Drawing on the narratological theories of Genette (“voice”) and Mieke Bal (“focalization”), Professor Jordan’s talk offers a new approach to understanding the illustrations to Dickens’s Bleak House (1852- 53) that emphasizes elements of retrospection, fantasy, and multiple temporality.
John Jordan is Professor of Literature, UCSC.
Professor Ochoa works at the conjuncture of the ethnography of media, modernity in Latin America, and queer/transgender studies. Queen for a Day: Transformistas, Misses and Mass Media in Venezuela (Duke, forthcoming) is a queer diasporic ethnography of femininity, spectacle, and nation in Venezuela.
Marcia Ochoa is Assistant Professor of Community Studies at UCSC.
Professor Frangos’s “Queer Morphologies” explores metamorphosis and non-human embodiment in literature from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance as sites of queer possibility and potentiality. The project asks how human/animal metamorphoses surface and resurface to produce and negotiate nonnormative configurations of sexuality, gender, and kinship.
Professor Frangos is Visiting Assistant Professor of Literature at UCSC.
Doctor Koelle researches how to develop data visualizations that represent spatial experience as subjective and relational rather than as defined through place. The goal is to map animal and human movements and constraints across the American West at different scales to facilitate an affective and aesthetic experience and provide a way to think about the politics of movement and immobility, from habitat destruction to transit budget cuts.
Sandra Koelle is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Humanities at Stanford University.
Professor Bell’s in-progress Frontiers of Hate: Anti-Semitism and Empire in Nineteenth-Century France explores articulations between anti-Semitism and imperialism that shaped the emergence of European racial thought. Arguing that colonial expansion helped French anti-Semitism adopt its modern racializing guise, the book also examines how anti-Semitism participated in the ideological elaboration of the imperial project.
Dorian Bell is Assistant Professor of Literature at UCSC.
This talk reports on work that detects the kind of rhetorical structures a person uses when attempting to persuade an audience to believe or act in a certain manner. Professor Anand discusses the collection and annotation of 3000 English and 500 Arabic blogs for a variety of rhetorical structures implicated in persuasion by communication theorists and a computational system that tries to learn from these annotations.
Pranav Anand is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at UCSC.
Using Mikhail Bakunin’s theorization of authority as a starting point, this talk explores secrecy as a strategy for political enlightenment, and calls attention to earlier conceptions of “propaganda” as education that were lost with the militarization of the term in the twentieth century.
Megan C. Thomas is Associate Professor of Politics at UCSC.
Professor Love, author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard, 2007), is at the Stanford Humanities Center this year. She is working on a book on the source materials for Erving Goffman’s Stigma: On the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963). Stigma serves as a methodological case study for thinking through the challenges and possibilities of comparative studies of social exclusion.
Heather Love is Associate Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania.
Professor Cooppan’s in-progress Race, Writing, and the Literary World System combines the economic analysis of world systems theory, world literature models of global literary movement, traditional theory and history of the novel, and psychoanalytic and philosophical studies of political affect. It explores how literary economies have helped to express, translate, shape, and contest the history of modern racial power, from slavery and empire to apartheid and the war on terror.
Vilashini Cooppan is Associate Professor of Literature, UCSC.
This talk discusses the narrative of Hernando Fontaneda de Escalante, a 16th century former captive and a Creole man born in Cartagena de Indias, who lived for seventeen years among the Calusa Indians of Florida. His account is considered one of the most extensive repositories of information about the Calusa, yet it has received little sustained attention from literary scholars. The presentation explores how his text engages juridically with Spanish conquest, resulting in the emergence of a genre we might call a “narrative of unsettlement.”
Anna Brickhouse is Professor of English at the University of Virginia.