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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

Silicon Valley Requiem: A Posthuman Electro-Acoustic Concert

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

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

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 ...

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

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

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

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 ...

IHC Open House

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

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

Inaugural Lecture: Too Much or Too Little?

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

For a long time, information was scarce. Messages and letters were transmitted at the speed of human or equine legs. The materials upon which information was inscribed were either too heavy or too perishable to circulate. But by the end of the eighteenth century, as machines took over, not only the means of transmitting information but what counted as information had changed. Knowledge and experience now yielded to the objectivity of information, grounded, for example, ...

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 ...

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

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

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

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 ...

Humanities Decanted: The Bones of Contention

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

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

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 ...

Alt-Right Media Literacy Series: Memeing their Way into the Mainstream: A Cultural Approach to Understanding the US Far Right

Zoom

The election of Donald Trump and the eventual J6th attempted insurrection left many people wondering how we got to this point. The answer to that question is multidimensional, complex, and nuanced, and this talk focuses on several pieces that helped generate the current moment. A broad constellation of far-right extremism highly adept at marketing ideas and emotions and far more sophisticated than often understood played a key role in rebranding white supremacy to ensure wider ...

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 ...

Conference: XXV International Colloquium on Mexican Literature: Ciudad y Mujer / Woman and City

Mosher Alumni Hall, BC Forum SBCC

This year's colloquium will place Santa Barbara in the center: its history (as an original town and a colonial city of Spanish migration in past centuries, as well as Mexican and Central American migration in more recent times); its current situation; the richness of its archives; the attractiveness of its streets. With that in mind, we will explore how women intervene in urban space and temporality, and the ways they construct memory and experience. For ...

Talk: Un Llanto Colectivo: a PerformaProtesta

Zoom

Join via Zoom here This talk will be an examination of the llanto (wail/scream) as political performance praxis through reflecting on the collective work of Cherríe Moraga, Celia Herrera Rodríguez and approximately twenty-five artists to stage a “PerformaProtesta,” Un llanto colectivo, at San Diego immigrant detention centers following the separation of migrant families during the summer of 2018. It discusses this “llanto space” as an alternative to the politics of recognition and representation, and the ...

Humanities Decanted: Hollywood’s Embassies

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

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

Talk: Anti-Racist Paradoxes

Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, Room 1217 Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

In this talk, Dr. Luis Martín Valdiviezo Arista will analyze some current discourses in the political and educational spheres that confront inequalities and injustices derived from racism that despite their best intentions, are nevertheless still based on racist assumptions. Dr. Valdiviezo Arista earned his EdD in Social Justice Education and his MEd in International Education at UMass-Amherst. Previously, he received his License in Philosophy and Bachelor in Humanities at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Peru (PUCP) ...

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 ...

Humanities Decanted: Jody Enders, Translating Medieval Farce

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

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

Roundtable Discussion: Isaac Julien’s Once Again…(Statues Never Die)

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

Join us for a discussion with Isaac Julien about his process of creating Once Again… (Statues Never Die). Commissioned by the Barnes Foundation on the occasion of its 100th Anniversary in 2022, Julien’s immersive, black-and-white, five-screen, on-site video installation Once Again… (Statues Never Die) brings to light the relationship between Dr. Albert C. Barnes, who was an early U.S. collector and exhibitor of African material culture, and the famed African American philosopher and cultural critic ...

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 ...

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

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

The annual Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature will be presented to Cherríe Moraga on February 8 in the McCune Conference Room of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. The award is given to a Chicano/Latino writer who has achieved national and international recognition. Cherríe Moraga is one of the most accomplished poets, playwrights, and writers in the United States. She is the author of numerous publications, including This Bridge Called My Back, co-edited with Gloria ...

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 ...

TMI Talk: The Climate Infowhelm

Zoom

Climate infowhelm is the experience of feeling overwhelmed by too much information about the environmental crisis. Heather Houser will discuss how infowhelm feels, sounds, and looks in various media and how contemporary art manages environmental knowledge and provides new ways of understanding environmental change. Audience Q&A will follow. Heather Houser is the Mody C. Boatright Regents Professor in American and English Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Ecosickness ...

Sal Castro Memorial Conference on the Chicano Movement and the Long History of Mexican American Civil Rights Struggles

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

The Sal Castro Memorial Conference on the Chicano Movement and the Long History of Mexican American Civil Rights Struggles will focus on the Chicano Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s as a seminal period in Chicano history on the struggle for civil rights and community empowerment. Papers will also include earlier Mexican American civil rights struggles and the continuation of such struggle after the Chicano Movement. This will be the 6th bi-annual Sal Castro ...

Information Sessions: Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program

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

Wednesday, February 22 | 12:00 PM | McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020 | RSVP Lunch will be provided. AND Thursday, February 23 | 4:00 PM | McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020 | RSVP Refreshments will be provided. Join the IHC on 2/22 or 2/23 to learn more about the Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program. Explore the course requirements, hear about paid internship opportunities, and find out more about the capstone presentation. If you would like ...

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 ...

Information Sessions: Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program

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

Wednesday, February 22 | 12:00 PM | McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020 | RSVP Lunch will be provided. AND Thursday, February 23 | 4:00 PM | McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020 | RSVP Refreshments will be provided. Join the IHC on 2/22 or 2/23 to learn more about the Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program. Explore the course requirements, hear about paid internship opportunities, and find out more about the capstone presentation. If you would like ...

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 ...

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

Zoom

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

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 ...

Talk: Art, Art History, and Artificial Intelligence

6206C Phelps and Zoom UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Computation and the Humanities is a series of events at the GCLR investigating the impact of computation on literary and visual research. Guests include researchers, artists, and practitioners working within and beyond the digital humanities. On March 20th, we welcome Dr. Leonardo Impett, who is a University Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities and convenor of the MPhil in Digital Humanities at Cambridge University. In this talk, Impett will introduce his current project, a new history of ...

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 ...

Conference: Listening to Cumbia

Pollock Theater; McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Listening to Cumbia brings together scholars, filmmakers, artists, and archivists for a symposium, screening, and DJ event on the contemporary cultural and political history of cumbia music in Mexico and the United States. Cumbia – as transnational record circulation and as local sound system dance scenes – is a living culture that provides insight into the cross-border effects of this popular music as force of social identity and mode of communication among Latinx communities. APRIL ...

TMI Talk: GPS for the Brain: Networks, Urbanisms, Algorithms

Zoom

Laura Kurgan will talk about her recent work involving network science and urban theory. She will present work from the Center for Spatial Research on the Urban History of Algorithms: Homophily and Weak Ties, a history which not surprisingly lies dormant in its use in network science. She will also present new work on navigation theory in neuroscience, which revisits and asks questions about the canonical urban theory of Kevin Lynch (1970) and Fred Jameson's ...

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 ...

Talk: Beyond the Wall: Teichoscopy and the Limits of Tragedy

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

Teichoscopy is a theatrical means of communicating occurrences that happen offstage. A figure, commonly subaltern and anonymous, climbs to an elevated position to report what it sees from this vantage point while the leading figure remains below to hear. In thus visibly inverting the positions of power on stage, teichoscopy can not only call into question social and political hierarchies, it also serves to comment on the central tragic notion of the ‘fall of kings’ ...

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 ...

TMI Talk: Creating, Weaponizing, and Detecting Deep Fakes

Zoom

Although varied in their form and creation, deep fakes refer to AI-synthesized image, audio, or video. Deep fakes add to a long line of techniques for manipulating reality, but their introduction poses new risks because of the democratized access to what would have historically been the purview of Hollywood-style studios. In this talk, Farid will provide an overview of how deep fakes are created, how they are being used and misused, and if and how ...

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 ...

Humanities Decanted: The Virus Touch

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

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

Talk: Winds of Hope, Storms of Discord: The United States since 1945

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

Professor Salim Yaqub will discuss his new book, Winds of Hope, Storms of Discord: The United States since 1945, which traverses the broad sweep of postwar U.S. history. It explores how Americans of all walks of life—political leaders, businesspeople, public intellectuals, workers, students, activists, migrants, and others—struggled to define the nation’s political, economic, geopolitical, demographic, and social character. The book chronicles the nation’s ceaseless ferment, from the rocky conversion to peacetime in the early aftermath ...

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 ...

Humanities Decanted: Giuliana Perrone

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

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

“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 ...

New Research in the Humanities: Presentations by the IHC’s 2022-23 Faculty Fellows

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

Please join us in celebrating our 2022-23 Faculty Fellows, whose works-in-progress are supported this year by IHC release-time awards. Fellows will give a short presentation of their work. A reception will follow. Heidi Amin-Hong, English “A Contaminated Transpacific: Ecological Afterlives of the Vietnam War” Charmaine Chua, Global Studies “Logistics Leviathan: Counterrevolutionary empire and just-in-time distribution in the Indo-Pacific” Raquel Pacheco, Anthropology “Re-making the Peasant Countryside: Intimate mestizaje in Neoliberal Mexico” Elana Resnick, Anthropology “Refusing Sustainability: ...

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 ...

“It Calls You Back and Draws You In”: The Personal Papers of Luis J. Rodríguez

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

Luis J. Rodríguez is an award-winning author and activist whose memoir about life in a gang, Always Running, is as popular as ever in 2023, its 30th anniversary. The UCSB Library Special Research Collections recently acquired Rodríguez’s personal papers, giving scholars and students an opportunity to see the personal and social context behind Always Running and Rodríguez’s other prose, poetry, and non-fiction, as well as his involvement in gubernatorial races, revolutionary organizations, and the prisoners’ ...

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 ...

Love and Information

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

Isla Vista Arts and Not Necessarily Shakespeare in the Park present “Love and Information," a play by Caryl Churchill and directed by Jake Marshall, Nicole Hearfield, Logan Null, Tori Kostic, Maylin De Leon, and Benjamin Atticus Scapellati, in which over a hundred characters try to understand meaning and human connection in a world with too much information. Showtimes are on June 9 at 7 PM and June 10 at 2 PM and 7 PM; admission ...

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 ...

2023 IRSCL Congress: Ecologies of Childhood

University of California, Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA

The 26th biennial Congress of the International Research Society for Children's Literature (IRSCL) will be hosted at the University of California, Santa Barbara on August 12-17, 2023 and will be devoted to the theme "Ecologies of Childhood." This is the first time the IRSCL Congress will be held in the United States. The interdisciplinary 2023 IRSCL Congress is co-organized by Sara Pankenier Weld of the University of California, Santa Barbara and Dafna Zur of Stanford ...

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 5, from 4-6 pm. Meet new Humanities faculty, IHC fellows, and staff members. Learn about Imagining California, our 2023-24 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

Imagining California Inaugural Talk: Imagine This: The (Re)generation of Place

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

Seeded by sorrow, the evolving work that Cherríe Moraga will present journeys through her home-country of California, marking her footsteps alongside Native ecologies and Chicanx genealogies. In part, it is reflective of a queer embodied half-century inquiry—writing of place and out of place, perhaps unknowingly inspired by a once paradisal Califas of women of color warriors. Here, nature and the implicate order of its elements (fire, air, water, and earth) become illuminated signposts along the ...

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 ...

Imagining California Talk: Is Barbie Feminist? It’s Complicated

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

In 1994, when M.G. Lord interviewed the California-based creators of the Barbie doll, she had no doubt Barbie would be as provocative in 2023 as she was in 1959. But Lord did not anticipate that this plastic object, once tarred as anti-feminist, would evolve into a touchstone for understanding feminism—as well as the star of a blockbuster attack on patriarchy. This talk will explore the Greta Gerwig effect and the 64 years of changes in ...

TMI Talk: How Are You? Sentiment, Surveillance, and Anti-Asian Racism

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

Sentiment analysis entails the widespread surveillance of users' posts and actions to determine how they feel. This talk outlines the importance of early- and mid-20th-century studies of women workers and Japanese and Japanese-American internees in U.S. WWII internment camps to the rise of sentiment analysis. A reception will follow. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is the Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University and leads the Digital Democracies Institute, which was launched ...

Humanities Decanted: Daughter of the Dragon

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

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

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 ...

Imagining California Talk: The Dreamt Land: How the Invention of California Became Miracle and Ruin

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

In this talk, journalist Mark Arax will discuss how California's capture of land and water is the story of a people's defiance of nature and the wonders and devastation it has wrought. It's a tale of magic and madness in the arid West, of genocide and endless extraction, of redirected rivers and ever higher dams and deeper wells, of imported workers left behind in the sun and the fatigued earth made to give more even ...

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 ...

Information Sessions: Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program

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

Tuesday, January 23 | 12:00 PM | McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020 | RSVP Lunch will be provided. AND Wednesday, January 24 | 4:00 PM | McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020 | RSVP Refreshments will be provided. Join the IHC on 1/23 or 1/24 to learn more about the Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program. Explore the course requirements, hear about paid internship opportunities, and find out more about the capstone presentation. If you would like ...

Information Sessions: Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program

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

Tuesday, January 23 | 12:00 PM | McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020 | RSVP Lunch will be provided. AND Wednesday, January 24 | 4:00 PM | McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020 | RSVP Refreshments will be provided. Join the IHC on 1/23 or 1/24 to learn more about the Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program. Explore the course requirements, hear about paid internship opportunities, and find out more about the capstone presentation. If you would like ...

Humanities Decanted: Liz Carlisle

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

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

Imagining California Talk: Writing Our Californias

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

For decades, America has imagined California novels as placed in locations like Hollywood or San Francisco. But, as Susan Straight will discuss in her presentation, other geographies are as beautiful, tragic, and full of narratives set in remote canyons, inland citrus groves, ancient ranchos, and hidden deserts. Straight's characters, who might be seventh generation Californian or people just arrived, live in the places she's known forever, hidden kingdoms of love and redemption amid the sycamore ...

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

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

The annual Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature will be given to Gustavo Arellano of the Los Angeles Times. Mr. Arellano is a prize-winning columnist for the LA Times. He is one of the major Latino journalists in the United States. His columns focus on Latinos in Los Angeles and California. He has also written several books, such as Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America and A People's Guide to Orange County. ...

Imagining California Event: California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline

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

Join us as Los Angeles Times reporter Rosanna Xia and Dr. Charles Lester, Director of UC Santa Barbara’s Ocean and Coastal Policy Center, discuss sea level rise and the challenges looming over the California coast. Xia will draw from her new book, California Against the Sea, in which deeply reported stories braid together science, policy, and the state’s social history. The conversation will explore how the decisions we make today will determine where we go ...

Talk: Mystery Children: The Stasova International Children’s Home During Stalin’s Purge

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

Drawing on her current book project, Communist Neverland, Elizabeth McGuire tells the story of the Stasova International Children’s Home, an elite orphanage and boarding school for the children of Communist Party leaders from all parts of the globe. Professor McGuire will focus in this talk on “Jimmy Ruegg,” one of the Stasova home’s many “mystery children.” Jimmy spent his earliest years in the International Settlement in Shanghai, believed he was German, and thought he had ...

2024 Arthur N. Rupe Great Debate: Is Housing a Human Right?

Campbell Hall Building 538, University of California, Santa Barbara, Mesa Rd,, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

The dramatic housing shortage in California affects millions of residents and leads thousands to homelessness. The 2024 Arthur N. Rupe Great Debate will address this issue by asking, “Is Housing a Human Right?” If so, our state faces a massive undertaking. Experts with diverse specialties and experiences will wrestle with some of our biggest challenges. How, for example, can we build low and moderate income housing when construction costs are high and community opposition is ...

Imagining California Talk: Aesthetic Mobility and Solidarities at Self Help Graphics & Art

Zoom

Self Help Graphics & Art is a legacy arts organization that served on the cultural front of the Chicano Movement. Its emphasis on printmaking as an accessible medium infused with activist aims and its ability to cultivate and navigate various solidarities helped to support over fifty years of growth. This presentation by the co-editors of Self Help Graphics at Fifty looks at the multiple aesthetic styles and collaborative innovations that produced intergenerational, transnational, and cross-racial ...

Humanities Decanted: Janet Afary

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

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

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 ...

RFG 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

Zoom

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 ...

Symposium: Edible Insect Art Exhibition

Glass Box Gallery UCSB Art Department, Building 534 (Space 1328), Santa Barbara, CA, United States

The Edible Insect Art Exhibition event is a community celebration of insect cuisine and a critical exploration of food futures. The event will take place April 4th, 2024 from 5:00–7:30 PM at UCSB's GlassBox Gallery and will feature student artwork, organization tabling, delicious food, insect-inspired tastings, and panel conversations with community members and edible insect experts, including Monica Martinez, founder of Don Bugito, Aly Moore, founder of Bugible, and MacKenzie Wade, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of ...

Imagining California Discussion: Ending Poverty in California: A Movement, A Plan, A More Equitable Future

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

What would a California without poverty look like? How would ending economic hardship advance freedom and well-being for all? This is a prospect that has captured the imaginations of activists, reformers, and everyday people for decades, ever since Upton Sinclair made it the centerpiece of his near successful gubernatorial campaign in 1934. Today, it animates the work of a new generation of community-based leaders who have come together in End Poverty in California (EPIC), an ...

RFG Talk: Images of War for Children in Ukrainian Picturebooks: Aesthetic, Political, and Emotional Strategies

Zoom

Parents and authors across the world are dealing with the question of how to talk to children about war. Ukrainian writers and illustrators in particular have to find narrative and visual techniques to address children who are growing up under circumstances of war and displacement. In this talk, Svetlana Efimova will analyze Ukrainian picturebooks created during two stages of war: since 2014 and especially since 2022. First, she will focus on the relationship between representation ...

Imagining California Panel Discussion: Reparations in California

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

Join us for a discussion on reparations in California with panelists Daina Ramey Berry (UCSB), Tiffany Caesar (San Francisco State University), and Jovan Scott Lewis (UC Berkeley), moderated by Giuliana Perrone (UCSB). Panelists will consider the history of reparations in the United States, explain why they are being considered in California, and assess the current status of plans for reparations in San Francisco as well as the state as a whole. Audience Q&A and a ...

Symposium: 11th Annual American Indian and Indigenous Collective Symposium: Indigenous Health and Well-being

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

The 11th Annual American Indian & Indigenous Collective (AIIC) Symposium, Indigenous Health and Well-being, brings together individual papers, performances, and panels from across disciplines (humanities, fine arts, social sciences, ITEK, and STEM) within and outside of the academy, including practitioners and community members. This annual gathering will address the prevalent issues facing Indian Country and beyond in terms of health disparities and how Native communities come together to heal and work toward Indigenous well-being, resilience, ...

New Research in the Humanities: Presentations by the IHC’s 2023-24 Faculty Fellows

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

Please join us in celebrating our 2023-24 Faculty Fellows, whose works-in-progress are supported this year by IHC release-time awards. Fellows will give a short presentation of their work. A reception will follow. Utathya Chattopadhyaya, History “Ganja Matters: Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India” Mona Damluji, Film and Media Studies “Pipeline Cinema” Rachael King, English “Improving Literature: Media, Environments, and the Eighteenth-Century Improvement Debate”

RFG Talk: Racialized Sound in Mainstream Cinema: Spike Jonze’s Her

Zoom

This talk examines Samantha, the operating system from Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), analyzing how the film’s portrayal of Samantha both differs from and uncannily evokes both fictional and real-world Black women domestic servants. Exploring how the film deliberately and repeatedly marks Samantha as female, how her vocal pitch, tone, and timbre code her as white, and how the film uses this ascribed white femaleness to grant her a form of subjecthood, Owens contends that the ...

Humanities Decanted: Thomas Mazanec

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

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

The History of Chicana/o Theater: Zoot Suit

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

Isla Vista Arts will host renowned Chicana/o theater scholar Professor Jorge Huerta (UC San Diego) for a lecture on the history of Chicana/o theater leading up to the monumental 1978 play Zoot Suit by Luis Valdez. Professor Huerta will contextualize the play within the history of the Zoot suit, a fashionable cut of suit worn by Chicano men in the 1930s and 1940s, and the “Sleepy Lagoon” murder trial 1942. The trial rapt the nation’s ...

RFG Talk: Thinking with the Sound of Catastrophe

Zoom

When death is ubiquitous and violence structural and gratuitous, catastrophe has a sound. How do our racialized lives allow for or shield us from familiarity to this sound? The conditions of colonial violence, imperialism, and global capitalism construct African Black bodies into a kind of listening bodies. But what kind of listening bodies are these? In this talk, Brenda Umutoniwase will explore the listening body from Rwanda to South Africa as a site of conflations: ...

Humanities Decanted: Swati Chattopadhyay

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

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

RFG Symposium: Intergenerational Dynamics: Undergraduate Research Showcase

6320 Phelps and Zoom

Intergenerational Dynamics is the second annual undergraduate research showcase sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center's Research Focus Group on Global Childhood Ecologies. It features multidisciplinary presentations of undergraduate research related to childhood, including senior honors thesis research in Comparative Literature by senior major Daian Martinez and research on Education by Lakshmi Garcia in the College of Creative Studies. The panel of presentations and subsequent discussion on the theme Intergenerational Dynamics will focus on dynamics between ...

RFG Talk: Seeking Mirabai: The Making of a Saint and Cultural Heroine

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

In this talk, Nancy Martin will trace the making of the sixteenth-century royal rajput devotee Mirabai into a saint and cultural heroine through the varied portrayals of her across the centuries found in hagiography, rajput historiography, nationalist rhetoric, and oral epic song traditions. She will also examine the early twentieth-century mobilization of Mirabai as a cultural heroine by Gandhi, Tagore, and others, culminating in Subbulakshmi’s film portrayal of the poet-saint on the cusp of Indian ...

The Future of the Lumpenproletariat: A Conference in Memory of Glyn Salton-Cox

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

This conference will explore the Marxist concept of the lumpenproletariat, which was initially translated into English as “social scum.” Speakers include: Maurizia Boscagli (UC Santa Barbara) Katherine Connelly (New York University London) Colleen Lye (UC Berkeley) Ben V. Olguín (UC Santa Barbara) Robert Weide (California State University, Los Angeles) Keynote: Cedric Johnson (University of Illinois, Chicago) Visit the conference website for more information. Cosponsored by the IHC’s Graduate Collaborative Award; Ben V. Olguín, Robert and ...

RFG Talk: “Guano in Their Destiny”: A Conversation with Tao Leigh Goffe

Zoom

Join the Environmental and Postcolonial Media Theories RFG for a conversation with Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe about her work, "'Guano in Their Destiny': Race, Geology, and a Philosophy of Indenture," and beyond. Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe is an associate professor of literary theory and cultural history with a focus on the environmental humanities and geology. She joined the Department of Africana, Puerto Rican, and Latino Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York after ...

RFG Talk: The Buddhist Heritage of Pakistan

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

Pakistan is today a Muslim country, and it has been so for nearly a thousand years. But before that, Buddhism thrived in the area known today as Pakistan, especially in the regions of Gandhara, Gilgit, and Baltistan. In this talk, José Cabezón will explore the Buddhist heritage of Pakistan through a virtual tour of some of its most important Buddhist sites, with examples of the exquisite art of Gandhara found in Pakistan’s major museums. José ...

RFG Talk: Narrating Nemo: Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland and the Evolution of the Comic Strip

Zoom

As one of the pioneers of the animation medium as well as the comics medium, Winsor McCay's cultural significance is rivaled by few. However, the scholarly scrutiny of his works has yet to match his historical prominence. His most well-known creation, Little Nemo in Slumberland, which ran from 1905 to 1927, was the first comic strip with an ongoing, open-ended serialized narrative. Yet, it only started off as a regular Sunday strip and over its ...