Faculty

Leon Litwack honored with new speaker series

January 31, 2025

UC Berkeley’s Department of History is recognizing one of its most beloved professors with a new speaker series devoted to African American history. The series extends the legacy of Leon Litwack, a trailblazing scholar who taught generations of students to peer behind the curtain of whitewashed narratives and learn difficult truths about their country’s past.

Few areas of scholarship are as contentious — and...

Creativity is What Comes Next: An L&S Lunch and Learn Conversation

March 27, 2025

On Tuesday, March 18, the College of Letters & Science Administrative Advisory Committee (AAC) hosted a conversation between Professors David Nadler and Shannon Steen on the topic “What is Creativity?” at its second L&S Lunch and Learn convening. Moderated by Aileen Liu, Director of Curricular Engagement Initiatives, this discussion afforded L&S staff the opportunity to thoughtfully engage with the scholarship of the College and connect with their colleagues....

‘Tremendously effective teachers’: Five UC Berkeley instructors receive Distinguished Teaching Award

March 27, 2025

The campus's highest honor for teaching excellence, the Distinguished Teaching Award underscores the profound impact instructors have on their students’ learning experiences and future careers.

Five UC Berkeley instructors have received the 2025 Distinguished Teaching Award, the campus’s highest honor for teaching excellence. The Academic Senate’s Committee on Teaching announced the selection on March 10, highlighting that this year’s recipients are “tremendously effective...

Seven faculty members named fellows of American Association for the Advancement of Science

March 27, 2025

Seven headshots of AAAS winners in circles against a blue backgroundSeven UC Berkeley faculty members from a broad range of fields are among the 2024 class of fellows elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), one of the world’s largest general scientific societies and publisher of the Science family of journals.

The 471 new AAAS fellows...

Language, Identity, and Ecolinguistics: An Interview with Nataliia Goshylyk on Teaching Ukrainian at Berkeley

March 25, 2025

Nataliia Goshylyk is a lecturer in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, where she teaches Ukrainian. Dr. Goshylyk received her M.A. in Philology from Lesya Ukrainka Volyn State University, and her PhD in linguistics from Kharkiv National University. She is the recipient of the Berkeley Language Center Summer Fellowship in 2022, as well as a U.S. Fulbright Scholarship from 2021-2022, and she was an Erasmus Mundus Ianus II recipient in 2015, where she did research in Graz, Austria. Some of her main areas of focus include ecolinguistics, language pedagogy, and...

Meet Our Faculty

The outstanding faculty in the Division of Mathematical & Physical Sciences are pushing the boundaries in the fields of astronomy, earth & planetary science, mathematics, and physics. Read below to learn more about their groundbreaking work.

Model Authority: Professor Madison Douglas

March 24, 2025

Permafrost is a major actor in the slow-motion disaster movie that we are all trapped inside. It contains vast amounts of carbon. As our planet warms permafrost thaws, releasing greenhouse gases that enter a feedback loop which accelerates climate change. How bad is that? Literally—quantify the danger so we can decide how to respond. We need to dig into the character of permafrost and learn its desires and habits and upbringing, understand what causes it to turn to the dark side. As the saying goes, keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

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Svetlana in Wonderland: Professor Svetlana Jitomirskaya

March 24, 2025

Consider the guitar leaning against the wall over there—you got it because you wanted to look cool, sure, but notice that it is unlike a piano (where you press one key and you get one note) and also unlike a violin (where you can press anywhere, and you look less cool). The guitar is somewhere in between because its frets are positioned where they are for a reason, not arbitrarily, but you can still make tiny changes to notes, as tiny as you like. It’s kinda digital at the same time it’s kinda analog.

Mathematics has a similar area of study,...

AAC Brings “What is Understanding?” Conversation to L&S Staff

October 22, 2024

Aileen Liu (left), Jennifer Johnson-Hanks (middle), and Hernan Garcia speak in a panel.

On Wednesday, October 9, the College of Letters & Science Administrative Advisory Committee (AAC) hosted its inaugural L&S Brown Bag Lunch and Learn. One of several new initiatives by the recently revamped AAC, the Lunch and Learn provides L&S staff members an opportunity to connect with their colleagues and...

UC Berkeley's Stephen Small and the representation of slavery in contemporary heritage tourism

March 18, 2025
Stephen Small, African American Studies professor, speaks about his book, In the Shadows of the Big House.

In this interview, Stephen Small shares the inspirations behind In the Shadows of the Big House, a compelling and deeply researched work that examines the representation of slavery in contemporary heritage tourism. Drawing from decades of scholarly inquiry and on-the-ground research at plantation sites across the American South, Small investigates the ways in which...