Teaching

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…

New course helps students make educated decisions when entering workforce after graduation

Humanities students often face structural gaps when it comes to preparing for careers after graduation. A new class, Careers in Humanities (COMPLIT 191P/ENG M191P) aims to change that, offering students career advice; opportunities to build their personal portfolio, CV or resume; and help with general interviewing skills. It is a collaborative effort between the Department of Comparative Literature and the UCLA Career Center, with Professor David MacFadyen teaching the course and Senior Director of Alumni Career Engagement Gloria Ko arranging alumni speakers to bolster students’ understanding of the concepts and career pathways taught. “I just felt that there was a…

Professor Charlene Villaseñor Black: Art as a means of getting outside ourselves

During a trip to Mexico when she was 15, Charlene Villaseñor Black wandered into the Church of Santa Prisca y San Sebastián in Taxco. “I was dazzled by the 18th-century interior, with Baroque paintings and gold retablos [devotional works] perfectly preserved,” says the Arizona native, now a professor of art history and Chicana/o and Central American studies at UCLA. At that moment, Villaseñor Black, who is Mexican American, knew she wanted to become an art historian. Today, she specializes in the art of the early modern Iberian world as well as in contemporary Latino art. Recently, she has focused on…