Books

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…

English major to publish debut novel

Arushi Avachat, a third-year English and political science undergraduate student at UCLA, will see her debut novel, “Arya Khanna’s Bollywood Moment,” hit bookstore shelves next year. A longtime, avid reader and writer, Avachat has also authored short stories — one of which served as the novel’s inspiration. “I had written a short story my freshman year of high school that I was really attached to,” she said. “I had a lot more to say about those characters — and then I had the idea that I wanted my novel to read like a Bollywood drama.” Avachat worked on outlining and…