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

Imagining California

Susan Straight | Writing Our Californias

Los Angeles Times reporter Rosanna Xia and Dr. Charles Lester, Director of UC Santa Barbara’s Ocean and Coastal Policy Center, discuss sea level rise and the challenges looming over the California coast. Xia will draw from her new book, California Against the Sea, in which deeply reported stories braid together science, policy, and the state’s social history. The conversation will explore how the decisions we make today will determine where we go tomorrow: headlong into disaster, or toward an equitable refashioning of coastal stewardship. Audience Q&A and a reception will follow.

Rosanna Xia is an environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times, where she specializes in stories about the coast and ocean. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2020 for explanatory reporting, and her work has been anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing series.

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

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Imagining California series, the IHC Idee Levitan Endowment, the UCSB Ocean and Coastal Policy Center, the Marine Science Institute, and the Environmental Studies Program

Rosanna Xia | California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline

Self Help Graphics & Art is a legacy arts organization that served on the cultural front of the Chicano Movement. Its emphasis on printmaking as an accessible medium infused with activist aims and its ability to cultivate and navigate various solidarities helped to support over fifty years of growth. This presentation by the co-editors of Self Help Graphics at Fifty looks at the multiple aesthetic styles and collaborative innovations that produced intergenerational, transnational, and cross-racial connections during the organization’s first five decades. 

Karen Mary Davalos, Professor of Chicano and Latino Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, has written two books on Chicana/o/x museums, Exhibiting Mestizaje: Mexican (American) Museums in the Diaspora (2001) and The Mexican Museum of San Francisco Papers, 1971-2006 (2010), the Silver Prize winner of the International Latino Book Award for Best Reference Book in English. Her research and teaching interests in Chicana feminist scholarship, spirituality, and art inform her award-winning book Yolanda M. López (2008). She conducted life history interviews with eighteen artists, a decade of ethnographic research in Southern California, and archival research on fifty years of Chican@/x art in Los Angeles to produce her book Chicana/o Remix: Art and Errata since the Sixties (2017). With Dr. Constance Cortez (UTRGV), she launched “Rhizomes: Mexican American Art since 1848,” a multi-component digital ecosystem that resolves the misunderstandings and invisibility of visual art by Mexican Americans. Since 2012, she has served on the board of directors of Self Help Graphics & Art.

Tatiana Reinoza is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Notre Dame. She specializes in the history of printmaking within the field of Latinx art. Her writing has appeared in the Archives of American Art Journal, Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, as well as edited volumes and exhibition catalogues such as ¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now. She has also curated exhibitions including the 2022 exhibition All My Ancestors: The Spiritual in Afro-Latinx Art, which took place at the Brandywine’s Printed Image Gallery. In 2023, she published her first book, Reclaiming the Americas:  Latinx Art and the Politics of Territory and, with Davalos, the co-edited volume Self Help Graphics at Fifty. She is currently at work on a new book project titled “Retorno: Art & Kinship in the Making of a Central American Diaspora.”

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

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

Karen Mary Davalos and Tatiana Reinoza | Self Help Graphics & Art

A dialogue between Janet Afary (Religious Studies) and Dwight Reynolds (Religious Studies) about Afary’s new book, Mollā Nasreddin: The Making of a Modern Trickster, 1906-1911. 

In the early twentieth century, a group of artists and intellectuals reinterpreted the Middle Eastern trickster figure Nasreddin in their periodical Mollā Nasreddin. They used folklore, visual art, and satire to disseminate a consciously radical and social democratic discourse on religion, gender, sexuality, and power in Transcaucasia and Iran. The periodical reached tens of thousands of people in the Muslim world, impacting the thinking of a generation.

This highly-illustrated book explores the milieu in which Mollā Nasreddin was born, the way the periodical recreated the trickster trope, and the influence of European graphic artists, especially Francisco Goya, on the journal. It focuses on the most creative period, 1906-11, when the journal reflected the social and political concerns of three major upheavals: the 1905 Russian Revolution, the 1906–1911 Iranian Constitutional Revolution, and the 1908 Young Turk Movement. Afary received the 2023 Eugenia M. Palmegiano Prize in the History of Journalism from the American Historical Association, awarded annually to the author of the most outstanding book published in English on the history of journalism. The book also received the 2023 British-Kuwait Friendship Award, given to the best scholarly work on the Middle East published in the U.K.

Janet Afary is Professor of Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara and the author of Sexual Politics in Modern Iran, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, and The Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906-11: Grassroots Democracy, Social Democracy, and the Origins of Feminism.

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

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment

Humanities Decanted

Janet Afary: Mollā Nasreddin: The Making of a Modern Trickster, 1906-1911

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

A discussion on reparations in California with panelists Daina Ramey Berry (UCSB), Tiffany Caesar (San Francisco State University), and Jovan Scott Lewis (UC Berkeley), moderated by Giuliana Perrone (UCSB). Panelists consider the history of reparations in the United States, explain why they are being considered in California, and assess the current status of plans for reparations in San Francisco as well as the state as a whole.

Daina Ramey Berry is the Michael Douglas Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts at UCSB. She is an internationally recognized scholar of the enslaved and a specialist on gender and slavery and Black women’s history in the United States. She is the award-winning author and editor of six books and numerous scholarly articles. Her most recent book, A Black Women’s History of the United States, won the 2021 Susan Koppelman Award for the Best Book in Feminist Studies, was a 2021 NAACP Finalist for Literary Non-Fiction, and received honorable mention for the 2021 Darlene Clark Hine Book Award sponsored by the Organization of American Historians.

Tiffany Caesar is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at San Francisco State University. Her research focuses on the preservation of transnational black women leaders and engagement with public history. She has participated in cultural heritage preservation initiatives in the United States and South Africa focusing on gender issues, cross-cultural youth dialogue, and social justice issues, and she is a cultural heritage ambassador for the Nelson Mandela Museum in Mthatha, South Africa. Among her recent publications is a co-authored piece entitled “Mothering Dead Bodies: Black Maternal Necropolitics” in the journal Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism. Dr. Caesar is the current commemoration chair of the SFSU 1968 Black Student Union/Third World Liberation Front Student Strike and journal chair of the 50th Anniversary of the 1973 Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival. With the Iberia African American Historical Society, she led the recent initiatives to create a historic marker for Queen Mother Moore – a founder of the modern-day reparations movement – in New Iberia, Louisiana. Dr. Caesar has also organized several public dialogues on reparations in the Bay Area.

Jovan Scott Lewis is Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley. His research is concerned with the questions of racial capitalism, underdevelopment, and radical terms of repair in the Caribbean and United States. He is the author of Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica and Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa. In 2021, he was appointed by California Governor Gavin Newsom to serve on the state’s Reparations Taskforce.

Giuliana Perrone is Associate Professor of History at UCSB and the author of Nothing More than Freedom: The Failure of Abolition in American Law.

https://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

Reparations in California

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

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. 

Utathya Chattopadhyaya, History (presentation not included)
“Ganja Matters: Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India”

Mona Damluji, Film and Media Studies
“Pipeline Cinema”

Rachael King, English
“Improving Literature: Media, Environments, and the Eighteenth-Century Improvement Debate”

ew Research in the Humanities: Presentations by the IHC’s 2023-24 Faculty Fellows

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

new single for the upcoming record release later in 2025. thanks for streaming <3 lyrics below

lyrics
you are my hot headed princess
my angelic misfit
my innocent delinquent
i love you and your shit fits
you tear my head off my clothes off
my head off, my clothes off

i am a shit fuck
a stray mutt
on most week nights i am drunk
a gambler with no luck
i love you and your lack of love for me
oh i'm evil and you're my good company
oh my angel who's lost her wings
you tear my head off my clothes off
my head off, my clothes off


Shit Fuck

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.

iNteResTInG HobBieS cLUb
follow us on socials for show details 
jules caspole- guitar/vocals
max young- drums/production
alex prichett- bass
chris wells- guitar

New tracks tagged #IHC