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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.
Visiting linguistics professor Tracy Conner recently spoke at the UCSB Linguistics Department’s biweekly colloquium about her impactful research on syntactical patterns of African American English (AAE). Further study of these patterns could benefit educators and prevent young AAE speakers from wrongful speech disorder diagnoses.
Los Angeles painter Salomón Huerta presented UCSB students, staff, and community members with artworks that were deeply influenced by his personal life. His paintings are on display at the Art, Design, and Architecture Museum as part of the ¡Chicanismo! collection, which was mounted in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Chicano/a Studies Department at UCSB.
UC Santa Barbara Art professor Sarah Rosalena Brady recently presented her work with the National Museum of the American Indian and Jet Propulsion Laboratory in an event sponsored by the Media Arts & Technology Department. Brady is a multi-media artist who combines computer craft like coding & 3D modeling with traditional art-forms like clay sculpting.
George Mason University historian Rosemarie Zagarri recently spoke to a UCSB audience about the ongoing demand for Electoral College system reform, especially after controversial elections. Her lecture, titled The Murky Past and Contested Future of the Electoral College, was co-sponsored by the departments of History, Political Science, Black Studies, as well as The Capps Center and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.
Jeffrey Boloten, who heads Art and Business Program at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, visited UCSB’s program in History of Art and Architecture to lecture on the booming contemporary art market and the boundaries that loosely define that art industry category.
"Green Games" is a class offered in the Film and Media Studies department that mixes environmental studies, media studies, and game design into one hands on course. For this session, the class is joined by visiting professor of architecture Janette Kim of California College of the Arts, who demonstrates her board game "Bartertown," which illustrates how climate change affects society.
Cesar Favila, a UCLA musicologist who specializes in Central America, recounted moving stories of nuns who sang in convents in Mexico in the 1600s as he shared his latest research with a UC Santa Barbara audience last week.
On Sunday, carillonist and Music Department Lecturer Wesley Arai performed a carillon recital to celebrate Storke Tower’s 50th anniversary. In an interview, Arai discussed the his experience as a carillon master. Dean John Majewski opened the event with remarks about the significance of Storke Tower and its carilion in campus history and culture.
In his presentation last week entitled Being African, Being Contemporary, UC Santa Barbara History of Art and Architecture professor Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie used both historic and contemporary images to map the journey of African art and its representations, showing its influence on the art of our world today.
The Carsey-Wolf Center opened its new “Special Effects” series this week with a screening of the 2015 post-apocalyptic action film Mad Max: Fury Road, followed by discussion that covered everything from stunts, to camera technologies, to gender politics. Wizard of Oz screens Saturday, October 5.
Second-year UC Santa Barbara student Frances Woo recently launched Um… Magazine, an online and print arts publication that aims to give marginalized communities a platform to showcase their art, writing, photography, and music.
In a recent interview, Woo discussed the creation of the magazine and her plans for its future.
In her years researching the social origins of the minimum wage in the Western world, historian, author, and professor at SUNY at Binghamton Kathryn Kish Sklar discovered that American labor pioneer Florence Kelley’s efforts in the late 19th century to protect women and children in factories led to the minimum wage in America. Sklar shared these findings in a recent UC Santa Barbara lecture hosted by the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy and the History Department.
Dartmouth anthropologist Sienna Craig discusses how a newer group of immigrants in New York, the Nepalis, are adjusting to a new way of life through khora, a pilgrimage and type of meditative practice.
Indiana University, Bloomington professor and UC Santa Barbara alumnus Bret Rothstein delivered a recent presentation titled “The Cheat, the Spoilsport, and the Virtuoso” to UCSB history of art & architecture students and faculty, describing the role of games in 16th century European artwork.
History of Art and Architecture professor Claudia Moser and Writing Program lecturer Christian Thomas have received a $94,000 grant from UC Santa Barbara’s Innovative Learning Technology Initiative (ILTI) to develop an interactive, game-based course called Rome: The Game. The lower division course, which will be available to students in winter 2021, is an introduction to the art, archaeology, and history of ancient Rome, with an emphasis on writing and research.
In a recent workshop, UC Santa Barbara English professor Jeannine DeLombard said American legal doctrine granted the status of ‘persons’ to slaves in order to prosecute them, a dynamic that lingered long after emancipation in the criminalization of African Americans.
“Slaves were recognized as criminally responsible, but not having civil rights,” DeLombard said. “And this is mapped onto African Americans today.”
During the Khmer Rouge reign of terror in Cambodia, possessing popular music was resulted in an immediate death sentence. Music archivist Nate Hun speaks to a UC Santa Barbara audience about his goal to recover and digitally restore vinyl recordings of Cambodian popular music from that lost era.
At a recent two-day conference called “Disquantified: Higher Education in the Age of Metrics,” leading analyst of technology in education Phil Hill spoke about the implications of digital courseware. The goal of the conference was to discuss the use of data and technology as a way to measure the quality of higher education and to drive policy change.
UCSB writing professor Kathy Patterson shared her recent research on incorporating blogging in first-year college writing courses during the 3rd annual celebration for the Charles Bazerman Endowed Faculty Fellowship for Professional Development in Writing. As the 2018-2019 recipient of the research fellowship, Patterson discussed the benefits blogging has on a college student’s motivation, writing process, digital literacy, and connection with their community.
