Symposia Series
The 2014-15 CIS Symposia Series awarded funds to selected workgroups to host lectures, workshops, or performances that furthered a interdisciplinary research interest or theme. Similar projects are now funded through the Humanities Interdisciplinary Project (HIP) Awards, the Center’s annual awards supporting projects of varying format and focus in the humanities fields or cross-college collaborations with a humanities emphasis.
Mobilizing the Arts in Southeast Asia and its Diasporas
Participants:
- Christina Schwenkel
- Mariam Lam
- Tamara Ho
- Sarita See
- Casey Avaunt
- Astara Light
- Shelley Guyton
- Stephen James
Working within the framework of successful projects over the last several years, from “Viral Ports” to “Points of Contact,” this year we aim to continue our new tradition of engaging the everyday, gendered, classed and racialized lives of Southeast Asians –broadly conceived in and beyond the nation – in relation to the arts. A study of regionally oriented texts, rituals, and performances once formed the basis of the establishment of the program in Southeast Asian Studies (SEATRiP). However, the orientation we are proposing here considers the region as a site of deep transnational social and aesthetic engagement with global processes and historical shifts and alignments. Thus, “viral ports” and “points of contact” refer to the recurring movements and migrations of people, centers of power and industry, moments of dispossession, changing loci of innovative
critical thought, as well as the cultural forms that compel, measure, and provoke such global changes. Through a focus on the arts, in particular, we seek to better understand the variegated artistic forms and practices through which ideas and ideologies are creatively expressed, shaped and communicated within and among different societies of Southeast Asia in connection with the diaspora.
Events
April 9, 2015
Nguyen Tan Hoang | The Spacing and Timing of Việt Kiều Intimacy in Charlie Nguyễn’s Để Mai tính
May 8, 2015
Janet Hoskins | God’s Left Eye Closes in Vietnam And Re-Opens in California
May 14, 2015
Dredge Byung’chu Käng | “For Whites Only” Queer Desires for Respect in Asianizing Thailand
June 5, 2015
1st Annual SEATRiP Graduate Student Conference
Transnational British Studies
Of primary interest to this research group—all of whom are deeply invested in British Studies—is the concept of Britishness itself. Writers, thinkers, explorers, soldiers, politicians, travelers, immigrants: all used the notion of Britishness to shape what they could accomplish and how those accomplishments would be defined politically and culturally. How has Britishness functioned from the sixteenth century to the present to bring a people together, even as it threatens to alienate them from one another? In what ways did images and fashions, even though adapted from foreign sources, serve to define Britishness? How did the collecting of objects from very different cultures come to be seen as characteristically British? How did people from distant lands come to identify with British colonial power and refashion aspects of Britishness for their own political and cultural ends?
Participants:
- George Haggerty
- Weihsin Gui
- Malcolm Baker
- Jonathan Eacott
- Susan Zieger
Critical Digital Humanities
The Critical Digital Humanities Collective is a group of graduate students and faculty members of the University of California, Riverside who work on, and through, the complex materialities of digital networks. For more information, please visit their website at http://cdh.ucr.edu/
Participants:
- James Tobias
- Margherita Long
- Steven G. Anderson
- April Durham
- Rochelle Gold
- Kimberly Hall
- Richard Hunt
- Jennifer Kavetsky
- Sarah Lozier
- Ian Ross
- Alexandra Saum-Pascual
- Anne Sullivan
- Mark Young
- Jeremiah Wishon