Professor Romero’s research includes post-1964 African American and trans-American literatures and literary history, poverty, memory, and cultural history. She is currently working on a manuscript, Wonder’s Collapse: Art at the Intersection of Embodiment and Sociality. Her talk thinks about drawing and history, and the practice and crisis of black radical movement.

Mercy Romero, UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Feminist Studies, UCSC

Courtroom sketch by Robert Templeton.

Professor Hershatter’s forthcoming book, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (California), traces a gendered history of early socialism in rural Shaanxi province, exploring how the past is remembered and understood in the light of intervening events. Her books include Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (California, 1997), and Women in China’s Long Twentieth Century (California, 2007).

Gail Hershatter is Distinguished Professor of History at UCSC.

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.