News

When Nathanael Stephen Payne ’23 was developing Wrestle with Jimmy for UC Berkeley’s “Introduction to Playwriting” class, he had no idea where the project would take him. His answer came several years later, when he crossed the stage at graduation as one of two students to receive the Larry Belling Promising Writers’ Award.

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST HERE.

Spanish speakers in the United States, among linguists and non-linguists, have been denigrated for the way that they speak, says UC Berkeley sociolinguist Justin Davidson. It's part of the country's long history of scrutiny of non-monolingual English speakers, he says, dating back to the early 20th century.

LISTEN TO BERKELEY TALKS

In Berkeley Talks episode 193, science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson discusses climate change, politics and the need for "angry optimism." Robinson is the author of 22 novels, including his most recent, The Ministry for the Future, published in 2020.  

We are honored to announce that Poulomi Saha, associate professor of English and co-director of the Program in Critical Theory, has received the 2023 American Cultures Excellence in Teaching Award.

This Thursday through Sunday, UC Berkeley’s Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies will present Marisela Treviño Orta’s The River Bride.  

In the play, set in a small Brazilian fishing village, a mysterious man is fished from the Amazon River three days before a wedding. Brazilian folklore and lyrical storytelling blend to share a tale of true love, regret, transformation and two sisters who struggle to stay true to each other, while staying true to themselves.

Listen to the Berkeley Voices Podcast here

In his research, UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate Saagar Asnani looks at music manuscripts from between the 12th and 14th centuries in medieval France. He says only recently have scholars begun to use a wider variety of media and artistic expressions as a way to study language. "If we unpack the genre of music, we will find a very precise record of how language was spoken," Saagar says.

Lauren Bartone is a PhD student in Italian Studies with a designated emphasis in folklore. Her background as a visual artist strongly informs her approach to studying Italian culture. Before joining the Department of Italian Studies at Berkeley, she completed a B.A. in Fine Art at UCLA, followed by an M.A. in Education at UC Berkeley, and an M.F.A. at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Berkeley Professor Nicole Starosielski is leading the way in subsea cable network sustainability while also empowering the next generation to take the lead.

While many people may think satellites are responsible for telecommunications as we know it, the global subsea cable network actually carries more than 99% of the internet traffic between continents. Because of their marginal carbon footprint, subsea cables have often been excluded from internet sustainability studies, yet they have the most potential for providing sustainable communications infrastructure.

The New Yorker profiled David J. Peterson, who has created more than 50 fictional languages for films and television, including "Game of Thrones" and both recent Dune movies. Peterson graduated in 2003 with a dual major in English and Linguistics. From the article:

The most influential conlanger working today is David J. Peterson. Born in Long Beach, California, Peterson started to create languages in 2000, while he was a sophomore at U.C. Berkeley... 

UC Berkeley will refurbish the Bancroft Dance Studio thanks to a generous gift by Daniel Hitchcock ’69, a mathematics and physics alum. Hitchcock provided the crucial funding to make the studio space safer and more accessible. The enhancements will include re-sanded floors, repaired windows, and a new water filtration system.

Listen now

Brittany chats with Professor Poulomi Saha about America's obsession with cults. With so many shows choose from, cult documentaries could now be seen as their own genre. But what might our fascination with cults reveal about society's shortfalls?

On February 28, the Berkeley Language Center and the Language and AI working group at the Townsend Center for the Humanities will be hosting a half-day conference Language and AI: Generating Interdisciplinary Connections and Possibilities.

Last year, Ashley Lawson, a communications major at Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania, had to take a journalism class online, even though the professor teaching the course was on her own campus.

Lawson was in the class with students from Lock Haven, Bloomsburg and Mansfield universities, which had been integrated in 2022 under the name Commonwealth University of Pennsylvania to reduce costs. The state schools had been running in the red and losing student population.