Center for Cultural Studies |

10/05/2011 10/05/2011

Oct. 5 Juliana Schiesari: “Rethinking Humanism: Horses, Honor and Virtue in the Italian Renaissance”

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Professor Schiesari is working on the relation between humanism and the post human by rethinking the human and non-human as they are constructed in the Italian Renaissance. Her recent publications include Beasts and Beauties: Animals, Gender and Domestication in the Italian Renaissance (Toronto, 2010) and Polymorphous Domesticities: Pets, Bodies and Desire in Four Modern Writers [...]

Location : Humanities 210

10/12/2011 10/12/2011

Oct. 12 Rei Terada: “Pasolini’s Acceptance”

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Professor Terada considers Pasolini’s turn away from Italian politics in his late prose and Salò, and the alternative models of working-through and legibility subsequently engendered in the “absence” of hope for renewal. Professor Terada’s books include Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject” (Harvard, 2001) and Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction (Harvard, [...]

Location : Humanities 210

10/19/2011 10/19/2011

Oct. 19 Eugene Switkes: “Studies of Visual Perception: A Window into Brain and Behavior”

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Scientists and humanists have found common interests in understanding correlations between neural events and complex human behavior. Over the past thirty years we have studied how aspects of human visual perception arise from neural processes that occur in the anatomical substrates of human vision. Professor Switkes discusses how understanding the brain’s recoding of spatial and [...]

Location : Humanities 210

10/26/2011 10/26/2011

Oct. 26 Gildas Hamel: “Monotheism and Empire II”

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Professor Hamel is working on a history of religious representations in Hellenistic and Roman Palestine and the notion of monotheism. He examines recent histories of monolatry and monotheism and accounts of religious mediations, asking whether monotheism is to be explained as a response to the Babylonian and Persian empires or as an episode of cultural [...]

Location : Humanities 210

11/02/2011 11/02/2011

Nov. 2 Steven McKay: “Masculinities Afloat: The Fragile Gender Projects of Filipino Migrant Sailors”

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Professor McKay examines the performance of masculinities among a group of men often considered exemplars of masculinity: merchant sailors. The talk explores their gender projects across liminal space (ocean-going ships) and in productive and reproductive spheres. Professor McKay is co-editor of the forthcoming New Routes for Diaspora Studies (Indiana) and working on Born to Sail? [...]

Location : Humanities 210

11/09/2011 11/09/2011

Nov. 9 Cary Howie: “On Transfiguration”

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Professor Howie thinks about how contemporary American poets reimagine early Christianity, using transfiguration to talk about the persistence in transformation of figures, and how poetic and theological concerns speak to gender and sexuality. His books include Claustrophilia: The Erotics of Enclosure in Medieval Literature (Palgrave, 2007) and the co-authored Sanctity and Pornography in Medieval Culture: [...]

Location : Humanities 210

11/16/2011 11/16/2011

Nov. 16 Deanna Shemek: “Digital Princess: Toward an Open-Access Online Archive of Renaissance Correspondence”

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Professor Shemek studies intersections of elite and popular culture in early modern Italy, especially among women. Her current research focuses on early modern letter writing. She is completing an edition of Isabella d’Este’s letters and a book on the broader significance of early modern women’s letters. The talk addresses plans to digitize the manuscript sources [...]

Location : Humanities 210

11/30/2011 11/30/2011

Nov. 30 Herman Gray: “At the Limit of Representation: Neoliberalism, Media and African American Visibility”

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With African Americans as the primary example, Professor Gray probes the social, intellectual, and political investment in the cultural politics of recognition and visibility in the context of neoliberalism, suggesting that with neoliberalism we have reached the limit of such investments. Looking beyond this investment in representation, recognition and visibility, he examines what other critical [...]

Location : Humanities 210

01/18/2012 01/18/2012

Jan. 18 Ann Tsing: “Critical Description After Progress”

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Professor Tsing’s current research tracks the commerce and ecology of a high-value wild mushroom to illuminate contemporary dilemmas of capitalism and multispecies life. Her in-progress Living in Ruins explores the consequences of building capitalist supply chains among cultural and biological histories of disturbance and precarious survival. Anna Tsing is a Professor of Anthropology at UCSC.