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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.

Image of UCLA doctoral student Rebecca GlasbergCourtesy of Rebecca Glasberg

Seeking the universal in the specific

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Doctoral student Rebecca Glasberg blazes new trails in the study of North African postcolonial French-language literature

Image of UCLA doctoral student Rebecca Glasberg

UCLA doctoral student Rebecca Glasberg

By Jonathan Riggs

As if earning your doctorate weren’t intense enough, try adding in the worldwide changes brought on by COVID.

“I defended the prospectus for my dissertation the day before UCLA shut down,” says Rebecca Glasberg, a Ph.D. student in the French Section of the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies. “Now I’m working on writing my dissertation, but all my experiences doing this are during a pandemic.”

The fact that Glasberg’s dissertation charts new academic waters compounds the challenges she faces as she moves closer to completing her doctorate. Glasberg draws on interdisciplinary sources to examine representations of Jews and Jewishness in North African postcolonial French-language literature. In doing this, she investigates how authors of Muslim background have challenged dominant narratives of interreligious conflict in the area.

“The field of Jewish studies is generally dominated by narratives of European Jewishness, so my focus on Jews from North Africa—and in particular authors writing about them who are non-Jewish—puts me in an unbelievably specific niche,” Glasberg says. “I’m very lucky to be at UCLA and have the support of the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies to explore really interesting questions.”

Born and raised in Virginia, Glasberg grew up knowing she wanted to be an educator. Although she loved her seven years as a middle and high school French teacher, she was deeply inspired by the intellectual rigor and emphasis on curiosity she found while earning her master’s in an immersive French-language program at Vermont’s Middlebury College. The decision to proceed to UCLA, where she was impressed by faculty innovators and student collaborators, was easy—even if her subsequent research hasn’t always been.

“There’s no database of the authors who fit my criteria, so it’s a lot of reading to discover what could work, searching used bookstores, talking to other scholars and following seemingly unrelated tangents in search of stumbling onto something that could go into my dissertation,” Glasberg says. “It can be slow going, but the exploration and the questions it raises keep me going. It’s a fascinating knot to unravel.”

After earning the Fritz, Jenny & Gustav Berger Fellowship in Holocaust Studies, Glasberg has been able to add another layer to her research by studying Arabic to enrich her linguistic and cultural access to these texts. She hopes, too, to be able to conduct firsthand research in France and North Africa, but first there’s COVID to navigate—as well as the round-the-clock demands of teaching, research and, of course, actually writing her dissertation.

“It’s taken me a long time to figure out how to set boundaries on my academic work while I’m facing this huge, monstrous project with the world outside so uncertain,” she says. “What I’ve found is if I set a schedule and stick to it, I chug along steadily and keep my sanity. I love doing my nerdy academic thing, but it’s also important for me to get out of my head and go hiking, eat delicious doughnuts and talk to my friends and family about things beyond what it means to be a “French” or “Francophone” author.”

Keeping those real-life connections so alive helps her stay a sensitive, curious reader—after all, the universal aspects of the human experience are what all the authors she studies are writing about. Their books and words have power because they speak to greater truths that affect us all, especially those wise and willing enough to listen.

“One of the questions I keep thinking through is, ‘What does it mean when we talk about a text being authentic?’ It’s an important question, but we need to keep an open mind,” she says. “For example, you might not expect a contemporary Algerian author to write about the Holocaust, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t. So it’s important to remember to keep looking even in unexpected places to find value, significance and poignant understanding.”

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

Image of UCLA doctoral student Thomas Ray GarciaCourtesy of UCLA doctoral student Thomas Ray Garcia

The transformative power of travel

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On and off the page, UCLA doctoral student Thomas Ray Garcia seeks to span great distances

Image of UCLA doctoral student Thomas Ray Garcia

UCLA doctoral student Thomas Ray Garcia

By Jonathan Riggs

The lure of the open road, the adventure of travel have long inspired and defined American writers who took “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country” to heart. In addition to being one of these journeymen himself, Thomas Ray Garcia, a UCLA doctoral student in the English Department, studies them, too.

“My dissertation focuses on literary representations of travel through the works of five 20th-century American writers I consider a chronological arc: Jack London, Jack Black, Carlos Bulosan, John Steinbeck and Jack Kerouac,” he says. “All of them wrote some sort of fictionalized memoir, so I’m analyzing how the genre helped them craft their travels as journeys — not only throughout the country, but also to the professional class.”

According to Garcia, these individuals show how the idea of American authorship transformed during the early 20th century, from deskbound typists to vigorous vagabonds writing about and taking agency over their lived experiences. All five of these authors paint larger-than-life, uniquely American self-portraits, from Jack London’s tales of survival to Jack Kerouac’s free-flowing Beat Generation politics.

Writing with bravado and a scope as vast as the idealized, untamed American West, all of these authors — including Jack Black’s criminal memoirs to Carlos Bulosan’s perspective as a Filipino immigrant to John Steinbeck’s empathetic wisdom — unsurprisingly turned their attention to California.

“California was always this mecca for them; they wanted to reach what they called ‘the end of the road,’” Garcia says. “Going to the Santa Monica Pier and seeing the symbolic end of Route 66 spoke to me, too. Knowing I’m at UCLA focusing on writers who have a special relationship to this place enables me to see their work and mine through a unique lens.”

Garcia’s own travels have been just as life-changing as those of the authors he studies. Growing up 10 miles from Mexico in the border town of Pharr, Texas, Garcia was the first in his family to go to college. His experiences at Princeton — including gaining a new understanding of his Latino identity — helped inspire him to found the College Scholarship Leadership Access Program (CSLAP), a thriving Rio Grande Valley-based nonprofit that helps students reach and navigate higher education.

“I’m able to share my stories and my experiences with students, so they don’t have to struggle as much as I did,” Garcia says. “Several of the students I’m now helping apply to graduate school are the same ones I helped apply to undergrad. Helping my community like this lets me come full circle.”

A recipient of UCLA’s Carolyn See Graduate Fellowship in Southern California & Los Angeles Literature, Garcia is an accomplished creative writer, working on short stories and poetry about the U.S./Mexico border as well as co-authoring Speak with Style, a book series that helps children and young adults improve their public speaking. A project of particular importance to him is the historical memoir of Chicano activist Aurelio Montemayor he co-wrote, which has been peer-reviewed and approved by the faculty committee of Texas A&M University Press and is currently undergoing copyediting.

Now back in Texas, Garcia divides his time among academic work, creative writing and his nonprofit. He’s also a long-distance runner and likes to sneak in some nighttime miles whenever possible. His time spent under those endless Texas skies gives him the opportunity to think deeply about travel and distance — but also the importance of remembering where you’re from.

“People like me who were born and raised around this area recognize that it means something special to us. It informs who we are and all that we do,” he says. “This is a meaningful place for me to be and is definitely influencing how I’m approaching my dissertation – and everything that comes next.”

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

Image of Doctoral student Isaac GimenezCourtesy of Isaac Gimenez

Living life like Brazilian poetry

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Doctoral student Isaac Gimenez finds wisdom and whimsy in the exploration, analysis and joy of art and poetry

Image of doctoral student Isaac Gimenez

UCLA doctoral student Isaac Gimenez

By Jonathan Riggs

Literary translation is an art form that requires attention to detail, creativity and daring — after all, the challenges can be immense. But for doctoral student Isaac Gimenez, an adventurous artist with a bachelor’s degree in translation and interpreting and applied foreign languages, it can also be a lot of fun.

“You get to know the work really closely, and you can even take a playful approach, almost like a creative writing exercise,” says Gimenez, who was born in Spain. “It’s a dance between reproducing the original text with capturing the spirit of it in another language. You have to have a sense of humor about it all.”

After completing his undergraduate education at the University of Granada in Spain, Gimenez took various jobs in the service sector to save money and to improve his proficiency in English and French. He also worked as a freelance translator and interpreter, translating legal, technical, audiovisual and academic documents. He came to the U.S. with the goal of going to graduate school, landing a job teaching foreign language conversation at Pomona College, leading daily language labs and organizing student cultural activities. Already captivated by the arts and culture of Latin America, Gimenez was thrilled to enroll at UCLA to pursue his Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures with a focus on Brazil.

Today, he’s working on his dissertation on 20th- and 21st-century Brazilian poetry, tracing the country’s changing notions of authorship back to the first Modernist phase in the 1920s. Gimenez explores how these writers created what he calls “a poetry of errors” — a playful form of artistic civil disobedience embraced by both experimental and “marginal” poets.

“I am interested in poetic expressions in general and, arguably, Brazilian literary tradition is very rich in humoristic, experimental, transdisciplinary and politically engaged approaches to poetry. A lot of people have a misconception that poems have to be dense and solemn, and, consequently, inaccessible, for many,” Gimenez says. “I am fascinated by poets who embody what they write about too. It’s a good lesson for all of us to engage with more poetry and live our lives poetically.”

Deeply inspired by the poetry he’s studying, Gimenez is also creating artistic works of his own. He created a video-poem titled “desterro/desmadre,” which he presented for the first time at the 2020 conference Letras Expandidas (2020), organized by PUC-Rio (Br). This video-poem served two purposes: it complemented his analysis of Camila Assad’s 2019 anthology Desterro (which inspired him to write an article published in the Portuguese literary magazine eLyra) and was also a personal reflection of what it meant to live in a global hub like Los Angeles while restricted to a smaller, screen-based scope of existence during the lockdown. “desterro/desmadre” will also be published in 2022 in Párrafo, the literary, artistic and cultural magazine of the UCLA Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

“A professor of mine, Patrícia Lino, reminded me that academic writing is, in fact, a creative practice as well,” he says. “In that sense, critical readings and interpretations of literary works can be inspired by and in dialogue with other art forms and mediums.”

Supplementing his academic and creative work is Gimenez’s role as Editor-in-Chief of Mester, the journal of UCLA’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese graduate students. (Click here for Mester’s open access.) As he works on his dissertation, Gimenez is grateful for the support he earned from the Lorrine Rona Lydeen Fund since it has allowed him to devote considerable time and energy to this additional work — as well as to expanding his professional skills and nurturing new collaborations, both at UCLA (participating in two Excellence in Pedagogy and Innovative Classrooms (EPIC) seminars) and through Mester, working closely with fellow scholars from Latin America and Europe. In fact, the journal will release its 50th issue later this year.

“I think it is quite remarkable that this issue builds bridges between scholars engaging with the Hispanic and Lusophone traditions from different continents and in different languages: English, Spanish and Portuguese,” says Gimenez.

It all adds up to why UCLA is such a special place for someone like Gimenez, who has traveled the globe.

“It means so much to be living in Los Angeles, a vibrant city that supports and is in continuous dialogue with artists, authors, intellectuals and cultural producers from Latin America and all over the world,” he says. “And most of all, being part of the UCLA community enhances those opportunities to access resources and meet scholars and professionals who inspire our work.”

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