News

UC Berkeley’s influence traverses the globe, and thanks to the Judith Stronach Travel Seminar, its creative scholars can as well.

This past November, art history professors Zamansele Nsele and Ivy Mills led a group of six graduate students to Senegal for an immersive, nine-day trip to the 2024 Dak'Art Biennale — a major art exhibition that showcases contemporary African art every other year.

As a child, Kimi Hill had seen the sketches that her grandfather, the well-known artist and UC Berkeley professor Chiura Obata, made while in World War II internment camps. But the artwork sat in storage, as quiet as the adults who never spoke of his incarceration.

“For many of my generation, we didn’t know anything because no one told us anything,” said Hill, now 70. “There was so much trauma and shame associated with being forced into the camps that parents generally didn’t want to talk about it.”

The Division of Arts & Humanities at UC Berkeley is proud to announce the launch of a new summer internship program in Taiwan, made possible by a generous $1 million gift from Steven and Constance Pan. This landmark investment will provide transformative international opportunities for all undergraduates at Berkeley, especially those studying East Asian Languages & Cultures and with majors in the Arts & Humanities Division, deepening their academic experience while equipping them for global careers.

We are proud to share that Aileen Zerrudo, a distinguished alumna of UC Berkeley’s Comparative Literature program, has been named the campus’s next Associate Vice Chancellor for Communications & Public Affairs and Chief Communications Officer.

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. 

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. 

When UC Berkeley junior history major Chloe Zitsow saw that the Center for Jewish Studies (CJS) offered courses in the Yiddish language, she leapt at the opportunity to learn the language her grandparents spoke at home.

“I found the language to be a great way to connect with both my culture and grandparents,” says Zitsow, a Jewish Studies minor from Los Angeles. “When my Bubbie and Zayde found out I could converse with them in Yiddish, they were so thrilled!”

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.