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    • Ending Poverty in California logo

    Imagining California Discussion: Ending Poverty in California: A Movement, A Plan, A More Equitable Future

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

    What would a California without poverty look like? How would ending economic hardship advance freedom and well-being for all? This is a prospect that has captured the imaginations of activists, reformers, and everyday people for decades, ever since Upton Sinclair made it the centerpiece of his near successful gubernatorial campaign in 1934. Today, it animates the work of a new generation of community-based leaders who have come together in End Poverty in California (EPIC), an ...

    • Reparations in California

    Imagining California Panel Discussion: Reparations in California

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

    Join us for a discussion on reparations in California with panelists Daina Ramey Berry (UCSB), Tiffany Caesar (San Francisco State University), and Jovan Scott Lewis (UC Berkeley), moderated by Giuliana Perrone (UCSB). Panelists will consider the history of reparations in the United States, explain why they are being considered in California, and assess the current status of plans for reparations in San Francisco as well as the state as a whole. Audience Q&A and a ...

    • IHC Open House

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

    You are invited to the IHC’s Open House on Thursday, October 3, from 4-6 pm. Meet new Humanities faculty, IHC fellows, and staff members. Learn about Key Passages, our 2024-25 public events series. Find out about our publicly engaged programs and funding resources for faculty and graduate students. Enjoy good food, drink, and conversation. Cosponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts

    Key Passages Inaugural Talk: AI: A New Passage to Human Creativity?

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

    March 14, 2023 marked the beginning of a new era: Chat GPT-4 was released, fundamentally changing the way humans relate to language. In this talk, Professor Park will explore the implications of this pivotal moment. She will consider AI’s impact on the production of works of fiction and on creativity more broadly. Questions to be explored include: Does AI-informed writing have the potential to supplant traditional novel writing? In what ways can AI innovate creativity? ...

    • Two people in the same outfit talk facing each other on a ship. Behind them others watch. This is a scene from Twelfth Night.

    Key Passages Talk: When Life Is a Shipwreck: Key Passages in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night

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

    Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night begins with a shipwreck, a violent birth onto unknown shores that separates orphaned twins on a journey to nowhere. The turbulent sea visualizes an environment of passages–into adulthood, towards sexual identity, and in search of new attachments and communities of belonging. Twelfth Night is a play about transitions and transitioning, about passages and passing. What skills, virtues, and capacities do the twins need to find their way along the shoreline of life, ...

    Key Passages Talk: When the Uyghur Language Confronts Atrocity

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

    Over the last decade, the persecution of Uyghurs in China has attracted global attention. When Uyghur was officially banned from education by the Chinese government in September 2016, Uyghur editors were arrested and heavily sentenced, and books were collected and burned. Private bookstores were shut down and Uyghur publishers and bookstore owners were sentenced. Today, Uyghur linguists, writers, and journalists remain persecuted. In January 2017, Uyghurs started to organize mother language schools, publish textbooks, and ...

    • Key Passages Talk: Subject or Objects? Key Passageways between Things and Humans

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

    Based on three research projects on aesthetic environments, this talk will discuss how and when humans and things become objects or subjects. Focusing on the figures of the opera fan, the shoe fit model, and the museum custodian, the lecture will delve into the passivity of the fan as agency, the fit model as subject and object at the same time, and the custodian and their reduction to an object, and how this, paradoxically, allows ...

    • Key Passages Talk: Antidotes to Ageism in the Anthropocene: Generational Time and Multispecies Literary Ethnography

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

    Models of the passage from midlife to old age—from Freud, Proust, and Simone de Beauvoir to contemporary conversations about how old is too old to be an American president—disclose the ageism, including internalized ageism, rampant in our culture, with aging figured overwhelmingly as decline. Today, old age is imagined in terms of splitting: the good third age of incremental diminishment and the bad fourth age of unremitting medical catastrophe. What antidotes can alleviate the toxin ...

    Key Passages Talk: Black History’s Warning to the World

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

    Resisting the tide of repression that threatens the teaching of Black history, we should look to that past to understand the ongoing processes that have shaped our world. Our current predicament, marked by extreme inequalities, everyday violence, militarism, and political strife derives in part from the history of colonial conquest, slavery, and imperial warfare. Our struggles for freedom and dignity emerge from that history, too. By understanding it, we might discern the scope, force, direction, ...

    • Key Passages Talk: The Making of Ghost Village: Across the Borders of Life and Death, Scholarship and Opera

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

    This talk will take you into the process of creating a new, experimental opera based on a historical ghost story from Pu Songling’s seventeenth-century Chinese masterpiece, Liaozhao’s Strange Tales (Liaozhai zhiyi). Entitled Ghost Village, the opera is a creative collaboration between Judith Zeitlin, as scholar and English language librettist, and the composer Yao Chen, a China-based, Chicago-trained professor of composition at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. Building on the European operatic tradition, Ghost ...

    Key Passages Talk: Translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses

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

    In this talk, Stephanie McCarter will discuss her recent translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Penguin, 2022). She will first address her tactics for transforming Ovid's poetic and metrical effects into English verse. She will then outline her strategies for interpreting and rendering Ovid's themes of sexual violence, gender, sexuality, and the body. She will consider throughout how she carefully negotiated Ovid's playful style and disturbing subject matter to produce a poetic, accurate, and ethical translation. Stephanie ...

    • Key Passages Talk: No Occupation: Derrida on Palestine

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

    Taking its point of departure from a thread of references to Palestine in Derrida’s writings, from Glas to his last texts, this lecture seeks to demonstrate that these key passages can be a resource for us as we navigate our way through the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It traces Derrida’s complicated relation to his own Jewishness and argues that it is this complexity that enables him to guide us through the thicket of the recent war ...

    • IHC Open House

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

    You are invited to the IHC’s Open House on Tuesday, September 30, from 4 to 6 pm. Meet new Humanities faculty, IHC fellows, and staff members. Learn about On Fire, our 2025–26 public events series. Find out about our publicly engaged programs and funding resources for faculty and graduate students. Enjoy good food, drink, music, and conversation. Cosponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts

    • On Fire Inaugural Talk: When It All Burns: The Creation of California’s Wildfire Crisis

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

    This talk offers an on-the-ground perspective from a record-breaking fire season on a California hotshot crew, tracing the sociological, historical, and economic forces that fuel today’s megafires. For wildland firefighters, navigating the escalating impacts of climate change is a matter of life and death. These fires are not natural disasters, but the result of political choices. Understanding where they come from—and how firefighters survive on their edges—is essential to imagining a more just and equitable ...

    • On Fire Talk: Spheres of Injustice: Minority Politics Today

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

    How can we revitalize minority politics while making the fight against discrimination beneficial for all? Bruno Perreau proposes thinking about minority experiences relationally. How one person is governed has a direct impact on how another is. Legal provisions that protect gender can be used to protect race; those that protect disability can protect age, sexual orientation, or class, and so on. This is what Perreau calls intrasectionality, a new concept and an innovative legal strategy ...

    • On Fire Talk: Keepers of the Flame: Learning to Be in Relation with Fire

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

    Keepers of the Flame is an initiative rooted in relationships—between cultural fire practitioners and students/faculty, and between people, plants, and fire. In a context of settler colonial environmental policy and increasing risk of catastrophic fire, Keepers centers respect for Indigenous fire practitioners, recognition of fire as part of the landscape, and personal, place-based understandings with fire. With attention to the environmental injustices of land theft and fire suppression and the inequitable impacts of catastrophic fire, ...

    • On Fire Talk: Looking, After the Fires

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

    In recent years, unprecedented wildfires ravaged multiple continents. The fires grow ever larger, more destructive, and more ubiquitous as our changing climate plunges us further into the Pyrocene. Despite the scale of the devastation, small moments of optimism can be found in elemental ecological reflexes. Fires have motivated similar bursts of creative response from human cultural networks as well, inspiring – perhaps necessitating – new ways to conceive of ourselves in relation to our landscapes. ...

    • On Fire Talk: Mass Deportation as Racial Engineering

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

    Ahilan Arulanantham will describe the role race discrimination has played in immigration and refugee policy and how that history continues to play out in the current struggle over the Temporary Protected Status program, which allows individuals to remain in the United States because of unsafe conditions in their home countries. Audience Q&A and a reception will follow. Ahilan T. Arulanantham is Professor from Practice and Co-Director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy (CILP) ...

    On Fire Talk: The Fires Last Time: Landlord Arson and the Reverb of Racial Capitalism

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

    Last year's wildfires in L.A. turned a spotlight on a corner of the insurance world that typically exists in the shadows: the California FAIR plan, the state's insurer of last resort. Though it is now synonymous with wildfire risk, the FAIR plan is the byproduct of a very different conflagration: the Watts uprising of 1965. The strange career of the FAIR plan illustrates the links between the urban crisis of the late twentieth century and ...

    • Bodies Politic Talk: Food and The Body: The Politics of What We Eat

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

    What we eat may feel like a matter of personal choice, but our choices are shaped by powerful forces: food companies and their marketing teams, government policy, agricultural subsidies, public health priorities, and an industry whose profits depend on selling us more. In this conversation with Good Food host Evan Kleiman, pioneering food-policy scholar Dr. Marion Nestle will explore how corporate and political power shape the American diet — and, ultimately, our bodies. Drawing on ...

    • ears of corn

    Bodies Politic Talk: A-Maizing Nahua Healers: Colonial Attacks on Indigenous Healers in Early Modern Central Mexico

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

    Dr. Edward Anthony Polanco will discuss how Nahua healers used maize to heal the human body in central Mexican communities in the 16th century. Titiçih (Nahua healing specialists) provided maize to patients topically and orally and relied on it for answers about illnesses. Dr. Polanco will also explore how Spanish Catholic authorities viewed these healers and their practices as a threat to settler colonial society and attempted to extirpate them. Audience Q&A and a reception ...

    Bodies Politic Talk: A Dark Cast: Disability, Blackface, and Franklin D. Roosevelt

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

    Drawing from her national best-selling book Darkology: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment, Rhae Lynn Barnes will explore the complex intersections of disability, presidential power, and racial masquerade. She will examine how minstrelsy and the dark cast of blackface performance functioned both as cultural entertainment and a political prosthetic during the Roosevelt era, masking the physical vulnerability of white children with polio while reinforcing racial hierarchies. Audience Q&A and a reception will follow. Dr. ...

    • Bodies Politic Talk: American Sexual Exceptionalism: Sex, Labor, and U.S. Foreign Policy

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

    Between the 1870s and 1930s, American social reformers, working closely with the U.S. government, transformed sexual vice into an international political and humanitarian concern. As these activists worked to eradicate prostitution and trafficking, they promoted sexual self-control for both men and women as a cornerstone of civilization and a basis of American exceptionalism. American reformers successfully pushed for international anti-trafficking agreements that mirrored U.S. laws, calling for states to criminalize commercial sex and restrict migration, ...

    • Heroic Roses painting by Paul Klee

    Bodies Politic Talk: Art, Culture, Ethics, and Disabilty

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

    Disability is a concept, social identity, community, and shared human experience represented in history, literature, visual art, music, dance, architecture, design, and popular culture. Images show and shape the way we think about disability and people with disabilities and how we understand variation in human bodies. New ways of seeing and representing disability have appeared in U.S. public culture because of the civil and human rights movement, its laws, attitudes, and social changes. This talk ...

    • Bodies Politic Talk: Inviting Death In: How I Helped My Dad Die, and The Fight to Control How Life Ends

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

    Esmé E. Deprez is an investigative reporter whose father was an aid-in-dying patient. In her forthcoming book, she explores assisted death through both a clinical and a personal perspective. She considers assisted death as a social phenomenon, a legal and political movement, and an area of medical practice that has transformed end-of-life health care. Audience Q&A and a reception will follow. Deprez is the author of the forthcoming book Inviting Death In: How I Helped ...