The Division of Arts & Humanities at UC Berkeley is pleased to welcome 10 professors in the departments of Art Practice, Comparative Literature, English, German, Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures, Philosophy, Scandinavian, and Spanish & Portuguese as of July 1, 2024.
Hannes Bajohr, Department of German:
Hannes Bajohr joins the Division of Arts & Humanities as an assistant professor in the Department of German. Bajohr’s research focuses on German intellectual history in digital humanities. Bajohr’s recent work has focused on the digital conditions of language and literary practices, with an emphasis on natural language generation in the context of stochastic machine learning. He has incorporated this research into his poetry, for which he uses traditional algorithms and machine learning. He has several publications in academic journals like German Studies Review and Poetics Today, the latter of which published his co-written essay, “On Artificial and Post-Artificial Texts: Machine Learning and the Reading Expectations of Literary and Non-Literary Writing,” which received the Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature from the Electronic Literature Association in July 2024. Originally from Berlin, he studied philosophy, German literature, and history at Humboldt University of Berlin before completing his doctorate in 2017 at Columbia University, where he wrote his dissertation on history and metaphor using philosopher Hans Blumenberg’s theory of language. After earning his Ph.D., he returned to Berlin, where he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research. Bajohr also served as a postdoctoral fellow in literary media studies at the University of Basel in Switzerland from 2022-23 before becoming a postdoctoral researcher the following year.
Yonatan Binyam, Department of Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures:
Yonatan Binyam joins the Division of Arts & Humanities as an assistant professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures. Born in Ethiopia and immigrating to the United States at the age of 10, he specializes in ancient Mediterranean and Ethiopic studies. His research also encompasses modern categories like race, racism, religion and ethnicity as analytical terms in the context of the ancient Mediterranean world. He is currently working on two monographs: The first employs recent scholarship on race, racism and religion in premodern contexts to reflect on antisemitism in antiquity, while the second contains analyses of episodes from the texts that form the transmission chain from Josephus’s Jewish War to the Hebrew Sefer Yosippon and the Ge’ez Zena Ayhud (History of the Jews). His most recent journal publication, “Ethiopia and the World, 330-1530 CE” (Cambridge University Press) uses recent advancements in Ethiopian, Eritrean and Medieval studies to reflect on key instances of contact between Ethiopia and Afro-Eurasia. Before coming to UC Berkeley, Binyam was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He received his doctorate in religion in 2017 from Florida State University, where his dissertation focused on rhetorical framings of the suffering of the Jews during the siege of Jerusalem.
Daniella Cádiz Bedini, Department of Spanish & Portuguese:
Daniella Cádiz Bedini joins the Division of Arts & Humanities as an assistant professor in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese. Her research focuses on literary exchanges and anticolonial activism in the 19th century, with a special interest on migrations, border crossings, empire and translation. She utilizes multilingual and transnational archives, which include correspondence, diaries, novels, graphic arts, periodicals, theory and poetry, in her research and teaching. Currently, she is working on a book, tentatively titled Crossing the Americas: Empire, Race, and Translation in the Long Nineteenth Century, which foregrounds diverse modes of translation strategies that were harnessed as anti-imperialist work in the Americas during the 19th and 20th centuries. Her writing and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in American Quarterly, MELUS and American Periodicals. Cádiz Bedini received her doctorate in English and comparative literature from Columbia University, where she also earned a Latin American Regional Certificate from the university’s Institute of Latin American Studies and the 2021 Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching for her work as a graduate teaching fellow. Her dissertation studied transnational literary relations in the Americas in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Raúl Coronado, Departments of English, Spanish & Portuguese:
Raúl Coronado joins the Division of Arts & Humanities as an assistant professor in the English and Spanish & Portuguese departments. Coronado joins the division as an internal transfer from the Department of Ethnic Studies in the Division of Social Sciences. His teaching and research aim to reconceptualize literature of the Americas in a transnational framework through the study of Latino/a literary and intellectual history from the colonial period to the 1940s. By historicizing the process by which certain genres came to be identified as literature, he focuses on the contemporary, social meaning of writing. His forthcoming teaching plans to focus on the development of a Latina/o public sphere in the United States; how 19th and early 20th century Latinos/as engaged with and theorized the development of a modernity in the Southwest, New Orleans and East Coast; Latino/a intellectual history and cultural studies; comparative postcolonial literatures and theories of 19th-century Americas; and the emergence of queer Latina/o print culture and publics. He won a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in American literature, which he put toward his book project, "The Emergence of the Latina/o Self, 1780-1870: Reason, Rights, Publics, Presence." Prior to joining the faculty at UC Berkeley in 2013, Coronado was an associate professor of English at the University of Chicago. He earned his doctorate in modern thought and literature in 2004 from Stanford University, where he also received his master’s.
Xandra Ibarra, Department of Art Practice:
Xandra Ibarra (MFA ’20) joins the Division of Arts & Humanities as an assistant professor in the Department of Art Practice. Originally from the US/Mexico border of El Paso/Juarez and now based in the Bay Area, Ibarra’s works span across performance, video and sculpture to address abjection and joy and the borders between proper and improper racialized, gendered and queer subjects. As a community organizer who’s worked with the national feminist of color organizations INCITE! and Survived and Punished since 2003, she centers her work around feminist anti-rape and prison abolitionist movements. Her work has been featured at places like El Museo de Arte Contemporañeo (Bogotá, Colombia), Broad Museum (Los Angeles) and ExTeresa Arte Actual (DF, Mexico) and in publications such as Paper Magazine and Huffington Post. Her recent residencies include the Headlands Center for the Arts, Open Space SFMOMA (columnist in residence), Marble House Project, Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture, National Performance Network and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Prior to joining the division as a professor, Ibarra was a UC President’s postdoctoral fellow, a Eureka fellow and a Lucas Visual Arts fellow. In addition to her MFA in art practice from UC Berkeley, Ibarra also holds a master’s degree in ethnic studies from San Francisco State University. She has previously lectured on these subjects at Stanford University, San Francisco Art Institute and California College of the Arts.
Karina Gutiérrez, Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies:
Karina Gutiérrez joins the Division of Arts & Humanities as an assistant professor in the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies. Gutiérrez’s work focuses on the intersection of politics and performance, with a concentration on how digital interventions, institutionalization efforts and historical narrative have affected the development and sustainability of social and politically engaged performance companies and collectives throughout the Americas. Her reviews have appeared in journals such as Theatre Survey and The Journal of American Drama, with forthcoming publications in Modern Drama, Theatre Annual, and the Latino Literature Encyclopedia for Students. Prior to coming to UC Berkeley, Gutiérrez was an assistant professor at Santa Clara University. She earned her doctorate in theater and performance studies with a minor in feminist, gender and sexuality studies from Stanford University in 2020, upon which she was awarded the Carl Webber Prize for integration of Creative Practice and Scholarly Research. Outside of academia, Gutiérrez works as an actor, director and dramaturgist throughout the Bay Area, in addition to co-founding BALTAN, or the Bay Area Latino Theatre Alliance Network. Reviews of her directed productions have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Broadway World and Berkeleyside.
Shu-han Luo, Department of English:
Shu-han Luo joins the Division of Arts & Humanities as an assistant professor in the Department of English. She studies medieval English, with a specialization in Old English and has research interests in Chinese poetics, literary form and the relationship between aesthetics and instruction. She’s also interested in how disciplinary history can aid literary inquiry and new comparative methodologies for close reading through and beyond disciplinary bounds. Her current book project aims to deepen the typical questions asked regarding learning and aesthetic experience in early medieval England by entwining formal strategies of Old English didactic poetry with Tang Chinese verse and later imperial commentary. Her most recent publication, “At the Limits of Knowledge: the Iron Poetics of Old English Verse in the Nineteenth Century” (Cambridge University Press) examines critiques of the metaphor of Old English poetry as iron and builds upon them to explore how this metaphor has been oversimplified in past scholarship. Luo received her master’s degree in medieval English literature from Oxford University, after which she earned her doctorate in English from Yale University, where she wrote her dissertation on “Wisdom as Formal Experiment: Reading Old English Poetry with Medieval Chinese Verse.”
Tadiwa Madenga, Departments of Comparative Literature, English African and African Diaspora Literatures and Culture:
Tadiwa Madenga joins the Division of Arts & Humanities as an assistant professor in the Comparative Literature and English departments. Her research centers archival work and site specificity in literary analysis to explore the relationship between literature and sexuality through 20th- and 21st-century African book fairs and their subgenres: keynotes, book stalls, magazines and poetry. Her current research studies the emergence of African queer literature and politics through the Zimbabwe International Book Fair, a preeminent destination for African literature and arts throughout the 1980s and 1990s that became notorious for its public debates surrounding race and homosexuality. Examining how the book fair functioned as a contested site that systematized the limits and possibilities of sexual freedom, her work reevaluates what genres and spaces are imagined to be foundational subjects of African literary and Black queer studies. Before coming to UC Berkeley, Madenga has been working on research through fellowships and grants at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. She earned her doctorate in African and African American studies, with a primary field in English, from Harvard University in 2020, where she studied the book fair in the year 1995, which saw the first public confrontation between the Gay and Lesbian Association of Zimbabwe and the nation’s former president.
Asta Mønsted, Department of Scandinavian:
Asta Mønsted joins the Division of Arts & Humanities as an assistant professor in the Department of Scandinavian. Born and raised in Uummannaq, North Greenland, her research focuses on the Greenlandic Inuit’s oral history and its potential to be evidenced in archaeological remains. She aims for the oral history to challenge instead of supplement the archaeological record in an effort to reconceptualize typical field methods. She has done field work in North, West and South Greenland, in addition to Denmark, Germany and Japan. She will develop the department’s interests in the Arctic region and is teaching a course on “Arctic Folklore and Mythology in Nordic Lands” this fall. Her research interests also include the High Arctic; Thule culture; Inuit drum; ethnohistory; cosmology; Inuit Whaling; and Qassi/men's house, to name a few. In June, she attended the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association conference in Bodø, Norway, where she presented her paper on “Preserving Indigenous Ecologies Through Greenlandic Inuit Oral History: Insights for Future Arctic Urban Environments?”, which aims to explain the ways Indigenous ecologies were safeguarded and transmitted through Greenlandic Inuit oral histories collected from 1735 to 1981. Mønsted earned her doctorate from the University of Copenhagen, where she wrote her thesis on “Animated reality: Inuit architecture and landscapes as seen through archaeology and oral history in Greenland.”
Daniel Viehoff, Department of Philosophy:
Daniel Viehoff joins the Division of Arts & Humanities as an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy. His research interests include ethics, understanding noncitizenship and political, legal, and social philosophy. He is particularly focused on questions regarding democracy and equality; private law theory; and political authority and legitimacy, the latter of which is the foundation for his current book project, which explores legitimacy’s fiduciary foundations. His most recent publication, “Subordination and the Wrong of Discrimination” (Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review) expands upon the philosopher Sophia Moreau’s book on the evil of subordination to clarify the normative and axiological status of her account and its structure. Before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, where he will also be an affiliate at the School of Law, Viehoff was an associate professor of philosophy at New York University. His previous appointments include: a permanent lecturer in philosophy at the University of Sheffield; a visiting fellow at Yale’s political science department; a faculty fellow at Harvard's Safra Center for Ethics; and a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellow at Princeton's Center for Human Values. Viehoff has a doctorate in philosophy from Columbia University, in addition to a doctor of law from Yale Law School.