UC Santa Barbara (Audio)

Revenge, justice, and betrayal in Shakespeare’s play and in the history of the politically-disputed Kashmir region arise as core topics in this discussion about the Hindi film Haider between Priya Jaikumar (USC) and Bhaskar Sarkar (UC-Santa Barbara.) The two professors interrogate and celebrate the film and play’s ability to combine local cultural specificity and popular accessibility. Arguing Haider offers new understandings of the character of Hamlet, the pair also question the concepts of “the original” and “the derivative.”

Series: "Carsey-Wolf Center" [Humanities] [Show ID: 33500]

Kim Coalson is Senior Vice President for Appfolio's MyCase, case management software that serves the legal industry. Kim ensures that the MyCase team delivers an outstanding customer experience and provides software that supports the success of solo practitioners and small law firms.

Kim joined the AppFolio team in 2011 as Vice President, Value Added Services for AppFolio Property Manager, where she launched and grew customer services. Prior to AppFolio, Kim served as Vice President of Marketing for Mindflash.com, from 2008 to 2010, where she was responsible for customer acquisition, web presence and customer research. Series: "Innovator Stories: Creating Something from Nothing" [Business] [Show ID: 33472]

Screenwriters Todd Louiso and Jacob Koskoff join moderator Jim Kearney (UCSB, English) for a conversation about their 2015 adaptation of Macbeth starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard. Louiso and Koskoff discuss how the film was originally intended to star the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, the challenges of making the supernatural elements of the play scarier, and unraveling the metaphor of Shakespeare’s soliloquies through foregrounding grief, trauma, and reinterpreting key scenes.

Series: "Carsey-Wolf Center" [Humanities] [Show ID: 33499]

Filmmaker Anne Galisky joins UCSB’s Helen Morales for a discussion of her 2014 film 14: Dred Scott, Wong Kim Ark, & Vanessa Lopez. The director explains the process of locating family members of the individuals the film focuses on, scoring the film, and developing conversations about citizenship including birthright citizenship but also recent debates about the status of people who are already citizens. Subjects of the talk range from the risks of being publicly undocumented, the rhetorical significance of families and children in political arguments, and her own personal family’s story of immigration. By way of encouraging future activist documentarians, she stresses the importance of forming trusting relationships with the subjects of her documentaries.

Series: "Carsey-Wolf Center" [Humanities] [Show ID: 33562]

The events of the Russian Revolution in 1917 exerted strong influences on immigrant Jews in the United States, who, over the previous three decades, had cultivated ties with various Russian-Jewish and Russian political parties. Tony Michels, Professor of American Jewish History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explores their attitudes towards Bolshevism. Series: "Taubman Symposia in Jewish Studies" [Humanities] [Show ID: 33470]

Brian is a computer programmer, entrepreneur, consultant, Angel investor, author and free software advocate. He was the original author of the GNU Bash shell and the primary maintainer of bash until early 1993. Brian also built the first interactive online banking software in the US for Wells Fargo in 1995 and he created an open source election system in 2008. Fox co-wrote a New York Times piece in 2017 with former CIA head R. James Woolsey advocating open source election systems as a means of securing US elections against Russian interference. Series: "Innovator Stories: Creating Something from Nothing" [Business] [Show ID: 33471]

Novelist and filmmaker David Bezmozgis speaks about his 2014 novel The Betrayers, an intense look at morality and the human conscience, that won the National Jewish Book Award. The book is about a famous Russian Jewish dissident who, after the fall of the Soviet Union, meets the man who denounced him. Series: "Taubman Symposia in Jewish Studies" [Humanities] [Show ID: 33367]

Part of the Humanities as Vocation event at UCSB, features two UCSB alumni talking about their work after their humanities studies. Reza Aslan is a producer and author. He addresses his training, the inspiration behind his creative work and the role the university can play in preparing the next generation of scholars. Tim Kring is a screenwriter and television producer. He tells how his religious studies background influences his productions. Series: "Ethics, Religion and Public Life: Walter H. Capps Center Series" [Humanities] [Show ID: 33469]

The earth's climate is dynamic and complex. Large changes in climate are recorded in ice cores, ocean mud and over the last two centuries, instrumental records. However, to understand the large scale patterns in climate and their changes and drivers, climate models are not only useful, but increasingly necessary to make skillful predictions for the future. Though critically important, understanding the role of climate models is often misunderstood or distorted. Climate scientist Gavin Schmidt discusses how climate models are not only useful, but increasingly necessary. Series: "Bren School of Environmental Science & Management" [Science] [Show ID: 33355]

Writer/director/producer Jordan Peele joins UCSB’s Matt Ryan for a Script-to-Screen discussion of Get Out (2017), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Peele explains how the tone of the film was influenced by his background in comedy, the work of Ira Levin (The Stepford Wives, Rosemary’s Baby), and the desire to subvert the tropes of African American characters in the horror genre, as well how he created “the sunken place” through conceptualizing racism in a new way for the screen, and bringing it to life through stand-out performances from the actors.

Series: "Carsey-Wolf Center" [Humanities] [Show ID: 33376]