With 30+ faculty, a dozen research centers and projects, and a culture of collaboration, we continue to invent new ways to do humanities research, creative-critical work, and public-facing projects on a beautiful campus between the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Ynez mountains.
News & Events
Faculty Bookshelf
Poetic and abolitionist imaginaries continue to intervene in our current political and cultural landscape in ways that challenge the violent status quo. As our beautiful vision reminds us, we are not the passive observers of history…
In The Virus Touch Bishnupriya Ghosh argues that media are central to understanding emergent relations between viruses, humans, and nonhuman life. Writing in the shadow of the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 global pandemics, Ghosh theorizes “epidemic media” to show how epidemics are mediated in images, numbers, and movements through the processes of reading test results and tracking infection and mortality rates
Chinese Whispers examines multiple contact zones between the Anglophone and Sinophone worlds, investigating how poetry both enables and complicates the transpacific production of meaning.
In this new book, the noted critic and best-selling author Yunte Huang explores the dynamics of poetry and poetics in the age of globalization, particularly questions of translatability, universality, and risk in the transpacific context.
The inscriptive . . . takes shape within the context of a heightened awareness of the intensified generation and circulation of language across media environments by human and nonhuman agents alike…
The Critics and the Prioress responds to a critical stalemate between the demands of ethics and the entailments of methodology. The book addresses key moments in criticism of the Prioress’s Tale—particularly those that stage an encounter between historicism and ethics—in order to interrogate these critical impasses while suggesting new modes for future encounters. It is an effort to identify, engage, and reframe some significant—and perennially repeated—arguments staked out in this criticism, such as the roles of gender, aesthetics, source studies, and the appropriate relationship between ethics and historicism.
2016
In the fall of 2013, we asked ourselves what we’d learn if we made a broadside ballad from the ground up; The Making of a Broadside Ballad provides our answers to that question. Taking cues ...
Read The Making of a Broadside Ballad (Internet Archive link).
Research Project
Research Centers
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Creative Critical Center
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The Global Latinidades Center
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Las Maestras Center
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Transcriptions Center
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Medieval Literatures
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Literature and Mind
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Literature and the Environment
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Hemispheric South/s
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Early Modern Center
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Center on Modern Culture, Materialism, and Aesthetics
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American Cultures and Global Contexts Center
Recent & Upcoming Courses
ENGL 128JG
Jewish Graphic NovelInstructor: Samolsky, Russell
Quarter: Spring 2026
ENGL 173
Between Text & Reader: Theoretical, Psychological, and Scientific PerspectivesInstructor: Amoretti, Valerio
Quarter: Winter 2026