Guest Speaker: Hannah Weaver (Columbia University) On the basis of manuscript evidence and a textual tradition that includes Ovid, Chrétien de Troyes, and Chaucer, this paper traces the uneven capacity of cloth to communicate. Hannah Weaver is an assistant professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the author of articles on Latin […]
Late Antique eXcursus (LAX) is a new seminar series at UCLA sponsored by the Robert and Dorothy Wellman Chair in Medieval History and by the CMRS Center for Early Global Studies. The series, which hosts a visiting scholar of Late Antiquity or the early Middle Ages each quarter, is designed to support graduate education, make […]
“‘Breedlings’ and the ‘most sad Fenns’: Perceptions of Untameable Places and People in Samuel Pepys’s England” Guest Speaker: Molly Warsh (University of Pittsburgh) In this talk, Warsh will consider Pepys’s observations about the English fens and their inhabitants in the context of shifting seventeenth century ideas about what made certain places and people wild. With Pepys’s […]
“Ilícita Amistad: Women’s Plural Relationships in Bigamy Cases of Colonial Mexico” Guest Speaker: Rebeca Martínez-Tibbles (History) This paper examines ilícita amistad—illicit or informal romantic relationships—as a central feature of women’s lives in colonial Mexico, particularly as revealed through bigamy cases prosecuted by the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Drawing on extensive archival research in Mexico City […]
The series, which hosts a visiting scholar of Late Antiquity or the early Middle Ages each quarter, is designed to support graduate education, make new connections across our community of scholars in southern California, and explore exciting projects-in-progress in the field. Stefan Esders (Freie Universität Berlin) will question forced baptism in Late Antiquity Register to […]
The Architecture Working Group will host their next event on Wednesday, April 8, 2026, with guest speaker Dr. Diane Favro, UCLA Professor Emerita. Dr. Favro is a Distinguished Research Professor of Architecture and Urban Design and studies the Roman built environment, including The Urban Image of Augustan Rome, and was president and Fellow of the […]
Participation in the Seminar consists of group discussion of pre-circulated papers, typically drafts of articles, book chapters, or dissertation chapters (with complete apparatus). Two of the papers are ordinarily by emerging scholars (including PhD students) and the other two are by established scholars. We allocate one hour per paper and presenters should anticipate substantial, and […]
Isabella Kelly-Ramirez, Cosmic Provenance, 2023 In his 1996 essay “Why Comparisons Are Odious,” W.J.T. Mitchell observed that if “difference and identity are the potent and inevitable terms in a new comparativism grounded in culture, it may be important to remind ourselves how insidious comparison can be, how invidious and odious.” Although written in response to […]
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 […]
In his landmark 1611 dictionary, the Tesoro de la le lengua castellana, the Castilian linguist Sebastián de Covarrubias noted that the verbs “to translate” in Spanish, traducir and trasladar, possessed both the meaning of words moving between languages and of movement of objects across space. Translation involved people, words, objects, images, and ideas in motion […]