German cinema from the Weimar period thrived in the hazy space between the real and the unreal. These films critique the notion of history itself — as Nicholas Baer suggests in his Book Chat, "we can never really know what happened."
It can take a while to understand why we love a certain painting, but that commitment constantly yields new lessons and experiences. To find meaning in a painting, Professor Alexander Nemerov suggests, is to find meaning in oneself.
Professor Eva Horn's interdisciplinary research focuses on the porous relationship between humans and the climates we inhabit. What was climate, Horn asks, before it was something we could capture in a computer?
In early April 2024, Ocean Vuong — poet, novelist, professor of creative writing at New York University, and the 2023–24 Avenali Chair in the Humanities — came to UC Berkeley.
For feminist historian, critic, poet, and UC Berkeley lecturer Angela Hume (College Writing Programs), researching radical abortion activism in the Bay Area began unusually — with poetry.
I cannot remember precisely when I first encountered James Baldwin’s writing — sometime in early high school, perhaps — but I remember that it was not a quote, or even one of his novels, that ushered him into my life.
It was actually a brief poem.