The Fifteenth Annual Literature Undergraduate Colloquium 9:00-9:10 AM - Opening Remarks Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Director, Literature Undergraduate Program 9:10-10:15 AM - Panel One: Borderlands: Creative Writers Read Moderator, Micah Perks James Williams: Impertinent Youth Marine Ashnalikyan: "In the Living Room" and other Poems Narine Ashnalikyan: "After Dinner" and other Poems Stephen Richter: A Southern Tradition […]

Despina Kakoudaki’s work focuses on literature, film, visual and cultural studies, and the history of technology. Her new book, titled Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural Work of Artificial People, traces our fascination with mechanical and constructed people, such as robots, cyborgs, androids and automata. Despina Kakoudaki is Associate Professor at American […]

Helen, the Spartan queen whose abduction by Paris the prince of Troy ignited the ten-year-long Trojan War, may be regarded as the femme fatale par excellence. The prominence of Helen’s images in the Greek tradition is as notable as their complexity and ambiguity. Alongside commonplace condemnations of Helen as the cause of a devastating war, […]

Noted film and cultural studies critic Meaghan Morris will give a seminar on the theme of "parochial blockbusters". The seminar will center on a discussion of her essay, "Transnational Glamour, National Allure: Community, Change and Cliché in Baz Luhrmann’s Australia", which is available for downloading at http://ihr.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Morris-Transnational-Glamour-final.pdf, and which should be read before the seminar. […]

Martin Holbraad Professor Social Anthropology, University College London and Co-Director of Cosmology, Religion, Ontology and Culture Research Group (CROC) Martin Holbraad's main field research is in Cuba, where he focuses on Afro-Cuban religions and revolutionary politics. Author of Truth in Motion: the Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination (Chicago, 2012). Holbraad currently directs a major comparative […]

What are the proposed uses of biometrics in health care and the ethics and politics of body data in the digital age? As security and surveillance become the order of the day, biometric technologies have become a ubiquitous and naturalized part of most aspects of everyday life. Operating from the premise that “bodies don’t lie,” […]

Sex, or the Unbearable (Duke University Press, 2013) is a dialogue between Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, two leading theorists of sexuality, politics and culture. In juxtaposing sex and the unbearable they don't propose that sex is unbearable, but that it unleashes unbearable contradictions, which we nonetheless struggle to bear. Through interpretations of works of […]

This talk is located in a shattered, yet intelligible zone defined by being in life without wanting the world--a state traversing misery and detachment that, the talk claims, is well-known to historically structurally subordinated people (people of color, of non-normative sexuality, proletarianized laborers . . .). Reading with Claudia Rankine (Don’t Let Me Be Lonely), […]

Tacitus' Germania, a brief ethnography of the peoples the Romans called Germani, exerted a profound impact on the European History of ideas. By no fault of its author, it ended up as an ideological cornerstone of the National Socialist regime. This talk will trace the influence of the Germania and reflect more generally on what […]