The History of Consciousness department is pleased to offer a quarterly series of talks by distinguished guests in the History of Consciousness Research Colloquium. Recordings of previous lectures are available in the Research Colloquium Archive. Speakers are selected in collaboration by a committee of faculty and graduate students. Please see the current events list below.
Attend in-person at Humanities 1 or virtually on Zoom. Zoom registration is below. Note that you may register to attend more than one event at the time of registration. Masks strongly recommended for those attending in person.
Upcoming events:
Whose Dialectic? Thinking with Fanon, Žižek, and Al Attar with Lisa Wedeen, University of Chicago
Monday January 26th at 1pm PST
Hum 1 Rm 210
This project begins with a question inspired by the work of the anthropologist David Scott, as to whether radical social transformation can remain a credible historical possibility if it is not undergirded by a belief in teleology. Does collectively willed transformation—the kind to which leftist and anticolonial movements have traditionally aspired—become unthinkable absent some degree of confidence in the arc of History bending toward social amelioration on its own? And if not, how do we begin adjudicating what counts as an emancipatory politics today? Put another way, this talk searches for forms that political hope might take in the disappointing and exhausted ruins of our postcolonial and post-socialist present. It approaches answers to these questions by examining a core concept in key narratives of leftist collective transformation, that is, by exploring anew the promise and limitations of “the dialectic.” It puts Frantz Fanon and Slavoj Žižek into conversation with the playwright Mohammad Al Attar, whose play While I Was Waiting not only shows us the dialectic in action, but in so doing offers a compelling approach to political transformation in the present.
Revolution and Restoration with Massimilano Tomba in conversation with Ariella Patchen & Shaun Terry, UC Santa Cruz
Monday February 9th at 1pm PST
Hum 1 Rm 210
This talk examines Tomba’s Revolution and Restoration as an expression of his philosophy of political time. Tomba argues that modernity consists of dynamic and overlapping temporal layers and that revolutionary change occurs when oppressed groups draw on forgotten or suppressed forms within these layers—commons, councils, sanctuary—to move beyond prevailing institutions. For Tomba, every social form is an open totality, shot through with contradictions and tensions, and therefore subject to radical change from within. The political horizon of revolutionary practice is, then, a form of relative transcendence that activates resources of justice already sedimented in the historical field. Understanding this method as revolutionary stratigraphy illuminates how concepts such as democratic excess and insurgent universality arise from the layered morphology of political life and how the past becomes a source of practical intervention in the present.
Timescape of Rings with Stephen David Engel, UC Santa Cruz
Monday March 2nd at 1pm PST
Hum 1 Rm 210
For this presentation, I will read from an experimental history called “Timescape of Rings.” In it, I meditate on a 2,200-year-old redwood round with markers for historical events affixed to its rings—the birth of Jesus, the invention of gunpowder, the drafting of the Magna Carta, and on. Running my fingers over the rings, I recall histories not commemorated by these markers, in particular revolts and egalitarian movements. From there, my daydreams carry me back deeper in time, all the way back to the first woody trees some 385 million years ago.
Elemental Encounters: how water, ice and fire + earth, spin and chemicals become us with Cymene Howe, Rice University
Monday March 9th at 1pm PST
Hum 1 Rm 210
From chemical relations to the sweep of stormfronts, the elements render a series of sensory, scientific and semiotic coordinates that reveal material intimacies. The classical forms of western philosophy (earth, air, fire, water) and the periodic table of chemical elements operate as tools of categorization. Eastern elemental philosophies and the many Indigenous elemental entities of world-making, in their multiple capacities, represent forces of encounter, interaction and transformation. In this discussion, I explore the analytic possibilities afforded through an engagement with elemental forms and I offer a preliminary set of coordinates to evaluate socioenvironmental phenomena through ethnographic engagement with elemental dispositions. Drawing from Alaimo and Starosielski’s conviction that the elements represent ‘lively forces that shape culture, politics, and communication,’ I consider how human and nonhuman encounters through (and with) the elements can help us surface both the punctuations and the cadences of our times and how the elements themselves, when heard as ethnographic interlocutors, have much to tell us about our place in the world.
Further Talk Information
Whose Dialectic? Thinking with Fanon, Žižek, and Al Attar with Lisa Wedeen, University of Chicago
Monday January 26th at 1pm PST | Hum 1 Room 210
This project begins with a question inspired by the work of the anthropologist David Scott, as to whether radical social transformation can remain a credible historical possibility if it is not undergirded by a belief in teleology. Does collectively willed transformation—the kind to which leftist and anticolonial movements have traditionally aspired—become unthinkable absent some degree of confidence in the arc of History bending toward social amelioration on its own? And if not, how do we begin adjudicating what counts as an emancipatory politics today? Put another way, this talk searches for forms that political hope might take in the disappointing and exhausted ruins of our postcolonial and post-socialist present. It approaches answers to these questions by examining a core concept in key narratives of leftist collective transformation, that is, by exploring anew the promise and limitations of “the dialectic.” It puts Frantz Fanon and Slavoj Žižek into conversation with the playwright Mohammad Al Attar, whose play While I Was Waiting not only shows us the dialectic in action, but in so doing offers a compelling approach to political transformation in the present.
Lisa Wedeen is a political scientist and the Mary R. Morton Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Known for her influential work on symbolic politics, authoritarianism, and the Middle East—particularly Syria—she combines interpretive methods with grounded ethnographic research. She is the author of Ambiguities of Domination, Peripheral Visions, and numerous widely cited articles that have shaped debates in comparative politics and political theory.
Revolution and Restoration: A Conversation with Massimilano Tomba in conversation with Ariella Patchen & Shaun Terry, UC Santa Cruz
Monday February 9th at 1pm PST | Hum 1 Room 210
This talk examines Tomba’s Revolution and Restoration as an expression of his philosophy of political time. Tomba argues that modernity consists of dynamic and overlapping temporal layers and that revolutionary change occurs when oppressed groups draw on forgotten or suppressed forms within these layers—commons, councils, sanctuary—to move beyond prevailing institutions. For Tomba, every social form is an open totality, shot through with contradictions and tensions, and therefore subject to radical change from within. The political horizon of revolutionary practice is, then, a form of relative transcendence that activates resources of justice already sedimented in the historical field. Understanding this method as revolutionary stratigraphy illuminates how concepts such as democratic excess and insurgent universality arise from the layered morphology of political life and how the past becomes a source of practical intervention in the present.
Massimiliano Tomba is Professor in the Department of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His publications include Marx’s Temporalities (Brill, 2012; Haymarket, 2013), Insurgent Universality: An Alternative Legacy of Modernity (Oxford, 2019; paperback 2021), and Revolution and Restoration: The Politics of Anachronism (Fordham, 2025).
Ariella Patchen is a PhD student in the History of Consciousness Department at UC Santa Cruz. Her work engages primarily with political theology, affect theory, archival research, and histories of the construct of race and ethnicity.
Shaun Terry is a PhD student in History of Consciousness and a communication scholar and political theorist.
Timescape of Rings with Stephen David Engel, UC Santa Cruz
Monday March 2nd at 1pm PST | Hum 1 Room 210
For this presentation, I will read from an experimental history called “Timescape of Rings.” In it, I meditate on a 2,200-year-old redwood round with markers for historical events affixed to its rings—the birth of Jesus, the invention of gunpowder, the drafting of the Magna Carta, and on. Running my fingers over the rings, I recall histories not commemorated by these markers, in particular revolts and egalitarian movements. From there, my daydreams carry me back deeper in time, all the way back to the first woody trees some 385 million years ago.
Stephen David Engel is a transdisciplinary scholar who thinks across big scales of history and time and who writes about them using creative genres. His writing has appeared in Rethinking History, ROAR Magazine, The Anthology of Babel, and other publications. He holds a PhD from the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he received the Hayden White dissertation fellowship for excellence in historical theory. This spring, he will serve as Visiting Professor at Deep Springs College, an alternative liberal arts college in the California desert.
Elemental Encounters: how water, ice and fire + earth, spin and chemicals become us
with Cymene Howe, Rice University
Monday March 9th at 1pm PST | Hum 1 Room 420
From chemical relations to the sweep of stormfronts, the elements render a series of sensory, scientific and semiotic coordinates that reveal material intimacies. The classical forms of western philosophy (earth, air, fire, water) and the periodic table of chemical elements operate as tools of categorization. Eastern elemental philosophies and the many Indigenous elemental entities of world-making, in their multiple capacities, represent forces of encounter, interaction and transformation. In this discussion, I explore the analytic possibilities afforded through an engagement with elemental forms and I offer a preliminary set of coordinates to evaluate socioenvironmental phenomena through ethnographic engagement with elemental dispositions. Drawing from Alaimo and Starosielski’s conviction that the elements represent ‘lively forces that shape culture, politics, and communication,’ I consider how human and nonhuman encounters through (and with) the elements can help us surface both the punctuations and the cadences of our times and how the elements themselves, when heard as ethnographic interlocutors, have much to tell us about our place in the world.
Cymene Howe is Professor of Anthropology and Co-Founder of the STS Program at Rice University. Her most recent books include Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene; Anthropocene Unseen; Solarities: Elemental Encounters and Refractions and The Johns Hopkins Guide to Contemporary Theory. She has conducted field research in Nicaragua and Mexico, Iceland and Greenland, the U.S. and South Africa and has been awarded The Berlin Prize for Transatlantic Dialogue in the Arts, Humanities, and Public Policy as well as a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residential Fellowship. Her current research focuses on the social impacts of glacier loss and sea level rise in coastal communities globally and she has co-created many public-facing events and art installations to raise climate awareness including the Okjökull Memorial (Iceland, 2019). She is currently at work on a book entitled The Elemental Turn.