What role do the humanities play In a world challenged by climate change, rising authoritarianism, censorship, racism, wars and collapsed economies?
The humanities and their forms of historical, visual and cultural literacy are critical to understanding and addressing the human experience and the planet’s survival, says Sara Guyer, dean of the Division of Arts and Humanities in UC Berkeley’s College of Letters and Science.
Since joining Berkeley's faculty in the Department of Film & Media last year, Professor Nicole Starosielski has been busy guiding and conducting research with her undergraduate students in a effort to both further research on sustainable internet practices and to help train the next generation of specialists on Sustainable Subsea Networks.
UC Berkeley’s Department of Music unveiled the new Helen and Thomas Wu Performance Hall in September, following an extensive renovation that was years in the making. The reopened space includes a larger stage, new seats, and state-of-the-art sound, lighting, and digital technology upgrades.
The 100-seat venue occupies a former lecture hall at Morrison Hall, a building that also houses music classrooms, practice rooms, and Berkeley’s storied collection of baroque, classical, gamelan, and other world instruments.
Professor and Chair of Art Practice Ronald Rael was selected to design one of the 25 site-specific, newly commissioned installations for Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial at the Cooper Hewitt, which explores design’s role in shaping the physical and emotional realities of home across the United States, US Territories, and Tribal Nations.
According to the prevailing narrative, the state of the humanities is dire. State legislators and far-right journalists attack degrees in these disciplines from ideological angles, while others claim they lack vocational relevance. The numbers don’t lie: Bachelor’s degrees awarded in the humanities declined nearly 16 percent between 2012 and 2020.
A surge of scholarly interest across the country in Ukrainian studies is far exceeding American universities’ capabilities, but UC Berkeley is positioning itself to fill that gap.
Curators of Berkeley is a series of interviews with Berkeley alumni from a range of disciplines in the arts and humanities who work across curatorial practices and fields. Patricia Cariño Valdez is an art consultant, independent curator, and manager of the Olivia Collection.
Tadiwa Madenga is a scholar of African and Black diasporic literature, gender and sexuality, and print cultures. Her research is concerned with the relationship between literature and sexuality which she traces through 20th and 21st century African book fairs and their subgenres: keynotes, book stalls, magazines, poetry. Across her academic and creative projects, her reading practice centers archival work and site specificity as critical methods for literary analysis.
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.
In Fiona McFarlane’s new book, Highway Thirteen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; $27.00), twelve stories are artfully connected by one serial killer.
Each year, the Guggenheim Foundation awards approximately 175 fellowships to “exceptional individuals” to enable “scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form, under the freest possible conditions.” Applications for 2025 are due in mid-September 2024.
A major scholarly inquiry into the cultural, historical, and societal implications of psychedelics, the Psychedelics in Society and Culture program is a joint effort between UC Berkeley and Harvard University led by the UC Berkeley Center for the Study of Psychedelics (BCSP), the Art and Humanities’s (A&H) Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry (CICI) and Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Center.
UC Berkeley SociolinguistJustin Davidson is on a mission to make American Spanish an officially recognized language. He’s a professor of Hispanic Linguistics at Cal and is studying the speaking patterns of Spanish-English bilinguals to create a “linguistic map” of American Spanish.
It was the opening days of 2022, in the aftermath of a huge volcanic eruption, when Tonga went dark. The underwater eruption – 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima – sent tsunami waves across Tonga’s nearby archipelago and blanketed the island’s white coral sands in ash.
For over a century, the modern Olympics have brought athletes from around the world together to compete and celebrate. Victors, whether they’re gymnasts flying across the balance beam or casually cool pistol shooters, are awarded coveted bronze, silver and gold medals. But one of the top honors of the Games is to stand atop the podium as the gold medalist’s national anthem plays and their country’s flag is raised.
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.
The Division of Arts & Humanities continues to experience a period of unprecedented faculty hiring, with sixteen new faculty who started in 2023 and additional new faculty incoming for academic years 2024-25 and 2025-26.
