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UCLA poised to become a world leader in hip-hop studies

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Building on decades of scholarship, the campus’s new Hip Hop Initiative will highlight the local and global impact of this Black art form
Collage image of the covers of books on hip-hop and Black culture by UCLA faculty members who will play an integral role in the new Hip Hop Initiative.

A sampling of books on hip-hop and Black culture by UCLA faculty members who will play an integral role in the new Hip Hop Initiative. Image credit: UCLA

By Jessica Wolf

UCLA’s Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies today launched its wide-ranging Hip Hop Initiative, which will establish UCLA as a leading center for hip-hop studies globally by way of artist residencies, community engagement programs, a book series, an oral history and digital archive project, postdoctoral fellowships and more.

Chuck D, the longtime leader of the politically and socially conscious rap group Public Enemy, is the program’s first artist-in-residence.

The initiative focuses on hip-hop as one of modern history’s most powerful cultural movements and most visible symbols of contemporary Black performance and protest.

“As we celebrate 50 years of hip-hop music and cultural history, the rigorous study of the culture offers us a wealth of intellectual insight into the massive social and political impact of Black music, Black history and Black people on global culture — from language, dance, visual art and fashion to electoral politics, political activism and more,” said anthropology professor H. Samy Alim, who is spearheading the initiative.

Co-leading the initiative with Alim are Bunche Center assistant director Tabia Shawel and Samuel Lamontagne, a doctoral candidate in the department of ethnomusicology.

The initiative is something Alim and his colleagues have been working toward for decades. It builds on the wealth of hip-hop scholarship produced at UCLA and across institutes of higher education since the 1990s and comes at a “convergence moment” when hip-hop music and culture have become dominant in the public sphere, as evidenced by the recent Super Bowl halftime show and the addition of break dancing to the 2024 Olympic Games.

“We’re also in a historical moment of hip-hop culture entering its ‘museum phase,’” said dream hampton, a writer and filmmaker who serves on the group’s advisory board.

Indeed, the Smithsonian Institution recently released a comprehensive hip-hop anthology, and museums like the Universal Hip Hop Museum in the Bronx and the South African Hip Hop Museum in Johannesburg are solely dedicated to the music and culture.

Shining a light on the West Coast and Los Angeles

With the launch of the initiative, UCLA becomes the first major West Coast destination for scholarly explorations of hip-hop culture, which allows for a deeper focus on hip-hop’s local development and impact, said Lamontagne, whose dissertation reexamines Los Angeles hip-hop history.

“Our goal,” he said, “is also to advance the legacy of UCLA by producing original, creative, public-facing, social justice–oriented work and building bridges between academia and the community by discussing the implications of scholarly research and how it can serve Black and brown communities in Los Angeles.”

The concentration of world-renowned scholars of hip-hop at UCLA makes the campus uniquely suited to lead hip-hop studies, both locally and globally, into the future, Shawel noted.

“At this moment, the UCLA Bunche Center has a critical mass of highly regarded, innovative faculty who, in some instances, have been writing about hip-hop culture for over four decades, exploring its musical, social and political impact around the world, from South Central to South Africa,” she said.

The Hip Hop Initiative’s advisory board includes some of the nation’s leading hip-hop artists and thinkers, like hampton, Chuck D, Joan Morgan, Davey D and UCLA alumni Jeff Chang and Ben Caldwell, who will serve alongside UCLA professors Cheryl Keyes, Bryonn Bain, Adam Bradley, Scot Brown, Gaye Theresa Johnson, Robin Kelley, Kyle Mays and Shana Redmond.

Image of Hip-hop legends Chuck D, Rakim and Talib Kweli, curator and journalist Tyree Boyd-Pates, and UCLA’s H. Samy Alim at an event at the California African American Museum co-sponsored by the Hip Hop Studies Working Group at UCLA.

Left to right: Hip-hop legends Chuck D, Rakim and Talib Kweli, curator and journalist Tyree Boyd-Pates, and UCLA’s H. Samy Alim at an event at the California African American Museum co-sponsored by the Hip Hop Studies Working Group at UCLA. (March 11, 2020) Image credit: HRDWRKER/Courtesy of California African American Museum

Hip-hop studies: Growing from UCLA roots

One of the pioneering academics in the field, Keyes is a professor at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music and chair of the department of African American studies. Nearly two decades ago, a group of graduate students set up an informal hip-hop research group with Keyes as their guide. In 2005, Alim organized their efforts into the formal Hip Hop Studies Working Group at UCLA, which has become a space for graduate students, postdoctoral scholars and advanced undergraduates to explore methodological and theoretical issues in the study of hip-hop culture.

“It’s been incredible to witness and mentor so many students as they reach into the histories and experiences of the communities that gave rise to hip-hop,” Keyes said. “There’s a richness and depth and context that are yet to be discovered and revealed, and this initiative will support much more of that.”

Students have also benefited from the working group’s ongoing speaker and event series, which has recently featured hip-hop icons Rakim, Chuck D and Talib Kweli at the California African American Museum and a film screening and discussion with rapper and filmmaker Boots Riley at the Fowler Museum at UCLA.

In addition to supporting the efforts of the Hip Hop Studies Working Group, the Hip Hop Initiative will include a wide variety of programs, including:

  • Artists-in-residence
    UCLA will host hip-hop artists whose work foregrounds issues of community engagement and social justice. Chuck D, who begins his UCLA residency this week, will participate in a series of on-campus events that bring together artists and members of the community.
  • Global community engagement
    Community-based projects include the Hip Hop High School–to–Higher Education Pipeline, the Hip Hop Disability Justice Project (with the Krip-Hop movement) and a long-standing project exploring hip-hop as culturally sustaining pedagogy in Spain and South Africa.
  • Book series and publications
    The initiative will expand the University of California Press Hip Hop Studies Series, which is edited by Alim and Chang along with leading hip-hop intellectuals Tricia Rose, Mark Anthony Neal, Marc Lamont Hill and others. The second book from this series, “Rebel Speak: A Justice Movement Mixtape” by Bryonn Bain, hits bookstores this spring. The initiative will also support the work of emerging scholars through manuscript-development workshops.
  • Postdoctoral fellowships
    The initiative will support a research position intended for hip-hop studies scholars whose work seeks to improve the conditions of Black life. Scholars will be housed in the Bunche Center.
  • Hip-hop lecture series
    Public-facing lectures will feature cutting-edge hip-hop scholarship presented by international scholars.
  • Oral history and digital archive
    UCLA is the first institution on the West Coast to develop an archive dedicated to the study of hip-hop in Los Angeles, which has long been a major hub for hip-hop cultural production and the hip-hop industry. Faculty and staff involved in the initiative have begun a community-based oral history and digital archive focused on preserving the history of West Coast hip-hop.

Read more on UCLA Newsroom and UCLA Magazine about hip-hop studies at UCLA:

► Teaching rap lyrics as literature

► Cheryl Keyes hits the right notes with Smithsonian anthology

► Are major labels passing up profits by playing to racial stereotypes?

► Bryonn Bain: ‘Lyrics from lockdown’

► Beat scholars

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu.

Department of African American Studies launches ‘Celebrate Us’ speaker series with talk by Kyle T. Mays

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At the close of Black History Month, the UCLA Department of African American Studies launched its new “Celebrate Us” lecture series, which focuses on topics that explore and celebrate Black life. On February 28, 2022, inaugural speaker Kyle T. Mays joined a virtual audience to discuss “Afro-Indigenous Relations from Black and Red Power to Contemporary Popular Culture,” based on themes explored in his recent book:

Mays, a Black and Saginaw Anishinaabe scholar, teaches African American studies and American Indian studies at UCLA. His book, “An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States,” is a groundbreaking intersectional study of U.S. history, racism and Afro-Indigenous solidarity.

Darnell Hunt, dean of the UCLA Division of Social Sciences, introduced the series. “Our motto in the social sciences division is ‘Engaging L.A., Changing the World,’” Hunt said. “Lecture series like ‘Celebrate Us’ contribute to the dialogue and positive impact we hope to see in the world by helping us make sense of the dynamic changes affecting the Black community today.”

Department chair Cheryl L. Keyes, also a professor of African American studies, ethnomusicology and global jazz studies, led the event, which was co-sponsored by UCLA American Indian Studies.

Learn more at the UCLA Department of African American Studies website.

Image credit: Rythum Vinoben

A legacy of confronting injustice

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UCLA Professor Terence Keel’s groundbreaking interdisciplinary work uncovers deadly hidden bias

Image of Dr. Terence Keel

Terence Keel delivering keynote lecture at Brown University Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice. Image credit: Rythum Vinoben

By Jonathan Riggs

As a freshman at Xavier University of Louisiana, Terence Keel carried a lot of weight on his shoulders. He dreamed of studying medicine to honor the hard work of his ancestors—sharecroppers, autoworkers and Black servicemen—and the loving diligence of his parents, who championed education and made sure he participated in STEM enrichment programs.

“Everything changed when my mother died from a very aggressive form of cancer. Because she was Black and didn’t have a lot of resources, she went undiagnosed when it should have been caught earlier,” Keel says. “Her passing shifted for me what I thought about science, medicine and their limits. I started to ask larger questions about the meaning and purpose of death, life, dignity and accountability.”

Those questions inspired Keel to switch his major to religion, and to go on to earn a master’s at Harvard Divinity School and then a doctorate in religion and the history of science at Harvard. Today, Keel holds a split appointment in the Department of African American Studies (in UCLA Social Sciences) and the Institute for Society and Genetics (in UCLA Life Sciences). In addition, he is the Founding Director of the BioCritical Studies Lab, the Associate Director in the Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice & Health at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, and the Advisor for Structural Competency and Innovation at the UCLA Simulation Center inside the David Geffen School of Medicine.

In 2018, Keel’s first award-winning book, Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science, discussed how pervasive Western religious ideas have shaped the approach of scientists and their work.

“For so much of human history, we have wanted to believe that God or nature determines the destiny of living things, so we have downplayed the significance of human activity in charting the course of history,” he says. “One clear example is the sustained unwillingness, until recently, to acknowledge that industrialization has fundamentally changed the climate of the Earth. I’m really interested in how our cultural commitments get in the way of good science and hard questions.”

His current work takes this sensibility and examines the life chances of Black and brown people, whose very health has been affected by structural racism’s influence on everything from access to medical care to prevailing beliefs about biology. Spurred on by the murder of George Floyd and the controversial subsequent medical investigations, Keel launched The Coroner Reports Project.

The project is a collaboration with Nick Shapiro, assistant professor, UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics; Helen Jones of the social justice organization Dignity and Power Now; and Lauren Brown, assistant professor, San Diego State University School of Public Health. It examines crowd-based sources to estimate the number of people who have died in law enforcement custody of causes not related to firearms over the past 20 years—including 350 people they’ve identified in Los Angeles alone.

“These are instances where a medical examiner or coroner has the most power in determining cause of death, but they’re also vulnerable to blaming the biology of the victims and not the actions of law enforcement,” says Keel. “We’ve also looked at a number of individuals who have died inside of the jail system in Los Angeles, which don’t get much media attention due to highly public beliefs around the incarcerated. And we are beginning to publish research that shows that there is a real crisis in how we investigate the deaths of the incarcerated and those taken into police custody.”

The work of witnessing these injustices and then carefully untangling the complicated factors that contributed to them is heart-wrenching, and Keel struggles sometimes to have these difficult conversations with his three sons, who range from elementary to high school to college age.

“Each new instance is yet another example in a long series of dinner conversations about what it is to be a Black man in this country and how to balance the anger and frustration and despair with hope and optimism,” Keel says.

When he feels that weight grow too heavy, he finds release in traveling—especially through Mexico, which offered a haven to many Black Americans who left the U.S during the 1920s and 1930s. But most of all, he draws strength from his activist heroes, like Frederick Douglass, and 20th-century figures such as the anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells and the African American sculptor and graphic artist Elizabeth Catlett.

“These fights are very old; Douglass, Wells, Catlett and many other people before me have tried to confront racial terrorism and structural violence. I think we all have an opportunity to respond better to the issues facing our community,” he says. “I see myself carrying on the legacy of never losing sight of the social conditions that bear on Black life.”

For more of Our Stories at the UCLA College, click here.

Image of Yogita GoyalCourtesy of Yogita Goyal

Yogita Goyal’s book about slavery honored with awards

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Editor’s note: UCLA Humanities interviewed Professor Goyal on her work, teaching and field of study. Read more at humanities.ucla.edu.
Image of Yogita Goyal

Yogita Goyal, professor of English and African American Studies in the UCLA College.

By Louise Kim

Yogita Goyal’s book, “Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery,” has received two prizes. The book received the René Wellek Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association and the Perkins Prize from the International Society for the Study of Narrative.

Goyal is a professor of English and African American Studies at UCLA. She specializes in modern and contemporary literature and the study of race and postcolonialism, with a particular emphasis on African American and African literature. Goyal is also editor of the journal Contemporary Literature and former president of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present.

The René Wellek Prize recognizes outstanding books in the discipline of comparative literature that cross national, linguistic, geographic or disciplinary borders. The Perkins Award annually recognizes “the book that makes the most significant contribution to the study of narrative.”

In “Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery,” released in October 2019 by NYU Press, Goyal argues that the slave narrative is a new world literary genre. She tracks the emergence of slavery as the defining template through which current human rights abuses such as unlawful detension, sex trafficking, the refugee crisis and genocide are understood.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu.

An image of Kyle Mays alongside his book coverPhoto credit: UCLA

Professor Kyle T. Mays spotlights Black–Indigenous solidarity in new book

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By Jessica Wolf

In ‘An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States,’ Kyle Mays reframes U.S. history

An image of Kyle Mays alongside his book cover

Mays’ narrative is infused throughout with his personal experiences as an Afro-Indigenous scholar. “As a Black and Indigenous person, I suppose I’m just Mr. In-between, a brotha without a home,” he writes. Photo credit: UCLA

With his book “An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States,” assistant professor Kyle Mays traverses broad, complex and intimate territory.

Mays, who is Black and Saginaw Anishinaabe, teaches African American studies and American Indian studies at UCLA. His latest book is billed as the first to examine the intersecting struggles of Black and Native Americans. In it, he delves into the the country’s founding; early 20th-century global reckonings with racism, like the multinational Universal Races Congress in 1911; the Black Power and Red Power movements of the 1960s and 1970s; and Black and Indigenous pop culture (and cancel culture) of today.

“Some say that the ongoing activism around civil rights for Black Americans and tribal sovereignty for Native Americans are two different things that aren’t in solidarity,” Mays said. “But what I try to do in the book is use those two things as a jumping off point and say, if we look historically throughout U.S. history, how U.S. democracy was constructed and how even if these two groups often might have different goals, we see they still often collaborated. They both wanted a whole different understanding of what the U.S. could be.”

In the book, which is intended for a general audience, Mays said he wanted to offer readers a window into his process and what thoughts come up to him as a researcher and scholar.

“I try to blend the storytelling and nuance and argumentation of the historian, while also keeping my unique voice and reveal how I actually am thinking,” he said. “If we consider writing as a form of thinking and process, this is how I’m literally thinking about it in my head, and I want readers to hear that.”

From memories of the literature and teachers who inspired (and confounded) him during his academic career to moments with his teenage cousins “on the rez” watching impromptu rap battles, Mays’ narrative is infused throughout with his personal experiences as an Afro-Indigenous scholar, and his writing captures his purposeful language style.

“As a Black and Indigenous person, I suppose I’m just Mr. In-between, a brotha without a home,” he writes.

Released for Native American Heritage Month, “An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States” anchors an understanding of U.S. history on the twin atrocities fueled by settler colonialism and capitalism:
– the dispossession and attempted erasure of Indigenous peoples who lived on land now called the United States long before European ships set sail toward it;
– the enslavement of Indigenous Africans forcibly brought to these shores and whose bodies worked the land for the profit of others.

He critiques the racist underpinnings of early foundational texts, including the Declaration of Independence, and writings like “Democracy in America.”

“We must recognize antiblackness (and anti-Indianness, too!) as a core part of this country’s material and psychological development,” he writes. The book also illustrates how the parallel oppressions of Indigenous dispossession and anti-Blackness are ongoing.

Despite that continuing oppression, Mays offers the suggestion that we should think about how Indigenous Africans who were forcibly brought to and sold in America, still retained their inherent indigenous identities, similarly to how displaced Native tribes forced to reservations far from their ancestral territories retained their original tribal identities.

Expanding on and contextualizing the personal, Mays spotlights the history of collaboration between Blacks and Indigenous people. To do so, he combed through speeches and writings from revered Black writers, leaders and scholars such as Malcom X, Stokely Carmichael, Audre Lorde, Martin Luther King Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois as well as Native activists and writers such as Charles Eastman (Dakota), Laura Cornelius Kellogg (Oneida), Dennis Banks (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) and others, exploring how Black and Indigenous peoples have always resisted and struggled for freedom, sometimes together, and sometimes apart.

“I try to explore all those and just to say, ‘look, there have been forms of collaboration,’ but I always remind people, as I do in the book, that, as Audre Lorde told us, that solidarity is not easy,” he said. “Anything worth fighting for should not be easy. And we have to break down assumptions about what solidarity means and what that could look like. Hopefully I offered at least an entryway into exploring what relationships have looked like, are looking like now and what they can look like going forward.”

“An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States” requires readers to set aside preconceived ideas about what the United States is and what it might become. Mays argues that the enslavement of Africans and dispossession of Indigenous peoples were not necessary to the creation of an American democracy, but they were invaluable to the creation of wealth, property and the prestige of whiteness.

Mays said he hopes the book inspires in readers to take a more critical look at how the United States practices democracy and how it might evolve, and the pervasiveness of racism, even among and between groups that are most affected by it.

“It is important to really critically think about how we can all sort of reproduce racism, prejudice about other people,” he said. “But our job is also to try to overcome those things. And you need some form of solidarity to do so.”

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu/news.

A photo of Chancellor Gene Block bestowing the UCLA Medal on U.S. Rep. and civil rights icon John Lewis.

Remembering John Lewis

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A photo of Chancellor Gene Block bestowing the UCLA Medal on U.S. Rep. and civil rights icon John Lewis.

UCLA Chancellor Gene Block bestows the UCLA Medal on Congressman John Lewis. (Photo Credit: Marc Roseboro/UCLA)

Patricia Turner is professor of African American studies in the UCLA College and professor of world arts and culture/dance in the School of the Arts and Architecture.

As I was driving from UCLA to my home in the Valley, on April 10, 2017, I was warmed by the knowledge that my meeting with Congressman John Lewis constituted a personal milestone that I would always treasure. With the news in December 2019 of his pancreatic cancer diagnosis, I was moved again by the quiet power of the man I had studied and taught about and the man I got to watch in action that day two years prior. Now, with the news of Lewis’ death, I have lost a personal hero.

As a faculty member, I discourage my students from over-indulging in hero worship. All too often the men and women whom we read about don’t match the ones we meet. They are —like us — flawed, human and self-serving.

But I couldn’t take my own advice with Congressman Lewis. I had taught about him numerous times in my African American Studies courses, drawing the students’ attention to his unswerving commitment to nonviolence, even when others in the then nascent Black Power movement were trying to marginalize him for his convictions. The 1965 image of him in his tan raincoat and with his backpack on being savagely beaten while marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge is seared in my mind.

Several decades later, I heard Lewis speak at a Smithsonian event on the mall featuring samples of the AIDS quilt, and I, like almost everyone else under the tent, was moved to tears to hear him talk about the honor he felt that his home district in Georgia had been selected as the one to care and preserve such an important expression of art and social justice. And now, no trip to D.C. is complete for me without a stop by the National Museum of African American History and Culture, an extraordinarily significant cultural resource that he shepherded through all of the requisite partisan and bureaucratic challenges that come with erecting a new museum in Washington.

When the call went out at UCLA to nominate deserving individuals for our highest honor, the UCLA Medal, I nominated Lewis and pitched bestowing the medal on him at our annual Winston C. Doby Distinguished Lecture, an annual event conceived by UCLA’s Academic Advancement Program in honor of a leader who dedicated his career to increasing student diversity and access at UCLA and throughout the University of California system. Within the acreage of UCLA, Doby was a John Lewis.

One of the first senior African American administrators on the campus, Doby fought tirelessly on behalf of all of students but he had a determined goal of increasing the number of Black admitted students and graduates. When Proposition 209 threatened to curtail the number of Black admits, Doby assembled an impressive and generous cohort of alumni and raised significant funds from them to underwrite scholarships for Black students — a practice that required a significant work around to be both legal and compliant with the new legislation. Hundreds of Black students have UCLA on their transcripts because of Doby’s efforts.

Lewis accepted our invitation and I knew as the senior dean of the UCLA College and the person who nominated him, I would get some face time with him. Inspired by his comments in his moving autobiography, “Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement,” I thought I would give him copies of my books and tell him that the work he and his generation had accomplished enabled me to achieve so much in a realm that was forbidden to us before the civil rights movement. He had noted in his autobiography, that his collection of books by Black authors was one of his most prized possessions. But then I realized that my story was the story of so many of my Black colleagues at UCLA. So I put out a call asking everyone to donate books for a gift.

We constructed a suitably academic backdrop for the question-and-answer period on the stage of Royce Hall — oversized leather chairs framed by bookshelves. At the end of a candid Q&A, Professor Tyrone Howard, who now holds the Pritzker Family Endowed Chair in Strengthening Families, told Lewis that the books weren’t props, they were all written by faculty of color at UCLA who agreed that his work on the front lines enabled our own in our laboratories and libraries and that we were sending them to Georgia for his library. He was quite moved.

I did get my face time with him and had no problem getting him to sign my copy of “Wind.” He asked about my teaching, and when I mentioned how much my students enjoyed reading about Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, a relatively unknown but vastly important figure in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, his face lit up. I had been temporarily uneasy about telling a civil rights icon how much my students liked someone else from the movement but he turned out to be an ardent and hardcore Robinson fan and showered me with praise for making sure my students knew about her.

At the luncheon, he was seated at the table with his long-time mentor and lecturer at UCLA, the Rev. James Lawson, Chancellor Gene Block, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, Meyer and Renee Luskin, myself and others. The Doby family was spread out at other tables but when I called them up to present him with the plaque that comes with the lecture, he professed admiration for all he had learned about Winston Doby. He offered to host them at the museum should they come to D.C. Meyer and Renee Luskin were so moved that they created a scholarship that now underwrites the cost of books for a UCLA student admitted from his congressional district.

In pre-event planning, we had fretted about security. In prior months, Lewis had been in an inelegant exchange with then President-elect Donald Trump. We didn’t get a lot of guidance from his staff. We opted for the regular “important speaker” contingent in the hall itself and arranged for one plain-clothes security officer to be around in the green room, backstage and at the luncheon. After all of the luncheon guests had departed, the man working security came up to him and said, “Congressman Lewis, can I have a picture with you?” Lewis thanked him for his service, handed me the officer’s cell phone and smiled with the profound sincerity, respect and dignity we had seen all day.

The world has truly lost a bright light, who provided an example by action, with dignity and grace.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom.

In memoriam: Professor Mark Sawyer, a champion for access and diversity

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UCLA faculty, students and staff in the Division of Social Sciences in the UCLA College are mourning the loss of Mark Sawyer, who was a professor of African-American studies and political science

Gift establishes endowed chair in history

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Nickoll Family Chair to be awarded to renowned history scholar and UCLA faculty member

nickoll

Ben Nickoll

History alumnus Ben Nickoll ’86 was brought up in a family in which helping others and giving back were the norm. Now, he has given back to his alma mater by establishing the Nickoll Family Endowed Chair in History, which will have a focus on women’s history. The inaugural holder will be renowned scholar and writer Brenda Stevenson, who will be formally installed on October 24.

“I am proud to have known Ben Nickoll since my days as Dean of Social Sciences,” said Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Scott Waugh. “His professional career, values and character are testaments to the importance of a liberal arts education.”

He said that the gift would help to ensure the quality and relevance of UCLA’s history department for decades to come.

“As a historian myself, I am deeply touched.” He said.

History chair Stephen Aron said that the gift would bolster the department’s efforts to attract and retain world-class faculty like Stevenson, whose research focuses on the history of slavery in the U.S. and Atlantic World, particularly of enslaved women.

“With this wonderful gift, Ben Nickoll has signaled his belief in the enduring value of a history degree, of excellent teaching, and of studying the past to shape a better future,” Aron said.

Nickoll grew up near UCLA, so it was a familiar fixture in his childhood. He recalled skateboarding through the campus, hanging out in Westwood with friends and attending basketball games with his dad at Pauley Pavilion. His parents were actively involved in the local community and in politics.

“They stood up for what they believed and gave to causes where they could have an impact,” he said.

When he first enrolled at UCLA, he had no idea what he wanted to study.

“Then I took a class taught by Prof. Roger McGrath, a gifted storyteller who brought historical characters and events to life in the classroom,” Nickoll said. “I was hooked and became a history major soon after that.”

After graduation, despite a lack of investment experience, Nickoll moved across country and talked his way into a job on Wall Street. He held high-level positions at top investment banks before co-founding investment firm Ore Hill in 2002. After that firm was sold in 2011, he founded El Faro Partners, an investment firm focused on real estate, private equity, credit and agriculture.

Nickoll is a member of the history department’s Board of Advisors and gave the commencement address at the department’s graduation ceremony in 2008. He is also a founding member of the board of the Fink Center for Finance and Investments at the Anderson School of Business.

“My wife, Chrissy, and I acknowledge that there are many worthy causes and organizations,” Nickoll said. “We believe in focusing the majority of our energy in our local communities, not just financially but also with action when possible.”

And he said he felt the time was right to make a major gift to his home department at UCLA.

If the liberal arts and subjects like history continue to be overlooked in favor of the sciences and engineering, he said, students might not develop a sufficiently broad, informed world view.

“I believe that the study of history is relevant to all aspects of life,” he said. “Take the investment world—an investor needs to understand context and how elements affecting past performance can affect a company today and in the future.”

For her part, Stevenson said that the Nickoll chair would allow her to take her work to a different level.

brenda_stevenson

Brenda Stevenson

“Thanks to the Nickoll chair, I will now have the resources to undertake larger projects more efficiently and expediently,” Stevenson said. “I’m also going to be hiring some undergraduates to do a long-term project that deals with the history of racial violence in America. Private funding is so important for research initiatives that really do make positive contributions to our lives and to the world and to educating students.”

A professor of history and of African American studies at UCLA, she is the author of several books, including Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South.

Although most of Stevenson’s work focuses on the 19th century, and particularly the Southern U.S., she received the Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism award for her 2013 book about more recent events in Los Angeles, The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins: Justice, Gender and the Origins of the L.A. Riots. Stevenson has been awarded several fellowships, including a Guggenheim in 2015.

Stevenson is at work on two new books: a history of the slave family from the colonial through the antebellum eras and a history of slave women. Her work continues to shed light—on the page and in the classroom—on important parts of human history with a view to creating a more just society.

From wrongfully jailed to artist, activist and UCLA professor

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A new professor in UCLA’s African-American Studies department is rallying with students and faculty around increasingly visible injustices in the U.S. criminal justice system. It’s a topic near and dear to Bryonn Bain’s heart.

UCLA senior has a new flight plan

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Anyadike made national headlines in summer 2009, at age 15, by piloting a single-engine, four-seater Cessna 172 from Compton, California, to Newport News, Virginia, and back, making scheduled stops in a dozen cities along the way.