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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.

A changing of the guard is coming to UC Berkeley’s venerable Center for New Music and Audio Technologies. For almost four decades, the institution known as CNMAT has served musicians and producers with groundbreaking research and tools. Now, longtime leader Edmund Campion is preparing to retire and hand over the reins to co-director and fellow music professor Carmine-Emanuele Cella.

This fall, incoming assistant professor of ethnomusicology Chris Batterman Cháirez is teaching the course Music, Movement and Migration in Latin America.

As a young kid growing up in Mexico City, UC Berkeley Professor Chris Batterman Cháirez would always hear music — it seemed to be playing everywhere he went, a kind of soundtrack to his daily life.

Hannes Bajohr is a Professor in the Department of German. Dr. Bajohr’s primary areas of focus include digital writing and literature, German philosophy of the 20th century, and political theory. He received the N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature by the Electronic Literature Organization in 2024. Dr. Bajohr studied philosophy, German literature, and modern history at Humboldt University of Berlin, and received his PhD from Columbia University. 

Eric Naiman is a Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. He is the author of the books Sex in Public (Princeton University Press, 1997) and Nabokov, Perversely (Cornell University Press, 2010). His teaching mainly focuses on 19th and 20th-century Russian literature, as well as early Soviet culture. Dr. Naiman received his JD from Yale Law School, and his PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Berkeley. 

"Present Tense (Roll Call)" covers BAMPFA's Art Wall in a collage of text unearthed from UC Berkeley's long history of radical education and protest.

This month, theatergoers watched the new Superman movie in 76 countries. Though the film played in many different languages, every showing included a new language created by David J. Peterson ’03 and his wife, Jessie Peterson.

The duo created Suh Ankripton, the latest version of the Kryptonian language used on Superman’s home planet. A pivotal scene that changes the world’s opinion of Superman involves characters speaking the language.