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Pulitzer-winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen '92, Ph.D. '97 found at UC Berkeley the intellectual home, identity, and political passion that ultimately led to his creative success.

Rael San Fratello Explores the Border Through Design

Before she was a chef and an internationally-known cookbook author, Samin Nosrat (B.A. '01) was an English major at Berkeley. She talks about the writing process—and why a day of writing is so hard—in this Freakonomics Radio interview. 

New York - Quando molti anni fa il padre del giovane Ted seppe che il figlio aveva scelto un corso di studio di letteratura all’università, gli scrisse poche e cordiali righe, che cominciavano così: “Mio caro figliolo, sono sconvolto, direi inorridito, nel sapere che hai scelto i classici come materia principale, al punto che oggi ho quasi vomitato tornando a casa”.

Before the development of film and television, no art form but theater was more closely suited to bring stories to life. Yet rarely are stories told by and for an entire people as neglected in theater as those of Native Americans.

Through the month, Bay Area audiences will have a unique opportunity to experience new stories in two alternately candid and comic small-cast plays written, directed by and featuring Indigenous people.

Meg Parker graduated from UC Berkeley in 2010 with a double major in French and Rhetoric, then went on to earn her JD from Georgetown University Law Center.

UC Berkeley English professors Hilton Als (for My Pinup) and Solmaz Sharif (for Customs) have both been longlisted for the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, which is awarded to a book-length work of any genre for its originality, merit, and impact, which has broken new ground by reshaping the boundaries of its form and signaling strong potential for lasting

Francesca Rochberg, Catherine and William L. Magistretti Distinguished Professor Emerita of Near Eastern Studies in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, has been named as one of the 2023 Martin Meyerson Faculty Research Lecturers at UC Berkeley. For more than a century, UC Berkeley’s academic senate has selected distinguished faculty members whose research has changed the trajectory of their disciplines and expanded the global understanding of a subject.

"It's hard to look at Egyptian art and not want to know more, and as I got older, I had this curiosity about how did we get to where we are today?" says Renée Dreyfus. "I always wanted to know that history of ideas."

Dreyfus, who completed a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies in 2001, is Curator of Antiquities at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which includes the de Young and the Legion of Honor.

LOS ANGELES — After decades of decline in humanities divisions across college campuses, the University of California, Berkeley has reported a resurgence of students declaring majors in the Division of Arts and Humanities — an increase of 73 percent compared to ten years ago.

For years, nearly every humanities field has seen sharp drops in enrollment. For the first time in two decades, U.S. degrees in the four major humanities fields—English, history, philosophy and languages—risk dipping below 100,000.

IN AN ESSAY on the uncompromising brilliance of Toni Morrison’s oeuvre, published just months before the passing of this inimitable writer, Namwali Serpell observes: “There are many ways to be ‘difficult’ in this world: stubborn, demanding, inconvenient, complex, troublesome, baffling, illegible. Black womanhood is where they overlap.” Black women have always been difficult for the world, which relentlessly demands their labors, but disdains the exorbitance their labors bring forth.

Originally published June 22, 2011

A few years ago, when I was composing a concerto for myself as vocalist, I rediscovered some tapes I had made when I was 6 years old. Back then one of my favorite things was a portable Aiwa cassette recorder and I used it to make non-linear musique concrète — that is a fancy way of saying I recorded weird sounds around the house, rubbing my toy cars against the microphone, alternately growling and counting off numbers in Japanese like some spastic MC.

This Fall, the Division of Arts & Humanities hosted the 2022 Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, or MMUF, Western Regional Conference in partnership with the University of New Mexico. This was UC Berkeley’s first time hosting the regional conference in 10 years and the second time hosting overall.