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Key Passages Inaugural Talk: AI: A New Passage to Human Creativity?

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

March 14, 2023 marked the beginning of a new era: Chat GPT-4 was released, fundamentally changing the way humans relate to language. In this talk, Professor Park will explore the implications of this pivotal moment. She will consider AI’s impact on the production of works of fiction and on creativity more broadly. Questions to be explored include: Does AI-informed writing have the potential to supplant traditional novel writing? In what ways can AI innovate creativity? ...

Text reads Humanities Decanted next to a wine decanter and picture of a book

Humanities Decanted: Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Join us for a dialogue between Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky (Global Studies) and Dwight Reynolds (Religious Studies) about Hamed-Troyansky’s new book, Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State. Empire of Refugees reframes late Ottoman history through mass displacement and reveals the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Hamed-Troyansky offers a historiographical corrective: the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire created a refugee regime, predating refugee systems set up by the League of Nations ...

Andrew Davis and Jeff Biggers | Disturbing the Bones

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Join us for a conversation between Jennifer Holt (Film and Media Studies) and co-authors Andrew Davis and Jeff Biggers about their novel, Disturbing the Bones. In Disturbing the Bones, a plot to disrupt a global peace summit in Chicago collides with a civil rights case breakthrough at a mysterious archaeological site. Chicago detective Randall Jenkins has not been back home to the historic Civil Rights hotspot of Cairo, Illinois since the disappearance of his mother, ...

RFG Event

Research Focus Group Talk: On the Problem of (Re-)Activity: Mobilizing Media with the Sikh Diaspora

2001A HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

A common refrain in political rhetoric is the charge that given instances of agonism are defective because they are in some crucial way reactive. However, “reactivity” is polysemous and opaque, despite any seeming transparency implied by the fluency by which it is so often attributed. This talk offers an analytic and ethnographic entrée into the problem of reactivity by considering diasporic investments in mass-mediated address. Sikh media activists scrutinize the reactivity seemingly cultivated by their ...

Tibetan children's book illustration

Research Focus Group Talk: Children’s Literature from the Himalayas: Gesar Stories, Cultural Authenticity, and Folkloresque

Zoom

Gesar is a warrior-like king in the realm of Ling and the protagonist of a voluminous folkloric poem that many Tibetan bards have performed for centuries. With Gesar’s increasing fame in modern times, the orature has become a quintessential representation of Tibetan culture. By comparing two children’s books that draw on the Gesar tradition, Tibetan Heroic Epic: Gesar Children’s Literature Collection and Gesar Epic: Hor-Ling Battle, Zhuoga will discuss the meaning and relevance of cultural ...

Research Focus Group Event: Global Childhood Media: Open House

6309 Phelps

Join our Research Group! Open to Undergraduates! Are you interested in: - children’s media, literature and culture historical childhoods - children’s rights - education - child pyschology - sociology of childhood - or anything else child-related? The Global Childhood Media Research Focus Group welcomes students from any department with an interest in Childhood Studies to attend our Open House! Join us for more information on programming, research opportunities, mentorship, participation in an annual Undergraduate Research ...

Two people in the same outfit talk facing each other on a ship. Behind them others watch. This is a scene from Twelfth Night.

Talk: When Life Is a Shipwreck: Key Passages in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night begins with a shipwreck, a violent birth onto unknown shores that separates orphaned twins on a journey to nowhere. The turbulent sea visualizes an environment of passages–into adulthood, towards sexual identity, and in search of new attachments and communities of belonging. Twelfth Night is a play about transitions and transitioning, about passages and passing. What skills, virtues, and capacities do the twins need to find their way along the shoreline of life, ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Ransoming Genoa: Captives, Consuls, Missionaries in the Early Modern Mediterranean

Zoom

The seminar aims to explore the phenomenon of Mediterranean captivity between the 16th and 19th centuries as analyzed in Andrea Zappia's monograph, Mercanti di uomini. Reti e intermediari per la liberazione dei captivi nel Mediterraneo (Città del Silenzio 2018), with a particular focus on the singular case of the Republic of Genoa and the redemption of its subjects. The first part of the seminar will provide a historical contextualization, examining the daily lives of prisoners ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Key Readings on Adaptation for Children

6206C Phelps and Zoom UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

This talk by Martina Mattei will explore key concepts from The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature and Culture, focusing on Chapter 27 ("Translation") and Chapter 29 ("Adaptation"). It will address how children's literature is translated and adapted across different cultures and media, examining the balance between staying true to original texts and making them accessible for young readers. The chapter on translation covers the complexities of translating children's literature, emphasizing the need to preserve cultural ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Feeling Asian American: Racial Flexibility between Assimilation and Oppression

4202 HSSB

In this talk, Wen Liu will argue that Asian Americans are not a coherent racial population, but they are made so through the psychological technologies of “racecraft.” These technologies aim to demonstrate the racial elasticity of the Asian American mind, including cultural essentialism, democratic governmentality, white ascendancy, and unconscious microaggression. They help construct a flexible racial identity that can demonstrate the wide range of cognitive styles, cultural practices, and, most importantly, race elasticity for the ...

Research Focus Group Conference: Queering Taiwan Studies International Conference

Ku'er, the Mandarin transliteration of the English word "queer," has a distinctly Taiwanese genealogy, as implied in the homophonic meaning of being "cool." This conference examines the interrelationships between queer studies and Taiwan studies, from placing Taiwanese history and culture on the map of queer inquiry to the queering of Taiwan studies. Does queer Taiwan studies mean a focus on queer content, or is "queering" a method that can be used in studying any content ...

RFG Event

Research Focus Group Talk: Reason/Rationality Versus Wisdom/Mysticism in Jainism and Indian Thought

The Club, Betty Elings Wells Pavilion

On November 14, as part of the inaugural celebration of the Bhagvan Vimalnath Endowed Chair in Jain Studies and South Asian Religions at UC Santa Barbara, we will welcome our new colleague, Anil Mundra, as the inaugural holder of the Endowed Chair. The celebration will feature a lecture by distinguished Visiting Professor Jayendra Soni at 4:00 pm and will be followed by a reception. Jayandra Soni retired in May 2012 from the Department of Indology ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Beyond the “New Cold War”: Intimating Movements across Taiwan and Asian/Pacific/America

4202 HSSB

Taiwan has long held a pivotal—if “strategically ambiguous”—position in inter-imperial tensions over global influence and has in recent decades been frequently used to refurbish debates over a “new Cold War.” Situated at the nexus of inter-imperial entanglements, settler-colonial formations, and migrant labor networks, Taiwan’s perpetually unresolved status is, Wong argues, pivotal not only for the geopolitics of empire but more importantly for its place in trans-geographical alliance building for those who have long survived, navigated, ...

Key Passages Talk: When the Uyghur Language Confronts Atrocity

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Over the last decade, the persecution of Uyghurs in China has attracted global attention. When Uyghur was officially banned from education by the Chinese government in September 2016, Uyghur editors were arrested and heavily sentenced, and books were collected and burned. Private bookstores were shut down and Uyghur publishers and bookstore owners were sentenced. Today, Uyghur linguists, writers, and journalists remain persecuted. In January 2017, Uyghurs started to organize mother language schools, publish textbooks, and ...

a wine decanter next to a book

Humanities Decanted: William Davies King

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Join us for a dialogue between William Davies King (Theater and Dance) and Jessica Nakamura (Theater and Dance) about King’s new book, Finding the Way to 'Long Day's Journey Into Night': Eugene O’Neill and Carlotta Monterey O’Neill at Tao House. In this book, King offers a new way to approach Eugene O’Neill’s most famous play by reading this intensely autobiographical masterpiece in terms of the Taoism-inspired California house where it was written on the verge ...

Research Focus Group Talk: One China, Many Taiwans: The Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism

4202 HSSB

In his talk, Ian Rowen will highlight how Chinese tourism split Taiwan into “Two Taiwans”—one portrayed as part of China for Chinese tour groups, and the other experienced as the everyday reality of local residents and independent travelers. He will also examine how this dynamic intensified conflicts between business, civil society, and government entities with differing stakes in maintaining a PRC-focused tourism industry, ultimately contributing to a more diverse civic nationalism in Taiwan. Rowen's book ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Matchstick for Survival: Indigenous Writing in the Russian Arctic

6320 Phelps and Zoom

As part of a new lecture series, "Children's Literature, Cultural Preservation, and Language Revitalization," the Global Childhood Media Research Focus Group invites you to a talk by Indigenous author Kseniia Bolshakova (Dolgan) entitled "Matchstick for Survival: Indigenous Writing in the Russian Arctic." Indigenous author Kseniia Bolshakova will give a talk on her decolonial book The Frost Also Melts. The novel explores the fate of Arctic Indigenous nomads through the personal story of a child raised ...

The Lawrence Badash Memorial Lecture Series: The Human Factor: Work as Science in Twentieth-Century China

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

In 1935, the Commercial Press in Shanghai published a modest-sized volume on a subject most of its readers likely never heard of. Titled An Overview of Industrial Psychology (工業心理學概觀), this text was written by a young psychologist who was trained in and recently returned from Britain. It was the first in Chinese on the titular subject, which promised to (amid other things) “restore the rightful place of human beings in processes of production.” What was ...

Humanities Decanted: Daina Sanchez

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Join us for a dialogue with Daina Sanchez (Chicana and Chicano Studies) about her new book, The Children of Solaga: Indigenous Belonging across the U.S.-Mexico Border. In The Children of Solaga, Sanchez examines how Indigenous Oaxacan youth form racial, ethnic, community, and national identities away from their ancestral homeland. Assumptions that Indigenous peoples have disappeared altogether, or that Indigenous identities are fixed, persist in the popular imagination. This is far from the truth. Sanchez demonstrates ...

Key Passages

Key Passages Talk: Subject or Objects? Key Passageways between Things and Humans

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Talk description forthcoming. Claudio E. Benzecry is Professor of Communication Studies and Sociology at Northwestern University. His book The Opera Fanatic: Ethnography of an Obsession (University of Chicago Press, 2011) received the Mary Douglas Award for best book in the Sociology of Culture (2012) and Honorable mention for the ASA Distinguished Book award (2014). He is the editor of four volumes on theory, culture, and knowledge, including Social Theory Now (with Monika Krause and Isaac ...

Key Passages

Key Passages Talk: Antidotes to Ageism in the Anthropocene: Generational Time and Multispecies Literary Ethnography

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Models of the passage from midlife to old age—from Freud, Proust, and Simone de Beauvoir to contemporary conversations about how old is too old to be an American president, disclose the ageism, including internalized ageism, rampant in our culture, with aging figured overwhelmingly as decline. Today, old age is imagined in terms of splitting: the good third age of incremental diminishment and the bad fourth age of unremitting medical catastrophe. What antidotes can alleviate the ...

Key Passages Talk: Black History’s Warning to the World

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Resisting the tide of repression that threatens the teaching of Black history, we should look to that past to understand the ongoing processes that have shaped our world. Our current predicament, marked by extreme inequalities, everyday violence, militarism, and political strife derives in part from the history of colonial conquest, slavery, and imperial warfare. Our struggles for freedom and dignity emerge from that history, too. By understanding it, we might discern the scope, force, direction, ...

humanities decanted lisa jacobson

Humanities Decanted: Lisa Jacobson

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Join us for a dialogue between Lisa Jacobson (History) and Erika Rappaport (History) about Jacobson's new book, Intoxicating Pleasures: The Reinvention of Wine, Beer, and Whiskey after Prohibition. In popular memory, the repeal of US Prohibition in 1933 signaled alcohol’s decisive triumph in a decades-long culture war. But as Lisa Jacobson reveals, alcohol’s respectability and mass market success were neither sudden nor assured. It took a world war and a battalion of public relations experts ...

Key Passages

Key Passages Talk: The Making of Ghost Village: Across the borders of Life and Death, Scholarship and Opera

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Talk description forthcoming. Judith T. Zeitlin is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. A scholar of early modern Chinese literature, her innovative work combines literary history with other disciplines, including visual and material culture, theater, music, medicine, gender studies, and film. Her many publications include The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature (2007), Historian of the Strange: Pu ...

Key Passages

Key Passages Talk: Translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

In this talk, Stephanie McCarter will discuss her recent translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Penguin, 2022). She will first address her tactics for transforming Ovid's poetic and metrical effects into English verse. She will then outline her strategies for interpreting and rendering Ovid's themes of sexual violence, gender, sexuality, and the body. She will consider throughout how she carefully negotiated Ovid's playful style and disturbing subject matter to produce a poetic, accurate, and ethical translation. Stephanie ...

Humanities Decanted: Juan Cobo Betancourt

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Join us for a dialogue with Juan Cobo Betancourt (History) about his new book, The Coming of the Kingdom: The Muisca, Catholic Reform, and Spanish Colonialism in the New Kingdom of Granada. The Coming of the Kingdom explores the experiences of the Indigenous Muisca peoples of the New Kingdom of Granada (Colombia) during the first century of Spanish colonial rule. Focusing on colonialism, religious reform, law, language, and historical writing, Cobo Betancourt examines the introduction ...

Humanities Decanted: Shana Moulton

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Join us for a discussion with Shana Moulton (Art) about her recent exhibition at MoMa, Meta/Physical Therapy. This 2024 exhibition is a new, site-specific installation. Through performance, video, and sculpture, Moulton chronicles the experiences of her semi-autobiographical alter-ego, Cynthia, as she navigates personal choices and physical limitations. Transforming the Kravis Studio into a prismatic environment, this installation employs the artist’s signature blend of spiritual imagery, medical technology, popular culture, and references to high art and ...