News

The Center for African Studies is thrilled to be participating again in Berkeley's November Crowdfunding campaign to promote equity and inclusion. Our goal is to raise $6,000 to support undergraduate research in Africa through our Geist and Rosberg Travel awards.

New banners celebrate 150+ years of Berkeley's prominence in teaching world languages, including African languages. Some 60 languages are taught on campus, and revitalizing and preserving endangered languages is a priority. This is an outcome of the UC Berkeley Task Force on Languages, Language-Based Disciplines and Global Citizenship.

Studying a language is an immediate way to immerse oneself in African knowledge systems.

The UC Berkeley Library has trial access until May 4th to a new digital archive produced by AM (formerly Adam Matthew Digital) titled Africa and the New Imperialism: European Borders on the African Continent, 1870-1914. Try this out and let the Library know what you think!

Larry Hyman, Professor Emeritus, Linguistics, was honored by Resulam, an organization of Cameroonians in the diaspora, for his contributions to Fè'éfè'ê, a Bamileke language spoken in Cameroon, around the town of Bafang. 

Via a collaboration with the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology and Ashesi University in Ghana, the Center for African Studies via the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program, is able to bring five Ashesi undergraduate innovators to UC Berkeley. The students include Abigail Efua Tetteh (Ghana), Judercio Nhauche (Mozambique), Mcebo Vincent Hlanze (Eswatini), Sandra Nettey (Ghana), and Styve Zeumo Lekane (Cameroon).

Christine Wilkinson, alum (ESPM PhD 2021), former Rocca recipient (2018, 2017, 2016) and postdoc has won Cell Press’ third annual Rising Black Scientist Award for her essay "The coyote in the mirror: Embracing intersectionality to improve human-wildlife interactions."

The National Institute of Health (NIH) awarded researchers at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health a two-year, $550,000 grant to develop and evaluate a pharmacy-based model to prevent high-risk women in Zimbabwe from contracting HIV.

Register for African Language Courses, Fall 2022

• Amharic
• Arabic
• Igbo
• Swahili

African Film Festival

After two years of pandemic-related cancellations or virtual screenings, we are proud to welcome the African Film Festival (AFF) back to BAMPFA. More information is here: https://bampfa.org/program/african-film-festival

Beginning in 2019, the Center for African Studies and Le Centre de Recherche et d’Action pour la Paix (CERAP) at Universite Jesuite in Abidjan have partnered on a Carnegie-funded project in Côte d’Ivoire, Documenting Violence and Promoting Peace in Africa: A Pilot Study for Data Collection in a Conflict-Affected Country.

Dr. Nana Adusei-Poku is joining the History of Art Department as an assistant professor in African Diasporic art history this Fall ’22 and Dr. Zamansele Nsele will join as an assistant professor in Spring ’23.

Martha Saavedra Wins 2021 African Studies Association Outstanding Service Award

#WestCoast_WestAfrica21

Monday and Tuesday, June 28-29, 2021
Virtual on Zoom

Every semester, UC Berkeley offers many new courses. The Amharic language course offered this spring is especially noteworthy. Except for a brief pilot program in 2006, this is the first semester students are able to take a course in Amharic, one of the languages of Ethiopia, which is spoken by nearly 26 million people worldwide. The course, which only opened for enrollment the week before the spring semester, was nearly full by the end of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, just before classes started.

Ivy Mills offers a new course on African Aesthetics in the History of Art (190M) in Spring 2018.