Raymond Knapp is Distinguished Professor of Musicology, and has served twice as Chair of his the Department (2006-09 and 2013-16); he is currently Academic Associate Dean in the School, and Director of the UCLA Center for Musical Humanities. Knapp has a broad interest in classical and contemporary music, and has authored 5 books, including the…

Romy Sutherland is Assistant Adjunct Professor of Comparative Literature at UCLA where she teaches courses on film in comparative contexts. She also teaches in the freshman cluster program. For the cluster course, “Mind over Matter: History, Science and Philosophy of the Brain,” she lectures on filmic portrayals of trauma and schizophrenia, and offers a seminar…

Efraín Kristal is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at UCLA. He has been a member of the faculty team responsible for teaching the “Mind over Matter” Cluster Course 73 over the last five years. In this course he has lectured on the history of literature as it intersects the history of the brain, and has…

Lauri Mattenson has been teaching composition courses for UCLA Writing Programs for over 25 years, and was awarded the 2020 Honors Division Eugen Weber Teaching Award for her work with undergraduates in BodyMind Literacy, an experiential Honors Collegium seminar she created in order to promote a more mindful and embodied approach to learning. Each summer,…

Vivian Delchamps is an English PhD candidate studying American literature, disability studies, and the health humanities at UCLA. In her research and teaching, Delchamps addresses the centrality of ableism to the legacies of gender and racial violence. Her dissertation, “The Names of Sickness: Writing Disability and Revising Diagnosis in Nineteenth-Century America,” argues that literature reveals…

Kersti Francis is a PhD candidate in English at UCLA where she works on the intersections between magic, gender, and sexuality in the Middle Ages and early English Renaissance (1100-1600). Her dissertation project, Queer Magic: Sodomy, Sin and The Supernatural in the Later Middle Ages, investigates the intersections of magic and gender in medieval literature…

I am a PhD Candidate in History at UCLA with a broad interest in the political possibilities that the study of history has for reimagining the places of our collective futures. My doctoral project examines histories of race, caste, and the cultural politics of place-making in the Central Himalayas. I evaluate the social and ecological…

Rebecca Chhay (she/her) is a doctoral student in the English department. Her research focuses on comparative ethnic US literatures, trauma, and memory. She holds a BA in Literatures in English from UC San Diego.