Faculty Research in the News

It’s hard to pinpoint when synesthesia, the rare neurological condition where a stimulus that affects one sense prompts a response in a different sense, was first documented. Scientific literature marks its beginning in 1812, when it appeared as an aside in a Bavarian medical student’s dissertation. Toward the end, there’s a small section where he detailed how he associated musical tones and letters with colors.

“He enumerates the colors he sees in connection with the letters of the alphabet. A and E: vermilion, I: white, O:orange and so forth,” says UC Berkeley French...

The burial rites at the heart of Sophocles’s famous tragedy Antigone can seem arcane to many contemporary Western audiences. But a new adaptation at Los Angeles’s Native Voices, Beth Piatote’s Antíkoni, reimagines the play as a complicated, humanizing tragedy about a Nez Perce family living in our nation’s capital, and caught between the pressures of...

Berkeley, CA — UC Berkeley’s Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry (CICI) and the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs (ICCTP) have been awarded $2.6 million to support a groundbreaking multi-year initiative titled “A Counter-Imaginary in Authoritarian Times.” Through collaborative workshops, conferences, performances, publications, and a dynamic, open-ended digital platform, this project brings together academics, artists, activists, and other community members to develop concrete strategies, tools, and proposals to create a counter-...

South African artist William Kentridge is not interested in being certain. With certainty, he believes, comes a stuckness. Whether as a way of making artwork or in thinking about the world, certainty closes a person off to a more expansive creativity, to seeing all the possibilities that aren’t immediately or obviously perceptible.

“One must be open to mistakes, to things that don’t work,” he says. “Not so much celebrating things that don’t work, but being open to suggestions, ideas that come from the cracks in the work and from the margins.”

In his work, which explores...