Author Luis J Rodriguez and Memoirist Kenneth Hartman spoke at the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center’s second installment in their TMI Talk series at UCSB to discuss their new book Make a Poem Cry: Creative writing from California’s Lancaster Prison. Both men having gone through the first hand experiences of incarceration, Hartman and Rodriguez spoke about their journey, advocacy, and how writing is a gift of healing and self-exploration for incarcerated individuals.
Eighteen students spent over 40 hours on two paintings during a summer course with Yumiko Glover, a visiting lecturer in UC Santa Barbara’s Art Department. But the long hours motivated them, knowing that their work would be on display in the Glass Box Gallery in the Fall. The exhibit ran for five days last week.
Experts from universities across the globe converged at UC Santa Barbara last weekend for a three-day conference—Satyajit Ray and the Sense of Wonder—to celebrate the centenary of the birth of acclaimed Indian author, graphic artist, and filmmaker Satyajit Ray. Speakers sang Ray’s praises, sharing discoveries they’ve made about his life and how he inspired them.
UC Santa Barbara’s AlloSphere hosted the premiere of “Musics Of The Spheres,” an experimental work by eclectic composer Robert Morris. His piece uses the full surround-sound capabilities of the AlloSphere to feature music from all across the globe.
UC Santa Barbara religious studies professor Juan Campo and Arabic language lecturer Magda Campo spoke last week on Jewish kosher food and Islamic halal food, and they prepared a chicken and couscous meal for a CalFresh enrollment party co-hosted by UCSB Health & Wellness, Thrive, and the Educational Opportunity Program. The event publicized the CalFresh program and UCSB’s Halal and Kosher Grocery Program for food-insecure students who observe these religions’ dietary laws.
UC Santa Barbara’s Religious Studies librarian David Gartwell explores Western esoteric traditions and their movement into publishing and modern spiritual practices in his new exhibit “Lifting the Veil.” The exhibit, created using publications from UCSB’s American Religious Collection, in now open to the public at the UCSB Library.
As part of UC Santa Barbara's Migration Initiative, the Mellon Sawyer Seminar hosted Unsettling California, a student-curated art exhibition at the Glass Box Gallery. The exhibition, which ran through September, featured 11 artists and built dialogues on race and migration in California. The project continues to display art virtually.
Wolf D. Kittler, a professor in UCSB’s department of Germanic and Slavic Studies, delivered the inaugural lecture for Interdisciplinary Humanities Center’s new series: Too Much Information, which explores the implications of our access to abundant information.
UCSB’s department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies organized a two-day internationally-attended symposium on Zoom titled “Translatability/Transmediality: Chinese Poetry In/And the World.” Hangping Xu of the East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies department and Yunte Huang of the English department organized the symposium to promote a special edition of a scholarly journal they wrote along with 10 scholars from around the world.
After two years of pandemic-related prohibitions the UC Santa Barbara Theater and Dance Program ‘s a Naked Shakes company returned indoors this fall with its production of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Performances were packed for the in-person audience experience. Director Irwin Appel discusses the show and the theater experience of recent years.
Every three months, one indigenous language goes extinct. But through the course “Language and Power,” UCSB doctorate student and Linguistics instructor Guillem Belmar Viernes imparts the importance of preserving indigenous languages to students. Viernes explained how failing to preserve indigenous languages can lead to discrimination, loss of culture, and the extinction of the language altogether.
Professor, artist, and PhD Student Masood Kamandy says his LGBTQIA+ identity inspires his artistry and drive to educate those locally and abroad in communities of Afghan heritage. He combines his passions for teaching, fine arts, and photography in his research on how to make the field of technology and computing more equitable. He creates programs and coding certificates refined for disadvantaged or minority students that otherwise would have limited access to these resources. He now teaches Javascript and Processing in the Art Department at UC Santa Barbara and Pasadena City College.
By Denise Shapiro
Exciting news this June is coming from UC Santa Barbara’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.
For starters, 13 Graduate Teaching Fellows are wrapping up this year’s courses in Foundations in the Humanities prison correspondence program. In this IHC initiative, incarcerated individuals engage in a correspondence in literary studies with graduate student mentors. It has over 150 participants in California prisons. The program gives participants the opportunity to continue their education and stimulate their intellectual capabilities, while giving the graduate students the chance to reflect on their education privileges.
The IHC will also be busy this summer hosting student veterans from across the UC system in the 2022 UC Student Veterans Summer Writing Workshop. This workshop is a bonding experience for veterans as they share their stories and experiences, allowing them to relate to one another and move forward in their civilian lives. Narrative writing can act as a form of therapy and this program acts as a writing retreat where like-minded people can reflect, relate, and restore their souls.
Finally, a big congratulations goes out to the winners of the 2022-23 IHC Dissertation Fellowship competition. The following Fellows will be awarded $7,000 to support their research in the upcoming school year:
Christopher Erdman, Classics: “Voting Culture and Political Theater in Late Republican Lawmaking.”
Addison Jensen, History: “Blowin’ in the Wind: Media, Counterculture, and the American Military in Vietnam.”
Nicky Rehnberg, History: “White Roots, Redwoods: Racializing German and U.S. Conservation, 1920-1945.”
Isabella Restrepo, Feminist Studies: “Transcarceral Care: Racialized Girlhood, Behavioral Diagnosis, and California’s Foster Care System.”
Reem Taha, Comparative Literature: “‘Of Here and Everywhere’: (Re)Mapping Mediterranean Identities at the Ibero-African Frontier.”
Denise Shapiro is UC Santa Barbara student graduating this spring with a double major in Communication and Film and Media Studies. She has has spent the past two years as a Web and Social Media Intern, with an emphasis on video journalism, for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.
UC Santa Barbara student Yulim Choi has been passionate about art since childhood. English was her second language, and she found she could use art to express herself better than she could words. She followed her passions into an art-focused high school and graduates this spring with a minor in Art and major in Communication.
Ryan Greenberg’s beautiful ode to his aunt Leith Harmon discusses the optics behind cryptocurrency, family bonding during a pandemic, and shifting careers.
After attending protests in both Japan and New York, Noriko Manabe, a leading scholar in ethnomusicology at both Stanford and Temple University, noticed that Americans are much quieter in protests than Japanese people. Manabe, who was hosted by UC Santa Barbara’s Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, attributes this difference to increased police presence in Japan which forces protesters to split into smaller groups and use sound to find unity with one another.
UC Santa Barbara biopsychology major Kiana Ranjbaran devotes herself to the study of Islamic poet Rumi and holds an internship with the Rumi Education Center via the Department of Religious Studies. She says everyone can benefit from reading Rumi, who writes about the interconnectedness of humanity, the world, and the divine.
UCSB English professor Cathy Thomas focuses on the Caribbean to lift up minority perspectives in literature and show her students a community they might not be familiar with. By building a class around the festival of Carnival, Thomas introduces her students to Caribbean culture through the examination of different forms of literary and creative expression.
Determined to include the arts in the future of STEM, third year UC Santa Barbara biology student Emily Nguyen incorporated technology and science with artistic expression in UCSB’s Art , Science and Technology course. She used her creativity in a project ,The Dexcavator, and in another which has taught her how to collect data from local beaches and apply it to the science behind ocean acidification.
Developing gender-neutral vocabulary in French can be challenging due to the highly gendered nature of the language and resistance from French academics and politicians. But Jordan J Tudisco, a doctoral student in Comparative Literature and French teacher at UC Santa Barbara, looks to provide students with the inclusive vocabulary they need to express themselves. In a recent interview, Tudisco discussed their work, some of the challenges that hinder the use of inclusive language in French, and what they see for the future of inclusive vocabulary.
