How a Channel Islands excursion brought environmental humanities vividly to life
Doctoral fellow Anatoli Ulyanov reflects on lessons learned during an excursion led by Professor Vetri Nathan.
Teaching
A community-engaged English composition course is building more confident writers
Students spend 20 hours at local nonprofits; their observations turn into papers for the class
Comparative lit class will be first in Humanities to use UCLA-developed AI system
Professor Zrinka Stahuljak said the technology will have immediate tangible benefits for her, teaching assistants and students.
For these first-year students, writings from the past shed light on issues around today’s AI revolution
A cluster course seminar led by doctoral candidate Jason Araújo provoked discussions on the nature of rapidly changing technology.
Four hands, two hearts, one mission
About 10 years ago, Mariam Janvelyan couldn’t get into UCLA’s already full American Sign Language course, despite a plea to Benjamin Lewis. Luckily, she made it into the class a year later.
In a world shaped by data, what happens to social justice?
A UCLA cluster course draws from the humanities and social sciences to encourage students to examine the impact of statistics and AI in a world that is increasingly being defined by datasets.
New creative writing minor is open to all UCLA undergraduates
A newly established minor will expand the opportunity for UCLA students to receive official credit for their creative writing pursuits. In replacing UCLA’s concentration in creative writing — which had been accessible only to English majors — the new creative writing minor will be open to all undergraduates, making it one of only a few UCLA minors in a creative practice. The minor also is more expansive in subject matter than the concentration was. While the minor requires students to complete two workshops in a core genre —fiction or poetry — students in the minor can pursue such diverse practices…
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…
Can AI and creativity coexist?
One of the Writers Guild of America’s demands in its current strike is for studios to regulate the use of artificial intelligence for creating, writing and rewriting TV and movie scripts and other material. That might have sounded like a far-fetched concern just a few years ago. But with increasingly sophisticated, easily accessed AI tools already making inroads in other creative fields — literary magazines and fine arts competitions have lately had to contend with a glut of AI-generated submissions — there is a very real concern that expensive, time-intensive human creative labor could soon be outsourced to machines. Higher…
English department celebrates launch of Digital Media Lab
The UCLA Department of English will celebrate the launch of its new Digital Media Lab on Friday, May 6 at noon at its location in Kaplan Hall 211. The Digital Media Lab is the result of an initiative by a group of English faculty members whose students were increasingly interested in using multimedia resources in their scholarly work, according to department chair Ursula Heise, the Marcia H. Howard Professor of Literary Studies and director of UCLA’s Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies. “[The lab] is not only about the creation of digital works, or research on digital works,” Heise said. “We’re…