News

This July, the Department of Art Practice hosted its first Summer Abroad course in the coastal city of Eleusis, Greece. For four weeks, a group of 21 Cal students lived in Eleusis while participating in a summer Art 160 course called “Artmaking, Community, and Social Impact” led by Professor Jill Miller.

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.

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

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.” 

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.

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.

See the original article on Berkeley News.

Benjamin Coleman has always loved being on a team.

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. 

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.

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.”

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.