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Paradise Now film screening

A 2006 Golden Globe winner for best foreign language film, Paradise Now intensely and powerfully tells the story of two lifelong friends that are tapped by an unidentified Palestinian resistance organization to carry out a suicide bombing together in Tel Aviv. Hany Abu-Assad, 91 min., Arabic and English, 2005, Palestine. In the MultiCultural Center's Cup […]

Campuswide Teach-In on UC Budget Crisis

This teach-in explores the origins and character of the current crisis at the University of California. The program is as follows; for more information see the Keep California's Promise website. 2:30 p.m. Welcome from the Campbell Hall Steps Reginald Archer, President, Graduate Student Association, UCSB Jessie Bernal, Student Member of UC Regents Amanda Wallner, Campus […]

Rethinking Early China in Light of the Mawangdui Finds

Many of the archaeological discoveries at Mawangdui have great artistic merit and aesthetic appeal. Beyond these qualities, however, the Mawangdui finds suggest that certain of our assumptions about early China, until now based on Confucian canonical texts, need serious reconsideration. As such the archaeological finds at Mawangdui are a powerful reminder of the narrowness of […]

The California Missions: History, Art, and Preservation

Julia Costello will be talking about her newly published book, The California Missions, History, Art, and Preservation (Edna E. Kimbro and Julia G. Costello with Tevvy Ball), as the Norman Neuerburg Memorial Lecture on Sunday October 18 at 2:00 pm in the Santa Barbara Mission Archive-Library conference room. The lecture is free. Copies of the […]

The Medicalization of the Maya: Ethnicity, Culture and Morality in Postrevolutionary Yucatan

This presentation will examine how the medical establishment in Mérida and medical student brigades from the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán interpreted the health conditions of rural Maya communities and prescribed solutions to the "Indian problem" in the 1930s and 1940s. In general, physicians identified Maya customs as the primary cause for the high incidence of […]

Signals Astray: Radio, Radioactivity, and Cold War Culture

The Federal Communications Act, as amended by Congress in 1951, grants the President of the United States the authority, during times of “public peril or disaster or other national emergency,” to “suspend or amend . . . the rules and regulations applicable to any or all stations or devices capable of emitting electromagnetic radiations.” In […]

The “Myth” of the Weak American State

Professor Novak, who is also a research professor at the American Bar Foundation, works in the fields of U.S. legal, political, and intellectual history. His first book first book, The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America, used nineteenth-century state court records to document the long history of governmental activism in the United States. […]

Biribi: The Penal Colonies of the French Army

Biribi is nowadays a forgotten and incomprehensible word for most people in France. But it was a well-known name in the late nineteenth and in the first half of the twentieth century. For every young Frenchmen who had to give two or three years of his life for conscription, Biribi was synonymous with hell on […]

The future of graduate education in the humanities at UC

Does graduate education in the humanities have a future at the University of California, and if so what might it look like? In this roundtable, the first event in the IHC’s Future of the University series, UCSB faculty will discuss innovative graduate programs and initiatives that transcend disciplinary boundaries and train students for the new […]