College of Humanities

Beloved former MA student and TA, Eric J. Lawrence, passed away last month. A scholarship celebrating his life and his brilliant work in our department and as a music librarian and DJ at KCRW has been established to help support future English MA students who wish to study the area of pop culture broadly defined. If you are able, please consider supporting this fund.

Background: Eric J. Lawrence was a respected and admired member of the English Department at CSUN, where his expertise as a teacher, a graduate student, and as a scholar of American Literature, noir, and pop culture studies complemented his encyclopedic knowledge of music. As a beloved on-air personality for UCLA Radio and as host of long-running show Dragnet on KCRW, he shared his outstanding musical knowledge and taste with the greater Los Angeles community for decades, and he also served KCRW as one of its most knowledgeable music librarians. In person and over the air waves, Eric had the unique capability to create a shared community of love for and about music and media, and he brought countless indie acts to the attention of wide audiences. He was a teacher and scholar both in the classroom and in our culture, and the care that he gave to his audiences and his in-class students provides an ongoing legacy for this work.

To contribute to the Eric J. Lawrence Pop Culture Studies Memorial Scholarship, please click here, then follow these instructions:

Lowriding is not just about the lovingly and extravagantly painted and restored cars that cruise slowly down the boulevards of Los Angeles. It's a way of life in Southern California and around the country. That culture is the focus of "The Politics of Low and Slow," an art show featured now in the  Story continues: csunshinetoday.csun.edu Read more

Xóchitl M. Flores-Marcial (Chicana/o Studies) has been awarded the highly prestigious Ford Postdoctoral Fellowship for 2022-2023 to complete her book project Zapotec Gift: Mesoamerican Social Networks 1330-2020.

The testimony included a detailed description of a then centuries-old tradition in which members of the community shared their goods or skills, knowing that sometime in the future the recipients would pay it back.

“The testimony provided hard evidence,” Flores-Marcial said, “that the indigenous people of the Americas for centuries before colonization had a system of collaboration, exchange and sharing, which researchers now refer to as social networks and shared economics.” Read more.

Beatriz Cortez (Central American and Transborder Studies) is a 2022–2024 Borderlands Fellow as part of the Vera List Center’s Focus Theme cycle Correction*.

Cortez’s fellowship project considers the Tierra Blanca Joven, the layer of ash deposited by the fifth century C.E. eruption of the Ilopango Volcano in what is now El Salvador. The resulting Tierra Blanca Joven is land with spiritual meaning to people who subsequently migrated and today continue to migrate from the Central American region to other territories. Crossing present and future borders and temporalities, the Tierra Blanca Joven makes visible and sacred the movement of matter and people.  Read more

Brandy Underwood (English) has been selected as the College of Humanities Research Fellow 2022/2023 for her project titled, The Black Crowd, Leadership, Affect, and Racial Uplift in African American Literature.  The Academic Affairs Research Fellows Program is a collaboration between the University Library, the Office of the Provost, and the colleges. The program’s goal is to foster research and mentor new scholars. Along with the honor of recognition, the fellowship provides twelve units of reassigned time for continuing work on a specific project.

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