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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 ...

IHC Fellow TALK: Plastic China, Plastic Chain: An Inconvenient Truth about Recycling

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

Until the Chinese government's new trade policy on waste importation this year, the environmental and practical impact of the global waste trade has been largely absent from US scientific and theoretical studies on waste. These new policies, however, are predicted to have a catastrophic impact on the American scrap recycling industry and have therefore ignited a conversation. This talk uses the lens of the critically acclaimed yet domestically banned documentary Plastic China (2016) by Jiuliang ...

HUMANITIES DECANTED: Elisabeth Weber, Kill Boxes: Facing the Legacy of US-Sponsored Torture, Indefinite Detention and Drone Warfare

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

Join us for a discussion of Elisabeth Weber's new work. Refreshments will be served. Kill Boxes addresses the legacy of US-sponsored torture, indefinite detention and drone warfare by deciphering the shocks of recognition that humanistic and artistic responses to violence bring to consciousness if readers and viewers have eyes to face them. The book provides intensive readings of philosophical texts by Jean Améry, Jacques Derrida, and Christian Thomasius, with poetic texts by Franz Kafka, Paul Muldoon, ...

Research Focus Group TALK: The Chinese Typewriter: A History

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

Chinese writing is character-based, the one major world script that is neither alphabetic nor syllabic. Over the past two centuries, Chinese script has encountered presumed alphabetic universalism at every turn, whether in the form of Morse Code, Braille, stenography, Linotype, punch cards, word processing, or other systems developed with the Latin alphabet in mind. Today, however, after more than a century of resistance against the alphabetic, not only have Chinese characters prevailed, they form the ...

TALK: The Best Possible Immigrants: International Adoption and the American Family

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

Prior to World War II, international adoption was virtually unknown, but in the twenty-first century, it has become a common practice, touching almost every American. How did the adoption of foreign children by U.S. families become an essential part of American culture in such a short period of time? Rachel Rains Winslow investigates this question, following the trail from Europe to South Korea and then to Vietnam. The Best Possible Immigrants shows how a combination ...

CONFERENCE: The Humanities in the Community: 2017 Convening of the Western Humanities Alliance

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

What is the significance and power of community in the 21st century? How has community been conceptualized and created by different cultures throughout history? How are relationships between specific communities and the broader social milieu constructed and maintained? In today’s global society, what provides the impetus for a life of civic engagement, built upon democratic values, goals, and aspirations? Is the “network” the latest form of community, now disconnected from the preconditions of shared physical or social space? These and other questions will be explored in the 2017 convening of the Western Humanities Alliance.

Talk: Interstellar Crossings: The Image of Exoplanets and the Imagination of Other Worlds

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

When seven rocky planets were discovered around the star TRAPPIST-1, claims of potentially habitable worlds animated the scientific discourse and press coverage. Beautiful animations of the surfaces of these planets and imaginative tales of planet hopping suggested that this discovery was not just about discovering more planets, but that it was also about discovering worlds. In this talk, Messeri will recount ethnographic findings from her work with exoplanet astronomers. She will explore how planets become worlds and what resources scientists draw on to execute this conceptual crossing and imaginatively leave the boundary of our world to extend human presence beyond the solar system.

INAUGURAL PANEL: Interdisciplinary Crossings + Boundaries

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

In this inaugural event for the IHC's Crossings + Boundaries public events series, four UCSB faculty members will discuss their varied experiences as interdisciplinary scholars, followed by a reception.   Beth DePalma Digeser (History, UCSB) studies the intersection of religion and philosophy with Roman politics, as well as the procession of “conversion” in Late Antiquity. Her latest book, A Threat to Public Piety: Christians, Platonists, and the Great Persecution (Cornell 2012), explores the interactions of Platonist ...

CONFERENCE: Interconnected Medieval Worlds

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

The conference gathers American and international medieval scholars to present papers on the global Middle Ages, with attention to the regions of East Asia, Africa, and the Americas. It includes a panel on pedagogy, oriented towards teaching a Middle Ages that is not only Eurocentric but which expansively includes networks across several continents and civilizations. Further papers explore specific instances of such connectivity and interaction, with opportunities for discussion between presenters and participants throughout the ...

ROUNDTABLE: Queer Resistance

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

Dr. Pavithra Prasad is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at California State University, Northridge. Her talk, “Alienation and Shape-Shifting in Vulgar Times,” offers a perspective on alienation and shape-shifting as an effective source of coalition building and resistance. Dr. Aimee Carrillo Rowe is Professor of Communication Studies at California State University, Northridge and the author of Power Lines: On the Subject of Feminist Alliances and Answer the Call: Virtual Migration in Indian Call Centers. Her ...

BOOK LAUNCH AND RECEPTION: Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan

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

Kate McDonald (History, UCSB) With commentary by: Ken Ruoff (History, Center for Japanese Studies, Portland State University), and Sabine Frühstück (Modern Japanese Cultural Studies, East Asia Center, UCSB) Please join us to celebrate the publication of Kate McDonald's new book, Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan. Placing Empire examines the spatial politics of Japanese imperialism through a study of Japanese travel and tourism to Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan between the late nineteenth century and the early ...

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. 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 Crossings + Boundaries, our 2017-2018 public events series. Find out about our community-engagement programs and our numerous funding resources for faculty and graduate students. Explore our new lending library. Enjoy good food, drink, and conversation.