Alexandra Minna Stern, Ph.D., has served as dean of the UCLA College Division of Humanities since November 2022.
As dean, she has championed successful efforts to establish a first-in-the-nation digital humanities major and create an innovative health humanities minor. She has also prioritized fostering a greater sense of community among UCLA humanities scholars and alumni, and strengthening programs in community-engaged humanities, global languages and global antiquity.
Those aims have been realized in part through generous philanthropic support from UCLA Humanities alumni and friends. During Stern’s tenure, the Humanities Division has received landmark gifts to support the Yanai Initiative, the Jeffrey P. Cunard Center for Global Antiquity and the Kwame J. Granderson Undergraduate Writing Center.
In collaboration with colleagues at other University of California campuses, Stern has spearheaded a drive to preserve global language instruction and coordinate efforts across the UC system. Through partnerships with UC humanities deans, language experts, UC Online and the UC Office of the President, the Global Language Network is meant to bolster the teaching of less commonly taught languages, which has come under significant pressure.
Trained as a historian of science and medicine, Stern examines the interplay of health and society across a wide range of domains, including eugenics and genetics, public health and infectious diseases, and demography and epidemiology. Her research spans the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries and covers the United States, Latin America and Western Europe.
She is the author of the award-winning Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America, the second edition of which was published in 2015 by University of California Press. She also wrote Telling Genes: The Story of Genetic Counseling in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), which was named a Choice 2013 Outstanding Academic Title in Health Sciences.
Stern has written extensively on the topic of extremist socio-political movements. Her most recent book, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right is Warping the American Imagination (Beacon Press, 2019) explored the rise of the alt right and the normalization of white nationalism in the United States in the 2010s; one leading scholar deemed it “the best book on the alt right ever written.” Following the publication of Proud Boys, Stern was asked to contribute her expertise to the congressional committee investigating the January 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol.
Her current research focuses on the dystopian 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints from literary and historical perspectives in the context of contemporary far-right ideologies and movements in the United States and Western Europe.
Stern was the founder and co-director of the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab, which from 2015 to 2025 studied patterns and experiences of eugenic sterilization in the U.S. during the 20th century. Funded by three major grants from the National Institutes of Health and two from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the lab’s research informed the creation of California Assembly Bill 1007, which established a program to compensate survivors of forced sterilization.
Stern has faculty appointments in the UCLA departments of English, digital humanities and history, in the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics, and in the Center for Social Medicine and Humanities at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. She has received numerous grants for her research, and in 2026, she was elected to the Society of American Historians.
Prior to her arrival at UCLA, Stern was a faculty member at the University of Michigan for two decades, from 2002 to 2022. As associate dean for the humanities at UM’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, she enhanced humanities research, promoted curricular and funding opportunities in experimental humanities, and supported languages and global studies. She was the Carroll Smith-Rosenberg Collegiate Professor of American Culture, and she held appointments in history, women’s and gender studies, and obstetrics and gynecology.
Before joining the faculty at Michigan, Stern was an assistant professor at UC Santa Cruz, from 2000 to 2002. She earned a bachelor’s degree from San Francisco State University, a master’s degree in Latin American studies from UC San Diego and a doctorate in history from the University of Chicago.