Homepage Featured News

Derek Allen, PhD Candidate in Hispanic Languages & Literatures with emphasis in Luso-Brazilian Studies, received The Center for African Studies' Andrew and Mary Thompson Rocca Fellowship.

The endowment supports student scholars at the advanced graduate level concentrating in African Studies. Derek’s dissertation researches literature and film from Mozambique, Angola, Portugal, and Brazil. His project focuses on novels and films of war and independence struggles and the many aesthetic and political collaborations that came to exist between writers and filmmakers....

A tradition in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UC Berkeley, S&P Research Day occurs in the first week of the Spring semester. This year, we gathered for the third annual S&P Research Day to hear our colleagues' presentations on anything from research topics, conference papers, dissertation chapters and other academic or creative works. It is a chance for the people in our department to share research or other work of any kind and at any stage. As a lower-stakes opportunity for folks to gather and learn from each other, it is a community-building event that...

It’s easy to forget that the cloud isn’t an amorphous ball of fluff, says UC Berkeley Professor Alex Saum-Pascual — that it is, in fact, physical internet infrastructure that takes many forms in many places across the world.

In her forthcoming book, Earthy Algorithms: A Materialist Reading of Digital Literature, Saum-Pascual argues that digital tools like generative AI mask the messy reality of the internet — the massive energy, hardware and human labor it requires — to trick us...

Professor Nathaniel Wolfson has published Concrete Encoded: Poetry, Design, and the Cybernetic Imaginary in Brazil with Texas University Press. Concrete art and poetry burst onto Brazil's cultural stage in the 1950s, while the country was embarking on a dizzying period of modernization. Bringing together key poets and visual artists alongside less recognized figures, Nathaniel Wolfson shows that concretism was hardly socially inert, as pundits have suggested. Rather, it presciently grappled with an emerging information age that would soon reorganize human relations globally.