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
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 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…
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.
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…
Winter 2023 Launch
April 6th, 2023
In collaboration with UCSB Reads, a program of the UCSB Library selected pieces from The Catalyst‘s Winter 2023 issue have been printed on canvas and will be hung on the walls of the UCSB Library ...
Research Project
Recent & Upcoming Courses
ENGL 107
The Craft of Fiction
Creative Writing - Who will show me myself?Instructor: Thomas, Cathy
Quarter: Spring 2023
ENGL 165NJ
Native Justice: Settler Colonialism, Legality, and DecolonizationInstructor: Salomón J., Amrah
Quarter: Spring 2024