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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! 

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.

Renowned author Isabel Allende talked candidly about grief and love at a conversation hosted by UC Berkeley’s Arts Research Center on Wednesday. 

Allende, who is now 83 years old, is from Chile. She was forced into exile after the military coup and subsequent assassination of her uncle, President Salvador Allende. She has since written nearly 30 books, most famously, “The House of the Spirits” in 1982. 

How Berkeley changed everything — from landing his first role to discovering what it means to be Asian American.

Dr. Johan Klingborg is a Professor in the Department of Scandinavian. He works on nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century Scandinavian literature, and his research largely focuses on its intersections with media networks. Dr. Klingborg received his PhD in Literary Studies from Stockholm University in 2024. 

Firstly, can you introduce yourself? What are your main interests in the Department of Scandinavian, and how were you originally drawn to academia? 

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is rapidly transforming our society. It is also raising deep questions and profound concerns. 

UC Berkeley’s Department of Philosophy is launching a new initiative to bring leading scholars to campus to discuss the most pressing philosophical questions surrounding AI.

As the curator of UC Berkeley’s Salz Collection of Stringed Instruments, Carla Shapreau traces the rich histories of treasured, centuries-old violins and connects them to the next generation of musicians.

If there’s one thing Carla Shapreau knows, it’s violins. Violins with a history, in particular — instruments that have traveled over centuries among families and throughout wars, sometimes disappearing for decades only to reappear in another country with another name. 

Grace Erny is a Professor in the Department of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies, and is affiliated with the Graduate Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology and the Archaeological Research Facility. Dr. Erny’s research focuses mainly on Greece and the Aegean in the first millennium BCE. She received her PhD in Classics from Stanford University, with a specialization in Archeology. 

Starting this semester, UC Berkeley students can declare their intent to major in Korean studies. The program, sponsored by the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, reflects surging demand across campus for a comprehensive and interdisciplinary evaluation of the Korean peninsula’s language, history, and culture.