Sean Brenner

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…

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…