Director’s Message
Welcome to the 2025–2026 academic year at the University of California, Irvine!
Each year, the Humanities Center selects an annual theme to guide our programming and conversations. For 2025–2026, our theme is “Food and Nurturance.” Amid ongoing political divisions and social upheavals, this theme invites us to reflect on what sustains us—biologically, emotionally, socially, and culturally.
We ask: What does food mean and symbolize for us? What rituals accompany eating, and how do these meanings and practices travel across borders? Equally important are questions about the political economy of food: Whose labor makes it possible to grow, transport, and prepare the meals that nourish us? And what environmental impacts accompany the convenience of having our favorite foods readily available? Are we able to tend to our needs and wellbeing, as well as others who are not our immediate kin?
The Humanities Center is engaging with these questions as well as supporting an exciting array of activities initiated by our partner research clusters and centers. This ecosystem of inquiry is at the heart of our collective endeavors, and there are multiple entry points to engage your curiosity–learning from and contributing to these intellectual communities. Please join us!
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu
Associate Dean in the School of Humanities of Research, Faculty Development, and Public Engagement
Faculty Director of the Humanities Center
Professor of History and Asian American Studies
Faculty Profile
Spring Quarter
Film Screening of
Fungi: The Web of Life (2024), 40 min.
Narrated by Björk.
Discussion Moderator: Jaimey Fisher, Director of the UCHRI and Professor of German and Cinema and Digital Media, UC Davis
Wednesday, May 13, 2026
5:00 p.m. - 6:15 p.m., McCormick Screening Room, HG 1070
(doors open at 4:30)
Reception in the Courtyard following movie screening
Please RSVP by Tuesday, May 11, 2026
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Entangled Lives: Understanding Plants and Fungi through the Humanities and Sciences
Join us for an interdisciplinary roundtable discussion to explore the interdependence of human, animal, plant, and fungi lifeforms. Inspired by Merlin Sheldrake’s book, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape our Futures, the UCI Humanities Center is collaborating with the UC Santa Cruz’s the Humanities Institute to consider how plants (which feed through photosynthesize) and fungi (that decompose organic matter) are both essential one another, to other forms of life, and have inspired human imagination.
Friday, May 15, 2026
Social and Behavioral Sciences Gateway (SBSG) 1517
11:00 a.m. Roundtable Discussion
12:00 p.m. Reception
Please RSVP by May 11, 2026
Speakers
Laura Martin
Faculty Deep Read Faculty Lead and Continuing Lecturer in Literature and at Porter College, UCSC
Jon Pitt
Associate Professor, East Asian Studies and author of Botanical Imagination: Rethinking Plants in Modern Japan (Cornell 2025)
Kathleen Treseder
Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Lead Investigator of the Treseder Lab: Fungi, Ecosystems, & Global Change
Cosponsored by: UCI Humanities Center, Humanities Core, Libraries, and Environmental Humanities, Illuminations: The Chancellor’s Arts and Culture Initiative, UCSC’s The Humanities Institute, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute
For more information and for students interested in traveling to UCSC to attend the May 31 Deep Read conversation with Merlin Sheldrake, please contact Professor Judy Wu (j.wu@uci.edu)
Winter Quarter
“Hunger, Craving, and Eating More: New Scholarship in Food Studies”
Friday, February 20, 2026
11:00 a.m. Author’s Conversation HIB 100
12:00 p.m. Reception HG Patio
Speakers
Dana Simmons, Associate Professor of Society, Environment and Health Equity, University of California, Riverside, and author of On Hunger: Violence and Craving in America, from Starvation to Ozempic (University of California Press, 2025)
Robert Ji-Song Ku, Managing Editor of Foundations and Futures: Asian American and Pacific Islander Multimedia Textbook of UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center, and co-editor of Eating More Asian America: A Food Studies Reader (New York University Press, 2025)
Moderator
Catherine Z. Sameh, Associate Professor and Chair, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and author of Axis of Hope: Iranian Women’s Rights Activism across Borders (University of Washington Press, 2019)
Co-sponsors
UCI Humanities Center, Humanities Core, Environmental Humanities. and Asian American Studies
Fall Quarter
Please join us for a kick-off event for a roundtable conversation on:
Islands, Nations, and the Global Circulation of Asian Food
Friday, October 24, 2025
11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Humanities Gateway Rm. 1030
12:00 pm Reception
Speakers
Yong Chen, Professor of History, Associate Dean, at UCI and author of Chop Suey, U.S.A.: The Rise of Chinese Food in America
Dana Collins, Professor of Sociology at California State University, Fullerton and author of “‘Eat That Nostalgia’: Filipino Foodways and Food Consciousness in LA”
Ping-Chen Hsiung, CIPSH (International Council for Philosophy and Humanities Studies) Chair in New Humanities at UCI and Professor of History and Director of the Taiwan Research Centre at the Chinese University of Hong Kong
Alyssa Paredes, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan and co-editor of Halo-Halo Ecologies: The Emergent Environments behind Filipino Food
Moderator
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Faculty Director of the Humanities Center
Co-sponsored by:
Asian American Studies, Environmental Humanities Research Center, Humanities Center, Humanities Core, Long U.S. China Institute, Illuminations, Office of Excellence
For more information, please contact Professor Judy Wu (j.wu@uci.edu).
Speakers
Moderator
