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HUMANITIES DECANTED: Elisabeth Weber, Kill Boxes: Facing the Legacy of US-Sponsored Torture, Indefinite Detention and Drone Warfare

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

Join us for a discussion of Elisabeth Weber's new work. Refreshments will be served. Kill Boxes addresses the legacy of US-sponsored torture, indefinite detention and drone warfare by deciphering the shocks of recognition that humanistic and artistic responses to violence bring to consciousness if readers and viewers have eyes to face them. The book provides intensive readings of philosophical texts by Jean Améry, Jacques Derrida, and Christian Thomasius, with poetic texts by Franz Kafka, Paul Muldoon, ...

HUMANITIES DECANTED: Robert Samuels, Educating Inequality: Beyond the Political Myths of Higher Education and the Job Market

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

Join us for a dialogue between Robert Samuels (Writing) and Heather Steffen (English and Writing) about Samuels’ new work, Educating Inequality. Refreshments will be served. Politicians and school officials often argue that higher education is the solution to many of our social and economic problems. Educating Inequality argues that in order to reduce inequality and enhance social mobility, public policies are needed to revamp the financial aid system and increase the number of good jobs. ...

HUMANITIES DECANTED: Bhaskar Sarkar, “No Man’s (Is)land: Ecology of a Border”

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

Join us for a dialogue between Bhaskar Sarkar (Film and Media Studies) and Lisa Sun-Hee Park (Asian American Studies) about Sarkar’s new article, “No Man’s (Is)land: Ecology of a Border.” Refreshments will be served. Focusing on a stretch of the international border between Bangladesh and India that coincides with the river Ganges, Sarkar’s new article examines the ambiguous productivities of proliferating borders in the era of globalization. In this overpopulated region of South Asia, the ...

Crossings + Boundaries Talk: Exodus: The Largest Movement of People Since the Second World War

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

The world is witnessing the greatest mass migration since 1945. More than sixty-five million people, about one in every hundred on Earth, have fled their homes. Some are internally displaced; others are refugees who have moved to multiple countries. This talk will discuss the three main causes of this giant human tide: the implosion of the Middle East following the Arab Spring; climate change, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, where drought and advancing deserts are pushing ...

Crossings + Boundaries TALKS: Sinan Antoon and Sara Pursley

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

Talk: The Times of Revolution in Jawad Salim’s Monument to Freedom The Iraqi artist Jawad Salim’s famous Monument to Freedom, which still stands in Baghdad’s Liberation Square, is usually read as a linear historical narrative of the Iraqi nationalist movement and the 1958 revolution it produced. Pursley’s talk explores heterogeneous conceptions of time in the work, including depictions of cyclical forms of temporality that reference Khaldunian historical time, Shi`i messianic time, and the time of mourning. She ...

HUMANITIES DECANTED: Lal Zimman, Transgender Language Reform: Some Challenges and Strategies for Promoting Trans-Affirming, Gender-Inclusive Language

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

Join us for a presentation and discussion with Lal Zimman (Linguistics) about his new work, “Transgender Language Reform.” Refreshments will be served. With a growing societal interest in the experiences of transgender people has come a new kind of awareness about gendered language. Zimman’s recent article, “Transgender language reform: some challenges and strategies for promoting trans-affirming, gender-inclusive language,” takes a linguistic approach to trans-inclusive language by distilling the practices of transgender speakers of English into ...

Social Securities Talk: Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women

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

Since 1980, the population of female prisoners has increased eightfold in this country, with women of color disproportionately impacted. In her talk, Ms. Law will examine the structural inequities and injustices behind the rise in the number of incarcerated women and the recurring violation of rights women face inside prison, including lack of access to reproductive and medical health care and pervasive sexual harassment and abuse. Law will also discuss how incarcerated women are challenging ...

Humanities Decanted: Carlos Morton, Trumpus Caesar

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

Join us for a staged reading of a new play by Carlos Morton (Theater and Dance), Trumpus Caesar, followed by a discussion. Refreshments will be served. A bawdy satire in the tradition of Greco-Roman Comedy–Saturday Night Live meets Julius Caesar.  The comic premise is that Trumpus Caesar, having recently been elected emperor by the plebeians, is impeached by a Chorus of Republican satyrs who then fight over the crown.  In this "farce for our times," Caesar doesn't die ...

Humanities Decanted: Mario T. García, Father Luis Olivares: A Biography

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

Join us for a dialogue between Mario T. García (Chicana and Chicano Studies and History) and Verónica Castillo-Muñoz (History) about García’s new biography, Father Luis Olivares: Faith Politics and the Origins of the Sanctuary Movement in Los Angeles. Refreshments will be served. García‘s latest book is the untold story of the Los Angeles sanctuary movement’s champion, Father Luis Olivares (1934–1993), a Catholic priest and a charismatic, faith-driven leader for social justice. Beginning in 1980 and continuing for most of the ...

Social Securities Talk: Why Can’t Feminists Change the Law? The History and Politics of Welfare Reform in the Modern U.S.

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

In her talk, Kornbluh will reveal how welfare reform is shaped by “intersectional sexism,” the gendered and racialized dimensions of legal activity that are evident, persistent, yet ignored by mainstream policy makers and Washington, D.C.-based intellectuals. Taking as her example the failed passage of a feminist welfare reauthorization bill in the early 2000s, Kornbluh will discuss why the Democratic Party resisted embracing this initiative and explore the crucial role feminist scholars and activists have to play ...

Social Securities Talk: Teaching the People: Enlightenment and the American Republic

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

In this talk, David Marshall will illuminate contemporary debates about the value of the liberal arts and sciences and public investment in higher education by examining Enlightenment arguments for both liberal education and public education in the early American Republic, and the 19th-century Land Grant movement, which resulted in the establishment of the University of California as a “public trust” in the California State Constitution. These two Enlightenment moments resonate today as we try to ...

Social Securities Talk: Environmental Justice as Freedom

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

This talk argues that environmental justice movements are freedom struggles. Beginning with the starting point that unjust environments are rooted in racism, capitalism, militarism, colonialism, land theft from Native peoples, and gender violence, the talk frames environmental justice as particularly significant in the moment of danger that we are currently facing. It is drawn from a forthcoming book that examines activism at Standing Rock, in Flint and the Central Valley, and in the wake of ...

Humanities Decanted: Silvia Bermúdez, Rocking the Boat

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

Join us for a dialogue between Silvia Bermúdez (Spanish and Portuguese) and Cristina Venegas (Film and Media Studies) about Bermúdez’s new book, Rocking the Boat: Migration and Race in Contemporary Spanish Music.  Refreshments will be served. Rocking the Boat is a nuanced account of how popular urban music, produced between 1980 and 2013, shaped the discourse on immigration, transnational migrants, and racialization in the Spanish State borne after the Constitution of 1978. Silvia Bermúdez is Professor of Spanish ...

Humanities Decanted: Ruth Hellier-Tinoco, Performing Palimpsest Bodies: Postmemory Theatre Experiments in Mexico

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

Join us for a dialogue between Ruth Hellier-Tinoco (Music) and Jessica Nakamura (Department of Theater and Dance) about Hellier-Tinoco’s new book, Performing Palimpsest Bodies: Postmemory Theatre Experiments in Mexico. Refreshments will be served. Performing Palimpsest Bodies proposes the concept of palimpsest bodies to interpret provocative theatre and performance experiments that explore issues of cultural memory, bodies of history, archives, repertoires and performing remains. Combined with ideas of postmemory and rememory, palimpsest bodies are inherently trans-temporal as they ...

Humanities Decanted Chavez-Garcia

Humanities Decanted: Migrant Longing: Letter Writing across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

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

Join us for a dialogue between Miroslava Chávez-García (History) and John S.W. Park (Asian American Studies) about Chávez-García’s new book, Migrant Longing: Letter Writing across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. Refreshments will be served. Migrant Longing draws upon Miroslava Chávez-García’s personal collection of 300 letters exchanged by family members across the U.S.-Mexico border, illuminating what migrants experienced in their everyday lives both “here” and “there” (aqui y alla). Chávez-García uses these private, firsthand accounts to demonstrate not ...

Critical Mass Talk: Ady Barkan: Love and Death, Hope and Resistance

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

Sitting in that hotel armchair, I realized that my deadly disease was giving me newfound power at the very moment it was depriving me of so much strength. My voice was growing softer, but I was being heard by more people than ever before. My legs were disintegrating, but more and more people were following in my footsteps. Precisely because my days were numbered, people drew inspiration from my decision to spend them in resistance. ...

Humanities Decanted: Borges, Buddhism and World Literature: A Morphology of Renunciation Tales

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

Join us for a dialogue between Dominique Jullien (French and Comparative Literature) and Sowon Park (English) about Jullien’s new book, Borges, Buddhism and World Literature: A Morphology of Renunciation Tales. Refreshments will be served. Jullien’s latest book follows the renunciation story in Borges and beyond, arguing for its centrality as a Borgesian compositional trope and as a Borgesian prism for reading a global constellation of texts. The renunciation story at the heart of Buddhism, that ...

Humanities Decanted: Queering Black Atlantic Religions: Transcorporeality in Candomblé, Santería, and Vodou

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

Join us for a dialogue between Roberto Strongman (Black Studies) and Jennifer Tyburczy (Feminist Studies) about Strongman’s new book, Queering Black Atlantic Religions: Transcorporeality in Candomblé, Santería, and Vodou. Refreshments will be served. In Queering Black Atlantic Religions, Roberto Strongman examines Haitian Vodou, Cuban Lucumí/Santería, and Brazilian Candomblé to demonstrate how religious rituals of trance possession allow humans to understand themselves as embodiments of the divine. In these rituals, the commingling of humans and the ...

Jessica Nakamura

Humanities Decanted: Transgenerational Remembrance: Performance and the Asia-Pacific War in Contemporary Japan

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Join us online for a dialogue between Jessica Nakamura (Theater and Dance) and Catherine Nesci (French and Italian, Comparative Literature) about Nakamura’s new book, Transgenerational Remembrance: Performance and the Asia-Pacific War in Contemporary Japan. Audience Q&A will follow. In Transgenerational Remembrance, Jessica Nakamura investigates the role of artistic production in the commemoration and memorialization of the Asia-Pacific War (1931–1945) in Japan since 1989. During this ...

Living Democracy Talk: Struggling to Save America’s Cities in the Suburban Age: Urban Renewal Revisited

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Urban Renewal of the 1950s through 1970s has acquired a very poor reputation, much of it deserved. But reducing it to an unchanging story of urban destruction misses some important legacies and genuinely progressive goals. Those include efforts to create more socially mixed communities, to involve suburbs—not just cities—in solving metropolitan inequality, and most importantly, to hold the federal government responsible for funding more ...

Helen Morales

Humanities Decanted: Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Join us online for a dialogue between Helen Morales (Classics) and Vilna Bashi-Treitler (Black Studies) about Morales’ new book, Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths. Audience Q&A will follow. A witty, inspiring reckoning with the ancient Greco-Roman myths and their legacy, from what they can illuminate about #MeToo to the radical imagery of Beyoncé. The picture of classical antiquity most of ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Cabranes-Grant Humanities Decanted

Humanities Decanted: The Bones of Contention

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

Join us for a dialogue between Leo Cabranes-Grant (Spanish and Portuguese, Theater and Dance) and Juan Pablo Lupi (Spanish and Portuguese) about Cabranes-Grant’s new play, The Bones of Contention. Refreshments will be served. The Bones of Contention describes the efforts of Yitipaka (an imaginary California town) to regain its economic and social stability after the COVID pandemic. Constructed as two collective latinx murals (one dedicated to the older generation, one dedicated to younger people), the ...

Humanities Decanted: Ross Melnick

Humanities Decanted: Hollywood’s Embassies

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

Join us for a dialogue between Ross Melnick (Film and Media Studies) and Charles Wolfe (Film and Media Studies) about Melnick’s new book, Hollywood’s Embassies: How Movie Theaters Projected American Power Around the World. Refreshments will be served. Beginning in the 1920s, audiences around the globe were seduced not only by Hollywood films but also by lavish movie theaters that were owned and operated by the major American film companies. These theaters aimed to provide ...

Humanities Decanted: Jody Enders

Humanities Decanted: Jody Enders, Translating Medieval Farce

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

Join us for a dialogue between Jody Enders (French and Italian) and Leo Cabranes-Grant (Spanish and Portuguese, Theater and Dance) about Enders' two new edited and translated volumes of medieval French comedies. Refreshments will be served. Trial by Farce: A Dozen Medieval French Comedies in Modern English (University of Michigan Press, 2023) In Trial by Farce, prize-winning theater historian Jody Enders brings twelve of the funniest legal farces to English-speaking audiences in a refreshingly uncensored but ...

The Critical Race Theory Forward Tracking Project - Event

TMI Talk: Critical Race Theory (CRT): What It Is, What It Isn’t, and What You Need to Know

Zoom

Critical Race Theory (CRT) seeks to understand why inequality persists in a society that has explicitly condemned racism and has repeatedly adopted laws and policies intended to eliminate it. Drawing on research in history, social sciences, and the humanities, CRT demonstrates how laws and policies can reproduce racial inequality—even when they are adopted without explicit racial bias. CRT is thus an important tool to support our nation’s ongoing efforts to achieve a robust multiracial democracy. ...

Humanities Decanted - Ghosh

Humanities Decanted: The Virus Touch

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

Join us for a dialogue between Bishnupriya Ghosh (English and Global Studies) and Elena Aronova (History) about Ghosh’s new book, The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media. Refreshments will be served. In The Virus Touch, Ghosh argues that media are central to understanding emergent relations between viruses, humans, and nonhuman life. Writing in the shadow of the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 global pandemics, Ghosh theorizes “epidemic media” to show how epidemics are mediated in images, numbers, and ...

Humanities Decanted: Giuliana Perrone

Humanities Decanted: Giuliana Perrone

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

Join us for a dialogue between Giuliana Perrone (History) and Jeannine DeLombard (English) about Perrone's new book, Nothing More than Freedom: The Failure of Abolition in American Law. Refreshments will be served. Nothing More than Freedom: The Failure of Abolition in American Law (Cambridge University Press, 2023) Nothing More than Freedom explores the long and complex legal history of Black freedom in the United States. From the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 until ...

Yunte Huang - Event

Humanities Decanted: Daughter of the Dragon

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

Join us for a dialogue between Yunte Huang (English) and Constance Penley (Film and Media Studies) about Huang’s new book, Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong's Rendezvous with American History. Refreshments will be served. Daughter of the Dragon is a trenchant reclamation of the Chinese American movie star, whose battles against cinematic exploitation and endemic racism are set against the currents of twentieth-century history. Born into the steam and starch of a Chinese laundry, ...

Liz Carlisle Humantiies Decanted

Humanities Decanted: Liz Carlisle

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

Join us for a dialogue between Liz Carlisle (Environmental Studies) and Peter Alagona (Environmental Studies) about Carlisle’s new book, Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming. Refreshments will be served. A powerful movement is happening in farming today—farmers are reconnecting with their roots to fight climate change. For one woman, that has meant learning her tribe’s history to help bring back the buffalo. For another, it has meant preserving forest purchased ...

Janet Afary HD Event

Humanities Decanted: Janet Afary

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

Join us for a dialogue between Janet Afary (Religious Studies) and Dwight Reynolds (Religious Studies) about Afary’s new book, Mollā Nasreddin: The Making of a Modern Trickster, 1906-1911. Refreshments will be served. In the early twentieth century, a group of artists and intellectuals reinterpreted the Middle Eastern trickster figure Nasreddin in their periodical Mollā Nasreddin. They used folklore, visual art, and satire to disseminate a consciously radical and social democratic discourse on religion, gender, sexuality, ...

Thomas Mazanec - Humanities Decanted Event

Humanities Decanted: Thomas Mazanec

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

Join us for a dialogue between Thomas Mazanec (East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies) and Xiaorong Li (East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies) about Mazanec’s new book, Poet-Monks: The Invention of Buddhist Poetry in Medieval China. Poet-Monks focuses on the literary and religious practices of Buddhist poet-monks in Tang-dynasty China to propose an alternative historical arc of medieval Chinese poetry. Combining large-scale quantitative analysis with close readings of important literary texts, Mazanec describes how Buddhist ...

Swati Chattopadhyay - Humanities Decanted Event

Humanities Decanted: Swati Chattopadhyay

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

Join us for a dialogue between Swati Chattopadhyay (History of Art and Architecture) and Cristina Venegas (Film and Media Studies) about Chattopadhyay's new book, Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire. Chattopadhyay recasts the history of the British empire by focusing on the small spaces that made the empire possible. Her book takes as its subject a series of small architectural spaces, objects, and landscapes of the British empire in India and uses them to ...