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Ending Poverty in California logo

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

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

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

Encyclopédie Noire

RFG Talk: Encyclopédie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Intellectual World

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

Sara Johnson is professor of literature of the Americas at the University of California, San Diego. Her book, Encyclopédie noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Intellectual World (Omohundro Institute/UNC Press, 2023), documents the work of Moreau de Saint-Méry, a late eighteenth-century Caribbean intellectual. The book combines traditional academic chapters and experimental forms in its use of archival fragments and visual culture to tell the stories of the free people of color and enslaved women ...

Janet Afary HD Event

Humanities Decanted: Janet Afary

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

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

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

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

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

Rosanna Xia Imagining CaliforniaEvent

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

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

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

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

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

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

Susan Straight - Event

Imagining California Talk: Writing Our Californias

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

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

Humanities Decanted: Liz Carlisle

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

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

Information Sessions: Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program

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

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

Information Sessions: Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program

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

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

Mark Arax: The Dreamt Land: How the Invention of California Became Miracle and Ruin

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

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

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

Yunte Huang - Event

Humanities Decanted: Daughter of the Dragon

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

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

Wendy Chun, How Are You? Sentiment, Surveillance, and Anti-Asian Racism

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

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

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

M.G. Lord - Is Barbie Feminist?

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

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

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

Inaugural Talk - Moraga

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

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

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

2023 Open House

IHC Open House

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

You are invited to the IHC’s Open House on Thursday, October 5, from 4-6 pm. Meet new Humanities faculty, IHC fellows, and staff members. Learn about Imagining California, our 2023-24 public events series. Find out about our publicly engaged programs and funding resources for faculty and graduate students. Enjoy good food, drink, and conversation. Cosponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts

Josephine Metcalf - Event

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

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

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

2022-23 Faculty Fellows - Event

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

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

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

LISO Conference 2023

“Continuing and Restarting”: The 26th Annual Conference on Language, Interaction, and Social Organization (LISO)

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

The Language, Interaction, and Social Organization GSO is pleased to host the 26th Annual Conference on Language, Interaction, and Social Organization on May 19–20, 2023, at UCSB. The LISO conference promotes interdisciplinary research and discussion in the analysis of naturally occurring human interaction. Papers will be presented by national and international scholars on a variety of topics in the study of language, interaction, and culture. Register to attend here For more information, visit the conference ...

Humanities Decanted: Giuliana Perrone

Humanities Decanted: Giuliana Perrone

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

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

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

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

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

Humanities Decanted - Ghosh

Humanities Decanted: The Virus Touch

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

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

Information Sessions: Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program

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

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

Information Sessions: Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program

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

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

Sal Castro Memorial Conference - Winter 2023

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

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

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

Leal Award 2023

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

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

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

Isaac Julien Event

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

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

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

Humanities Decanted: Jody Enders

Humanities Decanted: Jody Enders, Translating Medieval Farce

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

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

Humanities Decanted: Ross Melnick

Humanities Decanted: Hollywood’s Embassies

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

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

Cabranes-Grant Humanities Decanted

Humanities Decanted: The Bones of Contention

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

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

Make a Poem Cry cover art

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

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

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

Inaugural Lecture: Too Much or Too Little?

Inaugural Lecture: Too Much or Too Little?

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

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

IHC Open House 2022

IHC Open House

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

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

Scott Ellsworth: The Tulsa Race Massacre: Causes, Cover Up, and the Fight for the Past

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

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

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

James Siguru Wahutu - The Place of Africa: Erasure, Elision, and the Task of Self-Writing

Research Focus Group Talk: The Place of Africa: Erasure, Elision, and the Task of Self-Writing

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

Narratives of "connectivity" typically rely on discourses about Africa as a blank space devoid of social networks that are unique, vibrant, and continually being modified. While this takes agency away from Africans, it rests on the colonial assumption that "connectivity," just as "civilization" before it, is inherently exogenous, white, and male. This talk begins with the Rhodesian fantasy of connecting Africa from the Cape to Cairo and traces this logic through the contemporary discourse of ...

Vivian Gornick

Regeneration Talk: The Only True Reader Is a Re-reader

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

"I sometimes think I was born reading. I can’t remember the time when I didn’t have a book in my hands, my head lost to the world around me." What Vivian Gornick did not say when she wrote these sentences was how often the book in her hands was one she had read a number of times before. It became her habit as life went on to re-read the books that had repeatedly seemed important ...

Information Sessions: Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program

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

Thursday, February 24 | 4:00 PM | McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020 | VIEW IN-PERSON ATTENDANCE REQUIREMENTS AND Friday, February 25 | 12:00 PM | Zoom | REGISTER NOW Join the IHC in person on 2/24 or online on 2/25 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. If you would like to ...

John Lee Humanities Decanted

Humanities Decanted: The First Black Archaeologist

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

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 ...

POSTPONED Talk: “Hysteric Affirmation”: Language, Literature, and the Economy in Contemporary German Fiction

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

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 ...

POSTPONED Conference: Climate Fictions

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

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 ...

POSTPONED Conference: Sino-Japanese Studies in the Twenty-First Century

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

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 ...

Conference: Sal Castro Memorial Conference on the Emerging Historiography of the Chicano Movement

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

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 ...

Aaron Huey Critical Mass Talk

Critical Mass Talk: Art as Compass and Catalyst for Change

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

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 ...

Poetry Reading: Prodigal: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2014

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

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 ...

Symposium: Drawing Diversity: Identity, Organizing, and Imagining in Comics and Graphic Narratives

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

“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 ...

Humanities Decanted: Queering Black Atlantic Religions: Transcorporeality in Candomblé, Santería, and Vodou

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

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 ...

Information Sessions: Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program

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

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.

Talk: “Send My Body to the Medical College”: Alternative Afterlives in Turn of the Century America

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

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 ...

Information Sessions: Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program

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

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.

Talk: The Emotional Landscape of Revolution: Russia 1905-1925

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

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 ...

Humanities Decanted: Borges, Buddhism and World Literature: A Morphology of Renunciation Tales

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

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 ...

Critical Mass Talk: Ady Barkan: Love and Death, Hope and Resistance

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

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. ...

Humanities Decanted Chavez-Garcia

Humanities Decanted: Migrant Longing: Letter Writing across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

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

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 ...

The Lawrence Badash Memorial Lecture Series: Einstein’s War: How World War I Made Relativity

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

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 ...

UCHRI Funding Opportunities Information Sessions

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

9:30 am - 11:00 am - Faculty Funding Panel 11:15 am - 12:00 pm - Graduate Funding Panel Shana Melnysyn, Research Grants Manager at the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI), will host information sessions for faculty and graduate students who want to learn more about UCHRI's grant opportunities. Each session will include time for audience Q&A. The Faculty Funding Session (9:30-11 am) will include a panel on tips for crafting successful proposals with previous ...

Public Forum: Building a Green New Deal: Community, Coalition, and Organizing for Environmental Justice

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

In communities, classrooms, and protest sites across the country, people have embraced the call for a Green New Deal as a way of recognizing that climate change presents us with an unprecedented historic challenge—and the need for comprehensive and transformational reform. California’s Central Coast has a powerful tradition of grassroots activism to draw on in rising to the challenge, from the wide-ranging environmental movement sparked by the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill to the multi-racial ...

Critical Mass Inaugural Lecture: Plastic’s Tipping Point

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

Plastic production, use, and pollution have been growing steadily for decades, without much public comment or concern. But suddenly, and very recently, there has been strong and widespread backlash against the pervasiveness of plastic. What prompted this sudden change in public opinion?  Did plastic pollution itself reach a tipping point?  Or did public attitudes toward this pollutant undergo a radical shift? Roland Geyer will discuss the history of global plastic production and disposal and will ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Daylighting Conflict: Board Games as Decision-Making Tools

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

Janette Kim will join us to discuss Win-Win, a series of board games that play out climate risk scenarios. By designing interactions among players, objectives and resources, these games model the social justice implications of innovative financial and legal strategies. Equally important, they model the space of cities, offering unique ideas about the built environment in direct relationship to such dynamics. Together, these two interpretations of a ‘model’ serve as a new kind of decision-making ...

IHC Open House

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

You are invited to the IHC’s Open House on Thursday, October 3, from 4-6 pm. Cosponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts. Meet new Humanities faculty, IHC fellows, and staff members. Learn about Critical Mass, our 2019-2020 public events series. Find out about our community-engagement programs and our numerous funding resources for faculty and graduate students. Enjoy good food, drink, and conversation.

Symposium and Staged Readings: The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea

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

Cherríe Moraga’s play, The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (1995), depicts a dystopic future in a fractured América, aggravated by an entrenched patriarchy. It also explores the tenets of the movement that founded what are now thriving Chicana/Latina programs throughout the Southwest, including the UCSB Chicano Studies program, which celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2019. This symposium will present a timely (re)consideration of a movement in progress, alongside two staged readings of the play. Friday, ...

Reading: UC Santa Barbara Student Veteran Writers

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

Read the student veterans' stories in The Santa Barbara Independent. Eight student veterans will read stories about their military experiences.  Following the reading there will be time for questions from the audience. Gio Caballaro | Bradley Fry | Adrian Mejia | Andy Molina-Ochoa | Scott Rothdeutsch | Edward Rutherford | Kyle Shipe | Melissa Weidner Lunch will be provided. Sponsored by the IHC’s Social Securities series and the UC Santa Barbara Veterans Writing Workshop.

Launching New Research in the Humanities: Presentations by the IHC’s 2018-19 Faculty Fellows

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

Please join us in celebrating our 2018-19 Faculty Fellows, whose works-in-progress are supported this year by IHC release-time awards. Fellows will give a short presentation of their work. A reception will follow. Elena Aronova, History “Making Science History: The Forgotten Socialist Roots of Big History and Big Data” Karen Lunsford, Writing Program “The Effects of Intellectual Property Law in Writing Studies: Ethics, Gatekeepers, and Academic Knowledge-Making” Amit Shilo, Classics “The Afterlife in the Oresteia: Ethical and ...

“Disrupt and Advance”: The 25th Annual Conference on Language, Interaction, and Social Organization (LISO)

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

The LISO conference promotes interdisciplinary research and discussion in the analysis of naturally occurring human interaction. Papers will be presented by national and international scholars on a variety of topics in the study of language, interaction, and culture. This year’s conference theme is “Disrupt and Advance.” We understand ‘disrupt’ broadly as actions or ideas that intervene in or challenge the established theoretical, institutional, or narrative frame. The emphasis on disruption is an intentional examination of ...

Talk: The Cold War’s Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace

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

Paul Thomas Chamberlin argues that the Cold War, long regarded as a mostly peaceful, if tense, diplomatic standoff between the West and East blocs, fostered a series of deadly conflicts that killed millions on battlegrounds across the postcolonial world. For half a century, as an uneasy accord hung over Europe, ferocious wars raged in the Cold War’s killing fields, resulting in more than fourteen million dead—victims who remain largely forgotten. In chronicling this violent history, ...

Talk: Towards a Palestinian Third Cinema

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

In the 1970s, the filmmakers Masao Adachi and Jean-Luc Godard each created a sophisticated essay film that used the Palestinian revolution to reflect questions of truth, representation, media circuits, and the relationships that can and cannot be formed through them. This talk shifts attention away from these well-known works to focus on the films Palestinians themselves were making at this time, exploring how they engaged differently with the ideas that animated Adachi and Godard, as ...

Research Focus Group Conference: China Rising

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

On May 2 and 3, UC Santa Barbara is hosting a group of scholars, Ford Foundation project officers, film makers and movement leaders on campus. This group from China, Brazil and Ecuador offers novel “southern” or subaltern perspectives on China’s massive contemporary presence in Africa, Middle East and Latin America. This process of Chinese engagement across the continents of the global south may represent one of the most significant global-scale transformations of our era, challenging ...

Tyree Daye

The 2019 Diana and Simon Raab Writer-in-Residence: Tyree Daye

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

Tyree Daye is a poet from Youngsville, North Carolina. He is the author of two poetry collections: River Hymns, 2017 APR/Honickman First Book Prize winner, and Cardinal, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press, 2020. Daye is a 2017 Ruth Lilly Finalist and Cave Canem fellow. Daye’s work has been published in Prairie Schooner, The New York Times, and Nashville Review. Daye won the 2019 Palm Beach Poetry Festival Langston Hughes Fellowship and is a 2019 Kate Tufts Finalist. Daye most recently was awarded a 2019 ...

Humanities Decanted: Ruth Hellier-Tinoco, Performing Palimpsest Bodies: Postmemory Theatre Experiments in Mexico

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

Join us for a dialogue between Ruth Hellier-Tinoco (Music) and Jessica Nakamura (Department of Theater and Dance) about Hellier-Tinoco’s new book, Performing Palimpsest Bodies: Postmemory Theatre Experiments in Mexico. Refreshments will be served. Performing Palimpsest Bodies proposes the concept of palimpsest bodies to interpret provocative theatre and performance experiments that explore issues of cultural memory, bodies of history, archives, repertoires and performing remains. Combined with ideas of postmemory and rememory, palimpsest bodies are inherently trans-temporal as they ...

The Lawrence Badash Memorial Lecture Series: Science, Freedom, and the Cold War: A Political History of Apolitical Science

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

Why do so many U.S. scientists continue to lean on the language of apolitical science, even as political leaders display less and less interest in scientists’ claims to expertise, or even the existence of facts? In a new book, Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science, historian Audra J. Wolfe suggests the answer lies in Cold war propaganda. From the late 1940s through the late 1960s, the U.S. foreign policy establishment ...

Humanities Decanted: Silvia Bermúdez, Rocking the Boat

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

Join us for a dialogue between Silvia Bermúdez (Spanish and Portuguese) and Cristina Venegas (Film and Media Studies) about Bermúdez’s new book, Rocking the Boat: Migration and Race in Contemporary Spanish Music.  Refreshments will be served. Rocking the Boat is a nuanced account of how popular urban music, produced between 1980 and 2013, shaped the discourse on immigration, transnational migrants, and racialization in the Spanish State borne after the Constitution of 1978. Silvia Bermúdez is Professor of Spanish ...

Roma: A Symposium

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

Join faculty from the Departments of Chicana/o Studies, Spanish and Portuguese, and Political Science for a discussion of Alfonso Cuarón’s groundbreaking new film Roma. Free and open to the public Sponsored by the IHC Research Group on Latino Studies

Dean’s Lecture Series: Healing the Web of Life: Autonomous Transition Design as Political-Ontological Praxis

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

In the face of deepening social and ecological crises, design is emerging as a vital domain of praxis that engages these crises by imagining and organizing alternative life worlds. This confers upon design/ing an ineluctable ontological-political dimension. This lecture outlines the constructive reorientation of design as a praxis meant to heal the web of life, and describes the early stages of application of what we are calling “autonomous transition design” in the Cauca River Valley ...

Research Focus Group Event: A Talk with Sex Workers Outreach Project-Los Angeles

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

Sex Workers Outreach Project-Los Angeles is a local chapter of SWOP-USA, a national grassroots social justice network dedicated to the fundamental human rights of sex workers and their communities, focusing on ending violence and stigma through education, community building, and advocacy. SWOP is committed to the safety, autonomy, and human rights of people in the sex trade, and stands in solidarity with the many social justice moments intersectional to our own, including but not limited to ...

Social Securities Talk: Environmental Justice as Freedom

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

This talk argues that environmental justice movements are freedom struggles. Beginning with the starting point that unjust environments are rooted in racism, capitalism, militarism, colonialism, land theft from Native peoples, and gender violence, the talk frames environmental justice as particularly significant in the moment of danger that we are currently facing. It is drawn from a forthcoming book that examines activism at Standing Rock, in Flint and the Central Valley, and in the wake of ...

50th Anniversary Conference El Plan de Santa Barbara

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

The 50th Anniversary Conference El Plan de Santa Barbara will commemorate one of the seminal proclamations of the Chicano Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s.  The Chicano Movement was the largest and most widespread civil rights and empowerment movement by Mexican Americans.  El Plan was drafted at a conference held at UCSB in April of 1969.  It laid the foundation for the establishment of Chicano Studies at UCSB and elsewhere.  It also unified the ...

Social Securities Talk: Teaching the People: Enlightenment and the American Republic

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

In this talk, David Marshall will illuminate contemporary debates about the value of the liberal arts and sciences and public investment in higher education by examining Enlightenment arguments for both liberal education and public education in the early American Republic, and the 19th-century Land Grant movement, which resulted in the establishment of the University of California as a “public trust” in the California State Constitution. These two Enlightenment moments resonate today as we try to ...

Talk: Is Culture a Human Right?

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

A commemoration of the International Mother Language Day with the aim of raising awareness on campus towards preserving endangered languages and fostering tolerance towards cultural and linguistic diversity. This year's commemoration will feature a lecture Dr. Juan Uriagereka (University of Maryland). Sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Barandiaran Chair of Basque Studies, and the Etxepare Basque Institute

Timely Intersections: Black Histories on the Page and Stage

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

How are Black histories re-purposed and re-imagined as they move across mediums? Considering that both literature and theatre have advanced causes of Black liberation across historical eras and genres, our aim is to think through creative adaptations of Black histories as both a conduit for social change and a mode of education. Our symposium commemorates the Theater and Dance department’s LAUNCH PAD production of Cheryl West’s adaptation of The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963, a Civil ...

Information Sessions: Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program

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

Wednesday, January 30, 11:45-1:00 PM | 6020 HSSB Tuesday, February 5, 4:00-5:00 PM | 6020 HSSB Join the IHC to learn more about the new Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program.  Explore the course requirements, hear about the paid internships and fellow-designed community projects, and find out more about the capstone project. The January 30 session will include lunch from South Coast Deli and the February 5 session will have light refreshments.

Social Securities Talk: Shaping Community Futures Through Policy + Architecture

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

LA-Más is a Los Angeles urban design non-profit focused on empowering lower-income and working class families who struggle to find affordable homes to rent or for whom walking is a primary mode of transportation. This talk will explore the architectural projects of LA-Más that provide accessible affordable housing and support the pedestrian right of way, and that, in doing so, create built environments that address the city’s social instability. Elizabeth Timme is Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director ...

Film Screening: In the Shadow of the Moon

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

2019 marks the 50th anniversary of NASA’s Apollo program. The mission’s crewed flights began in 1968 with the first lunar circumnavigation; on July 20, 1969 Neil Armstrong became the first human to step foot on another planet. By the end of 1972 Apollo’s funding was cut short and NASA’s moon explorations were over. From 1969 to 1972 there were eight crewed missions and 12 astronauts walked on the surface of the moon, exploring and doing ...

Information Sessions: Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program

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

Wednesday, January 30, 11:45-1:00 PM | 6020 HSSB Tuesday, February 5, 4:00-5:00 PM | 6020 HSSB Join the IHC to learn more about the new Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program.  Explore the course requirements, hear about the paid internships and fellow-designed community projects, and find out more about the capstone project. The January 30 session will include lunch from South Coast Deli and the February 5 session will have light refreshments.

Social Securities Talk: Why Can’t Feminists Change the Law? The History and Politics of Welfare Reform in the Modern U.S.

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

In her talk, Kornbluh will reveal how welfare reform is shaped by “intersectional sexism,” the gendered and racialized dimensions of legal activity that are evident, persistent, yet ignored by mainstream policy makers and Washington, D.C.-based intellectuals. Taking as her example the failed passage of a feminist welfare reauthorization bill in the early 2000s, Kornbluh will discuss why the Democratic Party resisted embracing this initiative and explore the crucial role feminist scholars and activists have to play ...

Outlaw(ed) Intellectuals: Critiquing Structures of Power from Within

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

A group of formerly incarcerated and system impacted graduate students have organized a lineup of formerly incarcerated scholars, activists and healers to convene for a day of dialogue, learning, and solution building on the topic of the impact of mass incarceration and higher education. We intend to offer this colloquium as a space for interested students to engage and learn more from experts in the topic. As formerly incarcerated and system impacted folks ourselves, we ...

Social Securities Talk: Embracing Shari’a: Women, Law, and Activism in Somalia

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

Gender equality is a key principle of human rights and political security. But how are gender equality and human security ensured in societies struggling with legacies of civil war and political violence? This lecture reveals how, in a country where many observers presume law and security are absent, women are turning to Islam’s foundational sources—the Qur’an and the Hadith—to promote women’s rights and human and political security.  A reception will follow. Mark Fathi Massoud is Associate ...

Research Focus Group Talk: “I just needed a place to sleep”: Sex Offense, Housing Insecurity, and the Value of Surplus Sex

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

Registered sex offenders frequently report experiencing homelessness due to their stigmatized and heavily policed status. As a result, many have to rely on various sectors of the informal economy to survive in a system that is designed to keep them in perpetual motion while also demanding they be visible, discoverable, and traceable to a fixed location for public safety. In this talk, Terrance Wooten interrogates the ways in which the sex offender registry not only ...

Humanities Decanted: Mario T. García, Father Luis Olivares: A Biography

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

Join us for a dialogue between Mario T. García (Chicana and Chicano Studies and History) and Verónica Castillo-Muñoz (History) about García’s new biography, Father Luis Olivares: Faith Politics and the Origins of the Sanctuary Movement in Los Angeles. Refreshments will be served. García‘s latest book is the untold story of the Los Angeles sanctuary movement’s champion, Father Luis Olivares (1934–1993), a Catholic priest and a charismatic, faith-driven leader for social justice. Beginning in 1980 and continuing for most of the ...

The Fabricant: Symposium on the Figure of the Translator

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

This gathering seeks to explore the critical role of translator as the mediator between cultures. In today’s political landscape, the translator is often called upon to be the go-between different peoples, spaces—both real and fictional— academic fields, and cultures. Even as the Executive Order has banned immigrants of numerous countries to the United States, the literary translator is one of the artistic professionals that enables communication between countries. The translator, as a transcultural ambassador, is ...

Social Securities Talk: Money is No Object: Aesthetics, Abstraction, and the Politics of Care

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

In his talk, Scott Ferguson will rethink the historical relationship between money and aesthetics in an effort to broaden the politics of care using the alternative conception of money articulated by the contemporary heterodox school of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Mobilizing MMT, Ferguson critiques exhausted dialectical oppositions between money and art and contends that monetary abstraction, rather than representing a private, finite, and alienating technology, is instead a public and fundamentally unlimited medium that harbors ...

Inaugural Dean’s Lecture Series: Social Science Partnerships for the Common Good

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

Social research stands at a crossroads. On the one hand, new data sources and methods offer scholars unprecedented opportunities to understand and influence the social world.  On the other hand, fiscal constraints, security risks, misinformation campaigns, and “post-truth culture” threaten both the funding and the credibility of this research. In this context, the Social Science research Council (SSRC) launched the multidisciplinary, cross-sector To Secure Knowledge Task Force to consider optimal conditions for social science in this moment, including the infrastructure of ...

Screening: 1968: The Year That Shaped a Generation

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

1968 was a pivotal year in U.S. and global history. In the United States, students protested the Vietnam War. In France, they protested university conditions and sparked worker strikes across the country. In Mexico City, they protested state violence. This was also the year when the peaceful protest known as the “Prague Spring” flourished in Czechoslovakia, when Martin Luther King planned a Poor People’s March on Washington, and when Robert Kennedy ran for president. But ...

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

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

Tim Hernández will receive this year's Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature.  His debut novel, Breathing, In Dust received the 2010 Premio Aztlan Prize in Fiction. His collection of poetry, Natural Takeover of Small Things was released in 2013 and received the 2014 Colorado Book Award, and his novel, Mañana Means Heaven, which is based on the life of Bea Franco, also released in 2013, went on the receive the 2014 International Latino Book Award in historical fiction.  His ...

Humanities Decanted: Carlos Morton, Trumpus Caesar

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

Join us for a staged reading of a new play by Carlos Morton (Theater and Dance), Trumpus Caesar, followed by a discussion. Refreshments will be served. A bawdy satire in the tradition of Greco-Roman Comedy–Saturday Night Live meets Julius Caesar.  The comic premise is that Trumpus Caesar, having recently been elected emperor by the plebeians, is impeached by a Chorus of Republican satyrs who then fight over the crown.  In this "farce for our times," Caesar doesn't die ...

Social Securities Talk: Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women

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

Since 1980, the population of female prisoners has increased eightfold in this country, with women of color disproportionately impacted. In her talk, Ms. Law will examine the structural inequities and injustices behind the rise in the number of incarcerated women and the recurring violation of rights women face inside prison, including lack of access to reproductive and medical health care and pervasive sexual harassment and abuse. Law will also discuss how incarcerated women are challenging ...

Social Securities Inaugural Lecture: Social Insecurities: Media Policy and the Fight for Digital Liberties

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

In the US, media policy is designed to protect a host of cultural values, particularly those promoting the public interest and freedom of expression. This talk will explore how these values and their attendant “social securities” have been actively sabotaged by the regulators charged with preserving them, threatening everything from our individual privacy to democracy itself. In such a dire landscape, the humanities offer much needed direction toward reclaiming a brighter future. A reception will ...

Presentation: UCHRI Funding Opportunities

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

All UCSB faculty members are encouraged to join us for a presentation by David Theo Goldberg, Director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute, about upcoming UCHRI funding opportunities. The presentation will be followed by a roundtable featuring UCSB grant recipients Juan Cobo (History), Alenda Chang (Film and Media Studies), Diane Fujino (Asian American Studies), and Jennifer Tyburczy (Feminist Studies).  The event will conclude with audience Q&A. Come learn about UCHRI funding opportunities and best ...

IHC Open House

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

You are invited to the IHC’s Open House on Thursday, October 4, from 4-6 pm. Cosponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts. Meet new Humanities faculty, IHC fellows, and staff members. Learn about Social Securities, our 2018-2019 public events series. Find out about our community-engagement programs and our numerous funding resources for faculty and graduate students. Enjoy good food, drink, and conversation.

research fellows

Launching New Research in the Humanities: Presentations by the IHC’s 2017-18 Faculty Fellows

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

Please join us in celebrating our 2017-18 Faculty Fellows, whose works-in-progress are supported this year by IHC release-time awards. Fellows will give a short presentation of their work followed by a reception. Jennifer Holt Film and Media Studies “From Convergence to the Cloud: Media Policy in the Digital Era”     erin Khuê Ninh Asian American Studies “Almost Perfect: Passing for the Model Minority”     Eric Prieto French and Italian “World Literature, Urban Theory, ...

HUMANITIES DECANTED: Lal Zimman, Transgender Language Reform: Some Challenges and Strategies for Promoting Trans-Affirming, Gender-Inclusive Language

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

Join us for a presentation and discussion with Lal Zimman (Linguistics) about his new work, “Transgender Language Reform.” Refreshments will be served. With a growing societal interest in the experiences of transgender people has come a new kind of awareness about gendered language. Zimman’s recent article, “Transgender language reform: some challenges and strategies for promoting trans-affirming, gender-inclusive language,” takes a linguistic approach to trans-inclusive language by distilling the practices of transgender speakers of English into ...

Conference: Cultural Sustainabilities: Music, Media, Language, Advocacy

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

Cultural Sustainabilities is driven by the proposition that environmental and human sustainability are inextricably linked. Leading social scientists, humanists, and activists will convene to address the premise that reversing or ameliorating the negative impacts of human behavior on the globe’s environments is at its core a human cultural question. Topics considered include media, language, singing, fandom, indigeneity, trauma, and trash. The conference honors the work of the keynote speaker, Jeff Todd Titon. Keynote Address by ...

Crossings + Boundaries TALKS: Sinan Antoon and Sara Pursley

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

Talk: The Times of Revolution in Jawad Salim’s Monument to Freedom The Iraqi artist Jawad Salim’s famous Monument to Freedom, which still stands in Baghdad’s Liberation Square, is usually read as a linear historical narrative of the Iraqi nationalist movement and the 1958 revolution it produced. Pursley’s talk explores heterogeneous conceptions of time in the work, including depictions of cyclical forms of temporality that reference Khaldunian historical time, Shi`i messianic time, and the time of mourning. She ...

The Lawrence Badash Memorial Lecture Series: Truman’s Bomb and the Making of the Atomic Presidency

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

When we think of the importance of the atomic bomb to the Truman presidency, we think of Truman’s weighty decision regarding the use of the weapon on Japan. But historians have known for decades that the narrative of “the decision to use the bomb” is largely mythical, and his actual role was mostly peripheral. But despite this, Truman did make several decisions during the war that would have vast consequences for the future of nuclear ...

Crossings + Boundaries Talk: Borderwall as Architecture

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

Ronald Rael’s talk will reexamine what the 650 miles of physical barrier dividing the US and Mexico is and could be, suggesting that the wall is an opportunity for economic and social development along the border that encourages its conceptual and physical dismantling. Rael will illuminate the transformative effects of the wall on people, animals, and the natural and built landscape through the story of people on both sides of the border who transform and ...

Talk: Sanctuary and Literature: Words on the Move

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

In the present refugee crisis, millions of people are being driven from their homes by war, religious conflict, racial ostracism, famine, and poverty. Can literature help? Stripped of material possessions, refugees, migrants, and ‘arrivants’ still own their minds, which are filled with memories, stories, and knowledge. Can the cultural baggage of the imagination, the stories that displaced people carry in their heads, provide ways of establishing connection with their new circumstances? Can stories, inspired by ...

Humanities in Prison

Symposium: Humanities in Prison

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

Why study the humanities in prison? Why teach them?  What is the value of prison humanities programs for communities both inside and outside of prisons?  What humanistic texts and skills do we teach? This day-long symposium, hosted by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center of the University of California, Santa Barbara, will explore the building of intellectual communities across systemic divides through the humanities. The symposium will include the voices of educators and formerly incarcerated individuals and ...

Wijnberg Poetry Reading

Crossings + Boundaries Reading: Of Great Importance

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

The poems in Of Great Importance discuss taxes and debts, stocks and flows, citizenship and labor contracts, notaries and accountants, factories and strikes, freedoms and fundamental rights, how to make money and how to win elections, when to declare war and when to found a new state. The collection has been called “a painfully consistent and uncomfortably accurate analysis of power, economic and social structures and mechanisms which are at the root of the degenerate world in ...

IHC Visiting Scholar Talk: Media Before Gutenberg

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

Although “media” conjures modern, technologized modes of communication (television, the internet, print journalism), mediation is a central part of all communication. In the Middle Ages, media referred to networks of voices, texts, bodies, human actions, and nonhuman forces that were involved in sense perception, social interaction, storytelling, and other acts of cultural transmission. This talk will elaborate on the media ecology of the medieval West by putting Aristotle’s theories of sense perception in dialogue with ...

The Sixth Biennial Borderlands International Graduate Student Conference: Beyond Marginality: Race, Ethnicity, and Memory

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

Borderlands, broadly defined, are spaces where people of different ethnicities, cultures, religions, political systems, or linguistic traditions come into contact, often without any one authority exercising complete control. These encounters require both individuals and societies to adapt culturally, politically, economically, religiously, artistically, and technologically to other ways of life, often with unexpected and surprising results. The sixth biennial Borderlands International Graduate Student Conference, “Beyond Marginality: Race, Ethnicity, and Memory” showcases how studying the borderlands reveals ...

First Writers and Scholars in Indigenous Languages and Literatures Conference: Verbal Kaleidoscope

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

In a time where indigenous literatures are becoming more distinguishable, it is crucial to explore, challenge, and reformulate preexisting notions of spaces, identity, and knowledge. For the first time at UCSB, renowned indigenous poets of Mexico and the Basque country will establish an international dialogue with top scholars from all over the world to discuss the topic of the poetic act as a factor of visibility for marginalized cultures and political action. For the First ...

Crossings + Boundaries Talk: Murder and Mattering in Harambe’s House

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

Date change to Tuesday, March 6th at 4:00PM. This talk approaches the controversy over the killing of the gorilla Harambe in the Cincinnati Zoo in May 2016 as a unique window onto the making of animalness and blackness in the contemporary U.S.  It will explore the notion of a racial-zoological order in which the “human” is constructed simultaneously in relation to both the “black” and the “animal.” Claire Jean Kim is Professor of Political Science ...

HUMANITIES DECANTED: Bhaskar Sarkar, “No Man’s (Is)land: Ecology of a Border”

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

Join us for a dialogue between Bhaskar Sarkar (Film and Media Studies) and Lisa Sun-Hee Park (Asian American Studies) about Sarkar’s new article, “No Man’s (Is)land: Ecology of a Border.” Refreshments will be served. Focusing on a stretch of the international border between Bangladesh and India that coincides with the river Ganges, Sarkar’s new article examines the ambiguous productivities of proliferating borders in the era of globalization. In this overpopulated region of South Asia, the ...

Film Screening: Beyond Fordlandia

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

Written and directed by Marcos Colón, Beyond Fordlândia (2017, 75 min) presents an environmental account of Henry Ford’s Amazon experience decades after its failure. The story addressed by the film begins in 1927, when the Ford Motor Company attempted to establish rubber plantations on the Tapajós River, a primary tributary of the Amazon. This film addresses the recent transition from failed rubber to successful soybean cultivation for export, and its implication for land usage. There ...

Presentation: Imagining America

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

Please join us for a presentation by Imagining America director Erica Kohl-Arenas about public humanities and arts. The event will take place at 10:00 AM in the McCune Conference Room and will include audience discussion. Imagining America (IA) is currently based at UC Davis, its third host campus, as of July 2017. Comprised of a network of college and university members and community partners, IA’s annual programming includes convening a national conference and cultural organizing institutes, and collaborative research ...

Conference: Patterns and Networks in Classical Chinese Literature: Notes from the Digital Frontier

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

Twelve scholars from around the globe will present examples of the groundbreaking research taking place at the intersection of digital humanities and classical Chinese literary studies. Covering poetry, prose, fiction, history, linguistics, and philosophy over the course of two millennia, these studies will show how computing technologies can help researchers uncover previously unseen patterns and networks in their materials, shedding new light on premodern texts. Keynote Address by Michael Fuller (East Asian Languages and Literatures, ...

Crossings + Boundaries Talks: Sayak Valencia and Lorena Wolffer

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

Talk: From Queer to Cuir: Geopolitical Ostranenie from the Global South Sayak Valencia’s talk will explore the politics of survival and the alliances of the trans/border/messtizx/sissy/lesbian/dressed/slut-fag/cripple. The word “cuir” represents a defamiliarization—or ostranenie—of “queer,” which challenges automatic reading and registers, through its unfamiliarity, a geopolitical inflection southward and from the peripheries. Countering colonial epistemology and Anglo-American historiography, cuir invokes a space of decolonialized enunciation, at once playful and critical. Sayak Valencia (Cultural Studies, El Colegio de la ...

Research Focus Group Conference: Queer Hemisphere: América Cuir

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

Queer Hemisphere: América Cuir is a two-day conference comprised of six interdisciplinary graduate student panels, two keynote presentations, one by Prof. Sayak Valencia (author of Capitalismo Gore) and the other by performance artist Lorena Wolffer (Mapping Dissent), a keywords dialogue with Prof. Marcia Ochoa (UCSC), and a charla with UCSB Profs. Micaela Díaz-Sánchez and Cherríe Moraga. On the conference theme: This conference will bring together scholars from Mexico, Brazil, Peru, other Andean countries, as well as Latinx ...

Crossings+Boundaries TALK: Dreamland: America’s Opiate Epidemic and How We Got Here

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

Click here to read an article about Quinones' talk. Quinones will discuss the origins of our nationwide opioid epidemic: pharmaceutical marketing, changes in our heroin market, and new attitudes toward pain among American healthcare consumers. He will also discuss cultural shifts that made this epidemic possible. Sam Quinones is a Los Angeles-based freelance journalist and author of three books of narrative nonfiction. His book Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic won a National Book Critics Circle award ...

HUMANITIES DECANTED: Robert Samuels, Educating Inequality: Beyond the Political Myths of Higher Education and the Job Market

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

Join us for a dialogue between Robert Samuels (Writing) and Heather Steffen (English and Writing) about Samuels’ new work, Educating Inequality. Refreshments will be served. Politicians and school officials often argue that higher education is the solution to many of our social and economic problems. Educating Inequality argues that in order to reduce inequality and enhance social mobility, public policies are needed to revamp the financial aid system and increase the number of good jobs. ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Cold War Curvature: Measuring and Modeling Gravity in Postwar American Physics

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

A popular image persists of Albert Einstein as a loner, someone who avoided the hustle and bustle of everyday life in favor of quiet contemplation. Yet Einstein was deeply engaged with politics throughout his life; indeed, he was so active politically that the FBI kept him under surveillance for decades. His most enduring scientific legacy, the general theory of relativity – physicists' reigning explanation of gravity and the basis for nearly all our thinking about ...

Crossings+Boundaries TALK: Opening the Gates of Heaven: Religious and Philosophical Implications of Space Exploration

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

Religion and philosophy have always been present in human space exploration, in the form of religious rituals practiced during space missions, placement of sacred objects in space, and astronauts’ descriptions of transcendental changes in perspective when looking back on Earth. Space exploration also poses ethical, religious, and philosophical challenges. How, for example, do we protect other celestial bodies from contamination by human space exploration? How do we protect the Earth from contamination by extraterrestrial samples ...