UCLA Department of English

Happening today at 5pm in Kaplan 193! Join our pizza party to celebrate the end of spring quarter!

Students from the Creative Writing Program will also 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!

Join UCLA English TODAY, Tuesday, May 26 and Thursday, May 28 at 12:30pm in Kap 193 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. Full details and RSVP: https://english.ucla.edu/events/packer-lecture-with-caleb-smith-on-disavowal/

Research with a chance of meatballs - UCLA Humanities Using resources from the Clark Library collection, fourth-year student Alfons Rosales prepared a tasty dish from a 300-year-old recipe.

Join us on Wed. May 13 at 5pm in Kap 193 to celebrate the publication of UCLA English alum Woody Brown’s debut novel, Upward Bound. A small number of books will be available for purchase. Light refreshments will be served.

Event details & RSVP: https://english.ucla.edu/events/book-launch-upward-bound-by-woody-brown/

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.

Woody Brown is an author who has minimal speech and types to communicate. He is a summa cm 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.

Bruin Giving Day is April 28-29! Through 9 p.m. PDT on April 29, the UCLA community is joining together to make a difference through the power of philanthropy.

During the campus-wide giving challenge, consider a contribution to the Department of English. Your gift will help support the study of literature, culture, and critical theory, as well as our transformative, department-led study abroad trips, which take students to Dublin, Florence and London each summer.

Visit the UCLA Humanities Bruin Giving Day page, find “English” and/or “English Travel Study” and click the “Give” button to make your gift today and show your Bruin spirit!

https://bruingivingday.ucla.edu/pages/humanities-landing-page-1?appeal_id=69cedb4bcda9f4cbd5c6bfbf

Celebrate poetry tomorrow! Join us Thurs. April 30 at 12pm in Kap 193 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.

Event details: https://english.ucla.edu/events/lunch-poems-a-poetry-reading-by-eugene-ostashevsky-and-aditya-bahl/

Join us on Thursday, April 30 at 4pm for a talk by Dr. Jonathan Howard, “Inhabitants of the Deep: The Blueness of Blackness.” The talk will be followed by a Q & A moderated by Uri McMillan, Professor of English at UCLA.

Event details: https://english.ucla.edu/events/inhabitants-of-the-deep-the-blueness-of-blackness/

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.

Happening next week! Join us on Thursday, April 16 at 4pm in Kaplan 193 for a talk by Justin L. Mann, “Getting Lost in the Dark: Three Speculations on Black Insecurity.”

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.

A light reception will follow the event. Full details and to RSVP: https://english.ucla.edu/events/getting-lost-in-the-dark-three-speculations-on-black-insecurity/

The talk will be followed by a Q & A moderated by Uri McMillan, Professor of English at UCLA.

Happening next week! Join us Thursday, April 9 at 4pm in Kaplan 193 for a talk by Oxford University professor Jaś Elsner, “Lacan’s Veil: Ekphrasis between Access and Occlusion.”

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.

RSVP here: https://english.ucla.edu/events/lacans-veil-ekphrasis-between-access-and-occlusion/

Pictured: Detail from “Woman Reading a Letter” by Gabriël Metsu.

Join us on Wednesday, April 8 at 4pm in Kaplan 193 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. Drinks and light refreshments will be served. Full information and RSVP here: https://english.ucla.edu/events/an-afternoon-of-poetry-with-bob-perelman-and-brian-kim-stefans/