HumArts Clusters

Faculty Coordinators: Chunjie Zhang (German)

This collaborative and multi-disciplinary project aims to establish a digital archive of global migration in its literary, cinematic, theatrical, and artistic representations. Faculty and graduate students participants envision to collect and analyze textual and visual materials concerned with migration in different languages and cultures as a repository for students and faculty to teach and research in migration. This digital project also addresses the need for remote education in the era of Covid-19 and beyond. The first phase of this project will focus more on Europe and the Americas as multicultural and multilingual sites while the second phase will foreground Africa and Asia. The recent refugee crisis in Europe and worldwide in 2015 instigated a rapid surge in literary works, films, theatrical performances, and works of art that take migration and refuge as their subject matter. While migrants and refugees from Africa and the Middle East feature prominently in Europe’s current political and cultural discourses, discussions about migrations from Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Eastern Europe to Western Europe have been ongoing in the postwar period since 1945. The richness and innovativeness of the works on migration have significantly contributed to changing and shaping the literary and cultural landscape in European languages and cultures, yet the documentation and tracing of their impact remains lacking. Migration and Aesthetics aims to address this need. We will first include works in German, French, Spanish, Italian, Norwegian, and Korean and welcome input from other languages and cultures. Please contact the faculty coordinators Chunjie Zhang and Linn Normand with questions.   

Faculty Coordinators: Colin Webster (Classics), Dan Stolzenberg (History)

The Early Science Workshop brings together faculty, graduate students, and other members of the UC Davis community, who share an interest in the study of science, medicine, and technology from ancient times through the eighteenth century. In keeping with premodern categories and recent theoretical trends, we take “science” to include not only the study of nature, but also other branches of learning. We are interested in the history of knowledge, expansively construed—technologies as well as texts, practices as well as ideas, artisanal traditions as well as learned systems, Western as well as non-Western cultures, and topics that transcend such dichotomies. The Workshop holds a regular seminar for the discussion of works-in-progress by cluster members and organizes special events with scholars from outside UCD.

Faculty Coordinators: Anjali Nath (American Studies)

We are a working group of scholars at UC Davis that emerged as a response to burgeoning forms of military power. By militarization, we mean both military interventions and the securitization of everyday life. To this end we pursue research that foregrounds the production of subjects under practices of militarization, the technologies that facilitate surveillance and state power, and the contestations to such forms of violence. The group creates an interdisciplinary space where all the various cultural and social implications of contemporary militarization can be considered, discussed, and held accountable.