Arts & Humanities

For Cal alumni Sanjay Shah and Rachelle Mendez, lessons learned as undergraduate rhetoric majors forged a path to success in Hollywood.

In the late 1990s, Sanjay Shah and Rachelle Mendez were assigned to the same group project in a UC Berkeley rhetoric class. That collaboration would become a blueprint for two decades of friendship and creative partnership that led to parallel paths into the television industry, multiple hit shows, and prestigious awards like the Emmys.

Shah is a writer, showrunner, and executive producer on Everybody Still Hates Chris, an...

Minoo Moallem was getting her master’s degree at Tehran University when the Iranian revolution swept the country. At first, she enjoyed new civil liberties, but as those were curtailed, Moallem left to pursue her Ph.D. abroad.

Moallem is now a professor of gender and women’s studies and the new faculty director for the UC Berkeley Initiative for Iranian Studies.

Kelly Chuang is a third-year English and Rhetoric double major and a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow. She has a strong interest in speculative fiction, the uncanny, and narratology, and she jokes that she can connect almost anything she reads back to cyborgs, Carl Sagan’s Contact, or sci-fi.

Kelly chose English because of her long-standing love of literature and the teachers who encouraged it. She added Rhetoric after discovering how much she enjoyed the department’s interdisciplinary approach and the energy of its faculty.

The L&S Staff Achievement Awards, now in its second year, recognize and celebrate outstanding staff members in the College of Letters & Science. Awardees are selected for their exceptional commitment to the College’s shared mission of teaching, research, and public service. Each of these individuals has excelled in areas such as collaboration, goal accomplishment, inclusion & belonging, innovation, and mastery of their work.

We are deeply grateful to our 2025 recipients for their remarkable contributions to the College and to the University. Their...