Social Sciences (Faculty & Staff)

In the mid-1990s, Quirina Geary was a cashier at a Safeway store in Madera, California, and a young mother of two. While raised in a tribal community in California’s Central Valley, she did not speak her ancestral Mutsun language and wanted to fix that.

Intimidated, yet determined, she headed along with her sister, Clara Luna, to UC Berkeley to attend Breath of Life, a biennial workshop in which California Native Americans pair up with linguists and other scholars to revitalize Indigenous languages by sharing personal histories, knowledge and archival materials.

There, Geary...

On May 10, 2022, Dr. Lisa DeNell Cook, UC Berkeley alumna, was confirmed to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. She is the first Black woman to serve on the Fed in its 108-year history. As governor, Cook will take part in setting U.S. monetary policy and stabilizing the national financial system...

Wendy Brown, Professor Emerita in the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science, speaks to the New York Times about campus culture. Read more

You can hear Hari Srinivasan’s confident voice in his academic research papers, his Daily Californiannewspaper articles and in his poetry and essays. But in person, you’re not likely to hear him speak.

That’s because the UC Berkeley psychology major’s ability to vocalize is severely limited due to regressive autism and a neurological disorder known as oral-motor apraxia.

It closed many doors to him. But not at Berkeley, and certainly not now.

Srinivasan is the first nonspeaking person, or as he puts it, “minimally speaking autistic” to win a prestigious...