Faculty/Department

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…

Writer-in-residence Elaine Kahn discusses her experience

Elaine Kahn, a writer and artist based in Los Angeles, is the writer-in-residence in the UCLA Department of English for spring 2022. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Kahn has taught at Pomona College, Saint Mary’s College of California, the University of Iowa and elsewhere. She is the author of the full-length poetry collections “Women in Public” and “Romance or The End,” and her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Art Papers magazine and other publications. She founded the Poetry Field School, where she teaches independent workshops to writers of all levels. Kahn held a…

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…

Q&A: Dean David Schaberg on Humanities Advocacy Day

We interviewed David Schaberg, dean of the Division of Humanities, about his recent trip to Capitol Hill for Humanities Advocacy Day, where state-based delegations meet with members of Congress and their staff to make the case for federal funding for the humanities. The annual event is organized by the National Humanities Alliance, a coalition of over 200 member organizations including universities, cultural institutions and more. How was your Humanities Advocacy Day experience? Schaberg: This year’s visit was pretty high-powered advocacy. The group was led by Vice Chancellor Roger Wakimoto, who was there to represent UCLA in its overall engagement in…

Professor Dominic Thomas honored as Officer in the Order of Academic Palms

Dominic Thomas, Madeleine Letessier Professor of French in the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies, has been named an Officer in the Order of Academic Palms, or l’Ordre des Palmes académiques. The Academic Palms is the oldest civilian award given out and is second only in age to the Legion of Honor. They were created in 1808 by Napoléon Bonaparte to honor university professors. The French Minister of National Education recommends nominees for the honor to the French Prime Minister, who, if she or he is in agreement, issues an official decree naming recipients. Julie Duhaut-Bedos, Consul General of France…

Department of Asian Languages & Cultures receives $3.7 million in gift commitments

The UCLA Department of Asian Languages & Cultures has received $3.7 million in gift commitments from distinguished professor of Buddhist studies Robert E. Buswell Jr. and his wife, Christina Lee Buswell, a translator of Korean religious scriptures. The couple’s gift commitments created the Chinul Endowed Chair in Korean Buddhist Studies—the first permanent endowed chair in Korean Buddhism outside of Korea—and the Robert E. and Christina L. Buswell Fellowship in Buddhist Studies in support of graduate students in the department. The endowments will be funded as a blended gift with a portion paid over five years and the balance as a…

Professor Maite Zubiaurre selected to join Faculty Mentoring Honor Society

Professor Maite Zubiaurre has been selected to join the Faculty Mentoring Honor Society. The society recognizes UCLA faculty who have given much time and effort to the work of mentoring early and mid-career faculty, especially underrepresented faculty at UCLA. The work of mentoring is too often invisible and unrecognized, and such faculty contribute disproportionately to mentoring on campuses and deserve recognition. The society honors the mentorship of underrepresented faculty with respect to identities such as race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and disability. For more information on Professor Zubiaurre’s accomplishments and featured work, please click here.

English department celebrates launch of Digital Media Lab

The UCLA Department of English will celebrate the launch of its new Digital Media Lab on Friday, May 6 at noon at its location in Kaplan Hall 211. The Digital Media Lab is the result of an initiative by a group of English faculty members whose students were increasingly interested in using multimedia resources in their scholarly work, according to department chair Ursula Heise, the Marcia H. Howard Professor of Literary Studies and director of UCLA’s Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies. “[The lab] is not only about the creation of digital works, or research on digital works,” Heise said. “We’re…

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…

UCLA names Alex Stern dean of humanities

Alexandra Minna Stern, currently the associate dean for the humanities at the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, will be the new dean of humanities at the UCLA College. Her appointment is effective Nov. 1. Stern is the Carroll Smith-Rosenberg Collegiate Professor of American Culture at Michigan, where she also holds appointments in history, women’s and gender studies, and obstetrics and gynecology. Her research has focused on modern and contemporary histories of science, medicine and society in the U.S. and Latin America, and, most recently, on the cultures and ideologies of the far right and white…