UCLA Launches New Center for Ancient Studies

Enhancing our knowledge of ancient cultures is an essential foundation for humanistic understanding and can illuminate many of the challenges of today and the future. That vision is behind the new UCLA Jeffrey P. Cunard Center for Global Antiquity, made possible by alumnus Jeffrey Cunard's $11 million blended gift.

Housed in the UCLA College Division of Humanities, the Cunard Center will support and expand the groundbreaking work of faculty and students on the diversity, achievements and interconnectedness of ancient cultures. The center aims to deepen interdisciplinary expertise and scholarship about the cultures of the past, both across campus and beyond.

The Cunard Center's intertwined goals are to:

• Foster deep, enthusiastic faculty scholarship, which, in turn, will inspire innovative new programs and undergraduate and graduate courses.
• Provide critical funding for graduate students and awards to faculty, as well as graduate and undergraduate students.
• Provide a forum where scholars across disciplines and departments can come together to discuss and further comparative knowledge as to the similarities and differences in how ancient peoples around the globe — not just in the Mediterranean — dealt with all aspects of the human condition.
• Explore how the teaching and experience of ancient cultures can inform the present and the future.
• Disseminate the work of all involved to other scholars and the general public via multiple formats and platforms, including a new podcast, academic publication series, enhanced research initiatives, and public and academic programming, including a new Cunard Lecture Series in Global Antiquity.

"UCLA is at the forefront of developing ancient studies as an interdisciplinary and critical field, led by diverse, world-class faculty members studying the ancient past," said Alexandra Minna Stern, dean of the humanities division. "This gift will help ensure that UCLA remains a leader in approaching the discipline with a full and nuanced understanding of the ancient world, and we are deeply grateful to Jeffrey Cunard and inspired by the opportunities his generosity will create for humanities scholars now and in the future."

The Cunard Center will support and expand upon the work conducted by UCLA's Global Antiquity initiative, which is led by M. Rahim Shayegan, a professor of Old Iranian and the Ancient Near East, who holds the Jahangir and Eleanor Amuzegar Chair of Iranian Studies. He also serves as director of the UCLA Pourdavoud Institute for the Study of the Iranian World and the UCLA Yarshater Center for the Study of Iranian Literary Traditions.

"What the paradigm of global antiquity illustrates is that most civilizations are the result of synergies, cultural borrowings and consequently no cultural identity may emerge, or be fostered, in isolation," said Shayegan, who will direct the Cunard Center alongside a Global Antiquity faculty governance committee. "I am honored to helm this new center that shall foreground the diversity and interconnectedness of past human experiences to inspire a new, higher form of humanism that offers a more discerning, empathetic view of other cultures in the present."

While Cunard's gift — a mixture of current-use and estate funds — launches new opportunities for ancient studies at UCLA, the field is already a vibrant part of the university's academic landscape. It encompasses more than 60 affiliated faculty members from across campus, including in departments such as art history, classics, Near Eastern languages and cultures, anthropology, Asian languages and cultures, and history, as well as those affiliated with the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.

In addition to expanding scholarly collaborations across campus, the Cunard Center aims to do the same across Los Angeles, the nation and the world, connecting UCLA even more effectively with longtime partner institutions such as the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Research Institute and the Getty Conservation Institute.

It will also incorporate methodologies from social sciences, such as history, anthropology and archaeology, in addition to exploring newer ones. The field of archaeogenetics, for example — which focuses on the study of ancient DNA to understand people and populations — has little current representation at UCLA, but the Cunard Center's program hopes to encourage ways in which teachings from that newer discipline can work with humanistic and archaeological research to help better understand humanity's past.

Cunard's passion for the ancient world goes back to his own childhood and was further stoked by his global travels and his active, lifelong engagement in arts and humanities organizations across the country, including the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art and the Getty Museum's Villa Council. At UCLA, he was the humanities division's commencement speaker in 2011, has served as a longtime member of the Humanities Dean's Advisory Board and endowed the Lore and Gerald Cunard Chair in the UCLA/Getty Conservation of Cultural Heritage interdepartmental program.

Cunard, a now-retired lawyer, graduated from UCLA in 1977 with degrees in English and political science. As an undergraduate, he fondly remembers thumbing through the course catalog — "it was 2 inches thick, like a telephone book" — deeply inspired by the breadth of study across UCLA's disciplines and the elite caliber of faculty research, especially in the humanities.

"I am proud to be able to put an accelerator behind an already world-leading UCLA initiative to secure its future and take it to new heights," said Cunard. "The fields of ancient studies are fascinating as a subject of wonder and enthusiasm, scholarship and study. My hope with this gift is that others will be similarly inspired to support the study of the humanities and the remarkable, transformative impact they have on us all."