The forthcoming Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination (MIT, 2026) is the first examination of popular movies classified as “thrillers” that channel societal anxiety or dread about advanced technologies like supercomputers, robotics, AI, biotech, military weaponry, and digital surveillance. Technothriller traces the changing imagination of technology within an American context and its role in engineering some of the most profound ideologies of modern life. Murray considers beloved but often underrated films from the 1970s to the present, like The Andromeda Strain (1971), Westworld (1973), Rollerball (1975), Demon Seed (1977), WarGames (1983), The Hunt for Red October (1990), Jurassic Park (1993), Clear and Present Danger (1994), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), the Mission:Impossible franchise (1996- ), Ex Machina (2014), Tenet (2020), M3GAN (2022), and The Creator (2023) in order to think through deeply embedded popular beliefs about technology, innovation, and their imaginaries—in other words, the mechanics of power within our technological lives and the troubled, sometimes catastrophic relationships between humans and their innovations.

Soraya Murray studies contemporary visual culture, especially film and video games. She is an Associate Professor in the Film + Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her first book, On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space (I.B. Tauris, 2018, paperback Bloomsbury 2021), considers video games from a visual culture perspective and how they both mirror and are constitutive of larger societal fears, dreams, hopes and even complex struggles for recognition. She is currently co-editing an anthology with media and games scholar Trea Andrea Russworm on antiracist futures in games and play.

Date | Time
May 21, 2025 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

Venue | Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

What can criticism offer us in a world of unruly generative images and synthetic media? What precise language might we use for machine learning’s impact, or the wake of an algorithm? How must our practices of discernment and the critical impulse evolve in response to computational developments, to perhaps be more resilient and responsive?

This talk invites one to consider how our language might move with ‘intelligent’ systems and beings that simulate liveness and likeness. To navigate a present and future dominated by synthetic media, and created by predictive systems, we take up a practice of seeing through systems. This talk first explores the craft of developing a hybrid, strategic, collective and dissident criticism of technology. It second reviews cases of baffling, seemingly inarticulable experiences from early software experiments and artists’ interventions, into AI/ML. Third, it explores the evolution of language in response to material and symbolic systems that dramatically shape our creative approaches and cognition. Throughout, the talk explores evolving critical methods that help us better situate ourselves to identify a vast range of hidden fictions and beliefs about what technology is meant to do and be.

Date | Time
February 26, 2025 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

Venue | Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

What is the task of the trans translator? How have paradoxes of visibility bound translation and trans studies in uncanny inversions of each other? And what might autotheoretical methodologies contribute to decolonizing the transgender imaginary in translation? This talk probes how form—from the grammatical to the material and from the social to the structural—shapes and is shaped by the ways in which trans and translation interface with regimes of readability. It argues that the task of the trans translator is to renew trans life with an opacity that thwarts traps of visibility while elucidating the anti-colonial interventions and intertextual solidarities of translation itself. To navigate these counter currents is to surface what I call, following Glissant, a trans poetics of relation.

Alex Brostoff is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College and a 2025 Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Edinburgh. An interdisciplinary scholar and translator, they are currently completing their first book, Unruly Relations: A Critical Reframing of Autotheory (Columbia University Press, under advance contract), which recasts autotheory’s transnational and transdisciplinary place in the political history of trans and queer literature of the Américas. They are the co-editor of two volumes: Autotheories (The MIT Press, 2025) and Reassignments: Trans and Sex from the Clinical to the Critical (Fordham University Press, under advance contract), as well as the co-translator of Indigenous leader Ailton Krenak’s Life Is Not Useful (Polity Press, 2023) and Ancestral Future (Polity Press, 2024). Their scholarship and translations have appeared in ASAP/Journal, Critical Times, Synthesis, Dibur, and South Atlantic Quarterly, as well as at the Museum of Modern Art, and elsewhere. 

Date | Time
March 5, 2025 | 12:15 PM – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

Venue | Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

Details to follow.

Co-sponsored with the Film and Digital Media Department and the Institute of Arts and Sciences.

How can we explain decades of Israeli civil society’s consensus around a regime of oppression and impunity? What mediated attachments and disavowals mandate settler colonial violence? This talk follows the private media complex in order to articulate the intimate channels through which state sovereignty is distributed, structured and internalized. A prerequisite to the current genocidal moment, this research analyzes the seamless paths of mundane violence in the post-Oslo Jewish-Israeli public sphere.

Laliv Melamed is a Professor of Digital Film Cultures at the Goethe University, Frankfurt. Her work focuses on media and forms of governance in Israel-Palestine. Melamed is the author of Sovereign Intimacy: Private Media and the Traces of Colonial Violence (University of California Press, 2023.

Date | Time
December 4, 2024 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

Venue | Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

Gangadhar Adhikari returned to India from Germany in the 1920s with a tranche of books. He had recently completed his PhD in Chemistry in Berlin and had joined the Communist Party of Germany. Upon his return to India in 1928, he joined the Communist Party of India and was jailed in 1929 on charges of a conspiracy to commit treason against the colonial government. His books were impounded and many of them were returned to him upon his release in 1933. The same books were confiscated again in 1935. On the list of books was Friedrich Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. This book was returned to him again in 1936 with the assessment that it was a history book, not of instrumental use in political action. The book captured the imagination of some party intellectuals who believed that revolutionizing the family was crucial to a political and social revolution in India. Adhikari’s colleague in the party, Shripad Dange was inspired by it to chart the history of the Indian family. Engels’ categories were imported to make sense of the history of the family in India. This also occasioned a historical materialist reading of Indian epics and families, an engagement with orientalist readings, and evocations of primitive communism in Indian antiquity.

Juned Shaikh is Associate Professor of History at UCSC. He is currently working on a book on Gangadhar Adhikari.

Date | Time
April 10, 2024 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

Venue | Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

Co-sponsored by the Center for South Asian Studies

This talk traces across the disjointed pairing of two portraits an imperial form of kinship that emerged among covenanted servants of the East India Company in eighteenth-century Bengal. Noting the portraits’ departures from prevailing conventions in British family portraiture, the talk examines the overlapping “joint-stock” formations of domesticity and commercial partnership through which the Hastings-Hancock household accumulated and remitted its colonial wealth. 

 Zirwat Chowdhury is Assistant Professor of 18th- and 19th-Century European Art at UCLA. Her research explores the interconnected histories of art, visual culture, and aesthetic philosophy in 18th-century Britain, France, South Asia and the Atlantic World.

Date | Time
April 17, 2024 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

Venue | Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

Zoom Registration Link: https://ucsc.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAvdeGtqD4jEtCFmuRj0df7CA3YNV3qjBnh#/registration

This talk, very much a meditation-in-progress, asks a series of questions about how we (in the western European intellectual tradition) come to think about the categories of history and evolution and the various ways we might deconstruct this opposition, making way for co-constitutive material histories of the living. It also asks whether in the time of the now we are prepared to overcome a Cartesian inheritance to confront a shared, shattered and shattering historical predicament together with other living others.

Carla Freccero is Distinguished Professor of Literature and History of Consciousness at UCSC, where she has taught since 1991. Trained in early modern continental European history and literature, she also publishes in US popular culture, queer and feminist theory, and, most recently, animal studies. Author of three books (on Rabelais; on popular culture; and on Queer Early Modernity) and co-editor of a number of journal issues dealing with sexuality, race and animality, her in-progress book is tentatively titled Animate Figures.

Date | Time
April 24, 2024 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

Venue | Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

Co-sponsored by History of Consciousness: GeoEcologies + TechnoScience Conversations, Global and Community Health, and the Science & Justice Research Center

This two-hour roundtable improv (12.15-2.00pm) brings together ten UCSC scholars working on social, historical, and cultural studies of science, technology and medicine. The event will be structured around eight open, improvised conversations. Rather than structured around formal talks, each conversation will start with a question from a different panelist exploring emerging practices, speculative transformations, and critical imaginings of technoscience, health and ecology. With: Dimitris Papadopoulos (convener), Karen Barad, James Doucet-Battle, Kat Gutierrez, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Jenny Reardon, Warren Sack, Kriti Sharma, Matt Sparke, Zac Zimmer

Karen Barad is Distinguished Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness.

James Doucet-Battle  is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Co-Director of the Science & Justice Research Center.

Kat Gutierrez is an Assistant Professor in the History Department.

Dimitris Papadopoulos is Professor of History of Consciousness in the Department of History of Consciousness.

Maria Puig de la Bellacasa is Professor of History of Consciousness in the Department of History of Consciousness.

Jenny Reardon is a Professor of Sociology and the Founding Director of the Science & Justice Research Center.

Warren Sack is Professor of the Software Arts in the Film + Digital Media Department.

Kriti Sharma is an Assistant Professor of Critical Race Science and Technology Studies in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies.

Matt Sparke is Professor of Politics in the Politics Department and Co-Director of Global and Community Health.

Zac Zimmer is an Associate Professor of Literature in the Literature Department.

Date | Time
May 1, 2024 | 12:15 – 2:00 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

Venue | Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz