Sean Brenner

Adam Bradley co-curates Grammy exhibit celebrating 50 years of hip hop

“Hip-Hop America: The Mixtape Exhibit” at the Grammy Museum, which runs through Sept. 4, 2024, celebrates the genre’s 50th anniversary. It is co-curated by Adam Bradley, a UCLA professor of English and African American studies and founding director of the Laboratory for Race and Popular Culture (RAP Lab) at UCLA. The immersive exhibit explores music, fashion, activism and more to allow visitors to make hands-on connections with the past, present and future of hip-hop culture. Artifacts on display will include the Notorious B.I.G.’s iconic red leather jacket, Chuck D’s handwritten and illustrated lyrics and more, while a “Sonic Playground” will…

Climate emergency and the future of democracy

The final Possible Worlds lecture — the sixth in the series — was delivered by Robyn Eckersley, Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor in Political Science at the University of Melbourne and a fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. Eckersley joined the UCLA community on May 24 to present a lecture, “Climate Emergency and the Future of Democracy,” which attracted attendees both online and in person. “The Possible Worlds lectures bring big thinkers who are going to challenge us to think about the state of the world and the challenges we face in regards to climate change,” said…

Dean delivers 2023 Humanities Division commencement address

Alexandra Minna Stern, dean of humanities at the UCLA College, served as the commencement speaker for the 2023 humanities commencement ceremony. Stern said she was honored to be the speaker for the ceremony. She added that she hoped her speech would uplift students and families and thank them for all their hard work. “This has been quite a tumultuous time, especially since these graduates were by the pandemic, and their educational experience was disrupted,” Stern said. “I believe this generation has acquired an important skills for their future: How does one live with uncertainty? How does one recalibrate all the…

Professor emeritus receives Association for Asian American Studies lifetime achievement award

King-Kok Cheung, professor emeritus of English and Asian American studies at UCLA, received the Association for Asian American Studies lifetime achievement award late April for her contributions to the fields of Asian American and Pacific Islander studies. Cheung was born and raised in Hong Kong before coming to UC Berkeley to earn her Ph.D. in English. In 1984, Cheung was the first woman of color in the humanities division and the first faculty member of Asian descent to join the English department at UCLA. She is the author of “Articulate Silences” and “Chinese American Literature without Borders.” “I feel that…

Professor shares experience as Rome Prize recipient

Sarah Beckmann, an assistant professor of Roman archaeology in the classics department and a faculty member at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, has been named the 2023 Andrew Heiskell Rome Prize Fellow in ancient studies. “For over a century, the American Academy in Rome has awarded the Rome Prize to support innovative and cross-disciplinary work in the arts and humanities. Each year, the Rome Prize is awarded to about thirty artists and scholars who represent the highest standard of excellence,” according to the American Academy in Rome’s website. Beckmann received the award for her book project, “The Villa in Late…

Faculty project will highlight political and historical significance of the Nile River

The Getty Foundation approved a grant for a UCLA faculty project, “The Contested Beauty of the Nile: Connecting Early Career Intellectuals in Egypt and Sudan Through the Indigenous Art of Ancient Nilotic Cultures,” led by Kara Cooney and Jonathan Winnerman. Cooney, professor of Egyptian art and architecture and chair of the Near Eastern languages and cultures department, will work with Winnerman, lecturer in Egyptology and academic administrator for ancient studies in the division of humanities, on the project, which aims to use art and art history to transcend borders. “The goal of these programs is to bring different people together…

Exploring the fraught nature of memory and comparison

Michael Rothberg, UCLA’s 1939 Society Samuel Goetz Professor of Holocaust Studies, was one of the first scholars to recognize and write about the troubling, disruptive echoes that linked remembrances of the Holocaust and the end of European colonialism in the 1950s and 1960s. Rothberg’s most globally influential book to date, “Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization,” was published in 2009. A formative work in the then-new field of memory studies, the book’s premise is that there is value in widening collective cultural memory to explore how people look back at events like the Holocaust not as outliers, but alongside…

Gift from Arcadia will advance early global studies at UCLA through postdoctoral fellowships

UCLA received a gift of $552,693 from Arcadia, a charitable fund that works to protect nature, preserve cultural heritage and promote open access to knowledge, to establish the John W. Baldwin Postdoctoral Fellowship in the UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies, one of the oldest and most prestigious research centers of its kind in North America. Over a period of five years, the funding will allow the center to welcome three new scholars completing fellowships in European and global comparative medieval studies. The ideal candidates will be recent doctoral graduates in European medieval studies whose work takes an inclusive approach…

Amitav Ghosh delivers UCLA’s Edward W. Said Lecture

Focusing on his 2021 nonfiction work “The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis,” Amitav Ghosh gave an impassioned presentation on May 17 at UCLA’s third annual Edward W. Said Lecture, convened by Anjali Prabhu, UCLA professor and Edward W. Said Chair in Comparative Literature. “It is a great pleasure and privilege to be here today with so many old and new friends, and it is really extraordinary to be delivering the Edward W. Said Lecture,” Ghosh said. “I met him several times in New York in the gym where he loved to play squash. It is hard to…

Dive into the classical work of professor Alex Purves

Few forms can rival poetry for its power — through the enduring works of Homer, for example, the ancient world has remained vibrantly close to us for centuries. “I’m interested in early Greek poetry at a very fundamental level: the ways in which it can express aspects of our experience that other genres or art forms cannot,” says Alex Purves, professor and chair of the UCLA Department of Classics. “I like to think about the formalities and intricacies of poetic language in relation to the big-picture questions of space and time.” A recipient of a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship, Purves is working…