IV Live Presents Improvability: The Improvised Cinema Show Friday, February 21 at 8:00 PM Embarcadero Hall, Isla Vista $3 Admission Sponsored by IV Live, Isla Vista Arts, UCSB, and Associated Students
Showings of Ford v Ferrari at 7:00 and 10:00 PM
“Voices of Ancient Palmyra” began as an online public humanities project that explored how different publics engaged with ancient history and the destruction of ancient objects. The original goal was to encourage people of all ages and education levels to artistically rewrite words from ancient Palmyrene inscriptions, while learning about the history of the site. Artistic recreations were then uploaded to the website and social media. The project became a museum exhibition at the Fullerton ...
The Sal Castro conference will bring together 28 participants to present their research on a variety of topics on the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The Chicano Movement was the largest and most widespread civil rights and empowerment in the history of Mexican Americans. There is a renewed interest in the Chicano Movement by historians and other scholars and this will be showcased at the conference. Sponsored by Office of the Chancellor, Office ...
The Beyond Academia conference at UC Santa Barbara is an annual event aimed at preparing graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in all stages and disciplines to pursue a wide range of career options after graduate school. The conference offers attendees the opportunity to interact with professionals who have established careers outside the professoriate in industry, government, administration, nonprofits, and more. Come learn about potential careers in a variety of sectors and specialties outside of and ...
The UCSB Early Modern Center (EMC) warmly invites you to our upcoming annual conference, “Queer Crossings, Unruly Locales, 1500-1800,” scheduled for Friday, February 28th and Saturday, February 29th here at UCSB in Alumni Hall of Mosher Alumni House. The conference is free and open to the public, and all are welcome! Our keynote speakers are Dr. Melissa E. Sanchez (University of Pennsylvania) and Dr. Rajani Sudan (Southern Methodist University). Visit the following link to view ...
Aggressive criminal prosecution of unwed mothers who killed their newborns in early modern Europe (1550-1750) has led historians to assume that Europe was less tolerant of illegitimacy and infanticide than other pre-modern societies, including China and Japan. New research throws this assumption into question. In early modern Geneva, authorities often turned a blind eye to the untimely deaths and abandonment of unwanted bastards. These findings suggest that Europeans took a more practical approach to managing ...
Showings of Uncut Gems at 7:00 and 10:00 PM
IV Live Presents Improvability: The Leap Year Show Friday, February 28 at 8:00 PM Embarcadero Hall, Isla Vista $3 Admission Sponsored by IV Live, Isla Vista Arts, UCSB, and Associated Students
Showings of Uncut Gems at 7:00 and 10:00 PM
Debates on the “tribal question” constituted an important part of intellectual politics during the late colonial period in South Asia, especially during the decades leading to the Partition and Independence in 1947. Present-day "reservation" (affirmative action) policies for the "Scheduled Tribes" owe much to these debates. The “tribal question” was framed as a question that attempted to resolve how the British colonial government, and later the post-colonial Indian government, should engage groups of tribal communities ...
Gagaku (music, songs, and dances from the imperial court of Japan) is the oldest continuously performed genre of music in the world, dating back in Japan to at least the seventh century. This series of workshops offers a rare opportunity to experience directly this fantastic kind of music and dance and its unique musical instruments. The workshops are taught by former directors of the Gagaku orchestra at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo and by leading ...
Andrew Elrod is a PhD candidate in the History Department at UC Santa Barbara. He is a historian of American capitalism and economic thought who has published in the New Labor Forum, Jacobin, and Dissent. His talk will examine the responses of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations to the problems of inflation and price controls in the 1960s and 1970s. Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy
Showings of Parasite at 7:00 and 10:00 PM
IV Live Presents Improvability: The Course Evals Show Friday, March 6 at 8:00 PM Embarcadero Hall, Isla Vista $3 Admission Sponsored by IV Live, Isla Vista Arts, UCSB, and Associated Students
Showings of Parasite at 7:00 and 10:00 PM
This conference has been postponed and will be rescheduled at a later date. Email William Fleming for more information (wfleming@eastasian.ucsb.edu) This conference is presented by the Transregional East Asia Research Focus Group and will feature a keynote lecture by Joshua Fogel, York University, and panels on Intellectual History, Literary Culture, and Japanese Sinology. Saturday, March 14th, 10:00 AM-5:30 PM, and Sunday, March 15th, 9:30 AM-2:00 PM, at the McCune Conference Room, 6th floor, Humanities ...
THIS CONFERENCE HAS BEEN POSTPONED AND WILL BE RESCHEDULED AT A LATER DATE. EMAIL CHRISTENE D'ANCA FOR MORE INFORMATION (christene_danca@ucsb.edu) As climate change has become a central topic of discussion, laced with the uncertainty of tomorrow, the UCSB Graduate Center for Literary Research has invited scholars from a variety of disciplines to reframe their conversations with a focus on this ubiquitous topic as it has been interpreted in literary fiction, as well as within the ...
THIS EVENT WILL BE RESCHEDULED. SIGN UP FOR OUR EVENTS MAILING LIST FOR EVENT UPDATES. Lilla Balint is Assistant Professor of German in the Department of German at University of California, Berkeley. She specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century German literature, culture, and intellectual history in its broader comparative contexts. At UC Berkeley, she is affiliated with the Institute for European Studies and the Jewish Studies Program. Currently, she is at work on a book ...
Healing/Arts is a free, virtual symposium that brings together creative practitioners from literary studies, medical humanities, disability justice, and performance for a series of talks and workshops on the relationship between the arts and health activism. Featured facilitators Kelly Gluckman, Leora Fridman, Johanna Hedva, and Patty Berne will examine the role the creative arts might play in critiquing the institutional configurations of American healthcare and the normative imperatives underlying idealized notions of health. And they ...
This meeting at the 2020 Cognitive Science Society 2020 conference will explore the ways in which cognitive science is reshaping of key assumptions about the human mind. Literary scholars working on mental phenomena at ‘Literature and Mind’ center at UCSB note that, currently, progress in fields such as data driven machine learning and computer vision is providing unprecedented opportunities for the prospect of human-level artificial intelligence. But, as has been argued in computer science, the ...
Realisms in East Asian Performing Arts proposes new considerations of realism on stage. Since its association with 19th-century innovations in European and American drama, theatrical realism has largely remained limited to Euro-American definitions. We explore conventions of realism in culturally-specific locations and times across East Asia, articulating alternative histories of realism that extend from the premodern into the present. Through our individual inquiries, we aim to broaden the term’s analytic power and shed collective light on the diversity and ...
Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link In the two decades before the Civil War, a new type of capitalism developed in the northern United States that stressed mass education, widespread innovation, and new markets for art and design. For Black abolitionists, the changing northern economy presented new opportunities to highlight the evils of slavery. While continuing to attack slavery’s physical cruelty, Black abolitionists in the 1840s and 1850s increasingly highlighted ...
Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Join us online for a dialogue between Jessica Nakamura (Theater and Dance) and Catherine Nesci (French and Italian, Comparative Literature) about Nakamura’s new book, Transgenerational Remembrance: Performance and the Asia-Pacific War in Contemporary Japan. Audience Q&A will follow. In Transgenerational Remembrance, Jessica Nakamura investigates the role of artistic production in the commemoration and memorialization of the Asia-Pacific War (1931–1945) in Japan since 1989. During this ...
The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) was passed by the Indian Parliament on December 11, 2019. It amends the Citizenship Act of 1955 and creates an easier path for acquiring Indian citizenship for persecuted religious minorities—Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist, Christian, and Parsi—from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan who entered India before or on December 13, 2014. The Act does not encompass other (non-Islamic) neighboring countries, nor does it consider other persecuted minorities—for example, the Rohingya Muslims of ...
Join us online for a conversation between Jesmyn Ward, 2020 Diana and Simon Raab Writer-in-Residence, and IHC Director Susan Derwin. Audience Q&A will follow. MacArthur Genius and two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward has been called “the new Toni Morrison” (American Booksellers Association). In 2017, she became the first woman and first person of color to win the National Book Award twice—joining the ranks of William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Philip Roth, and ...
REGISTER NOW In honor of National Disability Employment Awareness Month and the thirtieth anniversary of the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Disability Studies Initiative is joining the Carsey-Wolf Center and the UCSB Library to host a virtual discussion with the directors of Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution (2020). In the early 1970s, teenagers with disabilities faced a future shaped by isolation, discrimination, and institutionalization. Located in the Catskills, New York, ramshackle Camp ...
Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Urban Renewal of the 1950s through 1970s has acquired a very poor reputation, much of it deserved. But reducing it to an unchanging story of urban destruction misses some important legacies and genuinely progressive goals. Those include efforts to create more socially mixed communities, to involve suburbs—not just cities—in solving metropolitan inequality, and most importantly, to hold the federal government responsible for funding more ...
REGISTER NOW On October 23, Sharon Kinoshita and Brian Catlos will join us for a conversation on the state of premodern Mediterranean studies. Together, Kinoshita and Catlos run the Mediterranean Seminar, an interdisciplinary research group that focuses on Mediterranean cultures and societies, and also the role of the Mediterranean in historical narratives of "the West." The seminar, which hosts a range of events (symposia, colloquia, workshops), has played a vital role in promoting Mediterranean studies ...
REGISTER HERE In this meeting, Professor Sangwon Suh (Bren School) will present research in progress about possible futures of human nature as it relates to selfishness and sustainability. This will be followed by discussion, moderated by Aili Pettersson Peeker. The meeting is open to all but we do ask you to register to attend so that we can spend our time in the meeting as productively as possible. After you've registered, you will receive a ...
Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Join us online for a dialogue between Helen Morales (Classics) and Vilna Bashi-Treitler (Black Studies) about Morales’ new book, Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths. Audience Q&A will follow. A witty, inspiring reckoning with the ancient Greco-Roman myths and their legacy, from what they can illuminate about #MeToo to the radical imagery of Beyoncé. The picture of classical antiquity most of ...
Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link At a moment when American Democracy was characterized by record levels of political division, inequality, and institutional distrust, it was hit by the perfect storm of the COVID-19 health crisis, an economic crisis of soaring unemployment and economic dislocation, and a civic crisis of reckoning with deep racism and police abuse. What would it take to create from the embers of these crises a ...
REGISTER NOW Drawing together insights from disability theory, literary studies, and interdisciplinary pain studies, Lau's lecture contributes to what Alyson Patsavas has called "cripistemologies of pain" that prompt us to think from the position of pained lived experience to imagine radically different models of care that move beyond the reductive binary of either amelioration or annihilation of pain. Can we theorize a standpoint (or what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has called "sitpoint") theory of pain that attends ...
SCHEDULE OF EVENTS: 4:00 - 5:15 PM Talks: William Davies King and Rebecca Falkoff 7:00 - 8:00 PM Staged Reading: Collections of Nothing Enough is Enough EVENT DETAILS: Talks: William Davies King and Rebecca Falkoff The Creative Edge of Collecting William Davies King has spent a lifetime collecting nothing in a way he brought to light in his 2008 book Collections of Nothing. His collecting of such things as Cheez-It boxes, “Place Stamp Here” squares, ...
ATTEND DISCUSSION The meeting will be hosted by our South Asia RFG colleague William Elison, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at UCSB, as part of his seminar on Religion and Ideology in Modern India: Current Approaches. This seminar session will feature a discussion with Amanda Lucia about her book, Reflections of Amma: Devotees in a Global Embrace (2014), which provides an ethnographic analysis of transnationalism and gender in a global movement centered around Amritanandamayi, who ...
The Asian/American Studies Collective is excited to host two events showcasing graduate student research this quarter. Graduate students will be presenting their research as part of the Collective-sponsored graduate seminar ASAM 200. These workshops will be held on November 9th and December 14th from 11am to 1pm PST. Sponsored by the IHC's Asian/American Studies Collective Research Focus Group
REGISTER NOW This workshop will discuss a PRECIRCULATED chapter from Merav Schocken’s dissertation, “Functional Fictions: Practices of Self-Deception in 19th-Century America.” (Please click on the “Download Reading” button above to access the precirculated chapter.) The chapter explores the narrative practices of self-deception that underlie the consolidation of proprietary whiteness in Jacksonian America. Schocken focuses on Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee (1836), claiming that the novel registers, and seeks to reconcile, anxieties among upper-class whites about ...
REGISTER NOW Classicization in U.S. heritage narratives often involves the imposition of classical elements, derived from Greek and Roman civilization, onto narratives of colonial conquest in Southwestern borderlands and frontier spaces. Ongoing controversies surrounding statues of the conquistador, Juan de Oñate, reflect the ways in which the classical legacy remains prominent in public spheres of historical narrative. In providing a visual narrative of conquest linked to classical imagery, the Spanish history of the settling of ...
REGISTER NOW Simone Chess will focus on early modern disability, queerness, and adaptive technologies. Chess is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program at Wayne State University in Detroit. She is the author of Male-to-Female Crossdressing in Early Modern English Literature: Gender, Performance, and Queer Relations (Routledge, 2016) and coeditor, with Colby Gordon and Will Fisher, of a special issue on “Early Modern Trans Studies” for the Journal ...
REGISTER HERE Join us to workshop "Cowboys in the Colosseum: Papal Power, Cattle Rustling, and Meat Supply in Early Modern Italy," a chapter from Brad Bouley's current book project. Brad Bouley (Assistant Professor, Department of History) specializes in histories of religion and science in the early modern, especially Italian, context. He is author of Pious Postmortems: Anatomy, Sanctity, and the Catholic Church in Early Modern Europe (UPenn, 2017). His current project, The Barberini Butchers: Meat, ...
Tuesday, November 17, 3:00-4:00 PM | Zoom | REGISTER NOW AND Wednesday, November 18, 12:00-1:00 PM | Zoom | REGISTER NOW Join the IHC online to learn more about the Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program. Explore the course requirements, hear about paid internship and fellow-designed community project opportunities, and find out more about the capstone presentation.
Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link This talk explores how visions of abolition guide and connect organizing across a range of social justice struggles. Gilmore will highlight examples relating to environmental justice, public sector labor unions, farm workers, undocumented households, criminalized youth, and community based approaches to prevent and resolve gender and interpersonal violence. The vivid California stories she will present reveal how abolition is a practical program for urgent ...
ATTEND DISCUSSION This seminar session will feature a discussion with Radhika Govindrajan about her book Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas (2018), which is an ethnographic study of the interspecies relationships between human and nonhuman animals in the mountain villages of the Central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand in India. Following is the University of Chicago Press’s description of the book: "What does it mean to live and die in relation to other animals? ...
The Asian/American Studies Collective is excited to host two events showcasing graduate student research this quarter. Graduate students will be presenting their research as part of the Collective-sponsored graduate seminar ASAM 200. These workshops will be held on November 9th and December 14th from 11am to 1pm PST. Sponsored by the IHC's Asian/American Studies Collective Research Focus Group
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER UC Press editors will offer insight into the academic book publishing process. The presentation will include: choosing the right publisher; preparing a book proposal; how the peer review and Editorial Committee process works; revising your manuscript; and working with publishers to promote your book. The session is intended to be interactive and questions are welcome. Following the presentation, we will host breakout rooms with editors based on field interests. This is ...
Zoom Meeting Link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/82289262845 The Asian/American Studies Collective is excited to announce our winter speakers series, which features an exciting lineup of scholars from across the UCSB campus. For each talk, an invited speaker will share their current research during the first hour and the second hour will be explicitly dedicated to creating space to allow graduate students to ask questions related to research and professionalization. Our first speaker is Dr. Simi Kang, a queer, ...
REGISTER NOW This panel will bring together the insight and expertise of three sex worker activists working and organizing in North America and Europe; including Sinnamon Love, BIPOC Adult Industry Collective, MF Akynos, Black Sex Workers' Collective, and Chiqui, Berlin Strippers Collective. It will be the first in a multi-part webinar conversation in 2020-2021 focused on sex work and sexual politics in the time of COVIC in a global frame. REGISTER NOW Cosponsored by the ...
Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act, which distributed public domain lands to raise funds for fledgling colleges across the nation. The creation story told around this event is that land-grant universities were given the gift of free land. But the truth is much more complicated: The Morrill Act worked by turning land expropriated from tribal nations into seed money for higher ...
THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED At the last meeting of the Sustainability and the New Human RFG, Professor Suh discussed sustainability and behavior change. This talk will continue our conversation about the interdependence of humans and the environment by offering an ecological approach to how we understand the arts. At this meeting, PhD candidate Daniel Martini will share his dissertation research on how aesthetic appreciation (‘sense-making’) can emerge from both the rigidity of universal human ...
Zoom Meeting Link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/84178208506 The Asian/American Studies Collective is proud to celebrate the publication of Dr. Diane Fujino's book, Nisei Radicals: The Feminist Poetics and Transformative Ministry of Mitsuye Yamada and Michael Yasutake. About the book While critiques of the model minority trope abound, this work has not dislodged the Nisei, or second-generation Japanese Americans, from the label of “Quiet Americans.” Working against the announced politics of Nisei assimilationism, this talk examines the feminist poetics ...
ATTEND DISCUSSION Continuing a trend set by Bollywood cinema since the mid-2000s, small towns and villages in India are being mined for their performative excess, comic potential, and cultures of violence by platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Mukherjee traced this trend to Jamtara: Sabka Number Aayega (Jan 2020–), an over-the-top (OTT) crime drama from Netflix/Tipping Point that portrays real-life mobile phone phishing scams conducted by teenagers in the state of Jharkhand. The reliance ...
Zoom Meeting Link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/82480745298?pwd=a3RkcUVKaWJoN0dEUkZPQjFQWVN1dz09 This discussion will focus on thinking about new paradigms in autism and neurodiversity. We will read the article titled "Throw Away the Master's Tools: Liberating Ourselves From the Pathology Paradigm," by Nick Walker (from Loud Hands: Autistic People, Speaking ) and the introduction to Autistic Disturbances (2018) by Julia Miele Rodas. If time permits, the discussion will also include Mad at School: Rhetorics of Disability and Academic Life (2011) by Margaret ...
Zoom Meeting Link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/89256077958?pwd=Mlp2MWFNVENGRTNmZXFIb2k0WE5rZz09 Zoom Room Password: chile FEMINISMS FROM BELOW, AND TOWARDS THE SOUTH This speaker series welcomes feminist militants from Latin America to share their perspectives and experiences on building popular power towards a mass feminist movement. Over the past decade, Latin American feminists have identified manifestations of gender-based oppression under capitalism in everyday women’s conditions in order to successfully mobilize them as part of a political movement. Feminists produce analyses and subsequent ...
REGISTER NOW FEMINISMS FROM BELOW, AND TOWARDS THE SOUTH This speaker series welcomes feminist militants from Latin America to share their perspectives and experiences on building popular power towards a mass feminist movement. Over the past decade, Latin American feminists have identified manifestations of gender-based oppression under capitalism in everyday women’s conditions in order to successfully mobilize them as part of a political movement. Feminists produce analyses and subsequent strategies around reproductive rights, resource extractivism, ...
Zoom Meeting Link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/85893482888 Inspired by Cho's ethnographic work with queer of color users of the platform Tumblr and using the Tumblr presence of Filipinx transfeminine visual and performance artist Mark Aguhar as a recurring touchstone, this work-in-progress talk’s provocation is that the assumptive ways in which a social media platform “should” be designed—singular identity, linear text exchanges, direct messaging, traversable connections, and more—in fact instantiate a model of “Man” that can be traced back ...
Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link What do strongman leaders across a century have in common? Why do people continue to follow them, despite the destruction they cause? Drawing on her new book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, Ruth Ben-Ghiat discusses the playbook of corruption, virility, propaganda, and violence they utilize, how people have resisted authoritarians over a century, and what we can do to strengthen democracy in America and ...
Click here for a 20% publisher's discount on The Musical Heritage of Al-Andalus Join us online for a dialogue between Dwight Reynolds (Religious Studies) and Debra Blumenthal (History) about Reynolds’ new book, The Musical Heritage of Al-Andalus. Audience Q&A will follow. The Musical Heritage of Al-Andalus is a critical account of the history of Andalusian music in Iberia from the Islamic conquest of 711 to the final expulsion of the Moriscos (Spanish Muslims converted ...
REGISTER NOW The Eighth Annual AIIC Symposium, “Native Feminisms: Centering American Indian and Indigenous Land and People,” seeks to focus Native feminisms by privileging the knowledge of Native women, girls, trans, non-binary, and two spirit people. As Mishuana Goeman shows, drawing attention to embodied experience, positionality, and spatiality foregrounds relationships between bodies, minds, spirits, and lands as methods of knowledge creation. Relevant topics to broader discussions of Native feminisms include: embodiment, futurity, spatiality, memory, trauma, ...
This talk explores how the cultural politics of elemental media influence crisis narratives produced in relation to urban change. Taking Calcutta as a case study, Doctoral Candidate Somak Mukherjee argues that the crisis of postcolonial cities has a distinct ecological imaginary, borne of tension between mediated pairings of elements and more typical civic imaginaries such as civility, citizenship, community, development, or progress. Four examples of elements—earth, air, water, and fire—are used as representative figures to ...
Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link While more people are incarcerated in the United States than in any other nation in the history of the western world, the prison is but one (comparatively) small part of a vast carceral landscape. The 600,000 people released each year join nearly 5 million people already on probation or parole, 12 million who are processed through a county jail, 19 million U.S. adults estimated ...
REGISTER NOW Charrúa women have gone through dispossession, exclusion, and negation that left marks on their collective memory and body-territory. This genocidal process did not end in 19th-century Uruguay, but continues today and manifests itself every time that institutions or civil society denies their existence as an indigenous people. For fifteen years, together with Charrúa sisters from Argentina, Charrúa women from Uruguay have been working to demolish hegemonic narratives of the market and state. As ...
REGISTER HERE Join Gary White, UCSB's Disabled Students Program, Eric Kruger, UCSB's Disabled Students Program, Afiya Browne, UCSB's Multicultural Center, Sam del Castillo, Graduate Division and graduate student, and Shanna Killeen, Disability Studies Initiative RFG, for a conversation about accessibility and intersectional justice. This conversation will discuss information, tools, and resources for creating intentional and accessible spaces and community engagement. This conversation also aims to help us think through what this moment of remote work ...
Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Join us online for a dialogue between Patrick McCray (History) and Alan Liu (English) about McCray’s new book, Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture. Audience Q&A will follow. Despite C. P. Snow’s warning, in 1959, of an unbridgeable chasm between the humanities and the sciences, engineers and scientists of that era enthusiastically collaborated with artists to ...
Zoom meeting link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/87492220092?pwd=RExPbnl0N3d0ZVR2ZGpEdkJ1cHdPQT09 While the lived reality of disability in the Middle Ages was surely a wretched one, at the same time we encounter persistent associations between disabled and royal or aristocratic bodies in medieval culture, its imagery and narratives. Nowhere is this truer than in the Arthurian world, at whose core there lies a powerful but immobile figure, the Rich Fisher King. This talk looks at such linkage through Arthurian texts and illustrated ...
Zoom meeting link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/81976204749?pwd=ekZ2UUtFd0U0Znh6bFpIcXFXWUs5QT09 Historical scholarship now conceives empire as a webbed uneven field of power relations and a multispecies enterprise. In other words, the anxious and breathless struggle of European imperialism to sustain itself subjected human, plant, animal, and insect bodies to its ambition to govern through logics of colonial difference. This paper argues that the cannabis plant in South Asia, in the nineteenth century, while being a subject of British revenue systems transformed ...
REGISTER NOW In the context of a disproportionate increase in sexual violence against cis, trans, and transvestite women since 2015, Argentine feminisms have prefigured the untimely irruption of public space in both process and form. The movements’ interventions not only impact the social conditions and the epistemic tools for popular intelligibility of language expression of gender violence, through an innovative use of communication technologies and social networks, but also articulate, from the multidimensionality in which ...
ATTEND DISCUSSION Epidemics make us keenly aware of our multispecies distributions: of changes to our microbial makeup, of the mediums (body fluids to the elements) that enable transmission. While our body makes us aware of fevers and aches, we need technical mediation beyond the everyday thermometer to track and understand changing microbial-human relations. Epidemic media—a range of technologies, microscopes to PCR machines—are the subject of Bishnupriya Ghosh’s book, The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media. Drawing ...
ATTEND DISCUSSION We will be discussing Professor Elizabeth Guffey's introduction and chapter 1 to her latest book, Designing Disability (Bloomsbury, 2018). A Professor of Art & Design History, and Director of the MA in Modern and Contemporary Art, Criticism and Theory at State University of New York at Purchase, Professor Guffey co-edited Making Disability Modern (Bloomsbury, 2020) and is the founding editor of the peer-reviewed journal Design and Culture (Routledge). Cosponsored by the IHC’s Disability ...
Register by emailing global.premodern.race@gmail.com by March 19, 2021 This symposium brings together scholars working in Iberian, Middle Eastern, and Medieval Studies to engage in a critical discussion concerning race—reevaluating both its utility as a category of analysis in the premodern world and how it has structured medieval and early modern studies as academic fields. Participants include: PAMELA PATTON (Art History, Princeton University) M. LINDSAY KAPLAN (English, Georgetown University) HANNAH BARKER (History, Arizona State University) MOHAMAD ...
REGISTER NOW In this RFG talk, Joshua Fogel will present on "Lingvo Internacia: The Esperanto Movement in China and Japan, 1905-1932." Joshua Fogel is Professor of History and Canada Research Chair at York University, Toronto. Sponsored by the IHC’s Transregional East Asia Research Focus Group REGISTER NOW
THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED Artist and filmmaker, Isaac Julien, and writer and curator, Mark Nash, will screen excerpts from Julien's film "Lessons of the Hour—Frederick Douglass" in a presentation that will explore the importance of looking to history and biography to articulate contemporary cultural movements. Isaac Julien's moving image practice draws from and comments on a range of artistic disciplines including film, theatre, photography and performance. Julien is a Distinguished Professor of the Arts ...
Uncertainty is a central psychological dimension of the ecological crisis. The science of climate change brings into view widely divergent scenarios; the discrepancy between these more or less catastrophic visions of the future undermines our ontological security (in Anthony Giddens’s terminology). Dr. Caracciolo argues that literary narrative has an important role to play in cultivating readers’ ability to live with uncertainty. He describes this process as a shift from a primarily negative understanding of uncertainty ...
Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Join us online for a dialogue between Ben Olguín (English, UCSB) and María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo (Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU) about Olguín’s new book, Violentologies: Violence, Identity, and Ideology in Latina/o Literature. Audience Q&A will follow. Violentologies: Violence, Identity, and Ideology in Latina/o Literature, explores how various forms of violence undergird a wide range of Latina/o subjectivities, or Latinidades, from 1835 to the present. ...
Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Join us online for a dialogue between Swati Rana (English) and Stephanie L. Batiste (English) about Rana’s new book, Race Characters: Ethnic Literature and the Figure of the American Dream. Audience Q&A will follow. A vexed figure inhabits U.S. literature and culture: the visibly racialized immigrant who disavows minority identity and embraces the American dream. Such figures are potent and controversial, for they promise ...
CONFERENCE REGISTRATION The interdisciplinary virtual conference “Fallout: Chernobyl and the Ecology of Disaster” will take place on Friday, April 30, 2021 at 9:00am-4:00pm, with an international slate of speakers representing a variety of disciplines who will share their insights on the 35th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. Thirty-five years after the 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl, the interdisciplinary virtual conference Fallout: Chernobyl and the Ecology of Disaster considers its afterlife and reverberations in various disciplines, including culture ...
One of the greatest threats against democracy and justice is indolence--defined as a form of militant indifference based on the lack of empathy for the suffering of others. Cristina Rivera Garza will explore how taking part in and contributing to transnational emotional communities in Mexico and the U.S., many based on shared experiences of social suffering and the grieving that comes with it, may help us leap out of ourselves and into the heart of the bond we share ...
REGISTER NOW Join the IHC to learn more about the Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program. Explore the course offerings, hear about paid internship and fellow-designed community project opportunities, and find out more about the capstone presentation. If you cannot attend the info session but would like to learn more about the program, please email Erin Nerstad at nerstad@ihc.ucsb.edu. REGISTER NOW
REGISTER NOW Revista Amazonas (Amazonas Magazine) is a collective made up of women from Colombia, Brazil, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Argentina, Mexico and Spain. It was born out of a commitment to publishing texts and images made by women from anywhere in the world, covering all literary themes and genres, but always from a perspective that is trans-feminist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-colonial and in defense of all forms of life. The magazine emphasizes that focusing on what women ...
ATTEND DISCUSSION Professor Rachel Lambert (Education, UC Santa Barbara) will offer a workshop on Universal Design for Learning (UDL). She will shed light on its development, including roots in Universal Design. She will describe the radical possibilities in UDL, as well as critiques. She will present some of her own work, which seeks to integrate design thinking as a process for educators to use UDL to (re)design curriculum, spaces and systems. Prior to the workshop, ...
Keith Cantú’s talk will center on the life and yogic literature of the Tamil yogi Sri Sabhapati Swami (Capāpati Cuvāmikaḷ, 1828–1923/4). The first part of the talk will consist of an overview of Sabhapati’s life and historical context, including his interactions and falling out with the founders of the Theosophical Society, his literature and visual diagrams in numerous prestige and Indian vernacular languages, his Śaiva yogic cosmology and perspectives on Hindu traditions and other religions, ...
Five hundred years of the colonial remaking of landscapes of most of the world’s continents have ravaged the planet in monumental ways. Empire-building has clearly benefitted people of Europe’s imperial projects while bringing catastrophic change to indigenous populations. The fallout of imperialism and all its attendant technologies has brought humankind to an existential crisis, with climate change and now pandemics as interlinked threats. This talk will bring together these issues, highlighting the wisdom contained in ...
Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Participants: Sonia Katyal, The University of California, Berkeley, School of Law Kate Klonick, St. John's University, School of Law Randal C. Picker, The University of Chicago, The Law School Moderator: Michael J. Burstein, Yeshiva University, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law Experts on law and technology will debate how Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft should be regulated. Are they 21st-century trusts? Guardians of free ...
Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Join us online for a dialogue between Tae-Yeoun Keum (Political Science) and Andrew Norris (Political Science) about Keum’s new book, Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought. Audience Q&A will follow. Plato’s use of myths—the Myth of Metals, the Myth of Er—sits uneasily with his canonical reputation as the inventor of rational philosophy. Since the Enlightenment, interpreters like Hegel have sought to resolve this ...
Read the student veterans’ stories in The Santa Barbara Independent. UC Santa Barbara student veterans will read stories about their military experiences, followed by audience Q&A. Presenters: David Guerrero, Robert Hickman, Michael Ramirez, and Nick Tash David Guerrero served in the United States Marine Corps as an Infantry rifleman from 2003 to 2007. He earned his AS in Criminology and Liberal Arts from Santa Barbara City College. David transferred to UCSB in the Fall of ...
ATTEND DISCUSSION Using evidence concerning the consolidation of Hindu nationalism in India, Aseema Sinha presents new ethnographic data about the variety of popular support for the Hindutva project and proposes an interactive theory of social identity. This framework helps us understand how Hindu nationalism becomes embedded in society. She argues that Hindu nationalism in India could be fruitfully analyzed by focusing on the processes through which ideas of exclusive nationalism spread among middle classes and ...
REGISTER NOW The presentation will illuminate the multiple roles played by women within the infrastructure of the Rede Ecologica (Ecological Consumers’ Network) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. These include: relations established with the agroecological producers; campaigns and other educational activities focused on the theme of food, nutritional security, and family-based agricultural practices; communication and networking with other social movements, among others. Through an intersectional feminist approach, we will analyze concrete experiences within territories in the ...
REGISTER NOW This webinar will feature presentations about the connections between climate justice, oil & uranium extractivism and responses to COVID-19 based on Indigenous territorial knowledges. First, Oswando Nenquimo, a Waorani leader from the Ecuadorian Amazon, will tells us about the importance of the Amazon Rainforest and the role of Indigenous organizations that he is part of: Alianza Ceibo and CONCONAWEP. He will emphasize on the challenges that oil extraction has posed for Indigenous peoples ...
ATTEND DISCUSSION In Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson brings together the freighted categories of “race” and “caste” and argues that, while the two are not synonymous, they “can and do coexi st in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other.” Wilkerson suggests that racism is the visible manifestation of a hidden and insidious caste system, a system of social domination that uses human differences in order to construct a ranking ...
REGISTER NOW This webinar will center dialogue on the importance of Indigenous Ecological Knowledges in California, and will offer critical perspectives on the COVID-19 pandemic as a symptomatic expression of the social and ecological imbalances wrought by colonial violence and the logics of enclosure and extraction. Julie Cordero-Lamb and Hana Aqiwo Lee of the Syuxtun Plant Mentorship Collective will speak to the crucial role that medicinal plant tending, harvesting, and processing continues to play in ...
REGISTER NOW Life Is a Dream (La Vida es Sueño) by Pedro Calderón de la Barca adapted by Nilo Cruz JUNE 4 & 5, 2021/ 7 PM PDT Please join us for the Zoom staging of Pedro Calderón de la Barca's La Vida es Sueño, broadcasting live on Friday, June 4 and Saturday, June 5. This virtual fairy tale tells the story of a young prince imprisoned in a tower, a woman in disguise seeking ...
REGISTER NOW Life Is a Dream (La Vida es Sueño) by Pedro Calderón de la Barca adapted by Nilo Cruz JUNE 4 & 5, 2021/ 7 PM PDT Please join us for the Zoom staging of Pedro Calderón de la Barca's La Vida es Sueño, broadcasting live on Friday, June 4 and Saturday, June 5. This virtual fairy tale tells the story of a young prince imprisoned in a tower, a woman in disguise seeking ...
Magic Lantern Films presents a back-to-school screening of “Save Yourselves!,” a brilliant satire/horror/comedy, with the writer/director team of Alex Fischer and Eleanor Wilson there to introduce and discuss their movie afterward.
Come join us for our first meeting of the IHC-sponsored Research Focus Group “What is a Shakespeare?” This will be the first of two welcome meetings we are hosting for the group (in order to cover more scheduling needs). The second meeting will be Thursday, October 7th at 11am PST (more info here). “What Is a Shakespeare?: Shakespeare and Global Media” is an interdisciplinary group of graduate students and faculty focused on investigating the notion ...
Come join us for our second meeting of the IHC-sponsored Research Focus Group “What is a Shakespeare?” This will be the second of two welcome meetings we are hosting for the group (in order to cover more scheduling needs). “What Is a Shakespeare?: Shakespeare and Global Media” is an interdisciplinary group of graduate students and faculty focused on investigating the notion of "global Shakespeare." We are interested in understanding both the ways that Shakespeare has ...
Join us online for a dialogue between Irwin Appel (Theater and Dance) and James Kearney (English) about Appel’s theater company, Naked Shakes, and their recent production of Twelfth Night, staged outside at UCSB’s Commencement Green in front of the lagoon. Audience Q&A will follow. Naked Shakes derives its rather provocative name from the principle that an actor in a bare theatrical space, along with meticulous attention to language, few technical elements, and the collective imagination ...
The grassroots environmental justice movement and the field of environmental justice studies have evolved in creative and inspiring directions over the years. Recent work focuses on the challenges of envisioning and realizing abolition, confronting anthropogenic climate change/disruption, and articulating transformative approaches to achieving ecologically healthy and socially equitable policy-making for a “just transition.” This presentation considers what each of these areas of scholarship and politics could signal for the future of environmental justice and for ...
In this talk Tejas Aralere will present a comparative analysis of the zodiacal melothesia as it appears in Manilius’s Astronomica, a Latin astrological epic poem (ca. 20–40 CE), and in Sphujidhvaja’s Yavana Jātaka ( “Greek Horoscopy”), a Sanskrit astrological treatise (ca. second century CE). Melothesia refers to the mapping of the twelve signs of the Babylonian zodiac on twelve regions of the human body over which they possess particular influence. In a brief discussion of ...
Please join us on October 18th at 2 pm in HSSB 3001E for a reading group discussion of Sharon Kinoshita’s chapter, “Worlding Medieval French Literature,” in eds. Christie McDonald and Susan Rubin Suleiman, French Global: A New Approach to Literary History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). As the first IHC Un-disciplining Premodern Histories of Race and Gender Research Focus Group event of the year, we will begin by discussing Kinoshita’s chapter and where un-disciplining and re-disciplining ...
Students often shy away from Shakespeare in their classes, but educators can also get nervous about teaching the Bard! Our goal for our pedagogical discussion is to reflect on our own experiences learning about and teaching Shakespeare in the classroom and how we can enhance our future teaching practices, particularly through the lens of utilizing global media and socio-culturally aware pedagogy. We will provide links to optional pre-event resources after registration, but we invite everyone ...
The Asian/American Studies Collective invites you to our Welcome Breakfast. Meet other graduate students interested in Asian/American Studies while enjoying coffee and pastries. Sponsored by the IHC's Asian/American Studies Collective Research Focus Group
Please join the Disability Studies Initiative for a discussion of Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory (available online after signing into the UCSB library). We will focus our discussion on two chapters: “Bodies of Nature: The Environmental Politics of Disability” by Alison Kafer and “Cripping Sustainability, Realizing Food Justice” by Kim Q. Hall. This event will be moderated by Olivia Henderson. A second year graduate student in the Department of English at ...
Academic historians have largely represented the Khoi and the San people of Southern Africa as marginal to the production of the region’s history, deleting their place in the emergence and development of African civilization and self-liberation. As a public historian, intellectual, activist and healer, Attaqua’s voice has intervened to forcefully reframe the history of the indigenous people of Southern Africa. In this talk, she will speak about the Khoi and San’s long struggle against the ...
Join us online for a conversation between Clint Smith and IHC Director Susan Derwin. Audience Q&A will follow. Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, which was a #1 New York Times Bestseller, and the poetry collection Counting Descent, which won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the ...
Please join us for our second IHC Un-disciplining Premodern Histories of Race and Gender Research Focus Group reading discussion. We will be discussing Leah DeVun's "Monstrous Races: Mapping the Borders of Sex" in The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021). Please email reemtaha@ucsb.edu or jessicazisa@ucsb.edu for access to the reading. Sponsored by the IHC's Un-disciplining Premodern Histories of Race and Gender Research Focus Group
The IHC Asian/American Studies Collective (AASC) Research Focus Group will be hosting a graduate student research roundtable on November 9th from 9:30-11 am in the IHC Seminar Room (HSSB 6056). During this roundtable, two advanced graduate students, Sam Harris (Education) and Kendall Ota (Sociology), will be presenting their works-in-progress for feedback and comments from attendees. The roundtable will occur during the first hour, and we welcome attendees to stay afterward for refreshments outside in the ...
In our first Works-in-Progress workshop, we will discuss various strategies and resources for developing archives related to Shakespeare and Global Media. This will include cultivating a multimedia bibliography that extends to potential source texts, critical works, and theoretical approaches, as well as developing questions and frameworks that interrogate established modes of scholarly production. We will consider questions like: What does it mean to do "global Shakespeare"? What methods and approaches push the boundaries of scholarship? ...
Zoom attendance link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/87209704725 In this talk, Jonathan Dickstein will discuss anatomical and residential animal taxonomies as represented in canonical Vedic texts of the second and first millennia BCE. The Brāhmaṇas (900-650 BCE) in particular emphasize a residence-based categorization of animals into two main categories: “village animals” (grāmya) and “wilderness animals” (āraṇya). Following a discussion of the complexities of these two classes, Dickstein will pivot to the relationship between residence and the concept of medha, ...
Zoom attendance link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/84686450683 Following widows and their families in the aftermath of a suicide attack in Kabul, Afghanistan, this talk centers the lives and aspirations of widows amidst serial war and serial humanitarianism. As white sentimentality structures landscapes of care in Kabul, refusal is what remains. This research is based on more than four years of fieldwork between 2006 and 2013. Dr. Anila Daulatzai is a sociocultural anthropologist and the Chancellor’s Fellow at UC ...
Rachel Lambert (Assistant Professor in Special Education and Mathematics Education, Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, UC Santa Barbara) will offer a workshop on the different models of disability, including medical, social, political/ relational and complex embodiment. Lambert’s scholarly work investigates the intersections between Disability Studies in Education and mathematics education. She has conducted longitudinal studies of how Latinx students with learning disabilities construct identities as mathematics learners, and how mathematical pedagogy shapes how teachers perceive ...
The IHC's Asian/American Studies Collective (AASC) Research Focus Group will be hosting a graduate student research roundtable on November 16th from 9:30-11 am in the IHC Seminar Room (HSSB 6056). During this roundtable, two advanced graduate students, Ryan Arellano (Education) and Jing Yu (Education), will be presenting their works-in-progress for feedback and comments from attendees. The roundtable will occur during the first hour, and we welcome attendees to stay afterward for refreshments outside in the ...
Zoom attendance link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/89607162040 A family story, a memoir, a travelogue, an intimate history of Jewish migration and persecution in the twentieth century—fitting into neither of these categories neatly, and yet resonating with all of them, Katja Petrowskaja’s Maybe Esther (2019; Vielleicht Esther, 2014) relates the narrator’s journey from Berlin to piece together her family’s history across Poland, the Ukraine, and Russia. This presentation considers fragmentation as the text’s key aesthetic quiddity to ask how ...
At a time when aesthetic philosophy defined whiteness in terms of the ability to behold and surveil the world, Phillis Wheatley Peters developed new forms of countervisuality in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). Badley's essay focuses on Peters' ekphrastic poetry, which portrays her lyric personae gazing upon paintings, people, and landscapes in ways that mark the limits of visual perception. By dramatizing spectatorship as a meditation upon opaque surfaces and inscrutable sentiments, ...
Zoom attendance link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/s/81168927411 How do histories of a people get confiscated? And what is the significance of indigenous epistemologies in reclaiming stolen, silent, and distorted histories? These are some of the fundamental questions that underlie Professor Shadreck Chirikure's research on Great Zimbabwe, a prominent symbol of African civilizations of Southern Africa that colonial historiography tried very hard to wrest away from Africans over the last two centuries. Professor Chirikure has produced several publications from ...
Join Las Maestras Center, Bridge contributors, and virtual participants near and far for an evening of remembrance and celebration of the fifth and 40th Anniversary Edition of This Bridge Called My Back – Writings by Radical Women of Color. Originally released in 1981, This Bridge Called My Back is a testimony to women of color feminism as it emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Through personal essays, criticism, interviews, testimonials, poetry, and visual ...
Come join the What is a Shakespeare?: Shakespeare and Global Media Research Focus Group as we discuss Noh Macbeth, a 2006 Japanese adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth. All are welcome! Please watch the film in advance of the discussion. The film can be accessed for free via the MIT Global Shakespeare archive here: https://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/noh-macbeth-izumi-noriko-2006/ Register to attend for Zoom link Image: Noh Macbeth Sponsored by the IHC's What Is a Shakespeare?: Shakespeare and Global Media Research Focus ...
The Asian/American Studies Collective (AASC), a research focus group supported by the IHC, will be hosting a graduate student research roundtable via Zoom. During this roundtable, two advanced graduated students will be presenting their works-in-progress for feedback and comments from attendees. We welcome parties interested in Asian American Studies work! For questions, please email: aasc.ucsb@gmail.com. Sponsored by the IHC’s Asian/American Studies Collective Research Focus Group
Zoom meeting link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/84025262121?pwd=SGVQRFpnbkhlcUlZcTBZRTRRa0VvUT09 Join the Un-disciplining Premodern Histories of Race and Gender Research Focus Group as we continue reading from Leah DeVun's pathbreaking history of nonbinary sex, The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), in preparation for her talk on January 31st. This week we will be reading the third chapter: "The Hyena's Unclean Sex: Beasts, Bestiaries, and Jewish Communities." Please email reemtaha@ucsb.edu or ...
Our discussion will focus on Isidro González's paper and another piece of scholarship. González's research focuses on Sonoma State Home for the Feebleminded in Eldridge, California, and how eugenics field workers—those involved in observing and notating nonnormative (“dysgenic”) phenotypic, familial, and lifestyle attributes of institutionalized people—crafted individualized clinical narratives of "inmates" to not only legitimize their profession, the state employer, and the Eugenics Record Office (ERO), but also to surveil, pathologize, and medicalize “unfit” human ...
In our second Works-in-Progress workshop, we will discuss various strategies and resources for conducting archival work, receiving funding, and getting involved in larger scholarly activities (such as conferences, journals, and symposia) related to Shakespeare and Global Media. We will build on our previous work of cultivating a multimedia bibliography, as well as developing questions and frameworks that interrogate established modes of scholarly production. We will consider questions like: What does it mean to do “global ...
In her new book, Passing for Perfect, erin Khuê Ninh considers the factors that drove college imposters such as Azia Kim—who pretended to be a Stanford freshman—and Jennifer Pan—who hired a hitman to kill her parents before they found out she had never received her high school diploma—to extreme lengths to appear successful. Why would someone make such an illogical choice? And how do they stage these lies so convincingly, and for so long? These ...