This talk discusses the narrative of Hernando Fontaneda de Escalante, a 16^th 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.

This talk explores luxury as one way that hierarchy, social distance, and subordination are felt affectively by bodies in consumption-oriented societies. The project seeks to upend a tradition of social thought that interprets luxury consumption as an other-directed, visually-mediated, and easily-subverted “language” of hierarchy and class. Professor Mathiowetz is a political theorist and the author of Appeals to Interest: Language, Contestation, and Political Agency (Penn State, 2011).

Dean Mathiowetz is Associate Professor of Politics at UCSC.

“Living projects” (Hausprojekte) are socially diverse alternative residential communities that offer affordable housing; collective, collaborative management; and cultural venues such as movie theaters, small independent businesses, galleries, and clubs. Representative of a distinctive thread in Berlin’s history and connected to the city’s identity, they are also in tension with official policies for urban development and private real estate investment, and under frequent threat of eviction. This talk analyzes Hausprojekte from a cultural, urban, and architectural perspective.

Daniela Sandler is Assistant Professor of Architectural History at UCSC.

Tourism is a form of capital accumulation that requires the presence of the consumer at the location of production. How does a place become a destination? What transfigurations of value occur in the process?  How do various actors collaborate and clash over the management of people and resources?  The talk explores these questions in relation to the Honduran tourist industry.  Professor Anderson is the author of Black and Indigenous: Garifuna Activism and Consumer Culture in Honduras (Minnesota, 2009).

Mark Anderson is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UCSC.

Mad at School (Michigan, 2010) uses a disability-studies perspective to examine how mental disabilities impact academic culture. Focusing on classroom discussions, conferences, and job searches, it examines the language used to denote mental disability; the role of “participation” and “presence” in student learning; the role of “collegiality” in faculty work; the controversy over “security” and free speech in the wake of recent school shootings; and the status of independent scholars with mental disabilities.

“Essential Functions” talk
“Essential Functions” slides
“Essential Functions” handout

Margaret Price is Associate Professor of English at Spelman College.

On October 28, 1910, Leo Tolstoy vanished. When he turned up at Astapovo, all of Russia was following the story. In The Death of Tolstoy (Cornell, 2010), Dr. Nickell describes a Russia engaged in a war of words over how this story should be told. Drawing on newspaper accounts, personal correspondence, police reports, secret circulars, telegrams, letters, and memoirs, he examines the national and international significance of the event.

William Nickell is Lecturer in Russian at UCSC.

“Our Mediterranean: American Adaptations, 1890-1975” explores the use of adaptation to think comparatively about American literary and cultural studies. “Our Mediterranean” refers improbably both to the California coast and the Caribbean, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Worlds.  Popularized in the 1890s, the term persists through the 1970s as a keyword in tourism, U.S. public policy, and race-climate theory. This talk examines enduring comparisons to the Mediterranean in the New World.

Susan Gillman is Professor of Literature at UCSC.

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 UCSC.