The Literature Department invites you to attend a talk held in conjunction with the search for a position in Mediterranean Studies: Ancient Comparative Why do ruins happen? Are they caused by natural catastrophes, invasions, economic collapse, state failure, or by something else? This talk will address these questions from a new perspective, integrating sociological comparison […]

Rebecca Karl’s current work includes a forthcoming book entitled The Magic of Concepts: Philosophy and the Economic in Twentieth Century China; this book examines the intersections between philosophical and economic questions as they emerge and re-emerge over the course of China's twentieth century. Ongoing work includes a project on histories of economic concepts in China […]

Abstract: One (often implicit) motivation for a linguistic knowledge representation (e.g., a set of linguistic parameters or constraints) comes from an argument from acquisition, where language acquisition is assumed to be straightforward if children’s hypothesis space is defined by the correct knowledge representation. Acquisition then becomes the process of selecting the correct language-specific grammar from […]

Warren Montag’s research has two foci: French and Italian thought of the 1960s and 1970s, especially Althusser; and Literature and Philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. His recent book concerns the emergence of a necro-economics from French economic thinkers to Adam Smith (and beyond, from Malthus to Von Mises). Warren Montag is Brown Family Professor […]

The Ottoman-Jewish story has long been told as a romance between Jews and the empire. The prevailing view is that Ottoman Jews were protected and privileged by imperial policies and in return offered their unflagging devotion to the imperial government over many centuries. In this talk, Julia Phillips Cohen offers a corrective, arguing that Jewish […]

Following on his earlier work on Adam Smith and David Ricardo, Gopal Balakrishnan’s current work on Marx seeks to demonstrate the logical unity of Marx’s mature economic thought, while recognizing its specifically 19th century assumptions, as well as its incompleteness as an account of the history of capitalism. Gopal Balakrishnan is associate professor in the […]

What first turned your professors into readers? What do they read for pleasure, and why? Come find out at "LIT UP," a new series of informal talks by UCSC Literature professors specifically for the undergraduate community, and open to everyone. The inaugural LIT UP event is "Welcome to the Jungle: Conrad and Me," with Professor Vilashini Cooppan, […]

The Mediterranean Seminar UCMRP Fall Workshop and Conference will be held in conjunction with the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Townsend Center for the Humanities at the University of California Berkeley on Friday and Saturday, November 15 and 16, 2013. The theme of the Conference (November 15) is Translation and Mediterranean Culture. We […]