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
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…
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.
In Inventing William of Norwich Heather Blurton resituates Thomas’s account by offering the first full analysis of it as a specifically literary work. The second half of the twelfth century was a time of great literary innovation encompassing an efflorescence of saints’ lives and historiography, as well as the emergence of vernacular romance…She examines The Life and Miracles within the framework of these new textual developments and alongside innovations in liturgical and devotional practices to argue that the origin of the ritual murder accusation is imbricated as much in literary culture as it is in the realities of Christian-Jewish relations or the emergence of racially based discourses of antisemitism.
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…
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 236
Studies in Literary Criticism and Theory
Accompanying Edward SaidInstructor: Ghosh, Bishnupriya
Quarter: Spring 2024
ENGL 159
English Renaissance Printing Practice and LiteratureInstructor: Fumerton, Patricia
Quarter: Spring 2025