• General Information
• Academic Departments
• Library & Archives

• Information Technology
• Summer Reading Lists
• College Counseling
• Speakers Series

Kip Fulbeck— November 4, 2009

Kip Fulbeck is an American artist, slam poet, and filmmaker. He is the author of Permanence: Tattoo Portraits; Part Asian, 100% Hapa; Paper Bullets: A Fictional Autobiography; and the upcoming Mixed: Portraits of Multiracial Kids, as well as the director of a dozen short films including Banana Split and Lilo & Me.

Kip has been featured on CNN, MTV, and PBS, and has performed and exhibited in over 20 countries. He speaks nationwide on identity, multi-raciality and pop culture — mixing together spoken word, stand-up comedy, political activism and personal stories.

A challenging and inspirational teacher, Kip is a professor of art at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is the recipient of the university's Distinguished Teaching Award. He is also an avid surfer, guitar player, motorcycle rider, ocean lifeguard, and pug enthusiast. He is also a world-ranked Masters swimmer.

Margaret Wertheim—February 11, 2009

Margaret Wertheim is an internationally noted science writer, commentator, and curator whose work focuses on the relations between science and the wider cultural landscape. She is the author of Pythagoras’ Trousers, a history of the relationship between physics and religion, and The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet.

In 2003, Wertheim and her sister founded the Institute For Figuring, an innovative Los Angeles-based organization devoted to enhancing public engagement with the aesthetic and poetic dimensions of science and mathematics. The IFF hosts lectures, curates exhibitions, and publishes books. Lecture topics have included hyperbolic space, the mathematics of knots, logic crystallography, the physics of snowflakes, the science of insect flight, and the history of computer memory devices. Through the IFF, the Wertheims have designed and curated exhibitions for galleries and museums around the country, including Santa Monica Museum of Art, Apexart (New York), Machine Project (Los Angeles), Art Center College of Design (Pasadena), and the Museum of Jurassic Technology (Los Angeles).

Nicholas Donabet Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn—February 23, 2010

The New York Times bestseller Half the Sky documents the global need to educate girls and women to ensure a healthier world community. Together, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of China and have written two previous books about Asia: Thunder from the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia and China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power.

Nicholas Kristof is an American journalist, author, op-ed columnist, and a winner of two Pulitzer Prizes. He has written an op-ed column for The New York Times since November 2001 and is widely known for bringing to light human rights abuses in Asia and Africa, such as human trafficking and the Darfur conflict. He has lived on four continents, reported on six, and traveled to 140 countries and all 50 states. According to his blog, during his travels he has had “unpleasant experiences with malaria, wars, an Indonesian mob carrying heads on pikes, and an African airplane crash.” Jeffrey Toobin of CNN and The New Yorker, a Harvard classmate, has said, “I’m not surprised to see him emerge as the moral conscience of our generation of journalists. I am surprised to see him as the Indiana Jones of our generation of journalists.”

Sheryl WuDunn is a Chinese American author, lecturer, and businesswoman who was the first Asian-American to win a Pulitzer Prize. A specialist in energy and alternative energy issues, she has also been a private wealth advisor with Goldman Sachs and was previously a journalist and editor for The New York Times. At the Times, she ran the Times's coverage of global energy, alternative energy, foreign technology, and foreign industry; previously, she was anchor of The New York Times Page One, a nightly program of the next day's stories in the Times. She also has worked in The New York Times Beijing and Tokyo bureaus, and speaks Chinese and Japanese. She won the Pulitzer Prize with husband Nicholas D. Kristof for her reporting from Beijing about the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. WuDunn and Kristof were the first married couple ever to receive a Pulitzer for journalism.

Azar Nafisi—April 14, 2010

Azar Nafisi is a visiting professor and the director of the Cultural Conversations at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, where she is a professor of aesthetics, culture, and literature and teaches courses on the relation between culture and politics.  Azar Nafisi held a fellowship at Oxford University, teaching and conducting a series of lectures on culture and the important role of Western literature and culture in Iran after the revolution in 1979. She taught at the University of Tehran, the Free Islamic University, and Allameh Tabatabai before her return to the United States in 1997—earning national respect and international recognition for advocating on behalf of Iran's intellectuals, youth, and especially young women. In 1981, she was expelled from the University of Tehran for refusing to wear the mandatory Islamic veil and did not resume teaching until 1987.

Azar Nafisi is best known as the author of the national bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, which electrified its readers with a compassionate and often harrowing portrait of the Islamic revolution in Iran and how it affected one university professor and her students.  Earning high acclaim and an enthusiastic readership, Reading Lolita in Tehran is an incisive exploration of the transformative powers of fiction in a world of tyranny.  The book has spent over 117 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.  Reading Lolita in Tehran has been translated in 32 languages, and has won diverse literary awards, including the 2004 Non-fiction Book of the Year Award from Booksense, the Frederic W. Ness Book Award, the 2004 Latifeh Yarsheter Book Award, an achievement award from the American Immigration Law Foundation, as well as being a finalist for the 2004 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Memoir.  In 2006 she won a Persian Golden Lioness Award for literature, presented by the World Academy of Arts, Literature, and Media.

Learn more about her here.