Professor Greene’s current research interests include the ethics of reading, material textual studies, and the history of the category of the literary, and her two primary archives are seventeenth-century literature and poststructuralist philosophy. This talk explores the heart as a figure for the porosity of being in the poetry of George Herbert, and the ways faith and writing render Herbert, in the words of Jean-Luc Nancy, “closed open.”

Jody Greene is Associate Professor of Literature at UCSC.

Professor Hirschkind studies how Europe’s Islamic past inhabits its present and unsettles contemporary efforts to secure Europe’s Christian civilizational identity. He analyzes the social and political processes that sustain an active relation to Europe’s Islamic heritage in southern Spain and the potential impact they have on forms of cooperation and responsibility linking Muslim immigrants, Spanish converts, and Andalusian Catholics as subjects of Europe.

Charles Hirschkind is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley.

Professor Meister’s talk concerns his forthcoming book, After Evil: A New Discourse of Human Rights (Columbia, 2010). In what ways does a moral consensus that the past was evil require a political consensus that the evil is past? After Evil develops and criticizes the temporal logic of late 20th-century human rights discourse as an attempt to conceive the present as a time in which the project of putting evil in the past is also a postponement of justice.

Robert Meister is Professor of Social and Political Thought at UCSC; and Director of the Bruce Initiative for Rethinking Capitalism.

Professor Catlos works on social relations in the premodern Mediterranean and is one of the scholars shaping the emerging interdisciplinary field of Mediterranean Studies. His current projects include a history of the Muslim communities in Latin Christendom from the eleventh to seventeenth centuries; studies of Muslim and Jewish minorities in Medieval Iberia based on original archival research; and premodern Mediterranean ethno-religious identity and intergroup relations.

Brian Catlos is Associate Professor of History at UCSC; Co-Director of the UC Mediterranean Studies Multi-Campus Research Project and the UCSC Center for Mediterranean Studies.

Barbara Epstein, Professor of History of Consciousness at UCSC, continues work emerging from The Minsk Ghetto 1941-1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism (California, 2008), which described cooperation between Jews and non-Jews in World War II Minsk. Interviews with ghetto survivors in Minsk and Israel yield assertions that relations between Jews and Belorussians were excellent before the war and deteriorated afterwards as a result of exclusively state-driven anti-Semitism.

The Center for Cultural Studies presents:

Florence Hsia: “Personae Gratae”

History of Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Professor Hsia discusses the articulation of scientific personae in the context of the Jesuit mission to late imperial China. Author of Sojourners in a Strange Land (Chicago, 2009), she explores the early modern encounter between Europe and China.

Co-sponsored by the Department of History.

Professor Godzich examines how the elevation of knowledge into a motor of economic activity affects the status and organization of knowledge. It is his hypothesis that a knowledge-driven economy poses a challenge to a capital-driven one, and that it foreshadows the advent of a knowledge-centered society. His research examines the role of universities within such a society.

Professor Godzich is Distinguished Professor of General and Comparative Literature and Critical Studies at UCSC.

Photo by James Clifford, Professor of History of Consciousness at UCSC.

Professor Bivens examines socialist literature in Germany, 1918 to 1989, through a discussion of narrative, ideology, and the built environment. Grounding the structures of feeling and narrative topoi central to East German literature in the proletarian experience of classical modernity, he moves from the factories and tenements of the Weimar Republic to the socialist cities and peoples’ enterprises of the GDR and back to the contested spaces of the “globalizing” Berlin Republic.

Hunter Bivens is Assistant Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz.

Professor Rutherford’s work focuses on West Papua. Raiding the Land of the Foreigners (Princeton, 2003) focused on alterity and the limits of the nation in Biak. She is now finishing a book on audience and sovereignty in West Papua, working on a book on technology and colonial experience in the Dutch New Guinea highlands, and beginning projects on secular belief and kinship and modernity in the U.S.

Danilyn Rutherford is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz.

Photo by Tim Laman.

Professor Hong’s Legal Fictions: Afro-Asian Human Rights Cultural Production and the Pax Americana in the Pacific Rim examines the historic relation of post-1945 human rights literature to the Pax Americana, the U.S. military “peace” that restructured the Asia Pacific following World War II. Her second project is provisionally titled Divided Memories: Museums, Monuments, and Memoirs in the Cold War Asia Pacific.

Christine Hong is Assistant Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz.