THE 2015-16 IHC SERIES: THE HUMANITIES AND THE BRAIN
Seat of consciousness and the unconscious; motor of knowledge, memory, judgment and problem-solving; locus of language and creativity; regulator of movement and emotion; processor of sense perception – the brain reigns sovereign over human cognition and sentience. The Interdisciplinary Humanities Center’s 2015-16 public events series “The Humanities and the Brain” will explore the workings of the brain from perspectives deriving from the humanities and fine arts, as well as from newer interdisciplinary fields such as neuroesthetics and neuroethics. The program will bring humanists and neuroscientists into dialogue to consider diverse analyses and representations of this most elusive organ. 

The Humanities and the Brain | 2015-16

What is the meaning and significance of community in the 21st century? How has community been conceptualized and created by different cultures throughout history? How are relationships between specific communities and the broader social milieu constructed and maintained? In today’s global society, what provides the impetus for a life of civic engagement, built upon democratic values, goals, and aspirations? Is the “network” the next form of community, now disconnected from the preconditions of shared physical or social space? These and other questions will be explored through the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center’s 2016-17 public events series Community Matters.

A primary focus of Community Matters will be the changing nature of a liberal education. Increasingly, higher education is emphasizing the cultivation of citizenship through field-based learning, collaborative community-based research and the co-creation of knowledge through community-university partnerships. Through such approaches, the goals of a liberal education are becoming refocused to align with the values of deliberative democracy, participatory citizenship and civic engagement through cooperative problem solving. Community Matters aims to stimulate reflection and transformation in this direction, inviting the campus and community to work together to develop humanities- and arts-based programs that cultivate essential skills of collaboration and that mutually engage the university and the local community through co-conceived learning opportunities and co-designed projects.

Community Matters | 2016-17

Crossings+Boundaries

What is the significance and power of community in the 21st century? How has community been conceptualized and created by different cultures throughout history? How are relationships between specific communities and the broader social milieu constructed and maintained? In today’s global society, what provides the impetus for a life of civic engagement, built upon democratic values, goals, and aspirations? Is the “network” the latest form of community, now disconnected from the preconditions of shared physical or social space? These and other questions will be explored in the 2017 convening of the Western Humanities Alliance.

The Humanities in the Community: 2017 Convening of the Western Humanities Alliance

A dialogue between Irwin Appel (Theater and Dance) and James Kearney (English) about Appel’s theater company, Naked Shakes, and their recent production of Twelfth Night, staged outside at UCSB’s Commencement Green in front of the lagoon.

Naked Shakes derives its rather provocative name from the principle that an actor in a bare theatrical space, along with meticulous attention to language, few technical elements, and the collective imagination of the audience, can create what Prospero in The Tempest calls “rough magic,” hopefully revealing the true heart, meaning, driving force, and original inspiration behind a Shakespeare play. This theatrical style demands actors who are highly skilled in voice and text, and simultaneously greatly expressive with their physicality and imaginations. Entrances and exits are not necessarily literal or linear; an actor can simply exit by pulling down a mask or picking up a musical instrument. With the inspiration and creative power of our choreographers and designers, Naked Shakes blends wild, actor-generated theatricality with razor sharp attention to language and imagery. As an audience member, one may, at times, experience a veritable visual feast while also being able to close one’s eyes and absorb the sound and text as if one were listening to a radio play or podcast.

Irwin Appel (he/him/his) is Professor and Chair of the Department of Theater and Dance at UCSB. As a professional director, Equity actor and composer/sound designer, he has worked with the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles, Shakespeare Santa Cruz, Orlando Shakes, the New York, Oregon, Utah, New Jersey, and Colorado Shakespeare Festivals, Southwest Shakespeare Company, The Acting Company, Theatre For a New Audience, Hartford Stage, Indiana Repertory Theatre, Arizona Theatre Company, PCPA, both the National Theatre Conservatory and Colorado New Play Summit at the Denver Center of the Performing Arts, the Bread Loaf Acting Ensemble, and other prominent regional theaters. In Europe, he acted the role of Pandarus in Troilus and Cressida in the Czech Republic with the Prague Shakespeare Company at the renowned Estates Theatre where Mozart premiered Don Giovanni in 1787. He is the founder and artistic director of Naked Shakes, producing Shakespeare’s plays at UCSB, in the United States, and internationally since 2006. For Naked Shakes, he has created two major adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays: first, The Death of Kings, combining eight Shakespeare history plays from Richard II through Richard III into one event that has been performed in California, Arizona, and the Czech Republic. Second and most recently, he combined Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, along with parts of George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, into one play entitled Immortal Longings. He has also has led workshops and lectured about Naked Shakes in China, Greece, Switzerland, Poland, and the Czech Republic. He is a graduate of Princeton University and the Juilliard School. www.deathofkings.com

https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/events/humanities-decanted/

Sponsored by the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment

Humanities Decanted

Irwin Appel: Naked Shakes

The 1921 Tulsa race massacre was the worst single incident of racial violence in American history. But for decades its very existence was denied. Official records went missing, incriminating articles were torn out of bound volumes of old newspapers, and researchers even had their lives threatened. Award-winning author and historian Scott Ellsworth, author of The Ground Breaking: An American City and Its Search for Justice, unpacks the story of the massacre and the challenges it presents for racial justice today. A reception will follow.

Scott Ellsworth has been researching and writing about the Tulsa race massacre off and on for more than forty-five years. In 1982, he published Death in a Promised Land, the first comprehensive history of the massacre, while in the late 1990s, he initiated the search for the unmarked graves of massacre victims. Ellsworth teaches in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan.

https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/events/2021-22-public-events-series-regeneration/

Sponsored by the IHC’s Regeneration series; the Sara Miller McCune and George D. McCune Endowment; the Blum Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy; the Department of Black Studies; and the Department of History

Scott Ellsworth | The Tulsa Race Massacre: Causes, Cover Up, and the Fight for the Past

Seeded by sorrow, the evolving work that Cherríe Moraga presents journeys through her home-country of California, marking her footsteps alongside Native ecologies and Chicanx genealogies. In part, it is reflective of a queer embodied half-century inquiry—writing of place and out of place, perhaps unknowingly inspired by a once paradisal Califas of women of color warriors.

Here, nature and the implicate order of its elements (fire, air, water, and earth) become illuminated signposts along the road toward an interrelational “State” of being and the formation of a living politic of radical optimism in the face of global despair.

Cherríe Moraga is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at UCSB and also serves as the Co-Director of Las Maestras Center for Xicana[x] Indigenous Thought, Art, & Social Praxis. She is an internationally recognized poet, essayist, and playwright and the co-editor of the avant-garde 1981 feminist anthology, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. She is the author of several collections of her own writings, including A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness. Three earlier works, Loving in the War Years, The Last Generation, and Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood were published in new editions by Haymarket Books in 2022 and 2023. In 2019, Native Country of the Heart—A Memoir was published to great acclaim by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship for Literature, the Barnard Medal of Distinction, and the American Studies Association Lifetime Achievement Award.

https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/events/2023-24-public-events-series-imagining-california/

Sponsored by the IHC’s Imagining California series

Imagining California

Cherríe Moraga | Inaugural Talk | Imagine This: The (Re)generation of Place

In 1994, when M.G. Lord interviewed the California-based creators of the Barbie doll, she had no doubt Barbie would be as provocative in 2023 as she was in 1959. But Lord did not anticipate that this plastic object, once tarred as anti-feminist, would evolve into a touchstone for understanding feminism—as well as the star of a blockbuster attack on patriarchy. This talk explores the Greta Gerwig effect and the 64 years of changes in Barbie’s jobs, ethos, and even body.

M.G. Lord is the co-host of the podcast L.A. Made: The Barbie Tapes, which tells the story of the doll’s creation in the voices of its original creators. She is also the author of Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll and The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice. Her 2005 family memoir, Astro Turf, is a cultural history of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) as well as the basis for L.A. Made: Blood, Sweat and Rockets, a 12-part podcast that she hosts. It tells the story of the early days of rocketry in Southern California, and the unusual figures—a practitioner of “Sex Magick” and an accused Communist—who founded JPL. Lord is Associate Professor of the Practice of English at the University of Southern California.

https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/events/2023-24-public-events-series-imagining-california/

Sponsored by the IHC’s Imagining California series and the IHC Idee Levitan Endowment

M.G. Lord | Is Barbie Feminist? It's Complicated

In this talk, journalist Mark Arax discusses how California’s capture of land and water is the story of a people’s defiance of nature and the wonders and devastation it has wrought. It’s a tale of magic and madness in the arid West, of genocide and endless extraction, of redirected rivers and ever higher dams and deeper wells, of imported workers left behind in the sun and the fatigued earth made to give more even as it keeps sinking.

Mark Arax has been called a “21st-Century John Steinbeck” for his books that pry open the soul of California. A writer of essays, history, biography, and journalism, he is a two-time winner of the California Book Award and a recipient of Stanford University’s William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. His most recent work, The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California, a national bestseller, has been hailed by critics as one of the most important books ever written about the West.

https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/events/2023-24-public-events-series-imagining-california/

Sponsored by the IHC’s Imagining California series and the Sara Miller McCune and George D. McCune Endowment

Mark Arax | The Dreamt Land: How the Invention of California Became Miracle and Ruin

A dialogue between Liz Carlisle (Environmental Studies) and Peter Alagona (Environmental Studies) about Carlisle’s new book, Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming.

A powerful movement is happening in farming today—farmers are reconnecting with their roots to fight climate change. For one woman, that has meant learning her tribe’s history to help bring back the buffalo. For another, it has meant preserving forest purchased by her great-great-uncle, among the first wave of African Americans to buy land. Others are rejecting monoculture to grow corn, beans, and squash the way farmers in Mexico have done for centuries. Still others are rotating crops for the native cuisines of those who fled the “American wars” in Southeast Asia. In Healing Grounds, Liz Carlisle tells the stories of Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian American farmers who are reviving their ancestors’ methods of growing food—techniques long suppressed by the industrial food system. These farmers are restoring native prairies, nurturing beneficial fungi, and enriching soil health. While feeding their communities and revitalizing cultural ties to land, they are steadily stitching ecosystems back together and repairing the natural carbon cycle. This, Carlisle shows, is the true regenerative agriculture – not merely a set of technical tricks for storing CO2 in the ground, but a holistic approach that values diversity in both plants and people.

Liz Carlisle is an Associate Professor in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where her work focuses on fostering a more just and sustainable food system. She holds a Ph.D. in Geography from UC Berkeley and a B.A. in Folklore and Mythology from Harvard University, and she formerly served as Legislative Correspondent for Agriculture and Natural Resources in the Office of U.S. Senator Jon Tester. Recognized for her academic publishing with the Elsevier Atlas Award, which honors research with social impact, Liz has also written numerous pieces for general audience readers, in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Business Insider, and Stanford Social Innovation Review. She is the author of two books about transition to sustainable farming: Lentil Underground (winner of the 2016 Montana Book Award) and Grain by Grain, coauthored with farmer Bob Quinn.

https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/events/humanities-decanted/

Sponsored by the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment

Liz Carlisle: Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming

For decades, America has imagined California novels as placed in locations like Hollywood or San Francisco. But, as Susan Straight will discuss in her presentation, other geographies are as beautiful, tragic, and full of narratives set in remote canyons, inland citrus groves, ancient ranchos, and hidden deserts. Straight’s characters, who might be seventh generation Californian or people just arrived, live in the places she’s known forever, hidden kingdoms of love and redemption amid the sycamore trees. 

Straight is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside, where she has taught since 1988. Her most recent novel Mecca (2022) was a finalist for The Kirkus Prize and named a best novel of the year by The Washington Post and NPR, as well as a Top Ten California Book by the New York Times, and it was the winner of the Southwest Book of the Year for Fiction.

Her memoir In the Country of Women (2020) was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence, was a Finalist for the Clara Johnson Prize for Women’s Literature, and named a best book of 2019 by NPR, Code Switch, Real Simple, and others.

She is also the author of the novels Aquaboogie (1990), I Been In Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All The Pots (1992), Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights (1994), The Gettin Place (1996), and Highwire Moon (2001), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Commonwealth of California Gold Medal for Fiction. A Million Nightingales (2006) was a Finalist for the 2006 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Take One Candle Light a Room (2010) was named a best novel of 2010 by The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Kirkus. Her novel Between Heaven and Here (2012) was named a Best Book of 2012 by the Los Angeles Times and The Daily Beast. She has also published numerous essays, articles, and stories in magazines and journals. Her short story “The Golden Gopher” won the 2008 Edgar Award, and her short story “El Ojo De Agua” won a 2007 O. Henry Prize.

In 2021, Straight was named Woman of the Year for the 61st Assembly District by Assemblyman Jose Medina, for her thirty years of writing stories of African-American, Mexican-American, Asian-American, and immigrant life in southern California, and bringing little-known histories, especially of women, into American books, museums, magazines, and libraries. In 2014, Straight received the Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 2011, she received the Gina Berriault Award for Fiction from San Francisco State University. Straight received the Lannan Prize for Fiction in 2007 and a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction in 1998.

https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/events/2023-24-public-events-series-imagining-california/

Sponsored by the IHC’s Imagining California series and the Diana and Simon Raab Writer-in-Residence Program

Susan Straight | Writing Our Californias

What would a California without poverty look like? How would ending economic hardship advance freedom and well-being for all? This is a prospect that has captured the imaginations of activists, reformers, and everyday people for decades, ever since Upton Sinclair made it the centerpiece of his near successful gubernatorial campaign in 1934. Today, it animates the work of a new generation of community-based leaders who have come together in End Poverty in California (EPIC), an organization devoted to elevating the voices of people experiencing economic hardship, creating and implementing policies rooted in their needs, and advancing a state agenda focused on equal opportunity for all. Since 2022, EPIC has been building grassroots support through its statewide listening tour and coalition-building activities, captured in the acclaimed documentary film Poverty and Power. Featuring excerpts from the film and a conversation with EPIC President Devon Gray, Chief Advisor for Storytelling and Narrative Greg Kaufmann, and Director of Organizing and Community Engagement Jasmine Dellafosse, this discussion, moderated by Professor Alice O’Connor, focuses on a movement that aims to change the narrative about poverty—and California’s economic future.

Devon Gray is President of End Poverty in California. He aligns EPIC’s organization’s priorities across issue areas to make a lasting impact for Californians. Prior to joining EPIC, he was a director with Evergreen Strategy Group, where he advised gun violence prevention organizations on policy and strategy. Gray previously served in the Newsom Administration as Special Advisor to the Governor’s Chief of Staff and is an alumnus of national and statewide political campaigns.

Greg Kaufmann is EPIC Chief Advisor for Storytelling and Narrative. He leads EPIC’s storytelling and narrative strategy, creating platforms for people in poverty to share their experiences, ideas, and insights so that we change the story about poverty in California. Prior to joining EPIC, Kaufmann was poverty correspondent at The Nation where his column was syndicated by Bill Moyers and Melissa Harris-Perry called him “one of the most consistent voices on poverty in America.”

Jasmine Dellafosse is Director of Organizing and Community Engagement at EPIC. She leads EPIC’s organizing and community engagement work to help build a movement that creates equal opportunity and ends poverty in California, affirming the dignity of all people. Dellafosse has confronted systemic racism for almost a decade—first as a youth organizer in her hometown of Stockton, CA, where she helped urban development projects such as bringing food desert areas access to fresh produce.

Alice O’Connor is Professor of History and Director of the Blum Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy at UCSB.

https://ihc.ucsb.edu/events/2023-24-public-events-series-imagining-california/

Sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center’s Imagining California series, the Blum Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy, and the Department of History

Ending Poverty in California: A Movement, A Plan, A More Equitable Future

INAUGURAL LECTURE: Should We Welcome the Anthropocene?
Ken Hiltner (English and Environmental Studies, UCSB)
Thursday, October 30, 2014 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

It is now clear that our planet is being impacted on a global scale by a range of human activities – climate change being a prime example. With this realization, comes another: that we have arguably entered a new geological era dominated by human beings, the Anthropocene. While it is often suggested that we should recoil from the Anthropocene and attempt to return the planet to a state comparable to what it was before widescale anthropogenic change, in this provocative talk Ken Hiltner asks whether we should instead welcome the Anthropocene.

Hiltner is a professor at UC Santa Barbara, where he holds appointments in both the English and Environmental Studies Departments. In 2012-13, he taught at Princeton University as the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and Humanities. He has written five books and numerous articles engaging with the environmental humanities. He is currently the Director of UCSB’s Environmental Humanities Center.

Sponsored by the Environmental Humanities Center and the IHC series The Anthropocene: Views from the Humanities.

INAUGURAL LECTURE: Ken Hiltner: Should We Welcome the Anthropocene?

A dialogue between Thomas Mazanec (East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies) and Xiaorong Li (East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies) about Mazanec’s new book, Poet-Monks: The Invention of Buddhist Poetry in Medieval China.

Poet-Monks focuses on the literary and religious practices of Buddhist poet-monks in Tang-dynasty China to propose an alternative historical arc of medieval Chinese poetry. Combining large-scale quantitative analysis with close readings of important literary texts, Mazanec describes how Buddhist poet-monks, who first appeared in the latter half of the Tang dynasty, asserted a bold new vision of poetry that proclaimed the union of classical verse with Buddhist practices of repetition, incantation, and meditation. Mazanec traces the historical development of the poet-monk as a distinct actor in the Chinese literary world, arguing for the importance of religious practice in medieval literature. As they witnessed the collapse of the world around them, these monks wove together the frayed threads of their traditions to establish an elite-style Chinese Buddhist poetry. Poet-Monks shows that during the transformative period of the Tang-Song transition, Buddhist monks were at the forefront of poetic innovation.

Thomas Mazanec is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He researches premodern Chinese literature and religion as well as their encounters with other cultures. He is also interested in world literature, poetics, digital humanities, and translation studies. His publications cover a broad range of topics, from the evolution of a Sanskrit literary term in medieval China; to systems of monetary, religious, and literary debts; to the potential contributions of network analysis to literary history. He is especially fond of the art of literary translation, maintaining a collection of bizarre and obscure translations of classical Chinese poetry into English and co-editing an online bibliography of Chinese poetry in translation. 

https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/events/humanities-decanted/

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment

Thomas Mazanec: Poet-Monks: The Invention of Buddhist Poetry in Medieval China

A dialogue between Swati Chattopadhyay (History of Art and Architecture) and Cristina Venegas (Film and Media Studies) about Chattopadhyay’s new book, Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire. Chattopadhyay recasts the history of the British empire by focusing on the small spaces that made the empire possible. Her book takes as its subject a series of small architectural spaces, objects, and landscapes of the British empire in India and uses them to narrate the untold stories of the marginalized people—the servants, women, children, subalterns, and racialized minorities—who held up the infrastructure of empire. In so doing, it opens up an important new approach to architectural history: an invitation to shift our attention from the large to the small scale.

Swati Chattopadhyay is Professor of History of Art and Architecture at UC Santa Barbara. She specializes in modern architecture and urbanism and the cultural landscape of the British empire. She is a Founding Editor of PLATFORM and has served as a director of the Subaltern-Popular Workshop, a University of California Multi-campus Research Group, and as the editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH). Her other works include Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field (2012) and Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (2005).

https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/events/humanities-decanted/

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment

Swati Chattopadhyay: Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire

Talk: High and Dry: On Deserts and ‘Crisis’
Dick Hebdige (Film & Media Studies & Studio Art, UCSB)
Thursday, December 4, 2014 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

The body in the swimming pool as metonym for trouble in paradise is a recurrent motif bordering on cliché in Hollywood/ West Coast sunshine noir. As California contends with its severest drought in the state’s recorded rainfall history and intimations of apocalypse proliferate, the trope becomes especially ominous and loaded. This talk poses questions about human agency and environmental blowback against the backdrop of the desert as a staging ground for rehearsals for the end of the world (or ‘life as we know it’) as various as the Trinity A-bomb test at Almagordo, NM in 1945, a performance by Jean Tinguely and Niki Saint Phalle in Nevada in 1962, the Burning Man festival at Blackrock, and the Virgin Galactic citizen space program currently under way in the Mojave. In the process we shall consider how the American desert figures as conflicted space: as dumping ground and crucible, as military compound, leisure site and sanctuary, as a sustainable energy (wind and solar power) platform, and as the index of an unhabitable future. Against the prospect of imminent global immolation we shall return intermittently to track the passage of the corpse floating face down in the pool from a backyard oasis on Wilshire Blvd in Los Angeles to a pumped out well south of Porterville in California’s Central Valley.

A cultural critic and theorist, Hebdige has published widely on youth subculture, contemporary music, art and design, and consumer and media culture. His books include: Subculture: The Meaning of Style (Methuen, 1979); Cut ‘n’ Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music (Methuen, 1987); and Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (Routledge, Methuen, 1988). His current interests include the integration of autobiography and mixed media in critical writing and pedagogy.

Sponsored by the IHC series The Anthropocene: Views from the Humanities.

Dick Hebdige: High and Dry: On Deserts and ‘Crisis’

Over the last decade, the persecution of Uyghurs in China has attracted global attention. When Uyghur was officially banned from education by the Chinese government in September 2016, Uyghur editors were arrested and heavily sentenced, and books were collected and burned. Private bookstores were shut down and Uyghur publishers and bookstore owners were sentenced. Today, Uyghur linguists, writers, and journalists remain persecuted. In January 2017, Uyghurs started to organize mother language schools, publish textbooks, and write story books for kids. There are now four Uyghur publishing houses, two bookstores, three online libraries among the Uyghur diaspora, and more than 70 Uyghur mother language classes, both online and in-person, teaching Uyghur around the world. 

In this talk, Abduweli Ayup will discuss his 2013 arrest for teaching the Uyghur language to kindergarteners, his activism, and his advocacy for Uyghur language education in China and the diaspora. Audience Q&A and a reception will follow.

Abduweli Ayup is a writer, activist, and linguist, specializing in Uyghur-language education. He has lived in Bergen, Norway since 2019 as a writer-in-residence through the International Cities of Refuge Network (ICORN) program. Abduweli founded Uyghur Hjelp in 2016, which investigates and documents the Uyghur plight, publishes books, and supports Uyghur bookstores, kindergartens and schools, and engages in advocacy. He has published six books in Uyghur, his essays and jail memoirs in Turkish, and his first English-language book will be published in September 2025 by Silkie Publishing House.

https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/event/when-the-uyghur-language-confronts-atrocity/

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Key Passages series and the Sara Miller McCune and George D. McCune Endowment

Abduweli Ayup | When the Uyghur Language Confronts Atrocity

Join us for a dialogue between Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky (Global Studies) and Dwight Reynolds (Religious Studies) about Hamed-Troyansky’s new book, Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State. Empire of Refugees reframes late Ottoman history through mass displacement and reveals the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Hamed-Troyansky offers a historiographical corrective: the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire created a refugee regime, predating refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. Grounded in archival research in over twenty public and private archives across ten countries, this book contests the boundaries typically assumed between forced and voluntary migration, and refugees and immigrants, rewriting the history of Muslim migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky is a historian of global migration and forced displacement and Assistant Professor of Global Studies at UC Santa Barbara. His research examines Muslim refugee migration and its role in shaping the modern world. His articles appeared in Past & Present, Comparative Studies in Society and History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Slavic Review, and Kritika.

https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/event/humanities-decanted-vladimir-hamed-troyansky/

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment

Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky | Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State

Resisting the tide of repression that threatens the teaching of Black history, we should look to that past to understand the ongoing processes that have shaped our world. Our current predicament, marked by extreme inequalities, everyday violence, militarism, and political strife derives in part from the history of colonial conquest, slavery, and imperial warfare. Our struggles for freedom and dignity emerge from that history, too. By understanding it, we might discern the scope, force, direction, and likelihood of the changes ahead—and be guided by the example and the wisdom of our ancestors. Audience Q&A and a reception will follow.

Vincent Brown is the Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He has published two prize-winning books about the history of slavery: The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (2008) and Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (2020). The author of numerous articles and reviews in scholarly journals, he is also Principal Investigator and Curator for the animated thematic map Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761: A Cartographic Narrative (2013), he was Producer and Director of Research for the award-winning television documentary Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness (2009), broadcast nationally on the PBS series Independent Lens, he was the executive producer and host for The Bigger Picture (2022), co-produced with WNET for PBS Digital Studios, and he was executive producer, writer, and host for How Do You Remember the Days of Slavery? (2024). He is co-founder of Timestamp Media, which explores the history that connects people and places across the world.

https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/event/black-historys-warning-to-the-world/

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Key Passages series and Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment

Vincent Brown | Black History’s Warning to the World

TALK: Life as a Terrorist: The FBI and Me
William T. Vollmann (National Book Award recipient)
Wednesday, November 6, 2013 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Journalist and novelist William T. Vollmann will discuss his experiences with government surveillance.  As detailed in a September 2013 article published in Harper’s Magazine, Vollmann obtained his own FBI file through a Freedom of Information Act request. In reading the file he learned that he had been a suspect in the Unabomber case and also a suspect in the Amerithrax case, in which terrorists mailed anthrax-laced letters that killed five people.  Vollmann is the recipient of the National Book Award for his novel Europe Central (2005).  He is the author of twenty books, including both fiction and nonfiction.  His articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and Granta.

Sponsored by the IHC series The Value of Care and the Center for Information Technology and Society (CITS).

William T. Vollmann: Life as a Terrorist: The FBI and Me

Based on three research projects on aesthetic environments, this talk will discuss how and when humans and things become objects or subjects. Focusing on the figures of the opera fan, the shoe fit model, and the museum custodian, the lecture will delve into the passivity of the fan as agency, the fit model as subject and object at the same time, and the custodian and their reduction to an object, and how this, paradoxically, allows them to occupy their subject position. Audience Q&A and a reception will follow.

Claudio E. Benzecry is Professor of Communication Studies and Sociology at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Opera Fanatic: Ethnography of an Obsession and The Perfect Fit: Creative Work in the Global Shoe Industry, as well as editor of Social Theory Now (with M. Krause and I. Reed), all published by University of Chicago Press. He’s currently Co-editor in Chief of Qualitative Sociology. His work has received multiple awards from the American Sociological Association, including the Lewis Coser, and the Mary Douglas prizes.

https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/event/subject-or-objects/

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Key Passages series and Sara Miller McCune and George D. McCune Endowment

Claudio Benzecry | Subject or Objects? Key Passageways between Things and Humans

Join us for a dialogue between Lisa Jacobson (History) and Erika Rappaport (History) about Jacobson’s new book, Intoxicating Pleasures: The Reinvention of Wine, Beer, and Whiskey after Prohibition.

In popular memory, the repeal of US Prohibition in 1933 signaled alcohol’s decisive triumph in a decades-long culture war. But as Lisa Jacobson reveals, alcohol’s respectability and mass market success were neither sudden nor assured. It took a world war and a battalion of public relations experts and tastemakers to transform wine, beer, and whiskey into emblems of the American good life. Alcohol producers and their allies—a group that included scientists, trade associations, restaurateurs, home economists, cookbook authors, and New Deal planners—powered a publicity machine that linked alcohol to wartime food crusades and new ideas about the place of pleasure in modern American life. In this deeply researched and engagingly written book, Jacobson shows how the yearnings of ordinary consumers and military personnel shaped alcohol’s cultural reinvention and put intoxicating pleasures at the center of broader debates about the rights and obligations of citizens.

Lisa Jacobson is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century.

https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/event/humanities-decanted-lisa-jacobson/

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment

Lisa Jacobson | Intoxicating Pleasures: The Reinvention of Wine, Beer, and Whiskey after Prohibition

This talk will take you into the process of creating a new, experimental opera based on a historical ghost story from Pu Songling’s seventeenth-century Chinese masterpiece, Liaozhao’s Strange Tales (Liaozhai zhiyi). Entitled Ghost Village, the opera is a creative collaboration between Judith Zeitlin, as scholar and English language librettist, and the composer Yao Chen, a China-based, Chicago-trained professor of composition at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing.

Building on the European operatic tradition, Ghost Village also evokes Chinese aesthetic and theatrical sensibilities. The eerily beautiful wedding scene, for example, draws inspiration from the rich Chinese tradition of spirit marriage and female ghosts. Though set in the past, this opera speaks to many pressing issues in today’s world, particularly war, terrorism, the refugee crisis, and the general suffering of innocent individuals through political violence. At the same time, Ghost Village builds on the long operatic tradition centered on love that crosses the boundaries of life and death, exemplified by such foundational early works such as Tang Xianzu’s Peony Pavilion (1598), and Monteverdi’s Orfeo (1607).

Judith T. Zeitlin is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. A scholar of early modern Chinese literature, her innovative work combines literary history with other disciplines, including visual and material culture, theater, music, medicine, gender studies, and film. Her many publications include The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature (2007), Historian of the Strange: Pu Songling and the Chinese Classical Tale (1993), and co-edited works such as Writing and Materiality in China (2000), Thinking in Cases: Specialist Knowledge in Chinese Cultural History (2007), Chinese Opera Film (2010), and The Voice as Something More: Essays toward Materiality (2019).

https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/event/the-making-of-ghost-village/

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Key Passages series and Hester and Cedric Crowell Endowment

Judith Zeitlin | The Making of Ghost Village: Across the Borders of Life and Death, Scholarship and Opera

Celebrate our 2023-24 Faculty Fellows, whose works-in-progress are supported this year by IHC release-time awards. Fellows give a short presentation of their work.

New Research in the Humanities: Presentations by the IHC’s 2024-25 Faculty Fellows

Stephanie McCarter | Translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Juan Cobo Betancourt | The Coming of the Kingdom: The Muisca, Catholic Reform, and Spanish Colonialism in the New Kingdom of Granada

ARTIST TALK: Music of the Anthropocene
John Luther Adams (composer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Become Ocean)
Thursday, June 4 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Today a growing number of geologists believe we have left the Holocene and entered a new period—the Anthropocene—in which the dominant geologic force is humanity itself.  What does this mean for music? What does it mean for a composer, or for any creative artist working in any medium today?  Can music be engaged with current events and at the same time detached from them? Can music resonate with world around us, and yet still create a world of its own?

Called “one of the most original musical thinkers of the new century” (Alex Ross, The New Yorker), John Luther Adams is a composer whose life and work are deeply rooted in the natural world. Adams composes for orchestra, chamber ensembles, percussion and electronic media. A recipient of the Heinz Award for his contributions to raising environmental awareness, Adams has also been honored with the Nemmers Prize from Northwestern University “for melding the physical and musical worlds into a unique artistic vision that transcends stylistic boundaries.”

Sponsored by the IHC’s Idee Levitan Endowment and the IHC series The Anthropocene: Views from the Humanities.

Footage from the documentary Strange and Sacred Noise
courtesy of Leonard Kamerling and the Alaska Center for Docuemtary Film,  
Univeristy of Alaska Museum of the North

John Luther Adams: Music of the Anthropocene

SYMPOSIUM: The Legacy of Abu Ghraib
Lisa Hajjar (Sociology, UCSB)
Joshua Phillips (author of None of Us Were Like This Before)
Tuesday, April 9, 2013 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Nearly a decade after the exposure of prisoner abuse perpetrated by US military personnel at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the IHC will host a symposium to consider the long-term impact of the violations upon human rights policy and upon the United States’ war on terror. Featured speakers will be Professor Lisa Hajjar, author of Torture: A Sociology of Violence and Human Rights, and award-winning print and broadcast journalist Joshua Phillips, author of None of Us Were Like This Before: American Soldiers and Torture.


Lisa Hajjar and Joshua Phillips: The Legacy Of Abu Ghraib

TALK: Much Ado About Liberal Education: What It is and How to Get One, Clio’s Mischief Notwithstanding
Sheldon Rothblatt (History, UC Berkeley)
Tuesday, March 4 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Unlike vocational or professional education, liberal education is difficult to define. It is historically ambiguous because, over the centuries, it has acquired much curricular and ideological baggage. The only certain fact is that the search for whatever is called “liberal education” awakens the deepest human feelings and aspirations. That is why every generation  must search for it.

Sheldon Rothblatt  was knighted by the Swedish Crown in 2010 as Knight Commander of the Royal Order of the Polar Star (founded 1748), Sweden’s highest award to foreigners. He is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley and sometime Director of the Center for Studies in Higher Education. He is a recipient of the Berkeley Citation for “distinguished achievement and for notable service to the University,” Educated at Berkeley and King’s College Cambridge University, he also holds an honorary doctorate from Gothenburg University in Sweden. He has been a Visiting Fellow of four Oxford University colleges, Princeton University and the Japan Society for the Advancement of Science. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society of Britain, a Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (the body that awards the Noble Prizes) and a Member of the National Academy of Education (USA). Besides teaching in American universities, he has taught in Australia, Austria, Sweden and Norway. His academic publications are on the comparative history of universities, with translations in Russian, German, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, Japanese and Chinese.

Sponsored by the IHC series The Value of Care and the IHC’s The Uses of The Public University RFG.

Sheldon Rothblatt: Much Ado About Liberal Education: What It Is & How to Get One

TALK: Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Rob Nixon (English, University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Friday, November 18, 2011 / 2:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

The violence wrought by climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, oil spills, and the environmental aftermath of war takes place gradually and often invisibly. Using the innovative concept of “slow violence” to describe these threats, Rob Nixon focuses on the inattention we have paid to the attritional lethality of many environmental crises, in contrast with the sensational, spectacle-driven messaging that impels public activism today. Slow violence, because it is so readily ignored by a hard-charging capitalism, exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosystems and of people who are poor, disempowered, and often involuntarily displaced, while fueling social conflicts that arise from desperation as life-sustaining conditions erode.
Nixon examines a cluster of writer-activists affiliated with the environmentalism of the poor in the global South. By approaching environmental justice literature from this transnational perspective, he exposes the limitations of the national and local frames that dominate environmental writing. And by skillfully illuminating the strategies these writer-activists deploy to give dramatic visibility to environmental emergencies, Nixon invites his readers to engage with some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

Rob Nixon: Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

TALK: Seeing War: Identity, Purpose and Play
Nina Berman (documentary photographer, Associate Professor of Journalism, Columbia University)
Tuesday, April 16, 2013 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

War is both everywhere and invisible.  It’s there when we shop, when we socialize. We are reminded of it and yet distracted from its effects. In our culture we conflate war and play.   We are attracted to weapons of war, in part, because they give us the promise of power and inspire heroic fantasies, at a time when many aspects of life feel small and without purpose.  In the words of Chris Hedges,  “war is a force that gives us meaning.” Photographic artist Nina Berman will present examples from three bodies of work – Purple Hearts,  Marine Wedding, and Homeland – which explore the consequences and allure of war and militarism in post-September 11 America.

Sponsored by the IHC series Fallout: In the Aftermath of War.

Nina Berman: Seeing War: Identity, Purpose and Play

PANEL: Using the Ancient Greeks to Think About Public Goods: A Dialogue
Greg Anderson (History, Ohio State University)
Josiah Ober (Classics & Political Science, Stanford)
Glenn Patten (Classics, UCSB)
Thursday, February 16, 2012 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Classical structures (such as the polis) and ideas (such as koinonia) are frequently invoked in discussions of the common good — either as the grounds from which modern ideas and structures developed, or as marks of a fundamental break between ancient and bourgeois societies.  Two leading scholars offer complementary views, exploring both civic decision-making and social practices, Aristotelian theory and cultural context, continuity of past with present and the distance between them.  Together they offer new perspectives on the problem of re-imagining the commons today.
Greg Anderson is the Ohio State University Department of History’s  specialist in the history of ancient Greece. He is a graduate of the universities of Newcastle and London in his native Britain, and holds MA, MPhil, and PhD degrees in Classics from Yale University. Anderson’s primary research areas are archaic Greece, classical Athens, and social theory. His work explores articulations between culture, politics, and the production of material life. His first book, The Athenian Experiment (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), addressed the cultural implications of the shift from a narrow oligarchic regime to a more socially inclusive political formation in pre-classical Athens. Among his more recent publications, one article reconsiders the cultural construction of “tyranny” in archaic Greece, while another makes a case for seeing the classical Greek “state” as a cultural “effect,” the product of a complex entanglement between the material and the ideational. His current book project (Illiberal Athens) is a postmodern Marxist “social ecology” of classical Athens, an account of the inequalities, the exploitations, and the other costs of producing a “free society” in Greek antiquity.
Josiah Ober, the Constantine Mitsotakis Chair in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanf, specializes in the areas of ancient and modern political theory and historical institutionalism. He has a secondary appointment in the Department of Classics and a courtesy appointment in Philosophy. His most recent book, Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens, was published by Princeton University Press in 2008. His ongoing work focuses on the theory and practice of democracy and the politics of knowledge and innovation, Recent articles and working papers seek to explain economic growth in the ancient Greek world, the relationship between democracy and dignity, and the aggregation of expertise.
He is sole author of about 60 articles and chapters and several other books, including Fortress Attica (1985), Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (1989), The Athenian Revolution (1996), Political Dissent in Democratic Athens (1998), and Athenian Legacies 2005). He has held residential fellowships at the National Humanities Center, Center for Hellenic Studies, Univ. of New England (Australia), Clare Hall (Cambridge), Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences , and Univ. of Sydney; research fellowships from the ACLS, NEH, and Guggenheim; and has been a visiting professor at University of Michigan, Paris I-Sorbonne, and UC-Irvine. Before coming to Stanford he taught at Montana State University (1980-1990) and Princeton University (1990-2006).

Using The Ancient Greeks To Think About Public Goods: A Dialogue

PANEL: Public Art as a Public Good
Laurel Beckmen (Art, UCSB)
Rita Ferri (Visual Arts Coordinator, Santa Barbara County Arts Commission)
Colin Gray (local artist)
Harry Reese (Art, UCSB)
Thursday, May 10, 2012 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Something happens when art goes public. Cultural interventions in spaces designated as belonging to the public are subject to greater and more varied kind of scrutiny than works exhibited or performed in the private sphere. Site specificity, community values, and notions of what constitutes “good art” all come into play when art goes public. This panel will examine public art in Santa Barbara as a public good precisely because it is an object of public debate.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Public Goods series.

Public Art as a Public Good

This talk offers an on-the-ground perspective from a record-breaking fire season on a California hotshot crew, tracing the sociological, historical, and economic forces that fuel today’s megafires. For wildland firefighters, navigating the escalating impacts of climate change is a matter of life and death. These fires are not natural disasters, but the result of political choices. Understanding where they come from—and how firefighters survive on their edges—is essential to imagining a more just and equitable climate future in California. Audience Q&A and a reception will follow.

Jordan Thomas is the author of When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World, which was recently nominated for a National Book Award. His work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and The Drift, among others. He is a cultural anthropology doctoral candidate at UCSB and former wildland firefighter.

https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/event/on-fire-inaugural-talk-when-it-all-burns-the-creation-of-californias-wildfire-crisis/

Sponsored by the IHC’s On Fire series

Jordan Thomas | When It All Burns: The Creation of California’s Wildfire Crisis

Join us for a conversation about Melody Jue’s (English) recent co-edited volume, Informatics of Domination. Jue will be joined by co-editors Zach Blas and Jennifer Rhee and contributor Rita Raley (English). Lisa Parks (Film and Media Studies) will moderate. Informatics of Domination is an experimental collection addressing formations of power that manifest through technical systems and white capitalist patriarchy in the twenty-first century. The volume takes its name from a chart in Donna J. Haraway’s canonical 1985 essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs.” Haraway theorizes the informatics of domination as a feminist, diagrammatic concept for situating power and a world system from which the figure of the cyborg emerges. Informatics of Domination builds on Haraway’s chart as an open structure for thought, inviting fifty scholars, artists, and creative writers to unfold new perspectives. Their writings take on a variety of forms, such as essays on artificial intelligence, disability and protest, and transpacific imaginaries; conversations with an AI trained on Black oral history; a three-dimensional response to Mexico-US border tensions; hand-drawn images on queer autotheory; ecological fictions about gut microbiomes and wet markets; and more. Together, the writings take up the unfinished structure of the chart in order to proliferate critiques of white capitalist patriarchal power with the study of information systems, networks, and computation today.

Melody Jue is a Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, working across the fields of ocean humanities, science fiction, science studies, and media theory. She is the author of Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater (Duke University Press, 2020), which won the 2020 Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science book award. She is the co-editor with Rafico Ruiz of Saturation (Duke University Press, 2021) and co-editor with Zach Blas and Jennifer Rhee of Informatics of Domination (Duke University Press, 2025).

https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/event/humanities-decanted-melody-jue/

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment

Melody Jue | Informatics of Domination

INAUGURAL LECTURE: Ecstasy: Linking the Humanities and the Brain
Ann Taves (Religious Studies, UCSB)
Thursday, October 15, 2015 / 4:00 PM 
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Ecstasy, an experience that is widely discussed in the humanities and sought after in the general culture, illuminates many of the difficulties involved in linking research in the humanities with research in the social, psychological and neurosciences.  In order to link these approaches, which employ different methods to study human experience at different levels, we need to identify features that are often associated with, but do not uniquely specify, ecstasy at the cultural level (studied by humanists) and specify these features in precise enough terms that they can be studied sociologically, psychologically, and neurologically.  The lecture will draw on humanistic approaches to examine the range of experiences that people have characterized as ecstatic and the meanings that people have found in and drawn from them and on the psychological and brain sciences to help understand the underlying mechanisms involved.

Ann Taves is a former President of the American Academy of Religion. She holds the chair of Catholic Studies at the university. Taves is especially known for her work Religious Experience Reconsidered, stressing the importance of the findings and theoretical foundations of cognitive science for modern religionists.

Empirically, she pursues research primarily within the contexts of American religious history, the history of Christianity in the modern era, and the history of the scientific study of religion, psychology, and related phenomena (e.g., psychical phenomena, magic, superstition).  Theoretically, her work builds on classical theorists, such as Durkheim and Weber, as well as evolutionary and developmental approaches to the study of human behavior.

Sponsored by the IHC series The Humanities and the Brain.

INAUGURAL LECTURE: Ann Taves: Ecstasy: Linking the Humanities and the Brain

TALK: Conditions of the Brain: Meaning, Metaphor, and Mechanism in Illness and Healing
Rebecca Seligman (Anthropology, Northwestern University)
Thursday, October 22, 2015 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Increasing evidence suggests the importance of meaning in conditioning bodily experiences and outcomes. This talk will explore the relationship between meaning and the body, with particular focus on the neurobiological and cultural mechanisms that mediate this relationship. Seligman explores the role of meaning and metaphor in illness and healing specifically, using the case of religious healing to illustrate how states of health and illness may be conditioned by interacting qualities and processes of mind, body, and brain.

Rebecca Seligman is associate professor in the Department of Anthropology and faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy research at Northwestern University. Her work explores the intersections of mental and physical health in social and cultural context, with an emphasis on the mechanisms through which cultural, social, and political-economic forces become embodied. Seligman also incorporates and critically evaluates relevant neurobiological research in these areas as a means to better understand how cultural beliefs and practices operate within bodies. Her book, Possessing Spirits and Healing Selves: Embodiment and Transformation in an Afro-Brazilian Religion, investigates the connections among mental health, embodied experience, and religious participation in northeastern Brazil

Sponsored by the IHC series The Humanities and the Brain.

Rebecca Seligman: Conditions of the Brain: Meaning, Metaphor, and Mechanism in Illness and Healing

TALK: Nature Spends the Past Few Million Years Experimenting with a Prosocial Brain
Kenneth S. Kosik (The Neuroscience Research Institute, UCSB)
Thursday, November 12, 2015 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Human interactions are finely calibrated and many of these interactions are prosocial, that is a social behavior that benefits other individuals or a larger group. The repertoire of prosocial behaviors is vast: How much eye contact we make, how much affection we show, how much concern we feel for the plights of others, what we reveal to others and what we don’t.  In a sense, the motivation for language itself is a prosocial activity. Among humans the degree to which we utilize these social tools is highly variable. At the extremes of the social behavior spectrum are clusters of neurological conditions caused by highly specific mutations. At one end of the spectrum are the autistics and savants; at the other end is a condition called Williams syndrome in which affected individuals are hyper-social and despite cognitive impairment have remarkably preserved language ability. Some neurodegenerative disorders such as fronto-temporal dementia selectively affect prosocial behavior. Knowledge of a genetic mutation in some of these cases tells us the root cause. Because genes have changed very little among primates, this genetic hook allows us to track genes related to social behavior through evolution and perhaps gather insights regarding the emergence of our particularly prosocial lifestyle relative to other primates.

Kenneth S. Kosik completed a B.A. and M.A. in English literature from Case Western Reserve University in 1972 and an M.D. from the Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1976. He served as a resident in neurology at Tufts New England Medical Center and was Chief Resident there in 1980. Beginning in 1980 he held a series of academic appointments at the Harvard Medical School and achieved the rank of full professor there in 1996. He also held appointments at McLean Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. In 2004, Kosik became the Harriman Professor of Neuroscience Research and Co-Director of the Neuroscience Research Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He founded and serves as Medical Director of the non-profit center, Cottage Center for Brain Fitness (CCBF).

Sponsored by the IHC series The Humanities and the Brain.

Kenneth Kosik: Nature Spends the Past Few Million Years Experimenting with a Prosocial Brain

TALK: The Neuroscience of Aesthetics and Art
Anjan Chatterjee (Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania)
Thursday, November 19, 2015 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

What can neuroscience possibly tell us about aesthetics and art? In this talk, Anjan Chatterjee will offer a framework from which a neuroscientist might deconstruct aesthetic experiences. Chatterjee will discuss findings from neurology and cognitive neuroscience that reveal neural structures and networks engaged when we respond to beauty and react to art. Finally, informed by our understanding of the neural underpinnings of art, he will speculate about its evolution. Previous debates about whether art-making and appreciation represent an instinct or an epiphenomenon of other evolved capacities are probably not well-framed. His talk offers a third way to think about why we are now – and perhaps have always been – surrounded by these mysterious objects that we call art.

Anjan Chatterjee is the Frank A. and Gladys H. Elliott Professor and Chair of Neurology at Pennsylvania Hospital. He is a member of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, and the Center for Neuroscience and Society at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his BA in Philosophy from Haverford College and his MD from the University of Pennsylvania; he completed his neurology residency at the University of Chicago. His clinical practice focuses on patients with cognitive disorders. His research addresses questions about spatial cognition and language, attention, neuroethics, and neuroaesthetics. He is the author of The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art and co-editor of Neuroethics in Practice: Mind, Medicine, and Society, and The Roots of Cognitive Neuroscience: Behavioral Neurology and Neuropsychology.

He was awarded the 2002 Norman Geschwind Prize in Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology by the American Academy of Neurology. He is a founding member of the Board of Governors of the Neuroethics Society, the President of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics, and the President of the Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology Society. He serves on the Boards of Haverford College, the Associated Services for the Blind and Visually Impaired, and Universal Promise and is on the Advisory Board of Cognitive Dynamics.

Sponsored by the IHC series The Humanities and the Brain

Anjan Chatterjee: The Neuroscience of Aesthetics and Art

TALK: Listening and the Semiosphere: How Our Individual Brains Build Shared Worlds
Seth Horowitz  (The Listening Program)
Thursday, January 14, 2016 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

We build the world from our senses. We see color and form, hear sound and vibration, feel temperature and texture, each sense taking a specific form of energy to create pieces of an ever streaming perceptual puzzle.   Our perceptions create our reality, our own personal psychophysical map of the world. But the map is not the territory.

We use complex neural behaviors like attention to filter and focus this map, turning seeing into looking and hearing into listening. We constantly try to validate our version of reality by comparing it to our memories and others’ perceptions, seeking a consensus. But sensory errors, interpersonal differences in perception, the endemic fuzziness of biological senses, psychological processes and interpersonal communication create gaps in reality, letting us see faces in rocks, hear a phantom cell phone ringing in the noise of a shower, “remember” an childhood event that probably never happened. And while we may think of our innate perceptual limitations as problems, these gaps between what we perceive and what exists in the world outside our head give rise to everything from illusion to art, from sound art to music, transforming the physics of the external world into the meaningful stories that drive the human mind.

Seth Horowitz is a neuroscientist whose work in comparative and human hearing, balance and sleep research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and NASA.

Sponsored by the IHC series The Humanities and the Brain.

Seth Horowitz: Listening and the Semiosphere: How Our Individual Brains Build Shared Worlds

TALK: The Natural and the Supernatural in the Scientific Study of Meditation and the Cognitive Science of Religion
John D. Dunne (Center for Investigating Healthy Minds, University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Thursday, February 18, 2016 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Over the last two decades, some of the most influential scientific studies of meditation have examined practices derived from Buddhism, and the success of these studies — as expressed in impact factors, citation rates, and grant funding — likely rests in part on their capacity to articulate “meditation” in a fashion that remains strictly naturalistic. During the same period, however, the cognitive science of religion (CSR) has routinely deployed the category of the “supernatural” as essential to anything that we can properly call “religion.” From the CSR perspective, one might conclude that the naturalistic rhetoric found in scientific studies simply reflects the ongoing modernist strategy of formulating a “scientific Buddhism” that is not a “religion.” While illuminating, this interpretation nevertheless leaves in place the highly problematic notion of the “supernatural” itself, especially as the marker of “religion.”  

This talk explores the aligned oppositions of natural/supernatural and science/religion within both the science of meditation and the Cognitive Science of Religion. Drawing on the critique offered long ago by Emile Durkheim, it shows how the rhetoric of both contexts remains largely blind to the modernist assumptions inherent in the concept of the “supernatural.”

Sponsored by the IHC’s Idee Levitan Endowment and the IHC series The Humanities and the Brain.

John Dunne: The Natural & Supernatural in Study of Meditation & Cognitive Science of Religion

TALK: Reading the Brain: Neuro/Science/Fiction
Pierre Cassou-Noguès (Philosophy, University of Paris XIII)
Tuesday, April 5, 2016 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

The Belgian writer Jean-Philippe Toussaint recently displayed at the museum Le Louvre in Paris a machine for reading thoughts. It looked like a shower cabin, connected to a TV screen. The subject would sit inside wearing an EEG helmet, and the screen would show the images popping up in her mind while the subject read a novel. Toussaint noted in an interview that people would be able to see what was going on in their minds. But don’t we already know? Don’t we somehow see the images that pop up in our minds, since, precisely, they appear in our minds? But, if so, why do we want to try (as we obviously do) Toussaint’s machine? Referring to various machines for reading thoughts, real or fictitious, Cassou-Noguès will argue that brain reading leads us to a change in our form of life, where thinking receives a new meaning, and various paradoxical situations may arise.

Pierre Cassou-Noguès is Professor in the Philosophy Department of University Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint Denis. He is co-editor of the journal SubStance. His work concerns philosophy in France in the 20th and 21th centuries, and the relationship between science and fiction, Reason and Imagination in Bachelard’s terms. He has recently published Lire le cerveau (Seuil, 2012), Les rêves cybernétiques de Norbert Wiener (Seuil, 2014)

Sponsored by the IHC series Humanities and the Brain.

Pierre Cassou-Noguès: Reading the Brain: Neuro/Science/Fiction

INAUGURAL LECTURE: George Lipsitz & Barbara Tomlinson: Insubordinate Spaces for Intemperate Times: Why Civic Engagement Matters Now
George Lipsitz (Black Studies, UCSB)
Barbara Tomlinson (Feminist Studies, UCSB)
Thursday, October 13, 2016 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

What is a university and why does the work we do here matter? What is the relationship between what goes on in our classrooms, studios and laboratories and what transpires in the wider world around us? The arts, humanities and social sciences promise to cultivate the capacity to imagine and create a better world, to envision and enact a common creative existence. Yet in practice, higher education is structured in dominance and the skills it cultivates are used to hurt as well as to help, to dominate and subordinate as well as to liberate. At this moment in history, when the economy, the environment and the educational system are all perpetually in crisis, when wars without end rage around the world, and millions of people facing displacement, dispossession, and deportation find themselves consigned to unlivable destinies, it has never been more important, and never more difficult, to discern what the proper role of the university should be. We argue for an ethic of co-creation and accompaniment, for recognizing and recuperating the lost potential of civically- engaged scholarship and fusing it with the energy, imagination and artistry emanating from aggrieved communities. We contend that there is worthy work to be done, both at the scene of academic argument and at the scene of social justice struggles where imaginative projects of art-based community making are bringing forth new polities and new politics, new practices and new pedagogies.

George Lipsitz studies social movements, urban culture, and inequality. His books include Midnight at The BarrelHouse, Footsteps in The Dark, The Posessive Investment in Whiteness, and Time Passages. Lipsitz serves as chairman of the board of directors of the African American Policy Forum and is a member of the board of directors of the National Fair Housing Alliance. He received his Ph.D in history at the University of Wisconsin.

Barbara Tomlinson’s work on rhetoric and affect in feminist and antifeminist argument in sociolegal studies, feminist musicology, and feminist science studies has appeared in Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Cultural Critique, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology, Journal of American Studies, and Literatura e Estudos Culturais/ Literature and Cultural Studies. Other work, particularly on metaphor and composing processes, has appeared in Cultural Sociology, Written Communication, Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, the Journal of College Reading and Learning and edited collections. She received her Ph.D from University of California Riverside.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Community Matters series.

Community Matters

INAUGURAL LECTURE: Insubordinate Spaces for Intemperate Times: Why Civic Engagement Matters Now

TALK: Driving Richmond: From Pop-up Public Art Exhibition to University Class—and Transit Museum

Laura Browder (English, University of Richmond)
Tuesday, October 25, 2016 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

In 2013, Laura Browder was commissioned by the city of Richmond to produce a piece for the RVA Street Art Festival, a four-day festival housed in the disused bus barns that were once the home of the Greater Richmond Transit Company. The resulting oral history/photography exhibition, Driving Richmond: Stories and Portraits of GRTC Bus Drivers, told a complex and dialogic story of Jim Crow, civil rights and the racial geography of Richmond through the eyes of the bus drivers.

Less than two years later, Browder was invited by the GRTC to memorialize the history of public transit in Richmond. In conjunction with GRTC bus driver Bruce Korusek and curator Alexandra Byrum, Browder and her University of Richmond students held history harvests at GRTC headquarters which attracted dozens of drivers and mechanics; conducted archival research at the Valentine Museum, and incorporated the portraits and text panels of Driving Richmond into RIDE: Public Transit in Richmond Since 1888, a permanent exhibition housed at the GRTC headquarters. This project provided a template for a series of projects Browder has completed since then, including museum exhibitions and documentary dramas, but also the pop-up archive project that she and her students are creating next spring in conjunction with faculty and students from Virginia Commonwealth University and Syracuse University, as well as a range of community partners.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Community Matters series.

Laura Browder: Driving Richmond: Pop-up Public Art Exhibition to University Class—& Transit Museum

PANEL: The Engaged Classroom: Learning at the Intersection of Campus and Community

UCSB students:
Zenzile Riddick
Katie Walker
Jonathan Gomez
Jasmine Kelekay

Moderators: Rick Benjamin (Associate Director for Community Engagement, IHC)
Margaret Klawunn (Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, UCSB)
Thursday, November 10, 2016  / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

How best might our academic experiences at UCSB be both guided and deepened by community engagement and practice? As the title suggests, this panel will be informed by an inquiry into opportunities students at UCSB have for engaging in building community in relationship with others. This includes, of course, outreach, but potentially also fostering communities on campus.

Zenzile Riddick is a second-year student majoring in Sociology and Black Studies, and is the Program Director of the Black Student Union. Katie Walker is a fourth-year student majoring in Anthropology and Theater with a community emphasis, and is the Artistic Director of City of Peace, a theater program for 13 – 19 year olds. Jonathan Gomez is a Doctoral Candidate in Sociology with emphasis in Black Studies, and is a Co-facilitator of the Transformative Pedagogy Project. Jasmine Kelekay is a Doctoral Student in Sociology with an interest in race and racism, punishment and social control, critical criminology, policing, global African diaspora, Black Europe, among other things.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Community Matters series.

PANEL: The Engaged Classroom: Learning at the Intersection of Campus and Community

TALK: Public Universities and the Future of Democracy
Harry Boyte (Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship, Augsburg College)
Thursday, November 17, 2016 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

In the midst of enormous external pressures to narrow or eliminate the public purposes of higher education, how can educators become agents of constructive, democratizing change, not objects, spectators, and observers of change? How can students, including first generation college students and students from immigrant, ethnic, and other backgrounds who feel like strangers in institutions where pedagogies and assessments are structured around individualist, hyper-competitive achievement norms, move from survival and protest to leadership in making change? In this talk, Harry Boyte will argue that higher education is a crucial site for democratic change making. To develop its potential requires incorporating skills and lessons of civic agency and “a different kind of politics” from broad-based, cross-partisan community organizations and related movements like the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa into both curricular and co-curricular life. We also need a future oriented time horizon, adapting such skills and lessons to prepare students for careers as citizen professionals, leaders in the democratic transformation of institutions and professions, not cogs in impersonal bureaucracies and corporations driven only by narrow bottom lines. Boyte will sketch new intellectual and practical resources for this work in the transdisciplinary field of Civic Studies. Civic Studies conceives of citizens as co-creators of a democratic way of life and it advances an epistemology of civic agency, a lived way of seeing and knowing in the world which blends “head,” “heart,” and “hand,” empirical, cultural and normative disciplines with capacities for effective action. Civic Studies is becoming a prominent presence in Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University, Augsburg College in Minneapolis, and the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development. It holds annual Civic Studies Institutes in Boston and the Ukraine, and constitutes a growing network of practitioners and public intellectuals associated with The Good Society: A Journal of Civic Studies.

Harry Boyte is an architect of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship’s public work approach to civic engagement and democracy, and the creator of Public Achievement. Boyte has worked with a variety of foundations, and non-profit, educational, and citizen organizations in the United States and abroad concerned with community development, citizenship education, and civic renewal. Boyte served as a senior advisor to the National Commission on Civic Renewal and presented research findings at a Camp David seminar on the future of democracy. He is the author of nine books on citizenship, democracy, and community organizing, and his writings have appeared in more than 100 publications including the New York Times, Perspectives on Politics, Kettering Review, and the Wall Street Journal. In the 1960s, he worked for the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a field secretary with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the Civil Rights Movement. Boyte teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on organizing theory and practice at the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, and is in demand as a keynote speaker with faculty, students, and professionals.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Community Matters series, the Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life and the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment.

Harry Boyte: Public Universities and the Future of Democracy

How does Shakespeare make different kinds of meaning in various local communities? And how can amateur theatre be a form of community engagement for drama and Shakespeare scholars? This talk will consider how community productions of Shakespeare produce indigenous forms of knowledge that should be of interest to academics and amateur theatre-makers alike. It further calls for academics who study Shakespeare to engage with their own community by not only attending local productions of Shakespeare, but also by making theatre alongside amateur actors and directors who are engaging in practice-based, collaborative research that shares knowledge and expertise and de-centers Shakespearean authority. Examples in the talk will be drawn from Brokaw’s own work acting, directing, and dramaturging with the amateur company Merced Shakespearefest in California’s Central Valley.

Katherine Steele Brokaw received her PhD in English from the University of Michigan in 2011. She is the author of Staging Harmony: Music and Religious Change in Late Medieval Early English Drama (Cornell University Press, 2016). She has also published articles and reviews in Shakespeare Bulletin, Comparative Drama, and Pedagogy, and has an essay in the forthcoming collection Beyond Boundaries: Rethinking Music Circulation in Early Modern England (Indiana University Press, 2017). She is currently working on articles about dice games in Tudor drama, and about contemporary performances of amateur drama.

Sponsored by the IHC series Community Matters.

Katherine Brokaw: Making Shakespeare: Theatre as Community Engagement

In this inaugural event for the IHC's Crossings + Boundaries public events series, four UCSB faculty members will discuss their varied experiences as interdisciplinary scholars.

Beth DePalma Digeser, Laila Shereen Sakr, Jeremy White, Brandon Whited

INAUGURAL PANEL: Interdisciplinary Crossings + Boundaries

When seven rocky planets were discovered around the
star TRAPPIST-1, claims of potentially habitable worlds
animated the scientific discourse and press coverage.
Beautiful animations of the surfaces of these planets and
imaginative tales of planet hopping suggested that this
discovery was not just about discovering more planets,
but that it was also about discovering worlds. In this talk,
Messeri will recount ethnographic findings from her work
with exoplanet astronomers. She will explore how planets
become worlds and what resources scientists draw on to
execute this conceptual crossing and imaginatively leave
the boundary of our world to extend human presence
beyond the solar system.
Before joining the Anthropology department at Yale earlier
this year, Lisa Messeri taught at the University of Virginia
and the University of Pennsylvania. Her published work
includes Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of
Other Worlds (2016), which traces how the place-making
practices of planetary scientists transform the void of
space into a cosmos filled with worlds that can be known
and explored.

Sponsored by the Idee Levitan IHC Endowment and the IHC’s
Crossings + Boundaries series.
Image Courtesy: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Lisa Messeri: Interstellar Crossings

“Impermanent Citizens: Precarity and the Recon guration of Communities,” Stephen James (UC Riverside)
“How Advertisements are Made Political and Provoke Emotion,” Matthew Alvarez (UC Merced)

Moderator: Jennifer Lugris (UCSB)

Panel-Critical Reflections on Citizenship and Belonging

Panel - Critical Reflections On Citizenship And Belonging

“Nursing the Spark of Social Engagement,” Michele Bury, Vivian Price, and Ellie Zenhari (CSU Dominguez Hills)
“Black Migrant Women: Seeking Voice, Finding Community,” Geta LeSeur (University of Arizona)
Moderator: Corinne Bancroft (UCSB)

Panel-Imagining and Narrating Communities

Panel - Imagining And Narrating Communities

“Disarming Hate: Gun Violence Prevention E orts and the University,” Melissa Barthelemy (UCSB)
“Co-mingling Bodies and Collective Postmemory: Theater and Performance as Ethical Praxis in Mexico,” Ruth Hellier- Tinoco (UCSB)

Moderator: Naz Keynejad (UCSB)

Panel: Social Memory and Community building

Panel - Social Memory And Community Building

“Making the Humanities Count: The Cultural Study of Quantification,” Heather Steffen (UCSB)

Originally a part of : "PANEL: EDUCATION AS COMMUNITY BUILDING"

Making the Humanities Count: The Cultural Study of Quantification

“Sovereignty Makes the Monument”
Swati Chattopadhyay (UCSB)
“Monuments Are Not Memory”
Dell Upton (UCLA)
Moderator: Jeremy White (UCSB)

The Humanities in the Community: 2017 Convening of the Weatern Humanities Alliance

Panel: Civic Monuments and Community

Since 1980, the population of female prisoners has increased eightfold in this country, with women of color disproportionately impacted. In her talk, Ms. Law will examine the structural inequities and injustices behind the rise in the number of incarcerated women and the recurring violation of rights women face inside prison, including lack of access to reproductive and medical health care and pervasive sexual harassment and abuse. Law will also discuss how incarcerated women are challenging and organizing against prison conditions and suggest ways that people on the outside can support their actions and resistance.

Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women

The world is witnessing the greatest mass migration since 1945. More than sixty-five million people, about one in every hundred on Earth, have fled their homes. Some are internally displaced; others are refugees who have moved to multiple countries. This talk will discuss the three main causes of this giant human tide: the implosion of the Middle East following the Arab Spring; climate change, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, where drought and advancing deserts are pushing people to abandon their homes; and famine, because of which at least twenty million people are currently at risk of starvation, most of them in Nigeria, South Sudan, Yemen, and Somalia. In his talk, Filkins will take the audience on a tour of these places and discuss ways to address the complex causes of mass migration.

Filkins has been a staff writer with The New Yorker since 2011. From 2000 to 2010, he was a reporter for the New York Times, reporting from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. He has also worked for the Miami Herald and the Los Angeles Times, where he was chief of the paper’s New Delhi bureau. In 2009, he won a Pulitzer Prize as part of a team of Times journalists covering Pakistan and Afghanistan. His book, The Forever War, won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Crossings + Boundaries series; the Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life; and the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment.

Dexter Filkins: Exodus: The Largest Movement of People Since the Second World War

Ronald Rael’s talk reexamines what the 650 miles of physical barrier dividing the US and Mexico is and could be, suggesting that the wall is an opportunity for economic and social development along the border that encourages its conceptual and physical dismantling. Rael will illuminate the transformative effects of the wall on people, animals, and the natural and built landscape through the story of people on both sides of the border who transform and creatively challenge the wall’s existence. He will also discuss his architectural studio’s counterproposals that reimagine, hyperbolize, or question the wall and its construction, cost, performance, and meaning. Rael proposes that despite the intended use of the wall, which is to keep people out and away, the wall is instead an attractor, engaging both sides in a common dialogue.

Ronald Rael is the Eva Li Memorial Chair in Architecture and Associate Professor in Architecture, the College of Environmental Design, and the Department of Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a partner in the award-winning architectural firm Rael San Fratello and CEO of Emerging Objects, a 3D Printing MAKE-tank. He is the author of Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (2017), Earth Architecture (2008), and Printing Architecture: Innovative Recipes for 3D Printing (2018).

Sponsored by the IHC’s Crossings + Boundaries series and the Sara Miller McCune and George D. McCune Endowment.

Ronald Rael: Borderwall as Architecture

This talk approaches the controversy over the killing of the gorilla Harambe in the Cincinnati Zoo in May 2016 as a unique window onto the making of animalness and blackness in the contemporary U.S.  It will explore the notion of a racial-zoological order in which the “human” is constructed simultaneously in relation to both the “black” and the “animal.”

Claire Jean Kim is Professor of Political Science and Asian American Studies at University of California, Irvine.  She is the author of Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (2000) and Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age (2015), both of which won book awards from the American Political Science Association.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Crossings + Boundaries series and the Sara Miller McCune and George D. McCune Endowment.

Claire Jean Kim: Murder and Mattering in Harambe's House

The IHC’s mission is to advance knowledge about human experience in cultural, historical, and social contexts and to do so through programs that foster human agency, social connectivity, and civic empowerment.

IHC events include lectures, seminars and conferences organized by IHC research focus groups and sub-units as well as events co-sponsored with campus departments. In addition, the IHC mounts year-long public programs on themes suggested by UCSB faculty and graduate students.

IHC UCSB

Pinned to spotlight

Popular tracks