English Department

Some Favorite Writers: Katie Kitamura
2026-02-19 19:30 - 21:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA, 90024
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025, Katie Kitamura’s most recent novel Audition asks who we are to the people we love. In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.
Called “…one of America’s best contemporary writers,” by the BBC, Kitamura has work translated into 21 languages and in adaptations for film and television. Her novel Intimacies was one of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2021, was longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and was a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. It was also one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2021.
Readings are followed by discussion with the author and UCLA professor Mona Simpson, who organizes this series.
Copresented by the UCLA Department of English. Limited books will be available for purchase.
Questions about the event?

Visit the Hammer Museum for full details.

Screening of Corneille’s The Illusion
2026-02-20 17:00 - 18:30 | Kaplan Hall 193, 415 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095
Due to unforeseen circumstances, this event has been canceled.

The Academy in a State of Siege: Pictures of an Institution
2026-02-23 16:00 - 17:30 | Kaplan Hall 193, 415 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095
UCLA Department of English presents a talk by W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Academy in a State of Siege: Pictures of an Institution.”
Register here to attend.
Since there is no doubt that the academy is in a state of siege at the present time, it seems like a good moment to reflect on the persons, places, and things we call “academies” and their long struggle with the forces that both threaten and define their existence. This will be a slide lecture on images and narratives of academia from the myth of Akademos, to Plato’s Academy, to the Florentine Academy of Drawing, to the British Royal Academy, to Pierre Bourdieu’s Homo Academicus. Mitchell will focus on the role of the visual arts in the academy (including his own), and conclude with contemporary attempts to re-imagine the academy as itself a work of art.
The talk will be followed by a Q & A moderated by Saree Makdisi, Professor of English & Comparative Literature at UCLA.
W. J. T. Mitchell is the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor in English Language and Literature, Art History, and the College at the University of Chicago. He was the longtime editor of the interdisciplinary journal, Critical Inquiry, a quarterly devoted to critical theory in the arts and human sciences. A scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature, Mitchell is associated with the emergent fields of visual culture. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Morey Prize in art history given by the College Art Association of America. Mitchell has published many volumes including, The Language of Images (1980), On Narrative (1981), The Politics of Interpretation (1983), Against Theory (1985), Art and the Public Sphere (1993), What Do Pictures Want? (2005), Seeing Through Race (2012), among many other works.
Questions about the event?
Email: englishevents@ucla.edu

ARC with Günter Leypoldt (Univ. of Heidelberg)
2026-03-05 16:00 - 18:00 | Kaplan Hall 193, 415 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095
“Literary Value from a Socio-Institutional Perspective.”

Graduate Committee Meeting
2026-03-06 13:00 - 14:00

Prospective Graduate Students Welcome Week Reception
2026-03-09 17:00 - 19:00 | Kaplan Hall 193, 415 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095
UCLA English faculty, graduate students, and staff are invited to attend our Welcome Week Reception, honoring visiting prospective English graduate students.

Tea and Conversation: Kiran Desai
2026-03-12 17:00 | Grace M. Hunt Memorial English Reading Room, Kaplan Hall 235, 415 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095
Join UCLA English for the Grace M. Hunt Memorial English Reading Room Writers Series:
Tea and Conversation with Kiran Desai
Kiran Desai will discuss her writing.
This event is followed by Some Favorite Writers: Kiran Desai at the Hammer Museum at 7:30pm. Visit the Hammer Museum for full details.
Both events are free and open to the public.
Kiran Desai’s newest novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, is a spellbinding story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years – an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a love story, a family saga, and a rich novel of ideas, it is the most ambitious and accomplished work yet by one of our greatest novelists.
Desai is the author of Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, which was published to unanimous acclaim in over 22 countries, and The Inheritance of Loss, which won the Booker Prize in 2006, as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was shortlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction.
Questions about the event?
Email: englishevents@ucla.edu

Some Favorite Writers: Kiran Desai
2026-03-12 19:30 - 21:00 | Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA, 90024
Kiran Desai’s newest novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, is a spellbinding story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years – an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a love story, a family saga, and a rich novel of ideas, it is the most ambitious and accomplished work yet by one of our greatest novelists.
Desai is the author of Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, which was published to unanimous acclaim in over 22 countries, and The Inheritance of Loss, which won the Booker Prize in 2006, as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was shortlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction.
Readings are followed by discussion with the author and UCLA professor Mona Simpson, who organizes this series.
Copresented by the UCLA Department of English. Limited books will be available for purchase.
Questions about the event?
Visit the Hammer Museum for full details.

Executive Committee Meeting
2026-03-13 09:00 - 10:00, 2026-04-10 09:00 - 10:00, 2026-05-08 09:00 - 10:00

Faculty Meeting
2026-03-13 10:00 - 12:00, 2026-04-10 10:00 - 12:00, 2026-05-08 10:00 - 12:00

Undergraduate Committee Meeting
2026-03-13 13:00 - 14:00, 2026-04-10 13:00 - 14:00, 2026-05-08 13:00 - 14:00

Creative Writing Prose Reading
2026-03-17 17:00 - 18:30 | Kaplan Hall 193, 415 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095
Looking for a fun way to celebrate the end of winter quarter? Come hang out with us at the Creative Writing Prose Reading Tuesday, March 17 at 5 PM in Kaplan 193.
Students from the Creative Writing Program will read from their work. Bring your friends, grab some pizza and drinks, and enjoy the party. Everyone is welcome and invited!
Hope to see you there!

An Afternoon of Poetry with Bob Perelman and Brian Kim Stefans
2026-04-08 16:00 - 17:30 | Kaplan Hall 193, 415 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095
Join us for an afternoon of poetry featuring Bob Perelman and Brian Kim Stefans. Perelman will share recent poems in addition to selections from his latest book, Chatty Fossils. Stefans will also share new poems, as well as read his recent AI-assisted work, Beauty Face.
Register here to attend. Drinks and light refreshments will be served.
Bob Perelman has published numerous books of poems, including: Chatty Fossils (Roof Books, 2026), Jack and Jill in Troy (Roof, 2019); Iflife (Roof, 2006); Playing Bodies, in collaboration with painter Francie Shaw (Granary Books, 2004); and Ten to One: Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1999). His critical books are The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History (California, 1994); The Trouble With Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky (Princeton, 1996); Modernism the Morning After (Alabama, 2017). His work can be heard on Penn Sound, and a feature on his work appears in Jacket 39. He is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
Brian Kim Stefans is a poet, translator, and digital artist who teaches at UCLA. His recent books include For Trapped Things (Roof Books, 2023) and the translations Festivals of Patience: The Verse Poems of Rimbaud (Kenning Editions, 2021). His critical book Word Toys: Poetry and Technics was published by the University of Alabama Press in 2017. His digital work “The Dreamlife of Letters” (2000) is widely anthologized in electronic literature scholarship and curricula. Poems have appeared in Poetry (Chicago), Lana Turner and other venues including Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (2013).
Questions about the event?
Email: englishevents@ucla.edu

Lacan’s Veil: Ekphrasis between Access and Occlusion
2026-04-09 16:00 - 17:30 | Kaplan Hall 193, 415 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095
Lacan’s veil, as discussed in his fourth seminar on object relations about absence and desire, represents an interesting model through which to understand description in general and especially the elevated kind (often about works of art) known as ekphrasis. Professor Jaś Elsner will focus in particular on issues of love and especially Enobarbus’ famous speech (‘the barge she sat in’) in Antony and Cleopatra as well as the very rich range of responses to it in English literature and art, from Shakespeare’s own Cymbeline, via Alma-Tadema and T.S. Eliot’s A Game of Chess in The Wasteland to the late Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia.
Register here to attend. A light reception will follow the event.
Pictured above: Detail from “Woman Reading a Letter” by Gabriël Metsu. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Questions about the event?
Email: englishevents@ucla.edu

Getting Lost in the Dark: Three Speculations on Black Insecurity
2026-04-16 16:00 - 17:30 | Kaplan Hall 193, 415 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095
UCLA Department of English presents a talk by Justin L. Mann, “Getting Lost in the Dark: Three Speculations on Black Insecurity.”
Register here to attend. A light reception will follow the event.
The talk will be followed by a Q & A moderated by Uri McMillan, Professor of English at UCLA.
Justin L. Mann (he/him) is an Assistant Professor and scholar of Black feminist literary and cultural studies at Northwestern University. His book Breaking the World: Black Insecurity and the Horizons of Speculative Fiction (Duke University Press, March 2026) argues that Black speculative fictions are an essential but overlooked archive for understanding the United States’ security ambitions since the Reagan administration. His work has appeared in MELUS, GLQ, Feminist Theory, ASAP, and American Quarterly.
Questions about the event?
Email: englishevents@ucla.edu

Thinking Gender 2026 Graduate Student Research Conference
2026-04-17 00:00 - 23:59 | Founders’ Room, James West Alumni Center, 325 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095
Register for Thinking Gender — April 17
Feminist and Queer Ecologies
Date: Friday, April 17, 2026
Location: James West Alumni Center
Cost: Free to attend
Join us for a day of graduate student presentations highlighting innovative research at the intersections of gender, sexuality, and the environment.
The conference will feature keynote speaker Cutcha Risling Baldy (California Polytechnic State University, Humboldt; NAS Rou Dalagurr Food Sovereignty Lab & Traditional Ecological Knowledges Institute), whose work centers Indigenous feminisms, land relations, and food sovereignty.
Register Online:
https://thinking–gender–2026.eventbrite.com
Thinking Gender 2026 Keynote Spotlight: Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy
Dr. Risling Baldy’s keynote talk, “Indigenous Women Know How to Save the World: Framing a California Indigenous Ecofeminist Ethic,” builds a California Indigenous ecofeminist ethic grounded in place, fugitivity, resistance, and humor. The talk asks what it means to rethink how we talk about climate change and to recognize how land, water, and more-than-human relatives model resilience, refusal, and justice.
More info:
https://csw.ucla.edu/tg26

Event contact:
www.csw.ucla.edu

New Book Salon, “Turning Away”
2026-04-22 16:00 - 17:30 | Kaplan Hall 193, 415 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095
A sweeping account of how we are at our most human when we turn away from the pains of the world.
“This is a book that makes a difference, not only in our grasp of human visuality but in all the mixed feelings of love and hate, attraction and repulsion, thought and feeling that make us the crazy animals we are.”—W. J. T. Mitchell, author of What Do Pictures Want?
“This lavish and virtuosic book finds in the gesture of turning away an entire history of why we turn to art to understand what we cannot look at directly.”—D. Vance Smith, author of Atlas’s Bones
Why do we look away from the suffering of others? Why do we cover our faces in shame or lower our heads in grief? Few gestures are as universal as the averted gaze. Fewer still are as ambivalent and inscrutable. In this incisive study, Benjamin A. Saltzman reveals how the kaleidoscopic appearance of these gestures in art, poetry, and philosophy has turned them into an essential language for our uncomfortable engagements with the world.
Into the horizon of contemporary discourse, Turning Away sets out from five influential scenes in which figures avert their gaze: Timanthes’s Sacrifice of Iphigenia, Plato’s Republic, Augustine’s Confessions, Christ’s Crucifixion, and the Fall and Expulsion of Adam and Eve. The gestures of aversion in these scenes refract across visual media, through philosophy and politics, into modernity and the present day, having been reimagined along the way by thinkers like Hannah Arendt, artists like Marc Chagall and Salvador Dalí, poets like Langston Hughes, and many others. Saltzman offers a timely critique of the privilege of turning away and of the too-easy condemnation of our tendencies to do so.

Benjamin Saltzman (University of Chicago) will be in conversation with Bronwen Wilson (UCLA, Art History) and David Russell (UCLA, English).
Benjamin Saltzman is associate professor of English at the University of Chicago, where he coedits the journal Modern Philology. Saltzman is the author of Bonds of Secrecy: Law, Spirituality, and the Literature of Concealment in Early Medieval England.
Bronwen Wilson is the Edward W. Carter Chair in European Art and the Director of the Center for 17th– and 18th-Century Studies and William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA. Wilson is the author of numerous books, including the forthcoming book, The Face of Uncertainty. She is also coeditor of Conversion Machines: Apparatus, Artifice, Body and The Erotics of Looking: Early Modern Netherlandish Art.
David Russell is associate professor of English at UCLA and the author of Tact: Aesthetic Liberalism and the Essay Form in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Marion Milner: On Creativity.
Cosponsored by the CMRS Center for Early Global Studies, the Department of English, and the Department of Art History.

ARC with Maia Gil’Adí (Johns Hopkins University)
2026-04-23 16:00 - 18:00 | Kaplan Hall 193, 415 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095
Join the UCLA Americanist Research Colloquium (ARC) for a discussion of Maia Gil’Adí’s essay, “Wood, Cloth, Plaster: Marisol’s Surface Work.”
Please email clooby@humnet.ucla.edu for a copy of the paper.
In this essay, Maia Gil’Adí examines the work of Venezuelan artist Marisol to reconsider the relationship between material form, diaspora, and hemispheric politics. Gil’Adí argues that the unfinished surfaces and fragmented bodies of Marisol’s sculptures produce encounters structured by opacity and estrangement, challenging expectations of interpretive depth. These aesthetic strategies, she suggests, register the affective consequences of displacement while reframing how the political appears in visual art. She situates Marisol within a broader Venezuelan cultural tradition that mobilizes incompletion as both an aesthetic form and a political condition.
Maia Gil’Adí is a Fannie Gaston-Johansson Assistant Professor of Latinx Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University. Her first book, Doom Patterns: Latinx Speculations and the Aesthetics of Violence (Duke University Press, 2025), examines how portrayals of destruction paradoxically foreground pleasure while revealing the ongoing nature of imperial, racial, and ethno-national violence. Her work has appeared in MELUS, Latino Studies, ASAP/Journal, and American Quarterly. She is also the President of the Association of the Study of the Arts of the Present.

“Because of slavery”: The Irreverent Art of Kara Walker and Harryette Mullen
2026-04-26 15:00 - 17:00 | The Brick, 518 N. Western Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, 90004
“Because of slavery” is the correct answer to the question: Why did the slaveholding states go to war against the free states of the Union? MONUMENTS reckons with deceptive narratives implicit in the presentation of a defeated Confederacy—not as traitors and losers, but as objects of hero worship. The Old South lost the Civil War but won the nation’s post-war reconciliation with monuments, movies, and textbooks that upheld white supremacy and perpetuated black subordination. Kara Walker’s art and Harryette Mullen’s poetry have in common an irreverent attitude toward oppressive systems and institutions, from the Lost Cause glorified in the proliferation of Confederate monuments to the ghosts of slavery still haunting American life. Walker and Mullen employ exacting craft to disarm the ugly isms with parody, satire, humor, and surprising remixes of historical and cultural artifacts.
In view of Walker’s Unmanned Drone, Mullen will read from her latest poetry collection, Regaining Unconsciousness.
Harryette Mullen’s latest poetry collection, Regaining Unconsciousness (Graywolf, 2025) is one of Publishers Weekly’s and California Independent Booksellers Alliance’s Best Books of the Year. Recyclopedia (Graywolf, 2006) won a PEN Beyond Margins Award. Sleeping with the Dictionary (U of California, 2002) was a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and LA Times Book Award. The Cracks Between (U of Alabama, 2012), essays and interviews, received an Elizabeth Agee Award. Other books include Her Silver-Tongued Companion (Edinburgh U, 2024), Open Leaves (Black Sunflowers, 2023), and Urban Tumbleweed (Graywolf, 2013). She teaches literature and creative writing at UCLA.
This program is co-presented by The Brick and the Humanities Division at UCLA in conjunction with MONUMENTS, an exhibition co-organized and co-presented by The Brick and The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (MOCA).
Questions about the event?
Visit the The Brick for full details.

Lunch Poems: A Poetry Reading by Eugene Ostashevsky and Aditya Bahl
2026-04-30 13:00 - 14:00 | Kaplan Hall 193, 415 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095
Join UCLA Department of English for a poetry reading by Eugene Ostashevsky and Aditya Bahl, followed by a discussion with Danny Snelson about poetics, experiment, and politics. Light refreshments will be served.
Eugene Ostashvesky is a Russian-American poet, translator, and critic who teaches at New York University. He is the author of numerous books of poetry and translations, including The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi (2017) and The Feeling Sonnets (2022), both published in the NYRB Poets series. He is also the translator of Mayakovsky, Kharms, Belorusets, Dragomoshchenko, etc.
Aditya Bahl is a poet and critic who teaches at UCLA. He is the author of four chapbooks of poetry, including Mukt (Organism for Poetic Research, 2022). He has written for The Nation, New Left Review, and London Review of Books, among others.
Danny Snelson is a poet and critic who teaches at UCLA. He is the author of numerous books of poetry and criticism, including RADIOS (Make Now Press,2016) and The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats (MIT Press, 2025).
The event is sponsored by the Department of English, the Department of Comparative Literature, and the Department of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Languages and Cultures.

Inhabitants of the Deep: The Blueness of Blackness
2026-04-30 16:00 - 17:30 | Kaplan Hall 193, 415 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095
UCLA Department of English presents a talk by Dr. Jonathan Howard, “Inhabitants of the Deep: The Blueness of Blackness.”
Register here to attend. A light reception will follow the event.
The talk will be followed by a Q & A moderated by Uri McMillan, Professor of English at UCLA.
Dr. Jonathan Howard is an Assistant Professor of Black Studies and English at Yale University. His research and teaching broadly interrogate western ideas about race and nature while also exploring black expressive culture as an alternative site of ecological thought and practice. His first book, Inhabitants of the Deep: The Blueness of Blackness, undertakes a black ecocritical study of the “deep” as the diffuse subtext of African American literature. It argues that blackness dawns in Middle Passage as an ongoing inhabitation of the deep, which is most fully apprehended not as social death but ecological life.
Questions about the event?
Email: englishevents@ucla.edu

20/21 Working Group with Michael Meagher
2026-05-06 16:00 - 17:30 | Kaplan Hall 193, 415 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095
UCLA English and The 20/21 Working Group Present:
Spring Paper Workshop Feat. Michael Meagher
Wednesday, May 6 at 4:00pm in Kaplan Hall 193
All are welcome for an informal discussion of Michael’s dissertation chapter on Edward Said’s memoir Out of Place, modernism, and postcolonial life writing.
Snacks will be provided!
RSVP: bit.ly/4sLiwxc

2026 Academic Conference for English Students (ACES)
2026-05-08 13:00 - 18:00 | Kaplan Hall 193, 415 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095
Join us for our annual Academic Conference for English Students!
ACES 14th Annual Conference
Friday, May 8 at 1 pm – 6 pm
Kaplan Hall 193
Zoom livestream link here.
The full conference schedule is now available: ACES 2026 Conference Program.
The Academic Conference for English Students provides a collaborative forum for students of literature to give oral presentations of their research and creative work. The event is held annually during UCLA’s Undergraduate Research Week.

Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead, Book Talk by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
2026-05-12 14:30 - 16:00 | Founders’ Room, James West Alumni Center, 325 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095
Join us Tuesday (5/12) for a book talk by Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Organized by the Department of American Indian Studies (DAIS) as part of its Special Speaker Series, this event will highlight her recent Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead (2025). Book sales and signing to follow the talk.
Questions about the event?
Visit the UCLA American Indian Studies Center for full details.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg musician, writer and academic. She is the author of eight books, including As We Have Always Done (winner of the NAISA subsequent book prize) and the novel Noopiming which was short listed for the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Dublin Literary Prize. Her collaboration with Robyn Maynard, Rehearsals for Living is a National Best Seller and was short listed for the Governor General’s Literary Award for non-fiction. Leanne’s new work, Theory of Water is a national best seller and won the Writer’s Trust Hilary Weston prize for non-fiction. Leanne has lectured and taught extensively at universities across Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Europe and has over twenty years experience with Indigenous land based education. Leanne is also a musician. Her latest release Live Like the Sky is out now from You’ve Changed Records. Theory of Ice (2021) was named to the Polaris Prize short list, and she was the 2021 winner of the Prism Prize’s Willie Dunn Award, presented to a Canadian trailblazer who has demonstrated excellence within the music video production community. Leanne holds a PhD from the University of Manitoba and is a member of Alderville First Nation.
