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IHC Open House

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

You are invited to the IHC’s Open House on Thursday, October 3, from 4-6 pm. Meet new Humanities faculty, IHC fellows, and staff members. Learn about Key Passages, our 2024-25 public events series. Find out about our publicly engaged programs and funding resources for faculty and graduate students. Enjoy good food, drink, and conversation. Cosponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Key Passages Talk: When the Uyghur Language Confronts Atrocity

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

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

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

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

Based on three research projects on aesthetic environments, this talk will discuss how and when humans and things become objects or subjects. Focusing on the figures of the opera fan, the shoe fit model, and the museum custodian, the lecture will delve into the passivity of the fan as agency, the fit model as subject and object at the same time, and the custodian and their reduction to an object, and how this, paradoxically, allows ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This talk will take you into the process of creating a new, experimental opera based on a historical ghost story from Pu Songling’s seventeenth-century Chinese masterpiece, Liaozhao’s Strange Tales (Liaozhai zhiyi). Entitled Ghost Village, the opera is a creative collaboration between Judith Zeitlin, as scholar and English language librettist, and the composer Yao Chen, a China-based, Chicago-trained professor of composition at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. Building on the European operatic tradition, Ghost ...

Key Passages Talk: Translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses

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

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

Key Passages Talk: No Occupation: Derrida on Palestine

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

Taking its point of departure from a thread of references to Palestine in Derrida’s writings, from Glas to his last texts, this lecture seeks to demonstrate that these key passages can be a resource for us as we navigate our way through the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It traces Derrida’s complicated relation to his own Jewishness and argues that it is this complexity that enables him to guide us through the thicket of the recent war ...

IHC Open House

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

You are invited to the IHC’s Open House on Tuesday, September 30, from 4 to 6 pm. Meet new Humanities faculty, IHC fellows, and staff members. Learn about On Fire, our 2025–26 public events series. Find out about our publicly engaged programs and funding resources for faculty and graduate students. Enjoy good food, drink, music, and conversation. Cosponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts

On Fire Inaugural Talk: When It All Burns: The Creation of California’s Wildfire Crisis

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

This talk offers an on-the-ground perspective from a record-breaking fire season on a California hotshot crew, tracing the sociological, historical, and economic forces that fuel today’s megafires. For wildland firefighters, navigating the escalating impacts of climate change is a matter of life and death. These fires are not natural disasters, but the result of political choices. Understanding where they come from—and how firefighters survive on their edges—is essential to imagining a more just and equitable ...

On Fire Talk: Spheres of Injustice: Minority Politics Today

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

How can we revitalize minority politics while making the fight against discrimination beneficial for all? Bruno Perreau proposes thinking about minority experiences relationally. How one person is governed has a direct impact on how another is. Legal provisions that protect gender can be used to protect race; those that protect disability can protect age, sexual orientation, or class, and so on. This is what Perreau calls intrasectionality, a new concept and an innovative legal strategy ...

On Fire Talk: Keepers of the Flame: Learning to Be in Relation with Fire

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

Keepers of the Flame is an initiative rooted in relationships—between cultural fire practitioners and students/faculty, and between people, plants, and fire. In a context of settler colonial environmental policy and increasing risk of catastrophic fire, Keepers centers respect for Indigenous fire practitioners, recognition of fire as part of the landscape, and personal, place-based understandings with fire. With attention to the environmental injustices of land theft and fire suppression and the inequitable impacts of catastrophic fire, ...

On Fire Talk: Looking, After the Fires

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

In recent years, unprecedented wildfires ravaged multiple continents. The fires grow ever larger, more destructive, and more ubiquitous as our changing climate plunges us further into the Pyrocene. Despite the scale of the devastation, small moments of optimism can be found in elemental ecological reflexes. Fires have motivated similar bursts of creative response from human cultural networks as well, inspiring – perhaps necessitating – new ways to conceive of ourselves in relation to our landscapes. ...

On Fire Talk: Working with Fire: Making Black Feminist Liberation in the South

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

This talk opens in the wake of a 2012 arson attack on Women With A Vision (WWAV) and moves with the members of this Black feminist collective as they refused the terror of this attack and rose from the ashes to carry their foremothers’ work forward ever. Their story is a lesson for our times. Our whole world is on fire. And yet, WWAV shows us how the flames meant to destroy us can also ...