Council on Advising and Student Services, UC Berkeley
On behalf of Berkeley’s Council on Advising and Student Services and our awards planning committee, we are pleased to announce the recipients of our 2025 Excellence in Advising & Student Services Awards and to express our sincere gratitude to all our nominees for their outstanding contributions. These awards recognize the positive and innovative impact our recipients have on...
Congratulations to Alexandra Gessesse who was awarded a 2026 UC President’s Pre-Professoriate Fellowship! As part of the UC Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI) Doctoral Diversity Initiative, it aims to enhance faculty diversity and pathways to the professoriate for students from California Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) in all disciplines. This competitive fellowship is designed to facilitate the academic career development of students who show potential to become excellent faculty or researchers in...
The Chancellor’s Outstanding Staff Awards are coordinated by the Chancellor’s Staff Advisory Committee. COSA awards are presented to individuals from our staff community who, in addition to performing their normal job duties with excellence, demonstrate exceptional initiative in contributing to the Berkeley campus community. These awards are among the highest honors bestowed upon staff by the Chancellor. The official program for the 2026 award ceremony can be viewed here.
Professor Catanese is a distinguished scholar of African American Studies and Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies whose research focuses on race, performance, and representation. Her book Racial Transgressions: Colorblindness, Multiculturalism, and Black Performance reconceptualizes the cultural and political meanings of race in contemporary performance and media, and her editorial leadership as Editor of Theatre Survey helped expand the field's engagement with underrepresented histories and voices. Through this and other work, she has advanced new frameworks for...
AFRICAM 119: Language Politics in Africa's Digital Age, Instructor: Dr. David Kyeu, Session D, TWTh 10-1230, in person, CN: 15902
This course explores the intersections of media, digital platforms, and language politics in Africa, with a focus on how language shapes access, representation, and power in the public sphere. Students will analyze both traditional and digital media to examine how these spaces reinforce or challenge linguistic...
As one of the strongest African American Studies departments in the country and the home of the first Ph.D. program in African Diaspora Studies, African American Studies at UC Berkeley is widely considered one of the most prestigious sites of intellectual engagement with the knowledge of Black people in the United States and around the world. But we are more than an academic department. We are a community that holds the next generation of scholars in Black Studies. From mentorship and professional development programs to the...
In this Spotlight on Swahili, the Berkeley Language Center sits down with Dr. David Kyeu, who teaches Swahili through the Department of African American Studies(link is external). The department offers a PhD in African Diaspora Studies; currently, students are able to enroll in full-year Elementary and Intermediate Swahili classes. The...
April is National poetry month, so we are featuring two poets today who are using their voices as a catalyst for social change.
Aya de León teaches creative writing in the African American Studies Department at UC Berkeley. She was the 2024-25 poet laureate of the City of Berkeley and is the author of 11 novels. She is also the principal playwright for Fashion vs. Fascism, a political theater project and fashion show to provide political education and inspiration to fight rising authoritarianism, which will premiere in the Bay Area in September 2026.
The Gordon Parks Foundation is marking its 20th anniversary with a year-long programme of exhibitions, publications, fellowships and public events that underscore the enduring relevance of Gordon Parks’ vision and the Foundation’s evolving role in supporting artists working at the intersection of art and social justice.
Today’s conversation is with Zana Sanders, a doctoral candidate in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines the intersections of visual culture, contemporary Black Art, media, and technology with an emphasis on representations of race, gender, class, and sexuality. She is particularly interested in how Black artists and cultural producers use visual technologies in their image-making practices to shape political consciousness and cultural memory, document, and reimagine Black social life. In this...
