Events

Home > 

Interdisciplinary Humanities Center

  1. Events
  2. Organizers
  3. Interdisciplinary Humanities Center
(805) 893-3907
events@ihc.ucsb.edu
https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu
For more information, contact:
Events from this organizer
Today

Crossings + Boundaries Talk: Exodus: The Largest Movement of People Since the Second World War

Corwin Pavilion 494 UCEN Rd, Isla Vista, CA, United States

The world is witnessing the greatest mass migration since 1945. More than sixty-five million people, about one in every hundred on Earth, have fled their homes. Some are internally displaced; others are refugees who have moved to multiple countries. This talk will discuss the three main causes of this giant human tide: the implosion of the Middle East following the Arab Spring; climate change, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, where drought and advancing deserts are pushing ...

Crossings + Boundaries Talk: Murder and Mattering in Harambe’s House

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

Date change to Tuesday, March 6th at 4:00PM. This talk approaches the controversy over the killing of the gorilla Harambe in the Cincinnati Zoo in May 2016 as a unique window onto the making of animalness and blackness in the contemporary U.S.  It will explore the notion of a racial-zoological order in which the “human” is constructed simultaneously in relation to both the “black” and the “animal.” Claire Jean Kim is Professor of Political Science ...

Wijnberg Poetry Reading

Crossings + Boundaries Reading: Of Great Importance

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

The poems in Of Great Importance discuss taxes and debts, stocks and flows, citizenship and labor contracts, notaries and accountants, factories and strikes, freedoms and fundamental rights, how to make money and how to win elections, when to declare war and when to found a new state. The collection has been called “a painfully consistent and uncomfortably accurate analysis of power, economic and social structures and mechanisms which are at the root of the degenerate world in ...

Humanities in Prison

Symposium: Humanities in Prison

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

Why study the humanities in prison? Why teach them?  What is the value of prison humanities programs for communities both inside and outside of prisons?  What humanistic texts and skills do we teach? This day-long symposium, hosted by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center of the University of California, Santa Barbara, will explore the building of intellectual communities across systemic divides through the humanities. The symposium will include the voices of educators and formerly incarcerated individuals and ...

Crossings + Boundaries Talk: Borderwall as Architecture

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

Ronald Rael’s talk will reexamine what the 650 miles of physical barrier dividing the US and Mexico is and could be, suggesting that the wall is an opportunity for economic and social development along the border that encourages its conceptual and physical dismantling. Rael will illuminate the transformative effects of the wall on people, animals, and the natural and built landscape through the story of people on both sides of the border who transform and ...

Crossings + Boundaries TALKS: Sinan Antoon and Sara Pursley

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

Talk: The Times of Revolution in Jawad Salim’s Monument to Freedom The Iraqi artist Jawad Salim’s famous Monument to Freedom, which still stands in Baghdad’s Liberation Square, is usually read as a linear historical narrative of the Iraqi nationalist movement and the 1958 revolution it produced. Pursley’s talk explores heterogeneous conceptions of time in the work, including depictions of cyclical forms of temporality that reference Khaldunian historical time, Shi`i messianic time, and the time of mourning. She ...

Talk: Winds, Dreams, Theater: A Genealogy of Emotion-Realms through the Lens of The Peony Pavilion

1930 Buchanan Buchanan Hall, Isla Vista, CA, United States

In his talk, Lam will give a revisionist history of emotions in Chinese literature and culture centered on the idea of emotion as space – which the Chinese call “emotion-realm” (qingjing) – rather than a state of mind. If The Peony Pavilion (Mudan ting, 1598) is the romantic play par excellence in early modern China, it is not because, as many assume, it celebrates emotion as the innermost essence of a liberated individual. Rather, it ...

Santa Barbara Food Cycle Exploration

UC Santa Barbara Greenhouse and Garden Project Lot 38, UCSB, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Where does our food come from? What are issues affecting food access in this community? Join us to explore these questions with farmers, beekeepers, scientists, and activists from the Santa Barbara Foodshed. The Santa Barbara community is invited to attend this free event to learn from local experts about the food cycle from soil and seed, to seedling and harvest, to distribution and justice. The event will take place at UC Santa Barbara’s Greenhouse and ...

HUMANITIES DECANTED: Lal Zimman, Transgender Language Reform: Some Challenges and Strategies for Promoting Trans-Affirming, Gender-Inclusive Language

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

Join us for a presentation and discussion with Lal Zimman (Linguistics) about his new work, “Transgender Language Reform.” Refreshments will be served. With a growing societal interest in the experiences of transgender people has come a new kind of awareness about gendered language. Zimman’s recent article, “Transgender language reform: some challenges and strategies for promoting trans-affirming, gender-inclusive language,” takes a linguistic approach to trans-inclusive language by distilling the practices of transgender speakers of English into ...

IHC Open House

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

You are invited to the IHC’s Open House on Thursday, October 4, from 4-6 pm. Cosponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts. Meet new Humanities faculty, IHC fellows, and staff members. Learn about Social Securities, our 2018-2019 public events series. Find out about our community-engagement programs and our numerous funding resources for faculty and graduate students. Enjoy good food, drink, and conversation.

Presentation: UCHRI Funding Opportunities

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

All UCSB faculty members are encouraged to join us for a presentation by David Theo Goldberg, Director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute, about upcoming UCHRI funding opportunities. The presentation will be followed by a roundtable featuring UCSB grant recipients Juan Cobo (History), Alenda Chang (Film and Media Studies), Diane Fujino (Asian American Studies), and Jennifer Tyburczy (Feminist Studies).  The event will conclude with audience Q&A. Come learn about UCHRI funding opportunities and best ...

Social Securities Inaugural Lecture: Social Insecurities: Media Policy and the Fight for Digital Liberties

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

In the US, media policy is designed to protect a host of cultural values, particularly those promoting the public interest and freedom of expression. This talk will explore how these values and their attendant “social securities” have been actively sabotaged by the regulators charged with preserving them, threatening everything from our individual privacy to democracy itself. In such a dire landscape, the humanities offer much needed direction toward reclaiming a brighter future. A reception will ...

Social Securities Talk: Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women

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

Since 1980, the population of female prisoners has increased eightfold in this country, with women of color disproportionately impacted. In her talk, Ms. Law will examine the structural inequities and injustices behind the rise in the number of incarcerated women and the recurring violation of rights women face inside prison, including lack of access to reproductive and medical health care and pervasive sexual harassment and abuse. Law will also discuss how incarcerated women are challenging ...

Humanities Decanted: Carlos Morton, Trumpus Caesar

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

Join us for a staged reading of a new play by Carlos Morton (Theater and Dance), Trumpus Caesar, followed by a discussion. Refreshments will be served. A bawdy satire in the tradition of Greco-Roman Comedy–Saturday Night Live meets Julius Caesar.  The comic premise is that Trumpus Caesar, having recently been elected emperor by the plebeians, is impeached by a Chorus of Republican satyrs who then fight over the crown.  In this "farce for our times," Caesar doesn't die ...

Inaugural Dean’s Lecture Series: Social Science Partnerships for the Common Good

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

Social research stands at a crossroads. On the one hand, new data sources and methods offer scholars unprecedented opportunities to understand and influence the social world.  On the other hand, fiscal constraints, security risks, misinformation campaigns, and “post-truth culture” threaten both the funding and the credibility of this research. In this context, the Social Science research Council (SSRC) launched the multidisciplinary, cross-sector To Secure Knowledge Task Force to consider optimal conditions for social science in this moment, including the infrastructure of ...

Social Securities Talk: Money is No Object: Aesthetics, Abstraction, and the Politics of Care

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

In his talk, Scott Ferguson will rethink the historical relationship between money and aesthetics in an effort to broaden the politics of care using the alternative conception of money articulated by the contemporary heterodox school of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Mobilizing MMT, Ferguson critiques exhausted dialectical oppositions between money and art and contends that monetary abstraction, rather than representing a private, finite, and alienating technology, is instead a public and fundamentally unlimited medium that harbors ...

Humanities Decanted: Mario T. García, Father Luis Olivares: A Biography

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

Join us for a dialogue between Mario T. García (Chicana and Chicano Studies and History) and Verónica Castillo-Muñoz (History) about García’s new biography, Father Luis Olivares: Faith Politics and the Origins of the Sanctuary Movement in Los Angeles. Refreshments will be served. García‘s latest book is the untold story of the Los Angeles sanctuary movement’s champion, Father Luis Olivares (1934–1993), a Catholic priest and a charismatic, faith-driven leader for social justice. Beginning in 1980 and continuing for most of the ...

The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (2017)

MultiCultural Center Lounge, UCSB 494 UCen Road, Isla Vista, CA, United States

Jeffrey Stewart, Professor of Black Studies at UC Santa Barbara, was awarded the 2018 National Book Award in the nonfiction category for his beautifully written prose in The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (Oxford University Press, 2017).  Dr. Stewart's award marked the first time since 1984 that a book published by an academic press was bestowed with that honor. This event will celebrate Dr. Stewart's outstanding accomplishment and will include: I. Welcome from the Department of ...

Social Securities Talk: Embracing Shari’a: Women, Law, and Activism in Somalia

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

Gender equality is a key principle of human rights and political security. But how are gender equality and human security ensured in societies struggling with legacies of civil war and political violence? This lecture reveals how, in a country where many observers presume law and security are absent, women are turning to Islam’s foundational sources—the Qur’an and the Hadith—to promote women’s rights and human and political security.  A reception will follow. Mark Fathi Massoud is Associate ...

Social Securities Talk: Why Can’t Feminists Change the Law? The History and Politics of Welfare Reform in the Modern U.S.

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

In her talk, Kornbluh will reveal how welfare reform is shaped by “intersectional sexism,” the gendered and racialized dimensions of legal activity that are evident, persistent, yet ignored by mainstream policy makers and Washington, D.C.-based intellectuals. Taking as her example the failed passage of a feminist welfare reauthorization bill in the early 2000s, Kornbluh will discuss why the Democratic Party resisted embracing this initiative and explore the crucial role feminist scholars and activists have to play ...

Information Sessions: Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program

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

Wednesday, January 30, 11:45-1:00 PM | 6020 HSSB Tuesday, February 5, 4:00-5:00 PM | 6020 HSSB Join the IHC to learn more about the new Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program.  Explore the course requirements, hear about the paid internships and fellow-designed community projects, and find out more about the capstone project. The January 30 session will include lunch from South Coast Deli and the February 5 session will have light refreshments.

Social Securities Talk: Shaping Community Futures Through Policy + Architecture

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

LA-Más is a Los Angeles urban design non-profit focused on empowering lower-income and working class families who struggle to find affordable homes to rent or for whom walking is a primary mode of transportation. This talk will explore the architectural projects of LA-Más that provide accessible affordable housing and support the pedestrian right of way, and that, in doing so, create built environments that address the city’s social instability. Elizabeth Timme is Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director ...

Information Sessions: Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program

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

Wednesday, January 30, 11:45-1:00 PM | 6020 HSSB Tuesday, February 5, 4:00-5:00 PM | 6020 HSSB Join the IHC to learn more about the new Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program.  Explore the course requirements, hear about the paid internships and fellow-designed community projects, and find out more about the capstone project. The January 30 session will include lunch from South Coast Deli and the February 5 session will have light refreshments.

Social Securities Talk: Teaching the People: Enlightenment and the American Republic

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

In this talk, David Marshall will illuminate contemporary debates about the value of the liberal arts and sciences and public investment in higher education by examining Enlightenment arguments for both liberal education and public education in the early American Republic, and the 19th-century Land Grant movement, which resulted in the establishment of the University of California as a “public trust” in the California State Constitution. These two Enlightenment moments resonate today as we try to ...

Social Securities Talk: Environmental Justice as Freedom

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

This talk argues that environmental justice movements are freedom struggles. Beginning with the starting point that unjust environments are rooted in racism, capitalism, militarism, colonialism, land theft from Native peoples, and gender violence, the talk frames environmental justice as particularly significant in the moment of danger that we are currently facing. It is drawn from a forthcoming book that examines activism at Standing Rock, in Flint and the Central Valley, and in the wake of ...

Talk and Discussion: Peter Manseau, Smithsonian Institution’s Curator of Religion

4080 HSSB UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Join us for “The Man Who Photographed Ghosts,” a talk on technology, belief, and seeing the dead based on Manseau’s new book, The Apparitionists, followed by a discussion with Manseau on careers in the public humanities. Lunch will be served. Peter Manseau is the Lilly Endowment Curator of American Religious History at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. He is the author of eight books, including the memoir Vows, the novel Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter, the ...

Dean’s Lecture Series: Healing the Web of Life: Autonomous Transition Design as Political-Ontological Praxis

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

In the face of deepening social and ecological crises, design is emerging as a vital domain of praxis that engages these crises by imagining and organizing alternative life worlds. This confers upon design/ing an ineluctable ontological-political dimension. This lecture outlines the constructive reorientation of design as a praxis meant to heal the web of life, and describes the early stages of application of what we are calling “autonomous transition design” in the Cauca River Valley ...

Humanities Decanted: Silvia Bermúdez, Rocking the Boat

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

Join us for a dialogue between Silvia Bermúdez (Spanish and Portuguese) and Cristina Venegas (Film and Media Studies) about Bermúdez’s new book, Rocking the Boat: Migration and Race in Contemporary Spanish Music.  Refreshments will be served. Rocking the Boat is a nuanced account of how popular urban music, produced between 1980 and 2013, shaped the discourse on immigration, transnational migrants, and racialization in the Spanish State borne after the Constitution of 1978. Silvia Bermúdez is Professor of Spanish ...

Humanities Decanted: Ruth Hellier-Tinoco, Performing Palimpsest Bodies: Postmemory Theatre Experiments in Mexico

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

Join us for a dialogue between Ruth Hellier-Tinoco (Music) and Jessica Nakamura (Department of Theater and Dance) about Hellier-Tinoco’s new book, Performing Palimpsest Bodies: Postmemory Theatre Experiments in Mexico. Refreshments will be served. Performing Palimpsest Bodies proposes the concept of palimpsest bodies to interpret provocative theatre and performance experiments that explore issues of cultural memory, bodies of history, archives, repertoires and performing remains. Combined with ideas of postmemory and rememory, palimpsest bodies are inherently trans-temporal as they ...

Tyree Daye

The 2019 Diana and Simon Raab Writer-in-Residence: Tyree Daye

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

Tyree Daye is a poet from Youngsville, North Carolina. He is the author of two poetry collections: River Hymns, 2017 APR/Honickman First Book Prize winner, and Cardinal, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press, 2020. Daye is a 2017 Ruth Lilly Finalist and Cave Canem fellow. Daye’s work has been published in Prairie Schooner, The New York Times, and Nashville Review. Daye won the 2019 Palm Beach Poetry Festival Langston Hughes Fellowship and is a 2019 Kate Tufts Finalist. Daye most recently was awarded a 2019 ...

2019 Arthur N. Rupe Great Debate: Immigration: A Boon or Burden to U.S. Society?

Campbell Hall Building 538, University of California, Santa Barbara, Mesa Rd,, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Thursday, May 2, 2019 / 7:30 PM Participants: Rubén G. Rumbaut Mark Krikorian Moderator: Donald M. Kerwin, Jr. UCSB Campbell Hall FREE Experts on immigration, national security and refugee movements will engage in a debate about the U.S. immigration system, the values and interests it serves and the impact of immigration on the nation. Mark Krikorian, Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies, is the co-author of Open Immigration: Yea & Nay and the ...

Launching New Research in the Humanities: Presentations by the IHC’s 2018-19 Faculty Fellows

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

Please join us in celebrating our 2018-19 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. Elena Aronova, History “Making Science History: The Forgotten Socialist Roots of Big History and Big Data” Karen Lunsford, Writing Program “The Effects of Intellectual Property Law in Writing Studies: Ethics, Gatekeepers, and Academic Knowledge-Making” Amit Shilo, Classics “The Afterlife in the Oresteia: Ethical and ...

Reading: UC Santa Barbara Student Veteran Writers

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

Read the student veterans' stories in The Santa Barbara Independent. Eight student veterans will read stories about their military experiences.  Following the reading there will be time for questions from the audience. Gio Caballaro | Bradley Fry | Adrian Mejia | Andy Molina-Ochoa | Scott Rothdeutsch | Edward Rutherford | Kyle Shipe | Melissa Weidner Lunch will be provided. Sponsored by the IHC’s Social Securities series and the UC Santa Barbara Veterans Writing Workshop.

Symposium and Staged Readings: The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea

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

Cherríe Moraga’s play, The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (1995), depicts a dystopic future in a fractured América, aggravated by an entrenched patriarchy. It also explores the tenets of the movement that founded what are now thriving Chicana/Latina programs throughout the Southwest, including the UCSB Chicano Studies program, which celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2019. This symposium will present a timely (re)consideration of a movement in progress, alongside two staged readings of the play. Friday, ...

IHC Open House

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

You are invited to the IHC’s Open House on Thursday, October 3, from 4-6 pm. Cosponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts. Meet new Humanities faculty, IHC fellows, and staff members. Learn about Critical Mass, our 2019-2020 public events series. Find out about our community-engagement programs and our numerous funding resources for faculty and graduate students. Enjoy good food, drink, and conversation.

Critical Mass Inaugural Lecture: Plastic’s Tipping Point

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

Plastic production, use, and pollution have been growing steadily for decades, without much public comment or concern. But suddenly, and very recently, there has been strong and widespread backlash against the pervasiveness of plastic. What prompted this sudden change in public opinion?  Did plastic pollution itself reach a tipping point?  Or did public attitudes toward this pollutant undergo a radical shift? Roland Geyer will discuss the history of global plastic production and disposal and will ...

Public Forum: Building a Green New Deal: Community, Coalition, and Organizing for Environmental Justice

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

In communities, classrooms, and protest sites across the country, people have embraced the call for a Green New Deal as a way of recognizing that climate change presents us with an unprecedented historic challenge—and the need for comprehensive and transformational reform. California’s Central Coast has a powerful tradition of grassroots activism to draw on in rising to the challenge, from the wide-ranging environmental movement sparked by the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill to the multi-racial ...

UCHRI Funding Opportunities Information Sessions

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

9:30 am - 11:00 am - Faculty Funding Panel 11:15 am - 12:00 pm - Graduate Funding Panel Shana Melnysyn, Research Grants Manager at the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI), will host information sessions for faculty and graduate students who want to learn more about UCHRI's grant opportunities. Each session will include time for audience Q&A. The Faculty Funding Session (9:30-11 am) will include a panel on tips for crafting successful proposals with previous ...

Humanities Decanted Chavez-Garcia

Humanities Decanted: Migrant Longing: Letter Writing across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

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

Join us for a dialogue between Miroslava Chávez-García (History) and John S.W. Park (Asian American Studies) about Chávez-García’s new book, Migrant Longing: Letter Writing across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. Refreshments will be served. Migrant Longing draws upon Miroslava Chávez-García’s personal collection of 300 letters exchanged by family members across the U.S.-Mexico border, illuminating what migrants experienced in their everyday lives both “here” and “there” (aqui y alla). Chávez-García uses these private, firsthand accounts to demonstrate not ...

Critical Mass Talk: Ady Barkan: Love and Death, Hope and Resistance

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

Sitting in that hotel armchair, I realized that my deadly disease was giving me newfound power at the very moment it was depriving me of so much strength. My voice was growing softer, but I was being heard by more people than ever before. My legs were disintegrating, but more and more people were following in my footsteps. Precisely because my days were numbered, people drew inspiration from my decision to spend them in resistance. ...

Humanities Decanted: Borges, Buddhism and World Literature: A Morphology of Renunciation Tales

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

Join us for a dialogue between Dominique Jullien (French and Comparative Literature) and Sowon Park (English) about Jullien’s new book, Borges, Buddhism and World Literature: A Morphology of Renunciation Tales. Refreshments will be served. Jullien’s latest book follows the renunciation story in Borges and beyond, arguing for its centrality as a Borgesian compositional trope and as a Borgesian prism for reading a global constellation of texts. The renunciation story at the heart of Buddhism, that ...

Information Sessions: Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program

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

Thursday, January 9, 4:00-5:00 PM | 6020 HSSB Thursday, January 16, 9:00-10:00 AM | 6020 HSSB Join the IHC and current Public Humanities Fellows to learn more about the Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program.  Explore the course requirements, hear about paid internship and fellow-designed community project opportunities, and find out more about the capstone project. Light refreshments will be served.

Jared Diamond

Critical Mass Talk: Nations in Crisis, People in Crisis: Connecting Upheaval

Corwin Pavilion 494 UCEN Rd, Isla Vista, CA, United States

IHC Director Susan Derwin asked Jared Diamond, UCLA Professor of Geography, a few questions about his work in light of the current pandemic. Read his comments here. Nations that successfully navigate crises do so by making selective changes to their identities and actions. When individuals experience crises—mid-life, financial, health, relationship—they may also adopt selective changes to overcome the situation. But some individuals, like some nations, are better at navigating upheaval than others. By drawing on the factors ...

Information Sessions: Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program

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

Thursday, January 9, 4:00-5:00 PM | 6020 HSSB Thursday, January 16, 9:00-10:00 AM | 6020 HSSB Join the IHC and current Public Humanities Fellows to learn more about the Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program.  Explore the course requirements, hear about paid internship and fellow-designed community project opportunities, and find out more about the capstone project. Light refreshments will be served.

Humanities Decanted: Queering Black Atlantic Religions: Transcorporeality in Candomblé, Santería, and Vodou

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

Join us for a dialogue between Roberto Strongman (Black Studies) and Jennifer Tyburczy (Feminist Studies) about Strongman’s new book, Queering Black Atlantic Religions: Transcorporeality in Candomblé, Santería, and Vodou. Refreshments will be served. In Queering Black Atlantic Religions, Roberto Strongman examines Haitian Vodou, Cuban Lucumí/Santería, and Brazilian Candomblé to demonstrate how religious rituals of trance possession allow humans to understand themselves as embodiments of the divine. In these rituals, the commingling of humans and the ...

Aaron Huey Critical Mass Talk

Critical Mass Talk: Art as Compass and Catalyst for Change

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

Amplifier.org is "a nonprofit design lab that builds art and media experiments to amplify the most important movements of our times." In this lecture the Founder of Amplifier will speak on the power of art at threshold moments, recounting visual campaigns like We The People, which flooded the streets for the Women's March and 2017 Presidential Inauguration protests. Amplifier believes that in times of uncertainty—in times like these, when fear and misinformation attempt to divide ...

POSTPONED Talk: “Hysteric Affirmation”: Language, Literature, and the Economy in Contemporary German Fiction

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, 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 ...

Inaugural Lecture: Living Democracy in Capitalism’s Shadow: Creative Labor, Black Abolitionists, and the Struggle to End Slavery

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 ...

Jessica Nakamura

Humanities Decanted: Transgenerational Remembrance: Performance and the Asia-Pacific War in Contemporary Japan

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 ...

Jesmyn Ward by Beowulf Sheehan

The 2020 Diana and Simon Raab Writer-in-Residence: Jesmyn Ward

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 ...

Living Democracy Talk: Struggling to Save America’s Cities in the Suburban Age: Urban Renewal Revisited

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 ...

Helen Morales

Humanities Decanted: Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths

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 ...

Archon Fung Talk

Living Democracy Talk: From the Embers of Crisis: Creating Equitable and Deliberative Democracy

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 ...

Critical Mass Talks and Staged Reading: On Collecting and Hoarding

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, ...

Information Sessions: Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program

Zoom

Tuesday, November 17, 3:00-4:00 PM | Zoom | REGISTER NOW AND Wednesday, November 18, 12:00-1:00 PM | Zoom | REGISTER NOW Join the IHC online to learn more about the Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program.  Explore the course requirements, hear about paid internship and fellow-designed community project opportunities, and find out more about the capstone presentation.

Making Abolition Geographies: Stories from California

Living Democracy Talk: Making Abolition Geographies: Stories from California

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link This talk explores how visions of abolition guide and connect organizing across a range of social justice struggles. Gilmore will highlight examples relating to environmental justice, public sector labor unions, farm workers, undocumented households, criminalized youth, and community based approaches to prevent and resolve gender and interpersonal violence. The vivid California stories she will present reveal how abolition is a practical program for urgent ...

Land Grab U: Land-Grant Universities and Indigenous Peoples

Living Democracy Talk: Land Grab U: Land-Grant Universities and Indigenous Peoples

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act, which distributed public domain lands to raise funds for fledgling colleges across the nation. The creation story told around this event is that land-grant universities were given the gift of free land. But the truth is much more complicated: The Morrill Act worked by turning land expropriated from tribal nations into seed money for higher ...

Strongmen: From Mussolini to Trump

Living Democracy Talk: Strongmen: From Mussolini to Trump

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link What do strongman leaders across a century have in common? Why do people continue to follow them, despite the destruction they cause? Drawing on her new book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, Ruth Ben-Ghiat discusses the playbook of corruption, virility, propaganda, and violence they utilize, how people have resisted authoritarians over a century, and what we can do to strengthen democracy in America and ...

Dwight Reynolds

Humanities Decanted: The Musical Heritage of Al-Andalus

Zoom

Click here for a 20% publisher's discount on The Musical Heritage of Al-Andalus   Join us online for a dialogue between Dwight Reynolds (Religious Studies) and Debra Blumenthal (History) about Reynolds’ new book, The Musical Heritage of Al-Andalus. Audience Q&A will follow. The Musical Heritage of Al-Andalus is a critical account of the history of Andalusian music in Iberia from the Islamic conquest of 711 to the final expulsion of the Moriscos (Spanish Muslims converted ...

Reuben Miller Critical Mass Talk

Living Democracy Talk: Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link While more people are incarcerated in the United States than in any other nation in the history of the western world, the prison is but one (comparatively) small part of a vast carceral landscape. The 600,000 people released each year join nearly 5 million people already on probation or parole, 12 million who are processed through a county jail, 19 million U.S. adults estimated ...

W. Patrick McCray

Humanities Decanted: Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Join us online for a dialogue between Patrick McCray (History) and Alan Liu (English) about McCray’s new book, Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture. Audience Q&A will follow. Despite C. P. Snow’s warning, in 1959, of an unbridgeable chasm between the humanities and the sciences, engineers and scientists of that era enthusiastically collaborated with artists to ...

Lessons of the Hour—Frederick Douglass

CANCELLED | Living Democracy Talk: Lessons of the Hour—Frederick Douglass

Zoom

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED Artist and filmmaker, Isaac Julien, and writer and curator, Mark Nash, will screen excerpts from Julien's film "Lessons of the Hour—Frederick Douglass" in a presentation that will explore the importance of looking to history and biography to articulate contemporary cultural movements. Isaac Julien's moving image practice draws from and comments on a range of artistic disciplines including film, theatre, photography and performance. Julien is a Distinguished Professor of the Arts ...

Humanities Decanted: Violentologies: Violence, Identity, and Ideology in Latina/o Literature

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Join us online for a dialogue between Ben Olguín (English, UCSB) and María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo (Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU) about Olguín’s new book, Violentologies: Violence, Identity, and Ideology in Latina/o Literature. Audience Q&A will follow. Violentologies: Violence, Identity, and Ideology in Latina/o Literature, explores how various forms of violence undergird a wide range of Latina/o subjectivities, or Latinidades, from 1835 to the present. ...

Rana Humanities Decanted

Humanities Decanted: Race Characters: Ethnic Literature and the Figure of the American Dream

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Join us online for a dialogue between Swati Rana (English) and Stephanie L. Batiste (English) about Rana’s new book, Race Characters: Ethnic Literature and the Figure of the American Dream. Audience Q&A will follow. A vexed figure inhabits U.S. literature and culture: the visibly racialized immigrant who disavows minority identity and embraces the American dream. Such figures are potent and controversial, for they promise ...

What We Can Do for Each Other: Wake Work in Our Times

Living Democracy Talk: What We Can Do For Each Other

Zoom

One of the greatest threats against democracy and justice is indolence--defined as a form of militant indifference based on the lack of empathy for the suffering of others. Cristina Rivera Garza will explore how taking part in and contributing to transnational emotional communities in Mexico and the U.S., many based on shared experiences of social suffering and the grieving that comes with it, may help us leap out of ourselves and into the heart of the bond we share ...

Information Session: Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program

Zoom

REGISTER NOW Join the IHC to learn more about the Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program. Explore the course offerings, hear about paid internship and fellow-designed community project opportunities, and find out more about the capstone presentation. If you cannot attend the info session but would like to learn more about the program, please email Erin Nerstad at nerstad@ihc.ucsb.edu. REGISTER NOW

2021 Arthur N. Rupe Great Debate: Taming Titans: How Should We Regulate Big Tech?

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Participants: Sonia Katyal, The University of California, Berkeley, School of Law Kate Klonick, St. John's University, School of Law Randal C. Picker, The University of Chicago, The Law School Moderator: Michael J. Burstein, Yeshiva University, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law Experts on law and technology will debate how Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft should be regulated. Are they 21st-century trusts? Guardians of free ...

Keum

Humanities Decanted: Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Join us online for a dialogue between Tae-Yeoun Keum (Political Science) and Andrew Norris (Political Science) about Keum’s new book, Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought. Audience Q&A will follow. Plato’s use of myths—the Myth of Metals, the Myth of Er—sits uneasily with his canonical reputation as the inventor of rational philosophy. Since the Enlightenment, interpreters like Hegel have sought to resolve this ...

VWW reading event

Reading: UC Santa Barbara Student Veteran Writers

Zoom

Read the student veterans’ stories in The Santa Barbara Independent. UC Santa Barbara student veterans will read stories about their military experiences, followed by audience Q&A. Presenters: David Guerrero, Robert Hickman, Michael Ramirez, and Nick Tash David Guerrero served in the United States Marine Corps as an Infantry rifleman from 2003 to 2007. He earned his AS in Criminology and Liberal Arts from Santa Barbara City College. David transferred to UCSB in the Fall of ...

Humanities Decanted: Naked Shakes Twelfth Night

Humanities Decanted: Irwin Appel, Naked Shakes

Zoom

Join us online for a dialogue between Irwin Appel (Theater and Dance) and James Kearney (English) about Appel’s theater company, Naked Shakes, and their recent production of Twelfth Night, staged outside at UCSB’s Commencement Green in front of the lagoon. Audience Q&A will follow. Naked Shakes derives its rather provocative name from the principle that an actor in a bare theatrical space, along with meticulous attention to language, few technical elements, and the collective imagination ...

David Pellow Regeneration Inaugural Lecture

Inaugural Lecture: Environmental Justice as Regeneration

Zoom

The grassroots environmental justice movement and the field of environmental justice studies have evolved in creative and inspiring directions over the years. Recent work focuses on the challenges of envisioning and realizing abolition, confronting anthropogenic climate change/disruption, and articulating transformative approaches to achieving ecologically healthy and socially equitable policy-making for a “just transition.” This presentation considers what each of these areas of scholarship and politics could signal for the future of environmental justice and for ...

Clint Smith

Regeneration Talk: Clint Smith

Zoom

Join us online for a conversation between Clint Smith and IHC Director Susan Derwin. Audience Q&A will follow. Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, which was a #1 New York Times Bestseller, and the poetry collection Counting Descent, which won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the ...

Regeneration Artist Talk: Harmonia Rosales

Regeneration Artist Talk: Harmonia Rosales

Zoom

Afro-Cuban American artist Harmonia Rosales will discuss her new and dynamic body of work presented in the exhibition, Entwined. Rosales’ interweaving of representations from ancient Greek and Yoruba mythologies invites viewers to challenge their ideas about identity and empowerment. Women and people of color, the protagonists of her canvases, assume roles of power and beauty in exquisite imaginings of ancient myths and Renaissance paintings. To learn more about the exhibition Entwined, which is on display ...

Regeneration Talk: Alexandre Gefen and Sandra Laugier

Regeneration Talk: Maintaining Life, Repairing the World: Ethics, Philosophy, and Literature

Zoom

The COVID pandemic appeared as a threat to human life, both in the vital sense (a risk to biological life) and in the social sense (a risk to social life: disruption from the suspension of activities, lack of public transport, closure of schools, etc.). It has revealed radical vulnerabilities: of institutions, the species, and the planet; of fragile populations, workers “on the front line,” and each individual. The importance of caring for others and for ...

John Lee Humanities Decanted

Humanities Decanted: The First Black Archaeologist

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

Proof of full vaccination required for all attendees. READ MORE TO VIEW ACCEPTABLE FORMS OF VACCINATION DOCUMENTATION. Join us for a dialogue between John W. I. Lee (History) and Krzysztof Janowicz (Geography) about Lee's new book, The First Black Archaeologist: A Life of John Wesley Gilbert. Audience Q&A will follow. The First Black Archaeologist reveals the untold story of a pioneering African American classical scholar, teacher, community leader, and missionary. Born into slavery in rural ...

Andrew Way Leong

Talk: A Queer, Queer Race: Orientations for Early Japanese American Literature

Zoom

REGISTER NOW This online talk will feature discussions and close readings from a chapter in Professor Andrew Way Leong's forthcoming book, "A Queer, Queer Race: Orientations for Japanese/American Literature." This book examines Japanese and English language texts written by Shōson, Sadakichi Hartmann, Arishima Takeo, and Yoné Noguchi—authors who resided in the United States between the opening of mass Japanese emigration in 1885 and the ban on Japanese immigration imposed by the Immigration Act of 1924. ...

Caroline Levine: Infrastructures of Collective Life: A Formalist’s Guide to the Climate Crisis

Regeneration Talk: Infrastructures of Collective Life: A Formalist’s Guide to the Climate Crisis

Zoom

  Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Join us online for a talk by Caroline Levine. Audience Q&A will follow. What do scholars of literature and the arts have to offer in response to the climate crisis? The aesthetic humanities have long traditions of insisting on open-endedness, negation, and inaction. Levine argues that in this moment of rapid and destabilizing change, this tradition has reached its political limit. She makes ...

Information Sessions: Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program

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

Thursday, February 24 | 4:00 PM | McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020 | VIEW IN-PERSON ATTENDANCE REQUIREMENTS AND Friday, February 25 | 12:00 PM | Zoom | REGISTER NOW Join the IHC in person on 2/24 or online on 2/25 to learn more about the Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program. Explore the course requirements, hear about paid internship and fellow-designed community project opportunities, and find out more about the capstone presentation. If you would like to ...

Information Sessions: Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program

Zoom

Thursday, February 24 | 4:00 PM | McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020 | VIEW IN-PERSON ATTENDANCE REQUIREMENTS AND Friday, February 25 | 12:00 PM | Zoom | REGISTER NOW Join the IHC in person on 2/24 or online on 2/25 to learn more about the Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program. Explore the course requirements, hear about paid internship and fellow-designed community project opportunities, and find out more about the capstone presentation. If you would like to ...

Russia's Invasion of Ukraine: A Roundtable Discussion

Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: A Roundtable Discussion

Zoom

UCSB faculty members will discuss the invasion of Ukraine, including its historical background, regional and global ramifications, and international responses. Panelists: Benjamin J. Cohen, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Political Science Adrienne Edgar, Professor, History Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, Assistant Professor, Global Studies Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Professor Emeritus, History Adrian Ivakhiv, Visiting Scholar, Carsey-Wolf Center Cynthia Kaplan, Professor, Political Science Moderator: Sara Pankenier Weld, Professor, Germanic & Slavic Studies Live closed-captioning will be provided. Free to attend; registration required to ...

Elizabeth Kolbert

Regeneration Talk: Elizabeth Kolbert

Corwin Pavilion 494 UCEN Rd, Isla Vista, CA, United States

It is said that we live in a new geological epoch characterized by climate change and other disastrous human impacts on the planet. In her new book, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Kolbert takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. Should we be seeking technological solutions to the damage humans have caused to the environment, or will such “solutions” only make the problems ...

Vivian Gornick

Regeneration Talk: The Only True Reader Is a Re-reader

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

"I sometimes think I was born reading. I can’t remember the time when I didn’t have a book in my hands, my head lost to the world around me." What Vivian Gornick did not say when she wrote these sentences was how often the book in her hands was one she had read a number of times before. It became her habit as life went on to re-read the books that had repeatedly seemed important ...

Monica Bethe: Ensuring the Future of Historic Textiles: The Case of a Japanese Empress's Court Gown.

Regeneration Talk: Ensuring the Future of Historic Textiles: The Case of a Japanese Empress’s Court Gown

Zoom

Objects talk to us over time and space, transmitting in their colors, shapes, textures, and materials insight into other lives and ways of living. Some we wish to preserve for their sheer beauty, others for the people, times, or places they represent. Of the items that are central to our daily lives, textiles are among the most perishable: if not used until they are rags, they still degrade naturally over time, prey to insects, mold, ...

Regeneration Talk: Afghanistan: The Forever War Ends

Corwin Pavilion 494 UCEN Rd, Isla Vista, CA, United States

After twenty years, the end of the American war in Afghanistan was ugly and chaotic, with terrible scenes of friends and allies being left behind and of the Taliban sweeping away everything America built. Did it have to be this way? Dexter Filkins, who began covering the country before the 9/11 attacks, will discuss how the Afghan state, built at such great expense, crumbled so fast, why America’s withdrawal turned out so badly, and how–whether ...

Scott Ellsworth: The Tulsa Race Massacre: Causes, Cover Up, and the Fight for the Past

Regeneration Talk: The Tulsa Race Massacre: Causes, Cover Up, and the Fight for the Past

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, 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 ...

IHC Open House 2022

IHC Open House

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

You are invited to the IHC’s Open House on Thursday, September 29, from 4-6 pm. Meet new Humanities faculty, IHC fellows, and staff members. Learn about Too Much Information, our 2022-23 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

Inaugural Lecture: Too Much or Too Little?

Inaugural Lecture: Too Much or Too Little?

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

For a long time, information was scarce. Messages and letters were transmitted at the speed of human or equine legs. The materials upon which information was inscribed were either too heavy or too perishable to circulate. But by the end of the eighteenth century, as machines took over, not only the means of transmitting information but what counted as information had changed. Knowledge and experience now yielded to the objectivity of information, grounded, for example, ...

Make a Poem Cry cover art

TMI Talk: Make a Poem Cry: Creative Writing from California’s Lancaster Prison

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

Make a Poem Cry is an anthology from one of California’s high-security prisons brought to us through the creative writing classes of Luis J. Rodríguez. Rodríguez and formerly incarcerated writer Kenneth E. Hartman have selected work penned from 2016 to 2018. These are poems, essays, stories, and more mined from the depths of familial, racial, and economic violence. They are imaginings for how to address trouble and crime without punishment, dehumanization, and violence in return. ...

Cabranes-Grant Humanities Decanted

Humanities Decanted: The Bones of Contention

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

Join us for a dialogue between Leo Cabranes-Grant (Spanish and Portuguese, Theater and Dance) and Juan Pablo Lupi (Spanish and Portuguese) about Cabranes-Grant’s new play, The Bones of Contention. Refreshments will be served. The Bones of Contention describes the efforts of Yitipaka (an imaginary California town) to regain its economic and social stability after the COVID pandemic. Constructed as two collective latinx murals (one dedicated to the older generation, one dedicated to younger people), the ...

Humanities Decanted: Ross Melnick

Humanities Decanted: Hollywood’s Embassies

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

Join us for a dialogue between Ross Melnick (Film and Media Studies) and Charles Wolfe (Film and Media Studies) about Melnick’s new book, Hollywood’s Embassies: How Movie Theaters Projected American Power Around the World. Refreshments will be served. Beginning in the 1920s, audiences around the globe were seduced not only by Hollywood films but also by lavish movie theaters that were owned and operated by the major American film companies. These theaters aimed to provide ...

Humanities Decanted: Jody Enders

Humanities Decanted: Jody Enders, Translating Medieval Farce

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

Join us for a dialogue between Jody Enders (French and Italian) and Leo Cabranes-Grant (Spanish and Portuguese, Theater and Dance) about Enders' two new edited and translated volumes of medieval French comedies. Refreshments will be served. Trial by Farce: A Dozen Medieval French Comedies in Modern English (University of Michigan Press, 2023) In Trial by Farce, prize-winning theater historian Jody Enders brings twelve of the funniest legal farces to English-speaking audiences in a refreshingly uncensored but ...

Isaac Julien Event

Roundtable Discussion: Isaac Julien’s Once Again…(Statues Never Die)

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

Join us for a discussion with Isaac Julien about his process of creating Once Again… (Statues Never Die). Commissioned by the Barnes Foundation on the occasion of its 100th Anniversary in 2022, Julien’s immersive, black-and-white, five-screen, on-site video installation Once Again… (Statues Never Die) brings to light the relationship between Dr. Albert C. Barnes, who was an early U.S. collector and exhibitor of African material culture, and the famed African American philosopher and cultural critic ...

Heather Houser TMI Event Infowhelm

TMI Talk: The Climate Infowhelm

Zoom

Climate infowhelm is the experience of feeling overwhelmed by too much information about the environmental crisis. Heather Houser will discuss how infowhelm feels, sounds, and looks in various media and how contemporary art manages environmental knowledge and provides new ways of understanding environmental change. Audience Q&A will follow. Heather Houser is the Mody C. Boatright Regents Professor in American and English Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Ecosickness ...

Information Sessions: Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program

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

Wednesday, February 22 | 12:00 PM | McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020 | RSVP Lunch will be provided. AND Thursday, February 23 | 4:00 PM | McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020 | RSVP Refreshments will be provided. Join the IHC on 2/22 or 2/23 to learn more about the Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program. Explore the course requirements, hear about paid internship opportunities, and find out more about the capstone presentation. If you would like ...

Information Sessions: Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program

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

Wednesday, February 22 | 12:00 PM | McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020 | RSVP Lunch will be provided. AND Thursday, February 23 | 4:00 PM | McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020 | RSVP Refreshments will be provided. Join the IHC on 2/22 or 2/23 to learn more about the Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program. Explore the course requirements, hear about paid internship opportunities, and find out more about the capstone presentation. If you would like ...

The Critical Race Theory Forward Tracking Project - Event

TMI Talk: Critical Race Theory (CRT): What It Is, What It Isn’t, and What You Need to Know

Zoom

Critical Race Theory (CRT) seeks to understand why inequality persists in a society that has explicitly condemned racism and has repeatedly adopted laws and policies intended to eliminate it. Drawing on research in history, social sciences, and the humanities, CRT demonstrates how laws and policies can reproduce racial inequality—even when they are adopted without explicit racial bias. CRT is thus an important tool to support our nation’s ongoing efforts to achieve a robust multiracial democracy. ...

Laura Kurgan - GPS for the Brain

TMI Talk: GPS for the Brain: Networks, Urbanisms, Algorithms

Zoom

Laura Kurgan will talk about her recent work involving network science and urban theory. She will present work from the Center for Spatial Research on the Urban History of Algorithms: Homophily and Weak Ties, a history which not surprisingly lies dormant in its use in network science. She will also present new work on navigation theory in neuroscience, which revisits and asks questions about the canonical urban theory of Kevin Lynch (1970) and Fred Jameson's ...

Farid - Deep Fakes

TMI Talk: Creating, Weaponizing, and Detecting Deep Fakes

Zoom

Although varied in their form and creation, deep fakes refer to AI-synthesized image, audio, or video. Deep fakes add to a long line of techniques for manipulating reality, but their introduction poses new risks because of the democratized access to what would have historically been the purview of Hollywood-style studios. In this talk, Farid will provide an overview of how deep fakes are created, how they are being used and misused, and if and how ...

Humanities Decanted - Ghosh

Humanities Decanted: The Virus Touch

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

Join us for a dialogue between Bishnupriya Ghosh (English and Global Studies) and Elena Aronova (History) about Ghosh’s new book, The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media. Refreshments will be served. In The Virus Touch, Ghosh argues that media are central to understanding emergent relations between viruses, humans, and nonhuman life. Writing in the shadow of the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 global pandemics, Ghosh theorizes “epidemic media” to show how epidemics are mediated in images, numbers, and ...

Humanities Decanted: Giuliana Perrone

Humanities Decanted: Giuliana Perrone

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

Join us for a dialogue between Giuliana Perrone (History) and Jeannine DeLombard (English) about Perrone's new book, Nothing More than Freedom: The Failure of Abolition in American Law. Refreshments will be served. Nothing More than Freedom: The Failure of Abolition in American Law (Cambridge University Press, 2023) Nothing More than Freedom explores the long and complex legal history of Black freedom in the United States. From the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 until ...

2022-23 Faculty Fellows - Event

New Research in the Humanities: Presentations by the IHC’s 2022-23 Faculty Fellows

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

Please join us in celebrating our 2022-23 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. Heidi Amin-Hong, English “A Contaminated Transpacific: Ecological Afterlives of the Vietnam War” Charmaine Chua, Global Studies “Logistics Leviathan: Counterrevolutionary empire and just-in-time distribution in the Indo-Pacific” Raquel Pacheco, Anthropology “Re-making the Peasant Countryside: Intimate mestizaje in Neoliberal Mexico” Elana Resnick, Anthropology “Refusing Sustainability: ...

Josephine Metcalf - Event

“It Calls You Back and Draws You In”: The Personal Papers of Luis J. Rodríguez

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

Luis J. Rodríguez is an award-winning author and activist whose memoir about life in a gang, Always Running, is as popular as ever in 2023, its 30th anniversary. The UCSB Library Special Research Collections recently acquired Rodríguez’s personal papers, giving scholars and students an opportunity to see the personal and social context behind Always Running and Rodríguez’s other prose, poetry, and non-fiction, as well as his involvement in gubernatorial races, revolutionary organizations, and the prisoners’ ...

2023 Open House

IHC Open House

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

You are invited to the IHC’s Open House on Thursday, October 5, from 4-6 pm. Meet new Humanities faculty, IHC fellows, and staff members. Learn about Imagining California, our 2023-24 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

Inaugural Talk - Moraga

Imagining California Inaugural Talk: Imagine This: The (Re)generation of Place

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

Seeded by sorrow, the evolving work that Cherríe Moraga will present journeys through her home-country of California, marking her footsteps alongside Native ecologies and Chicanx genealogies. In part, it is reflective of a queer embodied half-century inquiry—writing of place and out of place, perhaps unknowingly inspired by a once paradisal Califas of women of color warriors. Here, nature and the implicate order of its elements (fire, air, water, and earth) become illuminated signposts along the ...

M.G. Lord - Is Barbie Feminist?

Imagining California Talk: Is Barbie Feminist? It’s Complicated

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

In 1994, when M.G. Lord interviewed the California-based creators of the Barbie doll, she had no doubt Barbie would be as provocative in 2023 as she was in 1959. But Lord did not anticipate that this plastic object, once tarred as anti-feminist, would evolve into a touchstone for understanding feminism—as well as the star of a blockbuster attack on patriarchy. This talk will explore the Greta Gerwig effect and the 64 years of changes in ...

Wendy Chun, How Are You? Sentiment, Surveillance, and Anti-Asian Racism

TMI Talk: How Are You? Sentiment, Surveillance, and Anti-Asian Racism

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

Sentiment analysis entails the widespread surveillance of users' posts and actions to determine how they feel. This talk outlines the importance of early- and mid-20th-century studies of women workers and Japanese and Japanese-American internees in U.S. WWII internment camps to the rise of sentiment analysis. A reception will follow. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is the Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University and leads the Digital Democracies Institute, which was launched ...

Yunte Huang - Event

Humanities Decanted: Daughter of the Dragon

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

Join us for a dialogue between Yunte Huang (English) and Constance Penley (Film and Media Studies) about Huang’s new book, Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong's Rendezvous with American History. Refreshments will be served. Daughter of the Dragon is a trenchant reclamation of the Chinese American movie star, whose battles against cinematic exploitation and endemic racism are set against the currents of twentieth-century history. Born into the steam and starch of a Chinese laundry, ...

Information Sessions: Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program

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

Tuesday, January 23 | 12:00 PM | McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020 | RSVP Lunch will be provided. AND Wednesday, January 24 | 4:00 PM | McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020 | RSVP Refreshments will be provided. Join the IHC on 1/23 or 1/24 to learn more about the Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program. Explore the course requirements, hear about paid internship opportunities, and find out more about the capstone presentation. If you would like ...

Information Sessions: Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program

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

Tuesday, January 23 | 12:00 PM | McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020 | RSVP Lunch will be provided. AND Wednesday, January 24 | 4:00 PM | McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020 | RSVP Refreshments will be provided. Join the IHC on 1/23 or 1/24 to learn more about the Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program. Explore the course requirements, hear about paid internship opportunities, and find out more about the capstone presentation. If you would like ...

Liz Carlisle Humantiies Decanted

Humanities Decanted: Liz Carlisle

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

Join us for a dialogue between Liz Carlisle (Environmental Studies) and Peter Alagona (Environmental Studies) about Carlisle’s new book, Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming. Refreshments will be served. A powerful movement is happening in farming today—farmers are reconnecting with their roots to fight climate change. For one woman, that has meant learning her tribe’s history to help bring back the buffalo. For another, it has meant preserving forest purchased ...

Susan Straight - Event

Imagining California Talk: Writing Our Californias

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

For decades, America has imagined California novels as placed in locations like Hollywood or San Francisco. But, as Susan Straight will discuss in her presentation, other geographies are as beautiful, tragic, and full of narratives set in remote canyons, inland citrus groves, ancient ranchos, and hidden deserts. Straight's characters, who might be seventh generation Californian or people just arrived, live in the places she's known forever, hidden kingdoms of love and redemption amid the sycamore ...

Rosanna Xia Imagining CaliforniaEvent

Imagining California Event: California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, 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 ...

Rupe Great Debate 2024

2024 Arthur N. Rupe Great Debate: Is Housing a Human Right?

Campbell Hall Building 538, University of California, Santa Barbara, Mesa Rd,, Santa Barbara, CA, 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 ...

Imagining California Talk: Aesthetic Mobility and Solidarities at Self Help Graphics & Art

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 ...

Janet Afary HD Event

Humanities Decanted: Janet Afary

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, 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, ...

Ending Poverty in California logo

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

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

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

Reparations in California

Imagining California Panel Discussion: Reparations in California

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

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

Faculty Fellows Presentations

New Research in the Humanities: Presentations by the IHC’s 2023-24 Faculty Fellows

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, 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”

Thomas Mazanec - Humanities Decanted Event

Humanities Decanted: Thomas Mazanec

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, 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 ...

Swati Chattopadhyay - Humanities Decanted Event

Humanities Decanted: Swati Chattopadhyay

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, 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 ...