Faculty/Department

New English course embraces the potential of AI

A new UCLA English class is built around the premise that the best way to understand artificial intelligence tools, including their biases and limitations, is to experiment with them. The class, “Algo-Lit: An Introduction to AI Literature,” is taught by Danny Snelson, an assistant professor of English. “I think that the use of generative AI — to be specific, the type of large-language models or image synthesis tools built on massive accumulations of data — presents real ethical and moral concerns,” Snelson said. “But these tools, and the new ways of making they present, are not going away. That box…

Book by Bryant Kirkland – his first – is honored by Society for Classical Studies

UCLA professor Bryant Kirkland’s first book, “Herodotus and Imperial Greek Literature,” has been recognized as one of the books of the year by the Society for Classical Studies. Kirkland, a UCLA associate professor of classics, won the Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit, which each year honors three outstanding contributions to classical scholarship. “This is a highly original book, a real crucible of scholarly analysis that obliges us to think in fresh ways about the interrelationships between different texts, allowing us to calibrate voice, ethos and thought across genres and time,” the award citation reads. “One of the study’s many engaging qualities…

UCLA’s Justin Torres wins National Book Award for ‘Blackouts’

Justin Torres, a UCLA professor of English, has won the National Book Award for Fiction. The award was presented Wednesday evening in a New York City ceremony hosted by actor-director LeVar Burton and featuring a presentation by Oprah Winfrey. The National Book Foundation also presented honors for nonfiction, poetry, translated literature and young people’s literature. (Watch the full ceremony; Torres’ acceptance speech begins at about 2:08.00.) Torres was honored for “Blackouts,” a boldly experimental work that incorporates vignettes, imagery and poetry to present a dialogue between a twentysomething narrator and a much older man named Juan Gay, who is on…

$11 million gift establishes Yarshater Center for the Study of Iranian Literary Traditions

UCLA has received a commitment of $11 million from the Persian Heritage Foundation to establish the UCLA Yarshater Center for the Study of Iranian Literary Traditions, a research hub that aims to advance knowledge of ancient Iranian literature and culture worldwide. The center was named for the late Ehsan Yarshater, the inaugural Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies at Columbia University, whose lifework has had a profound impact on the study of the Iranian world globally. Among the many original projects Yarshater initiated are the “Bibliotheca Persica,” a collection of pioneering publications foregrounding Iranian literary traditions; “A History of Persian…

Symposium on environmental illnesses highlights new multicampus research initiative

Around the early 1910s, coal miners began sending birds into mines as a way to detect the presence of carbon monoxide or other toxic gases. The phrase “canary in a coal mine” would soon become widely used shorthand to describe something that could be used as an early indicator of danger ahead. A UCLA symposium scheduled for Nov. 17 and 18 will apply that idiom to discussions of environmental illnesses and the human stories that are often ignored or misunderstood in modern medicine’s treatment and care for people with chronic illnesses. The event, “Canary Knowledge: Chronic Fatigue, Chemical Sensitivities and…

Laure Murat wins Medicis Prize for nonfiction

Laure Murat, a UCLA distinguished professor of French and Francophone studies, has received the Medicis Prize in the “essay,” or nonfiction, category, one of France’s top literature awards. Murat was honored for “Proust and Me: A Family Romance” (“Proust, roman familial”), a genre-busting book that examines the influence of Marcel Proust’s work on Murat’s own life. The work blends nonfiction, autobiography, literary and sociological analysis in exploring the interrelationship between Proust’s seminal novel “In Search of Lost Time” (“À la recherche du temps perdu”), a seven-volume masterpiece published between 1913 and 1927, Murat’s family history and her own personal journey….

Gift from Robert Lemelson Foundation will advance Amazigh studies at UCLA

The UCLA Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures received a gift of $345,000 from the Robert Lemelson Foundation to establish the Amazigh Studies Program Fund at UCLA, which will advance the global study of the language, history and culture of one of North Africa’s oldest indigenous populations. The project will be led by Aomar Boum, professor of anthropology and of Near Eastern languages and cultures at UCLA, and Brahim El Guabli, chair and associate professor of Arabic studies at Williams College. The scholars, both of whom hail originally from Morocco and are of Amazigh descent, seek to lay the…

More than 1,100 flock to Clark Library open house

“A library is a focal point, a sacred place to a community; and its sacredness is its accessibility, its publicness,” author Ursula K. Le Guin famously said. “It’s everybody’s place.” To celebrate one such world-class resource, the UCLA William Andrews Clark Memorial Library held its annual open house and adopt-a-book fair Oct. 7, inspiring more than 1,100 people to join in person. “The event was a resounding success, with the vast majority of participants being first-time attendees. Everyone was deeply engaged with the materials on display and put forward astute questions and observations about book history,” said Anna Chen, the Clark’s head…

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…