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Professor Maite Zubiaurre increases empathy and pollution awareness through trash collages

When you think of the word “trash,” what types of images do you imagine? A garbage dump? Waste? Pollution? While negative connotations and depictions of the word are typically the first to arise, UCLA Germanic Languages and Spanish & Portuguese Professor Maite Zubiaurre seeks to change the way we think about trash, humanity, and empathy through her trashcollages and academic seminars. Zubiaurre’s alter ego, Filomena Cruz, is a Venice, CA visual artist and trash-collagist. She uses endless recycling and urban trash to create “trashcollages,” a term coined by Cruz to give expression to her mixed-media genre. Zubiaurre takes pictures of…

Establishment of Peter J. and Caroline B. Caloyeras Endowment for the Arts at UCLA

The UCLA Stavros Niarchos Foundation Center for the Study of Hellenic Culture announces the establishment of the Peter J. and Caroline B. Caloyeras Endowment for the Arts. The Caloyeras endowment will support the presentation of fine and performing arts related to Greece, from the ancient period through the modern day. Funds from the endowment will bring distinguished lecturers to speak on topics related to the art, history or archaeology of Greece The endowment will also support theatrical and musical performances. In the last year the Center has presented lectures by the President of the Acropolis Museum, Demetrios Pandermalis, the Cypriot “Icon…

UCLA receives two new endowments for Iranian Studies

UCLA Iranian Studies and the Pourdavoud Center are proud to announce two new endowments, the Jahangir and Eleanor Amuzegar Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Contemporary Iranian Studies and the Morvarid Guiv Graduate Fellowship in Zoroastrian Studies. UCLA has launched a national and international search for a top post-doctoral scholar who will be the inaugural recipient of the Jahangir and Eleanor Amuzegar Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Contemporary Iranian Studies. Read more about the post-doctoral fellowship on the UCLA College website. Thanks to a gift in 2018 from the Trust of Morvarid Guiv, the Morvarid Guiv Graduate Fellowship in Zoroastrian Studies has been established in…

UCLA Art History Professor Weighs in on Why Trump Fast Food Photo is Visually Arresting

It is not surprising that people found the photo visually arresting, said George Baker, a professor of art history at UCLA who specializes in modern and contemporary art. It observes the rule of thirds and has some aspects of the golden ratio, he said, but it’s more powerful in the way it evokes classical art. “You think of all of the great images of feasts in the history of art,” Baker said. “Right away, the most famous images are religious — ‘The Last Supper’ with Christ. And you have this incredible gesture [he’s] making, but it’s not really a presentation of the…

Assistant professor of Italian Andrea Moudarres receives Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award

On January 5, 2019, Assistant Professor of Italian Andrea Moudarres received the twenty-first annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies from the Modern Language Association of America. Moudarres accepted his award at the annual convention in Chicago in front of thousands of attendees for his book, The Enemy in Italian Renaissance Epic: Images of Hostility from Dante to Tasso. In this work, Moudarres explores the question of violence, enmity and the representation of the enemy in influential works like Dante’s Divina Commedia, Luigi Pulci’s Morgante, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme…

Professor Barbara Fuchs takes leadership role in Modern Language Association

Barbara Fuchs, professor of Spanish and Portuguese in the UCLA College, has been elected second vice president of the Modern Language Association. Founded in 1883, the Modern Language Association of America provides opportunities for its members to share findings and teaching experiences with colleagues and to discuss trends in the academy. Fuchs, who is also a professor of English, will serve in the office of second vice president from Jan. 7 through the close of the January 2020 convention and will automatically become first vice president in 2020, serving in that office through the close of the January 2021 convention….

Slavic Department’s Ph.D. student Lydia Roberts interviews Marianna Yarovskaya, director of “Women of the Gulag”

When a country experiences genocide, is talking about what happened the best way to heal from the past? Why is it important to preserve the memory of what happened and the lives that were lost for future generations? These complicated questions regarding the preservation of memory are discussed in Lydia Roberts’ interview with Marianna Yarovskaya, director of the documentary Women of the Gulag, for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Roberts, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Languages and Cultures at UCLA, recently sat down with Yarovskaya after a screening of her film, which…

What is truth? Humanities faculty offer their perspectives

For Bruins, including the humanities faculty we’ve quoted in this issue, the pursuit of truth is a fundamentally social process. Any claim is subject to testing, refinement and occasionally flat-out debunking. We seek truth like connoisseurs – passionate and ever wary of shoddy substitutes. Whoever you are and wherever you come from, when you step onto the UCLA campus, you’re invited to speak your own ideas, to defend them through the peaceful exercise of good thinking, to answer critiques, perhaps to change a mind, perhaps to change the world. We know that books alone won’t preserve or defend truths. For that…

Armando Guerrero Talks Spanish Accents and Latinx Representation in Film and TV

By: Megan Reusche Armando Guerrero, a Lecturer and Academic Coordinator in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, recently analyzed the accents of actors in famous movies and TV shows for the social media company Pero Like to see if the actors linguistically achieved the Latinx identity in the portrayal of their role. Buzzfeed’s Pero Like is a Facebook and Youtube channel that “makes content that resonates with English-speaking Latinxs.” Guerrero’s video, featured on a platform with over 1 million subscribers, explores the various linguistic representations of Latinx identities in film and TV, and addresses the lack of representation by an…

Laure Murat roils the #MeToo debate in France

UCLA International Institute, November 7, 2018 — Director of the UCLA Center for European and Russian Studies and Professor of French, Laure Murat has published a new book: “Une révolution sexuelle? Réflexions sur l’aprés-Weinstein [A Sexual Revolution? Reflections on the Weinstein Aftermath]” (Paris: Éditions Stock, 2018). Arguing that #MeToo is the first serious challenge to patriarchy in modern times, Murat dismisses the current discussion of #MeToo in France as a polemical misdirection. Instead, she calls for a genuine debate on the issues of sexual harassment and assault in that engages French young people, men and women, philosophers and intellectuals. Born and…