To journalism professor Lydia Chavez, covering arts and culture doesn't mean just cranking out reviews. Reporting on what a nation reads, watches, sees, and sings, she says, can often be the way to get the real news.
Dostoevsky was the 19th century's most devastating chronicler of social conflict and spiritual upheaval. In their new class, poet Robert Hass and war reporter Mark Danner reveal a literary world of appalling relevance to our own.
In 2003, Thompson arrived at Berkeley as a professor of rhetoric and women's studies, just as debate began to heat up over Proposition 71. Thompson's expertise in the bioethics of stem cells meant that partisans on both sides began lobbying for her support as soon as she arrived on the West Coast.
Berkeley video art professor Anne Walsh's funny, sad, unsettling narratives spark unlikely flickers of recognition, like a song we didn't know we knew, but whose words we start singing without even realizing it.
It wasn't art but war that first brought Richard Diebenkorn to Berkeley.
Since 1954, Berkeley's Regional Oral History Office has preserved the voices of Californians. Now they're tackling stem cells.
The humanities and social sciences come together to serve the once academically neglected half of the Western Hemisphere.
