Many modern problems involve computer simulations of physical or social processes. The field of statistics provides a range of tools to help with the design, analysis, and use of computer simulators. This talk will give an overview of these problems and the statistical perspective, with applications ranging from rocket science to hydrology to health care […]

Bhanu Kapil has written four full-length cross-genre works: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works, 2006), humanimal (Kelsey Street Press, 2009), and Schizophrene (forthcoming, Nightboat Books). Recent classes at Naropa have engaged architecture, somatics, biology and memory as ways to approach or navigate contemporary narrative and […]

“Quotidian Erasures: Gender and the Records of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade” will argue that the emergence of what early modern political theorists described as “political arithmetic”—and what we term demography—is a product of the trade in slaves that bolstered the colonial economies they were at pains to describe. Numeracy, political arithmetic, and the science of […]

The Center for Cultural Studies Colloquium Series Presents: Matt O'Hara,  History,  UCSC “The History of the Future in Mexico” Historians of Latin America have spent much energy studying historical legacies. The notion that “the past weighs heavily on the present” is a standard frame for historical analysis. Stepping outside this paradigm, Professor O’Hara’s book project […]

My aim will be to describe and assess Wittgenstein's anti-theoretical view of why philosophy ought not to be in conducted in the traditional way, how it should instead be done, and what can be accomplished by pursuing it properly. I will be especially concerned with the questions: (1) of how this view is related to […]

The UCSC Center for Labor Studies presents: Bill Fletcher, Jr.:  "Right-Wing Populism and the Crisis of Organized Labor" Free and Open to the Public Right-wing populism is a phenomenon deeply rooted in the US system.  It tends to emerge in a virulent form during times of economic distress and crisis.  It plays upon fears and […]

The Linguistics Colloquium Series Presents: Rajesh Bhatt (UMass Amherst) The location of agreement in the grammar has been the topic of considerable recent discussion. Bobaljik 2008 has argued that agreement is a post-syntactic process, other approaches (Boskovic 2009 and Chomsky 1999) locate it entirely within the syntactic system. More recently the data from agreement with […]

The Center for Cultural Studies Colloquium Series Presents: Cristina Lombardi-Diop, Italian Studies, UC Berkeley "Spotless Italy: Advertising Culture and the Post-racial Imagination" Professor Lombardi-Diop has published on gender and Italian colonial literature, African-Italian autobiographies, and the African diaspora in Italy. Her in-progress book is on the memory of Italian colonialism in Italy’s postwar cultural history. […]

Russian has a well-known rule called yer deletion: stem mid vowels are deleted when a vowel-initial suffix follows (as in `ditch (nom sg)' vs. (gen sg)). The rule is lexically idiosyncratic: most mid vowels in identical contexts do not alternate (as in `howl (nom sg)' vs. (gen sg)). There are two types of approaches to […]