In curatorial practices today, asking the question “What is art?” leads to a clear lack of a singularly “correct” answer. Expand the question to “What is African art?” and the territory becomes even murkier in that both the terms “art” and “Africa” resist definition. The navigation toward mutual understanding becomes an almost impassable quagmire of […]

This presentation will explore the use of the chocolate tree (Theobroma cacao L.) in Mesoamerican communities with a focus on the ancient Maya polity of Copan in Honduras. While the areas where cacao thrived in Mesoamerica were limited, the seeds were easily transportable and became a valued source of stimulants. By 1900 B.C. cacao was […]

Morphological case systems are frequently described in terms of distinctions related to transitivity. To a first approximation, the case system of Nez Perce nicely fits this bill: one case (ergative) marks transitive subjects, a distinct case (objective) marks transitive objects, and intransitive subjects remain in an unmarked (nominative) form. (1) Transitive: ERG subject, OBJ object […]

Every year, we honor Helen Diller, whose generous endowment continues to provide crucial support to Jewish Studies at UC-Santa Cruz, by hosting a public lecture on campus by an internationally recognized scholar.  This year's lecture will be presented by Dr. Robert Alter, and is entitled "Translating the Bible: The Wisdom Books."  The lecture will take […]

Drawing on the narratological theories of Genette (“voice”) and Mieke Bal (“focalization”), Professor Jordan’s talk offers a new approach to understanding the illustrations to Dickens’s Bleak House (1852- 53) that emphasizes elements of retrospection, fantasy, and multiple temporality. John Jordan is Professor of Literature, UCSC.

In this talk, I argue for a particular logic by which agreement (in particular, agreement between a verb or tense/aspect/mood-marker and a noun-phrase) is related to grammaticality, and show how this conclusion illuminates certain longstanding questions in the theory of syntax. In particular, I argue that agreement is best captured in terms of an operation. […]

Professor Bell’s in-progress Frontiers of Hate: Anti-Semitism and Empire in Nineteenth-Century France explores articulations between anti-Semitism and imperialism that shaped the emergence of European racial thought. Arguing that colonial expansion helped French anti-Semitism adopt its modern racializing guise, the book also examines how anti-Semitism participated in the ideological elaboration of the imperial project. Dorian Bell is Assistant Professor of Literature at UCSC. Sponsored […]

The history of the Israeli- Arab wars has had environmental implications which are often overlooked. Some pessimists argue that the next war will in the Middle East will be fought over water resources, especially with climate change so profoundly changing precipitation patterns in the Mediterranean region. As the conflict drags on past its 60th year, […]

A classic puzzle about CPs is that they distribute differently than nominal arguments. This fact is reflected, among other things, by the order of complements in English (Stowell 1981) and the right-peripheral position of CPs in many OV languages (Hindi, Farsi, German). This distribution has traditionally been seen as a reflex of grammatical function, most […]

This talk reports on work that detects the kind of rhetorical structures a person uses when attempting to persuade an audience to believe or act in a certain manner. Professor Anand discusses the collection and annotation of 3000 English and 500 Arabic blogs for a variety of rhetorical structures implicated in persuasion by communication theorists […]