Interdisciplinary Humanities Center UCSB

Research Focus Group Discussion: Global Adaptations: Throne of Blood
2022-05-02 13:00 - 14:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Zoom
This discussion will focus on Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 film, Throne of Blood, as a key twentieth-century film and as an adaption of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Discussion will be centered around a number of key critical questions, such as: What does Kurosawa bring to Shakespeare? How can we understand this as part of a larger history of Shakespeare and adaptation? How has this film been influenced by and subsequently influenced global cinema and global Shakespeare? What are the local traditions that inform this film as a global adaptation? How can we understand and situate this film as scholars and critics?
Please note that this is not a film screening, and you will need to screen the film prior to attending this discussion. Contact shaunnowicki@ucsb.edu if you have any questions about screening the film.
RSVP to attend
Sponsored by the IHC’s What Is a Shakespeare? Shakespeare and Global Media Research Focus Group

Research Focus Group Talk: The Indian Ramayana and Its Regional Performance Traditions
2022-05-06 15:00 - 17:00 | 2135 Social Sciences and Media Studies, SSMS UCSB, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
In this talk, Paula Richman will provide a brief survey of the major performance traditions in which the Ramayana narrative is enacted in different regions of India, including Kerala, Tamilnadu, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, and Assam. She will then provide analyses of two examples of how specific sets of theatrical conventions shape the representation of familiar characters. The 1954 Tamil mythological drama, “The King of Lanka,” starring Manohar, begins and ends as a conventional bhakti narrative, but depicts Ravana as a father whose worry about his daughter’s welfare leads to his death. The 2019 female Nangyarkuttu solo dance of Kerala, “Ahalya,” starring Usha, departs from the convention that the female solo be based on a Sanskrit Kudiyattam text by drawing its narrative from a Malayalam text. Richman will conclude by exploring the circumstances under which two acclaimed performances may transgress the expectations for the performance and considering the implications for actors, actresses, audiences, and experts in the tradition.
Paula Richman is the William H. Danforth Professor Emerita of South Asian Religions at Oberlin College. Her publications on the diversity of the Ramayana tradition include four edited volumes, Many Ramayanas (1991), Questioning Ramayanas, a South Asian Tradition (2000), Ramayana Stories in Modern South India (2008), and Performing the Ramayana Tradition: Enactments, Interpretations, and Arguments (2021), co-edited with Rustom Bharucha.
Sponsored by the IHC’s South Asian Religions and Cultures Research Focus Group, Film and Media Studies, Global Studies, and Religious Studies

Research Focus Group Talk: Is a Tekagami a Text? Reading the Fragmentary in a Calligraphy Album
2022-05-06 16:00 - 17:30 | 4080 HSSB, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Join the Transregional East Asia RFG for a talk by Edward Kamens entitled, “Is a Tekagami a Text? Reading the Fragmentary in a Calligraphy Album.”
Edward Kamens is Sumitomo Professor of Japanese Studies, Yale University, and Paul I. Terasaki Chair in U.S.-Japan Relations, UCLA.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Transregional East Asia Research Focus Group, East Asia Center, and Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies

Silicon Valley Requiem: A Posthuman Electro-Acoustic Concert
2022-05-07 19:30 - 21:00 | UCSB Studio Theater, TD East 1101, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Silicon Valley Requiem is a composition based on the requiem mass but replacing the liturgical environment with the public theater of Tech CEOs. A trio of synthesized male voices singing Gregorian chant melodies is paired with two live female performers singing statements regarding their actions on earth to a monolithic adjudicating soprano projected above. The application of contemporary technology on medieval plainchant creates a plethora of complex philosophical questions. What does it mean for non-humans to sing a text fundamental to the human condition, mortality, and the afterlife? If a techno-utopia is being sold to us by icons of Silicon Valley here on earth, are we living a post-human existence?
Andrew A. Watts is a composer of chamber, symphonic, multimedia, and electro-acoustic works regularly performed throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. His compositions have been premiered at world-renowned venues such as Ravinia, the MFA Boston, Jordan Hall, and the Holywell Music Room. Watts has written for many of the top new music groups today including Ensemble Dal Niente, Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble, Proton Bern, Distractfold Ensemble, RAGE Thormbones, Splinter Reeds, Quince Vocal Ensemble, and Line Upon Line Percussion. Watts completed his DMA in composition at Stanford, received his master’s with distinction from Oxford, and his bachelor’s with academic honors from the New England Conservatory. He has been a featured composer at the MATA Festival (USA), impuls Academy (Austria), Rainy Days Festival (Luxembourg), Delian Academy (Greece), Young Composers Meeting (Netherlands), Cheltenham Music Festival (England), Course for New Music at Darmstadt (Germany), Composit Festival (Italy), Ostrava Days Institute (Czech Republic), highSCORE Festival (Italy), Wellesley Composers Conference (USA), Etchings Festival (France), Fresh Inc. Festival (USA), New Music on the Point (USA), and Atlantic Music Festival (USA). Watts is currently a Lecturer in Music Composition at UCSB’s College of Creative Studies.
William Davies King is Distinguished Professor of Theater at UC Santa Barbara. His critical edition of The Iceman Cometh recently came out from Yale UP. His multimedia edition of Long Day’s Journey Into Night won the 2017 PROSE Award in Literature. He has written several critical/biographical studies of Eugene O’Neill and is currently finishing a book about O’Neill’s Tao House, as well as a play intended to be performed in its living room. His first book, Henry Irving’s “Waterloo”: Theatrical Engagements with Late-Victorian Culture and History, won the 1993 Callaway Prize. His memoir/essay about collecting, Collections of Nothing (Chicago UP), was named one of Amazon’s best books of 2008, and LAUNCH PAD gave a staged reading of an adaptation/sequel of the book in 2019. A further adaptation, Collections of Nothing Enough Is Enough, was presented on Zoom by the IHC two days after the defeat of Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election. It can now be viewed on YouTube. To get a glimpse of an exhibit he co-curated of material from his collections, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAVjYtz67uo&t=3s. Also see his newly redesigned website, with many images from his Hyper-Illuminated books and a list of all the brands of blueberries in his collection: http://williamdaviesking.com.
High Voice 1, Nina Guo
Hailing from Pasadena, CA, soprano Nina Guo has been drawn to new music since high school. After completing her Bachelor’s degree at the New England Conservatory of Music, she was awarded NEC’s John Cage Award for Outstanding Contribution to Contemporary Music Performance (2015). In 2016, she was awarded one of the Stipendium prizes at the Darmstadt Courses and was invited to return to the courses in 2018. More importantly, she is eternally grateful for the mentorship of Lisa Saffer and Steve Drury, and she is constantly inspired by her colleagues’ and friends’ hard work and incredible creativity. Recent performances have included a 5-hour installation-opera at a buffet, a shadow puppet opera with Maori instruments, singing a groovy, Petrushka-esque piece with orchestra, directing Beckett’s Rough for Radio 1 with multi-lingual vocal ensemble, and getting caught in noisy, improvised tape loops with Auguste Vickunaite. Nina recently completed a master’s degree in sound studies and sonic arts at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. She can be found in digital form at www.facesound.org.
High Voice 2, Micaela Tobin
As a performer, Micaela most recently played the principal role of Coyote in the critically acclaimed opera, SWEET LAND (dir. Yuval Sharon & Canuppa Luger; Comp. Raven Chacon & Du Yun). She also performed with The Industry in their groundbreaking opera, Hopscotch, a mobile opera for 24 cars (dir. Yuval Sharon). Other major roles include the poet Mina Loy in the opera Dada Divas (dir. Jacqueline Bobak), which has toured internationally both in Europe and Mexico; as a principal vocalist in the premiere of Ron Athey and Sean Griffith’s automatic opera, Gifts the Spirit; and as a soprano soloist alongside Annette Bening in the play Medea at UCLALive. Micaela is currently a voice teacher on faculty at the California Institute for the Arts and teaches through her private studio, HOWL SPACE, in Los Angeles, CA.
Projected Soprano, Kirsten Ashley Wiest
Kirsten holds a DMA in contemporary music performance in voice from UC San Diego, an MFA from California Institute of the Arts, and a B.M. cum laude from Chapman University’s Conservatory of Music. She founded UC San Diego’s annual Undergraduate Opera in 2017, producing and directing full operas each spring, and a fall scenes program composed entirely of undergraduate voice majors. Kirsten currently lectures in Music at California State University San Bernardino and San Bernardino Valley College, and is Instructor of Voice at University of California Riverside. Kirsten can be heard on recordings released by Sony Classical, Centaur Records, MicroFest Records, innova recordings, and Albany Records, among many others.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Faculty Collaborative Research Grant, NSF Development Council, College of Creative Studies, and Department of Theater and Dance

Research Focus Group Discussion: "Backwater Puritans”? Racism, Egyptological Stereotypes, and the Intersection of Local and International at Kushite Tombos
2022-05-12 14:00 - 15:30 | 6056 HSSB and Zoom
Egyptological and more popular perceptions of Nubia and the Kushite Dynasty (c. 747-654 BCE) have framed Kush as a periphery to civilized Egypt, unsophisticated interlopers in Egypt and the broader Mediterranean world during the first millennium. But to what extent was Nubia a “backwater” to “effete and sophisticated” Egypt, as John Wilson once asserted? It is clear from recent archaeological work at Tombos and elsewhere that Nubia was not an unsophisticated backwater. Objects with Egyptianizing motifs in the international style asserted a cosmopolitan social status that connected their owners to an international elite culture that spanned Nubia, Egypt, and the Mediterranean during the Iron Age. The Kushite civilization that flourished for a thousand years was not an imperfect imitation of ancient Egypt, as some Egyptologists have asserted, or even the fount of Egyptian civilization, as some Afrocentric scholars have argued. Instead, features taken from Egypt and the Mediterranean world were adapted and thoroughly integrated with local practices and belief systems to create a new and vibrant African tradition.
Stuart Tyson Smith is Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Barbara, specializing in the archaeology of Egypt and Nubia [the Sudan], ethnicity, culture contact and imperialism.
Register for Zoom attendance link here
Sponsored by the IHC’s Crossing Borderlands Research Focus Group

Regeneration Talk: The Tulsa Race Massacre: Causes, Cover Up, and the Fight for the Past
2022-05-12 16:00 - 18:00 | McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
The 1921 Tulsa race massacre was the worst single incident of racial violence in American history. But for decades its very existence was denied. Official records went missing, incriminating articles were torn out of bound volumes of old newspapers, and researchers even had their lives threatened. Award-winning author and historian Scott Ellsworth, author of The Ground Breaking: An American City and Its Search for Justice, unpacks the story of the massacre and the challenges it presents for racial justice today. A reception will follow.
Scott Ellsworth has been researching and writing about the Tulsa race massacre off and on for more than forty-five years. In 1982, he published Death in a Promised Land, the first comprehensive history of the massacre, while in the late 1990s, he initiated the search for the unmarked graves of massacre victims. Ellsworth teaches in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Regeneration series; the Sara Miller McCune and George D. McCune Endowment; the Blum Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy; the Department of Black Studies; and the Department of History

Per University guidelines, masks are recommended for vaccinated persons and required for unvaccinated persons during all indoor events except when actively eating or drinking. Before coming to campus, UCSB affiliates should complete the Student Health COVID-19 Screening Survey, and non-affiliates should complete the On-Demand Daily COVID-19 Screening Survey. Any individual who has symptoms suggestive of COVID-19 should avoid campus altogether. (See the university’s interim visitors protocol for additional information.)

Conference: Global Snapshot: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Media, Performativity, and Global Communities
2022-05-14 09:45 - 17:15 | Zoom
Many scholars have questioned what the rise of globalization, facilitated through new forms of technology, could mean for our ability to study and reach larger audiences. While some media practitioners and researchers have struggled to keep pace, changes to global technologies also present the benefits of accessibility and creativity. Due to the impacts of Covid-19, global media has become an ever more vital avenue for continuing typical social practices in scholarship and artistic endeavors like conferences and performances. This interdisciplinary conference seeks to interrogate the methodologies that have arisen with media development around the world. What is “global media,” and how have its various implementations influenced research and other endeavors? How can acts of formal or everyday performance combine with or be adapted to reach diverse audiences? What do we gain or lose by using various forms of media rather than being in person, or through the labor of keeping up with global media’s rapid developments? Where do ideas of permanence and freedom factor into these developments?
Register to attend here. For the full schedule and more information, please visit the conference website.
Sponsored by the IHC’s What Is a Shakespeare?: Shakespeare and Global Media Research Focus Group, Department of Theater and Dance, Graduate Division, Department of English, Graduate Student Association, and Early Modern Center
Image: “Visitor taking pictures of cloud bans” by GrandTetonNPS

Research Focus Group Talk: Saving the Dead: Conceptions of Agency in Tibetan Buddhist Funerary Rituals
2022-05-20 16:00 - 18:00 | 4080 HSSB, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
In this talk, Rory Lindsay will share with us insights from his forthcoming book, Saving the Dead: Tibetan Funerary Rituals in the Tradition of the Sarvadurgatipariśodhana Tantra (2022). He will discuss the history of one of the first Buddhist funerary traditions to be adopted in Tibet and the intersecting forms of agency—human, nonhuman, and material—that are described in this tradition’s ritual manuals. He will also examine polemical exchanges about these practices and Tibetan innovations concerning how the dead are conceptualized and assisted in this ritual framework.
Rory Lindsay is an Assistant Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. He is also a research editor at 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha and a visiting scholar at the Buddhist Texts Translation Initiative at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests include Tibetan Buddhist ritual, dream literature, biography, and Buddhist canons.
Sponsored by the IHC’s South Asian Religions and Cultures Research Focus Group and Buddhist Studies
