Humanities Center

2025-2026 Theme: Retrospection

As the Humanities Center celebrates over 25 years as the interdisciplinary heart of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, our theme for this year is Retrospection. When we pause to deeply consider the past – through history, art, storytelling, and film – we can recognize a lifetime’s worth of achievements, finally able to trace the full scope and development of a body of work. Sometimes, our look back requires us to reevaluate what we thought we understood about the past. What has been left out? What has been misunderstood? What wasn’t clear in the moment but emerges with the passage of time? We must reckon with how we remember in the present because it will impact our future. The Humanities Center’s purpose is to create and nurture a culture of ideas at Chico State and to engage our diverse intellectual community through public events. During the 2025-26 year, the Humanities Center will host a series of lectures and films that grapple with our relationship to and understanding of the past.

2026 Events

Digital Humanities Series
Oleksiy Al-saadi

Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science

"What is Computation? The Philosophy of Turing Machines"

Wednesday, March 4 at 5 p.m., on Zoom

In the 1930s, Alan Turing and Alonzo Church introduced a minimal model of computation that, in terms of expressive power, is able to compute anything a modern-day computer can. Church's statement, "There is no algorithm unless it can be computed by such a machine," has formed the basis to how we can even understand what problems can be computed. In this talk, we expound on the digital of "Digital Humanities". We discuss types of Turing Machines and their ability to model human solvability of certain games. Then, we discuss why, despite the universal acceptance of the Church-Turing thesis, it has never actually been proven.

Dr. Al-Saadi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Chico State, where he also did his B.A. before receiving a Ph.D from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln on distance and domination properties in graph theory. His work focuses on theoretical computer science and the study of finding faster, algorithmic solutions to challenging problems under certain restrictions. He also has great interest in reductions, a way of showing that one hard problem is really another hard problem in disguise.

Works-in-Progress
Shiyuan Xu

Assistant Professor of Ceramics, Department of Art and Art History

"From Micro Life to Porcelain Sculpture: Material, Process, and Culture"

Friday, March 6 at 12:00 p.m., PAC 113

In this talk, Shiyuan will discuss her artistic practice interpreting microscopic life forms into biomorphic porcelain sculptures. Through scientific inquiry, material searching, and systematic process exploration, her studio practice articulates an engagement with the evolving structures of nature, the fragile essence of life, and her own cultural lineage.

University Film Series Presents:
Mulholland Drive

David Lynch, United States, 2001
Color, 146 minutes

Tuesday, March 24 at 6:00 p.m., PAC 134
Introduced by Rob Davidson.

Blonde Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) has only just arrived in Hollywood to become a movie star when she meets an enigmatic brunette with amnesia (Laura Harring). Meanwhile, as the two set off to solve the second woman’s identity, filmmaker Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) runs into ominous trouble while casting his latest project. David Lynch’s seductive and scary vision of Los Angeles’s dream factory is one of the true masterpieces of the new millennium, a tale of love, jealousy, and revenge like no other.

Works-in-Progress 
Jeanie Ruth Candelaria Toscano

Assistant Professor of Spanish & Latin American Studies
Department of Languages & Cultures 

The Drug Ballads of “El Culiacanazo”

Friday, April 3 at 12:00 p.m., PAC 113

This discussion examines narcocorridos (drug ballads) that emerged on social media following the events of October 17, 2019, in Culiacán, Sinaloa—“El Culiacanazo,” when Mexican armed forces failed to capture Ovidio Guzmán, son of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. Circulating online amid the violence, these corridos seemed to aestheticize a momentary triumph of organized crime over the state. Far from triumphant, these ballads foreground historically excluded borderland communities as agents of critique, challenging a national project structured by moral and economic exclusions.

Visiting Scholar
Dr. Eva Diaz

Professor of Contemporary Art History, Pratt Institute

"After Spaceship Earth: Art, Techno-utopia, and Other Science Fictions"

Thursday, April 9 at 5:30 p.m., on Zoom

This talk is sponsored by the  Chico State Women's Philanthropy Council 

Eva Díaz’s new book  After Spaceship Earth: Art, Techno-utopia, and Other Science Fictions (Yale, 2025) is concerned with the legacy of architect-designer R. Buckminster Fuller in contemporary art. Many contemporary artists respond enthusiastically to Fuller’s concept of a hybrid artist-scientist role, as well as his arguments for radical social equity in design. Fuller maintained that we have the means to feed, house, and clothe the world’s population, and tirelessly sought to redistribute global resources to that end.

After Spaceship Earth is divided into two sections. Its first part, “Terrestrial,” considers works of art and design that use geodesic domes in various ways: as ad-hoc architectural projects grappling with climate change, as spaces of exhibition display and communication design, as proposals to solve housing crises, and as critiques of the pervasiveness of surveillance. In this talk, Díaz will focus on the book’s second half, “Extraplanetary,” which takes up the influence of Fuller and his acolyte Stewart Brand, founder of the  Whole Earth Catalog, in artworks examining outer space exploration and colonization. The four chapters in this second section interject the important corrective of Afrofuturist thinking into Fuller’s and Brand’s space optimism, and investigate artists’ challenges to a privatized and highly-surveilled future in outer space: how the space “race” and off-planet colonization are being reformulated as powerful tools to readdress economic, gender, and racial inequality, as well as ecological injustices.

Eva Díaz is Professor of Contemporary Art History at Pratt Institute. She received her B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University. Her teaching and scholarship are informed by historical and contemporary interdisciplinary collaborations between artists, designers, and other cultural producers. Her first book,  The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College, was released in 2015 by the University of Chicago Press. Díaz's new book  After Spaceship Earth: Art, Techno-utopia, and Other Science Fictions (Yale University Press, 2025) analyzes the influence of R. Buckminster Fuller in contemporary art. The book investigates artists’ challenges to a privatized and highly-surveilled future in outer space, and the means by which the space “race” and colonization are being reformulated as powerful tools to readdress economic, gender, and racial inequality, as well as ecological injustices. She is also the editor of  Dorothea Rockburne (Dia Art Foundation and Yale University Press, 2024).

Díaz is currently at work on a book that explores non-visual experiences in art, such as olfaction, topological procedures, and haptics, by examining the overvaluation of certain experiences in culture (vision and cognition, distance and analysis, for example) and the devaluation of others (smell and sensuality, proximity and the body). In support of this new research, Díaz was awarded a grant from the Huntington Library, and she was in residence at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles as a Getty Scholar in 2023-2024.

Digital Humanities Series
Thea Sommerschield

Assistant Professor in ​Greek History and Digital Humanities at the Department of Classics and Ancient History of Durham University

"Generative AI for studying Latin inscriptions: introducing Aeneas"

Wednesday, April 22 at 4:00 p.m., on Zoom

Recent advances in machine learning are continuously reshaping how historians work with ancient written sources. This talk examines how AI can support (and not replace) historical interpretation through two collaborative projects: Ithaca and Aeneas, which use neural networks to contextualize, restore, attribute and date Greek and Latin inscriptions.
The talk will focus primarily on Aeneas and show how generative models can move quantitative epigraphy beyond simple counting or string matching, by identifying textual and contextual parallels across vast datasets of Latin inscriptions, integrating visual evidence, and proposing probabilistic restorations of damaged texts. It will argue that responsible, transparent AI systems can extend both close and distant reading, helping scholars discover new patterns in the Roman epigraphic record, while preserving interpretive rigor.