Faculty

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.