
Arts & Culture
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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..
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Ahead of new game release, Animal Crossing: New Horizons book reflects on comfort, community, and capitalism
Professor of Computational Media Noah Wardrip-Fruin speaks on themes explored in his new book
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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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Photo Field Research Quarter: An art-filled road trip across California
Each summer, UC Santa Cruz students spend three weeks on the road in Photo Field Research Quarter, traveling across California to camp, connect with community partners, and create art shaped by the places they visit.
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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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Jazz Big Band students will perform alongside legendary pianist Benny Green
Lecturer and band leader Charles Hamilton, a Bay Area jazz staple, was Green’s middle school music teacher and arranged his visit to campus.
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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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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.
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Porter alum Cuauhtemoc Martinez and a life in sound
From East Los Angeles to UC Santa Cruz to leading sound production at Warner Bros., Porter alum Cuauhtemoc Martinez has built a life in sound.

