Of Monsters and Men: A Public Lecture

As Halloween approaches, please join the Davis Humanities Institute for a public conversation on horror and monstrosity through time and cultures! Featuring talks by Professors Michael Dylan Foster and Kathleen N. Cruz. The event is free, with food and beverages available for purchase.

What to expect

You'll hear from foremost experts on Ancient Greek and Roman civilization and Japanese culture and folklore, with plenty of opportunities to ask questions. You can enjoy themed cocktails (available for purchase) and participate in a short game of trivia to test your knowledge of all things horrific.

Who should attend

This event is for everyone! No prior knowledge is required.

Meet your speakers!

Kathleen (Katie) Cruz is an Associate Professor in the Ancient Mediterranean Studies Program at the University of California, Davis. She works primarily on the evocation of horror and aesthetic manipulation of violence in imperial Latin epic. Her first book (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press) presents two Latin epics of the 1st century CE - Lucan’s Civil War and Statius’ Thebaid – as being especially preoccupied with eliciting horror from their audiences across several distinct domains, from the manipulation of the human body to humanity’s place within greater natural and cosmic orders. She explored related questions of bodily autonomy in a 2023 article on reading the necromancy led by the witch Erictho in Lucan’s poem through the lens of zombie studies and has also published on the broader viability of applying the findings of modern horror studies to ancient texts. Her secondary research interests center on modern engagements with the ancient Mediterranean in Latin American and Latine/x contexts and is currently preparing a second book project on Puerto Rican negotiations with the classical past in the 19th/20th centuries.

Michael Dylan Foster is a Professor of Japanese in the East Asian Languages and Cultures Department at UC Davis. A specialist of folklore, he has written extensively about supernatural creatures and strange phenomena. His first book, Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yôkai (2009), is a cultural history that traces how notions of the mysterious have been understood within both academic discourses and popular practices from the seventeenth century through the present. It explores how aspects of everyday life we often take for granted—games, rumors, popular beliefs—reflect broader cultural and historical changes. His more recent book, The Book of Yōkai, Expanded Second Edition (2024), also focuses on monsters and supernatural beings in Japan, exploring their roots, interpreting their meanings, and introducing many of the people who have studied, catalogued, and sought to define them. For over two decades, Professor Foster has also engaged on a long-term ethnographic study of ritual, festival, and tourism in Japan.