"It's hard to look at Egyptian art and not want to know more, and as I got older, I had this curiosity about how did we get to where we are today?" says Renée Dreyfus. "I always wanted to know that history of ideas."
Dreyfus, who completed a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies in 2001, is Curator of Antiquities at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which includes the de Young and the Legion of Honor.
LOS ANGELES — After decades of decline in humanities divisions across college campuses, the University of California, Berkeley has reported a resurgence of students declaring majors in the Division of Arts and Humanities — an increase of 73 percent compared to ten years ago.
For years, nearly every humanities field has seen sharp drops in enrollment. For the first time in two decades, U.S. degrees in the four major humanities fields—English, history, philosophy and languages—risk dipping below 100,000.
IN AN ESSAY on the uncompromising brilliance of Toni Morrison’s oeuvre, published just months before the passing of this inimitable writer, Namwali Serpell observes: “There are many ways to be ‘difficult’ in this world: stubborn, demanding, inconvenient, complex, troublesome, baffling, illegible. Black womanhood is where they overlap.” Black women have always been difficult for the world, which relentlessly demands their labors, but disdains the exorbitance their labors bring forth.
Originally published June 22, 2011
A few years ago, when I was composing a concerto for myself as vocalist, I rediscovered some tapes I had made when I was 6 years old. Back then one of my favorite things was a portable Aiwa cassette recorder and I used it to make non-linear musique concrète — that is a fancy way of saying I recorded weird sounds around the house, rubbing my toy cars against the microphone, alternately growling and counting off numbers in Japanese like some spastic MC.
This Fall, the Division of Arts & Humanities hosted the 2022 Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, or MMUF, Western Regional Conference in partnership with the University of New Mexico. This was UC Berkeley’s first time hosting the regional conference in 10 years and the second time hosting overall.
A surprising number of acclaimed women artists have come out of Berkeley, working in a wide array of mediums and styles and hailing from different backgrounds. Here are a few we’d like to draw your attention to because their work was/is startlingly original and their messages carry a lasting urgency. And of course, they have a good story to tell.
The Berkeley Public Library Foundation is pleased to announce that it has selected The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life as its 2023 Fred & Pat Cody Award recipient.
Founded in Berkeley in 1962, The Magnes was one of the first Jewish museums in the US. Today, it is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s most preeminent collections of Jewish art, objects, texts, music, and historical documents about Jews in the Diaspora.
Eniola Fakile’s creations live in another world.
Fakile is a photographer. A performance artist. A filmmaker. A sculptor. A costume designer. She works in textiles, ready-made objects and assemblage. She’s not constrained by what has been or should be. Instead, she expands outward to see how far she can go. When an idea flashes in her mind, she imagines a new universe in which that idea, that creation, lives.
Berkeley, CA—The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life (The Magnes) and the Division of the Arts & Humanities at UC Berkeley are pleased to announce the appointment of Hannah Weisman as its first Executive Director.
Weisman’s appointment is the result of a landmark partnership between Taube Philanthropies, the Magnes Museum Foundation, and UC Berkeley. The first four years of the position are generously funded by a pledge from the Magnes Museum Foundation and Taube Philanthropies.
The English Department is thrilled to host Harmony Holiday as the visiting Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry for the 2022-23 academic year. As Holloway Lecturer, Holiday is teaching a semester-long creative writing workshop this fall and will be offering a featured reading in the Holloway Series.
On Nov. 20, 1969, a group of Indigenous Americans that called itself Indians of All Tribes, many of whom were UC Berkeley students, took boats in the early morning hours to Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. They bypassed a Coast Guard blockade and took control of the island. The 19-month occupation that followed would be regarded as one of the greatest acts of political resistance in American Indian history.
This article was originally posted at "OneDublin.org"
When I tell people I’m studying a subject within the humanities, they usually jump to an eyebrow raise coupled with some iteration of the following:
What are you going to use that degree for? How are you going to make any money? Wow, I wish I had an easy major too…
By now, I’ve grown accustomed to the rude comments, the derisive laughter. But the question that never fails to amuse me is this:
What will your parents think?
In the final few days of February, as the Russian Army advanced toward Kyiv, Ukrainian forces blew up the Irpin bridge, ripping open its latticed metal insides so that their edges buckled and curled. A suburb of Kyiv, Irpin was the last city that the Russian Army would have had to conquer to reach the capital; the bridge provided the fastest route from the city center to the Kyiv ring road. “It was the main bridge that stopped the invasion of Kyiv,” says Slava Balbek, a Ukrainian architect who is volunteering as a drone operator with territorial defense forces.
The pianist’s latest group fills its recent album “For the Love of Fire and Water” with idiosyncratic life.
The Magnes partners with UC Berkeley’s Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program (URAP) to provide opportunities for Cal students to work with faculty on our world-renowned research and curatorial projects.
Arts and humanities majors are routinely derided for their supposed uselessness and irrelevance.
For years the prevailing narrative about the humanities on college campuses has been that they’re in steep decline, with the number of students electing to major in one of the fields within the humanities falling steadily for more than a decade.
In 2007, the University of California, Berkeley Division of Arts & Humanities and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich) established a joint program to pursue innovative, collaborative research in the Humanities. The program facilitates academic exchange of faculty members, graduate students and postdocs in the areas of the Humanities.
Read the original article on Berkeley News
Matthew Rowe wasn’t considering a degree in the humanities when he joined UC Berkeley in fall 2022. Instead, he chose to major in political science, with the goal of preparing for a career addressing the global problem of climate change.
The University of California, Berkeley and Cal Performances announce a campus-wide residency with world-renowned, multi-disciplinary artist William Kentridge taking place over the course of the 2022–23 academic year. Featuring one of the most respected artists of our time, this residency will provide the UC Berkeley campus and wider Bay Area community the rare opportunity to engage directly with Kentridge and his artistry via lectures, performances, and events showcasing the breadth and depth of his creative output.