Events

Dean delivers 2023 Humanities Division commencement address

Alexandra Minna Stern, dean of humanities at the UCLA College, served as the commencement speaker for the 2023 humanities commencement ceremony. Stern said she was honored to be the speaker for the ceremony. She added that she hoped her speech would uplift students and families and thank them for all their hard work. “This has been quite a tumultuous time, especially since these graduates were by the pandemic, and their educational experience was disrupted,” Stern said. “I believe this generation has acquired an important skills for their future: How does one live with uncertainty? How does one recalibrate all the…

Amitav Ghosh delivers UCLA’s Edward W. Said Lecture

Focusing on his 2021 nonfiction work “The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis,” Amitav Ghosh gave an impassioned presentation on May 17 at UCLA’s third annual Edward W. Said Lecture, convened by Anjali Prabhu, UCLA professor and Edward W. Said Chair in Comparative Literature. “It is a great pleasure and privilege to be here today with so many old and new friends, and it is really extraordinary to be delivering the Edward W. Said Lecture,” Ghosh said. “I met him several times in New York in the gym where he loved to play squash. It is hard to…

UCLA Stavros Niarchos Foundation Center for the Study of Hellenic Culture to premiere chamber opera

On Saturday, January 21, at 7 p.m., the UCLA Stavros Niarchos Foundation Center for the Study of Hellenic Culture will proudly present the premiere of the experimental chamber opera Polymnia, the story of a young woman whose family was tragically expelled from its village by the Ottoman Turks. The performance will take place at UCLA’s Little Theatre. A second performance will be held on January 22 at 2 p.m. Written and composed by emerging artist Theodosia Roussos, the opera presents the story of Roussos’ own great-grandmother Polymnia Athanasiades Pappas and draws from fragments of Sappho’s poetry, Kassiane’s hymns, as well…

‘The New Treaties of Globalization’: Gabriel Zucman delivers Possible Worlds lecture

In the latest installment of the “Possible Worlds” lecture series, French economist Gabriel Zucman joined UCLA students, faculty and community members on October 11 to discuss the link between globalization, taxation and inequality. The event was held in person at Royce Hall, with a livestream reaching additional audience members virtually. In his talk, “The New Treaties of Globalization,” Zucman discussed a range of topics, including the concept of implementing a progressive wealth tax to better reflect modern society. The lecture was followed by a Q&A session moderated by Juliana Londoño-Vélez, an assistant professor of economics at UCLA and a faculty…

Commencement speaker Robert Buswell reflects on the past, looks toward the future

UCLA Buddhist studies scholar Robert Buswell will be the keynote speaker for the Division of Humanities commencement ceremony on Saturday, June 11 at Royce Hall. Buswell, a distinguished professor who holds the Irving and Jean Stone Endowed Chair in Humanities, will retire this year after more than three decades at UCLA, where he founded the Center for Buddhist Studies and Center for Korean Studies. He and his wife, Christina Buswell, also recently made gift commitments to establish both an endowed chair and a graduate fellowship in Buddhist studies at UCLA. Buswell said that he was fortunate to have joined UCLA…

Angela Davis addresses audience on ‘international solidarity’

Angela Davis, the internationally celebrated author, scholar and activist, delivered the second annual Edward W. Said Lecture in the UCLA Department of Comparative Literature on April 14. Davis, a distinguished professor emerita at UC Santa Cruz and a former UCLA professor of philosophy, is renowned for her decades-long commitment to social justice movements around the world. Her lecture, “International Solidarity in the Era of Black Lives Matter and Justice for Palestine,” was delivered virtually to more than a thousand audience members in the UCLA community and beyond. “Contemporary racism — whether against Black, Latinx, Indigenous communities, or Asian American communities…

Exhibition places viewers in midst of WWII-era forced removal of Japanese Americans

Eighty years ago, during World War II, the U.S. government forcibly removed Japanese Americans from the West Coast, incarcerating 120,000 in concentration camps. This May, an exhibition at the Japanese American National Museum lets visitors step into those dark days of 1942 through an augmented reality re-creation at the very site where thousands of Japanese Americans living in downtown Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo neighborhood were ordered to report before trains and buses took them to the camps. “BeHere / 1942: A New Lens on the Japanese American Incarceration,” which opens May 7, is presented by the Yanai Initiative for Globalizing Japanese Humanities, a…