In Spring 2010, the Center for Cultural Studies will continue to host a Wednesday colloquium series, which features current cultural studies work by campus faculty and visitors. The sessions are informal, normally consisting of a 30-40 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center will provide coffee, tea, and cookies.

April 7

Barbara Epstein
Professor, History of Consciousness, UCSC

“Belorussians, the State, and Anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union:  Perspectives of Minsk Ghetto Survivors”

Professor Epstein continues work emerging from The Minsk Ghetto 1941-1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism (California, 2008), which described cooperation between Jews and non-Jews in World War II Minsk. Interviews with ghetto survivors in Minsk and Israel yield assertions that relations between Jews and Belorussians were excellent before the war and deteriorated afterwards as a result of exclusively state-driven anti-Semitism. 

April 14

Brian Catlos
Associate Professor, History, UCSC; Director, UC Mediterranean Studies Multi-Campus Research Project and the UCSC Center for Mediterranean Studies

“The Paradoxes of Pluralism: Mediterranean Conflict and Collaboration in the Age of Holy War”

Professor Catlos works on social relations in the premodern Mediterranean and is one of the scholars shaping the emerging interdisciplinary field of Mediterranean Studies. His current projects include a history of the Muslim communities in Latin Christendom from the eleventh to seventeenth centuries; studies of Muslim and Jewish minorities in Medieval Iberia based on original archival research; and premodern Mediterranean ethno-religious identity and intergroup relations.

April 21

Bob Meister
Professor of Social and Political Thought, UCSC; Director, UCSC Rethinking Capitalism Initiative

"After Evil: The Intertemporal Grammar of Human Rights"

Professor Meister’s talk concerns his forthcoming book, After Evil: A New Discourse of Human Rights (Columbia, 2010).  In what ways does a moral consensus that the past was evil require a political consensus that the evil is past? After Evil develops and criticizes the temporal logic of late 20th-century human rights discourse as an attempt to conceive the present as a time in which the project of putting evil in the past is also a postponement of justice.

April 28

Charles Hirschkind
Associate Professor, Anthropology, UCB

“The Contemporary Afterlife of Moorish Spain”

Professor Hirschkind studies how Europe's Islamic past inhabits its present and unsettles contemporary efforts to secure Europe's Christian civilizational identity. He analyzes the social and political processes that sustain an active relation to Europe's Islamic heritage in southern Spain and the potential impact they have on forms of cooperation and responsibility linking Muslim immigrants, Spanish converts, and Andalusian Catholics as subjects of Europe.

May 5

Jody Greene
Associate Professor, Literature, UCSC

“I ♥ George Herbert”

Professor Greene’s current research interests include the ethics of reading, material textual studies, and the history of the category of the literary, and her two primary archives are seventeenth-century literature and poststructuralist philosophy. This talk explores the heart as a figure for the porosity of being in the poetry of George Herbert, and the ways faith and writing render Herbert, in the words of Jean-Luc Nancy, “closed open.”  

May 12

Gail Hershatter
Distinguished Professor, History, UCSC

“Rural Women and China's Collective Past”

Professor Hershatter’s forthcoming book, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (California), traces a gendered history of early socialism in rural Shaanxi province, exploring how the past is remembered and understood in the light of intervening events. Her books include Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (California, 1997), and Women in China’s Long Twentieth Century (California, 2007).


May 19
There will be no colloquium on May 19th due to the possible strike. Regular colloquia will resume the following week. The colloquium originally scheduled for May 19th (Mercy Romero) will take place on May 26th in Humanities 202.

May 26* [Special Location: Humanities 202]

Mercy Romero
UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Feminist Studies, UCSC

“Still Life: Black Radical Movement and Courtroom Drawings, 1971”

Professor Romero’s research includes post-1964 African American and trans-American literatures and literary history, poverty, memory, and cultural history. She is currently working on a manuscript, Wonder’s Collapse: Art at the Intersection of Embodiment and Sociality.  Her talk thinks about drawing and history, and the practice and crisis of black radical movement.

*Mercy Romero's colloquium is replacing the following appearance, which has been cancelled:

Vilashini Cooppan
Associate Professor, Literature, UCSC

“Disciplining World Literature: History, Memory, and the Work of Worlding”

Professor Cooppan’s Race, Writing, and the Literary World System combines the economic analysis of world systems theory, world literature models of global literary movement, traditional theory and history of the novel, and psychoanalytic and philosophical studies of political affect. It explores how literary economies have helped to express, translate, shape, and contest the history of modern racial power, from slavery and empire to apartheid and the war on terror.

June 2

Christine Hong
Assistant Professor, Literature, UCSC

"Dead and Red: Post-Socialism and the 'Anachronism' of War Commemoration in North Korea and Viet Nam"

Professor Hong's Legal Fictions: Afro-Asian Human Rights Cultural Production and the Pax Americana in the Pacific Rim examines the historic relation of post-1945 human rights literature to the Pax Americana, the U.S. military "peace" that restructured the Asia Pacific following World War II.  Her second project is provisionally titled Divided Memories: Museums, Monuments, and Memoirs in the Cold War Asia Pacific.