About

Professor Vanita Seth is a member of the faculty in the Politics Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The department is part of the Social Sciences Division and is committed to scholarly excellence and social impact. Faculty members, including Professor Seth, have been recognized with multiple teaching awards and prestigious fellowships from organizations such as the Guggenheim Foundation. They actively share their research through top academic journals and conferences and participate in globally important policy efforts, including organizing for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The department fosters a vibrant community of faculty, staff, and graduate students dedicated to innovative research and teaching in the field of politics.

Research topics

• Sociology
• History
• Philosophy
• Epistemology
• Art
• Political Science
• Literature
• Aesthetics
• Law
• Geography
• Gender studies
• Archaeology

Selected publications

• Rethinking Race

  2025-02-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• (UN)DOING HISTORY: A CASE FOR EPISTEMOLOGICAL ALTERITY

  History and Theory · 2023 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Epistemology
  • Philosophy

  ABSTRACT This article addresses two primary tensions that currently beset medieval history. The first concerns a contentious debate within the field regarding the relative merits of two interpretative approaches: that which seeks to situate the Middle Ages within a narrative of continuity wherein aspects of the medieval bear some relationship of familiarity with the present and that which accords a radical alterity to the past that instigates moments of historical rupture. The second tension concerns the fraught relationship between history as a site of knowledge production with some proximity to engaging and producing truth and history as constructed, wherein its purported object of study, the past, is not an ontological fact but a cultural artifact. In this instance, what we witness is less a debate among scholars within history than an amorphic anxiety about history. This article makes a case for engaging the radical alterity that confronts the historian of the Middle Ages. It does so, however, cognizant of an ontological impasse: if alterity is attentive to difference, a difference that resists translation into modern knowledge regimes, then what does it mean to engage it historically—that is, through a temporal structure that would have been foreign to the very period of study?

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• History and its Discontents

  Historical Materialism · 2022-12-15 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Through an engagement with Massimiliano Tomba’s work Insurgent Universality , this paper explores the possibilities and limitations that reside at the heart of historical thinking.

  PublisherDOI

• THE ORIGINS OF RACISM: A CRITIQUE OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS

  History and Theory · 2020 · 55 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Epistemology

  ABSTRACT This essay has two objectives. First, it seeks to engage critically with contemporary scholarship on the origins of racism through the lens of an older debate centered around the history of ideas. Specifically, it argues that Quentin Skinner's influential critique of the history of ideas can help identify the pitfalls of our current fascination with the origins of racism—most particularly when such origins are traced back to antiquity and the European pre‐ and early modern periods. In pursuing its second objective, the essay turns from histories cataloguing ancient, medieval, and early modern racisms to objections leveled, in these same literatures, against scholarship defending the modernity of race. The defense of a premodern origin to race is, I argue, not just a historical argument but a contemporary politics embedded in a narrative of continuity that insists on the relevance of the medieval past to the racial configurations of our current moment. Rather than demonstrating continuity and sameness, this essay seeks to draw attention to alternative modes of historicizing that are more attentive to the alterity of the past.

  PublisherDOI

• Europe's Indians

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2020 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Geography
  • History
  PublisherDOI

• 1 Self and Similitude

  2020-10-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Faces of the Self

  The Journal of Race Ethnicity and Politics · 2019-04-23

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This paper traces the centrality of the human face in the construction of modern individuality. It argues that the face of individuality no less than that of typology, is mired in and born of historical and political conditions that are subsequently disavowed in order that the individual (and the face she bears) is rendered a product of nature, an instantiation of the universal. Attempting to denaturalize and defamiliarize the authority invested in the face, this paper maps out three interrelated arguments: that the human face is historically produced; that its history is closely tethered to the production of modern subjectivity, and that its status as a purveyor of meaning relies upon the reiteration of preexisting norms through which it can be “read.” And yet, while this paper turns to the nineteenth century to trace the novel privileging of the face as an extension of selfhood, interwoven through this history is the figure of the “effaced” Muslim woman and the Muslim terrorist type.

  PublisherDOI

• Race

  2019-01-01 · 1 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Abbey and Me

  Dialnet (Universidad de la Rioja) · 2018-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Race

  The Encyclopedia of Political Thought · 2014-09-15

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The etymology of the word “race” traces its history back to the thirteenth century. By the sixteenth century it had entered most European languages. Its meanings included rage ( razen in Dutch), a species, kind, stock descent, lineage ( razza in Italian), horse breeding ( raza in Spanish), power, authority, kingship, and kingdom ( rīce in Old English), and in Middle English ras denoted swift course, speed, or current. By the nineteenth century “race” had come to take on the meaning we commonly associate it with today.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Christopher Connery

  3 shared

• Katherine Fatma

  New York University Press

  1 shared

• Nancy Rose Hunt

  1 shared

• Müge Göcek

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  1 shared

• Mamadou Diouf

  Columbia University

  1 shared

• Julia Adams

  1 shared

• Margaret R. Somers

  1 shared

• Julie Skurski

  The Graduate Center, CUNY

  1 shared