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Faculty/Department

Q&A: Maite Zubiaurre on her documentary Águilas, recently shortlisted for the Academy Awards

Courtesy of Águilas Press Kit We sat down with Maite Zubiaurre, a professor in the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies (ELTS) and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UCLA, to discuss her short documentary Águilas, recently shortlisted for the 94th Academy Awards in the documentary short category. Zubiaurre co-directed, co-produced and co-wrote it with Kristy Guevara-Flanagan, an Associate Professor at the School of Theater, Film and Television. What does this recognition of Águilas mean to you? Maite Zubiaurre: The recognition is very important to us because this is a documentary on a very important subject: migrant deaths…

Reimagining the scope and approach of the UCLA Center for Early Global Studies

Journalists, businesspeople and politicians working in foreign countries often depend on fixers — resourceful, problem-solving guides with a sophisticated grasp of local languages, cultures and customs. Zrinka Stahuljak has long considered herself a fixer, both literally — she was a wartime interpreter in her native Croatia during the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia — and metaphorically, in her role at UCLA. “I’m fascinated and inspired by the transcultural work of fixers, who ultimately help people make transformative connections,” she says. It’s in that spirit that Stahuljak has overseen the thoughtful transformation of the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance…

From fiction to action on climate change: Kim Stanley Robinson delivers Possible Worlds lecture

For the third installment of the Possible Worlds lecture series, Kim Stanley Robinson —recognized as one of the greatest living science fiction writers — joined students, faculty and UCLA community members Nov. 30 to discuss climate change advocacy and the incredibly high stakes facing our planet. “[We] are standing on the edge of creating a mass extinction event that would hammer humanity,” said Robinson in his talk, “Optopia: From Fiction to Action on Climate Change.” A collaborative effort between the Division of Humanities at UCLA and the Los Angeles-based Berggruen Institute, Possible Worlds invites today’s most imaginative intellectual leaders and…

UCLA professor receives award for promoting Spanish language and culture

Barbara Fuchs is the first recipient of the Ñ Prize, an award created to honor individuals who have promoted Spanish language and culture internationally. The Ñ Prize was created by the Instituto Cervantes, a Spanish public institution created in 1991 with the intent to promote the Spanish language through education and use of the language and to encourage the spread of Hispanic cultures globally. The Instituto Cervantes is also currently planning to open a branch in LA. The introduction of the Ñ Prize also aligns with the 30th anniversary of the institution. Fuchs, a professor of Spanish and English, said…

What gets remembered

There has never been one definitive Los Angeles. Spanning hundreds of years and countless cultures, the city represents something different for everyone. It belongs to us all, as young participants in the Summer Writers’ Workshop discovered in July.  An annual offering by creative writing nonprofit 826LA, the program featured something new this year: a collaboration between 826LA, UCLA and Professor of English and Chicana/o Studies Marissa López’s Picturing Mexican America project. The weeklong workshop brought middle and high school students together to examine—and imagine—both the future history of L.A. and their roles in that history, focusing on the questions, “Who makes decisions about what gets remembered?” and “How can we bring unseen or ignored things to light?”  López and her graduate students Efren Lopez (no relation), Robert Mendoza and Gabriela…

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…