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 News and Announcements
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| ANNOUNCEMENT: Administrative Restructuring for Humanities Departments and Programs in South Hall |
7/28/2010 |
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The staff supporting the Humanities Departments and Programs of English, Philosophy, Linguistics, ESL, and Writing in South Hall will be relocating on the days of September 9th through September 14th as part of an administrative restructuring. During this time, advising and academic services for the associated departments may be unavailable. After the 14th, support services will be available at the new Humanities South Administrative Support Center:
Student Services, South Hall 3432 x7488 (Undergraduate Advising, Graduate Advising)
Academic Services, South Hall 3431 x7489 (Personnel, Financial, ESL Program)
Prior department/program offices will close (as administrative centers) over the course of this move. Phone and E-mail contact information for staff will also be changing; phone availability may also be limited approaching the move as lines are disconnected and reconfigured. Please visit the following link after the move for up-to-date Humanities South Administrative Support Center Contact Info.
Note: The English Department's main x8711 line will be disconnected prior to September 9th. Please plan to use the new main lines (x7488 for Student Services, x7489 for Academic Services) after the move is complete for any general inquiries. Please also note that English Department faculty offices and the Chair's office will remain in their existing locations on the second floor of South Hall. Thank you for your patience during this transitional period!
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| English Department Newsletter |
7/12/2010 |
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 The Spring 2010 English Department Newsletter has been released in digital form. Read about our new faculty, programs, graduate student accomplishments, and recent events (.pdf format)
To subscribe to or unsubscribe from the newsletter, or if you have questions or comments, please write to: UCSB.English.news@gmail.com.
You can also view previous editions of the Newsletter here.
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| New Department Publication: 'Ballads and Broadsides in Britain' |
8/8/2010 |
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 Congratulations to the members of our department and campus, current or recent, involved in the publication this week of "Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500-1800", ed. Patricia Fumerton and Anita Guerrini, with the assistance of Kris McAbee (Ashgate, 2010). Five of the essays in the volume, which consists of 16 essays total, are by faculty and graduate students in the department's Early Modern Center and EBBA (English Broadside Ballad Archive project) community.
Click here for additional details on the book and the essays contributed by the department.
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| New Department Publication: 'Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History' |
8/16/2010 |
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 Released in bookstores this week is Professor Yunte Huang's new book Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History (W. W. Norton). The book has already garnered a number extensive reviews and interviews with Huang in the mainstream press, including:
Huang's book is being nominated for this year's National Book Award and next year's Pulitzer Prize. He will be on a book tour during the coming year, including a local stop for a book signing at Chaucer's Bookstore on Sept. 23rd.
For an excerpt from the book description, click here or on the image above.
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| Interdisciplinary student media project seeks donations to produce short films 'powered by ideas' |
6/15/2010 |
Two English Ph.D. students, Zach Horton (an independent filmmaker) and Lindsay Thomas (working in the area of digital humanities), have started the Collaborative Media Commons, which uses collaborative online technologies to allow student writers, scholars, artists, designers, video makers, actors, and others to produce short narrative films “powered by ideas.” The first episodes, which will be produced in Santa Barbara for worldwide showings online, will be about “cyberpunk”--a theme that many students are interested in and that combines ideas about tomorrow’s technology and society.
Making creative use of the new Google Wave technology, the group has enlisted the enthusiastic participation of many undergraduate and graduate students from several disciplines (as well as members of the public). Given a $500 matching pledge from UCSB's Humanities and Fine Arts Division, the Department is seeking $500 from alumni, the public, or companies (for a total of $1,000) to support this project and allow film production to proceed in the summer and fall of 2010. (The students are volunteering their own equipment, time, and work.) Donations may be made by going to the UCSB Giving Online to Humanities and Fine Arts site, where a gift can be designated for the English Department under the drop-down menu for “Specific Gift Area of Interest.” The “Comments” section can be used to indicate that a gift is for the Collaborative Media Commons. All gifts count toward the Campaign for UC Santa Barbara. (See the Collaborative Media Commons Prospectus.)
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| Congratulations to John Ridland on the Balint Balassi Award |
5/1/2010 |
 Congratulations to English Professor Emeritus John Ridland, who was given the Balint Balassi Memorial Award (in the form of a ceremonial sword!) for his translation of the Hungarian folk epic "Janos Vitez" (John the Valiant).
Click here for the translated interview about the award, appearing in the The Independent (and written by Charles Donelan, brother of Jim Donelan and himself formerly of the UCSB Writing Program).
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| Shirley Lim receives MELUS Lifetime Achievement Award |
9/23/2009 |
Congratulations to English department faculty member Shirley Lim on one of the most significant
awards a member of our faculty has ever achieved,
the MELUS Lifetime Achievement Award.
Dr. Lim is an internationally recognized scholar who is currently Professor of English at University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Lim has published widely in the areas of literary criticism, Asian American studies, poetry, fiction, and memoir. Her most recent publications include Princess Shawl (Maya Press: Kuala Lumpur, 2008); Listening to the Singer: New and Selected Malaysian Poems (Maya Press: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2007); and Sister Swing, A Novel (Singapore/London: Marshall Cavendish, 2006). Dr. Lim’s wide-ranging and deeply influential contributions to scholarship and teaching have frequently been acknowledged with numerous grants, prizes, awards, and honors such as NEH and American Book Award.
For more information on the MELUS Lifetime Achievement Award, see their website at http://webspace.ship.edu/kmlong/melus/.
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| 2009 Undergraduate Commencement Reception photos |
6/15/2009 |
 Please click here or the adjacent thumbnail photo to view the picture gallery of the department's undergraduate graduation reception. Thank you to everyone who attended and congratulations to our English majors. We are very proud.
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| ACGCC launches new Journal of Transnational American Studies |
2/24/2009 |
 The American Cultures & Global Contexts Center is delighted to announce the inaugural issue of its Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS), a new peer-reviewed online journal co-sponsored with Stanford University's Program in American Studies and now available free of charge at http://repositories.cdlib.org/acgcc/jtas/
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| New on The Agrippa Files |
12/9/2008 |
- Recovery of the code from an original 1992 diskette containing William Gibson’s self-encrypting, self-disappearing memory poem and an emulated “run” of its software. (Go to The Poem Running in Emulation)
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Original footage from December 9, 1992, public debut of Agrippa at the Americas Society in New York City during the “Transmission” event. (Go to The “Hack”)
- Essay by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, with Doug Reside and Alan Liu, “No Round Trip: Two New Primary Sources for Agrippa"
Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) appeared in 1992 as a collaboration between artist Dennis Ashbaugh, author William Gibson, and publisher Kevin Begos, Jr. The Agrippa Files (http://agrippa.english.ucsb.edu) is a scholarly site developed by members of the UCSB English and Comparative Literature departments that presents selected pages from the original art book; a unique archive of materials dating from the book’s creation and early reception; a simulation of what the book’s intended “fading images” might have looked like; a 1993 experimental video "remix" based on the bootleg video from an original 1992 Agrippa “transmission” event; a “virtual lightbox” for comparing and studying pages from the book; commentary by scholars; an annotated bibliography of scholarship, press coverage, interviews, and other material; detailed bibliographic descriptions of the book; and a discussion forum. (more)
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| English Department Expands Specializations Offerings |
7/7/2008 |
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| Online World of “Second Life” |
9/24/2007 |
The UCSB Transcriptions Project is proud to announce its recent pedagogic and artistic foray into the online world of "Second Life," a popular 3-D virtual environment that first debuted for public use in 2003 and now supports over 30,000 concurrent users.
Funded by a 2007 Instructional Improvement Grant and developed under the direction of Profs. Rita Raley and Alan Liu, the project has successfully created its own experimental classroom space. This property is currently open for all registered Second Life users to explore and utilize for educational purposes. English department undergrads, grads, and faculty are invited to visit our virtual home at the following SLURL location: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Kerlingarfjoll/179/245/46.
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For more information, please visit the Transcription's Second Life Project blog.
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| Literature and the Environment Programs Launched |
9/1/2007 |
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 The English Department recently underscored its commitment
to the study of literature and the environment (often referred to as
"ecocriticism") by announcing a number of exciting new programs and
courses. In fact, a total of
fourteen L&E
courses will be taught in 2007-08 from a range of over twice that many that
will now be regularly offered. Undergraduates
can both declare an Undergraduate
Specialization in Literature and the Environment (USLE) for the first time,
as well as have the option of completing it with honors. Graduate
students now have the benefit of a L&E
graduate colloquium, teaching
opportunities, and other exciting new proposals. A number of L&E
events will also be taking place throughout 2007-08. UCSB's commitment to environmental
issues dates from 1969; after one of the worst oil spills in U.S. history off
the coast of Santa Barbara, a group of twenty-one UCSB faculty members calling
themselves the Friends of the Human
Habitat helped create the modern environmental movement. This commitment to
the environment continues today with our English Department, especially the twelve
Professors
that teach L&E courses.
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| Transliteracies Project Awarded UC Funding |
10/8/2005 |
 In summer 2005, the Transliteracies Project for research in the technological, social, and cultural practices of online reading was granted status as a University of California Multi-Campus Research Group (MRG) for 2005-2010, with total funding of $175,000 from the UC system and another $175,000 in cost sharing from UC Santa Barbara. Headquartered in the UCSB English Department, the project is directed by UCSB Professor Alan Liu and includes scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and engineering from throughout the University of California system. Over five years, the group will study historical reading practices alongside contemporary digital technologies in order to define a framework, development plan, and speculative tools to improve online reading and, equally important, to understand what "improvement" might mean in a broad cultural and historical perspective. The project was launched at a June 2005 planning conference featuring well-known speakers from universities and industry. (fuller statement of Transliteracies topic) (Transliteracies Web site)
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| Early Modern Center Creates Online Ballad Archive |
10/7/2005 |
 The Department's Early Modern Center (EMC) is well on its way to completing an online archive of Samuel Pepys's collection of English broadside ballads, the most important such collection of the seventeeth century. Created with permission from the Pepys Library at Magdelene College, Cambridge, as part of the EMC's ongoing English Ballad Archive, 1500-1800, The Pepys Ballad Archive currently makes available on the Web facsimiles of all 1,857 ballads that Pepys collected; extensive cataloguing of the ballads; introductory essays about ballad culture and the categories in which Pepys assembled his ballads; sample transcriptions, audios of musicians reconstructing the original songs, XML encodings of the works; and sophisticated search functions. In the future, the EMC plans to complete its "facsimile transcriptions" (allowing the reader to toggle back and forth between the difficult to read "black letter" font of the original ballads and roman-type transcriptions that preserve the works' original illustrations and ornaments) and expand its musical repertory to 1,000 available tunes. The goal of the ballad project is to open up new ways of understanding early modern popular culture, literature, art, and music.
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| Race and Pedagogy Project Launched |
9/27/2005 |
 The English Department recently announced the creation of a new web resource: the Race and Pedagogy Project (http://rpp.english.ucsb.edu/). A product of the department's Diversity Work Group and the American Cultures and Global Contexts Center, this resource provides teachers, students, researchers and the interested public with on-site research summaries and citations as well as bibliographies of research and teaching materials. The project has been inspired by lively, ongoing exchanges regarding anti-racist teaching strategies, exchanges that have evolved in a wide variety of disciplines and educational settings. The site attempts to convey the range of these engagements by highlighting representative examples of scholarship. The site developers envision this as a multi-year endeavor and they encourage suggestions and advice from site visitors, especially at this early stage. The site is carefully designed to lend many different voices to race and pedagogy dialogues. To this end, visitors are encouraged to add their comments by making use of the dialogue boxes positioned after each research summary and bibliography. The RPP development team includes four English graduate students, Susan Cook, David Roh, Benjamin Shockey and Katherine Voll, as well as Professor Carl Gutierrez-Jones. The project has been funded by UCSB’s Office of Research and the Rockefeller Foundation.
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| Legal & Regulatory Notices |
1/1/2005 |
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