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June 16, 2023

The British Academy

Given its location in a part of the world known for sunshine and optimism, the University of California, Berkeley, seems like a fitting place to provide some bright news for the global humanities community.

June 14, 2023

UC Press Blog

We are very proud to publish “Fury and Justice in the Humanities” by Judith Butler in the new issue of Classical Antiquity.

June 8, 2023

California Magazine

Early into his tenure as chancellor, Clark Kerr had a realization: Berkeley’s humanities were in crisis.

He’d had suspicions, as a graduate student and then a faculty member. But a few years after he became chancellor in 1952, an exchange with a visiting professor confirmed it. When Kerr asked Gerald Holton, a physicist from Harvard, what brought him to Berkeley for the summer, Holton quipped, “I am from Athens; I thought I better take a look at what Sparta was doing.” 

June 7, 2023

California Magazine/Light the Way

Sugata Ray, Associate Professor of History of Art and South and Southeast Asian Studies

What can 16th-century India teach us about 21st-century California? Sugata Ray’s book Climate Change and the Art of Devotion explores the impacts of climate change on art, architecture, and religion in northern India during the repeated monsoon failures of the 16th through 19th centuries.

May 19, 2023

Berkeley News

Linda Kinstler always knew growing up that her Latvian grandfather had mysteriously disappeared after World War II. But she didn’t think much about it.

“That was a very common fate from this part of the world,” says Kinstler, a Ph.D. candidate in rhetoric at UC Berkeley. “It didn’t strike me as totally unusual. It was only later when I began looking into it more that I realized there was probably more to the story.”

What she discovered was too big for her to walk away.

May 16, 2023

Each year, nine seniors in the Department of Art Practice are selected to receive an honors studio for their final semester. Each student receives their own studio space with 24/7 access. The studio space allows students to work on longer-term projects and explore new mediums alongside their cohort. Arts & Humanities had the opportunity to interview three of the nine students in this year's honors studios as they completed their final projects for Professor Stephanie Syjuco's Art + Archive class.

May 15, 2023

See the original article on Berkeley News.

Benjamin Coleman has always loved being on a team.

May 12, 2023

Most members of the University of California, Berkeley’s Class of 2023 will always remember a stressful and disappointing two-year stretch, when the pandemic forced classes online at the end of their first year on campus.

But for graduating senior Catherine “Catey” Vera, those online classes instead were a refuge during the slow death of her father from ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, the illness that afflicted physicist Stephen Hawking. Someone who had been a stable rock in her life was suddenly weak and vulnerable.

Each year, nine seniors in the Department of Art Practice are selected to receive an honors studio for their final semester. Each student receives their own studio space with 24/7 access. The studio space allows students to work on longer-term projects and explore new mediums alongside their cohort. Arts & Humanities had the opportunity to interview three of the nine students in this year's honors studios as they completed their final projects for Professor Stephanie Syjuco's Art + Archive class.

May 8, 2023

Each year, nine seniors in the Department of Art Practice are selected to receive an honors studio for their final semester. Each student receives their own studio space with 24/7 access. The studio space allows students to work on longer-term projects and explore new mediums alongside their cohort. Arts & Humanities had the opportunity to interview three of the nine students in this year's honors studios as they completed their final projects for Professor Stephanie Syjuco's Art + Archive class. Jacob Li Rosenberg is a multi-media artist who is graduating this spring.

Berkeley News

It’s a Tuesday morning at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), and Samuel Wildman is covering the wall of an art gallery with night-lights. At a glance, these objects could be mistaken for mass-produced lights from the local hardware store, the sort you might find installed in a child’s bedroom to ward off bedtime anxiety. 

May 4, 2023

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) has announced its inaugural cohort of 2023 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellows, funded by the Mellon Foundation. Alan Yeh, UC Berkeley doctoral candidate in the Department of French, is one of the 45 fellowship recipients. 

May 2, 2023

Computing, Data Science, and Society

When Alice Xie moved from China to California as a teenager, she experienced major culture shock. She understood the words people spoke, but conversations were still hard to follow. She often felt isolated and underestimated.

Through art, Xie found a way to explore and communicate about this period in her life. So it was no surprise when she came to UC Berkeley and became an art history major. What caught her off-guard was that her other major – statistics – helped her understand herself, too.

April 26, 2023

Division of Social Sciences, L&S

Umair Khan’s mission in life, it seems, is to help budding entrepreneurs. “At Folio3 Software, I help entrepreneurs build out their products. At Mentors Fund, I invest in entrepreneurs. At Berkeley, I teach entrepreneurs. And at Zareen's(link is external), the restaurant which my wife established, I feed entrepreneurs.”

April 18, 2023

The Division of Arts & Humanities at UC Berkeley is pleased to welcome professor Zamansele Nsele as of Jan. 1, 2023. Nsele is an assistant professor in the History of Art Department, where she specializes in modern and contemporary African & African diasporic art, and holds a faculty position at the Center for African Studies. 

April 17, 2023

California Magazine

A few years ago, when Heesoo Kwon was visiting South Korea during a summer break from her MFA program at Berkeley, she found old home videos of her family. Watching the decades-old interactions among her family members and the Catholic rituals they practiced fascinated her. But in one video, her mother stood by the table while others ate, waiting to serve them. It made Kwon angry. 

April 14, 2023

How do border policies and technologies reanimate histories of racialized and imperial violence? How are climate and environmental changes affecting borders and their crossing? What are the possibilities and limits of humanitarian and human rights discourses on migration and refugees? 

April 11, 2023

Berkeley News

A new student-curated exhibition in Doe Library’s Brown Gallery showcases artists from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia and their artworks that reflect the complexity of what it means to inherit language.

April 6, 2023

OURS National Scholars

In Fall 2021, Bryce Wallace (’23, English & Linguistics) was still stunned that he had gotten into Cal as a transfer student from Irvine Valley College, when more UC-related honors started pouring in. He has since received the merit-based Sharer and Gilman Scholarships and was granted a College Corps Fellowship for his strong commitment to community service, especially in the areas of literacy and DEI work on campus. He has participated in URAP and was recently named a Haas Scholar.