News

Production designer Nina Ruscio and casting director Cathy Sandrich Gelfond dish on designing “triggering” hospital sets, casting for raw authenticity and how their time at Berkeley taught them to watch life closely, turning every detail into material for an immersive narrative. 

Ask people what they love most about The Pitt, the HBO Max medical drama that debuted in 2025 and went on to sweep the Emmys, and the answer is almost always the same: It feels so real.

The students leaned in to get a closer look at the object on the table: a small terracotta figurine of a woman cradling a baby, her features softened by time.

On the back, pressed into the clay more than 2,000 years ago, was a fingerprint — a trace of the maker’s hand and a link to the worshipper who once carried the statuette as an offering to a goddess. For the students gathered in the quiet classroom that day, the ancient world felt suddenly close.

As Cal Performances brings the 19th-century poet’s explosive verse to Zellerbach Hall with "Emily — No Prisoner Be," Berkeley lecturer John Shoptaw explores why her hymn-like verse is the ultimate prescription for a digital age.

In order to truly experience the poetry of Emily Dickinson, it must be read aloud, says Berkeley English senior continuing lecturer John Shoptaw. You have to hear her irregular metrics, her slant rhymes and signature dashes, in order to glimpse her inner world. 

Berkeley Professor Winnie Wong's new book, "The Many Names of Anonymity," is the first to explore in depth the lives and motivations of the Chinese artists during the Canton trade.

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, a little-known era of global art history was born, sparked by the arrival of European and American merchants to the port city of Canton (known today as Guangzhou). These merchants, from countries like Portugal, the Netherlands, England and Scandinavia, would arrive every fall to trade silver and illegal opium in exchange for tea and porcelain. 

Osargue Otebele is a PhD candidate in the Department of Film and Media. Her research mainly focuses on Nigerian art and film from 1960 to 2000. She is the Professor Norman Jacobson Memorial Fellow through the Townsend Center for Humanities dissertation fellowship. She is also a graduate-student writing instructor for the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF), as well as a former Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow. We are excited to be able to discuss her research, as well as MMUF, and her experience as a dissertation fellow! 

Alex Saum-Pascual proposes that new artistic representations could help bridge the gap between knowing a technology is harmful and actually changing our behavior.

It’s easy to forget that the cloud isn’t an amorphous ball of fluff, says UC Berkeley Professor Alex Saum-Pascual — that it is, in fact, physical internet infrastructure that takes many forms in many places across the world.

When Pylos: Warrior-Princes of Ancient Greece opened at the Getty Villa Museum last summer, visitors encountered one of the most extraordinary archaeological stories of the last half century: the discovery of the Griffin Warrior grave and the renewed understanding it has sparked of the Bronze Age Aegean. But for UC Berkeley students and alumni, the exhibition represents something more personal.

UC Berkeley researchers used machine learning to analyze more than 5,000 Billboard Hot 100 hits, finding that storytelling has been on the uptick since the 1990s thanks to the rise in popularity of hip-hop.

Minoo Moallem was getting her master’s degree at Tehran University when the Iranian revolution swept the country. At first, she enjoyed new civil liberties, but as those were curtailed, Moallem left to pursue her Ph.D. abroad.

Moallem is now a professor of gender and women’s studies and the new faculty director for the UC Berkeley Initiative for Iranian Studies. 

The multidisciplinary artist created BAMPFA’s newest site-specific installation with a goal she always has with her paintings: to break it out of its preciousness.

Los Angeles-based artist Sarah Cain never plans her works. To plan means they would be less alive, less real, less her. Plus, plans never go the way they’re supposed to, anyway. Something always gets in the way or breaks or plain doesn’t pan out. Instead, she arrives on site, in hot pink Nikes and a list of the paints she needs, and gets to work.

On October 5 and 6, 2025, Flemish Minister-President Matthias Diependaele visited UC Berkeley, highlighting more than half a century of cultural, academic, and diplomatic ties between Flanders and the university. His visit underscored the enduring strength of Dutch and Flemish Studies at Berkeley—home to the oldest such program in the United States—and celebrated new investments in its future.

Kelly Chuang is a third-year English and Rhetoric double major and a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow. She has a strong interest in speculative fiction, the uncanny, and narratology, and she jokes that she can connect almost anything she reads back to cyborgs, Carl Sagan’s Contact, or sci-fi.

Kelly chose English because of her long-standing love of literature and the teachers who encouraged it. She added Rhetoric after discovering how much she enjoyed the department’s interdisciplinary approach and the energy of its faculty.

On Nov. 11 and 12, the Korean Experimental Music Festival made a stop at UC Berkeley for four concerts, premiering compositions by students and faculty alike from UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz and Stanford University. Musicians from the South Korean National Gugak Center joined forces with the San Francisco-based Del Sol Quartet to bring these compositions to life. 

Berkeley Professor Hannah Zeavin explores how 20th-century ideals of motherhood and new media technologies became deeply intertwined, shaping and surveilling American family life.

Since Sara Guyer became dean of UC Berkeley’s Division of Arts & Humanities in 2021, she has served as a spokesperson for the discipline on a global scale. She directed the World Humanities Report, presided over the Consortium for Humanities Centers and Institutes, and frequently is quoted in the media contradicting the myth that the arts and humanities’ relevance is in decline.