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March 12, 2024

Berkeley News

This Thursday through Sunday, UC Berkeley’s Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies will present Marisela Treviño Orta’s The River Bride.  

In the play, set in a small Brazilian fishing village, a mysterious man is fished from the Amazon River three days before a wedding. Brazilian folklore and lyrical storytelling blend to share a tale of true love, regret, transformation and two sisters who struggle to stay true to each other, while staying true to themselves.

March 5, 2024

Berkeley News

Listen to the Berkeley Voices Podcast here

In his research, UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate Saagar Asnani looks at music manuscripts from between the 12th and 14th centuries in medieval France. He says only recently have scholars begun to use a wider variety of media and artistic expressions as a way to study language. "If we unpack the genre of music, we will find a very precise record of how language was spoken," Saagar says.

March 4, 2024

Lauren Bartone is a PhD student in Italian Studies with a designated emphasis in folklore. Her background as a visual artist strongly informs her approach to studying Italian culture. Before joining the Department of Italian Studies at Berkeley, she completed a B.A. in Fine Art at UCLA, followed by an M.A. in Education at UC Berkeley, and an M.F.A. at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

February 29, 2024

Berkeley Professor Nicole Starosielski is leading the way in subsea cable network sustainability while also empowering the next generation to take the lead.

While many people may think satellites are responsible for telecommunications as we know it, the global subsea cable network actually carries more than 99% of the internet traffic between continents. Because of their marginal carbon footprint, subsea cables have often been excluded from internet sustainability studies, yet they have the most potential for providing sustainable communications infrastructure.

February 28, 2024

New Yorker

The New Yorker profiled David J. Peterson, who has created more than 50 fictional languages for films and television, including "Game of Thrones" and both recent Dune movies. Peterson graduated in 2003 with a dual major in English and Linguistics. From the article:

The most influential conlanger working today is David J. Peterson. Born in Long Beach, California, Peterson started to create languages in 2000, while he was a sophomore at U.C. Berkeley... 

February 26, 2024

UC Berkeley will refurbish the Bancroft Dance Studio thanks to a generous gift by Daniel Hitchcock ’69, a mathematics and physics alum. Hitchcock provided the crucial funding to make the studio space safer and more accessible. The enhancements will include re-sanded floors, repaired windows, and a new water filtration system.

February 22, 2024

Sylvie Thode is a graduate student for the English department, whose work focuses on gender and sexuality studies, textual criticism, and drama. After having Sylvie as my graduate student instructor for a course on Shakespeare and talking with her about her research, I realized she would be an amazing addition to our column, as her work centers literary studies, but is highly informed by other disciplines within the Arts and Humanities. 

My next interview will be with Dr. Mairi McLauglin of the French Department. Professor McLaughlin’s research largely focuses on linguistics and translation studies.

February 6, 2024

Tell me about yourself and what languages you speak.
I am a third year Political Science major and I speak Spanish and English. Spanish is my first language and then I started speaking English once I started grade school. I also just completed my first year of Italian here at Berkeley. 

For our next interview, I will be speaking with Professor Atreyee Gupta of the History of Art Department. Professor Gupta’s area of focus is on Global Modernism, and Modern and Contemporary South and Southeast Asian art. She is also affiliated with the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, and the Center for Race and Gender, and has been a professor here at Berkeley since 2017. 

January 26, 2024

NPR

LISTEN HERE

Brittany chats with Professor Poulomi Saha about America's obsession with cults. With so many shows choose from, cult documentaries could now be seen as their own genre. But what might our fascination with cults reveal about society's shortfalls?

NPR: It's been a Minute

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Brittany chats with Professor Poulomi Saha about America's obsession with cults. With so many shows choose from, cult documentaries could now be seen as their own genre. But what might our fascination with cults reveal about society's shortfalls?

January 16, 2024

On February 28, the Berkeley Language Center and the Language and AI working group at the Townsend Center for the Humanities will be hosting a half-day conference Language and AI: Generating Interdisciplinary Connections and Possibilities.

January 5, 2024

Stateline

Last year, Ashley Lawson, a communications major at Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania, had to take a journalism class online, even though the professor teaching the course was on her own campus.

Lawson was in the class with students from Lock Haven, Bloomsburg and Mansfield universities, which had been integrated in 2022 under the name Commonwealth University of Pennsylvania to reduce costs. The state schools had been running in the red and losing student population.

December 29, 2023

Afro-Atlantic Catholics: America’s First Black Christians by Jeroen Dewulf, Queen Beatrix Professor in Dutch Studies and director of Berkeley's Institute of European Studies, has been selected as the recipient of the 2023 John Gilmary Shea Prize by The American Catholic Historical Association (ACHA). This esteemed award, established in 1945, is one of the highest honors bestowed by the Association, recognizing outstanding contributions to the field of American Catholic history.

December 21, 2023

California Magazine

One of the most anticipated movies of the Holiday Season is due to hit cinemas on Christmas Day. The Boys in the Boat, directed by George Clooney, finally brings to the big screen Cal alum Daniel James Brown's mega-bestselling book about the American crew team that triumphed in the so-called Nazi Olympics of 1936.

December 20, 2023

California Magazine

After interning for a state senator in high school and noticing the predominance of men on the Capitol floor, Bettina Duval '82 knew she wanted to work toward more equitable politics. She later founded the California Women's List, a political action committee to elect women. She has also volunteered across campus and became chair in 2023 of the UC Berkeley Foundation (UCBF), which encourages private giving to Berkeley.

How would you define your undergraduate experience?

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).

Berkeley News

In Berkeley Talks episode 186, a panel of UC Berkeley scholars from the College of Letters and Science discusses the transformative potential of artificial intelligence in academia — and the questions and challenges it requires universities and other social institutions to confront.