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Alisha Wormsley, who teaches at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg, is known for her film and sound installation projects, which she discussed as part of the UCSB’s Art Colloquium, that runs for 10 weeks. Over 200 faculty members and students tuned in to the Zoom lecture to hear how she uses art to create a creative space for Black women.
Professor JoAnn Kuchera-Morin is a composer and chief scientist of UC Santa Barbara’s revolutionary data visualization tool the AlloSphere. There Kuchera-Morin realized that the future of scientific research is having STEM fields collaborate with artists and composers.
Dancer and scholar, Kiri Avelar of Ballet Hispanico, presented her talk, Descubriendo Latinx: The Hidden Text in American Modern Dance, to a UC Santa Barbara audience as part of the Colloquia in Dance series. In her lecture she discussed how the pioneers of early American modern dance pulled from Latinx cultural artistic practices to create the modern dance techniques that are prevalent today.
UCSB sociology and feminist studies professor France Winddance Twine joined UCSB’s Film and Media Studies to present her 2019 research called “Silicon Valley’s Caste System: Race, Class and All Women Coding Boot Camps.” Twine’s research explores how ‘inequality regimes’ such as certain hiring processes contribute to the absence of Black women employees in Silicon Valley technology firms.
Utathya Chattopadhyaya, an assistant professor of History at UC Santa Barbara, last week spoke about his research on “Cannabis in South Asia” during the last installment of an Asian American Studies Collective series hosted by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.
A photographic record of roadside signage has put UC Santa Barbara art professor Alex Lukas in the company of artists who have responded to COVID-19 by visually interpreting this moment in time.
Published in The Boston Art Review’s winter 2021 edition, Lukas’ latest project “Stay Safe, Stay Home: Road Text in a Time of Contagion,” documents the emergence and progression of pandemic-related highway signs, capturing their language and appearance.
This spring, UC Santa Barbara is launching the Center for the Study of Ancient Fiction – the first scholarly center of its kind in North America.
Its goal is to foster collaborative research and interdisciplinary connections about prose fiction that dates from the earliest written literature to the modern era. Until now, scholarship in this field has come primarily from Europe.
Although 900,000 of the men in U.S prisons are white, incarceration is treated as a Black problem, says Chicago-based sociologist and criminologist Reuben Jonathan Miller. Society still conflates blackness with criminality, Miller told a UC Santa Barbara audience recently. Miller was hosted by UCSB’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center to discuss his research into incarcerated people and their families, in a recent Zoom webinar.
Since earning her Ph.D. in History at UC Santa Barbara in 2015, Jefferson has set out to uncover erased moments of African American history. Currently a scholar in residence at Occidental College, she has collaborated with artists, scholars, and institutions to produce educational programming, exhibits, and publications that are dedicated to sharing the African American experience with a wide audience.
Classics departments often struggle against the perception that they are stuck in the past. Focusing on ancient stories has nothing to do with us today, right? Visiting professor Stephen Trzaskoma argues otherwise, and his efforts are among the many ways UCSB Classics is engaging with contemporary life.
American journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winner Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of our Discontents has received global praise and became a New York Times best-seller last year. But it has been met with harsh criticism from some in academia. As part of its “Tertulia” series, the Latin American and Iberian Studies (LAIS) department hosted a live Zoom event in which UC Santa Barbara faculty had the opportunity to give their own critique of Wilkerson’s work.
History professor Hillary N. Green, of the University of Alabama, spoke at a UC-Santa Barbara History department event, to describe how she is bringing her university’s long-hidden history of slavery back into the school’s attention with her “Hallowed Grounds” campus tour.
The Sent-Down Youth Movement was a defining period in China’s Cultural Revolution. From 1968 to 1980, nearly 17 million urban students were forcibly relocated to rural Chinese villages in an organized effort to bridge the gap between China’s rural and urban populations. UC Santa Barbara Asian American Studies professor Xiaojian Zhao presented a talk on this movement called Crime and Punishment: Revisiting the Sent-Down Youth Movement in Mao’s China, to a UCSB virtual audience.
UCSB’s Carsey-Wolf Center hosted a virtual roundtable discussion titled Television in the Age of Pandemic about the changing landscape of entertainment in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and the political tensions in 2020. The panel included media experts from UC Irvine, CUNY Staten Island, Cornell, and University of Alabama.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an NYU professor of History and Italian Studies talked about her new book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present at a webinar hosted by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center last week. Ben-Ghiat discussed the content of her book, that analyzes who authoritarian leaders from Mussolini to Donald Trump gain power and maintain power.
Director of the Getty Research Institute, Mary Miller virtually visited UCSB to speak about new insights she has gained by studying 8th-century Maya figurines. In her talk, she shared images of exquisite sculptures that revealed a complex and little-known side of Maya civilization that likely included slavery.
With the coronavirus pandemic still in full swing, the 2021 Reel Loud Film and Arts Festival is reimagining its existence outside of UC Santa Barbara’s Campbell Hall, its home for the past 30 years.
Vidhisha Mahesh, producer for Reel Loud, and director Jeffrey Peepgrass, are working to adapt this year’s festival to the pandemic, and carry on the festival’s legacy of fostering collaboration among the arts through video and socially-distanced activities.
Swarthmore College anthropologist Sa’ed Atshan discussed LGBTQ movements across the Middle East and North Africa region in a virtual talk sponsored by UC Santa Barbara’s Center for Middle East Studies. Atshan focused on the story of late Egyptian activist Sarah Hegazi and said hope is necessary for social change.
Journalist Tristan Ahtone and historian Robert Lee presented their research into stolen and underpaid indigenous lands that were granted to universities as real estate speculation to raise money. The event “Land-Grab Universiites” was co-hosted by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center (IHC) and the IHC’s American Indian and Indigenous Collective Research Focus Group.
Smith College historian Marnie Anderson joined UCSB’s East Asia Center in a follow-up to discuss her virtual talk, “Starting Over in Meiji Japan: The Lives of a Former Samurai and his Ex-Concubine.” Anderson recounts how two reform-minded individuals were offered the opportunity to create new identities with the rise of the Meiji era in Japan.
