In his first book, Cesar Favila book takes an imaginative approach to recounting the lives of nuns who sang devotional music in Catholic churches in 17th- and 18th-century Mexico and Latin America. Favila, an assistant professor of musicology at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, is a faculty affiliate of the CMRS Center for Early Global Studies, the Center…
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…
Four Humanities graduate students are among the 12 UCLA scholars overall who have received Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowships for 2023. UCLA received more Fulbright-Hays awards than any other university. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, the Fulbright-Hays program allows awardees to study aspects of a society or societies, including their culture, economy, history and international relations. The…
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…
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’…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
“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 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…
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…
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