Kyla Schuller investigates the intersections between race, gender, sexuality, and the sciences in U.S. culture, and is particularly interested in ideas about how the body interacts with its environment from the periods both before and after classical genetics, i.e. the 19th century and the present. Overall, she examines how science and culture function as systems of knowledge that share methods and sources in common, even as they rhetorically claim distinct spheres.

Schuller is an Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick and an External Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center (2017-2018). She has previously held fellowships from ACLS and the UC Humanities Research Institute and a visiting scholar position at UC Berkeley.

Date/Time

May 2, 2018 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue/Location

Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

This talk will attempt to speak to the difficulty of this moment for queer/feminist theorists—for teachers, students and staff who live and work with harassment, with forms of misogyny that are so embedded in professional life as, in some ways, to feel synonymous with it. This work is a return to a scene many of us have never left, but which critical formations tend to represent as having passed: super-sexual political writing calling for openness against an intolerable future.

Jennifer Doyle is a Professor of English at UC Riverside.

Date/Time

May 16, 2018 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue/Location

Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

Saein Park’s current project argues that the discourses of Lumpen record the changing demarcations of disposable lives during the emergence of European industrial modernity. She researches 19th- and early-20th-century German-language literature, political philosophy, and critical theory, focusing on translation and reception studies, theories of waste, and plant studies.

Saein Park is a Visiting Assistant Professor at UC Santa Cruz.

Date/Time

May 23, 2018 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue/Location

Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

Robin Coste Lewis is the author of Voyage of the Sable Venus (2015), which won the National Book Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in various journals and anthologies, including The Massachusetts Review, Callaloo, The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, Transition, and VIDA.

Date/Time

May 30, 2018 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue/Location

Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

Stephanie Bosch Santana’s work focuses on Anglophone and African language fiction from southern Africa. Her current book project examines an alternative history of literary forms in periodical print and digital media from the 1950s to the present. It argues that writers from South Africa, Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe have developed new genres of fiction in these media to imagine changing modes of interconnection across space.

Stephanie Bosch Santana is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work, which has been supported by the Mellon foundation, focuses on Anglophone and African language fiction from southern Africa. Her current book project examines an alternative history of literary forms in periodical print and digital media from the 1950s to the present. It argues that writers from South Africa, Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe have developed new genres of fiction in these media to imagine changing modes of interconnection across space.

A Cultural Studies Colloquium / UCLA Junior Faculty Exchange Talk

Date/Time

June 6, 2018 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue/Location

Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

Megan Moodie’s work focuses on feminist political and legal anthropology and experimental ethnographic writing in India, East Europe, and the U.S. Moodie will read from her full-length novel-in-progress, The Wishful, based in part on fieldwork in Rajasthan, India, and discuss the relationship between aesthetics and analytics in ethnographic practice and textual production.

Megan Moodie is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz.

Date/Time

January 24, 2018 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue/Location

Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

Derek Conrad Murray is an interdisciplinary theorist specializing in the history, theory and criticism of contemporary art, visual culture and cultural studies. Author of Queering Post-Black Art: Artists Transforming African-American Identity After Civil Rights, Murray is completing two additional book manuscripts, Regarding Difference: Contemporary African-American Art and the Politics of Recognition and Mapplethorpe and the Flower: Radical Sexuality and the Limits of Control.

Derek Murray is an Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art and Visual Culture at UC Santa Cruz.

Date/Time

January 31, 2018 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue/Location

Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

Roddey Reid is Professor Emeritus of French Studies and Cultural Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Reid is the author three books including most recently of Confronting Political Intimidation and Public Bullying: A Citizen’s Guide for the Trump Era and Beyond; of Families in Jeopardy: Regulating the Social Body in France, 1750-1910; co-editor with Sharon Traweek of Doing Science + Culture; and author of Globalizing Tobacco Control: Anti-Smoking Campaigns in California, France, and Japan. His latest writing has been on trauma, daily life, and the culture of intimidation and bullying in the U.S. and Europe.

Date/Time

February 7, 2018 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue/Location

Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

Neel Ahuja’s research explores the relationship of the body to forms of imperial warfare and security. Focusing on the association of rectal feeding, used as a form of medical rape in CIA prisons, and bodily plasticity, the presentation argues that the terrorist body is not only a useful discursive figure in the current wars, but also an experimental material that can be used to modulate time, sensation, and resistance toward forms of racial control.

Neel Ahuja teaches in the interdisciplinary humanities programs at UC Santa Cruz.

Date/Time

February 14, 2018 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue/Location

Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

Caught within the both/and of dystopic collapse, the colonial fantasies of American futurities often reproduce themselves through nineteenth-century signs of the struggle for colonial dominance. This talk close reads HBO’s Westworld alongside LeAnne Howe’s Indian Radio Days to consider how procedural elements of technological play produce dystopic visions of American collapse as the failure of indigenous futures.

Jodi Byrd is Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of Illinois.

Date/Time

February 21, 2018 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue/Location

Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz