By Denise Shapiro
Exciting news this June is coming from UC Santa Barbara’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.
For starters, 13 Graduate Teaching Fellows are wrapping up this year’s courses in Foundations in the Humanities prison correspondence program. In this IHC initiative, incarcerated individuals engage in a correspondence in literary studies with graduate student mentors. It has over 150 participants in California prisons. The program gives participants the opportunity to continue their education and stimulate their intellectual capabilities, while giving the graduate students the chance to reflect on their education privileges.
The IHC will also be busy this summer hosting student veterans from across the UC system in the 2022 UC Student Veterans Summer Writing Workshop. This workshop is a bonding experience for veterans as they share their stories and experiences, allowing them to relate to one another and move forward in their civilian lives. Narrative writing can act as a form of therapy and this program acts as a writing retreat where like-minded people can reflect, relate, and restore their souls.
Finally, a big congratulations goes out to the winners of the 2022-23 IHC Dissertation Fellowship competition. The following Fellows will be awarded $7,000 to support their research in the upcoming school year:
Christopher Erdman, Classics: “Voting Culture and Political Theater in Late Republican Lawmaking.”
Addison Jensen, History: “Blowin’ in the Wind: Media, Counterculture, and the American Military in Vietnam.”
Nicky Rehnberg, History: “White Roots, Redwoods: Racializing German and U.S. Conservation, 1920-1945.”
Isabella Restrepo, Feminist Studies: “Transcarceral Care: Racialized Girlhood, Behavioral Diagnosis, and California’s Foster Care System.”
Reem Taha, Comparative Literature: “‘Of Here and Everywhere’: (Re)Mapping Mediterranean Identities at the Ibero-African Frontier.”
Denise Shapiro is UC Santa Barbara student graduating this spring with a double major in Communication and Film and Media Studies. She has has spent the past two years as a Web and Social Media Intern, with an emphasis on video journalism, for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.