UC Humanities Forum

Boom Gets “Best of 2011″ Nod from Library Journal

By Sarah McCullough Tuesday May 15, 2012

In its first year of publication, Boom: A Journal of California has been named one of the Best Magazines of 2011 by the prestigious Library Journal.

Headed by Louis Warren, W. Turrentine Jackson Professor of Western U.S. History, and Carolyn de la Peña, Professor of American Studies, Boom aims to create dialogue about the vital cultural, social, and political issues of our time in California and beyond.

Library Journal praises Boom as “an engaging and visually attractive forum for scholars and artists to describe some of California’s remarkable stories. It brings history and social sciences to life with readable scholarship that will not only please scholars and entertain general readers but also interest patrons well beyond California’s borders.”

What Remains: UCSB’s ::Bodies in Space: Flow/s:: Unconference

By Amanda P. Monday May 14, 2012

(Cross-posted on HASTAC)

This past weekend, I had the pleasure of attending the showcase for “::Bodies in Space: Flow/s:: Second Annual Guerrilla-Style Performance and Theory Bake-Off/Graduate Conference” here at UCSB put on by the Hemispheric South/s Research Initiative, the Center for Literature and the Environment, the American Cultures and Global Contexts Center (all coming out of the English Department) with support from the campus-wide Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and others (full list at the end of this post). Though the conference didn’t emerge from within the digital humanities, its spirit was very much aligned with the experimental and free-flowing unconferences like the THATCamps that we hold so dear.

Over 24 hours, conference participants gathered and brought their individual research interests and expertise to the group, which was divided into smaller teams that each had the task of creating a theory-informed academic performance piece for the showcase. The conference organizers provided food, structured activities for sharing intellectual interests and artistic inspiration, and a master class by Black queer theatre artist Sharon Bridgforth, fostering a space of collaboration and non-competition, in the words of Dr. Stephanie Batiste, who gave opening remarks at the showcase.

The “Forced Marriage” Between the Humanities and Social Sciences: A Perspective from India

Nishant Shah, director of the Centre for the Internet and Society in Bangalore, India, and co-editor of Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?, sat down in March with UCHRI’s David Theo Goldberg for a freewheeling discussion of the rocky relationship between social sciences and the humanities, “those people who do these foofy things with affect, with [...]

The Beauty and the Beholder

Long ago, when I lived in the Bay Area, I went to a comedy club in San Francisco and heard Sheng Wang, a Taiwanese-American stand-up comic, deliver these lines: “I wanna be like white dudes. I wanna date Asian girls. I wanna get Chinese characters tattooed on my back.” Well. That may be a sacrilegious [...]

UC Irvine’s ‘Critical Theory Emphasis Undergraduate Conference’

Last Friday I had the pleasure of attending the annual Critical Theory Emphasis Undergraduate Conference at UC Irvine. Organized by the 2011-12 Koehn Fellow Timothy Wong and sponsored by fourteen campus faculty, departments, programs and academic centers across the School of Humanities, the School of Arts, the School of Social Sciences, and the School of [...]

The Imperiled Promise of College and Why I Think I Should Have Frank Bruni’s Job

As if college kids have enough to worry about. Now there’s Frank Bruni, columnist at the New York Times, adding yet another middle-aged voice to the choir of anxious parents discouraging their kids from majoring in art history. Not surprisingly, the tone of his column was nostalgic: For a long time and for a lot [...]