Graduate Resources

Graduate Resources for Current and Prospective Students

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Elena Zhukova

The Division of Arts & Humanities offers 27 graduate degree programs, many ranked as being the best in the country. Our graduate students have the opportunity to study with more than 250 faculty members who study every dimension of the human experience from the ancient past to the anticipated future; they employ a range of critical, theoretical, and rhetorical frameworks and work in more than 60 different languages. 

Faculty Perspectives

Cathy Park Hong on Berkeley's Excellence

“Berkeley has long been the mecca of Asian American excellence—a pantheon of scholars, writers, artists, and activists have attended or taught at Berkeley such as Theresa Cha, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Jeff Chang, to name just a few. It’s where “Asian America” was first coined after all—as a call-to-arms—rather than an identity marker to stand for solidarity and anti-imperialism.”

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Andrew Jones on Berkeley's Inclusion

“If you look at the landscape of Asian Studies or East Asian studies across the U.S. and in Europe, it's not a field with a great deal of diversity of representation of non-Asian or non-white people. I want Berkeley to become a flagship for serving those populations as well as welcoming more people from California State Universities and different levels of the tertiary educational system here in California.

We get a lot of applications from people who grew up in the rich cultural matrix of Los Angeles, you know, where Koreatown is right next to East LA and people are absorbing each other’s foods and each other's cultures. If we can serve that kind of constituency — that's emerging out of who we are as Californians — that makes a lot of sense for the University of California.”

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Zamansele Nsele on her 2024 Graduate Student Seminar

"In the Spring of 2024, my colleague Dr. Ivy Mills and I are co-teaching a traveling Stronach graduate seminar on ‘Contemporary African Art’. We will take the entire graduate class to the Dak’Art Biennale in Senegal. ‘African Modernisms in America’ is an exhibition that is currently travelling around the USA, I contributed three biographies on South African black modernist painters for its its catalogue."

Poulomi Saha on the Interdisciplinarity of Critical Theory

“Students often come to my classes with a hunger for ‘big ideas’-- they want to tackle the major philosophical and ethical questions that confront us and yet, they also want to know how to change the world.” They said, “For many, no single field of study– whether in the humanities or social sciences– seems adequate to the task. This is where Critical Theory comes in and is often revolutionary for their thinking. Because it is fundamentally interdisciplinary and is invested in the question of how what we do in a university produces, and therefore can change, the conditions of life in society.”

Award-winning Graduate Students

Italian Studies PhD candidate Sean Wyer awarded a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship

The Newcombe Fellowship, funded by the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, is the largest and most prestigious award for Ph.D. candidates in the humanities and social sciences addressing questions of ethical and religious values in interesting, original, or significant ways. Fellows receive a 12-month award of $30,000 to support the final year of dissertation writing.

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Department of French Doctoral Candidate Alan Yeh Selected as 2023 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellow

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) has announced its inaugural cohort of 2023 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellows, funded by the Mellon Foundation. Alan Yeh, UC Berkeley doctoral candidate in the Department of French, is one of the 45 fellowship recipients. 

The fellowship aims to aid humanities and social sciences doctoral students with projects that challenge traditional doctoral education structures. Selected from almost 700 applicants, the first cohort’s fellows will each receive a $50,000 award to go toward their respective dissertation projects. 

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Rhetoric PhD Candidate Linda Kinstler wins 2023 Whiting Award for Nonfiction

Rhetoric Department PhD candidate Linda Kinstler has been announced as one of 10 Whitting Award winners on March 29. The prizes are designed to recognize excellence and promise in a spectrum of emerging talent, giving most winners their first chance to devote themselves full time to their own writing, or to take bold new risks in their work. Kinstler is a contributing writer for Jewish Currents and The Economist’s 1843 Magazine, and the deputy editor of The Dial. Her writing has been cited by the International Court of Justice and has inspired documentaries. Kinstler’s work appears in The New York TimesWashington PostThe AtlanticWired, and more. Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends is her first nonfiction book. 

Tausif Noor wins 2023 Grace Dudley Prize for Art Writing

Noor is a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is studying global modern and contemporary art with a focus on South Asia and its histories of decolonization. A former Fulbright scholar, he was from 2017 to 2020 the Spiegel-Wilks Curatorial Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. Both are contributors to Artforum.