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Kévin Drif is a third-year PhD student in the Department of French, with a designated emphasis in Film and Media Studies. His research largely focuses on cultural representations of children of immigrants in French media, as he explores the ways in which the idea of a French republican identity is confronted to children of immigrants’ cultural hybridity. Kévin received a BA and MA from the University of Tours in English literature, before receiving an MA in French and Francophone literature from CU Boulder. 

Saagar Asnani is a graduate student in Musicology and Medieval Studies. He focuses particularly on the regions of France, Italy, Occitania, and Catalonia. He works mainly with the relationship between language and music, as his research bridges sociohistorical linguistics with musicology. Saagar earned his MA from UC Berkeley in 2022, and BA in Music, French and Biology from University of Pennsylvania. 

In this first-person narrative, Yesenia Ochoa, a first-year student at UC Berkeley, tells UC Berkeley News about her experience being a student from a migrant family and her educational aspirations.

“I grew up in Yuba City. My parents immigrated there from a little village on the side of a hill called Las Estacas in Michoacan, Mexico, when they were 23. They work in the fields — agriculture is a huge industry in the region — so they leave really early in the morning to harvest peaches, walnuts, tomatoes, almonds, almond fields, things like that.

Major(s): Rhetoric and Legal Studies

Alejandra Colon, a proud Latina and 2018 graduate of UC Berkeley, has continued to honor her heritage through her work and community involvement. She remains an active member of the UC Berkeley Chicanx Latinx Alumni Association, and has served on the executive boards of both the Orange County and Los Angeles chapters. 

UC Berkeley’s Department of Music unveiled the new Helen and Thomas Wu Performance Hall in September, following an extensive renovation that was years in the making. The reopened space includes a larger stage, new seats, and state-of-the-art sound, lighting, and digital technology upgrades.

The 100-seat venue occupies a former lecture hall at Morrison Hall, a building that also houses music classrooms, practice rooms, and Berkeley’s storied collection of baroque, classical, gamelan, and other world instruments. 

Professor and Chair of Art Practice Ronald Rael was selected to design one of the 25 site-specific, newly commissioned installations for Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial at the Cooper Hewitt, which explores design’s role in shaping the physical and emotional realities of home across the United States, US Territories, and Tribal Nations.

A surge of scholarly interest across the country in Ukrainian studies is far exceeding American universities’ capabilities, but UC Berkeley is positioning itself to fill that gap.

Curators of Berkeley is a series of interviews with Berkeley alumni from a range of disciplines in the arts and humanities who work across curatorial practices and fields. Patricia Cariño Valdez is an art consultant, independent curator, and manager of the Olivia Collection. 

Tadiwa Madenga is a scholar of African and Black diasporic literature, gender and sexuality, and print cultures. Her research is concerned with the relationship between literature and sexuality which she traces through 20th and 21st century African book fairs and their subgenres: keynotes, book stalls, magazines, poetry. Across her academic and creative projects, her reading practice centers archival work and site specificity as critical methods for literary analysis.

The Division of Arts & Humanities at UC Berkeley is pleased to welcome 10 professors in the departments of Art Practice, Comparative Literature, English, German, Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures, Philosophy, Scandinavian, and Spanish & Portuguese as of July 1, 2024.