This seminar explores how pre-modern debates over body and soulshaped political and eschatological thought in the Mediterranean. Each panel brings Jewish, Christian, and Islamic voices into dialogue, with Dante Alighieri's oeuvre as a recurring point of comparison. Our aim is to situate questions of embodiment, psychology, soteriology, and collective destiny in light of their historical […]

In the spring of 1975, a 1,500-year-old Indigenous cemetery on Lee Road in Watsonville, California, was threatened by a development project. Members of the local Native American community with ties to this sacred site occupied the construction site in protest of the development. The local Sheriff called upon the newly formed well-armed County SWAT force, […]

It is a common (aspirational) refrain that climate change “changes everything,” and equally common to note that climate-related transitions seem to be changing very little at all. What climate-related changes are happening now? And how might we grasp emergent trajectories while we’re in the midst of these transitions? With a substantive focus on the city-hinterland […]

This talk proposes a new reading of Early Modern European sources for African history in light of Islamic African written records and oral traditions. It examines how Islam interacted with local religions and cultural practices in order to become meaningful and suitable for West African communities. Focusing on the need for protection against crocodile attacks […]

We gather to forge new vernaculars of the geopolitical, to assemble spatial imaginaries of the “oceanic” that refuse rather than relent to the insistent march of capital and empire. To dissent here is an invitation to think more about the messiness and stuckness of our intellectual labors across histories of slavery, indenture, colonialism and more. This event is open to the campus community. Register […]