David Kim

David D. Kim is Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages. He joined the University of California Los Angeles in Fall 2014. Before then, he had been Assistant Professor of German and Global Studies at Michigan State University, specializing in cosmopolitical, postcolonial, and translational issues. Kim’s research areas include fin-de-siècle Vienna, contemporary German literature, digital humanities, transnational adoption, human rights, and narratives of citizenship and solidarity.

Kim has recently completed a book, titled Cosmopolitan Parables: Responsibility and Trauma in Contemporary Germany. Forthcoming with Northwestern University Press, it contributes to the study of contemporary German literature, international postcolonialism, Holocaust memory, and cosmopolitanism by investigating how German writers after 1989 work through memories of colonialism, Nazism, and communism as cross-referential entanglements of past, present, and future in the post-Cold War world. Kim’s latest research also involves graph-analytic methods, big data, and network analyses in studies of world literature. In collaboration with the Center of Digital Humanities, he has developed WorldLiterature@UCLA, which permits the modeling of authorial, translational, and literary networks. For more information, click here. Two other major publications include Imagining Human Rights (De Gruyter, 2015; co-edited with Susanne Kaul) and The Postcolonial World (Routledge, 2016; co-edited with Jyotsna Singh). For a complete list of publications, see his vita.

Kim is working on two new book manuscripts. The first one explores why solidarity is one of the most elusive concepts in modern political and social theories. By reading Kant with Foucault, Arendt with Esposito, and Nietzsche with Cassano, it demonstrates how German philosophers are foundational in contemporary European struggles with political or social unity. The second project is located at the intersection of three interdisciplinary fields: animal, postcolonial and citizenship studies. It investigates how colonial and postcolonial experiences have radically transformed longstanding Eurocentric discourses on citizenship since early modernity.

Kim received his B.S. in Biology and A.B. in German Studies from Duke University. He received his Ph.D. in German Studies from Harvard University. He was a participant in the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, as well as a Fellow of the Modern Language Association International Bibliography, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, and the Leo Baeck Institute in New York City. In Fall 2016, Kim begins serving as a Faculty-in-Residence for the undergraduate Hedrick Hall community on the Hill.

Rebeca Méndez

Rebeca Méndez is an artist, designer, and tenured professor at UCLA, Design Media Arts, where she is founder and director of the CounterForce Lab, a research and fieldwork studio for art, design and environment. Her research and practice investigates design and media art in public space, critical approaches to public identities and landscape, and artistic projects based on field investigation methods. Méndez’s diverse works are driven by her interest in perception and embodied experience and they develop within science, design and art through immersive installations, sound, video, photography, book arts, and drawing, with focus on post-humanism, eco-feminism, anthropocene and environmental justice. Since 1996, she’s led Rebeca Méndez Studio in Los Angeles and has received significant recognition including her recent inclusion into the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the 2017 Medal of AIGA, induction into the One Club Hall of Fame, New York, and the 2012 National Design Award in Communication Design. Her diverse works have been exhibited widely in significant institutions including solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Hammer Museum, Nevada Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Oaxaca, Mexico, and group exhibitions at the 55th Venice Biennial, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, El Paso Museum of Art, and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Méndez is known for her career-long commitment to ‘design and art as a social force,’ and was awarded the ‘2016 Vision Over Violence Humanitarian Award,’ by Peace Over Violence, Los Angeles. Méndez was guest curator at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in ‘Rebeca Méndez Selects’ 2018–19, reviewed in The New Yorker magazine. She served as co-chair for the 2018 National Design Awards, faculty committee for the Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award, 2017, 2018 and 2019, keynote speaker at the AIGA Conference 2019 / Design Educators, and speaker, member of the steering committee and co-curator of the 2019 Aspen Ideas Festival. Her interests and initiatives are a bridge between art, design and science, and demonstrate a commitment to the environment and a sustainable future.

Samara Zeina Khalil

Samara Zeina Khalil is a Neurofeedback technician and recent graduate with a bachelor’s degree in psychobiology. Samara has conducted research on non-medication based treatment for PTSD in war veterans and moderation-based treatment for recovering addicts and alcoholics. She is a part of the UCLA Global Medical Training Club and has volunteered extensively in rural Nicaragua to bring medicines to under-served communities. Samara likes yoga, philosophy, bio and brain hacking, painting, and watching foreign films.

Rhiannon Imbeah

Rhiannon Imbeah is a UCLA undergraduate student studying Biology and Global Health. Rhiannon’s passion for working with children and the medical field has driven her to many opportunities at UCLA. For a while she served as a Teaching Assistant to children at the Krieger Center, part of UCLA’s Early Care and Education program. Rhiannon also serves as an student research assistant at the MacDonald Medical Research Laboratory under Dr. Grace Aldrovandi, a professor of Pediatrics and Chief of Infectious Diseases at UCLA Mattel Children’s Hospital. She hopes to use her experiences and training to develop a platform to bring attention to issues facing infants and children.

Jeric Rosas

I am a recent UCLA graduate with a degree in Environmental Science and a minor in Environmental Engineering. Growing up in Los Angeles, my motivation to study Environmental Science stemmed from the various water quality issues that the city constantly deals with. My current interest is to continue my research on the effects of kelp to modify seawater chemistry and its ability to decrease dissolved CO2. My research interest tackles the feasibility of kelp forests to serve as a pH refuge for marine organisms in a more acidic ocean.

Pedro Ramirez

Professor Pedro Ramirez is a Professor at California State University Los Angeles. He is in the Department of Geosciences and Environment. Professor Ramirez’s research includes reconstructing environmental change using sediments. His Ph.D. is from UC Santa Cruz.

Monica L. Smith

As an archaeologist, I specialize in the development of urbanism and the long-term human relationship with the environment. I describe myself as an ancient economic historian who utilizes archaeological data to analyze the collective effects of routine activities through the study of food, ordinary goods, and architecture. Over the long term of the existence of Homo sapiens, our species has had a significant impact on the environment. Even at low population densities as hunters and gatherers a hundred thousand years ago, humans had an outsized effect on their environments through their capacity to use fire and their ability to preferentially hunt vulnerable species, in some cases leading to extinction. By about ten thousand years ago when humans increasingly turned to farming, they engaged in genetic engineering through the purposeful selection of particular behavioral traits to produce domesticated plants and animals. Starting about five thousand years ago, people began to create synthetic materials theretofore unknown in nature such as bronze (and eventually, cement, plaster, and glass as the precursors of today’s ubiquitous plastic goods). For millennia, humans also have engaged in landscape modifications that changed water courses, altered natural vegetation cover, and created new environments in which commensal animals and invasive species thrived. 

Long-term trajectories of human engagement with the environment have set the stage for the increasingly intense interaction between cities and their hinterlands as our global population has grown. Cities have become the predominant mode of life and now house more than half of the world’s people, but their development over the past six thousand years has encompassed rapid and intense social, economic, and even biological adjustments. My current fieldwork is focused on the Indian subcontinent, a region that brought into existence some of the world’s earliest and most long-lived urban areas. Through research at the ancient city of Sisupalgarh, my colleagues and I have examined the growth and maintenance of a city that was occupied for more than a thousand years on the eastern coastal plains of the subcontinent. I have also worked on archaeological research projects at the Harappan site of Rojdi in India, the Buddhist site of Bhasu Vihara in Bangladesh, and Roman sites in the UK, Italy, Turkey, Tunisia, and Egypt.

In addition to my engagement with UCLA campus groups including the Center for India and South Asia, the Program on Central Asia, and the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, I currently serve as an Academic Trustee of the Archaeological Institute of America and as a member of the National Geographic Society’s Committee for Research and Exploration.

Selected publications

Book — Cities: The First 6,000 Years

Smith, Monica L. (Editor). 2017. Abundance: The Archaeology of Plenitude. University Press of Colorado, Boulder.

Smith, Monica L. 2016. Urban Infrastructure as Materialized Consensus. World Archaeology 48:164-178.

Smith, Monica L. 2015. The Origins of the Sustainability Concept: Risk Perception and Resource Management in Early Urban Centers. Research in Economic Anthropology 35:215-238.

Smith, Monica L. 2014. Feasts and Their Failures. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. 22: 1215–1237.

Emily Lindsey

Dr. Emily L. Lindsey is Assistant Curator and Excavation Site Director at the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum, and Adjunct Faculty in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. Her research uses information from past and modern ecosystems to understand how Ice Age animals and environments functioned, how climate change and human actions intersect to drive extinctions, and to predict future ecological response in the face of modern global change. She also collaborates cross-disciplinarily to develop strategies for integrating deep- and near-time perspectives on global change into land management practices, environmental law and policy frameworks, and conservation science.

Dr. Lindsey has conducted fieldwork in the United States, Chile, Antarctica, Guyana, and Ecuador, where her ongoing field program focuses on investigating the Quaternary asphaltic fossil localities of the Santa Elena Peninsula.  She teaches and mentors students in North and South America, and serves on the board of the Institute for Field Research. She studied at Brown University, the University of California – Berkeley, and as a Fulbright scholar at the Museo Nacional de Historia Natural in Uruguay, before joining NHMLA in 2016.

Miriam Marlier

Dr. Miriam E. Marlier is an Assistant Professor of Global Environmental Change in the Environmental Health Sciences Department at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and faculty at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. She is an interdisciplinary environmental scientist with broad interests in examining interactions between environmental change and public health using remote sensing data and interdisciplinary modeling techniques. Some of her recent research projects include forecasting the influence of different conservation and development policies in Indonesia on fire emissions, air pollution, and regional public health outcomes, measuring the effect of agricultural waste burning on air quality in India, understanding the physical climate drivers of fire activity in the western U.S., and using remote sensing data to improve responses to natural disasters. Dr. Marlier previously worked as an Associate Physical Scientist at the RAND Corporation and as a postdoctoral research scientist with joint appointments in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology at Columbia University and the Department of Geography at UCLA. She earned her Ph.D. in Earth & Environmental Sciences at Columbia University as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and her B.S. summa cum laude at UCLA in Atmospheric, Oceanic & Environmental Sciences. 

Dawn Wright

Dr. Wright is the chief scientist for the Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri), a world-leading geographic information system (GIS) software, research and development company. She aids in strengthening the scientific foundation for Esri software and services, while also representing Esri to the national/international scientific community. Dr. Wright also maintains an affiliated faculty appointment as professor of Geography and Oceanography in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University.

Dr. Wright’s research interests include geographic information science; ocean informatics and cyberinfrastructure; benthic terrain and habitat characterization; and the processing and interpretation of high-resolution bathymetry, video, and underwater photographic images. She has authored or co-authored more than 150 articles and six books on marine geographic information systems, hydrothermal activity and tectonics of mid-ocean ridges, and marine data modeling and cyberinfrastructure. Dr. Wright has participated in over 20 oceanographic research expeditions worldwide, including 10 legs of the Ocean Drilling Program, three dives in the deep submergence vehicle Alvin and twice in the Pisces V. Her fieldwork has taken her to some of the most geologically active regions of the planet, including the East Pacific Rise, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the Juan de Fuca Ridge, the Tonga Trench, and volcanoes under the Japan Sea and the Indian Ocean.

Dr. Wright serves on the Science Advisory Boards of NOAA, COMPASS Science Communication, Inc., and Conservation International, as well as many journal editorial boards. She is a fellow of: The American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Geological Society of America, and Stanford University’s Leopold Leadership Program. In 2007, she was named Oregon Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education.

Dr. Wright holds an Individual Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Physical Geography and Marine Geology from UC-Santa Barbara, an M.S. in Oceanography from Texas A&M, and a B.S. cum laude in Geology from Wheaton College, in Illinois.