GCLR Events

Far Left: UCSB faculty and graduate students with visiting scholar Marina Warner   Middle Two Images: Guest lectures by Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Mark Rothberg, respectively   Far Right: Colleagues after GCLR Annual Conference

Announcements

Future Between Technics and Poetics Workshop

We are looking forward to the Future Between Technics and Poetics workshop that brings together literary, poetic, mathematical and technical conceptions of futurity, combining perspectives from German Studies, Art History, and History of Science. February 7. 

Memory Studies Group Session on April 15
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PLease join the Memory Studies Group for a discussion with UCSB scholars Catherine Nesci and Jessica Nakamura on April 15!

Upcoming GCLR Co-Sponsored Event - Fallout: Chernobyl and the Ecology of Disaster
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This interdisciplinary conference, on April 17 in the McCune Conference Room (HSSB), brings together scholars and other experts to discuss the 1986 nuclear accident in Chernobyl.  

Upcoming GCLR Co-Sponsored Events for the Humanities and Social Change Center
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We are glad to announce upcoming events for the Humanites and Social Change Center! 

The Postwar Italian Art Scene in a Global Perspective
  • The Postwar Italian Art Scene in a Global Perspective

Please join us for this special GCLR-sponsored event on January 31. Together with special guest, Prof. Anneka Lenssen (UCB), Matteo Bertelé (UCSB/Ca’ Foscari) and Mohammadreza Mirzaei (UCSB) will discuss the role of the Italian art scene and its transnational effects during the Cold War, with special emphasis on the Middle East

GCLR Graduate Student Roundtable Winter 2020
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Grad Students, Are you looking for funds to attend a conference at another university? The GCLR is currently accepting proposals for the GCLR Winter Roundtable! Succesful Candidates receive funding for attending a conference or professional meeting. 

New CL Grad Seminar: Introduction to the Work of Hans Blumenberg
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The German Department and Comparative Literature Program are offering a new graduate seminar on Hans Blumenberg's philosophy. It will be taught by the visiting Kade professor, Dr. Eva Geulen. Tuesdays, 3-5:50 p.m. in Phelps 6206C. 

Annual Conference - Climate Fictions - Call for Papers
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GCLR Annual Graduate Student Conference Call for Papers! As climate change has become a central topic of discussion, laced with the uncertainty of tomorrow, the UCSB Graduate Center for Literary Research invites scholars from a variety of disciplines to reframe their conversations with a focus on this ubiquitous topic as it has been interpreted in literary fiction, as well as within the arts.

 
2020/21 Lecture Series on Russia and Iran
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The 2020-2021 Colloquium Series of the Iranian Studies Initiative will be held this next year in collaboration with the UCSB Graduate Center for Literary Research (GCLR)
 
2019-2020 GCLR Distinguished Visiting Scholar: Alain Badiou
  • Alain Badiou

The GCLR is looking forward to meeting with our 2020 distinguished visiting scholar, Alain Badiou from May 25-28. 

Introducing GCLR's New Director, Sven Spieker
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The GCLR is excited to introduce the new center director!

New Graduate Student Research Coordinator
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The GCLR is happy to introduce the 2019-2020 new Graduate Student Research Coordinator, Christene d'Anca. 

Congratulations to the New Recruitment Fellows 2019-2020
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GCLR would like to congratulate and welcome its new recruitment fellows Pujita Guha, Ursula Friedman, and James Nichols! 

2019-2020 Student Coordinator: Applications Due May 31
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Apply for the position of next year's GCLR Student Coordinator.

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What Graduate Students Are Reading

Antonio Damasio's The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures

Sebastian Stratan is reading Antonio's Damasio's The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feelings, and the Making of Cultures. 

In this book subjectivity, consciousness, culture, and life itself, are reconsidered, together with their interactions. The book maps out the path from self-awareness to feelings, and ultimately, to culture, creatively interpreting Damasio's decade-long research on the intricacies of the brain. It is a new theory of everthing. 

In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy by Adriana Cavarero

Olga Faccani is reading In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy by Adriana Cavarero. 

In this book, the author, an Italian feminist and philosopher, borrows four female figures from ancient Greek texts and gives them a new voice, reinterpreting them in light of theories of sexual difference. In the process she broadens the classical texts to evade the patriarchal discourse and encompass questions of identity, power, and sexuality. 

Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War by Jorge G. Castaneda

Caudia Grego March is reading Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War by Jorge G. Castaneda. 

This book is a comprehensive and intelligent analysis of Latin America's poltical left during and after the Cold War, written in a sharp and captivating prose. 

African Art and the Colonial Encounter: Inventing a Global Commodity, by Sidney Littlefield Kasfir

Megan Sheard is reading African Art and the Colonial Encounter: Inventing a Global Commodity, by Sidney Littlefield Kasfir.

What she is really enjoying about this book is the nuanced way Kasfir tracks colonisaztion's impact on the practices and art of the Idoma (Nigeria) and Samburu (Kenya). Kasfir shows how the colonial rupture generated new forms as African practices responded to colonial constraints, but seems to avoid the over-emphasis on African agency that can end up inadvertently romanticsizing the colonial period. 

 

Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia

Mohammadreza Mirzaei is reading Jaleh Mansoor's Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia. 

This book recognizes the works of three main portagonists of postwar Italian art (Burri, Fontana, and Manzoni) as indicators of the cultural, economic, and social transition of Italy during that period. 

Andrew Hemingway's Artists on the Left: American Art and the Communist Party, 1926-1956

Mary Okin is reading Andrew Hemingway's Artists on the Left: American Art and the Communist Party, 1926-1956.

She states, "he isn't so fluent in Russian avant garde theory, but he writes a lot about Marxism and Western Marxism and the history of Marxism in art history (excluding the Russian avant garde mostly), and I find him quite interesting."

Mystical Dimensions of Islam

Naz Keynejad is reading Annemarie Schimmel's Mystical Dimensions of Islam. 

This book traces the development of the Sufi movement throughout the Middle East. 

Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition

Daniel Martini is reading Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition. 

In the book, Arendt is interested in the vita activa (active life) as contrasted with the vita contemplativa (contemplative life) and she is concerned that the debate over the relative status of the two has blinded us to important insights about the vita activa and the way in which it has changed since ancient times. 

 

Marcel Strobel is reading Mark W. Turner's Backward Glances - Cruising Queer Streets in London and New York.

This book is a beautiful account of the literary representation of male gay street cruising at the turn of the 20th century.

 
The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women, edited by June Hall McCash

Christene d'Anca is readingThe Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women, edited by June Hall McCash

This book examines the important role women played in the creation of art through a multitude of mediums, and the significant ways in which they participated in the evolution of medieval culture. 

The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance, edited by Bruce Baird and Rosemary Candelario

Margarita Delcheva is readingThe Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance, edited by Bruce Baird and Rosemary Condelario

This book traces the history, scholarship, and reception of Butoh, from its connection to Afro-diasporic cultures, to its use of androgyny and the welcoming of taboo. 

 

Kozintsev's Shakespeare Films: Russian Political Protest in Hamlet and King Lear, by Tiffany Ann Conroy Moore

Arpi Movsesian is reading Kozintsev's Shakespeare Films: Russian Political Protest in Hamlet and King Lear, by Tiffany Ann Conroy Moore 

This book situates the Shakespeare films of Soviet director Grigori Kozintsev into their cultural and historical contexts by focusing on Hamlet and Lear in Russia in the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as from the Revolution until after Stalin's death, in the "Thaw."

 

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Graduate Center for Literary Research Annual Conference 

Climate Fictions

April 18, 2020 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Reception to follow.

April 19, 2020 10:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. 

McCune Conference Room, HSSB

Schedule Coming Soon

 

As climate change has become a central topic of discussion, laced with the uncertainty of tomorrow, the UCSB Graduate Center for Literary Research invites scholars from a variety of disciplines to reframe their conversations with a focus on this ubiquitous topic as it has been interpreted in literary fiction, as well as within the arts.

Originally coined by Dan Bloom, Climate-Fiction, popularly known as Cli-Fi, is a type of fiction that explores what the earth might become if climate change continues at its current rate, and specifically if humans do not intervene to save the planet. As many successful authors, such as Margaret Atwood, T. C. Boyle, Amitav Ghosh, Ursula Le Guin, Lydia Millet, David Mitchell, and Leslie Marmon Silko, have contributed to promulgating the topics of climate change and global warming into the public eye, Cli-Fi has gained prominence as more than a fringe genre.

However, the genre has become incorporated into discussions well outside literary studies, and this conference aims to interrogate how fictional texts as well as the arts have suggested new ways of thinking about climate change across broader media, including film, poetry, and other forms of art, forming a plurality of discourse networks better reconceptualized as Climate Fictions. 

Join us on April 18-19, 2020 for a variety of presentations from graduate students across disciplines.