UCHRI

In First Contact (2025), Zac Zimmer (UC Santa Cruz) tends to science fiction as the exemplary genre of the modern, colonial reality. This book was supported in part by UCHRI’s Faculty Manuscript Workshop in 2021-22. To learn more about our Faculty Manuscript Workshop Grant, please visit the link in our bio.

1. Image text: Title page reading “UCHRI Junior Faculty Manuscript Workshop 2021-22, Zac Zimmer (UC Santa Cruz), Manuscript Workshop Book Highlight.” Cover of Zimmer’s book, First Contact.
2. Image text: “How can we come to recognize that the world between the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans was a complete and independent world in itself before the period called the Conquest, with its own complexities, contradictions, and ontologies? How can we recognize this, while also reckoning with that world-altering event—the Conquest—­and the New World it brought into being?”
3. Image text: “At its heart, the speculative imagining of the conquest of the Americas is expressed in one short affirmation: it could have happened otherwise...What SF [science fiction] can teach its readers and audiences is how to use the tools of worldbuilding to truly imagine other worlds, conversant with other cosmovisions.”

In “Beyond the Kitchen: B. Smith and the Legacy of Black Women’s Cultural Work,” Kimberly Nettles-Barcelon centers Black women as active participants of cultural production and consumption, moving beyond dominant media stereotypes.

This project was supported by the UCHRI Faculty Summer Research Grant. For more on this project, please visit the link in our bio for Kimberly Nettles-Barcelon’s “”In Memoriam”” article.

Image descriptions:
1. Image of B. Smith recipe book, Rituals and Celebrations, with title text “Beyond the Kitchen” and author name, Kimberly Nettles-Barcelon (UC Davis). The image is labelled with the UCHRI logo and the “Sustenance Spotlight” series.
2. Image text: Beyond the Kitchen critically examines the long legacy of Black women’s work in the culinary and hospitality arts, as illustrated by the 40-year career of Barbara Elaine Smith (b1950-d2020), a model, restaurateur, lifestyle television host, cookbook author, and all-around style maven.
3. Line drawing of a plate of spaghetti and a fork. Image text: Rather than a traditional biography, this book works to build a portrait of B. Smith’s public life as an influential Black woman in the food and lifestyle space from the late 1970s to the early 2000s.
4. Line drawing of cutlery. Image text: Although popular media culture labeled her the “Black Martha Stewart,” Barbara Elaine Smith built consciously and expansively on a legacy of Black women cultural workers.
5-6. Panoramic image of B. Smith paraphernalia including cookbooks, dishware, and magazines laid on top of floral fabric.
7. Image text: Her tag line, “Whatever you do, do it with style!” served as a way to elevate Black women’s connection to elegance, femininity, and beauty often denied us in mainstream U.S. culture.
8. Image text: Supported by UCHRI Faculty Summer Research Grant and link to UCHRI website.