Faculty

UCLA faculty who are currently members of the CMRS Center for Early Global Studies are listed below by department with a summary of their academic interests and specialties. Faculty belonging to interdepartmental programs are cross-listed.

UCLA faculty specializing in any aspect of studies of the periods from the 3rd to the 17th century CE across the globe may request to be added to the Center’s faculty roster. Such requests are directed to the Center Director and approved by the Center’s Faculty Advisory Committee.

ANTHROPOLOGY
Stephen Acabado: Landscape archaeology; Early Modern Southeast Asia; historical ecology; historical archaeology; Indigenous responses to colonialism; engaged scholarship; Ifugao, Philippines.
Justin Dunnavant: African and African Diaspora archaeology; historical archaeology; colonialism; oral history; community-based archaeology; maritime archaeology; black geographies.
ART HISTORY
Lamia Balafrej: Islamic art and aesthetic theory; Persian manuscript painting; the Mediterranean; art, labor, and ecology; iconoclasm.
Charlene Villaseñor Black: Early modern Iberian world, 16th-18th centuries; early modern art, trade, and materiality; early modern art and science; Catholic art and gender politics.
Meredith Cohen: Art, architecture, and urban development of high medieval Europe; digital reconstruction.
Kristopher Kersey: The histories of art, material culture, and design in Japan, with particular attention to narrative, gender, materiality, and historiography.
Sharon E. J. Gerstel: Byzantine art and archaeology; late medieval peasantry; art and archaeology of the Crusades; ethnography of the early modern Balkans; cultural exchange in the Americas; construction technology; material culture studies; spatial theory.
Stella Nair: Andean art, architecture, and urbanism; cross cultural exchange in the Americas; construction technology; material culture studies; spatial theory.
Bronwen Wilson: The history of art, visual culture, and urbanism of Venice and the Mediterranean world (1400-1700); print culture; portraiture and physiognomy; cartography; travel imagery; early modern globalization.
ASIAN LANGUAGES & CULTURES
Stephanie Balkwill: Literary and public lives of Buddhist women who lived in what is now China between the 4th and 6th centuries.
Torquil Duthie: Early Japanese poetry, mythology, and historical writing.
Michael Emmerich: Classical, early modern, and modern Japanese literature.
Stephanie W. Jamison: Vedic Sanskrit; Indo-European linguistics.
Huijun Mai: Pre-modern Chinese literature and culture.
Oona Paredes: Historicizing “the fringe” in Early Modern Southeast Asia; pericoloniality; Catholic missions in the Spanish colonial period; Indigenous religion, conversion, syncretism; Lumad/Indigenous peoples; oral tradition as history; Mindanao, in what is now the Philippines.
Satoko Shimazaki: Early modern Japanese theater and popular literature; the modern history of kabuki; gender representation on the kabuki stage; sound and visual media; the interaction of performance, print, and text.
Sixiang Wang: Korean history (1300–1800), science, knowledge, and literary culture in early modern East Asia; comparative empire; the history of diplomacy.
Yinghui Wu: Late imperial Chinese literature (ca. 1400-1900); print culture; the history of reading, theater and popular culture.
CLASSICS
Sarah Beckmann: Late antiquity; domestic archaeology; Roman sculpture and statuary collection; the Roman provinces.
David Blank: Ancient philosophy; ancient medicine and rhetoric; transmission of classical texts.
Dieter Gunkel: The development of ancient Greek, Latin, and related Indo-European languages; how language is set to poetic meter and melody.
Francesca Martelli: Latin literature, especially Ovid and Cicero; the reception of classics in the Medieval and Renaissance worlds.
Kathryn A. Morgan: Greek intellectual history and philosophy and its reception in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
Giulia Sissa: Culture and thought in ancient societies; the classical tradition in medieval and Renaissance political theory; Political Science.
Lydia Spielberg: Historiography; classical rhetorical tradition; Roman political thought and reception, especially of Tacitus.
Adriana Vazquez: Latin literature of the Augustan period; the reception of Classics in Lusophone and Hispanophone literature of the early modern period, with a special focus on the Americas.
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
Allison Kanner-Botan: Literary cultures of early Eurasia, specializing in Arabic and Persian literature of the Persianate world (Balkans to Bengal); Medieval studies; History of sexuality; Animal studies; Mad and disability studies; Global south and anti-colonial theory
Efraín Kristal: Spanish-American colonial literature; the Spanish historical epic; Spanish and Portuguese.
Massimo Ciavolella: Boccaccio; Renaissance literature; Renaissance theories of love; Italian.
Nancy Alicia Martínez: Transhistorical dialogue between Central American and European written and print cultures; media theory, Indigenous studies, decolonial theory, sound studies, and book history; English, Spanish, German, and K’iche literature
Zrinka Stahuljak (CMRS-CEGS Director): Continental French, Anglo-French, and Outremer literature, historiography, and culture; Mediterranean studies; manuscript studies; medievalism; history of sexuality; translation studies; French and Francophone Studies.
DANCE/WORLD ARTS & CULTURES
Anurima Banerji: Critical historicizations of Indian dance and its relationship to the state.
ENGLISH
Christine Chism: Old and Middle English literature, drama, and culture; theories of history, society, and cultural encounter; medieval Islam and Arabic; gender and sexuality.
Matthew Fisher: Historiography; hagiography; paleography; codicology; Old and Middle English literature; Anglo-Norman literature; digital humanities.
Barbara Fuchs: Early modern English and Spanish literature; Mediterranean and transatlantic studies; literature and empire; transnationalism and literary history; race and religion in the early modern world; Spanish & Portuguese.
Eric Jager: Old English; Middle English; Latin; French; Italian; Augustine and patristics; the history of the book; law and ritual; literary theory.
Arthur Little: Nationalism and imperialism in early modern English culture; Shakespeare; race, gender, and sexuality in early modern culture.
Alexander Mazzaferro: Early American and African American literature; history of political thought; history of science; religious and secularity studies; race, slavery, and antislavery; indigenous studies; the novel and narrative form; book history; digital humanities.
Claire McEachern: Sixteenth and seventeenth-century English literature; historiography; national identity; history of gender; political theory; religion; editing of Shakespeare.
Debora Shuger (Distinguished Professor): Tudor-Stuart religion and literature; neo-Latin; early modern intellectual history (especially religion, law, political theory).
Arvind Thomas: Middle English and Early Modern Literature, particularly texts that engage discourses in Latin such as canon law.
Robert N. Watson (Distinguished Professor): Shakespeare; Renaissance drama; Metaphysical poetry.
Erica Weaver: Old English; Anglo Latin; Old English literature and poetry; poetic theory.
EUROPEAN LANGUAGES & TRANSCULTURAL STUDIES
Raphaëlle Burns: Medieval and Early Modern Literature; cultural and intellectual history; law; medicine; journalism.
Massimo Ciavolella: Boccaccio; Renaissance literature; Renaissance theories of love; Comparative Literature.
Roberta Morosini: Medieval and Renaissance Italian culture and literature in a pan-Mediterranean perspective, with a sea level approach and a strong belief in the Archipelagic thought, for a geo-philology of the sea; studies of the Mediterranean, metaliterary and geocritical studies, and spatial and cartographic writings from Dante to Renaissance island books; Christian-Muslim relations and mis-representations of Muhammad the Prophet of Islam
Zrinka Stahuljak (CMRS-CEGS Director): Continental French, Anglo-French, and Outremer literature, historiography, and culture; Mediterranean studies; manuscript studies; medievalism; history of sexuality; translation studies; Comparative Literature.
Stefania Tutino: Post-Reformation Catholicism; European early modern intellectual and cultural history; History.
HISTORY
Jessica Goldberg: Medieval Mediterranean history, especially Italy and Egypt; economic and legal history; geography; Cairo Geniza studies.
Andrea Goldman: Cultural and social history of early modern and modern China, with particular emphasis on the subfields of urban history, performance, the politics of aesthetics, and gender studies.
Katsuya Hirano: The intersection between history and critical theory with a focus on questions of ideology, political economy, and subject/subjectivity.
Choon Hwee Koh: Ottoman infrastructure; early modern fiscal administration; economic and social history.
Jamie Kreiner: Late antique and early medieval history.
Anthony Pagden: The history of political and social theory especially European overseas expansion and its aftermath; Political Science.
Carla Gardina Pestana: English America, especially 17th century; religion and empire in the British Atlantic world; conquest of Jamaica.
Peter Stacey: Renaissance political theory; intellectual history.
Kevin Terraciano: Colonial Latin American history, especially New Spain; Mesoamerican writing systems and languages; ethnohistory; philology; art history.
Stefania Tutino: Post-Reformation Catholicism; European early modern intellectual and cultural history; Italian.
Richard Von Glahn: Economic and social history of China, 10th-18th centuries; monetary history; comparative economic history; global economic integration, 1000-1800; East Asian maritime history, 1000-1800.
Greg Woolf: The Ancient Mediterranean and its hinterlands, especially Roman material culture and history; urbanism; human mobility.
INDO-EUROPEAN STUDIES PROGRAM
Dieter Gunkel: The development of ancient Greek, Latin, and related Indo-European languages; how language is set to poetic meter and melody.
Stephanie W. Jamison: Vedic Sanskrit; Indo-European linguistics; Asian Languages and Cultures.
Christopher M. Stevens: Germanic linguistics and philology; historical linguistics; dialectology; Germanic Languages.
MEDICINE
Leon G. Fine: Professor of Biomedical Sciences and Medicine; Director, Program in History of Medicine, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
MUSICOLOGY
Cesar Favila: Music, religion, gender, and race in New Spain; women’s sacred music.
Elizabeth Randell Upton: Medieval and Renaissance music and musical culture; musical paleography and codicology; performance and listening; Early Music revivals; medievalism and music.
NEAR EASTERN LANGUAGES & CULTURES
Solange Ashby: Roles of women – queens, priestesses, mothers – in traditional Nubian religious practices.
Carol Bakhos: Ancient and medieval rabbinic texts; comparative scriptural interpretation.
Catherine E. Bonesho: Early Judaism and literature; religious competition in Late Antiquity; Aramaic and Syriac language and literature.
Michael Cooperson: Classical Arabic literature, especially biography; the cultural history of Abbasid Baghdad.
S. Peter Cowe: Medieval East Christian theology and spirituality; Armenian language and literature.
Domenico Ingenito: Pre-Modern Persian poetry (in particular the history of lyric genres at the intersection of eroticisms and politics); rhetoric; prosody.
Luke Benson Yarbrough: Interreligious contacts in the Islamic world; Islamic historiography; manuscript studies; paleography.
PHILOSOPHY
Calvin Normore: Medieval philosophy; medieval and early modern political theory; 16th- and 17th-century philosophy.
POLITICAL SCIENCE
Anthony Pagden: The history of political and social theory especially European overseas expansion and its aftermath; History.
Giulia Sissa: Culture and thought in ancient societies; the classical tradition in medieval and Renaissance political theory; Classics.
SLAVIC LANGUAGES & LITERATURES
Gail Lenhoff: Old Russian hagiography; history writing; textual production.
SOCIOLOGY
Rebecca Jean Emigh: Fifteenth-century Tuscan agriculture; historical demography; sociological theory.
SPANISH & PORTUGUESE
Verónica Cortínez: Colonial and contemporary Latin American literature; literary theory; Chilean film.
John Dagenais: Medieval Castilian and Catalan literature; Hispano-Latin; manuscript culture; digital humanities; Romanesque architecture and pilgrimage.
Barbara Fuchs: Early modern English and Spanish literature; Mediterranean and transatlantic studies; literature and empire; transnationalism and literary history; race and religion in the early modern world; English.
Efraín Kristal: Spanish-American colonial literature; the Spanish historical epic; Comparative Literature.
Javier Patiño Loira: Early modern Iberian literature; early modern Spanish and Italian poetics and rhetoric; early modern libraries.