After spending an enormous amount of time studying the architecture and urban design of 1930s-era Italian towns in colonial Africa, professor of Italian studies Mia Fuller decided she had had enough of buildings and city plans. She wanted to add some people to her research on fascist-built places.
Not every scholar challenges the foundations of his discipline, but for professor of anthropology Paul Rabinow, that's the only response to the changing scope of humanity. The new science of genetics is transforming how we understand ourselves. As genomics breaks down humankind into its most finite elements, Rabinow has taken a front-row seat at the threshold of the 21st century.
Ashley Thompson's first glimpse of the ravages of time and war were in Thailand in the late '80s, in a refugee camp for Cambodians fleeing the Vietnamese occupation of their country. Many of the refugees still carried the burdens of living through the Khmer Rouge regime a decade earlier.
Inspiration often comes from movies, for Berkeley professor of film studies and rhetoric Linda Williams. But her most recent book burst forth from a true-life media storm that gripped the nation. Like many Americans, Williams found herself caught up Los Angeles' most famous crime drama of the 90s.
In the early 1930s, Japanese writer Kobayashi Hideo traveled to Manchuria to write about the new state being established there under Japanese rule. Kobayahsi's writings from Manchuria described the colony in beautiful, glowing terms, glorifying expansionism and overlooking the violence of colonialism. His superficial glimpse of the Chinese glossed over their subjection; they simply became bit parts in Japan's unfolding destiny.
If feminists have found much to criticize in opera, Berkeley professor of music Mary Ann Smart finds much to love, even if it means challenging more traditional feminist theories in favor of her own.
Tweaking her profession's central concern with the past, UC Berkeley professor of history Paula Fass finds herself looking back as a way of seeing the future. During a quarter century of historical research, Fass has returned again and again to one particular subject: childhood.
One might expect that an interest in early modern literature ensured solitary months in dark, dusty library basements, debating long-dead conversations by longer-dead thinkers. In the case of Victoria Kahn, Berkeley professor of English and Comparative Literature, that assumption couldn't be more wrong.
Walking up the stairs to enter the interactive art installation "Oxygen Flute", one can hear muted chirps and clicks and the occasional flute blast. Inside the plastic-sheathed chamber, it seems as if the music is coming from the grove of bamboo trees planted on the floor. Standing on a gangplank surrounded by bamboo, the visitor notices the heat and humidity. Slowly the sounds begin to change. Flute tones come in higher pitches, then suddenly wail and screech. The bamboo seems to be singing.