News

A new student-curated exhibition in Doe Library’s Brown Gallery showcases artists from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia and their artworks that reflect the complexity of what it means to inherit language.

In Fall 2021, Bryce Wallace (’23, English & Linguistics) was still stunned that he had gotten into Cal as a transfer student from Irvine Valley College, when more UC-related honors started pouring in. He has since received the merit-based Sharer and Gilman Scholarships and was granted a College Corps Fellowship for his strong commitment to community service, especially in the areas of literacy and DEI work on campus. He has participated in URAP and was recently named a Haas Scholar.

Rhetoric Department PhD candidate Linda Kinstler has been announced as one of 10 Whitting Award winners on March 29. The prizes are designed to recognize excellence and promise in a spectrum of emerging talent, giving most winners their first chance to devote themselves full time to their own writing, or to take bold new risks in their work.

This is not your typical final exam.

Art history students at UC Berkeley are putting their semester-long learning on display this week with Letters | الحروف: How Artists Reimagined Language in the Age of Decolonization — a thought-provoking exhibit opening March 13 in Doe Library’s Brown Gallery.

Eniola Fakile’s creations live in another world.

Fakile is a photographer. A performance artist. A filmmaker. A sculptor. A costume designer. She works in textiles, ready-made objects and assemblage. She’s not constrained by what has been or should be. Instead, she expands outward to see how far she can go. When an idea flashes in her mind, she imagines a new universe in which that idea, that creation, lives.

In the final few days of February, as the Russian Army advanced toward Kyiv, Ukrainian forces blew up the Irpin bridge, ripping open its latticed metal insides so that their edges buckled and curled. A suburb of Kyiv, Irpin was the last city that the Russian Army would have had to conquer to reach the capital; the bridge provided the fastest route from the city center to the Kyiv ring road. “It was the main bridge that stopped the invasion of Kyiv,” says Slava Balbek, a Ukrainian architect who is volunteering as a drone operator with territorial defense forces.

Read the original article on Berkeley News

Matthew Rowe wasn’t considering a degree in the humanities when he joined UC Berkeley in fall 2022. Instead, he chose to major in political science, with the goal of preparing for a career addressing the global problem of climate change.

It was fall 2022 and UC Berkeley’s first Black Wednesday of the year. Student Kaiyah Florence, excited to reconnect with the Black community on campus after summer break, wasn’t going to miss it.

A little more than a month after opening to the public on Jan. 28, 2020, UC Berkeley’s Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life’s In Real Times. Arthur Szyk: Art & Human Rights, curated by Francesco Spagnolo and Shir Gal Kochavi, was shut down due to the global pandemic created by Covid-19. 

Now that Hispanic Heritage Month has arrived, I’ve realized that this is my second year at Berkeley (a little late for the realization, I know).

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Linda Kinstler's (Rhetoric PhD Candidate) new book Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends, published by Public Affairs, has received national and international praise since it's publication in the US this August. Read select reviews below: 

The Guardian: Come to This Court and Cry by Linda Kinstler review – when Holocaust memories fade

In 2022-2023, UC Berkeley’s Arts + Design Initiative and Future Histories Lab will sponsor a series of music and dance performances, exhibitions, public conversations, and courses using Angel Island’s historic immigration station as a jumping-off point for discussion about race in America, global migration, and architectures of incarceration. We’ll use the arts, design, and historical and landscape interpretation to understand current events and envision better futures.

We’re thrilled to share that SFMOMA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) will be offering free museum admission to our employees and students during the run of the upcoming exhibition, Diego Rivera’s America. UC Berkeley’s classic Rivera fresco painting ‘Still Life and Blossoming Almond Trees’ is included as part of this showcase. 

"I plan to graduate in spring 2023, and my honors thesis is about language discourse and colonialism. This topic has been inspired by all the critical theory courses I have been able to take at Berkeley that have allowed me to make tangible connections between the lived realities I take with me from my hometown and the patterns of oppression that persist in other rural areas in California.

The course was part of the program New Strategies for the Humanities at Berkeley, a Mellon Foundation grant housed in the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry (CICI) under the Division of Arts & Humanities. It was also designated as a course in the Course Threads program under the Environment and Humanities. 

Hilton Als, celebrated writer, theater critic, and Teaching Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of English, has been announced as a recipient of the 2022 Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing.