Notice of Election and Call for Nominations
The UCLA Faculty Association is pleased to announce that four seats on the Executive Board are open for election. These seats have two-year terms (7/1/2026-6/30/2028). The following four members have been nominated to fill these seats:
Matthew FISHER (English)
Joseph FISHKIN (Law)
Kaily HEITZ (Geography)
Bharat VENKAT (Institute for Society & Genetics, Anthropology, History)
These nominees’ bios and candidate statements may be found below. Please note that even though the number of nominees currently matches the number of open seats, this is not an uncontested election. Per Article V, Section 4(b) of the UCLAFA Bylaws, each candidate must receive a number of votes equal to at least half the number of members casting any votes in the election in order to fill a seat.
Nomination Period: April 20 – April 30, 2026 Members who wish to place themselves on the ballot by petition may do so during the nomination period. Petitions must include a minimum of 25 signatures from association members and must be submitted no later than April 30, 2026, 11.59PM PT to the Elections Committee Chair, KOH Choon Hwee at chkoh@history.ucla.edu and the Secretary Liz KOSLOV koslov@ucla.edu. Signatories should be cc-ed.
(Per Article V, Section 5(b) of the UCLAFA Bylaws, any eligible candidate may be placed on the ballot by petition to the Secretary of members in good standing; the minimum number of such members is the greater of ten members or 5% of the membership at the time the Elections Committee announces its nominations.)
Voting Period: May 5 – May 15, 2026 Electronic voting will open on May 5, 2026. The slate of nominees will be updated to include any self-nominated candidate via petition, as well as candidates nominated by the Elections Committee. Electronic ballots will be sent to the email addresses of FA members. All members in good standing are encouraged to participate.
This year’s Elections Committee was formed on March 18, 2026 and completed its work on April 15, 2026.
The committee was comprised of:
KOH Choon Hwee, History (Chair)
Liz KOSLOV, Urban Planning + IoES
Raphael ROUQUIER, Math
Please direct any questions to the Elections Committee Chair, KOH Choon Hwee (chkoh@history.ucla.edu).
Current Candidates:
Matthew Fisher
Bio:
Matthew Fisher is Associate Professor in the Department of English at UCLA, where he teaches courses on medieval literature and book history. He is currently completing a book about the Cotton Library fire, which nearly, but did not, burn thousands of medieval manuscripts.
Candidate Statement:
I put myself through graduate school doing web design (poorly) and network administration (slightly more skilfully). As a scholar of the humanities broadly familiar with current trends and practices in corporate IT and enterprise software, I have served on a number of Academic Senate committees relating to IT, most recently serving on and chairing CDITP (2021-2024), and also the Committee on Instruction and Technology (2012-2014). On the Faculty Association Executive Board, I hope to use my experience and expertise to shape the FA’s response in advocating for faculty IT concerns in our research and teaching in the face of the Administration’s attempted erosions of academic freedom, free speech, equity, and digital privacy.
Joseph Fishkin
Bio:
I am a professor in the law school, where I teach and write about constitutional law, employment discrimination, election law, and related areas. My most recent book, with coauthor Willy Forbath, is The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy. I earned a doctorate in politics at Oxford and then a JD at Yale. I taught for a decade at the University of Texas, Austin, then moved to UCLA in 2021—in the middle of the pandemic, having barely set foot in LA before moving here. I’m very glad to have made this move! My partner and I have an 11 year old and a 7 year old and live in Westwood.
Candidate Statement:
I’m hoping to help with three things if I join the FA executive board:
First: I joined the FA last year because of the Trump administration’s brutal assault on American higher education. I expect that assault to continue in some form until January 2029. I found the FA’s successful effort to use litigation (with the AAUP and allies) to stop many egregious federal grant cancellations astonishing and inspiring. I would like to join the FA’s executive board to help creatively frame and target our ongoing efforts to fight a federal government whose leaders aim to destroy what we do—even as, awkwardly, the federal government is the primary funder of significant parts of what we do.
Second: UCLA’s coming budget battles. As a member of the LgA this year from the law school, I’ve seen firsthand how the FA and LgA can work together productively to strengthen faculty governance with respect to budgetary matters. We are going to need to do a lot more of that over the next two years. Our job, as I see it, and it’s an important job, is to press the university to find ways to solve its budget problems that do not undermine faculty research, teaching, or autonomy. Third: the ongoing controversies about academic freedom and free speech. I see the FA’s distinctive role in this area as pressing for the fundamental autonomy of faculty over our syllabi, our classes, our hiring decisions, the speakers we bring to campus, and the things any of us choose to say both in the classroom and in “extramural” settings. I hope to help us frame strong but also strategic efforts to protect these foundational freedoms.
Kaily Heitz
Bio:
Kaily Heitz is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. As a critical human geographer and Black geographies scholar, Dr. Heitz’s work focuses on cultural and community senses of place and responses to racialized dispossession in California. She is currently working on a manuscript, Oakland is a Vibe: The Relational Geographies of Black Cultural Development, which explores anti-displacement activist projects in Oakland that manipulate racial capitalist development in order to create sanctuaries for Black life, art, and liberation. Her ongoing community-based research projects explore Black land claims in California and the sensory environmental politics of smell at the Salton Sea.
Candidate Statement:
During my 2025-26 year as a member of the Faculty Association, I had the privilege of being able to organize in the legislative assembly around transparency between the administration and our faculty. Such communication, and being able to take action beyond the institution’s capacity, will continue to be important as our administration shows its unwillingness to stand up for the most vulnerable of our students, faculty, lecturers, and staff. As a member of the executive committee, I would continue to work to advocate for resources and protections for international staff and faculty, shared leadership in the senate, and to fight against institutional and federal censorship of scholarship on inequality.
Bharat Jayram Venkat
Bio:
Bharat Jayram Venkat is an Associate Professor at UCLA with a joint appointment spanning the Institute for Society & Genetics, the Department of History, and the Department of Anthropology. His research and teaching focus on questions related to climate change and health. His first book, At the Limits of Cure, is about tuberculosis in India. His forthcoming book, Swelter, is about thermal inequality and the impacts of extreme heat on our bodies. For the last four years, he has also served as a faculty-in-residence, living on the Hill amidst our undergraduate students. Most importantly, he has a dog named Seven.
Candidate Statement:
Since arriving at UCLA in 2019, I have lived and worked through multiple strikes, a global pandemic, fires, budget crises, funding suspensions, and the unleashing of physical violence against students, staff, and faculty. The university should be a public good. But for it to remain so, faculty must continue to fight to improve our conditions of labor, which are also our collective conditions of research, teaching, and learning. If elected to the FA Executive Board, I will work with all faculty to increase our power—in support of academic freedom, the prioritization of research and teaching in the budget, increased faculty hiring, decreased spending on administration and policing, and investments in faculty welfare (especially affordable housing and childcare).