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Memory Paths and Fragments from the Past: A Poetry Reading with Deborah Miranda in Conversation with Estelle Tarica

March 19, 2024
By Eva Whitney

On January 29, 2024, the Arts Research Center welcomed writer Deborah Miranda for a reading followed by a conversation with Estelle Tarica, Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture and Chair of the Department of Spanish & Portuguese (event info here). The full recording of the event is available for viewing on ARC’s YouTube channel, here.

What makes a memory? Is it a fixed thing, or part of one’s imagination? Can...

https://www.arts.berkeley.edu/memory-paths-and-fragments-from-the-past-a-poetry-…

Gabriel Lesser awarded the FULLBRIGHT-HEYS Fellowship

November 1, 2022

Our Ph.D. Candidate Gabriel Lesser received a Fulbright-Hays grant to conduct research abroad for his dissertation. With affiliations to the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and Mario de Andrade Library, in Brazil, Gabriel will spend his Spring 2023 semester collecting archival data for his comparative project about racial satire and caricatures in nineteenth-century Mexico and Brazil. In this work, Lesser argues that, in both countries, humoristic texts and images were a key aspect of lettered elite...

New Book by Michael Iarocci provides a new account of Goya’s print series

January 18, 2024

Widely acknowledged as a major turning point in the history of visual depictions of war, Francisco de Goya’s renowned print series The Disasters of War remains a touchstone for serious engagement with the violence of war and the questions raised by its artistic representation.

The Art of Witnessing: Francisco de Goya’s Disasters of War provides a new account of Goya’s print series by taking readers through the forty-seven prints he dedicated to the...

https://update.lib.berkeley.edu/2023/01/18/new-book-by-michael-iarocci/

Unique Contributions to the Digital Humanities in Spanish Alex Saum-Pascual, Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese

October 3, 2023
Emily Rabiner
Alex Saum-Pascual is a digital artist, poet, and professor who recently had two digital poetry works featured at the exhibition „Caracteres” at the Instituto Cervantes in New York City. Her new book, Earthy Algorithms: A Materialist Approach to Capital, Climate and Digital Literature (forthcoming 2024), takes inspiration from the fields of New Media and Electronic Literature to make a unique contribution to the Digital Humanities in Spanish. Focusing on the work of digital artists from Spain and the Latin American diaspora, Professor Saum-Pascual examines their engagement with concepts...
https://sites.google.com/berkeley.edu/artshumanitiesimpact/home?pli=1

2023 Impact Profile: Estelle Tarica, Professor and Chair of Spanish and Portuguese, Professor of Jewish Studies

October 3, 2023
Jennifer Monahan

Estelle Tarica’s 2022 book Holocaust Consciousness and Cold War Violence in Latin America proposes the existence of a recognizably distinct Holocaust consciousness in Latin America since the 1970s. Community leaders, intellectuals, writers, and political activists facing state repression have seen themselves reflected in Holocaust histories and have used Holocaust terms to describe human rights atrocities in their own countries. This unique, controversial approach to the memory of the Holocaust is little known outside the region. By drawing together two areas that have rarely been...

https://sites.google.com/berkeley.edu/artshumanitiesimpact/home?pli=1

Researcher finds commonalities between Holocaust and Guatemalan genocide narratives

March 10, 2021
Joshua Chan

Published December 3, 2018

Testimonies about a genocide occurring in Guatemala in the 1960s prioritize empathy, often losing historical context in the process, according to research presented by UC Berkeley Spanish professor Estelle Tarica. In this way, testimonies closely resemble victim-led narratives from the Holocaust.

Traica’s research compares genocide survivor testimonials from Guatemala and the Holocaust. She presented her research to an SF State audience on Thursday, Nov. 29, as the last talk in the Jewish Studies department’s...

https://goldengatexpress.org/86072/latest/news/researcher-finds-commonalities-be…

Alex Saum-Pascual weighs in on the transformative potential of AI in academia

December 15, 2023
Anne Brice

In Berkeley Talks episode 186, a panel of UC Berkeley scholars from the College of Letters and Science discusses the transformative potential of artificial intelligence in academia — and the questions and challenges it requires universities and other social institutions to confront.

"When it comes to human-specific problems, we often want fair, equitable, unbiased answers," said Keanan Joyner, an assistant professor of psychology. "But the data that we feed into the training set often is not that. And so, we are asking AI to produce something that it was never trained on, and that...

https://news.berkeley.edu/2023/12/15/berkeley-talks-ai-in-academia

Ana de Alba (Spanish & Portuguese '02) Confirmed by U.S. Senate to Serve on 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals

November 15, 2023
Alejandra Molina

Ana de Alba holds multiple degrees from UC Berkeley. She graduated in 2002 with a dual major in Spanish & Portuguese and Political Economy of Industrial Societies and earned her J.D. at Berkeley Law in 2007.

A first-generation Mexican American who worked in the fields with her farmworker parents has been elevated to the largest federal appeals court.

U.S. District Judge Ana de Alba, a California native who was born in Merced, was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on Monday to serve on the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. She was...

https://www.latimes.com/delos/story/2023-11-15/ana-de-alba-elevated-to-largest-a…

New banners celebrate 150+ years of Berkeley's prominence in teaching world languages

October 24, 2023
Gretchen Kell

At least 60 languages — from Mongolian and Old Norse to Polish, Catalan, Ancient Egyptian, Arabic and Biblical Hebrew — are taught at UC Berkeley, one of the nation’s top institutions for the breadth and depth of its world languages program. A growing emphasis also is being placed at Berkeley on revitalizing and preserving endangered languages, most of them spoken by Indigenous peoples.

To help honor more than 150 years of global languages at Berkeley, 63 colorful banners will begin flying throughout campus today, and for the next 18 months, that feature facts about the campus’s...

https://news.berkeley.edu/2023/10/24/new-banners-celebrate-150+-years-of-berkele…