Carla Freccero has taught at UCSC since 1991. This paper, a chapter of the in-progress Animate Figures, explores the long genealogy of human wolf eradication and figuration in the west, from economic competitor in Plautus's "homo hominy lupus" to sovereign double in Derrida's The Beast and the Sovereign. Carla Freccero is Professor and Chair of […]

Through a study of the Haitian Revolution, James Martel's recent work not only questions the liberal universalism of the French Revolution, but also the myriad of ways in which Haitians appropriated, subverted, and radicalized Enlightenment principles. James Martel is Professor and Chair of Political Science at San Francisco State University.

James Clifford taught in UCSC's History of Consciousness Department for 33 years and was the founding director of the Center for Cultural Studies. Clifford is currently completing Returns, a book about indigenous cultural politics that will be the third in a trilogy. The first volume, The Predicament of Culture (1988) juxtaposed essays on 20th-century ethnography, […]

Jenny Reardon is currently working on a manuscript entitled The Post-Genomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, Knowledge after the Genome. This book traces the efforts to transform genomics from a fields that in the 1990s sparked fears of racism and dehumanization to one that todays claims the banners of democracy and justice. Jenny Reardon is Associate Professor […]

Laurie Palmer's current work explores matter's agency as it asserts itself at different speeds and scales. In the contexts of sculptural practice and public participatory projects, she asks how we might access differing temporalities to re-imagine our entanglements in the material/social world. Laurie Palmer is Professor in the Sculptural Department, School of the Art Institute […]

Anyone who wishes to attend the webinar online instead of in person, please contact Nancy Chen <nchenucsc@gmail.com> as soon as possible to reserve a spot. We will be using Google + hangouts as the webinar platform so be prepared to have a Google account.  The platform is limited to 10 parties so please rsvp by […]

Gregory E. O'Malley is currently finishing his first book, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807. It examines a complex network for distributing enslaved Africans throughout North America and the Caribbean after their survival of the infamous (and much more thoroughly studied) Middle Passage across the Atlantic. Gregory E. O'Malley is Assistant […]

An historian of Islamic South Asian and the Indian Ocean world, Elizabeth's research focuses on the mobility of people, things and ideas in the medieval and early modern periods. Elizabeth is also interested in issues of periodization and the need for dialogue and thinking across the pre-Modern/Modern/Contemporary divides. Elizabeth Lambourn is Professor of South Asian […]

Aminda Smith’s forthcoming book, Thought Reform and China’s Dangerous Classes: Reeducation, Resistance, and the People focuses on Chinese Communist reformatories, where agents of the state worked to transform beggars, prostitutes, and other “vagrants” into new socialist citizens. She explores reeducation centers as both institutions and symbolic spaces through which “The People” were created. Aminda Smith […]