Zoom
August 2020
Research Focus Group Discussion: The New Human
This meeting at the 2020 Cognitive Science Society 2020 conference will explore the ways in which cognitive science is reshaping of key assumptions about the human mind. Literary scholars working on mental phenomena at ‘Literature and Mind’ center at UCSB note that, currently, progress in fields such as data driven machine learning and computer vision is providing unprecedented opportunities for the prospect of human-level artificial intelligence. But, as has been argued in computer science, the computational theory of mind, which claims that mental processes are computational processes, is insufficient to fully account for biologically evolved intelligence. For machine intelligence to take us all the way to human-level intelligence, we need explanations that span multiple levels of organization (neural, somatic, social) that take shape at multiple time-scales (evolution, development, life-long learning). The goal of this group is to provide a virtual
Find out more »October 2020
Conference: Realisms in East Asian Performing Arts
Realisms in East Asian Performing Arts proposes new considerations of realism on stage. Since its association with 19th-century innovations in European and American drama, theatrical realism has largely remained limited to Euro-American definitions. We explore conventions of realism in culturally-specific locations and times across East Asia, articulating alternative histories of realism that extend from the premodern into the present. Through our individual inquiries, we aim to broaden the term’s analytic power and shed collective light on the diversity and versatility of this important representational mode. The conference will end with a reading of the early twentieth-century play The Son, by pioneer of modern Japanese theatre Osanai Kaoru. Translated into English by David Jortner, performed by LAUNCH PAD of UCSB's Department of Theater and Dance. Conference Participants: Jyana Browne (University of Maryland), Xing Fan (University of Toronto), Man He (Williams College), David Jortner (Baylor University), Jieun Lee
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Inaugural Lecture: Living Democracy in Capitalism’s Shadow: Creative Labor, Black Abolitionists, and the Struggle to End Slavery
John Majewski
Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link In the two decades before the Civil War, a new type of capitalism developed in the northern United States that stressed mass education, widespread innovation, and new markets for art and design. For Black abolitionists, the changing northern economy presented new opportunities to highlight the evils of slavery. While continuing to attack slavery’s physical cruelty, Black abolitionists in the 1840s and 1850s increasingly highlighted the “mental darkness” of slavery, focusing on the systematic denial of literacy, learning, and creativity. Through their own creative labor, Black abolitionists made a compelling case for racial equality. The fate of Black creative labor after the Civil War, though, demonstrated the limits of using creativity as a way of obtaining citizenship, and raises important questions about how we in the 21st century “live democracy”
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Humanities Decanted: Transgenerational Remembrance: Performance and the Asia-Pacific War in Contemporary Japan
Jessica Nakamura
Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Join us online for a dialogue between Jessica Nakamura (Theater and Dance) and Catherine Nesci (French and Italian, Comparative Literature) about Nakamura’s new book, Transgenerational Remembrance: Performance and the Asia-Pacific War in Contemporary Japan. Audience Q&A will follow. In Transgenerational Remembrance, Jessica Nakamura investigates the role of artistic production in the commemoration and memorialization of the Asia-Pacific War (1931–1945) in Japan since 1989. During this time, survivors of Japanese aggression and imperialism, previously silent about their experiences, have sparked contentious public debates about the form and content of war memories. Working from theoretical frameworks of haunting and ethics, Nakamura develops an analytical lens based on the Noh theater ghost. Noh emphasizes the agency of the ghost and the dialogue between the dead and the living. Integrating her Noh-inflected analysis into
Find out more »Research Focus Group Symposium: India “Right”: Making and Unmaking Indian Citizenship
The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) was passed by the Indian Parliament on December 11, 2019. It amends the Citizenship Act of 1955 and creates an easier path for acquiring Indian citizenship for persecuted religious minorities—Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist, Christian, and Parsi—from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan who entered India before or on December 13, 2014. The Act does not encompass other (non-Islamic) neighboring countries, nor does it consider other persecuted minorities—for example, the Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar, the Ahmadiya and Shia of Pakistan, or the Tamils of Sri Lanka. While the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was able to pass the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) through Parliament without a hitch, it was unprepared for the massive protests against the Act that soon followed in a number of places in India. The protests were spearheaded by students from across universities in India.
Find out more »The 2020 Diana and Simon Raab Writer-in-Residence: Jesmyn Ward
Note: The full-length video recording of this event is available for UCSB affiliates through December 31, 2021. Please email events@ihc.ucsb.edu if you are a UCSB affiliate and would like to watch the video. Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Join us online for a conversation between Jesmyn Ward, 2020 Diana and Simon Raab Writer-in-Residence, and IHC Director Susan Derwin. Audience Q&A will follow. MacArthur Genius and two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward has been called “the new Toni Morrison” (American Booksellers Association). In 2017, she became the first woman and first person of color to win the National Book Award twice—joining the ranks of William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Philip Roth, and John Updike. Her writing, which encompasses fiction, nonfiction, and memoir, is “raw, beautiful, and dangerous” (The New York Times Book Review).
Find out more »Research Focus Group Discussion: Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution
REGISTER NOW In honor of National Disability Employment Awareness Month and the thirtieth anniversary of the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Disability Studies Initiative is joining the Carsey-Wolf Center and the UCSB Library to host a virtual discussion with the directors of Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution (2020). In the early 1970s, teenagers with disabilities faced a future shaped by isolation, discrimination, and institutionalization. Located in the Catskills, New York, ramshackle Camp Jened exploded those confines. Jened was the teens’ freewheeling utopia, a place where summertime sports, smoking, and make-out sessions awaited everyone; campers experienced liberation and full inclusion as human beings. Their bonds endured as many migrated west to Berkeley, California, a hotbed of activism where friends from Camp Jened realized that disruption, civil disobedience, and political participation could change the future for millions. Co-directors and
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Living Democracy Talk: Struggling to Save America’s Cities in the Suburban Age: Urban Renewal Revisited
Lizabeth Cohen
Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Urban Renewal of the 1950s through 1970s has acquired a very poor reputation, much of it deserved. But reducing it to an unchanging story of urban destruction misses some important legacies and genuinely progressive goals. Those include efforts to create more socially mixed communities, to involve suburbs—not just cities—in solving metropolitan inequality, and most importantly, to hold the federal government responsible for funding more affordable housing and other urban investments, rather than turn to the private sector. Cohen will revisit this history by following the long career of Edward J. Logue, who worked to revitalize New Haven in the 1950s, became the architect of the “New Boston” in the 1960s, and later led innovative organizations in New York at the state level and in the South Bronx. She will
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Research Focus Group Discussion: Let’s Talk Mediterranean: A Conversation with Sharon Kinoshita and Brian Catlos
Sharon Kinoshita and Brian Catlos
REGISTER NOW On October 23, Sharon Kinoshita and Brian Catlos will join us for a conversation on the state of premodern Mediterranean studies. Together, Kinoshita and Catlos run the Mediterranean Seminar, an interdisciplinary research group that focuses on Mediterranean cultures and societies, and also the role of the Mediterranean in historical narratives of "the West." The seminar, which hosts a range of events (symposia, colloquia, workshops), has played a vital role in promoting Mediterranean studies in the United States. In recent years, they have co-edited the groundbreaking volume, Can We Talk Mediterranean?: Conversations on an Emerging Field in Medieval and Early Modern Studies (Palgrave, 2017). Sharon Kinoshita (Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz) is a specialist in Old French literature, medieval Mediterranean studies, medieval globalism, and postcolonial theories. She is the author of Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old
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Research Focus Group Meeting: The Future of Humanity from a Sustainability Point of View
Sangwon Suh
REGISTER HERE In this meeting, Professor Sangwon Suh (Bren School) will present research in progress about possible futures of human nature as it relates to selfishness and sustainability. This will be followed by discussion, moderated by Aili Pettersson Peeker. The meeting is open to all but we do ask you to register to attend so that we can spend our time in the meeting as productively as possible. After you've registered, you will receive a Zoom invitation as well as a 1,000-word document introducing the research that we ask that you read before the meeting. Please see the information sheet "Sustainability and the New Human IHC Research Focus Group Meetings" available on our IHC webpage for more information about this and the structure of the meeting. Sangwon Suh is a professor at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management
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Humanities Decanted: Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths
Helen Morales
Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Join us online for a dialogue between Helen Morales (Classics) and Vilna Bashi-Treitler (Black Studies) about Morales’ new book, Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths. Audience Q&A will follow. A witty, inspiring reckoning with the ancient Greco-Roman myths and their legacy, from what they can illuminate about #MeToo to the radical imagery of Beyoncé. The picture of classical antiquity most of us learned in school is framed in certain ways -- glossing over misogyny while omitting the seeds of feminist resistance. Even today, myths are still informing harmful practices like diet culture and school dress codes. But in Antigone Rising, classicist Helen Morales reminds us that the myths have subversive power because they can be told -- and read -- in different ways. Through these stories,
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Living Democracy Talk: From the Embers of Crisis: Creating Equitable and Deliberative Democracy
Archon Fung
Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link At a moment when American Democracy was characterized by record levels of political division, inequality, and institutional distrust, it was hit by the perfect storm of the COVID-19 health crisis, an economic crisis of soaring unemployment and economic dislocation, and a civic crisis of reckoning with deep racism and police abuse. What would it take to create from the embers of these crises a deeper, more egalitarian and deliberative democracy in America? Many lay their hopes in a change of Presidential administration in the coming election. But long before Donald Trump, our government had already failed to create a system that shared the fruits of prosperity justly. Our government was unresponsive to the wishes of many Americans, especially people of color and non-wealthy Americans. A return to the pre-Trump
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Research Focus Group Talk: “Cripistemologies of Pain”
Travis Chi Wing Lau
REGISTER NOW Drawing together insights from disability theory, literary studies, and interdisciplinary pain studies, Lau's lecture contributes to what Alyson Patsavas has called "cripistemologies of pain" that prompt us to think from the position of pained lived experience to imagine radically different models of care that move beyond the reductive binary of either amelioration or annihilation of pain. Can we theorize a standpoint (or what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has called "sitpoint") theory of pain that attends to its crip and queer chronicities while also working toward new forms of care and interdependence? Travis Chi Wing Lau's research and teaching focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, health humanities, and disability studies. Alongside his scholarship, Lau frequently writes for venues of public scholarship like Synapsis: A Journal of Health Humanities, Lapham's Quarterly, Public Books, and The Los Angeles Review of
Find out more »November 2020
Critical Mass Talks and Staged Reading: On Collecting and Hoarding
William Davies King and Rebecca Falkoff
SCHEDULE OF EVENTS: 4:00 - 5:15 PM Talks: William Davies King and Rebecca Falkoff 7:00 - 8:00 PM Staged Reading: Collections of Nothing Enough is Enough EVENT DETAILS: Talks: William Davies King and Rebecca Falkoff The Creative Edge of Collecting William Davies King has spent a lifetime collecting nothing in a way he brought to light in his 2008 book Collections of Nothing. His collecting of such things as Cheez-It boxes, “Place Stamp Here” squares, hotel door cards, and the little stickers you find on fruit runs into the tens of thousands of items, all on the low edge of the valueless and the ephemeral. But he has also spent a lifetime engaged with the arts–drama, performance art, collage–and he has explored the ways the activity of the collector, who thinks through the world, connects to the work of the
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Research Focus Group Discussion with Amanda Lucia about Her Book Reflections of Amma
Amanda Lucia
ATTEND DISCUSSION The meeting will be hosted by our South Asia RFG colleague William Elison, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at UCSB, as part of his seminar on Religion and Ideology in Modern India: Current Approaches. This seminar session will feature a discussion with Amanda Lucia about her book, Reflections of Amma: Devotees in a Global Embrace (2014), which provides an ethnographic analysis of transnationalism and gender in a global movement centered around Amritanandamayi, who is celebrated as Amma, “Mother,” and the “hugging saint.” Following is the UC Press’s description of the book: "Globally known as Amma, meaning "Mother," Mata Amritanandamayi has developed a massive transnational humanitarian organization based in hugs. She is familiar to millions as the “hugging saint,” a moniker that derives from her elaborate darshan programs wherein nearly every day ten thousand people are embraced by the
Find out more »Research Focus Group Workshop: Graduate Student Research
The Asian/American Studies Collective is excited to host two events showcasing graduate student research this quarter. Graduate students will be presenting their research as part of the Collective-sponsored graduate seminar ASAM 200. These workshops will be held on November 9th and December 14th from 11am to 1pm PST. Sponsored by the IHC's Asian/American Studies Collective Research Focus Group
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Research Focus Group Workshop: Embodied Ownership: Sheppard Lee and Proprietary Whiteness in Jacksonian America
Merav Schocken
REGISTER NOW This workshop will discuss a PRECIRCULATED chapter from Merav Schocken’s dissertation, “Functional Fictions: Practices of Self-Deception in 19th-Century America.” (Please click on the “Download Reading” button above to access the precirculated chapter.) The chapter explores the narrative practices of self-deception that underlie the consolidation of proprietary whiteness in Jacksonian America. Schocken focuses on Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee (1836), claiming that the novel registers, and seeks to reconcile, anxieties among upper-class whites about the inclusion of propertyless white men in the electorate. Looking at the novel’s representation of whiteness as a neutral category as embodied by its propertyless white protagonist, Schocken argues that Black subjugation constituted a central yet crucially unacknowledged means by which the white subject, regardless of class, affirmed his belonging to the white man's republic. Merav Schocken is a PhD candidate in English at the
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Research Focus Group Talk: Dismembering Classicism: Contesting Colonial and Classical Legacies in the Southwest
Kendall Lovely
REGISTER NOW Classicization in U.S. heritage narratives often involves the imposition of classical elements, derived from Greek and Roman civilization, onto narratives of colonial conquest in Southwestern borderlands and frontier spaces. Ongoing controversies surrounding statues of the conquistador, Juan de Oñate, reflect the ways in which the classical legacy remains prominent in public spheres of historical narrative. In providing a visual narrative of conquest linked to classical imagery, the Spanish history of the settling of the Southwest becomes implicated in broader U.S. historical narratives that valorize conquest as a civilizing force in the settling of the American West. While much of this classical imagery first appeared in Spanish sources, this paper traces specifically how these classicized narratives of Spanish conquest became appropriated and implicated in Anglo-American/U.S. historical narratives, as well as counter-narratives of Indigenous resistance. Kendall Lovely, a member of
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Research Focus Group Talk: Assistive Technologies and Erotic Adaptation: Queer Disability in the Renaissance
Simone Chess
REGISTER NOW Simone Chess will focus on early modern disability, queerness, and adaptive technologies. Chess is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program at Wayne State University in Detroit. She is the author of Male-to-Female Crossdressing in Early Modern English Literature: Gender, Performance, and Queer Relations (Routledge, 2016) and coeditor, with Colby Gordon and Will Fisher, of a special issue on “Early Modern Trans Studies” for the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. Cosponsored by the IHC’s Disability Studies Initiative Research Focus Group and UCSB’s Early Modern Center REGISTER NOW
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Research Focus Group Workshop: Cowboys in the Colosseum
Brad Bouley
REGISTER HERE Join us to workshop "Cowboys in the Colosseum: Papal Power, Cattle Rustling, and Meat Supply in Early Modern Italy," a chapter from Brad Bouley's current book project. Brad Bouley (Assistant Professor, Department of History) specializes in histories of religion and science in the early modern, especially Italian, context. He is author of Pious Postmortems: Anatomy, Sanctity, and the Catholic Church in Early Modern Europe (UPenn, 2017). His current project, The Barberini Butchers: Meat, Murder, and Warfare in Early Modern Italy, investigates papal food policies formed during the Counter Reformation in an effort to promote Rome as an early modern city. Sponsored by the IHC's Connectivity in the Premodern Mediterranean Research Focus Group REGISTER HERE Image: Claude Lorraine, Campo Vaccino, 1636
Find out more »Information Sessions: Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program
Tuesday, November 17, 3:00-4:00 PM | Zoom | REGISTER NOW AND Wednesday, November 18, 12:00-1:00 PM | Zoom | REGISTER NOW Join the IHC online to learn more about the Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program. Explore the course requirements, hear about paid internship and fellow-designed community project opportunities, and find out more about the capstone presentation.
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Living Democracy Talk: Making Abolition Geographies: Stories from California
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link This talk explores how visions of abolition guide and connect organizing across a range of social justice struggles. Gilmore will highlight examples relating to environmental justice, public sector labor unions, farm workers, undocumented households, criminalized youth, and community based approaches to prevent and resolve gender and interpersonal violence. The vivid California stories she will present reveal how abolition is a practical program for urgent change grounded in the needs, talents, and dreams of vulnerable people. Audience Q&A will follow. Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Co-founder of many grassroots organizations including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network, Gilmore
Find out more »December 2020
Research Focus Group Discussion with Radhika Govindrajan about Her Book Animal Intimacies
Radhika Govindrajan
ATTEND DISCUSSION This seminar session will feature a discussion with Radhika Govindrajan about her book Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas (2018), which is an ethnographic study of the interspecies relationships between human and nonhuman animals in the mountain villages of the Central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand in India. Following is the University of Chicago Press’s description of the book: "What does it mean to live and die in relation to other animals? Animal Intimacies posits this central question alongside the intimate—and intense—moments of care, kinship, violence, politics, indifference, and desire that occur between human and non-human animals. Built on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the mountain villages of India’s Central Himalayas, Radhika Govindrajan’s book explores the number of ways that humans and animals interact to cultivate relationships as interconnected, related beings. Whether it is through the study of
Find out more »Research Focus Group Workshop: Graduate Student Research
The Asian/American Studies Collective is excited to host two events showcasing graduate student research this quarter. Graduate students will be presenting their research as part of the Collective-sponsored graduate seminar ASAM 200. These workshops will be held on November 9th and December 14th from 11am to 1pm PST. Sponsored by the IHC's Asian/American Studies Collective Research Focus Group
Find out more »Workshop: Demystifying the Book Publishing Process & Connecting with UC Colleagues
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 also an opportunity to connect with faculty and graduate students who share similar intellectual interests. When you sign up, please select a breakout room. If your area is not represented in the breakout session, please let us know your specialization. PRESENTERS: • Raina Polivka, Editor, UC Press • Kate Marshall, Editor, UC Press • Archna Patel, Associate Editor, UC Press • Beth Digeser, Professor, History,
Find out more »January 2021
Research Focus Group Talk: The Asian/American Studies Collective Winter Speakers Series
Simi Kang
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, mixed Sikh American community advocate, educator, artist, and scholar. Kang's work centers Southeast Asian American collaborative resistance to imagine environmentally and economically just futures in Louisiana. Kang is a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow in UCSB's Department of Asian American Studies. Abstract: Every year, multiple times a year, Southeast Louisiana’s coast-dependent communities must make the impossible decision to remain in an environmental sacrifice zone or leave home
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Research Focus Group Panel: Sex Work in the Time of Covid
Sinnamon Love, MF Akynos, Chiqui
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 IHC's New Sexualities Research Focus Group and the MultiCultural Center
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Living Democracy Talk: Land Grab U: Land-Grant Universities and Indigenous Peoples
Tristan Ahtone and Robert Lee
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 education. In all, the act redistributed nearly 10.8 million acres from more than 250 tribal nations for the benefit of 52 colleges. Those lands, when grouped together, represent an area approximately the size of Denmark. Ahtone and Lee's presentation will both examine the land specifically used to found the University of California and also discuss the methods employed in this investigation of land expropriation, in
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POSTPONED – Research Focus Group Meeting: Art, Environment, and Sense-Making
Daniel Martini
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 cognitive structures and the massive influence of environmental variations. The presentation will be followed by a discussion moderated by Professor Colin Gardner. The meeting is open to all but we do ask you to register to attend so that we can spend our time in the meeting as productively as possible. Please register by January 21. After you’ve registered, you will receive a Zoom invitation
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