The IHC is pleased to announce the winners of its Fall 2017 awards applications. Congratulations to these UCSB faculty members!
Faculty Fellowship
For a one-quarter teaching release during 2018-19 to concentrate on a research project.
Sex after NAFTA: and the Economy of Intimacy
Jennifer Tyburczy, Feminist Studies
“Sex after NAFTA” traces the influence of free trade policies and ideologies on everyday practices of intimacy. The project principally asks, how did the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) reconfigure U S /Mexico/Canada power relations to influence the circulation of erotic goods and ideas in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? What new analytic categories arrive for transnational sexuality and queer scholarship in the wake of NAFTA? To do so, “Sex after NAFTA” unravels what I call “the economy of intimacy” by exploring how NAFTA has influenced sex and sexuality in the United States, Mexico, and Canada.
Faculty Collaborative Awards
For collaborative research or instructional projects taking place within the next 12 months.
Cultural Sustainabilities
Tim Cooley, Music
Janet Walker, Film and Media Studies
“Cultural Sustainabilities” is a proposed two-day conference driven by the proposition that environmental and cultural sustainability are inextricably linked. While ecological scientists do inevitably engage human cultural practices since humans have increasing impact on ecologies globally, their focus nonetheless tends to be on nature separate from human intervention. When human impact and influence is included, it is often interpreted as a problem. This conference brings to campus leading social scientists and humanists to address the premise that reversing or ameliorating the negative impacts of human behavior on the globe’s environment is at its core a human cultural question.
Just Relations? White Romantic Imaginings and the Black Radical Tradition
Felice Blake, English
Julie Carlson, English
Friendship is usually defined on a principle of “sameness” and desired as “free” choice. Our project emphasizes differences among friends as a more philosophically and experientially accurate way to conceive the benefits of friendship, especially as “friend” has been thought in relation to justice. We bring together two radically opposed schools of thought that are nonetheless equally grounded in resistance to domination: radical White Romanticism and the Black Radical Tradition. Our project asks what allyship resides between their separate formulations of friend, collectivity, and justice and how their treatments of difference among intimates serve the capacity to better live together.
Pacific Coast Branch of British Studies Annual Conference
Erika Rappaport, History
Sears McGee, History
UCSB will host the annual conference of the Pacific Coast Branch of British Studies between March 23 and 25, 2018. The conference will feature papers representing all fields of British Studies – broadly defined to include those who study the United Kingdom, its component parts and nationalities, as well as Britain’s imperial cultures – from scholars and doctoral candidates in a wide range of disciplines across the humanities, social sciences, and the arts.
Exploring Catalan Identity
Antonio Cortijo, Spanish and Portuguese
Debra Blumenthal, History
Eloi Grasset, Spanish and Portuguese
The newly-founded Center for Catalan Studies at UCSB is unique within the UC system. The interdisciplinary nature of the Center is reflected in the fact that its associated members work on fields such as History, Political Science, Literature, Romance Linguistics, etc. The Center plans to hold a conference at UCSB in the spring of 2018 that will analyze many of the multifaceted issues surrounding Catalan identity (bilingualism vs biculturalism, translation and cognition, nation formation, cultural vs national identity, region vs nation, federalism vs political independence, etc.). Selected articles will be included in a volume to be published by University of Delaware Press.
Patterns and Networks in Classical Chinese Literature: Notes from the Digital Frontier
Thomas Mazanec, East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies
This conference will bring together a dozen sinologists from North America, Europe, and Asia to highlight the exciting new work that is taking place at the intersection of digital humanities and classical Chinese literary studies. Rather than focus on methodology, these papers provide concrete case studies of what new insights digital methods can bring to the study of classical Chinese literature. The conference papers will be published as a special issue of the Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture that will be guest-edited by Thomas Mazanec, Jeffrey Tharsen, and Jing Chen, to be published in November 2018.
Collaborative Arts Teaching Program Award
For community-engaged visual and performing art projects housed within UCSB courses.
Opera Outreach Program and Tour
Isabel Bayrakdarian, Music
The Opera Outreach Program (MUS A 239) is a Spring 2018 course designed and led by Assistant Professor Dr. Isabel Bayrakdarian in the Department of Music. It involves a touring performance of an operatic scene, sung by graduate and advanced undergraduate voice students from UCSB’s Department of Music. The opera excerpt will be presented to various high schools as well as select colleges in the Santa Barbara Area. The scenes will be sung in English, all the singers will be fully costumed (period costumes/wigs) with props as needed. The performances will take place in the Spring 2018 quarter.