News

The Division of Arts & Humanities at UC Berkeley is pleased to welcome 10 professors in the departments of Art Practice, Comparative Literature, English, German, Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures, Philosophy, Scandinavian, and Spanish & Portuguese as of July 1, 2024. 

Top philosophy graduate students from around the world are finding their way to UC Berkeley thanks to a recently established fellowship that enriches the discipline with new approaches.

The fellowship honors Carol Lee Price, a Berkeley alum who led a curiosity-driven life. Price was born in Cleveland to a Jewish family that emphasized education as an object of value that no one could take away. Whenever she moved, she took the knowledge she had gained with her.

The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) is organizing an exhibition of more than one hundred quilts by approximately eighty artists, the most expansive presentation to date of a transformative bequest of African American quilts that the museum received in 2019. Opening in Berkeley next year, Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California is a groundbreaking historical survey of the relationship between quiltmaking traditions and the history of Black migration to California from the Southern United States.

In community college, Jason Bircea came across UC Berkeley’s English department website and was blown away by a student’s honors thesis on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go. 

“I decided I wanted to go to a school that would teach me how to write like that,” Bircea recalls.

Bircea transferred to UC Berkeley in 2015. Several years later, he chose Berkeley again to start his Ph.D. in English literature.

Judith Butler appeared on City Arts and Lectures on June 13 in conversation with Poulomi Saha. 

Professor Whitney Davis (History of Art) was granted the 2024 NOMIS Distinguished Scientist and Scholar Award in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the advancement of science and human progress through their groundbreaking, innovative and collaborative research.

The plot of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 film, Rope, is a disturbing one:Two men in their shared apartment strangle a former classmate to death. Then, they host guests — including the victim’s family — at a dinner party. It’s an attempt to prove their superiority by committing the “perfect murder.”  

Although the killers — Brandon and Phillip — live together, it’s never acknowledged openly that they’re a couple. (At the time, the Motion Picture Production Code prohibited the depiction of “sex perversion,” which included homosexuality, on the big screen.) 

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.

In episode 202 of the Berkeley Talks podcast series, New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik discusses liberalism — what it means, why we need it and the endless dedication it requires to maintain. 

Liberal democracy, he said at a Townsend Center event in April, depends on two pillars: free and fair elections and the practice of open institutions, places where people can meet and debate without the pressures of overt supervision.