Faculty

In the fall, UCSB Professor of Religious Studies, Ann Taves, presented a talk entitled "Is politics our new religion?" as part of UCSB Library's Pacific Views: Library Speaker Series. 

UC Santa Barbara Professor Emeritus John Ridland passed away in Santa Barbara on January 29. Professor Ridland taught for over 40 years at UCSB, retiring in 2005. He was one of the founding faculty of the College of Creative Studies and a professor in the English Department, focusing on Robert Frost studies. 

The UCSB Library team was busy during the summer preparing for the start of the academic year. Here’s a summary of what’s changed. 

The Library’s current serials and newspapers have been moved from their location on 1st Floor, Mountain Side. Most serial volumes have been relocated to the general stacks, where they are interfiled by call number with other collections. A small selection of serials have been moved to a new browsable Current Serials area on the 1st Floor, Ocean Side (see map below for location). Most newspapers have been relocated to the new Current Serials a

The University of California has been out of contract with Elsevier since January. Unfortunately, in late February the negotiations stalled.

In April 2019, University of California (UC) and Cambridge University Press announced that they had entered into a transformative open access agreement that will give UC authors who publish with Cambridge the opportunity to make their research freely available and advance the global shift toward an 

Melvyl, the UCSB Library's connection to library collections across the UCs and around the world, is getting a new and improved user interface starting Monday, June 17. Melvyl is a discovery platform designed for the UC system that offers the ability to search and request hundreds of millions of items from research institutions worldwide through a single search box.

In the silkscreen print “Rio Por No Llorar” (“I Laugh to Keep from Crying”), Carmen Miranda’s famous fruit-laden headdress demands that you look more closely. Bananas with a Chiquita label are encased in barbed wire. A bunch of grapes is surrounded by skulls and crossbones — a pesticide warning. Above them, a Folger’s coffee can bursts open, and flies hover everywhere.

The photos are chilling: Giant swathes of devastation in the Brazilian Amazon. Men hip-deep in the brown muck of the gouged and flooded earth. They are the scenes of illegal gold mining in "Garimpeiros: The Wildcat Gold Miners of the Amazon Rainforest," an exhibition in the Ocean Gallery of the UC Santa Barbara Library through Aug. 31.

UCSB Professor Emeritus D. Barton Johnson’s academic biography describes him as “a leading figure of Nabokov studies for many years.”

Zoran Kuzmanovich, president of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society, begs to differ.

Johnson “was not a leading figure. He was and still is absolutely the central figure of Nabokov studies over the last four decades,” Kuzmanovich said during a Nabokov symposium at UCSB last year. The event was held in honor of Johnson, a retired Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies professor.