By Kate Rix

Like many prospective graduate students, Brenno Kenji chose Berkeley for its breadth of access to outstanding faculty. Kenji came to Cal last year to work on a Ph.D. in Hispanic languages and literatures. He moved to the U.S. from Brazil, where he was a law student, to join a department where he could work closely with faculty and other graduate students across Berkeley’s highly ranked departments in humanities and social sciences.

“What pushed me away from Law was its excessive instrumentality,” Kenji says. “It seemed that law schools were more interested in training a technician rather than forming a person capable of understanding the ideas on which law as a discipline and as a practice is grounded. It was precisely in this rather unexplored non-dogmatic aspect of law — its premises, its presuppositions — that I was interested.”

The exploration Kenji sought is a multi-disciplinary endeavor that pulls together many ways of studying the underlying structures of human cultures. It turned out that Berkeley’s intellectual support for wide-ranging study was a perfect fit for him. Berkeley adds up to more than just the sum of its parts, and one way it does this is through flexible, cross-disciplinary graduate programs called Designated Emphases. Pursued alongside the conventional Ph.D., these programs allow graduate students to approach research problems from multiple perspectives.

Berkeley is home to Designated Emphases in a wide array of programs, from computational biology to film studies. One of the newest Designated Emphases is in Critical Theory, the program that attracted Brenno Kenji.

Established last fall, this program positions Berkeley as a leader in cross-disciplinary work in the humanities and social sciences. It developed out of the Townsend Center for the Humanities, where professors Judith Butler and Martin Jay led a semester-long research and planning seminar. Now that the program is up and running, it includes faculty drawn from 20 different departments, ranging from history and literature to sociology and political science.

Berkeley is the first U.S. institution to offer such a program. Its intellectual focus grows out of work begun in the early 20th century by a number of influential German intellectuals centered at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. The participants in that project — who include Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Leo Löwentha l— argued that we were increasingly living our lives within a mass culture whose nature had deep political and economic significance. In their work, they used a variety of methods to understand our culture, drawing upon both philosophical and empirical studies.

With the advance of National Socialism in Germany, many of the Frankfurt School thinkers went into exile. Some continued their work in the United States, including Löwenthal, who taught as a distinguished member of the Berkeley faculty for many decades.

In more recent years, the questions confronting contemporary researchers in the humanities and social sciences have broadened beyond those that preoccupied the original Frankfurt School thinkers. In our increasingly globalized world, Critical Theory addresses fundamental questions about the underlying forces that shape political and cultural life, including questions about nationalism, religion, gender, and race.

For the faculty involved in the Critical Theory program, the new Designated Emphasis offers the opportunity to shape an influential intellectual tradition along new lines. And for graduate students like Kenji, the opportunity to participate in such a multi-disciplinary intellectual challenge is part of what makes Berkeley special. As Kenji says, it is Berkeley’s “well-known tradition of rethinking established truths” that makes it a perfect place for the kind of adventurous studies he wants to pursue.

To learn more about the program and the wider activities of the faculty and students involved in it, visit: http://criticaltheory.berkeley.edu.