Humanities Perspectives
Special Technology Trailblazers Issue
University of California, Santa Cruz
Fall 2014
The Humaniti Letter from the Dean
Welcome back from your summer adventures! Again this year, the Humanities Division welcomes several new faculty. Look herein for profiles on our new colleagues and their work. This fall, students will be able to declare the new undergraduate major and graduate emphasis in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. During the coming year, I anticipate that the newly renamed Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics will submit a proposal for a new undergraduate major in Applied Linguistics and Multilingualism for consideration by the Academic Senate. We are honored to have Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison deliver this year’s Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics lecture. Dr. Morrison will speak to the community on the theme “Literature and the Silence of Goodness” at the Rio Theatre on October 25. (Her remarks will also be simulcast over the web and to venues on campus.) Ms. Morrison has been selected to receive this year’s Foundation Medal from the trustees of the UC Santa Cruz Foundation. This will give the Humanities a prominent profile in the annual Founders Day celebrations that evening. This year opens the celebrations of the 50th Anniversary of UCSC’s founding in 1965. Anniversaries call forth reflections on the changes and enduring values within the institution, as well as comparisons between the current context for university education and inquiry and the national and international context that inspired and provoked the shape of the founding vision for the campus. This fall begins the fifth and final year of my service as dean of Humanities. I feel honored and grateful to have been given the opportunity to lead the division during an exciting period. And I look very much forward to a smooth transition to Dean Stovall in the spring—and the beginning of a sabbatical year. It remains important that faculty, departments, and the division as a whole continue to ensure that what we do—in teaching and learning as well as in our scholarly activities—is made visible and understandable to audiences beyond the academy. To be effective in the national conversation on the “value” of higher education, the case that we make for the principles of liberal education in undergraduate education must engage the legitimate concerns of undergraduate students and their families about preparation for career paths after graduation. Graduate training in Humanities fields similarly must respond to career objectives beyond the academy. Successful cases for support of our scholarly work are grounded in the ability to describe their impacts in compelling ways. I believe that the division has made progress over the last few years in finding its voice in this regard. Thanks are particularly due to Judy Plummer, Irena Polić, and our development staff and the Dean’s Advisors for their past and future guidance and assistance in this area. I look forward to seeing you at the “Welcome Back” reception on Monday, October 6 from 4-6 pm in Humanities 2, Room 259.
Bill Ladusaw
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ies Division Letter from the Assistant Dean Making our hearts sing. On May 12, 2014, biographer Walter Isaacson delivered the 43rd annual Jefferson Lecture, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. His lecture, entitled “The Intersection of the Humanities and Sciences,” covered several topics we often refer to as digital humanities. He spoke of a new fusion of media and, what he termed, the creative arts. It is within that intersection, he said, where most creativity will occur. Within that intersection we are capable of creating new forms of expression, new tools for discourse and new formats of understanding and knowledge. Scientists, he said, take empirical facts and weave them together with theories. Humanists take empirical facts and turn them into narratives with moral and emotional meaning. Telling a story is the humanist’s way of making sense out of data. In his biography of Steve Jobs, Isaacson stated that whenever a new Apple product was launched, Jobs would stride on-stage, and the projection screen behind him would show a symbolic map of the intersection of two streets named, Liberal Arts and Technology. “It is in Apple’s DNA,” said Jobs, “that technology alone is not enough...it is technology married with the liberal arts that yields us with the results that make our hearts sing.” The massive amounts of data that can now be “mined,” visualized and mapped, and the mashing of content across multiple delivery channels present opportunities and challenges for both faculty and staff. Our division file-sharing environment supports over one hundred concurrent users. Over three terabytes of the division’s most critical data is backed-up offsite. We continue to develop expertise in digital media support, Linux hosting, digital asset management and GIS services. We are redefining our communication strategy. However, there are limits to the capacity of our skeletal technology staff. How do we support the increased expectations for IT services? Where can we collaborate? What are the priorities given our limited resources? As we continue to develop a project plan for a UC Santa Cruz Digital Humanities Research Lab/Commons, your input is important to us. The IHR Digital Humanities Research cluster is a good place to send your thoughts. What kind of tools and methods can we create that will make our hearts sing? Link to the NEH Office of Digital Humanities web site: http://www.neh.gov/divisions/odh
David Symonik
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Academic Human Resources (AHR) Staff Team Profile Anne Callahan has held a job that she enjoys for a large chunk of UC Santa Cruz’s history – 37 years, to be precise. In this profile, Anne shares highlights of her journey and reveals what she’s learned along the way. On Supervision and Management I’ve learned a lot about supervision and management over the 37 years I’ve worked here at UC Santa Cruz. Mainly I’ve learned to relax and let professionals do their thing. The work environment is more important than any need a supervisor might have for control. Making great hires is critical to the establishment and development of a team. I’ve learned to focus in on the skills required by the job. In HR/Payroll those skills include ability to communicate with and empathize with a diverse “I try to create a group of faculty and student academic employees, close attention to detail respectful and fluid work (with no expectation for perfection), background and experience in human environment based on the resources and payroll accounting, flexibility, and integrity. Judy and Helen came to the division with extensive background in payroll accounting. Joyce assumption that we are came with a background in financial aid. All three have been able to develop all taking responsibility for strong human resources experience and skills in their jobs and I consider the work to get done in them to be subject matter experts in the various employee groups that they are responsible for. The Humanities Division is very fortunate to have a our individual areas.” dedicated team of HR/Payroll professionals who keep the infrastructure of appointments and pay going without drama. I try to create a respectful and fluid work environment based on the assumption that we are all taking responsibility for the work to get done in our individual areas. We assist each other when we need backup and we have just enough staff to assure that there is adequate support to do what the division needs to have done in the area of academic personnel and payroll and to have a solid audit circle to assure integrity in the process (in other words, we have good checks and balances). On Technology in the Workplace In 1977, when I first stated working at UCSC, everything was typewritten in a very particular style (the Red Book was a binder with instructions on how to set up each type of correspondence, including style, form, the type of letter/memohead to use, what color paper to use and how many carbon copies to make on which onion skin paper color!). Correspondence was then sent off in the intercampus mail and then the “wait” began for a typewritten response. Although there were telephones, this written format was the norm (including elaborate manual filing and tracking systems) and it required a great deal of patience (e.g., waiting for a response to come via intercampus mail, etc.). The workplace and conduct of business was a lot slower in those days. An example is that we used to mail payroll forms around for signatures and somehow still meet payroll deadlines. If we were up against a deadline, people would run around the campus to collect the proper signatures before racing to the payroll office to deliver the paperwork so that the pay could be on time. Everything payroll is electronic now!
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Anne Callahan, Manager
In the early 1980’s while working in the Labor Relations Office, the desktop “dumb” monitor and email led to a speed up in communication and response times. My boss at the time was forward thinking and we had some of the first computers in administrative offices on campus. Using the UNIX vi editor (for correspondence) and UNIX mail, correspondence, quick email conversations and the ability to communicate with multiple individuals at once made business communications more efficient, more creative, and (to be honest) more fun. The evolution of office technology has been constant during my 37 years of employment (database, spreadsheet and correspondence technology, FAX, voicemail, .pdf format, web-based resources, smart phones, teleconferencing, skyping, paperless systems, etc.) and although many believe the changes are not positive, I can’t imagine the workplace without these improvements in efficiency and access. However, I am glad that I experienced those office environments of the 1970’s because if the power goes out, I would know how to get things done in a non-technological way as long as I could find a manual typewriter! On Memorable Moments Receiving the Outstanding Staff Award was probably my most treasured personal moment of my career at UC Santa Cruz. But, the memorable moments were not necessarily moments where I was performing my AHR duties. There are some special memories that stand out: Gary Lease goes down in my memory book as the dean who brought the word fun to the division. He once sponsored a staff outing at the skating rink on Seabright and Gault. The entire division staff went roller-skating, including the large and hulking dean, who was surprisingly coordinated on roller skates. We brought our kids and partners and had a blast skating to rock and roll hits and eating pizza that was ordered in. Gary would spontaneously take a group of us to the boardwalk at lunchtime to ride the Big Dipper or the bumper cars (to get out our aggression by smacking his car extra hard). He would buy a block of tickets to Shakespeare Santa Cruz plays and we would all leave work for the afternoon. He also made the office environment fun – blowing his duck calls in the early morning as he checked in with all of us and wearing his lederhosen on Halloween. Speaking of Halloween, the best one was when the entire division staff dressed as a wedding party. Bob Jorgenson and I were bride and groom. Cheryl Ridgway was the ring bearer. Kathie Kenyon was our child out of wedlock. Peggy Hathcock was the other woman. Margie Sullivan was the maid of honor. Joan Houston was the wedding guest. And, Dan Wenger was the priest who joined Bob and I in marriage by connecting two computer cables. Michael Cowan, dean at the time, observed in disbelief.
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Academic Human Resources Staff Team Profile
Judy Scarborough Analyst
Writing this little blurb has been tickling at my mind all day, though meantime my job keeps happening, lecturers’ assignments are changing, salaries for new hires are being set, phone calls are coming in regarding numerous things, and if I do it all correctly it is seamless out there to those receiving their appointment letters, and eventually their paychecks. I am not quite sure when it happened, but somewhere along the way this job became much more than a job. It is family, people working together to get a job done and caring about those we serve and each other. I spend most waking hours here with my co-workers on the AHR team, and for the most part it is smooth sailing–even as we struggle to meet deadlines and learn the ins and outs of new contracts–in large part because of our respect for and trust in each other. As the manager and head of the team, Anne sets the tone rather than controlling every move. Anne gives us space, including space enough to make an error and learn from it. As a result, I know I have grown and I have seen growth in my fellow team members. We work cooperatively, we share, we each take care of our responsibilities, and we offer a helping hand when someone is especially hard hit with demands of a looming deadline. After 16 years I gratefully can still say that I like my job, I am not bored and I still like coming to work – well, at least most days.
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Joyce Smith
Payroll/Personnel Assistant
Helen Stroud-Finley
Payroll/Personnel Assistant
The four of you have a remarkable history together spanning more than a decade. How would you describe the secret to your success as a team? There’s no secret to why we work so well together – the simple fact is that we truly are a team. We play well together, we have a lot of interesting and funny stories to tell and each of us has a strong ethic to do our work well and get the job done. Under Anne’s tutelage, I am reminded daily through her example of the importance of treating our constituents with professional kindness, support, and competence.
I believe the secret to our success would have to be communication. The practice in the AHR office is to have a weekly staff meeting where we can stop, touch bases and share our current work experiences.
You’ve undoubtedly been through a great deal of change over the course of your employment at UCSC. What do you think was the most positive change and why? Aside from some advances on the tech side of things, my physical work environment ranks way up there. My office window looks out on a magnificent redwood forest. Windy days are some of my favorite when the trees wave around like kelp in the ocean, or being greeted by a family of deer in the early morning on my way up.
Since beginning at the Registrar’s Office in 1992, I’ve also worked for the Financial Safety Services, the Santa Cruz Center for International Economics, Staff Human Resources (SHR) and the Humanities Division, so I’ve seen a lot of changes. I can’t say that any change was more positive than any of the others. Change is change and along with it comes a whole new set of learning experiences.
Tell us about a memorable moment in your career as an AHR professional in the Humanities Division. I’d have to say that having my birthday remembered and celebrated each year has been very special.
It would have to be a little over four years ago when I was offered the job I currently have here in the AHR. I originally started working in the AHR in January 2004. Cher Roberts was my supervisor and I did payroll for the Humanities staff. When SHR centralized in December of 2005, I had my choice of staying on and working in AHR for the Humanities Division, or moving to the new centralized SHR. I was torn between leaving Anne and Judy or following Cher to SHR. I opted to go to SHR. To this day, I feel so fortunate to have found my way back ‘home.’
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People on the Move Separated Deborah Claesgens
Director of Development, Humanities
“Nothing endures but change.� Greek Philosopher, Heraclitus (ca. 540-ca. 480 B.C.)
Humanities Director of Development Deborah Claesgens left UCSC to become the Executive Director of the Sequoia Park Zoo Foundation in Eureka, California. Deborah brought a high level of experience and professionalism to the Humanities Division, guiding development of general and campaign strategy for major gift solicitations. She organized the first comprehensive plan for a divisional annual giving approach that now has eight departmental or special project solicitations scheduled for 2015. She increased major gift solicitations and designed the strategy that led to the endowment of the Dizikes Teaching Award and secured gifts to reach the goal of endowing the Baumgarten Chair in Jewish Studies. For these and many more contributions we thank her and wish her the best in her new role.
Brenda Barcelo, Continuing Lecturer in Spanish Language Jerome Frisk, Continuing Lecturer in Stevenson College Forrest Robinson, Distinguished Professor of Humanities Marti Stanton, Department Manager of Interdisciplinary Studies
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Appointed Tyler Stovall
Incoming Dean of Humanities
UC Santa Cruz names Tyler Stovall new dean of Humanities By Scott Rappaport UC Santa Cruz has appointed Tyler Stovall to serve as dean of the Humanities Division, effective Spring Quarter. Stovall comes to the campus from UC Berkeley, where he was a professor of French history and dean of the Undergraduate Division of the College of Letters and Science. Prior to that, Stovall spent 13 years as a faculty member in the UC Santa Cruz Humanities Division. During his last three years at Santa Cruz, he also served as chair of the History Department and provost of Stevenson College. “The humanities are central to intellectual life in the 21st century,” said Stovall. “I am thrilled to come to UC Santa Cruz, a university known locally and globally for its pioneering contributions to humanistic education and research.”
Blanca Rodriguez
Dean’s Office Administrative Associate
Originally from Columbus, Ohio, Stovall earned his B.A. in history from Harvard University and an M.A in European history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he went on to receive a Ph.D. in Modern European/French History with a minor in Latin American Studies. He has also taught at Ohio State University and was a visiting professor at the Université de Polynésie Française in Tahiti. Stovall is the author of several books and numerous articles in the field of modern French history, specializing in transnational history, labor, colonialism, and race. His most recent books include Black France ⁄ France Noire: The History and Politics of Blackness, and Paris and the Spirit of 1919: Consumer Struggles, Transnationalism, and Revolution—both published in 2012. Stovall is also working on a new book titled Universal Nation: A Transnational History of Modern France. Stovall will succeed William A. Ladusaw, who has served as dean of humanities since September of 2010.
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UCSC to host the 4th ann Ethics
Toni Morrison to speak on “Literature and the Silence of Goodness” and also receive the UC Santa Cruz Foundation Medal UC Santa Cruz will host the fourth annual Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture on Saturday, October 25, at 4 p.m. at the Rio Theatre in Santa Cruz. The featured speaker is Toni Morrison, novelist, editor, and professor, best known for her novels Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Song of Solomon. Morrison will speak on the topic “Literature and the Silence of Goodness.” After the lecture, Morrison will be awarded the UC Santa Cruz Foundation Medal at the 2014 Founders Celebration at Cocoanut Grove for extraordinary vision, literary achievement, and commitment to social justice. Morrison studied humanities at Howard and Cornell Universities, followed by an academic career at Texas Southern University, Howard University, Yale, and Princeton. She made her debut as a novelist in 1970, soon gaining the attention of both critics and a wider audience for her epic power, unerring ear for dialogue, and poetically-charged and richly-expressive depictions of Black America. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for Beloved, the Nobel Prize in 1993, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.
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nual Peggy Downes Baskin Lecture
The Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture is a centerpiece of UC Santa Cruz’s interdisciplinary studies in ethics. The lecture promotes public and scholarly engagement with ethical questions across all fields of human endeavor. It provides an opportunity for reflection, revelation and interaction in all areas of ethical consideration and aspires to involve students, academics, professionals and community members in the exploration of ethical questions. Presented annually, the Ethics Lecture is made possible by the Peggy Downes Baskin Humanities Endowment for Interdisciplinary Ethics, a fund created in honor of Peggy Downes’s longtime interest in ethical issues across the academic spectrum. “There are so many areas in which ethical problems arise--in journalism, politics, medicine--and the endowment emphasizes the need to address these issues in a cross-disciplinary context,” said Downes. For more information, visit https://events.ucsc.edu/event/2479.
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Technology Trailblaz Associate Profe For the past several months with the assistance of Humanities Computing doyenne Angela Thalls, I have been broadening my horizons by embarking upon digitizing a variety of archival materials accumulated during the past several decades. This process began with the Faculty Instructional Technology Center (FITC )when it was located at Crown College and continued after its relocation to the redesigned, expanded McHenry Library. Since arriving at UCSC, I have devoted a considerable amount of time and effort to using multimedia material in both instructional and research contexts. This has spanned the era of slides, analog audio and videotape to our present digital formats. Almost overnight it seemed that I had an entire repository of AV matter which was quickly becoming regarded as largely obsolete. To understand how this happened, one need only be reminded of what UCSC classrooms looked like in 1988 when I came on board as a faculty member. Instructional spaces typically included media cabinets, one at the front of a room and one at the back. The forward cabinet contained a VCR for showing VHS videotapes and an audio cassette deck for playback of cassette tapes; each of these sources had either projection capability for screening or was connected to the sound system. The rear cabinet housed one, sometimes two slide projectors. At this time there was an extensive slide collection in the old McHenry Library. Slides were still being used routinely in many classrooms. This was before power point and its successors became requirements for classroom instruction or conference and board room presentations. Incidentally this was also a period when McHenry Library had a card catalog. Librarians were invariably “hands on” and “old school,” fully adept at use of print finding aids and frequently prepared to handle and help researchers locate microform sources. The upshot of the sea of change in instructional technology is that I was faced with the task of digitizing a considerable number of analog teaching tools in a relatively short time. These ranged from audiotapes recorded off air, from radio sources such as NPR, and the BBC to videotapes of many now rare television programs and hard to find films, especially a critical mass of moving pictures produced either abroad or in limited quantities in this country. The need became even more acute when I decided to begin teaching African Cinema in 2004. Starting in FITC, I began digitizing audio and video initially with a view toward ensuring that it could be utilized in the classroom. However, research materials also needed to be digitized, starting with interviews done with informants and then maps, photos and other graphics. FITC played a major role in digitizing, lectures and visual sources, such as television broadcasts, that were then copied to DVD. But FITC had limits. The sheer scale of the work that needed to be done, and the fact that it requires copying in real time, made the case for a lab within Humanities for use by divisional personnel. Since the lab opened I have been able to accomplish twice as much in half the time allotted when FITC was the only expedient.
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zer: David Anthony fessor, History In the past year I have worked on several distinct projects. Project 1: Creation of an interactive timeline on the history of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. An outgrowth of research on the social and cultural history of an African locality through successive periods of imperial occupation by Germany and Britain. This is intended as an online archive available to students of processes of historical change in Africa during imperialism, colonialism and independence—particularly those who have connections to this specific locality—as well as a dynamic teaching tool suitable for classroom instruction purposes. These include maps, vintage photographs and other graphics, aural data (traditional Kiswahili cultural materials, e.g., vernacular poetry [shairi], songs [taarab]), other visuals, film clips, etc. This project is being done in collaboration with Arnav Jhala of Computer Engineering. “Since arriving at Project 2: Digitization of media archives of AV individual first person interview and panel discussion materials, including sonic and visual broadcasts in which I was a subject, e.g. radio shows To The Best of Our Knowledge on Wisconsin Public Radio (Jim Fleming, host), RadioGram on KUSP (Eric Schoeck, host), Sunset Salon and Something Better, KSCO (Brett Taylor, host) and television appearances on local and regional public and private cable and major market TV outlets, such as Hot Talk with Saul Landau and Cal Poly Pomona.
UCSC I have devoted a considerable amount of time and effort to using multimedia material in both instructional and research contexts.”
Project 3: Recorded Public Lecture and Community presentations, including Oakes College Inaugural Core Course Lecture and Master of Ceremonies, Annual UCSC Martin Luther King Convocation. Project 4: Off air archival materials recorded from BBC via KSPB, Stevenson School; NPR, APR and PRI on KUSP-FM and KAZU-FM. BBC materials include series such as The African Ear, Heritage, Omnibus, Islam: Faith and Power, The Story of Global English, and magazines like Outlook, Meridian, and news programs like NewsHour and The World Today. KUSP materials include select recordings Fresh Air, This American Life, Afropop Worldwide, Bluestage, and Monterey Jazz Festival audio media feeds from 1990 to the present. Recently the latter has borne unexpected fruit. After contact with the curator, it became evident that my MJF recording archive contains performances the Stanford MJF digital audiovisual collection lacked. They invited me to help document and augment their holdings. Project 5: Each of these endeavors is an outgrowth of two related ongoing documentation initiatives: 1) The David H. Anthony III Papers Collection, a catalogue of multi-media professional materials, and 2) The preparation of an itinerary of curated audiovisual archives.
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Technology Trailblaz Assistant Profes Ronaldo Wilson recently completed an Artist-in Residence appointment with the Center for Art and Thought (CA+T). The CA+T is a web-based nonprofit organization that harnesses the potential of digital and new media technologies to foster dialogues between artists, scholars, and the broader public. In this feature, Ronaldo talks about his experience at CA+T – made possible in part by the Humanities Division’s faculty instructional lab – and how his students will benefit. What digital and new media technologies do you use in the Humanities Division faculty instructional lab that directly contribute to your work showcased with the CA+T? I participated as an Artist-In-Residence with the Center for Art and Thought (CA+T) from January 15– April 15, 2014. I am also happy to announce that the residency and my relationship with the organization went so well that CA+T invited me to join their Board of Directors! Of course, I accepted. As a CA+T Artist-In-Residence, one of my goals was to expand my practice in making film and video with the cameras on my Mac and iPhone, to working with a freestanding video camera. I was inspired by the work of Firelei Báez, a visual artist I met at the Headlands Center for the Arts, where we were both Artists-in-Residence in the Summer of 2013. Firelei and I collaborated on video and performance in the coastal mountains of the Marin Headlands. To see her work in action as a cinematographer, using a camera, tripod, shotgun microphone, especially, outside in various locations, was inspiring. We also produced a good amount of footage, some of which I incorporated into the earlier films in my TEAR-E-AVATAR series. After the Headlands, and upon my invitation to work with CA+T, I thought of purchasing a camera, tripod, and microphone on my own, or with my research funds, but when I was put in touch with Angela Thalls, this opened up a great array of possibilities, via using the instructional lab’s camera kits, other equipment, and professional support that would let me capture and create everything I was imagining, and more. You refer to poetry recorded on you iPhone as “soundscapes, inspired by freestyle rap and performance art.” How do you create these digital soundscapes and what was your biggest technological challenge, surprise, or discovery during the process? In many ways, recording on the iPhone, has served as a means to capture, on the spot, or often on the move, what I imagine, notes I keep, and particular observations I make in the world. I record in many different environments— restaurants, streets, bars, cafés, beaches, forests—capturing whatever strikes me as interesting, i.e., sometimes animal-song, overheard conversations, the ocean, the wind, street sounds, and traffic. I often speak, or sometimes sing over these sounds, and often mix my recordings with one another, with other improvised lectures and raps, working out larger questions, playing with language, revealing threads of stories, arguments, pushing myself to find connections, and often surprising myself by what happens to emerge.
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zer: Ronaldo Wilson ssor, Literature Perhaps the biggest surprise in making these recordings was that I did not have to be wedded to transcribing them. Although I have transcribed a couple pieces— embedding one into a talk I gave at the California Institute of Integral Studies that they would publish and that I would include in my forthcoming book, Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose, Other— I am often surprised at how I can use the “raw” recordings in live performances, and talks, video, and improvise sound pieces that begin to push me (and my audience) into thinking about the possibilities of improvisation, argument, and document. I am excited by how many different ways I can incorporate this material into live performances, lectures, installation pieces at universities, museums, and other venues around the country, (and hopefully, beyond). We understand that you’re teaching both the Poetry Senior Seminar and the Advanced Writing class this quarter. How might your work in the faculty instructional lab impact teaching and learning? I am not teaching in the fall quarter, but will teach the Advanced Poetry Workshop in the Winter, and the Senior Poetry Seminar in the Spring. In addition, this Winter, I will teach a graduate seminar on Black Poetics and Visual Culture. In this seminar, we will look at a number of artists and poets that work across digital mediums, to include Adrian Piper, Black Took Collective, Mendi and Keith Obadike, and Claudia Rankine, all of whom I hope will inspire my students’ intersecting critical and creative work, something at the heart of my own interests as an artist, scholar and teacher. I am currently thinking about how our seminar “papers” will migrate across mediums to include video, audio, and performance as a means of interpreting and analyzing the texts we explore in our class. Thinking of the Advanced Poetry Workshop and the Senior Seminar raises different but related expectations. One of the reasons I work fluidly across digital platforms is because I remain attentive to what’s around me, and I try to cultivate a constantly reflective inner life. I would argue that this comes from paying attention to language in the careful writing and study of poetry. My first goal in my poetry classes is to have students understand how to work with form and structure in language by examining the work of other writers and artists, while at the same time, learning to capture their own observations, the material of their own lives, and to use this work as vehicles for their writing. Asking students to work across mediums in these formative classes is something I am slowly incorporating into my pedagogical practices. The first step is for students to figure out how to begin to move internally; then how they externally express what they discover is up to them. In some of the Advanced Poetry Workshops, we have worked collaboratively on making film, sound recordings, and improvised performances. These performances use their poetry in ways that move beyond the page. Often, the poems themselves redirect students to their ongoing primary concerns. What’s next for you? Currently, I am working on a few upcoming performances and exhibitions, AVATAR | DIASPORA i, ii., and iii, at California Institute of Integral Studies, University of Washington, Bothell, and UC Riverside, respectively, that returns me to the CA+T films and some of the selections from my album, Off the Dome: Rants, Raps, and Meditations. I am also working on new and revised works, including a new series of “home movies,” using film footage from my mother’s Super 8 collection. Concurrently, I am finishing up a new book of poems, Lucy 72, and starting some longer prose projects.
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Eye on the IHR: Digital Humanities Research Cluster UC Santa Cruz is currently engaged in broad discussions about the role of digital technologies in research and teaching in the Humanities, Arts, and Sciences. These discussions show a clear trend towards the integration of digital technologies in many areas of scholarship across the university. Now is the right moment for faculty and graduate students to formulate a vision for Digital Humanities at UC Santa Cruz. Digital Humanities exists at the intersection between humanities research methodologies and digital technologies. Interdisciplinary by definition, Digital Humanities scholars seek to apply data-driven processes to answer humanities research questions, often drawing upon digitized monographs and serials, archival documents, and artifacts. As described by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) “practitioners in the digital humanities draw not only upon traditional writing and research skills associated with the humanities, but also upon technical skills and infrastructure.” Digital Humanities includes developing tools (such as electronic publication, textual analysis, concordance building, document encoding, geo-temporal tagging, statistical analysis, data visualization, augmented reality, interactive gaming, and 3-D printing) and using these tools for research enabling the creation of scholarly works and online resources. The Digital Humanities research cluster will inform, support, and enrich current individual Digital Humanities projects and foster new ones. Activities will include invited speakers, visits to other campus facilities, Skype meetings with directors of Digital Humanities centers at other universities, and hands-on learning opportunities for faculty and graduate students at UC Santa Cruz. Outcomes would include a sense of collective purpose and current goals for Digital Humanities at UC Santa Cruz, and a list of identified potential funding sources to achieve these goals. Faculty Principal Investigators: Alan Christy, History Deanna Shemek, Literature Elaine Sullivan, History Co-Principal Investigator: Elizabeth Cowell, University Librarian Faculty Affiliates: Pranav Anand, Linguistics Karen Bassi, Literature/Classics María Elena Díaz, History Minghui Hu, History Catherine Jones, History Daniel Selden, Literature/Classics
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Graduate Student Affiliates: Melissa Brzycki, History Keegan Finberg, Literature Xiaofei Gao, History Evan Grupsmith, History Fabiola Hanna, Film and Digital Media Noel Smyth, History Stephanie Montgomery, History Amanda Wilson Bergado, History Dustin Wright, History
Digital Humanities Research Cluster Projects Alan Christy co-directs the Center for the Study of Pacific War Memories which is developing a number of digital public history projects, including a multi-lingual digital archive of WWII memories (Eternal Flames), a transmedia exhibition on the history of U.S. bases in Okinawa (The Gail Project), and a 3D modeling project on a massive war commemoration park in Okinawa (The Cornerstone of Peace). On the web: http://cspwm.ucsc.edu
Deanna Shemek co-directs IDEA: Isabella d’Este Archive, which includes visualizations of both documents and objects for collaborative research on the European Renaissance, involving 3D and 4D renderings of historic heritage sites that are partially destroyed or depopulated. On the web: http://isabelladeste.ucsc.edu/?page_id=376
Elaine Sullivan is project coordinator for the National Endowment for the Humanities-funded Digital Karnak Project and director of the 3D Saqqara project. Her work utilizes new forms of geo-spatial mapping technologies, such as 3D modeling and GIS, to document and visualize ancient archaeological sites. On the web: http://dlib.etc.ucla.edu/projects/Karnak
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Graduate Student Profile: Eric Zyman, Linguistics Linguistics graduate student Erik Zyman spent a remarkable summer in Michoacán doing fieldwork on the grammar of P’urepecha, an indigenous language spoken primarily in that state. Being a veteran of the National Spelling Bee and the National Vocabulary Championship, it's no surprise you found your way to linguistics. Tell us about the moment when you knew linguistics was going to be your future. I got into linguistics unusually early, in middle school. My mom had read a review of Steven Pinker's Words and Rules, and she recommended it to me, suspecting I'd find it interesting. I was hooked, so I bought more linguistics books. It became clear to me that the project of mapping out and explaining the complex, subtle systems known as the grammars of the world's languages was utterly fascinating, and so it only made sense to try to make it my job to contribute to this project. What is the biggest linguistics challenge you have been faced with on your trek to receiving your doctorate? One that comes to mind is the difficulty of investigating the grammar of a language you don't speak fluently—in my case, P'urhepecha, spoken primarily in Michoacán, Mexico. I can now carry on a conversation in P'urhepecha, but I'm not fluent yet. So if I've constructed a sentence I'm predicting should be unacceptable, and a native speaker tells me it is, I have to do my best to make sure it's unacceptable for the reason I think, and not, say, because I've accidentally used the wrong verb form or subject marker. Similar considerations are relevant when I'm working on English, but not being fluent in the language at hand adds another layer of challengingness. You have recently taken your research to the island of Janitzio to further understand how P'urhepecha grammar works and the ways in which the rules and principles of syntax and semantics varies across languages. How is your experience different from what you expected? I'm not sure exactly what I expected, but I found some intriguing differences between Lake Pátzcuaro P'urhepecha (LPP) and other languages. LPP, like many languages, allows the equivalent of Tom wants that his wife be happy; but it also allows the subject of the subordinate clause to ascend past that into the main clause, becoming its object: Tom wants his wife that be happy. In LPP you can say Intsïmpeaskani iamindu(eechani) achaatichani katsïkueechani 'I gave all the men hats as a gift'; in English all and the men can be reversed, but not in LPP. These observations raise the question, What are the fundamental grammatical differences between P'urhepecha and, say, English that cause these syntactic phenomena to behave differently in the two languages? What is the one thing linguistics has taught you that you didn't expect to learn? When I was ten, I probably would have told you that you could learn everything there was to know about grammar just by reading a good thick grammar book. The reality, which is very different, amazes me to this day: there are whole universes of intricate grammatical phenomena, even in English, that aren't mentioned in any ordinary grammar book—many of them undoubtedly still undiscovered. Is there anything you'd like to add? I'd like to thank Antonio Reyes Justo, Marimar Guzmán López, María de la Luz Séptimo Gabriel, and César Guzmán Domínguez of Janitzio—and Javier Mellápeti Cuiriz, who I've been in touch with online—for the warmth and hospitality they've shown me and for their judgments on and observations about P'urhepecha sentences. I'd also like to gratefully acknowledge the financial support I've received from the Institute for Humanities Research (a Summer Research Fellowship) and the National Science Foundation (a Graduate Research Fellowship).
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Undergraduate Student Profile: Hana Rothstein, History Congratulations to History major Hana Rothstein, recipient of the 2014 Haas/Koshland Memorial Award. The grant, which is given annually by the descendants of Walter A. Haas, Sr. and Daniel E. Koshland, Sr., funds a year of study and personal development in Israel. In this profile, Hana reflects on her experiences as a Jewish Korean American with one foot in Santa Cruz and the other foot in Tel Aviv. At what moment did you tell yourself, “Yes, I want to apply for the Haas/ Koshland Memorial Award?” The amazing staff at UCSC’s Hillel referred me to the Haas/Koshland Memorial Award. As soon as I read the application, I knew I wanted to apply. You identify as being a Jewish Korean American woman, and mentioned in an article (The Daily Kibitzer, May 30, 2014) that you have “recently felt a surge in my connection to Judaism.” How has your experience thus far as a student at UCSC minoring in Jewish Studies played a role in self-discovery? I transferred to UCSC in autumn 2013; during my first quarter, I took a course out of pure curiosity on Jewish literature and culture with Professor Baumgarten. Professor Baumgarten’s selection of literature and poetry were mesmerizing and made feel as if I was learning about myself. I was influenced to start researching my family’s shtetl, routes, and also Asian Jewish histories. I have found the Jewish Studies department to be incredibly special, and I am very grateful for Professors Baumgarten, Daccarett, and Thompson whom I have studied under. How do you foresee this experience affecting your daily life upon your return to the states? I have been living in Tel Aviv for a month, and the serenity of Santa Cruz has been replaced by a jolt of Middle East reality. My daily life here is intensely emotional, perplexing, and yet vibrant. The unfolding events have inspired questioning of every and all things. Upon my return to California, I am sure the sounds of air raid sirens and running to bomb shelters will have left their mark. I will still be thinking about American privilege, nonviolent creative ways to protest and provoke dialogue, the power of being kind, standing up and speaking out, and never forgetting the feelings of war. As this is only the beginning of my time in Israel, I can only imagine how I will reflect on these experiences in the coming year. Is there anything you’d like to add? I am creating a series of photographs on my experiences in Israel: underground Tel Aviv, Palestinian/ Jewish anti-war parties, friends’ moshavim and kibbutzim, volunteering at the African Refugee Development Center, and Asian communities. I hope to share this series to offer examples of the often overlooked perspectives. Lastly, to prevent one sided views, I want to encourage students to read a variety of news sources, and histories, talk to as many Israelis and Palestinians on their opinions, and perhaps even take a class.
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New Faculty Profiles LANGUAGES Mark Amengual, Assistant Professor Spanish Applied Linguistics Mark Amengual received his Ph.D. in Hispanic Linguistics from the University of Texas, at Austin in 2013. Since then, he has been an assistant professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. Amengual’s research focuses on phonetic transfer and interference between languages spoken by bilinguals (of various Spanish varieties). Amengual has a strong record of scholarship and publications, including a chapter in an edited volume on Intonational Cues in the Perception of Invitation and Information-Seeking Yes/No Questions by Mexican and Castilian Spanish Speakers, and a forthcoming book chapter on the effects of sounds in contact in Dominican Spanish. His research and teaching interests include Language Contact and Bilingualism, Experimental Phonology and Phonetics, Second Language Acquisition and Applied Linguistics, Language Variation and Change, Hispanic Linguistics, and Romance Linguistics. LITERATURE Martin Devecka, Assistant Professor Ancient Comparative Mediterranean Studies Martin Devecka received his Ph.D. in Classical and Comparative Literature from Yale University in 2012. He has been a visiting lecturer at Brown University and is presently a Mellon Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University (through 2015). Devecka’s dissertation, titled “Athens, Rome and Tenochtitlan: A Historical Sociology of Ruins,” is being revised for publication with the title “Disassembled Cities: The Historical Sociology of Ruins” and is currently under submission at the University of California Press. Devecka’s research is clustered around three areas: the cultural history of ruins, ancient zoology, and the interrelations of early Christianity and Islam. He works in Classics, Material Culture Studies, Animal Studies, and phenomenology of ancient remains. His work is characterized by a sustained commitment to literary analysis as the basis for exploring and comparing the cultures of ancient Greece, Rome, and early Islam.
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LITERATURE Camilo Gómez-Rivas, Assistant Professor Medieval/Early Modern Mediterranean Studies Camilo Gómez-Rivas received his Ph.D. in Medieval Studies from Yale University in 2009, with Classical Arabic literature as one of his fields. From 2007 to 2009 he was a Lausanne Pre-Doctoral Fellow in Religious Studies at the Willamette University in Oregon. Since then, he has been an Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern History in the Department of Arab and Islamic Civilizations at the American University in Cairo, where he currently heads the History Unit. Gómez-Rivas is also the founding director of the Spain-North Africa Project (SNAP), a scholarly initiative that seeks to bridge the study of the Iberian Peninsula and Maghrib. Gómez-Rivas, a specialist on the Islamic western Mediterranean, c. 1000 to 1640, has highly original and paradigm-changing work challenging the double marginalization of the “Far Maghrib” both in Islamic and western historiography. He will also bring a new Religious Studies component to the Literature curriculum in courses such as Islamic Civilizations and Comparative Mysticisms. PHILOSOPHY Janette Dinishak, Assistant Professor Janette Dinishak received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Toronto in 2008. She has been a visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at UC Santa Cruz since July 2012. Her areas of specialization are Philosophy of Psychology and Wittgenstein. Her areas of competency are Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Science, History of Psychology, Ethics, and Disability Studies. Dinishak’s research lies primarily at the intersection of philosophy of psychology, philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. Much of her work focuses, in one way or another, on a central feature of many forms of perception, often referred to as ‘aspect perception’. Sustained reflection on this phenomenon is of importance for a wide variety of philosophical topics, including (but not limited to) the very nature of cognition, methodology in psychology and philosophy of mind, and autism.
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New Faculty Profiles PHILOSOPHY Samantha Matherne, Assistant Professor Samantha Matherne received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from UC Riverside in 2013. She comes to UC Santa Cruz from an Assistant Professorship at the University of British Columbia in the Department of Philosophy. Her areas of specialization are Kant, 20th Century European Philosophy, and Aesthetics. Her areas of competency are Early Modern Philosophy, 19th Century Philosophy, Philosophy of Perception, and Ethics. Matherne’s dissertation title is “Art in Perception: Making Perception Aesthetic Again.” She has a book contract with Routledge to write an introductory volume on Ernst Cassirer for the Routledge Philosophers Series. She is interested in how philosophers in these traditions approach questions in Philosophy of Perception and Aesthetics. Matherne already has extensive teaching experience and is able to teach courses in Early Modern Philosophy, 19th Century Philosophy, and Ethics.
PHILOSOPHY Nico Orlandi, Assistant Professor Nico Orlandi received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2007. She has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rice University since then. Her areas of specialization are Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Psychology, and Cognitive Science. Her areas of competence are Epistemology, Philosophy of Language, and Wittgenstein. The main thrust of Orlandi’s research concerns the proper framework for explaining vision, in this context, confronting basic issues about how to understand the mind. Her book, The Innocent Eye: Why Vision is not a Cognitive Process, is in press with Oxford University Press. This work is devoted to spelling out the sense in which talk of interpretation in perception is misguided.
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WRITING Tonya Ritola, Security of Employment (SOE) Lecturer Tonya Ritola received her Ph.D. in English, with a concentration in Rhetoric and Composition, from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2011. She comes to UCSC from Georgia Gwinnett College where she served as an Assistant Professor of English, Writing, and Rhetoric. Her experience includes teaching a wide range of Composition and Rhetoric courses, the founding and coordination of the Peer Tutor Program, and the participation in a project funded by the Bill Gates Foundation to redesign developmental English. Ritola’s dissertation research situates the tasks of writing program design and administration within a study of “institutional narratives” and the relations among disciplinary rhetorics. Ritola is professionally engaged in the field of writing pedagogy, and has delivered a variety of papers at professional conferences.
WRITING Kimberly Helmer, Security of Employment (SOE) Lecturer Kimberly Helmer received her Ph.D. in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT) from the University of Arizona in 2007. After completing an M.A. from the Monterey Institute of International Studies’ distinguished program in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), she returned to graduate school to complete her Ph.D. She comes to UCSC from John Jay College of the City University of New York (CUNY), a Hispanic-serving institution where she was recently promoted to a tenured Associate Professorship. Helmer’s area of research is second language acquisition, linguistic anthropology, and education. She is also well versed in the strategies of instructional technology and program assessment. Much of her work is focused on Mexican-origin and Spanish-language education. She has earned two distinguished teaching awards at John Jay College and the University of Arizona.
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New Bachelor of Arts in Criti
UCSC to offer new B.A. degree in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies By Scott Rappaport Beginning this fall, students at UC Santa Cruz can now declare a major in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES), leading to a new bachelor of arts degree. Administered by the Humanities Division, the curriculum for the major will draw from the campus's Anthropology, Education, Feminist Studies, History, Film and Digital Media, Literature, History of Art and Visual Culture, Latin American and Latino Studies, Psychology, and Sociology Departments. "The program will build on long traditions of faculty work and student engagement with a critical and inclusive approach to studies of race and ethnicity," noted William Ladusaw, UCSC Dean of Humanities. "The new major will bring a distinctive transnational, comparative perspective to interdisciplinary work in these areas." The CRES major is designed to help students develop a deep understanding of how race and other modalities of power have structured human life, both in the past and the present. The major in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies will offer students the opportunity to study the dynamic power relations resulting from the cultural and institutional productions of the idea of "race" on a local, national, and global scale. As participants in an interdisciplinary course of study, CRES majors will critically examine methods and concepts from different academic disciplines as a means of better understanding historical and contemporary social phenomena and problems. In the process, they will learn to recognize both the limits and the value of established educational practices as they develop their own, innovative approaches to studying race and ethnicity. "Establishment of the CRES major and a graduate emphasis will provide a focal point for research and teaching in these areas," Ladusaw added. "I congratulate the faculty and students on an effective collaboration that has brought the program into reality." For more information, visit cres.ucsc.edu.
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ical Racial and Ethnic Studies
CRES staff members stand ready to welcome students this fall. From left to right: Anne Spalliero, Graduate Program Coordinator and Advisor Melanie Wylie, Undergraduate Coordinator Juliana Bruno, Interdisciplinary Department Manager
Statement by the program director, Vilashini Cooppan:
The new undergraduate major and designated graduate emphasis in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies shows us what is possible when students, faculty, and administrators bring their collective energy, wisdom, and commitment together to change the university. As the newest such program in the UC system, CRES offers an opportunity to connect established models of Ethnic Studies to the most pressing issues of the present, including domestic and global flows of migration, labor, and culture, the politics of social movements and social change, and the construction of identities and communities. Students in CRES courses will think across the borders of disciplines, nations, and group identities in order to understand the work that the idea of “race� has done and still continues to do. Students will also engage actively in the process of their own learning, exploring multiple forms of learning within and beyond the classroom.
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Digitizing Dickens By Janice Carlisle, Professor of English, Yale University and Elizabeth Frengel, Research Services Librarian at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University In recognition of the importance of the legacy of Charles Dickens to their campuses, the Dickens Project at UCSC and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University have joined together to digitize a wide range of materials that represent Dickens’s life and works. In August, Jon Varese, Director of Digital Initiatives for the Dickens Project, met during the Project’s annual conference in Santa Cruz with Janice Carlisle, Professor of English at Yale, and Elizabeth Frengel, Research Librarian at the Beinecke, to plan a website that will be made public during the coming academic year. The new site will feature unique materials held by the Beinecke, particularly those in the Richard Gimbel Collection of Dickens and Dickensiana, including original art work for Dickens’s fiction, manuscript materials, and memorabilia. Among the art objects are sketches made by Hablot K. Browne, aka Phiz, for novels such as The Pickwick Papers, The Old Curiosity Shop, and Bleak House, H. K. Browne, “Mr. Winkle’s Sitas well as a large set of studies made by Luke Fildes for the illustrations in uation when the ‘door blew to,’” Dickens’s last uncompleted novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Visitors to the website will also find examples from the Beinecke’s exceptionally rich holdings in first edition of Dickens’s works, representing the full range of the forms of serial publication in which his novels first appeared and manuscript correspondence to and from Dickens about the production of his books.
sketch for engraving later published in The Pickwick Papers
Finally, this collaborative website will feature memorabilia disseminated at the time of Dickens’s death. In June 1870, the young artist Luke Fildes was planning to visit Dickens’s home at Gads’ Hill in Kent on the day when the novelist died. Invited to stay there a few days later by Dickens’s sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth, Fildes was given the pen on Dickens’s desk, now one of the many objects in the Gimbel-Dickens Collection. Dickens writes to Fildes on 27 April 1870, proposing
subjects for a number of The Mystery of Edwin Drood
The collaborative Dickens site has looked to the Dickens Project website as a model. Its essays on such subjects as Victorian London and its “Our Mutual Friend Scholarly Pages” serve a wide range of users from high-school students and teachers to an international community of Dickens scholars. The new site will aim to reach a similarly diverse audience, combining the resources of the Dickens Project with the wealth of archival material at Yale to offer its viewers a characteristically Dickensian abundance of both text and image. For more information, visit dickens.ucsc.edu
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Building a Community of Sustainability In Fall 2013, the Humanities Division proudly launched its very first green team with the goal of obtaining Green Office Certification through the UCSC Office of Sustainability. Green team members pledge to serve as sustainability champions for the division and act as liaisons with the Office of Sustainability to implement sustainable practices in everyday operations, improve overall environmental performance, reduce waste, and build a community of sustainability for the Humanities Division. The team is also committed to the Chancellors Sustainability Challenge, a coordinated campuswide effort to make significant progress toward reaching zero waste by 2020. Contact: HGT@ucsc.edu On the web: http://humanities.ucsc.edu/about/divisional-services/green/index.html
Marissa Fullum-Campbell, `Development Coordinator
Courtney Mahaney, Program Manager IHR
Evin Guy, Event Coordinator IHR
Tony Grant, Space & Operations Coordinator
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Division of Humanities University of California, Santa Cruz Humanities 1 Building 506 Cowell-Stevenson Road Santa Cruz, CA 95064 humanities@ucsc.edu