Faculty Research in the News

External media reporting on faculty research 

No. 1 book of the century, ‘My Brilliant Friend’, is subject of UC Berkeley research, courses

December 17, 2024
Sarah Fullerton, Director of Communications

My Brilliant Friend, by the pseudonymous Italian author Elena Ferrante, is the New York Times’ No. 1 book of the century. This recognition, and the recent adaptation of Ferrante’s four-novel Neopolitan Quartet into an HBO series, underscores this writer’s profound influence.

Ferrante’s popular novels, translated into English by Ann Goldstein, are an intimate exploration...

https://news.berkeley.edu/2024/12/16/no-1-book-of-the-century-my-brilliant-frien…

KQED: A Serial Killer Looms Over Albany Author’s New Story Collection

August 13, 2024
Naomi Elias, KQED News

In Fiona McFarlane’s new book, Highway Thirteen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; $27.00), twelve stories are artfully connected by one serial killer.

The author, who lives in Albany and is currently an Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley, won the 2017 Dylan Thomas Prize for her first short story collection, The High Places. This second collection is loosely inspired by the real-life serial killer behind the infamous “backpacker murders” that rocked her home country of Australia...

https://www.kqed.org/arts/13962615/review-thirteen-highways-fiona-mcfarlane

KALW: Berkeley linguist says American Spanish should be officially recognized

August 13, 2024
Hana Baba, Julia Haney

LISTEN HERE

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.

Professor Davidson says there’s a language discrimination that happens with American Spanish, often seen by linguists as lower quality or ‘bad Spanish...

https://www.kalw.org/2024-08-13/berkeley-linguist-says-american-spanish-should-b…

Ronald Rael's Site-Specific "Making Home" Exhibition for Cooper Hewitt Triennial: Unearthing the Complex History of Los Conejos, Colorado

October 8, 2024

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. The exhibition is the seventh offering in the museum’s Design Triennial series, established in 2000 to address the most urgent...

Arts of the Border: Debarati Sanyal’s Guggenheim Year and the Exploration of Migrant Resistance through Smart Border Technologies

August 13, 2024
Aimee Chang

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. In any given year a few UC Berkeley faculty are recipients of the prestigious fellowship, including, in 2021, French professor and director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry (CICI) Debarati...

Interview: Tadiwa Madenga and her Research on 20th and 21st century African book fairs

August 23, 2024
By Dana Swensen, Department of English Communications

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. Madenga received her PhD from Harvard University, and her research has been supported by various fellowships and grants at...

https://english.berkeley.edu/news/new-faculty-interview-tadiwa-madenga-joins-ber…

World Humanities Report, directed by UC Berkeley’s Sara Guyer, warns of extinction risk to human knowledge

October 15, 2024
Sarah Fullerton

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.

She should know: Guyer is director of the prestigious World Humanities Report, a major...

https://news.berkeley.edu/2024/10/14/world-humanities-report-directed-by-uc-berk…

Medieval Manuscripts, Temporalities, and Touch: An Interview with Professor Henry Ravenhall

October 2, 2024
Lucille Lorenz, Arts & Humanities writer-in-residence
Dr. Henry Ravenhall is a professor in the Department of French, where he specializes in medieval French literature. Before coming to Berkeley, Professor Ravenhall earned his B.A., M.A., and PhD from King’s College London. He also served as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Professor Ravenhall’s research interests, which we discuss in this interview, include manuscript culture, temporality, and environmental humanities. Firstly, can you tell us a bit about how you decided to pursue academia, and what brought you to the field of medieval...

Vasugi Kailasam (SSEAS) is the 2024 recipient of the Pyrtanean Faculty Enrichment Award

December 6, 2024
Aimee Chang, Division of Arts & Humanities

The Division of Arts and Humanities is proud to announce that South and Southeast Asian Studies Assistant Professor Vasugi Kailasam is the 2024 recipient of the Pyrtanean Faculty Enrichment Award in recognition of her exceptional scholarship and service to the campus community. Kailasam plans to use the award to host a conference on Tamil Studies at UC Berkeley and for archival research for her second book.

A literary scholar specializing...

Exploring Mysticism, Aesthetics, and Experience: An Interview with Professor Niklaus Largier

November 7, 2024
By Lucille Lorenz, Arts & Humanities writer-in-residence

Niklaus Largier is Chair in the department of Comparative Literature, is a professor in the departments of German and Comparative Literature, and is affiliated with the Programs in Medieval Studies, Religious Studies, and the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory.

His scholarship covers an extensive range of interests, including the intersections of literature, philosophy, theology, and other fields of knowledge within medieval and early modern German literature. Professor Largier’s work delves into topics such as ascetic practices, eroticism, and the literary imagination,...