Arts & Humanities

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...

Fiat Vox: First Artist-in-Residence in the Department of Art Practice, Fred DeWitt

April 22, 2021

In a recent Fiat Vox podcast, Anne Brice interviewed Berkeley MFA student Fred DeWitt. DeWitt, 61, shares in his own words what the Black Panthers meant to him as a young boy growing up in the Bay Area, how Barack Obama’s election as president inspired him to go back to school to study art, and the complicated nature of honoring the lives of people who never wanted to be remembered for their deaths. His MFA show will be at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) in June.

Top rankings for L&S graduate programs in U.S. News & World Report

April 7, 2021

UC Berkeley’s College of Letters and Science received national recognition in the 2022 U.S. News & World Report rankings of graduate programs. English, History, and Sociology all received #1 rankings, underlining the exceptional quality and depth of graduate education at L&S, and over thirty L&S programs and specialties earned top ten rankings this year.

“The disciplines of the Humanities have been a pillar of Berkeley's strength from the moment of its founding,” said Anthony Cascardi, dean of the...

Next Dean of Arts and Humanities in the College of Letters & Science

April 15, 2021

Headshot of Sara Guyer, New Dean of UC Berkeley's Division of Arts and HumanitiesSara Guyer of the University of Wisconsin-Madison has been appointed the next dean of Arts and Humanities in the UC Berkeley College of Letters & Science. Having earned a master’s and a doctoral degree in rhetoric from UC Berkeley, Guyer is...