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Research Focus Group Talk: Assistive Technologies and Erotic Adaptation: Queer Disability in the Renaissance

Zoom

REGISTER NOW Simone Chess will focus on early modern disability, queerness, and adaptive technologies. Chess is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program at Wayne State University in Detroit. She is the author of Male-to-Female Crossdressing in Early Modern English Literature: Gender, Performance, and Queer Relations (Routledge, 2016) and coeditor, with Colby Gordon and Will Fisher, of a special issue on “Early Modern Trans Studies” for the Journal ...

Research Focus Group Workshop: Cowboys in the Colosseum

Zoom

REGISTER HERE Join us to workshop "Cowboys in the Colosseum: Papal Power, Cattle Rustling, and Meat Supply in Early Modern Italy," a chapter from Brad Bouley's current book project. Brad Bouley (Assistant Professor, Department of History) specializes in histories of religion and science in the early modern, especially Italian, context. He is author of Pious Postmortems: Anatomy, Sanctity, and the Catholic Church in Early Modern Europe (UPenn, 2017). His current project, The Barberini Butchers: Meat, ...

Research Focus Group Discussion with Radhika Govindrajan about Her Book Animal Intimacies

Zoom

ATTEND DISCUSSION This seminar session will feature a discussion with Radhika Govindrajan about her book Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas (2018), which is an ethnographic study of the interspecies relationships between human and nonhuman animals in the mountain villages of the Central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand in India. Following is the University of Chicago Press’s description of the book: "What does it mean to live and die in relation to other animals? ...

Research Focus Group Workshop: Graduate Student Research

Zoom

The Asian/American Studies Collective is excited to host two events showcasing graduate student research this quarter. Graduate students will be presenting their research as part of the Collective-sponsored graduate seminar ASAM 200. These workshops will be held on November 9th and December 14th from 11am to 1pm PST. Sponsored by the IHC's Asian/American Studies Collective Research Focus Group

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

Zoom

Zoom Meeting Link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/82289262845 The Asian/American Studies Collective is excited to announce our winter speakers series, which features an exciting lineup of scholars from across the UCSB campus. For each talk, an invited speaker will share their current research during the first hour and the second hour will be explicitly dedicated to creating space to allow graduate students to ask questions related to research and professionalization. Our first speaker is Dr. Simi Kang, a queer, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Research Focus Group Meeting: Film Discussion of Noh Macbeth

Zoom

Come join the What is a Shakespeare?: Shakespeare and Global Media Research Focus Group as we discuss Noh Macbeth, a 2006 Japanese adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth. All are welcome! Please watch the film in advance of the discussion. The film can be accessed for free via the MIT Global Shakespeare archive here: https://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/noh-macbeth-izumi-noriko-2006/ Register to attend for Zoom link Image: Noh Macbeth Sponsored by the IHC's What Is a Shakespeare?: Shakespeare and Global Media Research Focus ...

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

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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)

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 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 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Research Focus Group Discussion: Reading David Sterling Brown’s “‘Hood feminism’: Whiteness and segregated (premodern) scholarly discourse in the post-postracial era”

2635 South Hall South Hall, UCSB, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Please join us on Monday, October 17th, at 1 PM for a reading group discussion of David Sterling Brown's recent article, "'Hood feminism': Whiteness and segregated (premodern) scholarly discourse in the post-postracial era," and "Teaching guide for: 'Hood feminism’: Whiteness and segregated (premodern) scholarly discourse in the post-postracial era." Both works appeared in the 2021 special issue of Literature Compass, "Race Before Race: Premodern Critical Race Studies," edited by Dorothy Kim. As the first Un-disciplining ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Intellectual Disability, the English Law, and the Fools of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

2510 South Hall UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

This talk will examine how fools in early modern drama and literature were considered intellectually disabled, if viewed in the light of early modern criteria for intellectual disability. The English law was the discipline that most of all strove to conceptualize such a disability: calling it idiocy, it defined it as someone’s incapacity to manage property. Such thinking influenced the way literary characters were represented on the stage and page. Hence, they showcased a tendency ...

Research Focus Group Discussion: Disability in Latin American and Latinx Contexts

Zoom

Please join us for a discussion on disability in Latin American and Latinx contexts. While disability studies is a diverse and evolving field, much of the focus has been on exploring disabled bodyminds in the context of the Global North, often leaving out questions of neoliberalism, colonialism, and racialization. This conversation will begin to explore how scholars interested in disability might begin expanding this conversation by including both Latin American and US Latinx perspectives on ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Transnational Jewish Tradition and Memory in the Landscapes of Maurice Sendak

Zoom

This talk examines the role of Jewish folk traditions and memory in the picture books of the late Maurice Sendak (1928-2012), with special attention to Sendak’s handling of landscape and natural elements. Sendak’s own biography reflects a move in the 1970s from the urban spaces of Brooklyn and Manhattan to the forested landscape of Ridgefield, Connecticut. His work speaks to the experience of first-generation children of immigrants in early twentieth-century America, drawing on a Yiddish-inflected ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Leah Goldberg’s Psychogeographical Mapping of Hebrew Children’s Culture

Zoom

This talk examines the comparative representations of the Mizrahi immigrant and the Holocaust refugee through the motif of the child immigrant to Israel in the mid-20th century through the work of Leah Goldberg (1911-1970). A prolific modernist poet, author, playwright, literary translator, and comparative literary critic who chaired the Department of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Goldberg's focus upon dislocation and language in her work for both adults and children is informed ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Consensus without Collaboration? The Future of Emotion Research from the Perspective of History

Zoom

In recent years, multiple disciplines have converged on a biocultural understanding of human emotion, sensation and experience, but knowledge production in disciplinary silos remains. This talk is about the discipline of history's positionality in this budding, if unwitting, consensus among social neuroscientists, social psychologists, transcultural psychiatrists, neurophilosophers, and social scientists. Positioning history as a bridge builder, it nevertheless outlines the significant obstacles to genuine transdisciplinary collaboration. Rob Boddice (Ph.D., FRHistS) is Senior Research Fellow at ...

Research Focus Group Talk: The Trials and Tribulations of Bambi and the Inscrutable Felix Salten, Lover of Animals

Zoom

This talk follows Jack Zipes' recent publication of his new translation of Felix Salten's Bambi (1923). Zipes' research for this book demonstrates that Bambi was essentially a Jew, as were all the animals in the forest, and that he and they had to spend their lives avoiding pogroms in the forest and learning to deal with loneliness. Salten wrote other books, such as Fifteen Rabbits (1928) and Bambi's Children: The Story of a Forest Family ...

Research Focus Group Seminar: Care and Disability

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

In her 1982 work, In a Different Voice, Carol Gilligan outlined a new manner for women to think about moral values and practices, and put forward the concept of care, which has recently been at the core of a new ethics. The ethics of care centers our social relations on vulnerability, dependency, and interdependence. In this session of the Disability Studies Initiative, we will discuss works that address the limit of individual autonomy and the ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Racist Love – Author Conversation

Zoom

Please join us for a discussion of Leslie Bow's Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy (2022). The talk will feature a brief comment from the author, followed by Q and A with participants. Racist Love traces the ways in which Asian Americans become objects of anxiety and desire. Conceptualizing these feelings as “racist love,” Bow explores how race is abstracted and then projected onto Asianized objects. Bow shows how anthropomorphic objects and ...

Research Focus Group Meeting: Defiant Worship: How Conservative Christian Legal Organizations are Changing Legal Culture

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

In this RFG meeting, Moore will discuss her new paper that offers a critical analysis of religious freedom discourse engendered by the coronavirus pandemic. Restrictions on indoor religious gatherings during the first nine months of the pandemic were challenged in courts, and their constitutionality was addressed by the Supreme Court over the summer of 2020. This historic period—with lockdowns, testing, contact tracing, and vaccines, not to mention its prohibition on public gatherings—provide a unique opportunity ...

Research Focus Group Talk: US Policymaking and the Promises of Technology in the 1990s’ “New Economy”

4041 HSSB

On April 5th, 2000, President William Clinton stepped to the microphone at the White House Conference on the New Economy and told those gathered that the United States was experiencing “an economic transformation as profound as that that led us into the industrial revolution.” The 1990s was a heady moment for chatter about technological change, especially around personal computers and the Internet. Microsoft CEO Bill Gates predicted Business @ the Speed of Thought, as one ...

Research Focus Group Roundtable: AASC Works-in-Progress

5024 HSSB UC Santa Barbara

The Asian/American Studies Collective's Work-in-Progress Roundtables are an opportunity for UCSB graduate students to receive feedback on draft presentations of their research. On this occasion, we will be hearing from three graduate students who will be presenting at the annual conference of the Association for Asian American Studies. Mika Thornburg (History) | American Models & Hotel Occupiers: The Role of Tourism in the Entanglement of American and Japanese Settler Colonialisms Clara Chin (English) | oh, ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Rethinking Non-Violence: The Spiritual and Emotional Lives of Animals in Jain Literature

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

Why are Jains committed to non-violence (ahiṃsā)? Is it out of a compassion for animals? Is it because of the consequences of violent action on the soul? This talk argues that the answer to these questions depends in part on whether one is reading Jain doctrinal texts or Jain literature. Jain literature in Kannada and Sanskrit offers a rationale for non-violence that is based on an affective materiality that karmically binds souls together across transmigration ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Understanding LatDisCrit Contours

Zoom

In this talk, Alexis Padilla will focus on defining and showing the significance of LatDisCrit as a transdisciplinary sub-field. Padilla will use three illustrative counterstories to capture how disability gets racialized in Latinx marginalization dynamics, while race/ethnicity serves as a proxy for oppressive disablement through exclusionary processes within US settings. Dr. Alexis Padilla is the Director of Research at the Disability Policy Consortium. Padilla is the author of Disability, Intersectional Agency, and Latinx Identity. Theorizing ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Engaging Religious Difference: The Case of Haribhadrasūri

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

The philosophical corpus attributed to the preeminent eighth-century Śvetāmbara scholar-monk Haribhadrasūri presents one of the most sustained, systematic, and multifaceted engagements with religious difference in all of medieval South Asian literature. This talk will examine his various modes of engaging difference and how they fit together: his doxographies surveying the varieties of belief; polemics that advocate critical interrogation of partisan allegiances; rules for debate that seek common ground in the face of divergent identity-based presuppositions; ...

Research Focus Group Talk: The History of Our Minds: Evidence for Co-Evolution of Cultural and Psychological Processes

Zoom

Biologically modern humans are more than 200,000 years old. Many scientists have devoted their lives to understanding how architecture, social structure, and language have changed over this history. Yet we know almost nothing about the history of human minds. Behavioral science research has instead focused nearly exclusively on contemporary people, and psychological theories often draw from taxonomies that assume a culturally and historically stable structure to emotion, personality, morality, and other psychological processes. In this ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Trust Issues: Debating Medicine and Authority in Medieval India

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

When it came to medicine in medieval India, it was hard to know who to trust. Physicians and philosophers employed in royal courts disputed the competing claims to medical authority, using debates initiated around religious scriptures to assess the authority of canonical Sanskrit medical texts. This talk will focus on arguments made by Ugrāditya, a physician who was one of many Jain scholars working in the court at Mānyakheṭa of the Rāṣṭrakūṭa king Amoghavarṣa Nṛpatuṅga ...

10th Annual AIIC Symposium: Land Back/Language Back

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB; Zoom UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

In pondering the lush promise of living languages, worlds, waterways and lands, this symposium will share conversations on Indigenous praxis on the survival and continuance of living worlds linked to living words through relationships to the land. With this theme, participants can locate these conversations in language (re)vitalization work, but these discussions are also open to many approaches in focusing on the Land Back imperative. Keynote Speakers: April 21 | Sweeney "Hawk" Windchief Dr. Sweeney ...

Research Focus Group Film Screening: Does Your House Have Lions

Pollock Theater University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

"An archive of friendship – near, far and displaced." Filmed over six years, following Delhi-based poet, teacher and activist vqueeram and a group of friends living together in New Delhi, Does Your House Have Lions (48 min., 2021) invites us into a world of queer kinship, love and joy, experienced amidst—and in resistance to—the inequalities of caste, patriarchy, religion and fascism. Vishal Jugdeo is an interdisciplinary artist who works with video, installation, performance, and sculpture ...

Research Focus Group Colloquium: Agents of Ishq and the Radical Possibilities of Love

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

This colloquium will explore with Paramita Vohra the experience of co-creating a digital space about sex, love, and desire in India. Paromita Vohra is an Indian media artist and writer who works with a range of forms, including film, comic books, digital media, installation art, and writing, to explore themes of feminism, desire, urban life, and popular culture. Her filmography as director includes the documentary Partners in Crime, which will be screened on April 27 ...

Research Focus Group Workshop: The Power of Positionality: Self-Identification in Empirical Legal Writing

4429 SSMS, Anneberg Conference Room UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

What is the impact on and influence of the researcher in law and society? Drawing in part from the author's empirical research and professional experience, this workshop will discuss a paper that investigates the benefits and burdens of positionality. Positionality is the disclosure of how an author's racial, gender, class, or other self-identifications, experiences, and privileges influence research methods. A statement of positionality in a research paper can enhance the validity of its empirical data ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Color: Additions, Subtractions, Signals

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

In this presentation, Ricardo Cedeño Montaña will describe some of the particular principles, mechanisms, and techniques by which color film functioned in its formative years and the coding schemes for (re)producing, storing, and transmitting color information in electronic and digital media. Using a media archaeological approach to technical media, Cedeño Montaña will show that color in technical media is anything but stable and such instability implies different contexts of sensory data processing and storage. This ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Tape Letters: Migration on Tape

2406 Music UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

The Tape Letters project shines light on the practice of recording and sending messages on cassette tape as a mode of communication by Pakistanis who migrated and settled in the UK between 1960 and 1980. Drawing directly both from first-hand interviews and from the informal and intimate conversations on the cassettes themselves, the project seeks to unearth, archive, and represent a portrait of this method of communication, as practiced mainly by Pothwari-speaking members of the ...

Research Focus Group Symposium: Through Young Eyes: Undergraduate Research Showcase

6320 Phelps and Zoom

Through Young Eyes is an undergraduate research showcase sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center Research Focus Group on Global Childhood Ecologies, as well as the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies and Comparative Literature Program. It features multidisciplinary presentations of thesis research related to childhood by senior majors Victoria Korotchenko in Russian and East European Studies, Nicole Smirnoff in Comparative Literature, and Zoie Orth in English. The panel of presentations and subsequent discussion will focus ...

Research Focus Group Workshop: Rehearsals for Reparations

4065 HSSB HSSB, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

In this workshop, the Legal Humanities RFG will discuss Giuliana Perrone's new paper, "Rehearsals for Reparations." This pre-circulated paper considers a set of lawsuits in which emancipated people sued to have their enslavers’ bequests to them honored. It contends that we should see these suits as contests over reparations. By exploring this unappreciated history of reparations, this article argues that enslavers themselves believed reparations were due and were willing to pay them, there was a ...

“Continuing and Restarting”: The 26th Annual Conference on Language, Interaction, and Social Organization (LISO)

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

The Language, Interaction, and Social Organization GSO is pleased to host the 26th Annual Conference on Language, Interaction, and Social Organization on May 19–20, 2023, at UCSB. The LISO conference promotes interdisciplinary research and discussion in the analysis of naturally occurring human interaction. Papers will be presented by national and international scholars on a variety of topics in the study of language, interaction, and culture. Register to attend here For more information, visit the conference ...

Asian/American Studies Collective Graduate Symposium

West Conference Center 7050 Seaway Drive, Isla Vista, CA, United States

The Asian/American Studies Collective will be holding their second annual Graduate Student Symposium on May 20, 2023, at the West Conference Center (7050 Seaway Drive, Isla Vista). The Symposium offers a space for emerging scholars in Asian American and Asian diasporic studies to share research and foster community across the field, and this year highlights the cutting-edge work of scholars working in Critical Refugee Studies. The 2023 Graduate Student Symposium will feature a keynote event ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Worship Space Acoustics: Exploring Its Application in Hindu Temples

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

Acoustically important aspects of Hindu worship include chants, bells, conch-shells, and gongs. Every Hindu temple is fitted with bells that worshipers ring. Conch-shells and gongs are used at various times during pūjā rituals, during which texts from the Vedas and other Sanskrit scriptures are chanted. These Vedic chants have phonetic characteristics such as pitch, duration, emphasis, uniformity, and juxtaposition. In this talk, Shashank Aswathanarayana will discuss his postdoctoral research on the acoustics of Hindu temples ...

Research Focus Group Discussion: Energy and Environmental Justice

Loma Pelona Center Ocean Rd, Isla Vista, CA, United States

Join the Re-centering Energy Justice Research Focus Group for a roundtable discussion. Special guests Sourayan Mookerjea and J. Mijin Cha will be discussants for this event celebrating a new book by UCSB researcher Tristan Partridge. Sourayan Mookerjea is Director of the Intermedia Research Studio and Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Alberta. His work addresses Commons Theory, Decolonizing Critical Theory, Intermedia Research Creation, and Development Dispossession. Mijin Cha’s research focuses on labor/climate coalitions and ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Diving Into the Lake: On the Necessity, Joy, and Anxiety of (Re)Translating Tulsidas’s Rāmcaritmānas

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

The epic retelling of the Rāmāyaṇa, composed in ca. 1574 CE by the saintly poet Tulsidas, in the dialect of Hindi known as Avadhi, has long been considered one of the most sacred and beloved texts of the North Indian Hindu tradition. It has also, through ten complete English renderings, become one of the most translated works of premodern Indian vernacular literature. In this talk, Philip Lutgendorf will first briefly introduce the epic and some ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Are the Chornobyl Books Nature-Oriented?: Ukrainian Children’s Literature in Memory Dimensions

Zoom

The war in Ukraine raises the issue of a new nuclear threat, as five nuclear power plants are located there. Although the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the north of Ukraine is non-functional, the level of radiation is still very high. Moreover, the largest nuclear plant in Europe, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in the south of Ukraine, is threatened with a new nuclear catastrophe and radiation pollution since the Russian military invasion (Joint Statement ...

RFG Conference: Emotions in History: Boundary-Crossing Adventures

Zoom

“Emotions in History: Boundary-Crossing Adventures” is a truly interdisciplinary collaboration between History and Psychology. The symposium features two keynote speakers, Professor Leda Cosmides (UCSB) representing Psychology, and Professor Anna Shields (Princeton) representing the Humanities. The roundtable discussion will occur between three members of Team Psychology and three members of Team Humanities. Each speaker will deliver a short presentation on a “boundary-crossing adventure” that has happened in their own research. Psychologists will discuss how a specific ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Thanatofuturism: Making Space for the Marginal at a Tomb Shrine in Bangalore

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

In the middle of Bangalore, India, a small dargah (Sufi tomb shrine) is a space of possibility for multiple marginalized groups, facilitating imagined futures that include Muslims, subaltern Hindus, Dalits, and hijras as full citizens of the Indian polity. At a time when powerful actors seek to limit national belonging to certain Hindu Indians, Anna Bigelow argues that we have much to learn from such shrines and the people who intersect through them as they ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Writing Human Rights Across Borders

2623 South Hall Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Over the last two decades, the figure of the migrant has become the central imaginary subject of human rights precisely because the universal acknowledgement of migrancy as a human rights issue has been lacking and inconsequential. During the same time, a global literature of migration has emerged as an important medium that transcends national boundaries and calls for more universal formations of the legal status and acknowledgment of migrants as subject(s) of human rights. Such ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Between and Beyond Images and Words: A Multimodal Stylistic Study of Children’s Picturebooks

Zoom

A multimodal approach to children’s picturebooks focuses on how images and words (and their interactions) collaboratively make meaning. Narrative theory enriches picturebook studies by demonstrating how paratextual elements (book cover, author’s note, afterword, etc.) complement the body text. Drawing on Gérard Genette’s (1997) distinction of “peritext” and “epitext” and Nina Nørgaard’s (2018) multimodal stylistics of the novel, this talk treats another multimodal dimension of “quasi-textual” elements or features (such as typography, layout, page-turn, gutter, blank ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Brutal Beauty: Aesthetics and Aspiration in Urban India

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

Jisha Menon will discuss her recent book, Brutal Beauty: Aesthetics and Aspiration in Urban India. Brutal Beauty conveys the affective life of the city through multiple aesthetic projects that express a range of urban feelings, including aspiration, panic, and obsolescence. As developers and policymakers remodel the city through tumultuous construction projects, urban beautification, privatization, and other templated features of “world‑class cities,” urban citizens are also changing. Sketching out scenes of urban aspiration and its dark ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Secret Clocks: The U.S. Military, Einstein’s Relativity, and the Global Positioning System

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

For nearly a decade, beginning in the mid-1970s, a debate unfolded among physicists and engineers over how best to include effects from Einstein's general theory of relativity in the new military technology now known as the Global Positioning System (GPS). Although some exchanges were published in the open scientific literature, much of the debate played out behind the scenes, in memos, reports, and special review sessions arranged by the U.S. military. Theoretical physicists who had ...

UCSB Library Exhibition: Fossil Free UC

Ocean Gallery UCSB Library, Santa Barbara

This UCSB Library exhibition (November 13, 2023 – June 28, 2024) celebrates the achievement of the student-led campaign as a testament to the power of collective action to transform our university and our world. Between 2012-2019, student activists led a UC-wide coalition– the Fossil Free UC campaign– to pressure the University to divest faculty and staff retirement funds from oil company shares. UCSB students were at the forefront of the movement, working closely with their ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Roman-Persian Relations: The Emperor Jovian and the Syriac “Julian Romance”

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

The Roman emperor Jovian (363-364) only ruled for eight months and has not received much attention in scholarship. However, he is more than a footnote in history. After the reign of Julian, he returned to the policies of Constantius II and Constantine the Great. His peace agreement with the Sassanid king Shapur II also had great impact for Roman-Persian relations. The first part of this presentation evaluates the peace agreement, the responses to it, and ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Alice in Wonderland as a Fairytale and a Resource Book in China

Zoom

This talk focuses on some semiotic aspects of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its unrivaled reception in China with special reference to the first Chinese translation by Y. R. Chao in 1922. In view of the complex addresser-addressee relationships in “children’s literature,” which denotes literature of, for, and in some cases, by children, this study distinguishes Charles Dodgson the man who wrote as a child for the Liddell Sisters and Charles Dodgson ...

RFG Talk: Encyclopédie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Intellectual World

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

Sara Johnson is professor of literature of the Americas at the University of California, San Diego. Her book, Encyclopédie noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Intellectual World (Omohundro Institute/UNC Press, 2023), documents the work of Moreau de Saint-Méry, a late eighteenth-century Caribbean intellectual. The book combines traditional academic chapters and experimental forms in its use of archival fragments and visual culture to tell the stories of the free people of color and enslaved women ...

RFG Talk: Drawing Deportation: Art and Resistance among Immigrant Children

Zoom

Drawing Deportation: Art and Resistance among Immigrant Children (NYU Press, 2023) argues that immigrant children are not passive in the face of the challenges presented by U.S. anti-immigrant policies. Based on ten years of work with immigrant children in two different border states—Arizona and California—Drawing Deportation gives readers a glimpse into the lives of immigrant children and their families. Through an analysis of 300 children’s drawings, theater performances, and family interviews, this book, at once ...

Talk: Buddhists Whisper Down the Lane: A Burmese Novel and a Nepalese Nun Lost and Found in Translation

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

This talk by Christoph Emmrich follows the cascading series of translations into three languages, over a period of half a century, from 1963 to 2016, of the story, told by a leading Burmese poet, historian, and monastic manager, about a feisty Newar Buddhist adolescent girl child prodigy from a wealthy Nepalese family who joined a troupe of Assamese elephant hunters to cross the Indian northeast and reach a nunnery in a sleepy town on the ...

RFG Talk: Bhakti and Its Place in Subaltern India

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

In this talk, Maharshi Vyas will explore the intersection of studies of Adivasis, Indigenous tribal communities in India, and theorizations of the category of bhakti (devotion) in South Asian Studies. Drawing on archival materials and ethnographic research, he will seek to provide hermeneutical space to the subaltern voices of the Adivasis themselves by providing an analysis of bhajans, devotional songs, originating from the Bhil Adivasi community in the language of Bhili, an Adivasi language spoken ...

RFG Talk: Fractured Fairy Tales and Subversion: Red Ridin’ in the Hood and Other Cuentos by Patricia Marcantonio

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Inside a cardboard box, Mama packed a tin of chicken soup, heavy on cilantro, along with a jar of peppermint tea, peppers from our garden, and a hunk of white goat cheese that smelled like Uncle Jose's feet. That meant one thing. "Roja, your abuelita is not feeling well," Mama told me. "I want you to take this food to her." “But Mama, me and Lupe Maldonado are going to the movies," I replied, but ...