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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

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 ...

Fractured Fairy Tales

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 ...

Edible Insects Art Exhibition

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 ...

Ending Poverty in California logo

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

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 ...

Reparations in California

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, ...

Faculty Fellows Presentations

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 Event: Racialized Sound

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 ...

Thomas Mazanec - Humanities Decanted Event

Humanities Decanted: Thomas Mazanec

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

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

Jorge Huerta event

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

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: ...

Swati Chattopadhyay - Humanities Decanted Event

Humanities Decanted: Swati Chattopadhyay

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

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

RFG symposium event

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 ...

Conference: The Future of the Lumpenproletariat

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 ...

Guano in Their Destiny

Research Focus Group 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 ...

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

Salt of the Earth: A Conversation between a Palestinian and an Israeli Peace Activist

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

Join Osama lliwat and Rotem Levin, Palestinian and Israeli peace activists, as they share their personal stories of transformation, lessons of joint peaceful resistance, and the vastly different realities they face in the same land. The devastating escalation of violence in Israel and Palestine has left many feeling powerless, angry, and hopeless. Rotem and Osama believe in the possibility of a different reality grounded in a shared future of security, equality, and justice for all ...

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? ...

Text reads Humanities Decanted next to a wine decanter and picture of a book

Humanities Decanted: Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky

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

Join us for a dialogue between Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky (Global Studies) and Dwight Reynolds (Religious Studies) about Hamed-Troyansky’s new book, Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State. Empire of Refugees reframes late Ottoman history through mass displacement and reveals the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Hamed-Troyansky offers a historiographical corrective: the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire created a refugee regime, predating refugee systems set up by the League of Nations ...

Andrew Davis and Jeff Biggers | Disturbing the Bones

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

Join us for a conversation between Jennifer Holt (Film and Media Studies) and co-authors Andrew Davis and Jeff Biggers about their novel, Disturbing the Bones. In Disturbing the Bones, a plot to disrupt a global peace summit in Chicago collides with a civil rights case breakthrough at a mysterious archaeological site. Chicago detective Randall Jenkins has not been back home to the historic Civil Rights hotspot of Cairo, Illinois since the disappearance of his mother, ...

RFG Event

Research Focus Group Talk: On the Problem of (Re-)Activity: Mobilizing Media with the Sikh Diaspora

2001A HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

A common refrain in political rhetoric is the charge that given instances of agonism are defective because they are in some crucial way reactive. However, “reactivity” is polysemous and opaque, despite any seeming transparency implied by the fluency by which it is so often attributed. This talk offers an analytic and ethnographic entrée into the problem of reactivity by considering diasporic investments in mass-mediated address. Sikh media activists scrutinize the reactivity seemingly cultivated by their ...

Tibetan children's book illustration

Research Focus Group Talk: Children’s Literature from the Himalayas: Gesar Stories, Cultural Authenticity, and Folkloresque

Zoom

Gesar is a warrior-like king in the realm of Ling and the protagonist of a voluminous folkloric poem that many Tibetan bards have performed for centuries. With Gesar’s increasing fame in modern times, the orature has become a quintessential representation of Tibetan culture. By comparing two children’s books that draw on the Gesar tradition, Tibetan Heroic Epic: Gesar Children’s Literature Collection and Gesar Epic: Hor-Ling Battle, Zhuoga will discuss the meaning and relevance of cultural ...

Research Focus Group Event: Global Childhood Media: Open House

6309 Phelps

Join our Research Group! Open to Undergraduates! Are you interested in: - children’s media, literature and culture historical childhoods - children’s rights - education - child pyschology - sociology of childhood - or anything else child-related? The Global Childhood Media Research Focus Group welcomes students from any department with an interest in Childhood Studies to attend our Open House! Join us for more information on programming, research opportunities, mentorship, participation in an annual Undergraduate Research ...

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

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, ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Ransoming Genoa: Captives, Consuls, Missionaries in the Early Modern Mediterranean

Zoom

The seminar aims to explore the phenomenon of Mediterranean captivity between the 16th and 19th centuries as analyzed in Andrea Zappia's monograph, Mercanti di uomini. Reti e intermediari per la liberazione dei captivi nel Mediterraneo (Città del Silenzio 2018), with a particular focus on the singular case of the Republic of Genoa and the redemption of its subjects. The first part of the seminar will provide a historical contextualization, examining the daily lives of prisoners ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Key Readings on Adaptation for Children

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

This talk by Martina Mattei will explore key concepts from The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature and Culture, focusing on Chapter 27 ("Translation") and Chapter 29 ("Adaptation"). It will address how children's literature is translated and adapted across different cultures and media, examining the balance between staying true to original texts and making them accessible for young readers. The chapter on translation covers the complexities of translating children's literature, emphasizing the need to preserve cultural ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Feeling Asian American: Racial Flexibility between Assimilation and Oppression

4202 HSSB

In this talk, Wen Liu will argue that Asian Americans are not a coherent racial population, but they are made so through the psychological technologies of “racecraft.” These technologies aim to demonstrate the racial elasticity of the Asian American mind, including cultural essentialism, democratic governmentality, white ascendancy, and unconscious microaggression. They help construct a flexible racial identity that can demonstrate the wide range of cognitive styles, cultural practices, and, most importantly, race elasticity for the ...

Research Focus Group Conference: Queering Taiwan Studies International Conference

Ku'er, the Mandarin transliteration of the English word "queer," has a distinctly Taiwanese genealogy, as implied in the homophonic meaning of being "cool." This conference examines the interrelationships between queer studies and Taiwan studies, from placing Taiwanese history and culture on the map of queer inquiry to the queering of Taiwan studies. Does queer Taiwan studies mean a focus on queer content, or is "queering" a method that can be used in studying any content ...

RFG Event

Research Focus Group Talk: Reason/Rationality Versus Wisdom/Mysticism in Jainism and Indian Thought

The Club, Betty Elings Wells Pavilion

On November 14, as part of the inaugural celebration of the Bhagvan Vimalnath Endowed Chair in Jain Studies and South Asian Religions at UC Santa Barbara, we will welcome our new colleague, Anil Mundra, as the inaugural holder of the Endowed Chair. The celebration will feature a lecture by distinguished Visiting Professor Jayendra Soni at 4:00 pm and will be followed by a reception. Jayandra Soni retired in May 2012 from the Department of Indology ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Beyond the “New Cold War”: Intimating Movements across Taiwan and Asian/Pacific/America

4202 HSSB

Taiwan has long held a pivotal—if “strategically ambiguous”—position in inter-imperial tensions over global influence and has in recent decades been frequently used to refurbish debates over a “new Cold War.” Situated at the nexus of inter-imperial entanglements, settler-colonial formations, and migrant labor networks, Taiwan’s perpetually unresolved status is, Wong argues, pivotal not only for the geopolitics of empire but more importantly for its place in trans-geographical alliance building for those who have long survived, navigated, ...

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 ...

a wine decanter next to a book

Humanities Decanted: William Davies King

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

Join us for a dialogue between William Davies King (Theater and Dance) and Jessica Nakamura (Theater and Dance) about King’s new book, Finding the Way to 'Long Day's Journey Into Night': Eugene O’Neill and Carlotta Monterey O’Neill at Tao House. In this book, King offers a new way to approach Eugene O’Neill’s most famous play by reading this intensely autobiographical masterpiece in terms of the Taoism-inspired California house where it was written on the verge ...

Research Focus Group Talk: One China, Many Taiwans: The Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism

4202 HSSB

In his talk, Ian Rowen will highlight how Chinese tourism split Taiwan into “Two Taiwans”—one portrayed as part of China for Chinese tour groups, and the other experienced as the everyday reality of local residents and independent travelers. He will also examine how this dynamic intensified conflicts between business, civil society, and government entities with differing stakes in maintaining a PRC-focused tourism industry, ultimately contributing to a more diverse civic nationalism in Taiwan. Rowen's book ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Matchstick for Survival: Indigenous Writing in the Russian Arctic

6320 Phelps and Zoom

As part of a new lecture series, "Children's Literature, Cultural Preservation, and Language Revitalization," the Global Childhood Media Research Focus Group invites you to a talk by Indigenous author Kseniia Bolshakova (Dolgan) entitled "Matchstick for Survival: Indigenous Writing in the Russian Arctic." Indigenous author Kseniia Bolshakova will give a talk on her decolonial book The Frost Also Melts. The novel explores the fate of Arctic Indigenous nomads through the personal story of a child raised ...

The Lawrence Badash Memorial Lecture Series: The Human Factor: Work as Science in Twentieth-Century China

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

In 1935, the Commercial Press in Shanghai published a modest-sized volume on a subject most of its readers likely never heard of. Titled An Overview of Industrial Psychology (工業心理學概觀), this text was written by a young psychologist who was trained in and recently returned from Britain. It was the first in Chinese on the titular subject, which promised to (amid other things) “restore the rightful place of human beings in processes of production.” What was ...

Research Focus Group Talk: The Child Labor Issue as Depicted in the TV Cartoon Meena Ki Kahani

Zoom

In this talk, Dr. Jawa Jha focuses on child labor, particularly the issues faced by the girl child as depicted in the TV cartoon series Meena Ki Kahani (Stories of Meena), broadcast in India. This presentation is divided broadly into three main sections. The first section provides a brief overview of India’s children literature, tracing its transition from oral storytelling traditions to visual media like cartoon-based TV shows. The second section examines child labor issues ...

Humanities Decanted: Daina Sanchez

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

Join us for a dialogue with Daina Sanchez (Chicana and Chicano Studies) and Omar Pimienta (Spanish and Portuguese) about Sanchez's new book, The Children of Solaga: Indigenous Belonging across the U.S.-Mexico Border. In The Children of Solaga, Sanchez examines how Indigenous Oaxacan youth form racial, ethnic, community, and national identities away from their ancestral homeland. Assumptions that Indigenous peoples have disappeared altogether, or that Indigenous identities are fixed, persist in the popular imagination. This is ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Dual Language Picturebooks in Aotearoa: Contributions to Language Revitalisation and Critical Language Awareness

Zoom

As part of a new lecture series, Children’s Literature, Cultural Preservation, and Language Revitalization, the Global Childhood Media Research Focus Group invites you to a talk by Prof. Nicola Daly entitled "Dual Language Picturebooks in Aotearoa: Contributions to Language Revitalisation and Critical Language Awareness." In this talk, Prof. Nicola Daly will traverse a range of research studies exploring the contribution of dual language picturebooks to language revitalisation in Aotearoa New Zealand. Drawing on her new ...

Talk: The Last Tsar: The Abdication of Nicholas II and the Fall of the Romanovs

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

UCSB Professor Emeritus of History Tsuyoshi Hasegawa engages in a colloquy with Michigan State Professor Emeritus of History Lewis Siegelbaum on Professor Hasegawa’s new book, The Last Tsar: The Abdication of Nicholas II and the Fall of the Romanovs. When Tsar Nicholas II fell from power in 1917, Imperial Russia faced a series of overlapping crises, from war to social unrest. Although Nicholas’s life is often described as tragic, it was not fate that doomed ...

Information Sessions: Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program

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

Tuesday, January 28 | 4-5 PM | McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020 AND Wednesday, January 29 | 11 AM-12 PM | McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020 Join the IHC on 1/28 or 1/29 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. Refreshments will be provided. If you would like to learn more about the program but ...

Information Sessions: Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program

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

Tuesday, January 28 | 4-5 PM | McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020 AND Wednesday, January 29 | 11 AM-12 PM | McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020 Join the IHC on 1/28 or 1/29 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. Refreshments will be provided. If you would like to learn more about the program but ...

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 ...

Leal Award 2025

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

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

The Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature, now in its twentieth year, honors a writer of Chicano/Latino background who has attained national and international distinction. The recipient of the 2025 Leal Award is Manuel Muñoz. A MacArthur Fellow and a Professor of English at the University of Arizona, Muñoz is the author of three books of short stories and one novel, all of which have been highly acclaimed and received awards. Mr. Muñoz ...

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 ...

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, ...

Sal Castro Memorial Lecture 2025

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

The Sal Castro Memorial Lecture aims to present recent books published in Chicano/Latino history. Named after Chicano Movement icon Sal Castro, who struggled for educational justice for Chicans, this will be the inaugural lecture. Our first speaker is Prof. Oliver Rosales, who will discuss his recent book, Civil Rights in Bakersfield: Segregation and Multiracial Activism in the Central Valley (University of Texas Press: 2024). Prof. Rosales received his Ph.D. in History from UCSB. Cosponsored by ...

humanities decanted lisa jacobson

Humanities Decanted: Lisa Jacobson

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

Join us for a dialogue between Lisa Jacobson (History) and Erika Rappaport (History) about Jacobson's new book, Intoxicating Pleasures: The Reinvention of Wine, Beer, and Whiskey after Prohibition. In popular memory, the repeal of US Prohibition in 1933 signaled alcohol’s decisive triumph in a decades-long culture war. But as Lisa Jacobson reveals, alcohol’s respectability and mass market success were neither sudden nor assured. It took a world war and a battalion of public relations experts ...

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 ...

Humanities Decanted: Juan Cobo Betancourt

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

Join us for a dialogue between Juan Cobo Betancourt (History) and Antonio Cortijo (Spanish and Portuguese) about Cobo Betancourt's new book, The Coming of the Kingdom: The Muisca, Catholic Reform, and Spanish Colonialism in the New Kingdom of Granada. The Coming of the Kingdom explores the experiences of the Indigenous Muisca peoples of the New Kingdom of Granada (Colombia) during the first century of Spanish colonial rule. Focusing on colonialism, religious reform, law, language, and ...

Humanities Decanted: Shana Moulton

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

Join us for a discussion with Shana Moulton (Art) about her recent exhibition at MoMa, Meta/Physical Therapy. This 2024 exhibition is a new, site-specific installation. Through performance, video, and sculpture, Moulton chronicles the experiences of her semi-autobiographical alter-ego, Cynthia, as she navigates personal choices and physical limitations. Transforming the Kravis Studio into a prismatic environment, this installation employs the artist’s signature blend of spiritual imagery, medical technology, popular culture, and references to high art and ...

New Research in the Humanities: Presentations by the IHC’s 2024-25 Faculty Fellows

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

Please join us in celebrating our 2024-25 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. Stephanie Malia Hom, French and Italian “On Redemption: Slavery & Colonialism in Italy” Susan Hwang, East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies “Uncaged Songs: Culture and Politics of Protest Music in South Korea” David Novak, Music “Diggers: A Global Counterhistory of Popular Music”