Interdisciplinary Humanities Center UCSB

Magic Lantern Films Presents: Uncut Gems
2020-03-02 19:00 - 23:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | IV Theater, 960 Embarcadero del Norte, Isla Vista, CA, 93117, United States
Showings of Uncut Gems at 7:00 and 10:00 PM

Research Focus Group Talk: Amritlal Thakkar: A Gandhian "Intervention" in the "Tribal Question"
2020-03-04 16:00 - 18:00 | 3041 HSSB, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Debates on the “tribal question” constituted an important part of intellectual politics during the late colonial period in South Asia, especially during the decades leading to the Partition and Independence in 1947. Present-day “reservation” (affirmative action) policies for the “Scheduled Tribes” owe much to these debates. The “tribal question” was framed as a question that attempted to resolve how the British colonial government, and later the post-colonial Indian government, should engage groups of tribal communities that live in geospatially and socially marginalized conditions. This talk provides a critical analysis of the role of Amritlal Vithaldas Thakkar as an important interlocutor in these debates. Thakkar, a Gandhian activist, was hailed by many of his contemporaries as an exemplary champion of social service to the depressed castes and tribal communities. His intellectual battles with two other prominent figures—Bhimrao Ambedkar and Verrier Elwin—served to crystallize the problems of framing “indigeneity” in nationalist formulations. It also brought to light the inherent tensions involved in the politics of representing Adivasis, or “aboriginal tribes,” on the one hand, and Dalits, or “untouchables,” on the other. Although these intellectual debates were based on essentialist definitions of religion, culture, and civilization, they gave rise to methods of representation that greatly influenced the post-colonial state’s policies with regard to subaltern communities.
Maharshi Vyas is a doctoral student specializing in South Asian religions and cultures in the Department of Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara. His research focuses on subaltern communities in South Asia and explores more specifically the intersections among Adivasi tribal communities and institutionalized bhakti sampradayas, or devotional schools.
Sponsored by the IHC’s South Asian Religions and Cultures Research Focus Group

Gagaku Workshops: Court Music and Dance from Japan
2020-03-05 13:00 - 2020-03-06 17:00 | UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Gagaku (music, songs, and dances from the imperial court of Japan) is the oldest continuously performed genre of music in the world, dating back in Japan to at least the seventh century. This series of workshops offers a rare opportunity to experience directly this fantastic kind of music and dance and its unique musical instruments. The workshops are taught by former directors of the Gagaku orchestra at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo and by leading musicians from Japan. Please see the event flyer for workshop times and locations.
Organized by Fabio Rambelli (UCSB)
Produced by Naoyuki Manabe
Sponsored by Nora McNeely Hurley, Michael Hurley, and the Manitou Fund
Co-sponsored by: ISF Endowed Chair in Shinto Studies (UCSB), Department of Religious Studies (UCSB), Department of Theater and Dance (UCSB), East Asia Center (UCSB), Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies (UCSB), AD&A Museum (UCSB)
With Support from: Interdisciplinary Humanities Center (UCSB), Japan Foundation, Tokyo, Arts Council Tokyo, Northeast Asia Council (Association for Asian Studies)

Talk: The Class Politics of Inflation and Postwar Wage and Price Controls
2020-03-06 13:00 - 15:00 | 4041 HSSB
Andrew Elrod is a PhD candidate in the History Department at UC Santa Barbara. He is a historian of American capitalism and economic thought who has published in the New Labor Forum, Jacobin, and Dissent. His talk will examine the responses of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations to the problems of inflation and price controls in the 1960s and 1970s.
Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy

Magic Lantern Films Presents: Parasite
2020-03-06 19:00 - 23:30, 2020-03-09 19:00 - 23:30 | IV Theater, 960 Embarcadero del Norte, Isla Vista, CA, 93117, United States
Showings of Parasite at 7:00 and 10:00 PM

IV Live Presents Improvability: The Course Evals Show
2020-03-06 20:00 - 22:00 | Embarcadero Hall, 935 Embarcadero del Norte, Isla Vista, CA, 93117, United States
IV Live Presents Improvability: The Course Evals Show
Friday, March 6 at 8:00 PM
Embarcadero Hall, Isla Vista
$3 Admission
Sponsored by IV Live, Isla Vista Arts, UCSB, and Associated Students

POSTPONED Conference: Sino-Japanese Studies in the Twenty-First Century
2020-03-14 10:00 - 2020-03-15 14:00 | McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
This conference has been postponed and will be rescheduled at a later date. Email William Fleming for more information (wfleming@eastasian.ucsb.edu)

This conference is presented by the Transregional East Asia Research Focus Group and will feature a keynote lecture by Joshua Fogel, York University, and panels on Intellectual History, Literary Culture, and Japanese Sinology.
Saturday, March 14th, 10:00 AM-5:30 PM, and Sunday, March 15th, 9:30 AM-2:00 PM, at the McCune Conference Room, 6th floor, Humanities and Social Sciences Building
Conference participants include:
XIAOWEI ZHENG (UC Santa Barbara)
WILLIAM FLEMING (UC Santa Barbara)
JOSHUA FOGEL (York University)
ANDRE HAAG (University of Hawai’i)
CHUNLING PENG (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)
DAIGENGNA DUOER (UC Santa Barbara)
MANUEL COVO (UC Santa Barbara)
NAOKI YAMAMOTO (UC Santa Barbara)
HANGPING XU (UC Santa Barbara)
JING WANG (UC Santa Barbara)
WILLIAM HEDBERG (Arizona State University)
XIAORONG LI (UC Santa Barbara)
KATHERINE SALTZMAN-LI (UC Santa Barbara)
MOTOYA NAKAMURA (University of Tokyo)
MASAKI IENAGA (Tokyo Woman’s Christian University)
MARIKO KUBO (Seikei University)
YUJIRO MURATA (Doshisha University)
LUKE ROBERTS (UC Santa Barbara)
EMILY BAUM (UC Irvine)
Sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, College of Letters and Sciences, Department of History, Schlaikjer-McIntyre Family Fund in Japanese History, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, East Asia Center, Confucius Institute, and the Center for Taiwan Studies

POSTPONED Conference: Climate Fictions
2020-04-18 10:00 - 2020-04-19 16:30 | McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
THIS CONFERENCE HAS BEEN POSTPONED AND WILL BE RESCHEDULED AT A LATER DATE. EMAIL CHRISTENE D’ANCA FOR MORE INFORMATION (christene_danca@ucsb.edu)

As climate change has become a central topic of discussion, laced with the uncertainty of tomorrow, the UCSB Graduate Center for Literary Research has invited scholars from a variety of disciplines to reframe their conversations with a focus on this ubiquitous topic as it has been interpreted in literary fiction, as well as within the arts.
Originally coined by Dan Bloom, Climate-Fiction, popularly known as Cli-Fi, is a type of fiction that explores what the earth might become if climate change continues at its current rate, and specifically if humans do not intervene to save the planet.
As many successful authors, such as Margaret Atwood, T. C. Boyle, Amitav Ghosh, Ursula Le Guin, Lydia Millet, David Mitchell, and Leslie Marmon Silko, have contributed to promulgating the topics of climate change and global warming into the public eye, Cli-Fi has gained prominence as more than a fringe genre.
Join us on April 18-19, 2020 from 10 a.m. each day in the McCune Conference room, for a robust exploration of what constitutes Climate Fiction today.
Keynote presenter, John Shoptaw, has been writing about and teaching ecopoetry and ecopoetics in the English Department at UC Berkeley. Currently, he is exploring the ecopoetics and ecopoetry of climate change. His most recent publication is a climate fiction, titled “Whoa!” that is a retelling of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (book 2), in Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics. Among his other publications, is Time’s Beach, a collection of poems that evokes the cultural and environmental history of the Mississippi watershed, and On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery’s Poetry, a study of Ashbery’s poems through the form of a flow chart.
Sponsored by the Graduate Center for Literary Research

POSTPONED Talk: “Hysteric Affirmation": Language, Literature, and the Economy in Contemporary German Fiction
2020-05-05 16:00 - 18:00 | McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
THIS EVENT WILL BE RESCHEDULED. SIGN UP FOR OUR EVENTS MAILING LIST FOR EVENT UPDATES.

Lilla Balint is Assistant Professor of German in the Department of German at University of California, Berkeley. She specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century German literature, culture, and intellectual history in its broader comparative contexts. At UC Berkeley, she is affiliated with the Institute for European Studies and the Jewish Studies Program.
Currently, she is at work on a book manuscript, “Ruins of Utopia: History, Memory, and the Novel after 1989,” that exposes the afterlife of socialism in contemporary literature. This comparative and multilingual study puts authors from Central Europe in dialogue to investigate how historical fiction after 1989 reconstructs the Cold War East. Located at the intersections of narrative poetics, cultural history, and memory studies, the book analyzes how novelists from diverse linguistic and cultural contexts re-envision Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Sponsored by the UC Humanities Network and co-presented by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies

Symposium: Healing/Arts: Health Activism, Creative Practice, & the Medical Humanities
2020-05-14 13:00 - 18:30 | CA
Healing/Arts is a free, virtual symposium that brings together creative practitioners from literary studies, medical humanities, disability justice, and performance for a series of talks and workshops on the relationship between the arts and health activism. Featured facilitators Kelly Gluckman, Leora Fridman, Johanna Hedva, and Patty Berne will examine the role the creative arts might play in critiquing the institutional configurations of American healthcare and the normative imperatives underlying idealized notions of health. And they will explore the arts’ capacity to help us reimagine and produce individual and collective well-being by inviting participants to experiment with modes of communal engagement including somatic exercises, writing, discussion, performance, and art making. Please visit https://healingartssymposium.wordpress.com/ for more information.
Sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, Humanities and Fine Arts Division Office of the Dean, Graduate Center for Literary Research, Department of English Literature and Mind Research Center, and MultiCultural Center.

Research Focus Group Discussion: The New Human
2020-08-01 12:00 - 13:00 | Zoom
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 space is for cognitive humanists and cognitive scientists to discuss our current research on the developing nature of human mind with each other.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Sustainability and the New Human Research Focus Group

Conference: Realisms in East Asian Performing Arts
2020-10-01 14:00 - 2020-10-03 20:00 | Zoom
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 (Wake Forest University), Siyuan Liu (University of British Columbia), Jessica Nakamura (UCSB), Cody Poulton (University of Victoria), Katherine Saltzman-Li (UCSB), Catherine Swatek (University of British Columbia), Guojun Wang (Vanderbilt University), Miseong Woo (Yonsei University), Min-Hyung Yoo (Korea University), Soo Ryon Yoon (Lingnan University), Ji Hyon (Kayla) Yuh (Montclair State University), with Risa Brainin (UCSB) and William Davies King (UCSB)
The conference is open to the public, but registration is required. For registration, schedule, and conference information, please visit our website: http://www.realismseastasia.com.
Sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, UCSB Departments of Theater and Dance, East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, History, Comparative Literature, Art and Architecture, Carsey-Wolf Center, East Asia Center, College of Letters and Science, and Abdulhamit Arvas

Inaugural Lecture: Living Democracy in Capitalism’s Shadow: Creative Labor, Black Abolitionists, and the Struggle to End Slavery
2020-10-08 16:00 - 17:00 | Zoom
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” in a society that valorizes creativity amidst growing inequality and systemic racism. Audience Q&A will follow.
John Majewski is the Michael Douglas Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts and Professor in the Department of History. His areas of specialization include American economic, social, and legal history; Southern history; and the U.S. Civil War. He is the author of A House Dividing: Economic Development in Pennsylvania and Virginia Before the Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2000), Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Imagination of the Confederate Nation (UNC Press, 2009), and numerous articles, reviews, and book chapters.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Living Democracy series
ASL and Spanish interpretation will be provided. To view ASL interpretation, please attend the webinar on a desktop computer.

CONFERENCIA INAUGURAL: VIVIR LA DEMOCRACIA A LA SOMBRA DEL CAPITALISMO: TRABAJO CREATIVO, ABOLICIONISTAS NEGROS Y LA LUCHA PARA TERMINAR CON LA ESCLAVITUD
En las dos décadas anteriores a la Guerra Civil, se desarrolló un nuevo tipo de capitalismo en el norte de los Estados Unidos que enfatizaba la educación masiva, la innovación generalizada y nuevos mercados para el arte y el diseño. Para los abolicionistas negros, la cambiante economía del norte presentó nuevas oportunidades para resaltar los males de la esclavitud. Mientras continuaban las torturas y castigos físicos a los esclavos, los abolicionistas negros en las décadas de 1840 y 1850 destacaron cada vez más la “oscuridad mental” de la esclavitud, enfocándose en la negación sistemática de la alfabetización, el aprendizaje y la creatividad. A través de su trabajo creativo, los abolicionistas defendieron de manera convincente la igualdad racial. Sin embargo, el trabajo laborar y creativo hecho por los abolicionistas después de la Guerra Civil, demostró los límites de la utilización de la creatividad como una forma de obtener la ciudadanía, y plantea preguntas importantes sobre la forma en que en la sociedad que valora la creatividad en medio de crecimiento desigualdad y el racismo sistémico, vive e interactúa con la democracia en el siglo 21. Seguirán las preguntas y respuestas de la audiencia.
John Majewski es el Decano de Humanidades y Bellas Artes de Michael Douglas y profesor en el Departamento de Historia. Sus áreas de especialización incluyen la historia económica, social y legal de Estados Unidos; Historia del Sur y la Guerra Civil de Estados Unidos. Es el autor de A House Dividing: Economic Development in Pennsylvania and Virginia Before the Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2000), Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Imagination of the Confederate Nation (UNC Press, 2009) y numerosos artículos, reseñas y capítulos de libros.
Patrocinado por la serie Living Democracy – Vivir la democracia de IHC
Habrá interpretación en ASL y español. Para acceder a interpretación de señas favor de utilizar una computadora de escritorio.
Evento gratuito. Favor de registrarse de antemano para recibir el enlace a la conferencia de Zoom.

Humanities Decanted: Transgenerational Remembrance: Performance and the Asia-Pacific War in Contemporary Japan
2020-10-13 16:00 - 16:45 | Zoom
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 ethical and transnational feminist queries, Nakamura shows that performances move remembrance beyond current evidentiary and historiographical debates.
Jessica Nakamura’s research focuses on theater and performance in the Asia-Pacific. Her essays have appeared in the journals Modern Drama, Performance Research, and Trans Asia Photography Review and in the edited volumes Performance in a Militarized Culture and Performing the Secular. Nakamura has trained in Japanese Dance, Chinese Beijing Opera, and Balinese Dance. Her directing work includes productions of Federico Garcia Lorca’s Yerma and Gao Xingjian’s Wild Man; she most recently translated and directed Family Portrait by contemporary Japanese playwright Shu Matsui.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment

Research Focus Group Symposium: India "Right": Making and Unmaking Indian Citizenship
2020-10-14 12:30 - 14:00 | Zoom
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. The women of Shaheen Bagh, a Muslim neighborhood in Delhi, were also at the forefront of the protests. Protests were brought to a halt as riots erupted in Delhi that left 53 people dead and many more injured. Anti-Muslim rhetoric of the ruling BJP leaders preceded the riots as the party geared up for elections to the Delhi Assembly (which it lost) in early February 2020. However, in the post-riot reckoning it was the protesters who were blamed by the police for the riots and various participants in the protests are facing prosecution, while the BJP leaders who made inflammatory speeches have gone scot-free.
Among more recent events, the COVID-19 pandemic and a draconian lockdown after mid-March saw many laboring people from metropoles like Delhi walk back to their homes hundreds of miles away, and the Indian government was unable to do anything for a long time to ease their situation. The government has also used the lockdown—as have other high-handed regimes globally—to reimpose its authority. Other major moves of the government in the last 12 months include making inoperative Article 370 of the Indian constitution that gave special status to the northern state of Jammu and Kashmir, and laying the foundation for the building of a massive Ram Temple where a Muslim mosque once stood before it was demolished by BJP activists in 1992.
The UCSB faculty participants in this symposium will discuss the varied ways in which this chain of events has unfolded in India and what these events mean with respect to Indian democracy and its institutions, the rhetoric of nationalism, the onslaught on the idea of secularism, and the economy and the livelihoods of the Indian people. Anshu Malhotra, Professor of Global Studies and Kundun Kaur Kapany Chair of Sikh and Punjabi Studies, will discuss Shaheen Bagh and Muslim women in India. Utathya Chattopadhyaya, Assistant Professor of History, will reflect on the reconfiguration of nationalism in India. Aashish Mehta, Associate Professor of Global Studies, will discuss populism, policy, and the real economy in India before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Satyajit Singh, Professor of Global Studies and Political Science, will reflect on the student protests in perspective. Amit Ahuja, Associate Professor of Political Science, will discuss electoral politics and what the recent protests mean for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Cosponsored by the IHC’s South Asian Religions and Cultures Research Focus Group and the Department of Global Studies

The 2020 Diana and Simon Raab Writer-in-Residence: Jesmyn Ward
2020-10-20 17:00 - 18:15 | Zoom
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). Ward’s novels, primarily set on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, are deeply informed by the trauma of Hurricane Katrina. Salvage the Bones, winner of the 2011 National Book Award, is a troubling but ultimately empowering tale of familial bonds set amid the chaos of the hurricane. Ward’s memoir, Men We Reaped, deals with the loss of five young men in her life—to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that follows people who live in poverty. In 2016, Ward edited the critically acclaimed anthology The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, a New York Times bestseller. Her newest novel, the critically acclaimed Sing, Unburied, Sing, won the 2017 National Book Award. Sing has been called “a searing, urgent read for anyone who thinks the shadows of slavery and Jim Crow have passed” (Celeste Ng). Sing was named one of the best books of 2017 by The New York Times, Time, The Washington Post, and Publisher’s Weekly. Sing was also nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. An associate professor of creative writing at Tulane University, Ward received the 2016 Strauss Living Award and a 2017 MacArthur Genius Grant, and was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people of 2018. Scribner recently reissued her debut novel, Where the Line Bleeds.
Sponsored by the Diana and Simon Raab Writer-in-Residence Program, created to bring distinguished practitioners of the craft of writing to the UCSB community. Co-presented by the IHC’s Living Democracy series and the Writing Program.
Click here to learn more about the Diana and Simon Raab Writer-in-Residence Program.

Research Focus Group Discussion: Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution
2020-10-20 19:00 - 20:00 | Zoom
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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 producers Jim LeBrecht and Nicole Newnham will join Hannah Garibaldi (Film and Media Studies, UCSB) for a virtual discussion of this fascinating documentary. ASL interpretation will be provided during the event. The film may be viewed in advance on Netflix.
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Cosponsored by the IHC’s Disability Studies Initiative Research Focus Group, the Carsey-Wolf Center, the UCSB Library, the Disabled Students Program, Graduate Division, and the Resource Center for Gender and Sexual Diversity (RCGSD)

Living Democracy Talk: Struggling to Save America’s Cities in the Suburban Age: Urban Renewal Revisited
2020-10-22 16:00 - 17:00 | Zoom
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 analyze the evolution in Logue’s thinking and actions, when and how he met resistance and accommodation by communities, and what he and many others who cared about cities learned in facing the challenges of urban revitalization during the suburban boom of the second half of the 20th century. Amid substantial challenges today in the realms of racial injustice, public health, economic viability, and urban resilience, it is more important than ever that we reexamine the history of efforts—successful and failed—to keep American cities vital. Audience Q&A will follow.
Lizabeth Cohen is the Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies and a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of History at Harvard. Her most recent book is Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age (October 2019), winner of the Bancroft Prize. It examines the benefits and costs of the shifting strategies for rebuilding American cities after World War II by following the career of urban redeveloper Edward J. Logue, who oversaw major renewal projects in New Haven, Boston, and New York State from the 1950s through the 1980s. Cohen has been a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is also a former president of the Urban History Association.
To learn more about or purchase a copy of Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age, please visit Chaucer’s Books online.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Living Democracy series; the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment; the UCSB Blum Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy; and the UCSB Department of History
Image courtesy of Boston City Archives
ASL and Spanish interpretation will be provided. To view ASL interpretation, please attend the webinar on a desktop computer.

VIVIR LA DEMOCRACIA: LUCHA PARA SALVAR LAS CIUDADES DE AMÉRICA EN LA ERA SUBURBANA: REVISIÓN DE LA RENOVACIÓN URBANA
La Renovación Urbana de las décadas de 1950 a 1970 ha adquirido una muy mala reputación, en gran parte merecida. Sin embargo, reducirlo a una historia inmutable de destrucción urbana pierde algunos legados importantes y metas genuinamente progresistas. Estos incluyen esfuerzos para crear comunidades más socialmente mixtas, para involucrar a los suburbios, no solo a las ciudades, en la solución de la desigualdad metropolitana y, lo que es más importante, para responsabilizar al gobierno federal de financiar viviendas más asequibles y otras inversiones urbanas, en lugar de recurrir al sector privado. Cohen revisará esta historia siguiendo la larga carrera de Edward J. Logue, quien trabajó para revitalizar New Haven en la década de 1950, se convirtió en el arquitecto de “New Boston” o “el Nuevo Boston” en la década de 1960 y luego dirigió organizaciones innovadoras en el estado de Nueva York y en el sur del Bronx. La profesora analizará la evolución en el pensamiento y las acciones de Logue, cuándo y cómo encontró resistencia y adaptación por parte de las comunidades, y lo que él y muchos otros que se preocuparon por las ciudades aprendieron al enfrentar los desafíos de la revitalización urbana durante el auge suburbano de la segunda mitad del siglo XX. En medio de desafíos sustanciales de hoy en día en los ámbitos de la injusticia racial, la salud pública, la viabilidad económica y la resiliencia urbana, es de suma importancia que reexaminemos la historia de los esfuerzos, exitosos y fallidos, para mantener las ciudades estadounidenses con vida y relevantes. Seguirán las preguntas y respuestas de la audiencia.
Lizabeth Cohen es profesora de Estudios Estadounidenses Howard Mumford Jones y profesora de servicios distinguidos de la Universidad de Harvard en el Departamento de Historia de Harvard. Su libro más reciente es Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age (octubre de 2019). Examina los beneficios y costos de las estrategias cambiantes para la reconstrucción de ciudades estadounidenses después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial siguiendo la carrera del reurbanizador urbano Edward J. Logue, quien supervisó importantes proyectos de renovación en New Haven, Boston y el estado de Nueva York desde la década de 1950 hasta la década de 1950. Década de 1980. Cohen ha sido miembro de la Fundación Guggenheim, el National Endowment for the Humanities, el American Council of Learned Societies y el Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. También es ex presidenta de la Asociación de Historia Urbana.
Patrocinado por la serie Living Democracy de IHC ; el UCSB Blum Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy; el Departamento de Historia de UCSB; y la Dotación Conmemorativa Harry Girvetz de IHC
Imagen cortesía de Boston City Archives
Habrá interpretación en ASL y español. Para acceder a interpretación de señas favor de utilizar una computadora de escritorio.
Evento gratuito. Favor de registrarse de antemano para recibir el enlace a la conferencia de Zoom.

Research Focus Group Discussion: Let's Talk Mediterranean: A Conversation with Sharon Kinoshita and Brian Catlos
2020-10-23 15:00 - 16:30 | Zoom
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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 French Literature (UPenn, 2006), co-editor with Peregrine Horden of A Companion to Mediterranean History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), and translator of Marco Polo’s Description of the World (Hackett Press, 2016).
Brian Catlos (Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder) is a specialist in medieval Spanish history and author of Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain (Basic Books, 2018), Infidel Kings and Unholy Warriors: Faith, Power, and Violence in the Age of Crusade and Jihad (Farar, Straus & Girour, 2014), and Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, ca. 1050-1614 (Cambridge UP, 2015).
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Sponsored by the IHC’s Connectivity in the Premodern Mediterranean Research Focus Group
Image: Petrus de Ebolo (d. 1220) Liber ad honorem Augusti, sive de rebus Siculis, scene showing Tancred of Lecce claiming the crown of Sicily

Research Focus Group Meeting: The Future of Humanity from a Sustainability Point of View
2020-10-26 17:00 - 18:00 | Zoom
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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 at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on the sustainability of the human-nature complexity through the understanding of materials and energy exchanges between them. His work contributed to the theoretical foundations and practical applications of quantitative sustainability assessment in the areas of life cycle assessment (LCA) and industrial ecology.
Aili Pettersson Peeker is a PhD student in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research concerns cognitive literary studies and how reading literature can allow for selfless experiences.
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Sponsored by the IHC’s Sustainability and the New Human Research Focus Group
Image Credit: Geoff Jones, “Sustainable innovation”

Humanities Decanted: Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths
2020-10-27 16:00 - 16:45 | Zoom
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, whether it’s Antigone’s courageous stand against tyranny or Procne and Philomela punishing a powerful man, Morales uncovers hidden truths about solidarity, empowerment, and catharsis. Antigone Rising offers a fresh understanding of the stories we take for granted, showing how we can reclaim them to challenge the status quo, spark resistance, and rail against unjust regimes.
Helen Morales is a classicist and cultural critic with interests that include the ancient novel, Greek imperial poetry, mythology, literary criticism, sexual ethics, diversity, and pilgrimage. These interests are always connected to major contemporary concerns—leadership, class, race, sexual politics, aesthetics, law—a better understanding of which, in her view, comes through appreciating their investment in Classics. She is the author of Pilgrimage to Dollywood (2014), Classical Mythology: A Very Short Introduction (2007 and 2010), and Vision and Narrative in Achilles Tatius’ “Leucippe and Clitophon” (2004). She is also editor of the journal Ramus.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment

Living Democracy Talk: From the Embers of Crisis: Creating Equitable and Deliberative Democracy
2020-10-29 16:00 - 17:00 | Zoom
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 half century encompassing Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and perhaps Obama — of relatively narrowly bounded disputes between the center-left and center-right — would not address those deeper failures. Delivering on the promise of American democracy — the promise of inclusion, equality, deliberation, and self-government — requires more fundamental political reorganization: new leaders with relationships of mutual understanding and accountability to the communities that they are meant to represent; powerful new popular groups and organizations; and electoral structures that enable all Americans to participate meaningfully in politics. Audience Q&A will follow.
Archon Fung is the Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. His research explores policies, practices, and institutional designs that deepen the quality of democratic governance. He focuses upon public participation, deliberation, and transparency. He co-directs the Transparency Policy Project and leads democratic governance programs of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Kennedy School. His books include Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency (Cambridge University Press, with Mary Graham and David Weil) and Empowered Participation: Reinventing Urban Democracy (Princeton University Press). He has authored five books, four edited collections, and over fifty articles appearing in professional journals.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Living Democracy series and the Sara Miller McCune and George D. McCune Endowment
ASL and Spanish interpretation will be provided. To view ASL interpretation, please attend the webinar on a desktop computer.

VIVIR LA DEMOCRACIA: DESDE LAS CENIZAS DE LA CRISIS: CREAR UNA DEMOCRACIA EQUITATIVA Y DELIBERATIVA
En un momento en que la democracia estadounidense vivió niveles récord de división política, desigualdad y desconfianza institucional, fue golpeada por la tormenta perfecta de la crisis de salud de COVID-19. Una crisis económica de desempleo, dislocación económica y una crisis cívica que, expusieron el racismo profundo y el abuso policial. ¿Qué se necesita para crear a partir de las brasas de estas crisis una democracia más significativa, igualitaria y deliberativa en Estados Unidos? Muchos depositan sus esperanzas en un cambio de administración presidencial en las próximas elecciones. Pero mucho antes de Donald Trump, nuestro gobierno no logró crear un sistema que compartiera la prosperidad de manera justa. Nuestro gobierno no respondió a los deseos de muchos estadounidenses, especialmente a los de las personas de color y estadounidenses sin poder económico. Incluso si regresamos a la mitad del siglo pasado, que incluye a Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush y quizás Obama y Trump, de disputas relativamente limitadas entre la centroizquierda y el centroderecha, no abordaría esos fracasos profundos. Cumplir con la promesa de la democracia estadounidense – la promesa de inclusión, igualdad, deliberación y autogobierno – requiere una reorganización política más fundamental: nuevos líderes con relaciones de entendimiento mutuo y responsabilidad ante las comunidades que se supone que representan; grupos poderosos, nuevos y organizaciones populares. Al igual que estructuras electorales que permitan a todos los estadounidenses participar de manera significativa en la política. Seguirán las preguntas y respuestas de la audiencia.
Archon Fung es el profesor Winthrop Laflin McCormack de ciudadanía y autogobierno en la Harvard Kennedy School. Su investigación explora políticas, prácticas y diseños institucionales que profundizan la calidad de la gobernabilidad democrática. Se centra en la participación pública, la deliberación y la transparencia. Codirige el Proyecto de Política de Transparencia y dirige los programas de gobernabilidad democrática del Centro Ash para la Gobernanza Democrática e Innovación en la Escuela Kennedy. Sus libros incluyen Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparencia (Cambridge University Press, con Mary Graham y David Weil) y Empowered Participation: Reinventing Urban Democracy (Princeton University Press). Es autor de cinco libros, cuatro colecciones editadas y más de cincuenta artículos publicados en revistas profesionales.
Patrocinado por la serie Living Democracy de IHC y la Fundación Sara Miller McCune y George D. McCune
Habrá interpretación en ASL y español. Para acceder a interpretación de señas favor de utilizar una computadora de escritorio.
Evento gratuito. Favor de registrarse de antemano para recibir el enlace a la conferencia de Zoom.

Research Focus Group Talk: “Cripistemologies of Pain”
2020-10-30 11:00 - 12:30 | Zoom
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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 Books. His poetry has appeared in Barren Magazine, Wordgathering, Glass, South Carolina Review, Foglifter, and The New Engagement, as well as in two chapbooks, The Bone Setter (Damaged Goods Press, 2019) and Paring (Finishing Line Press, 2020 forthcoming).
Cosponsored by the IHC’s Disability Studies Initiative Research Focus Group and UCSB’s Early Modern Center
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Critical Mass Talks and Staged Reading: On Collecting and Hoarding
2020-11-05 16:00 - 20:30 | Zoom
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 artist, who makes a world through things. In this talk, King will use exhibits, imagery, anecdotes, and ideas to open up the creative nexus of collecting and its power to re-create the world.
William Davies King is Distinguished Professor of Theater and Dance at UC Santa Barbara. He is the author of Henry Irving’s “Waterloo”: Theatrical Engagements with Late-Victorian Culture and History (1993), Writing Wrongs: The Work of Wallace Shawn (1997), “A Wind Is Rising”: The Correspondence of Agnes Boulton and Eugene O’Neill (2000), Collections of Nothing (2008), and Another Part of a Long Story: Literary Traces of Eugene O’Neill and Agnes Boulton (Michigan, 2010), and he is the editor of critical editions of Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2014) and The Iceman Cometh (2020).
An Oikos for Everything: Hoarding against Waste
The first decades of the twenty-first century have seen an explosion of interest in hoarding, and in those whose accumulated possessions overwhelm living spaces, rendering them unusable and often unsafe. Hoarding is the subject of recent documentary and feature films, novels, memoirs, self-help books, installation art, stand-up comedy acts, and of course, reality series. In her talk, Rebecca Falkoff will explore the relationships between hoarding and wasting, and the narratives through which they are antithetically conjoined. Modern literary and visual texts from Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 Dead Souls to Song Dong’s 2005 Waste Not present hoarding as a way of suspending matter between waste and use in a bounded space of potential.
Rebecca Falkoff is an Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at New York University. She recently completed her first manuscript, Possessed: A Cultural History of Hoarding, and is working on a new project about industrial chemistry and literature, Modernity in the Air. She has published on illegibility, flea markets, and the Ferrante phenomenon. Her work on Carlo Emilio Gadda’s scientific and technical writings was awarded the Romance Studies Early Career Researchers Essay Prize.
Audience Q&A will follow.

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link

Staged Reading: Collections of Nothing Enough is Enough
Written by William Davies King (UCSB Theater and Dance)
Directed by Risa Brainin (UCSB Theater and Dance)
Cast: Irwin Appel (UCSB Theater and Dance) and Anne Torsiglieri (UCSB Theater and Dance)
The play delves into the mixed-up mind of the mega-collector and asks of that massive pile of stuff–thoughts, feelings, and jokes–the crucial question facing us all: What next?
Audience Q&A will follow.
Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link
Sponsored by the IHC’s Critical Mass series, the Hester and Cedric Crowell Endowment, the UCSB Department of Theater and Dance’s LAUNCH PAD series, and the UCSB Library

Related Exhibit: The Creative Edge of Collecting: The “Nothing” of William Davies King
UCSB Library exhibited a selection of William Davies King’s ephemera collection in its first floor Mountain Gallery during winter quarter 2020. In The Creative Edge of Collecting, King confronts the social and psychological impulses to collect, and also the eye-opening possibilities of the sort of things that one might assemble. Shortly after the exhibition opened, COVID-19 struck, and the campus shut down all physical spaces. While UCSB Library remains closed to visitors, you can still see the exhibition online. Please click here for a walk-through with William Davies King. For more information about the UCSB Library exhibition, please visit https://www.library.ucsb.edu/events-exhibitions/creative-edge-collecting.

Research Focus Group Discussion with Amanda Lucia about Her Book Reflections of Amma
2020-11-05 17:20 - 18:30 | Zoom
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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 guru one at a time, events that routinely last ten to twenty hours without any rest for her. Although she was born in 1953 as a low-caste girl in a South Indian fishing village, today millions revere her as guru and goddess, a living embodiment of the divine on earth. Reflections of Amma focuses on communities of Amma’s devotees in the United States, showing how they endeavor to mirror their guru’s behaviors and transform themselves to emulate the ethos of the movement. This study argues that “inheritors” and “adopters” of Hindu traditions differently interpret Hindu goddesses, Amma, and her relation to feminism and women’s empowerment because of their inherited religious, cultural, and political dispositions. In this insightful ethnographic analysis, Amanda J. Lucia discovers how the politics of American multiculturalism reifies these cultural differences in “de facto congregations,” despite the fact that Amma’s embrace attempts to erase communal boundaries in favor of global unity.”
Amanda Lucia is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Co-Director of the Institute for the Study of Immigration and Religion at UC Riverside. Her research explores the global exportation, appropriation, and circulation of Hindu traditions, focusing on religious encounters between South Asians and North Americans since the early nineteenth century.
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Sponsored by the IHC’s South Asian Religions and Cultures Research Focus Group

Research Focus Group Workshop: Graduate Student Research
2020-11-09 11:00 - 13:00 | Zoom
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

Research Focus Group Workshop: Embodied Ownership: Sheppard Lee and Proprietary Whiteness in Jacksonian America
2020-11-10 15:00 - 16:00 | Zoom
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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 University of California, Santa Barbara.
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Sponsored by the IHC’s Slavery, Captivity & the Meaning of Freedom Research Focus Group
Image: George Catlin, The Virginia Constitutional Convention, 1830

Research Focus Group Talk: Dismembering Classicism: Contesting Colonial and Classical Legacies in the Southwest
2020-11-12 12:00 - 13:00 | Zoom
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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 the Navajo Nation, is from Albuquerque, NM. She holds a double-major B.A. from the University of New Mexico in Comparative Literature & Cultural Studies and Anthropology, an M.A. in Comparative Humanities from Brandeis University, and a second M.A. in Museum Studies from UNM. Her recent thesis in Museum Studies explored Classical influence within early anthropology and museum discourses. Her examinations revealed how these models helped to construct colonial representations of gender, especially in Southwest ethnology. As a Ph.D. student in Public History at the University of California Santa Barbara, she continues these research inquiries toward decolonizing museum practices and the public interpretation of history in museum settings.
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Sponsored by the IHC’s Crossing Borderlands Research Focus Group

Research Focus Group Talk: Assistive Technologies and Erotic Adaptation: Queer Disability in the Renaissance
2020-11-13 12:00 - 13:30 | Zoom
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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
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