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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Proof of full vaccination required for all attendees. READ MORE TO VIEW ACCEPTABLE FORMS OF VACCINATION DOCUMENTATION. Join us for a dialogue between John W. I. Lee (History) and Krzysztof Janowicz (Geography) about Lee's new book, The First Black Archaeologist: A Life of John Wesley Gilbert. Audience Q&A will follow. The First Black Archaeologist reveals the untold story of a pioneering African American classical scholar, teacher, community leader, and missionary. Born into slavery in rural ...

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

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

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

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

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

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