Interested in the emotional terrains of activism, Deborah Gould’s current project explores political appetites, encounters, and the “not-yet” of politics.

Deborah Gould is Associate Professor of Sociology at UC/Santa Cruz.

As a former director of the Satyajit Ray Film and Study Center, Dan Selden’s long-standing interest in cross-cultural aesthetics extends to film production. Selden focuses on the application of the Western cinematic apparatus to non-Western contexts in an effort to better understand the work of such directors as `Abbās Kiyārostamī and Wong Kar Wai.

Daniel Selden is Professor of Literature at UC/Santa Cruz.

Jennifer Derr’s work explores the configuration and experience of the colonial state in Egypt through its construction of the agricultural environments that lined the banks of the Nile River. Derr traces the intersections of the colonial state in Egypt with the material experiences of environmental infrastructure, resource allocation, disease, and the geographies of colonial capitalism.

Jennifer L. Derr is Assistant Professor of History, at UC/Santa Cruz.

Though an historian of medieval thought, Clare Monagle’s most recent work turns to the twentieth-century and the deployment of the Middle Ages in International Relations Theory. Monagle argues that charting the medieval in this frame enables a new insight into the understanding of historical time that informs the discipline of international relations.

Clare Monagle is Senior Lecturer of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies at Monash University, Melbourne.

Katherine Gordy’s current book project traces the interrelations between what she identifies as different “spheres” of Cuban political thought—political doctrine (official sphere), political theory (academic sphere), and daily practice (popular sphere)—in order to challenge accounts that treat Cuban socialist ideology as solely state-originated dogma or as necessarily in opposition to academic and popular forms of political thought.

Katherine Gordy is Assistant Professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University.

Karla Mallette is currently working on a monograph, tentatively titled Lives of the Great Languages, which is a theoretical study of the cosmopolitan language system: the trans-regional and trans-historical mega-languages that were the literary media of cultural life in the pre-modern Mediterranean.

Karla Mallette is Professor of Italian and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan.

Due to the AFSCME systemwide strike and UAW local academic student employee sympathy strike scheduled for November 20th, this event has been cancelled. We are in the midst of rescheduling Professor Balakrishnan’s talk for later this academic year.

Following on his earlier work on Adam Smith and David Ricardo, Gopal Balakrishnan’s current work on Marx seeks to demonstrate the logical unity of Marx’s mature economic thought, while recognizing its specifically 19th century assumptions, as well as its incompleteness as an account of the history of capitalism.

Gopal Balakrishnan is Associate Professor of History of Consciousness at UC/Sana Cruz. He is also an Editorial Board Member of New Left Review.

“Camping Masculinity”

Kimberly Lau’s work explores some of the ways that World of Warcraft engages masculinity in play through the convergence of player practices, game designers, and the ongoing interaction between the two.  Reading invocations of hypermasculinity, Lau investigates how everyday “camp” practices might open up alternative spaces and forms of masculine sociality.

Kimberly Lau is Professor of Literature at UCSC.

“‘War Is the Force That Gives Us Meaning’: Militarized Queerness, Lieutenant Dan Choi, and Korean War Mascotry”

Offering a historically layered examination of the rights-based battle waged by former Lt. Dan Choi, son of a war orphan, against the now-defunct policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” this talk inquires into the homology between queer masking in the U.S. military and the Korean War practice of child mascotry.

Christine Hong is Assistant Professor of Literature at UCSC.

“Timely and Untimely Politics: Art and Protest in Early 1960s Japan”

William Marotti explores politics and timeliness by examining the advent of a critical art of the everyday in Japan in the 1960s and its links to political action. Out of sync with eventful mass activism, artists sought to create eventfulness against a state-promoted, depoliticized daily life in the high growth economy.

William Marotti is Associate Professor of History and Chair, East Asian Studies MA Interdepartmental Program at UCLA.