Sean Brenner

Emergency Support for Afghan Scholars at Risk

With the support of campus leadership, the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies launched an emergency effort to respond to the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan and help Scholars at Risk. The central campus administration has committed funding, but to bring several scholars from Afghanistan, we need your help. We would now like to give the campus community at large the opportunity to contribute to this effort. Our goal is to raise $100,000 by September 30 to enable emergency travel and placement of fellow Afghan scholars at UCLA. Our priorities are to support faculty members at acute risk and desperately trying to…

Spanish Government to honor UCLA professor for promoting language and culture

The Cervantes Institute, a Spanish government agency dedicated to promoting Spanish around the world, has chosen Barbara Fuchs, UCLA professor of Spanish and English, to receive its inaugural Ñ Prize, honoring her work disseminating Spanish language and culture through theater and literature. The president of Spain, Pedro Sánchez, will join Fuchs on July 22 at UCLA as part of an event to announce the first Instituto Cervantes branch in Los Angeles, which will be the seventh such center in the United States. In October, Spain’s King Felipe VI will present the bronze Ñ Prize to Fuchs in person in Madrid. Read the…

COVID 19 Fiat Lux Seminars: Shedding Light on the Pandemic (Part 1)

With many of us now living under government-issued stay-at-home or shelter-in-place orders, Raymond Knapp is taking a musical approach towards how people are coping. Knapp is the Academic Associate Dean at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music and a distinguished musicology professor. He also serves as the Director of the UCLA Center for Musical Humanities, and is among the many UCLA faculty members teaching a Spring 2020 COVID-19 Fiat Lux seminar. Knapp’s Fiat Lux seminar, titled “COVID-19: Inspirational Songs from Musicals in a Time of Crisis,” focuses on how many turn to songs from musicals during difficult times, oftentimes…

Tech moguls on twitter

There are an estimated 330 million monthly active users on Twitter. Even Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos are on the social media platform, curating their own digital persona like the rest of us. But considering their prominence both inside and beyond the tech world, who exactly is engaging with them online, and what do they have to say about these tech moguls? Kristen Tang, a cognitive science major who graduated in 2019, collaborated on “Twitter’s Take on Tech Moguls” with five other students: Christina Durkin, Matthew Huang, Liza Koulikova, Leegeo Fan, and Cami Nemschoff. This project was part…

Maite Zubiaurre’s “Talking Trash: Cultural Uses of Waste” receives Vanderbilt University Press award

“Talking Trash: Cultural Uses of Waste” by Maite Zubiaurre is the winner of the 2020 Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize. Awarded by the Vanderbilt University Press, the book has been recognized as the best book in the area of art or medicine. Zubiaurre’s book explores the often overlooked significance of litter in the urban landscape, particularly looking at litter in its early stages. “Talking Trash” touches upon a variety of disciplines and areas of interest, from anthropology and sociology to visual media and material culture. The book also focuses on the non-urban desert landscape, where clothing and other…

UCLA corrects academic codes for five majors in linguistics department

Approved changes to five undergraduate majors within the UCLA Department of Linguistics will open new doors for students. Effective Winter 2020, the changes will extend opportunities for research, scholarships, and jobs only previously available to students in STEM, but students enrolled in any of the five affected majors will still earn a B.A. degree. Originally developed by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, Classification of Instructional Program (CIP) codes are used to classify and track program completion at educational institutions in the U.S. Four majors—linguistics, applied linguistics, linguistics and anthropology, and linguistics and computer science—have been…

ACLS selects Javier Patiño Loira and David Kim for 2020 Fellowship Program

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) has selected UCLA Humanities faculty Javier Patiño Loira and David D. Kim for its 2020 Fellowship Program. The ACLS Fellowship Program awards fellowships to scholars in the humanities and social sciences, not limited to any specific time period, world region, or humanistic methodology. Applicants submit a proposal for a major scholarly work and, if chosen as fellows, receive funding to complete their research over the course of six to 12 continuous months. Loira is an assistant professor in the UCLA Department of Spanish & Portuguese, and Kim is an associate professor in the…

How interdisciplinary are UCLA undergraduate majors?

College is a time to explore and gain exposure to different fields of study and potential careers, so it’s no wonder that major programs at many universities try to provide as diverse of a curriculum as possible. UCLA is no exception. Here, an undergraduate studying environmental science can take classes in philosophy and public policy—and have it count towards their major. But are some majors more or less interdisciplinary than others? Natasha Ann Lum, a third-year global studies major, collaborated with two other students, Elizabeth Nakamura and Kyle Fernando, to create “Analysis of Major Interdisciplinarity,”which takes a look at what…

Humanities alumna receives 2020 Marshall Scholarship

The Marshall Aid Commemoration Commission announced the 2020 class of Marshall Scholars, including Leia Yen, a 2019 UCLA graduate. After receiving more than 1,000 applications, the Marshall Commission has awarded 46 students in total, the second-largest class in its 66 years. The scholarship program is primarily funded by the British government and will cover the full costs of each recipient’s postgraduate education. The Marshall Commission selects candidates based on academic merit, leadership potential, and ambassadorial potential. According to the UCLA Scholarship Resource Center (SRC), Yen is the first UCLA recipient in about a decade, as well as the first-ever UCLA…

Linguistic Society of America elects Professor Nina Hyams as 2020 fellow

The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) has selected professor Nina Hyams to be a fellow for its 2020 cohort. Since the early ’80s, Hyams has been a member of the LSA, an organization dedicated to fostering a community of linguistic professionals. The LSA aims to further advance the study of linguistics and promote public education, outreach, and advocacy by supporting its members’ research efforts. LSA Fellows are nominated and chosen by committee voting based on the merit of their contributions to the field of linguistics. Outside of her teaching as a distinguished professor in the UCLA Department of Linguistics, Hyams…