Literature
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Humanities EXPLORE Fellows bridge history, culture, and community
This year’s Humanities EXPLORE Program fellows are adventurous and ambitious, transcribing 300-year–old texts, helping to revitalize forgotten languages, exploring archives, and learning from faculty mentors. This winter, two fellows were given film cameras to preserve and share their experiences of connection, creativity, and purpose.
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Humanities skills are transferable skills
UC Santa Cruz humanities students graduate with a toolkit of transferable skills in high demand across fields ranging from academia to the entertainment industry and high-tech startups. Here are the stories of UC Santa Cruz humanities graduates thriving in a wide range of jobs.
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Humanities graduates apply human-centered thinking in impactful careers
Across disciplines, they point to critical thinking, ethical reasoning, adaptability, and empathy as core strengths developed through humanities coursework.
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Distinguished Professor of Literature Carla Freccero dies at 69
Carla Freccero, distinguished professor and chair of the Literature Department and a beloved mentor to hundreds of graduate students, died this week at Stanford Hospital, surrounded by loved ones. She was 69.
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Uncovering the troubling legacy of racism in fairy tales
In Specters of the Marvelous: Race And The Development Of The European Fairy Tale, Literature Professor Kimberly Lau reveals how “innocent” stories often encoded virulent prejudice.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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…
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This spooky season, join UC Santa Cruz experts in exploring what scares us and why
As Halloween approaches, UC Santa Cruz faculty are undertaking scholarly investigations of zombies, digging up cultural histories of vampires, and delving deeply into the metaphysics of creepiness.
