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.
Alexandra Lossada works on immigration, citizenship, and language in contemporary American ethnic literatures, especially in Latinx and Chicanx writing. Her current manuscript project, tentatively entitled The Interpreter of Crimmigration and Detention, reevaluates the figure and the role of the interpreter in post-9/11 literary works that depict detention, deportation, and/or family separation via the legal apparatus of crimmigration, or the intersection of criminal law with immigration law.
Farah Bakaari is a scholar of 20th and 21st century African literature. She joins Berkeley English after receiving her Ph.D. from Cornell University. Her teaching and research interests include postcolonial studies, questions of comparison, political theory and the novel as well as the relationship between aesthetics and politics.
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.
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.
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.
“I can’t believe this is real,” thought Andrea Chavez as nearly 2,000 concertgoers rose to their feet and began clapping in unison. Chavez had been playing the double bass for the UC Berkeley Symphony Orchestra for two years, but this was among the most rapturous responses she’d seen from an audience yet.
Quick: Think of “folklore.” Did images of witches, trolls, goblins or other fairytale creatures and stories populate your mind?
Next, think of something “computational.” Did you conjure a spreadsheet? An artificial intelligence prompt window? Zoolander famously looking for the files “in the computer?”
Now put the terms together: “Computational Folklore.” Sounds like a pretty wild collabo, huh?
All year I have been reading articles that paint an apocalyptic picture of humanities instruction in the age of artificial intelligence.
This article was adapted from a Berkeley Voices podcast episode. Listen to the original episode here.
When Winnie Wong first saw Dafen Oil Painting Village in 2006, it was nothing like she’d imagined.
Christine Philliou is currently the Chair of the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, and is a Professor in the Department of History. Professor Philliou specializes in the region of the Balkans and the Middle East, specifically focused on the emergence of the Greek and Turkish nation-states. She has published Biography of Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution (2011), as well as Turkey: A Past Against History (2021). Dr. Philliou received her M.A.
Sophie Cushman is a Ph.D. candidate in Classical Archaeology in the Department of Ancient Greek & Roman Studies at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on Aegean prehistory, with particular interest in Mycenaean mortuary practices, non-palatial communities, and material culture. Her dissertation, "Death and Taxes: Mortuary Perspectives on Non-Palatial Communities in the Mycenaean Argolid (ca. 1600–1070 BCE)," explores how small communities in the northeastern Peloponnese used chamber tombs in response to the rise of regional palatial authority during the Late Bronze Age.
Dr. Ramona Naddaff is an associate professor in the Department of Rhetoric. Professor Naddaff is also the director of the Art of Writing program. She is a co-director and editor of Zone Books, an independent nonprofit publisher focused on the humanities and social sciences. Professor Naddaff’s research interests include Ancient Greek philosophy, culture, poetics and rhetoric; the history of philosophy; theory of literary censorship; theory of the novel; and aesthetics.
