Inspiring Change: Creativity and Expression
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Humanities EXPLORE Fellows bridge history, culture, and community
This year’s Humanities EXPLORE Program fellows are adventurous and ambitious, transcribing 300-year–old texts, helping to revitalize forgotten languages, exploring archives, and learning from faculty mentors. This winter, two fellows were given film cameras to preserve and share their experiences of connection, creativity, and purpose.
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Engineered imagination
UC Santa Cruz alumna Lisa Winter (Porter ’09, art) brings an artist’s eye to the arena of combat robotics—evolving from childhood Robot Wars competitor to BattleBots judge and robotics entrepreneur.
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The creation of the Cigarette Surfboard
Alumnus Ben Judkins’s (Kresge ’17, film and digital media) award-winning documentary follows the creation of the Cigarette Surfboard: A surfboard created by friend Taylor Lane from 10,000+ cigarette butts collected off beaches. Judkins’s documentary has helped influence legislation in Santa Cruz County, and will be screened at UC Santa Cruz on March 8.
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Humanities graduates apply human-centered thinking in impactful careers
Across disciplines, they point to critical thinking, ethical reasoning, adaptability, and empathy as core strengths developed through humanities coursework.
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Centering nourishment at The Humanities Institute
The Humanities Institute (THI) at UC Santa Cruz is exploring the theme of nourishment this year, inviting the campus and community to reflect on what sustains life, fosters connection, and makes flourishing possible. “What does it mean to be nourished in our bodies, our minds and our communities at a moment of profound social, political,…
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Two UC Santa Cruz alumnae make their Off-Broadway debut
Rosie Glen-Lambert (Porter ’14, theater arts) and Hailey McAfee (Rachel Carson ’13, theater arts) make their Off-Broadway debut at Soho Playhouse from January 14 to February 13. The limited Off-Broadway engagement follows a sold-out run at the Hollywood Fringe Festival where the duo’s production received multiple honors.
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UC Santa Cruz Ethics Bowl team qualifies for national championships
A hard-working group of UC Santa Cruz undergraduate Ethics Bowl competitors is heading for the 2026 Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl National Championships in St. Louis, MIssouri, in March.
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Learning from Dolores Huerta’s legacy
New K-12 lesson plans support comprehensive history understanding by bringing Huerta’s life story into California classrooms
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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.
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Jazz Big Band students will perform alongside legendary pianist Benny Green
Lecturer and band leader Charles Hamilton, a Bay Area jazz staple, was Green’s middle school music teacher and arranged his visit to campus.
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Arts & Culture, Campus News, Climate & Sustainability, Earth & Space, Health, Social Justice & Community, Student Experience, TechnologyInspiring 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.
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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?