Lyn Hejinian is currently at work on a book-length essay, tentatively titled The Positions of the Sun, and exploring practical as well as conceptual possibilities for avant-garde and quotidian practices under conditions of late (or perhaps, now, triumphant) capitalism.
Lyn Hejinian is Professor of English at UC Berkeley.
In her new translation of Marco Polo’s Travels, Sharon Kinoshita reorients a text typically read as a western narrative of first contact, by returning it to its original context, the midpoint of the century chronicled in Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony, and to its original title, The Description of the World.
Sharon Kinoshita is Professor of Literature, and Co-Director of the Center for Mediterranean Studies at UC Santa Cruz.
Janette Dinishak’s work explores how Wittgenstein’s concept “noticing an aspect” can provide a frame for capturing and understanding commonly neglected phenomena that are characteristic of autistic experience. She also traces the inter-relations between scientific, cultural, and first-person perspectives on autism and how these perspectives interact in shaping our understanding of autism.
Janette Dinishak is Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at UC Santa Cruz.
Marc Matera is finishing a book, London and the Black International, on the wider Atlantic and imperial horizons of black activism, intellectual work, and cultural production in London between the world wars. His most recent work examines the Jamaican visual artist Ronald Moody’s agonistic relationship to modernism.
Marc Matera is Assistant Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz.
Going beyond the assessment that Asian American men in the movies embody asexuality/effeminacy/queerness, or a manhood that falls short of the norms, Celine Shimizu’s Straitjacket Sexualities (Stanford, 2012) explores how Asian/American men in US film history sought to formulate masculinities in, through, and beyond constricting notions of their identities.
Carla Freccero has taught at UCSC since 1991.This paper, a chapter of the in-progress Animate Figures, explores the long genealogy of human wolf eradication and figuration in the west, from economic competitor in Plautus’s “homo homini lupus,” to sovereign double in Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign.
Carla Freccero is Professor and Chair of Literature and History of Consciousness and Professor of Feminist Studies at UCSC.
Through a study of the Haitian Revolution, James Martel’s recent work not only questions the liberal universalism of the French Revolution, but also the myriad ways in which Haitians appropriated, subverted and radicalized Enlightenment principles.
James Martel is Professor and Chair of Political Science at San Francisco State.
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.