UCLA Department of English

UCLA Department of English English at UCLA is recognized as one of the leading literary departments in the nation.

Join us this Tuesday, September 29 at 4pm for Ecology, Memory, Poetry: Reading Paul Celan in the Anthropocene, presented...
09/23/2026

Join us this Tuesday, September 29 at 4pm for Ecology, Memory, Poetry: Reading Paul Celan in the Anthropocene, presented by UCLA Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies and the Working Group in Memory Studies. Paul Celan, one of the most important poets of post-World War II literature, is famous for his lyrical engagements with memory and the Holocaust. In recent years, he has also been read as a poet who addresses some of the most fundamental issues of environmental thought and writing in the Anthropocene: deep time, altered landscapes, new materialisms, posthumanisms, expressions of more-than-human loss, and poetry in its relation to geology. This roundtable brings together two experts on Celan and the environmental humanities – Jason Groves and Paweł Piszczatowski–with a poet and researcher, Rachel Kaufman, to explore Celan as an environmental poet.

Learn more: https://english.ucla.edu/events/ecology-memory-poetry-reading-paul-celan-in-the-anthropocene/

Happening today at 5pm in Kaplan 193! Join our pizza party to celebrate the end of spring quarter!Students from the Crea...
06/02/2026

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 f...
05/26/2026

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/

05/05/2026

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, Up...
05/05/2026

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 differ...
04/29/2026

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

Join us on Thursday, April 30 at 4pm for a talk by Dr. Jonathan Howard, “Inhabitants of the Deep: The Blueness of Blackn...
04/21/2026

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 t...
04/07/2026

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...
04/03/2026

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.

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