Humanities
-
PhD history student Linda Ulbrich helps bring Santa Cruz’s past to life in the city’s expanded online history page
Santa Cruz’s official government website now offers a brisk virtual tour through influential, intriguing, tragic and overlooked moments from the city’s past. The updated and lavishly illustrated Santa Cruz history timeline is the handiwork of history Ph.D. candidate Linda Ulbrich, whose work encourages further exploration..
-
Connecting hearts, heritage, and higher education
By supporting The Humanities Institute and volunteering with Senderos, Carolyn and Curt Coleman help bridge campus and community—connecting students, families, and cultural traditions across generations.
-
Using speculative fiction to fill the silences of Colonial history
In his acclaimed new book, First Contact, Associate Professor of Literature Zac Zimmer draws on the power of speculative fiction to revisit, question and upend stories and tropes about early contact between European explorers and Indigenous populations.
-
Exploring the hidden kingdoms of fungi: Bestselling author Merlin Sheldrake brings Entangled Life to the Deep Read program
British biologist Merlin Sheldrake—renowned for his scientifically rigorous and lyrical explorations of fungal networks and interconnected life—is this year’s featured author for The Humanities Institute’s (THI) seventh annual Deep Read.
-
Humanities EXCEL Fellows build community through hands-on Internships
At UC Santa Cruz, the Humanities EXCEL Program is helping Humanities undergraduates discover new pathways to professional growth and connect to local communities through paid internships.
-
Arts & Culture, Campus News, Climate & Sustainability, Earth & Space, Health, Social Justice & Community, Student Experience, TechnologyInspiring Change: UC Santa Cruz launches $750M campaign
The campaign is a collective effort to raise funding to accelerate the campus’s groundbreaking discoveries, create real, lasting solutions to some of the world’s most consequential challenges, and amplify the next generation of leaders and scholars.
-
Humanistic approaches to urgent environmental issues
At UC Santa Cruz, the environmental humanities encourage us to ask: what happens when we stop treating the natural world as merely a backdrop, resource, or object of study—and instead treat it as a web of interconnected lives?
-
UC Santa Cruz Professor Banu Bargu Awarded 2025 David Easton Prize for ‘Disembodiment’
UC Santa Cruz History of Consciousness Professor Banu Bargu, an acclaimed scholar of political theory and resistance, has spent her career exploring some of the most extreme and harrowing forms of political protest, including hunger strikes. Bargu’s work has now been recognized with the 2025 David Easton Prize from the American Political Science Association.
-
Preserving the Amazon: A digital lifeline for the Biblioteca Amazónica
Three years ago, a fire broke out at the Biblioteca Amazónica in Iquitos, Peru, imperiling one of the world’s most important collections of primary sources on Amazonian history, culture, and politics. For Amanda M. Smith, Associate Professor of Latin American Literature, the disaster highlighted the urgency of the project she had already begun: digitizing the…
-
From KZSC to national acclaim
How Jesse Thorn built a radio empire from his roots at the UCSC campus station
-
Get to know our researchers
Meet some of the passionate people leading our impact and innovation. Public support and federal funding make this work possible.
-
At the Crossroads of Language and AI
As technology advances in English, a UCSC professor is making sure Indigenous languages don’t get left behind.