Congratulations to the members of the Class of 2023 who participated in our Commencement ceremony!

Doctoral Degree

Ellen C. Feiss 

Grace Kuipers

Verónica Muñoz-Nájar Luque 

Ty Vanover

Bachelor of Arts Degree

Angelina Aparicio 

Drew Atkins

Bailey Baeza

Hannah Mae Brooks 

Andrea Calderon

Noelia Cortes

Joa Dimas 

Maya Ishtar Hernandez Reza

Marek Hertzler

Clarissa Hurst

Sousiva Phek-Im Ing

Leili Kamali

Guanhong Liu

Jesse Emmanuel Salto Martinez 

Ariana Warren Mattioli

Chandler Choey Matz

Siena Graziani Mazza

Mona Moayedifar

Andrea Palmer

Yiwen Pan

J. Antonio Soto-Beltrán

Yuki Suzuki

Sophia Serena Teng

Ava Van Gorden

Alexandra B. Vazquez

Yaoxing Yi

Annie Zhou

Maxwell Sutter Zinkievich

The department is pleased to announce the publication of Painting the Inhabited Landscape, Fitz H. Lane and the Global Reach of Antebellum America (2023). From the Penn State University Press website:  The impulse in much nineteenth-century American painting and culture was to describe nature as a wilderness on which the young nation might freely inscribe its future: the United States as a virgin land, that is, unploughed, unfenced, and unpainted. Insofar as it exhibited evidence of a past, its traces pointed to a geologic or cosmic past, not a human one. The work of the New England artist Fitz H. Lane, however, was decidedly different. In this important study, Margaretta Markle Lovell singles out the more modestly scaled, explicitly inhabited landscapes of Fitz H. Lane and investigates the patrons who supported his career, with an eye to understanding how New Englanders thought about their land, their economy, their history, and their links with widely disparate global communities. Lane’s works depict nature as productive and allied in partnership with humans to create a sustainable, balanced political economy. What emerges from this close look at Lane’s New England is a picture not of a “virgin w... [show more]

When Alice Xie moved from China to California as a teenager, she experienced major culture shock. She understood the words people spoke, but conversations were still hard to follow. She often felt isolated and underestimated. Through art, Xie found a way to explore and communicate about this period in her life. So it was no surprise when she came to UC Berkeley and became an art history major. What caught her off-guard was that her other major – statistics – helped her understand herself, too. “How stats [statistics] works is just how our brain works,” said Xie, remembering the moment her sophomore year this idea clicked. “We receive the data – the information – from all over the place. We process them in our mind and the mind is like a ‘layer’ – a gateway or a hole. Then we create our own interpretation and knowledge and reflect it back to us or to the world.” After this realization, Xie said, she felt “relief and also clarity in how I think about myself and my work in so many aspects.” Xie is the only art history and statistics double major at Berkeley graduating this year. But she is one of many – 70 percent of declared statistics majors in spring 2023 – to have more than one major. ... [show more]

The department is pleased to announce the publication of Darcy's new book, Creole. Portraits of France’s Foreign Relations in the Nineteenth Century (2022).  From Penn State University Press: This book addresses the unique and profound indeterminacy of “Creole,” a label applied to white, black, and mixed-race persons born in French colonies during the nineteenth century. "Creole” implies that the geography of one’s birth determines identity in ways that supersede race, language, nation, and social status. Paradoxically, the very capaciousness of the term engendered a perpetual search for visual signs of racial difference as well as a pretense to blindness about the intermingling of races in Creole society. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby reconstructs the search for visual signs of racial difference among people whose genealogies were often repressed. She explores French representations of Creole subjects and representations by Creole artists in France, the Caribbean, and the Americas. To do justice to the complexity of Creole identity, Grigsby interrogates the myriad ways in which people defined themselves in relation to others. With close attention to the differences between Afro-Creole and Euro-Creole ... [show more]

It's time to register for Summer Session classes.

The Department is pleased to announce the publication of Lisa's new book, Etruria and Anatolia: Material Connections and Artistic Exchange by Cambridge Press. The book is co-edited with Elizabeth P. Baughan, University of Richmond, Virginia. From the Cambridge website: Striking similarities in Etruscan and Anatolian material culture reveal various forms of contact and exchange between these regions on opposite sides of the Mediterranean. This is the first comprehensive investigation of these connections, approaching both cultures as agents of artistic exchange rather than as side characters in a Greek-focused narrative. It synthesizes a wide range of material evidence from c. 800 – 300 BCE, from tomb architecture and furniture to painted vases, terracotta reliefs, and magic amulets. By identifying shared practices, common visual language, and movements of objects and artisans (from both east to west and west to east), it illuminates many varied threads of the interconnected ancient Mediterranean fabric. Rather than trying to account for the similarities with any one, overarching theory, this volume presents multiple, simultaneous modes and implications of connectivity while also recognizing the distin... [show more]

Help Berkeley's Light Shine Brighter

  IN MEMORIAM                                                   Andrew F. Stewart                         Nicholas C. Petris Professor of Greek Studies, Emeritus                                                 UC Berkeley                                     (Aug. 23, 1948 – Jan. 13, 2023)                 Andrew F. Stewart, after a long, challenging, but determined struggle with respiratory disease, passed away on January 13, 2023. His departure leaves a very large gap not only in his departments and the university but in the larger fields of Greek art and archaeology. He is widely acknowledged as among a handful of the most distinguished scholars of Greek sculpture anywhere in the world. Classical civilization has lost one of its most passionate and articulate interpreters.             Andy (as he was known to all) was born in Portsmouth in the UK, and received his BA, MA, and PhD at St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge. His first full-time teaching post came as Lecturer at the University of Otago in New Zealand. It was there that he gained his initial experience as an excavator by digging at a Maori settlement in the Otago Province. But his first love, as always, was Hellas. ... [show more]