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Zrinka Stahuljak and Shannon Speed receive Mellon grant

Zrinka Stahuljak, in red, and Shannon Speed, in blue, pose in separate shots bisected by a white line.

Zrinka Stahuljak (left) and Shannon Speed (right).

Jonathan Riggs | July 24, 2023

Professors Zrinka Stahuljak and Shannon Speed received a $1 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to support a project called Race in the Global Past through Native Lenses. Its goals include elevating Native American, Pacific Islander and other Indigenous scholarship on historical articulations of “race” and “Indigeneity” across the globe, and supporting efforts to recruit and retain Indigenous faculty at UCLA.

In addition to creating a pipeline to study history more inclusively through these and other perspectives, the project will bring together community scholars-in-residence and deliver programming and outreach efforts led by Stahuljak, Speed and the respective interdisciplinary research centers they direct: the UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies and the UCLA American Indian Studies Center.

The project will also include partnerships with UCLA’s Center for Community Engagement and Center for Community College Partnerships, as well as with the UCLA Fowler Museum and its tribal members who are currently managing the implementation of the California Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

“I am very grateful to the Mellon Foundation,” said Stahuljak, professor of comparative literature, European languages and transcultural studies, and co-director of the UCLA Program in Experimental Critical Theory. “This grant will advance the work of alternative futures through the reinterrogation of the past, which is the core mission of the CMRS Center for Early Global Studies and central to our public commitment to global and planetary equity.”

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