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As part of UC Santa Barbara's Migration Initiative, the Mellon Sawyer Seminar hosted Unsettling California, a student-curated art exhibition at the Glass Box Gallery. The exhibition, which ran through September, featured 11 artists and built dialogues on race and migration in California. The project continues to display art virtually.
Wolf D. Kittler, a professor in UCSB’s department of Germanic and Slavic Studies, delivered the inaugural lecture for Interdisciplinary Humanities Center’s new series: Too Much Information, which explores the implications of our access to abundant information.
UCSB’s department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies organized a two-day internationally-attended symposium on Zoom titled “Translatability/Transmediality: Chinese Poetry In/And the World.” Hangping Xu of the East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies department and Yunte Huang of the English department organized the symposium to promote a special edition of a scholarly journal they wrote along with 10 scholars from around the world.
After two years of pandemic-related prohibitions the UC Santa Barbara Theater and Dance Program ‘s a Naked Shakes company returned indoors this fall with its production of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Performances were packed for the in-person audience experience. Director Irwin Appel discusses the show and the theater experience of recent years.
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.
After attending protests in both Japan and New York, Noriko Manabe, a leading scholar in ethnomusicology at both Stanford and Temple University, noticed that Americans are much quieter in protests than Japanese people. Manabe, who was hosted by UC Santa Barbara’s Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, attributes this difference to increased police presence in Japan which forces protesters to split into smaller groups and use sound to find unity with one another.
UC Santa Barbara English professor Kenneth Hiltner was recently named a 2022 recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award. As a professor of Environmental Humanities, Hiltner uses his popular Ecocriticism and climate crisis courses to educate students and the general public about environmental issues. In a recent interview, Hiltner discussed the evolution of his academic career, the human component of global climate change, and his recent award recognition.
The Raab Writing Fellows Program, sponsored by Santa Barbara writer Diana Raab, held its end of the year showcase at Mosher Alumni Hall last week. Students in the program presented their year-long research projects to students and faculty. Their projects featuring an array of academic articles, reports, memoirs, novellas, zines, and videos
Carmen Argote, a Los Angeles-based, world-renowned artist draws influence from the physical world around her. Her latest presentation at UCSB Art Department’s Visiting Artist Colloquium series describes her collection Pyramids, inspired by her walks through Lincoln Park in Los Angeles and other works, explaining what drives her creative process.
Touch is the largest organ of our body, says Felicia Davis, professor of Architectural Design at Pennsylvania State University. Davis uses computer-manipulated textiles that change in response to their environment. The textiles could provide relief for people who have a hard time expressing or understanding their own emotions. Presented by the graduate program in Media, Arts and Technology, she discussed her project in a recent seminar.
The Humanities and Fine Arts division hosted a panel of three UC Santa Barbara faculty members to discuss Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month. They said the need for a designated time to pay attention to AAPI individuals’ experiences indicates a need for societal change in America.
More than a dozen UC Santa Barbara students gave moving accounts of their COVID-19 pandemic experiences at a showcase last week that marked the close of a nonfiction narrative project that received funds from the Executive Vice Chancellor’s Office. The Pandemic Stories Creative Nonfiction Project gave each student the opportunity to collaborate with faculty and staff to creatively express the unique struggles and triumphs they faced throughout the pandemic.
The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre was one of the worst incidents of racial violence in America’s history. Yet, for decades Tulsa residents have kept silent about the event, author and historian Scott Ellsworth said at a recent event hosted by UCSB’s Humanities Center (IHC). Ellsworth told the audience that learning about the causes and consequences of the Tulsa Race Massacre is essential in helping Tulsa, and the U.S. as a whole, confront a long history of racial violence.
We tell stories to make sense of the world, and science fiction offers a way to explore complex moral dilemmas, award-winning author Ted Chiang told a UC Santa Barbara audience last week. At a recent event jointly hosted by the UCSB Library and UCSB Arts and Lectures, Chiang discussed his science fiction writing and short story collection Exhalation, which touches on themes of freewill, memory, and technology in a futuristic world. The English Department’s Melody Jue moderated.
“Toxic Seas,” a create-in event hosted earlier this month by UCSB’s Literature and the Environment Research Center, tackled ocean dumping through a creative humanities lens. Students read excerpts from Silent Spring, thinking of ways to raise awareness through mediums like poetry.
UC Santa Barbara’s annual undergraduate competition for the best short research presentation took place last week, spotlighting students who could explain their projects in three slides and under three minutes. The winner was Sriram Ramamurthy, a third-year biology-major for his work on genetic differentiation among tree species in their evolution.
The current golden age of international television offers an opportunity for more diversity on the screen, television executive Rick Rosen told a student audience at a recent Pollock Theater screening of an episode of HBO's limited series Scenes from A Marriage. It was part of the Carsey-Wolf Center’s “Global” screening series.
After a three-year hiatus, the social media storytelling project "Humans of UCSB," has made a comeback. Relaunched under the UCSB Writing Program, the project publishes student photos and interviews on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, providing a unique platform for UCSB students to share their stories.
This spring, UCSB’s Humanities and Fine Arts Division hosted a creativity contest to highlight creative student voices across the UCSB campus. Explore the second place prose entry submitted by David Gjerde.
This spring, UCSB’s Humanities and Fine Arts Division hosted a creativity contest to highlight creative student voices across the UCSB campus. Explore the first place prose entry submitted by Claudia Lee.
