Berkeleyan

News Briefs

08 May 2008

Berkeleyan takes a break

With the campus heading toward finals, graduation, and the pleasures of summer, news breaks s-l-o-w-l-y and events taper off. Hence, this is the last Berkeleyan until June 5, when we’ll return with a wrap-up of spring 2008 awards and ceremonies. While we’re away, keep up with campus happenings via the online NewsCenter (www.berkeley.edu/news).

Judith Butler to deliver Maruyama Lecture

The Maruyama Lecture on Political Responsibility in the Modern World is named in honor of the late Maruyama Masao (1914-96), historian of East Asian political thought and one of the most influential political thinkers in 20th-century Japan. The problem of political engagement and responsibility in modern times was the central concern in Maruyama’s work.

This year’s lecture, sponsored by the Center for Japanese Studies, will be delivered on Monday, May 12, from 4 to 6 p.m. in the Toll Room, Alumni House, by Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor in the departments of rhetoric and comparative literature. Her address will be titled “Critique, Responsibility, and Performative Rights.” The lecture is free and open to the public.

Butler is the author of several books, including Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990) and, with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging (Seagull Books, 2007). She continues to write on cultural and literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminism, and sexual politics.

Undergraduate researchers to be honored May 14

A reception in honor of the winners of the 2008 Library Prize for Undergraduate Research will be held from 4 to 6 p.m. on May 14 in the Morrison Library in Doe Library. The prize recognizes undergraduate researchers and their faculty and GSI supporters. The four winners for 2008 were selected from a pool of approximately 45 submissions.

Winners in the lower-division category include freshmen Carine de la Girond’arc and Alina Xu, who wrote about the comics of R. Crumb for a class taught by professor of mechanical engineering James Casey and Bancroft librarians Peter Hanff and David Farrell.

Three seniors won in the upper-division category. My Chau’s topic was the textiles known as double ikats and their international appeal; she wrote for a history-of-art honors class, under the direction of Professor Joanna Williams and with Library support from Virginia Shih. History student Linda Nyberg submitted her senior thesis on the collective experience of time in the German Democratic Republic. Her faculty supporter was GSI Chad Denton, and her Library support came from James Spohrer. Finally, Keith Orejel wrote about the politicization of black funerals during the civil-rights era, supported by history faculty Mark Brilliant and Charles Postel.

Communications effort aims to build understanding of UC’s impacts on California

A new public-education effort is being undertaken by the University of California system to better inform Californians about the many ways UC contributes to their lives and to the life of the state. The effort, funded by $700,000 in private endowment monies, is being launched on the Web, on radio, and through other information outlets.

Elements of the effort will include Web advertising on California newspaper sites and other news websites; radio spots on National Public Radio stations in major California markets; a website, www.universityofcalifornia.edu/ucthewayforward; and placements in a variety of other print and electronic communications vehicles operated by the university.

For the record . . .

In last week’s feature about Immigration at the Golden Gate, a new book by Bob Barde, deputy director of the Institute of Business and Economic Research (IBER), we mistakenly identified IBER as a unit within the Haas School of Business. In fact it is an Organized Research Unit that has its offices located at Haas.

In the same issue, we failed to credit the Cal Corps Public Service Center with co-sponsorship of the annual Chancellor’s Awards for Public Service, presented April 28.