The distraction came along when Elizabeth Abel, UC Berkeley professor of English, was researching a book about women's writing across racial lines. As she read about the history of segregation in the American south, she came upon a photograph by Dorothea Lange. The picture showed a black couple sitting at a lunch counter in 1938. The placement of a board, dividing service between whites and blacks, cut them off at eye level.
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The class was called "Images of Amazonia." It was 1988, and Professor Candace Slater had just come back from the first of what would become a long line of research trips to the Amazon. She'd gone with the purpose of challenging stereotypes, seeing beyond the rain forest scenery, and now she wanted to share her findings with her students. She began the class by questioning ideas and rattling off sets of facts. When asked how many people lived in the Amazon region, students' guesses ranged from 200,000 to 2 million. No, Slater told them, 23 million people made their homes within the nine countries that comprise the Amazon.
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Last fall, when the words "military commissions" began appearing in daily newspapers, Professor David Cohen felt it was time to take a broad look at tribunals and war crimes. The resulting conference took place on March 16 of this year. Organized by Cohen and Eric Stover, respectively the directors of UC Berkeley's War Crimes Studies Center and Human Rights Center, the conference brought together experts from recent tribunals in Yugoslavia, Rwanda and East Timor. As they explored the particulars of each tribunal, participants discussed the roots of these modern trials in World War II and considered possible military commissions in the American future.
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One day, an official was on patrol in the countryside when he came upon a large pool of blood. Interviewing the neighbors, he learned that a local man had gone missing. The next morning, the official sat down to write reports for his superiors. Two thousand years later and half a world away, that report now sits on UC Berkeley campus, above the Bancroft Library in the vault containing the Tebtunis papyri.
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In the early 1980's, when Deniz Göktürk first came to Berlin, the German government was fond of announcing, "Germany is not a country of immigration." As German journalist Josef Joffe would later summarize in the newspaper Die Zeit, "It used to be that it was easier to become a German citizen if you had a German shepherd somewhere in your ancestry than a Ph.D. in German literature."
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Since the 1960's, the UC Berkeley campus has been a leader in exploring, expressing and influencing the trends of gay and lesbian culture. Now a new organized research unit, the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture, will allow students and faculty to take this role one step further.
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In 1835, a man digging for peat on Denmark's Haraldskaer Estate came up with an unexpected find. It was a long, knobby human body, blackened by the bog but eerily preserved. Soon the unearthed woman had an identity and a name. She was Queen Gunhild, a monarch from old Norse legend. The Danish king, Frederick VI, supported this theory and prepared the body for a royal burial.
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To a god sitting atop Mount Olympus, no landscape might seem more foreign than the trailer parks of Montana. But bringing mythic power into working class America is exactly what playwright and choreographer Joe Goode plans to do Mythic Montana, a work in progress on the U.C. Berkeley campus.
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This fall, UC Berkeley English professor Sue Schweik is working with 31 other faculty members to create a groundbreaking program. The new minor will bring together subjects as diverse as art, engineering and political science to examine a much-overlooked subject: the lives and experiences of disabled people.
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illuminations is published online by the Division of Arts & Humanities in the College of Letters and Science at the University of California, Berkeley. illuminations spotlights current research being undertaken in the arts and humanities by faculty and students in the College of Letters and Science and elsewhere at U.C. Berkeley.
