News

Dear Friends of the Center for African Studies,

The International House at UC Berkeley is commemorating Black History Month through a YouTube video series. In consists of clips from residents, including many Mastercard Foundation Scholars, as well as alumni interviews by Scholar and I-House Global Community Ambassador, Excellence Joshua. More videos are added to the playlist throughout the month of February.

UC Berkeley students who join the Summer 2024 study abroad program "Pan Afrikan Social Movements: Past, Present and Future" in Ghana will receive a $1,000 scholarship! Deadline to apply is March 15, 2024.

Rocca and FLAS fellowship recipient, Annelise Gill-Wiehl’s conducts research on the affect of efficient cookstoves in Tanzania. Gill-Wiehl, Daniel Kammen, and Kathrine Lau’s findings share that these cookstoves are “overestimated” in their carbon saving credit.

Misbath Dauda joined the School of Public Health in January 2024. She is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Health Sciences whose interdisciplinary research focuses on the health equity implications of climate mitigation strategies in the US and in West Africa.

Trial access to the Africa Commons digital archival collections, produced by Coherent Digital, is available until January 31st.  This resource provides access to books, magazines, newspapers, government documents, manuscripts, photographs, videos, and oral histories related to African history and culture.  Africa Commons is a project which aims to enable Africa to easily control, digitize, and disseminate its cultural heritage–within Africa, and internationally.

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

Julia Schaletzky is executive director of the Center for Emerging and Neglected Diseases, Drug Discovery Center, at UC Berkeley, which co-founded the Alliance of Global Health and Science several years ago to integrate research at UC Berkeley with Makerere University in Uganda.

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.

The UC Berkeley Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program supported this collaboration by UC Berkeley & University of Nairobi Collaboration on a six-week “Virtual Global Innovation Workshop” on biomedical equipment design for low-resource settings through a Faculty Seed Grant.

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