Humanities
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Tyler Stovall, renowned history professor and former humanities dean, dies at 67
Stovall was a faculty member of the UC Santa Cruz Humanities Division for 13 years, including three years serving as the chair of the History Department and provost of Stevenson College.
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Alumna bell hooks—celebrated feminist theorist, cultural critic, artist, and writer—dies at 69
bell hooks was the author of over two dozen books that ranged from the groundbreaking text ‘Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism’ to her deeply felt memoir ‘Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood’.
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UC Santa Cruz receives Mellon Foundation humanities grant to investigate race, biomedicine
Faculty and students at UC Santa Cruz will critically investigate the relationships among medicine, race, and the environment both in the United States and in other regions of the globe shaped by the influence of American medicine.
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Karen Tei Yamashita receives 2021 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters
Yamashita used her acceptance speech, in part, to emphasize the significance of this medal being awarded to an Asian-American writer “especially this year, post-pandemic, having weathered the Twitter absurdity, corruption, and mendacity; the brutality of racial profiling; and the provocation of anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, anti-Muslim, [and] anti-Asian hatred.”
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New grant to support Dickens Project programming in year ahead
The programming in 2022 is focused on questions of race and social justice in the 19th century and today, with the summer’s Dickens Universe event broadening its purview by pairing a British novel with an African-American novel.
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Exhibit showcases remarkable lives of everyday Santa Cruz residents
Sponsored by The Humanities Institute and curated by THI’s Summer Public Fellow Morgan Gates, ‘Do You Know My Name?’ highlights the stories of everyday Santa Cruzans throughout the region’s history who were neither rich nor famous but whose lives are remarkable.
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Award-winning poet Gary Young to read at 12th annual Morton Marcus memorial event
Gary Young has written powerful, richly detailed verses often inspired by the bounty of the natural world. And as with most great poetry, Young’s work is great on the page, but truly comes to life when it is read aloud.
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How one tiny island influenced the world
Egill Bjarnason, journalist and Soc Doc alumnus, explains the big history of his native Iceland in a “joyously peculiar book.”
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Costumes get lead role
New gift from alumnus Jim Gunderson (Rachel Carson ’77, philosophy) ensures students have the opportunity to step into costumes that enrich their experience and enhance their performances.
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Mellon Foundation award to support UC Santa Cruz’s ‘Visualizing Abolition’ initiative
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a $1,977,000 grant to support ‘Visualizing Abolition,’ the nation’s most ambitious and sustained art and prison abolition initiative.

