He was “universally regarded as one of the kindest, warmest and most thoughtful people in the history of the English department,” said department chair Saree Makdisi.
His colleague Seiji Lippit remembered Loukota for his “pioneering work, drawing connections … that had not been seen before.”
A leading authority on American realism and naturalism, he wrote at least 10 books, including two that are recognized as among the most important works on those topics.
David Kunzle, a UCLA professor emeritus who was widely recognized as one of the founders of contemporary comics scholarship, died Jan. 1 at the age of 87. The cause was amyloidosis. Kunzle’s scholarship was unusually wide-ranging, but perhaps his signature work was the multivolume “The History of the Comic Strip,” which first appeared in 1973 as “The Early Comic Strip,” published by the University of California Press. A second volume, focusing on the 19th century, was published in 1990. He was celebrated in particular for his study of 1800s European cartoonists, according to an obituary published by the Comics Journal….
Political science chair Davide Panagia said she would be remembered for “her brilliance [and] her encyclopedic knowledge of the history of political thought.”