Awards and Honors

English major named fifth Arthur Ashe Jr. Scholar

Sydney Do credits an entire community with paving her path to UCLA. After high school, the Maryland native moved to California to live with her grandparents and attend community college. But when her grandmother died and her grandfather’s health failed, the teenage Do found herself living on her own with no family support. Searching for connection in the wider world, she volunteered at Mary’s Kitchen, an Orange County nonprofit supporting people experiencing homelessness. When the city temporarily shut down the facility, Do became an advocate for its guests, many of whom had mental illnesses or disabilities. She also volunteered at…

4 Humanities graduate students receive Fulbright-Hays fellowships

Four Humanities graduate students are among the 12 UCLA scholars overall who have received Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowships for 2023. UCLA received more Fulbright-Hays awards than any other university. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, the Fulbright-Hays program allows awardees to study aspects of a society or societies, including their culture, economy, history and international relations. The fellowship is designed to contribute to developing and improving the study of modern foreign languages and area studies in the U.S. UCLA’s 2023 fellows come from diverse disciplines, and they will conduct their research in Brazil, Chile, England, Japan, Mexico,…

Book by Bryant Kirkland – his first – is honored by Society for Classical Studies

UCLA professor Bryant Kirkland’s first book, “Herodotus and Imperial Greek Literature,” has been recognized as one of the books of the year by the Society for Classical Studies. Kirkland, a UCLA associate professor of classics, won the Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit, which each year honors three outstanding contributions to classical scholarship. “This is a highly original book, a real crucible of scholarly analysis that obliges us to think in fresh ways about the interrelationships between different texts, allowing us to calibrate voice, ethos and thought across genres and time,” the award citation reads. “One of the study’s many engaging qualities…

UCLA’s Justin Torres wins National Book Award for ‘Blackouts’

Justin Torres, a UCLA professor of English, has won the National Book Award for Fiction. The award was presented Wednesday evening in a New York City ceremony hosted by actor-director LeVar Burton and featuring a presentation by Oprah Winfrey. The National Book Foundation also presented honors for nonfiction, poetry, translated literature and young people’s literature. (Watch the full ceremony; Torres’ acceptance speech begins at about 2:08.00.) Torres was honored for “Blackouts,” a boldly experimental work that incorporates vignettes, imagery and poetry to present a dialogue between a twentysomething narrator and a much older man named Juan Gay, who is on…

Laure Murat wins Medicis Prize for nonfiction

Laure Murat, a UCLA distinguished professor of French and Francophone studies, has received the Medicis Prize in the “essay,” or nonfiction, category, one of France’s top literature awards. Murat was honored for “Proust and Me: A Family Romance” (“Proust, roman familial”), a genre-busting book that examines the influence of Marcel Proust’s work on Murat’s own life. The work blends nonfiction, autobiography, literary and sociological analysis in exploring the interrelationship between Proust’s seminal novel “In Search of Lost Time” (“À la recherche du temps perdu”), a seven-volume masterpiece published between 1913 and 1927, Murat’s family history and her own personal journey….

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…

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…

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…