Feb 5 – Aristea Fotopoulou: “All these emotions, all these yearnings, all these data’: Platform openess, data sharing and visions of democracy”

Aristea Fotopoulou works at the intersections of media & cultural studies with science & technologies studies. She has written on digital networks and feminism, information politics, knowledge production, and digital engagement. She currently explores algorithmic living and practices of data sharing.

Aristea Fotopoulou is Research Fellow, University of Sussex, UK; and 2014 Visiting Scholar at the Science and Justice Research Center, UC Santa Cruz.

Feb 12 – Gildas Hamel: “Stretching time: emergence of apocalyptics and its uses”

Gildas Hamel’s current work is on the economy, society and religion of ancient Israel and Graeco-Roman Judaea. His research focuses on taxes, forms of labor, the competition of various groups for resources and political power, and the evolution of religious structures, including the appearance of monotheism and new notions of time.

Gildas Hamel is Senior Lecturer Emeritus in the History Department.

Feb 26 – Matthew Wolf-Meyer: “Nervous Materialities: Love Robots, Pacified Bulls, Stimoceivers and Spinoza’s Brain”

Matthew Wolf-Meyer’s work focuses on medicine, science and media in the United States. He is currently finishing a book manuscript, tentatively titled What Matters: Autism, Neuroscience and the Politics of American Brains, on the alternative histories of American neuroscience, seen through the lens of extreme anti-social forms of autism.

Karen Bassi: “Fading into the Future: Visibility and Legibility in Thucydides History”

This talk was originally scheduled for March 5th. It has been rescheduled to take place on March 12th.

Karen Bassi’s current  book project, In Search of Lost Things: Classics Between History and Archaeology is a study of visual perception as the source of knowledge about the past in ancient Greek epic, history writing, and drama. The book explores the dominance of vision and visual metaphors in making truth claims, the role of language in distinguishing fiction from fact, and the criteria for establishing the reality of the past.

October 16 – Daniel Selden: “’Our Films, Their Films’: Postcolonial Critique of the Cinematic Apparatus”

As a former director of the Satyajit Ray Film and Study Center, Dan Selden’s long-standing interest in cross-cultural aesthetics extends to film production. Selden focuses on the application of the Western cinematic apparatus to non-Western contexts in an effort to better understand the work of such directors as `Abbās Kiyārostamī and Wong Kar Wai.

Daniel Selden is Professor of Literature at UC/Santa Cruz.

October 23 – Jennifer L. Derr: “Embodied Politics and Bilharzia Infection in Colonial Egypt”

Jennifer Derr’s work explores the configuration and experience of the colonial state in Egypt through its construction of the agricultural environments that lined the banks of the Nile River. Derr traces the intersections of the colonial state in Egypt with the material experiences of environmental infrastructure, resource allocation, disease, and the geographies of colonial capitalism.

Jennifer L. Derr is Assistant Professor of History, at UC/Santa Cruz.

October 30 – Clare Monagle: “Neo-medievalism and the Postcolonial: International Relations Theory and Temporality”

Though an historian of medieval thought, Clare Monagle’s most recent work turns to the twentieth-century and the deployment of the Middle Ages in International Relations Theory. Monagle argues that charting the medieval in this frame enables a new insight into the understanding of historical time that informs the discipline of international relations.

Clare Monagle is Senior Lecturer of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies at Monash University, Melbourne.

November 6 – Katherine Gordy: “Situated Theory: Radical Political Thought in Latin America”

Katherine Gordy’s current book project traces the interrelations between what she identifies as different “spheres” of Cuban political thought—political doctrine (official sphere), political theory (academic sphere), and daily practice (popular sphere)—in order to challenge accounts that treat Cuban socialist ideology as solely state-originated dogma or as necessarily in opposition to academic and popular forms of political thought.

Katherine Gordy is Assistant Professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University.