Neloufer de Mel is the author of Militarizing Sri Lanka and Women and the Nation’s Narrative. Her current research is on cultures of justice in postwar Sri Lanka, disability performance, and the politics of aesthetic work in contexts of violence.  De Mel is Professor of English at University of Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Date/Time
April 8, 2015 | 12:15 PM
Free and open to the public

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

Working at the intersection of religion, science, and feminist studies, Karen de Vries examines structures of knowledge and power in the Contemporary American West. Her current book project deploys queer storytelling both to explore tensions and schisms between religious and secular knowledge formations and to produce more livable futures.  De Vries is a lecturer in the Political Science Department of Montana State University, Bozeman.

Date/Time
April 15, 2015 | 12:15 PM
Free and open to the public

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

T.J. Demos’s current work explores the intersection of visual culture, art, environmental and indigenous activism, and the recent biocentric turn in law, particularly as it relates to political ecology in the Americas. His research accompanied the preparation for Rights of Nature: Art and Ecology in the Americas, a 2015 exhibition he co-curated at Nottingham Contemporary in the U.K. Demos is Professor of History in Art and Visual Culture at UC Santa Cruz.

Date/Time
April 22, 2015 | 12:15 PM
Free and open to the public

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

Brian Connolly is currently working on two book projects.  The first, Sacred Kin: Sovereignty, Kinship, and Religion in the Nineteenth-Century United States, excavates the relationship between national sovereignty and religion. The second project, Against the Human, is a genealogy of the human as a category of emancipation. Connolly is Associate Professor of History at University of South Florida and is currently at the School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University.

Date/Time
April 29, 2015 | 12:15 PM
Free and open to the public

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

Joshua Dienstag is the author of Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit and many books and articles on the history of political thought, film, literature and democratic theory.  He is currently working on a project entitled The Animal Condition: A Political Theory of Human Citizenship. Dienstag is Professor of Political Science and Law at UCLA and Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.

Date/Time
May 6, 2015 | 12:15 PM
Free and open to the public

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

Megan Thomas’s research focuses on the British forces that occupied Manila in 1762, just as East India Company rule in the subcontinent began. She traces their composition, the conditions under which they labored, and the strategies they employed for what they can tell us about the British Empire in and around the Indian Ocean.  Thomas is Associate Professor of Politics at UC Santa Cruz.

Date/Time
May 13, 2015 | 12:15 PM
Free and open to the public

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

Johnathan Beller is the author of The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle and Acquiring Eyes: Philippine Visuality, Nationalist Struggle and the World-Media System. His current book projects include The Rain of Images and Computational Capital. Beller is Professor and Director of the Graduate Program in Media Studies at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY.

Date/Time
May 20, 2015 | 12:15 PM
Free and open to the public

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

John Modern is the author of Secularism in Antebellum America and The Bop Apocalypse. John is currently at work on two projects: the first explores the intersections of religion and cognition in American history and the second is a meditation on entropy, tentatively entitled Akron Devo Divine: A Delirious History of Rubber. Modern is Chair and Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin & Marshall College.

Date/Time
May 27, 2015 | 12:15 PM
Free and open to the public

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

Maya Peterson’s work stands at the intersection of environmental and imperial history. Her current book project explores the ways in which a focus on the physical environment might open up new avenues for thinking about modernity and colonial relationships in Central Asia under Russian and Soviet rule. She is Assistant Professor of History at UCSC.

Date/Time
January 14, 2015 | 12:15 PM
Free and open to the public

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