Sarah Hirsch (IHC Research Fellow)
Wednesday, May 16 / 12:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

In Cities of the Dead (1996), Joseph Roach observes that New Orleans is a place “where the dead remain more gregariously present to the living, materially, and spiritually, than they do anywhere else.” No one understood this more than George Washington Cable who invoked the city’s haunting past in his fiction. Serving as an archivist and cultural historian, Cable utilizes detailed accounts of New Orleans’ topography and architecture in his novel The Grandissimes (1880) to articulate the secrets of what he calls the “semi-submerged” city.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Research Fellows Program.

Jessica L. Ambler (IHC Research Fellow)
Wednesday, April 18 / 1:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

The Roman rebuilding of Carthage as Colonia Concordia Iulia Karthago in the early first century CE has typically been described by scholars as an act of Roman hegemony, wiping out the traces of the earlier Punic city and creating a thoroughly Roman city in its place.  Yet the physical fabric of Colonia Concordia tells a different story, one of Carthage as an urban borderland or site of cultural contact and exchange.  This talk will explore how this infamous city, and rival of Rome, was the site of complex urban continuity in the ancient Mediterranean.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Research Fellows Program.

Laura Miller (IHC Research Fellow)
Wednesday, May 25 / 12:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Building on contemporary research in alchemy and gender, I engage the medium of space, examining the connections between the identity of the philosopher-alchemist and the composition of a masculine domestic space. I show that the private, enclosed nature of alchemical experimentation enabled the free exploration of masculinity. The private and semi-private nature of alchemical practices in England challenges the easy alignment of gentlemanly sociability and public display that have long dominated discussions of Restoration science.   Natural philosophy and a traditional heterosexual marriage were often considered incompatible during the time of Galileo and Descartes. The pursuit of alchemy, a private interest that required domestic space and secrecy, was likewise incompatible with marriage. During the Restoration, scientists were encouraged to be sociable, but they were also participating in a tradition that excluded such parts of social life as marriage. In private, alchemists could manipulate substances with names like “the Doves of Diana” and “spiritual semen,” changing substances’ genders or fusing them together. In this way, alchemy offered a contained space for the natural philosopher to think about gender and a metaphorical space for him to think about sexuality while still remaining celibate.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Reserach Fellows program.

Danielle Antoinette Hidalgo  (IHC Research Fellow)
Wednesday, May 11 / 12:30 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Drawing upon three years of intensive ethnographic research in both atypical and typical strip clubs in California and Oregon, Hidalgo discusses how embodied labor is negotiated in these clubs.  Further, she discusses how management practices and management-dancer relations impact the work of dancers, particularly highlighting the similarities and differences between types of clubs.  Finally, she ends with a candid methodological discussion of how she is conducting research on sex work and addressing the sociology of embodiment in stripping.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Research Fellows Program.

Shalini Kakar (IHC Research Fellow)
Wednesday, May 11 / 12:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Film stars are worshiped in India and even temples have been dedicated to them by their devotee-fans. The fan clubs of South Indian film star, Rajinikanth have been publicly ritualizing his film posters and appropriating Hindu rituals to divinize their star deity. A similar practice has been started by Rajinikanth fan clubs in the US. Mostly comprising of engineers working for companies such as Google and Yahoo, these US based devotee-fans of Rajinikanth worshipped a garlanded poster of his recent film, Endhiran (Robot) released in September 2010.  In the Serra Theatre in Milpitas, they held a special worship ritual followed by euphoric dancing. In the opening scene of Endhiran, when Rajinikanth appeared on the screen for the first time, his devotee-fans ran towards it to ritualize his image with lighted camphor, a practice followed for images of deities in Hindu temples. What makes these fans deify a film star in a transnational space? What transformation takes place in the process of transporting these devotee-fan rituals from India to a western landscape? This talk addresses these questions to argue that through such devotee-fan practices transnational devotional fandom augments new social communities.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Research Fellows Program.

Michelle Samura (IHC Research Fellow)
Wednesday, May 11 / 3:30 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

This panel explores emergent possibilities from using a spatial approach to examine, understand, and talk about race relations on college campuses. A spatial lens locates larger racial meanings and ideologies in concrete lived experiences, material environments such as buildings and classrooms, and social relationships such as student groups. It also provides language with which to talk about experiences of racialization, race-making, and even racism in this supposedly “post-racial” moment. The discussion will begin with a brief overview of Samura’s recent research on Asian American college students’ interactions with and within campus spaces. A panel discussion of undergraduate students Drew Holcomb, Jennifer Jolorte, Kristine Lee, Maria Mosqueda, Michael Riley and Alan Sun will follow.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Research Fellows Program.

Rose Hayden-Smith (IHC Research Fellow)
Wednesday, April 13 / 12:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Hayden-Smith will present an in-depth look at the past and present of the Victory Garden movement. This paper will review historical case studies and discuss current national policies and models as well as future work needed to sustain the Victory Garden model as part of the overall local food movement. Hayden-Smith will also discuss urban agriculture and how the local food-systems movement is addressing a wide range of challenges facing Americans today. A graduate of UCSB, Hayden-Smith is the Strategic Initiative Leader for Sustainable Food Systems for UC’s Agriculture and Natural Resources Division.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Research Fellows Program.

Website: www.victorygrower.com

Emily Engel (IHC Research Fellow)
Wednesday, November 10 / 12:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB
In this analysis of collecting practice in eighteenth-century South America, Engel suggests that viewing and sponsoring works of art, in particular portraits, provided the Bourbon South American viceroys with ways to contemplate and construct “American” components of their evolving identities. Portraits visually articulated identity as a conceptual category subject to manipulation by subjects, patrons, and viewers; they reveal socially viable modes of constructing identity by presenting the physical comportment of the sitter, by juxtaposing the public and private components of identity, personality, and appearance, and by establishing societal expectations.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Research Fellows Program.

Jacob Latham (IHC Research Fellow)
Wednesday, October 20 / 12:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

There were at least five disputed episcopal elections in the fourth through the sixth centuries. This intra-Christian competition did not, however, lead to the contestation of space in the form of processions as it did, for example, in Constantinople, where Arians and Niceans held competing processions. At Rome, intra-Christian competition took the form, at least rhetorically, of siege and occupation. Instead of conquering urban space through processions—impossible as the Roman aristocracy and their patronage of traditional public display still dominated and defined the public sphere—Roman Christians resorted to warfare.

Throughout all of these electoral disputes two elements consistently emerge: one, the use of martial language to describe the events and two, the concentration on a few contested sites. A strategy of militaristic occupation of centrally important churches clearly marked these schisms, as each side marched upon and occupied the principal churches of Rome, invading and expelling their enemies from other principal churches when they could. The martial language in the descriptions of these conflicts often veered close to the religious, indicating, hinting, that the origins of Christian processions lie in conflict and battle. From the literal soldiers of Christ, armed with clubs, rocks, and swords, emerged spiritual soldiers bearing crosses and singing hymns.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Geographies of Place series and Research Fellows Program.

Danielle Antoinette Hidalgo (IHC Senior Fellow)
Wednesday, June 2 / 12:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Building upon the vast amount of work on interaction-based perspectives on stripping, this talk will incorporate two areas of inquiry that have been absent in the literature: the performance or embodiments of stripping and performativity or the larger context in which stripping takes place.  Using her concepts of (hetero)performativity and (homo)performativity or the underlying heteronormative and/or homonormative sexual field (Green 2008) of spaces within the sites, Hidalgo will analyze and discuss the processes and dynamic differences between the peep show and typical strip club locale.  Addressing identities as a process, she will also discuss how the ongoing and multi-varied process of embodied interactions shift and change in different settings and impact how sexuality and gender are performed, understood, and challenged by dancers, clients and other actors within the locales.  While the general spatial dynamics of both spaces are characterized as heteroperformative and heteronormative, Hidalgo’s work addresses whether or not the actual spatial dynamics of the peep show (windows separating dancers from clients) and sexual dynamics of the dancers (queer identity is often discussed as accepted and normative) opened up space for transgressing the heteroperformativity of the space.  Prof. Hidalgo received her PhD in 2009 from UC Santa Barbara’s Sociology Department and MSc in Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science.  Her research addresses the spatio-temporal embodied dynamics of genders and sexualities in social relations.  In addition to her ongoing research on stripping, she is currently completing her book entitled, Expressions on a Dance Floor: Geographies of Genders and Sexualities in Bangkok Nightclubbing.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Senior Fellows Program.

Emily Engel (IHC Senior Fellow)
Wednesday, March 3 / 12:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

From the capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru, the city council of Lima regularly commissioned and exhibited official portrait paintings between 1700 and 1830. By the time of the revolution, the city’s art collection had grown to include over fifty portraits. This paper explores the origins and importance of municipal art collecting within a colonial political environment. The artistic imitation of seventeenth-century European portrait composition in eighteenth-century official portraits in Lima provided a visual format for composing the history of the city. Homi Bhabha has suggested that mimicry is a strategy for grappling with cultural difference; however, as art historians such as Partha Mitter have pointed out, this hierarchical model privileges the European as primary and characterizes the non-European as derivative. What meaning does stylistic and formal mimesis take on in late-viceregal Peruvian portraiture? As recorded in the official portraits of the municipal art collection, the shared local experience of Spanish colonial rule in the Viceroyalty provided a common historical foundation for a collective urban identity at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Senior Fellows program.

Susan Keller (IHC Senior Fellow)
Wednesday, February 3 / 12:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

The figure of a woman applying makeup in public was one of the quintessential images of modernity in the early twentieth century, and also highly scandalous. This talk explores the ways the “flapper” of the nineteen-teens embraced the mobility and freedoms of the modern metropolis, celebrating a new, openly artificial standard of femininity by touching up her makeup while on the street. The woman powdering in public came to stand in for a variety of aspects of modernity, from chic consumerism to the anonymity of urban crowds to the self-sufficiency of the suffragist demanding a political identity. Focusing on John Dos Passos’s novel Manhattan Transfer (1925), this talk argues that for women, makeup could either serve as a psychic shield to protect one from the shocks of the city or signal one’s self-conscious modernity and openness to the urban experience.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Senior Fellows program.

Kara Attrep (IHC Senior Fellow)
Wednesday, January 13 / 1:30 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

In 1971 Coca-Cola released its now iconic advertisement, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.”  This advertisement and its accompanying jingle became hits within the United States.  Besides its appeal as a piece of nostalgia for Baby Boomers, this commercial also reveals how American nationalism has continually been defined and redefined in terms of the selling of products.  This paper explores the advertisement in terms of its representation of youth and its use of “multiculturalism” through images and sound to market to the youth of the 1960s and 1970s.  I focus on the significance of the ad as it was debuted in the midst of both the Vietnam War and the Black Power Movement.  Additionally, through an analysis of not only the visual but also the musical aspects of the ad, I show how the “retellings” of this commercial–first in 1989 during the Super Bowl, featuring the children of the original cast members of the first ad, and then again in 2005 with musician G. Love and his band Special Sauce– reflect the sometimes contradictory and conflicting notions of what advertisers see as a “multicultural America.”

Sponsored by the IHC’s Senior Fellows program.