With 30+ faculty, a dozen research centers and projects, and a culture of collaboration, we continue to invent new ways to do humanities research, creative-critical work, and public-facing projects on a beautiful campus between the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Ynez mountains.
Faculty Bookshelf
In The Virus Touch Bishnupriya Ghosh argues that media are central to understanding emergent relations between viruses, humans, and nonhuman life. Writing in the shadow of the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 global pandemics, Ghosh theorizes “epidemic media” to show how epidemics are mediated in images, numbers, and movements through the processes of reading test results and tracking infection and mortality rates
Poetic and abolitionist imaginaries continue to intervene in our current political and cultural landscape in ways that challenge the violent status quo. As our beautiful vision reminds us, we are not the passive observers of history…
Chinese Whispers examines multiple contact zones between the Anglophone and Sinophone worlds, investigating how poetry both enables and complicates the transpacific production of meaning.
In this new book, the noted critic and best-selling author Yunte Huang explores the dynamics of poetry and poetics in the age of globalization, particularly questions of translatability, universality, and risk in the transpacific context.
The Critics and the Prioress responds to a critical stalemate between the demands of ethics and the entailments of methodology. The book addresses key moments in criticism of the Prioress’s Tale—particularly those that stage an encounter between historicism and ethics—in order to interrogate these critical impasses while suggesting new modes for future encounters. It is an effort to identify, engage, and reframe some significant—and perennially repeated—arguments staked out in this criticism, such as the roles of gender, aesthetics, source studies, and the appropriate relationship between ethics and historicism.
The inscriptive . . . takes shape within the context of a heightened awareness of the intensified generation and circulation of language across media environments by human and nonhuman agents alike…
Vol. X, Flow into Form
Fall 2023 - Spring 2024 Duration: 9 months
This edition of Emergence features creative and critical projects by the 2023-2024 cohort of Arnhold Undergraduate Research Fellows in UC Santa Barbara’s Department of English. The Arnhold program allows English majors to explore their intellectual ...
Research Project
Recent & Upcoming Courses
ENGL 197
Upper-Division Seminar
"J.M. Coetzee: Ethics and the Other." The course description is below.Instructor: Samolsky, Russell
Quarter: Spring 2024
ENGL 39
Pan-Latinx Literatures of TransformationInstructor: Olguín, Ben V.
Quarter: Winter 2025