Among the Sumerian texts attributed to the priestess Enheduana—who lived and presumably wrote over four thousand years ago and is often called history’s first named author—two are dedicated to the glory of the goddess Inana. As the most prominent female deity in Mesopotamia, Inana was powerful and marvelously complicated. The goddess of love and war, among other things, her heart was described as a raging storm, a fury of emotions. Although Enheduana was herself a high-ranking servant of the moon god, her poems known as the Exaltation and the Hymn to Inana appeal to the goddess instead, as Enheduana pleads…
Persia’s Greek Campaigns: Approaches to Historical Reconstruction and Political Myth John Hyland (Christopher Newport University) Wednesday January 27, 2027 at 4:00 pm Pacific Time Royce Hall 306 and Via Zoom Registration Link: https://forms.gle/PEZw9xf3oFGjXzZk8 Join Livestream Zoom: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/95846831926 Achaemenid Persia’s expeditions against the Greek city-states in the early 5th century BCE are the most (in)famous events in the empire’s history, crucial to Greco-Roman stereotypes of the “Barbarian” and misleading narratives of Persian decadence and decline. In the absence of Achaemenid narratives to counter the Greek source tradition, the so-called “Persian Wars” are widely perceived as failures of an over-extended empire against…
An Update on the US-Israeli War on Iran Afshin Matin-Asgar California State University, Los Angeles Sunday, December 13, 2026 Lecture in Persian Royce Hall 314, 4:00pm Zoom link for hybrid online viewing: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/97189398973 Registration requested: https://forms.gle/NvbydTUWyWui9x9z7 Based on the research published in, Axis of Empire: A History of Iran-US Relations, this book talk will briefly review the events leading to the US-Israeli war on Iran, followed by a summary of the most recent developments in the war and a discussion of how they are interpreted by Iranian and international scholars and political observers. Afshin Matin-Asgari is professor emeritus of…
Contrary to what we might think at first, biblical and Second Temple Jewish literatures are filled with mathematical thought. The densest concentration of mathematical thought in these texts is found in writings concerned with priestly and priestly-adjacent matters such as temples and sacrifice. Embedded within larger narrative contexts, these instances of counting, calculation, and measurement offer a unique glimpse into the socio-historical contexts of these texts and their relationship to broader knowledge networks in the ancient world. Mathematics in the ancient world, as in modernity, is highly contextual and culturally conditioned. How one counts or approaches even a simple arithmetical…
Are idols real? Do gods or demons dwell in them or around them? Or are they empty, devoid of existence except in the mind of the idolater? Ancient Christians and Jews gave very different answers to these questions. RSVP for this in-person event. Sonja Anderson (UCLA, B.A.; University of Notre Dame, M.T.S.; Yale University, M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.) teaches courses in ancient Christianity and Judaism, religious violence, gender and Catholicism, apocalypticism, and religion and medicine. Her current book project, Idol Talk: False Worship in the Early Christian World, will be published with Edinburgh University Press and explores how ancient Christians and…
Myth, Literature, and Geography in Transoxiana from Late Antiquity to the Early Islamic Period: Siyavash at Bukhara Florian Schwarz (Austrian Academy of Sciences) Wednesday January 13, 2027 at 4:00 pm Pacific Time Royce Hall 306 and Via Zoom Registration Link: https://forms.gle/VgZ8xmueie9azyLE7 Join Livestream Zoom: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/95409975203 The conquest of Transoxiana, the region beyond the river Oxus (Amu Darya), in the 7th to 8th centuries is generally regarded as a major historical watershed in the history of Central Asia. This view obscures deeper processes of transformation that affected the entire eastern Iranian world since long before the end of the Sasanian empire….
Entitled “Fugitive Tiepolo!” this talk ask the question, what are the relations between poetry, painting, and art-historical practice? And how might the connections between them be re-framed? This lecture considers the work of Saint Lucian poet (and painter) Derek Walcott, concentrating on the pictorial imagination of his book-length poem Tiepolo’s Hound (2000). Tracing the strange intimacies Walcott explores between the visual world of Giambattista Tiepolo and his own – two prospects onto the ends of empire – it considers his engagement in relation to the eccentric scholarly literature this eighteenth-century painter continues to accrue. In doing so, the lecture seeks…
Please see below for updated schedule as of 11/5/26. Please join us for the “Biological Naturalism about Consciousness,” a conference at UCLA from Thursday-Friday, November 5-6, 2026 in Royce Hall 306. RSVP HERE About the conference Can non-biological systems be conscious? If not, why not? These questions have taken on new weight as AI systems become increasingly sophisticated, not least because our answers bear on which entities might matter morally. This conference focuses on biological naturalism: the family of views holding that certain biological properties are required for consciousness. Biological naturalism is often positioned as the…
Friday, October 30, 2026 4:00 – 6:00 PM Dodd Hall 175 RSVP HERE Please join us for a colloquium with Cheshire Calhoun, Arizona State University. Public Kindnesses and Valuing Persons as Persons There’s an upsurge in cultural attention to kindnesses to strangers and mere acquaintances. Are there reasons other than, or in addition to, the reasons favoring general beneficence and personal relationship kindnesses, that face-to-face kindnesses to strangers and acquaintances matter? I explore their connection with valuing, treating, and attitudinally recognizing persons as persons. Rather than taking “valuing persons as persons” to be an exclusively moral notion,…
Why do people grieve a faith they have chosen to leave? If they no longer believe, what exactly have they lost? Ultimately, leaving a religion is rarely the simple loss of a world. Recent philosophical work has argued that deconversion can be an occasion for grief, comparable to bereavement in its power to unsettle one’s experiential world (Williams, 2024). Such accounts describe what this grief is like but leave unexplained why some deconversions take this experiential shape and others do not. This talk by Joshua Waugh (UCLA) aims to offer an explanatory account. RSVP here for the in-person event by…
