Dread Scott's recent large-scale art project, Slave Rebellion Reenactment, was a community-engaged performance reenacting the largest rebellion of enslaved people in U.S. history. Prof. Gray, UC Davis, will join him in conversation about art, revolution, and reenactments. This is the next event in Visualizing Abolition, an online program featuring artists, activists, scholars, and others united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition. Visualizing Abolition is a series of online events organized in collaboration with Professor Gina Dent and featuring artists,…

Left-Standing is a performance of written and video poems. The video does not illustrate the writing; rather the two media become an interconnected poetics. Together, these forms of poetry engage visual, aural, and affective dimensions of ordinary human encounters with the nonhuman world. The overall scenario presents encounters both with animals who wander a suburban neighborhood after a woods has been razed and developed, and with the trees, grasses, waters, and crops in the leftover woods and its surrounding farmlands.…

Please join the Humanities Division's newest Dean, Jasmine Alinder, to hear her thoughts on her first year as Dean as well as her inspirational vision for the growth and development of the Humanities Division. A brief talk on these topics will be followed by a casual question and answer period. All are welcome!

Anthony Cody is the author of Borderland Apocrypha, winner of the 2018 Omnidawn Open Book Prize selected by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and finalist for a 2020 National Book Award. He is a CantoMundo fellow from Fresno, California. His poetry has appeared in Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, The Boiler, ctrl+v journal, among others. Anthony is a member of the Hmong American Writers’ Circle and co-edited How Do I Begin? A Hmong American Literary Anthology. He is a recent MFA-Creative Writing graduate from…

For more information, please see the Linguistics Department Colloquia page.

In the past several years, moments of political opposition and revolutionary possibility have continued to unfold across North Africa. In 2018, protest erupted in Sudan. Algeria followed when in 2019, President Bouteflika announced his intention to seek a fifth term. In the Western Sahara, the Polisario Front resumed its armed struggle in 2020 after the end of a twenty-nine year-long UN mediated cease-fire. Featuring Khalid Medani (McGill University), Vivian Solana (Carleton University), and Farida Souieh (Aix-Marseille University), this event will…

This series of noontime conversations will feature key passages by Shakespeare, selected for what they reveal about life and living. What are the virtues or capacities that Shakespeare took to be essential to social, spiritual, and civic happiness? How do Shakespeare’s speakers think out loud about values and ends, and how does Shakespeare think in and through his characters about matters of meaning? What images did Shakespeare offer and what words did he choose to make these themes tangible to…

This talk/participatory workshop will draw from the methods and theoretical orientation of two of Cox’s current projects. The first, Cosmic Cartographies, explores how people define and actualize strategies for Black liberation and is inspired by the ways in which a group of multigeneration Black women activists articulate their physical and psychic relationship to space in Cincinnati. The second, BodyStorm, tracks the social choreography, mobilities, gestures, ways of experiencing the body, and what we might even call dance techniques that are…

COVID, climate change, and capitalism present a set of fundamental crises. What will it take for the left to be adequate to the task of addressing them? This talk will consider the barriers constituted by the continuation of anti-communist assumptions. It will draw out the limits of left “assemblism,” state-phobia, and amorphous inclusivity and highlight the necessity of a disciplined struggle for state power. If the problems are as severe as the ever-present evocations of dystopian catastrophe indicate, then the…

Thom Gentle Environmental History Lecture Empire of Rubber: Scenes from Firestone’s Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia In the early 1920s, Americans owned 80 percent of the world’s automobiles and consumed 75 percent of the world’s rubber. But only one percent of the world’s rubber grew under the U.S. flag, creating a bottleneck that hampered the nation’s explosive economic expansion. To solve its conundrum, the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company turned to a tiny West African nation, Liberia, founded…

This series of noontime conversations will feature key passages by Shakespeare, selected for what they reveal about life and living. What are the virtues or capacities that Shakespeare took to be essential to social, spiritual, and civic happiness? How do Shakespeare’s speakers think out loud about values and ends, and how does Shakespeare think in and through his characters about matters of meaning? What images did Shakespeare offer and what words did he choose to make these themes tangible to…

Professor Hibbert-Jones, Art, UCSC, and filmmaker Nomi Talisman present a curated selection of films. More information forthcoming.

A family of would-be migrants reenacts a swarm hunt at their former apiary in northeastern Bosnia. Their folk spells were well-attuned to the sorts of crises that tatter old human-apian ties, except the latest: extreme weather and emigration. Meanwhile, one tepid February, shepherds reflect on gratitude as their sheep graze by the growing coal-power plant. “The End is not yet,” they say. These are snapshots of what Jasarevic calls the quiets of disaster. Sharing a rough cut of a story…

This roundtable celebrates the launch of the Critical Ethnic Studies special issue “Borderland Regimes and Resistance in Global Perspective.” Taking up sites that range from US/Mexico, to the Mediterranean, to Palestine/Israel, and beyond, the special issue’s contributors move past superficial comparisons and think through the circulation of technologies, expertise, policing, and surveillance alongside the circulation of anti-colonial strategies via transnational social movements. By bridging conversations that are typically kept in separate academic silos — for example, critical refugee studies, Asian…

This series of noontime conversations will feature key passages by Shakespeare, selected for what they reveal about life and living. What are the virtues or capacities that Shakespeare took to be essential to social, spiritual, and civic happiness? How do Shakespeare’s speakers think out loud about values and ends, and how does Shakespeare think in and through his characters about matters of meaning? What images did Shakespeare offer and what words did he choose to make these themes tangible to…

Visualizing Abolition, the year-long program featuring artists, activists, scholars, and others united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition, concludes with a conversation on strategies, activism, and liberatory futures with Sora Han, Adrienne Maree Brown and Savannah Shange. Visualizing Abolition is a series of online events organized in collaboration with Professor Gina Dent and featuring artists, activists, and scholars united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition. Originally, Visualizing Abolition was being planned as an in-person…

Savcı will speak about her book Queer in Translation, which draws on the case of Turkey’s 16 years of AKP governance to intervene in Queer Studies’ separate — indeed, diagonically opposed — approaches to neoliberalism and to Islam. She theorizes “neoliberal Islam” as a unique regime that brings together economic and religious moralities to deploy marginality onto ever-expanding populations instead of concentrating it in the lower echelons of society, and she suggests that sexual liberation movements are the most productive…

Forging Ties, Forging Passports is a history of migration and nation-building from the vantage point of those who lived between states. Devi Mays traces the histories of Ottoman Sephardi Jews who emigrated to the Americas—and especially to Mexico—in the late nineteenth century through World War II, and the complex relationships they maintained to legal documentation as they migrated and settled into new homes. Mays considers the shifting notions of belonging, nationality, and citizenship through the stories of individual women, men,…

Join the Research Center for the America for their final event of the “Memory Studies in the Americas” thematic series which explores how markers or symbols of memory are imagined and disputed. Listen to presentations on the San Gabriel mission in Tovaangar (known as Los Angeles today) by Dr. Catherine Ramírez (Professor, Latin American and Latino Studies) and Confederate monuments in Virginia by Dr. Kate Jones (Associate Professor, History), as they weave the personal with the scholarly to explore the…

What does it mean to conjure a world without borders, a world without prisons, and a world without the carceral logics that detain and deport? How do we understand the connections and potential coalitions among struggles against policing and prisons, mobilizations against border fortification, and movements to create a more just university such as the COLA strike? This panel explores the abolitionist imperative to eradicate borders—which is fundamentally distinct from imperialist, neoliberal, and liberal humanitarian demands for borderlessness—as one that…

This series of noontime conversations will feature key passages by Shakespeare, selected for what they reveal about life and living. What are the virtues or capacities that Shakespeare took to be essential to social, spiritual, and civic happiness? How do Shakespeare’s speakers think out loud about values and ends, and how does Shakespeare think in and through his characters about matters of meaning? What images did Shakespeare offer and what words did he choose to make these themes tangible to…

Music for Abolition, directed and curated by Terri Lyne Carrington, is a project bringing together musicians across a variety of genres to create a soundtrack—and provide a heartbeat—to our shared struggle for abolition. Expressing grief, rage, exhaustion, and resolution in the face of the U.S. history of racism and oppression, the music resonates with calls of freedom. Join us May 18 for a conversation about the role of sound and music in the struggle for prison abolition with the participating…

The farmers protests in India have ignited a widespread resistance movement globally. Focused initially on repressive farm laws enacted by the Indian state, the protests have now expanded to include broader environmental, social and political concerns impacting the livelihood, independence and sustenance of working people. What was first seen as an agrarian protest movement has become a rallying call for much-needed debates on dissent, casteism, gender, and economic justice. This colloquium is a joint event with the Center for South…

Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from Ugiuvak (King Island) and Qawiaraq (Mary’s Igloo). The author of eight collections of poetry and prose, she teaches poetry and creative nonfiction at Harvard, is a lecturer in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism and Diaspora at Tufts, and was founding faculty of the graduate creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She’s currently a Visiting Fellow of Race and Ethnicity at The Center for the Study of…

As co-editors of the recently published special issue of Critical Ethnic Studies on Borderland Regimes and Resistance in Global Perspective, we invite you to join us for a workshop focused on academic journal article publishing. We will cover: adapting elements from your dissertation into journal articles; creating your own publication pipeline; navigating the journal submission, review, and publishing process; and dealing with rejections. We will also discuss the process of submitting to journal special issues, such as ours--including how to…

Presented by the Center for South Asian Studies and the Center for the Middle East and North Africa. Featured speakers: Amita Baviskar (Professor, Sociology-Anthropology and Environmental Studies, Ashoka University) and Gökçe Günel (Assistant Professor, Antropology Rice University).

For more information, please see the Linguistics Department Colloquia page.

This series of noontime conversations will feature key passages by Shakespeare, selected for what they reveal about life and living. What are the virtues or capacities that Shakespeare took to be essential to social, spiritual, and civic happiness? How do Shakespeare’s speakers think out loud about values and ends, and how does Shakespeare think in and through his characters about matters of meaning? What images did Shakespeare offer and what words did he choose to make these themes tangible to…

What does it take to cultivate decolonized subjects in postcolonial times? When anti-colonial struggles are all said and done, and the dust settles on a profoundly reshaped social, economic, and political landscape in their wake, what kinds of intellectual and political labor are required to undo colonized subjectivities and to gradually and systematically produce decolonized ones in their stead? This talk brings the oeuvres of central contemporary Arab thinkers to bear on these questions and discusses what the current resonances…

More information about Celebrating the Humanities will be available in the coming months.

This three-part virtual reading of one of Shakespeare’s most unusual tragedies continues the “Undiscovered Shakespeare” collaboration between Santa Cruz Shakespeare, the Humanities Institute, and The Shakespeare Workshop. Join us as we read through this play episodically on Zoom, and dig into the text with lectures from scholars and conversations with the cast. Swinging wildly between bawdy comedy, epic history, and tragic romance, Troilus and Cressida plays about against the backdrop of the Trojan War. With its examinations of honor, fidelity,…