Imagining California Event: California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline
2024-02-08 16:00 - 18:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Join us as Los Angeles Times reporter Rosanna Xia and Dr. Charles Lester, Director of UC Santa Barbara’s Ocean and Coastal Policy Center, discuss sea level rise and the challenges looming over the California coast. Xia will draw from her new book, California Against the Sea, in which deeply reported stories braid together science, policy, and the state’s social history. The conversation will explore how the decisions we make today will determine where we go tomorrow: headlong into disaster, or toward an equitable refashioning of coastal stewardship. Audience Q&A and a reception will follow.
Rosanna Xia is an environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times, where she specializes in stories about the coast and ocean. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2020 for explanatory reporting, and her work has been anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing series.
Cosponsored by the IHC’s Imagining California series, the IHC Idee Levitan Endowment, the UCSB Ocean and Coastal Policy Center, the Marine Science Institute, and the Environmental Studies Program

Talk: Mystery Children: The Stasova International Children’s Home During Stalin’s Purge
2024-02-12 16:00 - 17:30 | McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Drawing on her current book project, Communist Neverland, Elizabeth McGuire tells the story of the Stasova International Children’s Home, an elite orphanage and boarding school for the children of Communist Party leaders from all parts of the globe. Professor McGuire will focus in this talk on “Jimmy Ruegg,” one of the Stasova home’s many “mystery children.” Jimmy spent his earliest years in the International Settlement in Shanghai, believed he was German, and thought he had two families: one enmeshed in German-Chinese trade and the other in prison. As major underground operatives, his parents were eventually able to arrange for him to be raised at the Stasova home. There, he encountered many equally confused and traumatized children. Even the Stasova home’s administrators did not know the real identities of many children’s parents, which caused major difficulties during Stalin’s purge. Were children free of responsibility for the sins of their parents, as Stalin preached, or were they dangerous potential enemies of the people, as he often practiced?
Voices of history’s children matter today more than ever, when children from Gaza to Eastern Ukraine serve as high-profile symbols, pawns, and victims in the violent geopolitics of the world around them. Dozens of first-person interviews have allowed Professor McGuire to investigate how the equally fierce struggle for world communism looked through the eyes of children, and what the long-term consequences for them were.

Professor Elizabeth McGuire is a historian of global communism, focusing on cross-cultural human experiences and networks that arose in connection with the Soviet-backed transnational communist movement. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and is now Associate Professor of History at California State University, East Bay, where she also created and runs a B.A. program to prepare future high school history teachers. Her first book, Red at Heart: How Chinese Communists Fell in Love with the Russian Revolution, published by Oxford University Press in 2017, is about personal relationships between Russian and Chinese revolutionaries against the dramatic backdrop of shifting geopolitics. It won an honorable mention for the W. Bruce Lincoln prize for a first published monograph of “exceptional merit and lasting significance for the understanding of Russia’s past.” It was also a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and a London Times Higher Education Book of the Year. Professor McGuire is now writing a second book, Communist Neverland: History of an International Children’s Home, 1933–2013.
Sponsored by the Center for Cold War Studies and International History

2024 Arthur N. Rupe Great Debate: Is Housing a Human Right?
2024-02-13 19:30 - 21:30 | Campbell Hall, Building 538, University of California, Santa Barbara, Mesa Rd,, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
The dramatic housing shortage in California affects millions of residents and leads thousands to homelessness. The 2024 Arthur N. Rupe Great Debate will address this issue by asking, “Is Housing a Human Right?” If so, our state faces a massive undertaking. Experts with diverse specialties and experiences will wrestle with some of our biggest challenges. How, for example, can we build low and moderate income housing when construction costs are high and community opposition is often present? How can people experiencing homelessness be moved to shelter and housing? The event will include an audience Q&A.

Participants:
Andy Bales
Former President and CEO, Union Rescue Mission
David Garcia
Policy Director, Terner Center for Housing Innovation, University of California, Berkeley
Rasheedah Phillips
Director of Housing, PolicyLink
Eric Tars
Senior Policy Director, National Homelessness Law Center
Moderator: Larry Mantle
Host of AirTalk with Larry Mantle on NPR member station LAist 89.3

Tuesday, February 13, 2024 | 7:30 PM
UCSB Campbell Hall
Doors open at 7 PM
The event is free and open to the public
Paid parking is available on site

The Arthur N. Rupe Great Debate Series is presented by the UC Santa Barbara College of Letters and Science and co-presented by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and Arts & Lectures

Imagining California Talk: Aesthetic Mobility and Solidarities at Self Help Graphics & Art
2024-02-23 12:00 - 13:00 | Zoom
Self Help Graphics & Art is a legacy arts organization that served on the cultural front of the Chicano Movement. Its emphasis on printmaking as an accessible medium infused with activist aims and its ability to cultivate and navigate various solidarities helped to support over fifty years of growth. This presentation by the co-editors of Self Help Graphics at Fifty looks at the multiple aesthetic styles and collaborative innovations that produced intergenerational, transnational, and cross-racial connections during the organization’s first five decades. Audience Q&A will follow.
Karen Mary Davalos, Professor of Chicano and Latino Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, has written two books on Chicana/o/x museums, Exhibiting Mestizaje: Mexican (American) Museums in the Diaspora (2001) and The Mexican Museum of San Francisco Papers, 1971-2006 (2010), the Silver Prize winner of the International Latino Book Award for Best Reference Book in English. Her research and teaching interests in Chicana feminist scholarship, spirituality, and art inform her award-winning book Yolanda M. López (2008). She conducted life history interviews with eighteen artists, a decade of ethnographic research in Southern California, and archival research on fifty years of Chican@/x art in Los Angeles to produce her book Chicana/o Remix: Art and Errata since the Sixties (2017). With Dr. Constance Cortez (UTRGV), she launched “Rhizomes: Mexican American Art since 1848,” a multi-component digital ecosystem that resolves the misunderstandings and invisibility of visual art by Mexican Americans. Since 2012, she has served on the board of directors of Self Help Graphics & Art.
Tatiana Reinoza is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Notre Dame. She specializes in the history of printmaking within the field of Latinx art. Her writing has appeared in the Archives of American Art Journal, Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, as well as edited volumes and exhibition catalogues such as ¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now. She has also curated exhibitions including the 2022 exhibition All My Ancestors: The Spiritual in Afro-Latinx Art, which took place at the Brandywine’s Printed Image Gallery. In 2023, she published her first book, Reclaiming the Americas:  Latinx Art and the Politics of Territory and, with Davalos, the co-edited volume Self Help Graphics at Fifty. She is currently at work on a new book project titled “Retorno: Art & Kinship in the Making of a Central American Diaspora.”
Sponsored by the IHC’s Imagining California series, the IHC Idee Levitan Endowment, and the UCSB Library
Related Exhibition: Cultura Cura: 50 Years of Self Help Graphics in East LA is on view at the Special Research Collections of the UCSB Library from 10/25/2023 to 6/21/2024. Exhibition materials are drawn from the Library’s California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives, which includes an extensive collection of Self Help Graphics studio silk screen prints as well as organizational records, photographs, and ephemera.

Humanities Decanted: Janet Afary
2024-02-27 16:00 - 17:30 | McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Join us for a dialogue between Janet Afary (Religious Studies) and Dwight Reynolds (Religious Studies) about Afary’s new book, Mollā Nasreddin: The Making of a Modern Trickster, 1906-1911. Refreshments will be served.
In the early twentieth century, a group of artists and intellectuals reinterpreted the Middle Eastern trickster figure Nasreddin in their periodical Mollā Nasreddin. They used folklore, visual art, and satire to disseminate a consciously radical and social democratic discourse on religion, gender, sexuality, and power in Transcaucasia and Iran. The periodical reached tens of thousands of people in the Muslim world, impacting the thinking of a generation.
This highly-illustrated book explores the milieu in which Mollā Nasreddin was born, the way the periodical recreated the trickster trope, and the influence of European graphic artists, especially Francisco Goya, on the journal. It focuses on the most creative period, 1906-11, when the journal reflected the social and political concerns of three major upheavals: the 1905 Russian Revolution, the 1906–1911 Iranian Constitutional Revolution, and the 1908 Young Turk Movement. Afary received the 2023 Eugenia M. Palmegiano Prize in the History of Journalism from the American Historical Association, awarded annually to the author of the most outstanding book published in English on the history of journalism. The book also received the 2023 British-Kuwait Friendship Award, given to the best scholarly work on the Middle East published in the U.K.
Janet Afary is Professor of Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara and the author of Sexual Politics in Modern Iran, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, and The Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906-11: Grassroots Democracy, Social Democracy, and the Origins of Feminism.
Cosponsored by the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment

Research Focus Group Talk: Encyclopédie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry's Intellectual World
2024-02-28 16:00 - 18:00 | McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Sara Johnson is professor of literature of the Americas at the University of California, San Diego. Her book, Encyclopédie noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Intellectual World (Omohundro Institute/UNC Press, 2023), documents the work of Moreau de Saint-Méry, a late eighteenth-century Caribbean intellectual. The book combines traditional academic chapters and experimental forms in its use of archival fragments and visual culture to tell the stories of the free people of color and enslaved women and men who enabled Moreau’s work.
Please read the provided chapters in advance of the event.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Slavery, Captivity and the Meaning of Freedom RFG, Department of Black Studies, and Department of History

RFG Talk: Drawing Deportation: Art and Resistance among Immigrant Children
2024-03-06 15:30 - 16:30 | Zoom
Drawing Deportation: Art and Resistance among Immigrant Children (NYU Press, 2023) argues that immigrant children are not passive in the face of the challenges presented by U.S. anti-immigrant policies. Based on ten years of work with immigrant children in two different border states—Arizona and California—Drawing Deportation gives readers a glimpse into the lives of immigrant children and their families. Through an analysis of 300 children’s drawings, theater performances, and family interviews, this book, at once devastating and revelatory, provides a roadmap for how art can provide a necessary space for vulnerable populations to assert their humanity in a world that would rather divest them of it.
Silvia Rodriguez Vega is a community engaged writer, artist, and educational practitioner. She is an Assistant Professor at University of California, Santa Barbara in the Department of Chicana/o Studies. Her research explores the ways anti-immigration policy impacts the lives of immigrant children through methodological tools centering participatory art and creative expression. Before joining UCSB, Rodriguez Vega was a UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow and a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow at New York University in the Department of Applied Psychology. She received her Ph.D. from UCLA’s Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies.
Zoom attendance link
Sponsored by the IHC’s Global Childhood Ecologies Research Focus Group

RFG Talk: Buddhists Whisper Down the Lane: A Burmese Novel and a Nepalese Nun Lost and Found in Translation
2024-03-07 16:00 - 17:30 | 3041 HSSB, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
This talk by Christoph Emmrich follows the cascading series of translations into three languages, over a period of half a century, from 1963 to 2016, of the story, told by a leading Burmese poet, historian, and monastic manager, about a feisty Newar Buddhist adolescent girl child prodigy from a wealthy Nepalese family who joined a troupe of Assamese elephant hunters to cross the Indian northeast and reach a nunnery in a sleepy town on the opposite shore of the Bay of Bengal, aiming to learn about the meaning of nirvana. In this talk, Emmrich tries to solve not just the puzzle of nirvana but also to answer those questions posed by the iterations of a life story which, as it crosses the boundaries of genders, languages, regimes, and nation-states, the protagonist tries repeatedly and in multifarious ways to reappropriate as her own.
Christoph Emmrich is Associate Professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of Toronto. With a background in the study of the Buddhist Therāvada and the Śvetāmbara and Digambara doctrines of time, he works on Hindu and Buddhist Newar rites, texts, and material things involving poets, priests, girl children, translators, print pioneers, and shopkeepers in the Kathmandu Valley and does some of the same in Burma and Tamil Nadu. His publications include Writing Rites for Newar Girls: Marriage and Menarche according to Kathmandu Valley Manuals (Brill, forthcoming).
Sponsored by the IHC’s South Asian Religions and Cultures Research Focus Group, 84000 Buddhist Texts Translation Initiative, and Translation Studies

RFG Talk: Bhakti and Its Place in Subaltern India
2024-03-14 16:00 - 17:30 | 3041 HSSB, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
In this talk, Maharshi Vyas will explore the intersection of studies of Adivasis, Indigenous tribal communities in India, and theorizations of the category of bhakti (devotion) in South Asian Studies. Drawing on archival materials and ethnographic research, he will seek to provide hermeneutical space to the subaltern voices of the Adivasis themselves by providing an analysis of bhajans, devotional songs, originating from the Bhil Adivasi community in the language of Bhili, an Adivasi language spoken in the mountainous borderlands of the Indian state of Gujarat. These songs offer insights into the self-understandings and aspirations of the Bhils, the nature of the local deities worshiped by them, and the oral-performative methods deployed by this Adivasi community to fashion a distinctive regimen of religiocultural practices that sets them apart from the institutionalized forms of bhakti discourse developed by transnational devotional movements such as the Swaminarayan Sampradāya.
Maharshi Vyas is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests focus on the religious and cultural practices of subaltern Indigenous communities in India, with a particular focus on the Adivasis of Gujarat.
Sponsored by the IHC’s South Asian Religions and Cultures Research Focus Group

RFG Talk: Fractured Fairy Tales and Subversion: Red Ridin’ in the Hood and Other Cuentos by Patricia Marcantonio
2024-03-18 10:00 - 11:00 | Zoom
Inside a cardboard box, Mama packed a tin of chicken soup, heavy on cilantro, along with a jar of peppermint tea, peppers from our garden, and a hunk of white goat cheese that smelled like Uncle Jose’s feet.
That meant one thing.
“Roja, your abuelita is not feeling well,” Mama told me. “I want you to take this food to her.”
“But Mama, me and Lupe Maldonado are going to the movies,” I replied, but felt guilty as soon as I’d said it.
These are the lines that open Patricia Santos Marcantonio’s fractured version of the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood. In her retelling of this and other ten fairy tales published in the volume Red Ridin’ in the Hood and Other Cuentos (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2005), the Mexican American author makes use of a series of elements to provide a Latinx version of these fairy tales to counterbalance the lack of representation of Latinx children in the books she read growing up in the United States. In this presentation, Marina Bernardo Flórez will explore the elements Marcantonio modifies in order to subvert these fairy tales with a Latinx flavour.
Dr. Marina Bernardo Flórez received her Ph.D. in Representation and Construction of Cultural Identities at the University of Barcelona. She researches Chicanx children’s literature and carried out postdoctoral research as a visiting scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara (2023) within the Fulbright Program. She is a member of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature (IRSCL) and the Children’s Literature Association (ChLA). She is currently an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Barcelona.
Zoom attendance link
Sponsored by the IHC’s Global Childhood Ecologies Research Focus Group

Symposium: Edible Insect Art Exhibition
2024-04-04 17:00 - 19:30 | Glass Box Gallery, UCSB Art Department, Building 534 (Space 1328), Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
The Edible Insect Art Exhibition event is a community celebration of insect cuisine and a critical exploration of food futures. The event will take place April 4th, 2024 from 5:00–7:30 PM at UCSB’s GlassBox Gallery and will feature student artwork, organization tabling, delicious food, insect-inspired tastings, and panel conversations with community members and edible insect experts, including Monica Martinez, founder of Don Bugito, Aly Moore, founder of Bugible, and MacKenzie Wade, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Anthropology.
As part of the exhibition, Italian multimedia documentary photographer and filmmaker, Umberto Diecinove will showcase his photography project, I N S C T S, which provides a global look at insect rearing and insect-based cuisine and an investigation into the potential role insects may play as a solution to global challenges. I N S C T S showcases audio and visual profiles from across Europe, Thailand, Malaysia, Colombia and, ultimately, Santa Barbara County to highlight peoples’ perceptions—and relationships—with insects. The event will include a Q&A with the artist.
Guests unable to attend the event on April 4th 5:00-7:30PM are invited to view the exhibition at the GlassBox Gallery Monday, April 1st – Friday, April 5th between 9:00AM–5:00PM.
RSVP
Please contact MacKenzie Wade (mwade@ucsb.edu) or Alexandra Carlin (acarlin@ucsb.edu) with any questions.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Faculty Collaborative Award, UCSB Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities Award, and UCSB Graduate Student Association

Imagining California Discussion: Ending Poverty in California: A Movement, A Plan, A More Equitable Future
2024-04-18 16:00 - 18:00 | McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, 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 organization devoted to elevating the voices of people experiencing economic hardship, creating and implementing policies rooted in their needs, and advancing a state agenda focused on equal opportunity for all. Since 2022, EPIC has been building grassroots support through its statewide listening tour and coalition-building activities, captured in the acclaimed documentary film Poverty and Power. Featuring excerpts from the film and a conversation with EPIC President Devon Gray, Chief Advisor for Storytelling and Narrative Greg Kaufmann, and Director of Organizing and Community Engagement Jasmine Dellafosse, this discussion, moderated by Professor Alice O’Connor, will focus on a movement that aims to change the narrative about poverty—and California’s economic future.
Devon Gray is President of End Poverty in California. He aligns EPIC’s organization’s priorities across issue areas to make a lasting impact for Californians. Prior to joining EPIC, he was a director with Evergreen Strategy Group, where he advised gun violence prevention organizations on policy and strategy. Gray previously served in the Newsom Administration as Special Advisor to the Governor’s Chief of Staff and is an alumnus of national and statewide political campaigns.
Greg Kaufmann is EPIC Chief Advisor for Storytelling and Narrative. He leads EPIC’s storytelling and narrative strategy, creating platforms for people in poverty to share their experiences, ideas, and insights so that we change the story about poverty in California. Prior to joining EPIC, Kaufmann was poverty correspondent at The Nation where his column was syndicated by Bill Moyers and Melissa Harris-Perry called him “one of the most consistent voices on poverty in America.”
Jasmine Dellafosse is Director of Organizing and Community Engagement at EPIC. She leads EPIC’s organizing and community engagement work to help build a movement that creates equal opportunity and ends poverty in California, affirming the dignity of all people. Dellafosse has confronted systemic racism for almost a decade—first as a youth organizer in her hometown of Stockton, CA, where she helped urban development projects such as bringing food desert areas access to fresh produce.
Alice O’Connor is Professor of History and Director of the Blum Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy at UCSB.
Sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center’s Imagining California series, the Blum Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy, and the Department of History

RFG Talk: Images of War for Children in Ukrainian Picturebooks: Aesthetic, Political, and Emotional Strategies
2024-04-29 10:00 - 11:00 | Zoom
Parents and authors across the world are dealing with the question of how to talk to children about war. Ukrainian writers and illustrators in particular have to find narrative and visual techniques to address children who are growing up under circumstances of war and displacement. In this talk, Svetlana Efimova will analyze Ukrainian picturebooks created during two stages of war: since 2014 and especially since 2022. First, she will focus on the relationship between representation and abstraction, between references to real events and symbolic images of war as such. Second, she will discuss the interplay between visuality and emotions, looking at the intended therapeutic effect of children’s books in wartime, emphasized by several Ukrainian authors.
Dr. Svetlana Efimova is an Assistant Professor of Slavic Literatures and Media Studies at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley. In 2024, she was elected to the Young Academy at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities with her current research project “Aesthetics and Politics of Picturebooks in Contemporary Eastern European Children’s Literature.”
Zoom attendance link
Sponsored by the IHC’s Global Childhood Ecologies Research Focus Group and the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies
Image: a visual fragment from the book Vijna, shcho zminyla Rondo (2015) by Romana Romanyshyn and Andrij Lesiv

Imagining California Panel Discussion: Reparations in California
2024-05-09 16:00 - 18:00 | McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, 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 reception will follow.
Daina Ramey Berry is the Michael Douglas Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts at UCSB. She is an internationally recognized scholar of the enslaved and a specialist on gender and slavery and Black women’s history in the United States. She is the award-winning author and editor of six books and numerous scholarly articles. Her most recent book, A Black Women’s History of the United States, won the 2021 Susan Koppelman Award for the Best Book in Feminist Studies, was a 2021 NAACP Finalist for Literary Non-Fiction, and received honorable mention for the 2021 Darlene Clark Hine Book Award sponsored by the Organization of American Historians.
Tiffany Caesar is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at San Francisco State University. Her research focuses on the preservation of transnational black women leaders and engagement with public history. She has participated in cultural heritage preservation initiatives in the United States and South Africa focusing on gender issues, cross-cultural youth dialogue, and social justice issues, and she is a cultural heritage ambassador for the Nelson Mandela Museum in Mthatha, South Africa. Among her recent publications is a co-authored piece entitled “Mothering Dead Bodies: Black Maternal Necropolitics” in the journal Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism. Dr. Caesar is the current commemoration chair of the SFSU 1968 Black Student Union/Third World Liberation Front Student Strike and journal chair of the 50th Anniversary of the 1973 Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival. With the Iberia African American Historical Society, she led the recent initiatives to create a historic marker for Queen Mother Moore – a founder of the modern-day reparations movement – in New Iberia, Louisiana. Dr. Caesar has also organized several public dialogues on reparations in the Bay Area.
Jovan Scott Lewis is Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley. His research is concerned with the questions of racial capitalism, underdevelopment, and radical terms of repair in the Caribbean and United States. He is the author of Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica and Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa. In 2021, he was appointed by California Governor Gavin Newsom to serve on the state’s Reparations Taskforce.
Giuliana Perrone is Associate Professor of History at UCSB and the author of Nothing More than Freedom: The Failure of Abolition in American Law.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Imagining California series and the Sara Miller McCune and George D. McCune Endowment

Symposium: 11th Annual American Indian and Indigenous Collective Symposium: Indigenous Health and Well-being
2024-05-10 15:30 - 2024-05-12 16:00 | McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
The 11th Annual American Indian & Indigenous Collective (AIIC) Symposium, Indigenous Health and Well-being, brings together individual papers, performances, and panels from across disciplines (humanities, fine arts, social sciences, ITEK, and STEM) within and outside of the academy, including practitioners and community members. This annual gathering will address the prevalent issues facing Indian Country and beyond in terms of health disparities and how Native communities come together to heal and work toward Indigenous well-being, resilience, persistence, and futurity in the face of these disparities and structural inequities. Participants will address physical, mental, and spiritual facets of health. Interdisciplinary presentations will draw attention to how the arts are essential to the health, well-being, and healing of Indigenous people; consider scientific and social scientific approaches, including environmental and ecological health; and focus on Indigenous health teaching and activism.
Keynote Speakers:
Friday, May 10th | Sage LaPena
Sage LaPena is a Clinical Herbalist, ethnobotanist, lecturer, teacher, and gardener specializing in both Native American and Western herbal traditions. From the age of seven, Sage has been working with local medicine people from her tribe, the Northern Wintu (California), and other neighboring tribes. Sage maintains a strong connection with her tribe through continued participation in ceremonial and cultural activities. She has been teaching “Ethnobotany of California native plants” for over twenty years and leads plant walks throughout the state. Sage was a Community Health Representative (CHR ) for two years after her clinical internship with Sonoma County Indian Health. As a CHR, Sage assisted clients with diabetes care, nutritional counseling, and doctor patient translation. Sage is actively involved in watershed management projects and is currently the Water Resource Coordinator for the Hopland Band of Pomo Indians.
Saturday, May 11th | Gerald Clarke
Gerald Clarke is an enrolled citizen of the Cahuilla Band of Indians and lives in the home his grandfather built on the Cahuilla Indian Reservation, where he oversees the Clarke family cattle ranch. He is currently a Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California Riverside, where he teaches classes in Native American art, history, and culture.
Gerald has exhibited his work extensively, which can be seen in numerous exhibitions as well as major museum collections. In 2007, Gerald was awarded an Eiteljorg Museum Fellowship and served as an Artist-in-Residence at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2015. In 2020, the Palm Springs Art Museum hosted Gerald Clarke: Falling Rock, the first major retrospective of the artist’s work. Clarke is a frequent lecturer, speaking about Native art, culture, and social issues. He holds a B.A. in Art from the University of Central Arkansas and M.A./M.F.A. degrees in Painting/Sculpture from Stephen F. Austin State University, located in Nacogdoches, Texas.
Sunday, May 12th | Annette Cordero
Annette Cordero was born and raised in Santa Barbara, where she attended local schools, including SBCC and UCSB. She is an enrolled member of the Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation. Prior to retiring in 2020, Annette was a faculty member at SBCC for almost 30 years. She also taught at Allan Hancock College, where she served as the first Native American/Latina president of the Academic Senate. Over the past 42 years, Annette has been a community activist and member of numerous organizations, commissions and boards, including Just Communities Central Coast, Latinos for Better Government, the original Santa Barbara Tenants’ Union, Democratic Women of Santa Barbara County, PUEBLO, the SB County Affirmative Action Commission, the SB County Human Relations Commission, and various others, consistently working on behalf of equity, access, and inclusion for disenfranchised populations.
Register here
Cosponsored by the IHC’s Graduate Collaborative Award and American Indian and Indigenous Collective Research Focus Group, History of Art and Architecture, Asian American Studies, Chicana and Chicano Studies, English, Environmental Studies, Feminist Studies, Linguistics, History, Global Studies, Religious Studies, Latin American and Iberian Studies, Classics, Transnational Italian Studies Program, Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, Hemispheric South/s Research Initiative, Literature and the Environment Center, American Cultures and Global Contexts Center (ACGCC), Hull Chair in Women and Social Justice, Graduate Division Office of Diversity Programs, Office of Equal Opportunity Services (OEOS), Bren School, Blum Center, Walter Capps Center, Santa Barbara American Indian Health and Services (AIHS), American Indian and Indigenous Collective (AIIC), Graduate Division, Health Humanities Initiative, and Feminist Futures

New Research in the Humanities: Presentations by the IHC’s 2023-24 Faculty Fellows
2024-05-13 16:00 - 18:00 | McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Please join us in celebrating our 2023-24 Faculty Fellows, whose works-in-progress are supported this year by IHC release-time awards. Fellows will give a short presentation of their work. A reception will follow.
Utathya Chattopadhyaya, History
“Ganja Matters: Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India”
Mona Damluji, Film and Media Studies
“Pipeline Cinema”
Rachael King, English
“Improving Literature: Media, Environments, and the Eighteenth-Century Improvement Debate”

RFG Talk: Racialized Sound in Mainstream Cinema: Spike Jonze’s Her
2024-05-14 09:00 - 10:30 | Zoom
This talk examines Samantha, the operating system from Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), analyzing how the film’s portrayal of Samantha both differs from and uncannily evokes both fictional and real-world Black women domestic servants. Exploring how the film deliberately and repeatedly marks Samantha as female, how her vocal pitch, tone, and timbre code her as white, and how the film uses this ascribed white femaleness to grant her a form of subjecthood, Owens contends that the film uses Samantha to reinforce hegemonic notions of race, gender, labor, class, and beauty—and does so primarily through the sound of her voice.
Golden M. Owens is Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at University of Washington. She explores and teaches about representations of race and gender, artificial intelligence, haunting, popular culture, and racialized sounds and voices. Her current book project examines intelligent virtual assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana, contending that these aides evoke and are haunted by Black women slaves, servants, and houseworkers in the United States. The project demonstrates this haunting through analyzing popular 20th and 21st-century media depictions of Black female domestic workers, robotic and/or artificially intelligent servants/helpers, labor-saving products and devices, and contemporary virtual aides.
Dr. Owens’ work appears in Sounding Out! and has been accepted by the Journal for Cinema and Media Studies. Her research has been funded by the Ford Foundation (via the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine), the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (f.k.a. the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation), the Social Science Research Council, the Mellon Foundation, Northwestern University’s Office of Fellowships, and Northwestern University’s Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.
Zoom link here
Sponsored by the IHC’s Environmental and Postcolonial Media Theories Research Focus Group

Humanities Decanted: Thomas Mazanec
2024-05-14 16:00 - 17:30 | McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Join us for a dialogue between Thomas Mazanec (East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies) and Xiaorong Li (East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies) about Mazanec’s new book, Poet-Monks: The Invention of Buddhist Poetry in Medieval China.
Poet-Monks focuses on the literary and religious practices of Buddhist poet-monks in Tang-dynasty China to propose an alternative historical arc of medieval Chinese poetry. Combining large-scale quantitative analysis with close readings of important literary texts, Mazanec describes how Buddhist poet-monks, who first appeared in the latter half of the Tang dynasty, asserted a bold new vision of poetry that proclaimed the union of classical verse with Buddhist practices of repetition, incantation, and meditation. Mazanec traces the historical development of the poet-monk as a distinct actor in the Chinese literary world, arguing for the importance of religious practice in medieval literature. As they witnessed the collapse of the world around them, these monks wove together the frayed threads of their traditions to establish an elite-style Chinese Buddhist poetry. Poet-Monks shows that during the transformative period of the Tang-Song transition, Buddhist monks were at the forefront of poetic innovation.
Thomas Mazanec is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He researches premodern Chinese literature and religion as well as their encounters with other cultures. He is also interested in world literature, poetics, digital humanities, and translation studies. His publications cover a broad range of topics, from the evolution of a Sanskrit literary term in medieval China; to systems of monetary, religious, and literary debts; to the potential contributions of network analysis to literary history. He is especially fond of the art of literary translation, maintaining a collection of bizarre and obscure translations of classical Chinese poetry into English and co-editing an online bibliography of Chinese poetry in translation.
Refreshments will be served.
Cosponsored by the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment

The History of Chicana/o Theater: Zoot Suit
2024-05-15 14:00 - 16:00 | McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Isla Vista Arts will host renowned Chicana/o theater scholar Professor Jorge Huerta (UC San Diego) for a lecture on the history of Chicana/o theater leading up to the monumental 1978 play Zoot Suit by Luis Valdez.
Professor Huerta will contextualize the play within the history of the Zoot suit, a fashionable cut of suit worn by Chicano men in the 1930s and 1940s, and the “Sleepy Lagoon” murder trial 1942. The trial rapt the nation’s attention and nourished racial prejudices against Latinos. The defendants, seventeen young Chicano men, were denied access to their attorneys, mischaracterized as innately violent by the Los Angeles Sheriff, and dehumanized throughout the proceedings. Their imputed infamy was connected in the American popular imagination with Zoot suits. The jury convicted them all of murder. Two years later, their convictions were overturned.
The trial’s sensationalism stoked the aggression of Navy servicemen toward “Zoot Suiters.” Zoot suits were sumptuously voluminous, a visual violation of war-time conventions of austerity. “The Zoot Suit Riots” were a series of violent acts by US servicemen, mostly members of the Navy, who ranged through East Los Angeles in June of 1943 while assaulting Zoot Suiters.
Chicano activist and playwright Luis Valdez dramatized the interweaving threads of the Sleepy Lagoon trial, the Zoot Suit riots, and the subsequent exoneration of all those convicted. Professor Huerta will explain the significance of the play to the Chicano theater movement.
Professor Huerta’s visit and lecture are occasioned by UCSB’s upcoming production of Zoot Suit on May 18 and May 19 in UCSB’s Hatlen Theater. Isla Vista Arts, a project of the IHC, has assisted Zoot Suit’s student directors, Angel Diaz and Mayra Gomez-Labrada in realizing their theatrical vision, as part of its mission to expand the cultural impact of the arts in the campus community.
Sponsored by the IHC, Isla Vista Arts, and UCSB’s Global Latinidades Project

RFG Talk: Thinking with the Sound of Catastrophe
2024-05-21 09:00 - 11:00 | Zoom
When death is ubiquitous and violence structural and gratuitous, catastrophe has a sound. How do our racialized lives allow for or shield us from familiarity to this sound? The conditions of colonial violence, imperialism, and global capitalism construct African Black bodies into a kind of listening bodies. But what kind of listening bodies are these? In this talk, Brenda Umutoniwase will explore the listening body from Rwanda to South Africa as a site of conflations: as subject to the mechanics of colonial violence but also the very site from which it counters this violence.
Brenda Umutoniwase is a doctoral student in the Department of African American Studies at Emory University. Her research focuses on formulations of racialized Blackness beyond the Middle passage epistemologies, particularly looking at temporal/geographic spaces in Africa.
Zoom attendance link here
Sponsored by the IHC’s Environmental and Postcolonial Media Theories Research Focus Group

Humanities Decanted: Swati Chattopadhyay
2024-05-21 16:00 - 17:30 | McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Join us for a dialogue between Swati Chattopadhyay (History of Art and Architecture) and Cristina Venegas (Film and Media Studies) about Chattopadhyay’s new book, Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire. Chattopadhyay recasts the history of the British empire by focusing on the small spaces that made the empire possible. Her book takes as its subject a series of small architectural spaces, objects, and landscapes of the British empire in India and uses them to narrate the untold stories of the marginalized people—the servants, women, children, subalterns, and racialized minorities—who held up the infrastructure of empire. In so doing, it opens up an important new approach to architectural history: an invitation to shift our attention from the large to the small scale.
Swati Chattopadhyay is Professor of History of Art and Architecture at UC Santa Barbara. She specializes in modern architecture and urbanism and the cultural landscape of the British empire. She is a Founding Editor of PLATFORM and has served as a director of the Subaltern-Popular Workshop, a University of California Multi-campus Research Group, and as the editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH). Her other works include Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field (2012) and Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (2005).
Refreshments will be served.
Cosponsored by the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment

RFG Symposium: Intergenerational Dynamics: Undergraduate Research Showcase
2024-05-22 15:30 - 17:30 | 6320 Phelps and Zoom
Intergenerational Dynamics is the second annual undergraduate research showcase sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center’s Research Focus Group on Global Childhood Ecologies. It features multidisciplinary presentations of undergraduate research related to childhood, including senior honors thesis research in Comparative Literature by senior major Daian Martinez and research on Education by Lakshmi Garcia in the College of Creative Studies. The panel of presentations and subsequent discussion on the theme Intergenerational Dynamics will focus on dynamics between children and adults, as shown in Anglophone and Chinese picturebooks researched by Daian Martinez and rhetoric in mathematics education for linguistically diverse language classrooms researched by Lakshmi Garcia.
Intergenerational Dynamics: Undergraduate Research Showcase
Chair: Sara Pankenier Weld (Germanic and Slavic Studies, UCSB)
Panel Participants:
“Little Adults: The Adult Presence in Chinese and Anglophone Children’s Picturebooks”
Daian Michely Martinez ’24 (Comparative Literature, UCSB)
“Little Adults” focuses on picturebooks from both Anglophone and Chinese traditions to investigate the adult presence and underlying cultural values shown in text and image. Daian Martinez conducts a cross-cultural comparison to uncover nuances related to gender roles, social responsibility, authority figures, and child-parent relationships. Employing the theoretical frameworks of aetonormativity, cultural studies, and narratology, Martinez analyzes the dynamics of the adult presence within children’s literature.
“The rhetoric of MLR’s (Mathematical Language Routines) for linguistically diverse California elementary schools”
Lakshmi Garcia ’25 (College of Creative Studies Writing and Literature, UCSB)
Lakshmi Garcia’s research under Professor Sarah Roberts focuses on understanding the routinization of mathematics language routines (MLRs) in local Elementary schools. A “mathematical language routine” refers to a structured but adaptable teaching style with exercises designed to amplify, assess, and develop students’ language. MLRs are utilized as tools given to teachers to ensure their assigned curriculums are language accessible to students. Districts with large communities of multilingual learners most benefit from using MLRs, which have been shown to integrate language and vocabulary development successfully through mathematical reasoning. This project conducts qualitative research through careful analysis of classroom observations to prepare educators for work in linguistically diverse schools.
Zoom attendance link here
Sponsored by the IHC’s Global Childhood Ecologies Research Focus Group

RFG Talk: Seeking Mirabai: The Making of a Saint and Cultural Heroine
2024-05-22 16:00 - 18:00 | 3041 HSSB, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
In this talk, Nancy Martin will trace the making of the sixteenth-century royal rajput devotee Mirabai into a saint and cultural heroine through the varied portrayals of her across the centuries found in hagiography, rajput historiography, nationalist rhetoric, and oral epic song traditions. She will also examine the early twentieth-century mobilization of Mirabai as a cultural heroine by Gandhi, Tagore, and others, culminating in Subbulakshmi’s film portrayal of the poet-saint on the cusp of Indian Independence. The talk will challenge the persistent nineteenth-century “historical” domestication of Mirabai’s character and will present a far more dynamic portrayal of the saint that is the wellspring of her continuing power to inspire as well as of the ambivalence that still attends her into the twenty-first century.
Nancy M. Martin is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at Chapman University and Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University. Her research focuses on Hindu devotional traditions, gender and religion, and comparative religious ethics. Her recently published book Mirabai: The Making of a Saint (Oxford University Press 2023) is the culmination of three decades of research on the sixteenth-century saint Mirabai and is the first of three volumes. The second volume focuses on Mirabai’s poetry and the third volume on postcolonial and global incarnations and invocations of the saint.
Sponsored by the IHC’s South Asian Religions and Cultures Research Focus Group

The Future of the Lumpenproletariat: A Conference in Memory of Glyn Salton-Cox
2024-05-24 09:00 - 2024-05-25 17:00 | McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
This conference will explore the Marxist concept of the lumpenproletariat, which was initially translated into English as “social scum.”
Speakers include:
Maurizia Boscagli (UC Santa Barbara)
Katherine Connelly (New York University London)
Colleen Lye (UC Berkeley)
Ben V. Olguín (UC Santa Barbara)
Robert Weide (California State University, Los Angeles)
Keynote: Cedric Johnson (University of Illinois, Chicago)
Visit the conference website for more information.
Cosponsored by the IHC’s Graduate Collaborative Award; Ben V. Olguín, Robert and Liisa Erickson Presidential Chair in English & UCSB Global Latinidades Center; Charmaine Chua, Asst. Professor, Dept of Global Studies; The Carsey-Wolf Center; The Blum Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy; Amazon and Economic Justice Research Project; the Department of English, UCSB; the Graduate Division, UCSB; the Center on Modern Culture, Materialism, and Aesthetics (COMMA), UCSB English; Medieval Literatures (UCSB English); Bishnupriya Ghosh, Professor of English and Global Studies; the Early Modern Center (UCSB English); the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts; the Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor; the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies; the Department of Global Studies; Literature and the Environment Center (UCSB English); the Department of Film and Media Studies; the Department of Feminist Studies; the Central Coast Labor Center; the Graduate Center for Literary Research (GCLR); the Social Sciences Division, UCSB; and Eileen Boris, the Hull Endowed Chair of Gender and Feminist Studies
Image credit: Riot In The Galleria (1910) by Umberto Boccioni

Research Focus Group Talk: "Guano in Their Destiny": A Conversation with Tao Leigh Goffe
2024-05-29 09:00 - 10:30 | Zoom
Join the Environmental and Postcolonial Media Theories RFG for a conversation with Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe about her work, “‘Guano in Their Destiny’: Race, Geology, and a Philosophy of Indenture,” and beyond.
Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe is an associate professor of literary theory and cultural history with a focus on the environmental humanities and geology. She joined the Department of Africana, Puerto Rican, and Latino Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York after over a decade of research and teaching on Black feminist engagements with Indigeneity and Asian diasporic racial formations. This work builds on her long-standing research interest in the intersection of climate, race, and digital technologies. It is the basis of the Dark Laboratory, which she founded and leads as the Executive Director. Established for the study of Black and Indigenous ecologies, Dark Lab is housed at Hunter College and has been supported by the New Museum’s incubator for art and technology. Dr. Goffe graduated with an undergraduate degree in English literature at Princeton University before earning a Ph.D. at Yale University where she continued studies on racial formation and global colonial desire.
Professor Goffe’s research has appeared or is forthcoming in several academic and popular publications including South Atlantic Quarterly, New York Magazine, Small Axe, Women and Performance, Boston Review, and Social Text. She is the Global Black History and Theory co-editor at Public Books, where she is accepting pitches. Her commentary and analyses have been quoted in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Vice Munchies. Dr. Goffe is currently completing two books under contract. The first, After Eden: On the Racial Origins of Our Climate Crisis [(Doubleday, Hamish Hamilton (Penguin Books UK)], explores how 1492 was the genesis of the climate crisis. The second, Black Capital, Chinese Debt (Duke University Press), explores a long Afro-Asian history of affective and financial indebtedness after the abolition of racial slavery from 1806 to the present.
Zoom attendance link here.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Environmental and Postcolonial Media Theories Research Focus Group, Asian/American Studies Collective, and Wireframe
Image Credit: New York Public Library Digital Collections

RFG Talk: The Buddhist Heritage of Pakistan
2024-05-31 17:00 - 18:30 | 3041 HSSB, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Pakistan is today a Muslim country, and it has been so for nearly a thousand years. But before that, Buddhism thrived in the area known today as Pakistan, especially in the regions of Gandhara, Gilgit, and Baltistan. In this talk, José Cabezón will explore the Buddhist heritage of Pakistan through a virtual tour of some of its most important Buddhist sites, with examples of the exquisite art of Gandhara found in Pakistan’s major museums.
José Ignacio Cabezón is Research Professor and Dalai Lama Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His wide-ranging research interests in various aspects of Tibetan religious traditions and religious studies include Madhyamaka philosophy, gender and sexuality, classical South Asian political ethics, and Tibetan rituals. The recipient of many awards and fellowships, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019 and served as president of the American Academy of Religion in 2020. The author of numerous books and articles, his most recent publications include Sexuality in Classical South Asian Buddhism (Wisdom Publications, 2017), a landmark study of classical Buddhist theories of sexuality, and Sera Monastery (Wisdom Publications, 2019), the most comprehensive history of a Tibetan monastery in a Western language.
Sponsored by the IHC’s South Asian Religions and Cultures Research Focus Group

RFG Talk: Narrating Nemo: Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland and the Evolution of the Comic Strip
2024-06-06 15:00 - 16:00 | Zoom
As one of the pioneers of the animation medium as well as the comics medium, Winsor McCay’s cultural significance is rivaled by few. However, the scholarly scrutiny of his works has yet to match his historical prominence. His most well-known creation, Little Nemo in Slumberland, which ran from 1905 to 1927, was the first comic strip with an ongoing, open-ended serialized narrative. Yet, it only started off as a regular Sunday strip and over its first year of publication reached the said position, redefining the comics medium for the years to come. In this talk, Nima Bahrami will explore this notion, the narratological evolution of the first year of publication of Little Nemo, by considering the text and the image separately in order to offer an analytical explanation for the dynamics behind this process.
Nima Bahrami is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. With a double major in Architecture and Literature from the University of Tehran and a Research Masters in Literary Studies from the University of Amsterdam, his research involves theories of space and place, the comics medium, posthuman studies and the syntax-semantics interface.
Zoom attendance link here.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Global Childhood Ecologies Research Focus Group

IHC Open House
2024-10-03 16:00 - 18:00 | McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, 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

Salt of the Earth: A Conversation between a Palestinian and an Israeli Peace Activist
2024-10-08 16:30 - 18:30 | McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Join Osama lliwat and Rotem Levin, Palestinian and Israeli peace activists, as they share their personal stories of transformation, lessons of joint peaceful resistance, and the vastly different realities they face in the same land. The devastating escalation of violence in Israel and Palestine has left many feeling powerless, angry, and hopeless. Rotem and Osama believe in the possibility of a different reality grounded in a shared future of security, equality, and justice for all people.
Osama lliwat was born in Jerusalem, where his family is originally from, and was displaced like so many Palestinians around the world after the war of 1967. He grew up in Jericho. He has been in the peace world for more than 15 years and is the co-founder of Visit Palestine. He has dedicated his life to nonviolent resistance, working with different organizations, such as the Sulha Peace Project and Interfaith Encounter Association, appearing in several documentaries, including Objector and The Other, and regularly speaking on peacebuilding at organizations and universities around the world.
Rotem Levin was born and raised in Ein Vered. After his military service, he participated in a transformational intensive dialogue program in Germany, where he got to know Palestinians on a personal and intimate level. This instigated a change in perspective on the story he was born and raised with. After this experience, he started organizing similar programs in Aqaba, Jordan, where he offered the experience to other post-military Israelis and to Palestinian and Israeli medical workers. He is a committed activist and doctor by profession.
Sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center

Key Passages Inaugural Talk: AI: A New Passage to Human Creativity?
2024-10-10 16:00 - 18:00 | McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, 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? How will the proliferation of generative AI impact our understanding of the role of human agency in the creative process? Professor Park will draw from her experience as head judge of a spring 2024 AI-inclusive short story competition sponsored by UCSB’s Mellichamp Initiative in Mind and Machine Intelligence. Audience Q&A and a reception will follow.
Dr. Sowon Park is Associate Professor of English at UC Santa Barbara. She specializes in Cognitive Literary Criticism and is Director of the Center for Literature and Mind. Her current research projects include a five-year investigation on “Trauma-Informed Pedagogy” (2021- 2026) and the ongoing neuro-literary research forum on “Unconscious Memory” (https://unconsciousmemory.english.ucsb.edu/).
Sponsored by the IHC’s Key Passages series
Image: Adobe Firefly AI generator
