Faculty/Department

Professor aims to put the history of Mexicans in L.A. at your fingertips

Max Gordy | September 14, 2021 When a lot of people look at maps they see objective facts: the black lines depicting borders, a blue line tracing the path of a river, and locations of mountains, cities and lakes. Marissa López, professor in the departments of English and Chicana and Chicano and Central American studies, sees a story, one written from the perspective of the mapmaker. That kind of control over the narrative U.S. history has usually rested in the hands of white men. The result has been a history that omits the stories, contributions and perspectives of people of color….

Professor Charlene Villaseñor Black: Art as a means of getting outside ourselves

During a trip to Mexico when she was 15, Charlene Villaseñor Black wandered into the Church of Santa Prisca y San Sebastián in Taxco. “I was dazzled by the 18th-century interior, with Baroque paintings and gold retablos [devotional works] perfectly preserved,” says the Arizona native, now a professor of art history and Chicana/o and Central American studies at UCLA. At that moment, Villaseñor Black, who is Mexican American, knew she wanted to become an art historian. Today, she specializes in the art of the early modern Iberian world as well as in contemporary Latino art. Recently, she has focused on…

Emergency Support for Afghan Scholars at Risk

With the support of campus leadership, the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies launched an emergency effort to respond to the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan and help Scholars at Risk. The central campus administration has committed funding, but to bring several scholars from Afghanistan, we need your help. We would now like to give the campus community at large the opportunity to contribute to this effort. Our goal is to raise $100,000 by September 30 to enable emergency travel and placement of fellow Afghan scholars at UCLA. Our priorities are to support faculty members at acute risk and desperately trying to…

English Major Woody Brown Wins the Christopher Zyda Creative Writing Award

Aspiring novelist Woody Brown is going to have quite the author’s bio on a future dust jacket. “I grew up a mighty weird autistic kid who was presumed to be retarded because I couldn’t speak,” he says. “My intelligence was not fully acknowledged until I went to Pasadena City College, where they accepted me and my upward trajectory began.” Communicating using a letter board transcribed by his mother, Mary, his tireless champion and comic foil to his clever asides, Brown describes how his path to education, higher or otherwise, wasn’t always assured. In fact, his mother had to wage a…

English Professor Marissa López Teams up with 826LA on Summer Writers Workshop for Teens

Professor of English and Chicana/o Studies, Marissa López’s digital humanities project, Picturing Mexican America, teamed up with 826LA to create a virtual summer writers workshop for middle- and high-school students. 826LA is a non-profit dedicated to developing the writing skills of students 6 to 18, and provides a variety of services such as tutoring, workshops, help for English-language learners and student publications. Professor López partnered with 826LA to create a virtual summer writing workshop based on research from her Picturing Mexican America project. In the summer workshops, Professor López showed students photos of the city, uncovered in her research project, which are different from…

Mural pays respect to remains of women found near the U.S.-Mexico border

As you walk along Pacific Avenue in Venice, there’s a tattoo parlor — its side wall covered in graffiti — scraps of trash strewn about. Across the alley, interrupting the classic beach community scene, you encounter a wall installation of 389 pink and purple wooden crosses affixed to a 90-foot panoramic backdrop of cacti, sand and desert brush. Names adorn the crosses: “Paulina,” “Rosa,” “Maria,” “Fabiola,” are among them, but so many are “unidentified.” Each cross represents a female migrant who died in Pima County, Arizona, near the U.S.–Mexico border from January 2001 through May 2021. The exhibit is one…

Spanish Government to honor UCLA professor for promoting language and culture

The Cervantes Institute, a Spanish government agency dedicated to promoting Spanish around the world, has chosen Barbara Fuchs, UCLA professor of Spanish and English, to receive its inaugural Ñ Prize, honoring her work disseminating Spanish language and culture through theater and literature. The president of Spain, Pedro Sánchez, will join Fuchs on July 22 at UCLA as part of an event to announce the first Instituto Cervantes branch in Los Angeles, which will be the seventh such center in the United States. In October, Spain’s King Felipe VI will present the bronze Ñ Prize to Fuchs in person in Madrid. Read the…

UCLA SNF Center for Study of Hellenic Culture Director, Sharon Gerstel, awarded Commander of the Order of the Phoenix, Greece’s highest honor

News Release (Los Angeles, CA – June 30, 2021) UCLA Stavros Niarchos Foundation Center for the Study of Hellenic Culture (UCLA SNF Hellenic Center) Director Sharon E. J. Gerstel, for her contributions to the promotion of Hellenic Culture, has been named a Commander of the Order of the Phoenix, one of Greece’s highest honors. In April, Dr. Gerstel was bestowed with honorary Greek citizenship, which took place at the Consulate General of Greece in Los Angeles. “I am humbled by this distinction,” said Dr. Gerstel. “My love for the country runs very deep and my heart is with its people….

UCLA Library acquires new materials based on student proposals in English capstone course

It’s been more than a year since the coronavirus halted physical access to the UCLA Library. Rather than seeing it as a hurdle, Matthew Fisher, associate professor of English, and Devin Fitzgerald, curator of rare books and the history of printing, devised a series of remote-learning alternatives for students to research, think and write about books and book collections in new ways, culminating in a final writing project that allowed students to explore an unfamiliar role: special collections curator. The capstone course, “Writing the Digital Archive: Old Books in New Worlds,” was originally designed for students to work hands-on with…

Spanish and Portuguese department awards inaugural Dolores Huerta Community Service Award

Dolores Huerta is a labor leader and community organizer. She has worked civil rights and social justice for over 50 years. In 1962 she and Cesar Chavez founded the United Farm Workers union. She served as vice-president and played a critical role in many of the union’s accomplishments for four decades. In 2002, she received the Puffin/Nation $100,000 prize for Creative Citizenship which she used to establish the Dolores Huerta Foundation (DHF). DHF is connecting groundbreaking community-based organizing to state and national movements to register and educate voters; advocate for education reform; bring about infrastructure improvements in low-income communities; advocate…