Matthew Limb, History of Art and Architecture graduate student at UCSB, was awarded The Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in 2020. In a recent interview, Limb spoke about this fellowship and his dissertation, “'Living on the Edge': Ceramics and the Environment in the American West, 1961-2000,” which focuses on the overlap of craft production with the environmental movement within the United States.
After 60 years studying piano, UC Santa Barbara senior lecturer Charles Asche received the Lifetime Achievement Award for 2020 by the California Association of Professional Music Teachers. In a video interview, Asche expresses his gratitude for both the lifetime achievement award and for his lifetime of playing and teaching piano.
In a recent behind the scenes studio tour arranged by UC Santa Barbara’s Art, Design, and Architecture Museum, Los Angeles-based painter Sandy Rodriguez showed attendees her process for producing art from materials of the natural world. In addition, she previewed work that will be on display from January 8, 2022 until December 12, 2023 at the AD&A Museum.
The American Dream promises idealistic notions of upward mobility and economic prosperity, but is this narrative really accessible for all? In a recent Zoom event hosted by UCSB’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, English professor Swati Rana discussed her new book, “Race Characters: Ethnic Literature and the American Dream.” The event was part of the IHC Humanities Decanted series, which highlights faculty members’ new work in an online interview/dialogue format.
Due to the COVID 19 pandemic, the UCSB Dance Company had to forego its annual European tour and instead starred in its first documentary, UCSB Dance Company: In Flight and on Film. The film kicks off with a sequence of ten solo performances, each choreographed by the dancers themselves, expressing their feelings about the pandemic, followed by a group piece choreographed by company director Delilah Moseley, and three other films by guest choreographers.
Cecilia Méndez, director of the Latin American and Iberian Studies (LAIS) program at UC Santa Barbara, along with Spanish and Portuguese Professor Juan Pablo Lupi organized the second UCSB Latin American and Iberian Studies graduate student conference on the topic of Borders, Power, and Transgression last month. In an interview, Méndez said understanding the connections between power and transgression of borders is a global concern.
UC Santa Barbara graduate student Clint Terrell has been awarded a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship for his work examining themes of redemption in prison literature and narratives. After his own experience with incarceration, Terrell channeled his passion for reading classical literature in prison to obtaining a college education and further exploring narratives of prisoners. In a recent interview, Terrell described how he became inspired to pursue his Ph.D., why he chose prison narratives, and how the Ford Foundation Fellowship will impact his work and its societal reach.
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.
UCSB music associate professor David Paul is working on a new book called “After the Ball is Over: Memorializing the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Popular Media.” He explains how Americans previously viewed industrialization as positive progress whereas now, many Americans have connected industrialization to negative socioeconomic developments.
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.
