Alexandra Minna Stern, Ph.D., has served as dean of the UCLA Division of Humanities since November 2022.
As dean, she has prioritized strengthening programs in urban, public, environmental and health humanities, expanding access to language courses — in particular for less commonly taught languages — and rebuilding community in the division following the COVID-19 pandemic.
She also is spearheading an initiative to extend Humanities’ presence to downtown Los Angeles. Under her leadership, the division was granted space in the former Trust Building for use beginning in 2025–26. The expansion will enable faculty, staff and students to further develop initiatives in interdisciplinary humanities fields, and for the division to facilitate crossover projects with other UCLA academic units and programs.
Most of Stern’s research has focused on the uses and misuses of genetics in the United States and Latin America. She is the author of the award-winning Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America, the second edition of which was published in 2015 by University of California Press. She also is the author of Telling Genes: The Story of Genetic Counseling in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), which was named a Choice 2013 Outstanding Academic Title in Health Sciences.
Read UCLA Newsroom’s 2022 interview with Dean Stern
Her most recent book, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right is Warping the American Imagination (Beacon Press, 2019), applies the lenses of historical analysis, feminist studies and critical race studies to deconstruct the core ideas of the far right and white nationalism in the U.S. Following her work on that book, Stern was asked to contribute her expertise to the congressional committee investigating the January 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol.
Stern is the founder and co-director of the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab, which uses mixed methods to study patterns and experiences of eugenic sterilization in the U.S. during the 20th century. The lab’s research informed the creation of a California program, which was active from 2022 to 2023, to compensate survivors of compulsory sterilization.
Stern has faculty appointments in the UCLA departments of English and history, and in the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics. She has received numerous grants for her research, including funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Institutes of Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Prior to her arrival at UCLA, Stern was associate dean for the humanities at the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. In that role, she enhanced humanities research, promoted curricular and funding opportunities in experimental humanities, and supported languages and global studies. She was the Carroll Smith-Rosenberg Collegiate Professor of American Culture, and she held appointments in history, women’s and gender studies, and obstetrics and gynecology. She had been a faculty member at Michigan since 2002.
Beginning at Michigan, and continuing through her tenure at UCLA, Stern has helped build programs in medical and health humanities and science and technology studies, and she has supported innovation in writing programs, museum studies, and classical and ancient studies.
Before joining the faculty at Michigan, Stern was a professor at UC Santa Cruz, from 2000 to 2002. She earned a bachelor’s degree from San Francisco State University, a master’s degree in Latin American studies from UC San Diego and a doctorate in history from the University of Chicago.