American Studies Spring Symposium – “Twice Told Tales”: May 9, 2025,
You are cordially invited to this Spring’s American Studies symposium, “Twice-Told Tales 2025” on Friday, May 9, 2025, at the Women’s Faculty Club on the UC Berkeley campus. Since 1995, the Interdisciplinary Program in American Studies has hosted this small gathering. During this informal, half-day symposium, we will hear from four of our colleagues on campus, and celebrate together the end of another academic year. Attendance is free, no RSVP is required. This event is open to faculty, staff, and alumni, and we also welcome graduate students and especially American […]
American Studies in the News — Berkeley Voices Podcast: From Victorian-era letters to Swiftie bracelets, an evolution of American friendship
Excerpted from UC Berkeley News, by Anne Brice, Feb. 24, 2025 An American studies class at UC Berkeley explores how the depiction of friendship in popular culture and media has shifted throughout history, and what it looks like today. Have you ever seen letters from the 1800s? Aside from the pristine penmanship and grammar, the way friends expressed their fondness for each other is remarkable. “Letters sent between friends are often full of the kinds of loving and affectionate language that today we would only associate with romantic or sexual […]
Talk by Oz Frankel on his book Coca-Cola, Black Panthers, and Phantom Jets: Israel in the American Orbit, 1967–1973 – March 10
With the support of American Studies, History, the Center for Jewish Studies, and the Magnes, the Helen Diller Institute is sponsoring a book talk by Oz Frankel on his book Coca-Cola, Black Panthers, and Phantom Jets: Israel in the American Orbit, 1967–1973. The lecture is scheduled for Monday, March 10, at 4pm in the Law School (4-5:30pm), followed by a reception across the street in the patio of Freehouse (5:45-7pm).
2025 UGIS Commencement Ceremony: Monday, May 19, 9:00-11:00 AM, Zellerbach Auditorium
The ceremony will be live streamed with captioning, and recorded. This ceremony is for students in the American Studies, Media Studies, and ISF majors who are graduating in Fall 2024, Spring 2025, Summer 2025 and Fall 2025. For more information, please visit https://sites.google.com/berkeley.edu/ugis-commencement/home Guest tickets will be available in March and the link for purchasing tickets will be posted at https://sites.google.com/berkeley.edu/ugis-commencement/home. We will notify students and post an announcement here when tickets are available We look forward to seeing you there!
American Studies in the News: 9/11 shaped the U.S. in unimaginable ways. This class helps Gen Z students grasp how
This news story originally appeared in UC Berkeley News, September 11, 2024 Twenty-three years after the 9/11 terrorist attack, UC Berkeley Professor Michael Mark Cohen is teaching a course that examines how disastrous its consequences have been for the U.S. “I think students finally understand why the country lost its mind after this disaster,” said Professor Michael Mark Cohen. By Anne Brice Unless you lived through the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, it’s hard to know what it was like, said UC Berkeley Professor Michael Mark Cohen. Especially because […]
American Studies Majors in the News: Brandon Fellows and the Re-Emerging Scholars Program for formerly incarcerated individuals
American Studies major Brandon Fellows (’24) was recently featured in “Community college program helps formerly incarcerated students find opportunity,” in the Sacramento Bee. Here is an excerpt from the article: If you ask Brandon Fellows where he learned the most in his life, he’ll point to his time spent on the streets or when he was incarcerated. After he was released, he enrolled at Sacramento City College when he was 35. There, he found and helped build a community of acceptance — the Re-Emerging Scholars program, a cohort-based learning program for […]
May 14, 2024 UGIS Commencement Ceremony will be live streamed and recorded
The UGIS Commencement ceremony on May 14, 7-9pm, at Zellerbach Hall, will be live streamed with captioning at the link below. And on Thursday, May 16, a recorded video of the ceremony will be available for viewing at the same link. CONGRATULATIONS, CLASS OF 2024!
American Studies Major Brittany Postle Wins 2024 Haas Scholarship
Brittany is a junior with a concentration in Disability and Human Rights in America. Her Haas project is called “William O. Douglas and Fight for Pristine Wilderness in a Damaged World: How Ableism in the Supreme Court Shaped Our Ideas of Nature,” and her research questions are (to quote her application materials) “how the advocacy of Supreme Court Justice, William O. Douglas used his powers in office to create pristine wilderness spaces. Using the methodologies of Professor Sunaura Taylor’s disturbed ecologies, I seek to answer how the idea of the […]
American Studies Major Cat Stoehr Wins 2024 Haas Scholarship
Cat is researching the history of strikes and unionization drives among American ballet companies from the 1930s to the present.
Emma Gerson, American Studies graduate (class of 2023), has won the 2023 American Cultures Student Prize!
American Studies is proud to announce that Emma Gerson, a graduate of our program (class of 2023), has won the 2023 American Cultures Student Prize! This prize recognizes exemplary student projects developed in American Cultures courses “that promotes understanding of U.S. race, ethnicity, and culture and exemplifies a standard of excellence in scholarship.” Emma’s award-winning submission, “Alcatraz: A Carceral-Colonial Space,” was the capstone project she created in my class, American Studies 102AC (Beaches in Mind: The Beach in American Culture), in Fall 2021. The prize committee praised the impressive nature of Emma’s research […]