Humanities
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California Poet Laureate Lee Herrick to headline Morton Marcus Poetry Reading at UC Santa Cruz
Lee Herrick will headline the 17th annual Morton Marcus Poetry Reading at the Cultural Center in Merrill College. The reading, presented by The Humanities Institute, will take place at 6 p.m., November 19.
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Michael Stern: Championing and supporting the Humanities at UC Santa Cruz
Michael Stern has been a longtime supporter of the Humanities at UC Santa Cruz, supporting the Dickens Project, the premier center for scholarship about Dickens and 19th century literature, and establishing an internship with the Humanities Institute and the Humanities EXCEL program to uplift the next generation of journalists.
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The deadly poison that changed medicine; History Professor Matt O’Hara will read from The Flying Death at Bookshop Santa Cruz on November 9
In The Flying Death: Poison, Plunder, And The Quest For A Miracle Medicine In The Amazon, UC Santa Cruz History Professor and Cowell/Stevenson Provost Matt O’Hara tells a complex but fast-moving story, in which scientific breakthroughs emerged alongside questionable medical experiments, commercial rivalries, and the exploitation of the Indigenous communities whose knowledge made the discoveries…
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Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture to explore Japanese American redress and the legacy of incarceration
Forty-five years ago, more than 750 survivors and descendants of Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II spoke before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. On Nov. 5, UC Santa Cruz will revisit that history with the Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture by civil rights attorney Donald Tamaki, along with the premiere…
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THI Moving Image Lab Public Fellow helps bring horror exhibition to life at the Academy Museum
A scholar of queer history and culture with a passion for horror, Bradford Nordeen is The Humanities Institute Moving Image Lab’s 2026 curatorial and exhibitions fellow at the Academy Museum, where he worked on the new exhibition The Horror Show, featuring nearly 400 horror-movie artifacts. The exhibition, which runs until July 21, drew nearly 8,000…
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UC Santa Cruz history professor tapped to lead historic slave trade database as it moves to Harvard
Slavevoyages.org, a free online database chronicling tens of thousands of slave-trade voyages, is heading to Harvard University, and UC Santa Cruz History Professor Gregory O’Malley has been chosen to lead it.
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Quarry Amphitheater to Present Sir Isaac Julien’s Landmark Film Young Soul Rebels
A newly restored director’s cut of Sir Isaac Julien’s acclaimed 1991 film Young Soul Rebels is coming to the Quarry Amphitheater on Wednesday, October 21. Following the screening, Julien, Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities, will join The Humanities Institute (THI) and the Moving Image Lab for a discussion of the film’s origins, its…
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The Festival of Monsters returns to Santa Cruz
As Halloween draws near, the monsters are about to descend on Santa Cruz. From Wednesday, October 14, through Sunday, October 18, the UC Santa Cruz Center for Monster Studies will bring together more than 80 scholars, artists, writers and makers for the fifth annual Festival of Monsters, the center’s largest conference yet.
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Humanities students get real-world experience through summer programs
This past summer, 26 UC Santa Cruz humanities students had immersive work experiences across California in media offices, city government, museum curatorial work, nonprofit organizations and literary publishing— the result of two university programs, the Summer Humanities EXCEL program and HumLaunch. Both are designed to translate humanistic study into professional experiences.
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From the humanities to tech leadership: Alumna Lúcia Soares’s journey from UC Santa Cruz to Carlyle
UC Santa Cruz alumna Lúcia Soares is the CIO and Head of Technology Transformation at global investment firm Carlyle. Soares credits her humanities background with giving her critical skills that were essential to her growth in the tech industry.
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Transforming Futures alumni turn summer scholarships into community serving careers
UC Santa Cruz’s Transforming Futures Program, housed within the Social Science Division’s Institute for Social Transformation, is a philanthropy-funded program providing scholarships for students to pursue career-defining internship experiences. Three alumni of the program share how their time with Transforming Futures led to careers in community building.
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UC Santa Cruz research trip reconnects Filipino American families across the Pacific
A four-week research trip in the Philippines this summer by an intergenerational team from UC Santa Cruz, the Tobera Project, and the Pangasinan Polytechnic College (PPC) led to reunions and unexpected discoveries.