UCSD Center for the Humanities

2006-2007 Humanities Center Events

Summer 2007

Spring 2007

Winter 2007
Fall 2006

2005-2006 Humanities Center Events

Spring 2006
Winter 2006

For more information about the Center or to be added to our mailing list, please email humctr@ucsd.edu or call (858)534-0999.

SPRING 2007
Apr 10- May 8, 2007	The UCSD Center for the Humanities presents a new Lecture Series on Religion and Violence Tuesdays, April 10 - May 8, 2007 4:30-6:00 pm deCerteau room, Literature Building** FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC Click here to print the event flyer
4/10/2007	Patrick Patterson, UCSD History Is Islam a Religion of War? Some Answers from the History of the Balkans The Western mass media frequently offer up images of Islam and its followers that depict the religion as one of violence and intolerance. While this tendency has only become more pronounced after 9/11, the split between Islam and the West has also played a major role in the violent conflicts that surrounded the break-up of Yugoslavia beginning in the 1990s -- and continuing today. In this talk, Patrick Patterson explains in historical perspective how the various peoples of the Balkans have viewed the faith of their Muslim neighbors, examining the relationship between stereotype and lived experiences in this multi-ethnic, multi-confessional part of Europe.
4/18/2007	Deborah Hertz, UCSD History The Empire of Darkness: Why Jewish Women Became Radicals in Russia and Beyond During the last decades of the nineteenth century Jewish women living in the Pale of Settlement in Russia faced many obstacles when they sought education, love, and fulfillment in work and the wider political stage. In this lecture I bring to life a circle of women who chose a left-wing and even terrorist way of life, and made history when they wrote manifestos, organized strikes, and hurled bombs at the czarist officials. We can understand these women better when we also consider the paths these women did not choose, including the business wife role, Zionism, the secularist-socialist Bundist party, and the emergent secular feminist movement.
4/24/2007	Richard Madsen, UCSD Sociology Democracy’s Dharma: Religious Renaissance and Political Development in Taiwan In societies making a transition away from authoritarian rule, religious enthusiasm can be a destabilizing force, because religion can fan the fires of ethnic conflict and raise the intensity of cultural controversies to a dangerous level. In Taiwan, a remarkable religious renaissance – mostly of Buddhism and Daoism -- took place as that country began making its transition toward democracy. But in Taiwan this has had a positive effect. It has helped heal social divisions and reconcile cultural differences and has provided enough stability to keep Taiwan’s contentious democracy from descending into chaos. In this talk I discuss how and why this positive outcome occurred, and what implications this might have for other democratic transitions in Asia.
5/1/2007	** This lecture to take place in the Auditorium in Atkison Hall, at Calit2 Reading of the play “THREE NIGHTS IN PRAGUE" by Allan Havis, UCSD Theatre and Dance Five months before 9/11, lead hijacker Mohamed Atta is seen in Prague by Czech authorities in clandestine circumstances with a high Iraqi consulate official. "Three Nights in Prague" speculates what might have happened politically and personally, and if a powerful connection between Al Qaeda and Baghdad had been forged.
5/8/2007	Babak Rahimi, UCSD Literature Forget “Suicide Terrorism”: Three Models of Martyrdom in Post-Baathist Iraq The emergence of Sunni insurgency and Shi’i militias since the toppling of Saddam’s regime in 2003 has inaugurated a new dynamics in the expansion of political violence in the Islamic world. The lecture covers three ideological and ethical models of political violence in the terms of self-sacrifice in the post-Baathist Iraq. It argues that different militant-political groups are applying either “revivalist,” “honorific” or “millenarian” models of self-sacrifice, which are being applied by these groups in various circumstances for particular political ends. In broad terms, this lecture can be views as a critique of the discourse of “suicide terrorism,” which is argued as ideologically charged concept and a product of a post-9/11 American public sphere

Thurs, April 5, 2007	Sponsored Event Saidiya Hartman Professor of English, Columbia University “The Dead Book” From Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route 4:00 pm Atkinson Hall (Cal IT2) Auditorium Saidiya Hartman is a specialist in African American literature and history whose theoretical and literary contributions to our understanding of slavery are profound and original. Professor Hartman's first book, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America is an erudite and subtle exploration of the intersections of enslavement, gender, desire, and the making of liberal reason in the United States. Worked through an engagement with a variety of cultural materials – slave narratives, song and dance, legal texts, journals, diaries, and narratives -- Hartman explores the unstable institution of slave power. Her new book Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route is, as she puts it, an exercise in literary fieldwork. It lyrically confronts the disturbing relationships among memory, representation, and narrative. She focuses on the "non-history" of the slave, the way in which the unnamable catastrophe of slavery erased any conventional modality for writing an intelligible past. Weaving her own biography into an imaginative historical construction, she explores and evokes the non-spaces of black experience—the experience through which the African captive became a slave, became a non-person, became alienated from personhood. FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC Sponsored by the Dean of Arts and Humanities and the UC Humanities Research Institute


WINTER 2007
Feb 16-17, 2007	Sponsored Event Histories of the Aftermath: The European "Postwar" in Comparative Perspective A major international conference organized by the Department of History of the University of California, San Diego. Convenors: Frank Biess (UC San Diego) and Robert Moeller (UC Irvine). The conference will be held at the Institute of the Americas' Weaver Center. For details of the event and program, please click here. Conference funders include: German Academic Exchange Service; German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C.; the Center for German and European Studies (UC Berkeley); the University of California Humanities Research Institute; the UCSD Humanities Center; the Institute for International, Comparative, and Area Studies (UCSD), and the UCSD Department of History.

Jan 12-13, 2007	Sponsored Event Remembering the Chinese Cultural Revolution A unique multimedia presentation on the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976. A 2-day event featuring a Cultural Revolution poster exhibition, films, book talk, lectures, and panel discussions which are led by distinguished scholars in the fields of sociology, history, literature, art, library science, economics, political science, and film studies. With the exception of an invitation-only reception on opening night, the event is otherwise open to the public, without charge. Venues: Geisel Library - Lobby and Seuss Rm, and IR/PS - Robinson Auditorium For details of the event and program, please click here Sponsors: The University of California San Diego Libraries, the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IR/PS), the UCSD Center for the Humanities, the UCSD Chinese Studies Program, the American Chinese Culture and Education Foundation, and the San Diego Chinese Association.

	PAST EVENTS

FALL 2006
Oct 12 – Nov 9, '06	The UCSD Center for the Humanities and Eleanor Roosevelt College present Making of the Modern World \| 2006 A "short version" of the College's world civilization sequence. Please join us as five members of the MMW faculty take you on a tour of global trends and events from the modern world. Thursdays 7 - 8:30 PM October 12 – November 9, 2006 Great Hall, Eleanor Roosevelt College* FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC Click here to print event flyer
10/12/06	Stanley Chodorow, Professor Emeritus of History and former Dean of Arts and Humanities, UCSD “Clothing Europe in Stone: The Gothic Movement in the Arts”
10/19/06	Matthew Herbst, Ph.D., Academic Coordinator, The Making of the Modern World Program, UCSD “Patriarchs, Popes, and Icons: In Defense of Orthodox Christianity against Catholic Crusaders in the 13th Century”
10/26/06	Steven Cassedy, Director, The Making of the Modern World Program, UCSD “Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata and the Language of Feeling in Romantic Music” *please note this event will be held at a different venue: Erickson Hall, Mandeville Center
11/2/06	Pamela Radcliff, Associate Professor of History, UCSD “Modern Art and the Crisis of Meaning in Early Twentieth-Century Europe”
11/9/06	Patrick Patterson, Assistant Professor of History, UCSD “And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out -- Religion, Law and the Arts in Contemporary Society”

Oct 26 28, 2006	Sponsored Event Yolande Snaith and imaGomoves Present GARDEN TRILOGY Thurs Oct 26, 2006 8pm Sat Oct 28, 2006 8pm Sun Oct 29, 2006 2pm and 6pm UCSD Molli and Arthur Wagner Dance Building (Studio 3) Part I: Ghost Garden is a collaboration between visual artist Sharon Marston's evocative fiber optic lighting sculptures, with theatre design by Miranda Melville and Steven Kemp, text by Adele Edling Shank, lighting design by Sooyeon Hong. Music composed by Jean-Jaques Palix and David Coulter. Set in a futuristic garden of translucent and luminous forms, Ghost Garden intertwines a surreal language of dance, text, music and song in this stunning new production. The dramatic staging of tall, skeletal columns and evocative shapes of interlocking fibers and light suggest both plant-like forms and architectural structures, allowing the definitions of interior and exterior to be intriguingly ambiguous. This theatrical landscape shifts magically between a stark, haunting space, where intimate dances are strange and melancholy, to a vibrant field of light, athletic movement and energy. Dancers: Alison Deiterle-Smith, Raffaella Judd, Erica Nordin, Sadie Weinberg, John Diaz and Robby Johnson. Part II: Tablecloth Garden, a short dance theatre film interlude PART III: Garden Of Forbidden Loves is a poetic quartet set to the hauntingly beautifully voice of Alfred Dellar, singing lute songs by John Dowland. Designed by Yolande Snaith in collaboration with Steven Kemp, this ³through the looking glass² landscape of distorted scale and misplaced objects creates a dreamlike world, for a suite of exquisite dancing and visual tableaux.. Dancers: Yolande Snaith, Eric Geiger, Tonnie Sammatano and Elizabeth Swallow. Tickets at the door - $18 (students $10) Limited seating. RSVP reservations - 619 867 8749 See www.ucsd.edu for directions Created with a UCSD Center for Humanities Award

Thurs, Oct 5, 2006 Click here to listen to THESE DAYS host Tom Fudge (KPBS SAN DIEGO) speak to Professor Sen (October 5, 2006)	Economics Nobel laureate Amartya Sen “The Illusions of Identity” A talk based on his most recent book, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (2006) in which Prof. Sen takes on Harvard colleague and political scientist Samuel P. Huntington's "clash of civilizations" paradigm, offering a more complex view of identities. 5:30 – 7:00 pm Reception to follow Hojel Auditorium at the Institute of Americas FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC With the generous support of The Patricia and Christopher Weil Foundation For a map and directions, click here Economics Nobel laureate AMARTYA SEN is Lamont University Professor, and Professor of Economics and Philosophy, at Harvard University and was until recently the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. He has served as President of the American Economic Association, Econometric Society, the International Economic Association, and the Indian Economic Association. Born in Santiniketan, India, Prof. Sen studied at Presidency College in Calcutta, India, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is an Indian citizen. Prof. Sen’s groundbreaking research and writing has ranged over a number of fields in economics, philosophy, and decision theory, including social choice theory, welfare economics, public health, moral and political philosophy, and the economics of peace and war. He has also published seminal works on gender inequality, ways of measuring poverty and inequality and how economic policies affect the well being of a community, or of a nation, as a whole. His books have been translated into more than thirty languages, and include, among others, Collective Choice and Social Welfare (1970), On Economic Inequality (1973, 1997), Poverty and Famines (1981), Rationality and Freedom (2002), The Argumentative Indian (2005), and most recently, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (2006) about which he spoke at UCSD. Click here to print event flyer

	Sponsored Event Spoken Word at the Museum "Poets Respond to the Andy Warhol Exhibit" Featuring Rae Armantrout and Bob Perelman Date: September 7, 2006 Time: 6:00 pm Location: San Diego Museum of Art, Meet in the Rotunda Admission: Free with museum admission Sponsors: The San Diego Museum of Art UCSD Center for the Humanities UCSD Department of Literature


SPRING 2006
	The Center presents a new lecture series THE CITY What do we want from a city? How do we go about shaping the spaces that shape our lives and communities? How do we envision the city, and how have those images or concepts changed across time and place? Thursdays, April 6 – May 18 at 7:30pm Pepper Canyon Hall, Room 106 Click here for the Lecture Series Calendar We recommend parking in the Gilman Parking Structure. Permits are $3. Some metered spaces available. Permits can be purchased from the express permit dispenser at the Gilman Entrance Visitor Information Ctr on Gilman Dr, just north of La Jolla Village Dr. Click here to listen to THESE DAYS (KPBS SAN DIEGO) host Tom Fudge speak to Professor Janet Smarr and Professor Teddy Cruz about the lecture series. (April 13, 2006) Watch 4/20/06 lecture by prof. Teddy Cruz "Border Cities: Tactics of Encroachment" on UCSD TV See the Border Region through the Eyes of an Architect The work of architect and UCSD Visual Arts Professor Teddy Cruz is inspired by our location at the border between San Diego, California and Tijuana, Mexico (US and Latin America), where two radically different cultures, societies and economies approximate each other and occupy the same geography. In this engaging and timely talk, Cruz examines the unique bicultural territory formed in this region and makes an argument for redefining community design processes in order to produce more hybrid and flexible landscapes, while also fostering community engagement. Please click here
4/6/06	Prof. Marcel Hénaff, UCSD Literature “Toward the Global City: Monument, Machine, Network”
4/13/06	Prof. Yingjin Zhang, UCSD Literature “Cinematic Configurations of Beijing and Shanghai: Western Conquistadors, Chinese Bricoleurs, Transcultural Brokers"
4/20/06	Prof. Teddy Cruz, UCSD Visual Arts "Border Cities: Tactics of Encroachment"
4/27/06	Derrick Cartwright, Director, SD Museum of Art “In Visible Institutions: The City and its Museum”
5/4/06	Bruce Hollingsworth, President/CEO, & Ralph Hicks, Director, Land Use Planning San Diego Unified Port District “The Port's Land Use Planning & Development Process”
5/11/06	Prof. James Holston, UCSD Anthropology “Dangerous Spaces of Citizenship: Gang-Talk, Rights-Talk, and Rule of Law in Brazil”
5/18/06 CANCELED	Prof. Suzanne Cahill, UCSD History "What San Diego Can Learn from Medievel China: a Look at the CapitaL city of Chang'an during China's Golden Age"

	Sponsored Event Models and Prediction in Science, Science Studies, and Public Policy - A Research Workshop An interdisciplinary exploration of the role of models and prediction in physical, biological, and social sciences. Date: May 26-28, 2006 Location:UCSD Admission: Free. All members of the UCSD community are welcome. Registration required. Co-sponsored by National Science Foundation UCSD Center for the Humanities UCSD Division of Physical Sciences UCSD Division of Biological Sciences Scripps Institution of Oceanography UCSD Department of Philosophy

	Sponsored Event Spoken Word at the Museum: Goya Poets Respond to the Permanent Collection - Part 2 Date: May 18, 2006 Time: 6:00 pm Location: San Diego Museum of Art, James S. Copley Auditorium Admission: Free with museum admission Contact: Rae Armantrout Sponsors: The San Diego Museum of Art, UCSD Center for the Humanities, UCSD Department of Literature

	Sponsored Event Graduate Enrichment Guest Lecturer “Reading Corporate Globalization from the Borderlands” by Prof. Marguerite Waller Women Studies and Comparative Literature & Foreign Languages, UC Riverside Date: May 18, 2006 Time: 4:00 pm Location: deCerteau Room, 3155 Literature Bldg

	Sponsored Event Spring Cabaret Season presented by current undergraduate and graduate students Serena in X-temis - A Musical Fable Stephanie Robinson (music) and Ted Shank (lyrics) Date: Fri-Sat, May 12-13, 2006 Time: 8:00 pm Location: 157 Galbraith Theatre Admission: Free and open to the public. Call 858.534.3791 for additional information.

	Sponsored Event Lecture series: The Last Millennium of Chinese History: Transitions from Culture to Nation by IICAS 2006 Distinguished Lecturer Frederic Wakeman, Jr., Dept. of History, UC Berkeley Date: Monday, April 17, 2006 Time: 4:00 - 6:00 PM Location: Weaver Center, Institute of the Americas, UCSD Admission: Free and open to the public


WINTER 2006
	Sponsored Event Lecture/Discussion: An evening with Azar Nafisi evening with Azar Nafisi Date: Thursday, March 2, 2006 Time: 7:00 pm Location: Hojel Auditorium at Institute of Americas Admission: Free and open to the public. Entrance tickets are required, which are available at the UCSD box office.

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