Please join us at noon on Wednesday, April 23rd , for a series of responses to the exhibition Public Texts: A Californian Visual Language. This lunchtime gathering will bring invited faculty from across campus together to present their reactions and interpretations to the show. Professors Charmaine Chua (Global Studies) Letty García (Theater & Dance), Jaime Pérez González (Linguistics), and Althea Wasow (Film and Media Studies) will speak on the connection between their respective disciplines and works in the exhibition.
Moderated by exhibition curator Alex Lukas, this event is free and open to the public. Support provided by UCSB Arts Equity Commons.
Charmaine Chua (she/they) is an assistant professor of Global Studies at UCSB. Their interdisciplinary research focuses on political economy, postcolonial development, and technological change, with a specific interest in how the rise of the logistics industry has reconfigured the contemporary relations between supply chain capitalism, race, and empire across the US and Southeast Asia. Chua teaches courses on global political economy, labor, imperialism, supply chains, and ethnographic methods. They are currently writing two books, The Logistics Counterrevolution, and How to Beat Amazon: The Struggle of America's New Working Class (co-authored with Spencer Cox). Her work has been published in The Review of International Studies, the Socialist Register, Theory and Event, Antipode, Society and Space, The Boston Review, The Nation, and Jacobin, among other venues. At UCSB, they are a principle investigator on Organizing Knowledges, a project to mobilize university research in service of community organizations on the central coast. Chua is a 2023 Freedom Scholar and the 2023 recipient of UCSB's Plous Award.
Letty García is an Assistant Professor of Theater and Dance at UC Santa Barbara. She researches and writes about Shakespeare, critical race theory, pedagogy, cultural practice and production, performance theory, Latinx and Chicanx film and teatro. García is an arts advocate, dramaturge and community oriented educator. Before joining the Department of Theater and Dance at UC Santa Barbara, García was the President's Postdoctoral Fellow in English at UCSB. Letty's recent theatrical and academic work has been supported and featured by the San Diego Repertory Theatre, Los Angeles Shakespeare Center, Boston Latino International Film Festival, The Society for Renaissance Study, and most recently with the San Diego Shakespeare Society. García's forthcoming work will be featured by the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Shakespeare, and Digital Theatre+. In addition to her writing and research, García is currently working on a new project dedicated to supporting DREAM scholars and undocumented students and educators in higher education. García grew up en la frontera in the Imperial Valley and is a proud first-gen Mexicana in higher education.
As a morpho-syntactician, Jaime Pérez González studies word formation, with a special interest in the interface between morphology, syntax and semantics in human languages. Pérez González looks at functional factors that shape the use of certain morphological constructions in agglutinative languages, with a focus on how speakers activate these different domains when using their language and the abstract and formal principles that determine how these patterns are represented in their minds. Pérez González investigates these topics in lesser-studied languages, with focus on Mayan languages and Miskitu (Misumalpan language spoken in Nicaragua and Honduras). He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of Texas, Austin, Texas, and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at UC Santa Barbara.
Althea Wasow is a filmmaker and Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Her current book project, Moving Images/Modern Policing: Silent Cinema and Its Afterlives, analyzes the complicity and resistance between police power and motion pictures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is also in development on a parallel project, Untitled Bert Williams Essay Film. Prior to joining the faculty at UCSB, Wasow was UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences at UC Santa Cruz, where she collaborated on the public scholarship initiative, Visualizing Abolition, and curated “Ornament and Abolition,” a film series that draws attention to questions of film form and abolition. Wasow is studying incarcerated persons’ perceptions and experiences of increased satellite launching from Vandenberg Space Force Base and the relationship between the Federal Correctional Complex in Lompoc, California and VSFB, as co-PI of The Satellite Coast (PI Lisa Parks and co-PI Carlos Jimenez Jr.), an NSF-funded Science and Technology Studies research project (2024–2026). Wasow has taught courses on silent film history, avant-garde film, media and policing, and photography at UCSB, UC Berkeley, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts/The New School, and NYU. She has also taught in jails and prisons in New York and California, including San Quentin State Prison, Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, and Rikers Island. Wasow co-founded the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), a Brooklyn-based nonprofit organization that uses the power of art and design to increase meaningful civic engagement.
Alex Lukas is an Associate Professor of Print and Publication in the Department of Art at the UC Santa Barbara. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, and raised in nearby Cambridge, his research focuses on the intersection of place, human activity, narrative, and history through printed publications, sculpture, drawing, audio, and experimental curatorial platforms.
