UC Riverside Creative Writing Professor Laila Lalami is one of six finalists for the 2019 Simpson Literary Prize, which honors mid-career fiction authors. Lalami is the author of multiple award-winning novels, including her most recent book, “The Moor’s Account.” Her new novel, “The Other Americans,” will be published later this month. The $50,000 Simpson Literary Prize has been awarded annually since 2017 by the Simpson Project, a collaboration of the Lafayette Library and Learning Center Foundation and UC Berkeley’s English department. The finalists, announced March 6, [...]

Dana Simmons has devoted her life to teaching. She is an associate professor in the department of history and has been teaching at UC Riverside for 13 years. “With very little, if any, compensation, Dana has been tireless in her efforts to advance the careers of women faculty,” said Goldberry Long, UCR professor of creative writing. “She's truly the colleague we all hope for, one who wants all colleagues to be successful.  She works on their behalf without any apparent desire for recognition or [...]

Warm wishes from everyone at the Center for Ideas & Society! This coming year in 2019, the Center will be celebrating its 30th Anniversary. As we move forward into the new year, we will look back at the Center's history and impact over the last 30 years. Stay tuned!

The Center for Ideas and Society is pleased to announce that the winner of the annual Emory Elliott Book Award is Sang-Hee Lee for Close Encounters with Humankind. Please join us in congratulating Sang-Hee for her outstanding contribution to scholarship in CHASS. An award celebration will be hosted in winter 2019. Details coming soon. About the Book What can fossilized teeth tell us about the life expectancy of our ancient ancestors? How did farming play a problematic role in the history of human evolution? How [...]

UCR News Article on upcoming Hot off the Presses speaker, Jade S. Sasser and her new book: "On Infertile Ground: Population Control and Women's Rights in the Era of Climate Change." Jade S. Sasser's new book highlights contemporary population control’s consequences for poor women in the Global South. Over the past 100 years, the popularity of population control in the United States has ebbed and flowed. Once considered a responsible way to safeguard the planet and ensure its future viability, population control [...]

Author and UC Riverside Professor Rachelle Cruz gives a speech as she accepts an American Book Award on Sunday, Oct. 28. (Photo courtesy of Cati Porter, Inlandia Institute) UC Riverside Professor Rachelle Cruz accepted an American Book Award on Sunday, Oct. 28, an honor that the Inland literary community says is a milestone not just for her but also for the region. Cruz’s poetry collection, “God’s Will for Monsters,” was among 15 winners that the Before Columbus Foundation chose to recognize for  “outstanding literary achievement from [...]

Photo by Jimmy Lai/ Student Photographer, CHASS Marketing & Communications "Close Encounters with Humankind" is not your typical textbook. Every chapter starts with a question. Questions can be about the birth of fatherhood, or farming, or our changing brains. "A lot of the textbooks talk about the beginning that happened billions of years ago,” Lee said, “but this book starts with a question each chapter.  Each chapter is an exploration." The questions challenge the traditional progression of evolution and provide intriguing [...]

In a bold acknowledgment of the University of California, Riverside’s humanities programs, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded $1 million to the university’s Center for Ideas and Society. The award, which comes on the eve of the Center for Ideas and Society’s 30th anniversary in 2019, is the largest the center has ever received. It will support a series of fellowships for faculty members pursuing humanities and humanities-related scholarship, said UCR’s Georgia Warnke, center director and distinguished professor of political science. “This award [...]

Congratulations to Catherine Gudis (History), recipient of a UCHRI Engaging Humanities Grant for her project: Skid Row History Museum and Archives. Catherine Gudis is Director of the Public History Program at UCR and teaches classes in public history and 20th century U.S. history, building on her twin interests in modern consumer culture and cultural and urban constructions of race, space, and place. She received her B.A. in Philosophy from Smith College and Ph.D. in American Studies (with distinction) from Yale University, where she also won [...]

Catharina Santasilia (UC Riverside, Ph.D. Candidate, Anthropology) has been featured in Medium's latest issue. Santasilia was a participant in the Rise of Civilization in Mesoamerica Conference back in February 2018. Forget the hat and whip made famous by Indiana Jones. For a preteen Catharina E. Santasilia, her love of archaeology started with Daniel Day-Lewis. It was the actor’s star-making performance in “The Last of the Mohicans” that inspired the Denmark-born Santasilia’s lifelong interest in indigenous peoples and the things they left behind. “I’ve always [...]

As the academic year draws to a close, we want to THANK YOU for your participation and support! We’re celebrating another successful year of humanities-oriented programs at UCR. Over the last 12 months, the Center sponsored… 5 conferences & workshops reaching over 360 people 8 community events with over 450 participants 9 faculty-led projects hosting 27 guest speakers 8 faculty book talks including Emory Elliott Award winner: “Miss Burma” by Charmaine Craig 24 graduate dissertation research grants PLUS co-sponsorship of events across campus [...]

Congratulations to Jody Benjamin (History), recipient of a UCHRI Junior Faculty Manuscript Workshop award for his project: The Texture of Change: Cloth, Commerce and History in Western Africa, 1700–1850. Additional kudos for two UCR graduate students who have received Graduate Student Dissertation Support Grants from UCHRI: Mackenzie Gregg: Plagues that Fascinate: Literary Leprosy and Queer Affect in the Victorian Fin de Siècle Hannah Manshel: The Freedom of a Broken Law

Congratulations to CIS Senior Fellow Stephen Sohn (English), recipient of a 2018 NEH Summer Stipend for his project: The Korean War (1950-53) in Poetry by Korean Americans. NEH Summer Stipends support individuals pursuing advanced research that is of value to humanities scholars, general audiences, or both. The fellowship sponsors continuous full-time work on a humanities project for a period of two consecutive months. Stephen Sohn, a former University of California President’s Postdoctoral fellow (2006-2007), has edited or co-edited a number of different works [...]

Loubna Qutami (Ethnic Studies) has been awarded a UC Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC Berkeley. Congratulations! Loubna, a recent recipient of a CIS Humanities Graduate Student Research award, will complete her dissertation and graduate in June. She has completed a Masters of Arts degree in the College of Ethnic Studies: Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative at San Francisco State University. Her Master’s Thesis Transnational Belonging: Palestinian Youth Searching for Home interrogates the imagined and real boundaries impacting transnational Palestinian youth movements and belonging to homeland. [...]

Congratulations to Eric Stanley (Gender & Sexuality Studies), recipient of the 2018-19 UC President’s Faculty Research Fellowship for "Queer Remains: Race, Trans Resistance, and the Aesthetics of Violence​."  The award program, administered through UCHRI, provides UC faculty with fellowship support to carry out an extended research project in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. 

If you’ve ever wondered what it means to be human, what our purpose is in the world, and why things happen the way they do, you’re not alone. That’s the mission of the Center for Ideas and Society at the University of California, Riverside — to encourage and nurture humanities-related inquiry and discussion. “The academic disciplines referred to as ‘the humanities’ are often seen as either indulgences or extras in a university setting, which is more likely to be associated with research and innovation [...]

An unprecedented four-day symposium hosted by the University of California, Riverside will spotlight Native American artists whose work explores aspects of the contemporary Native American experience. Held Nov. 1-4, “Neo Native: Toward New Mythologies” further brings to life the Sam and Alfreda Maloof Foundation for Arts and Crafts’ 40-work exhibition of the same name, which opened in June at the Alta Loma-based gallery. The exhibition, curated by Navajo painter Tony Abeyta, includes pieces from 11 contemporary artists with Native American tribal affiliations, including ceramicists, [...]

The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference (MIGC) is an annual event held at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee that supports the sharing and collaboration of national and international graduate student research across disciplines. Urban development. Access to information technologies. Voting districts. Drone warfare. The asymmetrical identifies a lack of equivalence that is increasingly characteristic of contemporary economic, material, political, and visual relations. Asymmetry is often at the surface of history: where sustained and repeated practices of inequality manifest as image. The asymmetrical is also [...]

On Tuesday, Oct. 17, UCR’s Center for Ideas and Society-sponsored research group Migration and Conflict Across the Mediterranean kickstarted their year-long project of examining Mediterranean topics on religious conflict and toleration and migration through the arts and exile. Organized by three UC Riverside professors — Professor of Literature & Performance and Chairman of Theatre, Film, and Digital Production Erith Jaffe-Berg; Professor of History Michele Salzman and Associate Professor of History Fariba Zarinebaf — the group met at the Center of Ideas and Society, where [...]

The ability to speak two languages is considered a coveted social and professional advantage in an increasingly globalized society. Less frequently discussed, however, are the cognitive benefits that bilingualism offers to speakers. According to the University of California, Riverside’s Judith Kroll, distinguished professor of psychology and director of UCR’s Bilingualism, Mind, and Brain Lab, bilingualism’s consequences are evident over the entire life span. People who can speak more than one language develop “mental flexibility” that increases openness to new learning, while code-switching, the practice [...]

Mellon Advancing Intercultural Studies speaker and former UC Riverside Professor, Jonathan Walton, was one of the thirty-one professors arrested on Thursday at the DACA protest in Harvard Square. Before the arrests, several professors, one undocumented student, Massachusetts State Representative Marjorie C. Decker, and Memorial Church Minister Jonathan L. Walton spoke of the need to take action against the policy outside Massachusetts Hall to a crowd of roughly 300 students, faculty, and affiliates from five different universities. Khurana was also at the protest. Walton, who [...]

Center for Ideas & Society affiliate, Daisy Vargas, is one of the six Ph.D. candidates in the Department of History who have won prestigious fellowships and grants totaling more than $200,000 this year. Daisy has worked on several projects at the Center including Religions in Diaspora and Global Affairs (RIDAGA) and Articul@s Autonm@s. Daisy Vargas has been awarded $25,000 as one of 21 Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellows for 2017 at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. The Newcombe Fellowship is the nation’s [...]

In a few short weeks, the University of California, Riverside will graduate its first cohort of students awarded the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF). UC Riverside was awarded a $500,000 grant in 2014 by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the MMUF program on campus. The purpose of MMUF is to help diversify college and university faculty by mentoring and preparing undergraduate students for graduate school and academic positions. “UCR’s participation in the MMUF program is a testament to the strength of our [...]

This post is the third installment of our thread on the Moving Matters Traveling Workshop (MMTW), a project that explores migration and mobility by developing artwork, exhibitions, performances and public interventions. In the first installment, anthropologist and writer Helen Faller talked to Susan Ossman, Artistic Director of MMTW and in part two, performance artist Priya Srinivasan reflected on movement. The Hairpin (AB): Do you think that only legs can take you this far? And only four of them for that matter? Look at me, [...]

It was the moment that the sociologist from University of Amsterdam Olga Sezneva announced “I will be a talking artifact” while striking a pose in the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam that I knew our collaboration would work and that I was in the right place. The whole group burst into laughter and we continued our work of live performance in the museum engaging with the objects in the museum and also inserting our own objects into the exhibits. I had recently joined the [...]

The award-winning film “Daughters of the Dust” will kick off a free summer film series at the University of California, Riverside May 12-13. The series, “Film for Thought,” is part of the Center for Ideas and Society’s Mellon Advancing Intercultural Studies project. This two-year project will investigate issues surrounding economic inequality, access to higher education, religious identity and intolerance, and omitted or erased histories. As the debut film in the series, “Daughters of the Dust” is co-sponsored by the UCR Speculative Fiction and Cultures [...]

Three Scholars, all associated with the Center for Ideas & Society, win Fulbright Grants. April 24, 2017: Fellowships will support research on women in French architecture, conservation-resource rights tensions in South Africa, and the state of religiosity in India. Heidi Brevik-Zender will hold the 2017-18 visiting professorship at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, where she will do research for a book project exposing the role of women in 19th century French architecture. Anthropologist Derick Fay will return to South Africa, where he has conducted [...]

AN INTERVIEW WITH SUSAN OSSMAN #MMTW Excerpt from an interview with Susan Ossman, Artistic Director of the Moving Matters Traveling Workshop, by Allegra Laboratory: Helen: What is the Moving Matters Traveling Workshop? Susan: The MMTW is a collective of artists and scholars who develop art together based on their shared experience of living in several countries. The project started in 2013 at a seminar where anthropologists and artists developed “creative responses” to my book Moving Matters, Paths of Serial Migration. Since then we have [...]

Heidi Brevik-Zender (Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature) has been selected for a 2017-18 Fulbright US Scholar Award.  She will hold the Fulbright-Scotland Visiting Professorship at University of Aberdeen, where she will be working on a book-length research project on women, architecture, and the built environment in France in the 19th century. Learn more about Professor Brevik-Zender and her work at complitforlang.ucr.edu.

The Critical Studies Collective, a UC faculty and graduate student research initiative, received a substantial UCOP award to collaborate across five UCs to develop curricula, symposia, and a website, all devoted to Critical Refugee Studies. UCR's Lan Duong (Media and Cultural Studies), founding member and co-organizer of the collective, hosted theTowards a Critical Refugee Studies Symposium with support from the Center for Ideas and Society in 2016. Members of the collective are also currently organizing an anthology of key papers.

Ajay Verghese, an Assistant Professor of Political Science and current Fellow at the Center for Ideas and Society at UC Riverside, has received a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award to fund nine months of research in India. Dr. Verghese will be studying how globalization and modernization are impacting religious communities and identity in contemporary India. Learn more about Professor Verghese and his work at politicalscience.ucr.edu.

Plan to attend the second annual Digital Humanities Infrastructure Symposium, February 23-24! The digital humanities represent the cutting edge of humanities research and instruction, but they also represent a fundamental shift in the paradigm of humanities, from the model of the lone scholar to that of the interconnected team; and from the model of the durable paper publication to that of the digital, ephemeral product. Since the infrastructure (including staff, resources, and services) necessary to support these new models are very different from those required [...]

UCR Today article by Mojgan Sherkat on this year's Emory Elliott Book Award winner, Professor Anthea Kraut “It is truly an honor to be recognized in this way by my own colleagues at UCR,” Kraut said. “I’m also very fortunate in that I got to benefit from Emory’s mentorship while he was still with us, and I’m so moved to play a role in carrying on his formidable legacy.” About the book “Choreographing Copyright” is a new historical and cultural analysis of U.S. dance-makers’ [...]

Conrad Rudolph, winner of the 2015 Emory Elliott Award, has received the 2015-16 CHASS Distinguished Research Lecturer Award. "Dr. Rudolph is an art historian whose research focuses on the art of Medieval Europe, with special attention to the role of visual expression in the articulation of intellectual and theological concepts, and their dissemination into the broader culture. As a medievalist, Rudolph’s work is lauded not only for its historical rigor, but also for its conceptual daring and theoretical sophistication. Rudolph is known to be a [...]

UCR’s Rickerby Hinds has been nominated for a NAACP Theatre Award for Best Director on his play “Dreamscape.” "Dreamscape", a riveting race-related, hip-hop production depicting the death of a 19-year-old young lady killed by a local police department and examined by a dispassionate County Coroner leads in Local nominations with six – Best Choreographer, Best Director, Best Female Lead, Best Male Lead, Best Playwright and Best Producer. Keena Ferguson's exceptional one person show "Unbranded" follows with five nominations – Best Director, Best Lighting, Best [...]