Akash Kumar focuses on the crossing of poetry, philosophy, and science in 13^th-14^th century Italy, emphasizing multicultural knowledge transmission in the medieval Mediterranean. His talk emerges from his second book project on medieval Italian representations of chess and the exchange made possible by the game across gender, religious, and social boundaries.

Akash Kumar is an Assistant Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz.

Date/Time

March 15, 2017 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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

Bianca Freire-Medeiros, professor of sociology at Universidade de São Paulo and Tinker Visiting Professor at the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, discusses her work on tourism in favelas and takes part in a screening of Felippe Schultz Mussel’s 2012 documentary A Place to Take Away.

Date/Time

March 9, 2017 | 4:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue
Humanities Building 2, Room 259
University of California, Santa Cruz

Julia Clancy-Smith is the author of, most recently, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800-1900 (2010).  Her current work, From Household to Schoolroom: Education and Gender in North Africa, Europe, and the Mediterranean, c. 1900-present, is a multi-sided ethnographic inquiry into gender, education, literacy, and the social circulation of knowledge and people.

Clancy-Smith is Regents Professor of History at University of Arizona.

Date/Time

October 5, 2016 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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

Is it possible to think in a state of emergency? This is now a pressing question when the Anthropocene disrupts the biosphere where we – permanently connected and algorithmically controlled – live in a permanent state of emergency, universal, and unpredictable.

Bernard Stiegler is Director at Institut de recherche et d’innovation du Centre Pompidou and Distinguished Professor at Nanjing University.

Respondents:

Wlad Godzich, Professor, Literature, UCSC

Anna Tsing, Professor, Anthropology, UCSC

Hayden White, Professor Emeritus, UCSC

Co-Sponsored by DANM, Film & Digital Media, and the Arts Division

Date/Time

October 12, 2016 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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

Paul N. Edwards’ current research concerns the history and future of knowledge infrastructures, the history of climate science, and other large-scale information infrastructures. Edwards is the author most recently of A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (2010).

Edwards is Professor at the School of Information and Department of History at University of Michigan.

Date/Time

October 19, 2016 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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

Alma Rachel Heckman’s research crosses Jewish history, North Africa, French empire and the history of social movements. Her talk emerges from her project “Radical Nationalists: Moroccan Jewish Communists 1925-1975.”

Heckman is Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies at UC Santa Cruz.

Date/Time

October 26, 2016 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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

Written by Anna Tsing, Isabelle Carbonell, Joelle Chevrier and Yen-ling Tsai (Associate Professor of Anthropology at National Chaio Tung University Taiwan), Golden Snail Opera combines video and performance-oriented text into a genre-bending o-pei-la. This piece is a multispecies enactment of experimental natural history considering the “golden treasure snail,” imported to Taiwan in 1979, which is now major pest of rice agriculture. Whereas farmers in the Green Revolution’s legacy use poison to exterminate snails, a new generation of “friendly farmers” attempts to insert farming as one among many multispecies life ways within the paddy.

Anna Tsing is Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz and Co-Director of Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA).

Isabelle Carbonell is a PhD student in Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz and a documentary filmmaker.

Date/Time
November 2, 2016 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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

Joan Wallach Scott’s recent books, including The Fantasy of Feminist History (2011), focus on the relationship of the particularity of gender to the universalizing force of democratic politics. Her recent work tracks the mutually constitutive operations of gender and politics by examining the discourses of secularism from their nineteenth century anti-clerical origins to their current deployment in anti-Muslim campaigns.

Scott is Professor Emerita of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University.

Co-Sponsored by the Center for Emerging Worlds

Date/Time
November 9, 2016 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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

Robin Hunicke’s practice focuses on creating boundary-expanding, experimental game experiences by combining unique concepts and technologies. She works to create games that deliver unexpected emotional outcomes to players. This includes games that are peaceful and introspective, creative and healing as well as experiences that encourage intergenerational and international communication and play.

Hunicke is Associate Professor of Digital Arts & New Media at UC Santa Cruz.

Date/Time
November 16, 2016 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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

Sherene Seikaly’s current work explores the construction and regulation of the poor in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egypt in terms of governance and of popular politics. Through a political economy of the history of food, this project rethinks our understanding of the “masses” and the specter of the “bread riot.” This talk is generously co-sponsored by the Center for Emerging Worlds.

Seikaly is Assistant Professor of History at UC Santa Barbara.

Professor Seikaly will also read from her book, “Men of Capital” Wednesday evening as part of the Center for Emerging Worlds and Center for Cultural Studies’ “Book Talk” series.  Click here for more information.

Date/Time
April 6, 2016 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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