Colloquium Series
In fall 2005, 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 ROOMOctober 5
Gopal Balakrishnan
(Editor, New Left Review)
Future Wars
October 12
Sharon Kinoshita
(Literature, UCSC)
Paying Tribute: Old French Literature and the Medieval Culture of Empire
October 19
Haejoang Cho
(Sociology, Yonsei University)
The Anxious South Korean University Student:
Globalization, Human Capital, and Class
October 26
Helene Moglen (Literature, UCSC) & Sheila Namir (Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis)
(History, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs)
The Dis-Eases of Otherness: Psychoanalysis and War
November 2
William Marotti
(History, UCSC)
Political Aesthetics: Activism, Everyday Life, and Art’s Object in 1960s Japan
November 9
Laura Garcia-Moreno
(Humanities, San Francisco State University)
The Politics of Recycling in Juan Luis Martínez’s La nueva novela (1977)
November 16
Chris Hables Gray
(TUIU and Goddard College)
Naming Pragmatics: Cyborgs, Wars, Empires,
Informations, PowersParticipants
GOPAL BALAKRISHNAN is an editor at the New Left Review. He has taught at the University of Chicago, where he was Harper Schmidt Assistant Professor of History. He is the author of The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmidt (Verso, 2000) and editor of Debating Empire(Verso, 2003) and (co-edited with Benedict Anderson) Mapping the Nation (Verso, 1996). His project for the Rockefeller fellowship, “Future Wars,” focuses on the role that military power will play in shaping the international law and world market conventions of the 21st century. He will examine, among other issues, the extent to which war-making capacity still counts in the ranking systems of international power, how privatization has affected the strategic environment in which major states plan for war, whether there has been (as claimed) a revolution in military affairs that could overcome the anticipated problems of 21st century battlefield scenarios with new
technologies, and what the effects have been of widening military asymmetries.
SHARON KINOSHITAis Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz. Her Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature is forthcoming (Pennsylvania, 2006). Her talk is drawn from a new project, about which she writes, “This book project recasts old French epic and romance as a record of the encounter between medieval ‘European’ society and a Mediterranean world dominated by great tributary empires like Byzantine Greece and Fatimid Egypt, as well as the expanding commercial empires of the Venetian and Genoese, throwing into question the place of medieval Europe in the civilizational history of ‘the West.’
HAEJOANG CHO, a cultural anthropologist and feminist, is a professor at Yonsei University. Her early research focused on gender studies in Korean modern history; her current interests and research are in the area of education and youth culture in the global/local and post-colonial context of modern-day Korea. Cho’s works in Korean include Women and Men in South Korea (1988), Reading Texts, Reading Lives in the Post-colonial Era (1992, 1994), and Talking at the Edge: Letters Between Japanese and Korean Feminists (2004,co-authored with Ueno Chizuko). As an “action researcher,” Cho founded a youth center (The Youth
Factory for Alternative Culture, www.haja.net) in 1999, and serves as the principal of two alternative schools in Seoul.
HELENE MOGLEN holds a Presidential Chair in the Literature Department at UC Santa Cruz and is the founding director of the Institute for Advanced Feminist Research (IAFR). She has published in the areas of literary theory and criticism, feminist, psychoanalytic, and cultural theory, literacy, and education. Her most recent book is The Trauma of Gender: A Feminist Theory of the English Novel(California, 2001). She is currently working on a collection of personal, political, and theoretical essays.
SHEILA NAMIR is a training and supervising analyst at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles and a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in Santa Cruz. She has published in the areas of psychosocial aspects of AIDS and cancer, trauma, and feminist psychoanalysis.
WILLIAM MAROTTI is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz. His talk is drawn from his book project Money, Trains, and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan. He will discuss the development of an avant-garde artistic production in Japan from 1957 to 1964. He writes, “Focused upon the everyday world and its debris, this art was the first to identify its structures of domination and imagine its possible transformation, anticipating core issues for later 1960s activism.”
LAURA GARCIA-MORENOis Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities at San Francisco State University, where she coordinates the American Studies Program. Her publications include “The Indigestible Other: Writing, Cannibalism and Melancholy in Juan José Saer’s The Witness” (Revista de Estudios Hispánicos37, 2003). Of her talk she writes, “La nueva novela by Juan Luis Martínez is an experimental, humorous and at the same time sharply disquieting neo-avant-garde Chilean text. The author acts primarily as an anonymous collector who redefines the book as a heterogeneous, hybrid archive made of recycled cultural references found in the wasteland of the twentieth century.”
CHRIS HABLES GRAY works in the cultural studies of science and technology, with a recent focus on theories and technologies of information and the role they play in constructions of empire and of social movements. His major publications are The Cyborg Handbook, edited with Heidi Figueroa-Sarriera and Steven Mentor (Routledge, 1995), Postmodern War (Routledge/Guilford, 1997), Cyborg Citizen
(Routledge, 2001), and Peace, War and Computers (Routledge, 2005). He is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at the Graduate College of The Union Institute and University and at Goddard College.