Improvability: Eco-Friendly Show Friday, November 1st at 8:00 PM Embarcadero Hall, Isla Vista $3 Admission Sponsored by IV Live, Isla Vista Arts, UCSB, and Associated Students
Showings of student films (time TBD)
Eric Rauchway, History, UC Davis Rauchway is the author of Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America (2003); The Money Makers: How Roosevelt and Keynes Ended the Depression, Defeated Fascism, and Secured a Prosperous Peace (2015); and Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash over the New Deal (2018). This event is a part of The Political Economy of Racial Inequality, a series of UCSB talks and workshops sponsored by the Center for the Study ...
Showings of Spider-Man: Far From Home at 7:00 and 10:00 PM
Improvability: Gold Show Friday, November 8th at 8:00 PM Embarcadero Hall, Isla Vista $3 Admission Sponsored by IV Live, Isla Vista Arts, UCSB, and Associated Students
Showing of Rocky Horror Picture Show at midnight
Showings of Spider-Man: Far From Home at 7:00 and 10:00 PM
This South Asia symposium celebrates the life of Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh tradition, on the 550th anniversary of his birth. The symposium will feature talks by two UCSB faculty members: Anshu Malhotra, Professor and Kundun Kaur Kapany Chair of Sikh and Punjabi Studies, will give a talk on “Guru Nanak in Popular Imagination,” and Mark Juergensmeyer, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Global Studies, will share his reflections on “Global Sikhism.” Cosponsored by ...
SURVIVING HOME is an intimate documentary that follows four U.S. military veterans from different generations over an eight year period as they rebuild their lives after war. Interwoven with veterans' voices from across the country, their unique paths of healing and transformation shed light on longterm consequences of war and raise questions about the roots of war and societal cycles of violence. A severely injured Iraq War veteran discovers a new voice that helps heal ...
Einstein’s ascent to worldwide celebrity was, in large part, not his own doing. The 1919 confirmation of the German Einstein’s theory of general relativity by British astronomers soon after the end of the First World War made him an emblem of how science could rise above nationalism and petty patriotism. But in fact international science – and relativity with it – was nearly shattered by the war. It was only the dedicated efforts of pacifist ...
Showings of Ready or Not at 7:00 and 10:00 PM
IV Live Presents Improvability: Wrestlemania Friday, November 15th at 8:00 PM Embarcadero Hall, Isla Vista $3 Admission Sponsored by IV Live, Isla Vista Arts, UCSB, and Associated Students
The capacities of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are growing rapidly and new technologies are impacting society in a variety of ways, all of which raise significant ethical issues. LeRon Shults (University of Adger, Norway) argues that the Humanities are needed to help guide the ethical conversations around AI by becoming more engaged in “Human Simulation,” a new interdisciplinary approach to simulating human futures (as well as studying the past) that requires the expertise of historians, philosophers, ...
Showings of Ready or Not at 7:00 and 10:00 PM
Join us for a dialogue between Miroslava Chávez-García (History) and John S.W. Park (Asian American Studies) about Chávez-García’s new book, Migrant Longing: Letter Writing across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. Refreshments will be served. Migrant Longing draws upon Miroslava Chávez-García’s personal collection of 300 letters exchanged by family members across the U.S.-Mexico border, illuminating what migrants experienced in their everyday lives both “here” and “there” (aqui y alla). Chávez-García uses these private, firsthand accounts to demonstrate not ...
Traditional discussions of gender in Hindu traditions often begin with a critique of patriarchy in orthodox Brahmanical Dharmaśāstras, followed by a turn to potential feminist resources—for example, in goddess worship, Śākta traditions, and Tantra. One effect of this line of thinking has been a relative absence within Hindu studies of reflections on gender in relation to state power, a thematic hallmark of feminist postcolonial histories of South Asia. Geslani’s talk reframes the question of gender ...
Sitting in that hotel armchair, I realized that my deadly disease was giving me newfound power at the very moment it was depriving me of so much strength. My voice was growing softer, but I was being heard by more people than ever before. My legs were disintegrating, but more and more people were following in my footsteps. Precisely because my days were numbered, people drew inspiration from my decision to spend them in resistance. ...
David Stein, African American Studies, UCLA A UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Stein is the author of the forthcoming book, Fearing Inflation, Inflating Fears: The Civil Rights Struggle for Full Employment and the Rise of the Carceral State, 1929-1986. This event is a part of The Political Economy of Racial Inequality, a series of UCSB talks and workshops sponsored by the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy; and the Policy History Program. Pre-circulated papers available ...
Showings of Booksmart at 7:00 and 10:00 PM
IV Live Presents Improvability: The Musical Friday, November 22nd at 8:00 PM Embarcadero Hall, Isla Vista $3 Admission Sponsored by IV Live, Isla Vista Arts, UCSB, and Associated Students
Showings of Booksmart at 7:00 and 10:00 PM
Manuel Covo will discuss a chapter from his current book manuscript. The chapter, entitled “The Unfree Trade of an Abolitionist Colony,” explores the economic challenges facing Saint-Domingue in the aftermath of abolition and argues that the war context and the food dependency had long-lasting consequences for the new Haitian society. The text will be pre-circulated; for a copy, email rmaclean@ucsb.edu. Sponsored by the IHC’s Slavery, Captivity, and the Meaning of Freedom Research Focus Group
Showings of Once Upon a Time in...Hollywood at 7:00 and 10:00 PM
William Germano, Professor of English at Cooper Union, is the author of Getting It Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books; From Dissertation to Book; Eye Chart, among others. Prof. Germano will present a part of his current project tentatively titled, Shakespeare at the Opera: A History of Impossible Projects. *Prof. Germano will also hold a publication workshop on revising academic writing, which is mostly tailored for junior faculty who ...
Join us for a dialogue between Dominique Jullien (French and Comparative Literature) and Sowon Park (English) about Jullien’s new book, Borges, Buddhism and World Literature: A Morphology of Renunciation Tales. Refreshments will be served. Jullien’s latest book follows the renunciation story in Borges and beyond, arguing for its centrality as a Borgesian compositional trope and as a Borgesian prism for reading a global constellation of texts. The renunciation story at the heart of Buddhism, that ...
Book of the Dead of the Priest of Horus, Imhotep (Imuthes), ca. 332-200 B.C. From the poetry of Sappho to the New Testament, texts written on papyrus have been preserved for millennia by arid conditions in Egypt, excavated, and collected in archives. This timely colloquium examines the legal and ethical problems surrounding these papyrological archives. Roberta Mazza will tell the story of how ancient papyri of unknown provenance were acquired by the Museum of the ...
Showings of Once Upon a Time in...Hollywood at 7:00 and 10:00 PM
IV Live Presents Improvability: Naughty/Nice Show Friday, December 6th at 8:00 PM Embarcadero Hall, Isla Vista $3 Admission Sponsored by IV Live, Isla Vista Arts, UCSB, and Associated Students
UCSB Associate Professor Isabel Bayrakdarian will direct undergraduate students from UCSB’s Opera Outreach Program in a free community performance of Evan Mack’s 2016 children’s opera Lucinda y las Flores de la Nochebuena on Sunday, December 8, 2019 at 6 pm in Karl Geiringer Hall on the UC Santa Barbara campus. The 45-minute one-act opera is based on the Mexican folk tale of the same name that tells the story of how the poinsettia became a ...
In this talk, I consider the shifting, tumultuous, and consequential field of emotions that contemporaries perceived as defining public life in Russia during its “revolutionary” age. I take this story from the stillborn revolution of 1905, into global war and transnational revolution, through a bloody civil war into the first years of peaceful “socialist construction.” Often categorized as “the public mood,” a trope in Russian journalism and politics in the first half of the 20th ...
Thursday, January 9, 4:00-5:00 PM | 6020 HSSB Thursday, January 16, 9:00-10:00 AM | 6020 HSSB Join the IHC and current Public Humanities Fellows 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 project. Light refreshments will be served.
In 1876 American and English newspapers reported the extraordinary will made by an American woman living in London. Inspired by Bentham’s 1832 bequest of his body, Susan Fletcher Smith approached the Royal College of Surgeons with the proposal that, upon her death, her body be “completely dissected in the most thorough manner known to science.” Moreover, she stipulated that preference be given to persons of the female sex who wished to inspect the body in ...
IHC Director Susan Derwin asked Jared Diamond, UCLA Professor of Geography, a few questions about his work in light of the current pandemic. Read his comments here. Nations that successfully navigate crises do so by making selective changes to their identities and actions. When individuals experience crises—mid-life, financial, health, relationship—they may also adopt selective changes to overcome the situation. But some individuals, like some nations, are better at navigating upheaval than others. By drawing on the factors ...
Thursday, January 9, 4:00-5:00 PM | 6020 HSSB Thursday, January 16, 9:00-10:00 AM | 6020 HSSB Join the IHC and current Public Humanities Fellows 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 project. Light refreshments will be served.
Showings of The Lighthouse at 7:00 and 10:00 PM
Showings of The Lighthouse at 7:00 and 10:00 PM
Join us for a dialogue between Roberto Strongman (Black Studies) and Jennifer Tyburczy (Feminist Studies) about Strongman’s new book, Queering Black Atlantic Religions: Transcorporeality in Candomblé, Santería, and Vodou. Refreshments will be served. In Queering Black Atlantic Religions, Roberto Strongman examines Haitian Vodou, Cuban Lucumí/Santería, and Brazilian Candomblé to demonstrate how religious rituals of trance possession allow humans to understand themselves as embodiments of the divine. In these rituals, the commingling of humans and the ...
“Drawing Diversity” seeks to highlight the research and ideas of comix scholars who research questions of power, representation, and identity in comics. The symposium hopes to engage the politics and poetics of representing the intersections of race, nationhood, gender, and sexuality, among other social locations, through the comics form. Some central questions we will explore include: • What are the ethics and politics of visual representation amid the violent realities of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, imperialism ...
Showings of Terminator: Dark Fate at 7:00 and 10:00 PM
Showings of Terminator: Dark Fate at 7:00 and 10:00 PM
Showings of Harriet at 7:00 and 10:00 PM
Showings of Harriet at 7:00 and 10:00 PM
Linda Gregerson is the Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Michigan. She is an internationally recognized scholar in American and British literature, and she is also the author of six award-winning books of poetry. She was named as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her creative and scholarly works have ...
Showings of Jojo Rabbit at 7:00 and 10:00 PM
IV Live Presents Improvability: The Musical Friday, February 7 at 8:00 PM Embarcadero Hall, Isla Vista $3 Admission Sponsored by IV Live, Isla Vista Arts, UCSB, and Associated Students
Showings of Jojo Rabbit at 7:00 and 10:00 PM
Showings of TBA at 7:00 and 10:00 PM
IV Live Presents Improvability: The Anti-Valentine's Day Show Friday, February 14 at 8:00 PM Embarcadero Hall, Isla Vista $3 Admission Sponsored by IV Live, Isla Vista Arts, UCSB, and Associated Students
Showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at midnight
Amplifier.org is "a nonprofit design lab that builds art and media experiments to amplify the most important movements of our times." In this lecture the Founder of Amplifier will speak on the power of art at threshold moments, recounting visual campaigns like We The People, which flooded the streets for the Women's March and 2017 Presidential Inauguration protests. Amplifier believes that in times of uncertainty—in times like these, when fear and misinformation attempt to divide ...
Accent, Interaction, and Intimacy on the Autism Spectrum Kira Hall University of Colorado Boulder If intimacy is collaboratively produced in interaction, as discourse analysts argue, then how do individuals with atypical interactional behaviors achieve it? This paper addresses a sociolinguistic practice noted for individuals on the autism spectrum but rarely analyzed: the sustained adoption of non-local dialect features. For sociolinguists who view second dialect acquisition as a social achievement importantly related to identity, this practice ...
Showings of Ford v Ferrari at 7:00 and 10:00 PM
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 ...