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Living Writers Series
February 08, 2022
At the Living Writers Series, students, faculty, and community members come together to hear visiting writers read and talk about their work, and learn about the creative process from an artist working in the field. Hosted by the Literature Department’s Creative Writing Program, each event in the Living Writers Series features a contemporary writer reading their work, then engaging with the audience.
The goal of these events is to introduce students (and community members) to new writing and the many ways of being a writer in the world. The series serves as the central meeting place for UCSC’s creative writing community: faculty, graduate students, undergraduates and members of the public. Faculty organize the author visits, undergraduate interns serve as event hosts, and graduate students introduce the writers. The series is co-sponsored by many organizations, including The Puknat Literary Endowment, The Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, the Laurie Sain Endowment, The Humanities Institute, and Bookshop Santa Cruz, which sells the writers’ books.
The series is offered in conjunction with creative writing workshop courses at UCSC, giving creative writing students the opportunity to see how the lessons they learn in the classroom can be applied in the wider literary world. In this way, students learn creative techniques not only from their instructors and classmates, but also from authors practicing their art in the industry. Each series also includes one event featuring an undergraduate in the Creative Writing program as the main guest.
The Shakespeare Workshop
December 06, 2021
The Shakespeare Workshop is a research center dedicated to the study of the works of William Shakespeare with an emphasis on how they speak to the experiences of today’s audiences and readers. Since 2013 the workshop has created a community of scholars, practitioners, and enthusiasts that strives to explore enduring questions about the human experience through the lens of Shakespeare’s works, using the common vocabulary created by the dramatic world of his plays to address existential concerns.
The Workshop was founded based on the belief that public universities should be cultural as well as academic institutions. It builds on the UCSC tradition of public scholarship in the arts and humanities that began in 1981 when Audrey Stanley established Shakespeare Santa Cruz, a professional theater company, as a campus program. It is also the scholarly partner of Santa Cruz Shakespeare, the independent non-profit theater company that grew out of Stanley’s vision. The Shakespeare Workshop provides a valuable dynamic bridge between UCSC and the community of Santa Cruz and beyond, by bringing to wider attention the aspects of Shakespeare’s works that are most vital for today’s audiences.
During the summer, the Workshop organizes Weekend with Shakespeare, a free public symposium about the plays in the SCS season, featuring visiting scholars and professional directors, actors, and designers. During the school year, the Workshop offers a variety of programs intended to expand the public’s access to Shakespeare’s plays and poems and to explore the incredible diversity of uses to which those texts are being put in the modern world.
Past programs have focused on a translation of the Sonnets into American Sign Language, prison-based productions of Shakespeare’s plays, Shakespeare’s interest in the experience of veterans and the challenges they face when coming home from war, and the work of a contemporary director who illuminated the experience of global refugees through Shakespeare’s meditation on exile in As You Like It. In 2019, the Workshop and SCS launched Undiscovered Shakespeare, an annual, Zoom-based dramatic reading of plays that are rarely performed or studied.
Professor Sean Keilen–who teaches Shakespeare, British Literature, and criticism, humanities and the classics–founded the workshop in 2013-2014. Thanks to generous gifts and bequests from members, it became a research center two years later.
The Dickens Project
December 06, 2021
The Dickens Project is an international research consortium and community outreach organization based at UCSC and dedicated to creating communities around the study of 19th-century literature. The Project’s mission since its founding in 1981 has always been both academic and public-facing: it seeks not only to produce cutting-edge research about 19th-century literature and culture and to foster graduate student development, but also to engage the community at large in reading 19th-century novels and generating new ways to understand their relevance to our current moment.
Through its coordinated program of conferences, seminars, workshops, secondary school programming, and especially its annual week-long summer institute—the Dickens Universe—the Dickens Project not only helps to shape the direction of 19th-century Anglophone studies nationally and internationally, but also creates opportunities for senior citizens, K-12 teachers, high school students, and book lovers from all walks of life to produce new literary knowledge in and for themselves and their communities.
GANAS Career Pathways
December 06, 2021
Professor Juan Poblete (Professor of Literature and UCSC HSI Team Faculty) served as a co-PI for the Graduating and Advancing New American Scholars (GANAS) – Career Pathways project, a five-year, $3 million grant, which aims to improve academic and career outcomes for undergraduates and further advance the campus’s capacity to increase racial equity.
The proposal was inspired by UC Santa Cruz’s mission to help our Hispanic, first-generation, transfer, and low-income student populations complete their degrees, excel in the professional workforce, and contribute to multicultural communities.
The project has four goals: to increase achievement (passing rates) in courses identified as barriers to student success; to provide supplemental instruction; to increase career advising, internship opportunities, and financial literacy; and to build institutional capacity by providing coaching support to academic and student services and departments to identify and disrupt barriers in practices and policies that contribute to racial inequity.
Ethics & Astrobiology Reading Group
December 06, 2021
The Ethics and Astrobiology Reading Group is a humanities-focused component of UCSC’s larger Astrobiology Initiative, whose goal is to produce an interdisciplinary research team dedicated to the study of the origin, evolution, and prevalence of life in the universe.
The Astrobiology Initiative’s scientific research has its roots in the origin of life, planetary and atmospheric science, instrument development, and analysis of recently observed exoplanets. Research in this field demands reconciliation between a galactic scope of inquiry and humans’ hyper-local, terrestrial starting point. The orders of magnitude that separate these two scales offer a uniquely generative opportunity for humanistic attention to the ambiguities between the human experience and the edge of scientific inquiry. To explore these questions, the Ethics and Astrobiology Reading Group reads and discusses written works that both illuminate and resist straightforward empiricism and which emphasize the possibilities and dangers of consensus in the sciences.
The Ethics and Astrobiology Reading Group serves as a forum where UCSC’s most brilliant minds in the arts, humanities, and sciences can share their perspectives on topics that are relevant to the field of astrobiology, but which scientific inquiry alone cannot fully illuminate. Grounded in literature and the humanities, this group asks the ethical questions raised by the conduct and application of universe-altering research in the fields of astrobiology and planetary sciences, and solidifies long-term grant funding for humanities and arts collaborations within the Astrobiology Initiative.
Graduate Student Success
December 06, 2021
The Humanities Institute’s Graduate Student Success (GSS) program supports first- and second-year graduate students who were eligible for a Cota-Robles admissions award at UC Santa Cruz. The GSS program offers students fellowships, workshops, mentorship opportunities, and cohort building activities.
The GSS program is oriented towards fostering graduate success in the Humanities, especially among students who have confronted structural barriers to higher education and intend to use their degree to address social inequalities. The two-year program helps doctoral students navigate the challenges of graduate coursework, negotiate productive relationships with advisors, handle classroom and teaching duties, and envision pathways through departmental milestones. GSS activities also build new communities at UCSC and create supportive networks of peers, faculty, and staff.