Hundreds of faculty and students flooded UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza on Wednesday to defend academic freedom and free speech amid the Trump administration’s escalating threats to withhold funding from the campus.
Both UC Berkeley and UCLA are among the 10 universities under investigation by the Federal Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism after the Justice Department alleged that the schools failed to protect Jewish students during the widespread pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses last spring. UC Berkeley is also the subject of another investigation from the Department of...
Stephen Small, African American Studies professor, speaks about his book, In the Shadows of the Big House.
In this interview, Stephen Small shares the inspirations behind In the Shadows of the Big House(link is external), a compelling and deeply researched work that examines the representation of slavery in contemporary heritage tourism. Drawing from decades of...
UC Berkeley African American Studies Alumna J Finley began her career researching reparations and the legacy of slavery. But after studying how Black people navigate and resist oppression, she was eventually drawn to a subject – and a form of resistance – that was personally meaningful to her: comedy. As someone long drawn to comedy shows, Finley committed herself to collecting and honoring the stories Black women tell about themselves by becoming an audience member, critic and comedian herself.
Based on her research and experiences, Finley published the book...
Black women's humor is “an embodied expression of resilience at the moment of crisis," says J Finley, an associate professor at Pomona College and author of the 2024 book Sass
This month's departmental spotlight by Endria Richardson features graduating senior and Clark Scholar Amber Griffin-Royal.
Tell me about your work. What do you care about in the world, and how did you come to care about it?
I’m a third-generation Oakland native and an award-winning DJ/performing artist, and I often find myself reminiscing with friends and family about how Oakland used to sound—and dreaming about what the future might hold. DJing has become my way of making sense of what’s happening to...
Our March 2025 Departmental Spotlight features Assistant Professor Henry Washington Jr., interviewed by Graduate Student Endria Richardson.
Tell me about your work. What do you care about in the world, and how did you come to care about it?
My work is broadly concerned with the centrality of cultural representation to the logic of antiblackness and, in turn, to black people’s efforts to contend with the antiblackness of the world. I was initially politicized by the state-sanctioned murders of Trayvon...
AAS is launching a new section of our newsletter, Departmental Spotlights, organized by Graduate Student Endria Richardson. Our first spotlight features an interview with graduate student Karina Karbo-Wright.
Tell me about your work (whatever “work” means to you). What do you care about in the world, and how did you come to care about it?
My research interest is in Black film - specifically this intersection of horror and trauma that Black creatives and spectators consume from. Exploring these articulations gives deeper...
AAS is launching a new section of our newsletter, Departmental Spotlights, organized by Graduate Student Endria Richardson. Our first spotlight features an interview with graduate student Karina Karbo-Wright.
Tell me about your work (whatever “work” means to you). What do you care about in the world, and how did you come to care about it?
My research interest is in Black film - specifically this intersection of horror and trauma that Black creatives and spectators consume from. Exploring these articulations gives...
The University of California, Berkeley, is making a hopeful case for African American studies amid attacks on academic freedom.
Critical as they are to a healthy democracy, open conversations at public universities on race, history, and freedom are increasingly threatened by an array of attacks—from cuts to funding for humanities departments to...
