Annual UCLA Joan Palevsky Lecture Professor Naoíse Mac Sweeney, University of Vienna “The Birth of the Ancient Greek World: Migration, Urbanisation, and the Emergence of Greekness?” Lecture summary: By the start of the classical period, the Greek world stretched from Spain to Cyprus, and from Libya to the Crimea, and was comprised of over 1,000 autonomous polities. In this lecture, I will consider how this geographically dispersed and politically fragmented Greek world came into being over the course of the 11th to sixth centuries BCE, focusing in particular on new data from archaeological surveys designed to uncover processes of urbanisation and migration at varying scales. This new data suggests divergent pathways…
Join us for the third and final session of our Critical Thinking Focused Teaching Workshop, hosted by the University of Queensland Critical Thinking Project (UQCTP) and sponsored by the UCLA Department of Philosophy and HumTech. This session challenges the false dichotomy of teaching for thinking and teaching for content knowledge. We will show that developing deep and complex content knowledge demands attention to how students think, both as they are learning and in how they are using and creating new knowledge. The extent to which we value explicit teaching must carry into the explicit teaching of thinking, and the language…
Join us for the second session of our Critical Thinking Focused Teaching Workshop, hosted by the University of Queensland Critical Thinking Project (UQCTP) and sponsored by the UCLA Department of Philosophy and HumTech. In this session, we will explore a thinking and talk-based writing pedagogy that is transferable to any discipline and year level. Based on a schematic understanding of Accountable Talk (Michaels et al. 2015), argument structure, and the values of inquiry (Ellerton, 2015), we will unpack the significance and utility of these tools, both as stand-alone elements and as integrated components of a comprehensive writing pedagogy. Participants will…
Join us for the inaugural session of our Critical Thinking Focused Teaching Workshop, hosted by the University of Queensland Critical Thinking Project (UQCTP) and sponsored by the UCLA Department of Philosophy and HumTech. A key challenge for teachers is planning and assessing student thinking with the same precision and intentionality applied to content knowledge. This issue becomes particularly significant when addressing student engagement with AI. In this session, we will explore how to make the cognitive content of tasks and assessments, especially in argumentative contexts, explicit and targeted during both planning and evaluation stages. Participants will receive a variety of…
White Evangelicalism and Christian Nationalism has occupied an increasingly prominent position since—and in many ways before—the first Trump administration. Events such as January 6 and the second Trump presidency have highlighted the entanglement of politics and religious belief that is central to Christian Nationalism. This symposium brings together several scholars to discuss various aspects of white Evangelicalism and Christian Nationalism, particularly as they connect to modern and contemporary American politics. The symposium serves as a forum for investigating topics such as tolerance and religious pluralism, the use of anti-abortion protests, and the intersection of race and Christian Nationalism. Further, the…
The 5th Annual Conference of the UCLA Medieval and Early Modern Student Association seeks to highlight the innovative work of graduate students on the manifold ways people, texts, and objects “in-between” shaped the early global world, from the early medieval to the late early modern periods. Presentations will engage with the concept of the so-called “hybrid,” asking: what does it mean to label something as in-between, mixed, syncretic, blended, amalgamated, or composite? To what end might something be constituted as “hybrid”? Does “hybridity” as a term still carry meaning when encompassing so much? Does the contact and exchange of people, things, and…
Global Antiquity is pleased to invite you to the next in its 2024–2025 Faculty Lunch Series talks, featuring Professor Adriana Vazquez (Classics, UCLA). On Friday, February 28 from 12:00–1:30 pm in Royce 306, she will deliver a lecture titled “Por Mores Nunca D’antes Navegados…”: Poetic Primacy in Arcadian Epic and Caminões’s The Lusiads. Lunch and refreshments will be served at 12:00 pm followed immediately by the talk and discussion. All are welcome, and we hope to see you there! Abstract: This presentation is an excerpt of a monograph on the poetry of the Brazilian colonial period and its reception of…
Who is the human? What is legitimate religion? Who is left out of these discourses? Questions of power, humanity, and alterity animate religious discourse and responses to oppression. Leveraging the Rastafari movement and interrogating religious racism this talk will allow us to grapple with 20th century Black religious discourses and their continued relevance for thinking about how to protect religious freedom in the contemporary moment. RSVP here for in-person event. Register here for Zoom link. Shamara Wyllie Alhassan is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at the University of California – Los Angeles. Alhassan comes to UCLA from Arizona State University where she was…
Regal Metamorphosis: A Transcultural Journey of the Achaemenid Royal Women to the East Xiwangmu, also known as the Queen of the West, is a significant deity in ancient Chinese mythology, revered initially as the protector of departed souls. Her representation emerged during the late Western Han period around the 1st century BCE. Scholars have drawn parallels with Western deities such as Astarte, Kybele, and Athena, yet little attention has been given to the origins of her function in Chinese funerary art. Analysis suggests that her origin lies in the queenly figures of the Achaemenid royal court. Through trade and intermarriage,…
Zoroastrian Hermeneutics in Late Antiquity The Sūdgar Nask of Dēnkard Book 9 is a commentary on the ‘Old Avesta’ of the 2nd millennium BCE produced in Pahlavi (Zoroastrian Middle Persian) in the Sasanian (224–651 CE) and early Islamic centuries. This commentary is a value-laden, ideologically motivated discourse that displays a rich panoply of tradition-constituted forms of allegoresis. It mobilizes complex forms of citation, allusion, and intertextuality from the inherited Avestan world of myth and ritual in order to engage with and react to the profound changes occurring in Iranian society. Despite its value and importance for developing our nascent understanding…
