Faculty Research in the News

A project funded by the University of California’s Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives (MRPI) spotlights UC Berkeley's contribution in addressing critical global challenges through interdisciplinary innovation.

The UC Climate Action Arts Network (CAAN), awarded nearly $2 million, leverages art and design to inspire public engagement in climate resilience and sustainability. Berkeley's participation will be co-led by professors Jill Miller and Asma Kazmi, alongside collaborators across the UC system. This initiative unites creative placemaking and climate justice efforts...

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...

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...