Events

Home > 

Zoom

  1. Events
  2. Venues
  3. Zoom
Events at this venue
Today

Research Focus Group Talk: Ransoming Genoa: Captives, Consuls, Missionaries in the Early Modern Mediterranean

Zoom

The seminar aims to explore the phenomenon of Mediterranean captivity between the 16th and 19th centuries as analyzed in Andrea Zappia's monograph, Mercanti di uomini. Reti e intermediari per la liberazione dei captivi nel Mediterraneo (Città del Silenzio 2018), with a particular focus on the singular case of the Republic of Genoa and the redemption of its subjects. The first part of the seminar will provide a historical contextualization, examining the daily lives of prisoners ...

Tibetan children's book illustration

Research Focus Group Talk: Children’s Literature from the Himalayas: Gesar Stories, Cultural Authenticity, and Folkloresque

Zoom

Gesar is a warrior-like king in the realm of Ling and the protagonist of a voluminous folkloric poem that many Tibetan bards have performed for centuries. With Gesar’s increasing fame in modern times, the orature has become a quintessential representation of Tibetan culture. By comparing two children’s books that draw on the Gesar tradition, Tibetan Heroic Epic: Gesar Children’s Literature Collection and Gesar Epic: Hor-Ling Battle, Zhuoga will discuss the meaning and relevance of cultural ...

RFG Talk: Narrating Nemo: Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland and the Evolution of the Comic Strip

Zoom

As one of the pioneers of the animation medium as well as the comics medium, Winsor McCay's cultural significance is rivaled by few. However, the scholarly scrutiny of his works has yet to match his historical prominence. His most well-known creation, Little Nemo in Slumberland, which ran from 1905 to 1927, was the first comic strip with an ongoing, open-ended serialized narrative. Yet, it only started off as a regular Sunday strip and over its ...

Guano in Their Destiny

RFG Talk: “Guano in Their Destiny”: A Conversation with Tao Leigh Goffe

Zoom

Join the Environmental and Postcolonial Media Theories RFG for a conversation with Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe about her work, "'Guano in Their Destiny': Race, Geology, and a Philosophy of Indenture," and beyond. Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe is an associate professor of literary theory and cultural history with a focus on the environmental humanities and geology. She joined the Department of Africana, Puerto Rican, and Latino Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York after ...

RFG Talk: Thinking With the Sound of Catastrophe

RFG Talk: Thinking with the Sound of Catastrophe

Zoom

When death is ubiquitous and violence structural and gratuitous, catastrophe has a sound. How do our racialized lives allow for or shield us from familiarity to this sound? The conditions of colonial violence, imperialism, and global capitalism construct African Black bodies into a kind of listening bodies. But what kind of listening bodies are these? In this talk, Brenda Umutoniwase will explore the listening body from Rwanda to South Africa as a site of conflations: ...

RFG Event: Racialized Sound

RFG Talk: Racialized Sound in Mainstream Cinema: Spike Jonze’s Her

Zoom

This talk examines Samantha, the operating system from Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), analyzing how the film’s portrayal of Samantha both differs from and uncannily evokes both fictional and real-world Black women domestic servants. Exploring how the film deliberately and repeatedly marks Samantha as female, how her vocal pitch, tone, and timbre code her as white, and how the film uses this ascribed white femaleness to grant her a form of subjecthood, Owens contends that the ...

RFG Talk: Images of War for Children in Ukrainian Picturebooks

RFG Talk: Images of War for Children in Ukrainian Picturebooks: Aesthetic, Political, and Emotional Strategies

Zoom

Parents and authors across the world are dealing with the question of how to talk to children about war. Ukrainian writers and illustrators in particular have to find narrative and visual techniques to address children who are growing up under circumstances of war and displacement. In this talk, Svetlana Efimova will analyze Ukrainian picturebooks created during two stages of war: since 2014 and especially since 2022. First, she will focus on the relationship between representation ...

Fractured Fairy Tales

RFG Talk: Fractured Fairy Tales and Subversion: Red Ridin’ in the Hood and Other Cuentos by Patricia Marcantonio

Zoom

Inside a cardboard box, Mama packed a tin of chicken soup, heavy on cilantro, along with a jar of peppermint tea, peppers from our garden, and a hunk of white goat cheese that smelled like Uncle Jose's feet. That meant one thing. "Roja, your abuelita is not feeling well," Mama told me. "I want you to take this food to her." “But Mama, me and Lupe Maldonado are going to the movies," I replied, but ...

Drawing Deportation

RFG Talk: Drawing Deportation: Art and Resistance among Immigrant Children

Zoom

Drawing Deportation: Art and Resistance among Immigrant Children (NYU Press, 2023) argues that immigrant children are not passive in the face of the challenges presented by U.S. anti-immigrant policies. Based on ten years of work with immigrant children in two different border states—Arizona and California—Drawing Deportation gives readers a glimpse into the lives of immigrant children and their families. Through an analysis of 300 children’s drawings, theater performances, and family interviews, this book, at once ...

Imagining California Talk: Aesthetic Mobility and Solidarities at Self Help Graphics & Art

Zoom

Self Help Graphics & Art is a legacy arts organization that served on the cultural front of the Chicano Movement. Its emphasis on printmaking as an accessible medium infused with activist aims and its ability to cultivate and navigate various solidarities helped to support over fifty years of growth. This presentation by the co-editors of Self Help Graphics at Fifty looks at the multiple aesthetic styles and collaborative innovations that produced intergenerational, transnational, and cross-racial ...

Zongxin Feng - RFG Event

Research Focus Group Talk: Alice in Wonderland as a Fairytale and a Resource Book in China

Zoom

This talk focuses on some semiotic aspects of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its unrivaled reception in China with special reference to the first Chinese translation by Y. R. Chao in 1922. In view of the complex addresser-addressee relationships in “children’s literature,” which denotes literature of, for, and in some cases, by children, this study distinguishes Charles Dodgson the man who wrote as a child for the Liddell Sisters and Charles Dodgson ...

Zheng Ren - Between and Beyond Images and Words

Research Focus Group Talk: Between and Beyond Images and Words: A Multimodal Stylistic Study of Children’s Picturebooks

Zoom

A multimodal approach to children’s picturebooks focuses on how images and words (and their interactions) collaboratively make meaning. Narrative theory enriches picturebook studies by demonstrating how paratextual elements (book cover, author’s note, afterword, etc.) complement the body text. Drawing on Gérard Genette’s (1997) distinction of “peritext” and “epitext” and Nina Nørgaard’s (2018) multimodal stylistics of the novel, this talk treats another multimodal dimension of “quasi-textual” elements or features (such as typography, layout, page-turn, gutter, blank ...

Emotions in History: Boundary-Crossing Adventures Banner

RFG Conference: Emotions in History: Boundary-Crossing Adventures

Zoom

“Emotions in History: Boundary-Crossing Adventures” is a truly interdisciplinary collaboration between History and Psychology. The symposium features two keynote speakers, Professor Leda Cosmides (UCSB) representing Psychology, and Professor Anna Shields (Princeton) representing the Humanities. The roundtable discussion will occur between three members of Team Psychology and three members of Team Humanities. Each speaker will deliver a short presentation on a “boundary-crossing adventure” that has happened in their own research. Psychologists will discuss how a specific ...

Chernobyl and the Ecology of Disaster

Research Focus Group Talk: Are the Chornobyl Books Nature-Oriented?: Ukrainian Children’s Literature in Memory Dimensions

Zoom

The war in Ukraine raises the issue of a new nuclear threat, as five nuclear power plants are located there. Although the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the north of Ukraine is non-functional, the level of radiation is still very high. Moreover, the largest nuclear plant in Europe, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in the south of Ukraine, is threatened with a new nuclear catastrophe and radiation pollution since the Russian military invasion (Joint Statement ...

Farid - Deep Fakes

TMI Talk: Creating, Weaponizing, and Detecting Deep Fakes

Zoom

Although varied in their form and creation, deep fakes refer to AI-synthesized image, audio, or video. Deep fakes add to a long line of techniques for manipulating reality, but their introduction poses new risks because of the democratized access to what would have historically been the purview of Hollywood-style studios. In this talk, Farid will provide an overview of how deep fakes are created, how they are being used and misused, and if and how ...

Laura Kurgan - GPS for the Brain

TMI Talk: GPS for the Brain: Networks, Urbanisms, Algorithms

Zoom

Laura Kurgan will talk about her recent work involving network science and urban theory. She will present work from the Center for Spatial Research on the Urban History of Algorithms: Homophily and Weak Ties, a history which not surprisingly lies dormant in its use in network science. She will also present new work on navigation theory in neuroscience, which revisits and asks questions about the canonical urban theory of Kevin Lynch (1970) and Fred Jameson's ...

Emotions in History - The History of Our Minds Event

Research Focus Group Talk: The History of Our Minds: Evidence for Co-Evolution of Cultural and Psychological Processes

Zoom

Biologically modern humans are more than 200,000 years old. Many scientists have devoted their lives to understanding how architecture, social structure, and language have changed over this history. Yet we know almost nothing about the history of human minds. Behavioral science research has instead focused nearly exclusively on contemporary people, and psychological theories often draw from taxonomies that assume a culturally and historically stable structure to emotion, personality, morality, and other psychological processes. In this ...

Disability Studies RFG

Research Focus Group Talk: Understanding LatDisCrit Contours

Zoom

In this talk, Alexis Padilla will focus on defining and showing the significance of LatDisCrit as a transdisciplinary sub-field. Padilla will use three illustrative counterstories to capture how disability gets racialized in Latinx marginalization dynamics, while race/ethnicity serves as a proxy for oppressive disablement through exclusionary processes within US settings. Dr. Alexis Padilla is the Director of Research at the Disability Policy Consortium. Padilla is the author of Disability, Intersectional Agency, and Latinx Identity. Theorizing ...

The Critical Race Theory Forward Tracking Project - Event

TMI Talk: Critical Race Theory (CRT): What It Is, What It Isn’t, and What You Need to Know

Zoom

Critical Race Theory (CRT) seeks to understand why inequality persists in a society that has explicitly condemned racism and has repeatedly adopted laws and policies intended to eliminate it. Drawing on research in history, social sciences, and the humanities, CRT demonstrates how laws and policies can reproduce racial inequality—even when they are adopted without explicit racial bias. CRT is thus an important tool to support our nation’s ongoing efforts to achieve a robust multiracial democracy. ...

Racist Love - Event

Research Focus Group Talk: Racist Love – Author Conversation

Zoom

Please join us for a discussion of Leslie Bow's Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy (2022). The talk will feature a brief comment from the author, followed by Q and A with participants. Racist Love traces the ways in which Asian Americans become objects of anxiety and desire. Conceptualizing these feelings as “racist love,” Bow explores how race is abstracted and then projected onto Asianized objects. Bow shows how anthropomorphic objects and ...

Heather Houser TMI Event Infowhelm

TMI Talk: The Climate Infowhelm

Zoom

Climate infowhelm is the experience of feeling overwhelmed by too much information about the environmental crisis. Heather Houser will discuss how infowhelm feels, sounds, and looks in various media and how contemporary art manages environmental knowledge and provides new ways of understanding environmental change. Audience Q&A will follow. Heather Houser is the Mody C. Boatright Regents Professor in American and English Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Ecosickness ...

Jack Zipes, The Trials and Tribulations of Bambi and the Inscrutable Felix Salten, Lover of Animals

Research Focus Group Talk: The Trials and Tribulations of Bambi and the Inscrutable Felix Salten, Lover of Animals

Zoom

This talk follows Jack Zipes' recent publication of his new translation of Felix Salten's Bambi (1923). Zipes' research for this book demonstrates that Bambi was essentially a Jew, as were all the animals in the forest, and that he and they had to spend their lives avoiding pogroms in the forest and learning to deal with loneliness. Salten wrote other books, such as Fifteen Rabbits (1928) and Bambi's Children: The Story of a Forest Family ...

Consensus without Collaboration? - Rob Boddice Event

Research Focus Group Talk: Consensus without Collaboration? The Future of Emotion Research from the Perspective of History

Zoom

In recent years, multiple disciplines have converged on a biocultural understanding of human emotion, sensation and experience, but knowledge production in disciplinary silos remains. This talk is about the discipline of history's positionality in this budding, if unwitting, consensus among social neuroscientists, social psychologists, transcultural psychiatrists, neurophilosophers, and social scientists. Positioning history as a bridge builder, it nevertheless outlines the significant obstacles to genuine transdisciplinary collaboration. Rob Boddice (Ph.D., FRHistS) is Senior Research Fellow at ...

Psychogeographical Mapping of Hebrew Children's Culture

Research Focus Group Talk: Leah Goldberg’s Psychogeographical Mapping of Hebrew Children’s Culture

Zoom

This talk examines the comparative representations of the Mizrahi immigrant and the Holocaust refugee through the motif of the child immigrant to Israel in the mid-20th century through the work of Leah Goldberg (1911-1970). A prolific modernist poet, author, playwright, literary translator, and comparative literary critic who chaired the Department of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Goldberg's focus upon dislocation and language in her work for both adults and children is informed ...

Talk: Un Llanto Colectivo: a PerformaProtesta

Zoom

Join via Zoom here This talk will be an examination of the llanto (wail/scream) as political performance praxis through reflecting on the collective work of Cherríe Moraga, Celia Herrera Rodríguez and approximately twenty-five artists to stage a “PerformaProtesta,” Un llanto colectivo, at San Diego immigrant detention centers following the separation of migrant families during the summer of 2018. It discusses this “llanto space” as an alternative to the politics of recognition and representation, and the ...

Transnational Jewish Tradition and Memory in the Landscapes of Maurice Sendak

Research Focus Group Talk: Transnational Jewish Tradition and Memory in the Landscapes of Maurice Sendak

Zoom

This talk examines the role of Jewish folk traditions and memory in the picture books of the late Maurice Sendak (1928-2012), with special attention to Sendak’s handling of landscape and natural elements. Sendak’s own biography reflects a move in the 1970s from the urban spaces of Brooklyn and Manhattan to the forested landscape of Ridgefield, Connecticut. His work speaks to the experience of first-generation children of immigrants in early twentieth-century America, drawing on a Yiddish-inflected ...

Disability Studies RFG

Research Focus Group Discussion: Disability in Latin American and Latinx Contexts

Zoom

Please join us for a discussion on disability in Latin American and Latinx contexts. While disability studies is a diverse and evolving field, much of the focus has been on exploring disabled bodyminds in the context of the Global North, often leaving out questions of neoliberalism, colonialism, and racialization. This conversation will begin to explore how scholars interested in disability might begin expanding this conversation by including both Latin American and US Latinx perspectives on ...

Alt-Right Media Literacy Series

Alt-Right Media Literacy Series: Memeing their Way into the Mainstream: A Cultural Approach to Understanding the US Far Right

Zoom

The election of Donald Trump and the eventual J6th attempted insurrection left many people wondering how we got to this point. The answer to that question is multidimensional, complex, and nuanced, and this talk focuses on several pieces that helped generate the current moment. A broad constellation of far-right extremism highly adept at marketing ideas and emotions and far more sophisticated than often understood played a key role in rebranding white supremacy to ensure wider ...

Buddhism crip - Queered Variabilities

Research Focus Group Talk: Buddhismcrip – Queered Variabilities

Zoom

People performing diverse embodiments of sexualities, gender, and variable physical and neurological patterns, among others, often encounter specific difficulties and sometimes hostility when practicing Buddhism. In this talk, Professor Bee Scherer will look at these experiences of abjection, their grounding in social psychology, and how they relate to positions found in Buddhist philosophy and narratives. How can we negotiate oppressive readings of, for example, key Buddhist notions such as karma, No-Self, and detachment? How can ...

Global Snapshot: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Media, Performativity, and Global Communities

Conference: Global Snapshot: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Media, Performativity, and Global Communities

Zoom

Many scholars have questioned what the rise of globalization, facilitated through new forms of technology, could mean for our ability to study and reach larger audiences. While some media practitioners and researchers have struggled to keep pace, changes to global technologies also present the benefits of accessibility and creativity. Due to the impacts of Covid-19, global media has become an ever more vital avenue for continuing typical social practices in scholarship and artistic endeavors like ...

Research Focus Group Discussion: Global Adaptations: Throne of Blood

Zoom

This discussion will focus on Akira Kurosawa's 1957 film, Throne of Blood, as a key twentieth-century film and as an adaption of Shakespeare's Macbeth. Discussion will be centered around a number of key critical questions, such as: What does Kurosawa bring to Shakespeare? How can we understand this as part of a larger history of Shakespeare and adaptation? How has this film been influenced by and subsequently influenced global cinema and global Shakespeare? What are ...

GCLR Workshop Linshan Jiang

GCLR Dissertation Writing Workshop

Zoom

Please join us for this year's second GCLR Dissertation and Prospectus Writing Workshop for graduate students from any department in the Humanities at UCSB. Our presenter will be Linshan Jiang 蒋林珊, a doctoral candidate in the UCSB Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, who is presenting a chapter from her dissertation entitled "Mobilizing Shame: Tension between Nationalism and Feminism in Nieh Hualing’s Far Away, A River and Zhang Ling’s A Single Swallow." Linshan's ...

Mayte Green-Mercado - Mediterranean Displacements: Morisco Migration in the Sixteenth Century

Research Focus Group Talk: Mediterranean Displacements: Morisco Migration in the Sixteenth Century

Zoom

Please join us for a talk with Dr. Mayte Green-Mercado (Professor of History at Rutgers University--Newark) on the displacement of Moriscos —Iberian Muslims forcibly converted to Catholicism in the first two decades of the sixteenth century. In this discussion of an ethno-religious minority group, we will be exploring the possibilities of undisciplining and redisciplining histories of race and race-making in the premodern Mediterranean. Mayte Green-Mercado received her B.A. in European History from the University of ...

9th Annual American Indian and Indigenous Collective (AIIC) Symposium: “Imagining Indigenous Futurities”

Zoom

The Ninth Annual American Indian and Indigenous Collective (AIIC) Symposium, "Imagining Indigenous Futurities," is an interdisciplinary conference, featuring presentations from across the academy – including from the humanities, social sciences, fine arts, and sciences – and from community members and practitioners beyond academic borders. This year, in selecting the theme -- "Imagining Indigenous Futurities" -- the AIIC asks participants: “What is most urgent for our communities now?” In asking this, the symposium aims to advance ...

Monica Bethe: Ensuring the Future of Historic Textiles: The Case of a Japanese Empress's Court Gown.

Regeneration Talk: Ensuring the Future of Historic Textiles: The Case of a Japanese Empress’s Court Gown

Zoom

Objects talk to us over time and space, transmitting in their colors, shapes, textures, and materials insight into other lives and ways of living. Some we wish to preserve for their sheer beauty, others for the people, times, or places they represent. Of the items that are central to our daily lives, textiles are among the most perishable: if not used until they are rags, they still degrade naturally over time, prey to insects, mold, ...

Bolstering The Bard

Research Focus Group Discussion: Bolstering the Bard: Pedagogy and Performance Beyond UCSB

Zoom

This pedagogy event centers on an invited panel of knowledgeable actors, directors, dramaturgs, and educators to discuss experiences in conveying Shakespearean material to students and/or audiences with varying degrees of knowledge of the Bard, how to expand our methodologies as scholars, teachers, and/or artists to promote inclusivity, and how media/technology in various forms (film, social media, Zoom, etc.) can be utilized to help with these goals. The conversation will begin with introductions and a few ...

Racing Time: Chronologies of Black Muslim Belonging in Arabic Epics - Rachel Schine

Research Focus Group Talk: Racing Time: Chronologies of Black Muslim Belonging in Arabic Epics

Zoom

How do racialized icons of popular culture index Muslim ideas of history and belonging? Several Arabic epics (siyar sha‘biyya) contain Black protagonists who are assigned unique origin stories and legacies of involvement in Islam’s expansion. This talk will analyze their roles in the racial imaginaries of popular tales that proliferated from the 12th century onward across the Middle East and North Africa through oral and written traditions. Rachel Schine earned her Ph.D. in Near Eastern ...

Ship with wine barrels

Research Focus Group Workshop: Shifting Economic Power in Autun: The Donation of Constantine

Zoom

Autun’s textual and material record illustrates how and why ancient patterns of life in northeast Gaul began to give way during Late Antiquity. Adopting a methodology developed in feminist historiography, this paper explores the effect on Autun’s political economy of resources funneled to Autun’s bishop by the emperor Constantine in the early 4th century. Because Constantine did not restrict his patronage just to Autun, the city serves as a case study demonstrating how the introduction ...

John Majewski, The Many Journeys

Research Focus Group Talk: The Many Journeys of Robert Glenn: Memory, Slavery, and the Transition to Freedom

Zoom

Professor John Majewski will speak about the 1937 WPA interview of Robert Glenn, who recounted how he was sold as a child as part of the slave trade. After emancipation, he was eventually able to find his parents. Glenn's interview is remarkably rich and detailed, and because he includes many specific names and places, Professor Majewski has been able to begin reconstructing his life using census records and other documents. The discussion will explore the ...

Russia's Invasion of Ukraine: A Roundtable Discussion

Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: A Roundtable Discussion

Zoom

UCSB faculty members will discuss the invasion of Ukraine, including its historical background, regional and global ramifications, and international responses. Panelists: Benjamin J. Cohen, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Political Science Adrienne Edgar, Professor, History Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, Assistant Professor, Global Studies Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Professor Emeritus, History Adrian Ivakhiv, Visiting Scholar, Carsey-Wolf Center Cynthia Kaplan, Professor, Political Science Moderator: Sara Pankenier Weld, Professor, Germanic & Slavic Studies Live closed-captioning will be provided. Free to attend; registration required to ...

Hamraie Critical Access Studies

Research Focus Group Talk: Critical Access Studies

Zoom

Thirty years after the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act, much of the built environment remains inaccessible to disabled people. Accordingly, the vast majority of research and writing on accessibility seeks to convince the unconvinced of the value of inclusion. This field, which Professor Aimi Hamraie terms “Access Studies,” would benefit from greater engagement with the concepts, practices, and political commitments of critical disability studies. In this talk, Hamraie will discuss the emerging field ...

What is a Shakespeare Chalk Talk

Research Focus Group Discussion: Chalk Talk Revisited

Zoom

After the success of our first Chalk Talk this past fall, the What Is a Shakespeare?: Shakespeare and Global Media RFG is hosting “Chalk Talk Revisited.” Even if you weren’t able to make our first event, we welcome everyone to join us from any discipline as we continue our discussions about cultivating socio-culturally aware pedagogy and global media in the classroom. Whether you are a veteran Shakespearean or a first-timer to teaching the Bard, we ...

Information Sessions: Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program

Zoom

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 ...

Research Focus Group Discussion: Sameer Pandya

Zoom

Dr. Sameer Pandya will lead a discussion with graduate students to discuss his latest novel, Members Only, as well as his broader thoughts on South Asian American Studies. Sameer Pandya is an Associate Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at UC Santa Barbara, a fiction writer, and an interdisciplinary literary and cultural studies scholar. In both his fiction and scholarship, Pandya is primarily interested in the question of cultural dislocation and racial identity ...

Caroline Levine: Infrastructures of Collective Life: A Formalist’s Guide to the Climate Crisis

Regeneration Talk: Infrastructures of Collective Life: A Formalist’s Guide to the Climate Crisis

Zoom

  Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Join us online for a talk by Caroline Levine. Audience Q&A will follow. What do scholars of literature and the arts have to offer in response to the climate crisis? The aesthetic humanities have long traditions of insisting on open-endedness, negation, and inaction. Levine argues that in this moment of rapid and destabilizing change, this tradition has reached its political limit. She makes ...

Andrew Way Leong

Talk: A Queer, Queer Race: Orientations for Early Japanese American Literature

Zoom

REGISTER NOW This online talk will feature discussions and close readings from a chapter in Professor Andrew Way Leong's forthcoming book, "A Queer, Queer Race: Orientations for Japanese/American Literature." This book examines Japanese and English language texts written by Shōson, Sadakichi Hartmann, Arishima Takeo, and Yoné Noguchi—authors who resided in the United States between the opening of mass Japanese emigration in 1885 and the ban on Japanese immigration imposed by the Immigration Act of 1924. ...

Disability Studies RFG

Research Focus Group Discussion: Disability, Blackness, and Race in US Literature

Zoom

In celebration of Black History Month, the Disability Studies Initiative invites you to discuss two essays that shed light on the material intersections of disability and race: Josh Lukin's short article, "Disability and Blackness" (2006), which calls for the consideration of Black experiences in the history of disability and its artistic representations, and Michelle Jarman's "Race and Disability in US Literature" (2018), which takes its framework from Black feminist theories and calls for relational approaches ...

Asian/American Studies Collective RFG

Research Focus Group Roundtable: Graduate Student Research

Zoom

The Asian/American Studies Collective (AASC), a research focus group supported by the IHC, will be hosting a graduate student research roundtable via Zoom. During this roundtable, two advanced graduated students will be presenting their works-in-progress for feedback and comments from attendees. We welcome parties interested in Asian American Studies work! For questions, please email: aasc.ucsb@gmail.com. Sponsored by the IHC’s Asian/American Studies Collective Research Focus Group

Regeneration Talk: Alexandre Gefen and Sandra Laugier

Regeneration Talk: Maintaining Life, Repairing the World: Ethics, Philosophy, and Literature

Zoom

The COVID pandemic appeared as a threat to human life, both in the vital sense (a risk to biological life) and in the social sense (a risk to social life: disruption from the suspension of activities, lack of public transport, closure of schools, etc.). It has revealed radical vulnerabilities: of institutions, the species, and the planet; of fragile populations, workers “on the front line,” and each individual. The importance of caring for others and for ...

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

Zoom

Rubén Martínez will receive this year's Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature. Martínez is Professor of English and the Fletcher Jones Chair in Literature & Writing at Loyola Marymount University. His books include The Other Side: Notes from the New L.A., Mexico City & Beyond (1993), Flesh Life: Sex in Mexico (with Joseph Rodriguez, 2006), The New Americans (2004), Crossing Over: A Mexican Family over the Migrant Trail (2001), and East Side Stories ...

Leah DeVun Event Discussing The Shape of Sex

Research Focus Group Talk: Discussing The Shape of Sex with Leah DeVun

Zoom

Join the Un-disciplining Premodern Histories of Race and Gender Research Focus Group for a guest talk and conversation with Professor Leah DeVun on DeVun's new book, The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance. We will discuss the rich history DeVun traces in premodern Europe through the intersections of race, religion, sex, and gender. Leah DeVun is Associate Professor of History and Vice Chair for Undergraduate Education at Rutgers University, as well ...

Regeneration Artist Talk: Harmonia Rosales

Regeneration Artist Talk: Harmonia Rosales

Zoom

Afro-Cuban American artist Harmonia Rosales will discuss her new and dynamic body of work presented in the exhibition, Entwined. Rosales’ interweaving of representations from ancient Greek and Yoruba mythologies invites viewers to challenge their ideas about identity and empowerment. Women and people of color, the protagonists of her canvases, assume roles of power and beauty in exquisite imaginings of ancient myths and Renaissance paintings. To learn more about the exhibition Entwined, which is on display ...

Passing for Perfect Asian/American Studies Collective RFG erin Khuê Ninh Event

Research Focus Group Talk: Passing for Perfect Book Launch

Zoom

In her new book, Passing for Perfect, erin Khuê Ninh considers the factors that drove college imposters such as Azia Kim—who pretended to be a Stanford freshman—and Jennifer Pan—who hired a hitman to kill her parents before they found out she had never received her high school diploma—to extreme lengths to appear successful. Why would someone make such an illogical choice? And how do they stage these lies so convincingly, and for so long? These ...

What is a Shakespeare? RFG Works in Progress Event 2

Research Focus Group Workshop: Shakespeare and Global Media Works in Progress Event #2

Zoom

In our second Works-in-Progress workshop, we will discuss various strategies and resources for conducting archival work, receiving funding, and getting involved in larger scholarly activities (such as conferences, journals, and symposia) related to Shakespeare and Global Media. We will build on our previous work of cultivating a multimedia bibliography, as well as developing questions and frameworks that interrogate established modes of scholarly production. We will consider questions like: What does it mean to do “global ...

Disability Studies RFG

Research Focus Group Discussion: Dysgenic Stories: Field Worker Reports, Contradiction, and Confinement at Sonoma State Home, 1920-1921

Zoom

Our discussion will focus on Isidro González's paper and another piece of scholarship. González's research focuses on Sonoma State Home for the Feebleminded in Eldridge, California, and how eugenics field workers—those involved in observing and notating nonnormative (“dysgenic”) phenotypic, familial, and lifestyle attributes of institutionalized people—crafted individualized clinical narratives of "inmates" to not only legitimize their profession, the state employer, and the Eugenics Record Office (ERO), but also to surveil, pathologize, and medicalize “unfit” human ...

Reading group discussion: Leah DeVun's "The Monstrous Races: Mapping the Borders of Sex"

RFG Reading Group Discussion: Leah DeVun’s “The Hyena’s Unclean Sex: Beasts, Bestiaries, and Jewish Communities”

Zoom

Zoom meeting link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/84025262121?pwd=SGVQRFpnbkhlcUlZcTBZRTRRa0VvUT09 Join the Un-disciplining Premodern Histories of Race and Gender Research Focus Group as we continue reading from Leah DeVun's pathbreaking history of nonbinary sex, The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), in preparation for her talk on January 31st. This week we will be reading the third chapter: "The Hyena's Unclean Sex: Beasts, Bestiaries, and Jewish Communities." Please email reemtaha@ucsb.edu or ...

Asian/American Studies Collective RFG

Research Focus Group Roundtable: Graduate Student Research

Zoom

The Asian/American Studies Collective (AASC), a research focus group supported by the IHC, will be hosting a graduate student research roundtable via Zoom. During this roundtable, two advanced graduated students will be presenting their works-in-progress for feedback and comments from attendees. We welcome parties interested in Asian American Studies work! For questions, please email: aasc.ucsb@gmail.com. Sponsored by the IHC’s Asian/American Studies Collective Research Focus Group

Research Focus Group Meeting: Film Discussion of Noh Macbeth

Zoom

Come join the What is a Shakespeare?: Shakespeare and Global Media Research Focus Group as we discuss Noh Macbeth, a 2006 Japanese adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth. All are welcome! Please watch the film in advance of the discussion. The film can be accessed for free via the MIT Global Shakespeare archive here: https://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/noh-macbeth-izumi-noriko-2006/ Register to attend for Zoom link Image: Noh Macbeth Sponsored by the IHC's What Is a Shakespeare?: Shakespeare and Global Media Research Focus ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Reclaiming Confiscated African Histories

Zoom

Zoom attendance link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/s/81168927411 How do histories of a people get confiscated? And what is the significance of indigenous epistemologies in reclaiming stolen, silent, and distorted histories? These are some of the fundamental questions that underlie Professor Shadreck Chirikure's research on Great Zimbabwe, a prominent symbol of African civilizations of Southern Africa that colonial historiography tried very hard to wrest away from Africans over the last two centuries. Professor Chirikure has produced several publications from ...

Research Focus Group Workshop: Phillis Wheatley’s Desire to Look

Zoom

At a time when aesthetic philosophy defined whiteness in terms of the ability to behold and surveil the world, Phillis Wheatley Peters developed new forms of countervisuality in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). Badley's essay focuses on Peters' ekphrastic poetry, which portrays her lyric personae gazing upon paintings, people, and landscapes in ways that mark the limits of visual perception. By dramatizing spectatorship as a meditation upon opaque surfaces and inscrutable sentiments, ...

Talk: Shards of Places, Shards of Time: Katja Petrowskaja’s Modernist Poetics of History

Zoom

Zoom attendance link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/89607162040 A family story, a memoir, a travelogue, an intimate history of Jewish migration and persecution in the twentieth century—fitting into neither of these categories neatly, and yet resonating with all of them, Katja Petrowskaja’s Maybe Esther (2019; Vielleicht Esther, 2014) relates the narrator’s journey from Berlin to piece together her family’s history across Poland, the Ukraine, and Russia. This presentation considers fragmentation as the text’s key aesthetic quiddity to ask how ...

Disability Studies RFG

Research Focus Group Workshop: Why Different Models of Disability?

Zoom

Rachel Lambert (Assistant Professor in Special Education and Mathematics Education, Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, UC Santa Barbara) will offer a workshop on the different models of disability, including medical, social, political/ relational and complex embodiment. Lambert’s scholarly work investigates the intersections between Disability Studies in Education and mathematics education. She has conducted longitudinal studies of how Latinx students with learning disabilities construct identities as mathematics learners, and how mathematical pedagogy shapes how teachers perceive ...

RFG Event

Research Focus Group Talk: The Work of War: Gender and Care in Kabul, Afghanistan

Zoom

Zoom attendance link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/84686450683 Following widows and their families in the aftermath of a suicide attack in Kabul, Afghanistan, this talk centers the lives and aspirations of widows amidst serial war and serial humanitarianism. As white sentimentality structures landscapes of care in Kabul, refusal is what remains. This research is based on more than four years of fieldwork between 2006 and 2013. Dr. Anila Daulatzai is a sociocultural anthropologist and the Chancellor’s Fellow at UC ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Post and the Shell: The Sacrificability of Animals in the Vedic Village

Zoom

Zoom attendance link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/87209704725 In this talk, Jonathan Dickstein will discuss anatomical and residential animal taxonomies as represented in canonical Vedic texts of the second and first millennia BCE. The Brāhmaṇas (900-650 BCE) in particular emphasize a residence-based categorization of animals into two main categories: “village animals” (grāmya) and “wilderness animals” (āraṇya). Following a discussion of the complexities of these two classes, Dickstein will pivot to the relationship between residence and the concept of medha, ...

What Is a Shakespeare?: Shakespeare and Global Media: Works in Progress Series: Developing an Archive

Research Focus Group Workshop: Works-in-Progress Series: Developing an Archive

Zoom

In our first Works-in-Progress workshop, we will discuss various strategies and resources for developing archives related to Shakespeare and Global Media. This will include cultivating a multimedia bibliography that extends to potential source texts, critical works, and theoretical approaches, as well as developing questions and frameworks that interrogate established modes of scholarly production. We will consider questions like: What does it mean to do "global Shakespeare"? What methods and approaches push the boundaries of scholarship? ...

Clint Smith

Regeneration Talk: Clint Smith

Zoom

Join us online for a conversation between Clint Smith and IHC Director Susan Derwin. Audience Q&A will follow. Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, which was a #1 New York Times Bestseller, and the poetry collection Counting Descent, which won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the ...

African Studies Exploding the Khoi and San Colonial Stereotypes, Reclaiming African Histories Event

Research Focus Group Talk: Exploding the Khoi and San Colonial Stereotypes, Reclaiming African Histories

Zoom

Academic historians have largely represented the Khoi and the San people of Southern Africa as marginal to the production of the region’s history, deleting their place in the emergence and development of African civilization and self-liberation. As a public historian, intellectual, activist and healer, Attaqua’s voice has intervened to forcefully reframe the history of the indigenous people of Southern Africa. In this talk, she will speak about the Khoi and San’s long struggle against the ...

Disability Studies RFG

Research Focus Group Discussion: Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities

Zoom

Please join the Disability Studies Initiative for a discussion of Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory (available online after signing into the UCSB library). We will focus our discussion on two chapters: “Bodies of Nature: The Environmental Politics of Disability” by Alison Kafer and “Cripping Sustainability, Realizing Food Justice” by Kim Q. Hall. This event will be moderated by Olivia Henderson. A second year graduate student in the Department of English at ...

What is a Shakespeare Chalk Talk

Research Focus Group Chalk Talk: Moving Beyond One Dimensional Shakespeare in the Classroom

Zoom

Students often shy away from Shakespeare in their classes, but educators can also get nervous about teaching the Bard! Our goal for our pedagogical discussion is to reflect on our own experiences learning about and teaching Shakespeare in the classroom and how we can enhance our future teaching practices, particularly through the lens of utilizing global media and socio-culturally aware pedagogy. We will provide links to optional pre-event resources after registration, but we invite everyone ...

David Pellow Regeneration Inaugural Lecture

Inaugural Lecture: Environmental Justice as Regeneration

Zoom

The grassroots environmental justice movement and the field of environmental justice studies have evolved in creative and inspiring directions over the years. Recent work focuses on the challenges of envisioning and realizing abolition, confronting anthropogenic climate change/disruption, and articulating transformative approaches to achieving ecologically healthy and socially equitable policy-making for a “just transition.” This presentation considers what each of these areas of scholarship and politics could signal for the future of environmental justice and for ...

Humanities Decanted: Naked Shakes Twelfth Night

Humanities Decanted: Irwin Appel, Naked Shakes

Zoom

Join us online for a dialogue between Irwin Appel (Theater and Dance) and James Kearney (English) about Appel’s theater company, Naked Shakes, and their recent production of Twelfth Night, staged outside at UCSB’s Commencement Green in front of the lagoon. Audience Q&A will follow. Naked Shakes derives its rather provocative name from the principle that an actor in a bare theatrical space, along with meticulous attention to language, few technical elements, and the collective imagination ...

What is a Shakespeare

Research Focus Group Welcome Meeting Two: What Is a Shakespeare?: Shakespeare and Global Media

Zoom

Come join us for our second meeting of the IHC-sponsored Research Focus Group “What is a Shakespeare?” This will be the second of two welcome meetings we are hosting for the group (in order to cover more scheduling needs). “What Is a Shakespeare?: Shakespeare and Global Media” is an interdisciplinary group of graduate students and faculty focused on investigating the notion of "global Shakespeare." We are interested in understanding both the ways that Shakespeare has ...

What is a Shakespeare

Research Focus Group Welcome Meeting One: What Is a Shakespeare?: Shakespeare and Global Media

Zoom

Come join us for our first meeting of the IHC-sponsored Research Focus Group “What is a Shakespeare?” This will be the first of two welcome meetings we are hosting for the group (in order to cover more scheduling needs). The second meeting will be Thursday, October 7th at 11am PST (more info here). “What Is a Shakespeare?: Shakespeare and Global Media” is an interdisciplinary group of graduate students and faculty focused on investigating the notion ...

Event Series Performance: Life Is a Dream (La Vida es Sueño)

Performance: Life Is a Dream (La Vida es Sueño)

Zoom

REGISTER NOW Life Is a Dream (La Vida es Sueño) by Pedro Calderón de la Barca adapted by Nilo Cruz JUNE 4  & 5, 2021/ 7 PM PDT Please join us for the Zoom staging of Pedro Calderón de la Barca's La Vida es Sueño, broadcasting live on Friday, June 4 and Saturday, June 5. This virtual fairy tale tells the story of a young prince imprisoned in a tower, a woman in disguise seeking ...

Event Series Performance: Life Is a Dream (La Vida es Sueño)

Performance: Life Is a Dream (La Vida es Sueño)

Zoom

REGISTER NOW Life Is a Dream (La Vida es Sueño) by Pedro Calderón de la Barca adapted by Nilo Cruz JUNE 4  & 5, 2021/ 7 PM PDT Please join us for the Zoom staging of Pedro Calderón de la Barca's La Vida es Sueño, broadcasting live on Friday, June 4 and Saturday, June 5. This virtual fairy tale tells the story of a young prince imprisoned in a tower, a woman in disguise seeking ...

Discussion: Indigenous Dialogues on Root Causes: Climate Justice and COVID-19 in California

Zoom

REGISTER NOW This webinar will center dialogue on the importance of Indigenous Ecological Knowledges in California, and will offer critical perspectives on the COVID-19 pandemic as a symptomatic expression of the social and ecological imbalances wrought by colonial violence and the logics of enclosure and extraction. Julie Cordero-Lamb and Hana Aqiwo Lee of the Syuxtun Plant Mentorship Collective will speak to the crucial role that medicinal plant tending, harvesting, and processing continues to play in ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Race, Caste, Hierarchy, Difference: Reflections on Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste

Zoom

ATTEND DISCUSSION In Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson brings together the freighted categories of “race” and “caste” and argues that, while the two are not synonymous, they “can and do coexi st in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other.” Wilkerson suggests that racism is the visible manifestation of a hidden and insidious caste system, a system of social domination that uses human differences in order to construct a ranking ...

Discussion: Indigenous Responses to Climate Injustice and Pandemics in India and Amazonia

Zoom

REGISTER NOW This webinar will feature presentations about the connections between climate justice, oil & uranium extractivism and responses to COVID-19 based on Indigenous territorial knowledges. First, Oswando Nenquimo, a Waorani leader from the Ecuadorian Amazon, will tells us about the importance of the Amazon Rainforest and the role of Indigenous organizations that he is part of: Alianza Ceibo and CONCONAWEP. He will emphasize on the challenges that oil extraction has posed for Indigenous peoples ...

Talk: Women in Cooperative Agricultural Production and Consumption: The Case of Rio de Janeiro’s Rede Ecológica

Zoom

REGISTER NOW The presentation will illuminate the multiple roles played by women within the infrastructure of the Rede Ecologica (Ecological Consumers’ Network) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. These include: relations established with the agroecological producers; campaigns and other educational activities focused on the theme of food, nutritional security, and family-based agricultural practices; communication and networking with other social movements, among others. Through an intersectional feminist approach, we will analyze concrete experiences within territories in the ...

RFG Event

Research Focus Group Talk: Willing Ethnic-Nationalists, Diffusion, and Resentment: A Micro-Foundational Account

Zoom

ATTEND DISCUSSION Using evidence concerning the consolidation of Hindu nationalism in India, Aseema Sinha presents new ethnographic data about the variety of popular support for the Hindutva project and proposes an interactive theory of social identity. This framework helps us understand how Hindu nationalism becomes embedded in society. She argues that Hindu nationalism in India could be fruitfully analyzed by focusing on the processes through which ideas of exclusive nationalism spread among middle classes and ...

VWW reading event

Reading: UC Santa Barbara Student Veteran Writers

Zoom

Read the student veterans’ stories in The Santa Barbara Independent. UC Santa Barbara student veterans will read stories about their military experiences, followed by audience Q&A. Presenters: David Guerrero, Robert Hickman, Michael Ramirez, and Nick Tash David Guerrero served in the United States Marine Corps as an Infantry rifleman from 2003 to 2007. He earned his AS in Criminology and Liberal Arts from Santa Barbara City College. David transferred to UCSB in the Fall of ...

Keum

Humanities Decanted: Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Join us online for a dialogue between Tae-Yeoun Keum (Political Science) and Andrew Norris (Political Science) about Keum’s new book, Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought. Audience Q&A will follow. Plato’s use of myths—the Myth of Metals, the Myth of Er—sits uneasily with his canonical reputation as the inventor of rational philosophy. Since the Enlightenment, interpreters like Hegel have sought to resolve this ...

2021 Arthur N. Rupe Great Debate: Taming Titans: How Should We Regulate Big Tech?

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Participants: Sonia Katyal, The University of California, Berkeley, School of Law Kate Klonick, St. John's University, School of Law Randal C. Picker, The University of Chicago, The Law School Moderator: Michael J. Burstein, Yeshiva University, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law Experts on law and technology will debate how Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft should be regulated. Are they 21st-century trusts? Guardians of free ...

Keynote Address: Indigenous Knowledge and Climate Justice in a Pandemic-Prone World

Zoom

Five hundred years of the colonial remaking of landscapes of most of the world’s continents have ravaged the planet in monumental ways. Empire-building has clearly benefitted people of Europe’s imperial projects while bringing catastrophic change to indigenous populations. The fallout of imperialism and all its attendant technologies has brought humankind to an existential crisis, with climate change and now pandemics as interlinked threats. This talk will bring together these issues, highlighting the wisdom contained in ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Sri Sabhapati Swami and the “Translocalization” of Sivarajayoga

Zoom

Keith Cantú’s talk will center on the life and yogic literature of the Tamil yogi Sri Sabhapati Swami (Capāpati Cuvāmikaḷ, 1828–1923/4). The first part of the talk will consist of an overview of Sabhapati’s life and historical context, including his interactions and falling out with the founders of the Theosophical Society, his literature and visual diagrams in numerous prestige and Indian vernacular languages, his Śaiva yogic cosmology and perspectives on Hindu traditions and other religions, ...

Disability Studies RFG

Research Focus Group Workshop: A Disability Studies Perspective on Universal Design for Learning

Zoom

ATTEND DISCUSSION Professor Rachel Lambert (Education, UC Santa Barbara) will offer a workshop on Universal Design for Learning (UDL). She will shed light on its development, including roots in Universal Design. She will describe the radical possibilities in UDL, as well as critiques. She will present some of her own work, which seeks to integrate design thinking as a process for educators to use UDL to (re)design curriculum, spaces and systems. Prior to the workshop, ...

Talk: Popular Feminist Communication: Tools for Organization in Times of Destruction

Zoom

REGISTER NOW Revista Amazonas (Amazonas Magazine) is a collective made up of women from Colombia, Brazil, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Argentina, Mexico and Spain. It was born out of a commitment to publishing texts and images made by women from anywhere in the world, covering all literary themes and genres, but always from a perspective that is trans-feminist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-colonial and in defense of all forms of life. The magazine emphasizes that focusing on what women ...

Information Session: Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program

Zoom

REGISTER NOW Join the IHC to learn more about the Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program. Explore the course offerings, hear about paid internship and fellow-designed community project opportunities, and find out more about the capstone presentation. If you cannot attend the info session but would like to learn more about the program, please email Erin Nerstad at nerstad@ihc.ucsb.edu. REGISTER NOW

What We Can Do for Each Other: Wake Work in Our Times

Living Democracy Talk: What We Can Do For Each Other

Zoom

One of the greatest threats against democracy and justice is indolence--defined as a form of militant indifference based on the lack of empathy for the suffering of others. Cristina Rivera Garza will explore how taking part in and contributing to transnational emotional communities in Mexico and the U.S., many based on shared experiences of social suffering and the grieving that comes with it, may help us leap out of ourselves and into the heart of the bond we share ...

Conference: Fallout: Chernobyl and the Ecology of Disaster

Zoom

CONFERENCE REGISTRATION The interdisciplinary virtual conference “Fallout: Chernobyl and the Ecology of Disaster” will take place on Friday, April 30, 2021 at 9:00am-4:00pm, with an international slate of speakers representing a variety of disciplines who will share their insights on the 35th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. Thirty-five years after the 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl, the interdisciplinary virtual conference Fallout: Chernobyl and the Ecology of Disaster considers its afterlife and reverberations in various disciplines, including culture ...

Rana Humanities Decanted

Humanities Decanted: Race Characters: Ethnic Literature and the Figure of the American Dream

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Join us online for a dialogue between Swati Rana (English) and Stephanie L. Batiste (English) about Rana’s new book, Race Characters: Ethnic Literature and the Figure of the American Dream. Audience Q&A will follow. A vexed figure inhabits U.S. literature and culture: the visibly racialized immigrant who disavows minority identity and embraces the American dream. Such figures are potent and controversial, for they promise ...

Humanities Decanted: Violentologies: Violence, Identity, and Ideology in Latina/o Literature

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Join us online for a dialogue between Ben Olguín (English, UCSB) and María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo (Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU) about Olguín’s new book, Violentologies: Violence, Identity, and Ideology in Latina/o Literature. Audience Q&A will follow. Violentologies: Violence, Identity, and Ideology in Latina/o Literature, explores how various forms of violence undergird a wide range of Latina/o subjectivities, or Latinidades, from 1835 to the present. ...

Research Focus Group Meeting: Embracing Ecological Uncertainty through Narrative

Zoom

Uncertainty is a central psychological dimension of the ecological crisis. The science of climate change brings into view widely divergent scenarios; the discrepancy between these more or less catastrophic visions of the future undermines our ontological security (in Anthony Giddens’s terminology). Dr. Caracciolo argues that literary narrative has an important role to play in cultivating readers’ ability to live with uncertainty. He describes this process as a shift from a primarily negative understanding of uncertainty ...

Lessons of the Hour—Frederick Douglass

CANCELLED | Living Democracy Talk: Lessons of the Hour—Frederick Douglass

Zoom

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED Artist and filmmaker, Isaac Julien, and writer and curator, Mark Nash, will screen excerpts from Julien's film "Lessons of the Hour—Frederick Douglass" in a presentation that will explore the importance of looking to history and biography to articulate contemporary cultural movements. Isaac Julien's moving image practice draws from and comments on a range of artistic disciplines including film, theatre, photography and performance. Julien is a Distinguished Professor of the Arts ...

Medieval Studies Annual Colloquium: Global/Premodern/Race

Zoom

Register by emailing global.premodern.race@gmail.com by March 19, 2021 This symposium brings together scholars working in Iberian, Middle Eastern, and Medieval Studies to engage in a critical discussion concerning race—reevaluating both its utility as a category of analysis in the premodern world and how it has structured medieval and early modern studies as academic fields. Participants include: PAMELA PATTON (Art History, Princeton University) M. LINDSAY KAPLAN (English, Georgetown University) HANNAH BARKER (History, Arizona State University) MOHAMAD ...

Disability Studies RFG

Research Focus Group Discussion: Designing Disability

Zoom

ATTEND DISCUSSION We will be discussing Professor Elizabeth Guffey's introduction and chapter 1 to her latest book, Designing Disability (Bloomsbury, 2018). A Professor of Art & Design History, and Director of the MA in Modern and Contemporary Art, Criticism and Theory at State University of New York at Purchase, Professor Guffey co-edited Making Disability Modern (Bloomsbury, 2020) and is the founding editor of the peer-reviewed journal Design and Culture (Routledge). Cosponsored by the IHC’s Disability ...

Research Focus Group Talk: The Blood Files: Epidemic, Medium, Milieu

Zoom

ATTEND DISCUSSION Epidemics make us keenly aware of our multispecies distributions: of changes to our microbial makeup, of the mediums (body fluids to the elements) that enable transmission. While our body makes us aware of fevers and aches, we need technical mediation beyond the everyday thermometer to track and understand changing microbial-human relations. Epidemic media—a range of technologies, microscopes to PCR machines—are the subject of Bishnupriya Ghosh’s book, The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media. Drawing ...

Talk: A Wave of Difference: Language Expression in the Argentine Feminist Imaginary

Zoom

REGISTER NOW In the context of a disproportionate increase in sexual violence against cis, trans, and transvestite women since 2015, Argentine feminisms have prefigured the untimely irruption of public space in both process and form. The movements’ interventions not only impact the social conditions and the epistemic tools for popular intelligibility of language expression ​​of gender violence, through an innovative use of communication technologies and social networks, but also articulate, from the multidimensionality in which ...

Asian/American Studies Collective RFG

Research Focus Group Talk: Cannabis and South Asia

Zoom

Zoom meeting link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/81976204749?pwd=ekZ2UUtFd0U0Znh6bFpIcXFXWUs5QT09 Historical scholarship now conceives empire as a webbed uneven field of power relations and a multispecies enterprise. In other words, the anxious and breathless struggle of European imperialism to sustain itself subjected human, plant, animal, and insect bodies to its ambition to govern through logics of colonial difference. This paper argues that the cannabis plant in South Asia, in the nineteenth century, while being a subject of British revenue systems transformed ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Kings and Cripples in the Arthurian World

Zoom

Zoom meeting link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/87492220092?pwd=RExPbnl0N3d0ZVR2ZGpEdkJ1cHdPQT09 While the lived reality of disability in the Middle Ages was surely a wretched one, at the same time we encounter persistent associations between disabled and royal or aristocratic bodies in medieval culture, its imagery and narratives. Nowhere is this truer than in the Arthurian world, at whose core there lies a powerful but immobile figure, the Rich Fisher King. This talk looks at such linkage through Arthurian texts and illustrated ...

W. Patrick McCray

Humanities Decanted: Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Join us online for a dialogue between Patrick McCray (History) and Alan Liu (English) about McCray’s new book, Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture. Audience Q&A will follow. Despite C. P. Snow’s warning, in 1959, of an unbridgeable chasm between the humanities and the sciences, engineers and scientists of that era enthusiastically collaborated with artists to ...

Disability Studies RFG

Research Focus Group Roundtable: Disability Justice Conversation

Zoom

REGISTER HERE Join Gary White, UCSB's Disabled Students Program, Eric Kruger, UCSB's Disabled Students Program, Afiya Browne, UCSB's Multicultural Center, Sam del Castillo, Graduate Division and graduate student, and Shanna Killeen, Disability Studies Initiative RFG, for a conversation about accessibility and intersectional justice. This conversation will discuss information, tools, and resources for creating intentional and accessible spaces and community engagement. This conversation also aims to help us think through what this moment of remote work ...

Talk: We Are Charrúa Women: From Negation to Re-Existence In Our Body-Territory

Zoom

REGISTER NOW Charrúa women have gone through dispossession, exclusion, and negation that left marks on their collective memory and body-territory. This genocidal process did not end in 19th-century Uruguay, but continues today and manifests itself every time that institutions or civil society denies their existence as an indigenous people. For fifteen years, together with Charrúa sisters from Argentina, Charrúa women from Uruguay have been working to demolish hegemonic narratives of the market and state. As ...

Reuben Miller Critical Mass Talk

Living Democracy Talk: Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link While more people are incarcerated in the United States than in any other nation in the history of the western world, the prison is but one (comparatively) small part of a vast carceral landscape. The 600,000 people released each year join nearly 5 million people already on probation or parole, 12 million who are processed through a county jail, 19 million U.S. adults estimated ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Elemental City: Ecology, Media and Narratives of Crisis in Postcolonial Calcutta

Zoom

This talk explores how the cultural politics of elemental media influence crisis narratives produced in relation to urban change. Taking Calcutta as a case study, Doctoral Candidate Somak Mukherjee argues that the crisis of postcolonial cities has a distinct ecological imaginary, borne of tension between mediated pairings of elements and more typical civic imaginaries such as civility, citizenship, community, development, or progress. Four examples of elements—earth, air, water, and fire—are used as representative figures to ...

AIIC 2021 8th Annual Symposium: Native Feminisms

Zoom

REGISTER NOW The Eighth Annual AIIC Symposium, “Native Feminisms: Centering American Indian and Indigenous Land and People,” seeks to focus Native feminisms by privileging the knowledge of Native women, girls, trans, non-binary, and two spirit people. As Mishuana Goeman shows, drawing attention to embodied experience, positionality, and spatiality foregrounds relationships between bodies, minds, spirits, and lands as methods of knowledge creation. Relevant topics to broader discussions of Native feminisms include: embodiment, futurity, spatiality, memory, trauma, ...

Dwight Reynolds

Humanities Decanted: The Musical Heritage of Al-Andalus

Zoom

Click here for a 20% publisher's discount on The Musical Heritage of Al-Andalus   Join us online for a dialogue between Dwight Reynolds (Religious Studies) and Debra Blumenthal (History) about Reynolds’ new book, The Musical Heritage of Al-Andalus. Audience Q&A will follow. The Musical Heritage of Al-Andalus is a critical account of the history of Andalusian music in Iberia from the Islamic conquest of 711 to the final expulsion of the Moriscos (Spanish Muslims converted ...

Strongmen: From Mussolini to Trump

Living Democracy Talk: Strongmen: From Mussolini to Trump

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link What do strongman leaders across a century have in common? Why do people continue to follow them, despite the destruction they cause? Drawing on her new book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, Ruth Ben-Ghiat discusses the playbook of corruption, virility, propaganda, and violence they utilize, how people have resisted authoritarians over a century, and what we can do to strengthen democracy in America and ...

Asian/American Studies Collective RFG

Research Focus Group Talk: Social Media and the Shape of “Man”

Zoom

Zoom Meeting Link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/85893482888 Inspired by Cho's ethnographic work with queer of color users of the platform Tumblr and using the Tumblr presence of Filipinx transfeminine visual and performance artist Mark Aguhar as a recurring touchstone, this work-in-progress talk’s provocation is that the assumptive ways in which a social media platform “should” be designed—singular identity, linear text exchanges, direct messaging, traversable connections, and more—in fact instantiate a model of “Man” that can be traced back ...

Talk: Gendered Violence and Financialization of Social Reproduction: A Feminist Perspective On Debt

Zoom

REGISTER NOW FEMINISMS FROM BELOW, AND TOWARDS THE SOUTH This speaker series welcomes feminist militants from Latin America to share their perspectives and experiences on building popular power towards a mass feminist movement. Over the past decade, Latin American feminists have identified manifestations of gender-based oppression under capitalism in everyday women’s conditions in order to successfully mobilize them as part of a political movement. Feminists produce analyses and subsequent strategies around reproductive rights, resource extractivism, ...

Talk: An Expansive Rebellion: Feminism and Social Revolt in Chile

Zoom

Zoom Meeting Link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/89256077958?pwd=Mlp2MWFNVENGRTNmZXFIb2k0WE5rZz09 Zoom Room Password: chile FEMINISMS FROM BELOW, AND TOWARDS THE SOUTH This speaker series welcomes feminist militants from Latin America to share their perspectives and experiences on building popular power towards a mass feminist movement. Over the past decade, Latin American feminists have identified manifestations of gender-based oppression under capitalism in everyday women’s conditions in order to successfully mobilize them as part of a political movement. Feminists produce analyses and subsequent ...

Disability Studies RFG

Research Focus Group Discussion: Shifting Paradigms Around Neurodiversity

Zoom

Zoom Meeting Link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/82480745298?pwd=a3RkcUVKaWJoN0dEUkZPQjFQWVN1dz09 This discussion will focus on thinking about new paradigms in autism and neurodiversity. We will read the article titled "Throw Away the Master's Tools: Liberating Ourselves From the Pathology Paradigm," by Nick Walker (from Loud Hands: Autistic People, Speaking ) and the introduction to Autistic Disturbances (2018) by Julia Miele Rodas. If time permits, the discussion will also include Mad at School: Rhetorics of Disability and Academic Life (2011) by Margaret ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Cybercrime in Digital India: Jamtara’s Youth and OTT Production Cultures

Zoom

ATTEND DISCUSSION Continuing a trend set by Bollywood cinema since the mid-2000s, small towns and villages in India are being mined for their performative excess, comic potential, and cultures of violence by platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Mukherjee traced this trend to Jamtara: Sabka Number Aayega (Jan 2020–), an over-the-top (OTT) crime drama from Netflix/Tipping Point that portrays real-life mobile phone phishing scams conducted by teenagers in the state of Jharkhand. The reliance ...

Asian/American Studies Collective RFG

Research Focus Group Talk: The Asian/American Studies Collective Winter Speakers Series

Zoom

Zoom Meeting Link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/84178208506 The Asian/American Studies Collective is proud to celebrate the publication of Dr. Diane Fujino's book, Nisei Radicals: The Feminist Poetics and Transformative Ministry of Mitsuye Yamada and Michael Yasutake. About the book While critiques of the model minority trope abound, this work has not dislodged the Nisei, or second-generation Japanese Americans, from the label of “Quiet Americans.” Working against the announced politics of Nisei assimilationism, this talk examines the feminist poetics ...

POSTPONED – Research Focus Group Meeting: Art, Environment, and Sense-Making

Zoom

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED At the last meeting of the Sustainability and the New Human RFG, Professor Suh discussed sustainability and behavior change. This talk will continue our conversation about the interdependence of humans and the environment by offering an ecological approach to how we understand the arts. At this meeting, PhD candidate Daniel Martini will share his dissertation research on how aesthetic appreciation (‘sense-making’) can emerge from both the rigidity of universal human ...

Land Grab U: Land-Grant Universities and Indigenous Peoples

Living Democracy Talk: Land Grab U: Land-Grant Universities and Indigenous Peoples

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act, which distributed public domain lands to raise funds for fledgling colleges across the nation. The creation story told around this event is that land-grant universities were given the gift of free land. But the truth is much more complicated: The Morrill Act worked by turning land expropriated from tribal nations into seed money for higher ...

Research Focus Group Panel: Sex Work in the Time of Covid

Zoom

REGISTER NOW This panel will bring together the insight and expertise of three sex worker activists working and organizing in North America and Europe; including Sinnamon Love, BIPOC Adult Industry Collective, MF Akynos, Black Sex Workers' Collective, and Chiqui, Berlin Strippers Collective. It will be the first in a multi-part webinar conversation in 2020-2021 focused on sex work and sexual politics in the time of COVIC in a global frame. REGISTER NOW Cosponsored by the ...

Asian/American Studies Collective RFG

Research Focus Group Talk: The Asian/American Studies Collective Winter Speakers Series

Zoom

Zoom Meeting Link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/82289262845 The Asian/American Studies Collective is excited to announce our winter speakers series, which features an exciting lineup of scholars from across the UCSB campus. For each talk, an invited speaker will share their current research during the first hour and the second hour will be explicitly dedicated to creating space to allow graduate students to ask questions related to research and professionalization. Our first speaker is Dr. Simi Kang, a queer, ...

Workshop: Demystifying the Book Publishing Process & Connecting with UC Colleagues

Zoom

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER UC Press editors will offer insight into the academic book publishing process. The presentation will include: choosing the right publisher; preparing a book proposal; how the peer review and Editorial Committee process works; revising your manuscript; and working with publishers to promote your book. The session is intended to be interactive and questions are welcome. Following the presentation, we will host breakout rooms with editors based on field interests. This is ...