James Clifford taught in UCSC’s History of Consciousness Department for 33 years and was founding director of the Center for Cultural Studies. Clifford is currently completing Returns, a book about indigenous cultural politics that will be the third in a trilogy. The first volume, The Predicament of Culture (1988) juxtaposed essays on 20th-century ethnography, literature, and art. The second, Routes (1997) explored the dialectics of dwelling and traveling in post-modernity.

Jenny Reardon is currently working on a manuscript entitled The Post-Genomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, Knowledge After the Genome. This book traces the efforts to transform genomics from a field that in the 1990s sparked fears of racism and dehumanization to one that today claims the banners of democracy and justice.

Laurie Palmer’s current work explores matter’s agency as it asserts itself at different speeds and scales. In the contexts of sculptural practice and public participatory projects, she asks how we might access differing temporalities to re-imagine our entanglements in the material / social world.

Gregory E. O’Malley is currently finishing his first book, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807.  It examines a complex network for distributing enslaved Africans throughout North America and the Caribbean after their survival of the infamous (and much more thoroughly studied) Middle Passage across the Atlantic.

An historian of Islamic South Asia and the Indian Ocean world, Elizabeth’s research focuses on the mobility of people, things and ideas in the medieval and early modern periods. Elizabeth is also interested in issues of periodization and the need for dialogue and thinking across the pre-Modern/Modern/Contemporary divides.

Professor White serves as American Representative
of Pasts, Inc. Narrative Therapy:
“Get the Past You Deserve.” He wears the
title Philologian, the division of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences into which he
was inducted after being rejected by both the
history and literature divisions.

Hayden White is an Emeritus University Professor of Historical Studies at UCSC.

Professor Delpla focuses on the relation
between philosophy and anthropology in
theorizing international ethics and justice.
Her work on postwar Bosnia deals with the
Srebrenica massacre, the reception of the International
Criminal Tribunal and the status
of victims and witnesses.

Isabelle Delpla is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Montpellier III.

What makes animal technicians describe a
pig as “depressed,” “a rebel” or “girly”? How
do scientists get pigs to mimic human patients
biologically and become sources of information
on human health? Professor Pihl discusses
human/pig becomings in biomedical
research, focusing on apparatuses and spaces.

Eva Vibeke Kofoed Pihl is a PhD Fellow at the Center for Medical Science and Technology
Studies, University of Copenhagen as well as a Visiting Fellow at The Science and Justice Working Group at UCSC.

Excluded from favored liberal remedies for
realizing new freedoms in postemancipation
Virginia, children nevertheless shaped broad
Reconstruction contests over the meaning of
freedom. This paper focuses on children in
order to consider whether liberal assumptions
embedded in the idea of agency have excessively
narrowed historians’ analysis of postemancipation
politics.

Sponsored by The Institute for Humanities Research (IHR) at the University of California, Santa Cruz

Catherine Jones is an Assistant Professor of History at UCSC.