Showcasing Excellence: Let's Talk about the 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 almost 30 undergraduate and 28 graduate degree programs, and we enroll on average 18,000 undergraduate and 700 graduate students from across the university in our courses each semester. We are proud to be one of the most diverse large Divisions on campus: Over the last 10 years, on average 53% of A&H majors have been transfer students, whereas they make up about 33% of the undergraduate student population; 26.7% of all Arts and Humanities declared majors identify as Latinx, compared to the 19.3% of total campus undergraduates; and A&H serves a disproportionate number of California residents: 86.2% of our declared majors are CA residents compared to 76.3% of all Berkeley undergraduates.

2022-2023 Divisional Highlights

Provided by the Office of Planning and Analysis and the UCOP Public Data Dashboard

undergraduate_student_data_may_2023.pdf

Meet our Featured 2023-2024 Divisional Experts

Faculty listed below specialize in a broad range of current topics covering everything from climate, to A.I., to politics, and more. To contact them, please visit their faculty page or email sfullerton@berkeley.edu for an introduction.

Featured Expert List

John Alba Cutler

Associate Professor, English Department
Specialization: Chicanx/Latinx, Poetry, modernism, print culture

His current project, “Latinx Modernism and the Spirit of Latinoamericanismo,” examines the prodigious literary output of US Spanish-language serials in the early twentieth century. Daily newspapers, weekly magazines, literary reviews, and anarchist journals were the primary literary institutions for Latinx communities during this time period, publishing tens of thousands of original and reprinted poems, short stories, and crónicas.

Hilton Als

Teaching Professor, English Department
Specialization: Creative Nonfiction, writing, journalism, curatorial, Joan Didion

Als is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and staff writer for the New Yorker. Most recently, he curated an exhibition titled "What She Means" featuring works that surveyed the life of Joan Didion. His most recent book (2023), titled My Pinup, is a hybrid book of memoir and essays.

Stephen Best

Professor, English Department; Director, Townsend Center for the Humanities; President-elect, Consortium for Humanities Centers and Institutes
Specialization: 19th Century American, African American, Critical Theory, Film

Stephen Best's scholarship encompasses a variety of fields and materials: American and African-American literature and culture, cinema and technology, rhetoric and the law, and critical theory. His interest in the critical nexus between slavery and historiography, in the varying scholarly and political preoccupations with establishing the authority of the slave past in black life, quadrates with an exploration of where the limits of historicism as a mode of literary study may lay, especially where that search manifests as an interest in alternatives to suspicious reading in the text-based disciplines.

Rizvana Bradley

Assistant Professor, Department of Film & Media
Specialization: Aesthetic Theory, Art History, Black Studies, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Film Theory, Critical theory, Moving Image Installation, Postcolonial Studies, Race and the Philosophy of Media.

Her forthcoming book manuscript offers a critical examination of the histories and forms of racialized embodiment that move through a range of experimental artistic practices, which integrate film and other media. Bradley’s scholarly approach to artistic practices and cultural production within the wider black diaspora expands and develops frameworks for thinking across different artistic mediums in global and transnational contexts.

Jeroen Dewulf

Queen Beatrix Professor and Chair in Dutch Studies; Professor in German Studies; Faculty Academic Director of Study Abroad; Director of the Institute of European Studies; Director of the Center for Portuguese Studies
Specialization: Colonial history, Dutch Studies, Language and Identity, Cultural Anthropology, Postcolonial and Cosmopolitan Theory.

His academic work forcuses on African-American culture in Dutch Brazil, New Netherland and New York City. Most notably the legacy of Pinkster and Sojourner Truth in his book The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo: The Forgotten History of America’s Dutch-Owned Slaves (2017), and in Louisiana, most notably the origins of the Mardi Gras Indians in his book From the Kingdom of Kongo to Congo Square: Kongo Dances and the Origins of the Mardi Gras Indians (2017). In 2021, he also presented a new theory on the origins of a festive tradition in Brazil, known as cucumbi

Nadia Ellis

Associate Professor, Department of English
Specialization: Black diasporic, Caribbean, and postcolonial literatures and cultures.

Her book, Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora (Duke, 2015; Honorable Mention, William Sanders Scarborough Prize, MLA), explores forms of black belonging animated by queer utopian desire and diasporic aesthetics. It is a project built from a long-standing interest in following trajectories of literary cultures from the Caribbean to Britain to the United States. The work also developed through a preoccupation with several intersections, including those between queerness and diaspora, imperial identification and colonial resistance, performance and theory.

Sara Guyer

Dean, Division of Arts & Humanities; Professor, Department of English
Specialization: Guyer’s scholarship encompasses the fields of Romanticism, Jewish Studies, Literary and Cultural Theory, and also the Humanities itself.

Sara Guyer is the Dean of Arts & Humanities and Professor of English. Her term as Dean began in September 2021 following a career devoted to advancing the humanities, with special attention to public-private coalitions, innovative faculty research programs, the public humanities, and inclusive collaborations across the globe. She is Director of the World Humanities Report and outgoing President of Consortium for Humanitities Centers and Institutes.

Asma Kazmi

Associate Professor, Department of Art Practice
Specialization: ARVR, Islam, Muslim culture, complex trade routes, global flows of people and commodities, labor, colonial and indigenous knowledge systems, and interspecies entanglements.

Asma Kazmi is a research-based artist who combines virtual and material objects to explore simultaneity—a tug of more than one time and place. Her work involves long term engagement with cities, architecture, plants, animals, stones, and other matter to locate vestiges of relations forged by the legacies of colonialism and post-colonial contexts. Combining visual and textual detritus from western and non-western historical manuscripts, photographs, archival material, fragments of locations, and mixing them with her own fabulations, Kazmi tells intertwining stories about Islam, Muslim culture, complex trade routes, global flows of people and commodities, labor, colonial and indigenous knowledge systems, and interspecies entanglements.

Zamansele Nsele

Assistant Professor, Department of History of Art
Specialization: Modern and Contemporary African & African Diasporic Art

Zamansele Nsele is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary African & African Diasporic Art. She is currently working on her first monograph, provisionally titled, “Reckoning with Post-Apartheid & Imperialist Nostalgias in Archival Art Practice in Africa”. In the monograph, Zamansele Nsele explores how nostalgia can generate visual epistemologies that sanitize, disavow, and aestheticize oppressive racial histories— despite nostalgia’s conventional significance as an affective structure that affirms Black social life. One of the central themes that is consistent in Zamansele’s research and writing is her critique of image-based rituals of antiblack violence.

Beth Piatote

Associate Professor, Department of English
Specialization: Language revitalization, Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature

Beth Piatote is a scholar of Native American/Indigenous literature and law; a creative writer of fiction, poetry, plays, and essays; and an Indigenous language revitalization activist/healer, specializing in Nez Perce language and literature. She is the author of two books: Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature (Yale 2013), which won an MLA award; and The Beadworkers: Stories (Counterpoint 2019), which was longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize, the PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, and shortlisted for the California Independent Booksellers Association “Golden Poppy” Award. Her current projects include a series of scholarly essays on Indigenous law through sensory representations of sound, vision, synaesthesia, and haunting in the long 20th century literary works; essays on Indigenous language revitalization; a novel, a poetry collection, and further development of her play, Antíkoni, which was selected for the 2020 Festival of New Plays at the Autry.

Ronald Rael

Chair, Department of Art Practice; Professor of Architecture and Art Practice
Specialization: art and architecture installation, public art, social practice, Architecture, AutoCAD, 3D Printing, borderlands, refugees, environmental and climate-based practice, 3D mud printing

Rael is the author of Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (University of California Press 2017), an illustrated biography and protest of the wall dividing the U.S. from Mexico featured in a recent TED talk by Rael, and Earth Architecture (Princeton Architectural Press, 2008), a history of building with earth in the modern era to exemplify new, creative uses of the oldest building material on the planet. Emerging Objects, a company co-founded by Rael, is an independent, creatively driven, 3D Printing MAKE-tank specializing in innovations in 3D printing architecture, building components, environments and products (a short documentary of their work can be seen here). A monograph of the work of Emerging Objects entitled Printing Architecture: Innovative Recipes for 3D Printing was published in 2018 by Princeton Architectural Press. He was the co-founder of the start-up wood technology company, FORUST, where he maintains a position as design and technology consultant.

Poulomi Saha

Associate Professor, Department of English; Co-director of the Program in Critical Theory
Specialization: Cults in popular culture, Intentional communities, Asian American studies, psychoanalytic critique, feminist and queer theory, and postcolonial and anti-colonial studies.

I teach and write at the intersections of psychoanalytic critique, feminist and queer theory, postcolonial studies, and ethnic American literature. I am interested in shared histories of racialization, governance and regulation of gender/sexuality, and politics of resistance -- from the late 19th century decline of British colonial rule in the Indian Ocean through to the Pacific and the rise of American global power in the 20th century. My first book, An Empire of Touch: Women's Political Labor & The Fabrication of East Bengal (Columbia University Press, 2019) was awarded the Harry Levin Prize for outstanding first book by the American Comparative Literature Association in 2020 and the Helen Tartar First Book Subvention Prize (2017). A South Asia imprint by Penguin Random House (2019) is available here.

Debarati Sanyal

Professor of French, Director of The Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry
Specialization: Refugee Studies, French, Critical Theory, Gender Studies

Debarati Sanyal is Professor of French and Director of Berkeley's new Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry. She is affiliated with Critical Theory, the Center for Race and Gender, and European Studies. Her research and teaching interests include critical refugee studies; aesthetics and biopolitics; postwar French and Francophone culture; transcultural memory studies. Debarati's first book, The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony and the Politics of Form (Johns Hopkins, 2006), reclaims Baudelaire's aesthetic legacy for ethical inquiry and historical critique; her second book, Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (Fordham, 2015), addresses the transnational deployment of complicity in the aftermath of the Shoah. She is completing a book on migrant resistance, biopolitics and aesthetics in Europe's current refugee "crisis."

Alex Saum-Pasqual

Associate Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Specialization: digital literature, Transatlantic Literature, Spanish, Spain, electronic literature, digital humanities, new media, Latin America, machine learning and translation

Alex Saum-Pascual is a digital artist, poet, and professor. She is author of #Postweb! Crear con la máquina y en la red (Iberoamericana-Vervuert 2018) and numerous articles, special issues and book chapters on digital media and literature in the Spanish-speaking world, being featured in The Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, The Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, and Digital Humanities Quarterly, among others. Her digital artwork and poetry have been exhibited in galleries and art festivals internationally and have been studied in monographs such as Mujeres poetas del mundo digital (2020), and anthologized in the Electronic Literature Collection Vol. 4 (2022). Currently, she is Associate Professor of Contemporary Spanish Literature and New Media at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also part of the Executive Committee of the Berkeley Center for New Media, the advisory board of the Arts Research Center (Poetry and the Senses programs), and the board of directors of the Electronic Literature Organization

Solmaz Sharif

Shirley Shenker Assistant Professor, Department of English
Specialization: creative writing, poetry

Born in Istanbul to Iranian parents, Solmaz Sharif is the author of Customs (Graywolf Press, 2022) and Look (Graywolf Press, 2016), a finalist for the National Book Award. She holds degrees from U.C. Berkeley, where she studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, and New York University. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, the New York Times, and others. Her work has been recognized with a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lannan Foundation, and Stanford University. She is currently the Shirley Shenker Assistant Professor of English at U.C. Berkeley.

Stephanie Syjuco

Associate Professor, Sculpture, Department of Art Practice
Specializations: Photography, Sculpture, Installation, 3D Art, Fine Art, post/anti-colonial, immigration, archives, mixed-media

Stephanie Syjuco works in photography, sculpture, and installation, moving from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing and archive excavations. Recently, she has focused on how photography and image-based processes are implicated in the construction of racialized, exclusionary narratives of history and citizenship. Born in the Philippines, she is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and has exhibited widely, including at The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. She is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and resides in Oakland, California.

Ken Ueno

Associate Professor, Department of Music
Specializations: Composition, Sound Artist, Vocalist, Musician, Performance Art, experimental sound

Ken Ueno is a composer, vocalist, improviser, and sound artist. His music celebrates artistic possibilities which are liberated through a Whitmanesque consideration of the embodied practice of unique musical personalities. Much of Ueno’s music is “person-specific” wherein the intricacies of performance practice is brought into focus in the technical achievements of a specific individual fused, inextricably, with that performer’s aura. His artistic mission is to champion sounds that have been overlooked or denied so that audiences reevaluate their musical potential.

Winnie Wong

Associate Professor, Department of Rhetoric
Specializations: Labor and Creativity, Modern and Contemporary Art
Art and Law, China Studies

My research is concerned with the history and present of artistic authorship, with a focus on interactions between China and the West. My theoretical interests revolve around the critical distinctions of high and low, true and fake, art and commodity, originality and imitation, and, conceptual and manual labor, and thus my work focuses on objects and practices at the boundary of these categories. My first book, Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade (University of Chicago Press 2014, Joseph Levenson Book Prize 2015), is a study of Dafen village, China, the world’s largest production center for oil-on-canvas painting. The book is an ethnography of the encounters between artisanal painters and global conceptual artists. I am currently working on Nameless Image, an exploration of names, labor, art and science, in the export art of Guangzhou (Canton), circa 1730 to 1842, when it was the sole port of trade between China and Europe.

Damon Young

Associate Professor, Department of French and Film & Media
Specializations: Critical theory, Digital media, Film theory, Gender and sexuality studies, Global art cinema (with a focus on French and francophone).

Damon Young is co-appointed with the department of French and is affiliated with the Program in Critical Theory, the Berkeley Center for New Media, the Institute for European Studies, and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender & Sexuality. He teaches courses on art cinema, on sexuality and media, and on topics in digital media and film theory (including classical film theory, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, semiotics, feminist and queer theory). His first book, Making Sex Public and Other Cinematic Fantasies was published in the Theory Q series at Duke University Press in 2018, and shortlisted for the 2019 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize. That book examines fears and fantasies about women’s and queer sexualities—as figures for social emancipation or social collapse–in French and US cinema since the mid-1950s.

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Showcasing Excellence: Let's Talk about the Arts & Humanities

2022-2023 Divisional Highlights

Our top three highest-growing majors are Art Practice, Film & Media, and Music, which are in the top-10 highest-growing majors on campus over the past 5 years.

A&H faculty have won the most Distinguished Teaching Awards on campus, including 3 of the 5 awarded Distinguished Teaching Awards in 2023.

Over the last five years, A&H consistently has served a higher rate of URM, Pell Grant, and First Gen undergraduate majors compared to the campus as a whole.

A&H serves a disproportionate number of California residents: 86.2% of our declared majors are CA residents compared to 76.3% of all undergraduates.

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