Colloquium Series
In winter 2001, 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.
ScheduleALL COLLOQUIA ARE IN THE OAKES MURAL ROOMJanuary 10
Earl Jackson
(Literature, UC Santa Cruz )
Toward a Post-Wave East Asian Cinema
January 17
Wlad Godzich
(Dean of Humanities, UC Santa Cruz)
Reconstructing the Subject
January 27
Margaret Jolly
(Gender Relations Centre, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University)
Looking Back? Gender, Race and Sexuality in Pacific Cinema
January 31
Dana Frank
(American Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
GIRL STRIKERS OCCUPY CHAIN STORE, WIN BIG: the Detroit Woolworth’s Sit-Down Strike
February 7
Ann Saetnan
(Sociology and Political Science, Norweigan University of Science and Technology)
Elicited Whispers, Broken Sound Barriers
February 14
Rob Wilson
(Literature, UC Santa Cruz)
Global/local rumblings inside Empire: Gladiator and sublime spectacle
February 21
Marcial Gonzalez
(English, UC Berkeley )
Fredric Jameson’s Arrested Dialectic and the ‘Absent First Step of Renewed Praxis’
February 28
Alexandra Stern
(History, UC Santa Cruz)
Modern Racial Formations: Interrogating the History of Eugenics in California
March 7
Renya Ramirez
(American Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
Sarah Morgan’s Government Story: A Redefinition of Culture, Community and Citizenship
Participants
Earl Jackson is Associate Professor of Literature at UCSC. His research interests include new Asian cinema, science fiction, suspense, and genre fiction, gay male sexuality, digital media, and Japanese literature and poetics. He has published poetry, fiction, and many articles, and is involved in numerous web-based critical and literary activities. His books include Fantastic Living: The Speculative Autobiographies of Samuel Delany(forthcoming, Oxford) and Strategies of Deviance: Essays in Gay Male Representational Agency(Indiana, 1994). His web projects can be found at www.letsdeviant.com and www.anotherscene.com. Professor Jackson’s talk is from a current project on New Asian cinema.
Wlad Godzich is Dean of Humanities at UCSC, having recently arrived from the University of Geneva, where he was Professor of English and Chair of Emergent Literature. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including The Culture of Literacy(Harvard, 1994), Philosophie einer un-europ�ischen Literaturkritik(Philosophy of a Non-European Literary Criticism, Wilhelm Fink, 1988), and An Essay in Prosaics: The Emergence of Prose in the French Middle Ages(co-authored with Jeffrey Kittay, Minnesota, 1987). Dean Godzich’s current research interests include theories and modes of subjectivity, globalization and culture, and the field he founded: emergent literature.
Dana Frank is a Professor of American Studies at UCSC, where she teaches labor history, political economy, race, gender, and the cultural politics of class. She is the author of Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism(Beacon Press, 1999), which was excerpted in the Washington Postand won the Book of the Year Award from the International Labor History Association. She is also the author of Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919-1929(Cambridge, 1994), and reviews books regularly for The Nation. Her current project, on the Detroit Woolworth’s sit-down strike of 1937, is part of a forthcoming book with Robin D. G. Kelley and Howard Zinn, in which each author tells the story of a different strike.
Margaret Jolly is Professor and Head of the Gender Relations Project at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University. She has been at ANU since 1989. One of the world’s distinguished scholars of Pacific Island anthropology and cultural studies, Professor Jolly has published a wide-ranging series of books and articles, including Women of the Place: Kastom, Colonialism and Gender in Vanuatu (1994). A recent manuscript, An Ocean of Difference: Colonialisms, Maternalisms, and Feminisms in the Pacific, is under review. While at the Center, Professor Jolly will pursue research on gender, indigeneity, and diaspora in the Pacific with a particular emphasis on cinema and the visual arts.
Ann Saetnan is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. Her research focuses on science and technology as they relate to gender and to work. Her co-edited volume, Localizing and Globalizing Reproductive Technologies,was just published by Ohio State University Press. While at the Center, Professor Saetnan will work on her new book project, provisionally titled Ultrasonic Discourse,a mapping of the debates surrounding the use of ultrasound in pregnancy in Norway.
Rob Wilson joins the UCSC faculty this quarter as Professor of Literature, after having been a faculty member at the University of Hawaii at Manoa since 1976. He is one of the world�s most prominent scholars of Hawaiian and Pacific literatures and cultural production, as well as of American literature and poetics. His books include Reimagining the American Pacific: From �South Pacific� to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond(Duke, 2000), American Sublime: The Genealogy of a Poetic Genre(Wisconsin, 1991), as well as the co-edited volumes Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics and Identity in the New Pacific(Rowman and Littlefield, 1999) and Global/Local: Cultural Production in the Transnational Imaginary.
Marcial Gonzalez received his Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University in 2000, and became an Assistant Professor in the English Department at UC Berkeley in the fall of 2000. He works on Chicana/o literary and cultural studies, and is currently working on a book manuscript titled Postmodernism, History and the Chicana/o Novel: Toward a Dialectical Literary Criticism,a study of several important Chicana/o novels published from 1970-1992, which includes an argument that the postmodern critique of history has limited the potential for Chicana/o studies to develop an effective social criticism. An earlier version of his talk this quarter won the Michael Sprinker Award for best dissertation chapter from the Marxist Literary Group of the MLA in June 2000.
Alexandra Stern is Assistant Professor of History at UCSC, having completed her Ph.D. in History at the University of Chicago in 1999. From 1999-2000 she was interim director of the Historical Center for Health Sciences at the University of Michigan. Her work is on the history of science and technology, specifically eugenics. Recent articles include “Buildings, Boundaries, and Blood: Medicalization and Nation-Building on the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1910-1930” (Hispanic American Historical Review, Feb. 1999) and “Responsible Mothers and Normal Children: Eugenics, Welfare, and Nationalism in Post-Revolutionary Mexico, 1900-1940” (Journal of Historical Sociology,Fall 1999). Her talk is from a book in progress on eugenics and the U.S.-Mexican borderland.
Renya Ramirez is Assistant Professor of American Studies. She received her Ph.D. from the School of Education at Stanford University in 1999, and her Masters degree in Anthropology from Stanford in 1998. She has published several articles and given many papers on contemporary Native American issues, several of which draw on her fieldwork, which explored Native American healing practices and community formation in San Jose, California. Among the articles is “Healing Through Grief: Urban Indians Re-imagining Culture and Community in San Jose, California” (Journal of American Indian Culture and Research,1999). Her work is part of an attempt to establish new frameworks for the study of urban Indians.