Sasha Nasir, a student in our new Journalism for Web and Social Media course, has produced a video featuring undergraduates in UC Santa Barbara's division of Humanities and Fine Arts explaining what they love about their majors - Classics, Black Studies, Film and Media Studies, and English.
UC Santa Barbara Art professor Jane Callister is a featured artist in the Thomas Fire Artists’ Recovery Exhibition, taking place at Porch Gallery in Ojai, California until March 11th. Callister is a 53-year-old professional artist who has exhibited works of paintings, drawings, and installations.
Originally from the Isle of Man, she has been a full-time faculty member of the Art Department at UC Santa Barbara for more than 20 years. She donated one of her paintings, the acrylic Turmoil (2017), to the exhibition to help raise funds to benefit local artists who were victims of the fire.
“The story of American Jews is one of Americanization in linear and progressive terms…I want to present another way of understanding it, through the prism of revolution, of conflict and utopianism,” said Tony Michaels, PhD., a religious studies professor from University of Wisconsin-Madison, in a recent address in UC Santa Barbara.
Michaels has dedicated his career to researching the Jewish story in America and was presenting his new research for the first time as a guest of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center’s Taubman symposia in Jewish Studies.
In this edition of the Cool Courses series, we asked students of a variety of majors, such as Film and Media Studies, Art, and English, within the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts to describe their most memorable class experiences.
Bestselling author Sarah Vowell credited Lincoln’s “magnanimous” personality and “reason” for his ultimate success in passing the Emancipation Proclamation that ended slavery, and said his respect for democratic institutions was crucial.
“If we die, we die by suicide, because we stop adhering to our constitution and the rule of law,” said Vowell, summarizing Lincoln’s message in his 1838 address in Springfield Illinois. Vowell wrote 2005’s Assassination Vacation, in which she traveled the country visiting site related to assassinated presidents.
When English professor Jeremy Douglass was first asked by Humanities and Fine Arts Dean John Majewski to head up a new wall-less collaborative space on campus, he wasn’t quite sure what to expect.
“The vision was that the former arts library space (Music 1410) would become a campus center for public experiments in innovative research and teaching,” Douglass explained. “The initial focus on digital humanities expanded to embrace the arts as well, with Prof. Laurel Beckman proposing the name ‘DAHC’ – Digital Arts & Humanities Commons.”
“I know that it’s not very practical to be a performer. That’s a hard life because you’re just gigging all the time,” UCSB senior Claire Garvais said as she sat at a Starbucks at UC Santa Barbara. “I never wanted that for myself, but I also wanted to stay in music.”
Garvais recently declared a double major in Global Studies and Music Studies. Though it may seem unlikely for a musician, she majored in economics her freshman year then switched her major to global studies only to realize by junior year that she wanted to participate more fully in the university’s music scene.
“There’s no one else in my family that does music. I’m the only one,” said Garvais, who picked up her first instrument in elementary school. “I’ve always been in music.”
Jon Nathan is the director of the UCSB jazz and percussion ensembles and has taught jazz performance for over 20 years. He has performed in a variety of music groups and collaborations, from concerts to musical theater and wants to see more students joining his ensembles. Becoming a member of the jazz ensemble provides opportunities for people with a range of musical abilities -- and students can join regardless of major. These ensembles perform both on-campus and off-campus in Isla Vista.
Art therapy is not intended to train artists, but to instead make them happy, says Suzanne Hudson, an art history scholar at University of Southern California.
Hudson discussed the advent of art therapy and the role of television’s Bob Ross at UC Santa Barbara’s History of Art and Architecture winter lecture series. She is currently completing the research for her next book, Better For the Making: Art Therapy Process.
UC Santa Barbara students were met with standing ovations and enthusiastic cheers of appreciation when they performed Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro). The comedic opera showcased the talents of many of the Voice Program’s top graduate students.
"When Japanese music composer, Kojiro Umezaki came to UC Santa Barbara to perform the ‘shakuhachi,’ a traditional Japanese wind instrument, I experienced insights that stayed with me through the following days. He told us the story of the instrument, which has been used by Zen Buddhists since the 15th century to enhance their practice of emptying the mind and focusing on one sound as opposed to many."
— Film and Media Studies student Austin Bernales
Award-winning author and freelance journalist Sam Quinones told a packed UCSB McCune Conference room exactly what needs to happen for America to overcome the effects of a 20-years opioid epidemic:
“We have to question the drugs that are marketed to us, demand that the government stop allowing [drug] advertisements on television, depend less on pills as solutions and depend on our grocers to stock better food,” he said.
UCSB constructed the AD&A Museum in 1959 for its art education department and now it is a fully independent gallery free to anyone who wishes to visit. The small size of the museum allows for a warm, personal ambience that can be difficult to find in the larger, more popular exhibition halls of major cities. The type of art shown in the galleries varies from photography to paintings to sculpture and even video.
When graduating from college, one can feel anxious about finding the first post-grad job in the ‘real’ world. But Film and Media alumna Isabelle Carasso’s story offers solace to those of us worrying about leaving the university. She dove head-first into a highly competitive field - the entertainment industry - and got a job as a Page at NBCUniversal.
Carasso graduated in 2016, but now lives in Los Angeles and now works on the development of television shows that are ready to be produced.
Novelist and filmmaker David Bezmozgis said his novel The Betrayers (2014) offers one “provocative” answer to the moral dilemma. “If we accept that there are sociopaths and psychopaths in this world, why would we not also accept that the opposite exists,” he asked. “That some people are good, because they are born that way? That there is a limit to how good anyone can actually be? The only way you will know is when you are tested.”
Registration for Grad Slam 2018 is open for UCSB graduate students until February 9 at gradpost.ucsb.edu/grad-slam. The slam will take place from April 9-20.
