Dean’s Lecture in Humanistic Inquiry: Kate Manne on Sensitivity and Survival
2026-04-30 16:00 - 18:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Royce 314
The Inaugural Dean’s Lecture in Humanistic Inquiry
Thursday, April 30
4 p.m. – 6 p.m.
Royce Hall Room 314
Free admission. Reception with light refreshments to follow lecture. Advance registration strongly recommended.
Presented by the UCLA College Division of Humanities
The Dean’s Lecture in Humanistic Inquiry is a biennial lecture dedicated to exploring cross-cutting topics and ideas in humanistic research and examining how humanistic inquiry connects to the most pressing questions of the day.
About our inaugural speaker
Kate Manne is a professor at the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University. She specializes in moral, social and feminist philosophy, and has written three books: DOWN GIRL: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford University Press, 2018), ENTITLED: How Male Privilege Hurts Women (Crown, 2020) and UNSHRINKING: How to Face Fatphobia (Crown, 2024). In addition to her academic work, she regularly writes opinion pieces and essays for a wider audience, including in outlets such as The New York Times, The Cut, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Nation and Time. She writes a Substack newsletter, More to Hate, exploring misogyny, fatphobia and their intersection.
About Professor Manne’s lecture
Sensitivity and Survival
Accusations of oversensitivity are nowadays very common. Are they typically warranted? Is there in fact a scourge of snowflakes?
In this lecture, Kate Manne will distinguish three things that are commonly meant by “oversensitivity”: over-identification of instances, over-extension of the relevant concepts and over-reactions to the relevant harms or forms of injustice, such as sexism, misogyny and racism. Her talk will draw on two rich humanistic traditions: feminist epistemology and non-ideal theory.
While acknowledging that oversensitivity of all three kinds can and does occur, Manne will highlight and explore the comparatively under-emphasized converse dangers: the under-identification of instances, the under-extension of concepts, and under-reactions or the undermining of warranted reactions, respectively. In view of this, she concludes that what is called oversensitivity is often simply sensitivity: a normatively valuable and justified way of reacting to harms and injustices that often go under the radar in society as we know it.
Please visit this page to register.
Event cosponsors
Thank you to our cosponsors: UCLA Department of Philosophy, UCLA Department of Gender Studies, UCLA Center for the Study of Women | Streisand Center, and UCLA Program in Experimental Critical Theory

Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead | Book Talk and Signing with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
2026-05-12 14:30 - 16:30 | James West Alumni Center, 325 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
When: Tuesday, May 12th at 2:30pm
Where: Founder’s Room, James West Alumni Center
Join Leanne Betasamosake Simpson for a book talk and signing for her newest work, Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead. Leanne
Betasamosake Simpson is a renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg musician, writer, and academic. She is the author of eight books, including As We Have Always Done (winner of the NAISA subsequent book prize) and the novel Noopiming which was short listed for the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Dublin Literary Prize. Leanne’s new work, Theory of Water is a national best seller and won the Writer’s Trust Hilary Weston Prize for non-fiction. Leanne has lectured and taught extensively at universities across Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Europe and has over twenty years experience with Indigenous land based education.

Beyond Representation: Practicing Feminist Engineering featuring Regan Patterson
2026-05-20 15:30 - 17:00 | Center for the Study of Women, 1500 Public Affairs
Date: Wednesday, May 20th
Time: 3:30-5 PM
Location: Center for the Study of Women|Streisand Center
1500 Public Affairs
All are welcome! Open to students, faculty, staff, community members. Dr. Regan F. Patterson is an Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, Principal Investigator of the Engineering Environmental Justice Lab, and a UCLA CSW|Barbra Streisand Environmental Justice Fellow. She was previously the Transportation Equity Research Fellow for the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research. Dr. Patterson earned her Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from UC Berkeley.
Her research focuses on air quality, sustainable transportation, community engagement, and environmental justice. More specifically, she examines and models the impacts of transportation and infrastructure policies, alongside place-based, community-driven interventions, on air pollution exposure disparities and environmental justice outcomes.
No registration required. Seating is first come, first served.
Light refreshments to be provided.

Memory, Madness, Messianism: Thinking with My Father, the Messiah
2026-05-21 17:00 | Rolfe Hall 2125
Date: May 21st
Time: 5 P.M.
Location: 2125 Rolfe Hall (UCLA)
Featured Speaker: Gil Hochberg, Ransford Professor of Hebrew, Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies at Columbia University, discussing her new memoir, My Father, the Messiah.
UCLA Panel:

Hannah Jakobsen (Comparative Literature)
Rachel Lee (English/Gender Studies/Institute of Society & Genetics)
Michael Rothberg (English/Comparative Literature)

Presented by: The Working Group in Memory Studies and the Abolition Medicine & Disability Justice (AM&DJ) Project.
Co-sponsored by: UCLA Center for the Study of Women/Barbra Streisand Center; UCLA Departments of Gender Studies, Comparative Literature, and English; UCLA Division of Humanities; and the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies.
Parking: Pay-by-space available in Lot Five (Level Six) and Lot Three.

Feminist Armenian Research Collective Workshop: New Directions in Music, Arts, and Performance Studies
2026-05-26 - 2026-05-27 | Schoenberg Music Building, 445 Charles E Young Dr E, Los Angeles, 90095, United States
When: May 26th-27th
Where: UCLA Schoenberg Music Building, Green Room
View full schedule here.
Join us for the Feminist Armenian Research Collective’s (FemARC) Third Workshop, New Directions in Music, Arts, and Performance Studies, which will be held at UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music’s Schoenberg Music Building on May 26–27, 2026. This workshop was organized by Melissa Bilal, Promise Chair in Armenian Music, Arts, and Culture at UCLA and Lerna Ekmekcioglu, McMillan-Stewart Professor of History at MIT.

On May 26th, panels will run all day in the Green Room from 9:30 am to 6:00 pm, followed by an album-launch concert “Piano Works of Koharik Gazarossian” by Nare Karoyan at Schoenberg Hall. The workshop’s concluding discussion session will take place on May 27th (10:00 am – 11:30 am) in the Green Room.

Cozy Book Swap + Books to Jails Drive
2026-06-02 10:00 - 2026-06-04 14:00 | 1500 Public Affairs
Join us for the CSW|Streisand Center Cozy Book Swap! Bring a wrapped book, add a hint note, and swap with others!
Additionally, donate a popular book to LA County Jails in partnership with LA County Library as a part of our Books to Jails Drive.

What kinds of books to donate to the Books to Jails Drive (per LA County Library Guidelines)

Fantasy novels
Adventure novels
Mystery novels
Sci-Fi and Fantasy novels
Spiritual books
Poetry
Self-help books
Books in Spanish

Donation guidelines

NO hardcovers – ONLY paperback books
NO textbooks or academic books
NO depictions or descriptions on how to commit crimes
MUST be in good condition / shape

Learn more about our mini library and the books to jails partnership.
When: Tuesday, June 2nd – Thursday, June 4th, 10 am- 2 pm
Where: CSW|Streisand Center Office, 1500 Public Affairs (Located across from Jimmy’s Coffee House)

The Fire-Break: Latinx Fire Mitigation Workers and Settler Land Control in Southern California
2026-06-04 12:15 - 14:00 | 352 Haines Hall
CULTURE, POWER, SOCIAL CHANGE PRESENTS:
The Fire-Break: Latinx Fire Mitigation Workers and Settler Land Control in Southern California
Thursday 6.4.26 | Haines Hall 352 | 12:15 PM | Pizza served at noon
This presentation discusses the settler practice of managing fire risk to valorize property in Orange County’s wildland urban interface.
The presentation draws on four years of ethnographic research with Latinx fire mitigation workers in the chaparral canyon ecologies of Orange County. It also incorporates over three decades of archival materials from the Orange County Fire Authority and Dr. Zarate’s family’s involvement with the County of Orange fire mitigation program. The presentation contends that workers employ Migrant Ecological Knowledge, a practice grounded in the geographies of dispossession and displacement, to create forms of care and life in places where personal risks related to health, legal, and social precarity accumulate. These affective and social practices amongst workers denaturalize fire management across Southern California as a structure of risk-production that expands settler claims to land through regimes of racialized labor that seek to have Latinx migrants do the work of protecting property from fire and cultural obsolescence.
Salvador Zarate is an assistant professor in the department of anthropology at UC Irvine. His work dovetails ethnographic research with historical methods and centers on questions of racialized gender, labor, and the ecology. His recent work explores Latinx residential gardening, drought as a science of land domination, and wildfire as a cultural practice of racial domination and settler conquest. He has published in Anthropology of Work Review, Journal of Political Ecology, Feminist Formations, Catalyst, Practicing Anthropology, Latino Studies, Aztlan, and others. His co-written book on the politics of doing transformative community research, Transforming Science, will be published in May of this year.

Fetal Subjects and Legal Personhood in the Pre-Modern Catholic World: Theology, Medicine, and the Law
2026-06-08 - 2026-06-10 | 306 Royce Hall
The UCLA Department of History Presents: Fetal Subjects and Legal Personhood in the Pre-Modern Catholic World: Theology, Medicine, and the Law
Conference Program • June 8-10 • 306 Royce Hall, UCLA
Monday June 8
Block One: Theology and Embryology
10:00 | Daniel Sennert and the Problem of the Soul: From Generation to Theological Suspicion Joel Klein, The Huntington Library
10:45 | Politics of the Pure Body: Theology and Diplomacy in the Immaculate Conception Ana Sanchez Casado, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
11:30 | Out of Context: Sermons, Scripture, and Ensoulment in Cangiamila’s Sacred Embryology Karin Ekholm, Virginia Theological Seminary
Block Two: Evangelizing The Spanish Empire
1:15 | Cangiamila in Alta California: Pastoral Obstetrics in the Missions of Colonial California Anne Reid, CSU Fullerton
2:00 | Of Witnesses and Practitioners: Ordinary People, “Experts,” and Accounts of Cesarean Operations in the Spanish Empire Adam Warren, The University of Washington at Seattle
2:45 | The Early Uptake of Cesarean Surgery in Arizpe, Arizona, 1766
Elizabeth O’Brien, UCLA
4:30-6:00 Keynote 1: Abortion in Early Modern Italy John Christopoulos, University of British Columbia
Tuesday June 9
Block Three: Body and Soul in Iberia and Belgium
9:30 | “Peramorde Déu”:Cross-confessionalMidwiferyintheLateMedievalMediterranean World
Debra Blumenthal, UCSB
10:15 | Sacred Dietetics, or Ordinary and Extraordinary Fasting Spencer Weinreich, UCLA
11:00 | Aborting the Archive: Pregnancy Criminalization in Early Nineteenth Century Galicia
Mary Kate Wolken, University of Minnesota
11:45 | Cangiamila’s Afterlives: Ideological Conflict and the Postmortem Caesarean Section in Belgium Jolien Gijbels, Free University of Brussels
Block Four: Philanthropy, Obstetrics, and Midwifery in Sicily and France
1:30 | Fetal Subjects and Foundling Subjects in Early Modern Sicily Erin Maglaque, Durham University
2:15 | Midwifing Baptism: Promoting Catholicism through Parochial Midwifery Education in Languedoc Scottie Buehler, Texas State University
3:00 | When the Fetus Becomes a Child: Historicizing Fetal Viability in the Early 19th Century Jennifer Kosmin, Auburn University
4:30-6:00 Keynote 2: The Dangerous Womb: A History of Pregnancy Loss and Blame Kathleen Crowther, University of Oklahoma
Wednesday June 10
Block Five: Slavery and Legal Personhood
10:00 | Partus Sequitur Ventrem, Fetal Life, and Gendered Slavery in Colonial and 19th-Century Brazil Cassia Roth, University of California, Riverside
10:45 | Bearers of Interest: Slavery and Legal Personhood in Early Modern Havana Adriana Chira, Emory University
Zoom link:
https://ucla.zoom.us/j/4674787380

Second Chance Film Festival presented by PEP x BUS
2026-06-28 | Billy Wilder Theater, James Bridges Theater
A day of powerful stories, honest conversations, and community.

Join Prison Education Program & Bruin Underground Scholars for the Second Chance Film Festival, featuring screenings and discussions centered on incarceration, reentry, and what a second chance can look like.
UCLA James Bridges Theater
Sunday, June 28th
10:30 AM – 5:30 PM
Come watch films like The Alabama Solution, The Strike, and The Inside Scholars followed by meaningful conversation and reflection.
RSVP here.

"Legacy": Free Screening by UCLA Film & Television Archive
2026-06-28 19:00 - 21:00 | Billy Wilder Theater, 10899 Wilshire Blvd.,, Los Angeles, CA, 90024, United States
When: Sunday, June 28th at 7:00pm
Where: Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum
Join UCLA Film & Television Archive for a free screening of “Legacy”!
Directed by Karen Arthur, a first-time filmmaker, and independently produced, “Legacy” confounds 1970s Hollywood’s expectations with the introduction of a new kind of cinematic woman. Bissie (played by Joan Hotchkis) is a woman unraveling under the pressures of a vapid and materialistic society. She stuns audiences with her honesty that is confrontational, yet heartfelt, and her vulnerability.
