This talk emerges from Professor Bashir’s current project, Islamic Pasts and Futures: Conceptual Explorations, a critique of the conceptualization of Islamic history in modern scholarship. Bashir suggests alternatives emphasizing multiple temporalities and engaging contemporary academic debates regarding language, historiography, and history on the basis of materials of Islamic provenance.

Shahzad Bashir is professor in Islamic Studies and Director of the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford University

Date/Time

May 31, 2017 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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

Johan Mathew’s current project, Opiates of the Masses: Labor, Narcotics, and Global Capitalism, explores the history of narcotics in order to interrogate the concepts of “consumer demand” and “rational choice” in market exchange, focusing on the consumption of narcotics by workers in Asia and Africa to alleviate the stresses of labor under capitalism.

Johan Matthew is Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers University.

Date/Time

May 24, 2017 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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

Out of the urban ruins and food deprivation of World War II came the prototype for growing plants aeroponically. Aeroponics has since taken surprising turns as a technology for anthropocenic conditions – in Global South laboratories; “vertical gardens”; art installations; plant biology experiments for colonizing the cosmos. In its wake, questions open concerning the ethics of plant-people relations in future-making projects.

Debbora Battaglia is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Mt. Holyoke College.

Date/Time

May 10, 2017 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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

This talk draws on a work in progress entitled Revolutionary China and its Late Capitalist Fate, an analysis of the nature of post-reform China’s political economy, with particular attention to how this has affected everyday life, intellectual and critical work, ideological formation, cultural production, social movements, political action, and social space.

Chris Connery is Professor of Literature at UCSC and Professor of Cultural Studies at Shanghai University.

Date/Time

May 3, 2017 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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

This talk is drawn from Professor Porter’s current book project examining the history of San Francisco International Airport (SFO) and various social and political phenomena associated with it as a means of better understanding the core San Francisco Bay Area as a physical, social, and imagined urban space.

Eric Porter is Professor of History, History of Consciousness, and CRES at UCSC.

Date/Time

April 26, 2017 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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

Zac Zimmer’s current project reads original narratives of the conquest of the Americas and the philosophical debates it engendered with and against recent aesthetic attempts to reimagine that historical moment in marginal genres, especially alternative history and first contact science fiction, creating a point of contact between the contemporary world and the hemispheric American colonial encounter.

Zac Zimmer is Assistant Professor of Literature and LALS at UCSC.

Date/Time

April 19, 2017 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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

Necrotic metamorphosis is the biological transformation of the body after death. Humus, trees containing chemical elements drawn from human bodies, diamonds, and vestiges, all constitute figurations of the post-human. Professor Domanska describes manifestations of natural and technical metamorphosis, anticipating the future emergence of various new species.

Ewa Domanska is Professor of History at Adam Mickiewicz University, and Visiting Associate Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University.

Date/Time

April 12, 2017 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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