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.

Author of Fragmentos de Frankfurt (Siglo XXI, 2009), Materialismus und Messianismus (Aisthesis, Bielefeld, 2008) and Marxismo crítico en México: (FCE, 2007), Stefan Gandler works on the possibility of overcoming the Eurocentric limitations of the Frankfurt School, confronting its Critical Theory of Society with contemporary socio-theoretical debate in Latin America.

Stefan Gandle, Faculty in Ciencias Políticas y Sociales, Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro; Filosofía y Letras, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Unlike others who became part of the Russian Empire as a result of the partitions of Poland, Jews were not viewed as native to the newly colonized territories. Many accepted their doubly alien status; however, there also emerged Jewish views that rejected the assumption that they were necessarily alien. Professor Deutsch discusses the significance of these views against the backdrop of internal Jewish politics and Russian policies.

Nathaniel Deutsch is Professor of Literature, History, and Jewish Studies at UC Santa Cruz.

Professor Chan-Malik’s research explores the racialization of Islam in the U.S. She examines how national legacies of anti-blackness and late-20th century Black freedom struggles, alongside neoliberal logics of race, gender, class, sexuality, and “multicultural democracy,” have informed constructions of Islamic Terror and Muslim American cultural politics since the 1970s.

Sylvia Chan-Malik is the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in American Studies at UC Santa Cruz.