The UC Santa Cruz Library's Regional History Project has just announced the publication of two new oral histories featuring visionary professors who have helped shape the academic development of the campus.
The first volume, Edges and Ecotones: The Worlds of Donna Haraway at UCSC, spotlights one of UCSC's preeminent multi-disciplinary thinkers. A professor of history of consciousness and women's studies at UCSC since 1980, Haraway helped build both departments over the past 27 years and is considered one of the country's leading scholars in feminist theory, animal studies, philosophy, and technoscience.
Haraway received the J. D. Bernal Prize in 2000, a lifetime achievement award from the Society for Social Studies in Science. Her archive is housed at Special Collections in UCSC's McHenry Library, and the new oral history illuminates many of those materials.
The second publication, Jim Pepper: The Evolution of Environmental Studies at UC Santa Cruz, is part of the Regional History Project's continuing series of interviews with prominent UCSC professors who retired in the early 1990s. Between his arrival in 1972 and his retirement in 1994, Pepper helped to build a flagship program in environmental studies at the campus.
Pepper brought to UCSC's new program his practical experience and background as a professional landscape architect and planner, as well as his probing interest in the philosophical and ethical questions at the heart of environmental issues. In these two interviews, conducted by former Regional History director Randall Jarrell and current director Irene Reti, Pepper describes UCSC's environmental studies program as one that "had both a theoretical dimension to it and an applied dimension.a program that integrated theory and practice."
Outside of academia, Pepper has had a 45-year distinguished career in environmental planning, site planning, and urban design. His projects include the formulation of an earthquake recovery plan for downtown Santa Cruz after the Loma Prieta Earthquake of 1989.
Copies of Pepper's oral history are available on the UCSC Library's web site: library web site, in Special Collections, and in the circulating stacks of McHenry Library, as well as at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.
Haraway's oral history is available in both full text (PDF) and audio (MP3) on the UCSC Library web site, or through the Library's Cruzcat catalog. Copies of the transcript are also available in Special Collections, the Feminist Studies library, and at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley.
For more information, contact the Regional History Project at (831) 459-2847 or e-mail ihreti@ucsc.edu.
