Arts & Humanities

In the catacombs of the Bancroft Library, in a chilled, climate-controlled vault, is a 1,300-page document that tells the horrors of Manuel de Lucena’s life and death as a clandestine Jew during the Spanish Inquisition. In black ink on old parchment, scribes some 400 years ago penned the details of his lengthy imprisonment and his coerced testimony, along with the interrogation and torture of other Jews implicated in the investigation.

In the end, de Lucena and members of his family, and countless others, admitted their guilt and incriminated those they loved, and were then burned...

I was originally born at a refugee camp in Laos that no longer exists today. My parents were refugees from Laos who wanted to come to the states to give my sisters and I a better opportunity than they had growing up. Although I was quite young when we moved to the states, I definitely felt the pressure of coming from a refugee family because I had to pull my weight at an early age so we can have stability.

I grew up Buddhist with my parents reminding us not to forget our Lao roots and they instilled very valuable values within us that I still...

For Trinh T. Minh-ha, learning isn’t about accumulating knowledge.

“This has been something that my students very much appreciate,” said Trinh, a longtime UC Berkeley professor of gender and women’s studies and of rhetoric who retired in 2020. “But also, I have had students who agonized with me over the whole semester because of this.

When students write their dissertations, said Trinh, now a Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School, they are expected to prove their knowledge on a specific subject by showing how much they know. But this isn’t...

As a child in the Philippines during the 1970s, Joi Barrios-Leblanc remembers singing songs that glorified the country’s president Ferdinand Marcos, and his U.S-backed regime of martial law that turned the government into a one-man dictatorship that killed, tortured and incarcerated thousands of its citizens.

The songs sung in Tagalog — the Philippine national language — were slogans of propaganda that stressed the need for the populace to be submissive,...