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A message from UCLA’s Dean of Humanities

Dear UCLA Humanities Family: As I write this, we have successfully navigated seven weeks of remote teaching, learning, and administration at UCLA. While the transition to remote classrooms came with unprecedented challenges, it also revealed new strengths within our community. I am deeply grateful to the faculty, teaching assistants, staff, students, and supporters who have shown immense resilience, joining together on short notice to make our remote classrooms work. Because you have shown such concern and support for the humanities at UCLA, I want to keep you informed about the latest developments in the division and our plans for navigating this…

COVID 19 Fiat Lux Seminars: Shedding Light on the Pandemic (Part 1)

With many of us now living under government-issued stay-at-home or shelter-in-place orders, Raymond Knapp is taking a musical approach towards how people are coping. Knapp is the Academic Associate Dean at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music and a distinguished musicology professor. He also serves as the Director of the UCLA Center for Musical Humanities, and is among the many UCLA faculty members teaching a Spring 2020 COVID-19 Fiat Lux seminar. Knapp’s Fiat Lux seminar, titled “COVID-19: Inspirational Songs from Musicals in a Time of Crisis,” focuses on how many turn to songs from musicals during difficult times, oftentimes…

Center for Jewish Studies Director Sarah Stein named to new Viterbi Chair in Mediterranean Jewish Studies

Prominent historian Sarah Abrevaya Stein has been named the inaugural holder of the Viterbi Family Endowed Chair in Mediterranean Jewish Studies in the UCLA College divisions of humanities and social sciences. Stein, who directs the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies and is a history professor, has received prestigious accolades for her scholarship, writing and teaching, including two National Jewish Book Awards, the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award. She previously held the Maurice Amado Endowed Chair in Sephardic Studies at UCLA for 12 years. Stein’s 2019 book, “Family Papers: A Sephardic…

Tech moguls on twitter

There are an estimated 330 million monthly active users on Twitter. Even Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos are on the social media platform, curating their own digital persona like the rest of us. But considering their prominence both inside and beyond the tech world, who exactly is engaging with them online, and what do they have to say about these tech moguls? Kristen Tang, a cognitive science major who graduated in 2019, collaborated on “Twitter’s Take on Tech Moguls” with five other students: Christina Durkin, Matthew Huang, Liza Koulikova, Leegeo Fan, and Cami Nemschoff. This project was part…

Maite Zubiaurre’s “Talking Trash: Cultural Uses of Waste” receives Vanderbilt University Press award

“Talking Trash: Cultural Uses of Waste” by Maite Zubiaurre is the winner of the 2020 Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize. Awarded by the Vanderbilt University Press, the book has been recognized as the best book in the area of art or medicine. Zubiaurre’s book explores the often overlooked significance of litter in the urban landscape, particularly looking at litter in its early stages. “Talking Trash” touches upon a variety of disciplines and areas of interest, from anthropology and sociology to visual media and material culture. The book also focuses on the non-urban desert landscape, where clothing and other…

UCLA corrects academic codes for five majors in linguistics department

Approved changes to five undergraduate majors within the UCLA Department of Linguistics will open new doors for students. Effective Winter 2020, the changes will extend opportunities for research, scholarships, and jobs only previously available to students in STEM, but students enrolled in any of the five affected majors will still earn a B.A. degree. Originally developed by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, Classification of Instructional Program (CIP) codes are used to classify and track program completion at educational institutions in the U.S. Four majors—linguistics, applied linguistics, linguistics and anthropology, and linguistics and computer science—have been…

ACLS selects Javier Patiño Loira and David Kim for 2020 Fellowship Program

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) has selected UCLA Humanities faculty Javier Patiño Loira and David D. Kim for its 2020 Fellowship Program. The ACLS Fellowship Program awards fellowships to scholars in the humanities and social sciences, not limited to any specific time period, world region, or humanistic methodology. Applicants submit a proposal for a major scholarly work and, if chosen as fellows, receive funding to complete their research over the course of six to 12 continuous months. Loira is an assistant professor in the UCLA Department of Spanish & Portuguese, and Kim is an associate professor in the…

Update from Humanities Dean David Schaberg during COVID-19 campus closure

On behalf of the UCLA Division of Humanities, I trust that you and your loved ones are safe and well during these unprecedented times. You may already have learned about the measures UCLA is taking to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) on campus. I write today to share our progress, our plans, and our gratitude with you as we move forward together in this rapidly changing new reality.Our first priority is to protect the well-being and safety of our Bruin family while ensuring that students can finish their courses and degrees. Over the past few weeks…

How interdisciplinary are UCLA undergraduate majors?

College is a time to explore and gain exposure to different fields of study and potential careers, so it’s no wonder that major programs at many universities try to provide as diverse of a curriculum as possible. UCLA is no exception. Here, an undergraduate studying environmental science can take classes in philosophy and public policy—and have it count towards their major. But are some majors more or less interdisciplinary than others? Natasha Ann Lum, a third-year global studies major, collaborated with two other students, Elizabeth Nakamura and Kyle Fernando, to create “Analysis of Major Interdisciplinarity,”which takes a look at what…

EPIC remote learning and teaching page

The Excellence in Pedagogy and Innovative Classrooms (EPIC) Program has created a remote learning and teaching page to help ensure that faculty and TAs have the resources to teach effectively during these changing times.  The remote learning and teaching page features resources aimed to help all instructors transition their courses to remote teaching and provides links to relevant, continuously updating “living documents” about online learning and teaching support at UCLA. It also includes links on how to get direct help, including tutorials, online workshops, and appointments with experts from a range of centers/programs on campus. In addition, instructors may find…