After a trial run back in 2017, the Media Arts and Technology (MAT) graduate program at UC Santa Barbara officially established undergraduate courses for the first time this academic year.
The series of courses, titled Mediated Worlds, are led by MAT graduate professor Marcos Novak, a virtual architect and the founder and director of the department’s transLAB research facility, which investigates how technology affects virtual space in art and science.
In a recent virtual interview, Novak discussed the new undergraduate courses and the importance of cross-disciplinary connections to frame knowledge.
Asian Americans have made recent gains in the realm of popular culture at the same time as hate crimes are on the rise, Sameer Pandya and Lisa Sun-Hee Park of UCSB’s Asian American Studies Department told an audience. As Asian Americans become more visible, they also become more vulnerable to violence, especially since the COVID-19 outbreak, they said during their talk: What We Talk About When We Talk About Anti-Asian Violence. The discussion was part of the virtual All Gaucho Reunion, which invited both current and former UCSB students to join in communal discourse.
Marco Caracciolo is an author and associate professor of English and literary theory at Ghent University in Belgium. Together with UCSB’s Sustainability and the New Human research focus group he discussed his current book project, Contemporary Fiction and Climate Uncertainty at a virtual event hosted by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.
William Chavez, a doctoral candidate in Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara, has studied exorcism, dark fantasy and science fiction. Currently an Engaging Humanities Graduate Fellow at UCSB, he has been exploring terrorism’s links to nihilism – an absence of morals, values or beliefs - and how both are incorporated into the Joker, a fictional supervillain created in the 1940s for the comic book Batman.
UCSB Writing and Literature student Via Bleidner has her first book coming out on August 10, 2021. The book is a collection of short stories and personal essays detailing her life growing up in Calabasas. Bleidner recently sat down for an interview to discuss her journey to becoming a published student author.
Texas A&M University health and kinesiology professor Idethia S. Harvey gave a lecture to UCSB’s Center for Black Studies Research called “Diabetes is a Struggle.”
In this talk, Harvey said the high rate of Type 2 diabetes among rural black Americans can be traced to “stressors” faced by this community such as poverty, substance abuse issues, and food deserts.
Each of us can take meaningful steps to lower our carbon footprint and help the planet, Humanities and Fine Arts faculty members told a UC Santa Barbara audience at HFA Speaks: An Earth Day Agenda. English professor Ken Hiltner and Film and Media Studies professor Alenda Chang shared their vast knowledge and interdisciplinary insights with students to honor Earth Day.
UC Berkeley electrical engineering and computer science professor Hany Farid and founder of Stanford’s Computational Policy Lab Sharad Goel spoke with UCSB students last week about the accuracy, fairness, and limits of the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in the sphere of criminal justice.
UCSB's Carsey-Wolf Center hosted experts from the University of Michigan and the University of Texas, Austin to discuss the groundbreaking 1983 film "El Norte," which was recently restored. They said the film catalyzed immigration reform activism in the United States.
Alisha Wormsley, who teaches at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg, is known for her film and sound installation projects, which she discussed as part of the UCSB’s Art Colloquium, that runs for 10 weeks. Over 200 faculty members and students tuned in to the Zoom lecture to hear how she uses art to create a creative space for Black women.
Professor JoAnn Kuchera-Morin is a composer and chief scientist of UC Santa Barbara’s revolutionary data visualization tool the AlloSphere. There Kuchera-Morin realized that the future of scientific research is having STEM fields collaborate with artists and composers.
Dancer and scholar, Kiri Avelar of Ballet Hispanico, presented her talk, Descubriendo Latinx: The Hidden Text in American Modern Dance, to a UC Santa Barbara audience as part of the Colloquia in Dance series. In her lecture she discussed how the pioneers of early American modern dance pulled from Latinx cultural artistic practices to create the modern dance techniques that are prevalent today.
UCSB sociology and feminist studies professor France Winddance Twine joined UCSB’s Film and Media Studies to present her 2019 research called “Silicon Valley’s Caste System: Race, Class and All Women Coding Boot Camps.” Twine’s research explores how ‘inequality regimes’ such as certain hiring processes contribute to the absence of Black women employees in Silicon Valley technology firms.
Utathya Chattopadhyaya, an assistant professor of History at UC Santa Barbara, last week spoke about his research on “Cannabis in South Asia” during the last installment of an Asian American Studies Collective series hosted by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.
A photographic record of roadside signage has put UC Santa Barbara art professor Alex Lukas in the company of artists who have responded to COVID-19 by visually interpreting this moment in time.
Published in The Boston Art Review’s winter 2021 edition, Lukas’ latest project “Stay Safe, Stay Home: Road Text in a Time of Contagion,” documents the emergence and progression of pandemic-related highway signs, capturing their language and appearance.
This spring, UC Santa Barbara is launching the Center for the Study of Ancient Fiction – the first scholarly center of its kind in North America.
Its goal is to foster collaborative research and interdisciplinary connections about prose fiction that dates from the earliest written literature to the modern era. Until now, scholarship in this field has come primarily from Europe.
Although 900,000 of the men in U.S prisons are white, incarceration is treated as a Black problem, says Chicago-based sociologist and criminologist Reuben Jonathan Miller. Society still conflates blackness with criminality, Miller told a UC Santa Barbara audience recently. Miller was hosted by UCSB’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center to discuss his research into incarcerated people and their families, in a recent Zoom webinar.
Since earning her Ph.D. in History at UC Santa Barbara in 2015, Jefferson has set out to uncover erased moments of African American history. Currently a scholar in residence at Occidental College, she has collaborated with artists, scholars, and institutions to produce educational programming, exhibits, and publications that are dedicated to sharing the African American experience with a wide audience.
Classics departments often struggle against the perception that they are stuck in the past. Focusing on ancient stories has nothing to do with us today, right? Visiting professor Stephen Trzaskoma argues otherwise, and his efforts are among the many ways UCSB Classics is engaging with contemporary life.
American journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winner Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of our Discontents has received global praise and became a New York Times best-seller last year. But it has been met with harsh criticism from some in academia. As part of its “Tertulia” series, the Latin American and Iberian Studies (LAIS) department hosted a live Zoom event in which UC Santa Barbara faculty had the opportunity to give their own critique of Wilkerson’s work.
