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Nicole Daena Leon Loya, a Berkeley transfer student from San Joaquin Delta College, has managed to balance numerous responsibilities while pursuing her educational goals. Loya brings a wealth of experience and a deep love for languages and education to Berkeley. Before coming to UC Berkeley, she worked full-time as a Spanish teacher. “I have been an assistant teacher at an Elementary Montessori school teaching Spanish since 2021 and I love the environment and their philosophy on teaching.”

In Greece, and about 2,000 miles from the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, UC Berkeley is celebrating 100 years of archaeological excavation at a site of the ancient Panhellenic Games, a religious and athletic event that inspired the modern Olympics.

Folger Shakespeare Library director Michael Witmore (Rhetoric Ph. D. '97) calls the Folio — a collection of 36 of Shakespeare's plays, published by his friends in 1623, seven years after his death — "the ultimate message in a bottle." A new expansion to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. makes that message more accessible.

When you start with language, whose meaning is more often than not taken for granted and then use it to mean differently, multiply, and unconventionally, in literature, you enter a world where resolution won’t be found or even assumed. At best, you will propose a sufficiently acceptable explanation of meaning, something we have to acknowledge is temporary, experimental, and hopeful.

It won’t be the last reading or the only one, but it will reflect your effort, your humility, and your sense. 

How often do undergraduates get a chance — in person — to ask a best-selling writer about their creative process?

Of the four finalists for this year's University Medal, two of them are Arts & Humanities majors. Meet Skylar Li Song (Art Practice), Bryce Wallace (English and Linguistics), and their fellow finalists for Berkeley's highest academic honor for undergradautes.

We talked to graduating senior Wilson Wang about his experiences at Berkeley. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Seven alums of the Division of Arts & Humanities were among the 188 Guggenheim Fellows whose names were announced on April 11, 2024.

Mai Der Vang

(B.A. English ‘03)
English Poet & Assistant Professor, Department of English, California State University, Fresno

For the first three years of Justin Davidson's childhood in Chicago, his mom spoke only Spanish to him. Although he never spoke the language as a young child, when Davidson began to learn Spanish in middle school, it came very quickly to him, and over the years, he became bilingual.

Now an associate professor in UC Berkeley's Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Davidson is part of a research team that has discovered where in the brain bilinguals store language-specific sounds and sound sequences. The research project is ongoing.

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.

There are countless English varieties in the U.S. There's Boston English and California English and Texas English. There's Black English and Chicano English. There's standard academic, or white, English. They're all the same language, but linguistically, they're different.