Past Events

Three-quarters of the seed varieties on earth in 1900 are now extinct, and more than half of the remaining commercial seeds are owned by three large companies. Mark Schapiro examines the fate of our food supply under the pressures of corporate consolidation.

Questioning the assumption that the slave past provides an explanatory prism for understanding the black political present, Stephen Best offers a new way of understanding the constitution of black subjectivity.

Shana Melnysyn, research grants manager at the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI), hosts a workshop for faculty members who want to learn more about UCHRI's grant opportunities and tips for successful proposals.

Shana Melnysyn, research grants manager at the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI), hosts a workshop for graduate students interested in learning about UCHRI's grant opportunities and tips for successful proposals.

Alva Noë explores the many unexpected ways in which baseball is truly a philosophical kind of game — a window on language, culture, and the nature of human action, intertwined with deep and fundamental human truths.

Seth Lerer, Distinguished Professor of Literature at UC San Diego, examines how cross-hatching — the controlled marking of parallel lines — became the great technique through which visual artists of the early modern era discovered the representation of physical and emotional reality.

Imagine trying to tell someone something about yourself and your desires for which there are no words. Michael Lucey examines characters from 20th-century French literary texts whose sexual forms prove difficult to conceptualize or represent.

Timothy Hampton’s close examination of Bob Dylan's songs locates the artist’s transgressive style within a long history of modern (and modernist) art.

For many, the right place to look for law is in constitutions, statutes, and judicial opinions. This book looks for law in the “wrong places” — in the realms of language, text, image, culture, and other sites in which no formal law appears.

Mary Ann Smart explores how nineteenth-century Italian opera sparked political change by turning the newly engaged spectator in the opera house into an actor on the political stage.