Visiting Scholars
Dr. Fred Arroyo, Creative Nonfiction Reading
Associate Professor of Creative Writing
Middle Tennessee State University
Wednesday, October 15 at 7:30 p.m., ARTS 150
Co-sponsored by the Chico State Women’s Philanthropy Council and The Writer’s Voice
Dr. Arroyo will read selections from new and published work, including his most recent collection: Sown in Earth: Essays of Memory and Belonging.
Fred Arroyo is the author of Alba and Other Songs, winner of the 3rd Gunpowder Press Alta California Chapbook Prize, published in a bilingual edition (2024). His Sown in Earth:Essays of Memory and Belonging was shortlisted for 2021-2022 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. He is also the author of Western Avenue and Other Fictions (also shortlisted for the Saroyan Prize), and The Regionof Lost Names—all three of these titles with the University of Arizona Press. His writing has appeared in the anthologies Camino del Sol: Fifteen Years ofLatina and Latino Writing and The Colors of Nature: Essays on Culture, Identity and theNatural World. Fred’s Emigrant Creek and Other Songs (poems) will appear with Letras Latinas / Red Hen Press Collaborative in 2027. He’s also working on a collection of short fictions, The Book of Manuels.
Dr. Sara E. Johnson, "Notes on Writing a Communal Biography of the Enslaved"
Professor of Literature, Co-Director of the UCSD Black Studies Project
University of California San Diego
Thursday, February 5 at 5:30 p.m., on Zoom
Register for Dr. Johnson's Webinar
This talk is sponsored by the Chico State Women's Philanthropy Council
Professor Johnson’s research and teaching areas include literature, theory, and history of the Hispanophone, Francophone, and Anglophone Caribbean and its diasporas; hemispheric American literature and cultural studies; the Age of Revolution in the extended Americas; and music and dance of the African Diaspora.
She has done extensive research abroad, living in Senegal, Cuba, Haiti, and Martinique. Her past fellowships include those from the Ford Foundation, the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Program, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Hellman Fund, the UC Consortium for Black Studies, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Bibliographical Society of America. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Stanford University and her B.A. from Yale University in Comparative Literature and African American Studies.
Dr. Michael Hattem, "The American Revolution in Popular Memory"
Historian, Associate Director of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute
Thursday, February 19 at 5:30 p.m., on Zoom
Register for Dr. Hattem's Webinar
This talk is sponsored by the Chico State Women's Philanthropy Council
In this talk, historian Michael D. Hattem explores how and why the American Revolution has had a unique place in the nation's popular memory of its past. He will discuss the importance of how generations of Americans have told the story of the Revolution, how politics have shaped how the Revolution has been remembered, and how Americans have fought over the meanings and legacy of the Revolution for nearly 250 years. By uncovering the role of the memory of the Revolution as an American "origin myth," he will offer insights into the history of the changing relationship between the American people and their Revolution as we approach 2026 and the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Dr. Michael D. Hattem is a historian on early America, the American Revolution, and historical memory, who earned his Ph.D. in History from Yale University. He is the author of The Memory of '76: The Revolution in American History (2024), which was a finalist for the 2025 George Washington Prize, and Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution (2020). His work has been featured in The New York Times, TIME magazine, The Smithsonian Magazine, the Washington Post, as well as many other mainstream media publications and outlets. He has also served as a historical consultant or contributor for a number of projects and organizations, curated historical exhibitions, appeared in television documentaries, and authenticated and written catalogue essays for historical document auctions. For more information, visit mdhattem.com.
Dr. Eva Diaz, "After Spaceship Earth: Art, Techno-utopia, and Other Science Fictions"
Professor of Contemporary Art History, Pratt Institute
Thursday, April 9 at 5:30 p.m., on Zoom
Register for Dr. Diaz's Webinar
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.