Visiting Scholars

 GCLR 2023/2024 Distinguished Vistor: Dr. Mario Biagioli (UCLA)

 

The GCLR is pleased to announce that our 2022/2023 Distinguished Visitor was Dr. Mario Biagioli (UCLA). 

Dr. Biagioli is a Distinguished Professor of Law and Communication at UCLA. He was previously a Distinguished Professor in the School of Law, the STS Program, and the Department of History at UC Davis, where he was the founding director for the Center for Science and Innovation Studies, and an Associate faculty member of the Cultural Studies Program and the Critical Theory Program. Dr. Biagioli’s scholarship is at the intersection of intellectual property and science and technology studies. He is currently completing a book on the new forms of scientific fraud and misconduct that are spawn by the introduction of metrics of academic evaluation. Other interests include patentable subject matter, the history of the idea/expression divide, and the role of eyewitnessing in science. A recipient of a Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the NSF, the Mellon Foundation, the ACLS, and the Russian Ministry of Science and Education, Dr. Biagioli has been awarded fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford). He has authored and edited eight books, including Gaming the Metrics: New Ecologies of Academic Misconduct (with A. Lippman, MIT Press, 2020); From Russia with Code (with Vincent Lepinay, Duke University Press, 2019); Making and Unmaking Intellectual Property (with P. Jaszi and M. Woodmansee, University of Chicago Press, 2011); Galileo's Instruments of Credit: Telescopes, Images, Secrecy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Scientific Authorship: Credit and Intellectual Property in Science (with Peter Galison, Routledge, 2003); and Galileo, Courtier (University of Chicago Press, 1993), (translated into German, Greek, Spanish, and Portuguese). His articles have appeared in many prestigious journals including Nature, Critical Inquiry, and Notre Dame Law Review, among many others.

On Thursday, May 30, 5pm-6.30pm he held an open workshop on “The Curriculum Vitae: Recording, Constructing, and Evaluating Authorship" which explored the history and function of the Curriculum Vitae, a crucial tool for job-seeking and also a primary means for the ongoing evaluation of academics by their institutions. 

Then, on Friday, May 31, 4pm-5:30pm Dr. Biagioli delivered his Public Lecture: “The Impact of Impact” in the Wallis Annenberg Conference Room

This lecture examined the ethical problems that arise from using metrics-based measurements to assess academic scholarship.The shift from peer review to metrics ("impact") was celebrated as a move towards transparency, objectivity, and fairness, leaving behind the dubious and problematic values of the “old boy network.” And yet, this shift also brought with it a plethora of problems, beginning with the difficulty of even defining what constitutes impact.

 

Past Visting Scholars         

Our 2022/2023 Distinguished Visitor was Dr. Ursula K. Heise (UCLA).

 
 
Ursula K. Heise teaches in the Department of English and at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. Her research and teaching focus on contemporary literature; environmental culture in the Americas, Western Europe and Japan; narrative theory; media theory; literature and science; and science fiction. Her books include Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008),  Nach der Natur: Das Artensterben und die moderne Kultur (After Nature: Species Extinction and Modern Culture, Suhrkamp, 2010), and Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (University of Chicago Press, 2016).
 

Heise is the Managing Editor of Futures of Comparative Literature: The ACLA Report on the State of the Discipline (Routledge, 2016), and co-editor, with Jon Christensen and Michelle Niemann, of The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (2016). She is editor of the bookseries, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment with Palgrave-Macmillan and co-editor of the series Literature and Contemporary Thought with Routledge. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and served as President of ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment) in 2011.

 

During her stay at UCSB, Prof. Heise delivered a public lecture entitled "Beyond Realism: Narrative and Environmental Crisis" (Thursday, May 4, at 5:00 p.m, in the Wallis Annenberg Conference Room in the HSSB, Room 4315), and she also hosted a seminar for graduate students entitled "Multispecies Justice and Narrative" (Friday, May 5, from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. in the GCLR Conference Room, Phelps 6206-C) as part of her desire to interact with both students and faculty. 

 

Our 2021/22 Distinguished Visitor was Dr. Emily Apter (NYU).      

 
On Monday, May 23, from 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. she gave a lecture, titled "Interpreters in Court: Diplomacy, Justice, and Untranslatability in Katie Kitamura's Intimacies" that may be viewed online here. 
 
This talk considered the case of the professional interpreter as, on the one hand, a fixed structure of the international court - a neutral part of the machinery, an interpassive agent of transparency and justice dispensation -  and on the other hand, as a subject mired in force-fields of affect, prone to disorientation linguistically and socially. Katie Kitamura’s best-selling novel Intimacies, about a translator involved in the trial of a war criminal at the International Court in the Hague, focuses on how living in the swirl of translated words and worlds unmoors the translator's ethical centeredness.  Drawing on her own work as a theorist of the "Untranslatable," Prof. Apter looked at how untranslatabilities operate in the novel; distributing and redirecting agency in the courtroom, contributing overall to the fluidity of the law, and expanding the parameters, between law and literature, of how we define what a language is, especially in its capacity as a system of justice.
 
 
 
 Professor Apter's seminar "Towards a Theory of Reparative Translation" (Seminar), taking place on Tuesday, May 24 from 10:00 a.m. to 12 p.m focused on the following concepts:
 
How do we rethink translation theory in response to the imperatives of racial justice movements? In the wake of debates around reparations and restitution? How can translation repair the damages of cultural violation and appropriation? How does the critic redress what Spivak calls “translation-as-violation? Or traditions of policing and social harming in language? These are some of the questions that we will address in this informal seminar session drawing on specific translation case studies across media.