About Us

About the Division of Arts & Humanities

The Arts & Humanities (A&H) at UC Berkeley are collectively, and in their parts, recognized as among the best in the country and the world. Our faculty and students are shaping discourse and society, improving our understanding of human experience, and gaining new insight into the individual and collective imaginations of those living today as well as those who have inhabited the earth over the past thousands of years.

Across 19 departments and 14 research units, more than 250 faculty members study every dimension of the human experience from the ancient past to the anticipated future; they employ a range of critical, theoretical, and rhetorical frameworks and work in more than 60 different languages. Our faculty includes leading philosophers, award-winning poets and novelists, and practicing artists in music, theater, dance, and the visual arts; they have won the most Distinguished Teaching Awards on campus, and we count among them a significant number of Macarthur “genius” grantees, Guggenheim Fellows, and recipients of other prestigious national and international awards.

We offer more than 30 undergraduate and 27 graduate degree programs, and we enroll almost 18,000 undergraduate and 700 graduate students from across the university in our courses each semester. We are proud to be the most diverse large Division on campus: half of our majors are students who transferred in from community colleges and a sizeable number of our undergraduate and graduate students come underrepresented minorities.

Featured Divisional Priorities