UCLA Humanities

The Art of Duo: A Journey through Europe to the USA from 1700 to 1930
2025-05-03 14:00 - 15:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 2520 Cimarron Street, Los Angeles, CA, 90018, United States
Ambroise Aubrun, violin
Steven Vanhauwaert, piano
“ A Journey through Europe to the USA from 1700 to 1930” invites you to an exploration of the violin and piano duo’s rich history. Each piece performed will reflect the evolving styles and cultural influences that shaped the duo’s repertoire from the baroque era to the early 20th century. The performance is complemented by engaging presentations and discussions, offering a guide to a deeper understanding of this timeless repertoire.
Further details and the complete program are on the website.

California Medieval Seminar (Spring 2025)
2025-05-03 09:30 - 16:00 | Royce 306, 10745 Dickson Ct, Los Angeles CA, 90095, United States
Participation in the Seminar consists of group discussion of pre-circulated papers, typically drafts of articles, book chapters, or dissertation chapters (with complete apparatus). Two of the papers are ordinarily by emerging scholars (including PhD students) and the other two are by established scholars. We allocate one hour per paper and presenters should anticipate substantial, and substantive, feedback. Calls for presenters are circulated via e-mail from the Center approximately two months prior to each meeting and papers are accepted on a first-come basis.
More information can be found here.
Register to attend in Royce 306
Register to attend via Zoom

Symposium – (Mis)Using the Bible: White Evangelicalism & Christian Nationalism in America
2025-04-28 14:00 - 17:00 | Royce Hall 306/Zoom
White Evangelicalism and Christian Nationalism has occupied an increasingly prominent position since—and in many ways before—the first Trump administration. Events such as January 6 and the second Trump presidency have highlighted the entanglement of politics and religious belief that is central to Christian Nationalism. This symposium brings together several scholars to discuss various aspects of white Evangelicalism and Christian Nationalism, particularly as they connect to modern and contemporary American politics. The symposium serves as a forum for investigating topics such as tolerance and religious pluralism, the use of anti-abortion protests, and the intersection of race and Christian Nationalism. Further, the symposium opens a discussion on how Evangelicalism and Christian Nationalism use and misuse biblical and historical material to bolster their narratives.

Space is limited. RSVP here for the in-person event.
Register here for the Zoom link here.

Symposium Schedule:
2–2:10: Welcome – Carol Bakhos, Chair, Study of Religion
2:10-2:30: Introduction and Opening Remarks by Gina Konstantopoulos, Symposium Moderator – “Evangelizing Antiquity: The Museum of the Bible and the Appropriation of the Past”
2:30-3:00 Sophie Bjork-James – “To Be Pro-life in an Age of Extinction: Abortion, Christian Nationalism, and Ecological Denial”
3:00-3:20: Break
3:20-3:50: Brooklyn Walker – “Counterpoint in the Heavenly Choir: Christian Nationalism, Anti-Christian Nationalism, and the Multivocality of American Christianity”
3:50-4:20: Michael R. Fisher, Jr. – “Race, Politics, and Christian Nationalism in the Second Era of Trump”
4:20-5: Discussion and Q&A

Opening Remarks: “Evangelizing Antiquity: The Museum of the Bible and the Appropriation of the Past”
Founded in 2017 by David Green, the Museum of the Bible stands as an impressive institution: it boasts seven floors and 430,000 square feet of exhibition space, all located two blocks from the National Mall in Washington DC. The museum presents a narrative wherein historical and religious evidence and artefacts are utilized to bolster an evangelical perspective. This talk discusses how the Museum of the Bible, as well as other evangelical institutions, utilize the past in particular in their attempt to craft—and moreover legitimize—their own, often very specific, narrative.
Gina Konstantopoulos is an associate professor in Assyriology and Cuneiform studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research centers on religion, magic, and literature in Mesopotamia, with a focus on the role of demons and monsters. She is the author of The Divine/Demonic Seven and the Place of Demons in Mesopotamia (Brill, 2023). She has authored articles on demons and monsters in Mesopotamia, translations of Sumerian and Akkadian texts, and the reception of Mesopotamia in later pre-modern and modern contexts.

“To Be Pro-life in an Age of Extinction: Abortion, Christian Nationalism, and Ecological Denial”
Within Christian Nationalism, anti-abortion and anti-environmental politics are united. Since white evangelicals adopted an anti-abortion stance between the late 1970s and early 1980s, they have sought to make it the most significant moral issue of our time. Abortion can then act as a moral pivot, re-directing concern away from other problems, especially environmental ones. Drawing on long-term research on white evangelical politics in Colorado, this talk shows how within Christian Nationalism concern about abortion often serves to occlude care about the environment and the climate crisis. The significance of this is hard to overstate in our current era of climate crisis and species collapse.
Sophie Bjork-James is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University. She has over ten years of experience researching both the US based Religious Right and the white nationalist movements. She is the author of The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism’s Politics of the Family (Rutgers 2021, winner of the Anne Bolin & Gil Herdt Book Prize) and the co-editor of Beyond Populism: Angry Politics and the Twilight of Neoliberalism (2020). She has been interviewed on the NBC Nightly News, NPR’s All Things Considered, BBC Radio 4’s Today, and in the New York Times. Her work has received support the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, the American Academy of Religion, the National Science Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. She is currently working on a new book exploring how young people understand abortion in a state that has implemented a total abortion ban.

“Counterpoint in the Heavenly Choir: Christian Nationalism, Anti-Christian Nationalism, and the Multivocality of American Christianity”
The Bible has been used to give voice to the concepts of rule by religious precept and ethnocentrism central to Christian nationalism. But, in opposition to religious nationalism, the Bible has also been used to proclaim themes of pluralism, equality, and liberty. Using data drawn from a survey of American Christians, I explore the extent to which both Christian nationalist and anti-Christian nationalist ideas derived from the Bible have taken hold in the public. Among American Christians, support for Christian nationalism and anti-Christian nationalism are positively linked. While anti-Christian nationalist ideas have the potential to improve tolerance, feelings of threat can silence these messages supportive of religious pluralism.
Brooklyn Walker is an Instructor of Political Science at Hutchinson Community College and will be joining the University of Tennessee-Knoxville as Assistant Professor in the fall of 2025. Brooklyn is interested in how people come to think of themselves as members of politicized groups and in the effects of politicized identities on intergroup relations and public opinion. Her projects have explored the intersections of Christian nationalism and religious and racial group identities. She also researches in the areas of political psychology, racial and ethnic politics, and gender and politics.

“Race, Politics, and Christian Nationalism in the Second Era of Trump”
Although Christian nationalism ideology resonates across the United States, it’s important to recognize that, like many demographic groups, supporters of Christian nationalism don’t universally subscribe to the same ideas. Existing research focuses almost exclusively on White Americans who qualify as Christian nationalism adherents and sympathizers (hereafter Christian nationalists) and does so through observational analysis with few exceptions. This presentation leverages observational analysis and causal inference to examine the ideological and political differences between Black, White, and Latine Americans who qualify as Christian nationalists.
Michael R. Fisher Jr., Ph.D. is Assistant Professor in the political economy of race/racism in the Department of African American and African Studies and is a Faculty Affiliate at the Center for the Study of Religion at The Ohio State University. Trained as an interdisciplinary scholar, Dr. Fisher’s areas of specialization include race, policy, and socio-economic inequality and race and religion. He holds research appointments at the Metropolitan Policy Center at American University, the National Initiative of Mixed-Income Communities at Case Western Reserve University, and the Institute for Gender Studies at the University of South Africa. He is also a 2023–25 Public Fellow with the Public Religion Research Institute and is editor of Confronting Racism and White Supremacy in the US: Twenty-First-Century Theological Perspectives (Friendship Press, 2024).

Organized by Gina Konstantopoulos
Co-sponsored by the UCLA Department of History and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures.

Teaching for Thinking
2025-04-28 11:00 - 12:30 | Young Research Library, YRL 2"d Floor West Classroom 23167, Los Angeles, 90095, United States
Join us for the third and final session of our Critical Thinking Focused Teaching Workshop, hosted by the University of Queensland Critical Thinking Project (UQCTP) and sponsored by the UCLA Department of Philosophy and HumTech.
This session challenges the false dichotomy of teaching for thinking and teaching for content knowledge. We will show that developing deep and complex content knowledge demands attention to how students think, both as they are learning and in how they are using and creating new knowledge. The extent to which we value explicit teaching must carry into the explicit teaching of thinking, and the language and concepts of how this is best done are critical for effective pedagogical discussions.  A range of concepts and tools will be discussed that demonstrate practical guides to putting key principles of teaching for thinking into action.
Lunch will be provided to allow for informal conversation, networking, and deeper reflection on these practices.
Space is limited. Please RSVP.

Chamber Music at the Clark 30th Anniversary presents Borromeo String Quartet
2025-04-27 14:00 - 16:00 | William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 2520 Cimarron Street, Los Angeles, CA, 90018, United States
Concert presented in honor of Bruce Whiteman
Each visionary performance of the award-winning Borromeo String Quartet strengthens and deepens its reputation as one of the most important ensembles of our time. Admired and sought after for both its fresh interpretations of the classical music canon and its championing of works by twentieth- and twenty-first-century composers, the ensemble has been hailed for its “edge-of-the-seat performances” by the Boston Globe, which called it “simply the best.”
The group recently premiered new works written for it by Sebastian Currier and Aaron Jay Kernis at recitals at Carnegie Hall, Shriver Concerts, and the Tippet Rise Art Center. The ensemble continues to perform violinist Nicholas Kitchen’s transcriptions of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and the Well-Tempered Clavier Bk. I, the latter of which the BSQ recently released as an acclaimed premiere recording which hit the billboard charts.
Further details and the complete program are on the website.

“Hybridity”: In-Between People, Texts & Objects Across the Early Global World – MEMSA Graduate Student Conference
2025-04-26 09:00 - 17:30 | Royce 306, 10745 Dickson Ct, Los Angeles CA, 90095, United States
The 5th Annual Conference of the UCLA Medieval and Early Modern Student Association seeks to highlight the innovative work of graduate students on the manifold ways people, texts, and objects “in-between” shaped the early global world, from the early medieval to the late early modern periods. Presentations will engage with the concept of the so-called “hybrid,” asking: what does it mean to label something as in-between, mixed, syncretic, blended, amalgamated, or composite? To what end might something be constituted as “hybrid”? Does “hybridity” as a term still carry meaning when encompassing so much? Does the contact and exchange of people, things, and ideas inevitably result in “hybridity”? The event seeks to problematize the term and its synonyms, thinking about “hybridity” as a threshold of negotiation, contestation, in(ter)vention, interpretation, translation, and debate.
Register to attend in Royce 306
Organized by the Officers of MEMSA: Chase Caldwell Smith, Sofía Yazpik, Miranda Heaner, and Stanley Wu
Sponsored by the UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies

Naoíse Mac Sweeney | “The Birth of the Ancient Greek World: Migration, Urbanisation, and the Emergence of Greekness?”
2025-04-24 17:00 - 19:00 | Fowler Museum
Annual UCLA Joan Palevsky Lecture Professor
Naoíse Mac Sweeney, University of Vienna
“The Birth of the Ancient Greek World: Migration, Urbanisation, and the Emergence of Greekness?”
Lecture summary: By the start of the classical period, the Greek world stretched from Spain to Cyprus, and from Libya to the Crimea, and was comprised of over 1,000 autonomous polities. In this lecture, I will consider how this geographically dispersed and politically fragmented Greek world came into being over the course of the 11th to sixth centuries BCE, focusing in particular on new data from archaeological surveys designed to uncover processes of urbanisation and migration at varying scales. This new data suggests divergent pathways to Greekness in different parts of the Greek world, with the adoption of Greek lifestyles and cultural traits happening at radically different times and in response to different local contexts. If, as this evidence suggests, the Greek world was forged in a more piecemeal and uneven manner than previously thought, does this have implications for what we assume the Greek world fundamentally was?
About the speaker: Naoíse Mac Sweeney, professor of Greek archaeology at the University of Vienna, is the author of books including “Community Identity and Archaeology” (2011), “Foundation Myths and Politics in Ancient Ionia” (2013), “Troy: Myth, City, Icon” (2018) and, most recently, “The West: A New History of an Old Idea” (2023).
Kindly RSVP at collegeevents@support.ucla.edu.

Thinking, Talking and Writing
2025-04-23 11:00 - 12:30 | Young Research Library Presentation Room, YRL 1st. Floor Presentation Presentation Room 11348, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
Join us for the second session of our Critical Thinking Focused Teaching Workshop, hosted by the University of Queensland Critical Thinking Project (UQCTP) and sponsored by the UCLA Department of Philosophy and HumTech.
In this session, we will explore a thinking and talk-based writing pedagogy that is transferable to any discipline and year level. Based on a schematic understanding of Accountable Talk (Michaels et al. 2015), argument structure, and the values of inquiry (Ellerton, 2015), we will unpack the significance and utility of these tools, both as stand-alone elements and as integrated components of a comprehensive writing pedagogy.
Participants will have the opportunity to think through and share how they might integrate more critical and collaborative thinking into writing experiences.
As with our first session, lunch will be provided to allow for informal conversation, networking, and deeper reflection on these practices.
Space is limited. Please RSVP.

Careers In the FBI
2025-04-22 16:00 - 18:00 | 314 Royce Hall, 10745 Dickson Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
Join us in person to meet a variety of professionals who work for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and learn about different career paths and opportunities. Speakers will talk about their experiences in their job roles and provide tips on applying for current open positions and opportunities.
To register, go to: Careers Inside the FBI
Speakers will include:
Assistant Director in Charge of the Los Angeles Field Office, Akil Davis
Special Agent
Supervisory Intelligence Analyst
Language Analyst

Assessing for thinking in an age of AI – the Cognitive Audit
2025-04-22 11:00 - 12:30 | Young Research Library, YRL 2"d Floor West Classroom 23167, Los Angeles, 90095, United States
Join us for the inaugural session of our Critical Thinking Focused Teaching Workshop, hosted by the University of Queensland Critical Thinking Project (UQCTP) and sponsored by the UCLA Department of Philosophy and HumTech.
A key challenge for teachers is planning and assessing student thinking with the same precision and intentionality applied to content knowledge. This issue becomes particularly significant when addressing student engagement with AI. In this session, we will explore how to make the cognitive content of tasks and assessments, especially in argumentative contexts, explicit and targeted during both planning and evaluation stages.
Participants will receive a variety of resources designed to make the processes of planning and assessing thinking transparent, actionable, and easily shareable across all subject areas. Additionally, lunch will be provided to all attendees, allowing you to network and discuss insights with fellow educators over a meal.
Space is limited, please RSVP

New Book Salon Book Talk by Roberta Morosini
2025-04-14 | Royce 306, 10745 Dickson Ct, Los Angeles CA, 90095, United States
What does a flying bull with a half moon on its belly in Filippino Lippi’s 1502 painting, the Adoration of the Golden Calf, have in common with Muhammad, as a character of Dante’s Comedy? This is the question that Roberta Morosini tries to answer by following the journey of a legend traveling in the Oriental Mediterranean. She argues that what Lippis’s painting and Dante’s Muhammad have in common is a legend of a celestial delivery of the “bull law,” the Qur’an and Moses’s Tablets of the Law. Just as Moses received the Tablets of the Law from God on Mount Sinai, the Qur’an, written according to Thomas Aquinas by mixing fables and a rippled Bible, is carried by the bull on its horns. Taking us from Medieval Christian Byzantium to the depictions of Muhammad and Averroës in the iconographic tradition, to the Rome of Oliviero Carafa in the events following the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 through Dante’s Comedy, the real protagonists of Dante, Moses and the Book of Islam, a story narrated through texts and images, are the Book and the Mediterranean as spaces of transmission of knowledge. Morosini provides a ground breaking reading of Filippino’s Adoration of the Golden Calf as an ancient scene of anti-Islam propaganda, while shedding new light on Dante’s construction of the cultural other, on his spaces of otherness, and on the importance the poet gives to books that bring unity and give form to what lacks it, like his book, the Comedy.

Early Global Caribbean: Conference 3: Materialities
2025-04-11 10:00 - 2025-04-12 13:30 | William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 2520 Cimarron Street, Los Angeles, CA, 90018, United States
Conference organized by Carla Gardina Pestana (University of California, Los Angeles) and Gabriel de Avilez Rocha (Brown University)
Co-sponsored by the Joyce Appleby Endowed Chair of America in the World
The tangible realities of daily life and the patterns of exchange in the Caribbean and the other Atlantic regions integrated into the Caribbean’s orbit enhance our understanding of the local dimensions of global processes that have long shaped the Caribbean Basin. This final conference will consider how the region’s early global histories may be tracked through their material manifestations in constructed and natural environments from a variety of different disciplinary perspectives. Focusing on the materials embedded and moving through Caribbean land- and waterscapes prompts lines of investigation about how historical interactions and social constructions of meaning were mediated across different historical moments. These interactions and constructions can be explored through physical artifacts, objects, and living organisms. We will deliberate on how both the environment itself and the material cultural productions of the people living in the Basin were profoundly and continuously influenced by the advent of different groups, the imposition of new agricultural regimes, and a host of other aspects of quotidian life that persisted, gained new forms, or disappeared. To what extent might the historical study of transformations in the circumstances of life in the Caribbean benefit from considering distributed agencies of different human and non-human actors across time? What do considerations of materiality in or beyond traditional archives contribute to a global understanding of Caribbean history?
Please visit the website for a complete list of speakers and the program schedule.

Seeking Liberation: Contemporary Female Ascetic Orders Among the Jains
2025-04-09 14:00 - 15:00 | Online on Zoom
Present day records show an overwhelming numerical preponderance of nuns in Jain mendicant orders. Their striking presence demands that we question the androcentric models of renunciation in South Asia, as well as interrogate the commonsensical assumptions about the attraction that a lifetime of mendicancy may hold for women. By privileging the voice of the nuns, themselves, this presentation looks at how the Indic concept of liberation as spiritual deliverance (moksa) may sometimes overlap, or approximate the more this-worldly idea of women’s liberation.
Register here for Zoom link.
Manisha Sethi, Associate Professor, Centre for Jawaharlal Nehru Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.

Hammer Art History Lecture by Shawon Kinew, “St. Paul Among the Snakes: A Maltese Artist Goes Home, c. 1660”
2025-04-07 17:00 - 18:00 | Royce 314, 10745 Dickson Ct, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
Abstract: At the end of the 1650s, Melchiorre Cafà, a Maltese sculptor, was newly established in Rome. Rome was the most significant site for sculptural production in Europe at that time. It was also a Golden Age of sculpture as artists vied for papal commissions and pushed the limits of their medium. They transformed hard stone into weightless apparitions. But, in his early days in the Caput Mundi, Cafà returned home conceptually. He carved in the humble material of wood the patron saint of his island, St. Paul, to be sent back to Malta. Today the sculpture is at the center of local devotional practices, still carried in processions celebrating the Apostle’s shipwreck in Malta. Our time is connected to Paul’s and to Cafà’s in this living tradition. A study of Cafà’s St. Paul is one of Mediterranean cultural continuities, and a meditation on the ethnographic gaze of the art historian.
Shawon Kinew is an art historian of early modern Southern Europe at Harvard University and specializes in seventeenth-century Rome’s art and theory. Her research on Roman Baroque sculpture focuses on the Maltese artist Melchiorre Cafà, who is the subject of a book manuscript in preparation, Baroque Softness: Melchiorre Cafà and the Sculpture of Mysticism.
Register to attend in Royce 314
More information about past Hammer Art History Lectures can be found here.

Bilingual Lecture Series: Calendar and Identity: Why did the Persian solar calendar survive for 1400 years and become an important feature of Iranian identity?
2025-04-07 15:00 - 17:00 | 10383 Bunche Hall, 11282 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
Calendar and Identity:
Why did the Persian solar calendar survive for 1400 years and become an important feature of Iranian identity?
Monday, April 7, 2025 at 3:00pm, Bunche Hall 10383
Alternate live stream on Zoom:
https://ucla.zoom.us/j/95885037418
(No need to register in advance, just click the link at 3:00pm on April 7 to join.)

Since the end of the Sasanian era, the Persian solar calendar—and the associated rite of Norouz—has endured and grown to become a significant feature of Iranian, and to some extent the Persianate, cultural identity. With Hijra as its starting point but based on vernal equinox, it is a unique solar time reckoning throughout the Muslim world and beyond. This talk explores the circumstances that allowed its survival and adoption as a national calendar of Iran at the turn of the 20th century.
About the Speaker

Abbas Amanat is William Graham Sumner Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University. Since 1983, he has taught history of early modern and modern Iran, Shi’ism, modern Middle East, and the Persianate world at Yale. He has authored eight books, most recently Iran: A Mod-ern History (Yale University Press, 2017) and Ahd-e Qajar va Sowda-ye Farang in Persian (London, 2021). He has edited and coedited thirteen volumes and published numerous articles, encyclopedia entries, and op eds. His forthcoming books include A Study of the Solar Calendar and Iranian Identity (2024 in Persian); A Study of Historiography and Reconstruction of National Identity in Iran (2024 in Persian and 2025 in English); A New Biography of Fatemah Zarin-Taj Baraghani Qorrat al-Ayn Tahereh (OneWorld, 2025 in English); Companion of Qajar Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2025); and Circle of Justice: Persian Art of Governance (Yale University Press, 2026). Amanat served as the Chair of the Yale Council on Middle East Studies and as the Director of the Yale Program in Iranian Studies. He was the editor-in-chief of the journal of Iranian Studies and he is the editor-in-chief of the forthcoming series Sources for the Study of the Persianate World.

Bilingual Lecture Series: Calendar and Identity: Why did the Persian solar calendar survive for 1400 years and become an important feature of Iranian identity?
2025-04-06 16:00 - 18:00 | 314 Royce Hall
:گاهشماری و هویت
چگونه تقویم خورشیدی ایران ۱۴۰۰ سال پایدار ماند و نماد بارزی از هویت ملی شد؟

Calendar and Identity:
Why did the Persian solar calendar survive for 1400 years and become an important feature of Iranian identity?
Sunday, April 6, 2025 at 4:00pm, Royce Hall 314
Alternate live stream on Zoom:
https://ucla.zoom.us/j/97895439218
(No need to register in advance, just click the link at 4:00pm on April 6 to join)

Since the end of the Sasanian era the Persian solar calendar, and the associated rite of Nowruz, endured as became a significant features of Iranian, and to some extent the Persianate, cultural identity. With Hijra as its starting point but based on vernal equinox, it is a unique solar time reckoning throughout the Muslim world and beyond. This talk explores the circumstances that allowed the survival and its adoption as a national calendar of Iran at the turn of the 20th century. A book of the same title is in the press.

About the Speaker

Abbas Amanat is William Graham Sumner Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University. Since 1983, he has taught history of early modern and modern Iran, Shi’ism, modern Middle East, and the Persianate world at Yale. He has authored eight books, most recently Iran: A Mod-ern History (Yale University Press, 2017) and Ahd-e Qajar va Sowda-ye Farang in Persian (London, 2021). He has edited and coedited thirteen volumes and published numerous articles, encyclopedia entries, and op eds. His forthcoming books include A Study of the Solar Calendar and Iranian Identity (2024 in Persian); A Study of Historiography and Reconstruction of National Identity in Iran (2024 in Persian and 2025 in English); A New Biography of Fatemah Zarin-Taj Baraghani Qorrat al-Ayn Tahereh (OneWorld, 2025 in English); Companion of Qajar Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2025); and Circle of Justice: Persian Art of Governance (Yale University Press, 2026). Amanat served as the Chair of the Yale Council on Middle East Studies and as the Director of the Yale Program in Iranian Studies. He was the editor-in-chief of the journal of Iranian Studies and he is the editor-in-chief of the forthcoming series Sources for the Study of the Persianate World.

USC-UCLA Graduate Conference in Philosophy
2025-04-05 | USC
April 5, 2025
USC

Join us for the 2025 USC-UCLA Graduate Student Conference in Philosophy happening on April 5, 2025 at USC!

The USC-UCLA Graduate Student Conference began in 2006. Each year, the graduate students of the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles solicit high-quality papers in all areas of philosophy from graduate students studying at other departments to be presented at the annual conference. For more information, please visit the Conference Home Page.

Conference program coming soon.

For any questions, please contact the conference organizers at <uscucla.conference@gmail.com>

Pourdavoud Lecture Series: Yuhan Vevaina
2025-04-02 16:00 - 18:00 | 306 Royce Hall, 10745 Dickson Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
Zoroastrian Hermeneutics in Late Antiquity
The Sūdgar Nask of Dēnkard Book 9 is a commentary on the ‘Old Avesta’ of the 2nd millennium BCE produced in Pahlavi (Zoroastrian Middle Persian) in the Sasanian (224–651 CE) and early Islamic centuries. This commentary is a value-laden, ideologically motivated discourse that displays a rich panoply of tradition-constituted forms of allegoresis. It mobilizes complex forms of citation, allusion, and intertextuality from the inherited Avestan world of myth and ritual in order to engage with and react to the profound changes occurring in Iranian society. Despite its value and importance for developing our nascent understanding of Zoroastrian hermeneutics and the self-conception of the Zoroastrian priesthood in Late Antiquity, this primary source has attracted scant scholarly attention due to the extreme difficulty of its subject matter and the lack of a reliable translation. This 2-volume work represents the first critical edition, translation, and commentary of this formidable text which will contribute to the philological, theological, and historiographical study of Zoroastrianism in a pivotal moment in its rich and illustrious history. Reading the Sūdgar Nask is a hermeneutic process of traversing texts, genres, and rituals in both the Avestan and Pahlavi corpora, thus activating nodes in a web or network of textual and meta-textual relations that establish new forms of allegoreses or meaning making. It is argued that this entire hermeneutical complex of weaving a ‘new’ text composed of implicit proof text and explicit commentary renews, extends, and, ultimately, makes tradition.
About the Speaker
Yuhan Sohrab-Dinshaw Vevaina is the Bahari Associate Professor of Sasanian Studies and a Fellow of Wolfson College at the University of Oxford. He received his Ph.D. in Iranian and Persian Studies from Harvard University in 2007. Since then he has taught at Harvard University, Stanford University, and the University of Toronto prior to coming to Oxford in 2017. He is the co-editor with Michael Stausberg of The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Zoroastrianism. He is particularly interested in the interplay between apologetics, polemics, and historicising interpretations of the ancient Avestan scriptures by the Zoroastrian priesthood in the Sasanian and early Islamic periods. In 2023 and 2024 he published a two-volume book project of a critical edition and commentary on the ninth book of the Dēnkard with Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden. It was awarded the Association for Iranian Studies Book Prize for Best Book in Ancient Iranian Studies in 2024. He is currently preparing a manuscript entitled: Topographies of Rhetoric and Moral Reasoning in Sasanian and Post-Sasanian Zoroastrianism based on his four lectures at L’École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris in Spring 2024, and he is also working on a co-authored critical edition of the Epistles of Manuščihr with Arash Zeini to be published by Edinburgh University Press.

Pourdavoud Lecture Series – Yuhan Vevaina

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William and Lois Matthews Samuel Pepys Lecture by Carla Pestana
2025-04-01 18:00 - 19:00 | Luskin Conference Center, 425 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles, 90095, United States
Striving for Expertise
Guest Speaker: Carla Pestana (UCLA)
Scholars often refer to Samuel Pepys as an early example of a state bureaucrat, his career as a civil servant in the burgeoning Restoration bureaucracy offering documentation of an important shift in governance. Of equal note—and perhaps greater interest—is the way Pepys himself aimed for expertise. Not content to serve as a cog in a larger bureaucratic machine, Pepys sought to educate himself about the workings of the navy and of sailing ships, going beyond the demands of his own office to achieve a deeper understanding. In doing so, he once again revealed his insecurities, while he also indulged in personal rivalries and resisted the limitations placed on him in his role as a civil servant.
Carla Gardina Pestana is Distinguished Professor of History and Joyce Appleby Endowed Chair of America in the World. Her research focuses on 17th and 18th century Atlantic worlds, especially the English Atlantic, the Caribbean, and U.S. religious history. Professor Pestana has published books on religion and empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most notably Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World (2009).
Professor William Matthews, a member of UCLA’s English Department faculty and the Center’s second Director (1970-1972), was an authority on the life and writings of the seventeenth-century British wit and diarist Samuel Pepys. With the assistance of his wife Lois, Matthews and his co-editor Robert Latham produced the definitive edition (eleven volumes) of Pepys’s works, which was published incrementally between 1971 and 1983. The Matthewses’ will, which endows the Center’s annual lecture and also a festive dinner, specifies that the event should be scheduled to coincide with Pepys’s own annual celebration commemorating the surgery he endured on March 26, 1658.
Register to attend in Luskin Conference Center, Laureate Classroom
More information about past William and Lois Matthews Samuel Pepys lectures can be found here.

ELTS Job Fair
2025-03-31 09:30 - 16:00 | Royce Hall 306 and 314, 10745 Dickson Court, Los Angeles, CA, 90095
The UCLA Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies will host its 2025 job fair on March 31 from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. in Royce Hall, rooms 306 and 314. This transcultural event builds on the success of the 2024 French Job Fair and offers a broad range of global and interdisciplinary career opportunities.
Students will have the chance to connect with professionals, explore career paths, and discover how language and cultural studies can open doors across various industries.
Learn more about the ELTS Job Fair here.
We look forward to seeing you there!

Cases and Scale in Historiography
2025-03-14 10:00 - 17:00 | William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 2520 Cimarron Street, Los Angeles, CA, 90018, United States
Conference organized by Michael Osman and Cristóbal Amunátegui (University of California, Los Angeles)
In the last few decades, debates stemming from the science and history “wars” have called attention to the ways in which cases are constructed and proven across disciplines. “Cases and Scale in Historiography” will explore the relationship between the case and one of its constitutive elements: scale. Among many other things, cases are a way of managing distance: between the past and the present, the far away and the near, norms and exceptions, ideation and reality. Thus defined, cases are inevitably bound to the shifting measures and temporalities of scale, something which may seem at odds with today’s dominant culture of scholarly specialization. Like magnets, cases have the potential of centripetally attracting different knowledge, sites, and periods in order to solve the problems they pose. To deal with the spatiotemporal vagaries of scale, however, entails facing a wide-ranging set of historiographical and epistemological difficulties: the scalar analysis imposed by cases seems to pit historiographical specificity against both blind specialization and Diogenean erudition. By pointing to the links between scale and the case, then, our invitation is to explore the limits and possibilities of the historian as both expert and generalist.
Please visit the website for the list of speakers and program schedule and register for this event.

The Bible in Its Ancient Iranian Context
2025-03-13 - 2025-03-14 | 306 Royce Hall, 10745 Dickson Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
March 13-14, 2025 | 306 & 314 Royce Hall
UCLA
An International Conference Convened by:
M. Rahim Shayegan, UCLA
William Schniedewind, UCLA
Catherine Bonesho, UCLA
Co-sponsored by:
The Pourdavoud Institute for the Study of the Iranian World
The Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies
Zoom Webinar Link
Download the Conference Program
Although there has been renewed interest in the Persian period in biblical scholarship, the profound impact of the ancient Iranian world on the biblical books of Esther and Daniel has often been taken for granted. From their dynamic portraits of foreign kings and Jewish communities in the imperial court to their use of Iranian institutions and literary traditions, it is impossible to disentangle the books of Esther and Daniel from their ancient Iranian contexts. This conference foregrounds the influence of the ancient Iranian world on Esther and Daniel and its lasting impact on ancient Jewish communities.
In organizing this conference, we hope to offer a truly interdisciplinary analysis of Esther, Daniel and ancient Iranian Studies by inviting speakers specializing in subjects related to Second Temple Judaism, Hebrew Bible, and the Achaemenid Empire. Topics explored at the conference include Jewish constructions of the diaspora and Persian court, Achaemenid religions, Aramaic scribalism, and imperial ideology and hybridity.
Register
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This RSVP form is for both conference days. Please select the day(s) you are able to attend in person. The Zoom webinar link to attend the event online is: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/91611647646

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Thursday, March 13

Friday, March 14

Please select all dates you plan to attend the lectures in-person.

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Thursday, March 13

Friday, March 14

Please select all dates you plan to attend the lectures online.
Use this Zoom webinar link for all days.
https://ucla.zoom.us/j/91611647646

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Katherine Philips, Meta-Metaphysical Poet
2025-03-10 12:00 - 13:00 | ZOOM Lecture
Kenneth Karmiole Endowed Graduate Research Fellowship
Lecture by Arya Sureshbabu, Ph.D. Candidate in English, University of California, Berkeley. Recipient of the 2024–25 Kenneth Karmiole Endowed Graduate Research Fellowship
Katherine Philips (1632–64) occupies an unusual place in the canon of seventeenth-century poetry. Now alternatively billed as an apostle of female friendship or a proto-sapphic icon, she was also known in her own time as an exemplary practitioner of intimacy. But a less adulatory strain of reception history reads her verse as overstuffed with hyperbolic praise and extended conceits that fail to sustain readerly interest. This talk suggests that these seemingly contradictory assessments of Philips are in fact connected: her poems and letters express closeness through a disproportionate outpouring of attention to minor details, petty situations, and all-too-earthly individuals. Philips’s preoccupation with the interplay between excess and diminution is as stylistic as it is thematic; her copious adaptations of her poetic predecessors index a process of intimate reading in addition to describing intimate relationships among members of her literary coterie. Her self-conscious reflections on the twinned practices of reading and writing are especially evident in her embellishments of John Donne’s poems, where she iteratively revises his images with an assiduousness that anticipates modern characterizations of the metaphysical conceit’s simultaneous fragility and force. Taking these resonances as a point of departure, this presentation explores how Philips’s poetics blur the lines between affection, interpretation, and creative endeavor—and how eighteenth-century readers’ fleeting encounters with her literary output remix and reactivate its intimate potentials.
Arya Sureshbabu is a PhD candidate in English with a Designated Emphasis in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is completing a dissertation on intimacy and textual minutiae in the poetry, drama, and correspondence of the English Renaissance. In addition to the Center & Clark, her work has been supported by the Beinecke Library, the Harry Ransom Center, the UC Humanities Research Institute, and the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender.
For additional details and to register for the Zoom lecture

Bilingual Lecture Series: Women’s Rights and the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran
2025-03-09 11:30 - 13:30
زن در قانون اساسی ایران
Women’s Rights and the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran
Sunday, March 9, 2025 | 11:30 am – 1:30 pm
Zoom Registration:
https://ucla.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_pM3LdrXXSriCfDMGfzVg8w

The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, ratified after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, stands as the country’s foundational legal framework, requiring all subsequent laws to align with its principles. The revolution itself was propelled by widespread calls for social and political reform, with significant factions advocating for democracy, human rights, and gender equality. Iranian women played a prominent role in this movement, underscoring the aspirations for a more inclusive and equitable society. While the constitution reflects these revolutionary demands by enumerating freedoms and rights modeled after Western constitutions, it also incorporates elements of Islamic jurisprudence. This duality emerged from the influence of conservative religious factions, who, after helping to overthrow the monarchy, swiftly consolidated power post-revolution. In this talk, I will examine the provisions within Iran’s constitution that pertain to women’s rights, focusing on how these provisions intersect with religious and secular legal systems. I will also explore the real-world impact on women’s personal and professional lives, highlighting the challenges of extreme gender-based oppression under the current system. Finally, I will discuss pathways for reform and envision how future constitutional efforts can avoid the missteps that have perpetuated inequality for over forty years.
About the Speaker

Pegah Banihashemi is currently a JSD candidate at the University of Chicago Law School, where she also completed an LL.M. in 2022. Pegah is currently working on the history of the formation of the Iranian Constitution both before and after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. In this project, she will explore the problems of implementing the constitution in Iran. Part of Pegah’s project is dedicated to the issue of comparing constitutions among different countries. Pegah began her undergraduate studies focusing on French literature in Iran where reading the works of French philosophers and thinkers piqued her interest in the field of law. She completed a second Bachelor’s of Law, after which, she earned a Master’s and LL.M. in International Commercial Law and Private Law at Shahid Beheshti University, achieving a first rank and defending her thesis in international arbitration. In Britain, she worked on human rights research, commentary, and advocacy, focusing on death sentences, immigration law, and women’s and children’s rights in Middle Eastern and Sharia Law. She has worked extensively in the analysis of international law and international human rights and is a regular expert legal analyst with many global media outlets and non-profits. She has also taught several legal courses on topics including women, economics, and the law, human rights advocacy, and students’ and teachers’ rights.

Preserving Your Family History
2025-03-08 10:00 - 12:30 | William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 2520 Cimarron Street, Los Angeles, CA, 90018, United States
Join us at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library to learn the basics of understanding and caring for your family heirlooms with the Clark’s librarians and conservators from the UCLA Library Preservation & Conservation Department.
Participants may bring up to five paper-based heirlooms (no larger than 18” x 24”) from their own collections. These items will become part of the instructional display, alongside examples from the Clark Library’s stacks. Using this group display, librarians and conservators will be able to discuss and show common issues – and provide guidance for next steps and other preservation resources.
For more information and to register for this workshop, please visit our website.
This workshop is limited to 30 participants and will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis.
Registration will close on Monday, February 17 at 5:00 p.m.

The Codex Osuna: A Landmark Nahua Lawsuit in Early Colonial Mexico City
2025-03-06 12:00 - 13:00 | Zoom
Early Modern Research Group Works-in-Progress Session
Presented by Sofia Yazpik, Ph.D. Student, University of California, Los Angeles
The Codex Osuna, or the Pintura del gobernador, alcaldes y regidores de México (Painting of the Municipal Governor, Judges, and Councilors of Mexico), is a pictorial and Nahuatl-language text produced by Nahuas for a legal dispute in Mexico City during the sixteenth century. It is a valuable resource for deepening our understanding of how the Spanish legal system functioned in New Spain and how Indigenous litigants strategically presented their cases to defend their rights and property within this colonial institution, particularly during the politically tumultuous period of the 1560s. By focusing on pictorial writing in particular, Yazpik’s research project seeks to demonstrate the Codex Osuna’s historical significance in the early colonial period by examining how Indigenous peoples utilized their own creative forms of expression within the Spanish legal system.
Sofía Yazpik is a third-year Ph.D. student in History at UCLA. Her research focuses on Mesoamerican codices, presently examining an early colonial legal pictorial and alphabetic-writing manuscript from central Mexico. She is interested in Indigenous productions of knowledge, the relationship between pictorial and alphabetic writing systems, and early modern collecting practices.
For additional details and to register for the Zoom lecture, visit the website.

Chamber Music at the Clark 30th Anniversary presents, Ariel Quartet
2025-03-02 14:00 - 16:00 | William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 2520 Cimarron Street, Los Angeles, CA, 90018, United States
Distinguished by its virtuosity, probing musical insight, and impassioned, fiery performances, the Ariel Quartet has garnered critical praise worldwide for more than twenty years. The Quartet serves as the Faculty Quartet-in-Residence at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music, where they direct the chamber music program and present a concert series in addition to maintaining a busy touring schedule in the United States and abroad.
Recent highlights include the Ariel Quartet’s Carnegie Hall debut, as well as the release of a Brahms and Bartók album for Avie Records. In 2020, the Ariel gave the U.S. premiere of the Quintet for Piano and Strings by Daniil Trifonov (with the composer as pianist). Ariel Quartet has won numerous international prizes, including the Cleveland Quartet Award: Grand Prize at the 2006 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition.
Further details and the full program are on our website. Competition
Photo: Ariel Quartet by Marco Borggreve

“The Same Frame of Mind, but a Different Villain”: Conspiracist Narratology and the Decolonization of Africa
2025-02-28 13:00 - 15:00 | Kaplan Hall 348, 415 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
A workshop with Christian David Alvarado

KAPLAN HALL ROOM #348
1:00-2:30pm Workshop
2:30-3:00pm Reception

This workshop is open to UCLA Comparative Literature graduate students, UCLA English graduate students, and UCLA African Studies Center students.

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UCLA Comparative Literature graduate studentUCLA English graduate studentUCLA African Studies Center studentUCLA facultyUCLA staff

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Related Document: Workshop Chapter
The chapter we will be discussing in this workshop examines a key episode in the history of global conspiracist thought: speculative accounts and narratives regarding the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya across mid-20th century Britain and its empire. In it, I argue that contemporary allegations about the uprising’s aim of “white genocide,” the Satanic rituals conducted by those who participated in it, and its role in global Communist plots should all be read as conspiracy theories which fundamentally shaped its history and attempts to suppress it. Reframing them as such allows us to see how speculative thinking about Mau Mau is part of a longer tradition of reading world events that continues to inform many of the most prominent iterations of conspiracism that shape Western politics and culture today. Developing this chapter also led to my second major research project, which aims to understand how the history of conspiracist literary production in European and African contexts shaped imperial governance and engagements with processes of decolonization on both of these continents.

About the Speaker
Christian Alvarado received his PhD in History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz and is President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the African American and African Studies Department at the University of California, Davis. His current book project situates the event most commonly known as the Mau Mau Uprising in late-colonial Kenya within the broader historical and narratological landscape of 20th century Africa. By tracing how understandings of this event circulated across transnational networks and cultural formations, his work aims to show how the frameworks to which Mau Mau is put illuminate novel insights into the global dimensions of knowledge production regarding African decolonization.

Global Antiquity Faculty Lunch Series- “Por Mares Nunca D’antes Navegados…”: Poetic Primacy in Arcadian Epic and Caminões’s The Lusiads with Adriana Vazquez
2025-02-28 12:00 - 13:30 | Royce Hall 306, 10745 Dickson Court, Los Angeles, California, 90095
Global Antiquity is pleased to invite you to the next in its 2024–2025 Faculty Lunch Series talks, featuring Professor Adriana Vazquez (Classics, UCLA). On Friday, February 28 from 12:00–1:30 pm in Royce 306, she will deliver a lecture titled “Por Mores Nunca D’antes Navegados…”: Poetic Primacy in Arcadian Epic and Caminões’s The Lusiads. Lunch and refreshments will be served at 12:00 pm followed immediately by the talk and discussion. All are welcome, and we hope to see you there!
Abstract: This presentation is an excerpt of a monograph on the poetry of the Brazilian colonial period and its reception of antiquity, titled “Arcadia Ultramarina: Studies in the Neoclassical Literature of Portuguese America.” The talk highlights statements of poetic primacy in two epics produced under the umbrella of 18th century Brazilian Arcadianism, each of which considers moments in the Portuguese settlement of Brazil. I argue that both epics conceive of poetic primacy as an adaptation of colonial concepts of ‘newness,’ reflecting the crisis in European thinking ignited by the apparent lacunae in ancient geographic knowledge concerning the so-called New World. I additionally consider the intermediary of Camões’ The Lusiads as instrumental to the formalization of a lexicon of poetic primacy in the Arcadian epics.
About the Speaker: Adriana Vazquez is an assistant professor of Classics at UCLA specializing in Latin literature of the Augustan period, with particular interest in its legacy in the Lusophone literature of the 17th- and 18th-centuries. She is currently working on a monograph on the legacy of Latin literature in the poetry of colonial Brazil, which analyzes the literary output of the poets of the Arcadia Ultramarina, a literary academy that placed itself in dialogue with the ancient poetic tradition. She is a cofounder and former steering committee member of Hesperides: Classics in the Luso-hispanic World, an interest group focusing on Ibero-global reception.

What is this thing called Mau Mau? The “Storm in Kenya” in Global Perspectives
2025-02-27 17:00 - 20:00 | Kaplan Hall 348, 415 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
A Talk by Christian David Alvarado

Kaplan Hall Room #348
5:00-8:00 PM

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In the opening pages of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s 1967 novel A Grain of Wheat, a European district officer asks a version of the question at the core of discourse about the anticolonial movement that gripped Kenya in the 1950s: “What is this thing called Mau Mau?” As an icon of violent resistance to colonial domination, one answer regarding the armed struggle that defined late-colonial Kenya has been to read it as an “unfinished revolution” whose decolonial aims remain unfulfilled (or, more precisely, betrayed). This talk attends to Mau Mau’s symbolic place in cultural politics in Kenya and beyond by exploring how narratives interpreting it as such have shaped transnational understandings of postcolonialism and decolonization. By tracing the rhetorical politics that cohere around it, I argue that we should consider the invocation of the idea of Mau Mau — whether it be central to a text or present as an offhand reference — as a catalyst through which broader claims are made. I link how African and diasporic writers have positioned Mau Mau as an episode in the greater “African Revolution” to the challenge it represents to existing racial and ethnic structures. Drawing from Kenyan, South African, and American sources, this talk explores how these dual interpretations have shaped Mau Mau’s prominent position in cultural production and the politics of dissent across the world.

About the Speaker
Christian Alvarado received his PhD in History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz and is President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the African American and African Studies Department at the University of California, Davis. His current book project situates the event most commonly known as the Mau Mau Uprising in late-colonial Kenya within the broader historical and narratological landscape of 20th century Africa. By tracing how understandings of this event circulated across transnational networks and cultural formations, his work aims to show how the frameworks to which Mau Mau is put illuminate novel insights into the global dimensions of knowledge production regarding African decolonization.
