The Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies is pleased to announce that Professor Zrinka Stahuljak (Comparative Literature and ELTS, PI), together with Professor Shannon Speed (Gender Studies and Anthropology, co-PI), received a $1M grant from the Mellon Foundation for “Race in the Global Past through Native Lenses.” Realized through a partnership between the CMRS Center for Early Global Studies, directed by Stahuljak, and the Center for American Indian Studies, directed by Speed, the three-year grant will initiate a substantive collaboration between UCLA and California Native and Indigenous communities. The goal of the grant is to create disciplinary pathways and improve the institutional climate that will counter the lack of Native epistemes in academic disciplines and buttress conditions for recruitment and retention of Indigenous faculty in the university. To do so, the grant will support scholars-in-residence, faculty and students, community advisors, postdoctoral fellows, and tribal managers who will compare and co-learn the historical articulations of “race” in different parts of the globe in the period broadly defined as “premodern” or “pre-/early colonial.” The collaborative cohorts will gather in research workshops, focused on comparative processes of racialization in the global past and geared toward curricular design work and inflecting museum and institutional practices.
To learn more about the project, please see the UCLA Newsroom story.