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.

 

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  • 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 Virus Touch
    Theorizing Epidemic Media
    Author: Bishnupriya Ghosh
  • 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…

    Inscriptive Studies
    Toward a Field Articulation
    Edited by Rita Raley and Paul Benzon
  • 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.

  • 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…

    Antiracism Inc.
    Why the Way We Talk About Racial Justice Matters
    Edited by Felice Blake and Paula Ioanide, Alison Reed
The Catalyst: Contemporary Literary Arts Magazine
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 ...

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