News

We are excited to announce that the Departments of African American Studies and Gender and Women's Studies at UC Berkeley, in collaboration with Adrienne Torf, Raymond O. Caldwell, and the Fountain Theater of Los Angeles, are hosting a performance of the award-winning Poetry for the People: The June Jordan Experience in Berkeley in February 2026. This theater piece is an intimate portrait of the late poet, UC Berkeley professor, and activist June Jordan, told largely through her own poetry, essays, memoir, and interviews. In conjunction with the production,...

Our October 2025 Departmental Spotlight features one of our first-year graduate students, Sam Jean-Francois, interviewed by graduate student Endria Richardson.

Do you have an alternate-universe life in which you spend your time doing something totally different from this life? What do you do? Why?

Oh, that’s easy—I’d be a hair stylist.

Throughout my life, I’ve found so much joy in the intimacy that hair holds. Growing up, I would braid my younger sister’s hair, and it became a structured act of...

Our August 2025 Departmental Spotlight features our newest faculty member, Assistant Professor, Darlène Dubuisson, interviewed by Graduate Student Endria Richardson.

Who do you love? Writers, thinkers, artists, parents, friends—who has inspired you to be in the world the way that you are?

What a delightful question. I love my two boys, partner, and myself, of course. I also love my small group of dear friends—strong, intelligent women who treat me with sisterly (and sometimes motherly) care despite being so far away, in different states, countries,...

On March 19 and April 17, 2025, faculty from African American Studies, Gender and Women's Studies, and Ethnic Studies (A.G.E.S.) at the University of California, Berkeley, participated in two Rise Up for Education Rally/Teach-ins organized by the Berkeley Faculty for the Freedom to Learn. "The Berkeley Faculty for the Freedom to Learn is a coalition of faculty from UC Berkeley coming together out of a sense of mounting alarm at the wholesale attack by the Trump administration on higher education around the country. We...