The Division of Arts & Humanities continues to experience a period of unprecedented faculty hiring, with 16 new faculty who started in 2023 and additional new faculty incoming for academic years 2024-25 and 2025-26. This growth is supported in part by the division’s Advancing Faculty Diversity in the Arts and Humanities (AFDAH) program which promotes greater inclusion of the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program in hiring plans across departments; cluster hiring in African/African diasporic humanities and Latinx cultural expression; support for research, course design, and service programs aligned with career advancement milestones; and a robust mentorship program for new faculty.
The inaugural program is funded through a grant from the University of California Office of the President. AFDAH focuses on field-specific mentorship and cohort-building for faculty working in underrepresented areas of study that broaden the arts and humanities in expansive, innovative, and inclusive directions. The first participants in the program are new professors in Art Practice; English; Film and Media; French; German; History of Art; Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures; Music; and Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies.
The two-year program pairs new faculty fellows with experienced faculty mentors, gives each fellow $10,000 in research funding, and convenes the group for workshops focused on needs identified by the fellows. Together, the fellows and mentors develop new strategies for inclusive mentorship and scholarly community building, with the mentors sharing things they wished they had known as junior faculty, tools they wished they had, and information and experiences regarding research, campus culture, tenure and promotion, and other parts of Berkeley life. At the culmination of each cohort, the division intends to launch an ever-growing faculty toolkit and resource site as well as community-building communications, such as a faculty research newsletter.
In 2024-25 a new group of faculty fellows will be entering the program. Together, this growing cohort of fellows and mentors are transforming the division, supporting campus thriving initiatives, and tapping into existing pipelines to diversify our faculty.
Faculty Fellows
Nicholas Baer, German
Iggy Cortez, Film and Media
Timmia Hearn DeRoy, Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies
Nora Jacobsen Ben Hammed, Middle Eastern Language and Cultures
Zamansele Nsele, History of Art
Henry Ravenhall, French
Luanne Redeye, Art Practice
Juan David Rubio Restrepo, Music
Solmaz Sharif, English
Faculty Mentors
Samera Esmeir, Rhetoric
Donna Jones, English
Roshanak Kheshti, Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies
Hertha Sweet Wong, English
Winnie Wong, Rhetoric