UC Santa Barbara’s Carsey-Wolf Center hosted Cuban writer-director Miguel Coyula and actress Lynn Cruz to discuss their 2021 film Corazón Azul. The filmmakers spoke about the challenges they faced over the decade it took to produce the film, specifically, government censorship in Cuba.
Jaime Alves, Black Studies professor at UCSB, said that scholars should frame Blackness as a resistance to Latin American colonial narratives that have falsely asserted Blacks were fully integrated into society. This talk was part of the 21st Hispanic and Lusophone Conference, hosted annually by UCSB’s Spanish and Portuguese department.
This spring, UC Santa Barbara’s Humanities and Fine Arts Division hosted the annual creativity contest to highlight creative student voices across the UCSB campus. The following are the winning submissions in the Photography and Visual arts categories.
Jody Enders, medievalist and UCSB Distinguished Professor in the department of French and Italian Studies, recently translated two books of French farce. Enders spoke at a recent IHC Humanities Decanted event with Leo Cabrantes-Grant, a professor of Spanish and Portuguese. They discussed contemporary themes in medieval farces that resonate with a 21st-century audiences and how Enders approaches translating.
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.
Scholars from around the globe gathered last week to celebrate the 100th birthday of the late UC Santa Barbara professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Compartive Literature, Jorge de Sena. The event, a colloquium titled ““One Hundred Years of Jorge de Sena Itineraries: Portugal, Brazil, United States,” featured five keynote speakers who each provided unique insight into de Sena’s literary work and personal life.
The Spanish and Portuguese Department earlier this month presented “Verbal Kaleidoscope” the first interdisciplinary conference at UC Santa Barbara dedicated to Indigenous literatures. Several poets of the Zapotec, Mazatec, Spanish, Basque, and other language groups recited their work in what organizer Osiris Gómez described as a display of diversity.
“Verbal Kaleidoscope is a metaphor for cultural and linguistic plurality, said Gómez, a Spanish and Portuguese Ph.D. candidate. “The world, even at a community level is immensely diverse…With every swirl, movement, transition, we face new challenges and promising forms.”
Aline Ferreira, an assistant professor in the department of Spanish and Portuguese, is currently directing high-tech eye tracking equipment in UCSB’s Bilingualism, Translation, and Cognition Laboratory to observe the brain as it translates from a speaker or typist’s mother tongue to a second language and back again.
She discussed this and other projects in a recent interview with HFA student Sierrah DeBoer.