Faculty Research in the News

Liesl Yamaguchi, Assistant Professor in the Department of French at UC Berkeley, is a scholar and translator whose work bridges 19th-century French literature, poetics, linguistics, literary theory, and translation. In this interview, Professor Yamaguchi reflects on her path to academia, the interdisciplinary nature of her research, and the creative challenges of translation. She offers a preview of her forthcoming book, On the Colors of Vowels: Thinking Through Synesthesia, which examines the convergence of literary and scientific discourses on synesthesia in the 19th century....

UC Berkeley Professor Timothy Tangherlini, of the Department of Scandinavian and the School of Information, has been named one of the co-principal investigators on a groundbreaking $7.5 million grant awarded by the U.S. Department of Defense. The project, led by researchers at Indiana University, will bring together an interdisciplinary team of experts in informatics, psychology, communications, and folklore to examine how artificial intelligence (AI) influences online communication, including the spread of misinformation and radicalizing messages.

This five-year research initiative...

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...

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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...