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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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. ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...