English Department

New Book Salon, “Turning Away”
2026-04-22 16:00 - 17:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | 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

Executive Committee Meeting
2026-05-08 09:00 - 10:00

Faculty Meeting
2026-05-08 10:00 - 12:00

Undergraduate Committee Meeting
2026-05-08 13:00 - 14:00

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.

Book Launch: Upward Bound by Woody Brown
2026-05-13 17:00 - 18:30 | Kaplan Hall 193, 415 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095
Join UCLA Department of English to celebrate the publication of UCLA alum Woody Brown’s debut novel, Upward Bound.
Register here to attend. A light reception will follow the event.
The reading will be followed by a Q & A moderated by Mona Simpson, Professor of English at UCLA.
Upward Bound is not a place anyone dreams of spending their days. The dreary adult daycare center for Los Angeles’s disabled community is, for many of its clients and staff, a place of last resort. This includes Carlos, a young aide who lost his mother as a boy and now works there alongside his beloved sister, Mariana; Jorge, the gentle nonspeaking giant whom Carlos seeks to befriend (and prevent from escaping); Tom, a beautiful young man with cerebral palsy who pines for Ann, the summer lifeguard at the center’s pool who feels out of her depth. Then there’s Dave, Upward Bound’s director, who came to L.A. to pursue an acting career but now channels his passion into staging an overly ambitious holiday show starring the center’s irrepressible clients. Framing these intertwined narratives—and connecting them in surprising, shattering ways—is the riveting and sometimes ironic testimony of Walter, a recent community college graduate who, after a family tragedy, must return to the company of his disabled peers.
In Upward Bound, Woody Brown has created an indelible, authentic, and profoundly moving group portrait of autism and other disabilities, all illuminated by his empathy, sly sense of humor, and enormous gifts as a novelist. With remarkable sophistication, insight, and creativity, Brown depicts a community too-often invisible in literature and society. Filled with characters you won’t soon forget, Upward Bound will inspire and touch you, teaching you as much about yourself as the tender, miraculous world behind the center’s doors.
Woody Brown is an author who has minimal speech and types to communicate. He is a summa cum laude graduate of UCLA, where he received top writing honors. He earned an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University in 2024. Upward Bound, his debut novel, is a Read With Jenna book club pick, and was named a Most Anticipated title by The New York Times, Time, Harper’s Bazaar, Good Housekeeping, Alta Journal, Publishers Weekly, and Literary Hub. He was featured in The New York Times and The Guardian. He lives in Los Angeles and is working on a second novel.
Questions about the event?
Email: englishevents@ucla.edu

Jameson in California, and Beyond
2026-05-15 13:00 - 19:00 | Kaplan Hall 193, 415 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095
Jameson in California – and Beyond
Friday, May 15 at 1:00-7:00 pm
Kaplan Hall 193
This day-long event will focus on Fredric Jameson’s intellectual, educational, and now archival legacy and engagement in California, and beyond. The conference will feature scholarly papers, personal reflections, archival updates, and multimedia works.
Register here to attend. An RSVP is required for catering purposes.
Conference Sponsors: Program in Experimental Critical Theory, UCLA Departments of English, Political Science, European Languages and Transcultural Studies, Spanish and Portuguese, and Comparative Literature
Conference Organizer: Eleanor Kaufman
1 pm: Aditya Bahl, UCLA, “Greimas avec Mao: Periodizing the Periphery”
Introduced and moderated by Mary Shannon, UCLA
2 pm: Jason E. Smith, ArtCenter College of Design, “Demographies of the Postmodern”
Introduced and moderated by Joseph Serrano, UC Berkeley
3 pm: Archives and Students
Audra Eagle Yun, UC Irvine, University Archivist
Eleanor Kaufman, UCLA
Saree Makdisi, UCLA
Anjali Prabhu, UCLA
Introduced and moderated by Davide Panagia, UCLA
4:30 pm: Eric Cazdyn, University of Toronto, “Jameson as Blindspot Machine”
Introduced and moderated by Nouri Gana, UCLA
5:30 pm: Kim Stanley Robinson, UC San Diego PhD, “Professor Jameson”
Introduced and moderated by Ursula Heise, UCLA
Questions about the event?
Contact the event coordinators: Lisset Cadena, Comparative Literature; Marta Wallien, English

Spring Reception
2026-05-17 16:00 - 19:00

5th Annual Professional Writing Minor Capstone Seminar Colloquium
2026-05-19 14:00 - 16:45, 2026-05-20 09:00 - 10:45, 2026-05-20 13:00 - 15:45, 2026-05-21 09:00 - 13:45, 2026-05-21 15:00 - 15:45 | Kaplan Hall 126A, 415 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095
Join us for the 5th Annual Professional Writing Minor Capstone Seminar Colloquium!
Dates/Times/Location
Tuesday, May 19 – Thursday, May 21 in 126A Kaplan Hall
Tuesday, 2 to 4:45 pm
Wednesday, 9 to 10:45 am and 1 to 3:45 pm
Thursday, 9 am to 1:45 pm and 3 to 3:45 pm
The full panel schedule is available here.
About the Colloquium
UCLA Writing Programs and the Department of English are thrilled to invite you to our fifth annual Professional Writing Minor Capstone Seminar Colloquium, organized as part of Undergraduate Research Week 2026. In a series of 45-minute panels across three days, students from the Professional Writing Minor will present an exciting array of capstone seminar projects. Fifty-six students will present on a rich diversity of topics that exemplify the range, depth, and individualized paths possible within the Professional Writing Minor. From astronaut hearts to queer horror, birthright citizenship to Los Angeles nightlife, students from diverse majors will share their original work in a range of genres including memoirs, websites, zines, research articles, and more. The colloquium is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served, and a short Q&A will follow each panel. Friends, family, faculty, staff, and students are welcome to attend. Join us to experience writing as an act of both communication and exploration as these emerging writers and soon-to-be graduates share their insights and discoveries.
The PWM Capstone Seminars are led in Sp26 by Writing Programs faculty, Drs. Amber West, Maja Manojlovic, Laurel Westrup, Megan Stephan, and Ms. Rachel Swanger.
Questions about the event?
Visit UCLA Writing Programs for full details.
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” -Joan Didion

Hammer Poetry Series: A.E. Stallings
2026-05-19 19:30 - 21:00 | Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA, 90024
A.E. Stallings, forty-seventh Oxford Professor of Poetry and winner of the MacArthur Fellowship, has published five volumes of poems (most recently This Afterlife), as well as distinguished translations of Lucretius, Hesiod, and the pseudo-Homeric Battle between the Frogs and the Mice. Her new book Frieze Frame: How Poets, Painters, and their Friends Framed the Debate Around Elgin and the Marbles of the Parthenon, is as edifying and entertaining as a son et lumière of its venerable subject. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, the Atlantic Monthly, and the New Yorker.
Organized and hosted by poet, literary critic, and UCLA Distinguished Research Professor Stephen Yenser. Cosponsored by UCLA Department of English and UCLA Recreation.
Questions about the event?
Visit the Hammer Museum for full details.

2026 Spring Athenaeum
2026-05-20 16:00 - 17:30 | Kaplan Hall 193, 415 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095
2026 Spring Athenaeum
Wednesday, May 20 at 4-6pm in Kaplan 193
Featuring Presenters Enrique Olivares-Pesante and Jonathan Grossman, with Yogita Goyal as Respondent.
Please join us in Kaplan 193 for scholarship, refreshments, & conversation.
The Athenaeum brings together one dissertation-stage graduate student and one faculty member to present their research, providing a venue for grad student and faculty research to be in conversation with one another. The hope is to generate collegiality and dialogue across the department, spanning historical periods and methodological approaches. Please join us for conversation and refreshments as we celebrate the wonderful research of our colleagues!

The Sea Within Us: Caring for the Deep
2026-05-21 15:00 - 17:00 | Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA, 90024
Co-presented with the UCLA Department of Media Arts and the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.
To celebrate the 75th anniversary of Rachel Carson’s award-winning and widely influential book, The Sea Around Us, an interdisciplinary group of Indigenous culture bearers, scientists, artists, and ocean storytellers will address the legacy of DDT+, industrial, and radioactive waste dumping off the southern California coast. As a visionary marine biologist, Carson represented the science of the ocean alongside an ethic of accountability to what she termed our “mother sea.” To Carson, the ocean was a teacher, agent, and ancestor carried in our briny veins.
This panel will engage a wide range of perspectives about the cultures of ocean knowledge including Indigenous stewardship, the history and science behind the contamination, its impact on ocean ecosystems and marine mammals, and how collectively we might chart a path toward healing and accountability through diverse practices of caring for the deep.
Presenters
Lihini Aluwihare, Professor, UCSD Scripps Institution of Oceanography
Tina Orduno Calderon, Culture bearer of the Tongva, Chumash and Yoeme Indigenous People
Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Professor, UCLA Department of English and Institute of the Environment and Sustainability
Alissa C. Deming, Vice President of Conservation Medicine and Science, Pacific Marine Mammal Center
Rebeca Méndez, artist and professor, UCLA Department of Design Media Arts
Tina Treude, Professor, UCLA Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences and Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences
Rev. Adelia Sandoval, Spiritual leader of the Acjachemen Indigenous People
David Valentine, Distinguished Professor, UCSB Department of Earth Science
Rosanna Xia, investigative journalist at the Los Angeles Times
Questions about the event?
Visit the Hammer Museum for full details.

ARC with Hannah Van Hove (Vrije Universiteit Brussel and 2025-26 Van Dyck Chair, UCLA)
2026-05-21 16:00 - 17:30 | Kaplan Hall 193, 415 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095
“Ambivalence and the Politics of Form: Literary Experiment and the Question of Representation, 1970-2000.”

Memory, Madness, and Messianism: Thinking with My Father, the Messiah by Gil Z. Hochberg
2026-05-21 17:00 - 18:30 | Rolfe Hall 2125, 345 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095
Gil Hochberg is Ransford Professor of Hebrew, Comparative Literature and Middle East Studies at Columbia University. She discusses her new memoir in conversation with UCLA colleagues, Hannah Jakobsen (Comp Lit), Rachel Lee (English/Gender Studies/Institute of Society & Genetics) & Michael Rothberg (English/Comp Lit).
Sponsored by the Working Group in Memory Studies & the Abolition Medicine & Disability Justice Project.
Co-sponsored by the UCLA Center for the Study of Women/ Barbra Streisand Center, the UCLA Departments of Gender Studies, Comparative Literature and English; UCLA Division of Humanities & the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies.
* Pay-by-space parking available in Lot Five (Level Six) and Lot Three.

Out of Plain Sight
2026-05-21 19:30 - 21:00 | Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA, 90024
Post-screening conversation with UCLA English Professor Elizabeth DeLoughrey, UCLA Design Media Arts Professor Rebeca Méndez, and the film’s co-director, investigative journalist Rosanna Xia.
Co-presented with the UCLA Department of Media Arts and the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.
From the Los Angeles Times and Pulitzer Prize-finalist Rosanna Xia, Out of Plain Sight is a cinematic exposé of an environmental disaster lurking just off the coast of Southern California.
Not far from Catalina Island, aboard one of the most-advanced research ships in the world, David Valentine discovers a corroded barrel on the seafloor that gave him chills. The full environmental horror sharpens into greater clarity once he calls Xia, who pieces together a shocking revelation: In the years after World War II, as many as half a million barrels of toxic waste had been quietly dumped into the ocean—and the consequences continue to haunt the world today.
2024, Dir. Daniel Straub, Rosanna Xia, DCP, color, 94 min.

Questions about the event?
Visit the Hammer Museum for full details.

Medieval Texts Reading Group
2026-05-22 15:00 - 16:30 | Kaplan Hall 193, 415 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095
The UCLA Medieval Texts Reading Group welcomes undergraduate students, graduate students, staff, and faculty interested in medieval literature. Once each term, we get together to discuss a text in English translation from across the Global Middle Ages, to think about what it tells us about its cultural and literary context.
Each discussion will be led by an expert on the chosen text and its place in the wider medieval world. No expertise or preparation beyond a brief skim of the text is required – only enthusiasm!
For our Spring meeting this year, we will read Cædmon’s Hymn and some related texts. Discussion will be led by Professor Erica Weaver (English).
View the readings.
Sponsored by the CMRS Center for Early Global Studies.

Revelation Reading: Cymbeline, Refinished
2026-05-22 16:00 - 18:30 | Kaplan Hall 193, 415 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095
Join us for a screening of Cymbeline, Refinished, directed by Michael Sexton and produced by Red Bull Theater. This event is part of the Revelation Reading Series.
Cymbeline, Refinished
Friday, May 22nd
4:00 PM (approx. 2 hours 15 minutes)
Kaplan Hall 193
The reading will feature Shakespeare’s original play, with Shaw’s reimagined final act, giving us a seamless experience of the two singular geniuses.
Experience this powerful adaptation and join in brief discussions, with opportunities to connect with others after the screening.
Hosted by: Mayra Cortes, Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, English Department.

Packer Lecture with Caleb Smith: On Disavowal
2026-05-26 12:30 - 14:00 | Kaplan Hall 193, 415 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095
Join UCLA English on Tuesday, May 26 and Thursday, May 28 for the Barbara L. Packer lectures featuring Caleb Smith, professor of English and American Studies at Yale University. In addition to his formal lectures, Professor Smith will lead a graduate workshop on Wednesday, May 27. All events include a light lunch. An RSVP is required to attend the lectures and graduate workshop. Please RSVP at the link below.
Register here to attend the lectures and graduate workshop.
About the lectures:
Ancient speech acts like confession, disavowal, and testimony have strange afterlives in modern, secular culture. Smith’s lectures reflect on how we use these rituals and what kind of justice we want from them.
Event Schedule:
“On Disavowal”: Tuesday, May 26 at 12:30pm. A light lunch will be served at 12pm.
“On Disavowal,” is an essay in the genealogy of morals, tracing the development of disavowal from religious and legal ceremonies through psychoanalysis to contemporary political rhetoric and critical theory.
Graduate Workshop: Wednesday, May 27 at 12:00pm. Lunch provided.
Graduate students and faculty are welcome to attend a lunch workshop with Professor Smith.
“Revenge Vows”: Thursday, May 28 at 12:30pm. A light lunch will be served at 12pm.
“Revenge Vows,” takes up a case study from nineteenth-century American literature, Charles Chesnutt’s “The Dumb Witness” (1897), where a testifying voice becomes an instrument of binding punishment.
Caleb Smith is professor of English and American Studies at Yale University, where he teaches courses in American literature, cultural history, and critical theory. His books include The Prison and the American Imagination (Yale University Press, 2009); The Oracle and the Curse (Harvard University Press, 2013); and the first published edition of Austin Reed’s 1858 prison memoir, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict (Random House, 2016). His latest, Thoreau’s Axe: Distraction and Discipline in American Culture, appeared from Princeton University Press in 2023.
Questions about the events?
Contact Marta Wallien: mwallien@english.ucla.edu

Graduate Lunch Workshop: Caleb Smith
2026-05-27 12:00 - 13:30 | Kaplan Hall 193, 415 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095
Join UCLA English on Tuesday, May 26 and Thursday, May 28 for the Barbara L. Packer lectures featuring Caleb Smith, professor of English and American Studies at Yale University. In addition to his formal lectures, Professor Smith will lead a graduate workshop on Wednesday, May 27. All events include a light lunch. An RSVP is required to attend the lectures and graduate workshop. Please RSVP at the link below.
Register here to attend the lectures and graduate workshop.
About the lecturers:
Ancient speech acts like confession, disavowal, and testimony have strange afterlives in modern, secular culture. Smith’s lectures reflect on how we use these rituals and what kind of justice we want from them.
Lectures and Graduate Workshop Schedule:
“On Disavowal”: Tuesday, May 26 at 12:30pm. A light lunch will be served at 12pm.
“On Disavowal,” is an essay in the genealogy of morals, tracing the development of disavowal from religious and legal ceremonies through psychoanalysis to contemporary political rhetoric and critical theory.
Graduate Workshop: Wednesday, May 27 at 12:00pm. Lunch provided.
Graduate students and faculty are welcome to attend a lunch workshop with Professor Smith.
“Revenge Vows”: Thursday, May 28 at 12:30pm. A light lunch will be served at 12pm.
“Revenge Vows,” takes up a case study from nineteenth-century American literature, Charles Chesnutt’s “The Dumb Witness” (1897), where a testifying voice becomes an instrument of binding punishment.
Caleb Smith is professor of English and American Studies at Yale University, where he teaches courses in American literature, cultural history, and critical theory. His books include The Prison and the American Imagination (Yale University Press, 2009); The Oracle and the Curse (Harvard University Press, 2013); and the first published edition of Austin Reed’s 1858 prison memoir, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict (Random House, 2016). His latest, Thoreau’s Axe: Distraction and Discipline in American Culture, appeared from Princeton University Press in 2023.
Questions about the events?
Contact Marta Wallien: mwallien@english.ucla.edu

20/21 Working Group with John Lurz (Tufts University)
2026-05-27 16:00 - 17:30 | Kaplan Hall 193, 415 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095
The Barthes Fantastic: John Lurz in conversation with Louise Hornby
Wednesday, May 27 at 4:00 pm
Kaplan 193
John Lurz explores the intersection of literature and everyday life in the work of Roland Barthes. Doing so allows him to develop an expanded understanding of the fantastic as a conceptual category—a way of thinking—in which the texts we read come to inform the texture of our real lives.
RSVP: bit.ly/425BmDD
