Linguistics alumna Ananda Lima on her fiction debut, ‘Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil’
Lima, who earned a master’s degree in 2008, still sometimes laughs when she says the title of her new book aloud.
Books
Collection edited by Yogita Goyal broadens research on African American literature
The professor of English and of African American studies said the book highlights the shift taking place within Black studies and the need for further research.
Poetry in motion: A forthcoming anthology showcases the genius of UCLA’s Harryette Mullen
Her new anthology, “Regaining Unconsciousness,” to be published in 2025, will surely be one of poetry’s most talked-about books of the year
On the ‘Afterlife of Photography’: Q&A with art historian George Baker
When George Baker was asked to write an essay on photography for an exhibition in 2008, unbeknownst to him, he had begun the journey toward completing “Lateness and Longing: On the Afterlife of Photography.” In it, the UCLA art history professor sets out to investigate how a generation of women artists is invigorating photography in the age of digitization by returning to earlier, incomplete or unrealized moments in the field’s history. For the first installment of the UCLA College’s Bruin Bookshelf Spotlight, Baker shares a snapshot of the approach and inspirations for his latest work, how a resurgence in analog photographic…
Exploring the sacred music of nuns in colonial Mexico and Latin America
In his first book, Cesar Favila book takes an imaginative approach to recounting the lives of nuns who sang devotional music in Catholic churches in 17th- and 18th-century Mexico and Latin America. Favila, an assistant professor of musicology at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, is a faculty affiliate of the CMRS Center for Early Global Studies, the Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies, and the LGBTQ Studies Program in the UCLA Division of Humanities. “Immaculate Sounds: The Musical Lives of Nuns in New Spain,” published in November by Oxford University Press, examines rarely studied printed and manuscript sources…
Q&A: Justin Torres on creating ‘sustained and deep engagement’ with literature
Justin Torres was just 31 years old when his first novel, “We the Animals,” caused a literary sensation. Narrated by a young boy of mixed heritage who is finding his way amid family struggles and a budding queer identity, the novel received the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and became a bestseller as well as an award-winning film. Since its publication more than a decade ago, Torres has experienced the kind of broad, enduring recognition that eludes many authors. The literary landscape has also changed significantly in the last decade; today, literature by and about Latinos continues to gain ground. Torres, a…
New UCLA College webpage highlights books by Bruin authors
A new page on the UCLA College website celebrates the wide range of authors and expertise among College faculty, students, alumni and staff. The Bruin Bookshelf catalogs books published by scholars affiliated with the College, and all are invited to bookmark the site and use it as a resource. Through a link on the site, College-affiliated authors can submit information about books they wish to be included, and the page will be updated regularly.
Q&A: Harryette Mullen’s newest poetry brings us closer to nature
Harryette Mullen has a singular way of connecting readers with the world around them. This spring, her work was included in a public art installation as part of New York City’s Park Poems initiative, a collaboration with the Poetry Society of America. Previously, and closer to home, Mullen wrote an original poem for UCLA Magazine that celebrated the small pleasures of everyday life, even amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The celebrated poet, literary scholar and UCLA English professor was elected in April to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The same month, her collection “Open Leaves / poems from earth” was published by the independent Black Sunflowers Poetry…
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…
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…