Arts & Humanities

"Can Silicon Valley Find God": NYT guest essay by Ph.D. candidate Linda Kinstler

July 30, 2021

Linda Kinstler, Ph.D. candidate in the Rhetoric Department, was recently featured in The New York Times Sunday Review. Her essay, "Can Silicon Valley Find God?" is an exploration of the relationship between spirituality and technology, between the digital and the divine. It’s the product of over a year of reporting and dozens of conversations with religious leaders, programmers, and believers of all faiths about how our devices are indeterminately altering our interior lives.

Bruno Anaya Ortiz pursues work at the intersection of legal studies, political theory, and colonial studies

July 7, 2021

Bruno Anaya Ortize, PhD Student in RhetoricCongratulations to PhD student, Bruno Anaya Ortiz, for becoming a Berkeley Empirical Legal Studies (BELS) Fellow for 2021-2022. Ortiz is a fifth-year student in the Rhetoric Department.

Berkeley Empirical Legal Studies (BELS) is characterized by a rich interdisciplinary approach that seeks to ground empirical analysis in sociolegal theory and embrace a...

L&S celebrates the commemoration of Juneteenth as a national holiday

June 18, 2021

JuneteenthUC Berkeley embraces the declaration of Juneteenth as a national holiday. In the College of Letters & Science, we celebrate this momentous occasion, affirming our pursuit of diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and justice across all aspects of...

Meet Alan Huang '21

June 17, 2021
L&S Student Spotlight: Alan Huang '21
Majors: Music (Arts & Humanities Division) and Neurobiology (Biological Sciences Division)

Alan Huang Class of 2021. Photo by Kevina XiaoA natural multitasker, Alan Huang pursued two seemingly disparate majors in the College of Letters & Science: music and neurobiology. He found harmony in...

Truly changing sex is possible, says Berkeley trans scholar Grace Lavery

June 14, 2021

Grace Lavery, Trans ScholarWhen Grace Lavery joined UC Berkeley’s English department in 2013, she didn’t know that she would become one of the most followed trans scholars in the world on social media and an outspoken advocate for the trans community.

An associate professor of Victorian literature, Lavery first became interested in trans studies after reading the work of...

What Pedro De Anda Plascencia '21 Wants His Fifth-Grade Self to Know

June 3, 2021

Pedro De Anda Plascencia '21 holds English and political science degreesPedro De Anda Plascencia recently graduated with two degrees in English and political science from the College of Letters & Science. He is an Achievement Award Program (TAAP) Scholar in UC Berkeley's Class of 2021. Following is an excerpt from his speech delivered at this spring's TAAP...

Chance phone call keeps alive scholar's remarkable Amazonian legacy

May 24, 2021

In March, UC Berkeley linguist Zachary O’Hagan called Florida Atlantic University anthropologist Gerald Weiss to ask about audio recordings that Weiss had made in the 1960s and ‘70s of Ashaninka people, the largest Indigenous group living in Peru’s Amazon rainforest.

O’Hagan figured they’d discuss their shared passion for the Peruvian Amazon and the need to preserve early records of the region’s languages and cultures.

Little did he know then that Weiss soon would entrust him, sight unseen, with his entire Ashaninka collection of dozens of audiotapes, more than 4...

How the Asian American movement began at Berkeley, sparked creativity and unity

May 14, 2021

In the second part of a three-part series, Philip Kan Gotanda, playwright and UC Berkeley professor in the division of Arts & Humanities, discusses how he began to write music during the emerging Asian American movement, which began at Berkeley in the late 1960s. And how, after his music career didn’t take off as he’d hoped, he went to law school, where he wrote his first play. Now, he’s one of the most prolific playwrights of Asian American-themed work in the United States.

For Anna Sharpe, a theater degree means her son sees her pursuing her dream

May 11, 2021

Anna Sharpe has never done something because it was easy. Quite the opposite. If it’s hard — if it’ll take all she’s got, if it’ll leave her in pieces, she’s interested. Because it shows that it means something. That it matters.

When Sharpe first arrived at UC Berkeley as an undergraduate student in 2017, she didn’t know that she wanted to be an actor — that being on stage would help pull her out of the postpartum depression she’d been experiencing since giving birth to her son several months before. But after taking a theater class to lighten her rigorous art history class load,...

Four L&S faculty elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

April 22, 2021

L&S Faculty Electees into American Academy of Arts and SciencesSix UC Berkeley faculty members and top scholars have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), a 241-year-old organization honoring the country’s most accomplished artists, scholars, scientists and leaders who help solve the world’s most urgent challenges.

Four of the six newest...