Sean Brenner

Can AI and creativity coexist?

One of the Writers Guild of America’s demands in its current strike is for studios to regulate the use of artificial intelligence for creating, writing and rewriting TV and movie scripts and other material. That might have sounded like a far-fetched concern just a few years ago. But with increasingly sophisticated, easily accessed AI tools already making inroads in other creative fields — literary magazines and fine arts competitions have lately had to contend with a glut of AI-generated submissions — there is a very real concern that expensive, time-intensive human creative labor could soon be outsourced to machines. Higher…

Chancellor’s Council on the Arts looking for submissions to honor 2 students

The UCLA Chancellor’s Council on the Arts will honor two students – a graduate and an undergraduate student – as 2023 class artists. Winners will be featured in a UCLA commencement video and storytelling package on UCLA Newsroom along with receiving a $1500 honorarium each for their recognition. Students who are from academic units represented in Chancellor’s Council on the Arts are eligible to nominate themselves or one another. These include the School of the Arts and Architecture, Herb Alpert School of Music, School of Theater, Film & Television, Division of Humanities, and Division of Social Sciences. The submissions…

Harryette Mullen among 3 UCLA professors elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

In 1781, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington were among the first members elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious honorary societies. This year, three UCLA faculty members were elected to join them. UCLA’s new members for 2023 are: Heather Maynard Maynard is UCLA’s Dr. Myung Ki Hong Professor of Polymer Science and a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA. A leader in the area of protein-polymer conjugates — important therapeutics for a variety of diseases — Maynard develops new synthetic methods to make the materials, invents new polymers to improve…

3 Humanities professors among 5 UCLA faculty to receive Guggenheim Fellowships

Five UCLA professors — including three from the UCLA Division of Humanities — are among the 171 Guggenheim Fellows for 2023. Presented annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the fellowships recognize the recipients’ prior achievements and exceptional promise. The grants, which vary in amount, are intended to “further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions.” Representing the Humanities Division are professors Michael Berry (Asian Languages and Cultures), Alex Purves (Classics) and Michael Rothberg…

Celebrate Pi Day with a slice of UCLA PIES

In mid-March every year, the spotlight shines extra brightly on the Greek letter pi, which represents the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. That’s because, although ratio’s value is an irrational and transcendental number — it has been calculated to more than 50 trillion digits without repetition or pattern — it is approximately 3.14, which, of course, corresponds with the date March 14. It probably also doesn’t hurt that the name of the letter is pronounced just like the name of an appropriately round dessert, which provides a nifty excuse for anyone to eat, well, pie. But did…

UCLA’s Russian Flagship Program builds knowledge and community

Geneva Flores, a first-year applied linguistics major, shared her experiences as a participant in UCLA’s Russian Flagship Program, which allows students of all majors to build professional-level competence in Russian through studies on campus and abroad. “The Russian Flagship Program equips courageous global leaders with the language skills and cultural competence to build bridges between international communities,” according to the program’s website. The website also states: “The UCLA Russian Flagship was one of the three original Russian programs funded by The Language Flagship, a federally funded initiative to revolutionize the way Americans learn languages by offering a rigorous, articulated program…

Postdoctoral fellow expands research in the UCLA Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

Alisée Devillers joined the UCLA Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures as a postdoctoral researcher through a fellowship awarded by the Belgian American Educational Foundation. Devillers, an Egyptologist archaeologist and art historian, originally applied for the fellowship in connection with a project that involved conducting research on ancient Egyptian stelae. “With this project, the idea was to pinpoint visual identity strategy used by people who were not meant to be seen in our Egyptological documentation — so people who were not part of the elite,” Devillers said. After arriving at UCLA, Devillers has received several new opportunities. She is…

Professor Joshua Javier Guzmán discusses Warhol Foundation grant

Joshua Javier Guzmán, assistant professor of gender studies and chair of the LGBTQ studies program at UCLA, received a 2022 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in support of his new book, “Brown Exposures: Queer Photography and the Literary Aperture.” Funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and administered by Creative Capital, the program “supports writing about contemporary art and aims to ensure that critical writing remains a valued mode of engaging with the visual arts,” according to the grant website. The site includes a synopsis of Guzmán’s forthcoming book: Joshua Javier Guzmán’s book Brown Exposures: Queer Photography…

Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in classics shares experience

Julio Vega-Payne joined the classics department as a UCLA Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow this academic year. According to the fellowship website, “The Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program offers postdoctoral research fellowships and faculty mentoring to outstanding scholars whose research, teaching, and service will contribute to diversity and equal opportunity at the University of California.” The expectations of the fellowship are to focus full-time on research and avoid other commitments, meet regularly with assigned faculty mentors and attend an annual academic retreat, according to the website. Vega-Payne, who earned his Ph.D. in classics at UC Santa Barbara, is researching representations of the natural…

Dominic Thomas wins international Gutenberg Research Chair honor

Last November, Dominic Thomas, Madeleine L. Letessier Professor of French and Francophone Studies in the UCLA Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies, won the Gutenberg Research Chair. As part of his prize, he will serve as lead investigator on a project, “Ecology and Propaganda.” “This honor is a testament to the remarkable timeliness, power and scope of Dominic Thomas’ work,” said Alexandra Minna Stern, dean of the UCLA Division of Humanities. “We are proud to have him representing our division, university and field on a global scale as he innovates new approaches to critically studying pressing environmental and ecological…