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Gefyra documents weaving traditions in Geraki, Laconia

From June 24 to July 14, 2023, graduate students from UCLA, Simon Fraser University, and the University of British Columbia explored the artistry of weaving in Geraki, a Lakonian village where generations of women have preserved and passed down their craft. This comprehensive project, which forms part of Gefyra, a partnership between the SNF Hellenic Centers at UCLA and SFU, was generously funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. The project was held in collaboration with the Cultural Society of Geraki and was further supported by the Municipality of Evrotas. The Ephorate of Antiquities of Laconia and The Geraki Project, affiliated…

Q&A: Harryette Mullen’s newest poetry brings us closer to nature

Harryette Mullen has a singular way of connecting readers with the world around them. This spring, her work was included in a public art installation as part of New York City’s Park Poems initiative, a collaboration with the Poetry Society of America. Previously, and closer to home, Mullen wrote an original poem for UCLA Magazine that celebrated the small pleasures of everyday life, even amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The celebrated poet, literary scholar and UCLA English professor was elected in April to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The same month, her collection “Open Leaves / poems from earth” was published by the independent Black Sunflowers Poetry…

Zrinka Stahuljak and Shannon Speed receive Mellon grant

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:…

Climate emergency and the future of democracy

The final Possible Worlds lecture — the sixth in the series — was delivered by Robyn Eckersley, Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor in Political Science at the University of Melbourne and a fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. Eckersley joined the UCLA community on May 24 to present a lecture, “Climate Emergency and the Future of Democracy,” which attracted attendees both online and in person. “The Possible Worlds lectures bring big thinkers who are going to challenge us to think about the state of the world and the challenges we face in regards to climate change,” said…

Dean delivers 2023 Humanities Division commencement address

Alexandra Minna Stern, dean of humanities at the UCLA College, served as the commencement speaker for the 2023 humanities commencement ceremony.  Stern said she was honored to be the speaker for the ceremony. She added that she hoped her speech would uplift students and families and thank them for all their hard work.  “This has been quite a tumultuous time, especially since these graduates were by the pandemic, and their educational experience was disrupted,” Stern said. “I believe this generation has acquired an important skills for their future: How does one live with uncertainty? How does one recalibrate all the…

Professor emeritus receives Association for Asian American Studies lifetime achievement award

King-Kok Cheung, professor emeritus of English and Asian American studies at UCLA, received the Association for Asian American Studies lifetime achievement award late April for her contributions to the fields of Asian American and Pacific Islander studies. Cheung was born and raised in Hong Kong before coming to UC Berkeley to earn her Ph.D. in English. In 1984, Cheung was the first woman of color in the humanities division and the first faculty member of Asian descent to join the English department at UCLA. She is the author of “Articulate Silences” and “Chinese American Literature without Borders.” “I feel that…

Professor shares experience as Rome Prize recipient

Sarah Beckmann, an assistant professor of Roman archaeology in the classics department and a faculty member at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, has been named the 2023 Andrew Heiskell Rome Prize Fellow in ancient studies. “For over a century, the American Academy in Rome has awarded the Rome Prize to support innovative and cross-disciplinary work in the arts and humanities. Each year, the Rome Prize is awarded to about thirty artists and scholars who represent the highest standard of excellence,” according to the American Academy in Rome’s website. Beckmann received the award for her book project, “The Villa in Late…

Faculty project will highlight political and historical significance of the Nile River

The Getty Foundation approved a grant for a UCLA faculty project, “The Contested Beauty of the Nile: Connecting Early Career Intellectuals in Egypt and Sudan Through the Indigenous Art of Ancient Nilotic Cultures,” led by Kara Cooney and Jonathan Winnerman. Cooney, professor of Egyptian art and architecture and chair of the Near Eastern languages and cultures department, will work with Winnerman, lecturer in Egyptology and academic administrator for ancient studies in the division of humanities, on the project, which aims to use art and art history to transcend borders.  “The goal of these programs is to bring different people together…

Exploring the fraught nature of memory and comparison

Michael Rothberg, UCLA’s 1939 Society Samuel Goetz Professor of Holocaust Studies, was one of the first scholars to recognize and write about the troubling, disruptive echoes that linked remembrances of the Holocaust and the end of European colonialism in the 1950s and 1960s. Rothberg’s most globally influential book to date, “Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization,” was published in 2009. A formative work in the then-new field of memory studies, the book’s premise is that there is value in widening collective cultural memory to explore how people look back at events like the Holocaust not as outliers, but alongside…

Gift from Arcadia will advance early global studies at UCLA through postdoctoral fellowships

UCLA received a gift of $552,693 from Arcadia, a charitable fund that works to protect nature, preserve cultural heritage and promote open access to knowledge, to establish the John W. Baldwin Postdoctoral Fellowship in the UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies, one of the oldest and most prestigious research centers of its kind in North America. Over a period of five years, the funding will allow the center to welcome three new scholars completing fellowships in European and global comparative medieval studies. The ideal candidates will be recent doctoral graduates in European medieval studies whose work takes an inclusive approach…