The Burke Lectureship in Religion and Society presents
Khaled Abou El Fadl, The Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Professor of Law at UCLA Law School
Islamic Law and the Challenge of Islamophobia
Monday, May 5, 2008

8:00 p.m.
Price Center Ballroom B at UCSD

Professor Abou El Fadl is widely acknowledged as the leading authority on Islamic Law in the U.S. and a major contemporary Islamic thinker. An article last August in the New York Times Magazine singled him out as one of two Islamic thinkers worldwide with the potential to bring about constructive transformations in Muslim political theology. His books include The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists (Harper, 2005), Islam and the Challenge of Democracy (Princeton Univ. Press, 2004), Rebellion and Violence in Islamic Law (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001), Speaking in God’s Name: Islamic Law, Authority, and Women (Oneworld Press, 2001), and The Place of Tolerance in Islam (Beacon Press, 2002).
 

At UCLA Law School he teaches Islamic Law, National Security Law, Law and Terrorism, Human Rights, and International Law. As a strong proponent of human rights, he serves on the Advisory Board of Middle East Watch and previously on the Board of Directors of Human Rights Watch. He is a member of the U. S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. Last year he was awarded the Lisl and Leo Eitinger Human Rights Prize by the University of Oslo, Norway. In addition to his formal training in Islamic jurisprudence in Egypt and Kuwait, he holds a B.A. from Yale, a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from Princeton.

This Burke Lecture is co-sponsored by the UCSD Dean of Arts and Humanities, the Center for the Humanities, the Middle East Studies Program, the Department of History, and the Institute for International, Comparative, and Area Studies (IICAS). For further information, contact Alisha Conley at aconley@ucsd.edu, (858) 534-0999. This lecture is free and open to the public.
 

Thursday, May 8, 2008

6:00 p.m.
Cross Cultural Center

Theodore S. Gonzalves is a musician and associate professor of American Studies at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. He has published extensively on Filipino and Filipino-American youth culture, particularly around the politics of cultural identity in the performing arts and film. He is currently working on a book titled Seditious Play, a cultural history of a stage performance to be published by Temple University Press.
 

In the field of performing arts, Gonzalves has served as a board member for Bindlestiff Studio, a San Francisco performing arts venue; co-founder of Jeepney Dash Records, an artist-run recording label; keyboardist for the Legendary Bobby Banduria; and musical director for "tongue in A mood" Theatre. Gonzalves' musical work has been featured at concerts such as the Asian American Jazz Festival and theater & music festivals at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. He has also written, produced and performed several scores for independent film projects. Gonzalves has received a Meet the Composer Award from the Meet the Composer Fund in New York. He was named a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome. In 2005, Gonzalves lectured and researched in the Philippines as a U.S. Fulbright Senior Scholar.

In Stage Presence, Professor Gonzalves will be discussing his recent edited anthology of the same name (Stage Presence: Conversations with Filipino American Performing Artists (Meritage Press, 2007), which features interviews and essays with / on Filipino American performing artists as diverse as Eleanor Academia, Pearl Ubungen, Danny Kalunduyan, Jessica Hagedorn, and others. From the cover: This collection of interviews and reflections by many of the leading Filipino American cultural workers demonstrates the range and vitality of Filipino American performing arts – an inspiring and dynamic range of practices encompassing everything from kulintang to head-banging heavy metal, from college PCNs to off-Broadway New York theatre, from the Bayanihan to site-specific performance art. Stage Presence gives us a view rarely available to students, scholars, and audiences: the winding paths through history and identity that led these groundbreaking artists into the spotlight. — Karen Shimakawa, author of National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage
 

University of California

Disabilities Studies: Technology, Pedagogy, Disciplinarity

Friday, May 9, 2008 - 10:00 - 5:00 p.m.

   Price Center, Gallery A

Saturday, May 10, 2008 - 10:00 - 3:00 p.m.

   Faculty Meeting: MCC Room 201

Saturday, May 10, 2008 - 11:00 - 2:00 p.m.

   Graduate Students: MCC Room 133

Two-day series of workshops for faculty, staff and graduate students from across the UC campuses focusing on furthering interdisciplinary, intercampus curricular development, dialog and networking on scholarship and teaching in disability studies. Keynote presentations by Georgina Kleege, UC Berkeley, author of Sight Unseen  and Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller; Catherine Kudlick, UC Davis, author of Reflections: the Life and Writings of a Young Blind Woman in Postrevolutionary France and Disability History: Why We Need Another 'Other'; and Sue Schweik, UC Berkeley, author of The Ugly Laws (forthcoming), and Disability Politics and American Literary History: Some Suggestions. Details ...
 

New Writing Series: Camille F. Forbes

4:30pm

Visual Arts Facility Performing Space

Camille F. Forbes, historian and performer, is the author of Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America’s First Black Star (Basic Civitas, 2008). Her life in performance has taken her from stand-up comedy acts in Boston to her ever-evolving one-woman stage piece, Tales of Suburban Squalor, in San Diego. She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego.

Christianities and Genealogies of Empire Conference / Workshop

Saturday, May 17, 2008

9:00 - 5:00 p.m.

Eucalyptus Point Conference Building at UCSD

The papers to be presented and discussed among the participants of this workshop revisit the study of empire and imperial sovereignty as a philosophical, juridical, theological, economic, political, and / or poetic discourse, in light of both ancient and modern Christianities. By “Christianities,” we highlight the irreducible heterogeneity of cultural practices and social movements that claim allegiance to Christian monotheism, even as they contradict or come into conflict with other groups that affirm similar or identical claims. We also underline the productive engagement between Christianity and modern forces of conquest, colonization, displacement, disfranchisement, commodification, and competition. Featured panelists include: Page Dubois (Literature, UCSD), Nina Zhiri (Literature, UCSD), Lisa Lampert-Weissig (Literature, UCSD), Sharon Kinoshita (Literature, UCSC), Brian Catlos (History, UCSC), Seth Kimmel (Comparative Literature, UCB), Keith McNeal (Anthropology, UCSD), Amelia Glaser (Literature, UCSD), Dayna Kalleres, Program for the Study of Religion / Literature, UCSD), and Jody Blanco (Literature, UCSD). This event is co-sponsored by the Transborder Interventions and Transcontinental Archives project under the UCSD Center for the Humanities, the UCSD Program for the Study of Religion, and the Literature Department. The event is free and open to the public. For more information, email: jdblanco@ucsd.edu or dkalleres@ucsd.edu.   Schedule of Events ...

Patrick Patterson, UC San Diego: Sonnenallee
Monday, May 19, 2008

6:00 – 8:30 p.m.

Social Sciences Building (SSB), Room 104

The final film of the German Film Series: Moving History, Sonnenallee (director Leander Haußmann), represents Germany's Ostalgie (nostalgia for the East) in a comedy about teenagers in East Germany in the 1970s. This screening is a rare opportunity to see a film not available for wide US release. Introduction and discussion by University of California, San Diego Professor Patrick Patterson.

UCSD Department of Literature Graduate Student Colloquium

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

2:00 - 3:30 p.m.

Literature Building, Room 155 (deCerteau)

Featuring... Catherine Gmuca: August Webster's Mother and Daughter Sonnet

Sequence: An Honest Love - Benjamin Balthaser: Traveling Against Empire: Reading the anti-Imperial Politics of Travel and Migration in the Depression Left and Michael Grattan: Reconciling the Past: Problematic historiography in Milton's Paradise Lost

George Varga: Rise of Rock Journalism

Thursday, May 22, 2008

11:00 a.m.

Literature Building, Room 155 (deCerteau)

You are invited to join Professor Robert Cancel’s LTEN 159 class in Popular Music of the Sixties in Cultural Context for this lecture focusing on the origins and examples of journalism centering on the emerging genres of rock music.

Perhaps the only daily newspaper pop music critic in Southern California who doesn't know how to drive, George Varga began writing professionally about music at the age of 15 in Frankfurt, Germany, where he grew up. He also spent 10 years drumming in jazz and rock bands in Germany and California. Varga has been the pop music for The San Diego Union-Tribune and Copley News Service since 1988. His work has also appeared in Jazz Times, Billboard, Spin and other publications, and he has written the liner notes for more than a dozen albums by such artists as Michael Brecker, James Moody ,and the band Happy The Man. He has done in-depth interviews with, among others, Miles Davis, Ravi Shankar, Kanye West, the Rolling Stones, Chris Rock, Alison Krauss, Mos Def, Hugh Hefner, Paul McCartney, Dizzy Gillespie, Johnny Rotten, Diana Krall, Rage Against The Machine, Afro-pop pioneer Fela Kuti, Waylon Jennings, B.B. King, Frank Zappa, and -- over a game of chess -- Ray Charles. Varga's 1990 review of a Madonna concert was the first anywhere to expose her extensive lip-syncing, and led to his being interviewed by Rolling Stone magazine. In 2002 he created and taught the course Jazz in a Post-Ken Burns World for UCSD's Extension Program.
 

Sara Castro-Klarens: Transatlantic Studies and National Literatures

Thursday, May 22, 2008

4:00 - 6:00 p.m.

Literature Building, Room 155 (deCerteau)

Prof. Sara Castro-Klaren is a senior scholar in Latin American literature currently at the University of California, Irvine. She received her Ph.D. from UCLA and has taught at Darmouth College and John Hopkins University. Her current research focuses on colonial studies and postcolonial theory as well as on feminist criticism. Prof. Castro-Klaren’s talk is based on her on-going research and critique of the epistemological foundations of literature programs in Spanish in the United States and of the relation of these programs with the emerging field of transatlantic studies.

Sara Castro-Klaren has published several books, among them: El mundo mágico de José María Arguedas (1973), Escritura sujeto y transgresión en la literatura latinoamericana (1989), and Understanding Mario Vargas Llosa (1990). She is the editor of Narrativa femenina en América: prácticas y perspectivas teóricas (2003), and with Sylvia Molloy and Beatriz Sarlo she co-edited Women’s writing in Latin America: an anthology (1991).

Ray Boudreaux and Henry Jones: A Legacy of Torture:
The San Francisco 8 and the Domestic Police State
Friday, May 23, 2008
3:00—5:30 p.m.
Literature Building, Room 155 (deCerteau)
 

Boudreaux and Jones are two former Black Panthers and two of the “San Francisco 8” (SF8), a group of former members of the Black Panther Party (BPP) who were framed for the killing of a police officer in 1971. In attempting to get members of the SF8 to confess to the killing various pre-Abu Ghraib torture methods were employed including electric shock, cattle prods, beatings, sensory deprivation, plastic bags and hot wet blankets for asphyxiation. The case was thrown out of court in 1975 by a federal court in San Francisco due to the information that came out in regard to the torture of the men when they were arrested in New Orleans. The men were rearrested January of last year and re-charged with the killing of the officer and with various others offences dating back to the early 70s. An international outcry to free the SF8 of these charges ensued with the men themselves at the lead.
Sponsored by: African American Studies Minor, California Cultures in Comparative Perspective, Department of Ethnic Studies, Department of Literature

Graduate Students in the Literature Department Present
Ngugi wa Thiong’o

Literature and Politics: The Relevance of Art to Life
Thursday, May 29, 2008
4:00 p.m.
CALIT2 Auditorium at Atkinson Hall
Reception

6:00 p.m.

Calit2 Auditorium at Atkinson Hall with a Live Webcast at http://calit2.net/webcast

Click for more details...