Alea iacta est and all that: Game Theory and Caesar at the Rubicon
2011-02-07 00:00 (America/Denver) | CA
Robert Morstein-Marx is Professor of Classics at UCSB.
This event is sponsored by the Ancient Mediterranean Studies program and the Ancient Borderlands Research Focus Group.
jwil 05.I.2011

Magic and Religion in Ancient Corinth
2011-02-08 00:00
Located at the narrowest part of the Greek peninsula and controlling land and sea traffic in all four directions, Corinth became famous as one of the greatest commercial centers in the ancient world. Her mighty rock fortress of Acrocorinth also made her almost impervious to attack. Corinth was a prime player in all the important historical events of antiquity, succumbing at one point to destruction by the Roman armies in 146 B.C. and abandonment for roughly a century. Revived by Julius Caesar, Corinth became a provincial capital and once again a thriving center of trade and culture, attracting a large and diverse population of Italians, Egyptians, Jews, Syrians, and many others.
From at least as early as legendary times Corinth also had a reputation as a center for magic and the occult. The city was the venue for some of the most striking adventures of the most notorious witch in Greece, Medea. Many tales about ghosts, haunted houses, the supernatural, and monsters were set in Corinth. Excavations by the American School of Classical Studies have revealed a “cell” where black magic was practiced at night high up on the slopes of Acrocorinth in the Sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone. It was established at roughly the same time as St. Paul’s famous Christian mission to Corinth in the middle of the first century after Christ.
This lecture will present some of the special magical equipment used in these secret activities, as well as the texts incised on lead tablets carrying curses that were deposited in this shrine. Named individuals are singled out for destruction and merit special attention because both writers and targets of many are women.
Ronald Stroud is Klio Distinguished Professor of Classical Languages and Literature Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley.
jwil 29.vii.2010

The Evolution of Arab- and Muslim-American Activism in the Post-9/11 Decade
2011-02-09 00:00
The talk is sponsored by the Center for Cold War Studies and International History (CCWS) and cosponsored by the Department of History.
The event is free and open to the public. A brief reception will follow Dr. Ibish’s presentation.
Please join us for this exciting event!
Hussein Ibish will discuss Arab- and Muslim-American activism after September 11, 2001. He will address immediate reactions to the terrorist attacks, examining how the communities coped with various kinds of fallout and backlash and organized politically in response. He will also consider the longer-term ramifications for Arab and Muslim Americans’ political and community organizing, and the prospects for their empowerment and integration into the American social, cultural, and political scene. Finally, Dr. Ibish will look at the rise of Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism in the broader American cultural and political discourse, and responses to it from various sources.
Hussein Ibish is a Senior Fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP) and Executive Director of the Hala Salaam Maksoud Foundation for Arab-American Leadership. Dr. Ibish has made thousands of radio and television appearances and has written for many newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. He was the Washington, DC Correspondent for the Daily Star (Beirut). Dr. Ibish is editor and principal author of three major studies of hate crimes and discrimination against Arab Americans and the author of numerous articles on Middle Eastern politics, U.S. policy, civil liberties, and Arab-American life. His most recent book is “What’s Wrong with the One-State Agenda? Why Ending the Occupation and Peace with Israel is Still the Palestinian National Goal” (ATFP, 2009).
hm 1/29/11

The Politics of Heritage from Madras to Chennai.
2011-02-10 00:00
Discussant: Prof. Amit Ahuja, Political Science, UCSB
The Politics of Heritage from Madras to Chennai examines the dynamics of public memory in the southern Indian city of Chennai, a former colonial port that now hosts new economic ventures such as software engineering, back office services and export processing. Over the past two decades of neoliberal globalization, state and municipal authorities have launched new efforts to attract investment and consumption through regulatory changes and by fashioning a heritage-conscious cityscape. Working from specific sites (museums, temples, vernacular architecture projects and memorials), Hancock grapples with the question of how people in Chennai remember, represent and debate their past, considering the political and economic contexts and implications of those memory practices.
Mary Hancock is Professor in the Departments of History and Anthropology at UCSB, where she teaches courses on public memory, religion and the anthropology of space and place. She earned her PhD n Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, and is the author of The Politics of Memory from Madras to Chennai, as well as numerous articles that have appeared in Modern Asian Studies, American Ethnologist, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.
Amit Ahuja, Assistant Professor of Political Science, UCSB, conducts research on the participation and mobilization of marginalized ethnic groups. His interests are located in the areas of ethnic politics, political development, security studies, and South Asia.
Download chapters from the Book: Chapters 1 and 4 from the
RFG Identity website.
Chapter 1 provides background information and we will focus our discussion on Chapter 4.
Sponsored by RFG Identity.
hm 1/30/11

Painting the People’s Court: Art and Democracy in Postwar Japan
2011-02-11 00:00
This paper introduces the work of a group of miner-artists at a coal mine in northern Japan, as an exampleof how art and other forms of cultural expression became vehicles for building new forms of democratic
subjectivity after the end of WWII. The miner-artists’ vision was but one of a multiplicity of visions that
jostled and jockeyed in the dispersed cultural environment of the early postwar, but their efforts to represent
and memorialize an important moment in their recent history can be seen as part of a broad movement
among ordinary people to participate in the formation of their own culture and lay claim to the franchise of
authorship.
hm 2/9/11
