Friday, April 10, 2026 4:00 – 6:00 PM Royce Hall 306 RSVP HERE Join us on April 10, 2026 for a talk with Eva Jablonka, hosted by the UCLA Department of Philosophy. The talk will take place from 4:00 – 6:00 PM in Royce 306. The Evolution of Animal Consciousness The study of animal consciousness is becoming a respectable domain of study, which has implications for neuroscience, evolutionary biology and ethics. In this lecture I discuss the theoretical commitments of different naturalistic approaches to animal consciousness and point to markers of consciousness. I suggest that an approach focusing on cognitive capacities…
In this talk, historians Devi Mays and Julia Phillips Cohen discuss the unknown role that Jews from the eastern and southern Mediterranean played in the shaping of modern couture. Following two fashion houses run by an interconnected network of North African and Middle Eastern Jews in fin-de-siècle Paris, the talk reveals the participation of these firms in a global web of makers, suppliers, and designers stretching from Algiers and Constantinople to Cairo, Tabriz and Kyoto. Julia Phillips Cohen is an Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University. Her publications include the books Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial…
This lecture will examine the discussion of pluralism in the field of comparative theology in light of a core question in the history of Israelite religion. It will create a dialogue between the work of historians of religion such as Yehezkel Kaufmann and theologians such as John Hick, with some reference to the Egyptologist Jan Assmann, moving from a close reading of passages in Deuteronomy, Psalms, and Isaiah to much broader theological issues. Benjamin Sommer is Professor of Bible at the Jewish Theological Seminary. His books, Revelation and Authority: Sinai in Jewish Scripture and Tradition (2015), The Bodies of God…
Misunderstanding in Ancient Interstate Relations The Arsacid Princes of the Roman Empire Jake Nabel (Pennsylvania State University) Wednesday, April 22, 2026 at 4:00 pm Pacific Time Royce Hall 306 and Via Zoom Registration Link: https://forms.gle/ZFb7yBFBeEs2VfMt6 Zoom: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/92060104969 In the first century CE, several Arsacid princes from the Iranian empire of Parthia were sent to live at the court of the Roman emperor. While Roman authors called these figures “hostages” and scholars have studied them as such, this talk will employ Iranian and Armenian sources to argue that the Parthians would have seen them as the emperor’s foster-children. These divergent…
Conference Page Please visit the conference page for additional information. RSVP for non-participants: If you are not presenting but plan to attend the conference: Please RSVP here by Monday, April 20, 2026. The form lets you indicate if you plan to attend in person or via Zoom. If you plan to attend virtually via Zoom: You MUST register by April 20. You will receive the Zoom link on April 21. Call for Papers Please view the Call for Papers on the conference page. For participants: All submissions are through the conference portal, which will open in mid-February….
NOTE: Due to unforeseen circumstances, part two of the UCLA Art Council Distinguished Scholar Lectureship with Hilton Als is cancelled. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused and thank you for your understanding. Hilton Als delighted the audience in part one of the 2025-26 UCLA Art Council Distinguished Scholar Lectureship in Art History on Wednesday, March 5th. If you missed this talk on Diane Arbus, you can watch it on YouTube here. Als will be returning to the Billy Wilder Theater on Wednesday, April 15th at 7:30 PM for a conversation with Zoë Ryan, Director of the Hammer Museum. The conversation…
The Program in Experimental Critical Theory presents Living on After Failure A Talk with Irving Goh Tuesday, April 14, 2026 5:00pm PDT Kaplan Hall Room #348 In person Advanced Registration Advanced registration is required by Friday, April 10, 2026. REGISTER TO ATTEND HERE About the Talk In this talk, Irving Goh will present on his latest book, Living On After Failure (Duke UP, 2025). He will share his thoughts on failure as failure, that is, failure without recuperation, failure as all negativity. Such a thinking of failure as a thorough impasse not only resists narratives of progress…
Waiting on Forever by Franco The Creator Mbilizi. Image courtesy of Stephanie Bosch Santana. Friday, March 6, 2026 2:30pm Kaplan Hall Room #348 (third floor) In person REGISTER TO ATTEND HERE About the Talk In this talk, Stephanie Bosch Santana discusses her first monograph, Forms of Mobility: Genre, Language, and Media in African Literary Cultures, published by Northwestern University Press in 2025. Based on an unstudied archive of texts in English and Chichewa/Nyanja from Malawi, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Zambia, Forms of Mobility proposes alternate categories of fiction—migrant forms, township tales, weekend stories, pan African…
Meat is one of the most visible markers of Jewish distinctness and social separation. In his most recent book, John Efron argues that meat has played an especially important role in the formation of Jewish and Christian identities in Germany from the Middle Ages until today. To an extent not seen elsewhere in Europe, the importance of meat is reflected in many realms including the visual arts, literature, religion, politics, commerce, and home life. Studying the history of meat and its multiple meanings in Germany tells us much about the changing nature of German and German-Jewish identity, the links between…
The short fiction collected in In the Shadow of the Holocaust recovers a range of compelling voices that had been scarcely known or translated. Jewish authors from Ukraine, Lithuania, Russia, and Belarus, some writing in Yiddish and others in Russian, tell the stories of ordinary people living on after the massive devastation of the Holocaust on Soviet territory, depicting memories, conflicts, love, and loss. These are not stories only about how people died, but how they continued to live: an entire family legacy is reduced to a single tea cup, the now raspy voice of a telephone that once never…
