Key Passages

Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night begins with a shipwreck, a violent birth onto unknown shores that separates orphaned twins on a journey to nowhere. The turbulent sea visualizes an environment of passages–into adulthood, towards sexual identity, and in search of new attachments and communities of belonging. Twelfth Night is a play about transitions and transitioning, about passages and passing. What skills, virtues, and capacities do the twins need to find their way along the shoreline of life, and back to each other? In this lecture, scholar and dramaturg Julia Reinhard Lupton examines key passages in Twelfth Night that illuminate the navigation of life changes and social bodies at the heart of Shakespeare’s most beautiful and sonorous romantic comedy.  Audience Q&A and a reception will follow.

Julia Reinhard Lupton is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine and Interim Director of the UC Humanities Research Institute. She also co-directs the New Swan Shakespeare Center and serves as Dramaturg for the New Swan Shakespeare Festival. She is the author or co-author of five books on Shakespeare, including Shakespeare Dwelling and Thinking with Shakespeare. Her edited collections address topics such as Shakespeare and virtue, Shakespeare and hospitality, and Shakespeare and wisdom literature. A former Guggenheim fellow, she is a frequent teacher in the community. She is currently writing a book on Shakespeare and virtue.

https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/event/when-life-is-a-shipwreck/

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

Julia Lupton | When Life Is a Shipwreck: Key Passages in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night

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

March 14, 2023 marked the beginning of a new era: Chat GPT-4 was released, fundamentally changing the way humans relate to language. In this talk, Professor Park will explore the implications of this pivotal moment. She will consider AI’s impact on the production of works of fiction and on creativity more broadly. Questions to be explored include: Does AI-informed writing have the potential to supplant traditional novel writing? In what ways can AI innovate creativity? How will the proliferation of generative AI impact our understanding of the role of human agency in the creative process? Professor Park will draw from her experience as head judge of a spring 2024 AI-inclusive short story competition sponsored by UCSB’s Mellichamp Initiative in Mind and Machine Intelligence. Audience Q&A and a reception will follow.

Dr. Sowon Park is Associate Professor of English at UC Santa Barbara. She specializes in Cognitive Literary Criticism and is Director of the Center for Literature and Mind. Her current research projects include a five-year investigation on “Trauma-Informed Pedagogy” (2021- 2026) and the ongoing neuro-literary research forum on “Unconscious Memory” (https://unconsciousmemory.english.ucsb.edu/).

https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/event/inaugural-talk-ai/

Sponsored by the IHC’s Key Passages series

Sowon Park | Inaugural Lecture | AI: A New Passage to Human Creativity?

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

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

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.

Sowon Park | Inaugural Lecture | AI: A New Passage to Human Creativity?

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