Center for the Humanities

Shakespeare's writing responded to ecological problems in his own time. Today, we can adapt his works to speak to the urgent environmental crises facing our communities, as the group Shakespeare in Yosemite does every spring.

Based on the final chapter of Katherine Steele Brokaw's Shakespeare and Community Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) and “Shakespeare and Environmental Justice: Collaborative Eco-Theatre in YosemiteNational Park and the San Joaquin Valley.” In Situating Shakespeare Pedagogy in  US Higher Education: Social Justice and Institutional Contexts. Edited by Marissa Greenberg and Elizabeth Williamson (Edinburgh University Press, 2024). Also based on the work of Shakespeare in Yosemite, https://yosemiteshakes.ucmerced.edu.

This comic is based on the article "Evaluating settlement defensibility during the Late Classic: A geospatial approach to the study of conflict in ancient Aguascalientes, Mexico," by Manuel de Jesús Dueñas-García, Miriam Selene Campos-Martínez, and Nicola Lercari, published in the Journal of Conflict Archaeology, vol. 17, no. 2, 2022, pp. 155-183. https://doi.org/10.1080/15740773.2022.2124143.

The study of conflict and warfare in the Northern Frontier of Mesoamerica during the Late Classic period (500–900 CE) has long been shaped by colonial narratives and incomplete archaeological records. This article introduces a novel geospatial analytical framework to better understand conflict in ancient West Mexico. We present the results of a UAV-based aerial survey at Cerro de en medio, Aguascalientes, and, using GIS methodologies, analyze the site's defensiveness and the spectrum of conflict, ranging from sporadic raids by small groups to inter-polity or interregional warfare. Our findings suggest that visual control was not a primary concern at the site. Instead, its concealed location and features suitable for sustaining small-scale conflict indicate that Cerro de en medio functioned more as a refuge than a fortress. These results challenge earlier interpretations, suggesting that conflict in the region may have been sporadic or seasonal, and emphasize the need for further investigation.

This comic shows how sexual orientation and gender identity shape the uptake of influenza, shingles, and pneumococcal vaccines among U.S. older adults.

It is based on resesarch from: Polonijo, Andrea N., and Eric M. Vogelsang. "Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Differences in Influenza, Shingles, and Pneumococcal Vaccination Among U.S. Older Adults." LGBT Health, vol. 10, no. 2, 2023, pp. 138-147.

This is a one-page comic adaptation of a 2018 article, "Acquired Tastes: Urban Impactson Jeju Shamanic Ritual." The article, originally published in the December 2018 volume of The Review of Korean Studies, and the Bobcat Comics adaptation focuses on a phenomenon in shamanism in Jeju Island, South Korea in which offering goods increasingly feature cosmopolitan insertions. While the findings confirm longstanding observations that Jeju's indigenous shamanism is on the decline, the research also emphasizes that shamanic practices still maintain surprising vitality as they adapt newer forms of offering goods and ritual formats.

This comic is based on the research in the book Before Gentrification: The Creation of DC’s Racial Wealth Gap, published by the University of California Press (2024).

 This book shows how a century of redlining, disinvestment, and the War on Drugs wreaked devastation on Black people and paved the way for gentrification in Washington, DC. In Before Gentrification, Tanya Golash-Boza tracks the cycles of state abandonment and punishment that have shaped the city, revealing how policies and policing work to displace and decimate the Black middle class.

This comic is based on Nicosia Shakes's book, Women's Activist Theatre in Jamaica and South Africa: Gender, Race, and Performance Space (University of Illinois Press, 2023). 

All Our Relations: Stars, Plants, and Mothers in the Mesoamerican Story of Mayahuel, previously published as Mayahuel’s Mysterious Maguey: The Divine Mesoamerican Mother’s Sacred Story of Transformation, explores the narrative of Mayahuel as told in the Histoyre du Mechique, the extant French translation (via a lost Spanish translation) of the lost or destroyed original Nahua sacred narrative. This visual text adapts glyphs and iconography from the Indigenous-authored Codex Yohualli Ehecatl (Borgia), Codex Mictlan (Laud), Codex Tonalpohualli (Vaticanus B), and Codex Mendoza (as well as including Jordan Collver’s original artwork) to bring the story of Mayahuel’s transformation into maguey to contemporary readers. Embedded within this visual narrative are Indigenous, specifically Nahua, Aztec, and Mexica, ideologies related to motherhood, death, interconnectedness, nature, and teotl, a Nahuatl term not easily defined. Inspired by Felicia Rhapsody Lopez’s article, "Case Study for the Development of a Visual Grammar: Mayahuel and Maguey as Teotl in the Directional Tree Pages of the Codex Borgia," published in rEvista: A Multi-media, Multi-genre e-Journal for Social Justice, vol. 5, no. 2, 2017