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.
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…
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.
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.
In Inventing William of Norwich Heather Blurton resituates Thomas’s account by offering the first full analysis of it as a specifically literary work. The second half of the twelfth century was a time of great literary innovation encompassing an efflorescence of saints’ lives and historiography, as well as the emergence of vernacular romance…She examines The Life and Miracles within the framework of these new textual developments and alongside innovations in liturgical and devotional practices to argue that the origin of the ritual murder accusation is imbricated as much in literary culture as it is in the realities of Christian-Jewish relations or the emergence of racially based discourses of antisemitism.
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…
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
Recent & Upcoming Courses
ENGL 236
ENGL 236
Oceanic Forms IIInstructor: Jue, Melody
Quarter: Winter 2025
ENGL 103SH
The Secret History of Eighteenth-Century LiteratureInstructor: King, Rachael Scarborough
Quarter: Winter 2025