Davis Humanities Institute

African American Studies

Faculty Contacts: Halifu Osumare , Milmon Harrison
The African American Studies Research Cluster engages in an exploration of the ways in which the discipline of African American Studies is central to many of the current discourses concerning globalization, contemporary American religion, politics, post-colonial theory, and literary criticism. As a group, we investigate how the African American experience has been and continues to be central to U.S. history, politics, culture, and even international relations. Our areas of study include not only the complexities of what has recently been called the “racial stalemate” in America, but also the vital contributions of African American expressive culture, including music, dance, religion, literary, and popular cultural styles. The research cluster allows faculty and graduate students to jointly develop cutting-edge research questions and inquiry into some of the most vital and vexing questions of our American history and contemporary times.

American Cultures and Politics

Faculty Contact: Matthew Stratton
Student Contacts: Erin Hendel, Shannon Pufahl, Ami Sommariva
Founded in 2004, the American Cultures and Politics (ACAP) research cluster provides a forum for scholars to meet and discuss research while fostering cross-disciplinary interventions. ACAP unites faculty and graduate students studying the Americas in any historical period. Participants come from Sociology, English, History, Cultural Studies, Art, Spanish, Native American Studies, Music, Asian American Studies, Women and Gender Studies, American Studies, and the law school. ACAP participants further our research and make the strength of our scholarship more visible on campus through a variety of programs including colloquia, guest speakers, lectures, and writing workshops.

Asian Pacific American Cultural Politics

Faculty Contact: Wendy Ho

Comprising a fluid group of faculty and graduate students from across HArCS , Social Sciences, and the School of Law , this research cluster’s multidisciplinary examination of Asian Pacific American (APA) culture, history, and society builds on the insights of traditional disciplines and recent innovations in theory and praxis. We are interested in how perceptions of language, gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and trans/nationality can organize and affect identities, complex social relations, and cultural objects in space and time. The diversity among our members’ expertise enables us to create an exceptionally fruitful space for intellectual engagement with APA cultural production and representation. Cluster members conduct workshops on research-in-progress, organize panels and symposia featuring guest and UCD-affiliated speakers that are helpful to our research goals. Themes and events are determined and developed by the cluster’s membership. Our events have included, among other things, the Asian American Performance series, Asian American Sexualities series, Critical Race Theory series, and a panel on Asian and Arab American studies and comparative research on Muslim Americans. In 2007-8, we hope to feature a number of working artists in various media who are interrogating complex identity formations in their work and performance/practice: Denise Uyehara (performance artist, playwright and writer), Philip Kan Gotanda (playwright, filmmaker, writer and musician). Other working artists/writers/filmmakers will be circulating in Asian American Studies, as well. We invite interested individuals to join our group!

Chicana/Latina Studies in California

Faculty Contact: Lorena Oropeza, Inés Hernández Avila
The main purpose of the Chicana/Latina Studies in California research cluster is to engage directly with the future of Chicana/Latina studies within the UC system and within the state of California. On the one hand, the neoliberal, corporate, hybrid model of higher education advocated by UC administrators is one that divorces itself from any obligation to provide institutional support for Chicana/Latina research. On the other hand, the breadth of scholarship at UC Davis that falls under the rubric “Chicana/Latina Studies” – which spans the fields of education and ecology, history and public health, and indigenous studies and immigration politics – speaks to the vitality of this academic enterprise. This cluster brings together faculty and graduate students working on Chicana/Latina strategies of survival, of creative resistance, of cultural celebration, and of political protest. Moreover, this cluster recognizes the severe underrepresentation of Chicana, Latina, and Native women scholars in the UC system and thus remains committed to providing a space for building mentoring relationships.

Critical Studies in Food and Culture

Faculty Contact: Kimberly Nettles
Student Contacts: Stacy Jameson, David Michalski
The Critical Studies in Food and Culture research cluster supports critical work on the cultural aspects of foodways, food practices, and consumption. The CSFC represents faculty and graduate students whose research and teaching focuses on the critical investigation of food and culture, and aims to enable interdisciplinary collaboration and support for researchers across the arts, humanities, social sciences, and food-related disciplines who are engage in contemporary and historical studies of the cultures of food production and consumption. For more information visit the cluster’s website or blog.

Early Modern Studies

Faculty Contact: Fran Dolan
The DHI early modern cluster draws on the considerable faculty and graduate student interest in the period from roughly 1500-1700 across the globe. Our members represent a wide range of disciplines, including Art History, Classics, Comparative Literature, English, French, History, and Spanish. We bring in several speakers a year and we also provide opportunities for faculty and students to present their work in progress. The cluster has been especially helpful in introducing new colleagues and their work to the community of early modernists. In the last few years, we have learned about the work of Katherine Burnett (Art History), Margie Ferguson (English and Comparative Literature), Katie Harris (History), Jessie Ann Owens (Music), and Heghnar Watenpaugh (Art History). The topics for our events speak to our group’s interests in the intersections of history, art history, and literature; our commitment to pressing against and interrogating chronological, geographical, and disciplinary boundaries; and our emerging engagement in the histories of science.

Eighteenth-Century Studies

Faculty Contact: David Simpson
Student Contacts: Karolyn J Reddy, Peter Weise
This research cluster supports scholars working in a wide variety of fields during the long eighteenth century. The cluster hosts the annual Hopkins-McGuinness lecture as well as formal and informal presentations of work by faculty and graduate students. It also serves as an informal advisory board to the journal Eighteenth-Century Studies, which is housed at DHI. You can obtain the journal on the Internet at Project Muse or Johns Hopkins University Press.

Environmental Humanities

Faculty Contact: Michael Ziser
Website: http://environmentalhumanities.ucdavis.edu
As Californians face 21st century challenges defined by the collision of industrial, ecological, and cultural systems, the expertise of humanities scholars in analyzing and addressing environmental problems will be of as much importance as the scientific knowledge and techniques that UC Davis already generates. The Environmental Humanities research cluster is designed to foster environmental-humanities research, support graduate students and postdoctoral scholars, and collaborate with affected communities. It brings together a large number of UC Davis humanities scholars already working on environmental problems within individual departments and programs for works-in-progress research presentations. This year cluster members are working with humanities and social science faculty at UC Merced to present a multidisciplinary research conference, “California, the University, and the Environment,” at UC Davis on May 7-8, 2009.

Estudios Culturales en las Américas

Faculty Contact: Robert Irwin
Student Contacts: Magali Rabasa, Isabel Porras, Ingrid Lagos
Website: http://estudiosculturales.ucdavis.edu
This research cluster focuses on the interdisciplinary field of Latin@american Cultural Studies, and specifically on contemporary critical debates and new research by scholars working on Chican@/Latin@ and/or Latin American cultural studies in the humanities and social sciences. In the tradition of Latin@american cultural studies, this cluster focuses on issues of political expediency and on power relations within the cultural sphere, topics related to gender and race, and work by women and indigenous peoples. Other possible themes of analysis include migration, subaltern knowledges, cultural industries, globalization, bilingualism, iconography, memory, and cultural policy, among others. The cluster approaches its topic through a transamerican perspective in interdisciplinary cultural studies.

Language and Social Contexts

Faculty Contact: Cecilia Colombi
The Language and Social Contexts research cluster examines the intersection of language and social contexts from educational linguistics as well as language ideologies and identities. Bringing together scholars and students from diverse fields interested in language use, this group fosters interdisciplinary connections though reading groups and the discussion of research projects. In 2006-07, for example we explored issues around “globalization” and language through a discussion group that met every week either to comment on specific readings or discuss our research projects.

Medieval Research Consortium

Faculty Contact: Claire Waters
Student Contact: Keri Wolf
The Medieval Research Consortium’s goal is to foster interaction among medievalists, promote medieval studies on campus, and support the research interests of graduate students and faculty. Our affiliated faculty and graduate students come from a wide range of disciplines, including Art History, Classics, Comparative Literature, English, French, German, History, Middle East/South Asia Studies, Religious Studies, and Spanish. The MRC organizes formal talks, workshops, and seminars by scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, both members of the Davis community and visitors from outside. We also host internal events on professionalization and pedagogy that are particularly tailored for graduate students, including a practice session for those presenting their work at the annual conference at Kalamazoo each May. Like the Early Modern Cluster, with which we sometimes collaborate on events, we are committed to working across disciplinary boundaries and taking advantage of the way cross-temporal approaches illuminate a variety of fields, including economics, anthropology, social science, Islamic studies, and art history, as well as traditional literary-historical disciplines. We hope to build on existing interest on campus in these areas by inviting relevant speakers, thereby broadening and enriching our sense of what medieval studies means.

Modern European Critical Thought

Faculty Contacts: Scott Shershow, Blake Stimson, Gerhard Richter
Student Contacts: Karen Embry, Natalie Strobach
The research cluster “Modern European Critical Thought,” in conjunction with the Graduate D.E. in Critical Theory, affords faculty and students the opportunity to interrogate the variegated traditions of critique as they have developed since Kant. The cluster provides a space in which to investigate the central underlying assumptions of what we call modernity, emphasizing comparative perspectives on the fundamental axioms of the arts and aesthetic theory as well as on the dominant principles of social, political, and cultural practice. Like the DE in Critical Theory, members of the cluster are united by no single set of presuppositions but rather by a shared commitment to close reading, rigorous thinking, and the pursuit of what Marx famously calls “a ruthless critique of everything that exists.” We accordingly understand critical theory not as a static canon, nor as a merely academic exercise, but as a robust, ongoing engagement with texts, artworks, institutions, the polis, and the world. Thinkers and writers who play a central role in the cluster are, among others, Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Bloch, Adorno, Benjamin, Arendt, Lacan, Foucault, Lyotard, Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, and Derrida.

Queer Studies

Faculty Contact: Kathleen Frederickson
Student Contacts: Matt Franks, Tristan Josephson
The Queer Research Cluster, founded in Fall 2004, is an interdisciplinary project devoted to interrogating structures of gender, sexuality, desire, affect, and embodiment in the contexts of political institutions, economic processes, and theoretical discourses. Events sponsored by the QRC include student-led reading groups, workshops for both grad students and faculty work, invited speakers and film screenings, professionalization workshops, and co-sponsorship of the Queer Symposium in Spring quarter. We welcome graduate students and faculty from all disciplines who are invested in, work in, or want to learn more about queer studies.

Space and Spatiality

Faculty Contact: Jaimey Fisher Student Contact: Chris Tong The Space and Spatiality research cluster brings together graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and faculty from across disciplines and programs to engage in the study, discussion, and research of space and spatiality. While social and cultural theories have tended to focus on temporalization and historicization as modes of critique, space has re-emerged in discourse as an important counterpart to and an interlinked phenomenon with time. Part of this development has been the increasing interest in the complexity of modernity and of multiple modernities around the world. “Space” can manifest itself as perceived, conceived, and lived as spatial practices, representations of space, and spaces of representation, respectively. Across an array of disciplines, “spatiality” can take on the properties and dimensions of the social, psychoanalytic, political, economic, cultural, geographic, urban, environmental, gendered, ethnic, filmic, textual, visual, haptic, ambient, bodily, mathematical, scientific, musical, performative, and so on. Given the diversity of fields from which spatial theories arise and impact, the research cluster organizes group discussions to develop a theoretical common ground and critical approaches. Building on the interdisciplinary character of the “spatial turns” in the humanities and social sciences, the cluster will act as a forum for invited speakers and presentations pertaining to the study of space and spatiality.

Studies in Performance and Practice

Faculty Contact: Jon D. Rossini
Student Contact: Claire Blackstock
The Studies in Performance and Practice research cluster functions as a forum for scholars and practitioners to share research and engage in scholarly dialogue and embodied practice around issues of performance and performativity, practice and process, ideally asking questions that cross these lines. One of the goals of the cluster is to engage with issues of practice and performance across a range of disciplinary sites including the more traditional performing arts as well as cultural, literary, historical, and scientific studies. Though many of those involved are interested in the idea of Performance Studies, the cluster is in critical dialogue with this discipline while simultaneously recognizing the powerful lens that emerges from the ability to view a variety of events “as performance.” Participants include graduate students and faculty from Cultural Studies, English, French, Music, Spanish, and Theatre and Dance and the majority of the cluster meetings are centered around research/creative presentations by participants and visiting speakers, some of which are intended to question the conventions of typical research presentations. We are also hoping to sponsor a local conference in 2007-8 on the relationship between performance and identity.

Technoscience, Culture and the Arts

Faculty Contact: Fran Dyson This group concentrates on the relationship of technoscience to cultural, literary and artistic practice and on the cultural, performative and media-oriented dimensions of science, technology and medicine. Our transdisciplinary focus includes cultural studies of science and technology, science and technology studies, history and philosophy of science and technology, technocultural studies, histories of the arts as they relate to science and technology, literature and science and science fiction, neuroscience and culture, digital arts, and computer science and representation.

Traveling Debates in Postcolonial Studies

Faculty Contact: Parama Roy Student Contacts: Alysia Garrison The Traveling Debates in Postcolonial Studies research cluster is an interdisciplinary, graduate student-centered forum dedicated to advancing research in contemporary debates in postcolonial studies and beyond. The cluster is concerned with interrogating the value of traditional postcolonial studies in a globalized world increasingly controlled by multinational corporations, transnational flows of labor and goods and U.S. corporate and military hegemony. Older debates of the relationship of postcolonial studies to anti-colonial nationalisms, on the one hand, and to poststructuralist theory and the so-called linguistic turn, on the other, have now been infused with newer discussions of globalization, prompting us, following the lead of editors of a recent anthology of postcolonial studies, to ask: What, then, is the value of postcolonial studies in our globalizing world, and does it have a viable future beyond its existing lifespan, however one tracks that genealogy? In animating these critical debates, the cluster seeks an active engagement with those cartographies that have an uncertain, or misplaced relationship to the traditional model, and that render the term postcolonial both critically capacious and spatially and temporally contingent. Central to the cluster’s focus will be how postcolonial debates are themselves translated and transfigured in different contexts. Adopting a horizontal approach, the cluster seeks to de-center discussions of the nation-state while remaining critically aware of emergent nations and nationalisms under late global capital by encouraging relational, cross-border perspectives. Following the lead of the UC Transnational & Transcolonial Studies Multicampus Research Group, we too are interested in tracking transcolonial and transnational flows that bring cultural formations into productive exchanges, and that go beyond the narrowly vertical exchanges between imperial center and (post) colony.