IMPACT
An Inaugural Report Prepared by the Division of Arts & Humanities
The Division of Arts & Humanities at UC Berkeley
Are collectively, and in their parts, recognized as among the best in the country and the world. Our faculty and students are shaping discourse and society, improving our understanding of human experience, and gaining new insight into the individual and collective imaginations of those living today as well as those who have inhabited the earth over the past thousands of years.
Across 19 departments and 14 research units, more than 250 faculty members 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. Our faculty includes leading philosophers, award-winning poets and novelists, and practicing artists in music, theater, dance, and the visual arts; they have won the most Distinguished Teaching Awards on campus, and we count among them a significant number of Macarthur “genius” grantees, Guggenheim Fellows, and recipients of other prestigious national and international awards.
We offer more than 30 undergraduate and 27 graduate degree programs, and we enroll almost 18,000 undergraduate and 700 graduate students from across the university in our courses each semester. We are proud to be the most diverse large Division on campus: half of our majors are students who transferred in from community colleges and a sizeable number of our undergraduate and graduate students come underrepresented minorities.
Dean's Message
I am delighted to present to you the inaugural Impact Report for Berkeley Arts & Humanities. This report reflects the profound influence our division has on campus – and beyond, in the immediate community and the world at-large.
From groundbreaking research to community engagement initiatives, from award-winning artistic productions to field-shaping articles and prize-winning books, faculty and students in Arts & Humanities are pushing against the boundaries of what is possible.
Our focus on global literatures and arts, deep critical understanding, creative world-making, and relentless inquiry, prepares students to engage in every facet of society and to face the future with knowledge, imagination, and critical judgment.
As I invite you to look back on the achievements and challenges of these past two years since I arrived on campus, I also ask you to join me in facing the future, I already am anticipating how the students that joined us in the fall will contribute to this intellectual community and how the faculty that we are only now recruiting will open new fields of inquiry through their research. This ongoing academic project is a source of constant energy. I hope that this report inspires you to join me on this journey.
Sara Guyer
Irving and Jean Stone Dean of the Division of Arts & Humanities
Professor of English
A New Story for the
Arts & Humanities
Arts & Humanities
The division aims to uplift the arts and humanities at Berkeley and in the world. We are shaping a new narrative through rich stories that center our students, bring visibility to our stellar faculty and their cutting-edge research, and showcase the complexity of work that happens in our classrooms. We believe the arts and humanities are foundational to Letters & Science, the university, and society at large. The key pillars of our mission are access, sustainability, and inclusive excellence:
Undergraduate Student Access:
The Division of Arts & Humanities prepares students to flourish in a rapidly changing world. We want every student who wants to study the arts and humanities at Berkeley to feel like they can. That means providing access to classes they want to take, a diverse and complex curriculum, financial support, mentorship, and opportunities to engage with worlds beyond their own. Students at Berkeley should also have access to tools and narratives that support and encourage their academic and career aspirations.
Inclusive Excellence in Research and Teaching:
We share a cross-departmental commitment to teaching and learning that cuts across historical and geographic borders, and we have a singular commitment to broad multilingualism. With this in mind, we prioritize diversity and inclusion at every level of our recruitment and retention efforts. We consistently attract and recruit the very best graduate students and faculty, and we provide the necessary resources to retain them. We center mentorship and community, bring visibility to the essential work that they do, and provide the conditions necessary for their research to flourish.
Reinvesting in the Arts at Berkeley:
Our faculty and students lead the way in the creative arts and arts research, and they study its theory, history, and practice, ranging from performance and theater to film, music, literature, poetry, and the visual arts. The arts at Berkeley have a storied past, and our departments are
seeing new successes and sustained growth. We intend to invest in this bright future through additional resources and by bringing visibility and awareness to the richness and breadth of artistic disciplines within the division.
Easing administrative burden and supporting staff:
The administrative staff in the Arts and Humanities works tirelessly to support and further the mission and goals of the division. Together, we are focused on supporting faculty and staff by easing administrative and bureaucratic burdens, advocating for funding and other resources, and prioritizing internal communications. As we continue to grow, a solid and collaborative administrative structure will be vital to the sustainability and success of our division, its faculty, students, and staff.
Upholding a legacy of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion:
We are the most diverse large division on campus, and we are proud that half of our majors are students who transferred in from community colleges. We continuously strive to make A&H more accessible; we offer extensive fellowships and programs for underrepresented students and faculty at all career stages. Our leadership represents an inclusive humanities that is thoroughly global and represents our commitment to the inclusion of multiple forms of knowledge. In turn, our curriculum aims to amplify the humanities as a voice and tool for social justice and change.
Research Excellence in the Humanities
Adam Benkato
Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures
Adam Benkato holds the Bita Daryabari Presidential Chair in Iranian Studies. He investigates a wide variety of textual and audio sources through the lenses of material philology, sociolinguistics, and archive studies, examining the diversity of languages spoken in Iran both before and after the arrival of Islam, including Sogdian, Middle Persian, Chorasmian, and the contemporary endangered language Yaghnobi. One of Benkato’s current projects is the creation of a worldwide online database of Middle Persian documents, including the Bancroft Library’s Pahlavi Archive, the world‘s largest collection of Middle Persian administrative documents. Other recent publications explore the dialectology and sociolinguistics of Arabic — particularly in North Africa — as they intertwine with patterns of migration and postcolonialism.
Catherine Flynn
Associate Professor, Director of Irish Studies, Director of Berkeley Connect, Affiliate of the Program in Critical Theory
Catherine Flynn works on British and Irish modernist literature in a European avant-garde context. For the hundred-year anniversary of Ulysses, she compiled The Cambridge Centenary Ulysses: The 1922 Text with Essays and Notes, a facsimile edition of the historic 1922 Shakespeare and Company text, featuring Joyce’s own errata as well as references to later amendments, along with maps, photographs, and footnotes, and an essay by a leading Joyce scholar on each of the eighteen episodes (Cambridge University Press, 2022). She also co-hosted the related podcast U22 The Centenary Ulysses. Her edited volume, The New Joyce Studies: Twenty-First Century Critical Revisions, was published by Cambridge University Press in September 2022.
Niklaus Largier
Professor and Chair of German, Professor of Comparative Literature
An expert on mystical traditions in German literature and thought, Niklaus Largier currently focuses on the history of the imagination and emotions. In a study ranging across medieval contemplation, the invention of aesthetic experience, nineteenth-century decadent literature, and early twentieth-century essays and film, Largier’s recent book Figures of Possibility: Aesthetic Experience, Mysticism, and the Play of the Senses (Stanford, 2022) shows how mystical practices have been reinvented across the centuries. Arguing for a new understanding of mystical experience, he foregrounds the ways in which devotion builds on experimental practices in order to reshape perception, cognition, and emotion. Largier is affiliated with Berkeley’s programs in Medieval Studies and Study of Religion as well as the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory
Roni Masel
Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature
Roni Masel is currently completing Bad Readers: Misreading, Mistranslation, and Other Textual Malpractices in Hebrew and Yiddish, a book manuscript that examines Jewish literatures in Eastern Europe and examines what it means when someone is referred to as a “bad reader.” Masel studies Hebrew and Yiddish literatures, particularly in the context of modern Jewish history and culture in Eastern Europe; the history of reading and the book; and queer and postcolonial theory. Her project “Yiddish Empires: Visions of Race and the Global in Modern Yiddish Culture” examines the 20th-century globalization of Yiddish culture.
Alva Noë
Professor and Chair of Philosophy
Alva Noë’s latest book, The Entanglement (2023), explores the inseparability of life, art, and philosophy, arguing that we have greatly underestimated what this entangled reality means for understanding human nature. Human nature, he contends, is an aesthetic phenomenon, and art — our most direct and authentic way of engaging the aesthetic — is the truest way of understanding ourselves. Noë’s research and teaching focus is perception and consciousness, and the philosophy of art. Other recent books include Infinite Baseball: Notes from a Philosopher at the Ballpark (2019) and Learning to Look: Dispatches from the Art World (2021).
Zamansele Nsele
Assistant Professor of History of Art
Zamansele Nsele joined History of Art in January 2023. Her upcoming book project, Reckoning with Post-Apartheid & Imperialist Nostalgias in Archival Art Practice in Africa, engages the artworks of contemporary artists in Africa who visually reference the imperial and settler colonial photographic archive in ways that reveal how photography as a medium can sanitize, romanticize and eventually obscure Black suffering. Nsele’s research concerns post-Apartheid visual culture, archival art, and literature in relation to Blackness and the Black body through critical race theory, Black feminism, and post-1994 literature on nostalgia.
Solmaz Sharif
Assistant Professor of English
Solmaz Sharif is the author of two books of poetry, most recently Customs (2022). Her 2016 book, Look, was a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times Notable Book. Her work has been recognized with a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lannan Foundation, and Stanford University. As a Berkeley undergraduate, she studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Harpers, Paris Review, Poetry and the New York Times.
Estelle Tarica
Professor and Chair of Spanish and Portuguese, Professor of Jewish Studies
Estelle Tarica’s 2022 book Holocaust Consciousness and Cold War Violence in Latin America proposes the existence of a recognizably distinct Holocaust consciousness in Latin America since the 1970s. Community leaders, intellectuals, writers, and political activists facing state repression have seen themselves reflected in Holocaust histories and have used Holocaust terms to describe human rights atrocities in their own countries. This unique, controversial approach to the memory of the Holocaust is little known outside the region. By drawing together two areas that have rarely been brought into contact — Holocaust studies and Latin American studies —Tarica deepens our understanding of Holocaust awareness in a global context.
From Local to Global, Stephen
Best is Taking Berkeley Humanities to the World’s Stage
Best is Taking Berkeley Humanities to the World’s Stage
Since joining as the Director of the Townsend Center for the Humanities last year, Professor Stephen Best has been busy shaping the future of the Townsend Center by forging more campus collaborations, seeking interdisciplinary partnerships, and strengthening public engagement, all while continuing the Townsend’s legacy of elevating humanities research by our faculty and students. When joining the role, his vision was clear, “I’d like to extend the networks of the Townsend Center — both on campus and globally — fostering collaboration, exchange, and dialogue with faculty and students who may not have felt themselves to be stakeholders in the project of humanistic inquiry as it has taken place at the Townsend…,” and a year on that vision has shaped unparalleled programming on campus.
Best and his team —Michaela Byrne, Rebecca Egger, Eric Kotila, Jane Liaw, Ramona Nadaff, and Diane Soper— have been working closely with campus institutions such as Cal Performances and BAMPFA to bring some of the most famous artistic and thought leaders of our time to Berkeley. Namely, a year-long residency with South African artist William Kentridge, a talk with Chinese political artist Ai Weiwei at Cal Performances, and a spring event with the acclaimed author Ocean Vuong. Amidst all of the blockbuster programs, the Townsend continues to offer undergraduate and graduate programs, workshops, course threads, and writing instruction that forms the core of their campus excellence.
Best’s aspirations to forge global humanities partnerships at Berkeley have also been realized this year. Best’s appointment as President of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, following outgoing President Sara Guyer, brings the only international humanities organization in the world to the Berkeley campus. Best leads a membership of over 300 humanities centers and institutes around the world, who collaborate regularly on transnational projects, which often center issues where the humanities are not typically present, such as the post-colonial legacy of mining and a community-centered vision of generative A.I. In May 2024, Best and the Townsend Center will host the next Annual Meeting where Berkeley will play host to hundreds of esteemed global humanities leaders.
The Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry facilitates new programs that explore humanities research, ranging from anti-authoritarianism to psychedelics
Formerly known as the Consortium for Interdisciplinary Research, The Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry (CICI) was reimagined last year under the leadership of Director Debarati Sanyal. The Center fosters cross-divisional collaborations in order to address some of the most urgent political, social, religious and environmental questions of our time. The center facilitates collaborations between the arts, humanities, law, and the sciences (social, natural and digital) to address contemporary global challenges. Current programs focus on religion and politics, the global forms of critical theory, authoritarianism old and new, borders, migration, and climate change. In addition to coordinating projects across disciplinary, divisional and regional lines, CICI provides a setting for emerging fields such as environmental, psychedelic, medical, public and global humanities.
This year the center was awarded an experimental grant by the Mellon Foundation in support of Imagining Beyond Authoritarianism: Race and Gender in our Times, a project co-facilitated by center Director Debarati Sanyal and Professor Emerita Judith Butler. In addition, the center is a main partner with the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics to explore how the humanities and social sciences intersect with psychedelic research and teaching.
The Arts at Berkeley
The arts at UC Berkeley are thriving and expanding — with a record number of new full-time faculty joining our arts departments, new and renovated spaces on the horizon, increased funding for MFA students in Art Practice, and undergraduate enrollments topping an all-time high — the arts are a priority. Our faculty and students distinctly combine theory and practice, creative and scholarly. Their inquiry directly informs and shapes the work that we do.
This year, the division welcomes faculty members Marié Abe (Department of Music), Iggy Cortez (Department of Film & Media), Timmia Hearn DeRoy (Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies), Cathy Park Hong (English Department), Darian Longmire (Department of Art Practice), Zamansele Nsele (History of Art), Luanne Redeye (Department of Art Practice), Juan David Rubio Restrepo (Department of Music), Solmaz Sharif (English Department), and Nicole Starosielski (Department of Film & Media) to our arts community.
The 2023-2024 academic year also marks the centennial anniversary of the Department of Art Practice and ushers in its 100th incoming MFA class. Over the last five years, Art Practice as a major has remained in the top ten fastest and highest-growing majors on campus, increasing at 12% year over year on average. Similar enrollment trends can be seen in Film & Media majors, which have increased 12% year over year and in Music majors, which have increased 36% year over year.
Stephanie Syjuco Associate Professor, Department of Art Practice
Stephanie Syjuco’s photogravures in the series Afterimages (2021) are part of her larger project Native Resolution, a body of work drawn from Syjuco’s research into the ways in which photography, anthropology, and museums produce and proliferate images of exclusion and othering, generating a skewed American history that assumes a white subject. The photogravures are from Syjuco’s 2019/2020 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, during which she spent hours immersed in the archives of the National Museum of American History, and the National Museum of Anthropology in Washington, D.C., searching for visual evidence of the Philippines and Filipinos. Works from this series have recently been acquired by major museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Tres Hornos: Earthen Ovens and Foodways of the Southwest
Ronald Rael, Chair and Professor, Department of Art Practice, Stephanie Syjuco, Associate Professor, Department of Art Practice; Jun Sunseri, Associate Professor, Archaeology
Students in the collaborative research seminar, funded by the Mellon Foundation, experimented with the design and construction of earthen ovens, using a traditional brick mold process combined with a newly designed inflatable mold. The process yielded sustainable and efficient methods that can be easily transported and deployed by those experiencing displacement due to humanitarian crises and migration. With a mission to bring together undergraduates and graduates from across the campus, the course used a mentorship model as students and faculty worked together to explore topics including food studies, sustainability, and colonialism.
Creative Writing at Berkeley
Hilton Als, Teaching Professor of English
Hilton Als joined the Berkeley faculty in 2022. A staff writer at The New Yorker since 1994, Als was previously a staff writer for the Village Voice and an editor-at-large at Vibe. He is the author of The Women, White Girls (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Lambda Literary Award), and My Pinup. Als is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2017, a Guggenheim for creative writing in 2000, and Lambda Literary’s Trustee Award for Excellence in Literature in 2016. In 2022 Als organized “Joan Didion: What She Means,” an “exhibition as portrait” in homage to his longtime friend for the Hammer Museum at UCLA. His classes use a broad range of authors — including James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Shakespeare and Richard Wright — as a lens into the creative writing process.
Cathy Park Hong, Professor of English and Class of 1936 First Chair in the College of Letters and Science
Cathy Park Hong has published three volumes of poetry, and her book Minor Feelings (2020) was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and received the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. She was also named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People of 2021. She also received the Windham-Campbell Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. This fall, Park Hong is teaching a seminar on writing poetry, where students explore how a poem can be “disobedient.” The class is reading works from the New York School, Afro-futurism, trans-poetics, and documentary poetics while writing their own poems that break out, emote, question, and imagine beyond their comfort zones.
Esteemed Lunch Poems Program Returns to Morrison Library
After two years of online programming, the Lunch Poems series returned to Morrison Library in Fall 2022. This esteemed noontime poetry series has hosted some of the most celebrated voices in poetry since its founding by Professor Robert Hass in 1995. In the 2022-2023 academic year, it welcomed Alex Dimitrov, Safiya Sinclair, Claire Hong, and Ishion Hutchinson to our campus. The Lunch Poems series is supported by Dr. and Mrs. Tom Colby, the UC Berkeley Library, the Morrison Library Fund, the Arts Research Center, the UC Berkeley English Department, the Dean’s Office of the College of Letters and Science, and Poets & Writers Inc.
Instrument Design for Musical Expression At the Center for New Music and Audio
Andrew Blanton, Ph. D. Candidate, Music
In this Spring class, students explored the practice and theory of contextual instrument design by creating new instruments and performance environments using a variety of physical interaction paradigms, programming practices, and musical processes emerging from the UC Berkeley Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT). Building on music methodologies, Blanton’s course helps students to develop aesthetic, analytic and technical skills through discussion, empirical study, and collaborative engagement.
During final presentations, students showcased a number of built instruments that were controlled by movement, Custom-coded programs, and repurposed materials, demonstrating the ingenuity and combination of computer science, technology, and music.
Within These Walls Berkeley Dance Project, Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies
Within These Walls is an award-winning multimedia experience that integrates contemporary dance with poetry, original music, and video projection. Inspired by the experiences of the estimated 170,000 Chinese immigrants who were processed—and often unjustly detained or interrogated—at the U.S. Immigration Station on Angel Island between 1910 to 1940, Within These Walls served as a meditation on healing, resilience, and compassion.
Lenora Lee Dance premiered the work in 2017 as a site-specific performance at the Angel Island Immigration Station. TDPS re-staged the work in 2023 with a cast of 14 students for Berkeley Dance Project, the department‘s annual dance concert.
Background Matters: The Art of Environment in Modern China
Weihong Bao Associate Professor of Film & Media and East Asian Languages & Cultures
Weihong Bao’s upcoming book, Background Matters: The Art of Environment in Modern China, analyzes the aesthetics of set design in film and theater through the twin lenses of social reform and human influence on the environment, framing climate as a matter of mind, medium, and society. Bao explores similar themes in the essays she contributed to two special issues she co-edited: “Climate/Media” (Representations) and “Medium/Environment” (Critical Inquiry).
Her previous publications address — among other topics — comparative media history and theory, early cinema, propaganda theory and practice, and Chinese language cinema of all periods and regions.
The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life Expands Access and Facilitates Community
With the appointment of Hannah Weisman as the first Executive Director of The Magnes Collection for Jewish Art and Life (The Magnes), student, faculty and public access to the museum’s collections have been creatively facilitated through partnerships, community building, and rich programming. Weisman’s appointment resulted from a landmark partnership between Taube Philanthropies, the Magnes Museum Foundation, and UC Berkeley.
A year into her tenure, Weisman has extended operating hours, curated programs that nurture curiosity and community building, and strengthened partnerships that extend across the Bay Area and the nation. The Magnes remains committed to the preservation, digitization, and interpretive needs of large collections, especially as the collection continues to grow with new acquisitions including the Taube Family Arthur Szyk Collection and the Roman Vishniac Archive.
20+ Years at Berkeley, the Arts Research Center Thrives as a Think Tank for the Arts
The Arts Research Center was founded more than 20 years ago as an Organized Research Unit (ORU) within the Consortium for the Arts, a coalition conceived by then Provost Carol Christ to “advance all of the arts at Berkeley” (1998-2008). Together, ARC and the Consortium organized a broad range of symposia, artist residencies, and teaching opportunities. Twenty years later, ARC remains a core think tank for the arts at Berkeley and in the Bay Area.
The center has a long history of being a public conduit for artistic production and research on a national scale, providing essential programs such as artist and writer-in-residence programs, institutional partnerships, and fellowships for faculty. Since the appointment of Faculty Director Beth Piatote, the center has been reimagining what arts research looks like. With programming centered around language revitalization, poetry, and indigeneity, and a mission to center justice and equity in the arts, ARC is leading important conversations around artistic production and visibility.
Languages at Berkeley
This year the division welcomes faculty members Nicholas Baer (German), Mohamed Wadji Ben Hammed (Comparative Literature), Nora Jacobsen Ben Hammed (Middle Eastern Languages & Culture), Grace Erny (Ancient Greek & Roman Studies), Robyn Jensen (Slavic), Akash Kumar (Italian), Roni Masel (Comparative Literature), Luther Obrock (South and Southeast Asian Studies), Liesl Yamaguchi (French), and Henry Ravenhall (French). They join a thriving multilingual community at UC Berkeley, which leads among institutions of higher education in the depth and breadth of languages taught—offering classes in more than sixty languages. Our language and literature courses equip our students to become global citizens, to engage with local communities, and to interact meaningfully with people and ideas from different regions of our fast-changing world.
In recognition of the crucial role that languages play in our students’ educations and in our institutional diversity, the funding of our Area Studies Centers, and our reputation as a top global university, Dean Sara Guyer convened The Task Force on Languages, Language-Based Disciplines, and Global Citizenship. Meeting over the course of three semesters, the members of the task force presented recommendations this summer on enhancing and supporting instructional and research strengths in global languages. The division looks forward to implementing their recommendations in the coming years and thanks the faculty and staff who served on the task force for their important contributions.
Indigenous Language Revitalization Beth Piatote, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and English and Director, Arts Research Center
Beth Piatote’s current scholarly projects include articles on Indigenous language revitalization with a focus on Nez Perce literature and language, and a book manuscript on Indigenous literature, law, and the senses. As director of the Arts Research Center, she has focused programming on Indigenous artists, co-producing (with community arts organization AlterTheater) the world premiere of Dillon Chitto‘s play, Pueblo Revolt, and hosting multiple events featuring Indigenous artists and poets. The Poetry and the Senses program has expanded to include a partnership with the University of Hawaii and Arizona State University, featuring Indigenous poets Craig Santos Perez and Natalie Diaz. Piatote‘s creative work includes poetry, stories, and plays that center Nez Perce language and aesthetics, and through the ARC, she has launched the Indigenous Poetics Lab (IPL), which has offered workshops and fellowships for students to support Indigenous language revitalization through the arts.
Unique Contributions to the Digital Humanities in Spanish Alex Saum-Pascual, Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese
Alex Saum-Pascual is a digital artist, poet, and professor who recently had two digital poetry works featured at the exhibition „Caracteres” at the Instituto Cervantes in New York City. Her new book, Earthy Algorithms: A Materialist Approach to Capital, Climate and Digital Literature (forthcoming 2024), takes inspiration from the fields of New Media and Electronic Literature to make a unique contribution to the Digital Humanities in Spanish. Focusing on the work of digital artists from Spain and the Latin American diaspora, Professor Saum-Pascual examines their engagement with concepts of evironmental crisis and late-stage modernity.
The Berkeley Language Center Celebrates New Funding for Ongoing Programs
Words in Action is an annual multilingual student performance directed by Senior Lecturer Annamaria Bellezza; this year the Berkeley Language Center (BLC) recognized the additional generous support of Bruce and Judy Schroffel. A Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation grant supported this year’s Film in the Language Classroom program, in which language instructors design lesson plans using film. The BLC was also awarded a three-year U.S. Department of Education International Research and Studies grant to develop instructional materials that leverage machine translation tools to support language learning, critical digital literacies, and global citizenship. This project will have immediate and long-term impacts on language instructors and students, at UC Berkeley and beyond.
Grant from Henry Luce Foundation Launches Project on Southeast Asian Lives
The UC Berkeley Center for Southeast Asia Studies (CSEAS) received a $400,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation Initiative on Southeast Asia for the project Southeast Asian Lives and Histories (SEALIVES). The grant is coordinated by PI Penny Edwards (Professor, Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies). The heart of SEALIVES focuses on biographical interviews that will give voice to life histories of Southeast Asians in their homelands and diasporic communities. CSEAS is thrilled to launch a small grants program this fall for students and early career researchers to participate in this oral history collection.
Gender Neutral Italian for the Classroom Simo Cocco, Doctoral Candidate, Department of Italian Studies
In Spring 2023, Simo Cocco received a Berkeley Language Center Instructional Development Research Fellowship. Their project aims to create a guide for Italian language instructors to incorporate gender-neutral Italian in the classroom, with particular emphasis on student involvement, basic understanding of Italian culture and language and of grammatical and social gender, and use of media. Simo is also an undergraduate alum of UC Berkeley, having received their B.A. with a double major in Italian Studies (Honors) and Comparative Literature with a focus on Italian, Spanish, and English language literatures.
Student-Curated Exhibit in Doe Library Showcases Arabic Alphabet in Postcolonial Art
Anneka Lenssen, Associate Professor, History of Art
The undergraduates who enrolled in Professor Lenssen’s Fall 2022 seminar on calligraphic modernism had a unique opportunity: they spent their semester researching and designing an exhibit for Doe Library to showcase the works of artists from the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia who turned to the Arabic alphabet as a means of modernist, postcolonial expression. The student-curated exhibit, Letters | الحروف : How Artists Reimagined Language in the Age of Decolonization, was on display in the library from March through August.
Outstanding Student Work
Benjamin Coleman Spring ’23, English, Legal Studies, and Political Science Major
While still in high school, Benjamin Coleman founded a nonprofit to encourage access to sports among newly arrived immigrants. At Berkeley, he completed three majors — English, political science and legal studies, along with a minor in journalism — while also writing for the Daily Cal, doing research at the Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law, and serving on the Arts & Humanities Dean’s Leadership Team. Since graduating in May, he has been working as a social impact associate for the Minnesota Vikings in the NFL.
Linda Kinstler Doctoral Candidate, Department of Comparative Literature
In March 2023, Rhetoric Department Ph. D. candidate Linda Kinstler was announced as one of 10 Whiting Award winners. These awards recognize early-career achievement and empower recipients to fulfill the promise of exceptional literary work to come. 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.
Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends (2022) is her first nonfiction book.
Fabiola Vázquez Fall ’24, English and Spanish & Portuguese Major, Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow
As an incoming transfer student in 2022, Fabiola Vázquez was admitted to the division’s prestigious Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program, which guides students’ intellectual and professional development, preparing them for academic careers that will contribute to diversity and equal opportunity in the academy. Vázquez‘s research focuses on the impact of intergenerational literacy on Latinx populations. Upon graduation, she hopes to pursue a Ph.D. to work in education and improve the inclusion of multilingual speakers in and out of academia.
Catherine Vera Spring ’23, Cognitive Science Major, University Medalist
UC Berkeley’s University Medal is awarded by the Academic Senate Committee on Prizes to the most distinguished graduating senior based on grade point average, scholarly work, extracurricular activities and qualities that make the student “an exemplar of the university’s highest ideals.” When this year’s recipient, Catherine Vera, was interviewed about her pursuit of human rights advocacy work, she credited an inspiring film class called Arts of the Border: Refugee Itineraries and Identities taught by French professor Debarati Sanyal.
Wilson Wang Fall ’23, Film & Media and Philosophy Major
Now a member of the Arts & Humanities Dean’s Leadership Team, Wilson Wang initially came to Berkeley intending to study bioengineering on a pre-med track but developed a passion for film. Currently in his senior year, Wilson is writing his honors thesis under the direction of professor Weihong Bao and is conducting research in Guangzhou this summer with support from a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship. This spring, he was selected to participate in the Townsend Center’s honors thesis workshop with center director Stephen Best.
Alan Yeh Doctoral Candidate, Department of French
Alan Yeh is part of the inaugural cohort of Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellows. His project translates roughly as, “Child, have you eaten yet?“ It focuses on the act of feeding in diasporic Vietnamese literature; archives in the United States and France; and community oral histories to construct an archive of care that foregrounds refugee experiences and epistemologies. „Feeding is such a primordial act of care,” Yeh said. “It is a way to not only literally take care of others (since food is essential to survival), but also communicate care when all else fails.”
Funding a Bright Future for the Arts & Humanities
Morrison Recital Hall Renovation an inspiring venue for stellar performances
Laurie Wu McClain (B.A. ‘64, J.D. ‘82) and Chuck McClain have been attending music performances on campus for years. They are intimately familiar with 768-seat Hertz Hall — and were aware that no equivalent venue existed on campus for small performances. UC Berkeley parents John and Kristi Cumming likewise noticed that the quality of spaces in Morrison Hall did not do justice to the talent of student musicians. Thanks to their generosity, that is about to change.
125 Morrison Hall is currently used mainly as a music classroom. Unchanged since 1958, it shows the wear of 65 years of continuous use. Meanwhile, the Department of Music has seen the largest increase (36% year over year for the past 5 years) in majors across A&H, and Music department performances draw audiences from across the Bay Area.
In 2020, the McClains pledged a $1 million launch gift for the renovation of 125 Morrison, which will be renamed Wu Recital Hall in memory of Laurie’s parents. This was the latest in a series of transformative gifts by the McClains. As Builders of Berkeley, Laurie and Chuck have supported an impressive range of programs including undergraduate scholarships, graduate fellowships in music and public health, and the Library. Their connections to Berkeley run deep: Laurie serves on the board of the UC Berkeley Foundation, Charles taught at Berkeley Law, and their son Christopher is an alum.
The Cumming family, whose philanthropy supports a number of educational causes, made a $1 million gift in spring 2023. The Cummings’ son graduated from Berkeley this past May with a dual major in music and sustainable environmental design; he recently began a job with a major record label.
The new space will be a beautiful addition to the campus‘s public outreach efforts, with performances of chamber music, recitals, jazz, choral groups, Latin and Chinese music ensembles, and Baroque opera productions. The new room will serve as the principal performance venue for the department‘s research wing, the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT), which will be presenting state-of-the-art digital audio and video productions utilizing the latest technologies developed by our researchers at CNMAT. The effect of the new room will be transformative for all the musicians in the department and on campus, and once again we thank our donors for their incredible vision and generosity!
Continue the Legacy
Two memorial funds support graduate students in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology
Two memorial funds support graduate students in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology
Two recent gifts in memory of beloved faculty members have ensured that their legacy will live on, supporting graduate students in the fields to which they dedicated their life’s work.
Ron Stroud, a leading expert in the study of Greek epigraphy, taught in the Department of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies from 1965 until 2007. He helped found the Graduate Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology (AHMA) in 1968 and was instrumental in building AHMA into the premier program of its kind in the nation.
Soon after Professor Stroud’s passing in October 2021, James Barter (B.A. ‘68), an early student of Stroud’s, established an endowment in his memory with a gift of $500,000 for graduate student support. The gift was matched by a campuswide program, and the resulting $1 million endowment will allow AHMA to award a Stroud Fellowship to a Ph.D. student each year.
Barter’s connection to Berkeley and to classical civilizations remains strong. He audits a course every semester and recently participated in Professor Kim Shelton’s archaeological excavation in Mycenae, Greece. Barter has also made generous gifts to the Nemea Center and the Library, including the Classics collection and the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri. The passing of Professor Emeritus Andrew Stewart (History of Art and DAGRS) inspired another generous gift to AHMA.
Stewart, one of the world’s foremost experts in the study of ancient Greek art, served as director of AHMA for six years, enhancing its profile in art history and archaeology and strengthening the program’s ties with experts in the study of the ancient Near East. He was awarded the Archaeological Institute of America’s Gold Medal Award for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement in January 2023, just weeks before his death. John “Jack” Nickel (B.A. ‘78, M.A. ‘85) made a $25,000 gift to establish the Andrew Stewart Memorial Fund, which will be used to support graduate students in AHMA.
Nickel is a longtime supporter of AHMA, DAGRS, and the Nemea Center for Classical Archaeology among other programs on campus.
"These gifts will help us continue to recruit and support the brilliant students who will be at the vanguard of our field in the next generation,” says Emily Mackil, professor of History and current director of AHMA. “I cannot think of a more meaningful way to honor the achievements of these two distinguished scholars, who were our colleagues and friends for so many decades.” and the Nemea Center for Classical Archaeology, among other programs on campus.
Crowdfunding ensures student access for Chamber Chorus trip to Portugal
In May 2023, the UC Berkeley Chamber Chorus took its first trip in 20 years: an 8-day tour of Portugal with performances. Thanks to a successful campaign on Berkeley’s crowdfunding platform they were able to offer partial and full scholarships based on financial need, ensuring that all students could embark on this once-in-a-lifetime performance experience!
Advancing Faculty Diversity in the Arts and Humanities, a multi-year Dean’s Initiative Receives Seed Funding from UCOP
The Division of Arts & Humanities is pleased to announce Advancing Faculty Diversity in the Arts and Humanities (AFDAH), a new multi-year recruitment and mentorship grant funded by the UC Office of the President that is focused on interventions in our faculty searches, hiring strategies, and support for the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 academic years. Over the next two years, this grant will strengthen the recruitment, mentorship, and support of new and recently hired A&H faculty working in underrepresented fields, in particular African/African Diasporic Humanities and Latinx Cultural Expression.
We launch this fellowship program with the mission of creating a community of mentorship and peer support amongst new A&H faculty committed to underrepresented areas of academic research and teaching. We recognize the need to provide these new faculty members with the career development tools necessary to pursue the highest levels of research in their areas of study; to design new courses not currently offered within the curriculum; to receive consistent and appropriately aligned mentorship; and to participate in service that promotes inclusion and belonging. We have funding for approximately ten AFDAH New Faculty Fellows.
AFDAH will be led by Professor Donna V. Jones, an interdisciplinary scholar of literature and race, philosophy, gender, and science studies. Professor Jones has been on the Berkeley faculty for over twenty years, and has been an engaged mentor for early career faculty for over a decade. She will work in close collaboration with Arts & Humanities Dean Sara Guyer, Arts & Humanities Assistant Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Dr. Alberto Ledesma, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Program Manager, Dr. Maria Faini.
Over the past year, Dr. Ledesma and Dr. Faini developed a new Division-wide pilot program to improve connections to the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP). They have focused on broadening applicant pools, identifying possible candidates for faculty positions, and socializing new recruitment strategies across departments.
Year-in-Review
The events presented across the division over the last year brought world-renowned artists, musicians, writers, and academics to the UC Berkeley campus and showcased our centers, faculty, and leadership. Here is a sampling of the events that put Berkeley’s Division of Arts & Humanities at center stage.
