Faculty/Department

Assistant professor of Italian Andrea Moudarres receives Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award

On January 5, 2019, Assistant Professor of Italian Andrea Moudarres received the twenty-first annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies from the Modern Language Association of America. Moudarres accepted his award at the annual convention in Chicago in front of thousands of attendees for his book, The Enemy in Italian Renaissance Epic: Images of Hostility from Dante to Tasso. In this work, Moudarres explores the question of violence, enmity and the representation of the enemy in influential works like Dante’s Divina Commedia, Luigi Pulci’s Morgante, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme…

Professor Barbara Fuchs takes leadership role in Modern Language Association

Barbara Fuchs, professor of Spanish and Portuguese in the UCLA College, has been elected second vice president of the Modern Language Association. Founded in 1883, the Modern Language Association of America provides opportunities for its members to share findings and teaching experiences with colleagues and to discuss trends in the academy. Fuchs, who is also a professor of English, will serve in the office of second vice president from Jan. 7 through the close of the January 2020 convention and will automatically become first vice president in 2020, serving in that office through the close of the January 2021 convention….

Slavic Department’s Ph.D. student Lydia Roberts interviews Marianna Yarovskaya, director of “Women of the Gulag”

When a country experiences genocide, is talking about what happened the best way to heal from the past? Why is it important to preserve the memory of what happened and the lives that were lost for future generations? These complicated questions regarding the preservation of memory are discussed in Lydia Roberts’ interview with Marianna Yarovskaya, director of the documentary Women of the Gulag, for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Roberts, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Languages and Cultures at UCLA, recently sat down with Yarovskaya after a screening of her film, which…

Armando Guerrero Talks Spanish Accents and Latinx Representation in Film and TV

By: Megan Reusche Armando Guerrero, a Lecturer and Academic Coordinator in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, recently analyzed the accents of actors in famous movies and TV shows for the social media company Pero Like to see if the actors linguistically achieved the Latinx identity in the portrayal of their role. Buzzfeed’s Pero Like is a Facebook and Youtube channel that “makes content that resonates with English-speaking Latinxs.” Guerrero’s video, featured on a platform with over 1 million subscribers, explores the various linguistic representations of Latinx identities in film and TV, and addresses the lack of representation by an…

Laure Murat roils the #MeToo debate in France

UCLA International Institute, November 7, 2018 — Director of the UCLA Center for European and Russian Studies and Professor of French, Laure Murat has published a new book: “Une révolution sexuelle? Réflexions sur l’aprés-Weinstein [A Sexual Revolution? Reflections on the Weinstein Aftermath]” (Paris: Éditions Stock, 2018). Arguing that #MeToo is the first serious challenge to patriarchy in modern times, Murat dismisses the current discussion of #MeToo in France as a polemical misdirection. Instead, she calls for a genuine debate on the issues of sexual harassment and assault in that engages French young people, men and women, philosophers and intellectuals. Born and…

Art history professor Charlene Villaseñor Black wins MRPI Funding Award

UCLA Art History Professor Charlene Villaseñor Black was recently awarded over $1 million in funding as a winner of the 2019 Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives (MRPI) competition. MRPI funding encourages innovative research collaborations across UC campuses that lead to cutting edge discoveries in areas that are important to UC, California, and the global society. Professor Villaseñor Black and her colleagues Professor Jennifer Hughes (UC Riverside), Professor Amy Lonetree (UC Santa Cruz), and Professor Ross Frank (UC San Diego) were one of sixteen awardees selected from the 179 applications to receive funding for their project titled “Critical Mission Studies at…

Linguistics professor Jessica Rett gets curious with Jonathan Van Ness

Jessica Rett, Associate Professor of Linguistics at UCLA, was recently featured on the podcast “Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness.” Van Ness is well-known for his role as part of the Fab Five in the Netflix reboot of Queer Eye. Rett’s research interests include formal semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language. In this podcast, Rett explains her role as a theoretical linguist as an individual who uses logic to model what it is people know when they know the meaning of language. By using this model, Rett and fellow theoretical linguists believe that as young children, when we listen to…

Frankenstein: The enduring appeal of Mary Shelley’s 200-year-old creation

In 1804, when the use of electricity was in its infancy, a scientist named Giovanni Aldini jolted the recently hanged body of an executed convict from London’s Newgate prison with bolts of electricity, momentarily re-animating the limbs of the corpse — an experiment conducted at the Royal College of Surgeons. This moment was vividly described in newspapers of the day, discussed widely among the educated and middle classes of the times, and debated by scientists for years to come. Author Mary Shelley was just 7 at the time, but the impact of it jolted through her as well, and ultimately…

Alain Mabanckou’s novel ‘Black Moses’ wins 2018 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award

Franco-Congolese poet and novelist Alain Mabanckou won the 2018 Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award for fiction for “Black Moses,” a novel that follows the journey of an orphan from Loango through a revolution in the Congo to Pointe-Noire and the home of a madam with “ten girls, each more beautiful than the last.” “It all began when I was a teenager, and came to wonder about the name I’d been given by Papa Moupelo, the priest at the orphanage in Loango: Tokumisa Nzambe po Mose yamoyindo abotami namboka ya Bakoko,” the novel opens. “A long name, which in Lingala…

How a UCLA philosophy professor helped construct ‘The Good Place’

A funny thing happened in the esoteric world of philosophy in late 2016 — professors and students were buzzing on social media about a sitcom. Is there really a television show that muddles through questions like “Is it ever OK to lie?” and “Is morality judged on results or intentions?” And even more surprisingly, how is this mainstream network TV show getting these debates so right? That show is “The Good Place,” which debuted on NBC in September 2016 and whose third season opened Sept. 27. The show picks up the story of a young woman immediately following her untimely death by shopping cart….