December 2015

Designed to encourage academic professionalization, the IHC Graduate Affiliates Program will foster a community of graduate student scholars to engage in dialogue around the events of the 2015-16 IHC series The Humanities and the Brain

Thursday, December 03, 2015 / 5:00 PM IHC Research Seminar Room, 6036 HSSB The December 2015 meeting of the Architecture and Mind RFG focuses on the perception of different environments throughout the twentieth century. Participants will read (in advance) and discuss texts by Gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin...

Thursday, December 3, 2015 / 4:00 Performing Arts Theater Friday, December 4, 2015 / 9:30 AM Mosher Alumni House Saturday, December 5, 2015 / 9:30 AM MultiCultural Center, University Center On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the publication of Franz Kafka’s famous text “The Metamorphosis,” an interdisciplinary conference at...

December 01, 2015 / 12:00 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Professor David Cleveland (Environmental Studies, UCSB) will introduce the film and lead a Q&A directly after the screening. Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret is a groundbreaking feature-length documentary following intrepid filmmaker Kip Andersen as he uncovers the...

Hilal Elver (UCSB Orfalea Center) November 23, 2015 1:00 PM McCune Conference Room Climate change poses a distinct threat to all aspects of food security, threatening livelihood of already vulnerable people, while current fossil fuel based agricultural practices are responsible for accelerating climate change. Moreover, some mitigation and...

Anjan Chatterjee (Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania) Thursday, November 19, 2015 / 4:00 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB What can neuroscience possibly tell us about aesthetics and art? In this talk, Anjan Chatterjee will offer a framework from which a neuroscientist might deconstruct aesthetic experiences. Chatterjee will discuss findings...

Anrea Acri (Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre, ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, Singapore) Wednesday, November 18, 2015 / 5:00 PM IHC Research Seminar Room, 6056 Humanities and Social Sciences Building This lecture will survey the Indic traditions of ṣaḍaṅga-yoga (“six-limbed yoga”) and aṣṭāṅga-yoga (“eight-limbed yoga”) in the Indonesian Archipelago, as illuminated...

Thursday, November 5, 2015/ 4:30 PM Mosher Alumni Friday, November 6, 2015/ 9:00 AM MultiCultural Center, UCSB Saturday, November 7, 2015/ 9:00 AM Casa de la Guerra This year, the colloquium will be dedicated to the theme of “Real or Fake” in history, culture, literature, cinema,...

Q&A with director Jeff Malmberg Wednesday, November 4, 2015 / 7:00 PM UCSB Pollock Theater The screening is free but tickets are required. Visit this page for reservations: http://www.carseywolf.ucsb.edu/pollock Marwencol is a feature documentary about the fantasy world of Mark Hogancamp.  A violent attack outside a Kingston, NY bar in...

Lynn Garafola (Dance History, Columbia University) Tuesday, November 3, 2015 / 5:00 PM McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020 Lynn Garafola is Distinguished Professor of Dance History at Columbia University/Barnard College. A dance historian, critic and contributor for The Nation, Garafola’s importance to Dance and Performance Studies was best...

Rebecca Seligman (Anthropology, Northwestern University) Thursday, October 22, 2015 / 4:00 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Increasing evidence suggests the importance of meaning in conditioning bodily experiences and outcomes. This talk will explore the relationship between meaning and the body, with particular focus on the neurobiological...

Thursday, October 15, 2105 / 7:00 PM Century 10 Downtown, Ventura Field trip! Come with us to see National Theatre's simulcast of Hamlet, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, live from London You may purchase tickets here. Sponsored by the IHC's W/Shakespeare RFG....

Narayani Lasala-Blanco (Political Science, UCSB) Thursday, October 15, 2015/4:00 PM Lane Room, 3824 Ellison Hall Debates about immigration policies in the United States have been present during electoral campaigns since the 1700s. Zolberg argues that the sustained presence of these debates in political campaigns is related...

Thursday, October 8, 2015 / 4:00 – 6:00 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Please join us for the IHC’s annual Open House. Meet new faculty, fellows and staff. Learn about the IHC’s programming series for this academic year: The Humanities and the Brain. Find out...

Thursday, October 1 / 5:00 PM IHC Research Seminar Room, 6056 HSSB The new Research Focus Group is dedicated to readings about and discussions of the various ways in which the humanities, cognitive psychology, and behavioral/cognitive geography examine and think about human comprehension of space and place,...

Thursday, October 1, 2015 / 4:00 PM Crowell Reading Room, 6028 HSSB This interdisciplinary Health, Medicine and Care Working Group invites new members! Join other faculty, postdocs, graduate students, advanced undergraduate researchers, and community members at the UCSB campus to give and receive feedback on research...

PERFORMANCE AND INSTALLATION: Quantum Love Story Performance: Tuesday, September 29 / 8:00 PM Installation hours: Wednesday – Friday, September 30-October 2 / 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM Glass Box Gallery, Art Building You are invited to attend and experience Quantum Love Story, a live dance performance...

This RFG brings together faculty and graduate students who study enslavement, manumission, liberation, and freedom from a range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives. The complex, often elusive, concepts of enslavement and freedom are both historically contingent and central to the broader social, economic, political, and...

Conveners: James Kearney, English kearney@english.ucsb.edu Irwin Appel, Theater and Dance appel@theaterdance.ucsb.edu The w/Shakespeare proposed research focus group is dedicated to the innovative study and performance of Shakespeare. W/Shakespeare invites undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty from across the humanities and the university to think with and about Shakespeare. Our fundamental commitment is...

Conveners: Volker M. Welter, History of Art & Architecture welter@arthistory.ucsb.edu Mary Hegarty, Psychological & Brain Sciences mary.hegarty@psych.ucsb.edu Dan Montello, Geography montello@geog.ucsb.edu Please sign up here to join the RFG. Click here for RFG readings (password protected, please email conveners for the password.) As architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner once observed, it is nearly impossible...

Peter Alagona (History and Environmental Studies, UCSB) Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook (English and Comparative Literature, UCSB) John Foran (Sociology, UCSB) Ken Hiltner (English and Environmental Studies, UCSB) Jeff Hoelle (Anthropology, UCSB) David Lea (Geology, USCB) Christopher Walker (English, UCSB) Thursday May 28, 2015 / 4:00 PM McCune...

Written by Brian Granger (Lecturer, Theatre, Vanderbilt University) Directed by Risa Brainin (Theater and Dance, UCSB) Tuesday, May 26 / 5:00 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Eden Falls is a darkly comic allegory about two neighboring families, divided by a huge privacy fence and different values, whose lives...

Adam Krug (Religious Studies, UCSB) Friday, May 22 / 4:00 PM 6056 Humanities and Social Sciences Building The Seven Texts on Siddhi  (ca. ninth to tenth centuries) were influential in both the development of Vajrayāna Buddhism in India and the later emergence of the mahāmudrā meditation traditions of...

Emily C. Thomas (Art, UCSB) Friday, May 22, 2015 / 5:30 PM Art, Design & Architecture Museum Part One of 'Infinite Human Night Light,' a sculpture and performance project by Emily C. Thomas, will be installed within the exhibition "Mystical Absolutes" held at the Art, Design & Architecture...

Thursday, May 21, 2015 / 9:00 AM-12:30 PM Multipurpose Room, Student Resource Building SKILLS Day is the capstone event of the School Kids Investigating Language in Life and Society (SKILLS) academic outreach program, a university/community partnership between UCSB and Santa Barbara County schools and youth organizations. SKILLS...

Thursday, May 21, 2015 / 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM Pollock Theater Don’t Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock and Roll tracks the twists and turns of Cambodian music as it morphs into rock and roll, blossoms, and is nearly destroyed along with the rest of the...

Participants: Dr. Angelika Hilbeck (Institute of Integrative Biology, ETH Zurich) Dr. Pamela C. Ronald (Plant Pathology, UC-Davis Moderator: Paul Voosen Wednesday, May 20, 2015 / 8:00 PM UCSB Campbell Hall FREE A key factor in discussions about how best to feed the world’s growing population and...

Asif Siddiqi (History, Fordham University) Wednesday, May 13, 2015 / 4:00 PM HSSB 4020 Secrecy was endemic in Soviet society and culture. Information that we might consider benign in the Western context was off-limits to most of the general populace throughout the existence of the Soviet Union. Controls...

Enda Duffy (English, UCSB) James Kearney (English, UCSB) Ross Melnick (Film & Media Studies, UCSB) Tuesday, May 12 / 4:00 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB The recipients of the 2014-15 IHC Faculty Release Time awards will present their work. Enda Duffy is a Professor in the English...

May 8, 2015 Flying A Studios Room, University Center An interdisciplinary group of scholars of medieval and early modern Japanese literature, history, religion, and performing arts examine topics related to “War and Remembrance” during Japan’s years of military rule (late 12th to late 19th centuries). Exploring a...

G. Reginald Daniel ( Sociology, UCSB) Adrienne Edgar (History, UCSB) Paul Spickard (History, UCSB) Lily Anne Y. Welty Tamai (Japanese American National Museum) Ingrid Dineen Wimberly (History,University of La Verne) Monday, May 4 / 4:00 PM Lane Room, Ellison Hall 3rd floor This roundtable will focus...

The Arthur N. Rupe Great Debate Series explores contemporary societal issues of national and international significance through the presentation of eminent figures who hold divergent viewpoints. “Let us bring the greatest minds of our time together at UCSB,” explains Arthur N. Rupe, “and provide a...

Andrew Kalaidjian (English) Jacqueline Viskup (Theater & Dance) Tuesday, April 28 / 4:00 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB This panel will feature presentations by the two recipients of the UC Graduate Fellows in Humanities award for 2014-15. Kalaidjian’s dissertation is entitled “Places of Rest: Modernism and Environmental Recovery.”  His...

Martin Ehala (Tartu University, Estonia) Thursday, April 23 / 4:00 PM Lane Room, 3824 Ellison Hall Professor Ehala is a Visiting Fulbright Scholar in the Department of Communications at UCSB.  He received his doctorate in linguistics from Cambridge University and is a Professor at the University...

Akira Mizuta Lippit (Film, USC) Wednesday, April 22, 2015 / 4:00 PM SSMS 3145 Among the most enduring effects of the Great East Japan Earthquake (Higashi nihon daishinsai) that struck Japan on March 11, 2011 is the total disruption of spatial order it produced. The earthquake struck the Tohoku region...

Philip Schultz (poet, winner of the Pulitzer Prize) Tuesday, April 21, 2015 / 6:00 PM UCSB Corwin Pavilion A public reading by Pulitzer Prize winning poet and writer Philip Schultz from his recently published novel-in-verse The Wherewithal. After reading the manuscript of The Wherewithal before its publication,...

Monica Heller (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Anthropology, University of Toronto) Friday, April 17, 2015 / 1:30 PM Education 1205 Professor Heller’s LISO talk is a special tribute to John Gumperz whose work focused, in large part, on the relationship between the making of social difference and...

Monica Heller (Education & Anthropology, University of Toronto) Friday, April 17 / 1:30 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Monica Heller’s LISO talk is a special tribute to John Gumperz ,whose work focused in large part on the relationship between the making of social difference and the making...

Gavin Wright (History, Stanford University) Friday, April 10, 2015 / 1:00 PM HSSB 4041 Wright is the author of Sharing the Prize: the Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South (2012); Slavery and American Economic Development (2006); Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern...

Abdallah Helmy Shehata (Political Science, American University in Cairo) Thursday, April 9, 2015 / 4:00 PM Lane Room, 3824 Ellison Hall Helmy Shehata was an activist during the events and involved in organizing social protest. He is Vice Chairman, Programs Director, of the Sadat Association for...

Bliss Lim (Film and Media Studies, UC Irvine) Thursday, April 2, 2015 / 4:30 PM "Queer Aswang Transmedia: Camp Temporality and Philippine Folklore" In recent years, the aswang – a supernatural creature of Philippine folklore that is often associated with female monstrosity  and patriarchal misogyny – is...

The Media Fields Collective at UC Santa Barbara is excited to announce its fifth biennial conference exploring the intersections of media and space. We propose “encounters” as a framework through which these intricate relationships may be addressed. This term has been strategically deployed to think...

The Public Scholar program supports well-researched books in the humanities intended to reach a broad readership. Although humanities scholarship can be specialized, the humanities also strive to engage broad audiences in exploring subjects of general interest.

Patricia Fumerton (English,UCSB) Pamela Smith (History, Columbia) Friday, February 27-Saturday, February 28 / 9:00 AM Alumni Hall and West Conference Center We seek to explore the various kinds and forms of making. From manufacturing a sheet of paper, to printing a ballad, to conducting an experiment,...