I am a third-year PhD student in the History of Consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz. This program has, since 1966, supported rigorous interdisciplinary research that crosses boundaries between humanities, sciences, social sciences, and arts. Students are granted free range to assemble a committee from any or all of these areas, and they are expected to execute a dissertation that integrates bodies of knowledge instead of siloing them. My own dissertation will offer an aesthetic and political theory of vast scales of time, including but not limited to geologic time. The dissertation, though philosophical in its aims, makes use of creative writing methodologies, ranging from what Joe Dumit has called "implosion writing" to place-based writing to auto- and experimental ethnography. The first chapter, entitled "Deep Time for Militants," attempts to reconcile nonhuman timescales on the order of thousands, millions, or billions of years, on the one hand, with the immediacy of radical politics, on the other. Its key questions are, "Of what use are vast timescales for revolutionary politics? Of what relevance is deep time to the militant?" I offer my own answer by borrowing forms from science writing (found in Claude Albritton Jr.'s book on the history of geology) and by retasking them such that the bigness of deep timescales shrinks the felt duration of injustice perpetrated by states, empires, and economies. Other chapters will likely be more site-specific, taking up a place and moving into larger questions of time and politics from that place. I would like to visit The Sweeney Granite Mountains Desert Research Center for a few reasons. First, I would like to consider the research center, and the broader Mojave National Preserve, as a possible site for place-based writing. Second, I would like to be able to supplement what are too often bookish encounters with the history of geology with embodied and sensory encounters with landscapes whose geologic history is out in the open, on display. I have spent time in the Mojave National Preserve in the past, and many of my ideas for this dissertation have been shaped by my experiences with its dunes, creosote, and cinder cones. I would like more time in that desert space to reflect on both the chapter I am writing as well as the future of the dissertation, what directions it can take. Using the research center as a home base would be perfect for this. Additionally, if staying at the test site would enable me to have conversations with those scientists and personnel who work there, this would benefit my work greatly, as I could ask them whether, and how, they think about the relationship between earth time and human time. This could take the form of interviews or casual conversation, as participants so choose. Thank you for your consideration.

Approved