Gifts/Grants

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…

Art is their adventure: Graduate students will benefit from Peter and Sheri Weller’s beautiful vision

When he was working on his master’s degree at the highly selective program at Syracuse University’s campus in Florence, Italy, Peter Weller experienced firsthand the challenges of graduate work in art history: hours of archival research, hours in front of the art itself, fluency in multiple languages and, of course, the expenses of travel, school and life. “It was extraordinarily arduous, and I wanted to quit after a month,” he said with a laugh. An Oscar-nominated filmmaker and acclaimed actor of stage and screen, Peter persevered and even went on to earn his doctorate in art history from UCLA in 2014. However,…

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:…

Gift from Arcadia will advance early global studies at UCLA through postdoctoral fellowships

UCLA received a gift of $552,693 from Arcadia, a charitable fund that works to protect nature, preserve cultural heritage and promote open access to knowledge, to establish the John W. Baldwin Postdoctoral Fellowship in the UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies, one of the oldest and most prestigious research centers of its kind in North America. Over a period of five years, the funding will allow the center to welcome three new scholars completing fellowships in European and global comparative medieval studies. The ideal candidates will be recent doctoral graduates in European medieval studies whose work takes an inclusive approach…

Professor Joshua Javier Guzmán discusses Warhol Foundation grant

Joshua Javier Guzmán, assistant professor of gender studies and chair of the LGBTQ studies program at UCLA, received a 2022 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in support of his new book, “Brown Exposures: Queer Photography and the Literary Aperture.” Funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and administered by Creative Capital, the program “supports writing about contemporary art and aims to ensure that critical writing remains a valued mode of engaging with the visual arts,” according to the grant website. The site includes a synopsis of Guzmán’s forthcoming book: Joshua Javier Guzmán’s book Brown Exposures: Queer Photography…

Four faculty members receive NEH grants

Among the 204 projects nationwide funded by $28.1 million in grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities this year are initiatives by UCLA faculty members Meredith Cohen, Willeke Wendrich, Li Min and Ellen Pearlstein. Cohen, an associate professor of art history, received an NEH-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication, which includes an outright grant of $60,000 to work on “The Lady Chapel as a Model for Visualizations of Digital 3-D Historical Reconstructions.” The project will involve researching, writing and using data visualization to create a website to explore 3-D architectural reconstructions of the Lady Chapel of Saint-German-des-Prés. Wendrich, the Joan…

$1.2 million from Kachigian family trust establishes lectureship in Armenian studies

The UCLA Division of Humanities has received a $1.2 million bequest from the estate of siblings George and Alice Kachigian to support the Armenian studies program in the department of Near Eastern languages and cultures. As part of the gift, the department created the Kachigian Family Lectureship in Armenian Language and Culture. The inaugural holder of the lectureship will be Hagop Kouloujian, a UCLA scholar and instructor who specializes in Western Armenian, a language that since the Armenian Genocide of the early 20th century has been spoken almost exclusively by people in the diaspora. Kouloujian was instrumental in having it…

Clark Library receives centuries-old rare books from longtime donor

A new donation of 40 historical texts from Paul Chrzanowski further bolsters an already remarkable collection of early English texts at UCLA’s William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. The newly added items — including a 17th-century parchment with the seal of Queen Elizabeth I and a handwritten manuscript describing precious metals and gems — have been prepared for use by scholars as part of the library’s Paul Chrzanowski Collection. “This donation reflects the broader interests and learning needs of English readers at the time,” Chrzanowski said. A physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, Chrzanowski began donating rare books…

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…

Gift to UCLA’S Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies bolsters field of Moroccan Jewish studies

The UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies has received a pledge of $100,000 from its Moroccan academic partner, the Université Internationale de Rabat (UIR) to support Arabic translation projects pertaining to Moroccan Jewish studies. Moroccan Jewish studies is an emerging field that focuses on the history of Sephardic Jewish communities in Morocco. Following the final expulsion of Jews in 1492 and Moriscos (converted Muslims) in 1609 from the Iberian Peninsula, many went on to establish Sephardic communities in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. Although there is considerable academic literature and studies about Sephardic communities of the Ottoman…