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Indiana University, Bloomington professor and UC Santa Barbara alumnus Bret Rothstein delivered a recent presentation titled “The Cheat, the Spoilsport, and the Virtuoso” to UCSB history of art & architecture students and faculty, describing the role of games in 16th century European artwork.
History of Art and Architecture professor Claudia Moser and Writing Program lecturer Christian Thomas have received a $94,000 grant from UC Santa Barbara’s Innovative Learning Technology Initiative (ILTI) to develop an interactive, game-based course called Rome: The Game. The lower division course, which will be available to students in winter 2021, is an introduction to the art, archaeology, and history of ancient Rome, with an emphasis on writing and research.
In a recent workshop, UC Santa Barbara English professor Jeannine DeLombard said American legal doctrine granted the status of ‘persons’ to slaves in order to prosecute them, a dynamic that lingered long after emancipation in the criminalization of African Americans.
“Slaves were recognized as criminally responsible, but not having civil rights,” DeLombard said. “And this is mapped onto African Americans today.”
During the Khmer Rouge reign of terror in Cambodia, possessing popular music was resulted in an immediate death sentence. Music archivist Nate Hun speaks to a UC Santa Barbara audience about his goal to recover and digitally restore vinyl recordings of Cambodian popular music from that lost era.
Alan Liu, a professor of English at UC Santa Barabara is a self-described digi-humanist. Liu is currently directing a $1.1 million humanities grant from the Mellon Foundation. The project, “WhatEvery1Says,” collects big data relating to the word ‘humanities.’ He also published a book last year with the University of Chicago Press titled “Friending the Past.”
Liu recently sat down for an interview to discuss the intersection between humanities and our increasingly digital environment.
At a recent two-day conference called “Disquantified: Higher Education in the Age of Metrics,” leading analyst of technology in education Phil Hill spoke about the implications of digital courseware. The goal of the conference was to discuss the use of data and technology as a way to measure the quality of higher education and to drive policy change.
UCSB writing professor Kathy Patterson shared her recent research on incorporating blogging in first-year college writing courses during the 3rd annual celebration for the Charles Bazerman Endowed Faculty Fellowship for Professional Development in Writing. As the 2018-2019 recipient of the research fellowship, Patterson discussed the benefits blogging has on a college student’s motivation, writing process, digital literacy, and connection with their community.
As part of the recent memorial of the 2014 Isla Vista shooting, gun violence expert Robyn Thomas spoke at UC Santa Barbara about the future of gun safety in the United States. “It is an absolutely devastating crisis,” Thomas said. “But we have momentum on our side.”
Thomas is the executive director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence and her talk was hosted by the Walter Capps Center for Ethics, Religion, and Public Life.
Booklets, musicals, websites, essays and short stories were just some of the creative mediums produced and presented by students at the Raab Writing Fellows Showcase last week at the Mosher Alumni House. For the third year in a row, the program has allowed students to embrace their passions and explore their topic of interest through year-long research under the mentorship of faculty members in the Writing Program. The program is generously funded by UCSB Trustee Diana Raab, an award-winning author and poet, and advocate for personal writing as a source of healing and empowerment.
Hosted by the Carsey-Wolf Center and the Religious Studies department at UC Santa Barbara, Brown University modern culture and media professor Regina Longo screened and spoke about her film “Shoah: Four Sisters” at an event recently at the Pollock Theatre.
“These films are points of confluence, death of family members and harshness of ghettos or concentration camps,” she told an audience of a campus and community members.
“It comes from the premise that we need a comparative frame for understanding cities in much of the world,” said professor Chattopadhyay in UCSB’s History of Art and Architecture department. In a recent talk, Chattopadhyay addressed the challenges of documenting temporary structures specifically in Kolkata, the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal, where structures are built for their annual Hindu religious festival called Durgapuja.
Film and Media Studies major Katelyn Zamudio recently produced Playdolls, a documentary that looks at the issue of human trafficking from different perspectives. In a recent interview, Zamudio discusses her experience bringing this issue to light in an empathetic way.
It’s a “dystopian fiction tragi-comedy set in 2050” that explores “our desire of a technological utopia that is supported by human greed and inevitable climate change,” said Maiza Hixon, a graduating Master of Fine Arts student.
Hixon recently held a reading of her first written play Chimera at the Art, Design and Architecture Museum in conjunction with the opening of the 2019 MFA thesis exhibition Temporary Clash.
In celebration of the 2019 Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibition, Temporary Clash, The Art, Design, & Architecture Museum held a Friday evening reception in conjunction with the Art Department. Students, faculty, and community members admired the works of the eight featured artists—Maiza Hixson, Madeleine Eve Ignon, Adam Jahnke, Kayla Mattes, Elisa Ortega Montilla, Andrew Morrison, Echo Theohar, and Christopher Anthony Velasco. Temporary Clash highlights the M.F.A. students’ strikingly diverse styles, mediums, and messages, while collectively portraying the human experience.
Visiting poet Tyree Daye says his process for exposing reality in a poem is more fantastical and imaginative than literal. “Imagination. Magic all day long,” Daye told a recent gathering of UC Santa Barbara students interested in poetry, or aspiring to be poets themselves. Daye recited selections of his work at the 2019 annual event to honor the Diana and Simon Raab Writer in Residence.
UC Santa Barbara alum Brian Yaeger is the author of Red, White, and Brew: An American Beer Odyssey and Oregon Breweries. But before he became a published author, he graduated from UCSB in 1996 with a Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies. He has now returned to his alma mater to teach a course about beer through UCSB’s Department of Recreation.
On Thursday evening, UCSB alumnus and artist John Nava returned to his alma mater to discuss his creative evolution with students, staff, and community members at the Art, Design, and Architecture Museum. Nava channels his fascination with the fine details of the human figure into his work and credits his UCSB art education as the catalyst that led him to discover his artistic voice.
Writing Program lecturer Robert Krut’s newest book, The Now Dark Sky, Setting Us All on Fire, has been awarded the Codhill Poetry Award by the Codhill Press. The award is given to the poet whose work stood out as the best of the year among all other submitted poetry. “It is always a nice feeling to know that someone appreciated what you’ve written,” Krut said.
“Any excessive emotion, that’s where it comes in, because you got nothing but emotion to the rest of the aria,” said mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade, one of the music world’s most beloved figures, mentoring students at a recent UCSB Department of Music’s “Guest Artist Masterclass.” Students Kelly Guerra, Byron Mayes and others brought their best work for von Stade to critique.
UCSB Writing Program lecturer Ellen O’Connell Whittet examines the art and tradition of ballet, with the critical eye of a writer and the perspective of a former ballerina. In this interview, she discusses her experience as a dancer and her memoir, which explores the intersection of feminism and ballet.
