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Exploring the hidden kingdoms of fungi: Bestselling author Merlin Sheldrake brings Entangled Life to the Deep Read program

British biologist Merlin Sheldrake—renowned for his scientifically rigorous and lyrical explorations of fungal networks and interconnected life—is this year’s featured author for The Humanities Institute’s (THI) seventh annual Deep Read.

Humanities EXCEL Fellows build community through hands-on Internships

At UC Santa Cruz, the Humanities EXCEL Program is helping Humanities undergraduates discover new pathways to professional growth and connect to local communities through paid internships. 

Chancellor Larive in an auditorium with the Inspiring Change logo projected on a screen.

Inspiring Change: UC Santa Cruz launches $750M campaign

The campaign is a collective effort to raise funding to accelerate the campus’s groundbreaking discoveries, create real, lasting solutions to some of the world’s most consequential challenges, and amplify the next generation of leaders and scholars.

Humanistic approaches to urgent environmental issues 

At UC Santa Cruz, the environmental humanities encourage us to ask: what happens when we stop treating the natural world as merely a backdrop, resource, or object of study—and instead treat it as a web of interconnected lives?

UC Santa Cruz Professor Banu Bargu Awarded 2025 David Easton Prize for ‘Disembodiment’

UC Santa Cruz History of Consciousness Professor Banu Bargu, an acclaimed scholar of political theory and resistance, has spent her career exploring some of the most extreme and harrowing forms of political protest, including hunger strikes.
Bargu’s work has now been recognized with the 2025 David Easton Prize from the American Political Science Association.

Preserving the Amazon: A digital lifeline for the Biblioteca Amazónica

Three years ago, a fire broke out at the Biblioteca Amazónica in Iquitos, Peru, imperiling one of the world’s most important collections of primary sources on Amazonian history, culture, and politics. For Amanda M. Smith, Associate Professor of Latin American Literature, the disaster highlighted the urgency of the project she had already begun: digitizing the archive’s collections to preserve them, at least in electronic format, for the future.

From KZSC to national acclaim

How Jesse Thorn built a radio empire from his roots at the UCSC campus station

Students and a faculty member handle archival materials

Get to know our researchers

Meet some of the passionate people leading our impact and innovation. Public support and federal funding make this work possible.

Arts of "Rabbit and the Bear" sitting at the table together

At the Crossroads of Language and AI

As technology advances in English, a UCSC professor is making sure Indigenous languages don’t get left behind.

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Last modified: Oct 02, 2025