* To advertise your unit or department’s event in the “Of Interest” section of this weekly bulletin, please e-mail complete event information in text format (no PDFs) to cult@ucsc.edu no later than noon on Friday of the prior week.
* Additional information and regular updates on many “Of Interest” events can be found on the IHR website.
OF-INTEREST EVENT DESCRIPTIONS:
Monday, April 6 / DIRECTIONS IN DIGITAL HUMANITIES / Lisa Snyder / “The Devil is in the Detective Work: Researching and Reconstructing Cultural Heritage Sites with Special Emphasis on The World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893” / 12:15-2:00pm / Humanities 1, Room 210
One might argue that the creation of a computer reconstruction of a cultural heritage site requires a curious mix of academic training, detective work, and obsession. Unlike automated or algorithmic technologies that record extant sites and artifacts, building a three-dimensional computer model of an ephemeral or long-demolished environment combines traditional historical methods with new technologies and results in an entirely new form of scholarly publication. Rather than a printed monograph, the hours spent in search of obscure details buried in primary source materials or pouring over archival manuscripts and photographs are transformed into an interactive learning environment for interrogation by students and secondary scholars. Using her computer reconstruction of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 as a case study, Snyder will address the process of researching and reconstructing historic urban environments, the challenges of translating multi-media research materials into a cohesive computer model, and the opportunities for teaching and learning afforded by this new form of scholarship. (And, yes, obsession will be discussed.)
Lisa M. Snyder (Ph.D. UCLA) is an architectural historian and research scholar with UCLA’s Institute for Digital Research and Education (IDRE) and is an Associate Editor of Digital Studies / Le Champ Numérique.
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Monday, April 6 / FILM + DIGITAL MEDIA ARTIST SERIES / Deborah Stratman / “Considered Intervals” / 7:00pm / Communications 150 (Studio C)
Chicago-based artist and filmmaker Deborah Stratman makes work that investigates issues of power, control and belief, exploring how places, ideas, and society are intertwined. She has exhibited widely at venues including MoMA NY, Centre Pompidou, Hammer Museum, Mercer Union, Witte de With, the Whitney Biennial and festivals including Sundance, Viennale, CPH/DOX, Oberhausen, Ann Arbor, Full Frame and Rotterdam. Stratman is the recipient of Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships, a Creative Capital grant and an Alpert Award. She teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
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Tuesday, April 7 / CLASSICAL STUDIES / “The Warrior’s Husband: Theseus, Antiope, and the Amazons” / 5:00-6:30pm / Cowell Provost House
Fierce Amazons are at the center of some of the most famous Greek myths. Every great hero, from Heracles to Achilles, tangled with warrior queens, and Theseus captured and married the Amazon Antiope. Were Amazons mere figments of the Greek imagination? Combining classical myth and art, nomad traditions, and scientific archaeology, this lecture reveals intimate, surprising details and original insights about the fighting women known as Amazons, with a special focus on Antiope.
Adrienne Mayor’s most recent book is The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World (Princeton 2014). She is also the author of numerous publications; other books include a biography of Mithradates, The Poison King, a nonfiction finalist for the 2009 National Book Award, and The First Fossil Hunters (2000). A research scholar in Classics and History of Science at Stanford, Mayor’s work is often featured on the BBC, The History Channel, National Geographic, History Today, and other media.
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Wednesday, April 8 / SIKH AND PUNJABI STUDIES / Prakarsh Singh / “Gender-Differential Effects of Terrorism on Education: The Case of the Punjab Insurgency 1981-1993” / 3:30-5:00pm / Economics 2, Room 499
This study explores the long-run effect of the 1981-1993 Punjab Insurgency on the educational attainment of adults who were between ages 6-16 years at the time of the insurgency. To examine the long-term effect of the insurgency on education, we use a large scale cross-sectional dataset – the 2005 India Human Development Survey. To explore the channels through which the conflict affected education, we use a unique historical dataset on the annual expenditure decisions by farmers (farm account surveys) for Punjab during 1978-1989. We combine both datasets with the annual district level data on major terrorist incidents from the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP). We find a substantial and statistically significant effect of terrorism on educational attainment by girls who were of school age during the conflict. We also identify the impact of terrorism at the household level. Households that had high ratios of girls to boys and who resided in the districts that experienced terrorist events, had reduced the amount of educational expenditures. This finding suggests that this reduction was one of the channels through which conflict affected education.
Prakarsh Singh is Assistant Professor of Economics at Amherst College, Massachusetts. A sampling of his recent work can be found at https://sites.google.com/site/prakarshsinghac/research.
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Wednesday, April 8 / VISUAL AND MEDIA CULTURES COLLOQUIA / Anne Cheng / “Ornamentalism and Aesthetic Being” / 4:00-6:00pm / Porter College, Room D245
What is the relationship between ornament and law? In what ways can the law be said to decorate a body, and what does it mean to recognize legal personhood as being indebted to a sartorial imagination? This talk juxtaposes a significant but little known nineteenth-century immigration case and a much more celebrated nineteenth-century photo archive as two “primal” moments in the collusion between law, visuality, race, and gender and argues that the juridical making of the raced body is also the moment in which that body disappears. This is, in short, a story about the critical shift in law and in visual culture from racialized visibility to racialized visuality, a turn that takes place as early as the nineteenth century and continues to impact how we think about race and visuality today.
Anne Anlin Cheng is Professor of English and the Center for African American Studies and Director for the Program in American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of The Melancholy of Race: Assimilation, Psychoanalysis, and Hidden Grief (Oxford University Press) and Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford University).
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Wednesday, April 8 / Public Reception / An Uncommon Place: Shaping the UC Santa Cruz Campus / 5:00-7:00pm / Sesnon Art Gallery
Curated by Emeriti Professors James Clifford, Michael Cowan, Virginia Jansen, and Emeritus Campus Architect Frank Zwar
Everyone agrees that the UC Santa Cruz campus is breathtaking. How was it created? An Uncommon Place traces decisive moments in the site’s early development. Here an innovative educational project engaged with a beautiful and challenging environment. The university took shape among steep ravines and dramatic trees in a way that respected as it transformed the landscape. Using architectural plans, photographs, and oral histories, the exhibition illustrates paths taken and not taken-decisions, constraints, and hopes. It celebrates the achievement of UCSC’s founding planners while analyzing the tensions and contradictions that were built into their project. Through its many subsequent transformations, the UC Santa Cruz campus remains an extraordinary work of environmental art.
Remembering these formative years can perhaps help us renew a powerful utopian experiment. At UC Santa Cruz, architecture and environment still conspire to create an uncommon place, a setting for teaching, research and imagination outside the bounds of the ordinary.
Exhibition Dates: Wednesday, April 8, 2015 – Saturday, May 9, 2015
Alumni Weekend: Sesnon Reception at Porter koi pond and Curators’ walkthrough, April 24, 4-6PM
Alumni Weekend campus walk with curators: April 25, 2:15 PM, meet at Cowell College
Sponsored by UCSC Alumni Association; Divisions of the Arts, Humanities, Physical and Biological Sciences, Social Sciences; Colleges: Cowell, Eight, Kresge, Oakes, Porter, and Stevenson; McHenry Library Special Collections & Archives; and University Relations.
In conjunction with An Uncommon Place exhibition, The Sesnon Gallery also presents, Rhythms of Place: Photographic Explorations of the UCSC Campus.
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Thursday, April 9 / ANCIENT STUDIES / Yannis Galanakis / “The Diplomat, the Dealer and the Digger: Writing the History of the Antiquities Trade in 19th century Greece” / 4:30-7:00pm / Humanities 1, Room 210
During the 19th century in Europe, new states were founded and nationalism and colonialism were strengthened; while some Empires disintegrated, others managed to maintain or even increase their power. At the same time, archaeology was transformed into a structured discipline and large-scale excavation projects commenced across the Mediterranean. The stories of the people behind the antiquities trade in Greece during the 19th century—the diplomats stationed in Athens, the local art dealers and the private diggers—help us write an important chapter in the social, economic, and cultural history of Europe and of Mediterranean archaeology as a whole. This lecture explores how the commodification of the past became interwoven with power politics and gave rise both to different attitudes toward collecting and to debates on cultural property, ownership and the value of things in our modern world.
Yannis Galanakis is Lecturer in Classics (Greek Prehistory), Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge Fellow and Director of Studies in Classics, Sidney Sussex College.
For more information, please contact hedrick@ucsc.edu
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Friday, April 10 / DEPARTMENT OF LANGUAGES AND APPLIED LINGUISTICS / “An Evening of Futuristic Musical Poetry with Luciano Chessa” / 5:00-6:00pm / Humanities 2, Room 259
An evening with Italian composer, performer, and musicologist Luciano Chessa. Chessa will perform Piedigrotta (a Futurist musical poem). Chessa is the author of Luigi Russolo, Futurist: Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult (UC, 2012), the first English-language monograph dedicated to Russolo and the art of Noise. He has been performing futurist sound poetry for well over 10 years. He has been active in Europe, the U.S., Australia, and South America as a practitioner of world avantgarde music; his scholarly areas include both 20th-century and late-14th-century music. Compositions include a piano and percussion duet after Pier Paolo Pasoliniʼs “Petrolio.”
Reception to follow.
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Friday, April 10 / FRIDAY FORUM FOR GRADUATE RESEARCH / Jess Whatcott / “Abolition Feminism Against Eugenics in California Prisons” / 12:00-1:30pm / Humanities 1, Room 202
Jess Whatcott is a graduate student in Politics. The presentation will address a 2013 report by Justice Now documenting hundreds of cases of illegal sterilizations of prisoners since the 1990’s. Using the frameworks of abolition feminism, reproductive justice, and queer of color critique Jess will theorize how gendered, racialized, and disabled prisoners are rendered precarious to reproductive abuse. Finally, the presentation examines the practice of abolition feminism and reproductive justice by Justice Now, as a radical intervention into hegemonic carceral feminisms and the on-going feminist and maternalist engagement with eugenics.
The Friday Forum is a graduate-run colloquium dedicated to the presentation and discussion of graduate student research. The series will be held weekly from 12:00 to 1:30PM and will serve as a venue for graduate students in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts divisions to share and develop their research. Light refreshments will be available.
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Friday and Saturday, April 10-11 / UC PRESIDENTIAL CHAIR IN FEMINIST CRITICAL RACE AND ETHNIC STUDIES / “The Feminist Architecture of Gloria Anzaldúa: New Translations, Crossings and Pedagogies in Anzaldúan Thought” / Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206
Beginning with her co-editorship of This Bridge Called My Back: Writing by Radical Women of Color (1981) to the foundational Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) to the anthologies Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras (1990) and This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation (2002), the collection of engagements in Interviews/Entrevistas (2000), The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader (2009) and her children’s books, the work of Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa has greatly influenced critical race, feminist, queer and decolonizing theories of an active subjectivity and agency. Her worldview as intellectual, lesbian of color, poet, teacher privileges the knowledge that comes from experiencing life in-between spaces—the border dweller, the queer, the colored, and the mestiza. Embracing ambiguity, liminality and border thinking, Anzaldúa affirms life from within these spaces. Her call for women of color, particularly lesbians of color, to write, engage and interrogate the world, challenges the hegemony of knowledge production and categorical logic. The movement of U.S. third world feminists that Anzaldúa initiates centers coalitional politics and intersectional analysis of the lived experiences of women of color, yet there continues to be a problem of legibility, a misrecognition and appropriation of the theoretical contributions of these writers (Perez, 2010). The issue of legibility deflects scholars’ attention from engaging Anzaldúan thought in the critical ways that it deserves.
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