard to choose! I haven’t mentioned this yet, but another component of the Deep Read program is the undergraduate class at Porter that I teach every Spring, which is centered around the Deep Read book. One opportunity my students have is to meet the author, usually over lunch, and it’s always amazing to see them talking with the author whose work we’ve been studying all quarter. 

Last year, I took my students to Venus, and we were at this long table with Hernan Diaz. He insisted that we play musical chairs and move around periodically so he would get to meet each student, talk to them directly about Trust and his other work, field questions, and listen to comments that they wanted to share with him. It was really moving to see how seriously he took them and their ideas, and I know it was quite an extraordinary experience for my students to be able to engage with him in such a genuine way. 

Lastly, a fun question, if you could choose to have a Deep Read for any book with an author from any time period, what would you pick?

I think it would have to be Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. She delivered amazing lectures in her day (A Room of One’s Own, for example), so we would be guaranteed a good, meaningful show in that regard.  A modernist classic, To the Lighthouse is one of those books that is best read with others and with some guidance, I think. She’s innovating at the level of form in this novel, and there are a lot of historical, literary, and biographical contexts that need to be drawn out and explained more fully to really appreciate what she’s doing. At a basic level, though, the novel is a familiar story – a tale of individual aspiration (here a woman’s desire to be a serious artist) in conflict with a society that doesn’t allow for or take this aspiration seriously. I think it’s something a lot of us can relate to. It is also a book that has been subject to critiques, especially postcolonial ones, which is an interesting part of its afterlife and makes it a productive choice. While I don’t think perfect books exist, I do think perfect Deep Read books might exist, and I think this is one such an example–a book that takes some collective study, generates potentially diverse perspectives and reading experiences, and offers a model and ground for meaningful community and thinking.