Professor Caldwell examines the politics of poverty, social welfare, care and intimacy in Russia through ethnographic research in Dacha Idylls: Living Organically in Russia’s Countryside (California 2011). Her new research is on Russian-African assistance and development relations in the twentieth century. She also studies changing food practices in the postsocialist world.

Melissa L. Caldwell is a Professor of Anthropology at UCSC, and Co-Director for the UCMRP on Studies of Food and the Body.

Although the Melian Dialogue is not much of a dialogue, it is anointed as the foundation of political realism. The paper argues that realism is delusional and defeating. The more inclusive dialogue in Euripides’ The Trojan Women juxtaposes the language of power, war and empire with loss, hopelessness and what Saïd called “the crippling sorrow of estrangement.”

Peter Euben is an Emeritus Research Professor of Political Science and Classical Studies, and a Kenan Distinguished Faculty Fellow Emeritus at Duke University.

Professor Lippit has recently completed a book on contemporary experimental cinema, Ex-cinema: Essays on Experimental Film and Video, and is completing another book on contemporary Japanese cinema and the concept of the world. He is also writing a book on David Lynch and anagrams.

Akira Mizuta Lippit is a Professor of Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages and Cultures at USC. He is also Chair of the Critical Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts.

With African Americans as the primary example, Professor Gray probes the social, intellectual, and political investment in the cultural politics of recognition and visibility in the context of neoliberalism, suggesting that with neoliberalism we have reached the limit of such investments. Looking beyond this investment in representation, recognition and visibility, he examines what other critical modes and sites of cultural analysis and politics are possible.

Herman Gray is Professor of Sociology at UCSC.

Professor Shemek studies intersections of elite and popular culture in early modern Italy, especially among women. Her current research focuses on early modern letter writing. She is completing an edition of Isabella d’Este’s letters and a book on the broader significance of early modern women’s letters. The talk addresses plans to digitize the manuscript sources for her edition and visualize the social network of a Renaissance princess.

Deanna Shemek is Professor of Literature at UCSC.

Professor Howie thinks about how contemporary American poets reimagine early Christianity, using transfiguration to talk about the persistence in transformation of figures, and how poetic and theological concerns speak to gender and sexuality. His books include Claustrophilia: The Erotics of Enclosure in Medieval Literature (Palgrave, 2007) and the co-authored Sanctity and Pornography in Medieval Culture: On the Verge (Manchester, 2010).

Cary Howie is Associate Professor of Romance Studies at Cornell University.

Professor McKay examines the performance of masculinities among a group of men often considered exemplars of masculinity: merchant sailors. The talk explores their gender projects across liminal space (ocean-going ships) and in productive and reproductive spheres. Professor McKay is co-editor of the forthcoming New Routes for Diaspora Studies (Indiana) and working on Born to Sail? Racial Formation, Masculinity and the Making of Filipino Seafarers.

Steven McKay is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Labor Studies at UCSC.

Professor Hamel is working on a history of religious representations in Hellenistic and Roman Palestine and the notion of monotheism. He examines recent histories of monolatry and monotheism and accounts of religious mediations, asking whether monotheism is to be explained as a response to the Babylonian and Persian empires or as an episode of cultural borrowing and translation of religious stories and practices.

Gildas Hamel is S.O.E. Lecturer in History at UCSC.

Scientists and humanists have found common interests in understanding correlations between neural events and complex human behavior. Over the past thirty years we have studied how aspects of human visual perception arise from neural processes that occur in the anatomical substrates of human vision. Professor Switkes discusses how understanding the brain’s recoding of spatial and chromatic information sheds light on the neural basis of visual behavioral phenomena.

Eugene Switkes is Professor of Chemistry and Psychobiology, UCSC and Affiliate Professor of Vision Sciences and Optometry, UC Berkeley.

Professor Terada considers Pasolini’s turn away from Italian politics in his late prose and Salò, and the alternative models of working-through and legibility subsequently engendered in the “absence” of hope for renewal. Professor Terada’s books include Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject” (Harvard, 2001) and Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction (Harvard, 2009).

Rei Terada is Professor of Comparative Literature, UCI

This colloquium is co-sponsored by the Affect Working Group