News

Let me paint a picture for you all: about a month ago, I was giving a speech in front of Sproul Hall. Alongside many other Armenian students, I was protesting the cancelation of a film screening about the displaced people of Nagorno-Karabakh, which we had planned for Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day.

Comparative literature student Frank Cahill competed in the Scripps National Spelling Bee as an eighth grader. This year, on May 28 and 29, he’ll be on the other side of the stage.

There’s a word UC Berkeley comparative literature Ph.D. student Frank Cahill will never forget. He misspelled it as an eighth grader in the second round of the live televised Scripps National Spelling Bee finals. 

Porwigle. Yes, you read that correctly. The word was p-o-r-w-i-g-l-e, pronounced por·​wi·​gle. 

This I’m a Berkeleyan was written as a first-person narrative compiled from a UC Berkeley News interview with student Daniela Guadalupe Castellanos, who’s graduating this May. 

This is my third year at Berkeley, but I’m graduating already. I am from northeast Sacramento, a really small town, Cameron Park, where there’s nothing really there except McDonald’s.

“What they were really touching was each other,” says French Professor Henry Ravenhall. “The book was just a conduit for whatever kind of social desire was needed to be expressed within that group.”

As a specialist in medieval French literature, Henry Ravenhall has examined hundreds of manuscripts from the Middle Ages. Every time he does, he sits quietly in a special library viewing room and gingerly turns each page with clean, dry hands, careful not to tear or otherwise harm these precious artifacts. 

Leah Binkovitz (History of Art, ‘10), a senior editorial writer at the Houston Chronicle, has been awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing as part of the Chronicle’s editorial board.

This I’m a Berkeleyan was written as a first-person narrative from a UC Berkeley News interview with student Emily Thompson, who’s graduating this May with a major in film and media and a minor in Scandinavian studies.  

“I grew up one of five kids in a very conservative, Mormon family in a small town in Utah. My ancestors were all Mormon pioneers going all the way back to the beginning of the church. It was the culture we lived in. 

Héctor Muñoz-Guzmán is a first-year MFA student from South Berkeley. Captivated by art at an early age, he strives to represent his immigrant family and community in the world of fine art. UC Berkeley writer Alexander Rony interviewed Muñoz-Guzmán at an open studio event where he displayed his paintings from the past year.

The Armenian language and literature program at Berkeley will be supported in perpetuity thanks to an effort led by alum Eric Esrailian (B.A. ‘96 Integrative Biology) and his family.

When Dr. Esrailian first came to Berkeley in the early 1990s, it was a large and often impersonal place. Seeing a flyer about the Armenian Students Association helped him find community and feel at home.

Eleni Berg is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores themes of nature, immigration, consumerism, and indigeneity.

Berg spoke with UC Berkeley writer Alexander Rony at a recent open studio event for MFA (master’s in fine arts) students. At the time, Berg was hosting a workshop where visitors were sculpting clay filled with native seeds.