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December 15, 2023

Berkeley News

It’s almost unheard of for a first-year college student to curate an exhibition at a prestigious art institution. Yet, on a recent December afternoon, three new undergraduates at UC Berkeley — Raena Chan, Emma Cusimano and Caitlyn Liao — guided visitors around Five Tables of Art & Climate Change, a one-day pop-up show they helped curate at the campus’s Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA).

December 14, 2023

Brad Morgan and Julie Shin Morgan found their people at UC Berkeley. Julie’s best friend for life, Stella Sebastiani. Brad’s mentor, Paul Bartlett, and his first labmate, Yumi Nakagawa. And, at a party filled with chemistry students and church youth counselors, they fell for one another — “a small town Midwestern boy and a big city girl from LA,” as Brad said.

Moving to Berkeley had been a culture clash for both students in different ways, but they each welcomed the new perspectives. UC Berkeley taught them how to communicate, collaborate, and think critically.

December 8, 2023

New York Times

The writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin said his mission was to “bear witness to the truth,” and he did so in ways that were impassioned, influential and enduring. Baldwin will be the subject of a symposium at the Brooklyn Museum on Saturday where writers and artists will talk about his legacy. Here is a preview from my colleague Melissa Guerrero, who spoke with some of them:

December 6, 2023

Modern Language Association

The Modern Language Association of America today announced it is awarding its thirty-first annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies to Michael Lucey, the Sidney and Margaret Ancker Professor of Comparative Literature and French at the University of California, Berkeley, for his book What Proust Heard: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk, published by the University of Chicago Press.

November 30, 2023

What do we learn from history? And how do we tell Anne Frank's story to a generation whose grandparents were not yet born at the time of the Holocaust?

Ronald Leopold, Director of the Anne Frank House Museum in Amsterdam, explored the ways in which people have understood and engaged with Anne Frank's legacy during a November 15 lecture organized by the Dutch Studies program and hosted at The Magnes.

California Magazine

Adrian Tomine earned a B.A. in English in 1996.

November 27, 2023

Andrew F. Jones, Louis B. Agassiz Professor in Chinese, teaches modern Chinese literature and media culture.

November 20, 2023

Dozens of documentaries about cults are currently available on Netflix, Hulu, and Max, along with countless podcasts on Spotify, Apple, and other platforms. What's driving this trend? What's behind our collective fascination with communities and spiritualities that offer total belonging and total enthrallment?

November 15, 2023

Los Angeles Times

Ana de Alba holds multiple degrees from UC Berkeley. She graduated in 2002 with a dual major in Spanish & Portuguese and Political Economy of Industrial Societies and earned her J.D. at Berkeley Law in 2007.

A first-generation Mexican American who worked in the fields with her farmworker parents has been elevated to the largest federal appeals court.

Berkeley, CA -- On November 15, the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard University announced a new, collaborative initiative that will expand psychedelic research across the arts, humanities and social sciences.

November 13, 2023

The Daily Cal

A criminal justice major at UC San Diego, Dominique Fawn Hill was just like many students at UC Berkeley, wondering if her studies were something she truly enjoyed, or just something that paid the bills. She decided to take a costume practice class for fun and, realizing that this could be both a profession and a passion, has pursued costume design ever since.

November 9, 2023

Our next interview will be with a PhD student in the English Department: Noor Asif. I first met Noor because she was my GSI for English 45C, which was one of the first English classes I took at Berkeley, and which covers literature from the mid-19th through the mid-20th century. The class taught me so much about the ways to go about studying, and writing about, literature. Noor also is an editor for a magazine called Parapraxis, which focuses on psychoanalysis, and she previously studied art history.

November 6, 2023

Damon Young is Associate Professor in French and Film and Media Studies. Young specializes in Critical theory, Digital media, Film theory, Gender and sexuality studies, Global art cinema (with a focus on French and francophone). Below is an interview with Young conducted by Lucille Lorenz for her weekly column "What is Humanities Research?" 

October 31, 2023

This is an interview with Andrew F. Jones, Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, who also holds the Louis B. Agassiz Chair in Chinese, he is also the Head Graduate Advisor. Bold questions posed by Ann Chen. 

October 27, 2023

Mario Telò is a Professor of Rhetoric, Ancient Greek & Roman Studies, and Comparative Literature; participating member in the Critical Theory DE.

To start us out, how did you first come to study classics and comp lit? And are there any interests you enjoy outside of academia that you see informing your studies? 

October 24, 2023

Berkeley News

At least 60 languages — from Mongolian and Old Norse to Polish, Catalan, Ancient Egyptian, Arabic and Biblical Hebrew — are taught at UC Berkeley, one of the nation’s top institutions for the breadth and depth of its world languages program. A growing emphasis also is being placed at Berkeley on revitalizing and preserving endangered languages, most of them spoken by Indigenous peoples.

California Magazine

Mona Simpson made her mark on the literary world with her very first major work, the critically praised novel Anywhere But Here (1986), which was later adapted into the 1999 film by the same name starring Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman. Since then, the Berkeley alum ('79) has added five more books to her name and garnered high-profile awards including a Whiting Prize, a Guggenheim, and a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

October 23, 2023

Tell me about yourself and what languages you speak.
I am a double major in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures and Political Science and I speak Arabic, English and a little bit of Turkish. I took Turkish at Berkeley.

Congratulations to assistant professors Lilla Balint (German), Fumi Okiji (Rhetoric), and Nathaniel Wolfson (Spanish and Portuguese) on being named 2023 Hellman Fellows!