Daniela Blei, who hails from Stanford University, has found a home in the History department. Her work in 20th century German history focuses on the history of education, moving beyond educational policy to examine the experience of schoolchildren and teachers in the years prior to National Socialism. Blei’s teaching excellence at Stanford was recognized when she was appointed to teach pedagogy to other graduate students. At Berkeley she teaches a course on modern German history (1914 to the present). Students and faculty working on the history of education and on Holocaust history are greatly benefiting from her presence.

Eva-Marie Dubuisson, now with Berkeley's Anthropology Department, earned her Ph.D. in linguistic anthropology from the University of Michigan. Her dissertation, grounded in three years of ethnographic research in Central Asia, examined a particular form of improvisational poetic dueling in Kazakhstan. Her new research project focuses on Kazakh culture, exploring narratives of healing, “discursive ecologies” and “citizen storytellers” in a part of the world of great interest both to scholars on post-Soviet socialism and to scholars in Islamic studies. Dubuisson, an outstanding teacher who was awarded multiple teaching prizes at Michigan, is bringing her expertise on Central Asia to an upper division course called “Warriors, Words and Wonders: Eurasia at the Crossroads of the World” this fall.

Amma Y. Ghartey-Tagoe of the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies received her doctorate from the Performance Studies program at New York University. She practices and studies the intersections of academic history and performance. Her research interests center on the African Diaspora, particularly on the impact of the transatlantic slave trade in her homeland of Ghana, and on how performance mediates the interactions between continental Africans, first-generation Africans in the U.S., and African-Americans. Her book project on W.E.B. DuBois’s relation to the American Negro Exhibit at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition combines African American studies, American studies, and Performance Studies. She brings these interests to the teaching of courses in Performance and History, performance-related methodologies and the use of archives, and historical research methodologies. Her ongoing, award-winning work for HISTORY (formerly known as the History Channel) producing documentaries, educational materials, and related oral history and theatre workshops is an important addition to the department’s emphasis on community-based performance. This semester her course exploring the different processes that historians and artists employ to present history to the public.

Fabiola Lopez-Duran of the History of Art Department comes to Berkeley from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she completed her Ph.D. in History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art. Her long-term research focus has centered on the aesthetic, scientific, and political core of both French and Latin American modernism, particularly how it relates to eugenics as both a biological and social movement. She is now continuing her research, emphasizing a study on how eugenics moved from the realms of medicine and law to architecture and urban planning in early 20th century Latin America. Lopez-Duran brings a range of international experience in the classroom. She has taught in Venezuela and the U.S. and led an interdisciplinary panel discussions in Switzerland. This semester she is teaching a course on art and politics in modern Latin America which she dubs a “visual culture travelogue.” Her expertise in the history and theory of European and Latin American art and architecture are proving to be a valuable resource for our undergraduates as well as for her colleagues in History of Art.

Ozge Samanci, a well-known comics artist in Turkey and internationally, comes to Berkeley from the Georgia Institute of Technology, adding to the Department of Art Practice’s strengths in digital arts. At Berkeley she is continuing her work in new media on what she calls “Embodied Comics,” a form of digital performance based on full-body interaction technology, in which a performer’s actions triggers projected story events. Her teaching draws on her expertise in media-film-communications theory, interactive narrative, tangible interfaces, comics, animation, and performance art. Samanci’s work, including her marvelously inventive digital full-body interactive storytelling environment “Embodied Comics: Egg’s Journey,” may be explored at her website.