Our Work

Arvind Thomas has been selected to receive a Faculty Career Development Award from UCLA’s Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion for his research project titled “Standing One’s Ground in Law and Literature.” The project places both literary and non-literary sources from the abundant premodern corpus of maxims on self-defense in conversation with current approaches to lethal self-defense in legal discourse. At once grounded in historical particularity and transhistorical in scope, the project makes the case for the urgent relevance of premodern writings to the present–indeed, to vital concerns of life and death that we confront in an increasingly weaponized world.