28 Sep Welcome Back, from IHC Director Susan Derwin
September 28, 2021
Dear IHC Community,
Welcome back! Our office is open, and the IHC staff is happy to be working in person again to support the many wonderful interdisciplinary humanities projects of UCSB faculty and students.
Although we find it necessary to forego our annual Open House, we are offering a robust schedule of events on Zoom this Fall quarter. As soon as conditions allow, we will look forward to hosting you in person.
This year’s public events series, Regeneration, will explore how societies and cultures in previous historical eras have moved from crisis and upheaval into periods of sustainable and equitable regeneration and will consider the institutional transformations, creative expressions, activist interventions, and philosophical recalibrations needed to establish foundations of solidarity upon which new futures can be realized. Regeneration is also about intergenerational futures: how we are connected to past generations, how we care for the multiple generations of the present and how the worlds we make will enable future generations to thrive.
Here is a sampling of the Regeneration line-up:
October 14, 2021 – Inaugural Lecture by David Pellow (UCSB) on “Environmental Justice as Regeneration”
November 3, 2021 – Clint Smith, staff writer at The Atlantic and author of the recently released narrative nonfiction book How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, which was a #1 New York Times Bestseller, and the poetry collection Counting Descent
January 27, 2022 – Artist Harmonia Rosales on her new work in the exhibition Entwined at UCSB’s AD&A Museum during winter quarter
February 17, 2022 – Caroline Levine (Cornell University) on “Infrastructures of Collective Life: A Formalist’s Guide to the Climate Crisis”
April 4, 2022 – Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and staff writer for The New Yorker, on her new book, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
April 21, 2022 – Monica Bethe (Medieval Japanese Studies Institute, Kyoto) on “Ensuring the Future of Historic Textiles: The Case of a Japanese Empress’s Court Gown”
We also look forward to hosting Dexter Filkins (The New Yorker) for an event on the U.S. withdrawal from and future of Afghanistan. More information on this and other Regeneration events can be found on our website.
Our Humanities Decanted faculty forum will kick off on October 12 with Irwin Appel in conversation with James Kearney about prof. Appel’s new Naked Shakes production of Twelfth Night.
I welcome your suggestions for additional speakers, creative presentations, and other events in Regeneration or Humanities Decanted. Please contact me with your ideas at derwin@ihc.ucsb.edu. And stop by the IHC to say hello when you are in the neighborhood!
Best wishes,
Susan Derwin, Director
Interdisciplinary Humanities Center