Faculty/Department

Humanities Division welcomes new faculty for 2023-24

The Division of Humanities is proud to introduce its new faculty members for the 2023–24 academic year. These accomplished scholars represent nearly every department in the division and are at all ranks; their scholarship covers a wide range of subjects, from the ancient world to linguistics, from the digital humanities to health humanities — with some engaged in scholarship that spans departments. Congratulations and a warm welcome to our newest faculty members: Whitney Arnold, Comparative Literature Nohora Arrieta Fernandez, Spanish & Portuguese Solange Ashby, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures Meg Cychosz, Linguistics Lara Fabian, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures Rebecca…

The real story behind ‘The Exorcist’: Q&A with Henry Ansgar Kelly

Turning 50 this year — and looking not a day over diabolical — “The Exorcist” is one of the most influential, critically acclaimed and financially successful horror films of all time. (Based on a 1971 novel, the film even inspired a 2023 sequel, as well as some silly questions.) While its sensationalized depiction of demonic possession has all but defined this type of narrative in the popular imagination, the material itself is loosely based on a real-life case from 1949, where Father William Bowdern performed a series of exorcisms on a 14-year-old boy. “I was the only one to whom he…

Adam Bradley co-curates Grammy exhibit celebrating 50 years of hip hop

“Hip-Hop America: The Mixtape Exhibit” at the Grammy Museum, which runs through Sept. 4, 2024, celebrates the genre’s 50th anniversary. It is co-curated by Adam Bradley, a UCLA professor of English and African American studies and founding director of the Laboratory for Race and Popular Culture (RAP Lab) at UCLA. The immersive exhibit explores music, fashion, activism and more to allow visitors to make hands-on connections with the past, present and future of hip-hop culture. Artifacts on display will include the Notorious B.I.G.’s iconic red leather jacket, Chuck D’s handwritten and illustrated lyrics and more, while a “Sonic Playground” will…

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…

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…

Zrinka Stahuljak and Shannon Speed receive Mellon grant

Professors Zrinka Stahuljak and Shannon Speed received a $1 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to support a project called Race in the Global Past through Native Lenses. Its goals include elevating Native American, Pacific Islander and other Indigenous scholarship on historical articulations of “race” and “Indigeneity” across the globe, and supporting efforts to recruit and retain Indigenous faculty at UCLA. In addition to creating a pipeline to study history more inclusively through these and other perspectives, the project will bring together community scholars-in-residence and deliver programming and outreach efforts led by Stahuljak, Speed and the respective interdisciplinary research centers they direct:…

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…

Professor emeritus receives Association for Asian American Studies lifetime achievement award

King-Kok Cheung, professor emeritus of English and Asian American studies at UCLA, received the Association for Asian American Studies lifetime achievement award late April for her contributions to the fields of Asian American and Pacific Islander studies. Cheung was born and raised in Hong Kong before coming to UC Berkeley to earn her Ph.D. in English. In 1984, Cheung was the first woman of color in the humanities division and the first faculty member of Asian descent to join the English department at UCLA. She is the author of “Articulate Silences” and “Chinese American Literature without Borders.” “I feel that…

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…