Events

IHC Series

  1. Events
  2. IHC Series

Views Navigation

Event Views Navigation

Today

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? ...

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

Talk description forthcoming. Claudio E. Benzecry is Professor of Communication Studies and Sociology at Northwestern University. His book The Opera Fanatic: Ethnography of an Obsession (University of Chicago Press, 2011) received the Mary Douglas Award for best book in the Sociology of Culture (2012) and Honorable mention for the ASA Distinguished Book award (2014). He is the editor of four volumes on theory, culture, and knowledge, including Social Theory Now (with Monika Krause and Isaac ...

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 ...

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

Talk description forthcoming. Judith T. Zeitlin is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. A scholar of early modern Chinese literature, her innovative work combines literary history with other disciplines, including visual and material culture, theater, music, medicine, gender studies, and film. Her many publications include The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature (2007), Historian of the Strange: Pu ...

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 ...