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Research Focus Group Panel: Sex Work in the Time of Covid

Zoom

REGISTER NOW This panel will bring together the insight and expertise of three sex worker activists working and organizing in North America and Europe; including Sinnamon Love, BIPOC Adult Industry Collective, MF Akynos, Black Sex Workers' Collective, and Chiqui, Berlin Strippers Collective. It will be the first in a multi-part webinar conversation in 2020-2021 focused on sex work and sexual politics in the time of COVIC in a global frame. REGISTER NOW Cosponsored by the ...

Land Grab U: Land-Grant Universities and Indigenous Peoples

Living Democracy Talk: Land Grab U: Land-Grant Universities and Indigenous Peoples

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act, which distributed public domain lands to raise funds for fledgling colleges across the nation. The creation story told around this event is that land-grant universities were given the gift of free land. But the truth is much more complicated: The Morrill Act worked by turning land expropriated from tribal nations into seed money for higher ...

POSTPONED – Research Focus Group Meeting: Art, Environment, and Sense-Making

Zoom

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED At the last meeting of the Sustainability and the New Human RFG, Professor Suh discussed sustainability and behavior change. This talk will continue our conversation about the interdependence of humans and the environment by offering an ecological approach to how we understand the arts. At this meeting, PhD candidate Daniel Martini will share his dissertation research on how aesthetic appreciation (‘sense-making’) can emerge from both the rigidity of universal human ...

Asian/American Studies Collective RFG

Research Focus Group Talk: The Asian/American Studies Collective Winter Speakers Series

Zoom

Zoom Meeting Link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/84178208506 The Asian/American Studies Collective is proud to celebrate the publication of Dr. Diane Fujino's book, Nisei Radicals: The Feminist Poetics and Transformative Ministry of Mitsuye Yamada and Michael Yasutake. About the book While critiques of the model minority trope abound, this work has not dislodged the Nisei, or second-generation Japanese Americans, from the label of “Quiet Americans.” Working against the announced politics of Nisei assimilationism, this talk examines the feminist poetics ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Cybercrime in Digital India: Jamtara’s Youth and OTT Production Cultures

Zoom

ATTEND DISCUSSION Continuing a trend set by Bollywood cinema since the mid-2000s, small towns and villages in India are being mined for their performative excess, comic potential, and cultures of violence by platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Mukherjee traced this trend to Jamtara: Sabka Number Aayega (Jan 2020–), an over-the-top (OTT) crime drama from Netflix/Tipping Point that portrays real-life mobile phone phishing scams conducted by teenagers in the state of Jharkhand. The reliance ...

Disability Studies RFG

Research Focus Group Discussion: Shifting Paradigms Around Neurodiversity

Zoom

Zoom Meeting Link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/82480745298?pwd=a3RkcUVKaWJoN0dEUkZPQjFQWVN1dz09 This discussion will focus on thinking about new paradigms in autism and neurodiversity. We will read the article titled "Throw Away the Master's Tools: Liberating Ourselves From the Pathology Paradigm," by Nick Walker (from Loud Hands: Autistic People, Speaking ) and the introduction to Autistic Disturbances (2018) by Julia Miele Rodas. If time permits, the discussion will also include Mad at School: Rhetorics of Disability and Academic Life (2011) by Margaret ...

Talk: An Expansive Rebellion: Feminism and Social Revolt in Chile

Zoom

Zoom Meeting Link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/89256077958?pwd=Mlp2MWFNVENGRTNmZXFIb2k0WE5rZz09 Zoom Room Password: chile FEMINISMS FROM BELOW, AND TOWARDS THE SOUTH This speaker series welcomes feminist militants from Latin America to share their perspectives and experiences on building popular power towards a mass feminist movement. Over the past decade, Latin American feminists have identified manifestations of gender-based oppression under capitalism in everyday women’s conditions in order to successfully mobilize them as part of a political movement. Feminists produce analyses and subsequent ...

Talk: Gendered Violence and Financialization of Social Reproduction: A Feminist Perspective On Debt

Zoom

REGISTER NOW FEMINISMS FROM BELOW, AND TOWARDS THE SOUTH This speaker series welcomes feminist militants from Latin America to share their perspectives and experiences on building popular power towards a mass feminist movement. Over the past decade, Latin American feminists have identified manifestations of gender-based oppression under capitalism in everyday women’s conditions in order to successfully mobilize them as part of a political movement. Feminists produce analyses and subsequent strategies around reproductive rights, resource extractivism, ...

Asian/American Studies Collective RFG

Research Focus Group Talk: Social Media and the Shape of “Man”

Zoom

Zoom Meeting Link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/85893482888 Inspired by Cho's ethnographic work with queer of color users of the platform Tumblr and using the Tumblr presence of Filipinx transfeminine visual and performance artist Mark Aguhar as a recurring touchstone, this work-in-progress talk’s provocation is that the assumptive ways in which a social media platform “should” be designed—singular identity, linear text exchanges, direct messaging, traversable connections, and more—in fact instantiate a model of “Man” that can be traced back ...

Strongmen: From Mussolini to Trump

Living Democracy Talk: Strongmen: From Mussolini to Trump

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link What do strongman leaders across a century have in common? Why do people continue to follow them, despite the destruction they cause? Drawing on her new book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, Ruth Ben-Ghiat discusses the playbook of corruption, virility, propaganda, and violence they utilize, how people have resisted authoritarians over a century, and what we can do to strengthen democracy in America and ...

Dwight Reynolds

Humanities Decanted: The Musical Heritage of Al-Andalus

Zoom

Click here for a 20% publisher's discount on The Musical Heritage of Al-Andalus   Join us online for a dialogue between Dwight Reynolds (Religious Studies) and Debra Blumenthal (History) about Reynolds’ new book, The Musical Heritage of Al-Andalus. Audience Q&A will follow. The Musical Heritage of Al-Andalus is a critical account of the history of Andalusian music in Iberia from the Islamic conquest of 711 to the final expulsion of the Moriscos (Spanish Muslims converted ...

AIIC 2021 8th Annual Symposium: Native Feminisms

Zoom

REGISTER NOW The Eighth Annual AIIC Symposium, “Native Feminisms: Centering American Indian and Indigenous Land and People,” seeks to focus Native feminisms by privileging the knowledge of Native women, girls, trans, non-binary, and two spirit people. As Mishuana Goeman shows, drawing attention to embodied experience, positionality, and spatiality foregrounds relationships between bodies, minds, spirits, and lands as methods of knowledge creation. Relevant topics to broader discussions of Native feminisms include: embodiment, futurity, spatiality, memory, trauma, ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Elemental City: Ecology, Media and Narratives of Crisis in Postcolonial Calcutta

Zoom

This talk explores how the cultural politics of elemental media influence crisis narratives produced in relation to urban change. Taking Calcutta as a case study, Doctoral Candidate Somak Mukherjee argues that the crisis of postcolonial cities has a distinct ecological imaginary, borne of tension between mediated pairings of elements and more typical civic imaginaries such as civility, citizenship, community, development, or progress. Four examples of elements—earth, air, water, and fire—are used as representative figures to ...

Reuben Miller Critical Mass Talk

Living Democracy Talk: Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link While more people are incarcerated in the United States than in any other nation in the history of the western world, the prison is but one (comparatively) small part of a vast carceral landscape. The 600,000 people released each year join nearly 5 million people already on probation or parole, 12 million who are processed through a county jail, 19 million U.S. adults estimated ...

Talk: We Are Charrúa Women: From Negation to Re-Existence In Our Body-Territory

Zoom

REGISTER NOW Charrúa women have gone through dispossession, exclusion, and negation that left marks on their collective memory and body-territory. This genocidal process did not end in 19th-century Uruguay, but continues today and manifests itself every time that institutions or civil society denies their existence as an indigenous people. For fifteen years, together with Charrúa sisters from Argentina, Charrúa women from Uruguay have been working to demolish hegemonic narratives of the market and state. As ...

Disability Studies RFG

Research Focus Group Roundtable: Disability Justice Conversation

Zoom

REGISTER HERE Join Gary White, UCSB's Disabled Students Program, Eric Kruger, UCSB's Disabled Students Program, Afiya Browne, UCSB's Multicultural Center, Sam del Castillo, Graduate Division and graduate student, and Shanna Killeen, Disability Studies Initiative RFG, for a conversation about accessibility and intersectional justice. This conversation will discuss information, tools, and resources for creating intentional and accessible spaces and community engagement. This conversation also aims to help us think through what this moment of remote work ...

W. Patrick McCray

Humanities Decanted: Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Join us online for a dialogue between Patrick McCray (History) and Alan Liu (English) about McCray’s new book, Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture. Audience Q&A will follow. Despite C. P. Snow’s warning, in 1959, of an unbridgeable chasm between the humanities and the sciences, engineers and scientists of that era enthusiastically collaborated with artists to ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Kings and Cripples in the Arthurian World

Zoom

Zoom meeting link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/87492220092?pwd=RExPbnl0N3d0ZVR2ZGpEdkJ1cHdPQT09 While the lived reality of disability in the Middle Ages was surely a wretched one, at the same time we encounter persistent associations between disabled and royal or aristocratic bodies in medieval culture, its imagery and narratives. Nowhere is this truer than in the Arthurian world, at whose core there lies a powerful but immobile figure, the Rich Fisher King. This talk looks at such linkage through Arthurian texts and illustrated ...

Asian/American Studies Collective RFG

Research Focus Group Talk: Cannabis and South Asia

Zoom

Zoom meeting link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/81976204749?pwd=ekZ2UUtFd0U0Znh6bFpIcXFXWUs5QT09 Historical scholarship now conceives empire as a webbed uneven field of power relations and a multispecies enterprise. In other words, the anxious and breathless struggle of European imperialism to sustain itself subjected human, plant, animal, and insect bodies to its ambition to govern through logics of colonial difference. This paper argues that the cannabis plant in South Asia, in the nineteenth century, while being a subject of British revenue systems transformed ...

Talk: A Wave of Difference: Language Expression in the Argentine Feminist Imaginary

Zoom

REGISTER NOW In the context of a disproportionate increase in sexual violence against cis, trans, and transvestite women since 2015, Argentine feminisms have prefigured the untimely irruption of public space in both process and form. The movements’ interventions not only impact the social conditions and the epistemic tools for popular intelligibility of language expression ​​of gender violence, through an innovative use of communication technologies and social networks, but also articulate, from the multidimensionality in which ...

Research Focus Group Talk: The Blood Files: Epidemic, Medium, Milieu

Zoom

ATTEND DISCUSSION Epidemics make us keenly aware of our multispecies distributions: of changes to our microbial makeup, of the mediums (body fluids to the elements) that enable transmission. While our body makes us aware of fevers and aches, we need technical mediation beyond the everyday thermometer to track and understand changing microbial-human relations. Epidemic media—a range of technologies, microscopes to PCR machines—are the subject of Bishnupriya Ghosh’s book, The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media. Drawing ...

Disability Studies RFG

Research Focus Group Discussion: Designing Disability

Zoom

ATTEND DISCUSSION We will be discussing Professor Elizabeth Guffey's introduction and chapter 1 to her latest book, Designing Disability (Bloomsbury, 2018). A Professor of Art & Design History, and Director of the MA in Modern and Contemporary Art, Criticism and Theory at State University of New York at Purchase, Professor Guffey co-edited Making Disability Modern (Bloomsbury, 2020) and is the founding editor of the peer-reviewed journal Design and Culture (Routledge). Cosponsored by the IHC’s Disability ...

Medieval Studies Annual Colloquium: Global/Premodern/Race

Zoom

Register by emailing global.premodern.race@gmail.com by March 19, 2021 This symposium brings together scholars working in Iberian, Middle Eastern, and Medieval Studies to engage in a critical discussion concerning race—reevaluating both its utility as a category of analysis in the premodern world and how it has structured medieval and early modern studies as academic fields. Participants include: PAMELA PATTON (Art History, Princeton University) M. LINDSAY KAPLAN (English, Georgetown University) HANNAH BARKER (History, Arizona State University) MOHAMAD ...

Lessons of the Hour—Frederick Douglass

CANCELLED | Living Democracy Talk: Lessons of the Hour—Frederick Douglass

Zoom

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED Artist and filmmaker, Isaac Julien, and writer and curator, Mark Nash, will screen excerpts from Julien's film "Lessons of the Hour—Frederick Douglass" in a presentation that will explore the importance of looking to history and biography to articulate contemporary cultural movements. Isaac Julien's moving image practice draws from and comments on a range of artistic disciplines including film, theatre, photography and performance. Julien is a Distinguished Professor of the Arts ...

Research Focus Group Meeting: Embracing Ecological Uncertainty through Narrative

Zoom

Uncertainty is a central psychological dimension of the ecological crisis. The science of climate change brings into view widely divergent scenarios; the discrepancy between these more or less catastrophic visions of the future undermines our ontological security (in Anthony Giddens’s terminology). Dr. Caracciolo argues that literary narrative has an important role to play in cultivating readers’ ability to live with uncertainty. He describes this process as a shift from a primarily negative understanding of uncertainty ...

Humanities Decanted: Violentologies: Violence, Identity, and Ideology in Latina/o Literature

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Join us online for a dialogue between Ben Olguín (English, UCSB) and María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo (Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU) about Olguín’s new book, Violentologies: Violence, Identity, and Ideology in Latina/o Literature. Audience Q&A will follow. Violentologies: Violence, Identity, and Ideology in Latina/o Literature, explores how various forms of violence undergird a wide range of Latina/o subjectivities, or Latinidades, from 1835 to the present. ...

Rana Humanities Decanted

Humanities Decanted: Race Characters: Ethnic Literature and the Figure of the American Dream

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Join us online for a dialogue between Swati Rana (English) and Stephanie L. Batiste (English) about Rana’s new book, Race Characters: Ethnic Literature and the Figure of the American Dream. Audience Q&A will follow. A vexed figure inhabits U.S. literature and culture: the visibly racialized immigrant who disavows minority identity and embraces the American dream. Such figures are potent and controversial, for they promise ...

Conference: Fallout: Chernobyl and the Ecology of Disaster

Zoom

CONFERENCE REGISTRATION The interdisciplinary virtual conference “Fallout: Chernobyl and the Ecology of Disaster” will take place on Friday, April 30, 2021 at 9:00am-4:00pm, with an international slate of speakers representing a variety of disciplines who will share their insights on the 35th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. Thirty-five years after the 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl, the interdisciplinary virtual conference Fallout: Chernobyl and the Ecology of Disaster considers its afterlife and reverberations in various disciplines, including culture ...

What We Can Do for Each Other: Wake Work in Our Times

Living Democracy Talk: What We Can Do For Each Other

Zoom

One of the greatest threats against democracy and justice is indolence--defined as a form of militant indifference based on the lack of empathy for the suffering of others. Cristina Rivera Garza will explore how taking part in and contributing to transnational emotional communities in Mexico and the U.S., many based on shared experiences of social suffering and the grieving that comes with it, may help us leap out of ourselves and into the heart of the bond we share ...

Information Session: Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program

Zoom

REGISTER NOW Join the IHC to learn more about the Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program. Explore the course offerings, hear about paid internship and fellow-designed community project opportunities, and find out more about the capstone presentation. If you cannot attend the info session but would like to learn more about the program, please email Erin Nerstad at nerstad@ihc.ucsb.edu. REGISTER NOW

Talk: Popular Feminist Communication: Tools for Organization in Times of Destruction

Zoom

REGISTER NOW Revista Amazonas (Amazonas Magazine) is a collective made up of women from Colombia, Brazil, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Argentina, Mexico and Spain. It was born out of a commitment to publishing texts and images made by women from anywhere in the world, covering all literary themes and genres, but always from a perspective that is trans-feminist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-colonial and in defense of all forms of life. The magazine emphasizes that focusing on what women ...

Disability Studies RFG

Research Focus Group Workshop: A Disability Studies Perspective on Universal Design for Learning

Zoom

ATTEND DISCUSSION Professor Rachel Lambert (Education, UC Santa Barbara) will offer a workshop on Universal Design for Learning (UDL). She will shed light on its development, including roots in Universal Design. She will describe the radical possibilities in UDL, as well as critiques. She will present some of her own work, which seeks to integrate design thinking as a process for educators to use UDL to (re)design curriculum, spaces and systems. Prior to the workshop, ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Sri Sabhapati Swami and the “Translocalization” of Sivarajayoga

Zoom

Keith Cantú’s talk will center on the life and yogic literature of the Tamil yogi Sri Sabhapati Swami (Capāpati Cuvāmikaḷ, 1828–1923/4). The first part of the talk will consist of an overview of Sabhapati’s life and historical context, including his interactions and falling out with the founders of the Theosophical Society, his literature and visual diagrams in numerous prestige and Indian vernacular languages, his Śaiva yogic cosmology and perspectives on Hindu traditions and other religions, ...

Keynote Address: Indigenous Knowledge and Climate Justice in a Pandemic-Prone World

Zoom

Five hundred years of the colonial remaking of landscapes of most of the world’s continents have ravaged the planet in monumental ways. Empire-building has clearly benefitted people of Europe’s imperial projects while bringing catastrophic change to indigenous populations. The fallout of imperialism and all its attendant technologies has brought humankind to an existential crisis, with climate change and now pandemics as interlinked threats. This talk will bring together these issues, highlighting the wisdom contained in ...

2021 Arthur N. Rupe Great Debate: Taming Titans: How Should We Regulate Big Tech?

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Participants: Sonia Katyal, The University of California, Berkeley, School of Law Kate Klonick, St. John's University, School of Law Randal C. Picker, The University of Chicago, The Law School Moderator: Michael J. Burstein, Yeshiva University, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law Experts on law and technology will debate how Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft should be regulated. Are they 21st-century trusts? Guardians of free ...

Keum

Humanities Decanted: Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Join us online for a dialogue between Tae-Yeoun Keum (Political Science) and Andrew Norris (Political Science) about Keum’s new book, Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought. Audience Q&A will follow. Plato’s use of myths—the Myth of Metals, the Myth of Er—sits uneasily with his canonical reputation as the inventor of rational philosophy. Since the Enlightenment, interpreters like Hegel have sought to resolve this ...

VWW reading event

Reading: UC Santa Barbara Student Veteran Writers

Zoom

Read the student veterans’ stories in The Santa Barbara Independent. UC Santa Barbara student veterans will read stories about their military experiences, followed by audience Q&A. Presenters: David Guerrero, Robert Hickman, Michael Ramirez, and Nick Tash David Guerrero served in the United States Marine Corps as an Infantry rifleman from 2003 to 2007. He earned his AS in Criminology and Liberal Arts from Santa Barbara City College. David transferred to UCSB in the Fall of ...

RFG Event

Research Focus Group Talk: Willing Ethnic-Nationalists, Diffusion, and Resentment: A Micro-Foundational Account

Zoom

ATTEND DISCUSSION Using evidence concerning the consolidation of Hindu nationalism in India, Aseema Sinha presents new ethnographic data about the variety of popular support for the Hindutva project and proposes an interactive theory of social identity. This framework helps us understand how Hindu nationalism becomes embedded in society. She argues that Hindu nationalism in India could be fruitfully analyzed by focusing on the processes through which ideas of exclusive nationalism spread among middle classes and ...

Talk: Women in Cooperative Agricultural Production and Consumption: The Case of Rio de Janeiro’s Rede Ecológica

Zoom

REGISTER NOW The presentation will illuminate the multiple roles played by women within the infrastructure of the Rede Ecologica (Ecological Consumers’ Network) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. These include: relations established with the agroecological producers; campaigns and other educational activities focused on the theme of food, nutritional security, and family-based agricultural practices; communication and networking with other social movements, among others. Through an intersectional feminist approach, we will analyze concrete experiences within territories in the ...

Discussion: Indigenous Responses to Climate Injustice and Pandemics in India and Amazonia

Zoom

REGISTER NOW This webinar will feature presentations about the connections between climate justice, oil & uranium extractivism and responses to COVID-19 based on Indigenous territorial knowledges. First, Oswando Nenquimo, a Waorani leader from the Ecuadorian Amazon, will tells us about the importance of the Amazon Rainforest and the role of Indigenous organizations that he is part of: Alianza Ceibo and CONCONAWEP. He will emphasize on the challenges that oil extraction has posed for Indigenous peoples ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Race, Caste, Hierarchy, Difference: Reflections on Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste

Zoom

ATTEND DISCUSSION In Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson brings together the freighted categories of “race” and “caste” and argues that, while the two are not synonymous, they “can and do coexi st in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other.” Wilkerson suggests that racism is the visible manifestation of a hidden and insidious caste system, a system of social domination that uses human differences in order to construct a ranking ...

Discussion: Indigenous Dialogues on Root Causes: Climate Justice and COVID-19 in California

Zoom

REGISTER NOW This webinar will center dialogue on the importance of Indigenous Ecological Knowledges in California, and will offer critical perspectives on the COVID-19 pandemic as a symptomatic expression of the social and ecological imbalances wrought by colonial violence and the logics of enclosure and extraction. Julie Cordero-Lamb and Hana Aqiwo Lee of the Syuxtun Plant Mentorship Collective will speak to the crucial role that medicinal plant tending, harvesting, and processing continues to play in ...

Event Series Performance: Life Is a Dream (La Vida es Sueño)

Performance: Life Is a Dream (La Vida es Sueño)

Zoom

REGISTER NOW Life Is a Dream (La Vida es Sueño) by Pedro Calderón de la Barca adapted by Nilo Cruz JUNE 4  & 5, 2021/ 7 PM PDT Please join us for the Zoom staging of Pedro Calderón de la Barca's La Vida es Sueño, broadcasting live on Friday, June 4 and Saturday, June 5. This virtual fairy tale tells the story of a young prince imprisoned in a tower, a woman in disguise seeking ...

Event Series Performance: Life Is a Dream (La Vida es Sueño)

Performance: Life Is a Dream (La Vida es Sueño)

Zoom

REGISTER NOW Life Is a Dream (La Vida es Sueño) by Pedro Calderón de la Barca adapted by Nilo Cruz JUNE 4  & 5, 2021/ 7 PM PDT Please join us for the Zoom staging of Pedro Calderón de la Barca's La Vida es Sueño, broadcasting live on Friday, June 4 and Saturday, June 5. This virtual fairy tale tells the story of a young prince imprisoned in a tower, a woman in disguise seeking ...

What is a Shakespeare

Research Focus Group Welcome Meeting One: What Is a Shakespeare?: Shakespeare and Global Media

Zoom

Come join us for our first meeting of the IHC-sponsored Research Focus Group “What is a Shakespeare?” This will be the first of two welcome meetings we are hosting for the group (in order to cover more scheduling needs). The second meeting will be Thursday, October 7th at 11am PST (more info here). “What Is a Shakespeare?: Shakespeare and Global Media” is an interdisciplinary group of graduate students and faculty focused on investigating the notion ...

What is a Shakespeare

Research Focus Group Welcome Meeting Two: What Is a Shakespeare?: Shakespeare and Global Media

Zoom

Come join us for our second meeting of the IHC-sponsored Research Focus Group “What is a Shakespeare?” This will be the second of two welcome meetings we are hosting for the group (in order to cover more scheduling needs). “What Is a Shakespeare?: Shakespeare and Global Media” is an interdisciplinary group of graduate students and faculty focused on investigating the notion of "global Shakespeare." We are interested in understanding both the ways that Shakespeare has ...

Humanities Decanted: Naked Shakes Twelfth Night

Humanities Decanted: Irwin Appel, Naked Shakes

Zoom

Join us online for a dialogue between Irwin Appel (Theater and Dance) and James Kearney (English) about Appel’s theater company, Naked Shakes, and their recent production of Twelfth Night, staged outside at UCSB’s Commencement Green in front of the lagoon. Audience Q&A will follow. Naked Shakes derives its rather provocative name from the principle that an actor in a bare theatrical space, along with meticulous attention to language, few technical elements, and the collective imagination ...

David Pellow Regeneration Inaugural Lecture

Inaugural Lecture: Environmental Justice as Regeneration

Zoom

The grassroots environmental justice movement and the field of environmental justice studies have evolved in creative and inspiring directions over the years. Recent work focuses on the challenges of envisioning and realizing abolition, confronting anthropogenic climate change/disruption, and articulating transformative approaches to achieving ecologically healthy and socially equitable policy-making for a “just transition.” This presentation considers what each of these areas of scholarship and politics could signal for the future of environmental justice and for ...

Making Sense of Melothesia

Research Focus Group Talk: Making Sense of Melothesia: Embodying the Zodiac in Ancient Rome and India

4080 HSSB UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

In this talk Tejas Aralere will present a comparative analysis of the zodiacal melothesia as it appears in Manilius’s Astronomica, a Latin astrological epic poem (ca. 20–40 CE), and in Sphujidhvaja’s Yavana Jātaka ( “Greek Horoscopy”), a Sanskrit astrological treatise (ca. second century CE). Melothesia refers to the mapping of the twelve signs of the Babylonian zodiac on twelve regions of the human body over which they possess particular influence. In a brief discussion of ...

The Possibilities of Undisciplining with Sharon Kinoshita’s “Worlding Medieval French Literature”

Research Focus Group Reading Group Discussion: The Possibilities of Undisciplining with Sharon Kinoshita’s “Worlding Medieval French Literature”

3001E HSSB HSSB UCSB, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Please join us on October 18th at 2 pm in HSSB 3001E for a reading group discussion of Sharon Kinoshita’s chapter, “Worlding Medieval French Literature,” in eds. Christie McDonald and Susan Rubin Suleiman, French Global: A New Approach to Literary History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). As the first IHC Un-disciplining Premodern Histories of Race and Gender Research Focus Group event of the year, we will begin by discussing Kinoshita’s chapter and where un-disciplining and re-disciplining ...

What is a Shakespeare Chalk Talk

Research Focus Group Chalk Talk: Moving Beyond One Dimensional Shakespeare in the Classroom

Zoom

Students often shy away from Shakespeare in their classes, but educators can also get nervous about teaching the Bard! Our goal for our pedagogical discussion is to reflect on our own experiences learning about and teaching Shakespeare in the classroom and how we can enhance our future teaching practices, particularly through the lens of utilizing global media and socio-culturally aware pedagogy. We will provide links to optional pre-event resources after registration, but we invite everyone ...

Asian/American Studies Collective RFG

Research Focus Group Welcome Breakfast

HSSB Courtyard Humanities and Social Sciences Building, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

The Asian/American Studies Collective invites you to our Welcome Breakfast. Meet other graduate students interested in Asian/American Studies while enjoying coffee and pastries. Sponsored by the IHC's Asian/American Studies Collective Research Focus Group

Disability Studies RFG

Research Focus Group Discussion: Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities

Zoom

Please join the Disability Studies Initiative for a discussion of Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory (available online after signing into the UCSB library). We will focus our discussion on two chapters: “Bodies of Nature: The Environmental Politics of Disability” by Alison Kafer and “Cripping Sustainability, Realizing Food Justice” by Kim Q. Hall. This event will be moderated by Olivia Henderson. A second year graduate student in the Department of English at ...

African Studies Exploding the Khoi and San Colonial Stereotypes, Reclaiming African Histories Event

Research Focus Group Talk: Exploding the Khoi and San Colonial Stereotypes, Reclaiming African Histories

Zoom

Academic historians have largely represented the Khoi and the San people of Southern Africa as marginal to the production of the region’s history, deleting their place in the emergence and development of African civilization and self-liberation. As a public historian, intellectual, activist and healer, Attaqua’s voice has intervened to forcefully reframe the history of the indigenous people of Southern Africa. In this talk, she will speak about the Khoi and San’s long struggle against the ...

Clint Smith

Regeneration Talk: Clint Smith

Zoom

Join us online for a conversation between Clint Smith and IHC Director Susan Derwin. Audience Q&A will follow. Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of 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, which won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the ...

Reading group discussion: Leah DeVun's "The Monstrous Races: Mapping the Borders of Sex"

RFG Reading Group Discussion: Leah DeVun’s “The Monstrous Races: Mapping the Borders of Sex”

3001E HSSB HSSB UCSB, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Please join us for our second IHC Un-disciplining Premodern Histories of Race and Gender Research Focus Group reading discussion. We will be discussing Leah DeVun's "Monstrous Races: Mapping the Borders of Sex" in The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021). Please email reemtaha@ucsb.edu or jessicazisa@ucsb.edu for access to the reading. Sponsored by the IHC's Un-disciplining Premodern Histories of Race and Gender Research Focus Group

Asian/American Studies Collective RFG

Research Focus Group Roundtable: Graduate Student Research: Sam Harris and Kendall Ota

6056 HSSB UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

The IHC Asian/American Studies Collective (AASC) Research Focus Group will be hosting a graduate student research roundtable on November 9th from 9:30-11 am in the IHC Seminar Room (HSSB 6056). During this roundtable, two advanced graduate students, Sam Harris (Education) and Kendall Ota (Sociology), will be presenting their works-in-progress for feedback and comments from attendees. The roundtable will occur during the first hour, and we welcome attendees to stay afterward for refreshments outside in the ...

What Is a Shakespeare?: Shakespeare and Global Media: Works in Progress Series: Developing an Archive

Research Focus Group Workshop: Works-in-Progress Series: Developing an Archive

Zoom

In our first Works-in-Progress workshop, we will discuss various strategies and resources for developing archives related to Shakespeare and Global Media. This will include cultivating a multimedia bibliography that extends to potential source texts, critical works, and theoretical approaches, as well as developing questions and frameworks that interrogate established modes of scholarly production. We will consider questions like: What does it mean to do "global Shakespeare"? What methods and approaches push the boundaries of scholarship? ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Post and the Shell: The Sacrificability of Animals in the Vedic Village

Zoom

Zoom attendance link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/87209704725 In this talk, Jonathan Dickstein will discuss anatomical and residential animal taxonomies as represented in canonical Vedic texts of the second and first millennia BCE. The Brāhmaṇas (900-650 BCE) in particular emphasize a residence-based categorization of animals into two main categories: “village animals” (grāmya) and “wilderness animals” (āraṇya). Following a discussion of the complexities of these two classes, Dickstein will pivot to the relationship between residence and the concept of medha, ...

RFG Event

Research Focus Group Talk: The Work of War: Gender and Care in Kabul, Afghanistan

Zoom

Zoom attendance link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/84686450683 Following widows and their families in the aftermath of a suicide attack in Kabul, Afghanistan, this talk centers the lives and aspirations of widows amidst serial war and serial humanitarianism. As white sentimentality structures landscapes of care in Kabul, refusal is what remains. This research is based on more than four years of fieldwork between 2006 and 2013. Dr. Anila Daulatzai is a sociocultural anthropologist and the Chancellor’s Fellow at UC ...

Disability Studies RFG

Research Focus Group Workshop: Why Different Models of Disability?

Zoom

Rachel Lambert (Assistant Professor in Special Education and Mathematics Education, Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, UC Santa Barbara) will offer a workshop on the different models of disability, including medical, social, political/ relational and complex embodiment. Lambert’s scholarly work investigates the intersections between Disability Studies in Education and mathematics education. She has conducted longitudinal studies of how Latinx students with learning disabilities construct identities as mathematics learners, and how mathematical pedagogy shapes how teachers perceive ...

Asian/American Studies Collective RFG

Research Focus Group Roundtable: Graduate Student Research: Ryan Arellano and Jing Yu

6056 HSSB UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

The IHC's Asian/American Studies Collective (AASC) Research Focus Group will be hosting a graduate student research roundtable on November 16th from 9:30-11 am in the IHC Seminar Room (HSSB 6056). During this roundtable, two advanced graduate students, Ryan Arellano (Education) and Jing Yu (Education), will be presenting their works-in-progress for feedback and comments from attendees. The roundtable will occur during the first hour, and we welcome attendees to stay afterward for refreshments outside in the ...

Talk: Shards of Places, Shards of Time: Katja Petrowskaja’s Modernist Poetics of History

Zoom

Zoom attendance link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/89607162040 A family story, a memoir, a travelogue, an intimate history of Jewish migration and persecution in the twentieth century—fitting into neither of these categories neatly, and yet resonating with all of them, Katja Petrowskaja’s Maybe Esther (2019; Vielleicht Esther, 2014) relates the narrator’s journey from Berlin to piece together her family’s history across Poland, the Ukraine, and Russia. This presentation considers fragmentation as the text’s key aesthetic quiddity to ask how ...

Research Focus Group Workshop: Phillis Wheatley’s Desire to Look

Zoom

At a time when aesthetic philosophy defined whiteness in terms of the ability to behold and surveil the world, Phillis Wheatley Peters developed new forms of countervisuality in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). Badley's essay focuses on Peters' ekphrastic poetry, which portrays her lyric personae gazing upon paintings, people, and landscapes in ways that mark the limits of visual perception. By dramatizing spectatorship as a meditation upon opaque surfaces and inscrutable sentiments, ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Reclaiming Confiscated African Histories

Zoom

Zoom attendance link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/s/81168927411 How do histories of a people get confiscated? And what is the significance of indigenous epistemologies in reclaiming stolen, silent, and distorted histories? These are some of the fundamental questions that underlie Professor Shadreck Chirikure's research on Great Zimbabwe, a prominent symbol of African civilizations of Southern Africa that colonial historiography tried very hard to wrest away from Africans over the last two centuries. Professor Chirikure has produced several publications from ...

Roundtable: Bridge Turns 40

YouTube

Join Las Maestras Center, Bridge contributors, and virtual participants near and far for an evening of remembrance and celebration of the fifth and 40th Anniversary Edition of This Bridge Called My Back – Writings by Radical Women of Color. Originally released in 1981, This Bridge Called My Back is a testimony to women of color feminism as it emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Through personal essays, criticism, interviews, testimonials, poetry, and visual ...

Asian/American Studies Collective RFG

Research Focus Group Roundtable: Graduate Student Research

Zoom

The Asian/American Studies Collective (AASC), a research focus group supported by the IHC, will be hosting a graduate student research roundtable via Zoom. During this roundtable, two advanced graduated students will be presenting their works-in-progress for feedback and comments from attendees. We welcome parties interested in Asian American Studies work! For questions, please email: aasc.ucsb@gmail.com. Sponsored by the IHC’s Asian/American Studies Collective Research Focus Group

Reading group discussion: Leah DeVun's "The Monstrous Races: Mapping the Borders of Sex"

RFG Reading Group Discussion: Leah DeVun’s “The Hyena’s Unclean Sex: Beasts, Bestiaries, and Jewish Communities”

Zoom

Zoom meeting link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/84025262121?pwd=SGVQRFpnbkhlcUlZcTBZRTRRa0VvUT09 Join the Un-disciplining Premodern Histories of Race and Gender Research Focus Group as we continue reading from Leah DeVun's pathbreaking history of nonbinary sex, The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), in preparation for her talk on January 31st. This week we will be reading the third chapter: "The Hyena's Unclean Sex: Beasts, Bestiaries, and Jewish Communities." Please email reemtaha@ucsb.edu or ...

Disability Studies RFG

Research Focus Group Discussion: Dysgenic Stories: Field Worker Reports, Contradiction, and Confinement at Sonoma State Home, 1920-1921

Zoom

Our discussion will focus on Isidro González's paper and another piece of scholarship. González's research focuses on Sonoma State Home for the Feebleminded in Eldridge, California, and how eugenics field workers—those involved in observing and notating nonnormative (“dysgenic”) phenotypic, familial, and lifestyle attributes of institutionalized people—crafted individualized clinical narratives of "inmates" to not only legitimize their profession, the state employer, and the Eugenics Record Office (ERO), but also to surveil, pathologize, and medicalize “unfit” human ...

What is a Shakespeare? RFG Works in Progress Event 2

Research Focus Group Workshop: Shakespeare and Global Media Works in Progress Event #2

Zoom

In our second Works-in-Progress workshop, we will discuss various strategies and resources for conducting archival work, receiving funding, and getting involved in larger scholarly activities (such as conferences, journals, and symposia) related to Shakespeare and Global Media. We will build on our previous work of cultivating a multimedia bibliography, as well as developing questions and frameworks that interrogate established modes of scholarly production. We will consider questions like: What does it mean to do “global ...

Passing for Perfect Asian/American Studies Collective RFG erin Khuê Ninh Event

Research Focus Group Talk: Passing for Perfect Book Launch

Zoom

In her new book, Passing for Perfect, erin Khuê Ninh considers the factors that drove college imposters such as Azia Kim—who pretended to be a Stanford freshman—and Jennifer Pan—who hired a hitman to kill her parents before they found out she had never received her high school diploma—to extreme lengths to appear successful. Why would someone make such an illogical choice? And how do they stage these lies so convincingly, and for so long? These ...

Regeneration Artist Talk: Harmonia Rosales

Regeneration Artist Talk: Harmonia Rosales

Zoom

Afro-Cuban American artist Harmonia Rosales will discuss her new and dynamic body of work presented in the exhibition, Entwined. Rosales’ interweaving of representations from ancient Greek and Yoruba mythologies invites viewers to challenge their ideas about identity and empowerment. Women and people of color, the protagonists of her canvases, assume roles of power and beauty in exquisite imaginings of ancient myths and Renaissance paintings. To learn more about the exhibition Entwined, which is on display ...

Leah DeVun Event Discussing The Shape of Sex

Research Focus Group Talk: Discussing The Shape of Sex with Leah DeVun

Zoom

Join the Un-disciplining Premodern Histories of Race and Gender Research Focus Group for a guest talk and conversation with Professor Leah DeVun on DeVun's new book, The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance. We will discuss the rich history DeVun traces in premodern Europe through the intersections of race, religion, sex, and gender. Leah DeVun is Associate Professor of History and Vice Chair for Undergraduate Education at Rutgers University, as well ...

Award: Luis Leal Award For Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature

Zoom

Rubén Martínez will receive this year's Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature. Martínez is Professor of English and the Fletcher Jones Chair in Literature & Writing at Loyola Marymount University. His books include The Other Side: Notes from the New L.A., Mexico City & Beyond (1993), Flesh Life: Sex in Mexico (with Joseph Rodriguez, 2006), The New Americans (2004), Crossing Over: A Mexican Family over the Migrant Trail (2001), and East Side Stories ...

Regeneration Talk: Alexandre Gefen and Sandra Laugier

Regeneration Talk: Maintaining Life, Repairing the World: Ethics, Philosophy, and Literature

Zoom

The COVID pandemic appeared as a threat to human life, both in the vital sense (a risk to biological life) and in the social sense (a risk to social life: disruption from the suspension of activities, lack of public transport, closure of schools, etc.). It has revealed radical vulnerabilities: of institutions, the species, and the planet; of fragile populations, workers “on the front line,” and each individual. The importance of caring for others and for ...

Asian/American Studies Collective RFG

Research Focus Group Roundtable: Graduate Student Research

Zoom

The Asian/American Studies Collective (AASC), a research focus group supported by the IHC, will be hosting a graduate student research roundtable via Zoom. During this roundtable, two advanced graduated students will be presenting their works-in-progress for feedback and comments from attendees. We welcome parties interested in Asian American Studies work! For questions, please email: aasc.ucsb@gmail.com. Sponsored by the IHC’s Asian/American Studies Collective Research Focus Group

Disability Studies RFG

Research Focus Group Discussion: Disability, Blackness, and Race in US Literature

Zoom

In celebration of Black History Month, the Disability Studies Initiative invites you to discuss two essays that shed light on the material intersections of disability and race: Josh Lukin's short article, "Disability and Blackness" (2006), which calls for the consideration of Black experiences in the history of disability and its artistic representations, and Michelle Jarman's "Race and Disability in US Literature" (2018), which takes its framework from Black feminist theories and calls for relational approaches ...

John Lee Humanities Decanted

Humanities Decanted: The First Black Archaeologist

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

Proof of full vaccination required for all attendees. READ MORE TO VIEW ACCEPTABLE FORMS OF VACCINATION DOCUMENTATION. Join us for a dialogue between John W. I. Lee (History) and Krzysztof Janowicz (Geography) about Lee's new book, The First Black Archaeologist: A Life of John Wesley Gilbert. Audience Q&A will follow. The First Black Archaeologist reveals the untold story of a pioneering African American classical scholar, teacher, community leader, and missionary. Born into slavery in rural ...

Andrew Way Leong

Talk: A Queer, Queer Race: Orientations for Early Japanese American Literature

Zoom

REGISTER NOW This online talk will feature discussions and close readings from a chapter in Professor Andrew Way Leong's forthcoming book, "A Queer, Queer Race: Orientations for Japanese/American Literature." This book examines Japanese and English language texts written by Shōson, Sadakichi Hartmann, Arishima Takeo, and Yoné Noguchi—authors who resided in the United States between the opening of mass Japanese emigration in 1885 and the ban on Japanese immigration imposed by the Immigration Act of 1924. ...

Caroline Levine: Infrastructures of Collective Life: A Formalist’s Guide to the Climate Crisis

Regeneration Talk: Infrastructures of Collective Life: A Formalist’s Guide to the Climate Crisis

Zoom

  Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Join us online for a talk by Caroline Levine. Audience Q&A will follow. What do scholars of literature and the arts have to offer in response to the climate crisis? The aesthetic humanities have long traditions of insisting on open-endedness, negation, and inaction. Levine argues that in this moment of rapid and destabilizing change, this tradition has reached its political limit. She makes ...

Research Focus Group Discussion: Sameer Pandya

Zoom

Dr. Sameer Pandya will lead a discussion with graduate students to discuss his latest novel, Members Only, as well as his broader thoughts on South Asian American Studies. Sameer Pandya is an Associate Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at UC Santa Barbara, a fiction writer, and an interdisciplinary literary and cultural studies scholar. In both his fiction and scholarship, Pandya is primarily interested in the question of cultural dislocation and racial identity ...

Information Sessions: Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program

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

Thursday, February 24 | 4:00 PM | McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020 | VIEW IN-PERSON ATTENDANCE REQUIREMENTS AND Friday, February 25 | 12:00 PM | Zoom | REGISTER NOW Join the IHC in person on 2/24 or online on 2/25 to learn more about the Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program. Explore the course requirements, hear about paid internship and fellow-designed community project opportunities, and find out more about the capstone presentation. If you would like to ...

Information Sessions: Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program

Zoom

Thursday, February 24 | 4:00 PM | McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020 | VIEW IN-PERSON ATTENDANCE REQUIREMENTS AND Friday, February 25 | 12:00 PM | Zoom | REGISTER NOW Join the IHC in person on 2/24 or online on 2/25 to learn more about the Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program. Explore the course requirements, hear about paid internship and fellow-designed community project opportunities, and find out more about the capstone presentation. If you would like to ...

What is a Shakespeare Chalk Talk

Research Focus Group Discussion: Chalk Talk Revisited

Zoom

After the success of our first Chalk Talk this past fall, the What Is a Shakespeare?: Shakespeare and Global Media RFG is hosting “Chalk Talk Revisited.” Even if you weren’t able to make our first event, we welcome everyone to join us from any discipline as we continue our discussions about cultivating socio-culturally aware pedagogy and global media in the classroom. Whether you are a veteran Shakespearean or a first-timer to teaching the Bard, we ...

Hamraie Critical Access Studies

Research Focus Group Talk: Critical Access Studies

Zoom

Thirty years after the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act, much of the built environment remains inaccessible to disabled people. Accordingly, the vast majority of research and writing on accessibility seeks to convince the unconvinced of the value of inclusion. This field, which Professor Aimi Hamraie terms “Access Studies,” would benefit from greater engagement with the concepts, practices, and political commitments of critical disability studies. In this talk, Hamraie will discuss the emerging field ...

Russia's Invasion of Ukraine: A Roundtable Discussion

Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: A Roundtable Discussion

Zoom

UCSB faculty members will discuss the invasion of Ukraine, including its historical background, regional and global ramifications, and international responses. Panelists: Benjamin J. Cohen, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Political Science Adrienne Edgar, Professor, History Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, Assistant Professor, Global Studies Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Professor Emeritus, History Adrian Ivakhiv, Visiting Scholar, Carsey-Wolf Center Cynthia Kaplan, Professor, Political Science Moderator: Sara Pankenier Weld, Professor, Germanic & Slavic Studies Live closed-captioning will be provided. Free to attend; registration required to ...

John Majewski, The Many Journeys

Research Focus Group Talk: The Many Journeys of Robert Glenn: Memory, Slavery, and the Transition to Freedom

Zoom

Professor John Majewski will speak about the 1937 WPA interview of Robert Glenn, who recounted how he was sold as a child as part of the slave trade. After emancipation, he was eventually able to find his parents. Glenn's interview is remarkably rich and detailed, and because he includes many specific names and places, Professor Majewski has been able to begin reconstructing his life using census records and other documents. The discussion will explore the ...

Sybille Krämer

From Alphabetical to Digital Literacy? Some Reflections on Orality, Writing, Cultural Techniques, and Digitality

6206C Phelps Phelps Hall, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Are we witnessing the transition from alphabetic to digital literacy? But what does "literacy" mean? Going back to the discovery of the difference between orality and literacy in the 1960s and 1970s, we find a real discovery - the difference between oral and written language - combined with a problematic narrative: The supremacy of literal to oral cultures. To avoid this ideology we should consider orality and literacy as the two ends of a continuum. ...

Eileen Goddard, Self-Formation and Selflessness in the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava Tradition

Research Focus Group Talk: Self-Formation and Selflessness in the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava Tradition

3041 HSSB UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

The sixteenth-century Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition proposes a unique model of grace that decenters the paradigm of atonement and forgiveness and instead centers on forgetting and remembrance. In this Kṛṣṇa bhakti tradition, jīvas, embodied beings, occupy a unique intermediary position that identifies them both in relationship to Kṛṣṇa, the supreme Godhead, and to the material world of prakṛti. Jīvas can therefore choose to either turn toward or away from Kṛṣṇa. A person turns away from or ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Hungry Ghosts and the Karma of Meanness

4080 HSSB UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

The realm of hungry ghosts is one of the unfortunate realms of rebirth in the Buddhist cycle of existence, and those reborn there are said to have led lives consumed by greed and spite. But hungry ghosts know the error of their ways, and they sometimes appear among humans, like the ghosts that haunt Ebenezer Scrooge, as augurs of what may await. Hungry ghosts are like modern felons who participate in “scared straight” programs. In ...

Ship with wine barrels

Research Focus Group Workshop: Shifting Economic Power in Autun: The Donation of Constantine

Zoom

Autun’s textual and material record illustrates how and why ancient patterns of life in northeast Gaul began to give way during Late Antiquity. Adopting a methodology developed in feminist historiography, this paper explores the effect on Autun’s political economy of resources funneled to Autun’s bishop by the emperor Constantine in the early 4th century. Because Constantine did not restrict his patronage just to Autun, the city serves as a case study demonstrating how the introduction ...

Elizabeth Kolbert

Regeneration Talk: Elizabeth Kolbert

Corwin Pavilion 494 UCEN Rd, Isla Vista, CA, United States

It is said that we live in a new geological epoch characterized by climate change and other disastrous human impacts on the planet. In her new book, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Kolbert takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. Should we be seeking technological solutions to the damage humans have caused to the environment, or will such “solutions” only make the problems ...

Vivian Gornick

Regeneration Talk: The Only True Reader Is a Re-reader

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

"I sometimes think I was born reading. I can’t remember the time when I didn’t have a book in my hands, my head lost to the world around me." What Vivian Gornick did not say when she wrote these sentences was how often the book in her hands was one she had read a number of times before. It became her habit as life went on to re-read the books that had repeatedly seemed important ...

Racing Time: Chronologies of Black Muslim Belonging in Arabic Epics - Rachel Schine

Research Focus Group Talk: Racing Time: Chronologies of Black Muslim Belonging in Arabic Epics

Zoom

How do racialized icons of popular culture index Muslim ideas of history and belonging? Several Arabic epics (siyar sha‘biyya) contain Black protagonists who are assigned unique origin stories and legacies of involvement in Islam’s expansion. This talk will analyze their roles in the racial imaginaries of popular tales that proliferated from the 12th century onward across the Middle East and North Africa through oral and written traditions. Rachel Schine earned her Ph.D. in Near Eastern ...

Bolstering The Bard

Research Focus Group Discussion: Bolstering the Bard: Pedagogy and Performance Beyond UCSB

Zoom

This pedagogy event centers on an invited panel of knowledgeable actors, directors, dramaturgs, and educators to discuss experiences in conveying Shakespearean material to students and/or audiences with varying degrees of knowledge of the Bard, how to expand our methodologies as scholars, teachers, and/or artists to promote inclusivity, and how media/technology in various forms (film, social media, Zoom, etc.) can be utilized to help with these goals. The conversation will begin with introductions and a few ...

Monica Bethe: Ensuring the Future of Historic Textiles: The Case of a Japanese Empress's Court Gown.

Regeneration Talk: Ensuring the Future of Historic Textiles: The Case of a Japanese Empress’s Court Gown

Zoom

Objects talk to us over time and space, transmitting in their colors, shapes, textures, and materials insight into other lives and ways of living. Some we wish to preserve for their sheer beauty, others for the people, times, or places they represent. Of the items that are central to our daily lives, textiles are among the most perishable: if not used until they are rags, they still degrade naturally over time, prey to insects, mold, ...

9th Annual American Indian and Indigenous Collective (AIIC) Symposium: “Imagining Indigenous Futurities”

Zoom

The Ninth Annual American Indian and Indigenous Collective (AIIC) Symposium, "Imagining Indigenous Futurities," is an interdisciplinary conference, featuring presentations from across the academy – including from the humanities, social sciences, fine arts, and sciences – and from community members and practitioners beyond academic borders. This year, in selecting the theme -- "Imagining Indigenous Futurities" -- the AIIC asks participants: “What is most urgent for our communities now?” In asking this, the symposium aims to advance ...

Beethoven: The Complete Sonatas for Piano and Violin

Beethoven: The Complete Sonatas for Piano and Violin

Congregation B'nai B'rith 1000 San Antonio Creek Road, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Join violinist Alexandra Birch and pianists Alvise Pascucci, Chika Nobumori, Pete Paesaroch, Pinshu Yu, Lucía Álvarez Núñez, Marc Lombardino, and Jui-Ling Hsu for three performances of the complete sonatas for piano and violin by Beethoven. All performances will be at Congregation B'nai B'rith: Sonatas 1, 2, 3, 4 at 2 PM on April 24th; Sonatas 5, 6, 7, 8 at 7 PM on April 25th; and Sonatas 9 and 10 at 7 PM on April ...

Mayte Green-Mercado - Mediterranean Displacements: Morisco Migration in the Sixteenth Century

Research Focus Group Talk: Mediterranean Displacements: Morisco Migration in the Sixteenth Century

Zoom

Please join us for a talk with Dr. Mayte Green-Mercado (Professor of History at Rutgers University--Newark) on the displacement of Moriscos —Iberian Muslims forcibly converted to Catholicism in the first two decades of the sixteenth century. In this discussion of an ethno-religious minority group, we will be exploring the possibilities of undisciplining and redisciplining histories of race and race-making in the premodern Mediterranean. Mayte Green-Mercado received her B.A. in European History from the University of ...

Regeneration Talk: Afghanistan: The Forever War Ends

Corwin Pavilion 494 UCEN Rd, Isla Vista, CA, United States

After twenty years, the end of the American war in Afghanistan was ugly and chaotic, with terrible scenes of friends and allies being left behind and of the Taliban sweeping away everything America built. Did it have to be this way? Dexter Filkins, who began covering the country before the 9/11 attacks, will discuss how the Afghan state, built at such great expense, crumbled so fast, why America’s withdrawal turned out so badly, and how–whether ...

James Siguru Wahutu - The Place of Africa: Erasure, Elision, and the Task of Self-Writing

Research Focus Group Talk: The Place of Africa: Erasure, Elision, and the Task of Self-Writing

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

Narratives of "connectivity" typically rely on discourses about Africa as a blank space devoid of social networks that are unique, vibrant, and continually being modified. While this takes agency away from Africans, it rests on the colonial assumption that "connectivity," just as "civilization" before it, is inherently exogenous, white, and male. This talk begins with the Rhodesian fantasy of connecting Africa from the Cape to Cairo and traces this logic through the contemporary discourse of ...

GCLR Workshop Linshan Jiang

GCLR Dissertation Writing Workshop

Zoom

Please join us for this year's second GCLR Dissertation and Prospectus Writing Workshop for graduate students from any department in the Humanities at UCSB. Our presenter will be Linshan Jiang 蒋林珊, a doctoral candidate in the UCSB Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, who is presenting a chapter from her dissertation entitled "Mobilizing Shame: Tension between Nationalism and Feminism in Nieh Hualing’s Far Away, A River and Zhang Ling’s A Single Swallow." Linshan's ...

Research Focus Group Discussion: Global Adaptations: Throne of Blood

Zoom

This discussion will focus on Akira Kurosawa's 1957 film, Throne of Blood, as a key twentieth-century film and as an adaption of Shakespeare's Macbeth. Discussion will be centered around a number of key critical questions, such as: What does Kurosawa bring to Shakespeare? How can we understand this as part of a larger history of Shakespeare and adaptation? How has this film been influenced by and subsequently influenced global cinema and global Shakespeare? What are ...

Paula Richman | The Indian Ramayana and Its Regional Performance Traditions

Research Focus Group Talk: The Indian Ramayana and Its Regional Performance Traditions

2135 Social Sciences and Media Studies SSMS UCSB, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

In this talk, Paula Richman will provide a brief survey of the major performance traditions in which the Ramayana narrative is enacted in different regions of India, including Kerala, Tamilnadu, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, and Assam. She will then provide analyses of two examples of how specific sets of theatrical conventions shape the representation of familiar characters. The 1954 Tamil mythological drama, “The King of Lanka,” starring Manohar, begins and ends as a conventional ...

Edward Kamens - Is a Tekagami a Text? Reading the Fragmentary in a Calligraphy Album

Research Focus Group Talk: Is a Tekagami a Text? Reading the Fragmentary in a Calligraphy Album

4080 HSSB UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Join the Transregional East Asia RFG for a talk by Edward Kamens entitled, "Is a Tekagami a Text? Reading the Fragmentary in a Calligraphy Album." Edward Kamens is Sumitomo Professor of Japanese Studies, Yale University, and Paul I. Terasaki Chair in U.S.-Japan Relations, UCLA. Sponsored by the IHC's Transregional East Asia Research Focus Group, East Asia Center, and Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies

Silicon Valley Requiem

Silicon Valley Requiem: A Posthuman Electro-Acoustic Concert

UCSB Studio Theater TD East 1101, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Silicon Valley Requiem is a composition based on the requiem mass but replacing the liturgical environment with the public theater of Tech CEOs. A trio of synthesized male voices singing Gregorian chant melodies is paired with two live female performers singing statements regarding their actions on earth to a monolithic adjudicating soprano projected above. The application of contemporary technology on medieval plainchant creates a plethora of complex philosophical questions. What does it mean for non-humans ...

Stuart Tyson Smith - "Backwater Puritans"?

Research Focus Group Discussion: “Backwater Puritans”? Racism, Egyptological Stereotypes, and the Intersection of Local and International at Kushite Tombos

6056 HSSB and Zoom

Egyptological and more popular perceptions of Nubia and the Kushite Dynasty (c. 747-654 BCE) have framed Kush as a periphery to civilized Egypt, unsophisticated interlopers in Egypt and the broader Mediterranean world during the first millennium. But to what extent was Nubia a “backwater” to “effete and sophisticated” Egypt, as John Wilson once asserted? It is clear from recent archaeological work at Tombos and elsewhere that Nubia was not an unsophisticated backwater. Objects with Egyptianizing ...

Scott Ellsworth: The Tulsa Race Massacre: Causes, Cover Up, and the Fight for the Past

Regeneration Talk: The Tulsa Race Massacre: Causes, Cover Up, and the Fight for the Past

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

The 1921 Tulsa race massacre was the worst single incident of racial violence in American history. But for decades its very existence was denied. Official records went missing, incriminating articles were torn out of bound volumes of old newspapers, and researchers even had their lives threatened. Award-winning author and historian Scott Ellsworth, author of The Ground Breaking: An American City and Its Search for Justice, unpacks the story of the massacre and the challenges it ...

Global Snapshot: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Media, Performativity, and Global Communities

Conference: Global Snapshot: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Media, Performativity, and Global Communities

Zoom

Many scholars have questioned what the rise of globalization, facilitated through new forms of technology, could mean for our ability to study and reach larger audiences. While some media practitioners and researchers have struggled to keep pace, changes to global technologies also present the benefits of accessibility and creativity. Due to the impacts of Covid-19, global media has become an ever more vital avenue for continuing typical social practices in scholarship and artistic endeavors like ...

Rory Lindsay - Saving the Dead 5/20/22

Research Focus Group Talk: Saving the Dead: Conceptions of Agency in Tibetan Buddhist Funerary Rituals

4080 HSSB UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

In this talk, Rory Lindsay will share with us insights from his forthcoming book, Saving the Dead: Tibetan Funerary Rituals in the Tradition of the Sarvadurgatipariśodhana Tantra (2022). He will discuss the history of one of the first Buddhist funerary traditions to be adopted in Tibet and the intersecting forms of agency—human, nonhuman, and material—that are described in this tradition's ritual manuals. He will also examine polemical exchanges about these practices and Tibetan innovations concerning ...

Buddhism crip - Queered Variabilities

Research Focus Group Talk: Buddhismcrip – Queered Variabilities

Zoom

People performing diverse embodiments of sexualities, gender, and variable physical and neurological patterns, among others, often encounter specific difficulties and sometimes hostility when practicing Buddhism. In this talk, Professor Bee Scherer will look at these experiences of abjection, their grounding in social psychology, and how they relate to positions found in Buddhist philosophy and narratives. How can we negotiate oppressive readings of, for example, key Buddhist notions such as karma, No-Self, and detachment? How can ...

Hamlet's Big Adventure! (A Prequel)

Hamlet’s Big Adventure! (A Prequel)

Isla Vista Community Center 976 Embarcadero del Mar, Isla Vista, CA

Before the tragedy, before the betrayal, there was a performance! Isla Vista Arts and Not Necessarily Shakespeare in the Park present "Hamlet's Big Adventure (A Prequel)," a new play by Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor and directed by Grace Kimball. Showtimes are on June 3 and 4 at 4 PM; admission is free. Join us for a night full of laughs!

Asian/American Studies Collective RFG

Asian/American Studies Collective Graduate Symposium

6020 and 5024 HSSB HSSB, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

The Asian/American Studies Collective RFG will host a Graduate Symposium featuring discussions on Asian American classroom experiences, Asian American genres, performing Asian America, legacies of violence, and settler colonialism, as well as a keynote by Dr. Heidi Amin-Hong (UCSB).

Asian/American Studies Collective RFG

Asian/American Studies Collective Welcome Breakfast

HSSB Courtyard Humanities and Social Sciences Building, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Join the Asian/American Studies Collective (AASC) to kick-off our academic programming for the year! This is an informal gathering for any and all graduate students or faculty who work in or are interested in Asian American Studies. It is also the perfect opportunity to meet members of the collective and to learn more about what we have planned for the year! Free coffee and pastries provided. No RSVP necessary. Sponsored by the IHC’s Asian/American Studies Collective Research ...

IHC Open House 2022

IHC Open House

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

You are invited to the IHC’s Open House on Thursday, September 29, from 4-6 pm. Meet new Humanities faculty, IHC fellows, and staff members. Learn about Too Much Information, our 2022-23 public events series. Find out about our publicly engaged programs and funding resources for faculty and graduate students. Enjoy good food, drink, and conversation. Cosponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts

Disability Studies RFG

Research Focus Group Event: Meet and Greet Open House

Early Modern Center, 2510 South Hall Santa Barbara, CA, United States

The co-conveners of the Disability Studies Initiative invite you to come and join us for tea or coffee. We will discuss as a group potential activities for the year and come up with an agenda of exciting events and initiatives. Let's meet face to face if you can. Participants may also register and join us online so we can exchange ideas and brainstorm about current research in Critical Disability Studies. Let's continue our work on ...

Satyajit Ray and the Sense of Wonder

Conference: Satyajit Ray and the Sense of Wonder

Wallis Annenberg Conference Room 4315 SSMS, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

This three-day conference and accompanying film series have been organized to celebrate the birth centenary of the renowned Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray (1921-1992). Most critical evaluations of Ray, which tend to focus on his films while overlooking his considerable literary and design output, have consecrated him as a modernist master or a postcolonial auteur. Such discussions are often couched in terms of modernity and tradition, Orientalism and nativism, objectivity and irrationality, skepticism and enchantment, art ...

Make a Poem Cry cover art

TMI Talk: Make a Poem Cry: Creative Writing from California’s Lancaster Prison

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

Make a Poem Cry is an anthology from one of California’s high-security prisons brought to us through the creative writing classes of Luis J. Rodríguez. Rodríguez and formerly incarcerated writer Kenneth E. Hartman have selected work penned from 2016 to 2018. These are poems, essays, stories, and more mined from the depths of familial, racial, and economic violence. They are imaginings for how to address trouble and crime without punishment, dehumanization, and violence in return. ...