Awards and Honors

Art history professor Charlene Villaseñor Black wins MRPI Funding Award

UCLA Art History Professor Charlene Villaseñor Black was recently awarded over $1 million in funding as a winner of the 2019 Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives (MRPI) competition. MRPI funding encourages innovative research collaborations across UC campuses that lead to cutting edge discoveries in areas that are important to UC, California, and the global society. Professor Villaseñor Black and her colleagues Professor Jennifer Hughes (UC Riverside), Professor Amy Lonetree (UC Santa Cruz), and Professor Ross Frank (UC San Diego) were one of sixteen awardees selected from the 179 applications to receive funding for their project titled “Critical Mission Studies at…

Alain Mabanckou’s novel ‘Black Moses’ wins 2018 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award

Franco-Congolese poet and novelist Alain Mabanckou won the 2018 Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award for fiction for “Black Moses,” a novel that follows the journey of an orphan from Loango through a revolution in the Congo to Pointe-Noire and the home of a madam with “ten girls, each more beautiful than the last.” “It all began when I was a teenager, and came to wonder about the name I’d been given by Papa Moupelo, the priest at the orphanage in Loango: Tokumisa Nzambe po Mose yamoyindo abotami namboka ya Bakoko,” the novel opens. “A long name, which in Lingala…